Let’s be honest: You’ve been doing everything you were told to do.
You’re publishing consistently.
You’ve set up your paid tier.
You’re posting on Notes.
Maybe even running a promotion or two.
And yet, your paid subscriber count barely moves.
You watch other creators earn their bestseller badges, celebrate milestones, share screenshots of their growth, and you’re sitting there thinking, what am I doing wrong?!
Well, here’s the good news: There is a clear, simple path to becoming a Substack Bestseller.
And the reason most creators haven’t found it yet isn’t that they’re doing things wrong — it’s that the advice they’re following was written for a version of Substack that no longer exists.
When I first joined Substack back in 2020, all you could do was publish posts and send emails. It was basically a simple email service provider.
Today, it’s a social media platform, a podcasting platform, an email tool, a live streaming platform, a collaboration tool, and much, much more.
Most of the advice floating around right now was written for the old Substack. This article gives you a completely new playbook for how to actually earn your bestseller badge in 2026.
I’ll break down what the badge really means, why the old playbook is broken, and the five pillars I’d follow if I had to earn my bestseller badge all over again starting at zero.
What a Substack Bestseller Actually Is
Before we get into strategy, let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing because there’s a lot of confusion around this.
Substack has three levels of bestseller badges:
The white badge means you’ve crossed 100 paid subscribers.
The orange badge means you’ve hit 1,000 paid subscribers.
And the purple badge means you have tens of thousands.
These have to be real paying subscribers. People who trust your work enough to pay for it. Compensated subscriptions don’t count toward the badge.
And if you’re wondering whether the badge actually matters, think of it this way: You walk into a bookstore. There are thousands of books on the shelves. You don’t have time to read the first chapter of all of them. So what do you do?
You look for signals like a bestseller sticker, a recommendation from someone you trust, or a cover that catches your eye.
The Substack Bestseller badge works the same way. When someone is browsing Substack, deciding who to follow or who to pay, that badge is a trust signal. It says, other people have decided that this is worth paying for, so you should probably take a closer look as well!
But it goes deeper than social proof. When you have paying subscribers, Substack’s algorithm has a financial reason to promote you because the platform takes a 10% cut of your revenue. Substack is literally incentivized to put your content in front of more people once you start monetizing.
And the first badge only requires 100 paid subscribers. That’s way more achievable than most people think. It means 100 people voting with their wallets that your work matters.
Within 18 months, we crossed 1,000 paid subscribers and earned the orange badge.
I’m not saying that to brag. I’m saying it because it wasn’t a coincidence. We had a clear system, clear goals, and clear processes that you can replicate.
🔴 Want a clear path to bestseller status? I'm hosting a free live training where I'll walk you through the exact system we used — and the one we still use to grow our publication every single month.
If you go looking for advice on how to become a Substack Bestseller right now, most of what you’ll find was written in 2024 or early 2025. And a lot of it follows the same logic: write great long-form content, be consistent, be patient, and eventually people will discover you.
I don’t agree with that.
The path of publishing one great post per week and waiting for people to magically find you — that’s the slow lane. And honestly, you’re risking not getting discovered at all.
Here’s why: something major happened recently that most creators on Substack haven’t even noticed yet.
Open your Substack mobile app right now and go to any writer’s profile. What do you see first?
You see their activity tab — their Notes feed. Short posts, real-time updates, conversations. The long-form articles are pushed to second place.
This is not a small design tweak. Substack doesn’t redesign its core profile layout on a whim. It’s a clear signal.
Substack is telling us that the social aspect of the platform matters more than ever. The creators who ignore that and still treat Substack purely as a blog or newsletter are going to keep wondering why their growth has stalled.
The data backs this up. At a creator event at their New York headquarters in 2025, Substack shared that they added 32 million new free subscriptions and nearly half a million new paid subscriptions in just 3 months. The majority of that growth was driven by Notes and the app, not by people finding publications through Google or external traffic.
People are discovering creators inside Substack itself.
So here’s the real picture: If your strategy is to publish one post per week and hope readers eventually find you, you’re leaving your growth up to chance.
It’s like using a screwdriver when you could be using a power drill. The screwdriver will get a screw in the wall, but when you’ve got a hundred screws to get through, you want the tool that gets you there 10 times faster, right?
And that tool is understanding that Substack in 2026 rewards the creators who show up daily, engage with their readers like real humans, and treat the platform as a relationship-building machine, not just a place to park blog posts.
The 5 Pillars of a Bestselling Substack Publication
Here’s what I’ve learned after building a Bestselling publication, coaching hundreds of creators, and watching what actually works on Substack right now.
To become a Substack Bestseller, you need 3 things working together:
steady growth of free subscribers (a pipeline of new people discovering your work)
and reliable retention (so people don’t upgrade for a month and then cancel).
Pillar 1: Show Up on Substack Notes Every Day
Notes is the discovery engine of Substack in 2026.
When you write a Note, Substack’s algorithm decides who to show it to based on what they’ve interacted with before.
The more consistently you publish, the better the algorithm learns who your ideal reader is, and the more precisely it puts your content in front of those exact people.
And now that Notes is literally the first thing people see when they visit any writer’s profile, if your Notes feed is empty, you’re basically invisible. It’s like walking into that bookstore we talked about and finding a shelf with no books on it. Nobody’s going to stick around.
At Write • Build • Scale, we publish Notes every single day.
We mix up the formats: one-liners, mini frameworks, behind-the-scenes moments, engagement questions, hot takes on the creator space, quick tactical tips, and more.
And we engage with other creators’ Notes too, because that’s how you build real relationships on the platform.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, Every single day? That sounds like a lot!
That’s why we recommend batch-producing your Notes.
Pick one day a week and write 7 to 10 Notes for the week ahead. Then post them at the same time every single day.
Personally, I keep a large backlog of ideas and half-written Notes that I add to throughout the week.
Whenever I come across something I want to share — an insight, a question, a framework — I capture it immediately in my Notes Management System, which is part of Substack System.
That way, I always have content ready to go without needing to dedicate a batch day to it:
Find whatever method and workflow actually works for you. The key is that you show up consistently without overwhelming yourself.
And Substack actually made this even easier recently. They added a draft Notes feature, so now you can start writing a Note, save it, and come back later to polish it before publishing:
The creators who master Notes right now are building a head start that will be very, very hard to close later on.
💡 Want a shortcut?
Our 365 Substack Notes Templates give you a full year of ready-to-post Notes across dozens of formats, so you never stare at a blank screen again.
Pillar 2: Build a Paid Tier That’s Actually Worth Paying For
Notes are driving your free subscriber growth. But free subscribers don’t pay your bills, right? You need them to upgrade.
And this is where most creators go wrong. They turn on paid subscriptions, paywall a few posts, and just… wait. Then they wonder why nobody upgrades.
Here’s the problem: If all you’re offering behind the paywall is more posts that are similar to the free ones, there’s not a compelling reason for someone to pull out their credit card.
Think about the last movie you watched: before you bought a ticket, you probably saw a trailer that made you think, “I need to see that.”
But the trailer didn’t show you the whole movie. It showed you just enough to make you want the full experience.
Your free content should do the same thing. It should make people think, if the free stuff is this good, what’s behind the paywall must be incredible!
But here’s the critical part: when they do upgrade, you have to deliver on that expectation. Otherwise, they’ll cancel within a month or two.
What actually works is building specific assets that give people a clear, tangible reason to stay.
Let me show you what we built at Write • Build • Scale:
When someone becomes a paid member of our publication, they don’t just get extra posts.
They get access to an entire ecosystem.
We publish weekly growth strategies — deep dives that go way beyond what we share for free.
We have an in-depth premium content library with dozens of resources created specifically for our audience.
And one of the things I’m most proud of is our Creator Growth Vault — a collection of dozens of advanced resources, tools, and frameworks that paid members can use to accelerate their growth.
This vault alone is something people tell us is worth more than the annual subscription. It includes things they can actually use right away: templates, checklists, strategy frameworks — not just more content to read.
When someone upgrades to paid on our publication, they immediately feel like they got a real deal. Not like they just unlocked a few extra articles.
💡 Not sure how to structure your paid tier? Our Free-to-Paid Playbook walks you through exactly how to design a paid tier that converts — including pricing, content structure, and the exact assets to build first.
Pillar 3: Growth Without Retention Is a Treadmill
Becoming a bestseller isn’t just about getting to 100 paid subscribers. It’s about keeping them.
If you gain 10 new subscribers a month but lose 7, you’re going to struggle to grow, no matter how good your acquisition strategy is.
There are a few things we’ve learned about retention that have made a massive difference:
Get people onto your annual plan.
This is the single biggest retention lever. Very few of our paid subscribers are on the monthly plan, and that’s by design. If someone joins your monthly plan, they might have a busy month where they don’t open your emails — and they cancel. But if they’re on the annual plan, you have 12 months to prove your value. If this month’s content doesn’t resonate, maybe next month’s will. You get time to build that relationship.
Make your paid content actionable.
Your free content can be inspirational. It can cover the why. But your paid content needs to be the how — actionable templates, workshops where people get feedback, strategies with specific steps. If someone reads your paid post and thinks, I know exactly what to do next, they’re not going to cancel.
Stay connected with your subscribers.
When someone joins us as a paid member at Write • Build • Scale, we reach out to them directly. We welcome them. We ask about their biggest challenges. We point them to the resources that will help them the most. Even as a beginner, Substack’s private chat feature makes this incredibly easy — and it’s something no other content platform offers.
Those personal conversations build a level of loyalty that no amount of content can replicate on its own.
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Now that your Notes strategy is driving free subscriber growth and your paid tier is genuinely worth paying for, you need a way to turn free readers into paying members.
And this is where most creators drop the ball because they turn on their paid tier and then casually mention it at the end of a post by saying something like, “If you enjoyed this, consider upgrading to paid.”
And that usually doesn’t work.
Think about the last time you went to see a movie again: before you bought that ticket, how many times had you already been exposed to the film? Maybe you saw an ad on TV, a poster at a bus stop, a trailer on YouTube. Maybe your favorite actor was in it and you’d been primed for years to check out anything they’re in.
By the time you sat down in that theater, you’d been marketed to dozens of times.
Nobody walks into a cinema and picks a random movie they’ve never heard of.
And nobody opens their Substack app and randomly decides to upgrade to a paid tier they’ve barely seen.
What you want to do instead is run dedicated promotional campaigns. I’m talking about actual events with a start date, an end date, a specific reason to upgrade right now, and real tangible things that people get when they take action.
When we first launched our paid tier, we didn’t just flip a switch and hope for the best.
We ran an entire boot camp called Substack September.
We hosted live workshops, member-only calls, and special trainings exclusively for paid subscribers. We promoted it in our Notes, talked about it in our posts, and sent emails about it. We made it an event.
That single campaign brought in more than 100 paid subscribers and helped us earn the first Bestseller badge.
We still use this strategy multiple times per year, and it works like a charm every single time.
If you look at our paid subscriber growth chart, you can see very clear jumps that align exactly with our promotional campaigns. It’s not a slow, steady drip. It’s an intentional, focused promotion that creates step-by-step leaps in growth:
Pillar 5: Collaborate With Other Creators
Right now, Substack is in its golden era. More readers are joining than ever before. And the creators who build connections with each other are the ones capturing that growth.
Here’s what collaborations look like in practice: It can be a newsletter recommendation exchange where you and another creator recommend each other’s publications — that’s the simplest one, and you can start today.
But you can also do guest posts on each other’s Substacks.
You can do live streams together, which Substack now makes incredibly easy with its built-in live video tools.
And you can cross-promote each other’s Notes consistently.
At Write • Build • Scale, we’ve been doing collaborations since day one. We regularly feature other creators, host live streams with guests, write guest posts, and run cross-promos.
All of that has been one of the biggest growth drivers for our publication.
And here’s what surprised us: our most effective and profitable partnerships have always been with other creators in our space — even people you might call our competitors.
But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense: your audiences overlap, but they’re not identical. Every collaboration introduces you to people who are already interested in what you do. They just haven’t found you yet.
And here’s the part most people miss: you don’t need a huge audience to start collaborating.
The best collaborations often happen between creators at similar stages. Start with 5 creators who are writing about topics similar to yours. Follow their work. Leave thoughtful comments. Then propose a small collaboration — a recommendation exchange, a joint live stream, a guest post swap.
The creators who are generous with their audience and their time tend to grow the fastest on Substack.
The Multiplier: Go Multimedia
Now, the last piece ties everything together.
In March 2026, Substack launched the Recording Studio — a free built-in tool that lets you pre-record video conversations, and it automatically generates clips and thumbnails for you. No external tools, no complicated editing software.
They also added screen sharing for live and recorded video, plus publication branding so your logo shows up on every video you create. All of this is heading in a clear direction: Substack wants creators to build multimedia businesses on the platform.
And the numbers prove why: Substack shared that creators who used audio or video in the past 90 days grew their audience 50% faster than those who didn’t.
It makes sense. People pay for people they trust. And nothing builds trust faster than hearing someone’s voice or seeing their face.
Don’t get me wrong — text is powerful.
That’s how we’ve built the foundation of our entire publication. But when a reader hears you explain something on a live stream or watches a video where you walk them through a strategy step by step, something shifts.
They start to feel like they know you. And people who feel like they know you are dramatically more likely to become paying subscribers.
At Write • Build • Scale, we’ve probably done more live streams than any other publication on Substack at this point.
We launched our podcast on the platform over a year ago.
We host live Q&As for our paid members.
And now we’re using the Recording Studio to produce polished conversations without needing external tools.
If you’ve been hesitant about putting yourself on camera or hitting “go live,” this is your year to start. The barrier to entry has never been lower, and the reward for doing it has never been higher.
The Bestseller Badge Is Not the Destination — It’s the Front Door
Now, before I wrap up, I need to tell you something that might surprise you. And it completely reframes everything I just shared: at Write • Build • Scale, our paid Substack subscriptions represent less than 10% of our total income.
Now, you might be thinking, wait — if the publication only accounts for a small fraction of your revenue, what’s the point of being on Substack at all?!
It’s because the Bestseller badge is not the final destination. It’s the front door.
Here’s what actually happens when someone becomes a paid subscriber: They go from casually reading your free content to actually experiencing the depth of what you deliver behind the paywall.
They see the quality of your work. In our case, they access the Creator Growth Vault.
They join our workshops and live sessions. They start getting real, tangible results.
And for most of them, that’s the moment they realize they want more.
A large portion of our coaching clients and course students started as paid subscribers. The paid tier was the bridge — the moment they went from “this is interesting” to “I trust these people enough to invest serious money.”
So when I tell you to pursue the Bestseller badge, I’m not telling you to chase a check mark. I’m telling you to build the front door of a business that can support you for years to come.
The badge is just a domino. Once you knock it over, you set so many other moving parts into motion. Your credibility, your visibility, your revenue potential — all of it starts to compound.
That’s the real game. And that’s what nobody else is really telling you about becoming a Substack bestseller.
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This really changes how you look at it, it’s less about writing better posts and more about building a full system around them.
This is really useful! Thank you for all of your guys work/advice!