If you’ve been showing up on Substack week after week, publishing consistently, and quietly wondering why it isn’t turning into much, this post is for you.
By the end, you’ll know the half of the equation almost nobody talks about, and why working harder on the other half won’t fix it.
For the better part of two years, I published steadily and kept waiting for the growth to follow. It never really did, and the reason had nothing to do with how much I was writing because I was only ever working half the equation.
You’re not starting from zero
Let’s clear one thing up before anything else, because it quietly shapes every decision you make: When people talk about starting on Substack, they call it starting from zero, but you almost never are. You’re bringing years of work, a skill, a point of view, an audience you built somewhere else, or simply a life that taught you something worth sharing.
I started writing back in 2018, long before I went all-in on Substack, turning the in-person workshops I was running into written articles.
So by the time I landed here, the blank page wasn’t really blank.
This matters because the “zero” story is where comparison creeps in.
You look at someone further along and assume they had something you didn’t. Usually they just started earlier, or started iterating sooner. You’re not behind. You’re deciding what to build from here.
Consistency is only half the equation
For years, I believed that growth would happen if I just kept publishing.
Everywhere you look, the advice is the same: Be consistent, show up, publish more.
And that advice isn’t wrong. But it’s one side of the coin, and on its own, it barely moves you forward.
I know because I lived the other version. I published long-form articles steadily for the better part of two years, heads-down on creation, and I barely made progress. I was pouring everything into making the work and almost nothing into checking whether the work was landing.
Think of it like a car. Consistency is the engine: Without it, you don’t move at all.
But an engine with no hands on the wheel just takes you in circles faster.
The steering is the other half, and the steering is iteration: Looking honestly at what’s working, what isn’t, and adjusting as you go.
You can publish hundreds of posts, but if nobody is reading them, you’re not necessarily making progress.
Consistency on its own doesn’t automatically compound, it piles up without direction.
None of this means consistency is optional.
Showing up is real work, and some days it’s a slog to come up with something worth posting. That’s exactly why we built 365 Substack Notes Templates, so you’re never staring at an empty Note wondering what to say. It clears the friction from the half you control, so you’ve got energy left for the half that actually steers.
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You have to earn attention, and the scoreboard usually lies
Once you accept that showing up isn’t enough, the next trap is obvious in hindsight.
A lot of us start out with a quiet sense of entitlement: I made something good, so people should pay attention.
It feels reasonable. It’s rarely true. You can write something genuinely excellent and still have to earn every reader, because attention doesn’t move in lockstep with the quality of your work or the hours you put in. When you assume it does, you focus on the wrong things and end up down rabbit holes that feel productive and aren’t.
The scoreboard makes this worse, because most creators are watching the wrong numbers. If you come from Instagram or LinkedIn, you’re used to likes arriving fast and in bulk.
But 100 likes on Substack is not 100 likes on LinkedIn.
You rarely see tens of thousands of anything here, and that’s not even the point either.
Substack works differently.
A post I published months ago still picks up comments and restacks today.
It behaves less like a social feed, where a post is dead within a day, and more like a library that keeps working long after you hit publish. So the instant-gratification scoreboard, the one that tells you a post failed by Tuesday, is measuring the wrong thing. You don’t need thousands of likes for a publication to be profitable and to carry a real business.
Model what works, then make it yours
The answer isn’t always more output. Sometimes, it’s just better input, and you get that by borrowing before you invent.
The moment I stopped only creating and started studying, everything sped up. I became obsessed with Modeling of Excellence: Finding what already works for people ahead of you and figuring out how to apply it in your own space.
Back when I was still doing this on the side, interning full-time, I quietly maxed out my copier card printing articles that were going viral. I sat with a yellow marker and studied how they built their hooks, how they opened, how they structured the whole thing.
That’s the input the “just publish” advice leaves out. You want to keep creating, but you also want to stay genuinely critical about what you’re creating, so you’re not spending a year producing work that reaches a handful of people when it could reach far more.
Then you add the part that keeps it yours. Model the pattern, but run tiny experiments on top of it. Take something you admire and ask what you’d change to make it feel more like you. Most of these experiments are small, which means you have almost nothing to lose. Some fall flat. Some become the thing your audience actually responds to. You keep what works, and you move on to the next one.
The things you’re obsessing over probably don’t matter
Notice what wasn’t on that list: A perfect posting schedule.
Most people getting started fixate on the same details: how often to post, what time of day, whether to match the unofficial one-free-one-paid-a-week cadence. These rarely make the biggest difference. If a single paid piece takes you hours and a weekly rhythm isn’t realistic, you don’t want to force it. One strong paid piece every two weeks, or one substantial thing a month, can serve people better than a schedule you resent.
The bigger truth sits underneath all of it: On strategy, there’s almost never a clean, universal answer. When someone hands you a flat “here’s exactly when to turn on paid subscriptions,” you want to be skeptical, because the honest answer depends on your time, your goals, and where you’re trying to go. The setting questions have clear answers. The strategy questions have your answers, and those are the ones worth getting right.
That’s also the whole case for a real feedback loop instead of a year of guessing.
Where this leaves you
If there’s one thing to carry out of all this, it’s this: Stay consistent, but don’t confuse motion with progress.
Model what already works, run small experiments on top of it, and pay close attention to what’s actually landing. That’s the pattern worth repeating in your first year, and it’s a lot less lonely with someone checking your direction while you drive.
If you already run a business or coaching practice and you’d rather not spend the next two years figuring Substack out by trial and error, the Substack Accelerator might be your perfect next step.
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