If you’re a coach, consultant, or expert using Substack to grow your business, you might’ve realized that we’re getting access to new features almost every week right now.
And the hard part isn’t keeping up with the changes themselves. It’s telling the difference between an update that changes what you can actually do and one you can safely ignore.
Three recent updates are worth your attention: Creator Match, tags and segments, and group chats. Together, they push Substack closer to a real email marketing and collaboration engine. The reason that matters now comes down to who’s arriving on the platform.
Substack is going mainstream, so moving now beats waiting
Over the last 3 months, we’ve watched more coaches, consultants, experts, and speakers move to Substack than at any point since we started. People with large audiences elsewhere are treating a Substack presence as something they can’t skip, and creators who aren’t here yet are starting to feel like they’re missing the party.
A fresh signal landed recently: Substack appointed a head of partnerships for the German-speaking market, covering Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. 🇩🇪🇦🇹🇨🇭
Welcome Karsten @ Substack! 👋
That points to real expansion into new countries and more publishing in native languages, which has been missing on the platform until now. It matters to us directly, since we’re based in that market.
We’ve been publishing on Substack for over 2 years, recently past 50,000 subscribers and more than 2,000 paying members, and the pace of change right now is faster than anything we saw in the early days.
The takeaway for your business is simple: The audience you want is arriving, but so is your competition.
The creators who build their collaboration and list infrastructure now will own the room when everyone else shows up.
Creator Match, and the overlap number that should change who you collaborate with
The clearest sign of where the platform is heading is a feature built entirely around collaboration.
Creator Match is in beta and currently limited to Product Lab members, so you need Bestseller status to see it today. It will almost certainly roll out to everyone soon, so it’s worth understanding before it does.
What it does is match you with publications whose audience crosses over with yours, so you can find people to collaborate with, and it gives you a message button to reach them directly.
If you already know everyone in your niche, the matching itself isn’t the valuable part. The valuable part is the overlap number.
We looked at a creator in our niche who writes about almost exactly what we write about, with an audience of around 30,000 subscribers. We have 54,000 subscribers, and the exact-match overlap between the two audiences is only 3,000 people.
For the past 2 years, we assumed the big accounts covering our topic shared most of our audience. Now, we know that it’s not necessarily true.
And even if it were, a small overlap isn’t a reason to skip a collaboration, it’s the reason to do it. A live stream or a swap puts you in front of tens of thousands of people who have never heard of you, and puts them in front of yours.
So when you get access, don’t just look at who you’re matched with. Look at how small the overlap is, and treat the smallest overlaps with creators you genuinely respect as your best opportunities.
Most collaborations still start with a message, and that message is exactly where most creators freeze. Our Substack DM Playbook gives you the templates to turn a match into a real conversation that goes somewhere, so a message button doesn’t sit there unused.
Tags and segments finally give you email-marketing control
Collaboration brings new people into your world. The next feature on our list decides what you do with them once they’re on your list.
Tags and segments were limited to Bestsellers and are now rolling out to everyone. If you’ve used Kit or Mailchimp, this will feel familiar. A tag is a private label you assign to a subscriber that only you can see, so you can filter and segment your list instead of treating everyone the same.
Here’s where it earns its place for a business: You can tag everyone who attended a webinar, so the next time you run one you don’t spam the same people with an invitation they’ve already sat through.
You can tag your existing customers and your premium members, so when you send a promotion to apply or buy, it doesn’t land with the people who already did.
You can tag the creators you collaborate with, so they’re quietly kept out of your sales messages.
You can apply tags three ways: In bulk, individually, or automatically as you import someone to your list.
This is the update that moves Substack from a publishing tool toward something closer to a real email marketing platform. It isn’t at the level of a dedicated tool yet, but with every release it gets closer, and the control you get over who hears what is the part that directly protects your relationships and your revenue.
Group chats, used with intention
Segmentation controls your one-to-many messages. Group chats open a different lever: Small, high-trust rooms.
Substack finally lets you create group DMs. The limits are worth knowing up front: Up to 50 people per chat, and everyone inside can invite others, so you don’t get admin-only control over who joins. Within those limits, there’s a lot you can build.
You can run a beta group for a new product and build it in the open with the people who raise their hand.
You can create a private room for your founding members where they drop in questions and you answer them, which makes a founding-member offer genuinely worth more.
You can pull together a small mastermind of peers you trust and talk about the things you’d never post publicly, like income reports or what’s actually working right now.
One thing you want to avoid: Don’t add people to a group chat without asking first. Getting pulled into a random group is the fastest way to get muted or blocked, so only bring in people you’re confident will be glad to be there.
The pattern behind all of this
Every one of these updates points the same direction. Substack is becoming a place where collaboration and segmentation, not just publishing, drive the growth.
The creators who put these features to work now, while most people are still only posting, are the ones who’ll be positioned when the platform goes fully mainstream.
If you already run a business or a coaching practice, and you’d rather not spend the next year working out how to turn all of this into real income by trial and error, that’s what we built the Substack Accelerator for.
It’s direct coaching from the Write • Build • Scale team, applied to your specific publication, built around one outcome: Becoming a Substack Bestseller and building real income on top of it. It’s application-based, because we only take people we’re confident we can get there.
If that sounds like you, apply here: substackcoaching.com
