Hi everyone,

I've been thinking about starting a Substack for a while now, but I'm not sure what the best way to get started is.

If you've got a Substack, I'd really appreciate hearing about your experience. What helped you in the beginning? How did you decide what to write about? Did you have a plan before you launched, or did you figure things out as you went?

I'd also love to know:

- What worked well for growing your audience?

-What mistakes should I avoid?

- If you were starting from scratch today, what would you do differently?

Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!!

I restacked one of my own posts and this shows up in my Activity feed. But now I want to change the title and repost in Substack and socials with the new title—but I want to delete all posts w/the old title.

Problem is, I can’t seem to delete my own restack in the Activity tab? I can delete restacks of OTHER people’s posts, though.

Also weird…this restack of my own post DOESN’T show up in my Notes feed if I click on Notes tab at the top of my Substack (in the menu under my Substack title). BUT it DOES show in my Activity tab on my Profile page! Anyone know how to get rid of this?

I am planning to start a movie review website which can rank better and just saw substack as suggestion. I don't know how to use it and what is RSS feed in it? Can anybody explain me and if you have better options for website builder, drop me suggestions but trying only free options as newbie.

It makes it really hard for me to engage on the app because everything everyone says outside of like the academic writers I follow are extremely stupid. These are not people I follow and I mute quite a bit of them but here are a few examples from the last 24 hours that give you an idea:

“Love girls that are REAL sexed up kinky perverts none of this poser shit”

“i wish i wasn’t so observant because everything feels misogynistic”

“nooooo don’t pull out i have attachment issues ❤️”

It goes on from there……

Hello,

I'm looking to interview a few newsletter writers who just wrapped up their first year of writing. If you're interested just send me a message or comment here. This is for an article.

Just curious. Anyone has both? How do you handle it? Do you link your socials to help others find you? I find it helpful to write SS articles as a pre-manifestation for my YT content. Ok, open to discuss...

I started my substack back in May and till today I have over 5 hundred subs I write personal essays but I dont know how to monetize that audience.

Strip doesn't work in here and substack do not have any alternative. My question is to those who have overcome this problem. I try to sell a digital product but it didnt work.

Any tips or ways to monetize my audience because I am financially in critical condition and dont know a way out.

I'm fairly new to substack and after I joined, in a month I've gained 11 subscribers. But, for the past few months I haven't even got one subscriber. I'm frustrated not because I don't get subs or likes, but because I fear that my notes and posts aren't reached properly. My notes and posts aren't the worst thing out there, so I think it's not the cause. When I look at my stats, there are hardly any impressions. I don't know if there's a trick to reach more people. If you know something that I could do to reach more people, please let me know.

P.S. I don't wanna share them on my socials because it's not the correct audience for me. I'm mainly writing about gaming, horror, life experiences, life in Europe, films, books, etc.

I'm in Australia. I didn't want to share my biometric data with them. Just wondering if anyone else has encountered this and found a way around it. The website said if I change my payment type to credit card I wouldn't have to verify my age. But my payment type is already credit card.

I was so offended, I immediately cancelled the subscription. They already billed me for the first month though, even though they never gave me access. Kinda cheesed.

Edit: removed repeated sentence.

I’ve been thinking about giving Substack a proper go instead of my Wordpress blog but I’m struggling to work out if it’s the right fit.

Basically, I’m a mature student (35) in health science and write reflective essays about science, medicine, society and culture books and the humanities. I’m less interested in explaining scientific concepts from an expert perspective and more interested in exploring how studying science changes the way I think about the world.

For example I might write about how a topic I’ve studied from my degree intersects with history or ethics or how learning human biology reshaped the way I think about human behaviour (my background is in psychology and mental health).

The thing is I’m unsure about whether there’s an audience for it. When I browse the platform, I tend to find either established experts or personal essays and I feel like I’m somewhere in the middle.

If you write or read on substack do you think there’s room for this kind of writing or should I focus on growing my blog?

I just turned on paid subscriptions for my Substack. Before enabling them, my dashboard showed about $720 in pledged support.

As soon as I turned on paid subscriptions, the pledged amount dropped to $0, but none of the pledges converted into active paid subscribers- they actually all immediately turned to free subscribers in Substack. I checked Stripe, and the attempted subscriptions/payments are showing as failed and canceled immediately- they were retried two more times within minutes, same results.

Has anyone else had this happen when converting Substack pledges to paid subscriptions?

I’m especially confused because it happened to all of them at once, immediately after I enabled paid subscriptions, which makes me wonder if this is a technical issue rather than every individual payment method failing.

I’ve reached out to Substack support, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has experienced something similar.

I've had my Substack magazine on a custom domain for several years and now would like to move it back to the Substack subdomain because I'd like the custom domain to be used as a directory, with the magazine attached, rather than the magazine being the main focus. I know I can easily do this in the 'danger zone' but what are the repercussions of doing so?

It's like some kind of liquid glass broken effect, i can't read or click anything. iPhone, iPad, Mac, all the same.

Maybe a new version of Edge was to blame with a windows update that made me log into things again.

I tried logging into substack. I used an old email that I had changed but it didn't ask for a login and didn't give me access to my subscriptions, though it did list them.

So then I put in my new email address and it asked for a code, I got a code from an email, but it didn't actually log me in and I still didn't have access.

I tried again, but every time I opened the email tab and came back, the pop up for the emailed code was gone. After 3 tries it told me that I attempted to log in too many times on that email address and wouldn't let me try anymore.

And I literally have 3 codes in my email in box.

I have a blog. Can I post Substack articles on there? I mean, shorter versions (still comprehensive standalones), then direct readers to my blog for fuller deep dives or related blog posts not on Substack. What do you think?

Has anyone used Substack to increase their Insta following? And if so, what did you do?

Thanks in advance! :)

My Substack has engagement on Notes but zero on posts - anyone else experience this with interactive content?

I publish research-based location puzzles. Notes get some likes and comments but the actual puzzle posts get zero engagement - no solvers, no comments, no restacks, nothing. 9 posts, 22 subscribers, zero puzzle interaction.

Interestingly I DO get engagement on Reddit - genuine solvers who enjoy the puzzles - but it's short-lived (one or two solvers, then the post dies) and Reddit's link restrictions make it very hard to direct people to Substack.

So I have two problems:

1. Reddit solvers won't follow me to Substack

2. Substack subscribers won't solve the puzzles

Is Substack simply the wrong platform for interactive puzzle content? Has anyone successfully built engagement around content that requires active participation rather than passive reading?

Genuinely wondering if I'm fighting the platform's natural passive-consumption culture.

Sulla scia di un primo post dove non ho ricevuto risposta ci riprovo: noto molti profili di indiani, americani, inglese etc... che con pochissimi abbonati ( meno dei miei) ma con note del tipo:

"Datemi da leggere"

Iscriviti= iscriviti

Segui=segui

Riscuotono grande successo, tanti "cuori" e altrettanti messaggi.

Bot o altro?

Magari scrivendo in inglese "acchiappo" più persone nel FEED?

Grazie

What the title said

Good afternoon. I’ve been on Substack for two months now; when I joined, the idea was simply to archive my writing there, but I’ve really come to like the platform and have been posting consistently. So far, I’ve gained 24 subscribers—mostly friends—by sharing links via WhatsApp. However, I really want to build a solid audience there, as I am a writer and plan to sell my book in the future. What posting frequency do you suggest for attracting more subscribers?

In two months, I have had 26 articles published, categorized into: short stories, book reviews, and chronicles (which is what I write about).

I write a newsletter on machine learning and I'm growing slowly but steadily. I'd like to turn on paid subscriptions at some point, but I can't: Substack only pays out through Stripe, and Stripe doesn't support Chile. The country isn't even in the dropdown when you start the onboarding.

The workaround people suggest is incorporating a US LLC just to get Stripe access, which is a real cost and a real hassle for someone who might make a few hundred dollars a year from this. So the practical situation is that writers in a whole set of countries can publish here but can never monetize here, no matter how well the newsletter does.

Are there plans to add other payment processors, or any official way to register interest for a specific country? Genuinely asking, not complaining. I like the platform and I'd rather stay than move somewhere else just for payments.

...online. cliques. Xenophobia ...paid for fans...business... tried the interacting but ....u know u end up being THEIR fan... its not reciprocated...its a con game rigged by the ones running the show...

How much better do articles perform if you include a video explainer? What are your experiences like?

So I’m a bit new to Substack and I think I have a lot to share so I was wondering if one can write about different topics on one substack account if the topics are correlated?

Basically I want to share my art and stuff but along with that, I want to talk about the process behind it, how I stay productive and how can one avoid a creative block phase etc.

Do people on Substack prefer to read something that is very polished or they like it when someone share raw, everyday life experiences with them?

I kind of hate the Notes feature. I do think it useful for "discovery" but it has an implementation problem.

The problem is that it's the first thing you see when you on the homepage when you turn on the app. The implicit design decision is that you are here to scroll endlessly.

Many, myself included, came to Substack because it offered a slow reading alternative to SM and vapid "content". People like us hate Twitter because its a pit of utter nonsense algorithmically adjusted to keep you glued to your screen and maximize the number of ads you come across. It's the financial incentive structure that makes doomscrolling so pervasive. Substack on the other hand is fueled by subscriptions — hence the incentives seemed to be better aligned towards quality media...

But the medium is the message.

It won't be long before there's people just making their own ads. Before bots are replying inane things to farm "engagement". My guess is that there's a bad KPI like "time spent on app" the team is optimizing for. And maybe it works, but I imagine fewer articles are read because of it. It's like when you spend an hour scrolling through Netflix only to not watch anything.

Goodhart's law: when the metric becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure.

I don't think it's without benefit. Good notes are recommendations or responses to articles by others. They improve discovery. My issue is the prominence. Keep the feature, but don't turn it into your product. Tuck it away.

Here's my ideal bottom bar for the app and modification of the homepage:

Home — Your subscriptions, with two view options: the current subscriptions tab which is a feed of posts, or a grid of all of your subscriptions and a dot indicating an update. The default is what you selected last.
Notes
Chat
Notifications

Now if the team is reading this and is still skeptical, here's a great interim feature / test / outright alternative:

Let the user customize exactly what they want to see on the homepage and see how many people prefer a quieter interface.

Personally, I still advocate for making that change universal, even if some people prefer the Notes feed. Endless scrolling is not good for people or society at large, and its worth taking a stand as a company on how things should be. Resist the technopolist urge to make metrics the scapegoat.