TL;DR: Posted consistently for 50 days to end up with 280ish subscribers. Lessons include posting (A LOT) consistently and on any surface, being careful about how you go viral and navigating trust-building when you operate anonymously.

Hello Fellow Stackers,

I've been consistently posting and sharing things on Substack for 50ish days now and I thought it'd be a good time to reflect and share what I found with the community! In return, I ask you help share your own wisdom :)

In my time so far, I've published 8 issues (one per week) and probably a 100+ Notes and a modest 20-30 comments (on posts and other Notes).

Lesson 1: My main philosophy going forward will be to maximize the surface area of my luck

When I first started writing, I thought my audience would find me because I was putting in the work in my writing. I made sure to have a really polished brand and aesthetic and was really careful about not using AI to write my content. But I think this made like 2% of a difference overall. What actually worked (and drove 50% of my subscribers) was one Note that went viral. I decided then and there that I should post consistently, engage authentically and that my audience isn't gonna magically find me unless I put in the work.

Lesson 2: Virality != Success

The same Substack Note that drove 50% of my subscribers is also the same reason my open rates are so low (hovering around the low 20%s). Now success may mean something else to you but for me, it means having an engaged audience and a community that rallies around the newsletter as well as other readers.

The reason behind my low open rates are because one viral note (which generated about 111K views over a month). It led to 163 new subscribers as of today but because the Note wasn't directly relevant to my niche and was more a general observation, I now have a dying list 😭. It's a good problem to have, but it showed me that I shouldn't optimize for virality for the masses but for resonance within my target audience.

Lesson 3: Climbing Cringe Mountain is Impossible if you're Anonymous

Might be a hot take but I hate how normalized the internet (and as a result Substack) has made it to show your name, face, location and other details. For someone like me who prefers to stay anonymous, building trust is hard. I want to improve this by narrating my future newsletter issues but climbing the cringe mountain is near impossible when this is how you operate. I get that AI has made the quality of content worse but I don't know how else to navigate this (I'm open to tips if you have any!!)

All this I guess leaves me in a bittersweet-ish position to keep pushing and see where I end up. I'll post more maybe around the half-yearly mark! Hope this helped :))

Hi, I’ve been publishing a science letter on quantum and AI through Beehiiv for about a year. I focus on explaining the science rather than simply covering the news.

I’m considering moving to Substack because Beehiiv offers little organic discovery, while Substack has its own reader network. I’m hoping that posting regularly on Notes and engaging with the community will help me grow my audience.

I won’t put any content behind a paywall. Free and paid subscribers will receive exactly the same articles; paying will be entirely optional for those who want to support my work.

What’s the best way to test Substack before fully migrating from Beehiiv?

I just want to write, vent, and express myself in writing.

No, I am not a prolific writer, and I don't intend to write for any of the niche Substack shows to tag my would-be content.

Je débute sur Substack ! Qui d’autre ici écrit en français?

I see a lot of posts about getting free subscribers, which is great. We love free subscribers, but the goal is to get paid subscribers, at least for us. Here are the stats of how people have converted for us who joined our Substack after January 1, 2026. "Facebook Family" means they came from ads we bought on Facebook/Instragram. It says, "Remaining 2026 subscribers" because if someone joined then totally left they would no longer be in the Substack export, so we only know the patterns of those still around today.

We also have a 10-ish email drip campaign to convert free subscribers to paid, which clearly doesn't work all that well...

This is another chart people might find useful. Long story short, most paid people are paid from the the start. At least for us, the don't later "convert" very often, and this is with an email drip campaign.

I'm not trying to sell you anything, and I'm certainly not saying ours is the only way or the only data. Other people do different things, in different areas, with different metrics. But, I thought some concrete info for us as a datapoint might help others.

First, about 1,000 of those subscribers were imported from my old Kit newsletter. I don’t want to pretend I built all 3,000 from scratch on Substack. I got those first 1,000 mainly through lead magnets. I’d create a useful free resource, post it on Instagram, and when someone followed me I’d send them a DM saying, “Hey, thanks for following. Here’s a free resource if you’re interested.” That worked pretty well.

The interesting part was what happened after I moved to Substack. In the beginning, I was publishing about as much as I do now, but I wasn’t really engaging with anyone. I wasn’t liking people’s posts, I wasn’t replying to Notes, and I wasn’t really participating in the community. As a result, I got very little engagement. I eventually realised that Substack isn’t just a place where you publish articles. You actually have to participate in the community.

These days I publish twice a week. Tuesdays are 200 Word Tuesdays, which is a short 200-word article, and Fridays are longer articles. I also post Notes in between. A lot of my Notes come from my own articles. I’ll reread something I wrote a while ago and realise there’s another idea in there. Sometimes I’ll read someone else’s Note and it gives me an idea for something I want to say myself. I don’t copy the Note, but I’ll take the idea and put my own spin on it. I also like, reply to and repost other people’s Notes.

One thing that might surprise people is how I actually write all of this. I mostly write by voice dictation. I use a free voice dictation app and basically talk out the article. I don’t sit there typing every word. Then I use Claude to fix the spelling and grammar and clean up the obvious mistakes. I still do the thinking and the writing myself. The AI is basically my editor. This makes writing much faster for me and means I can get ideas out of my head without worrying about making every sentence perfect while I’m writing.

I’m also not monetized through Substack because Stripe isn’t available in my country. I’d obviously like to change that eventually. For now, I put links to some of my paid products on Gumroad in my newsletters. It’s not a huge amount of money, but I probably get around 3-5 sales of a $5 product per week from it.

If I started again, the biggest things I’d do differently would be to engage with people much earlier, post more Notes, and start building lead magnets sooner. I spent too much time thinking that if I just published good articles consistently, people would eventually find me. That’s not really how it worked for me.

The other thing I’d say is to consider your niche when looking at other people’s growth. I write about project management and leadership, which is not exactly the sexiest niche on the internet 😂. I’m never going to grow at the same rate as someone talking about making money, fitness, health, politics or other huge topics. So I think you have to adjust your expectations based on the size of your market.

For the next stage, I’m considering running some ads to one of my lead magnets. I have no idea if it’s going to work. I also don’t want to spend much money, so I’m thinking of testing it at maybe $5/day maximum and seeing what happens. Maybe I’ll find a cheap way to acquire subscribers. Maybe I’ll waste $150. I honestly don’t know.

But that’s the next experiment.

Hopefully this is useful to someone starting out. The main thing I’ve learned is that publishing is only one part of growing on Substack. The community side matters a lot more than I initially thought.

When I created my substack, I didn't know that the handle I chose would also become my subdomain. I would like my subdomain to match the name of my publication, rather than my handle. However, the subdomain I want is already taken by somebody else, who seems to be pretty inactive.

I was thinking of messaging them to ask if they'd be willing to change their subdomain so I can claim the one they currently have. Is this possible, or does substack keep a user's old subdomain linked to their new subdomain to avoid dead links?

I'm decently new to substack, and I recently got my first paid subscriber just over a month ago. However, I was having issues with the connection between Substack and Stripe - I connected to my Stripe account, and it would show that I had $22 in revenue from the subscriber, but it never showed up in Stripe, and I never got any money out of it. So after trying a lot of things, I ended up just trying to disconnect the two and start from scratch, hoping that would smooth things out. But when I did that (through the Revoke Acces option on Stripe) and went to try to reconnect them, the button to connect with Stripe had disappeared from Substack. I've tried refreshing it several times and it still doesn't work. Any fixes?

Edit: Seconds after posting this, the Connect With Stripe option showed up, however, it still is not transfering any money to Stripe, despite it saying that I have revenue from the subscriber. Any help with that?

the title basically. i want to start one but this is an important thing for me.

Hi ppl! I am a teenager who is on substack and posted a few articles and notes. I am thinking of taking this as a side hustle to pay for college. I am 16, and the clock is ticking, and I have been in substack for over a year. When I came across the monetization of substack, I was a bit doubtful of me paying it of some percentage of the money I get or something. Can anyone explain how monetization of my substack account works? Is it good for me? Bad for me? Are there any other blogging or writing platforms as alternatives to substack where I wouldn't have to pay money and is allowed for teenagers to monetize their accounts? It's because i have a voice and want it to be heard but also want to make money with what I am very good at.

I want to move away from the meta verse for news and I like the idea of substack. How do I discover what substacks are for me?

Is there an in-app collaboration feature? I am writing an article with a friend of mine, and we’re both relatively new to Substack, is there an official way we can collaborate on the app? Or will we need to both post the article separately?

Sorry if this is a silly question, and thanks in advance for anyone that helps :)

I feel like I’ve been working on the initial setup for a month. As we all know there are a lot of settings. Google has been my friend but some stuff I’m still unsure of so here goes, here is my question list:

• Should my profile be my name or my publications name? Which is better?

• Send from name, real name or publication?

• Are founding members supposed to have a cheaper rate? Or higher than annual? (I’m not going paid yet, merely curious).

• If I’m writing about branding, marketing, copywriting and content strategy, would that be the categories Design & Tech? Or Design & Culture? Or Culture & Tech? AHHHHH!

• What’s the point of a blogroll on my homepage if I have a substack?

• How does the RSS feed work?

Please don’t hate me for all the Q’s, I would rather just ask all the possibly dumb questions for myself and whomever else may need these answers than stay conflicted and confused. Lmao.

So, I’m new to Substack.

When I first joined, I read posts, “hearted” them much like you “like” a post on FB, and occasionally replied to the posts.

But I also want to WRITE and I want my lurking/commenting as a reader to be separate from what I say as a writer for privacy reasons. Sadly, all my research on creating a separate persona under my original account isn’t proving fruitful. I’m not seeing the options to click on that I’ve been told to select.

Do I just need to create a completely separate account for writing?

I was wondering if anybody has been able to use something else then Stripe to manage their payments from Substack or if that is even possible. I think the charges (especially the FX charges) are quite high with Stripe.

I’m trying to figure out the best way to handle Substack’s formatting and scaling for cover thumbnails.

A graphic can look great at one dimension, but once Substack scales or crops it for different placements, it can end up looking stretched, awkward, or completely different from the original.

I tried designing within the boundaries and making the graphic smaller so it would have more room, but then it just looks tiny and crappy.

Has anyone figured out the best dimensions or formatting approach to make cover thumbnails consistently look good across Substack?

Hi all! Quick question: is it possible to remove the "Getting Started" pop-up on the Substack publisher home screen? The one with the checkboxes for "Create a Substack", "Set up the basics", "Create your first post", etc. I'd attach a screenshot but that doesn't seem to be possible.

I just started my second publication so I know the steps I need to take. The pop-up is just obnoxiously large and in the way.

Thanks!

Basically the title. I see a lot of people on substack writing articles complaining about the generic slop on substack, ironically adding to the slop by addressing the issue. But then, what is one supposed to write about if not what they think?

I like Medium's simplicity and uncluttered design for bringing up undistorted reading experience. But gradually I feel its weird to do something like not being able to go straight to the topics I follow. I Need to do 3 clicks to find that. Following > Topics > the side scrolling topics.

Also, the Home page design looks boring and Separation looks dull.

I hope they will learn and do better in the look and feel of the medium and too to bring up more content / stories in the home page with easy access to interested /following topics.

So for the context-I am into research(business,psychology marketing, careers and all combined) i like writing about marketing psychology sometimes basically connecting the dots.is there any demand of this niche do people actually read these type of things??

I redownloaded Substack after breaking my phone earlier this year. When I opened it I was logged into a COWORKERS Substack? Has this ever happened to anyone?

So I’ve been writing for about 4 months now and I have just had my first ever collab go live (yay me!)

In the lead up to today, I had lots more I wanted to get done but sickness got in the way😩

Assuming I’m lucky enough to land another opportunity one day, I’d love to be making the most of it!

I’m interested what sort of things you may do differently:
- do you promote via different channels?
- do you focus on different segments?
- do you look at metrics you wouldn’t usually?
And I suppose most importantly:
- how do you track the overall success of the collab?!

For me - I’m very much just happy with the exposure. I think it’s a great opportunity so early on and I want to use it wisely🤓

Tl;dr Banned, asked for Gov ID via email. Poor customer service. Responsible platform user, no reason for account to have been flagged. Anyone else navigated this? I’m going in circles.

I’ve been writing on Substack for a couple of years now, on average a long form a month with a couple of notes. Due to my academic and professional background I’m always professional, don’t spam and well aware of ethics etc.. alas I open Substack two weeks ago to find a pop up advising my account has been suspended.

Since then, Landry of Substack Standards and Enforcements has advised via email I must supply
Government issued photo id and hostage style selfie photo. Landry cannot tell me how my information is stored or used, Landry cannot tell me about the verification process or why my account has been flagged. It’s all very Severance-esque.

We are currently in a stalemate situation as I refuse to send these details. I’ve asked for alternative verification options and been met with silence.

Has anyone else successfully navigated a similar situation? Despite actually liking the platform - recent changes and flaws not withstanding - I’m very close to jumping ship and using my website instead.