and a very warm welcome to everyone who’s joined us in the last couple of weeks. i’m so glad you’re here!

substack recently added a feature called creator match to our dashboard this month, and when i first saw it my honest reaction was oh no. more homework. 🫠

i’d just published a post about burning out on here. the last thing i needed was a shiny new feature telling me to go and message twenty strangers.

then i opened it.

and i haven’t stopped thinking about it since, because it turns out this is the biggest time saver substack has given beginners all year and almost nobody is talking about it properly yet.

so here’s everything. what it is, what the numbers actually mean, nine ways to collaborate, and the exact DM i’d send.

take what fits, leave the rest. 🩷

first, the thing that made me put my pen down

substack gave me twenty matches. seven excellent, seven strong, six good.

and the top four are:

. who i interact with and had actually been planning to DM. seeing her sitting at number one was such a lovely surprise!

. who i’m about to interview for the Starting From Zero series.

who i already interviewed. on august 5th. weeks before this feature existed. 🙈

who i engage with quite regularly.

four out of four. not one stranger among them.

and i sat there feeling slightly caught out, because here’s what that actually means. creator match didn’t find those people for me.

i found them. by reading, and commenting, and turning up in their corners for three months. the shared subscribers came from that, their readers wandered over to see who this person in the comments was, some of them stayed, and eventually the algorithm noticed and handed it back to me like news.

which is rather reassuring, if you think about it.

it means the creator match page is a mirror, not a map. it isn’t showing you who you should know. it’s showing you the last three months of you showing up.

so if you open yours and it’s full of people you already like, you’re not behind. you’re doing it right, and this is just the receipt. 🩷

and if you open it and it’s a bit thin?

the fix isn’t a hack. it’s go and be a good neighbour in someone’s comments for a few weeks. the page will catch up.

and this is the part i really want you to hear: it’s a massive time saver

before this, finding someone to collaborate with looked like this.

scroll notes for an hour. spot someone whose writing you like. open their profile. read their about page. try to work out whether their people are your people, based on absolutely nothing but a hunch.

keep a scrappy list in a notebook. or a google docs or maybe a word doc (if you’re like me!) forget the doc or where you saved it, lol! start again next month.

i did this. it took me whole weekends and i was mostly guessing! 🙃

because you cannot see someone else’s subscriber list. you never could. so every collab pitch any of us has ever sent has been a coin toss dressed up as a strategy.

substack can see it. and now it just... tells you. in 2 seconds.

no more hunting for similar substacks. that’s the whole feature, honestly, and it’s enormous.

where it’s hiding:

dashboard → creator tools → creator match. right under website editor.

there’s no banner, no red dot, nothing. and i think so many writers don’t even know it exists!

the three numbers on every card (two of them aren’t real)

right, this is what you need to know and i did the analysis for an hour so you don’t have to (and then we’ll get to the fun part below, promise!)

every match card shows you three things: shared subscribers, new audience for you, and new audience for them.

i assumed all three were doing work. they’re not!

when i lined up “new audience for them” across all twenty of my matches, the whole range was 566 to 610. it barely moves. meanwhile “new audience for you” runs from 366 all the way up to 1,800.

so i sat down with the sums, and here’s what those two boxes actually are:

new audience for them = your subscriber count − shared subscribers

new audience for you = their subscriber count − shared subscribers

that’s it. 646 minus 63 is 583. 646 minus 74 is 572. every single time.

neither one is a prediction.

nobody at substack is forecasting what your collab will do. it’s subtraction in a nice box with a border. 🙃

which leaves exactly one real number on the card: shared subscribers. that’s the only figure describing an actual relationship between your list and theirs.

and honestly? i found that so freeing.

“new audience for them” is just my own size wearing a different hat. i cannot make myself look bigger by picking a fancier person to message. there is no version of that page where i audition well!

so you can stop worrying about whether you’re impressive enough for the writer with 1.9K. that box was never about them. it was always just you.

the number i’d actually use

take shared subscribers. divide it by their subscriber count. that gives you the share of their room that already reads you.

mine, at the two ends:

• — 421 subscribers, 53 shared. that’s about one in eight of her readers already getting my emails.

• — 1.9K subscribers, 80 shared. about one in twenty-four.

now look at what substack puts on those two cards. Tracy has my biggest “new audience for you” number on the whole page: 1,800. Danielle has my smallest: 366.

so the card shouting the loudest is pointing me at the coldest room in the building.

substack is like stars hollow, isn’t it!

walking into Danielle’s list is walking into luke’s.

you haven’t met everyone, but enough of them already half-know you that you’re not really a stranger, and someone will shuffle over to make space.

walking into Tracy’s list is emily’s club in hartford. bigger room. much better food. nobody knows you, and you’ll spend the entire evening explaining who you are and why you’re there.

both rooms have people in them. only one of them is warm.

try this: open your page and do that division on your top five. shared ÷ their subscribers. write it in the margin. then message the highest percentage first, not the highest number. takes four minutes and it will completely reorder your list.

everyone’s instinct is to message the biggest name on the list. mine was too! but the dragonfly didn’t happen because lorelai marched into the grandest hotel in hartford and pitched herself. it happened because she and sookie were roughly the same size, needed each other roughly equally, and had already been in the same kitchen for years. 🩷

nine ways to collaborate, easiest first

okay, the fun part.

“collaboration” sounds enormous and formal and like something that needs a contract, and i think that’s exactly why most of us never do it. it really doesn’t have to be a big deal.

here they are, roughly in order of how little effort they cost the person you’re asking:

1. just recommend them. costs you nothing, needs no reply, no permission, no scheduling. if their writing is something your readers would genuinely want, add them to your recommendations today.

many people notice and quietly recommend you back. this is the lowest-effort collab on the entire platform and most beginners skip it.

2. or, if your topics don’t match — a “go follow this writer” mention. not every good match is a good recommendation.

if their subject isn’t what your people signed up for, a recommendation is a slightly odd fit. a warm one-line mention in a post or a note does the same kind thing without confusing your readers.

something like “i’ve been loving X’s writing on Y, go and have a look.” it costs them nothing and it means a lot.

3. restack them with a real comment. not a bare restack. two honest lines about why.

this is how you warm someone up before you ever land in their inbox, and it’s the difference between “who is this” and “oh, it’s her.”

4. a shared question, same day. you both post the same question as a note on the same morning and send your people to each other’s replies.

takes ten minutes. no drafts, no editing, no calendar.

5. a two-voice post. one question, two honest answers, and you each publish the whole thing to your own list.

my favourite version of this, because both of you get a full post out of one afternoon.

6. an interview. this is what my whole Starting From Zero series is. you ask, they answer, you do the formatting.

it’s generous, it’s easy for them to say yes to, and the person being interviewed almost always shares it.

7. a guest section. they write one small block inside your newsletter, you write one inside theirs. tiny. no co-editing.

8. a joint live video. substack pushes these hard and both audiences get notified. more effort, more reach.

9. a podcast swap, or a small shared series. three to five posts over a few weeks, alternating.

the biggest commitment on this list, and the one i’d only do with someone you’ve already worked with once.

start at the top of that list, not the bottom. a recommendation today beats a five-part series you’re both too tired to start.

the DM (steal this, then make it yours)

the button says message. nobody tells you what goes in it.

think of this like you’re walking into luke’s in Gilmore Girls! don’t walk into someone’s DMs and immediately start talking about yourself.

four things. that’s all.

1. the overlap, as a plain fact. not flattery. it’s the one thing you know that they might not.

2. one specific thing of theirs you’ve actually read. named. not “i love your work.”

3. one idea — and then a door left open.

4. an easy out.

the bit i almost got wrong: ask, don’t pitch

i wrote a first version of that message where i explained my whole idea in detail. formats, dates, word counts, the lot. very organised. very me. 🙈

and then i deleted it, because the other person may well have a better idea than you do.

they know their readers.

they know what their people have been asking for and what flopped last time. if you turn up with a fully-formed plan, the only two answers left for them are yes and no.

if you turn up with one idea and a real question, you get their thinking as well — and their thinking is half the reason you wanted to work with them in the first place.

so: one idea, then hand them the pen.

and the five words that do more work than the other hundred:

“i’ll write the first draft.”

because the thing standing between you and a yes is almost never enthusiasm. it’s the other person quietly doing sums about how much unpaid work has just landed on them from a stranger. take that off their desk and the answer changes.

so want something that will definitely be lovely and easy?

sort by overlap and message the top.

want proper new reach?

go further down the list on purpose. a “good” match at 4% overlap is a colder pitch and a much bigger room.

oh and what if you don’t have enough subscribers to use it yet?

that’s real and i don’t want to breeze past it.

the feature needs shared-subscriber data to say anything at all, and at forty subscribers it will have nothing to show you. i was at 39 in june! if that’s you right now, the page will still be there in three months and none of this is urgent.

go and be in someone’s comments instead that’s what builds the overlap that fills the page later anyway. 🩷

the seven things i’d write down

1. only shared subscribers is a real number. the other two boxes are your list and their list with the overlap taken off. stop reading them as forecasts.

2. sort by overlap, not by size. shared ÷ their subscribers. highest percentage is your warmest room and your likeliest yes.

3. your biggest match is your coldest pitch. the number that looks most exciting is describing the room where the fewest people know you.

4. message the ones where you’d give more than you’d get. divide their gain by yours. above 1.0 goes first.

5. recommend before you ask. it’s free, it needs no reply, and it’s the warmest possible way to arrive.

6. bring one idea and a real question. they may well have a better one, and asking is how you find out.

7. say you’ll write the first draft. it removes the only genuine objection, which is workload, not interest.

use it or pass it to a writer friend who’s been meaning to do a collab 🩷

okay, your turn, and it’s a small thing

go and open dashboard → creator tools → creator match. it takes eleven seconds. you don’t have to message anybody.

then come and tell me one thing:

who is sitting at the top of your list, and did you already know them?

that’s the bit i’m actually curious about. not whether the feature works.

whether it’s handing us back people we’d already found on our own, the way it did with me, or whether it’s genuinely turning up strangers.

i’ll go first: all four of my top matches are women i already talk to. one of them i’d interviewed three weeks earlier. the algorithm was a whole month behind my own reading. 🙈

and if the answer is that you already knew them too, then that’s rather lovely, isn’t it. it means the slow, unglamorous thing we’re all doing like turning up in each other’s comments is what was building the list all along.

i read every single reply and respond🩷

see you next week 🫶

Yuvika

Want to keep reading? Try this:

i’ve started this post about four times and deleted it every time, because it isn’t a very flattering story. but the unflattering ones tend to be the useful ones, so. okay so here we go.

i burnt out in august.

not dramatically. nobody would have noticed from outside.

i didn’t announce anything or write a brave post about stepping back. i just stopped being able to do it.

what it actually looked like

i think we describe burnout in very tidy words afterwards, and it is so much messier than that while it’s happening. so here’s the real version.

my migraines got worse. they’ve been around for years and i mostly manage them, but last month they parked behind my right eye for three and four days at a stretch. the kind where you’re technically functioning and light still hurts.

both my kids were home for the summer.

the thirteen-year-old and the eight-year-old, all day, every day, needing food and lifts and refereeing. which i love, and which is also completely relentless.

and i was still trying to turn up here on substack every single day.

notes, replies, staying in the conversation, not breaking the streak, because everyone says consistency is everything.

and the numbers weren’t helping

here’s the part i haven’t told you.

while all of that was going on, my growth had gone completely flat.

in june i posted 75 notes and 153 people subscribed. in august i posted 58 notes and twelve people did.

there was one week in the middle i think the second week of august, where i posted eighteen notes and got exactly one subscriber. one. i refreshed the page twice because i assumed something was broken! lol!

and i want to be honest about what a plateau does to you, because i don’t think we say it plainly enough.

here’s the lovely plateau if you want to take a look:

it wasn’t the number.

i’ve genuinely made my peace with small numbers.

it was that i was pouring my last drops into this by writing notes at eleven at night with a headache, while the kids were home and the kitchen was a disaster and nothing was moving, and i couldn’t tell you why.

that’s the bit that breaks you.

not the plateau. the plateau plus the not knowing.

then one monday i just couldn’t open substack

i closed the app.

i didn’t decide to take a break, and i want to be clear about that, because “i took a mindful pause” is a much nicer sentence than what actually happened.

i just didn’t open it. then i didn’t open it again on tuesday. and by wednesday, not opening it had quietly become a thing i was doing.

i felt awful about it all week. properly awful. i was fairly sure i’d undone three months of work in four days.

i came back on the saturday.

and there was a DM waiting from a woman i’ve never met. she’d found my publication while i was gone, read two posts, and subscribed. she had no idea i’d been having a wobble.

she just found the writing, and it was still sitting there doing its job without me hovering over it.

i’d spent five days certain i’d broken something. and a stranger had wandered in while i wasn’t looking.

what i found when i finally looked properly

once my head cleared i went back through three months of notes, fully expecting to discover that i’d slacked off in august.

i hadn’t. i posted nearly as much as i did in june.

what i found instead was that the weeks i posted the most were simply not the weeks people subscribed the most.

eighteen notes got me one subscriber in august, and 207 in july. and almost all of those 207 came from one note, about a man who DMed me to say my writing was trash.

so the volume was never doing the work. it was never doing the work.

i’d spent a whole month paying with my evenings and my patience and a very sore head for a lever that wasn’t attached to anything.

left this in my comments a few days later and i haven’t been able to put it down:

I’ve hit that same space…. how can I keep going, keep building, without burning out. Spending more time here is not an option. I need to spend less.

i need to spend less.

that’s the entire brief, isn’t it.

five things i’ve put in place for next time

because there will be a next time. (that’s the bit i’ve stopped arguing with, lol! life happens even if we dont want it to.)

this isn’t a system.

i’m just beginning my fourth month, i’m deeply suspicious of anyone who has a system by month four!! so, for now it’s just five things.

1. a week off is not a debt.

what you’ve already written stays out there working while you rest.

mine found a complete stranger while i was hiding from my laptop. that one changed something in my head permanently.

2. one hour a week for notes. not one hour a day.

this one isn’t mine!

left it in my comments and i’ve been using it ever since.

fifteen minutes scheduling your notes, forty-five minutes properly engaging with three to five people whose writing you actually love. everything else goes to writing.

my shoulders came down about two inches when i read it.

3. i decide the week’s floor on a sunday, while i’m well.

one post, two notes.

that’s the minimum. anything above it is a bonus.

deciding it on a good day means i’m not negotiating with myself on a wednesday with a migraine and that is a negotiation i lose every single time.

4. when my head goes, i will comment instead of posting.

told me she does this and it’s the smartest thing i’ve heard all summer!

sounds like a the lowest-effort way to stay visible and stay connected without having to produce a single thing!! almost like magic

think of it as sitting at Luke’s counter for a week instead of running the Dragonfly. you’re still in Stars Hollow. everyone can still see you. you’re just not the one making the beds. 🥐

5. i look at my numbers once a week, not every night.

daily numbers are noise!!

and noise is the precise thing i keep writing about wanting less of. it took me three months to notice that irony. 🙃

and one thing that isn’t a tip

you’re allowed to be a person.

i think we forget that here.

we read each other’s good weeks and quietly assume everyone else is coping beautifully. and then somebody mentions a migraine or a hard month and forty people go “oh thank god, me too.”

i think about Lorelai a lot with this one.

she runs an inn, raises a teenage kid, keeps roughly half of Stars Hollow upright on coffee and sheer nerve (and she still has the episodes where the whole thing comes apart and she ends up at her kitchen table eating something she didn’t want) ☕

nobody watches those episodes and concludes she’s bad at running an inn. it’s just an episode. she’s in the next one.

so, here’s my story- i had a bad month. my head hurt, my kids were home, my growth was flat, and i couldn’t do it.

that isn’t a strategy failure. that’s just what the stars had for me in august 🩷 (here’s hoping that september would be better!)

okay.

now i’d love something from you, and it’s a small thing.

tell me about your wobble.

not the lesson you took from it. not the comeback. just the week or the month where you couldn’t and what it actually looked like. the migraine. the toddler. the job. the thing you didn’t tell anyone at the time because it felt like admitting something.

i’ll go first. i just did. 🙈

because i’m fairly sure there are forty of us reading this right now, each one quietly convinced that everybody else is coping.

and the only way that ever gets fixed is if one person says it out loud and the rest of us go “oh, you too?” in the comments.

and if you’re in the middle of yours right now. the writing you’ve already done is out there working for you while you rest.

go and lie down. i’ll keep your seat warm.

see you later 🫶

Yuvika

Want to keep reading?? try this:

This week I’m talking to K. Yvette from , a warm little community for women building something of their own.

She started on Substack almost by accident, joining a friend’s journaling challenge, and a few months later she’s around 200 subscribers in.

She calls the people she writes for “Chapter One women” who are still in the early, uncertain, unglamorous part of building something. And the reason her writing lands is simple: she isn’t describing Chapter One from the outside. She’s living it, right alongside her readers.

What I like about K. Yvette is that she has documented every quiet step of this out loud. Back in June she published a whole post celebrating four subscribers including her brother, herself, and two other people and she meant it. A month later she crossed a hundred. She’s around two hundred now. But she’ll be the first to tell you the number was never really the point.

Her whole philosophy is stop chasing everyone else’s formula and learn to trust yourself.

I asked her the ten questions I most wanted answered when I began, and she answered them honestly and in her own voice. I’ve kept it that way. Pull up a chair.

Slow growth doesn’t mean you’re failing.

1. What finally made you hit publish, after wanting to for so long?

I finally realized I had something to say that I wished someone had told me years ago. I gave up on myself too soon while trying to build something of my own, and I don’t want other women to do the same.

The Spark Within exists to remind women that uncertainty, rejection, and slow growth don’t mean they’re on the wrong path. They’re often just part of building something meaningful.

2. What did you believe about growing on Substack that turned out to be wrong?

I thought I needed a coach or the perfect strategy before I could grow. Instead, I’ve learned to trust myself.

Teachers and strategy absolutely have their place. However, I’ve found that listening to my own intuition has been far more valuable than constantly chasing someone else’s formula.

3. How did you land on your topic, and how sure were you at the start?

I’ve always been fascinated by women’s stories, especially those of women building something of their own.

Once I realized that was the conversation I wanted to contribute to, I was all in. My mission remains the same, even though my writing continues to evolve.

Go check out her amazing stuff here. i promise you’ll LOVE it!!

4. What’s actually driving your growth right now?

Since I started sharing a few months ago, my subscriber base has grown to 200. It’s easy to obsess over metrics, and so I don’t.

Instead, I started noticing tiny wins like publishing, or just showing up. I even write them down.

Also, writing from my heart and not following a formula has been key.

5. How do you keep showing up when the numbers are small?

I think about the woman who’s ready to give up because no one told her that building something meaningful is a roller coaster.

I wish someone had reminded me that slow growth doesn’t mean you’re failing. If my writing helps even one woman keep going, it’s worth showing up.

6. What tools or AI do you actually use each week, and what’s hype?

I use AI primarily as a repository for my ideas and topics.

It’s where I capture thoughts, organize them, and revisit them as they develop.

7. Should beginners think about money early, or wait?

I don’t think there’s one right answer.

Some creators should monetize early, while others should wait.

My advice is to pay attention to your own values and goals instead of following someone else’s timeline. Deep down, you usually know what feels right for you.

8. What growth advice do you now ignore?

The advice to follow every expert.

Right now, I’m choosing to trust myself.

I may invest in a coach someday to refine what I’m building, but I didn’t want to outsource my own voice before I had really learned to hear it.

9. If you started over tomorrow, what’s the one thing you’d do differently?

Honestly, I wouldn’t change anything.

Every essay, every quiet week, and every small milestone has helped me become a better writer and clarified my mission. I trust the path I’ve taken.

10. What’s one tiny action a reader can take today?

Start an Evidence Envelope, either digital or on paper. Save encouraging comments, thoughtful emails, kind messages, and every small win.

On the days when you wonder if you should quit, open it. Sometimes we need a reminder that our work is reaching people, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Before you go

If there’s one thread running through everything Yvette just said, it’s this: the growth you’re looking for starts with trusting yourself. The numbers are quiet at first, but the small wins are real, and they add up.

If this resonated with you, go say hello to Yvette.

The Spark Within

Stories, questions, and quiet moments that help you trust your instincts, follow your spark, and create a life that's true to who you are.

If you’re a woman building something of your own and you’re tired of doing it alone, subscribe to her newsletter The Spark Within.

It’s the corner of Substack that reminds you setbacks aren’t embarrassing and small wins matter.

If there’s one thread running through everything K. Yvette said, it’s this: the growth you’re looking for starts with trusting yourself.

The numbers are quiet at first, but the small wins are real. Real enough to celebrate at four subscribers, and real enough to keep celebrating at two hundred.

If this resonated with you, go say hello to her. If you’re a woman building something of your own and you’re tired of doing it alone, subscribe to her newsletter The Spark Within.

It’s the corner of Substack that reminds you setbacks aren’t embarrassing and small wins matter. And if you’re deep in your own Chapter One, she may just want to tell your story too.

And here’s a small challenge before you close this tab: pick any one of the ten questions above and answer it for yourself in the comments. Even one honest sentence counts. I read every single one, and I’ll reply. 🤍

See ya till next time 🫶

Yuvika

This is a “reader supported” publication. The newsletter itself is free but if you LOVVVVED my writing, pay what you want here.

Buy me a coffee

This one is a little special 😊

Danielle and I met here as beginners, the way so many of the best Substack friendships seem to start.

writes The Everyday Sprint, where she takes the Agile and project-management principles she’s used for fifteen years in tech and applies them to the beautiful chaos of real life.

So when I asked her the ten questions, she answered them honestly and in her own voice. I’ve kept it that way.

She’s a full-time IT Director, a mom to a toddler, and a self-described recovering perfectionist, and somehow, in about three months on Substack, she’s built a warm, steadily growing corner of this place from scratch.

Come pull up a chair! 🫶

1. What finally made you hit publish, after wanting to for so long?

I had wanted to create something of my own for years, but becoming a mom in 2024 made that desire even stronger.

As I tried to balance work, motherhood, and everything else, I realized the same project management and Agile principles I used in my career could actually make everyday life feel more manageable.

Writing had always been a creative outlet for me, so I combined those two passions and started The Everyday Sprint—a place where I share simple systems, reflections, and practical ideas to help people make progress one small sprint at a time.

(for non-techy peeps like me, think of it as working on one small goal for a week or two instead of trying to fix your whole life at once!) 🙂

2. What did you believe about growing on Substack that turned out to be wrong?

Honestly, I assumed you needed a large audience elsewhere before you could grow on Substack. I quickly realized that wasn’t true.

I’ve met so many writers who started from zero and built thousands of subscribers simply by consistently showing up and creating meaningful work.

I haven’t relied much on promoting my publication on other platforms because I wanted to see if I could grow organically within the Substack community and so far, it’s working!

3. How did you land on your topic, and how sure were you at the start?

My niche is still evolving, but the core meaning has stayed the same from day one. I’m an overthinking, perfectionist millennial mom who also happens to be a project manager, and I realized I was spending so much energy optimizing work that I wasn’t applying those same skills to my own life.

I’m not just trying to teach Agile or project management through my writing as that information is already readily available (though it may become a separate offering someday).

Instead, I’m building in public, being vulnerable, collaborating, and exploring what systems thinking looks like when real life is messy and imperfect.

4. What’s actually driving your growth right now?

I feel like everyone is probably saying this lately, but Notes. I didn’t start Notes until about a month into my Substack journey. Then I decided to post one Note a day.

One of those Notes about building in public brought in 70 subscribers (I only had 9 at the time).

That was when I realized the potential of Notes.

Now I try to do one or two Notes a day, reply to every comment with something thoughtful, and publish one article every Wednesday.

This is sustainable for me at this point, and it has helped me bring in consistent subscribers. I’m growing slowly but steadily, and I’ll take that for now! 🙂

5. How do you keep showing up when the numbers are small?

I’ve had to remind myself that I’ve quit before when I don’t see immediate growth, and I don’t want to do that again.

I’ve learned Substack growth is up and down. One Note may take off and bring you 50 subscribers. Your next Note may get one like.

Sometimes the trend in the Notes isn’t the same either. Short Notes have worked for me in the past, but some of my best-performing Notes are longer as well.

I try to remind myself that the slow days aren’t the whole picture, and to just keep going!

(ps: this is my favourite takeaway from the entire interview and something i am learning each day! actually i have somehow starting liking this ocassional downtime and use it to spruce up little things on my substack like i connected my substack to Google search console, batched a few notes, brainstormed about which tool to make next and spent more time playing snakes and ladders board game with my 2 kids, lol!! )

6. What tools or AI do you actually use each week, and what’s hype?

I think AI today feels a lot like the internet in its early days or even social media around 2007. Some people are all in, some are skeptical, and most of us are still figuring out where it truly adds value.

I use AI every week to brainstorm ideas, tighten my writing, and challenge whether something actually makes sense, but I never use it as a replacement for my voice.

Readers can usually tell when something is entirely AI-generated, and authenticity still wins. One area where I think AI is a huge advantage is branding and image generation.

It has saved me countless hours creating a cohesive visual identity, and as you refine your style, the tools get better at reinforcing it.

Aesthetics matter in a digital world, but your voice will always matter more than a perfectly polished image.

ps: aint’t she a smart cookie!👆🏽

Go check out her amazing stuff here. i promise you’ll LOVE it!!

The Everyday Sprint

Helping ambitious overthinkers build a more intentional life through reflection, simple systems, and continuous improvement—one sprint at a time.🌿

By Danielle Wright

7. Should beginners think about money early, or wait?

This is probably one of the biggest debates on Substack right now, and honestly, I don’t think there’s one right answer.

When I first launched, I turned on paid subscriptions almost immediately without really understanding all the settings.

A friend subscribed, and I actually felt guilty and switched her back to free because I wasn’t confident I had a clear paid offering yet (although I was also incredibly honored that she wanted to support me!).

Personally, if I’m paying for a subscription, I want to know what unique value I’m getting beyond the free content. Recently, I decided to turn paid back on for The Everyday Sprint, but my mindset has changed.

The more I learn about Substack, the more it seems like having a paid option is simply part of building a publication. It also gives people who genuinely want to support my work a way to do that while I continue building what’s next.

I’m still earning that trust. I’m still finding my voice. And I’m still figuring out exactly what a paid membership should become before encouraging people to subscribe.

Could I look back a year from now and realize I gave away too much for free? Absolutely. But I’d rather build something people are genuinely excited to support than rush to put content behind a paywall before it feels right. For now, that approach feels authentic to me. 🙂

8. What growth advice do you now ignore?

The advice I probably ignore the most is to post Notes as often as possible just to feed the algorithm. I tried that at first, but it quickly started to feel inauthentic.

While I absolutely believe Notes are one of the best growth tools on Substack, I don’t think every Note should exist simply for the sake of posting. If I don’t have anything meaningful to say, I’d rather stay quiet than force it.

For me, Notes work best when they’re rooted in what’s actually happening in my life or what I’m genuinely thinking about that day.

That authenticity is what drew me to Substack in the first place, and I never want to lose it in pursuit of growth.

ps: i completely agree with this and yes honest > optimized!!

9. If you started over tomorrow, what’s the one thing you’d do differently?

Stop overthinking and just start.

I work full-time as an IT Director, I’m a mom to a toddler, a wife, a dog mom, and I’m trying to keep up with a home, busy schedules, and everything else life throws at us.

For years, my excuse was that I was too busy to build something of my own. Looking back, I realize that was really perfectionism disguised as productivity. In just three months on Substack, I’ve evolved my audience, messaging, and direction multiple times.

I still don’t have the entire path figured out, and I don’t think you need to before you begin. Your first version isn’t supposed to be your final version, just click publish. 🙂

One other piece of advice: don’t try to do it completely alone.

If you’re serious about growing and staying consistent, find a coach or another writer you genuinely connect with. You absolutely don’t need to pay for guidance to succeed, but having accountability and someone who understands the journey can make all the difference when your motivation dips.

The community on Substack is super special, so definitely lean into it! This post is clearly proof of that. Yuvika and I connected pretty early on, and look at us now!

ps: you go girl!!🩷

10. What’s one tiny action a reader can take today?

Write one sentence that clearly explains what your publication is about and who it’s for. I picked this because it’s something I’ve personally struggled with.

I love writing about everything, but I’ve learned that clarity is essential if you eventually want to grow and monetize.

“The Everyday Sprint is for overthinkers who want to build a calmer, more intentional life through simple systems, honest reflections, and practical ideas.”

The important thing to remember is that your sentence doesn’t have to be perfect and it will evolve as you do.

Mine has changed multiple times over the past few months, and I expect it will continue to. The goal isn’t to find the final version on day one; it’s to give yourself enough clarity to create consistently.

Once you have your sentence, use it everywhere: your About page, your profile, DMs, comments, and anywhere someone asks what you write about. It becomes a filter for your content, making it much easier to decide what belongs in your publication.

If you’re stuck, use Claude or ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas (just make sure the final version sounds like you!) 🙂

Before you go

If there’s one thread running through everything Danielle just said, it’s this: you don’t have to have it all figured out to begin. You just have to keep showing up, one small sprint at a time.

If this resonated with you, the kindest thing you can do is go say hello to Danielle.

If you’re an ambitious overthinker who’s quit every planner you’ve ever bought, and you want to trade perfectionism for steady, real-life progress, subscribe to her newsletter The Everyday Sprint. She’s warm, honest, and genuinely in it with you.

And here’s a small challenge before you close this tab: pick any one of the ten questions above and answer it for yourself in the comments. Even one honest sentence counts. I read every single one, and I’ll reply. 🤍

See ya till next time 🫶

Yuvika

This is a “reader supported” publication. I intend to keep all that i share here free forever. If you LOVVVVED my writing, feel free to get me a coffee or doughnut (i love the one with the sugar sprinkles) i know sugar isnt healthy but its kinda my favourite treat, lol! I am truly grateful to you for supporting my journey! 😊

Buy me a coffee

Want to keep reading?

Here’s what I recommend:

Until 15 days back, I couldn’t have told you which of them actually worked. Not approximately. Not even vaguely. I genuinely did not know.

Which is a slightly mad thing to admit, given I’ve been doing it nearly every day for three months!! 🙈

So I sat down with a cup of green tea I’d made two hours earlier and forgotten about (some things are not going to change) and pulled all 216 into one sheet. Impressions, likes, comments, and the number I actually wanted: how many subscribers each one brought in.

Then I sorted it.

135 of them had brought me nobody at all.

Not “not many.” Nobody. 🙃

What came out of that afternoon is a little method I now use every month. I’ve started calling it SORT method for notes analytics, partly because it’s four steps, and partly because you are, quite literally, sorting a spreadsheet!!

S , Sort by subscribers

O , Outlier out

R , Repeats only

T , Test one thing

I’ll walk you through each one with what my own numbers said. And by the end you’ll be able to do the whole thing yourself, on paper, in about fifteen minutes.

Cool! Let’s go.

S: Sort by subscribers

Here’s the first thing I got wrong, and I got it wrong before I even opened the spreadsheet.

I went in expecting to prove that likes are a vanity metric. You’ve read that a hundred times. I have too. I was quietly looking forward to writing it.

My data says the opposite.

In my 216 Notes, likes and subscribers move together almost perfectly. So do comments. So do restacks. Every single engagement number is closely tied to how many subscribers a Note brought in.

Which sounds like good news until you think about what it actually means.

They all move together because they’re all measuring the same thing underneath: how many people saw it. A Note that reaches a lot of people picks up more of everything. More likes, more comments, more subscribers, all at once.

So none of those numbers is telling you something the others aren’t. They’re four different thermometers in the same room.

The only number worth sorting by is the one at the end of the chain. Not “did people react,” but “did anyone actually stay.”

And when I sorted by that, here’s what showed up:

135 of my 216 Notes brought in exactly zero subscribers. That’s 63%.

I’ll come back to that in a minute, because it’s the most important number in this whole post.

One useful signpost though.

My Notes with twenty or more comments averaged 17.5 new subscribers. Under twenty comments, the average was 0.5.

Not because comments cause subscribers, but because twenty replies means a Note genuinely travelled. It’s a decent proxy if you can’t see subscriber numbers per Note.

Try this: open your Notes and rank them by new subscribers, not by hearts. If you can’t see that number easily, use replies as your stand-in. Twenty or more replies is your “go and study this one” threshold.

O: Outlier out

Right. This is the step I’m most embarrassed about, and also the one I most want you to steal.

For six weeks I went around telling people Thursday was my best day for Notes.

I had the data! My Thursday Notes were averaging 3.1 times everything else. I’d rearranged my whole week around it. I felt like I’d cracked something.

Then I took out one Note. The one that brought 175 subscribers.

It was posted on a Thursday.

Without it, Thursday drops to 0.7 times my average. It becomes one of my worst days. My actual best days turned out to be Tuesday at 2.2x and Wednesday at 2.1x.

So I’d built an entire rule out of one lucky night. And then told people about it. 🫠

Why this happens to absolutely everyone:

One enormous result sitting inside a small pile of data behaves like one lottery winner moving into your street. The average wealth of the street goes up. Nobody else got any richer.

And here’s the uncomfortable bit: almost every “I analysed my Notes and found X” post you’ve ever read has this problem sitting quietly inside it, unexamined. Including, until three weeks ago, mine.

Try this: find your single best Note. Cross it out. Now check whether your pattern is still standing. If it disappears, you didn’t find a pattern. You found a good evening.

Thirty seconds, and it will save you from more bad decisions than anything else in this post!!

R: Repeats only

Okay, now coming back to that 63% number.

135 of my 216 Notes brought in zero subscribers. 63%.

Not “not many.” Zero.

I sat with that for a bit, because it felt like proof I’d wasted an awful lot of evenings! 🙈

And then I made myself look at the other end of the list.

My Notes have brought in 429 subscribers altogether. My top ten did 319 of them, which is 74%. One single Note did 41% of everything.

Here’s the reframe that genuinely helped me, and I’d love it to help you too.

It’s a bit like Lorelai, honestly.

She says roughly forty things a minute and most of them go absolutely nowhere. Half are a reference nobody caught. But she keeps talking, and every so often one line lands so perfectly you’re still quoting it three seasons later.

Nobody sits there counting the ones that didn’t land. That isn’t the point. The volume is how you get the good ones.

Your quiet Notes aren’t waste. They’re the search. You can’t find the 38% without writing the 62%, and nobody has ever found a way around that.

So if you’re posting and it’s mostly silence over there, I really need you to hear this properly: you are not doing it wrong. You’re doing it at the normal rate.

I just had no idea that was the normal rate, and knowing it would have saved me about three weeks of lying awake feeling rubbish about myself.

Try this: only trust a pattern that turns up three or more times. Once is luck. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a finding.

T: Test one thing

The reason most of us learn nothing from our own numbers is that we change five things at once and then can’t work out which one did it.

So change one variable at a time. Watch it for two weeks. Then check and sort again.

What happened when I did this:

I’d been keeping my Notes short, because everyone says keep Notes short, and I was feeling rather pleased with myself about it. My median Note is 34 words.

• Under 40 words: 29% brought at least one subscriber

• 40 to 79 words: 42%

• 80 words or more: 66%

My long Notes were more than twice as likely to bring someone in! Which annoyed me, briefly.

Thinking about it afterwards though, it makes sense. A short Note can be clever. A longer one has room to be true. It has space for what actually happened and how it actually felt, and that turns out to be the part people answer.

And then the other one, which is almost embarrassing in how simple it is:

• Notes with an image: 536 median impressions

• Notes without: 238

That’s 2.2 times the reach. There’s no clever insight there. I just wasn’t doing it.And I’d been adding images to just 11% of my Notes. silly me, lol! 🙃

One more, while we’re being honest.

Of my 216 Notes, 45 were restacks of other people’s work. Those got 133 median impressions against 299 for Notes I wrote myself, and brought 0.2 subscribers each.

Whatever the numbers say, I’m going to carry on restacking people, because it’s a kind thing and this place is nicer for it! Just dont do it for the growth, do it beacause of the lovely community and because you want to do it!

Try this: pick the cheapest thing you’re currently ignoring and change only that for a fortnight. For most of us it’s images. Then sort again and see what moved.

Here’s how to do the entire SORT method in 15 minutes

Get your choice of beverage, and your fav band on in the background (i’m stuck listening to BTS because my 13 yr girl is an army fan!) and let’s get to it:

1. Open your last twenty Notes. Twenty, not two hundred, or you’ll never start.

2. Draw five columns: what it was about, roughly how many words, what day you posted it, whether it had an image, and how it went.

3. Rank them by who actually subscribed, or by replies if that’s easier to see. That’s your S.

4. Cross out your best row and check the pattern survives. That’s O.

5. Circle anything that shows up three or more times. That’s R.

6. Pick one thing to change for two weeks. That’s T.

7. It’s dull for about four minutes and then it becomes weirdly gripping, I promise.

Do this notes audit once a month and you’ll stop guessing. You’ll be writing from your own evidence instead of somebody else’s, and yours is the only kind that actually fits you.

Every week I share what my own Substack data actually says. No hacks, no crushing it, just the real numbers and what I changed because of them.

Free, always 🩷A small confession about today

I’m publishing this on a Saturday.

My own data says Saturday runs at 0.5x for me. Tuesday and Wednesday are more than four times better.

So why am I doing it anyway?

Partly because I’d rather publish than optimise. And partly because a rule you’ve never actually tested isn’t a finding, it’s a superstition. isnt it, lol!

Consider this my T experiment, running live. I’ll report back. 🩷

And if you’d rather not do notes analytics by hand

Everything above works perfectly well with a pen. I used a spreadsheet because I had 216 of them and the patience of a gnat.

Substack will show you your top few converting Notes if you go digging through Audience, then Growth, then sources. for each note! Multiply that by the number of notes you have and you get the number of clicks you need to get that number!! whew!!

yeah. no thanks.🙃

so i built a little tool for myself. one click, and it pulls every note i’ve ever posted into one simple sheet. the note itself, its impressions, likes, comments, clicks, and how many subscribers it brought me. all together. with the link to the note.

you also get :

• what’s working. whether your image notes beat your text ones, and by how much. which length actually brings subscribers. how much of your growth came from just your top ten notes

• your best day to post, worked out from your own notes, not from someone else’s advice

• your notes by length. short, medium and long, with the word counts, and which one converts

• your content pillars. your notes sorted into the themes you actually write about, and which theme pulls the most readers

• your top 10 notes, ranked

• five things to write next, taken straight from the notes that already worked for you

• lines worth reusing. your own best sentences, pulled back out so you can use them again

• and you can download the whole thing as a report or a shareable image

Let me see it first

What’s coming next

This is the first of a little series. I’ll be taking each letter apart properly, with the numbers:

• Why your Notes aren’t getting views (seven reasons, checked against my own data)

• What all your engagement numbers are actually measuring (it’s one thing, not four)

• The best day to post, and why nobody can tell you (including me)

I spent months following guru advice that turned out to be completely wrong for me. My own Notes had been quietly telling me something else the entire time. I just hadn’t sat down and sorted them.

Yours are telling you something too. 💛

Do the fifteen minute version and come and tell me what you found! I really want to know whether your best day is Tuesday as well, or whether that’s just me and my particular corner of people.

And if someone’s brave enough to volunteer, I’ll SORT another writer’s Notes in public using my Quiet Notes Insights & Studio tool. Let me know in the comments if you’d like me to do this for you! I’ll do it for free and you’ll get the whole read.

See you Tuesday 🩷

Yuvika

Check out Quiet Notes Studio + Insights

Keep Reading.

okay so.

i’m not a guru. just a normal real and relatable person who accidentally wandered onto Substack!

i want to say that first, before anything else.

i’m 71 days into this.

i still google things i probably should know by now. i still overthink every note before i post it. and a cup of coffee that goes cold (before I know it)!

so this isn’t the “unwritten rules of substack” post from someone standing at the top of the mountain telling you how the climb works.

this is me, still on the climb, turning around to tell you the things nobody told me at the door.

(not the etiquette stuff like don’t spam links, don’t pitch collabs to strangers, reply to your comments. you’ll pick that up).

here they are.

i am new here too so take what fits, leave the rest.

1. someone will tell you you don’t belong. keep writing anyway.

a few weeks ago a 77-year-old man with 600+ subscribers sent me a dm telling me my writing was trash and that i shouldn’t be on substack.

and i won’t pretend it didn’t sting. it did. for a moment i actually thought - maybe he’s right. maybe i don’t know enough. maybe i should stop.

but then i thought about how many women stop themselves before they even begin, because someone somewhere might decide they’re not ready.

so i blessed him, blocked him, and went back to writing my post for the week.

(i was overwhelmed with how the entire substack community showed up and supported me! i really appreciate each one of you and you are the reason i am still here, still writing and still showing up, thank you so much! )

2. ten readers is not “only ten.”

i know how it feels to look at a tiny number and feel embarrassed by it.

but try this instead. imagine ten actual people sitting around a table, and you’re about to read them what you wrote. would you say “oh, it’s only ten”?

Or would you pull up a chair, pour the tea, and say, come sit, let’s talk?

3. you don’t need a “real” number before you’re allowed to speak.

when i started i had 0 subscribers. zilch, zero, nada.

part of me wanted to wait until i had something impressive you know 4k, 14k, some number that felt like it earned me the right to say anything at all.

but i decided i’d rather build this out loud, fumbling and honest, than wait until i became someone i hadn’t lived yet.

4. the gurus’ pace will break you. find one your life can actually hold.

all the advice says post 5 to 7 notes a day if you actually want to grow.

i’m a 40-something mom. i’m an introvert. i don’t like talking too much and my brain genuinely needs quiet to function. i can’t do that. and i’ve decided that’s okay.

find the pace your real life can carry.

that’s the only pace that lasts.

PS: If you’ve already got Quiet Notes Insights, you will be getting the updates to your email over this weekend. And anyone who gets it now automatically gets new version.

5. hiding feels safe. it costs you everything.

my biggest early mistake was hiding.

i’d write something true, and then i’d soften it. hedge it. sand the edges down until it was smooth and safe and completely forgettable.

you cannot build a real audience from behind a wall.

6. it’s a coffee shop, not a stage.

i used to think being on substack meant: write post, hit publish, wait.

then i slowly realised the actual rhythm is different. show up in other people’s corners. leave a real comment. stay in the conversation. be a person in someone else’s space before you ever ask them to come visit yours.

that’s the app when it’s working.

not a stage with a spotlight. a diner with a lot of chairs. (me and lorelai both want our coffee and a muffin so many similarities duh!!)

so sit down and pull up a chair.

that’s the whole secret.

7. the quiet days still count.

there will be stretches where it feels like nothing is happening. no numbers. no proof. no applause.

i want to gently tell you: roots grow in the dark long before anything shows above the ground.

so keep showing up and keep writing

8. the small, ordinary scenes are the ones that land.

my eight-year-old boy made me a bracelet recently.

it took him five tries.

four times the beads fell out, four times he picked them up with his tiny hands and started again. on the fifth try he brought it over with the proudest little smile.

i still think about how easily an adult would’ve quit at try two.

Or the one where I shared my 13 year old girls’s pretty drawing (that she hated, lol!)

Check out Quiet Notes Studio

9. don’t perform certainty you don’t have.

half the time i’m genuinely excited. the other half i’m wondering if i’m doing all of this completely wrong.

and then someone replies kindly, or subscribes, or just says “i like that” and the whole thing feels worth it again.

you’re allowed to be figuring it out in real time.

10. you’re allowed to begin again. as many times as it takes.

i was fired while i was pregnant.

then i built a career development business of my own. then ai made a big part of it obsolete almost overnight. and now, at 41, i’m starting again here, small and scared, on substack.

if all of that taught me one thing, it’s this: beginning again is not failure. it’s just the next step.

that’s it.

that’s the list i wish someone had handed me at the door.

i’m still new. i’m still learning most of this as i go. but if any of it made your own beginning feel a little less lonely, then it did its job.

so tell me, what’s one rule you wish someone had told you when you started?

i read every reply and respond!

come sit, let’s talk. 🩷

Want to keep reading?

Try this 👇🏽

Okay, so here I go!

Last Sunday afternoon, my 13-year-old and I ended up on the living room floor with a tangle of yarn and two crochet hooks, making a mess and giggling at my very wonky first row in the hearts we were making for a keychain.

I am not good at it (yet) and she’s so much more better than me! But somewhere between dropped stitches, i started thinking you know that crocheting is creativity too! isnt it?

We tend to think “being creative” means the writing, the post, the perfectly-worded note. But it’s also the crochet, the doodle, the dinner you improvised, the shelf you rearranged for no reason.

Creativity isn’t one lane. It’s a way of moving through your days. And keeping it alive in small, hobby-sized ways is honestly what keeps the writing alive too.

Which, funnily enough, is exactly why I made a big change this week. 👇

Quiet Happy is now Quiet Creator

Here’s the honest why.

I started out writing under “Quiet Happy,” all about happiness.

But the longer I wrote, the more I felt this quiet pressure to be happy. All the time. And that’s just not how it works, is it?

Happiness comes and goes in waves. some days it’s here, some days it isn’t. and pretending otherwise started to feel a little false.

“Quiet Creator” feels truer to me.

It’s about building a quiet, creative life and business as an introvert, without the hustle. Happiness is welcome whenever it visits, but it’s not the job anymore. Creating is.

(same me, just a name that finally fits) 😊

Worth your Scroll

Two posts I actually want you to read this week, both from the lovely Olivia over at Petal + Hearth:

👉 40+ Substack Paid Tier Ideas That Aren’t “More Posts”

By Olivia Wickstrom · Petal + Hearth · Jul 6, 2026

If you’ve ever gone to switch on paid subscriptions and frozen because you had no idea what to actually put behind the paywall, this one’s for you. Olivia calls it the “blank-paywall problem,” and makes the case that “more posts” is the weakest reason to ask anyone for money.

Instead she gives 40+ upgrade ideas sorted from lowest to highest effort: a members’ directory, a curated opportunity feed, 15-minute office-hours mini-consults, a small evergreen mini-course, and more.

my take: gorgeous list, but please don’t read it as a to-do list. pick the one or two ideas that genuinely fit your personality and your situation, and be honest about which shiny ones would quietly drain you or eat into your hours and your life long-term. skip those, even if they look impressive. a paid tier should slot into the life you actually want, not become a second job you never asked for. (her own best line agrees: the strongest tiers run on just three or four things, not forty.)

👉 How to Take Your Substack Full-Time

By Olivia Wickstrom · Petal + Hearth · Jun 26, 2026

Olivia went from zero subscribers to taking Petal + Hearth full-time in about a year (23,000+ subscribers, 600+ of them paying), and this is her honest roadmap of how she did it: foundation, Notes, audience, paid tiers, and the actual leap.

my take: if you’ve been quietly fantasising about doing this full-time one day, read it as inspo, not pressure. it’s proof it’s possible for a real person who started exactly where you are.

and can I just say, I love how warm, comforting and encouraging every one of Olivia’s posts feels. you leave them believing you can, not panicking that you’re behind. that tone is a whole lesson on its own. 🩷

About Substack: What you need to know

Two genuinely useful Substack updates dropped, and both matter even if you’re brand new here.

Country leaderboards.

Substack rolled out country-specific leaderboards, starting with the UK, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.

If you’re based in one of those, you can now appear on your country’s Top and Rising lists, and readers there can discover you. They’ve said more countries are coming.

my take: if you’re in one of those five, the Rising list is the one to care about, not Top. you don’t need to be big to land there. you need to be growing and consistent. and if your country isn’t on the list yet, just keep writing and chill. don’t let it nag at you. leaderboards are a nice-to-have, not the game. the daily note still does the heavy lifting.

One-click post translations.

Every post you publish can now be translated with a single click.

So, if you write in English, readers can read you in ~15 languages. Or write in your own language and have it land in English. Short notes got this first; now it’s full posts too.

my take: this quietly made your tiny newsletter global overnight, and nobody’s saying it loudly enough for beginners. your honest little post can now be read by someone in Istanbul or São Paulo who’d never have found you before. you don’t have to do anything clever. just know your words travel further than they used to now. 🌍

This Week’s Tool- Quiet Note Insights

You might remember my little one-click tool, Quiet Notes Insights, the one that shows you which of your Notes actually brought in subscribers. Well, it just grew up a little. 🌱

I’ve added two small bonuses to it. I hope you enjoy using it more now!

Visual Snapshot Maker: turns your notes stats into a clean, shareable image card in just one click. (perfect for a “here’s my month” post).

Here’s my notes snapshot that shows my 60-day journey on Substack!

Image Note Analytics: now you get detailed analytics of your image notes too (turns out my image notes perform 2.7x of my normal text ones!)

PS: If you’ve already got Quiet Notes Insights, you will be getting the updates to your email over this weekend. And anyone who gets it now automatically gets new version.

Take a peek

The One Thing

Before the weekend: do one creative thing that isn’t your writing.

Doodle, bake, crochet a wonky row, rearrange a shelf. Then notice whether the writing feels easier afterwards. (it usually does.)

reply and tell me what you made, I’d love to see. 🫶

You’re not behind

If you’re reading this with 9 subscribers and a half-finished draft, you’re not behind.

Want some more inspo to help you start or just continue showing up here?

Read this 👇🏽

From the stack : Reader Wins

A little cheer to start us off:

Yvette, who writes The Spark Within (and who I recently did a lovely collab with to be out soon), just crossed 100 subscribers! 🎉 I’ve watched her show up quietly and consistently, and this milestone could not be more deserved.

If you started around the time she did, let this be your proof that steady and heartfelt adds up. Go give her a cheer here The Spark Within 🫶

Got a win this week?

Reply and tell me, and you might open the next issue. 🥳

The Stack Bag

Stat: Substack’s new translations cover 15+ languages, your post can now be read in most of them with one click.

Quote: “creativity isn’t one lane. it’s a way of moving through your days.” (me, on the floor, covered in yarn 🧶

Read: both of Olivia’s posts up in Worth Your Scroll, then go leave her a kind comment while you’re there.

Check out Quiet Note Insights

Your Turn

What’s one creative thing, other than writing, that fills you up?

Reply and tell me. I read every single one (and reply to all of them, like I do on my notes. you should too, while you’re small enough to! 🫶)

That’s all for this issue. I’m off to untangle more yarn and keep pretending my scarf will one day actually be a scarf. 🧶

(and in the evenings, yes our Gilmore Girls rewatch continues, while my younger 8 year old watches his cartoons! I really like the fast talking duo you know Lorelai and Max (somehow i have a soft corner for Max, even though I like Luke the best! donno why though)

See ya next week,

Yuvika

• • •

Want to keep reading?

Try this 👇🏽

Maybe this is your third reinvention.Or maybe your fifth. You’ve built things before. Some worked. Some quietly fell apart.

And here you are again, staring at an empty Substack page, wondering if it’s too late to begin one more time.

We get it. We’re right here too.

We’re two women in our forties who started over on Substack a couple of months ago at the same time, in two very different corners of it. We met here as beginners, and we’re both still figuring it all out!

One of us writes about building a quiet, no-hustle creative life as an introvert (Quiet Creator). The other writes about building real side income after decades of working on someone else’s dream (The Side Door).

Different niches. Same beginner nerves.

And we’re still in it. We’re not writing this from the other side of some shiny success story. We’re beginners on substack too, a couple of months in, still figuring it out, still a little surprised every time something works.

So we skipped the “here’s how we made it” post.

Instead, we asked each other the ten questions we most wanted answered when we were exactly where you are now. Then we answered them honestly, side by side.

No hustle. No gatekeeping. No pretending we have it all figured out. Just two beginners talking openly, in case it helps you begin too.

Pull up a chair. This one is for you.

1. What finally made you hit publish, after wanting to for so long?

Yuvika: Honestly, a big part of it was that my old work was quietly drying up. I’d spent about nine years as a resume writer and LinkedIn profile strategist for executives and professionals. (Before this business, I worked in the corporate world for 12+ years as a recruiter!)

I worked with four companies and had my own direct clients coming in through LinkedIn and referrals. Then AI got good, really fast, and that work started shrinking a lot.

So I began thinking about writing somewhere else, building something that was actually mine, and seeing if I could grow an audience for myself. Substack was that experiment.

And the way I finally got past the fear of publishing was just lowering the stakes. I couldn’t face writing a whole post, so I told myself I’d write one small, honest Note instead. That was my way in.

Gabby: My husband lost his job. It wasn’t a romantic “fulfil my destiny” moment, just real financial pressure that needed a real answer.

We started a Substack for him first, a cooking newsletter, and I launched The Side Door to document the whole experiment.

About two months in, I realised two things: building two publications at once is brutal, and working with your partner on the same project is a different kind of brutal.

So the cooking newsletter became his, and The Side Door became mine.

2. What did you believe about growing on Substack that turned out to be wrong?

Yuvika: That you need an audience before anyone will read you. I really thought you had to show up with a list already, or some kind of proof that you were worth listening to. That turned out to be completely wrong.

Almost all of my growth has come from Notes, and mostly from strangers who’d never heard of me until one honest little post showed up in their feed.

You don’t build the audience first and then write. Writing honestly, out in the open, is how your people actually find you.

Gabby: I had no idea what I was walking into. I came in thinking it was a newsletter platform and nothing else. The social layer caught me completely off guard. Notes, the reader relationships, the comment threads, none of that was on my radar.

I also assumed quantity would matter the way it does on Facebook: post more, grow faster. It doesn’t work that way here. The other thing I got wrong was the community.

Substack turned out to be the last corner of the internet where people my age can exist without dancing videos, without algorithmic suppression for linking elsewhere, and without the pressure to be online every hour..

3. How did you land on your topic, and how sure were you at the start?

Yuvika: When I started, I was writing about happiness through ancient, timeless wisdom, the kind you find in Eastern philosophy and a few other traditions. But gradually, writing about happiness started to feel like a lot of pressure.

I’m an introvert, and honestly for me happiness comes and goes in waves. I mean i’m not happy like all the time! No one is! So I kept thinking, how can I keep writing about happiness when I’m not actually happy all the time?

That’s when I started wondering why not rebrand to something that fits my personality better. I like my quiet time. I like thinking things through and creating slowly, and I’m completely anti-hustle.

I’m a mom of two, always balancing work and life, and all that growth advice about posting ten times a day is just not something I can do.

So I thought, why not write about building something quietly online instead? That felt much more like me. And that’s how, in month two, even as I write this, I’ve been rebranding to Quiet Creator.

So no, I wasn’t sure at the start at all. Your topic isn’t something you lock in on day one. It’s something you grow into as you go.

Gabby: I landed on it through the situation I was in, not through a strategy session. I was 48, my husband was unemployed, and I was trying to figure out how to build something that could earn real money.

That became the topic, because it was my life. I wasn’t sure at all at the start. I just knew I could document the experiment honestly, and I thought people in the same position might find that useful.

The confidence came later, from readers who showed up and said, this is exactly where I am.

4. What’s actually driving your growth right now?

Yuvika: For me it comes down to a small 30-minute Notes routine I’ve followed almost since the beginning. I start by spending about 15 minutes reading other people’s Notes and actually replying to them properly.

Not “great post” or “love this,” but real, thoughtful comments that might genuinely be useful to the person who wrote it, and to their readers too. Then I post my own Note.

After that, I hang around in my own comments for another 15 minutes or so, talking to whoever shows up, and I keep replying to other people’s Notes and restacking the ones I love.

I don’t really like the word “engagement,” I prefer “conversations,” because that’s what it actually is. I don’t post my note and disappear. I stay, hang around and talk to people just like I would if we were in a coffee shop.

That whole thing takes me about half an hour a day. I really credit that little routine for my growth, and for the lovely relationships I’ve built here. I’ve somehow built this small, warm, genuinely supportive community. and 793 substackers seem to agree!!👇🏽

Check out the Quiet Notes Routine

Gabby: Notes, and being social on the platform rather than just publishing into it. Reading other people’s work, leaving real comments, restacking things I liked.

That is what moved the needle, not posting frequency.

Once I stopped treating Substack like a broadcast channel and started treating it like a room full of people I actually wanted to talk to, the numbers shifted.

5. How do you keep showing up when the numbers are small?

Yuvika: I keep reminding myself that small is not nothing, it’s just early. When I had around 160 subscribers, I went ahead and created a notes analytics tool for myself.

Then i posted a note about it to see if anyone would like to use it. In that beta launch week, 16 people offered and ultimately 7 people got the Quiet Notes Inisights tool within the first 24 hours. Seven! But a few weeks before that I’d been too scared to publish anything at all, so this felt like a genuine win.

I stopped performing for some big invisible audience and started writing for the handful of people who are actually here. When you write for the ten who are really in the room, the rest slowly takes care of itself.

Quiet Notes Insights

Gabby: In the early weeks, showing up was a necessity. We needed the income, so stopping wasn’t an option.

Then something changed. I downloaded the app so I could read and connect on the go, and it stopped feeling like work.

Now I’m at around 100 subscribers, and I’ll be honest, I cherish this number. I can still reply to every single person who writes in. I know that window will close at some point, so I’m making the most of it while it’s here.

6. What tools or AI do you actually use each week, and what’s hype?

Yuvika: You really don’t need a fancy setup. Substack itself is free and when I got frustrated with how much time I was wasting hunting for notes analytics, I went and built my own notes analytics tool simply because Substack hid the one number I wanted to see.

And I think that instinct of solving your own small problem matters more than any shiny app. I use AI to think out loud and get unstuck, but never to write in my voice for me.

The thing I’d skip is all the elaborate automation and scheduling systems people set up before they’ve even found their voice. Keep it simple when you start.

Gabby: Claude is my main partner, not for generating content but for thinking through structure, pressure-testing ideas, and catching the things I’m too close to see.

I did my entire Notes analysis by screenshotting 38 individual stats pages and handing the data over to find the patterns. It took a while, but it worked.

I’ve also set it up as a kind of strategic filter: if I’m about to spend time on something that won’t move the needle, it tells me. And then sometimes I ignore it anyway.

7. Should beginners think about money early, or wait?

Yuvika: I did put out a paid tool around day 50, but the thing is, it came straight out of a real frustration I’d been ranting about on Notes, not from some monetization plan.

My newsletter itself is free.

My take is to earn trust first, keep your writing free in the early days, and let anything paid grow out of a genuine problem your readers actually have.

Money too early, before people even know your voice, just adds pressure which I don’t think you need when you start. (Gabby and I don’t fully agree here, which is honestly part of the fun.)

Gabby: This is where Yuvika and I disagree, which is rare! I’d say think about money from day one if you can. I turned on my paid tier and published my first paid post while the newsletter was still new.

People tend to adapt to whatever you establish at the start. If you give everything away indefinitely, that becomes the expectation. The thing I got wrong wasn’t the timing, it was the sequence.

I launched without a product ready and built the offer while the newsletter was already running. It worked out, but I’d do it differently next time: have something to sell before you start, or at least know clearly what it will be.

8. What growth advice do you now ignore?

Yuvika: The etiquette-as-a-checklist thing. There’s so much “here are the 11 rules of Substack” advice out there, and if you read it the wrong way it’ll freeze you on day one.

I ignore the pressure to get all of it perfect. I just pick one small habit, like posting one honest Note a day, and let the rest become second nature by being a good neighbour in the room. (like Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls!)

I also ignore the strict “post daily at 9am or the algorithm will punish you” fear. Just show up honestly. That’s really the whole thing.

Gabby: Post Notes three times a day. That advice was everywhere on YouTube when I started, so I tried it, and nothing moved.

One solid Note matters more than three forgettable ones, and neither matters as much as actually talking to people. Commenting on their work, showing up in their threads, restacking things worth sharing.

Almost nobody said this clearly, but it was obvious from the first week: you have to listen before anyone will listen to you.

9. If you started over tomorrow, what’s the one thing you’d do differently?

Yuvika: I’d start with Notes much sooner and stop waiting to feel ready.

I lost a few weeks polishing my niche and my plan, when the real growth came from simply showing up and being honest in public.

If I could go back, I’d publish the small messy thing on day 1 instead of day 30. You don’t feel ready and then start. You start, and the readiness slowly follows.

Gabby: Have the product ready before hitting publish on anything. I spent the first two months building the newsletter and the offer in parallel, which meant I was always slightly behind myself. The newsletter was seeding interest in a product that didn’t exist yet.

Start with what you’re selling, then build the content that leads people toward it. And one more thing:

I started because I had to, and looking back, that pressure was the best thing that could have happened. Without it, I’d still be waiting to feel ready. You never feel ready. That isn’t a personal failing, it’s just how starting works.

10. What’s one tiny action a reader can take today?

Yuvika: Open Notes right now, find the most honest thing you’ve posted so far, and write one more in that same voice.

Just one. Don’t schedule it, don’t over-think it, don’t wait for the perfect idea.

Write one true sentence about where you actually are today and hit publish. That one small habit did more for me than anything clever I tried. and then show up, talk to people and BE HUMAN!!

Take a peek at Quiet Notes Insights

Gabby: Open the posts you actually read this week and leave three real comments on them.

Not “great post,” but one sentence about what landed for you, or a question the piece left you with.

You’ll get more from those three comments than from posting a Note nobody sees yet, because you haven’t given anyone a reason to look for you. Attention on this platform moves toward the people who give it first.

Before you go

If there’s one thing we both want you to take from this, it’s that you’re not behind, and you already know enough to start.

We’re both proof that you can begin quietly, in your forties, with no audience and no plan, and still build something real here. We’re both still figuring it out too, and honestly, that’s the whole point.

We both hope you found it helpful!

Say hello to Gabby here!

She writes practical and honest tips to build real side income after years of building someone else’s dream on her Substack - The Side Door.

The Side Door - by Gabby Gazdag

Side income strategies for the 45+ crowd who spent decades building someone else's dream. Now it's your turn.

And let us know which little thought, tip or advice you liked the most!

Have questions?? We would love to answer them for you. Please ask us in the comments. We both read every single response, and we’ll reply.

See ya till next time 🫶

Yuvika

This is a “reader supported” publication. I intend to keep all that i share here free forever. If you LOVVVVED my writing, feel free to get me a coffee or doughnut (i love the one with the sugar sprinkles) i know sugar isnt healthy but its kinda my fav treat, lol! I am truly grateful to you for supporting my journey! thank you!😊

Buy me a coffee

Want to keep reading?

I recommend this 👇🏽

Enola Holmes 3 dropped on Netflix last week, and my 13-year-old and I have already claimed the couch, negotiated the snacks, and banished all phones to another room.

(If you need me after 8pm, I’ll be the one narrating the plot out loud while she tells me to shush 😅)

And yes, we’re still doing our Nth Gilmore Girls rewatch in between. She’s Team Rory. I remain, as ever, Team Lorelai-is-secretly-a-life-coach. 👀

Anyway.

This week was a big one for me. I finally launched the silly little tool I’d been ranting about (it sold 7 copies before I’d stopped panicking 🙈, more on that below), and I read one post I think every single beginner who’s not hustling to get their first 200 subscribers here needs. Let’s dive in 😊

🗞️ WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

👉 The Unwritten Rules of Substack Nobody Talks About

Shannon’s been posting weekly for a whole year on her publication ‘the flow’, and she finally wrote down all the etiquette nobody hands you at the door.

Don’t drop cold links on someone’s Note, don’t pitch in the DMs before you’ve even said hello, don’t post-and-ghost. Her line I keep repeating: “It’s not a megaphone. It’s a dinner party.”

my take: all of it is true, but please don’t read her eleven do’s as a checklist you’re already flunking. as a substack beginner, that’s like the fastest way to freeze on day one.

Substack is Stars Hollow. A tiny town with a hundred unwritten rules, and you don’t learn them from a manual. You learn them by showing up to the town meetings and being a good neighbour. 🏘️

⚡ WORTH YOUR SCROLL

Two Substack updates worth a few seconds this week:

Reply Rules.

You can now set the tone for how people reply to you, in comments, Notes and chat. Filter out AI slop and profanity, or something sillier (apparently you can ask for replies in haiku, lol).

Notes still loves strangers

The feed keeps showing people writers they don’t already follow, which is the best news for beginners. Your honest little Note can reach someone who’s never heard of you.

🛠️ THIS WEEK’S TOOL

Okay, storytime.

Last week I was ranting on Notes about how Substack buries the one number I actually wanted: which of my Notes brought in subscribers.

Not likes. Not comments. Actual humans. And it makes you click about four times per Note to find out.

And if I go do that for a hundred Notes? No thank you.

So, still cranky, I built myself a little one-click tool. And so many of you asked for it that I cleaned it up and put it out. It’s called Quiet Notes Insights, and here’s what it does:

One click on your own Substack profile, and it hands you a clean sheet of every Note you’ve ever posted, with its impressions, likes, comments, restacks, clicks, and the big one, how many subscribers each Note actually brought you.

Here’s a snapshot of my notes analytics as on July 7. (psst; this is after exact 50 days on substack! Planning to write up a full post about that later 😊)

It even pulls your followers list (not a complete one as substack doesn’t return the full data to us yet).

Then you sort by subscribers and, in about five seconds, you can see what’s genuinely working and go write more of that.

It’s founding week till July 10 Friday if you’d like to get it while you can at 50% off. (ps: I’m working on an update to the tool to make it more robust and it will be on full price of $16.99 after that)

Continue

🎯 THE ONE THING

Before next Tuesday:

open your Notes and find your own best one so far, then write another in that same honest voice. One Note. That’s it.

(If you’ve got the tool, sort by subscribers. If not, just scroll and trust your gut.)

If you do it, reply and let me know, I’ll swing by and drop some love in your comments. 🫶

💬 YOU’RE NOT BEHIND

If you haven’t posted this week, you’re not behind.

If your “sales” would fit on one hand like mine do, you’re not behind either. Seven people is not a viral launch, but six weeks ago I was too scared to hit publish on a post.

Small is not nothing. Small is just early. I’m right here with you.

📬 FROM THE STACK — READER WINS

Danielle Wright used the Quiet Notes Insights tool and messaged to say:

“Thank you SO much, it worked perfectly. I’ve been looking for an easier way to get Notes data, so this was GREAT,” and then, “you should sell it to Substack ;) lol.” She even dedicated her Friday Retro post to it.

But here’s my favourite part:

she used the numbers to spot her best day to post.

Let me see it first

Got a win this week? Reply and tell me, you might be in the next issue.

🎒 THE STACK BAG

Stat: Most of what people now see in the Notes feed comes from writers they don’t already follow. The discovery engine is genuinely working for small accounts.

Here’s a little proof from one of my own notes that went mini viral last week and continues to send me a ton of subscribers that zoomed my subscriber list to 215+!

Quote: “It’s not a megaphone. It’s a dinner party.” from Shannon Bindler

Read: Shannon’s full list of unwritten rules (linked up top). Bookmark it and come back in a month, it hits different once you’ve been here a while.

🙋 YOUR TURN

What’s the one Substack thing still confusing you the most right now?

Reply and tell me, I read every single one, and I reply everytime! (like i reply on my notes everytime. and you should do it too when you are tiny and when you can!) and your question might become a future main story.

That’s all for this issue.

We’re off to watch Enola solve her mystery (while I, a 41-year-old woman of taste and composure, am absolutely not just here for Henry Cavill’s Sherlock!) 🙈

See ya next Tuesday 🫶

Yuvika

This is a “reader supported” publication. I intend to keep all that i share here free forever. If you LOVVVVED my writing, feel free to get me a coffee or doughnut (i love the one with the sugar sprinkles) i know sugar isnt healthy but its kinda my favourite treat, lol! I am truly grateful to you for supporting my journey! thank you!😊

Buy me a coffee

It’s past midnight here.

My daughter fell asleep halfway through tonight’s Gilmore Girls episode (we’re on the Nth rewatch, obviously), and instead of going to bed like a reasonable adult, I’m sitting here scrolling Substack with a cold cup of tea.

This is my favourite time to write (when the house is quiet and nobody needs anything from me), lol!

And tonight I went down a rabbit hole about Notes. So that’s what this issue is about.

The post that made me stare at my own feed

📌 “I Looked at Your Notes Feed. I Know Exactly Why You Aren’t Growing”
by Mack Collier · Backstage Pass Read it here

Mack’s whole argument is that your Notes feed is a signal.

A potential subscriber lands on your profile, scrolls for about forty seconds, and decides whether you’re worth following (based entirely on what your feed says about you).

He breaks down three patterns that quietly kill growth:

• the Broadcaster (only ever posting “here’s my new thing”),

• the Ghost (silence, then a burst of self-promotion, repeat), and the

• Surface Engager (lots of “love this!” comments that don’t actually say anything).

It reminded me of why Gilmore Girls is so watchable, of all things. Lorelai and Rory never announce things at each other. It’s all rapid-fire, interrupting, building-on-each-other conversation. That’s what good Notes feel like. A conversation you happen to be having where people can see it.

What I’ve actually been doing (and how it’s working)

So here’s the routine I’ve quietly settled into.

It takes me about thirty minutes a day, and it’s the single thing that’s moved my numbers more than anything else.

The first fifteen minutes, before I post anything of my own, I go and genuinely engage with other people’s Notes. Not “great post.” Actual sentences. A real thought, a question, something that adds to what they said.

Then I post my own Note.

And then I stick around for another fifteen minutes aaand I don’t post and run! I reply to people who responded, I keep the thread going, I treat it like an actual conversation instead of a drop-and-disappear.

The part that surprised me most: the active commenting is doing more for me than my own Notes are.

When I leave a real, thoughtful comment on someone else’s Note, other people read it. They click my name. They land on my profile. That comment becomes a tiny open door. And more than the numbers — it’s building actual relationships, which is the whole point.

Because nobody grows on Substack alone. We’re not in competition over here. We’re all collaborators, rising together. The sooner that clicks, the easier all of this gets.

One more tip:

you can schedule Notes now.

So batch a few when you’ve got the energy and let them go out across the week, because we all know how life gets (like I got crushed under that silly migraine last week!). The routine doesn’t have to depend on you being online at the perfect moment.

A little something I made for you

I wrote this whole routine down, the exact thirty-minute structure, what to do in each window, and the kind of comments that actually open doors instead of clutter feeds. If the routine above sounds useful but you want it in one place you can actually follow, it’s right here.

Quiet Notes Routine

What’s new on Substack this week

Two genuinely big shifts landed, and both are worth knowing about even if they don’t apply to you yet.

📌 “Substack’s NEW Native Sponsorships Program That Pays”
by Kristina God · The Online Writing Club. Read it here.

Substack just rolled out native brand sponsorships AND real names like Uber, T-Mobile and Balenciaga are putting actual money into creators, with the writer keeping editorial control. Right now it’s only open to bestsellers with 100+ paid subscribers.

📌 “Ditch The Templates” (on Subscriber Perks & monetization)
by Andi Bitay · Ditch The Templates Read it here.

The other launch was Subscriber Perks which is a dedicated tab where paid subscribers get extras like discount codes, downloads and live-session invites, while free readers see them locked.

Subscribe now

It’s properly late now and the tea’s been cold for an hour.

But this is the stuff I genuinely love thinking about, not the hacks, the human part. The showing up, the conversations, the slow building of a little corner where people actually know each other.

Kind of like Stars Hollow, honestly.

You don’t become part of the town by standing in the square shouting about yourself. You become part of it by showing up, every day, and being a real one. That’s the whole game here too.

I hope you found this round up about Substack useful and it hopefully saved you some bit of time that you can go spend the way you like!

See you next week 🩵

Yuvika

Quiet Notes Routine

First, a small apology and a slightly embarrassing confession. 🙈

This issue is a few days late, and the reason is very human.

I went for a walk in the full midday sun (I know better, I really do), and by that evening, I had a migraine that flattened me for two whole days.

No laptop. No Notes. Just a dark room, a cold cloth over my eyes, and my own poor judgement for company.

So if you have been waiting on this, thank you for your patience.

I am back, a little squinty, coffee in hand, and excited to tell you what happened in the two weeks before my own head got in the way.

(no, coffee doesn’t trigger my migraine yet, lol!) 😄

I ran a small experiment, and it surprised me

For 14 days, I decided to take Substack Notes seriously.

Not posts. Notes.

I wanted to answer one question: does this actually help me grow my newsletter, or am I talking to no one?

Here is what happened in those two weeks.

I went from 24 subscribers to 74.

That is more than double.

3.1 times more or 208% (if you prefer percentages).

(ps: I am not saying this to brag. I am a very ordinary writer who started her Substack just 23 days back. I had zero knowledge of the platform and am piecing together the way forward as I go)

My point is if I can do this, I’m sure you can do WAY better than me!

Okay, so back to the topic.

My views over the same window more than tripled, from 121 to 385. And when I looked at where all these new readers came from, one source sat far above the rest.

Out of 74 subscribers:

Notes brought in 47 of my new subscribers, more than every other source combined.

Not a viral post. Not a clever funnel. Just small, honest Notes.

A bit about why this matters to me.

I spent 12 years as a recruiter and 9 years writing resumes for other people, which means I have read roughly ten thousand pieces of personal branding advice.

Almost all of it says the same thing:

do more, post more, hustle harder, be everywhere at once.

That has never been me. And I am guessing it is not really you either, or you probably would not be reading something called Quiet Happy.

So here is the part I love.

Below are the ones that did the work, and why I think they landed.

Subscribe now

🌿 The Notes that worked for me (and why I think so)

I am sharing the real ones below so you can see what I wrote and how it was framed. Take the shape if it helps, but fill it with your own truth. That is the part that matters.

1. The “building out loud at 44” Note

This did the most work of anything I posted: 92 likes, 27 replies, and 6 new subscribers from one Note. When I wrote it, I had 44 subscribers. Today, barely a week later, I have 74.

Why I think it worked:

people are tired of big number flexes.

Showing my real, tiny number and choosing to talk anyway told other small writers they did not have to wait for some magic milestone.

The screenshot made it impossible to ignore. This is me, this is exactly where I am, and I am here talking to you anyway.

But guess what, more than 100 of you gave your love, support and encouraged me to keep going.

So, thank you so much. It meant the WORLD to me!

2. The “16 years ago” life timeline

My most loved Note so far: 95 likes and 36 replies.

Why I think it worked:

the timeline format gently pulls people down the screen, one line at a time, until by the end they have quietly lived a whole life with me.

I did not tidy it into a neat success story. I left in the miscarriage, the money I lost, the business AI ended overnight.

People do not lean in for polished. They lean in for true.

Subscribe now

3. The “I’m not expert enough” confession

74 likes, 22 replies, and 5 new subscribers.

Why I think it worked:

it said the quiet fear out loud

you know the “who am I to talk about this?” that nearly every beginner carries. Naming it made people feel less alone.

and the line about writing for the version of me from six months ago gave them a reason to start before they felt ready.

The pattern, if you are keeping score: not one of these took an hour to make.

The writing was the easy part. What really moved things was what I did around each Note, which is the bit I want to walk you through next.

This is WHAT I did after hitting post (aka- my daily Notes routine)

Here is the part most growth advice skips.

THE HOW and WHAT I did.

I did not post my Notes and vanish. The posting itself was maybe a tenth of the work. The rest was showing up around each Note.

First, a small note about the experiment.

In these 2 weeks, I scheduled notes for one week and manually posted for the second week. So, everything you are seeing came from a mix of both.

Scheduling kept me consistent on the days my head or my kids needed me more. Manual posting helped me wander into the conversations live. Both worked, so you really do not have to pick a side.

Either way, I wrote the Notes in advance.

So, they were already ready for posting in my word document. On the scheduled week they sat in the queue. On the manual week I kept them ready in a Word document and pasted them in when it was time.

Keeping writing time and posting time separate is what kept this calm instead of frantic.

I posted twice a day on average, and each time I gave it roughly 30 minutes, split before and after the Note. (and yes, I skipped a couple times as well. am a human after all with a LIFE, lol!)

Before posting (about 15 minutes):

I opened the Notes home feed and started READING!

Then:

· liked the ones I actually liked. Some days it was twelve, other days maybe five. (didn’t really keep a count of how many notes I was liking in a day!)

· left real comments on a few, full sentences about what I thought or why something helped, never a quick “great post.” One of those honest replies on someone else’s Note quietly sent me subscribers and followers, which taught me that replies behave a little like Notes of their own. People read them, click your name, and find you.

· restacked a Note or two that would help other beginners, usually with a short line like “saving this for the Substack newbies.” (and this led to many conversations with the authors too which was fun!)

Then I posted my Note.

No tabs, no targets, no spreadsheet. About 30 minutes a Note, twice a day, most of it spent being a real person in other people’s corners of Substack before asking anyone to come and visit mine.

I have turned this into a simple one-page routine you can keep next to your laptop and try for yourself.

Simple Daily Notes Routine

📚 Worth The Scroll

Tracy Friedlander · The Second Act Strategist

Tracy went from 100 to over 1,000 subscribers in four months, and pulled 79 of them in a single week, all without a content treadmill. Her whole philosophy is “write like a human, not a robot.” She is openly fine with her growth taking longer, because she refuses to churn out generic, AI flavoured posts. I LOVE that!

my take:

reading her feels like being allowed to slow down.

My messiest, most personal Notes pulled the warmest replies, which is exactly her point. It’s genuinely useful and lines up with exactly what worked for you.

Her big idea is the “Relatable Experience Note,” a Note that simply names a feeling your readers are already having, so they recognise themselves and click through.

That’s precisely why the “I’m not expert enough” and “16 years ago” Notes landed.

I wasn’t teaching anything, but naming a shared feeling.

🎯 One small thing for this week

Post one honest Note this week.

Just one.

Then do the part that actually matters: stay for half an hour and reply to whoever shows up, the way you would to a friend. That is the entire assignment, and it is plenty.

If you try it, reply and tell me.

I will come and find your Note and cheer you on. 🫶

💛 You are not behind

If your last Note got three likes, you are not behind.

If your subscriber count still fits on one hand, you are not behind. I had 44 a week ago, and a migraine in the middle of my big experiment.

Slow is allowed. Resting is allowed.

The writers whose Notes you admire all posted a hundred quiet ones first. You are simply earlier in the same story.

📬 From the community: your wins

LaToya Jovena – a lovely reader went and applied one of the notes template I had shared in the earlier issue. Isnt that great?

Check out her Substack here: The Expansion!

🎒 Three things worth reading

The number: 24 to 74 subscribers in 14 days, with 47 of them coming straight from Notes. Quiet and honest beat loud and clever.

The line I keep coming back to: “I could’ve waited until I had a real number to post this. I have 44. But I’d rather build this out loud.” That was me, last week, at 44 subscribers. Show your journey, however tiny it may be and it may inspire others!

Worth reading: Tracy Friedlander’s “relatable experience” approach to Notes. The gentlest, most sustainable take on growing without burning out that I have found.

🙋 Over to you

What is the one Note you have been too scared to post?

Hit reply and tell me about it, or be brave, post it, and send me the link.

That is everything, friend. I am going to drink water like a responsible adult, stay out of the sun, and write one small honest Note before bed.

If you are just starting out and today felt heavy, please know you are not doing it wrong. You are doing it slowly, on purpose.

And that is ENOUGH.

Take care of your head, your heart, and your small growing list.

See ya next week 🫶

Yuvika

ps: why not try the simple daily notes routine I made? it may inspire you to create one that fits your life and schedule! get your free copy below.

The Simple Daily Notes Routine

it looks like showing up. every single day, for everything and everyone that needs you including your job, your family, your responsibilities, your next plan after the last one fell apart.

it looks like being capable. being dependable. being the person who figures it out.

from the inside?

it sometimes feels like quietly carrying something heavy that you can’t put down and can’t quite explain to anyone, because nothing is obviously wrong.

your life is fine. you have things to be grateful for. you know this. you remind yourself often.

and yet.

there it is. that low, persistent hum that something is still missing.

the timeline

sixteen years ago, i started my first job. full of ambition, certain the good feeling was just a few achievements away.

i got married. had my daughter. built a career i was proud of, got the promotion, the team, the title, the things you work toward.

and then life did what life does.

i miscarried my second child. quietly grieved, kept going. quit a stable HR job to move to a new country. tried stock trading, lost everything i’d put in.

started a career development business from scratch. had my second child. rebuilt everything, again.

five months ago, AI made that business obsolete overnight.

now, at 41, i’m here. starting fresh on substack.

when i shared this recently, someone left a comment that stopped me:

that’s exactly it, isn’t it.

you don’t need to share my story. you just need to recognise the pattern including the hard stops, the pivots, the things that changed everything, the quiet resilience of people who just didn’t stop.

most of us have a version of this timeline. we just don’t say it out loud very often.

what was underneath all of it

here’s the thing i didn’t understand for most of those sixteen years.

i was good at functioning. genuinely, reliably, impressively good at it. what i was not good at, what i didn’t even know i was avoiding was stopping.

every loss, every pivot, every rebuild,

i moved through them with my head down and my feet moving. i thought that’s what you do. you keep going. falling apart wasn’t really an option i let myself consider.

and somewhere in all that keeping going, i lost the thread back to myself.

the hollow feeling wasn’t a gap to be filled with the next achievement.

it was the sound of someone who had learned, very early, to keep moving so she never had to stop and feel what was underneath.

three years ago, at 40, i finally got help for the childhood trauma i had been carrying my entire adult life.

i want to stay with that for a moment, because it’s the most important sentence in this post.

not because the trauma is the point. but because of what turning toward it, finally, slowly, with a lot of resistance actually revealed.

from feeling. from being present in my own life rather than just managing it.

the therapy didn’t fix me. nothing fixes you.

but it did something more useful. it taught me how to stop running. how to sit with what was there instead of outrunning it.

someone in the comments said something that’s stayed with me: “the twists don’t just happen to you. they happen in you.”

yes. that’s exactly what i found.

every loss, every rebuild, every hard thing i’d carried quietly, it had been doing something beneath the surface the whole time.

forming something. slowly, without my permission, building a floor underneath me i didn’t even know was there.

until the moment i finally needed it.

what i found when i stopped running

when the career development business collapsed overnight, something was different about how i met it.

not easier. but different. quieter. like for the first time, the rug being pulled didn’t take me entirely with it.

i’d been reading deeply, almost desperately the stoics, the taoists, the vedic philosophers, the sufi poets. not as a self-improvement project. not to optimise anything. just because after everything modern had offered and everything modern had failed to reach, something in these timeliness voices finally did.

marcus aurelius, writing to himself in a private journal he never meant anyone to read: “you have power over your mind, not outside events. realise this, and you will find strength.”

these weren’t motivational quotes. they were people who had lived through exile, grief, loss, failure and arrived, somehow, at the same quiet conclusion.

not in the next achievement. not in the rebuilt version of yourself that finally has it together. not waiting at the end of the self-help book you haven’t read yet.

it has always lived within.

as a quiet, steady presence underneath all the noise, available not when your circumstances are perfect, but when you stop long enough to remember it’s there.

i didn’t find this in a single breakthrough moment. i found it in a slow accumulation of stopping. of turning inward. of finally asking the question i’d been running from for sixteen years.

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if any of this sounds familiar

maybe your life looks fine from the outside too.

maybe you’ve kept going through things that deserved more grief than you gave them. maybe you’ve achieved things that didn’t feel the way you thought they would.

maybe you’re tired, not dramatically, not in a way anyone would notice, just tired in the way of someone who has been carrying something for a long time without setting it down.

you’re not broken. you’re not failing at happiness. you’re not ungrateful.

you’re just someone who learned to keep going, so well, for so long, that you forgot to ask where you actually wanted to go.

someone said that to me recently and i haven’t stopped thinking about it.

this newsletter is me, looking back. and sharing what i see.

every week i take one timeless idea from the ancient wisdom traditions and translate it into something a modern overthinker can actually feel (not just understand) on a regular day.

no jargon. no ten-step programmes. just one quiet idea, simply told, from people who figured this out long before there were apps for it.

if you’re not subscribed yet, come in.

and if you’re already here, i appreciate you.

this is your reminder.

yuvika 🌿

Subscribe now

I just finished binge-watching Virgin River on Netflix. Cried twice😭, zero regrets.

And then I roped my 13-year-old gurl into rewatching Gilmore Girls with me for what is genuinely the Nth time. She thinks Rory is relatable. I think Lorelai is a life coach. (I think we’re both kinda right! Lol, what do you think? 👀

Anyway.

Between episodes (and the snack negotiations that come with a teenager), I spent this week deep in a rabbit hole of posts from Substack writers who started from zero and actually made it work.

Not the gurus. Not the people selling courses about their courses. Real writers who started exactly where you are, you know - confused, a little embarrassed to admit they had no idea what they were doing, and wondering if anyone would ever read their stuff. (including me!)

I like the sound of that! Let’s dive deeper into it 😊

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🗞️ WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

5 Steps To Launch A New Substack From Scratch In 2026

By Dickie Bush · Dickie’s Digest · Mar 15, 2026

👉

Dickie’s Digest

5 Steps To Launch A New Substack From Scratch In 2026

I’m done writing online…

Read more

6 months ago · 200 likes · 19 comments · Dickie Bush

Dickie Bush went from 192 subscribers in month 7 to building multiple newsletters with a total of over 200,000 subscribers. (even as he was on the verge of quitting!) In this post, he outlines the exact launch mistakes most beginners make (going too broad, being clever instead of clear, and naming your newsletter after yourself) and the 5-step playbook he’d use if starting from scratch today.

Gilmore Girls parallel no one asked for: Lorelai never waited until the Dragonfly Inn was perfect before opening it. She opened it, then fixed things. Same energy.

⚡ WORTH YOUR SCROLL

5 Proven Hacks You Can Use to Grow on Substack as a Beginner Fast

By Maxim Spasskiy · Writing Secrets · Feb 4, 2026 👉

Writing Secrets

5 Proven Hacks You Can Use to Grow on Substack as a Beginner Fast

Struggle to grow on Substack…

Read more

7 months ago · 79 likes · 50 comments · Maxim Spasskiy

Maxim started with 0 subscribers in February 2025. This post is the honest, no-fluff version of what actually moved the needle (written specifically for writers under 800 subscribers). Big takeaway: long-form posts build trust, but Notes get you seen. If you’re only publishing posts and ignoring Notes, you’re working in the dark.

Substack Changed Everything in 2025. Here’s My New Strategy for 2026.

By Wes Pearce · Escape the Cubicle · 2025 👉

Escape the Cubicle

Substack Changed Everything in 2025. Here’s My New Strategy for 2026.

I watched a writer quit last week…

Read more

9 months ago · 40 likes · 6 comments · Wes Pearce

The old advice was: build your audience on LinkedIn or X first, then bring them to Substack. Wes explains why that’s outdated. Substack added 32 million new subscribers from within the app in just three months last year. The discovery engine is working, meaning you no longer need to dominate another platform before Substack can work for you.

🛠️ THIS WEEK’S TOOL

Copy, customise, and post your notes

The single highest-ROI thing a new Substack writer can do this week is post 5 Notes. Not 5 posts. 5 Notes. Staring at a blank Note is the fastest way to do nothing. So I created 5 simple templates you can steal, customise in 30 seconds, and post today:

Note 1 — Introduction

“I just started a newsletter about [topic]. My goal is to [one sentence]. If that’s your thing, I’d love to have you subscribe.”

Note 2 — Honest take

“The most confusing thing about Substack when I started was [X]. Here’s how I finally figured it out: [one sentence answer].”

Note 3 — Question

“Question for other new writers: what’s the one thing you wish someone had told you before you hit publish for the first time?”

Note 4 — Mini insight

“One thing I learned this week: [short lesson]. Sharing in case it’s useful.”

Note 5 — Restack

Find a Note from another writer you genuinely agree with. Restack it. Add two sentences of your own take.

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🎯 THE ONE THING

Before next Tuesday: post one Note.

Doesn’t have to be polished. Doesn’t need a hook. Doesn’t need to go viral. Just needs to exist. One Note by next Tuesday. That’s it.

💬 YOU’RE NOT BEHIND

If you haven’t published yet this week, you’re not behind. If your subscriber count is still in single digits, you’re not behind. (I’m with you too!)

Every single writer you admire on Substack had a first post that felt embarrassing, a month where nothing grew, and a moment where they nearly quit. The difference between them and everyone who gave up isn’t talent. It’s one more Tuesday.

📬 FROM THE STACK — READER WINS

Got a win this week? Reply to me for a chance to be featured here!

🌱 WRITER SPOTLIGHT

Lizzy the Ronin · The Michi

Writing about healthy habits, lifestyle, and wellness, while sharing aesthetic creativity. It’s just like sitting around a cozy fire, where you escape the world and share your thoughts with like-minded people. Not to mention, she writes the tastiest recipes for helshry living (she’s currently writing her own cookbook! Keep an eye out for it😉)

Check out her substack here: The Michi

Know a beginner writer who deserves a spotlight? Hit reply with their name and newsletter.

🎒 THE STACK BAG

Stat: Substack added 32 million new subscribers from inside the app in just 3 months in 2025. The discovery engine is real now.

Read: Karen Cherry’s breakdown of the Notes algorithm (straight from the engineer who built it. The clearest explanation out there for beginners). 👉

PubStack Success

The Notes algorithm explained (by its actual creator)

This post was brought to you by the Substack Starter Kit, your all-in-one toolkit to launch and grow a successful newsletter with confidence and speed. Everything you need to start, plan, and grow a Substack publication, ready to use and easy to follow…

Read more

10 months ago · 2079 likes · 225 comments · Karen Cherry

🙋 YOUR TURN

What’s the one thing about Substack that still confuses you the most right now? Hit reply and let me know. I read every single one, and your question might become next week’s main story.

That’s Issue #001. I’m going to go hit play on Season 1, Episode 1 of Gilmore Girls now while my daughter insists, she’s “only watching for the fashion.” (we both know that’s a lie!)

Thanks for being here from the very beginning. It genuinely means the WORLD to me.

See ya next Tuesday 🫶.

Yuvika

Most of them are guessing.

A handful are drawing on real data. And almost none of them are explaining it in a way that’s actually useful to a writer who is just starting out. Someone without 10,000 subscribers, without a viral Note to their name, without years of platform experience to draw from.

This post is different.

It’s built entirely from what Substack’s own team has publicly shared, including a rare behind-the-scenes explanation from the platform’s head of machine learning and co-founder. (Plus I curated the documented results of writers who have tested what works!)

Here is what the algorithm actually does, why it is genuinely different from every other platform you’ve used, and exactly how to use it to grow a brand-new newsletter from zero.

First: Substack’s algorithm has a completely different goal from every other platform

Most social media algorithms are built to keep you scrolling.

Their success metric is time spent on the platform, because more time means more ad impressions and, in turn, more revenue. Substack has no ads.

Which means the algorithm has no reason to trap you. Unlike Instagram or LinkedIn, Substack does not optimize for time spent on the platform or ad clicks. It is focused entirely on driving subscriptions.

This changes everything about how you should think about growth.

You are not fighting an algorithm designed to keep people distracted. You are working with one that is actively trying to connect your work with readers who want it.

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Karen Cherry of PubStack Success has a deep dive on this if you’d like to check it out: → The Notes Algorithm Explained (By Its Actual Creator)

How the algorithm actually decides who sees your Notes

The Notes feed is where most new Substack writers focus their growth energy and rightly so. Substack’s own data shows that 32 million new free subscribers and nearly half a million paid subscribers came from inside the app in just three months.

Not from LinkedIn, not from Instagram, but from readers discovering writers directly on the platform.

When you consistently engage with three or four writers in your niche, the algorithm starts showing your Notes to their audiences (even people who have never heard of you). You do not need a large following to get reach. You need the right engagement behavior.

Here’s a great breakdown from Wes Pearce of Escape the Cubicle → Substack Keeps Shifting. Here’s the New Way To Build a Profitable Newsletter in 2026.

The one thing the algorithm rewards more than anything else

This is the single most counterintuitive thing about Substack and the most important. Writers who come from Instagram or LinkedIn are conditioned to think of growth as zero-sum. Someone else’s win is your loss.

Substack works the exact opposite way. The more genuinely you support other writers, the more the algorithm supports you.

Substack’s own team has stated publicly that signal-boosting other publishers and joining wider conversations are both directly linked to noticeable growth.

Restacking and genuinely engaging with writers you admire is not just good community behavior. It is one of the MOST effective ways to grow.

The 10-5-1 Rule: The simplest daily habit for working with the algorithm

Understanding how the algorithm works is one thing. Having a system for acting on it daily is another.

The most practical framework I’ve found is the 10-5-1 rule, created by Philip Hofmacher, at Write • Build • Scale. This is the daily Substack routine he suggests:

· like 10 Notes from writers in your niche,

· leave 5 genuinely thoughtful comments on other people’s Notes or posts,

· and send 1 DM to a writer you genuinely admire.

Each of these actions performs a specific task. Likes and comments generate algorithmic signals that connect your profile to overlapping audiences. Comments in particular are free visibility, so everyone who reads that Note also sees your comment, and some will click your profile.

The DM builds real relationships that eventually lead to recommendation swaps, collaborations, and organic word of mouth that no algorithm can manufacture.

Notes are not just about posting.

It is about building a real community. Writers who treat it as a broadcast channel post and disappear see minimal returns. Writers who treat it as a daily conversation see compounding growth.

The 10-5-1 framework was developed by Philip Hofmacher from Write • Build • Scale → 3 Lessons I Learned From Publishing Substack Notes for 365 Days Straight

It remains the most practical engagement system I’ve come across for writers at any stage.

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What the algorithm cannot do for you

Here is the part that most algorithm explainer posts leave out.

The algorithm can put your Notes in front of the right people. It cannot make those people subscribe if your profile is confusing, your About page is vague, or your pinned post does not immediately communicate why someone should follow you.

Most publications lack a clear value proposition.

The more specific your writing, the faster your audience grows. Ideally, you can communicate the target audience and the value of your publication in one single sentence.

Discovery without conversion is wasted effort. Before you invest heavily in Notes and engagement, make sure the destination is ready.

Your profile description, your About page, and your pinned Hero Post should all tell the same clear story: who this is for, what they get, and why it is worth their time.

The bottom line on the Substack algorithm

It is not mysterious. It is not random. And it is not working against you.

It is a subscription engine that rewards consistent publishing, genuine community engagement, and cross-publication generosity.

Every writer who has cracked meaningful growth on this platform has done so by working with those three principles (not by finding a hack around them)

Publish consistently. Engage genuinely. Support other writers publicly and specifically. Do those three things for ninety days, and the algorithm will do its job.

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Inside the Stack tracks what is changing on this platform every week including algorithm updates, new features, and the strategies that are actually working right now.

I believe good advice should reach every writer, that’s why Inside the Stack will always be free. If anything here helped you, pass it on to a friend who’s figuring Substack out. That’s how this grows. And hey, if you want to say thanks, I’m always up for a coffee. ☕

They fail quietly. The writer shows up, publishes consistently, does everything they’ve been told to do and still watches their subscriber count barely move.

They’re not lazy. They’re not untalented. They’re just making a handful of mistakes that are nearly invisible from the inside.

I’ve spent weeks reading everything written about Substack growth, possibly hundreds of posts, coaches, data studies, and writer case studies. And these same seven mistakes keep appearing, regardless of the niche, the writing quality, or how long someone has been on the platform.

Here they are and more importantly, here’s what to do instead.

Mistake #1: Treating Substack like a blogging platform

This is the most common and most damaging mistake of all.

Writers publish a post, hit send, and wait. No Notes. No engagement. No recommendations. Just content into the void (and the assumption that good writing alone will bring people in).

The problem is that Substack is not WordPress. It is not Medium.

When you have 2, 5, or even 50 subscribers, the algorithm does not show your posts or Notes in the general feed, regardless of how much you publish.

Writing is only part of the equation. Showing up in the ecosystem is the other part, and most writers skip it entirely.

Alesia Zakharova talks about it in her substack “Grow Smarter With AI”→ I Used Claude To Analyze 100 Substack Newsletters That Couldn’t Break 100 Subscribers

She used AI to analyze 100 Substack newsletters with fewer than 100 subscribers and found that this was the single most consistent reason they never grew.

What to do instead: Think of your long-form newsletter as the foundation. Think of everything else — Notes, comments, recommendations, collaborations as the growth engine. You need both.

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Mistake #2: Writing for everyone and reaching no one

Vague publications don’t grow.

“I write about life, creativity, and personal growth” tells a new visitor nothing about why they should subscribe.

The most successful Substack publications can describe exactly who they help and what they deliver in one sentence. If you cannot do that yet, your About page is working against you every single day.

If you cannot communicate your publication’s value in one sentence ‘who it helps and what they get’ then you don’t yet have clarity on what your newsletter actually is.

What to do instead: Test yourself. Write down in one sentence exactly who your newsletter is for and what they get from it. If it takes three sentences, keep cutting until it fits in one. Then make sure your profile description, your About page, and your pinned post all say the same thing.

Mistake #3: Paywalling your best content too early

This one is counterintuitive, but the data is clear.

Locking your strongest posts behind a paid tier in your first six months kills your growth.

Hide that post behind a paywall, and NONE of that happens.

What to do instead: Keep your best two or three posts permanently free. Pin your strongest one to your profile. Let it work as a 24/7 growth engine. The paid tier comes later, once you have an audience that already trusts you.

Mistake #4: Ignoring the recommendations feature

Substack’s recommendations feature is the single most underrated growth tool on the platform. When you recommend another newsletter and they recommend yours, both publications grow.

Lenny Rachitsky of Lenny’s Newsletter publicly shared that 78% of his new subscribers were coming directly from other newsletters recommending his. Chenell from Growth in Reverse talks about it here: The 5 Biggest Takeaways From Lenny's Journey To 1 Million Subscribers. He called it a “game-changing feature” and one of the most impactful growth tools he’d ever seen.

But most new writers either ignore it completely or do it wrong. Like recommending every newsletter that asks, regardless of audience fit, until their recommendations page becomes meaningless noise.

What to do instead: Choose five to seven newsletters whose readers would genuinely benefit from yours. Build a real relationship with those writers first. Engage with their Notes, reply to their posts, then ask for a swap. Quality over quantity, every time.

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Mistake #5: Publishing without a consistent schedule

Inconsistency is the silent killer of newsletters.

A reader who subscribed three weeks ago and has received nothing since has already emotionally unsubscribed. They just haven’t clicked the button yet.

What to do instead: Choose one day. Protect it. Publish on that day every single week without exception. Pull content from an emergency content bank you’ve built in advance if life gets busy (which it WILL!) Never miss your day.

Mistake #6: Using Notes as a broadcast channel

Writers who post a Note and immediately close the app are missing the entire point of the feature.

The writers growing fastest on Substack are spending as much time engaging with other people’s Notes as they are posting their own, including liking, replying, restacking (add your own thoughts too!)

Every thoughtful comment you leave on someone else’s Note is free visibility. Their entire audience sees it. Some of those readers will click your profile. Some will subscribe.

The most practical daily framework for doing this consistently is the 10-5-1 rule, developed by Philip Hofmacher from Write • Build • Scale. It is the most actionable daily engagement habit I’ve come across for new Substack writers. → 3 Lessons I Learned From Publishing Substack Notes for 365 Days Straight

He tells you to follow this daily substack routine:

· like 10 Notes from writers in your niche,

· leave 5 genuinely thoughtful comments on other people’s Notes or posts, and

· send 1 DM to a writer you admire.

What to do instead: For every Note you publish, spend time engaging with at least ten others. This is the 10-5-1 rule in practice.

Each action does a specific job. The likes and comments create algorithmic signals and free visibility, and the DM builds the real relationships that eventually lead to recommendation swaps and collaborations.

Mistake #7: Waiting until everything is perfect before starting

This is the mistake that costs the most time and generates the least return. Writers spend weeks perfecting their About page, their logo, their niche, their posting schedule and publish nothing.

Meanwhile, the writers who started imperfectly three months ago have thirty posts, a growing audience, and a clear sense of what their readers actually want.

What to do instead: Start before you’re ready. Your first ten posts exist to teach you what your newsletter actually is. The writers still here in two years are not the ones with the best ideas in month one, they’re the ones who kept going past the point where it felt pointless.

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All these mistakes are fixable…

None of these mistakes are fatal. Every single one is fixable, often within a week. The writers who grow on Substack are no more talented than those who don’t. They’ve just stopped making the mistakes that keep most writers invisible.

If Inside the Stack does its job right, you’ll never have to hunt for this kind of insight again. Every week, I read everything being written about Substack growth and send you only what’s worth your time.

I believe good advice should reach every writer, that’s why Inside the Stack will always be free. If anything here helped you, pass it on to a friend who’s figuring Substack out. That’s how this grows. And hey, if you want to say thanks, I’m always up for a coffee. ☕