• Don’t hide behind the paywall. If the first thing a new reader sees is four paid posts out of five, they leave before they know you. Keep a free Start Here post, pin it, introduce yourself, and make it easy for someone to get in and read.

• Say your USP, not your name. A description that repeats your publication’s name teaches the reader nothing. Say what makes you different. In this case, the writer also runs a publishing company and helps women authors get published, and that belonged front and center.

• Guide people with a menu and sections. A navigation menu and clear sections walk readers from your profile to your posts to the exact place you want them to land, like your free group or your about page. Without it, people wander off.

• Get personal in your Notes. If you write about story, tell your story. Promoting your group over and over is not the same as letting people connect with the person behind it.

• Two publications? Put your main one first. The one you list first is the one people subscribe to when they hover over your name. And honestly, if you can focus on a single publication, do. A second one is rarely worth it in time or money.

• Small design fixes add up. A wordmark instead of plain text, and consistent cover images instead of random ones, make the whole thing look intentional and trustworthy.

This kind of setup, the free-first structure, the sections, the navigation, the profile that converts, is exactly what we build together in my bootcamp.

It’s called The Subscriber Sprint. Two days, live, 90 minutes each. Day one is how to set your Substack up to work for you right now. Day two we go into your own publication, hands-on, with a live Q&A.

It starts tomorrow, Wednesday, and doors close tonight.

Join the Bootcamp Here

Already a paid member? You get 30% off. Your link is in the members’ email.

Subscribe now

See you tomorrow 🤩,
Claudia

We covered a lot for a short one.

Someone asked how to convert free subscribers into paid ones. My answer:

• focus on the transformation, not the features.

• Give people something they can use the moment they upgrade, mix in a social element like a chat or a live, and where you can, add a bit of personalization.

That combination is what makes paid feel worth it.

Someone else said their Notes get a ton of effort and one like back. I have been there. When I started, I showed up every day for three months with almost no interaction. But let me tell you one thing: it compounds. Keep writing them, make them personal, add an image, and show up for other writers so they show up for you.

We also talked about the thing that made me build my bootcamp in the first place. A reader recently told me she cancelled all her Substack emails. Too many, too overwhelming. But she still follows people and reads them in her feed. That means you have followers and you have subscribers, and turning one into the other is where your growth is hiding.

And the timing matters. September is when people come back from holidays, back to their desks, back to reading. It is one of the best windows all year to get your Substack working for you.

That is exactly what I’m teaching this week in The Subscriber Sprint, my 2-day bootcamp. This Wednesday and Thursday, 90 minutes each, 11am ET. Day one is how to make Substack work for you right now. Day two we go into your own publications, hands-on, with feedback and a live Q&A.

Doors close tomorrow.

Join the Subscriber Sprint

Already a paid member? You get 30% off. Your discounted link is in the members’ email.

Get in now to get that deal

See you on Wednesday,
Claudia

They told me they don’t subscribe to people on Substack anymore.

Too many emails, too overwhelming. But they follow the writers they like, and they trust that the posts will show up in their feed when it matters. That’s how they read now.

My first instinct was to think of that as a problem to solve. Then I realized it isn’t one.

Here are my two numbers. I have more than 13,000 subscribers on Wander Wealth. I also have more than 34,000 followers. For a long time I looked at that gap and had no idea what to do with it. I figured I was supposed to march those 34,000 people over to my email list somehow, and I felt vaguely guilty that I hadn’t.

I don’t feel that way anymore. And I convert more of them now than I ever did when I was trying to.

Email fatigue is real, and it’s not going away

Let’s just be honest about this first. People are tired of their inboxes. Your reader has forty newsletters they meant to read and didn’t, and a little pang of guilt every time another one lands. So a lot of them made a quiet decision. They’ll follow you, they’ll read you in the feed, and they won’t hand over their email to one more sender.

Don’t take it personally, they simply protect their attention in nowadays’ attention-seeking fight.

So the game isn’t the inbox. The game is the feed. If following is how people want to read, then the feed is where you earn the subscribe, not by dragging them out of it.

Quick tip: go look at your own two numbers today, followers and subscribers. Go to your dashboard > audience > stats > audience. There you can see your followers.

Why I don’t ask my followers to subscribe

Most advice tells you to ask. Post a Note telling your followers to subscribe. Say it again and again until they do.

I don’t do that, and I wouldn’t tell you to either.

When someone genuinely likes what they see from you, when they trust you and they’ve seen the real, personal side of you, they subscribe on their own. They don’t need to be told. And when they don’t feel that yet, asking just makes you one more person demanding something from a tired reader. It pushes against the exact fatigue that made them follow instead of subscribe in the first place.

So I’d rather spend that energy giving people a reason. The value is the ask. Show up well enough in the feed and the subscribe takes care of itself.

Where the conversion actually happens

Three surfaces do almost all the work for me. Here they are in the order I’d put my time.

1. Posts in Notes, and restacking your own words. This is the engine, and I’d start here before anything else. Your followers live in the feed, so that’s where they need to meet your writing. When you publish a post, share it as a Note. Restack the sharpest line from it as a quote. Pull one idea out and let it stand on its own. This is how a follower actually reads you instead of just seeing your name float by.
   There’s a mechanical reason this matters too. A bare link dropped into a Note performs badly. Substack buries it. But when you share an actual post, the link rides along natively and reaches people. So the move isn’t “post a link.” The move is “share the post and restack the good parts.” Do that with every piece you publish.
   

2. Substack Live. I see a real uptick every time I go live. When you start a live, your followers see it hit their feed. It puts you in front of people who follow you but haven’t committed yet, in a format that feels immediate and human. You don’t need to be polished. You just need to show up and let them see you.
   

3. Your community chat. Start one. It’s one of the easiest features on the platform and almost nobody uses it well. An active chat pops up in people’s feeds, it connects you directly with your people, and you show up right there in the thread with them. It’s also a soft nudge toward subscribing, because the people who want to be part of the conversation tend to want to be closer than a follow. Just don’t get obsessed with it. Keep it alive, keep it warm, and let it do its quiet work.

Notice what all three have in common. None of them ask for anything. They just put you where your followers already are and let the good stuff pull them closer.

Your 10-minute version

You can do this today.

Take the last post you published. Share it as a Note. Then pick the one line from it you’re most proud of, restack it as a quote, and add a sentence of your own about why it matters. That’s it.

Want to do this with me, live?

I’ve wanted to run this one for a while, so I’m doing it.

It’s called The Subscriber Sprint. Two days, live, built for people who are fairly new to Substack and want to set it up properly and actually grow.

• Wednesday, September 2nd, 11am ET, 1.5h

• Thursday, September 3rd 11am, ET, 1.5h

Here’s how it works:

• Day one is a 90-minute workshop on Wednesday, September 2, at 11:00 AM ET. We cover the whole follower-to-subscriber approach, the feed-first way I just described, plus the setup essentials most people get wrong when they start. Notes that carry your posts, going live, running a chat, and how it all fits together. You’ll leave knowing exactly what to do.

• Day two is a live Q&A on Thursday, September 3, also at 11:00 AM ET. This is my favorite part. You bring your own Substack and your own questions, and we go through them together. I’ll give you direct feedback on your actual publication, we’ll do a round where people share what they’re working on, and I’ll try to connect you with other writers in the room who can help. It’s a small, intimate group, so you’ll get real attention, not a webinar where you’re one of a thousand faces.

It’s $147 to join. If you’re already a paid Wander Wealth subscriber, you get a discounted rate, and your link is waiting in the member version of this post.

Doors close Tuesday, September 1, the day before we start.

If your follower count keeps climbing but your subscriber list is standing still, this is the fix, and we’ll do it together.

Join the Subscriber Sprint Here

or subscribe first to get the discounted price for $97.

Subscribe now

This time I sat down with , who writes Not a Niche — a publication built on the refusal to niche down. She shares the stories she’s lived and the lessons (really, the reminders) that came from them. She just crossed 1,000 subscribers, so we dug into what could take her further.

What Courtney’s already doing well:

• Her notes are strong. Personal, consistent, and well-mixed between posts, images, and little moments. A photo plus a few personal lines is exactly what’s working on Notes right now.

• Her personality comes through clearly in her profile and in conversation.

Where we found room to grow:

1. Add credibility to the profile. Her opener (”fully me, finally happy and free”) is great, but there’s no signal of why she’s the right person to write what she writes. She has a degree in education and over a decade of real experience, and it appears nowhere.

2. Hide the subscription count. Her profile showed 308 public subscriptions she’s reading, which can make people wonder if she’s reading or just follow-farming. Fix: Edit Profile > Subscription Privacy > Hide all. That removes the number entirely.

3. Bring the personality into the publication. Her homepage doesn’t yet match the warmth of her profile. We talked through: pull Notes out of the menu, rename “Start Here” to something more personal, work in sections to organize posts, and fix inconsistent header images (go all-in on nature or her own photos instead of mismatched AI images).

4. Sharpen the publication description. “Helping you reconnect with you so you can live out your magic” is lovely, but I recommended her lean harder into the transformation and how she delivers it.

5. Stay with one publication. She asked about starting a second. I don’t recommend it. I have one and constantly question that decision.

The throughline: Substack is a long game. Nobody shows up overnight and makes millions. Courtney’s built a great foundation. Now it’s about making the publication feel as alive as she does.

The list filled three pages.

How often to post.

What to write when nobody’s reading.

When to turn on paid.

What to charge.

Why some posts bring 40 subscribers and others bring 2.

You get it. The list is endless.

I had to figure out every single line the slow way, one experiment at a time, 159 published issues and counting.

A few weeks ago I finally did something I’d been putting off for a year. I took everything that worked and organized it into one place.

Today it goes live for paid members, on its own member page.

What’s inside

The Playbook is four systems. Read them in order if you’re new, or jump straight to the one that hurts most right now.

• The Growth System covers growing from zero: the setup, the publishing cadence, the daily routine, the Notes engine, and what to realistically expect at 3, 6, and 12 months. No fantasy numbers.

• The Publication System is how to publish posts people actually read, every week, without burning out. My formats, my headline process, my weekly workflow.

• The Engagement System turns silent subscribers into a real community. Chat, lives, challenges, and the reactivation plays that wake up quiet readers.

• The Money System is the one most of you have been asking for. When to go paid, how to price, the welcome email that converts up to 30% of free subscribers, and how to launch your first paid offer without feeling gross about it.

And then there are the ten templates. These are fill-in documents. The welcome email. The pricing worksheet. The launch checklist. The first 90 days roadmap. Open one, replace the brackets with your answers, use it the same day.

Two ways to get it

If you just want the Playbook on its own, you can buy it outright for $149 here:

Get the Playbook Here

Or become a paid member for $99 a year and it’s simply included, along with everything else: the Monthly LIVE Substack Glow-Up (one real Substack gets a live makeover each month), my Notes Scheduler (worth $180 on its own), and every new module I add as I keep learning. Same price as the Playbook alone.

Subscribe now

Here’s what one member wrote when she joined:

“I subscribed to Claudia because I wanted to learn from someone who actually built a five-figure newsletter in just a year and could show me the exact playbook instead of theoretical advice.”

That playbook is now literally the Playbook I am offering today.

Below the paywall: your member page link and where to start.

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Reading a great book is only the beginning, remembering and applying it is what creates real change. Sumizeit helps you build a daily learning habit with 15-minute book summaries, audio versions, quizzes, flashcards, daily challenges, streaks, and other retention tools designed to help knowledge stick. Instead of consuming information and forgetting it, you’ll reinforce key ideas, build lasting habits, and turn learning into meaningful personal and professional growth, all in just a few minutes a day.

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“How do I grow on Substack!?” is the question I get asked the most. Followed by, “Do I really need to write Notes to grow?!”.

That’s why today I give you more insights into where my personal subscribers come from, plus what other writers on here analysed in terms of growth and algorithm changes.

I figured most of my new subscribers came from my email list. The people who already know me, already open my stuff, already care.

But that’s not the truth. From my “My Note Scheduler” article I got 33 new free subscribers. Only 2 of them came from email.

Seventeen came from the in-app feed.

So I dug into where those views came from. On the source Substack labels “substack app,” that post got 578 views. 537 of them were from people who weren’t subscribed to me. Strangers.

My email list, with 4,519 opens, gave me 2 new subscribers. Of course it did. Those people already subscribe.

So the growth wasn’t coming from my subscribers. It was coming from people who had never heard of me, scrolling a feed, deciding in about a second whether I was worth a tap.

That changes what a good Note even is.

The feed got bigger, and your followers matter less

I wanted to know if this was just me, so I went looking at the bigger numbers.

More Notes, same hours in the day. So attention got spread thin. The same analysis found average likes per Note dropped from 22.5 in June 2025 to 18.8 a year later. That’s a 16% fall while the volume kept climbing.

The drop in likes matters less than where the attention moved. The giant viral outliers are shrinking. In June 2025 the average Note earned about 7.5 times the median. By 2026 that gap narrowed to 6.3 times. The runaway hits are pulling a smaller share, and the typical Note is earning a little more than it used to. Attention is spreading out.

That’s good news if nobody follows you yet. You don’t need an audience to get shown. The feed hands your Note to strangers either way. What you need is a Note that makes a stranger stop.

Stop trying to go viral. The math is brutal.

read through 1.3 million Notes from about 3,700 writers. They found roughly 135 that hit true viral status.

That’s about one in ten thousand.

If your plan is to write the one Note that blows up, you’re planning around a 0.01% event. I’ve watched writers burn months swinging for that, get nothing, and quit.

So forget the viral hit. Aim for the small, repeatable thing you can control: a Note a stranger stops on. You can write for that on purpose.

The format that works on people who don’t know you

When someone follows you, they cut you slack. They’ll read a Note that references your last post, or a half-formed thought, because they trust there’s a person they like behind it.

A stranger gives you none of that. So the format has to carry the whole thing on its own. These six pieces are what that takes.

1. Front-load the value in the first line. The feed shows a stranger your opening words with your name shrunk down beside them. Your name does no work here. So the first line has to.

2. Say one thing. Not five. A stranger scrolling can catch exactly one idea before their thumb moves.

3. Make it stand alone. Cut anything that needs context. “Like I said last week” means nothing to someone meeting you for the first time. Every Note should make complete sense to a person who has never read a word you’ve written.

4. Be specific enough to be useful by itself. A stranger won’t take vague wisdom on faith, because faith is what followers give you and this person isn’t one yet. Give a number. Give a step. Give a before and after.

5. Write the last line to be restacked. Restacks are what the feed rewards, and a restack is how you reach the next stranger, and the one after that. So the final line is the one that has to be quotable.

6. Sound like a person. The feed is filling up with AI-written Notes that are technically fine and completely forgettable. Right now, sounding unmistakably like yourself is the cheapest edge available.

What that looks like in practice

Take a Note I could write the forgettable way:

“Consistency is the real secret to growing on Substack. Keep showing up and good things happen. Trust the process.”

A follower might like that because they like me. A stranger scrolls right past. It’s true and it’s useless.

Now the same idea, built for someone who doesn’t know me:

“33 people subscribed to me from one post last month. Only 2 came from my email list. Seventeen came from strangers in the feed who’d never heard of me. Your next subscriber probably isn’t your follower. It’s someone who stopped on one good Note.”

Specific. Self-contained. One idea. A last line worth re-sharing. Nothing in it needs you to already know who I am.

That’s the whole shift. Write every Note like the person reading it has never met you. Because now, most of them haven’t.

Exclusive Access For My Premium Subscribers:

To help you grow faster, check out the resources waiting for you inside my Growth Library, available to paid members only.

That includes The Wander Wealth Playbook: my complete growth system with four systems, 10 fill-in templates, and workshop recordings, built from two years of growing this newsletter from 0 to 20,000 subscribers.

(If you aren’t a paid member yet, upgrade and unlock the full Playbook, the templates, and everything else in the Library, so you can skip the mistakes I made.)

Upgrade here

He writes about what happens after you move to a new country, the systems and pressures nobody warns you about. A year in, 1,100 subscribers, and with pretty good engagement on every post.

The full teardown is in the video above. But a few things came up that apply to almost ever…

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Not from subscriptions alone, that’s for sure.

But through

• 1:1 coaching requests (which increased by 50%!)

• Done for your Design Service

• My new Substack Playbook Offer

• My new AI skills library

• And sponsoring of my newsletter.

And it did not come out of nowhere.

While subscriptions have been slower for sure (due to it also being summer in the US and Europe), I eagerly worked on improving my product and service offerings in June and July.

And it paid off.

But this is not even what I wanted to talk about. 😅

Today I wanted to share my latest experiment on how many Substack Notes per day actually pay off.

Because I know it can be tiring trying to grow here on Substack and I wanted to bring my own experience into it.

So, let’s jump into it, shall we?

For three weeks I posted 4 Notes a day. 84 Notes in a row.

And while I am not crazily shocked by this, it still surprised me: a Note I wrote months ago did more than all eighty-four combined. 🤯

Every big account on here says the same thing. Post more. Volume wins. Show up in the feed ten times a day and the algorithm rewards you. I’d nodded along to that advice for two years. So I decided to run it properly, in public, with real numbers at the end.

For 21 days I doubled my usual output to 4 Notes a day.

What doubling my volume actually did

Almost nothing for my growth.

My audience grew at nearly the same pace as the three weeks before I started. If anything, a bit slower.

Three things I learned:

• The first is the number I mentioned at the top. One Note I wrote months ago, a plain one about how I actually grew, brought in 110 new subscribers over a three-week stretch. My best brand-new Note from the whole experiment brought in 22. Eighty-four fresh Notes, and not one of them came close to a single old one I’d already written and forgotten.

• The second: timing mattered far more than volume. I pulled the likes on my own Notes and split them by time of day. Posted in my European morning, they averaged 27 likes. Posted in the evening, 119. 53% of my readers live in the US, which is how I explain this difference.

• The third one is humbling. My most polished Notes were rarely the ones that performed well. The Notes that grew me were plain, specific, and mostly short.

So, what I’m taking from my 84 Notes experiment?

Volume is not the lever. More Notes did not mean more readers. If you’ve been feeling guilty for not posting ten times a day, you can let that go tonight.

Find your winners and feed them. That one old Note is worth more than a month of filler. Go into your stats, find the two or three Notes that actually brought subscribers, and write more like them. Reshare your best ones with one fresh line on top.

Post when your readers are awake. This one is almost too simple, and it roughly doubled my engagement on its own. Open your dashboard, find where your readers actually live, and show up on their clock instead of yours (remember that you can schedule Notes and posts!).

Where I landed

I’ve gone back to 2 and max 3 Notes a day. Fewer, better, posted in the evening when the people I’m writing for are actually here. I’m running a second experiment now, this time focused on quality instead of quantity, and I’ll bring you those numbers too.

If there’s one thing to take from all of this, it’s that you probably don’t have a volume problem. You have a “which two Notes are worth repeating” problem. That’s a much nicer problem to solve.

Quick tip before you go: open your stats, pick your single best-performing Note from the last few months, and repost it tonight with one new sentence on top.

Was this helpful? 🧡

If this saved you from posting into the emptiness, share it with a fellow Substack writer. We all grow together.

Share

P.S. - Have you joined our free community chat yet? That’s where I’m sharing the second experiment as it runs, numbers and all.

As you know, I use AI, and I even have another publication here (Level Up with AI) which is all about how to use AI systems and automations to make your life as a writer and creative easier.

So you’d think I’d be first in line for a tool that sorts the real writers from the slop. I’m not. Three things keep nagging at me.

I use AI to help me in my processes. The stories, the numbers, the experience all comes from me, my own head. But my AI squad supports me in putting it down in words. Apparently good enough to be a 100% human text. Please note that I do edit it myself again afterwards. If you want access to my AI helpers, get them here:

I want these AI helpers

The detector punishes people who learned English second

This is the one that bothers me most.

Researchers at Stanford ran a batch of essays written by non-native English speakers through seven different AI detectors. The detectors flagged more than half of them as AI-generated. The essays were written by actual humans. Their only crime was a smaller vocabulary and simpler sentence patterns, which is exactly what you get when you’re writing in a language you learned as an adult.

As English is my second language too, I know how you can just tell that somebody has a smaller vocabulary than a native speaker would have.

I don’t want Substack to become Medium

I wasn’t on Medium for long, but long enough to realise the changes they have made in terms of being really strict when it comes to AI writing. So much that all the big writers decided to leave because it also flagged human-written things as AI, and everybody just seemed to suffer. Now I feel like Medium is no longer actually a platform that writers want to be on.

I don’t love where the writing goes

To score your post, the detector has to read your post. Every piece you write gets passed through an outside company’s model before it reaches a single reader.

Maybe that’s nothing. But I spent years learning to write in my own voice, and handing all of it to a system built to grade it sits wrong with me. I’d rather you be the judge of whether my writing is worth your time. You’re better at it than any model.

You can love it or hate it, but the point is AI is here to stay, and so is probably the AI screening.

And to some degree, I can understand why they are doing it. They want to prevent that Substack turns into another LinkedIn, which is the other extreme, where simply one AI bot is talking to another AI bot.

For my newsletter, it will always be like this: the ideas come from me, the brainstorming comes from me. It’s my data, my numbers, my life experience, and stories that I share. That’s how I started this newsletter, and this is how I will continue running it.

Will I continue using my own created AI skills? Hell yeah.

And if you want to, you can too.

24 new subscribers from that one post. My average across the last 21 is nine.

My first thought was that it must have gone semi-viral, reached way more people than usual. So I checked. 4,934 views, a little below my normal. Fewer people saw it than a regular post, and it still brought in almost three times the subscribers.

I know why, because I did it on purpose.

Ten minutes of something I’d refused to do for two years because it always felt tacky to me. The writing had nothing to do with it.

Right after the post went live, I messaged a handful of writer friends and asked them to restack it. A plain restack without an extra Note. And I told them I’d return the favor.

Then I looked at where those 24 subscribers came from.

The email did nothing. 3,910 views, zero new subscribers. Which makes sense as everyone reading the email subscribed already.

The app feed sent 240 views. Tiny next to the email numbers. The 240 views brought 16 of my 24 new subscribers. Which means that people who have not subscribed to me yet converted at 7%.

Of course, this all makes sense.

My email list can’t grow my email list. The people who haven’t found me yet are in the feed, not my email list.

And a restack from another writer is the shortest way in. Think about it: a writer with an established audience shares your post, they trust them and check it out. Easy as that.

This is how you can start, if you’d like to give it a go as well.

• Ask people who already know you.

• Keep it small: a plain restack is one tap and people say yes to one tap.

• Restack them back fast, before they have to remind you.

• Don’t do it for every post. Save it for the posts that matter.

So if you want to start, start there.

Restack three posts you loved this week. Then next time you publish something you can ask to return the favor.

Upgrade here

Everything we fixed in the first Substack Glow-Up, so you can steal the whole check list.

Almost 100 people showed up to watch me give live feedback on a Substack with 88 subscribers.

My screen share froze twice 😅. At one point I vanished completely and Robyn, my guest, had to host her own feedback session while I restarted my connection. My laptop batte…

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The Notes advice everyone gives you is: study the big accounts. Copy what works. Write like Dan Koe (325,000 subs).

I tested that advice with actual data. It’s wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that wastes months for smaller accounts.

Here’s what I found, what I do instead, and the exact system that made Notes the number one source of my subscribers.

The data that changed how I write Notes

Nicolas Cole has 124,000 subscribers. Most of his Notes get between 22 and 160 likes.

I found that while analyzing 500+ Notes from the biggest creators on Substack. Dan Koe writes the same kind of declarative, philosophical Notes and gets 1,000 to 2,600 likes per Note. Two giant accounts, the same style, completely different results. Even at the top, this style sometimes lands and sometimes doesn’t.

So the style can’t be the engine. For Koe, the engine is trust. 325,000 people decided to follow him before today’s Note ever reached them. When he posts three philosophical lines, his readers already believe the person behind them. The writing barely matters. The Note collects trust he earned over years.

And trust is the one thing you can’t copy. Take his exact sentences, post them on your account, and they arrive with no history attached. The stranger scrolling past doesn’t recognize you. Your Note has to make them stop, feel something, and hand over their email address, all on its own, starting from zero.

Different job. Different playbook.

So be careful whose Notes advice you take. The big accounts play with trust they already have. What you need is the playbook of someone who recently earned it from zero, on this platform, one stranger at a time.

My own experience growing on Substack from 0

What I can tell you is that 2 years ago, I started here from 0. My audience and growth comes 50% from Substack Notes.

I don’t use any other social media platform, ads or anything else.

It’s 100% Substack.

So when I tell you I tested each and every strategy out there, you can believe me.

If you don’t believe me, believe my data. I figured out what works on Notes and what doesn’t if you are a small account. Specifically, if you are below 1,000 subscribers.

Now, my Notes go viral, on average they each get 100 likes and comments. They always compound over time.

What actually works under 1,000 subscribers

If I were starting my Notes from zero today, this is the playbook. It’s built from my own numbers, not from watching famous people.

1. One: write from your real position. The most magnetic thing a small account can post is the honest middle. “My first 100 subscribers took 8 weeks” outperforms borrowed wisdom every time, because only you can say it. Big accounts can’t write small-account Notes. That’s your edge, not your handicap.

2. Two: specific numbers in the first line. My highest performers almost all start with one. Numbers stop the scroll because they’re checkable and concrete in a feed full of vague inspiration.

3. Three: vary your lengths deliberately. Some ultra-short truths, some 80-word insights, some 150-word stories. My analysis of both big accounts and my own shows different lengths catch different readers, and the algorithm seems to reward accounts that don’t feel like a template on repeat.

4. Four: end so the reader feels seen. Not “crushing it” energy. “I know exactly where you are, I was there” energy.

5. Five: reply to every single comment. At small scale this is rocket fuel: every reply doubles the Note’s conversation, and conversations are what the feed promotes. I still reply to everything, and I often get a small wave of subscribers just from working through my comments.

6. Six: post daily, but batch it. This is the one that changes lives, so it gets its own section.

The system: 21 Notes every Sunday in 30 minutes

Daily Notes presence is non-negotiable for growth. But daily creativity on demand is impossible for a normal human with a life.

The answer (for me) is batching. Every Sunday I write and schedule my Notes for the whole week in one sitting, about 30 minutes. Then I spend my daily Notes time on the part that can’t be batched: replying and having actual conversations.

My Sunday routine:

• First, I look at what worked. Every two-three weeks I pull my Notes data and check which ones brought engagement AND which ones brought subscribers.

• Then I write the week in one sitting: a mix of milestone numbers, one system breakdown, one honest struggle, one post share with a real reason, and a few short truths. Different lengths, one voice: mine.

• Then I schedule them and close the tab. My week of presence is done before Monday coffee.

That’s the whole machine. One data check, one writing session, daily replies. When I got serious about this system, my growth went from a trickle to hundreds of subscribers per month, and it has never depended on any single Note going viral.

Viral is lovely when it happens. Consistent is what pays.

Your next 14 days

Don’t overhaul everything. Do this:

• Days 1-2: Write one Note with a specific number from your own journey in the first line. Post it. Reply to every comment.

• Days 3-7: One Note per day, alternating: a short truth, a lesson with a number, a share of your best post with one honest sentence about why it matters.

• Day 7: First mini-review. Which Note brought profile visits or subscribers? (Check your subscriber sources in your dashboard, not your likes.)

• Days 8-14: Batch a full week in one sitting based on what you learned. Schedule it. Spend the freed-up daily time in the comments.

Two weeks. That’s enough to feel the machine start turning. From there it compounds, and I mean that literally: my Notes from months ago still bring subscribers every week.

Trust me, the feed has room for you. It just doesn’t have room for you pretending to be Dan Koe.

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FAQ: Substack Notes for Small Accounts

• Q: Do Substack Notes work for small accounts?

  A: Yes. Notes are my number one subscriber source, but small accounts need a different playbook than big creators: specific numbers, honest-middle stories, and daily presence via weekly batching, not copied viral styles.

• Q: How many Substack Notes should you post per day?

  A: One per day is enough, if you show up every day. But I usually do 2-5 per day and I batch them: 21 Notes written and scheduled every Sunday in about 30 minutes, so my daily Notes time goes into replying to comments instead.

• Q: Why do my Notes get likes but no subscribers?

  A: It takes time to build up trust on Notes. What works: a specific number in the first line, a system with a result, a post share with an honest reason, and an ending that makes one reader feel seen.

• Q: Should you copy viral Notes from big creators?

  A: No. I analyzed 500+ Notes from the biggest accounts, and a creator with 124,000 subscribers still gets 22 likes on Notes in the exact style everyone copies. A small account’s Note has a different job: make a stranger stop, feel something, and subscribe.

• Q: How long does it take to grow from Substack Notes?

  A: Give it two weeks with a mini-review at day 7, checking subscriber sources instead of likes. Notes compound: my Notes from months ago still bring subscribers every week.

Grow your Substack with me

People started sharing their own travel stories.

• Gabby talked about her Budapest site.

• Melanie just got back from a week in India to celebrate her 50th.

• Jenn’s been writing about all her different travel stories on Substack.

Reading through all of it, I kept thinking two things.

1. First, this is exactly why I write. These small beautiful moments from some trip that stick with you and make you want to tell someone about them.

2. And second, less warm and fuzzy: every one of these writers has travel posts sitting in their archives, getting traffic, still bringing in readers who are clearly thinking about going somewhere. And almost none of them are earning from it.

I wasn’t either.

Parmesan, Nonna pasta, and the posts I almost forgot about

That spring we camper vanned through Tuscany and all the way down to Sicily using Agricamper, this network where you stay at local farms, vineyards, olive groves, and cheese production sites for free. They give you water, electricity, everything. The only thing they ask is that you buy a local product.

That’s how I ended up tasting the freshest Parmesan I’ve ever had. Straight from the producer. Olive oil so good I didn’t know that quality existed. And pasta made by hand by an actual Nonna.

I didn’t plan to write about any of it. But when you’re standing in a vineyard at sunset eating cheese that someone made that morning, you grab your pen and you write.

Those posts are still pulling people in months later. After I set up Travelpayouts and went back through my old content to add affiliate links, I started earning when readers clicked and booked.

Then I looked at the numbers. My most-read Italy post gets around 3,000 visitors a month. About 60 of them click a link. Two percent.

The other 98% read about the Nonna, scrolled past the farm, maybe saved the Agricamper link for later. Interested enough to read the whole thing. And I earned nothing from them.

I kept thinking about that. Not just for my posts. For all the travel content that came up in those comments.

What I did about the other 98%

A few weeks after setting up Drive (Drive scans your content and traffic automatically, finds the spots where you mention hotels or destinations without any monetization, and connects them for you) on my site, I found a feature I hadn’t turned on yet: Targeted Offers.

My page looks the same. The reader stays on my site the entire time. The offer is just in another tab. If they’re interested, they see it when they’re done. If not, they close it.

I’ll be honest, my first reaction was that this would make my site feel weird. I don’t do popups. I don’t do exit-intent overlays. So before I left it on, I went through my own site with it running. Pages looked the same. I had a friend browse without telling her anything changed. She didn’t notice until I pointed out the tab.

You can turn it off with one click. I tested it for a week before I decided to keep it on.

I looked up other creators who’d been using it longer.

• GoWorldTravel had Targeted Offers running for about six months. Their revenue went up 8x. That number stuck with me because it meant most of what they’d been missing before came from readers who never clicked anything. The content was already doing the work. They were just finally earning from their full audience, not the small slice that happens to click.

• Hong, another creator, earned over $5,000 from Targeted Offers alone by end of 2025, about a third of everything she made through Drive.

Tell me where you’ve been

After reading all your comments last week, I want to hear more.

Where did you last travel? Where are you headed for the rest of 2026? I’m collecting ideas because we’re loosely planning something for fall and my entire plan so far is “somewhere warm, not too far, good food.” Very specific, I know.

And if you have travel posts sitting in your archive, it might be worth looking at what those readers are actually doing when they visit. I spent a long time ignoring that part.

• If you’re already on Travelpayouts, you can turn on Drive and activate Targeted Offers right now.

  Find the set-up guide here

• If you haven’t tried it yet, signing up is free. Sign up through my link and you get up to $100 extra when you start earning.

  Sign up here

• You can also earn up to $600 for every creator who joins through your referral link. If you know someone who writes about their travels, send it their way.

And now, tell me about your trips. I’ll be in the comments reading.

Leave a comment

I know because I checked the timestamp on my screenshot afterward. 14 minutes of sitting there, water glass filled, notes open, telling myself I’d click it “in a sec.” My heart was doing that fast shallow thing. I had 4 bullet points written on a sticky note next to my laptop and I kept rearranging them like the order mattered.

When I finally hit the button, 3 people showed up.

Three.

One of them was someone I recognized from the Chat. The other two I’d never seen before. I talked for maybe 12 minutes, stumbled over my words twice, forgot one of my bullet points entirely, and ended it feeling like I’d just done a bad podcast episode to an empty room.

And then something weird happened.

Within an hour, one of those 3 people subscribed to paid. She told me why afterward: “I’ve been reading your posts for weeks but hearing you talk made it feel real. Like you’re an actual person.”

That one sentence rewired how I think about Lives.

Why we all avoid them

I get it. Trust me, I get it.

Lives feel like the most exposed thing you can do on Substack. Writing is safe. You can edit, rewrite, delete a paragraph, sleep on it, come back tomorrow. Going live is the opposite of all of that. You press the button and whatever comes out of your mouth is just... out there.

And the attendance numbers feel brutal at first. When you’re used to seeing 2,000 people open your email and then 6 show up to your Live, your brain does this cruel math where it calculates a percentage and makes you feel terrible about it.

I talked to a writer friend who has 8,000 subscribers and she told me she’d never done a single Live because, and I quote, “I don’t want to go live and have nobody show up.” She’d rather not try than see a low number.

I understood that completely. And I think she’s wrong.

The math that actually matters

Those 6 people who show up to your Live are your most engaged readers. Nobody else even comes close.

Clicking into a Live means being on Substack at that exact moment, seeing your notification, deciding to stop whatever else they’re doing, and sitting there listening to you talk. That’s a level of commitment that makes opening an email look like nothing.

In the 12 months since I started doing Lives regularly, here’s what I’ve tracked:

• Readers who attend at least one Live convert to paid at roughly 3x the rate of readers who only engage with posts

• My Chat activity jumped noticeably after I started doing Lives. People who watched me talk felt more comfortable typing in Chat afterward, like they already knew me

• I’ve gotten multiple collaboration DMs directly from people who first found me through a Live

The quality of connection is completely different from anything else on the platform.

What actually happens during a Live

I want to be honest about what these look like in practice, because I think a lot of writers imagine they need to run a polished webinar with slides and a Q&A structure and a strong close.

My Lives are messy.

I usually have 3 to 4 topics I want to cover. I talk about them in whatever order feels natural. Sometimes I go on tangents. Sometimes someone asks a question in the comments and I spend 5 minutes on it and completely lose my original thread.

And that’s fine. That’s kind of the whole reason they work. Your readers already have your polished writing in their inbox. The Live gives them the unpolished version. The version where you say “um” and pause to think and occasionally say something you didn’t plan.

That contrast between your written voice and your spoken voice creates trust faster than anything I’ve found on this platform.

How I structure mine (loosely)

I do a Live roughly every two weeks. Here’s my loose format:

• Before: I post a Note the day before saying “Going live tomorrow at [time], talking about [topic].” That’s it. No fancy graphics, no countdown. Just a heads up.

• The first 2 minutes: I say hi, wait for a few people to trickle in, and give a quick “here’s what we’re talking about today” overview. I keep this casual. “Hey, thanks for being here. Today I want to talk about [thing] because [specific reason it’s on my mind].”

• The middle 15 to 20 minutes: I talk through my topic. I share what I’ve tried, what worked, what didn’t. I check comments every few minutes and respond to them out loud.

• The last 5 minutes: I ask if anyone has questions. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Both are fine.

Total time commitment: maybe 45 minutes including prep. That’s less time than I spend writing most of my posts.

Start smaller than you think

If the idea of going live makes your stomach drop, start with this:

• Pick one topic you’ve already written about. Something you know well enough to talk about without notes. Set your Live for 10 minutes. Tell yourself you’re going to talk for 10 minutes and then stop, no matter what.

• Don’t promote it heavily the first time. Just post a casual Note an hour before. “Going live in an hour to chat about [topic], come hang out if you want.”

• The low-pressure framing matters. You’re not hosting an event. You’re just talking.

• And if only 2 people show up? Those 2 people are about to become your most loyal readers. Treat them like gold, because that’s what they are.

What I wish someone had told me

I wasted months avoiding Lives because I was measuring them wrong.

I kept comparing Live attendance to my email open numbers and feeling deflated. That comparison makes zero sense. An email open takes half a second. Showing up to a Live takes real time and real attention.

When I stopped counting heads and started paying attention to what happened after my Lives, everything clicked. Chat got busier. People started replying to my posts who never had before. Paid upgrades ticked up. I got collaboration requests from writers I admired.

The Live itself is 20 minutes. The impact stretches out for weeks.

So yeah. I know you hate the idea of going live. I hated it too. I still get nervous every time I press that button. But I press it anyway, because 14 minutes of staring at a button turned into one of the best growth decisions I’ve made on this platform.

Your turn. 10 minutes, one topic, low pressure. You can do this.

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Leave a comment

By the way, have you joined my free community chat? We connect every Wednesday in a free Notes Boost to grow together. Please come and join us.

We get excited when a new subscriber pops up.

We get sad, when some decide to leave.

And oh my do we get crazy if a paid subscriber appears out of nowhere.

Let’s just be honest about it and accept that, after all, we are here to connect with writers, to earn with our words and to put our stuff out there to be read.

Success here can look different depending on your goals, but it usually starts with this one thing:

Growing your audience. Getting people to notice you. Get these free subscriber numbers up.

Successful Substackers Do These 3 Things

If you start from 0 without any audience built up over years on other platforms, and you literally just decided to be brave, to try out this new platform called Substack and put yourself out there, it can be tough as f***.

Trust me, that’s my journey too, so I actually know what I’m talking about here.

These early lonely months. The endless Substack notes without any interaction.

It sucks. And it breaks 90% of people’s spirit to even continue showing up here.

So today I wanted to share my view on what it takes to be successful on here, aka to grow your audience.

#1 They don’t complain.

We’ve all been there: the 0 interaction on your Notes and posts in the first 0-6 months. It’s just frustrating. But the people I see succeed on here (and most of them have been with me for more than 2 years!), they don’t complain.

• “I don’t see any engagement”

• “Nothing works”

• “Should I even continue?”

They know it’s tough. But they pull through. And they lead by curiosity and ask “Claudia, what can I do to get there?” and we sit down, create a roadmap (long-term!) and they power through these tough months. Until finally, growth compounds and they finally see their audience grow.

#2 They give time for strategies to work

Don’t change your strategy week after week if something does not work out. Things take time. Give it time.

Contradictory to this but I promise it makes sense: Pivot if there’s no light at the end of the tunnel (after quite some time!). Usually after 3-6 months of showing up daily and you don’t see your goals being reached, it’s time to look at the data and change things up.

If you are stuck with that, I help hundreds of people with this weekly on Substack. Just reach out and I will take a look at your journey.

#3 They connect with other writers.

I’ve been struggling with this myself in the beginning. I thought I can do this walk alone easily. But it turns out, the most successful people here are crazy good networkers. They reach out to others, they invite them to do Lives together, to collab on posts, to recommend each other.

And don’t just focus on 1 person, spread your wings, connect to new people weekly, if not daily.

Recommendation growth is besides Notes and Lives the other main driver of growth.

Get out there and connect, that’s what we are here for and people are genuinely excited to chat with you.

Pro tip: Reach out to people who have a similar audience to yours and who have around the same audience size, they are in the same boat as you. They also want to grow. Connect with them first.

I’m writing all of this because I see too many people give up after a few months and it genuinely makes me sad.

Please keep going. The growth compounds, I promise. It just takes longer than anyone tells you it will.

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By the way, have you joined my free community chat? We connect every Wednesday in a free Notes Boost to grow together. Please come and join us.

Quick FAQ:

Q: How long does it take to grow on Substack?

A: Most successful Substack writers report it takes 1-2 years of consistent effort before growth compounds significantly. The key is not giving up during the first 6 months when engagement is low.

Q: What do successful Substack writers do differently?

A: Three patterns stand out: they stay resilient instead of complaining, they give strategies time to work before pivoting, and they actively connect and collaborate with other writers.

Q: How do I grow my Substack audience from zero?

A: Start by posting Notes daily, publishing one article per week, and connecting with writers who have a similar audience size. Recommendation growth, Notes, and Lives are the main drivers of discovery on Substack.

And somehow, between the bad connection and the smell of the gas stove, I managed to publish.

That trip wasn’t actually a typical “content trip.” I wasn’t researching travel guides or reviewing hotels. I was a writer who happened to be living out of a van for a few months, driving through Italy, France and England writing about whatever came up. Sometimes that was a Substack growth strategy. Sometimes it was a restaurant in Palermo that had the best nonna-made pasta I’ve ever tasted and cost three euros. 😱

Travel ended up in my writing because it was part of my life. I didn’t plan it that way, and I don’t think most of you did either.

You’re writers who also happen to go places. You mention the hotel that surprised you on a weekend trip, or recommend a restaurant because a reader asked. Maybe you opened a newsletter with a scene from a cafe in Barcelona because that’s where you happened to be when the idea hit.

Those posts keep getting traffic for months, sometimes years. People find them through search, they get shared, someone mentions a trip to Portugal and a friend sends them your post about Lisbon. And every one of those views earns you exactly nothing.

The Part That Took Me Two Years to See

I was so focused on the “real” monetization paths. Paid subscriptions, coaching, digital products. Those were the serious revenue streams. Travel posts were just... content. Nice for engagement, maybe. Never something I thought of as an income source.

What was actually happening: readers were landing on my posts about Sicily, finding the hotel I recommended, and then opening a new tab to go book it on their own. Some of them even messaged me asking for the exact name and address. I’d just reply. In a DM. For free. With no link to anything.

I was recommending things to people who wanted to buy them, and I wasn’t earning a cent from it.

What Changed

A few months ago I found Travelpayouts. And I genuinely wish I’d known about it back in that camper van.

Travelpayouts gives you access to affiliate programs from brands your readers already use: Booking.com, GetYourGuide, Trip.com, and more. You go back to the posts you’ve already written, add tracking links to the hotels and tours and flights you already mentioned, and when someone books through your link, you earn a commission.

Your content and workflow stay exactly the same. You’re just connecting the recommendations you already made to the brands your readers are booking with anyway.

For me, that meant going back to posts about Italy, Portugal, Spain. Posts where I’d mentioned places by name and readers had already asked for details. The traffic and the intent were already there. All I’d been missing was a link.

I also set up Travelpayouts Drive on my website. One piece of code, took about 5 minutes. It scans your content and traffic automatically, finds the spots where you mention hotels or destinations without any monetization, and connects them for you. I had posts I’d completely forgotten about that Drive caught. Stuff I would have never found going through my archive manually. Here’s the setup guide if you want to see how quick it is.

Why This Matters For You

A lot of writers dismiss affiliate income as “not for them.” I did too, for two years.

You don’t need a travel niche. You need content that occasionally mentions travel. Maybe it’s your remote work setup post that names the Airbnb you stayed at, or a personal essay about a trip that changed how you think. Even a “what I packed” post or a productivity newsletter that opens with a scene from some cafe counts.

If you have a website and you’ve ever mentioned a place, a hotel, a flight, a tour, a booking platform, you have content that qualifies. And if that content gets any traffic at all, there’s revenue sitting in it.

I spent two years building every other income stream and ignoring this one. I could have set it up in an afternoon.

One More Thing About That Camper Van

We drove 11,000 kilometers across Europe on that trip. I wrote more during those three months than I had in the entire year before. Something about the movement and the new places every few days just made me want to write constantly.

I wrote about all of it. The places, the food, the weird little moments. Those posts still bring people to my site, and for years I let all of that traffic pass through without capturing a single euro.

If you have content like that, and want to earn from it, just sign up here, it’s easy:

Sign up here

And once you’re set up, you can earn up to $600 for every fellow creator who joins through your referral link. Worth mentioning to anyone in your circle who writes about their travels, even if “travel writer” isn’t in their bio.

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This is normal. This happens every single summer. And the writers who know it’s coming use it instead of panicking through it.

I know because I panicked through it last year. July through October 2025, my subscriber count flatlined. Gained 30, lost 25. Gained 15, lost 20. Net growth was basically zero. I tried new headline formats, different posting times, more Notes, fewer Notes. Most of it didn’t work.

But that slow period is exactly when I built everything that powered my November growth spike. 7,000 to 13,000 subscribers in three months. The biggest jump I’ve ever had, set up during the months when nothing seemed to be happening.

This year I’m not waiting for the panic. Here are the 5 things I’m setting up right now, in June, while the numbers still look normal.

1. Batch your content before July hits

I wrote about batching 21 Notes in one sitting back in April. That system saved me hours every week. But I wasn’t batching articles last summer, and it showed.

By the third week of July, my motivation was gone. The stats were flat. Nobody was engaging the way they did in spring. And I was staring at a blank doc trying to write something brilliant while my brain was telling me nobody cared.

This year I’m pre-writing 3 full articles in June. Not publishing them now. Just drafting them, editing them, and saving them. When July hits and the motivation disappears, I’ll have three weeks of content ready to go.

Sit down this week. Pick your next three topics. Draft them while you still have momentum. Future you will be grateful.

2. Switch from growth mode to retention mode

This is the one that changed everything for me last year, even though I didn’t plan it.

When my growth flatlined in July 2025, I stopped trying to attract new subscribers and started paying attention to the ones I already had.

• I ran polls in my community chat.

• I asked what they needed.

• I wrote posts based on their answers instead of what I thought would perform well.

At the time, it felt like giving up on growth. It was actually building the foundation for compound growth.

So starting this week, I’m shifting my focus. More polls. More chat engagement. More “what do you need from me?” and less “how do I get the algorithm to notice me?”

If you have a community chat, go ask a question in it today. If you don’t have one yet, start one. Even with 50 subscribers, those conversations will shape your best content for the rest of the year.

And while you’re having those conversations, pay attention to who keeps showing up. The people who reply to your emails, comment on your Notes, engage in your chat. Those are your warm leads. Start a simple list. Name, what they’re working on, what they’ve told you they need. DM a few of them. Not to sell anything. Just to ask what they’re stuck on, what would actually help them right now.

By the time September rolls around and you’re ready to launch something, you won’t be pitching cold. You’ll be offering something to people who already told you what they wanted.

3. Fix your leaks while traffic is low

I wrote about this a few weeks ago. Your Substack probably has small things set up wrong that are quietly costing you subscribers. Welcome email, pinned post, free-to-paid bridge.

Summer is the best time to fix them.

If you fix your welcome email in September when traffic picks back up, every new subscriber from that point forward gets the better experience. But all the subscribers you gained during summer got the broken version. If you fix it now, even the smaller trickle of summer subscribers goes through a better funnel. And when fall traffic returns, your system is already optimized.

Here’s my summer audit checklist:

• Rewrite your welcome email in your own voice. Link your best post. Invite them to reply.

• Check your pinned post. Look at the first post a stranger would see. If it doesn’t represent your best work and your core topic, pin something better.

• Look at your last 10 posts. If none of them give free readers a taste of paid content, plan one “window post” for this month. The kind where the first 60% is free and genuinely valuable, and the paywall kicks in right when they’re most engaged.

Impact: every subscriber who finds you for the rest of the year gets a better first impression.

4. Build your September offer now

I waited almost half a year to monetize Wander Wealth. When I finally launched my first paid offer, my existing readers told me they’d been waiting for it.

Waiting for me. While I was agonizing about whether I was ready.

If you’ve been thinking about launching something, whether that’s a paid tier, a coaching offer, a course, or a resource guide, summer is your window to get clear on it before you build it.

Most creators skip straight to building. They make the course, design the landing page, set up the payment link. Then they launch and hear crickets, because they never got specific about who it’s for and what problem it actually solves.

Summer gives you time to do this the right way. Talk to your readers first (that warm lead list from move 2). Find out what they’re actually struggling with. Then define your offer around that, not around what you think sounds good.

Write down three things:

• who this is for (be specific, not “anyone who wants to grow”),

• what outcome they get, and

• what it costs.

Sit with it for a week. Pressure-test it against the conversations you’re having in your chat and DMs. Adjust.

September and October are when audiences come back hungry. Open rates climb. Engagement picks up. People are in “fresh start” mode after summer. That’s when you want to launch, not build.

I’m using June and July to finalize two things I’ve been sitting on. I’m not announcing them. I’m not teasing them. I’m defining exactly who they’re for and making sure the offer matches what people have actually told me they need. The building part is easy once you know those answers.

5. Plant seeds in other people’s audiences

Cross-promotion was my single biggest regret from year one. I spent months reading growth tactics alone when the writers who were actually growing were talking to each other. Collaborating on posts. Recommending each other’s newsletters in their welcome emails.

Summer is when everyone’s calendar opens up. Other creators are looking for collaborations too. Guest posts, cross-promotions, recommendation swaps, joint live sessions. These conversations are easier to start in July than they are in October when everyone’s busy launching.

I’m reaching out to five writers this month.

Do the same & find three writers around your size whose content you actually enjoy reading. Send them a message this week. Comment on their Notes. Share their posts. Build the relationship now. By September, you’ll have collaborators instead of cold contacts.

The short version

Summer will feel slow. Your stats will dip. Your open rates will sag. That’s not a sign that your newsletter is dying. That’s just June.

1. Batch your content.

2. Focus on your existing readers.

3. Fix your funnel.

4. Build your fall offer.

5. Make friends with other writers.

I watched that happen to my own numbers last fall. 7,000 to 13,000 in three months, after four months of nothing.

This summer, I’m trusting the process instead of fighting it. I’d love for you to try the same.

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The video is above if you want the full thing. Here’s the short version.

What I walked through:

• My writing system is called Drift. It knows my voice from past articles, but I taught it everything else.

  • Including a personal anecdote.

  • Follow 18 anti-AI writing rules.

  • Run a humanizer that strips the AI language back out.

• Important: Drift asks me questions before it writes. I don’t hand it a topic and walk away. It interviews me first, I answer in my own words, and the piece comes out sounding like me thinking out loud.

• I stopped typing. I talk to my laptop with Whisperflow now. It works.

The “what not to say” moment:

• Someone asked how I train it on what to avoid. I had a fresh one from this morning.

• It gave me the line, “make people go wait, can you do that!” I read it and knew immediately. That’s not me.

• So I told it. And I told it to update my voice profile so it never tries that again. Lots of back and forth. That’s the whole point.

My Notes workflow (this got the most questions):

• I connect my browser with Claude and it analyzes my profile plus five high-performing profiles from the last 14 days. Likes, restacks, comments.

• I feed the summary into Drift. It writes notes in my voice.

• I batch-upload through my scheduler as a CSV. Three a day, done for the week.

• That gives me time back to actually read and reply to people instead of staring at a blank note box.

What the chat brought up:

• Courses trained on your own documents

• Claude interviewing you to build your content pillars

• Editing your writing without touching your voice

• Using Perplexity for research, then Claude for the prose

• Image tools, after four months of fighting with the text rendering

Thank you to everyone who showed up and made it fun.

One more thing. My June AI business builder program is one-on-one and there’s one spot left, open until Sunday. It’s for people who want to package their skills and sell them at real prices, automate their workflows, and start landing business clients. Drift is included, plus the new sales-email skill I launched last week.

If you want in, let me know asap.

Save the last spot

“Not knowing if this is worth my time” won across the board.

I get it. I’ve been there. Multiple times, actually.

So I went back and pulled my subscriber chart from the very beginning. May 2024 to today. And I annotated it with what I was feeling at each stage, because the numbers alone don’t tell you the full story.

Here it is.

The red zone: 0 to 500

I started Wander Wealth in May 2024. For the first three months, my chart was basically a flat line. I’d publish a post, check my stats, and see maybe 4 new subscribers. Sometimes 2. Sometimes none.

I remember opening the Substack app during a lunch break and just staring at the number. 127 subscribers. I’d been at this for six weeks.

My brain kept running the same calculation: if I’m gaining 5 subscribers a week, it’ll take me 4 years to reach 1,000. Four years. For something that might never make a dollar.

This is where most people quit. And honestly, I almost did too. I drafted a “final post” at one point. Never published it, but it existed.

What kept me going was something small. One reader replied to my newsletter and told me she’d restructured her entire Substack homepage based on my advice. That one reply was enough to write one more post.

The orange zone: the slow build

Around month 4, something shifted. Growth wasn’t fast, but it was consistent. I went from gaining 5 subscribers a week to 20, then 40, then sometimes 80.

This phase still feels slow while you’re in it. You’re doing the math every week. You’re watching bigger creators hit milestones you haven’t reached yet. You publish a post you’re really proud of and it gets 3 likes.

But when I zoom out and look at that orange section of the chart now, I went from basically nothing to 7,000 subscribers in about 10 months. I couldn’t see it at the time because I was measuring day by day instead of month by month.

The biggest lesson from this phase: stop checking your stats daily. I switched to checking once a week on Monday mornings. Suddenly I could see the trend instead of the noise, and I stopped writing posts based on yesterday’s numbers.

The yellow zone: the plateau that almost broke me

Then I hit 7,000 and the line went flat.

July, August, September, October 2025. Four months of my subscriber count barely moving. I’d gain 30, lose 25. Gain 15, lose 20. The net was close to zero.

This was harder than the beginning, honestly. At the beginning, I had nothing to lose. At 7,000 subscribers, I had proof that growth was possible, and now it had stopped. I started second-guessing my topics, my posting schedule, whether my writing had gotten stale. Maybe I’d just gotten lucky and the luck ran out.

I tried a bunch of things during those months. New headline formats. Different posting times. More Notes. Fewer Notes. Most of it didn’t work.

What actually worked was something I didn’t expect. I stopped trying to grow and started focusing entirely on the readers I already had. I ran polls in my community chat. I asked what they needed. I wrote posts based on their answers instead of what I thought would perform well.

That shift is what set up the next phase.

The green zone: compound growth

November 2025. The line started moving again. And then it didn’t stop.

7,000 to 13,000 in about three months. I gained more subscribers in that stretch than I had in the entire first year.

What actually changed things was a Note that went viral. I’d written something more personal than usual, and it took off in a way my tactical posts never did. So I leaned into that. More stories. More of the messy, honest stuff. I stopped trying to write what I thought the algorithm wanted and started writing what felt true.

It was this Note by the way…

The purple zone: and then it happens again

Right now, May 2026, I’m in another plateau. Around 13,000 subscribers. The line is flat again.

And you know what? It’s less scary this time. I’ve seen this movie before. The flat part is where the foundation gets built for the next spike. I’ve lived through the cycle twice now, so I trust it more than I trust my anxiety about the numbers.

Every level has a plateau. You don’t outgrow them. You just get better at recognizing them for what they are.

So is Substack worth your time?

I can’t answer that for you. But I can tell you what I wish someone had told me at 127 subscribers.

The chart never looks like progress when you’re living it. It only looks like progress when you zoom out.

If you’re in the red zone right now, write for 10 people, not 10,000. Find one reader who got value from something you wrote. That one person is your proof of concept. That’s enough to justify one more post.

Once you’re past that and stuck in a plateau, stop trying to fix your growth. Talk to the people who are already there. Ask them what they need. Build for them. The growth comes back when the foundation is solid.

Growth on Substack is anything but linear. It’s flat, then a spike you didn’t see coming, then flat again.

Look at my chart one more time. Every flat stretch was followed by a spike. I just couldn’t see it when I was in the flat part.

I’m making this easier than I had it 🚀

Everything I just described, every mistake, every lesson, every shortcut I eventually figured out, that’s what the Wander Wealth community is built around. It’s the resource I wish existed when I was staring at that blank dashboard in May 2024.

🎉 Right now, until end of this week I’m running a 30% discount on annual memberships. That brings it down to about $97 for the year (normally $139).

You get direct access to me, the full archive of strategies and templates, and a group of writers who are actively building alongside you.

Get your discount here

No pressure. Genuinely. But if you’re in the stage where you’re trying to figure this out on your own and you’re tired of guessing, this is the shortcut I didn’t have.

Was this helpful? 🧡

If you found this helpful, please share it with a fellow Substack writer who’s trying to grow their audience. Or leave a comment. We all grow together.

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I had no audience. No newsletter experience. No connections in the creator space. I’d just moved countries, was figuring out a new chapter of my life, and thought, okay, maybe writing online could become something.

Two years ago.

Today I have 13,302 subscribers on Wander Wealth. I launched Level Up With AI (almost 3,000 subscribers). I launched a third publication (1,000 subscribers). That’s 17,000 people across three Substacks, all built from that blank page.

And honestly, I made so many mistakes getting here that I almost want to apologize to past-me for how much harder I made it.

So if I could go back to May 2024 and whisper in my own ear, here’s what I’d say.

#1 I’d stop trying to figure it out alone

I spent my first three months reading everything about Substack growth. I had 47 bookmarked resources, a folder full of saved tutorials, and zero real connections with other writers.

All that research didn’t move the needle. Connecting with people did. I sat in my apartment consuming content about growth tactics while the writers who were actually growing were busy talking to each other. Cross-promoting. Collaborating on posts. Recommending each other’s newsletters in their welcome emails.

I didn’t do any of that until around August 2024. When I finally started reaching out to other creators, my growth rate nearly doubled within six weeks. I’m not exaggerating. I went from gaining maybe 80 subscribers a week to consistently hitting 150+.

The unlock wasn’t some tactic I read about. It was a DM I sent to another writer around my size saying “hey, want to do a cross-promotion?”

So if you’re in your first few months and you’re spending more time reading about growth than actually connecting with other writers, flip that ratio. Today. Send three DMs to writers you genuinely enjoy reading. Not a pitch. Just a real message about something they wrote that resonated. That’s how it starts.

#2 I’d start the community chat on day one

I launched my Substack chat around October 2024. Six months in. And the moment I did, I kicked myself for waiting so long.

Before the chat, my relationship with readers was basically one-directional. I’d publish, they’d read (maybe), and that was it. Some people would reply to emails, which was great, but there was no ongoing conversation.

The chat changed that completely. Readers started talking to each other, sharing wins, telling me what they were struggling with. Their questions basically became my content calendar for the next six months.

But the biggest impact was on retention. People who joined the chat stayed subscribed. They opened more emails. They became the core group that would show up whenever I launched something new.

I know it feels weird to start a chat when you have 12 subscribers. Do it anyway. Those first 12 people will become your most loyal readers precisely because they were there at the beginning.

#3 I’d start selling more directly

This one still stings a little.

I waited until early 2025 to seriously monetize. That’s almost a year of writing consistently, building trust, growing an audience, and leaving money on the table because I was scared.

I kept thinking I needed to “earn the right” to charge for something. More subscribers first. More credibility. More proof that people actually valued what I was sharing.

Fear talking, not strategy.

When I finally launched my first offer, something surprising happened. My free subscribers didn’t run away. My unsubscribe rate barely moved. And the people who upgraded told me they’d been waiting for me to offer something.

Waiting for me. While I was over here agonizing about whether I was “ready.”

Selling earlier wouldn’t have just meant more revenue (though yes, it would have). It would have meant deeper relationships with my readers sooner. Paid subscribers engage at a completely different level. They show up more. They give better feedback. They push your writing to get sharper because you know they’re investing real money in what you create.

If you have 100 subscribers and something valuable to offer, offer it. You don’t need to hit some magic number first. The right readers will pay for transformation, and the wrong readers were never going to anyway.

#4 I’d pivot faster

This is the big one. The one that probably cost me the most in terms of raw growth.

I have an MSc in AI. I’ve worked in AI for years. And when I started Wander Wealth, I wrote about Substack growth and monetization because that’s what the audience wanted and it’s what I was actively learning by doing.

But I kept feeling the pull toward AI content. I knew more about AI than I did about newsletters, honestly. I had real expertise there, not just “I tried this and it worked” experience.

I hesitated for months. Wander Wealth was growing. The curve was going up. I didn’t want to mess with something that was working.

So I waited. And waited. And when I finally made the pivot to focus more on AI, you can actually see it in the growth chart. My WW growth curve flattened (beginning of this year).

It was still the right call.

Because that pivot led me to launch , which hit almost 3,000 subscribers. The total across them is now 17,000. If I’d clung to Wander Wealth’s growth curve and ignored the pull, I’d probably have maybe 15,000 on one newsletter instead of 17,000 across two, with a much more diversified audience and multiple revenue streams.

The lesson I keep coming back to is this: follow the pull. If you feel drawn to a different angle, a different topic, a different format, don’t wait for your current thing to plateau before you explore it. The pull is data. Pay attention to it.

Two years from zero

I sat down to write this thinking I’d list maybe three things I’d do differently. I ended up with four, and honestly I could keep going.

But those four capture the expensive ones. The months of isolation when I should have been connecting. The retention I left on the table by not launching chat earlier. The revenue I delayed because of imposter syndrome. The growth I slowed by not following my instincts sooner.

Two years. 17,000 subscribers. Started with zero and a blinking cursor.

I’m proud of that. I’m also painfully aware of how much faster it could have gone if I’d known what I know now.

Which brings me to something I’ve been thinking about.

I’m making this easier than I had it 🚀

Everything I just described, every mistake, every lesson, every shortcut I eventually figured out, that’s what the Wander Wealth community is built around. It’s the resource I wish existed when I was staring at that blank dashboard in May 2024.

🎉 Right now, through the end of May, I’m running a 30% discount on annual memberships. That brings it down to about $97 for the year (normally $139).

You get direct access to me, the full archive of strategies and templates, and a group of writers who are actively building alongside you.

Get your discount here

No pressure. Genuinely. But if you’re in the stage where you’re trying to figure this out on your own and you’re tired of guessing, this is the shortcut I didn’t have.

Was this helpful? 🧡

If you found this helpful, please share it with a fellow Substack writer who’s trying to grow their audience. Or leave a comment. We all grow together.

Leave a comment

P.S. - New to Substack? Check out my resources to get started.