Lessons From My First Year on Substack - WeGrowMedia

Today is my 1-year anniversary on Substack! I want to take you behind the scenes and share the specific ways this platform has helped me reach new readers, and more deeply engage with them. Along the way I’ll do something I’ve never done before and share all the numbers that I can. That feels a little scary for me, but I want to demystify this whole process so you can glean lessons that help you reach your readers.

I’ve sent out a weekly email newsletter for 19 years and was super nervous to move to Substack. Why? I simply fear change. The results, however, have been astounding. Here are some highlights:

In a single year, my newsletter subscribers doubled.
I get far more engagement — meaningful interactions with readers — here on Substack than I ever did on my blog, previously in my newsletter, or on any social network. That’s after sharing tens of thousands of posts on social media.
I’ve become a “Substack Bestseller” because more than 100 of you have chosen to sign up for my paid posts. Just a few years back, many people would have found it absurd that a writer get paid for their newsletter!

Why Substack?

I help writers develop their platforms as authors, find their ideal readers, and launch their books. This is work I have done full-time since 2010, which is why I was helping writers with Substack long before I moved my own newsletter here. That gave me a fascinating lens to experience Substack from the vantage point of multiple different writers, and see what worked best for them.

By the time I decided to move my own email list here in early 2023, I was more than convinced that Substack was a sound decision. But since I’m a nervous person, I took it slowly and really prepared. To me, these are some of the massive things that Substack offers:

The focus on you as the writer “owning” your connection to readers. Now this, of course, is common to any email newsletter service. But it’s worth noting in an age when so many writers are building their platforms on social networks where they can easily lose all of their connection to readers with a slight algorithm change that’s out of their control. With your email list on Substack, you can download it, back it up, and even move it elsewhere if and when you need. I encourage you to regularly back up your list — Substack makes it super easy, it’s literally the click of a single button.
Substack solved the discoverability problem that no other similar service even came close to. There are lots of services that can help manage email subscribers and send out newsletters. But you were nearly always on your own to find new readers. With writer after writer I have worked with, I saw that their newsletter list on Substack grew way quicker than it did before they moved over.
Writers are getting paid! This is a huge one. Substack has solved a problem that writers have been flummoxed by for decades. I remember going to so many conferences in the early 2000s as newspapers and magazines tried to figure out paid subscriptions, and rarely got it right. Today, individual writers are able to easily have paid subscriptions for reader support. It’s incredible.
Recommendations and comments are back in vogue. Substack’s recommendation feature is really effective at making it easy for one writer to help another. I’ll talk a lot more below about the amazing way that Substack has brought back thriving comments sections again in a way that I haven’t really seen since the early days of blogging.
Substack celebrates the written word, not short viral videos. Of course, they aren’t the first to do that, but they have been successful where others haven’t in moving the needle in terms of conversation and engagement around writing. In many other places, writers have to get good at short and vibrant videos in order to get attention. But here on Substack, it’s all about celebrating writing and reading.
Normalizing sharing actual stats, not the perception of success. Having been so active with email newsletters for nearly two decades, I rarely saw people share actual numbers around their subscriber count. But on Substack, that has been encouraged and normalized. I think this kind of transparency is wonderful, and something I’m trying to emulate in this post.

Okay, let’s talk about the actual benefits I’ve seen in using Substack for the past year…

Doubling My Subscribers in a Year

Let’s look at some data! I am surprised to say this, but my subscriber list doubled in a single year on Substack. I dug deep into 19 years of newsletter metrics to try to show you why this is so astounding.

Here are the takeaways from all the data I’ll present below:

It took me 13 years to go from zero to 3,500 subscribers
It took me another 5 years to add an additional 1,000 subscribers, bringing the total to 4,500.
It took a single year on Substack to double that to 9,326 subscribers.

I tried to get historic data from each newsletter service I used since launching my newsletter in 2005. I used four services in that time: one was a proprietary system within a company I worked for at the time, followed by Aweber, Convertkit, and then Substack. I don’t have all of the data I would like to be able to show in a simple chart, but I have enough to illustrate why Substack has been gamechanging.

For the first five years, my email newsletter existed mostly within a company I worked for. I’ve written about the harrowing story of that newsletter’s birth here, and how I thought it was going to get me fired. I sent the first issue out to 9 people, and soon after, the CEO sent out an email to the entire company (I think around 4,000 employees) encouraging them to sign up. I quickly ended up with several hundred subscribers. Over the years, that grew because we had an international parent company, with loads of other divisions that the newsletter was open to. So from 2005 to mid-2010, I went from zero to 1,068 subscribers.

The newsletter then moved outside of the company (because the company sold off its brands and folded) and I started WeGrowMedia, working directly with writers. The service I moved to was Aweber, and from 2010 to mid 2018, my newsletter list grew from 1,068 to 3,500 subscribers. While I have the numbers for these first two eras, I don’t have simple charts to illustrate the growth.

In 2018 I moved my list to Convertkit, enamored by their ability to more easily create automations and segments. From there, I have actual charts to show the growth. Here is one showing growth from mid 2018 to April 2023 — growing from around 3,500 subscribers to 4,571:

Convertkit

In the image above, the jumps you see are from when I would run a free workshop, do a giveaway, or have a collaboration with another writer.

Then, of course, I moved to Substack a year ago. This is what subscriber growth has looked like:

Substack

(Note: I modified the image to remove months and months of it showing zero subscribers before I moved my newsletter over.)

When looking at the two images above, one thing to keep in mind is the timeline: the first image is across five years, and the second is across a single year.

Something I want to really point out in the Substack chart is those first couple months where my list was barely growing at all. Substack is not some magic bullet that will immediately grow your reach. It took time for me to find my groove. Then I had a few lucky breaks where something was shared and went viral. Overall, you can see that the angle of the growth has generally kept increasing the more I have doubled-down on Substack.

Why talk about subscriber growth when I so frequently discuss the importance of deep engagement over numbers alone? Because growth is difficult, and it takes time. And it is one factor in how we get to create meaningful moments with readers.

Every Single Week, I Lose Subscribers Too

Something you don’t see in these charts is that every single week, people unsubscribefrom my list, as well. In fact, every time I click “publish” on a new post, some people unsubscribe.

This is a normal part of the process! But one that I want to highlight because “growth” is really an ebb and flow. I have talked to many writers who have a huge following and get upset when they notice a few people unsubscribe. They feel like they’re failing, losing their knack, or letting people down.

So in sharing these charts with lines going upwards and to the right, I never want to gloss over that every week I lose subscribers, as well. Yet each week, for 19 years, I have showed up again and clicked “publish.”

Reader Engagement on Substack Has Been Exponential

I wish I had an obvious stat to showcase the growth in reader engagement I have seen on Substack. But then, I suppose stats wouldn’t tell the whole story. Look at the number of comments on some of my recent posts (circled in red):

I mean, I have never had so much engagement anywhere. Years ago, before social media took off, blog comments would be a wonderful community, but never this many. Then everything moved to social media, where conversations were often spread out across the network instead of being centralized with a single piece of writing.

Of course, each of these numbers represents a person who took the time to read and reply. Earlier this week I shared a 30+ minute video for my paid subscribers showing how I reply to each comment and take time to learn about my readers.

Similar things are happening in Substack Notes — their social network — as well:

Substack Notes

Every day, I am connecting directly with readers. For those who also publish here on Substack, I can read what they are writing! This has felt so different from my experience on social media, which seems increasingly more focused on an algorithm that distract us instead of moving us closer together.

So often success on Substack is illustrated by charts like the ones above, but really, this is success: connecting with real people who resonate with what you write (these are some people who commented on my last post):

readers

I am Reading More and Discovering More Writers!

Of course, I am not just on Substack as a writer, but also a reader. I am discovering so many other writers and reading way more essays that deeply resonate with me than ever before. Sure, I have heard people discuss “Substack burnout” and the overwhelm that one can feel when they subscribe to too many publications, too quickly. But honestly, I welcome that problem as opposed to the opposite. To live in a world where there is too much good writing and too many interesting writers is definitely the right place for me.

Yet, There is So Much I am Not Doing Well

I don’t say this to be negative, but it’s worth mentioning. My goal with this post is not to show off, but share the reality behind the scenes of publishing a weekly newsletter for so long. Here is a list of things I don’t really do that well at the moment:

I make very little effort to promote my paid subscription.
I keep forgetting to move my podcast to Substack.
I don’t really use Chat as much as I should.
I don’t use those Substack buttons nearly as much as others.
I have gotten very quiet on social media.

I say this to remind you that no matter how much “success” one has, it’s easy to not see it and focus only on the ideas that are not pursued, or ideas that one doesn’t feel they are doing well enough.

I want to thank the Substack team themselves who have been incredibly accessible and actively out here supporting writers: Hamish McKenzie, Farrah @Substack, Linda @ Substack, Bailey Richardson and the many other people on their team. I so appreciate all of your efforts, it has changed my life for the better.

If you want help launching or growing your own Substack, I have a series of workshops that showcase my best advice, loads of tips, and clear examples and case studies. You can see those here.

Please let me know in the comments: where are you sharing that feels great for you, and what is it you like about it? That could be Substack, but it could be somewhere else too.

Thank you for being here with me.
-Dan