1 Year on Substack: Learnings after 4,000 subscribers
One year ago I published my first newsletter. These are my learnings after publishing a newsletter every week and gaining 4,000+ subscribers.
One year ago I published the first number of Getting Better, titled “Beginnings are hard, but they are key to progress”. This was the TL;DR:
I still remember the thrill I had when I finally hit “publish”, after weeks of intense procrastination. My daughter had just been born and I had no excuses - I had to publish the first newsletter.
It was something I told myself at the beginning of 2024:
“You are going to publish the first newsletter when Olivia is born”.
And so I did. That Sunday afternoon in April, Getting Better landed in the inbox of exactly 28 people (mostly family and friends).
Since then, I’ve published a newsletter every Sunday, 52 weeks in a row.
The title of my first issue was right: beginnings are hard.
But looking back, I’ve learned that consistency is even harder.
In today’s newsletter I’m reflecting on 12 months of writing on Substack, and sharing some key learnings from growing Getting Better from 0 to over 4,000 subscribers.
🔄 Consistency really matters
If you want to grow, you have to be consistent.
There is no way around it.
And it’s not only about the frequency of your posts (e.g. weekly, bi-weekly, monthly - this matters relatively), it is what you write about.
You have to be consistent in what you write.
After all, building a newsletter is like building a brand, or growing a community.
Sometimes your newsletter is more of a brand. Sometimes it is a community.
If you are very good at doing it, it can be both.
Your readers need a sense of familiarity. They should know what to expect when they open your emails. Surprises can be exciting, but too many, and people lose interest.
For example, here’s how I defined Getting Better in my first post:
What is “Getting Better”?
📖 I want it to be the go-to newsletter to grow your career and get better at life.
📝 I will write about frameworks, concepts, stories, ideas and academic research to get better at productivity, team management, negotiation, leadership, communication and strategy.
🎙️ I will also interview senior professionals to validate (or challenge) the theories I will write about, or just to get them share their stories.
I did not focus on a specific niche, but this description made it clear what Getting Better would deliver. And I stuck to it.
Frameworks to plan your year, academic research to increase productivity at work and to become more persuasive, how to write the perfect CV, an audio podcast, and many more.
Everything I published aligned with that original vision. No surprises. No sudden pivots. Just content that reinforced why people subscribed in the first place.
🟧 Substack is just another social media
Substack might seem like the Garden of Eden for writers and readers, full with kind, caring and gentle people.
Some believe it’s different from other social media platforms.
Truth is different though.
Substack is just another social media.
Sure, it’s different in some ways. Maybe even better.
But at its core, it belongs to the same big family.
Like any social platform, Substack craves our time and attention.
That’s the currency we pay to exist (and grow) here.
If you decide to spend your time on Substack, how you spend it is up to you.
For example, for months I posted 5–7 notes1 every single day. Every. Single. Day. And I grew a lot because of it.
I don’t use any other social media, so it was easy for me to focus on Substack.
I also share and comment on other people’s publications (only the ones I really enjoyed2), I share my content frequently on Notes to make it discovered, and I recommend other people’s newsletters.
Your content won’t be discovered by chance.
Even if you think you write better than Hemingway.
You have to work hard to make your work discovered.
You have to work hard for its distribution.
I have always loved this quote, which is particularly true on Substack:
“Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.”
Your content is important, but even more important is how you distribute it so that other people can find it.
And like any social media platform, Substack is filled with all kinds of people. As my friend perfectly wrote in her retrospective:
“You will find the gurus who promise you all the dreams with easy-to-follow steps. You'll find the grinders and the shouters. You'll find the celebrities, the 'overnight successes.’ Nothing wrong with that. But, so you know.”
I’ve seen and met the gurus selling the dream. Most of them are people writing on Substack about Substack with the business goal to make other people grow on Substack. I’ve seen the grinders (I am definitely one) and I’ve seen the shouters.
I’ve seen celebrities coming to Substack bringing their massive followings, and I’ve seen the ‘overnight successes’, for example witnessing one person gaining 20,000+ subscribers from a single note3 (yes, twenty thousands).
It’s easy to get distracted by all this.
But in the end, none of it matters.
Just keep doing the work.
⏳ Substack will change soon
I don’t know when, and probably I have only a partial sense of how, but Substack will change in the future.
Last month Substack celebrated 5 million paid subscriptions. Assuming an average of $6-7/month for each subscription, that’s $360-420 million of value generated on Substack, and about $40 million of revenues for Substack.
Good enough?
I don’t think so.
Currently Substack is about empowering writers, but how long can this go before investors want their returns? Each platform, at some point, will make a choice: either prioritize users or prioritize growth and profit4.
There’s a correlated concept by journalist Cory Doctorow called “enshittification”, which perfectly describes what happens to many platforms:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
We’re already seeing TikTok creators bring their audiences to Substack. And if the platform fills up with TikTok creators and their massive followings, advertisers will start paying more attention. And ads will become a natural necessity for Substack.
I hope Substack won’t fall into an enshittification phase. But, hey, one’s gotta to be prepared for the worst.
What to do then?
Surf the wave while it lasts, know it might change soon, don’t get distracted, focus on growth, and remember that with changes new opportunities might come.
👍 Recommendations feature work. Use it!
The Substack recommendation feature is an amazing growth engine.
It helped me get discovered by many new readers who I would have not reached otherwise.
I have generated 1,100+ subscribers to the 10 newsletters I have recommended, while receiving more than 1,900 from the 52 newsletters that recommended Getting Better.
The steps that worked for me:
Find newsletters with a similar audience to yours
Ask nicely if they are willing to exchange recommendations
Do not recommend more than 7-8 newsletters at the same time
If you haven’t leveraged the recommendations feature, it’s time to do it.
mentioned it as one of the most powerful growth engine for his newsletter in both his 500,000 and 1,000,000 subscribers posts.
You probably won’t reach 1,000,000 subscribers that easily, but you could surely grow well if you leverage it wisely.
🎁 You’ll never know what writing will bring to you
Since starting Getting Better, I’ve had hiring managers tell me they loved what I was writing.
A few companies even reached out to sponsor the newsletter, because they read a piece and wanted to reach my audience.
Some former colleagues and friends told me they were “truly inspired” by what I was building.
I have VPs and Executives reading and commenting my newsletter.
This is powerful stuff.
You never know what opportunities it will unlock. Or who’s paying attention.
And that’s one of the best reasons for why you should do it.
Ignore the fear. Ignore what others might think.
Just start.
Of course, not everyone will get it.
Some hiring managers probably saw Getting Better as a “distraction”.
That’s fine. I wouldn’t want to work with people who think like that anyway.
A few former colleagues even laughed at the idea of a newsletter.
Until it started to grow. Then suddenly, they were in my inbox asking for advice.
People like that spend more time commenting on others than building anything themselves.
I don’t write for them.
I write for the curious, the learners, the builders, the creators.
These are the people I want to surround myself with.
🔢 Don’t get addicted to the numbers
There were days when I refreshed my subscriber count over 100 times, chasing that dopamine hit of watching the numbers go up.
Some mornings, I’d wake up to tens of new subscribers overnight, and it felt incredible.
But here’s the problem: I got too obsessed with the outcome instead of focusing on the work itself.
I was thinking about growth instead of writing.
That’s a dangerous trap. Because when the numbers don’t move as fast as you want, it’s easy to lose motivation. Just remember that we control the efforts, not the results.
So, focus on the efforts, and write, write, write.
🏃 Don’t procrastinate. Start now.
I opened my Substack on January 28th, 2024.
It was a Saturday. I had time. I decided to make the jump.
I quickly designed a logo on Canva (the same one you see today) and set up my newsletter. Then, I waited.
I told myself I wasn’t ready.
That I needed the right moment, the perfect idea, the spark of creativity.
All lies.
I wasn’t waiting for inspiration. I was just procrastinating.
You probably know the feeling.
And if you do, this might sound cliché, but it’s true:
There’s never a perfect moment. The only way to start is to start.
Every time I look at the graph, I ask myself: Why didn’t I start sooner?
I was ready. I just needed to hit publish.
Glad I finally did.
Hope you do too.
➡️ If you enjoyed reading this, have a look at Getting Better most popular posts.
Personal note: I've recently started a new exciting job, and to maintain the quality of Getting Better, I've decided to switch from weekly emails to biweekly (i.e. once every two weeks).
This means you'll now receive a new edition every other Sunday, giving me more time to research, write, and ensure each issue is as valuable as possible.
See you on Sundays 🗓️
Thanks,
Giacomo
For those not familiar with Substack, notes are like tweets, that can be only seen by people with a Substack account.
Some of my favorites have been The Operator’s Handbook, , , and .
And feeling a bit envious about it.
I really enjoyed this great read on the topic by .
Hi Giacomo!
I happened to come across this post of yours & let me tell you - I’m so darn glad that I did 😀
I find this to be super inspiring due to couple of reasons perhaps;
- I’m fairly new to Substack
- I write on similar topics as that of you.
Nevertheless, I’m subscribing! Looking forward to seeing your work 🙏🏼
Feeling inspired.