Lessons from a Year of Substack - How to Grow Your Audience
After one year in Substack, I finally decided to take it more seriously and managed to unlock real growth.
27% of subscribers came over the past 3 months. Most of them after I started posting more on both newsletters & notes.
Growth requires a system, and giving it your all.
In this newsletter, I will be taking you through the most important lessons and how I unlocked growth that compounds.
P.S.: Premium subscribers get access to the whole newsletter with the Claude Skills that helped me grow.
#1 Don’t expect natural growth - BYOA: Bring Your Own Audience
The myth is simple. Write something good, and Substack finds your readers. It doesn’t work that way.
The platform rewards you for bringing your existing audience in from everywhere else.
Discovery inside Substack (Notes, recommendations, the network) only kicks in once you have shown up with an audience of your own.
I did it with LinkedIn.
Substack did not allow me to move my previous email list, and few subscribers were active enough to subscribe.
You need to “feed” Substack from:
Your social audience
Email lists
Website
Personal network / DMs
P.S.: If you don’t already, feel free to follow me on LinkedIn as well.
#2 Recommendations
1/3 of my subscribers came from recommendations.
Shoutout to George Chasiotis who writes Growth-Waves and Antonis Dimitriou of Search & Signups.
Roughly a third from recommendations by other newsletters
Roughly a third from my social & website
The rest from everything else combined
Being recommended by another, bigger newsletter in your space is the single fastest way to grow your own.
You earn it by doing the relationship work most people skip:
Co-write. Bring a guest into a piece, or write into someone else’s audience.
Cross-post. Write for their newsletter, post theirs on yours.
Ask directly. Tell the people you already know to recommend you. Friends, partners, former colleagues, guests from the podcast.
#3 Weekly Cadence
Everything above compounds only if you show up consistently.
Growth picked up when I moved from biweekly to weekly + more notes (next advice).
You can see the traffic picking up exactly 2 weeks after starting to write more.
#4 Notes bring the Organic Growth (The Flywheel)
Treat Substack as any other social channel.
I post at least three Notes a day.
Volume is the important.
More Notes means more surface area, more entry points, more chances for one to go big.
I built a content flywheel of sorts to make that work.
I use AI to break a finished post into shareable lessons at quantity.
Every single note is reviewed & edited, a few AI tells stay, but what the heck, it’s volume > quality for now. (got my day job as well)
Paid subscribers get the Claude Skills that helped to break the posts into notes. Subscribe to access them!
#5 Like, Comment, Share = Engagement
Notes are a social feed.
Treat them like one.
Liking, commenting, and showing up in other people’s Notes is also important. I don’t do it enough, but it’s part of the game.
If you want to grow faster, spend some time engaging with people on the platform.
Note down the top 30-50 creators in your niche
Follow them
Engage often
Engage with their most active followers
#6 More Notes on Autopilot
Most Substack schedulers use a Chrome Plugin, meaning your laptop / pc has to stay open overnight to post.
I built my own scheduler on Lovable.
A dashboard with analytics
Notes scheduling capabilities
On even if my PC sleeps (using cron jobs)
I can’t share the scheduler as it’s tough to implement on your own, but if you are interested, send me a message or comment below and I will show you how.
Below, I am sharing the Claude skills that made everything possible.
That’s for paid subscribers only!
