A few learnings and observations from my first year on Substack

📝 3 tips for growth plus some things that surprised me

This week we are focused on sharing some of our learnings about Substack with the goal of helping others. More regular programming will return next week.

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If you have recently started a Substack publication or have been thinking about creating a Substack, here are a few lessons I’ve learned in my first year on the platform that you may find helpful on your Substack journey.

Context

I started publishing on Substack in January 2023 and didn’t tell anyone. Here was my first post:

Starting anew

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If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can become one here:

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Learnings

1. Growth

Growth may seem slow and steady, happen in fits and starts or not at all — but if you zoom out, it’s generally up and to the right over longer periods of time.

Here is a graph that shows how the number of subscriptions has grown over time.

Here is an annotated version of the same graph, which I will explain below:

First, let me highlight two things:

• Hibernation: I created my Substack account in January 2022 but did not actually start posting until a year later — in January 2023. This explains why the number of subscribers remained zero across nearly half the graph.

• First post: My first post on January 2, 2023 went to exactly one person (me).

So what have I learned since then?

Here are three lessons related to growing an audience:

1. Go to Office Hours

Each week, Substack hosts office hours for writers on Thursdays. They can be very helpful and insightful — and also a way to discover other writers and be discovered. Some of my earliest subscribers came about as a result of interactions at these office hours. You can see this initial bump in the graph above.

2. Recommendations are powerful

46% of my subscriptions have come about as the result of recommendations by other writers on the Substack platform. Almost half of my readers have come from someone else saying, in essence, hey, I like this Substack and think you might, too. That’s incredible.

Two have been especially powerful (and I encourage you to consider subscribing if of interest and you don’t already):

• Roberto Seif
  , who writes
  The Mid-Career Pivoter

• Norman Winarsky
  , who writes
  Your Venture Coach

When Norman Winarsky began recommending

Bryce's Blog

last summer, I saw a surge in new subscriptions (denoted by Recommended on the graph above). Thank you,

Norman Winarsky

.

3. Ask for help

If you have a goal in mind, share it with your readers and they just might help you realize it. In December, I wrote that, “while this has never been about numbers, secretly it would make me smile if we crossed 100 by the one-year anniversary in January.”

Guess what? By the very next week, we had surpassed 100.

Here is the graph once more, recast to show the trend since I started posting in January 2023. The growth line (shown in yellow) is a bit steeper — and generally up and to the right:

2. Observations — and surprises

As I reflect on my first year on Substack, here are a few other observations and learnings:

• Welcome: Far fewer people actually respond to the welcome email than I had anticipated. (I encourage new subscribers to reply and introduce themself).

• Links: While I believe in the power of hypermedia and have made linking to sources and embedding songs, playlists or videos an integral part of the publication in most issues, people haven’t accessed links or embedded media as much I had hoped.

• Chat: I haven’t been successful in cultivating a consistently active community in the subscriber chat yet. Adoption has been relatively low (fewer than 10% of subscribers participate) but it has generated some thoughtful comments and exchanges. Part of this could be because the majority of my readers read via email rather than the app.

• Comments: Readers will sometimes comment on a post (which I appreciate) and I strive to respond to every comment, but what I haven’t seen yet is readers commenting on each other’s posts. I hope as the community matures this will begin to happen more.

• People will surprise you: a short story I wrote recently has become my most popular post to date (with some suggesting it could be a rom-com), above others like a three-part series on productivity I wrote last year that I put a lot more time and effort into.

Finally, two general comments:

• People are nice

• There is a lot of talent on this platform

If you would like to join in and start a Substack of your own, you can do so here:

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Thanks for reading. I hope you found this post helpful or interesting. Let me know below.

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The sun ☀️is actually out today so it’s time to enjoy the day. I hope you have a wonderful weekend wherever you are.

Be well,

-Bryce