My 23rd Month Publishing on Substack: Here's What I Learned

Working through 2026

Happy Tuesday! We are now one third of the way through 2026. Normally, I publish this update at the start of the month for free subscribers, and then I publish a similar update at the end of the month for Paid subscribers that gets more into the business side of building the Paid community at Backstage Pass. Starting this month, those two posts will be combined into one, and that’s why you’ll see a paywall on this article if you are a free subscriber.

First, let’s get into the numbers on the free side from April:

This is how my free subscribers have increased over the last year. The first dip you see in the middle came in November when I pruned about 300 inactive subscribers from my list. I did a second, smaller prune on April 13th, removing 178 inactives.

Before anyone decides to do the same, let me clarify: Both prunes were to remove an imported list that I added in May of 2024 before I started publishing. The list I imported was a ‘cold’ list, meaning I wasn’t actively publishing to the list at the time I imported it here. The list was 868, and quite honestly less than 200 of the names are active. These two prunes removed about 500 of them, and likely another 100-150 have unsubscribed since 2024.

So if you are thinking about importing a list, I would suggest you only do so if it is a ‘warm’ list, in other words, a list that you are actively publishing to. For example, if you have an active newsletter you are running with MailChimp or Constant Contact, and want to move it here, then importing it can make sense.

Taking into account the prune, I added a net of 70 new free subscribers. That’s actually my second best month ever for free subscriber growth (last month was first).

To give you a sense of the impact the prune, here’s how the posts performed immediately before and after the prune on the 13th:

As you can see, no real negative impact. Open Rate increased from 28-29% to 33-34%, which was to be expected.

Here’s how daily views have tracked the last 90 days:

As you can see from the graph, daily views are going sideways, if not down slightly. I’ve talked to other creators and most all tell a similar tale. Spurts of growth, then periods of slow or no growth. With no rhyme or reason.

Views were very strong the first half of the month, then seemed to backslide. I saw the same thing in March.

One good sign was my search traffic continues to increase:

This is the number of clicks I received from search engines, and this number is up about 25% over last month when it was 326. In the grand scheme of things, these are still really small numbers, say 4 or so clicks a day. It will be interesting to see what happens if it continues to grow at current rates.

In January, I wrote about how we can expect to see a growth spurt hit Substack sometime in the next 6-12 months. This echoed what the Substack team was forecasting about seeing 10X growth coming to the number of Paid subscribers.

So far, I haven’t seen anything that tells me we are seeing that growth arrive yet. I have always expected that we would start to see signs of growth in either the Summer or Fall. So within the next 2-4 months.

I’ll keep an eye out, and I know you will too! That’s the free side, now let’s jump over to the revenue/Paid side:

But first…if you’re reading this post, you likely are tracking most of the same numbers I am. You probably have your growth goals, and you know the places you want to take your Substack.

I know because I’ve been in your shoes. I spent the first 14 months here with almost no growth. Then, I turned the corner, and now I share what I have learned to grow my substack, with you. So you can take these same tactics and apply them to your own efforts.

When you upgrade to Paid, you get two very important things: Direct access to mentoring and advice. You can DM me anytime you want and I’ll help you work through whatever problem or idea you have for your Substack.

Second, you get access to the Paid community. I can tell you firsthand, there’s nothing better than having a group of friends who are tackling the same growth challenges you are, that you can lean on for support and guidance.

You get all the mentorship and support you need to not only grow, but to thrive. Click the Subscribe button and let’s start your growth path. Today.

And spoiler alert, a big surprise coming for Paid subscribers on Thursday. If you upgrade now, you will be able to take advantage then. Or you can wait till Thursday and upgrade then! It’s gonna be good.