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

Consistency leads to growth

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I'm sitting here Saturday morning, Feb 1st writing this post. I normally start my monthly Substack recap by diving straight into the numbers, but I wanted to pause and address a couple of points first that might be helpful to you.

I started writing on Substack in June of 2024. In May, I started investigating the environment here to see if it would be worth my time to write here. I was intrigued by the option of paid subscriptions and wanted to grow this Substack into a viable revenue stream. One of the first posts I saw, probably from

Lucy Werner

, said that yes you can make money on Substack, but you have to commit to it. It’s a slow burn, you have to stick with it. Well that was encouraging, and just what I wanted to hear.

The more I investigated, the more I saw successful Substack writers saying something similar. In fact, many of them expressly said you have to keep going till the growth comes. This is a testament to how supportive the community is here on Substack. I’ve never been on a social media platform where users so openly taught and encouraged others how to grow. Normally, they are happy to sell you a course to show you how.

So it became obvious that growing on Substack was going to be a slow burn. I decided to start writing, and early on I was learning a ton (still do!). I wanted to share what I was learning, and that’s where the idea for this series, a monthly recap of my learnings and progress, came from.

However, I quickly realized that committing to this series also meant that I wouldn’t have much to show at first, in terms of my own progress. I still don’t, I’m just now up to one new sub a day.

So why do this? Because I believe that it’s also a slow burn to build trust. I thought it would be worth it to show my publishing journey from the start here, to the present. Sure, the start wouldn’t be that impressive, but it would help you track the growth over time, and see if these engagement concepts I keep talking about work or not. I could have laid low for a year, not talk about my journey, then when growth kicks in suddenly talk about it. But that wouldn’t tell the whole story, and I think telling the whole story is where the trust is earned. And I think having your trust is honestly more valuable than having your money.

Because Trust leads to Advocacy, and as I am always talking about here on Backstage Pass, your happy customers are better salespeople than your brand is.

Also, I think we don’t talk enough about the role that consistency plays in building really any type of following online. This is where I think a lot of the ‘Substack experts’ do their audiences, and honestly themselves, a disservice. They try to talk about how they had amazing growth in a very short time.

That might make them look good, but the goal should be to teach your audience how to grow. And to do that, you really need to focus on the value of consistency. The value of creating a schedule for writing here, and sticking to it.

I really think more focus needs to be on staying consistent and the role it plays in the growth of your Substack. I get that saying you went from 0 to 1,000 subs in a month sounds sexy (let’s not mention the 990 emails that you imported on Day One), but the goal shouldn’t be making you sound sexy, it should be giving your audience the tools they need to grow as well. Anyway, I’m off my soapbox now!

Let’s switch gears and jump into my numbers for last month:

All green across the board is always good to see.

Here’s my daily traffic for the last 90 days:

I began to notice a bit of an increase in traffic right around Jan 1st. Right after Christmas, I started spending more time everyday on Substack. At first, I got caught up on my writing. On December 23rd, I didn’t have a single post scheduled. By January 11th, I had the next three weeks’ worth of posts written.

In the second half of the month, I started spending more time on engagement. Moving forward, I am going to block off time every morning for engagement, and every afternoon for writing. I tried this new schedule last week, and it really worked well for me.

Here’s a breakdown of the sources for my subscribers:

I imported 868 emails on May 31st, 2024 from Mailchimp. The size of that list has fallen to 751 currently. The combined subs I have picked on Substack is 241. Which means over the last 8 months I have averaged exactly 1 new sub a day.

Over the last 30 days I’ve had 30 news subscribers and 107 new followers. So I am averaging 1 new sub a day and about 3.6 new followers a day.

I’ve Set a New Goal For Myself for February

For February, my goal is to hit 60 subs for the month. This would give me 2 subs a day for February. Long-term, my goal is to average 4 subs a day by April 1st. That would move me into the 2nd phase of growth, and would mean I would likely enter the 3rd stage of growth around September 1st.

Just to recap, here are the 3 states of growth on Substack:

First stage: Very slow growth aka ‘the slog'. Writers typically stayed in this first stage 6-12 months. Growth would be around 0-3 subs a day, on average.

Second stage: Growth accelerates a bit. Writers typically stayed in the second stage about half as long as the first stage. Growth would be around 4-10 subs a day, on average.

Third stage: Growth takes off, aka 'the hockey stick'. This is typically where writers start selling a decent amount of paid subs. In fact, for most writers it seemed like free subscribers really didn't convert to paid in any great numbers until hitting this phase, then they took off.

For most successful writers, significant monetization didn’t start until they hit the third stage, and the third stage typically took 9-18 months to reach for successful writers.

If you want to help me reach my subscriber goal for February, please click this subscribe button!

Final Thoughts…

Over the last 6 weeks or so, I’ve started to notice signs of growth. Nothing huge, most of it marginal, but it’s enough of a pulse to show me that the consistency is starting to pay off. I want to again thank everyone in this supportive community who stressed endlessly the need to keep writing until the growth happens. Without constant encouragement from the larger Substack community, I would have likely quit writing here after a couple of months as the growth was so slow. But thankfully, everyone said that’s perfectly normal, keep going.

As an aside, I am also tweaking my engagement strategy here on Substack. I will talk about my current engagement strategy in depth in the last article of the month, on February 27th.

I hope you have a wonderful week, thanks again for reading!

Mack