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

Breaking down the numbers from the first 30 days

Happy Thursday, y’all! So I wanted to share the takeaways from my first month of publishing on Substack. Hopefully this will be valuable to you, whether you are on Substack yourself, or thinking of joining.

Since 2014, I’m been publishing a newsletter as an extension of my book, Think Like a Rock Star. At the end of May, I emailed my list and informed them I was moving the newsletter to Substack, to give anyone that wanted to unsubscribe before the move a chance to do so. If anyone is considering importing a list to Substack, I would suggest notifying your list before you do.

Here’s the raw numbers from June. I started publishing on June 3rd and published 8 issues in June:

The first thing you will likely notice is a loss of 5 subs in June. At the end of May I imported 868 emails from my existing list for Backstage Pass. I mentioned that I had been publishing Backstage Pass since 2014, but it’s been sporadic. I would publish in spurts, I would publish weekly for 2-3 months, then stop and go 2-3 months with no issues, then start back up again. Part of it was simply me not having the patience to stick with the publishing until I saw the results I wanted.

But mainly, I hated the lack of engagement and interaction that I experienced from publishing Backstage Pass. It’s in my nature to be helpful, but a newsletter really makes it hard to develop interactions, especially among list members. I missed that social element.

Which is why I wanted to move the list to Substack. Substack is a social platform, so I felt it would be much easier to have interactions with list members, and for members to engage directly with each other. And that’s exactly what has happened. In the first month of publishing on Substack, I’ve had as much interaction with list members as I did in the previous 10 years of sending out emails. So from that standpoint, the move has been a big win.

The lost subscribers came from list members who were imported to Substack. As I mentioned earlier, publishing was sporadic to the list before it came to Substack. At best, it was weekly, but never twice a week as it has been since joining Substack. My guess is the lost subscribers are people who subbed years ago and haven’t been reading the issues for a while and since they were getting 2 a week now, they noticed them and decided to unsub.

I gained 14 subscribers in June, and all those came from Substack. So you can do the math, that means 19 subscribers were lost off my existing email list that was imported, and 14 gained back on Substack. My guess is the number lost from the imported list will decrease by about 50% in July and the number of new subs from Substack will increase by about 50%. Which would give me a projected gain of about 10 subscribers overall. We’ll see what happens.

BTW, I gained 43 Followers on Substack in June. I’m not sure what, if any, correlation that has to subscribers and newsletter readers, but am mentioning in case anyone was wondering.

Here’s number of views for the month of June:

The spike every 3-4 days is when the newest issue of Backstage Pass went out. What I noticed from these numbers is the number of views the day after the latest issue was published is trending up. I take that as a good sign as the issues are generating more engagement the next day. It also could lead to a scenario where the Monday issue is still generating spillover engagement on Tuesday and Wednesday, then when the Thursday issue comes out, that could have a marginal positive impact on its views as a result. I will keep watching it.

Open rate fluttered between 27-32%, which is very much in line with the open rate I saw when the list was on MailChimp.

I did notice under the Subscriber Report section of my stats that the top 6 newsletters that my readers are subbed to are all focused on writing. Ideally, my audience would be subbed to newsletters that are focused on business. So I have some work to do on connecting with my desired audience. This is another reason why I love being on Substack, the discoverability elements.

So there’s the numbers from my first month of publishing on Substack. I hope this is helpful to you and if you have any questions, feel free to ask. I know these numbers aren’t as impressive as some of the numbers you see being posted on Substack by other writers, but that’s precisely why I wanted to share them. I want to make sure everyone understands that most Substacks grow slowly and it takes a long time to see the results you want.

One final thought on Substack. One thing I’ve found very interesting about Substack is that my ‘network’ isn’t here, for the most part. Ever since I’ve been using social media, whether it was joining Twitter and Facebook in 2007, or Friendfeed in 2008, or a few years later Instagram, I’ve always had a core group of friends and connections that I could immediately connect with. When I joined Twitter, I had a lot of friends that I knew from my blog that I could immediately connect with. When I joined Facebook, my Twitter friends were already there, so I immediately had a community to be a part of. So on and so forth.

Yet with Substack, most of my connections are not active here. So in a way it’s almost like starting over. On the one hand, it hurts my engagement to not have my core group of friends and connections here. On the other hand, it means I can create a new group of connections here and expand my overall network. The end result is my initial growth on Substack will likely be lower, but long-term growth should be higher.

BTW, I wanted to highlight three people who have been quite generous with their time and expertise since I’ve joined Substack:

Paul Chaney: I’ve known Paul since around 2008. Paul has been encouraging me to join Substack since January or so and in May I finally listened. I’m glad I did and wish I had taken his good advice sooner. Paul writes the AI Marketing Ethics Digest, which is devoted to the ethical considerations of AI in business use. Paul is way ahead of the curve on this topic, and if you work with AI, you should absolutely sub to him.

Lucy Werner: When I first joined Substack, Lucy’s substack was one of the first stacks I found, and ironically it was because Paul had restacked her. Lucy is doing amazingly well with her paid newsletter, and since I wanted to eventually launch a paid newsletter myself, I asked Lucy a ton of questions. And despite the fact that she didn’t know me from Adam’s Housecat, Lucy was kind enough to go out of her way to help me, and I will always appreciate that. I’ve always said you can learn a lot about people by how they treat animals, and if they engage with people who have no following on social media LOL

Neela: As an introvert, one of the things I love about social media is how easy it is to meet new people. But occasionally, I connect with a dear friend and kindred spirit. That’s Neela. Neela is the best community-builder hands-down that I’ve met on Substack and one of the best I’ve met anywhere. Like Lucy (who is also great with community), she was more than happy to help me with many MANY questions, even though I truly am a ‘nobody’ on Substack. She goes out of her way to help and promote me, but she does that for everyone. Joining Substack has been worth it simply because I met Neela.

Please subscribe to Paul, Lucy and Neela’s substacks. Trust me, you will love all three for very different reasons.

So that’s it for this issue of Backstage Pass. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and please celebrate the Fourth safely!

Mack