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

Slogging through Phase 1 of growth

Happy Tuesday, y'all! I hope you had a good weekend and while you are thinking about it, please press the Like button for me, so we can help improve the visibility of this article on Substack. Thank you!

Today I will review my fourth month publishing on Substack. Let's dive right into the core numbers:

All green numbers, other than paid subscribers. Which is good. Open rate is up nicely, I switched my Paid issues to offer a one-week trial and that seems to have helped the open rate on Paid issues a bit. Still, slow growth in subscriber numbers, that's a bit disappointing.

Here's subscriber growth over the last 90 days. Again, very slow, but steady growth. I imported a list from MailChimp in late May that had around 868 subs, so without that imported list, I would likely be at under 100 subs right now. The goal will be to hit 1,000 subs by the end of the year.

This is daily traffic over the last 90 days. That one day where views spiked is because I accidentally sent that day's paid issue twice. There was an error in my dashboard, I Published the issue and it was showing up in my dashboard as still being scheduled. So I deleted the Scheduled version, and that deleted the published one as well. So I had to send the email again, luckily I thought to open it in another tab before I sent in case that happened.

After 4 months on Substack, where am I at?

When I started researching Substack in May before I began publishing in June, I noticed that successful writers here had three growth phases:

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.

When I first started writing on Substack, I was hoping to be entering the second phase by October 1st. That obviously hasn't happened as my numbers show I am still in the middle of phase one at best. So the new goal will be to enter phase two by the end of the year. Based on the above numbers, that would mean I would need to be averaging at least 4 subs a day by December 31st.

Still, successful writers across the board here agree that the first phase is very slow, definitely a slog'. But if you stick with it, the growth eventually comes.

What changes will I make to increase growth?

Two areas I want to focus on moving forward are content and engagement.

With content, I still don't feel like I have nailed down the exact focus of my content for either the free or paid versions of Backstage Pass. I have a general idea for both, but I need a sharper focus on each.

I do want to take more ‘swings’ at the content for Backstage Pass and do some experiments. One area I am definitely going to play with is adding audio to issues. I want to start that before the end of the month. I also noticed in doing research that many writers noted that they changed their focus a few times before they settled on their current niche or topic for their newsletter.

Anna Mackenzie

talks about how he did this in the link above. I feel like I have the general topics I want to cover, I just need to better bring it into focus. I also want to experiment more with series of posts such as Marketing and Movies.

As for engagement, I feel like this is one area where I am doing pretty well. Most of my issues, and even Notes, get 10 or more Likes and usually about half as many comments. My engagement approach so far has been to devote about 75% of my time engaging with people I am following and who are following me. I would rather build a connection with people who have already signaled an interest in engaging with me versus trying to connect with a new audience. You could argue that's hurting my growth a bit, but I would rather have deeper connections with fewer people versus shallow connections with a lot of people.

Having said that, I do need to do a better job in connecting with new audiences, especially writers who cover marketing, customer experience and business topics. So that will continue to be a focus, but the priority will be engaging with my existing community versus trying to reach a new one.

So that's my thoughts and takeaways after 4 months. I like to share my thoughts on my Substack journey and hope it helps some of you. I've learned so much from the other writers who have been kind enough to share their story as their Substack grew. I'll be honest, if I hadn't heard over and over again how the first phase of growth was so slow, I likely would have given up on Substack by now. But everyone agrees if you keep pushing through the lull, the growth eventually comes. So that's my plan!

Hope you have a great week, see you again with an issue for Paid subscribers on Thursday!

Mack

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