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

Glimmers of growth

Happy Thursday, y’all! Please Like and Restack this isOveraty on Substack. Thank you! And if you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to Backstage Pass. Free subscribers get access to all articles as they come out, after one month, older articles are paywalled. Paid subscribers have access to all Backstage Pass content with no paywalls.

Let's jump right into the main numbers:

Overall, topline numbers are up a bit. You can compare to last month’s numbers by clicking here. Subs are the most important metric, and this was one of the better months I’ve had for subs. It becomes even better when you look at sources of subs:

In November, the imported accounts were 82% of total subs. In December, that percentage fell to 79%. That means all sources of subs increased, except for imported accounts, which lost 12 subs.

So if we remove imported accounts from the sub totals, that drops me to 207 subs, and an increase of 38 subs in December. That’s almost a 20% monthly increase, which is pretty good.

Speaking of subs, let’s look at daily gains with subs:

I had a couple of spikes on December 15th and 29th of subs. Then Substack came back and broke my heart and said a lot of those were likely bots:

To be fair, I assumed something could be up when I saw some of the emails that were signing up. So if you have seen similar boosts then declines in your own numbers, it seems this is a sitewide issue with Substack. I suspect Substack will address by hardening their review during the signup process to catch some of these bots moving forward.

Tracking Growth on Substack

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.

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. Based on this formula, the soonest I could reach the Third Stage would be May 2025, the latest would be August 2026.

Growth, especially when you first join Substack, can be difficult to track. This is compounded by the fact that growth on social media is NOT linear, and Substack is no exception.

Currently, I am still in the First Stage of growth, which is 0-3 new subs per day on average. So I want to look for ‘signals’ that suggest to me that I am getting closer to advancing to the second stage of growth.

For instance, I know that in the Second Stage of growth on Substack, I will average at least 4 new subs a day. So in theory, when I start having more days where I have at least 4 new subs, that suggests I am getting closer to reaching the Second Stage of growth. The first day where I had at least 4 new subs came in late November. I had another 3 days in December where I had at least 4 new subs in a 24 hour period. So that suggests to me that I am moving closer to the Second Stage of growth.

So for now, I am happy to continue to grind away. This is the first month where it really felt like I was making slight, but consistent growth. As EVERYONE has said, don’t stop writing, keep going until the growth happens.

This stat really drives home the importance of consistency on Substack. 45% of all Substacks are inactive. I suspect the vast majority of those inactive Substacks happened because the writers felt they weren’t seeing enough growth to justify sticking with it. Which is why I made the earlier point that growth on Substack is NOT linear.

What I’ll Be Changing Moving Forward

Since I started writing on Substack, I have tried to schedule my new issues at least one week in advance. I did pretty good with staying a week ahead until November when I started falling behind and often didn’t write new issues until the week or sometimes even the day it was published. I want to get back in the habit of being at least a week ahead, ideally two weeks.

What I’ve found is my best issues of Backstage Pass tend to be the ones that I write 2 or more week in advance. I write the ‘first draft’ of the post, then over the course of the next week or two, I can gradually add to or tweak the issue to make it even better.

I will also add a new monthly series, starting with the next issue. The Monthly Marketing Minute will debut on Tuesday, and will focus on breaking industry news and research associated with marketing via customer engagement. This will mean that 4 monthly issues are a set series:

1 - Monthly recap of the previous month’s progress on Substack. This will be published as the first issue of each month.

2 - The Monthly Marketing Minute will be published as the second issue of each month.

3 - Marketing and Movies will be published the 3rd Tuesday of each month.

4 - Marketing and Music will be published the 3rd Thursday of each month.

This will set the topics for half the monthly issues, and give me flexibility in picking the other 4-5 issue topics each month.

So that’s my December recap of what happened here on Substack. I feel pretty good about the growth, it feels like I am a few months away from moving into the second phase of growth. We shall see! See you on Tuesday!

Mack