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

I've hit the wall...

Happy Monday, 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 third month writing on Substack. This month was different than the first two in that it started with a bang, and then seemed to just go sideways for the last 3 weeks. Not sure what happened.

Before we get into the numbers from August, I wanted to clarify how I got started on Substack. I started writing Backstage Pass in June, but on May 30th, I imported a list with 862 subs from Mailchimp. That explains the jump in my subs at the start. I didn’t do a good job of explaining that in the recap post for last month so I wanted to make that clear at the start for this month.

Here’s the main numbers as they stood on August 31st:

Not bad numbers, but much of that growth happened at the start of the month. From August 1st-10th, I picked up 21 subs, and added another 19 the rest of the month. I even got my first 3 paying subscribers in those first few days of August!

Wait, so 21 plus 19 adds up to 40, why does my image above say 24 new subs in the last 30 days? Because I lost 16 from the Mailchimp list that I imported. I typically have 1-3 unsubs after every newsletter issue, but so far, the unsubs seem to be coming from the imported list and not new subs from Substack users. Which I think is a good thing.

The open rate continues to inch lower. This seems to mostly be due to the paid issues having fewer opens. The open rate for the free issues were in the 26-27% range while the paid issues were in the 24-25% range.

Here’s what daily views have looked like for June-August:

The spikes every 3-4 days is when the new issue of the newsletter goes out. The lower levels or non-newsletter days are more interesting to me. I want to see the ‘low points’ for traffic rising moreso than the high points. It seems views on the days where I don’t publish a new issue of the newsletter seem to be gradually increasing, and I am pleased with that.

Here’s daily views for June-August just from Substack:

A jump in both July and August when I published my first and second month recap of how I did. So hopefully there will be another boost from this post.

Finally, here’s how subscribers have grown over the last 90 days:

Overall, the numbers for August aren’t bad, but I’m a bit disappointed by the final numbers after the fast start. Around August 7th or so, I was picking up new subs so quickly that it appeared possible that I might hit 1,000 subs by September 1st. Of course I fell far short of that number. Ah well, maybe I can hit that by October 1st.

Last month I talked about how most Substacks seem to grow in three stages: a first stage that typically lasts 6-12 months with very modest growth. Then a second stage that typically lasts 3-6 months with growth about double the first stage, then the ‘hockey stick’ stage where growth shoots upward. After last month, I was hoping I could be on pace to move into the second phase of growth by the start of October. Or after 4 months. Beginning to look like that won’t happen.

Recommendations

I currently have 11 subs recommending me (Thank you guys!), and they have sent me 52 subs so far. I am recommending 10 subs and have sent them 44 total subs currently. I need to up my game a bit here!

What will I do differently in September?

One thing I need to do more of in September is community-building. I need to spend more time on Substack simply engaging with other users. I didn’t do a good job of this the last half of August, which partially contributed to my sideways numbers, I am sure.

I also need to simplify the content creation process. Years ago I talked to a colleague about content creation and she gave me a great idea. She says she views her blog (this was around 10 years ago) as a television channel. So she doesn’t think in terms of writing posts, but instead in terms of writing episodes for series. She thinks about how she can create series for her blog, then write posts for that series. That thinking has always helped me simplify the content creation process by creating series of content. On that note…

Announcing: Marketing and Movies!

Guys, I am SO excited for this! Starting this month, I will launch a new series called Marketing and Movies. Once a month, I will review one of my favorite movies, and also talk about some of the key business and marketing lessons it contains. I started doing this series a few years ago on my blog, and had an absolute blast writing these, so I am bringing it to Substack. On the third Monday of every month, I will review a different movie. Here’s the tentative schedule for the coming year:

September - Moneyball

October - V for Vendetta

November - The Time Traveler’s Wife

December - The Book of Eli

January - Ford vs Ferrari

February - Hearts in Atlantis

March - Smokey and the Bandit

April - The Big Short

May - Memento

June - Interstellar

July - The Dark Knight

August - Top Gun

I think you will love these, I know I will love writing them. So that’s my third month on Substack recap, gonna have to get to work to see these numbers turned around for September. To everyone that has subbed and engaged with me, thank you so much for your help! Hope you have a wonderful week!

Mack