The Next Six Months For Substack

The growth wave may have just hit the shore

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Last week I wrote about how much growth I experienced in June.

Throughout the month I started asking some of my friends if they were seeing growth as well.

Almost all of them confirmed they were. Some of them admitted to being baffled, since they weren’t posting as often, or at all, yet growth was suddenly occuring.

What’s really interesting about this growth spurt is that it came in June. The summer has always been a time when social media usage hits a rare lull period. So the fact that many of us were seeing surprising growth during early summer was doubly surprising. In a good way.

Last December, I wrote down some thoughts on where I thought Substack was headed in 2026. My contention then, and now, was that at some point in 2026, Substack would begin a growth spurt that would likely last for 6-12 months. I still believe this will happen. Perhaps we are in the early days of that growth spurt now. If we see another month of growth in July that’s on par with June, I think we may be there.

Substack Has Been Busy Behind the Scenes

Substack has made several moves recently that signal it is priming for a growth period:

Announcing Creator Kits - Substack recently announced that once a creator reaches Bestseller status, they can access their Creator Kit. This will help them signal to potential sponsors that they are interested in working with them. This is a native feature where Substack will essentially function as the middleman or matchmaker between sponsors and creators. Substack has also hinted at a sort of ‘marketplace’ where companies can reach out directly to creators about sponsorships.

Subscriber Perks - Bestsellers can now also set different perks for each subscriber level. This is another feature that many creators have been requesting for a long while. We want the ability to offer certain perks at the monthly or annual level, but not both. Used strategically, this would be a way to help push subscribers toward upgrading at either tier.

UPDATE! Eagle-eyed subscriber Dr. Jacqueline McAdam pointed out that Subscriber Perks are actually now available to anyone that has payments enabled on their Substack!

To set yours up, go to Settings in your Substack Dashboard.

Scroll down to Payments

Click Manage next to Subscriber Perks

Thanks again, Jacqueline!

Email Onboarding Sequences - Bestsellers can also access an Email ‘drip’ or sequencing option that lets them send new subscribers a series of welcome emails rather than just one. This is another feature that users have been asking for, but for now, it’s reserved to the Bestseller level.

Obviously, Substack is using these features as incentives to push creators to reach Bestseller status. It makes sense, Bestsellers tend to sell more Paid subscriptions, and that would mean more revenue for Substack.

This seems to be Substack’s plan: Take features that users are requesting, and lock them behind the Bestseller level. I suspect that what will eventually happen is Substack will begin offering Paid tiers to users. For instance, pay X dollars a month, and you can access all the Bestseller-level perks, now. This would be another way for Substack to raise revenue.

Notice that we still aren’t talking about Substack inserting ads into our feeds in any form. You could technically say the sponsorships could be ads, but creators opt-into those. Besides, some creators have been offering sponsored emails for a long time.

Substack has been very intentional in how it approaches monetization. For that, they should be commended. When Substack’s massive $100M funding round was announced last year, I honestly thought we would see ads in feeds by now. Instead, not a single peep from the Substack team about ads.

Where Will We Be By the End of 2026?

I do think we will enter the anticipated growth spurt sometime before the year ends. We could be in it now, I think we will have a better idea by the end of next month if we are. If we see growth levels in July and August consistent with what most of us saw in June, then we are probably there.

I know many of the members of the Backstage Pass Paid community have been preparing. I’ve been working with several of you to help nail your positioning and build out a Paid tier that will have you ready when growth does arrive.

If you are still in the beginning stages of your journey on Substack, I would advise you to upgrade to Paid, then read this post:

Three Strategies You Need to Create a Successful Substack

This post gives you the same strategy I have used to build Backstage Pass. That will get you started, the Paid community and mentoring will help you maximize your results.

Rethinking Making Money on Substack

For some of you, the idea of growing, making money on Substack, it can make you feel a little uncomfortable.

Maybe you are concerned that focusing on profiting off Substack will change the quality of your writing. Maybe you fear that some may judge you for wanting to make money here. Maybe it’s something else.

Years ago, I was talking to a highly successful consultant who was making a LOT of money. When I talked to her she was excited because she had just signed a contract to keynote at an event with an audience of 10,000. She was a ‘big deal’.

And she was super aggressive about promoting and selling herself and her services. It was honestly the reason why I wanted to talk to her. I hated selling myself and wondered if she could help me wrap my mind around how to do it in a way that made sense for me.

She told me “I want to make as much money as I possibly can. Do you know why? Because the more money I make, the more people I can help.”

That totally reframed how I viewed money made from business. It became a tool. A tool I could use to help others.

This also changed my mental perspective of what money was and what it meant to me. Money went from being something I could get to buy all the cool ‘toys’ I wanted, to being a tool to leverage to benefit others.

This a big part of the reason why I wanted to shift my focus a year ago to focus on helping others grow on Substack. Yeah, I could keep what I am learning to myself, but why? Why not help others so we all can celebrate growth together?

And that’s what is happening now. Several members of the Backstage Pass Paid community are now growing much faster than I am. I love it.

I will continue to stick to my guns on this: Substack offers a very unique opportunity for us to make real friendships and real money, at the same time, that simply doesn’t exist on any other social media platform.

I want you to take advantage of it.

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Backstage Pass is more than a name. It’s an invitation.

An invitation to curious people who like to peek behind the curtain. The people who say “Show me how you did that.”

These are the people who should be in the Backstage Pass community.

In August of 2025, I had 7 paid subscribers and a 0.5% conversion rate.

At that point I made two decisions: First, I was going to build a system to increase my conversion rate and my revenue. Second, I was going to share everything I learned with my paid subscribers.

The people like me. The ones who want to build something instead of being handed something.

Join us?

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