What I Learned Growing from Zero to 10K Subscribers
When I started my first Substack in late 2022, I had no experience with writing a newsletter.
Worse, I had no email list.
For the previous few decades I relied on large platforms—the Daily Beast, USA Today, CNN—to take my columns, which were typically tied to a topic that was dominating the news cycle, and push them out to their extensive audiences.
I feel pretty lame admitting I never amassed an email list. Most people in my business possess such lists, but I never made it a priority to build one. I just didn’t get the self-promotion gene.
I do have an extensive email list of more than a thousand journalists, politicians, thought leaders, and such whom I could have used as a starting list for my Substack. But I don’t love it when people add me to lists without my consent, so I chose to not do this.
So, when I pushed publish in November 2022, I had exactly zero subscribers.
It feels incredible to me that I’ve passed 10K subscribers and as I’ve appreciated the transparency of other writers on Substack about reaching subscriber milestones, I thought I’d do the same about my own.
There are a lot of numbers and data in this post, so if you would rather skip ahead, the section on “Key Takeaways” is at the end.
Timeline
My story is slightly disjointed because I started and then paused, and then started again. I’m going to try to make it as easy to follow as I can.
In October 2022, I launched the first newsletter, Things That Matter. I realized pretty quickly I did not want to write this newsletter (which was focused on politics), and while there was a quick spurt of growth caused mostly by being selected as a Substack Featured publication, it then became pretty stagnant, I assume due to my inconsistent publishing.
In April 2023, I explained to readers that I no longer wanted to write about politics and was shifting the focus to the newsletter.
At this point, six months after launching Newsletter #1, I had about 3000 free subscribers and 216 paid subscribers.
I offered to refund yearly subscriptions, but nobody took me up on this offer; in fact, I gained 176 subscribers from the post announcing the shift, including 27 paid subscribers.
In August 2023, I paused billing on Newsletter #1 because I still didn’t have clarity on what I wanted the newsletter to be.
In mid-September 2023, I announced I was relaunching the newsletter as Changing the Channel and started posting weekly and engaging more intentionally with the Substack community.
Seven months later, I passed 10k subscribers, 480 of whom are paid. I reach about 100k page views monthly thanks to the generous sharing of readers.
Below are the stats for May 1, 2024.
Where do my subscribers come from?
Here is a chart for the period of Oct 1 2022-May 1 2024 that covers stats for both newsletters.
What you don’t see there is the critical role that recommendations from other Substack publications play because it would be too much to post all the publications that recommend Changing the Channel. Below is the big picture.
Social Media Had Almost Nothing To Do With My Growth
I hear a lot of writers expressing concern that they can’t be successful on Substack because they lack the large social media presence that other writers have. I also hear coaches and marketing experts telling writers they have to be active on social media in order to be successful writers.
I do not believe this is true.
Spend your time doing good writing, not draining your life energy posting or interacting with people on social media. If you are going to interact with anyone, make it other writers and readers on Substack through Notes or engaging with their writing.
These are generally high-quality interactions that energize you. Connecting with like-minded writers is uplifting and has the added benefit of helping your publication grow as people become aware of you and your work.
The overwhelming majority of my growth has come from other writers recommending my publication and Substack readers sharing my work.
If you enjoy being on social media and it doesn’t have any negative mental health effects for you or take away from your writing time, then knock yourself out. However, most people do not become better or more proficient writers by scrolling on Instagram or fighting with people on Twitter.
I really want to underscore what a small role social media actually played in my growth.
Twitter: My largest social media following is on Twitter—with close to 300k followers—and you can see in the chart the comparatively small role it has played in my growth. I will discuss my most viral post in the next section, but I’ll note here that Twitter played no role whatsoever in the success of that post.
Caveat: This is not to say that Twitter can’t help your Substack grow. If you are active on Twitter and have a following I’m sure it helps. I, however, stepped away from the platform in 2019 and rarely post and almost never go on the platform to interact with other users. Because of this the algorithm doesn’t prioritize my content so my reach is severely limited even when I do post.
Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn: I almost never use these and you can see they play no role in my growth.
Instagram: I have about 37K followers on IG, and I hardly ever use it. The stat that 12% of my traffic came from IG is misleading because close to 100% of that was for one viral post. My average post gets about 1% of its traffic from IG.
Slow Growth After Relaunching
When I relaunched my newsletter, growth was slow.
While I came to Substack with a public profile as a columnist and political analyst, when I relaunched, I made a risky choice to switch lanes in terms of my focus.
It’s axiomatic in the writing world that you should stick to what you are known for. When you venture into a new territory you are typically guaranteeing failure. I was known for writing about politics, culture and faith in a very specific way that was almost always pegged to a “news hook.”
Would anybody want to read about the things I thought were important?
Here is what was happening between September 12, when I relaunched until the day before I published an essay on November 29, that went viral.
I was feeling pretty defeated, especially since I was used to my writing reaching large audiences and having an impact. Suddenly, it felt like I was screaming into a void. I chose to keep moving forward, believing that the process was just as important as the outcome. I felt led to write about these topics, and whether large numbers of people read them or not, I was going to continue.
A Post Goes Viral
November 29, 2023, was when Changing the Channel turned a corner.
I emailed the essay The Way We Live In The United States Is Not Normal to 3200 people, and for whatever reason, it took off, ultimately reaching over 80,000 page views. I gained almost 2500 free subscribers and 58 paid subscribers from that post. It was shared 2454 times.
From that point on, Changing the Channel has seen steady growth and robust reader engagement.
I mentioned earlier that Instagram typically plays almost no role in driving readers to my publication. This essay was an exception. Here is what was different:
First, I think the topic captured people’s interest and involved a personal announcement that my husband and I had bought land in Italy. So, that started a lot of likes and comments, which then caused the algorithm to prioritize the post for other followers.
Second, I put “DM me for link” in the post rather than telling people to go to link in bio. I ended up DMing the link to hundreds and hundreds of people. This was very very time consuming. I got this idea from someone on Substack (unfortunately don’t remember who). For whatever reason, people are far more likely to DM you for a link but won’t go to link in bio even though it takes the same amount of time.
Even with all that effort, Instagram only accounted for 12% of the engagement in this essay. I have tried the “DM for link” with other essays and got very few requests, so I think that this was a combo of making that effort but also doing it for an essay that had caught people’s attention in a unique way.
The essay went viral for one simple reason: word of mouth. Substack readers shared it with their friends and family and also on Notes. If you would like a deeper breakdown of why people felt compelled to share it, Sarah Fay analyzed my essay here as part of a workshop on going viral. I found her analysis fascinating, if for no other reason than I didn’t do any of the things she mentioned consciously. I just wrote about a topic I was passionate about.
Key Takeaways
— On going viral. It’s important to say that I did not try to go viral, nor did I expect that essay to go viral. I didn’t even expect it to be successful. I wrote most of it on a ten-hour flight from Rome to Washington, DC, and when I hit publish, I worried that it was kind of a muddle. I wished I had more time to polish it, but I had set a deadline and wanted to meet it. Prior to that essay, I don’t think I had ever gotten more than 50 likes on a post. I remember saying to my husband as the likes started ticking up, “Oh, I wonder if it will hit 100 likes!” As of today, that viral essay has 2582 likes.
—Educate yourself: Online writing was new to me, so I did my due diligence and read everything I could about how to be successful on Substack. I’m a paid subscriber to
and I watched all of Sarah’s workshops and read her posts. I also made a 1:1 appointment with her and have another appointment set up. I also devoured every post by other writers I could find about how they achieved growth. I read all of the information Substack provides to help you succeed.—Experiment and follow your intuition. Most of the experts on Substack, including Sarah, urge you to keep your posts short. They have plenty of data about how for most writers, these will perform better. However, for me this is not true. My shorter posts do not perform as well as my longer posts. There is simply no comparison. The America Is Not Normal post was 3600 words, for example.
My second most read and shared post was 1600 words. This one was included in Substack Reads about five days after it posted but was already performing well above average when it was included. I don’t know how to know how many subscribers were added from this promotion. If anyone does, let me know in the comments, and I’ll update it.
Another top performing post was 2500 words. I do write shorter posts, so it’s not just that all I write is long posts and I’m picking the ones that perform the best.
—Do the work: I have been writing for large audiences for two decades and meeting hard deadlines. This is not a minor thing. It gives me an advantage here. But I still have to show up and do the work. The viral piece I wrote took 12 hours of writing, research, editing, and cutting. And I’m a speedy writer due to all the deadline writing I’ve done. Also, what you don’t see is all of the words that ended up on the cutting room floor.
In addition to those twelve hours, there are the hours and hours I spent reading articles and books, doing interviews, and just working out my ideas with other people. I mention this because I see some griping from some writers on Substack about how unfair it is that already successful writers get promoted by Substack and so on. People get promoted by Substack because they do work Substack believes will resonate. My advice is to stop resenting other writers and start learning from them. This is what I do.
—Don’t be afraid to change directions: Something that keeps people from starting their Substack is that they don’t know exactly what they want to do. Just do it. You will figure out what works and doesn’t work by writing and testing out different ideas and formats. I changed the name and topic, and I don’t know how many times I’ve changed my “short description,” but I still haven’t refined it to a place where I feel it accurately describes what I’m doing with this publication.
—Develop a paid strategy: My conversion rate is average at about 5 percent. It would probably be higher if I put all my essays behind a paywall. Right now, my paid content involves my Friday Threads, a weekly roundup of links and recommendations, and the ability to comment on everything. My strategy has been to make my content free for a week, and then it goes behind a paywall. Actually, calling that a strategy is misleading because there is no real thought behind it. I still need to develop a real strategy. So far, I’ve been acting on instinct and experimenting to see what works.
—Don’t get alerts: The only alert I get is when someone signs up as a paid subscriber, so I can get a sense of who the new subscriber is by looking at their dashboard. I don’t look at unsubscribes or get alerts when someone unsubscribes. These are distractions, as are all the other alerts. The unsubscribes have a high potential of getting in your head, so avoid them at all costs. They don’t matter. Churn is normal. Don’t take them personally.
—Interact with your readers as much as possible: I do my best to respond to every comment because part of what I am doing is creating a community. This is easy for me because I enjoy it. I really love my readers, interacting with them, and getting to know them. They are extremely interesting people, and I have learned a lot from them. You may not enjoy this kind of interaction or may not have time to do it. If so, don’t feel you must do this. I’m just sharing what I do and what works for me.
—Connect with other writers who share your interests. I spend a little time on Notes each day, sharing, liking, and commenting, and also clicking through to read posts that catch my interest. I don’t do this to help my publication grow; I do it because I enjoy it, and I like to be supportive of other writers. But I suspect it plays some role in my growth, although I don’t know how to quantify that. I also read tons of other publications and do my best to like and comment when I connect with what is being written. I would do this even if it didn’t lead to growth, but I also know that other readers will see my comment, and if it resonates with them, they may click through to my publication and sign up.
—Make explicit asks: If you want something from your readers, tell them. For example, I was bummed at my low engagement rate. Everyone said that was normal because most people read the posts in email, and so it’s not the same as being on an app where it’s easy to engage. After seeing this suggestion on one of the
threads (I wish I knew who it was so I could credit them), I added to the header of my emails to subscribers an “ask.” I wrote, “Did you know that if you hit the heart at the bottom or the top of this email it will help others discover my publication and also make me super happy?” The engagement rate went up astronomically.—Use Grammarly and then proofread: After running my post through Grammarly, I email it to myself and read it through at least five times. Mistakes still get through, but they are far less than if I don’t do this.
I know this is a lot, but I hope that something in here was helpful to you!
If you hit the ❤️ at the top or bottom of this post, you will MAKE MY DAY + make it easier for other people to find Changing the Channel
This is so thoughtful and helpful, thank you! FWIW, I think you owe your Substack success to finding your voice and living it out. You are that rare combination of no-nonsense and deeply caring. It's trustworthy.
Fantastic article Kristen. Refreshingly honest, and that's why I'm a subscriber. You put your heart and soul into this and it shows. I'm here for the long haul and can't wait to hear more about how the book is going and the move to Italy!