How I Got My First 1,000 Subscribers on Substack

  Sam Vander Wielen: So you’re hearing all these people talk about Substack and you’re like, wait, what even is Substack? And do I need to be on it? Maybe you’re curious because you want a place to write more, or you heard that it’s a really great place to get discovered, but you’re also skeptical because the last thing you need is another platform on your to-do list.

Even if you did try it, part of you is thinking, okay, but there’s no way I’m building this thing to a thousand subscribers from scratch. I can’t even do that with my email list. Because that’s the tricky part. Substack growth can feel like it’s reserved for people who already have a huge audience or who are willing to crank out constant content, have a gorgeous setup and obsess over metrics. Exactly the stuff that can make you lose the whole point, which is getting better at the craft.

Plus you’re sort of trying to get off of social media or at least not be on your phone so much so like how does this platform really help you?

So in this episode, I’m walking you through exactly how I got my first 1000 Substack subscribers using organic strategies only, meaning I did not import any of my 61,000 person email list subscribers, use any fancy graphics or custom pages, and I just stayed focused on the writing.

I’ll share exactly what I did, what I didn’t do, and the simple consistency habits and grassroots moves that made the numbers start ticking up.

And before we get into today’s episode, I just wanna take a moment to welcome you or welcome you back to On Your Terms®. On Your Terms®, is a podcast for online business owners who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses. And one of the things I really like about Substack is I think it could be a really cool way to both be more present in your life and more profitable in your business because it’s a little bit like I think, less social media e than a lot of other platforms, and it has a revenue generating opportunity with people being able to pay you money for your writing or your newsletter. So I’m really excited to chat about it today.

So this is not the first time on the podcast that I’ve talked about Substack. In episode 271 of the podcast I shared about why I started a Substack when I already have an email list of 60 something thousand people, using Kit, I’ve built my entire email list on Kit, and that is a completely separate beast and animal on its own.

That is not what we’re talking about today. And also, I just wanna say for the record, I love Kit and I’m not leaving Kit. I, I always feel like very defensive of this because people think it’s like one or the other and I’m like, no, no, no. I could not leave Kit because first it has so many capabilities, like I wish people understood that it’s not a conversation of like either or because they’re totally different. And with Kit you can do so much more tagging and automation and you know, I can email people who live within 50 miles of Austin and I can set up email sequences for people based on their clicking behavior and their location, the timing and like so many things. So this is not an either or.

I shared in that episode that I started Substack for a very different reason, very similar to what I talked about in last week’s episode, about focusing on the craft and picking something that you want to get better at in your business, and then that being the thing that you’re practicing, right?

And so for me that that craft has been writing lately, like ever since I came out with my book, or even while I was working on my book, obviously. I was curious and more interested in becoming a better writer. And at least for me, I can’t think of a better platform to do that on than something like Substack because Substack is really, first of all, I think built out of a community of readers and writers.

Like it’s a very, it’s a very prime audience of like people who obviously like to read ’cause they’re consuming things in written format and they’re also just some of the most incredible writers on there. So, so much I can both learn but also contribute to there.

And I think Substack has done a really good job of making it a discoverable platform so that the pieces that you write and publish on your Substack can be public and you can SEO optimize them on the backend so that hopefully they could be found, you know, searched for by people who maybe didn’t know you existed before they searched for that thing.

So with my kind of mindset always being a little bit more like SEO search oriented Substack spoke to me when I thought about where can I do this personal writing.

I think that also I may, I’m not sure if I explained it that well in my episode that I, in episode 271 where I talked about like sub, why I have both Substack and Kit.

But I think that it’s really helped me actually to start to delineate where I’m writing about what, so it’s really made it very clear to me. Like my email newsletter called Sam’s Sidebar, that’s my email newsletter through Kit. That’s I’ll, I’ll make sure there’s a link for both this and for my Substack called Beyond Business, down below, but my email newsletter, Sam’s Sidebar, is really for online business owners they wanna know what it’s like to run this kind of business, the things I’m learning, the legal news that they need, all that kinda stuff, right?

So that is like now made it very, very clear because before I used to write essays about grief there. And I used to write essays about trauma and like PTSD and these kinds of things. And I would tie it back to business. Like I can, I can tie anything back. I would tie it back. And I still think that’s relevant there, but it is different. Like I think I almost felt like I wanted to tell the personal story, but then I felt like I had to tie it back to the business stuff. And starting a Substack has allowed me to be like actually, I wanna practice writing these personal essays that don’t have to have a business lesson. I don’t have to tie it up with a nice, neat bow.

I’ve written a lot of personal pieces there that don’t necessarily have this like perfect advice, right?

So, for me, Substack has felt like letting myself as a writer outta the gate. And like I can just write there. It doesn’t have to be for performance. Uh, if it’s not helpful to you, like, I’m sorry, if it’s just me telling you that, like a story of something that happened to me. Like, it’s okay. It’s, it’s like my playground to learn how to be a better writer. And so yeah, it’s, it’s been fine.

So I want to become a better writer as I talked about last week ’cause this is something I’m always working on. Yes, eventually I want to build an audience of people who want to read the kinds of things I want to write about.

So, in comes Substack, right? When I decide that this is what I wanna do, I wanna write more, I wanna write another book, maybe several, or just write in different ways and first I did what I always encourage you to do, which is to become a big personal fan of the, of the platform or the app that you want to get better on.

So I started out as just a big personal fan of Substack, not not even going into it thinking, oh, I’m gonna become a fan because I want to grow one here. I just genuinely was like attracted to it as someone who loves to read and write myself, and in doing that, I really got to know the platform itself.

I understood it. I knew the different like assets and like a ability, like I knew that there was chat and I knew what posts were and I knew that like when they rolled out audio, like you were able, you’re able to do like a voiceover of your actual post itself, right? I know that they have podcast RSS feeds there, so I, I understood because I already saw other people doing it and I already got a lot of examples of how people were making the platform work for them.

And I think, I wasn’t intending to do it this way at the time, but looking back on it, I also see how like, the fact that I follow so many different, like, uh, diverse Substacks I see in all different fields from all different kinds of people, I see them all using these things differently. Like there’s not like a, this is the one way, this is not Instagram.

So there’s not like a you have to do it this way or say this word or use this hook or have this you know, style to editing your reels or whatever for it to go well, I’m seeing a lot of people there do things really differently, really well. So that was cool to me and to even like open that mindset that this is a place where you can kind of play and experiment.

So I started my own Substack a couple of years ago. I mean, honestly, just to even park the kind of like URL and the name, you know, there’s lots of Sam Vander Wielen’s running around out there, so you gotta fight ’em off left and right. Um, so I wanted to just kind like, you know, stake my, my little place. And I, I would have like, I would every once in a while would like make, um, what they call a note.

So if you’re not familiar with Substack, there are posts and there are notes. So posts are more what they sound like they are the main, those are like, that’s like the whole enchilada. The main post is similar to a blog post. A note on Substack is more similar to a tweet.

You can include links in them, you can include photos and video. Now, that’s relatively new compared to when they started. , But those are really the differences in what we’re talking about.

So, when I first started, I would just like make little notes every once in a while wasn’t doing any original real writing there or I was repurposing my newsletter there, which a couple of you,, DMd me after the last episode of 271 where I talked about this and said, what do you think about a strategy of me posting my newsletter there? ‘Cause I’m just getting started. And I was like, I love that. I think that’s a great idea. Just get started, get in the habit of posting there. You can reformat or edit them a little bit to work with the platform better, you know, to utilize the, the tools that Substack has so I think that’s a great idea.

And, and like also I just think of this as like, why not? Right? What it’s hardly any cost to you to just copy and paste the text over there, do some formatting and send it out. It’s like, and it’s another discoverable, searchable platform. Like, great, why not? So that’s how I started. I just started doing that.

And again, wasn’t doing any original writing. But then last August, I decided to start taking it seriously. And if we were on YouTube, I would show you a little graph. But one thing that makes me very proud is that if you go on my Substack on the backend, if you look at the graph, , if you put a little point on last August of 2025, uh, when I started to actually post original content there and take it seriously every week, it’s just like a straight line up after that. So it’s, it’s really interesting to see how like this consistency paid off.

So since then, since last August, I’ve built up to about a thousand subscribers there using organic strategies only. And I think it’s important, ’cause whenever I say this, people are like, oh yeah, but didn’t you drag over everybody from your email list?

I’m like, no, I didn’t carry over automatically without telling people. I did not carry over anyone from my email list for several reasons. One, legal, If you signed up for my regular email list because you wanted email or marketing tips, I don’t think legally it’s appropriate to drag you over for me writing about like my dead parents.

So I am, I’m not doing that. I, I’ve, every once in a while I’ve like linked to it or invited people, but this has not been a real focus to be honest.

Two, I don’t want to confuse other people, , about what these two things are and like how they’re different. And also it’s helped me to not confuse myself because it’s helped me to be like, these are two very different things.

And if people wanna come over, like great. Um, one of the things we find on the, like the back end of the business is that our customers often really want my Substack. It’s really funny. So like once they kind of already have the business stuff, then they’re like, can I read this thing? So. It helps like me to keep it clear, clear with other people, yada, yada.

And the third reason is that I truly wanted to see what I could build there. Like, I often wonder, like if I had to start today, if you took away everything, like, could I do this again? Could I build an email list again? Like, I hope the advice that I’m giving you is helping you to do what I think it can do.

Right? And like, I’m, I’m just honest and I think, I hope realistic about that. So there was a part of me that was like, I wonder if following some of my own advice and, and just the advice, not of being a Substack expert, but of trying and playing and experimenting on a space if that would lead to some progress.

So, yeah, I hope at, at least at this point, it serves as a little bit of like proof of what I’m saying.

Okay, so I wanted today to share with you the things, the top things that I think helped me to build my first 1000 subscribers on Substack so that you could do the same. If you wanna start a Substack today, I’m hoping that the things I’m sharing today you’re able to implement these and within several months start working up to building up to a thousand subscribers too.

Okay, so the very first thing is working on our craft, just like we talked about in the last episode, 279. It’s really important to approach any new platform, whether it’s Substack or any other, that you’re there to practice and get better, right? I, for example, write really vulnerable stuff on Substack in particular.

I’m not trying to get caught up in the metrics, but I also fail at that a lot. Right? And I shared that in the last episode, so I have a lot. Of like untangling to do when it comes to like trying , I hope you guys are all ready to hear this, but you can create things just to create it without anybody giving you feedback or praise or without you having to get lots of likes or being helpful to other people.

That’s like, like real mindblower to me is like, wait, you don’t always have to be helpful. You don’t have to be helpful to be worthy and like valuable to everybody. If you’re not valuable, people won’t like you. This is a wild concept to me. So there is a lot of disentanglement that’s going on in my own brain and and soul right now.

But I really, you know, on a good day I come back to this idea that like, I’m not there for the metrics.

I don’t have any fancy layout or a custom page designed. In fact, I’ve actually kept my team mostly out of this. I have Michelle and my team helps to upload the uh, podcast episodes each week and then she’s going in on the backend and making sure.

I taught her like my little, my very elementary, like SEO process that I do there for my own posts. , And so we have that, but otherwise I’ve pretty much asked people to stay out of it because I’m like, I just kind of wanna figure this out. I haven’t had anybody design anything for me or made custom graphics.

I made my own logo on Canva, so woo-hoo. That still works. Um, so yeah, just like trying to really keep it very simple and not getting caught up in so many of the like stories that a lot of us have around how fancy things need to be in order for us to start. Like how often have you done this where you’re like, oh, I need to have like a fancy video editor or fancy camera for me to do this or I need to have the most fancy mic in order to start a podcast or whatever. Right? So really taking that mindset that I’m there to practice and I’m focused on the writing, like the writing should be the thing that’s really good. It doesn’t have to be the perfect lighting and the perfect sound and the perfect whatever.

I’m focused on the writing and if the writing is good. My thought process is that people will read. You know, that’s the way I think of it.

Now, the next thing I think you have to do in order to get to your first 1000 subscribers on Substack is to become a fan of the platform. I think you have to like the platform itself. If you go on there and you’re like, I don’t like this. This is stupid. I don’t even like reading.

Well, if you don’t like reading. Then you’re gonna, you’re gonna write things that you expect other people to read. So like, that doesn’t make sense, right? People often say this to me about YouTube. It says all the time about YouTube. I have a friend who said to me, I ne I, she thinks it’s so funny that I watch YouTube like tv, like I watch YouTube more than I watch regular tv.

And she’s like, but I think I should be on YouTube. ’cause like my business coach told me that it’s like a great discoverability platform. And I’m like, but you just told me you think it’s stupid that people watch YouTube. Who’s gonna watch your videos? The people that you think it’s stupid to watch videos like you really, you do have to have like, I think the proper mindset going into this.

I think it also, even from like a more strategic standpoint, I see a uptick in my own growth when I genuinely engage on other people’s Substack. It’s so funny. The other day I left a comment on somebody’s Substack that was about getting off of social media, but still having a business like they had an online business.

And I commented on this Substack, like this whole long thing about, you know, some of my thoughts about how you still could grow an online business this way. Then I ended it with, and I hope you know about Amelia Hruby’s, , podcast called Off the Grid. I was actually a guest on it recently, and here’s a link to the episode.

I linked to it. This comment of mine has now hundreds of likes. It’s like every day I am getting notifications that this comment keeps going. And apparently the episode has seen a little bit of an uptick, which I found out through Amelia. So it’s just so funny that it’s like it’s, it’s genuine engagement because I genuinely like being there and genuinely like reading the content.

I even see it from other, like, I comment on, uh, I read obviously a lot of food related stuff and like, uh, different like culture, Substack, politics Substack. And no matter what I comment on, it seems to send things my way. So it’s really interesting. I also am, you know, admittedly strategic in like, around the time that my book was coming out, I was leaving comments being like, oh, actually I just came out with a book and whatever and then a lot of times the Substackers would come back and be like, drop a link here, and I would drop a link to it. So I would also be, I’m also careful to make sure that there’s something in my comment that I guess gives people an idea of like, Hey, I’m also on Substack and this is what I’m writing about so that I attract the people who would want to read what I’m writing about.

Now we’re never gonna get through this episode talking about how to build subscribers on any platform without talking about mindset, really, that that could be the whole episode. But if you don’t go into building on Substack or any other platform with a growth mindset. In my opinion, you should just stop right there because a growth mindset is the belief that our abilities and our qualities can be developed.

They’re not fixed or stagnant, right? So if we are going into Substack being like, I am not a good writer, therefore I can’t grow on Substack, that’s going to put you in a very different place than like going into Substack, being like, I am not the best writer right now, but I can become a better writer.

And I think through practice. And learning and training and being open to like failing in public that I can become a better writer. So I think having the attitude that you are there to learn and grow and get better over time will really serve you for actually doing well on the platform. The goal is not to be a Substack all star on day one.

The only people who are Substack all stars on day one. Like, you know, they come out with all these like bestseller, like New Substack, whatever. Is when it’s like a celebrity joins Substack and they bring their, like gigantic. If you were around for the Glennon Doyle, like 24 hour Substack fiasco, like she came over to Substack with her giant email list was immediately like world’s number one Substacker um, went through a whole turmoil and left.

But it’s all to say that like it’s not normal for people to come there and be, uh, you know, superstars on day one.

Part of having a growth mindset is also that you seek out things as a challenge. Like you even see something as a challenge and then you’re like, well, that the fact that it’s challenging or the fact that I don’t know this yet, like I don’t, I’m not comfortable like in the Substack world yet.

Like I don’t know what all these things are. What are you talking about? Notes and posts and RSS feeds. I don’t know what all these are, right? It’s the idea that you have the mindset that you’re open to, open to learning what they are and taking those on as challenges and not seeing those as like blockades that you’re not interested in going past.

And I think a lot of that relates back to being okay to learning in public. We talked last week in the episode about, you know, learning in public kind of publicly, like announcing that you’re here to do this thing, right? Like I, I’m here to learn, being vulnerable in that way I think connects you to your audience, but you’re really there to learn and grow.

The next thing you have to do to grow on Substack is to be consistent. So I started writing once per week back in August, like I said, but I have not been perfect by any means. There have been weeks or a couple of weeks that have gone by and then I get like super tornado creative, like wave goes through and I’ve, I’ve posted a couple of times, twice in a week, you know, and I’m like, I have to get this out there.

This is timely. So I have not been perfect, but in general, my goal is to have, uh, on average one post per week. I can tell you though, that when I’m consistent, the numbers reflect that. So I mean for let that be what it is. But I think that there’s something to whether that’s, because you know, you are committing to being consistent, which means you’re actually getting the reps in and so you’re practicing, um, and therefore you’ll become better.

But I also think that, people come to like expect some sort of, I don’t know, like cadence of sorts. Right? And I don’t know, like back in the day, I think people knew like, you know, your episodes, new episodes always come out on Monday and like we could sometimes get this in our head of like thinking, everyone’s sitting around waiting for my episode to drop.

And I think, I think over time and working on my ego has been helpful to be like, oh, I don’t think anyone knows. I think if I didn’t show up for like a month, maybe some, maybe there’d be like three people who are like, wait, where’s that girl who used to like talk to me every once in a while? And on this podcast, you know. I think that, um, I think you can start to become part of people’s weekly routine if you actually make it a routine.

So now I am committed to showing up there once per week, regardless of whether what I’ve written is perfect or frankly even done. Uh, I had an essay yesterday that I was like, I feel like this could use, like there’s something missing, or this could be better.

But you know what? Like it’s going out and it’s good enough and people liked it. I, I mean, it is what it is. But the point is just that like, I want to practice and the point of being there is not for it to be perfect every single time. If I was that hard on myself, I’d be sitting here all day long looking at the essay, picking apart a million. I mean, there’s a million different things that could be wrong with the essay. Right?

So it’s really interesting to like just kind of sit with this mindset that we come to and. I, I see this get in the way of a lot of people’s consistency because they can’t be consistent ’cause they get so like caught up on the, like the perfection wheel.

The next way you can get a thousand subscribers on Substack is by building a habit and a practice of writing. So for me, I’ve gotten in this habit of waking up early a few times per week and going straight downstairs to write by myself. Um, everybody has their own thing of like whether you need to write in the morning, uh, before the kids get up.

Whether you write late at night after the kids go to bed. Some people like to go sit at a coffee shop, like insert whatever the thing is here. The point is that you have to prioritize the way that it works for you and actually make it happen. Here’s a little thing about me that I noticed, once the world has infiltrated my brain, I have a really difficult time being as free and creative like a lot of times, essentially lately, I’ll like see the news and then I’m upset, I’m pissed off. I’m something to the point that now the thing I’m gonna write is like, filtered through that like agitated version of myself, which is not me, probably not the truest version of me, except on most days. But like, you know, it’s not, it’s not technically me and that’s not how I intended the piece to come up or how I wanted to even feel while I was writing it.

Like there have been so many times when I’ve had an idea of I already knew what topic I was going to write about. And then I open up Instagram and then I see something that really annoys me or pisses me off or makes me sad or like insert emotion here and then I’m like, I, I’m like, it’s like I’m stifled.

Like I’m not even in the mood anymore and I think this happens. You’ll have to tell me. But I think this happens to a lot of people. Um, whenever I’ve mentioned this in the past, they’re like, oh, me too. After a while though of me doing this, like where I learned, okay. What I, what’s important for me is that I write in the morning before I’m infiltrated with the, the business, with Slack, with, social media, anything else that I, the news, anything that I see. So that was important to me.

I started doing that and started like making this more of a habit. And after a while I noticed something really interesting. I started actually waking up with ideas. Like it became such a habit that now I would like, my little eyes would open up and I’d be like. Literally, I would think of a moment or a story for me, everything’s always like story oriented, so I would always like think of a little story and I then use that as my jumping off point.

If you have an idea or a little moment or story you wanna write about, just start writing. Don’t think, don’t sit down and be like, I have this thing I wanna write about, but what’s the, like, what’s the whole story? What’s the arc? What’s the point? Where is it going? What are the tips?

My best advice is that you sit down and you start to let it flow. Like my best writing advice is just let it flow. So I will, like the other day, I had this, I just had this like memory when I woke up of my mom banning me from using the word annoying. And I don’t know why this popped into my mind. I, I hadn’t, nothing had happened yet.

This popped into my mind and I was like, but that’s like a two second story. It’s a boring story probably for most people, and I don’t really know where it’s going. Like, what’s the point? What do I wanna tell after it? So I just literally started writing the story. Like when I was 13, I went on the only vacation I ever went on with my mom, and she banned me like eight days into a 10 day trip she banned me from saying the word annoying, and this became like a family thing and.

I just wrote it and then I was like, well, actually that reminds me of like this other day I saw this TV show and then I started writing about that, and then I started seeing the connection between the two where, there was this part of me that very rightfully was annoyed both as a 13-year-old I was a very abused, uh, kid that was going through like a very, uh, like living in a really dysfunctional and abusive situation. So I had a lot to be annoyed about, just like after my, both my parents died and like my mom being killed in the way she was. I have a lot to be annoyed about that, like annoyed part of me has been a big part of me for many years now.

I can also feel myself moving away from that part and that’s part of what was bothering me about seeing this woman in the reality show who was still in that like so annoyed phase, was that I could simultaneously relate and wanted to like push myself away from it. I didn’t, I don’t wanna be associated with that anymore. It was almost like I was seeing myself through her, right? So as I was literally writing about it, I was connecting the dots.

Maybe this is the worst writing advice that anyone will ever give you. I don’t know. I have no idea if like the writing gurus would tell you, this is the way to do it. This is a way that’s worked for me as somebody who overthinks gets in my head, judges myself, is worried that this doesn’t make sense, is worried that no one cares.

That has been you in the past. Try what I’m saying, like don’t judge it. Don’t think it, you don’t need to have it all worked out. Sit down, start writing about something and it maybe this is something that never sees the light of day. That’s fine too. I have tons of Substack drafts that won’t probably ever get published. That’s fine.

But get in the practice of not knowing, of being open and being playful, remember going back to that mindset that you’re there to see how this goes and see what comes of it.

In order to balance this though with our like commitment to consistency, like say you, you are committed to posting once a week, which it doesn’t have to be that frequency, but if it is, I also like to keep an idea bank for when I feel less inspired. And so I’ll read you a couple of things actually that I have on my phone just so you can like see an example of how formed and unformed these ideas are.

Some of these are funny. Uh, okay, so I have one on here. I actually can’t wait to write about this, but I have one on here called de optimizing my life, um, which is really interesting ’cause I can be like ultra optimizer and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I’ve ac I feel like I’ve actually been in a process of like de optimizing myself.

I have another one that’s like, business is like a relationship. It’s not always going to be rainbows and butterflies or super romantic and fun. It can be boring boring’s, okay? It can be your job. You need to develop yourself outside of work. That’s one of my notes.I have another one called How to Spend Less Time Online in 2026. Things that I’ve stopped doing, a list of things that I’ve stopped doing, like just random. So again, maybe these things will not become something. Maybe they will, but it’s great on days when I do sit down and I’m like, I don’t have anything fresh, like no childhood wound to write about today. I will often look at this list and be like, okay, I’ll write about one of these.

If I could give you like my biggest secret tip thing that you need must stop what you’re doing and pay attention to what I’m saying. It is that you need to write a bank of essays that are at least finished again, not perfect, but like you’d be willing to send, have a couple banked up and scheduled because I learned this tip from Sarah Fay on Substack who teaches people how to grow and build like Substack.

Um, she was saying that you need to have a bunch lined up and ready to go. Like if you just write them like one at a time, for example, and you write like this week’s Substack, then no one reads it or no one left a comment and now you’ll talk yourself out of sending next week’s Substack.

If you’ve written like three and now you have those loaded to go and every week now you’re committed to writing once you’re kind of like building up that runway and like the bank of like you’re writing in the future, essentially. You are, you are hard wiring the consistency that we talked about, so you’re making sure that you’re showing up regardless of how this week’s post goes.

And honestly, I think this is fantastic advice for any medium if this is for your podcast. If you wanna grow on Instagram, you have to create the content and bank it before you let the world tell you how it went, because otherwise you’re going to, you’re going to let its performance dictate your consistency in the future, and that we, we have to show up regardless of how it goes.

If you have a podcast or something similar, we set up my podcast there as an RSS feed, which essentially means that every single time my podcast, , gets. Produced, like a new episode comes out, it automatically populates on Substack as, uh, a post essentially.

So it’s like the post itself is a, the show notes and then has like an embedded audio of the episode itself. The cool thing about Substack, , from this perspective, if you’re like a podcaster, Substack, or want to be. That people can listen to slash download your podcast in Substack itself, like you’re not, you can link of course to like Apple and Spotify and send them elsewhere, but it’s pretty cool that they can actually just listen within the app.

And we are getting additional podcast downloads there. A couple months ago, I’d asked the team, like, by the way, are we counting like what we’re seeing on Substack and even like platforms like YouTube, for example. So it’s, it’s, it’s interesting, like, I’m not saying it’s huge. We’re not hitting blockbuster numbers on, Substack, but this kind of goes back to my earlier tip when people ask me like, should I share my current newsletter there for right now?

Like, I don’t have the capacity to add on something new. I’m like, yeah, go for it. Like if you’re already producing a podcast. Why not put it out to, obviously on YouTube as an audio thing, why not put it on Substack? Like people are hanging out there and they’re consuming content in that way.

The next strategy I’ve adopted is, you know, leaning into Substack notes. So again, Substack notes are kind of like their version of like Twitter posts or Facebook posts. And the little system that we have going as a team is that after I’ve recorded a podcast episode, and then that podcast episode’s going to become a post or after I’ve written a native Substack post, like a direct for Substack post.

Michelle on our team takes that post and pops it into a custom GPT. We have, uh, we were able to get this custom GPT through my friend Gemma Bonum Carter, she started this program called AI All Stars that will build out these like different custom gpt for you and one of them can write podcast show notes, which has been such a huge, huge lift for us.

I’ve shared here many times my thoughts on AI for particularly for the purposes of like creating original content and how I think it’s like, at least for me, destroying my brain, it was destroying my brain and like really squashing my creativity.

So by doing this system, this is really helping me to be able to focus on what I’m there for, which is the writing, right? Like, ’cause if the original piece is good enough, like if my podcast is good enough or my original writing is good enough, then we can take that and we can churn out the Substack notes using the custom GPT trained to write like me and is literally taking my voice and my words and turning it into a Substack note.

A few times a week, I also sit down and I’ll write a couple of organic, Substack notes just to see how they go. It’s a, it is 100% a place where, or like a medium where you have to take this like open mindset. I. Write a lot of them, they get zero traction, literally zero. No one will even like it or comment on it.

Then I get others that will take off a little bit. So it’s really interesting the faster you can kind of get into that, like, oh yeah, it’s just interesting. Like it’s just data, it’s just feedback. It’s interesting, there could be so many reasons why this thing didn’t do well. All the way down to your hook was no good.

Uh, there, you didn’t ask anybody to say anything. To, for whatever reason, like an algorithm didn’t show it to someone. Like there’s just so many reasons why. So I don’t really spend any time trying to figure that out. I kind of just like keep going, to be honest. I just keep practicing it.

Last but not least, a strategy I would employ from relatively the beginning is utilizing referrals and recommendations. Both like using the actual tools that Substack as an app gives you, but also some of like the organic strategies that I’ll tell you about in a sec.

So Substack itself has this recommendation tool very similar to what Kit also has for our newsletters, where people can recommend other Substack to people so that when, for example, if you join my Substack, after you subscribe, my Substack is free.

And so like you just join it. You put in your email, you put in your name. And you join my Substack, it will then automatically prompt you to ask if you want to join the Substack of those that I recommend. And so these are Substack that I read that I like or that I think you will like based on kind of my idea of who’s probably reading my Substack.

And I send traffic that way, right? So, and vice versa I have been, uh, fortunate enough that a number of people have now recommended my Substack, so that when people are signing up for their Substack, it’s then encouraging people to sign up for mine. Now you can let this happen organically of course, and that is great.

It will also take longer. You can also reach out to people and straight up ask, right? So there have been a number of people whose Substack I read and, and really like and admire. And I know that our audiences are nice like crossover shoulder audiences where their people also would probably enjoy my content, but I’m not, I’m not like competing on the same turf, right?

So I have directly reached out to those Substack and said, Hey, would you mind recommending my Substack? I recommend yours. I just wrote to someone the other day and I was like, I’ve already sent you like a hundred subscribers for yours, so clearly my people like your stuff.

I think your people would like my stuff. Would you consider recommending my Substack? So you can do that. Yeah, and you can also reach out to people, um, more so from like, uh, you know, recommendations and referrals in their actual posts. So maybe you could ask people like, Hey, would you be willing to link to my, I wrote like something similar that I think your audience would like, would you link to it in your next post?

Um, and Substack also now allows cross posting. So two people, two different Substack who have two different Substack can write a post together. That post can appear on both of their feeds. Kind of similar to what we can do in podcasting where you can like cross post to each other’s and so that’s a great like cross pollination audience growth strategy that you can get into.

Obviously whenever it comes to collaborations and like these kinds of things, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. One is that you have to be careful like that the people that you’re reaching out to. Are not currently at a very different stage than you are, right? So if you’re reaching out to someone who has a million Substack subscribers and you have 11, they’re gonna be like, I don’t really understand how this is beneficial to me.

But I do think there’s so much like, um, I don’t know, like there’s like categories and tier as you’re working your way up of like there are people there who have a thousand subscribers, for example. Who their subscriber based is very engaged. Like we, it doesn’t have to be that this person has a million people.

So I have reached out to a lot of people who have 500 subscribers, a thousand subscribers, like something still within this realm. 5,000, maybe even 10,000, because I’m like, well, I have an audience outside of this. So I can still, like, I think I have, I have the confidence that I will like send people here and that I will build this up eventually.

But I have reached out to people kind of in those tears. I’m not reaching out to like world’s number one sub stacker right now. in being like, if you recommend mine, I’ll recommend yours. Like pretending like that’s an equal favor, right? So I think that’s where a lot of times people will say like, oh, I’ve tried that and it hasn’t worked, and I’m like have you though, like, have you tried it this way? Because I get a lot of these, you know, for myself for asking to be in my newsletter or something like this, and they have like a thousand subscribe. It’s just not the same thing, unfortunately. Right. And so that’s, this is business and it’s just the way that it goes.

I’m sure too that if you looked around, there are a lot of people like within your community and your peers and colleagues who are already even on Substack and like that would be a great like coming up together strategy to be like, Hey, you wanna write this like cross post? We can start doing this together.

One of the things that you, like, you, you might have a mindset going into, or like an assumption going into Substack because you’ve been so, like badly tortured and abused by other social media platforms that like Substack only rewards the people who are already famous. Substack is actually quite different in this respect.

So Substack actually I think is one of the only platforms I’ve seen that like, I feel like people have like equal opportunity to be found. Like I see a lot of people’s, um, individual Substack posts take off who have like, hardly any subscribers, but a single post will go crazy and then that brings them in this like big influx of subscribers.

It just, it feels a lot different to me. It feels like when someone’s writing is actually very good or the message really resonates with people in particular, like, again, not everybody has to be like Joan Didion, like they’re not all like the best writers there, but their message maybe lands really, really well.

I’ve, I have seen firsthand these, these take off and really lead to a lot of growth. I’ve also seen firsthand people make like one note, remember those, those little, little pieces you can post on Substack. I’ve seen like one note send hundreds or even thousands of subscribers somebody’s way.

So if you’re there, but remember, like if you make a note. And then people click over to your Substack if you haven’t been showing up there consistently. If you’re not writing, if your writing is unclear, you’re like, you’re writing about cows one week and then like environment the next week, and then like three Instagram strategies the next week, like, what’s your deal?

If it’s not clear when they get there and they don’t understand like, oh yeah, this is for like, they see themselves and they’re like, oh, this is for me. This is a place. I wanna hang out, this is a place that will welcome me and be helpful to me. Then they’re gonna bounce. Right? So it’s almost like you have to be prepared for that moment.

I wish more people thought about it that way instead of like, once I get really big, then I will do those things. And it’s like, no. It’s almost like you have to be, it’s like dress rehearsal for when that happens. And so you showing up every week, becoming a better writer, working on your clarity. Like on your actual page and your header or your bout page or something like this, um, on your topics, your titling getting better and better at that is like preparing you for that moment when all that traffic comes in and all of a sudden you do have subscribers.

That was really my, you know, best way of growing to a thousand subscribers on Substack So far. I, I really don’t think it’s that much more complicated than that. I’d be so curious to hear from you, um, like what questions you have about Substack, what else you wanna know? Are you encouraged to try it after this?

I’m so curious. Like I said, I’ll leave you a link down below for my Substack called Beyond Business absolutely free. But I would love for you to come over and say hi there. And once you’ve listened to this episode, obviously you should come say hi there, but you can also DM me on Instagram at sam vander wielen. Let me know how this episode landed with you, whether you liked it, what questions you have, and even whether you want me to do another Substack episode, maybe on a different topic or angle of Substack.

With that, thank you so much for listening. I can’t wait to chat with you next week. See you soon.

  Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.