Tricking the Substack system is not a solid strategy

Not for longterm, sustainable growth, anyway.

When I first joined Substack, someone who had a lot of subscribers already and was earning good money from it told me that if they went a while without posting, they lost less paid subscribers. They were laughing, as they said it.

I felt a bit sad that this had become a strategy: just don’t remind people that you exist and they will forget to stop supporting you. It’s complicated, isn’t it? But on the whole, I think we want our writing to gain us new paid subscribers, rather than make them leave.

In fact, last week I did an experiment to see if posting one Substack essay a day, Monday to Friday, would have an impact on my subscribers - free and paid. I did lose a few free subscribers (maybe they got bored of seeing the paywall) but I gained many more paid.

I decided that I would prefer to be gaining in income than in readers, and so I was pleased with this result. Obviously, I’d love it everyone stayed around and eventually, decided to pay a pretty tiny amount to read my weekday essays. But I’ll take what I get.

What I saw was that the more I put in to my Substack, the more I gained. And that felt good. Because meanwhile, there have been some strange tips floating around about ways to trick the Substack system. And I don’t think that’s a great longterm strategy.

How people (including me) are tricking the Substack system

I wrote in this piece about how Substack is essentially a social media platform, with an algorithm that sends more traffic your way if you’ve created something that resonates or gets people engaging. And with that, comes visible markers of ‘success’.

So, if you look at an individual author’s Substack profile - here’s mine - you might be able to see how many free subscribers they have and where they are ranking in the bestsellers’ lists. Some people hide these stats, I don’t.

We are like sheep. So, if we see that everyone is following a particular person, buying a particular product, trying a new exercise regime: we want to give it a go, too. See what all the fuss is about. Even if we try to tell ourselves that we don’t care about it.

Therefore, if we see that someone has 500,000 readers on Substack, we’re interested. We assume they have something good to say. We assume they are doing something right. We see a light emanating from their reader stats: a light of dazzling success.

If, however, we see that someone has 25 subscribers, we might be less interested. That’s not to say you should quit now, if you have 25 (or less) subscribers - you definitely shouldn’t, keep going - but it is a truth of human nature that:

We almost always follow the crowd.

So, people want those stats to look good, on their author profile. And when I accidentally made mine look better, I got a taste of how it would feel to shoot right up and become something of a dazzling success myself.