How To Get Big On Substack

From a person who is medium on substack

1 Introduction

Like a snail or the economy of Greece, when I first started my substack, growth was slow. I was in high school, I wrote mostly mediocre articles about utilitarianism—and occasionally about atheism. I started it at the end of January, but by May 6, I had only 28 subscribers. For a while, I was getting about a new subscriber per day—then two, then three, and now about ten.

I’m not a hugely successful substacker. I don’t have the number of subscribers of Scott Alexander or Richard Hanania, for instance, but I do decently well. I currently make about 10,000 dollars a year from substack, and am on track to be able to make a living if growth keeps up at the current rate.

Given my decent success, with my substack now being much larger than most substacks are, I thought it would be worth sharing some advice about how to have a successful blog. While a lot of having a successful blog is about being able to write well, that’s not all of it—there are various bits of concrete advice that I’ve picked up over the years that are relevant to growing a blog.