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For years, newsletters were mostly treated as something for writers, journalists and media companies.

I think that view is badly outdated.

If you want to become known for what you know, a newsletter may be one of the most valuable professional assets you can build, whether you’re happily employed, building something on the side, running your own business or already well established in your field.

It gives you something social media alone rarely does: a body of work people can find, spend real time with, subscribe to, and come back to long after you published it.

I started thinking much more seriously about this because of what has been happening on LinkedIn.

People are frustrated. Organic reach has fallen, the feed has changed, and plenty of professionals are wondering whether the time they’ve invested there still produces the same return.

I’m one of them. My own LinkedIn reach has changed, the feed has changed, and there are days when another batch of suspiciously polished AI wisdom makes me want to close the app too.

And I’m not imagining the decline in reach. One major independent LinkedIn study found organic reach on personal profiles dropped 47% in just seven months.

Why newsletters are my favorite way to build both a personal brand and a business

If you think newsletters are dying because everybody is making video now, the numbers suggest otherwise.

Substack crossed 5 million paid subscriptions last year. On beehiiv, paid-subscription revenue grew 138% in 2025. These are obviously individual platform numbers, not the entire newsletter industry, but this is not a format quietly disappearing.

And if your goal is to become known for what you know, I think newsletters have some advantages that are difficult to beat.

First, serious buyers actually read this stuff. The latest Edelman–LinkedIn research found that roughly two-thirds of management-level buyers spend more than an hour a week consuming thought leadership, and more than half use it when evaluating vendors.

That matters to me. Short-form video can be fantastic for attention, but if someone is considering hiring you, promoting you, referring you, or trusting you with a substantial piece of business, an article gives you room to show how you actually think.

Second, good long-form content can keep working for years. I still get found through articles I wrote years ago. And now there’s AI search on top of traditional search. One large 2026 study found LinkedIn among the most frequently cited domains in its AI-search dataset, with long-form LinkedIn articles accounting for the largest share of LinkedIn content cited.

Third, you’re accumulating intellectual property. Article by article, you’re building a body of work that can eventually become a framework, keynote, workshop, product, or even a book. Newsletter-led businesses themselves have sold for tens of millions, and there are writers who have had agents and publishers discover book ideas through their newsletters.

And finally, I can turn one substantial article into LinkedIn posts, Notes, carousels, video scripts, Reels or podcast topics. I’d much rather start with the deepest version of an idea and work backwards.

I’ve never had someone tell me, “I found that 60-second video you made six years ago and now I want to hire you.”

I have had that happen with old articles.

So when my LinkedIn reach started dropping, I already knew I wanted another newsletter.

The question was where to build it.

And that’s what sent me back to Substack.

Why I gave Substack another look

I’ve invested eight years into LinkedIn, building more than 78,000 followers and 38,000+ newsletter subscribers. So when my reach drops, I pay attention.

Since I rely heavily on LinkedIn for client acquisition for my business, Unignorable Brands, the LinkedIn reach decline has pushed me to rethink my strategy here and also to say I need to diversify my marketing channels more.

So I decided to give Substack a try. This is my second time. Last year, I set up a publication but left because I didn’t see the economical value. Honestly, it felt like a writer’s platform, not a business one.

But helping an energy executive build a newsletter there earlier this year changed my mind. So in August, I returned and spent a month actively publishing on Substack.

I expected to study the platform. I didn’t expect to like it this much.

Within a month, I’d had more than 50 one-on-one conversations. People were unusually accessible. I was meeting writers, consultants and professionals I almost certainly wouldn’t have met otherwise, and frankly, I was having a ridiculous amount of fun.

I’m very glad I came to Substack.

LinkedIn helps people find you. Substack helps them know you.

I think people are making a category mistake. LinkedIn and Substack increasingly look like competitors. Both have feeds. Both have long-form publishing. Both have video, comments, followers and some version of a creator economy. But they came from completely different places.

LinkedIn is a professional networking site that expanded into media. Substack started as a publishing platform and has since added Notes, video, Chat, recommendations, communities and other social features.

There’s overlap, obviously. But people still use them for very different reasons.

LinkedIn is where people look for jobs, employees, clients, consultants, vendors, speakers, partners and professional opportunities.

Substack is built much more around writers, readers, subscribers, publications and direct relationships with an audience.

So when someone says they’re leaving LinkedIn for Substack because their reach dropped, I’m not convinced they’re replacing one platform with another. They may be giving up one useful tool because another one currently feels better.

As one woman put it while preparing her return to LinkedIn:

“Substack is nice and cozy, but I need both.”

After a month of using both seriously, that’s where I’m landing too.

I don’t think I need to choose between them, because I’m asking them to do different jobs.

And once I started looking at newsletters that way, I realized Substack and LinkedIn are only part of a much bigger story. Medium, Kit, beehiiv, Ghost and others have all built different versions of the same basic opportunity: helping people publish, build an audience and potentially make money from it.

So before getting into the actual economics, it’s worth looking at what each of these platforms is really built to do.

Different newsletter platforms for different problems

Before Substack, there was Medium.

Medium launched in 2012 and introduced its Partner Program in 2017, the same year Substack was founded. But the two went in very different directions.

Medium pays writers from its overall membership model based on how paying members interact with their work. Substack made the relationship much more direct: readers subscribe to an individual publication, the creator sets the price, and the subscriber list can be exported.

Since then, the category has gotten a lot more crowded.

LinkedIn layered newsletters onto an enormous professional network.

Kit grew from email marketing into a much broader creator-business platform.

beehiiv has leaned heavily into newsletter growth and monetization.

Ghost has focused more on independent publishing, ownership and control.

They all involve newsletters, but they’re not really built for the same job.

And that matters, because choosing where to publish depends a lot less on which platform is “best” and a lot more on what you actually want your newsletter to do.

I don’t think most people need to choose one platform and swear allegiance to it. If professional discovery matters, LinkedIn is hard to ignore. If you want a deeper publishing relationship and direct subscriber emails, Substack becomes much more interesting. And if you’re running a business, an email platform such as Kit can sit underneath both.

The right question isn’t “Which platform wins?” It’s “What job do I need each platform to do?”

What Substack gets very right.

Before I get into the economics, I want to give Substack a lot of credit.

The platform itself is extremely well designed.

I’m fairly technical, so your mileage may vary, but I found the backend easy to figure out. I could realistically start from nothing and have a personalized publication up and running in about an hour, with branding, navigation, email delivery, subscriber management and payments already built in.

The reporting is also much more substantial than I expected. You can track subscribers, paid subscribers, revenue and individual post performance, and connect Google Analytics if you want deeper traffic and conversion data.

And the barrier to entry is remarkably low. Substack is free to start and run; it makes its money when you turn on paid subscriptions and takes 10% of that revenue.

But the biggest positive surprise for me wasn’t the technology.

It was how social the place is.

Publishing and distribution live together. There are long-form posts, Notes, comments, restacks, recommendations, messaging and collaborations, so you’re not necessarily publishing an article and then leaving the platform to figure out how anybody will find it.

That isn’t just my impression. Substack says more than 30% of paid subscriptions now originate within its network, and more than one million posts are discovered by potential subscribers in the app every day.

In my first month, I’ve also had more than 50 one-on-one conversations with people I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise. People have been remarkably accessible.

And then there’s the feature I probably value most:

I can export my subscriber email list.

That may sound boring compared with Notes and paid subscriptions, but from a business perspective it’s huge. Substack lets publishers download their subscriber data as a CSV, including email addresses, That gives you a much more portable subscriber relationship than you get from most social-platform followers..

I’ve spent years building audiences where an algorithm still determines whether I can reach the people who chose to follow me. An exportable email list gives me something much more portable.

So yes, I understand why people love Substack.

I’m very glad I came back.

What I became skeptical about wasn’t the newsletter or even the platform.

It was the economics of making the paid subscription itself the business.

And that’s where I started doing the math.

Same content. Wildly different economics.

This was the part I really wanted to understand when I came back to Substack.

Because the paid newsletter model sounds pretty great.

You write. People pay you to read it. Enough people pay, and suddenly you’ve created recurring revenue around your ideas.

Substack’s default pledge pricing is $8 a month or $80 a year, so rather than cherry-picking an unusually low price, I’m going to use $8 as our baseline. (Substack FAQ)

Start with one $8 monthly subscriber.

Substack takes 10% of every paid transaction. For a standard credit-card payment, Stripe currently charges 2.9% plus 30 cents, plus a 0.5% recurring billing fee. (Substack)

That leaves roughly $6.63 from an $8 subscription, before taxes, refunds, currency conversion or anything else.

So roughly:

At 1,000 paying subscribers, that’s real money.

But the number I became much more interested in was how many people you need before you ever get to 1,000 paying subscribers.

Substack says it typically sees somewhere around 5–10% of free subscribers convert to paid, with 10% being a good target.

So 100 paid subscribers may mean building an audience of roughly 1,000–2,000 free subscribers first.

500 paid may mean 5,000–10,000.

And 1,000 paid may mean 10,000–20,000.

That’s when I stopped looking at the $8 subscription and started looking at the acquisition.

Because convincing someone to pay $8 is only one part of the job.

First you have to find thousands of people.

And once I started asking successful Substack writers how long that part had actually taken, the economics got a lot more interesting.

The hidden cost of doing business on Substack

The fees surprised me.

The time surprised me much more.

When I asked successful Substack writers how many hours they spent running and growing their publications each week, several had to stop and think about what I meant.

Did I mean the writing?

What about Notes, comments, DMs, restacks, communities, calls and collaborations?

A lot of that apparently didn’t count.

Several essentially told me, “I don’t count that. That’s leisure time.”

I found that fascinating because I would count it.

Writing the newsletter itself is only one part of running a publication. There’s the research, drafting and editing, but also the work involved in getting discovered, talking to readers, collaborating with other writers and keeping people interested once they subscribe.

So I started asking another question:

How long did it actually take you to build the audience?

Among the writers I spoke with, the answer was consistently measured in years.

Some had built their audiences largely on Substack.

Others had arrived with years of work behind them already: blogs, Medium, Twitter, ghostwriting, professional writing, existing email lists or audiences built somewhere else.

Which means a Substack publication may be two years old while the audience, reputation and writing experience behind it are much older.

I started noticing the same thing in the growth articles I saw.

One of the most common customer-acquisition posts here is some version of:

“How I grew my Substack to X subscribers in X months.”

Usually with a very impressive screenshot.

I understand why. If you sell growth advice, demonstrating growth is excellent marketing.

But in every example I personally checked, there was a story before Substack.

Maybe the publication really did reach 10,000 subscribers in 18 months. But the writer may also have entered those 18 months with years of writing experience, an existing email list, a network, an audience or all four.

The number can be accurate while still leaving a brand-new creator with the wrong impression about what starting from zero actually looks like.

So what does that do to the math?

Take 100 paid subscribers at $8 a month.

After the basic Substack and Stripe fees we calculated earlier, that produces roughly $7,954 a year before taxes and other expenses.

Now suppose running and growing the publication takes 20 hours a week.

If you attribute those hours to the publication, that’s about $7.65 an hour in revenue after the basic platform and payment fees.

At 30 hours a week, it’s about $5.10.

At 40 hours, about $3.82.

And even that calculation leaves out whatever acquisition work happened before those 100 paid subscribers existed.

For perspective, 20 hours a week for three years is 3,120 hours.

Thirty hours is 4,680.

I’m not suggesting every successful Substack writer spends that amount of time, or that every hour someone spent building an audience years ago should now be charged against their Substack income.

But time is still an input, and I was surprised by how rarely it appeared in conversations about revenue.

The economics also improve substantially at scale.

At 500 paid subscribers at the same $8 price, you’re around $39,768 a year after those same basic fees.

At 1,000, around $79,536.

That’s real money.

What became clear to me was that I was evaluating the business differently from many of the people I was talking to.

I was asking: What did this earn relative to the time required to build and run it?

Some of them were asking something closer to: Am I getting paid to spend my time doing something I genuinely enjoy?

Those are not the same calculation.

When the subscription model makes perfect sense

The business math I just laid out doesn’t apply equally to everyone on Substack.

For some people, writing is the business.

They’re full-time writers, journalists, authors, or people who genuinely want to spend most of their working life writing and interacting with readers. Several of the people I spoke with basically told me, “I could do this all day.” They love the writing, the conversations and the community, and they don’t even count much of that time as work.

In that case, calculating every hour the way I did above may not be especially useful.

If subscriptions allow you to make a living doing exactly what you want to spend your days doing, fantastic. The publication is the product.

But for most of us, the newsletter is doing a different job.

If you’re employed, consulting, coaching, running a company, or building something on the side, you probably don’t want your newsletter to become another 20-hour-a-week job. You’re using it to build visibility and credibility, yes, but ultimately those things should lead somewhere.

Maybe that’s a better job, promotion or speaking opportunity.

But for most of the people I work with, and in the way I teach newsletters, the bigger goal is to create a gateway into the rest of your business.

Consulting. Coaching. Cohorts. Digital products. Books. Workshops. Advisory work. Whatever sits behind the newsletter.

The newsletter helps the right people discover you, understand what you know, trust your thinking and eventually move toward something else you offer.

That changes the math considerably.

If a newsletter takes 20 hours a week and generates $500 a month in subscription revenue, a professional writer may be perfectly happy with that because they love spending those 20 hours writing.

But if you’re a consultant, those same hours need to help create business beyond the subscription itself.

One $5,000 consulting engagement generated by an article may be worth roughly the same revenue as 63 people paying $8 a month for a year after the basic fees we calculated earlier.

So for most non-writers, I don’t think the question should be:

How many paid subscribers can I get?

It should be:

What is this newsletter helping me build, sell or become known for?

If writing is the product, subscriptions can make perfect sense.

If your expertise, career or business is the product, the newsletter is usually more valuable as the gateway to everything else.

One cultural difference between Substack and LinkedIn

If you’re coming to Substack from LinkedIn or a traditional B2B environment, selling feels very different here.

On LinkedIn, content routinely leads to consulting, coaching, software, services and other relatively high-value purchases.

On Substack, the native transaction is much smaller. An $8 monthly subscription is normal. Free is even more normal.

I’ve met people who proudly told me they’d been reading newsletters for years without ever paying for one. One woman said she read the same publication for several years before finally deciding to “take the plunge” and upgrade. Now that she’d paid for the year, she considered herself pretty much set.

That took some getting used to. 😂

I also got an interesting data point from one of the publications I paid for myself. The publisher had around 120 paid subscribers, roughly 80 of them annual. He told me I was only about the fifth annual subscriber who had purchased without interacting with him first. For most of the others, he estimated it took three to six months of engagement before they upgraded.

That’s one publication, not a study. But it lined up with what I was seeing elsewhere: people here can be very cautious buyers, even at fairly low price points.

Substack’s own rules reinforce the culture. Its Content Guidelines say the platform is intended for editorial content rather than conventional email marketing, and publications can’t exist primarily to advertise outside products or push promotions.

So if you come over from LinkedIn expecting to immediately turn readers into $300 calls, $1,500 cohorts or $5,000 consulting clients, I’d be careful.

One writer I spoke with gave me a better way to think about it. I’d said maybe the goal isn’t always to “grow your Substack.” Maybe it’s to decide what job Substack is supposed to do inside whatever you’re building.

His answer was basically: exactly.

That’s where I’ve landed too.

For me, Substack is strongest at discovery, relationships and depth. I want the right people to find my thinking, spend more time with it and know there’s a larger business behind the newsletter if they ever want to go further.

What happened when I tried it myself?

After all that analysis, I also wanted to see what happened when I actually tried to build on Substack myself.

When I came back in August, I had 48 subscribers on the platform. I wasn’t starting from zero visibility, obviously. I already had a large LinkedIn audience and years of publishing behind me, which is exactly the kind of context I wish more growth stories disclosed.

Within my first month, I was at more than 200 subscribers, had generated more than 6,000 views, picked up five paid subscribers, and had more than 50 one-on-one conversations.

I was genuinely happy with that.

The five paid subscriptions were nice, but they weren’t the most valuable result.

The conversations were.

Substack introduced me to people I probably would never have met on LinkedIn. Notes helped me get discovered. The longer articles gave people a much better sense of how I think. And because messaging is so easy, a reader could turn into an actual conversation very quickly.

That is already useful to my business.

So after a month, I’m not looking at Substack and thinking, How do I turn five paid subscribers into 500 as fast as possible?

I’m thinking, How do I keep using this to meet the right people, build a body of work, deepen relationships and create opportunities around the business I already have?

If the paid subscriptions grow too, great.

But they’re a bonus.

The bigger win for me is that I now have another place to build an audience and a direct relationship around my ideas without giving up LinkedIn.

That is much closer to what I was actually looking for in the first place.

I still think everyone needs a newsletter

After all the math, conversations and digging around, I’m actually more convinced about newsletters than I was when I started this experiment.

Just not necessarily about paid newsletters.

Those are two different things.

If writing is your business, paid subscriptions may be exactly the model you want.

But for most professionals, I think the bigger value is everything around the subscription: visibility, credibility, intellectual property, searchability, relationships and a direct audience you can keep building over time.

A newsletter gives you somewhere to develop what you know in public. It gives potential employers, clients, partners and customers enough material to understand how you think. And unlike another short social post, the work can keep getting discovered years later.

That’s why I’m not leaving LinkedIn for Substack.

I’m using them differently.

LinkedIn helps people find me. Substack helps them know me.

And I still want my email list and business infrastructure underneath both, because I have zero interest in spending another eight years building something entirely at the mercy of one platform.

So if you’re happily employed, consulting, building something on the side, running a company or figuring out what comes next, my argument is the same:

You don’t need to become a professional writer.

You don’t need 10,000 subscribers.

You definitely don’t need to spend 30 hours a week hanging out on Substack.

But I do think you should be building a body of work around what you know.

A newsletter is still one of the smartest ways I know to do that.

And if enough people are interested, I’m considering doing a live masterclass showing exactly how I’d set one up: which platform to choose, what to write about, how to structure it, and how to use it to build visibility and eventually lead people toward whatever you actually want to sell or become known for.

Because the hardest part probably isn’t starting a newsletter anymore.

It’s deciding what job you want it to do for you.

And underneath both, I’m continuing to build assets and income streams that give me more control over what happens next.

Which, really, is the whole idea behind the new brand I’ve been building, FU Money Plan.

You don’t wait until you lose the client, the job disappears or the algorithm stops working to start building options. You build them while things are still going well.

If this has you thinking less about “which platform should I use?” and more about what you actually want your work, visibility and income to lead to, that’s exactly what we’re working through in my next FU Money Plan cohort, starting September 22.

We’ll spend four live weeks figuring out what you’re building toward, which income and opportunity paths make sense for you, and what deserves your time next.

And if newsletters are the part you want to learn more about, follow me on Substack and here on LinkedIn. I have a feeling I’m going to have a lot more to say about this experiment.

If you’re already running a business and want help becoming better known for what you do, you can also find my advisory work at UnignorableBrands.co.

If you’re figuring out how to turn what you know into more income, recognition, and career options, subscribe to FU Money Plan

Subscribe now

It started with a few whispers.

Substack.

I’d hear the name here and there, usually from writers, and I’ll admit I never paid much attention. My impression was that it was basically like Medium, a place for professional writers to write very writerly things for other writers.

Then I started hearing about it more often.

People I followed on LinkedIn would post something and say they’d written the full article on Substack. Writers I remembered from Medium were suddenly publishing there. Eventually curiosity got the better of me, so I wandered over to see what everyone was talking about.

That’s when I discovered something mildly ridiculous.

I already had a Substack account.

Since 2020.

Apparently Past Krista had arrived at the frontier years earlier, looked around, and quietly gone home without leaving Present Krista any useful instructions.

I no longer had access to the account, and Substack wasn’t able to help me recover it, so I started over. And because apparently I learned nothing from the first incident, I created two accounts this time for security.

Excellent start.

Then I entered the Wild West

I had no idea what I was looking at.

Notes. Publications. Restacks. Chats. Recommendations. Writers recommending writers. Notes that seemed to be doing extraordinarily well for reasons I couldn’t begin to explain.

And then there was my feed.

For reasons known only to the algorithm, Substack seemed convinced I was deeply interested in perimenopause, divorce, men behaving badly, and women with several cats rebuilding their lives.

To be fair, maybe the algorithm knows me better than I’d like to admit.

Professionally, though, I was confused.

I’m a marketer and entrepreneur who writes. I care about business models, money, positioning, work, creators, audiences, professional identity, and why smart people sometimes build businesses they eventually realize they don’t want.

So I figured I needed some help understanding this strange new land.

I joined a cohort run by a couple of genuinely lovely people who knew Substack well. Unfortunately, it also made something clear pretty quickly: I wasn’t really their target audience.

Most of the conversation revolved around becoming a full-time writer, growing through the writer community, recommending one another, commenting on each other’s work, and participating heavily in the Substack ecosystem.

There’s nothing wrong with that. It just wasn’t what I was trying to build.

Some of the growth advice also felt uncomfortably close to the engagement-pod and follow-for-follow behavior I’d spent years avoiding on LinkedIn.

So I finished the experience thinking I’d either have to figure Substack out my own way, or accept that maybe it wasn’t for me.

Naturally, I kept coming back.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn was testing my patience

LinkedIn has been incredibly good to me.

I’ve found clients there, built relationships around the world, grown a large audience, and had opportunities I never would have had otherwise.

I’m not leaving.

But by 2025, reach had dropped dramatically, the platform was changing, and I was becoming much more aware of something I had always known intellectually:

I could spend years building an audience there and still own none of it.

LinkedIn owns the platform. LinkedIn controls distribution. LinkedIn can change the rules whenever it wants.

At one point I was frustrated enough that I seriously considered walking away altogether, but abandoning an audience I had spent years building would have been ridiculous.

So instead, I started paying closer attention to what was happening elsewhere.

And Substack kept giving me reasons to look again.

Paid subscriptions.

Your own publication.

Chats and community features.

A direct relationship with readers.

And then I discovered the feature that really got my attention:

You can download your subscriber list.

You can leave.

That was huge for me.

After years of thinking about professional equity, audience ownership, platform dependence, and how much of our careers we build on land that belongs to someone else, Substack suddenly made more sense.

Maybe this wasn’t Medium 2.0 after all.

Maybe everyone really was loading up their wagons and heading west because somebody had heard there was gold out there.

So eventually, I packed mine too.

So where exactly is the gold?

For me, it starts with ownership.

I’ve spent years building an audience on LinkedIn, and I’m extremely grateful for it. But if LinkedIn disappeared tomorrow, I couldn’t exactly pack up my followers and take them with me.

On Substack, if someone subscribes to my publication, I have their email address. I can export the list. If one day I decide Substack has completely lost its mind, I can pack up the wagon again and leave.

That changes the relationship.

Then there’s the business model.

This was probably the biggest reason I started noticing so many writers migrating from Medium.

Medium has its own ecosystem and its own model for paying writers.

Substack makes it incredibly easy to create your own publication and charge readers directly.

No pitching an editor.

No submitting an article and waiting to see whether somebody wants it.

No asking permission to start.

You could wake up tomorrow, decide you’re now the proud publisher of The Weekly Potato, and have subscribers by lunchtime.

I find that kind of incredible.

And you don’t have to become a full-time paid newsletter writer for any of this to be useful.

I already have a business.

What interests me is having a place where my writing, audience, community, products, and business can actually connect.

That’s where Substack became much more interesting to me than simply “a place for writers.”

LinkedIn and Substack are useful for different reasons

I don’t really see one replacing the other.

LinkedIn is still incredibly good for discovery.

Someone who has never heard of me can come across one of my posts because somebody in their network commented on it. A CEO can find an article. A potential client can look at my profile and immediately understand my background.

And I can do the same with them.

That’s something I didn’t fully appreciate until I came to Substack.

On LinkedIn, I usually know who I’m talking to.

I can see that someone is a founder in London, a consultant in New York, or a marketing director in Singapore. I can see their work history, company, posts, and often whether we know some of the same people.

On Substack, sometimes I click a profile and get a first name, a tiny photo of a dog, and approximately zero additional information.

Who are you?

What do you do?

Are you a Nobel Prize-winning economist?

Are you twelve?

Do you even own that dog?

I have questions.

The anonymity also has a downside.

I’ve already come across things I would never expect to casually stumble across in my LinkedIn feed, including racist content, extremist propaganda, and explicit sexual material.

I’m perfectly capable of reading opinions I disagree with.

But there’s disagreement, and then there’s opening your feed over coffee and wondering how you accidentally wandered into a part of the internet you definitely weren’t looking for.

So no, I’m not declaring Substack the promised land.

The wagon has hit a few potholes.

And then there are Notes

I still don’t understand Notes.

I’ve spent years studying content and distribution. I understand LinkedIn pretty well. I can usually look at a post and make an educated guess about why it traveled.

Notes?

No idea.

I’ll see something like:

Sunday.

Apparently 4,000 people needed to hear that.

Meanwhile, I’ll publish something I spent actual time thinking about and Substack appears to show it to seven people and a squirrel.

Clearly I still have some frontier skills to acquire.

Oddly enough, I kind of enjoy that.

I’m new here.

I don’t have the platform figured out.

And after spending years being the person who supposedly understands LinkedIn, there’s something refreshing about being a beginner again.

What I’m actually here to write about

After eight years of entrepreneurship, 12 revenue streams, six pivots, a few spectacular mistakes, some things that worked far better than expected, and several moments when I wondered what on earth I was doing, I have plenty to talk about.

I’m interested in what happens after the shiny announcement.

What happens when the business you built stops fitting the life you want.

Why talented people can make good money and still feel trapped by what they created.

What happens when a title disappears.

How you turn experience into something you actually own.

How you build recognition without becoming an internet personality.

How you create multiple ways to earn without accidentally creating six different jobs for yourself.

And occasionally, why LinkedIn has 99 problems and somehow keeps finding another one.

I care much more about the messy middle than someone standing at the finish line explaining their perfect five-step formula.

Those formulas usually look a lot cleaner in hindsight.

Who I hope finds me here

Smart, experienced people who are questioning the traditional script.

Maybe you already have a business, but something about it no longer fits.

Maybe you have a great career and want to build something that belongs to you alongside it.

Maybe you’ve been laid off, burned out, retired, scaled back, changed industries, moved countries, raised children, started over, or simply reached the point where you’re asking:

Is this really how I want to spend the next ten years?

Those are the conversations I’m interested in.

I’m still building, experimenting, changing my mind, and occasionally driving the wagon into a ditch myself.

But I’m willing to talk about what happens between the success stories.

The pivots.

The bad bets.

The things I spent money on and regretted.

The things I nearly didn’t do that changed everything.

And the lessons you generally acquire only after paying for them in time, money, ego, or all three.

What you’ll get if you stick around

Free subscribers get my essays and observations on money, work, marketing, reinvention, business models, and how people earn now.

Paid subscribers get closer to what’s actually happening behind the scenes: the numbers, experiments, decisions, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’m changing next.

After eight years, 12 income streams, and six pivots, I’ve accumulated a decent collection of scars.

I might as well make them useful.

So if you just discovered this publication, welcome.

Pull up a chair.

Or climb into the wagon.

Apparently we’re heading west.

There’s a growth trick hiding in plain sight on every platform right now. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

It looks like this. Someone joins a paid growth community. Within weeks, their engagement explodes. Hundreds of comments. Thousands of likes. Then comes the testimonial: “I grew faster in 30 days with this program than in three years on my own.”

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Free subscribers get the stories and ideas. Paid subscribers get the receipts.

The numbers are real. The growth is not.

Here’s the mechanic. Every platform’s algorithm treats early engagement as a quality signal. When a large account comments on your post, the algorithm reads it as an endorsement and shows your post to more people. When fifty members of the same community pile into your comments in the first hour, the algorithm reads momentum and distributes accordingly.

Paid growth communities know this. Membership quietly includes engagement: the leader’s account comments on members’ posts. Members support each other’s content. Everyone’s numbers go up. Everyone’s testimonial writes itself.

I’m not describing anything illegal. I’m describing a pod with a price tag.

Borrowed vs. earned

Let me be precise, because the line matters more than the outrage.

Borrowed distribution is neither new nor bad. A podcast appearance is borrowed distribution. A guest essay is borrowed distribution. Someone respected sharing your work is borrowed distribution. Every recognized name you can think of borrowed reach on the way up.

The question that separates strategy from theater is simple: borrowed from whom?

When you borrow distribution from an audience full of your future clients, borrowing converts. The reach becomes relationships, the relationships become opportunities, and some of those opportunities become revenue.

When you borrow distribution from an audience of people exactly like you — fellow members, fellow aspiring creators, fellow marketers — you get solidarity, and solidarity photographs beautifully. Big numbers. Full comment sections. Warm feelings. And a customer count of zero, because the people cheering for you were never going to buy from you. They’re rooting for you the way classmates root for each other.

That’s the tell I watch for in every “overnight growth” story: the engagement went up. Did the business?

How to spot it in 60 seconds

Next time a post stops you with a suspiciously loud comment section, run two checks.

First, look for the heavyweight. Is there a very large account in the comments? Large accounts routinely engage with each other — reciprocity among peers is normal. But when a large account keeps showing up on much smaller accounts, there’s usually a relationship behind it. Often a paid one: a membership, a cohort, a community where engagement is part of the package.

Second, look for the common denominator. Click through ten of the commenters. Are they all in the same program? Same hashtag, same challenge, same community in their bios? Congratulations — you’ve found the pod. Not a conspiracy. Just classmates applauding classmates.

Neither check makes anyone a villain. But both tell you the numbers you’re envying are rented, and the testimonial you’re about to trust was generated by the machine it’s praising.

Why this matters if you’re the quiet one

If you’re an accomplished expert watching louder people rack up engagement you can’t seem to match, this pattern is half the explanation. You’re comparing your earned numbers to their borrowed ones.

And here’s the part I care about, because I’ve lived the expensive version of the mistake: an audience of the wrong people is worse than a small audience. Years ago I added tens of thousands of connections in a single year. The numbers looked wonderful. That inflated, misaligned network still suppresses my reach today, because the algorithm learned to show my work to people who were never my market. I’m still paying interest on engagement I “won” years ago.

So when you’re tempted by anything that promises fast engagement — a pod, a challenge hashtag, a community that guarantees comments — ask the only question that matters:

Will these people ever buy from me, hire me, invite me, or recommend me?

If yes, borrow away. That’s called marketing.

If no, you’re renting applause. And rented applause doesn’t just cost money. It teaches the algorithm the wrong lesson about who your work is for — a lesson that can take years to unteach.

The slower, boring, compounding alternative

Earned distribution has exactly one growth hack: make things worth showing to strangers, consistently, in a voice that’s unmistakably yours, aimed at the people you actually serve.

It’s slower. It looks worse in screenshots. There’s no testimonial moment where everything explodes overnight.

But every follower means something. Every comment is a potential relationship. And the algorithm slowly learns precisely who your work is for — which means every post you publish starts working harder than the last.

Recognition compounds. Applause just echoes.

Make sure the one you are celebrating is the long-term one; not fleeting.

Subscribe to FU Money Plan. I’m documenting what I’m building in real time: the experiments, numbers, pivots, mistakes, and lessons behind creating independent income without working my life away.

Free subscribers get the stories and ideas. Paid subscribers get the receipts.

Warning: Professional Writers, Please Skip This

A quick disclaimer before we begin: if you are a professional writer, studied literature, or care deeply about prose, rhythm, and the finer points of literary craft, there is an excellent chance this article will irritate you.

I am not a professional writer, and I’m not entirely convinced I’m even a particularly good one. I write the way I think, which tends to be through systems, patterns, contradictions, and blunt observations about how people behave.

So you will find no claim to literary excellence here. What follows is simply one businessperson’s field notes after spending a couple of months wandering around Substack, trying to understand what exactly is happening here.

That has been long enough to see some of the good, quite a bit of the bad, and a few things that are genuinely bizarre.

Consider this less of a serious platform analysis and more of a Sunday wildlife documentary.

Welcome to Substack: A Wildlife Documentary

When I first arrived on Substack, the platform felt enormously promising. There were thoughtful writers, long-form ideas, interesting conversations, and far less of the frantic professional performance I had become accustomed to elsewhere online.

Then I spent more time here and began noticing something.

Substack has species.

There are distinct tribes with their own rituals, incentives, language, mating calls, migration patterns, and preferred methods of attracting subscribers. Once you begin seeing them, you cannot unsee them.

This is not a scientific taxonomy, obviously. It is simply what I have observed so far.

1. The Top Writers Clique

You usually notice this group fairly quickly because they seem to know everyone, and everyone seems to know them.

Many built sizable audiences on places such as Medium or X before becoming active on Substack, so they did not necessarily arrive here as anonymous writers starting from scratch. They brought years of writing practice, established relationships, existing readership, and a finely tuned understanding of what people respond to online.

They are often excellent writers, extraordinarily consistent, disciplined about publishing, and much more experienced at this than the average founder or professional who decided six weeks ago that perhaps they should start a newsletter.

They also tend to support one another. They recommend each other, comment on one another’s work, appear in the same conversations, and naturally create a network effect around their writing.

There is nothing sinister about this. In fact, it is how healthy professional networks work everywhere. The important thing is understanding what you are actually comparing yourself against.

If you run a company, advise clients, manage people, sell services, or have another demanding profession and write when you have time, comparing your publishing output with someone whose primary occupation is writing is a wonderful way to manufacture unnecessary feelings of inadequacy.

You are not playing the same game, so stop using the same scoreboard.

2. The “How to Grow on Substack” Crowd

This species appears almost immediately after you join.

Their subjects are subscriber growth, Notes strategies, recommendations, monetization, engagement, conversion, pricing, audience building, and the many mysterious ways one might persuade more people on Substack to follow a publication about growing on Substack.

There is an impressively circular economy operating here.

A surprising amount of Substack content is essentially advice about becoming successful at the platform on which that advice is being sold, shared, or used to attract subscribers.

Some of it is genuinely useful, particularly when you are new and trying to understand how the mechanics work. Much of it, however, begins to sound familiar after a while because the same ideas are packaged and repackaged with slightly different headlines.

The bigger problem for me is relevance.

If your primary goal is building a media business or earning money directly from an audience, this information may be enormously valuable. If you are running an operating company, advising organizations, investing, managing a team, or using writing as one part of a larger professional ecosystem, the obsession with platform growth begins to feel disconnected from what you are actually trying to accomplish.

There is nothing wrong with the creator economy. I simply do not want every road to lead back to becoming a creator.

3. The “Hi, I’m New Here” Networkers

You have probably seen these posts.

Someone announces that they are new to Substack, would love to connect with like-minded people, promises to support anyone who supports them, and receives dozens of cheerful responses welcoming them to the neighborhood.

Everyone is pleasant, everyone is supportive, and for approximately twelve minutes it appears that lifelong friendships are about to form.

Then almost nothing happens.

I understand the instinct because arriving on a new platform feels awkward, and most of us have been taught that community growth begins with introducing ourselves and networking. The problem is that reciprocal politeness is not the same thing as a relationship.

Following someone because they followed you rarely creates meaningful intellectual exchange, collaboration, friendship, or business opportunity. It mostly creates two people who now have one more account appearing in their feeds.

I think of it as networking cosplay. It looks like networking, contains many of the same words, and produces a satisfying little burst of activity, but the underlying relationship usually has no reason to continue.

4. The Monetization Mystics

Every platform eventually develops a priesthood of people who have cracked the code, and Substack has no shortage of them.

They will explain what they earn, how quickly they grew, the conversion rate on a particular offer, how they structured paid subscriptions, which funnel produced the best results, and what they would do if they were starting again today.

I actually enjoy studying business models, so I do not object to the subject itself. What interests me more is how self-referential these ecosystems can become.

Many of the people teaching others how to make money on Substack are primarily attracting readers who also want to make money on Substack. The product, audience, distribution mechanism, and subject matter begin collapsing into one another.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. It is simply a very specific business model being discussed as though it were the universal destination for anyone who writes online.

I am curious to see how long the gold rush lasts.

5. The Personal Essay Cinematic Universe

Then there is the emotional wing of Substack, which may be the biggest adjustment for anyone arriving from a more professionally oriented platform.

You will encounter divorce, reinvention, grief, betrayal, menopause, dating, aging, identity changes, family relationships, career collapses, personal awakenings, and an enormous number of essays explaining who someone was before a major life event and who they became afterward.

Some of these pieces are exceptional. They are beautifully observed, vulnerable without being manipulative, and capable of making you see an ordinary human experience differently.

Others leave me feeling as though I accidentally opened someone’s diary.

That distinction is obviously personal. One reader’s extraordinary vulnerability is another reader’s oversharing, and Substack allows considerably more emotional range than the platforms many professionals came from.

For someone wired toward systems, strategy, business, and analysis, however, it can take some getting used to. If you arrived expecting an intellectual salon and suddenly find yourself knee-deep in menopause, divorce, betrayal, spiritual awakening, and the intimate details of someone’s childhood, welcome to Substack.

It is definitely not LinkedIn.

6. The Quiet Operators

This is the group I find most interesting, and ironically it is often the hardest to discover.

They are founders, investors, analysts, executives, researchers, builders, consultants, and practitioners who have spent enough time doing something to have developed a point of view about it.

Their writing often comes from decisions they have actually made, things they have built, mistakes they have paid for, industries they understand, or patterns they have watched unfold over years.

They may publish irregularly because writing is not their primary job. They tend not to spend much time talking about audience growth, and some seem almost mildly embarrassed by the idea of promoting themselves.

As a result, their work may never generate the engagement numbers that dominate a feed.

That does not make the writing less valuable.

In many cases, the opposite is true. A thoughtful essay written by someone who has spent twenty years wrestling with a problem can be more useful to me than fifty perfectly optimized posts about how to increase newsletter engagement.

The difficulty is finding these people because the characteristics that make them interesting are often the same characteristics that make them relatively invisible.

Substack Feels Like Several Platforms Living on Top of Each Other

Once I started thinking about Substack this way, my frustration with the platform made more sense.

There is a creator-economy layer focused on audience growth and monetization. There is a deeply personal layer built around essays, identity, relationships, and lived experience. Then there is a quieter professional and intellectual layer populated by people using newsletters to document expertise, develop ideas, or communicate with a relatively specific audience.

Obviously these categories overlap, and some of the best publications move comfortably between them. Still, the incentives and cultures are different enough that two people can both say they “use Substack” while having almost nothing in common.

The mistake I made initially was assuming the platform itself would somehow sort this out for me.

It did not.

Why the Feed Can Become Exhausting

Like every social platform, Substack has incentives, and people eventually learn what receives attention.

Replies create conversation. Recommendations accelerate discovery. Reciprocity helps people build networks. Emotion prompts reactions. Stories are easier to connect with than abstract arguments.

None of those things are inherently bad, but they do shape what becomes visible.

Depth, experience, rigor, technical knowledge, and long-term thinking do not always generate immediate responses. A detailed analysis of an industry problem may be extraordinarily useful to 300 people and almost invisible to everyone else, while a highly relatable observation about the emotional experience of being a writer can travel much further.

That does not mean the system is malicious. It means visibility and value are not the same measurement.

Once I accepted that, I stopped expecting the feed to do all of my intellectual filtering for me.

How I’m Fixing My Feed

The biggest improvement came from becoming much more selective.

Ruthless unfollowing

If someone’s publication is primarily about growing on Substack, monetizing Substack, or building an audience on Substack, I now ask whether I genuinely need more of that information.

Usually I don’t.

So I unfollow, unsubscribe, or filter without feeling guilty about it. There are too many intelligent people publishing online to spend scarce attention consuming subjects that no longer interest you.

A feed is a mental diet, and allowing an algorithm to choose the entire menu seems like a terrible idea.

Manual discovery

I also stopped relying heavily on the Recommended section and began using a much older method of finding interesting people.

I find one person whose thinking I respect, look at what they read and recommend, follow a few trails, and repeat the process.

This is slower than algorithmic discovery but produces much better results because human judgment travels through networks. Interesting people tend to know other interesting people.

Inbox over feed

For publications I genuinely value, I prefer email.

The feed encourages browsing, reacting, and moving on. Email creates a clearer decision: either I care enough about this person’s work to open it or I don’t.

That tiny bit of friction is useful.

Reframing what Substack is for

The biggest shift, though, has been changing what I expect the platform to do for me.

I am not treating Substack as a lottery ticket or another audience-growth competition. I see it as a place to develop ideas, create a searchable archive of my thinking, distribute longer-form work, meet interesting people, and build intellectual and professional equity over time.

That is a very different objective from trying to become a Substack celebrity.

It is also much more sustainable for me.

The Part Worth Sticking Around For

My feed is already better than it was when I arrived because I have stopped assuming the most visible people are necessarily the people I will find most interesting.

There are extraordinary writers here. There are fascinating operators, unusual thinkers, highly experienced practitioners, and people with knowledge I would probably never encounter through my normal professional network.

They simply require a little digging.

You may have to pass through the monetization advice, growth hacks, reciprocal networking, personal drama, and endless explanations of how to succeed on Substack before finding the quieter corners of the platform.

That is fine.

Every ecosystem has noise.

The useful skill is learning how to distinguish signal from popularity and then building your own map accordingly.

I am still figuring Substack out, and I suspect my opinion of it will change several more times before I understand what I am doing here.

For now, though, I intend to keep wandering through the wildlife.

If you found yourself nodding at any of this, there is a decent chance we will get along.

I write primarily for founders, operators, consultants, and leaders who are building things in the real world and are interested in how businesses, careers, brands, and ideas actually develop over time.

You will probably not find many growth hacks here, and I have no intention of becoming a professional Substack expert.

There are already plenty of those.

Subscribe if this sounds like your corner of the internet.