Confession first: I can’t say I went from zero.
I opened this account last year and let it sit untouched.
So this isn’t a zero-to-hero story. It’s more of an “I finally showed up and started trying” story, which feels more useful anyway.
At the beginning of August, I had about 48 subscribers.
One month later:
204 subscribers
5,000+ views
4 paid subscribers
I spent roughly 20 hours on Substack and $131.
I didn’t go viral. I didn’t import a giant email list and call it organic growth. I didn’t join a follow-for-follow scheme.
I just started treating Substack like something I actually wanted to learn.
Here’s what happened.
The numbers, first
The subscriber growth is nice, obviously. But the number I’m paying the most attention to right now is the 5,000+ views.
I’ve seen publications with much larger subscriber counts getting fewer views, which tells me my work is getting seen well beyond the people already subscribed.
That’s what I want at this stage.
I’m much more interested in reaching the right people than collecting a big number of people who followed me for reasons that have nothing to do with what I write.
And I’m going to keep publishing these numbers every month, including the flat months and the months when something I tried completely bombs.
There’s something humbling about being new somewhere after you’ve already built an audience somewhere else.
You know enough to know what good looks like, but you’re still starting over.
A very quick history
This actually isn’t my first attempt at Substack.
The first time I showed up, I wrote a dry, slightly sarcastic field report after a short scouting trip. I was deep in my “serious Fractional CMO / GTM Revenue Architect phase” at the time, writing for a much more buttoned-up business audience.
My conclusion was basically: I don’t think this place is for me.
So I left.
Then I came back.
This time I wrote about Substack like a pilgrim heading into the Wild West: lots of opportunity, very little order, and no idea what I was walking into.
One month later, I’m still more backpacker than settler. I haven’t figured the place out, but at least I know where to catch a few fish.
What surprised me most
The social side.
Everyone talks about coming to Substack to escape social media, and I understand why.
There are no ads in the feed. My DMs are almost completely spam-free. Nobody is sending me a connection request and immediately asking if I need help generating qualified leads.
It reminds me of early organic Facebook, or LinkedIn before LinkedIn became whatever LinkedIn is now.
What I didn’t expect was how easy it would be to actually talk to people here.
There’s chat. There are DMs. You can message someone without going through the weird ceremony of explaining why you deserve to connect with them.
I genuinely look forward to opening my Substack inbox now, which is not a sentence I expected to write about any platform in 2026.
And the mix of people is interesting. I’m seeing writers, career people, tiny-business owners, longtime newsletter creators, people starting over, and a whole wave of Instagram creators moving into newsletters.
Every so often, someone I know from LinkedIn appears too.
It still feels early enough that people are actually talking to each other instead of simply broadcasting at each other.
I hope it stays that way.
Starting now, this becomes a monthly report, and this is where the free version stops.
Paid subscribers get the receipts: what I published, how much time and money I spent, what actually moved growth, what failed, the tactics I refused to use, and what I’m testing next.
Same sections every month, including the months when the numbers suck.
If you’re building here too, this is the part worth stealing.
