The Many Faces of Substack

The Substack Survival Guide for Operators, Consultants, and Other Regular People

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.