Almost everybody arrives at Substack with the same quiet assumption. That there is an audience in there, and publishing is how you get introduced to it.

There is an audience in there. It is just not looking for you yet. One writer in a thread I keep coming back to put it about as bluntly as it can be put: Substack is a hosting platform. It does not gift people a platform. Writing is at most half the work involved in growing.

That is the whole reframe. If you have been publishing for two months into silence and concluding that the writing is the problem, the writing is probably not the problem. You have simply been doing one of the two jobs.

The good news buried in that. The half you have been skipping is the more learnable half. Distribution is a set of behaviors. You can start doing them on a Tuesday.

This is the growth that happens without you leaving the platform, and for a lot of people it is now the majority of it. Substack has published its own numbers here. Back in February 2024 they said recommendations alone drove half of all new subscriptions on the platform and a quarter of new paid ones.

Notes is the part you control. It is the short-form feed inside the app, and unlike your posts, a Note can be shown to people who have never heard of you. Writers who grew from nothing on Notes describe the same rhythm: a few short standalone thoughts a day, and real time spent in other people’s comment sections.

I have written the tactical version of this separately, because it deserves its own page. The Substack Notes playbook is here.

Comments are the underrated half. A thoughtful reply on a bigger publication puts your name in front of that writer’s readers, and it does it in a context where you have already demonstrated you are worth reading. Nobody clicks a profile because it is there. They click because the comment was good.

Recommendations come later and mostly come to you. They arrive once other writers have a reason to point at you, which is a downstream effect of the first two, not a thing to chase on day one.

The other camp in that thread was equally direct. You have to promote it on social media. You have to climb cringe mountain essentially.

Cringe mountain is real and it is worth naming, because the discomfort is not a sign you are doing something distasteful. It is a sign you are doing something unfamiliar in public. Almost everyone who now shares their work comfortably felt exactly like this for the first few months.

What actually works off-platform. Not “new post is up” with a link. That is the version everybody tries, and it converts terribly. What travels is the idea itself, delivered whole, in the format that platform rewards. A micro-essay on LinkedIn or Threads. A short video where you say the one thing. A single strong paragraph that does not need the click to make sense.

Then the link is the follow-up, not the offer. People subscribe because a piece of your thinking was good, not because you announced that more thinking exists elsewhere.

Pick one outside platform. One. Doing three badly is how people conclude that external promotion does not work.

The most useful thing in that whole thread was the least comfortable. Those who love you will not read you. If you make the list full of those, you are only lying to yourself, and eventually the open rate goes low.

Your sister subscribes. Your old coworker subscribes. Neither opens. Now you have forty subscribers and a 20% open rate, and you cannot tell whether that means your writing is not landing or your list is full of people who were never going to read it. You have destroyed your only instrument.

It gets worse than misleading. Email providers watch engagement. A list full of people who never open teaches the inbox that your mail is ignorable, and that starts affecting the people who did want it.

What to do instead. Describe the one person you are writing for in a single sentence, then go find where they already gather and be useful there without pitching. Twenty strangers who chose you are worth more than two hundred people being kind to you.

The best question I saw asked in that thread reframes the whole thing: rather than how do I get a thousand people, ask what could I publish that ten people would immediately want to send to someone else.

Interviews are the most underused move for someone with no audience. You ask an expert five good questions. They answer. You publish it, and they share it, because people share things they appear in. You have just borrowed their distribution and their credibility in one go.

It also solves the authority problem sideways. You do not have to be the expert. You have to be the person who asked the expert well.

Collaborating with peers works on the same principle at smaller scale. Two writers at three hundred subscribers each, doing something together, both reach an audience they did not have. Neither needs to be big.

And then there is the cornerstone piece. One genuinely useful thing that answers a real question completely. A resource, a walkthrough, a comparison somebody would bookmark. That piece keeps working for a year while your Notes work for a day.

Zero to a thousand is paralyzing because there is no action attached to it. Nobody knows what to do differently on a Tuesday to get a thousand subscribers. But everybody knows what to do to get ten.

First 10. People who know your work, not people who know you. Reply to five posts a day in your subject area. This is the stage where you learn to write a Note that anyone reads.

10 to 50. Establish a cadence you can sustain on a bad week. Notes most days, one real post a week. The point of this stage is proving to yourself that you will keep going.

50 to 100. Publish the cornerstone piece. Find out what people actually ask you and answer it completely. Somewhere in here you will get your first note from a stranger, and it changes something.

100 to 250. Add the second engine. If you have only been internal, pick one outside platform. If you have only been external, get serious about Notes.

250 to 500. Collaborations and interviews. You are now big enough that other small publications will say yes.

500 to 1,000. Recommendations start arriving on their own, and the compounding you were promised finally shows up. This is also the point where turning on paid stops being premature.