A List of Substack Success Stories in Tweets

Is Substack Word of Mouth a real driver of growth? Social proof says it is.

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Hey Guys,

So the entire point of this thread is to let the Tweets do the talking: (some images my not format, so you may need to click the tweet to see all the numbers).

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

When I started my new Substack blog, my initial goal was to have 50,000 readers and 5,000 subscribers. A year and a half later, I have now reached that goal! Thanks to everyone for reading! Onward to 100,000 and 10,000!😍

This will also feature Tweets about Substack’s cross-promotion “Newsletter recommendation feature” as a continuation of my last post. It launched on April 12th-ish, 2022. In your monthly report from Substack this was come in as “Substack Network”.

Sleepwell 🛌 @SleepwellCap

Just surpassed 3000 free subs on my Substack, crazy part is I haven't published anything new this year... The recent spike (+14% m/m) is driven by Substack's new recommendation feature which is awesome. Nice to see network effects in this business! Great work @SubstackInc

Eric Newcomer (1 year review)

• I think I could live off $20.6k a month! Context.

• A bit sad when people don’t share numbers, but it is what it is.

Ellen Kate Boyle | Content By The Sea @contentbythesea

My @SubstackInc newsletter subscribers since the platform launched its Recommendations features whereby other writers can add your newsletter to a spotlight section on their page and vice versa...

• The curve is really different at least for free subs for these individuals.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

Marked acceleration in Noahpinion's email list over the past few months. Don't think I'm doing anything different. Not complaining though! 🥰

• The pandemic bump was real for Noah, as well.

• The rapid spikes are noted.

Will Lawrence ⭕️ @will_lawrenceTO

@hamishmckenzie Can you guess when I started to get recommendations? Seriously though, great work.

• So when do you know you have “made it” on Substack? Maybe above 5,000 free subs as an organic growth threshold. If only Substack data scientists gave us some rules of the game (which would vary by category I imagine).

Word of Mouth on Substack

• Word of mouth? Oh sure, to get 30 to 45% of your traffic from Newsletter Recommendations (cross-promotions) is now perhaps the norm for smaller Newsletters on Substack today in the Summer of 2022. Think of how that compounds revenue though over-time?

So even bigger Newsletters via word of mouth can grow 30% faster each month. Think about how that compounds for an entire year. We met Ali in his first year of Substack Grow graduation on YouTube. Some thresholds for him were:

• Going viral on product hunt

• Going viral on Twitter

• And now this! He’s essentially easily doubled the size of his free subs list.

Ali Abouelatta @abouelatta_ali

Shoutout to the growth team @SubstackInc! Just ran my monthly reports and Substack contributed 34% of my growth in April, up from 4% in March!

Casey Newton also managed to double his free subs list on his 1st year on Substack, even without this feature. At the top of the growth curve of Substack, growth is a waterfall.

We would expect to see that in Substack’s revenue in 2022, we will find out later.

The secret to the success of Substack is that, like Netflix, it has perfected the frictionless experience… Some months ago, I was talking to an academic with a blog, and I told her she should get on Substack because I liked the fact that it was so easy to sign up for e-mails. She told me that I could just go to her WordPress site, scroll or direct my eyes to the right place, and subscribe to her blog too. What’s the big deal? Sounds like the same thing. I tried to get through to her that I’m a very busy guy who already finds it difficult to keep up with everything I want to read, and I’m sure other potential readers are in the same position, so five seconds versus one second to sign up for a blog is a big difference. - Bryan Caplan

So we come to our boy Connor. Never did figure out why he turned off paid subs.

Conor Mac @InvestmentTalkk

Substack’s app and recent recommendation feature seem to be quite effective in cross-pollenating readers between writers that read each other’s work. H/T @SubstackInc

Cherry picked Tweets from the people who have been on Substack a while is one thing, but I wonder how the new Newsletters are doing? Too soon to say.

Welcome to the Creator Economy Lenny, he’s about to release his Podcast.

Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan

Legit growth inflection right after Substack launched their recommend-other-newsletters feature. Thank you Substack.

Wordpress discovery is a no-man’s land of SEO, I’m not the first or the last person to realize this.

Bryan Caplan @bryan_caplan

Results of my switch from @wordpressdotcom to @SubstackInc: 4x subscribers in 2 weeks. I doubt I could have even got 2x if I'd stayed. Thanks to the 85% of people on twitter who advised me to switch.

Someone got Early Access

Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz

An amazing feature from @SubstackInc. I’ve been using the beta and gotten ~700 new subscribers while driving ~3,000 subscribers to newsletters I personally read, like & are complimentary to The Pragmatic Engineer. Ones like @lennysan, @EricNewcomer, @BigTechnology, @alexxubyte.

Substack @SubstackInc

📣 Today we are rolling out recommendations, a new feature that allows writers to directly endorse each other’s publications on Substack. Learn more: https://t.co/J1AMlgmoIT https://t.co/Ph2lGGhBck

Some people call the Creator Economy the Ownership Economy, I sort of get it. Now if only creators could get fair pay.

Thanks for reading guys!