Growth is a long-tail journey
A geeky stat-filled, deep-dive reflection on nearly one year of writing on Substack.
This is part 2, of sorts, of a newsletter I wrote earlier this year about the return to long-form writing, just 2 months after I launched this newsletter on Substack. But first, I want to acknowledge and celebrate all the writers, but in particular—and especially—new and young writers who have chosen this platform as their launching post, the ones who are building their audience from the ground up and trying to find their voice in this growing, crowded space. It isn’t easy. Not when every subscriber gained feels hard won, and not when every subscriber lost feels personal.
To the writers—
It takes guts and trust to put yourself out there week after week. To hit that publish button and feel a momentary flash of panic because you're exposing your vulnerability to your audience, no matter how big or small the numbers. The bouts of writer’s block, the newsletters that get scrapped half-finished, the crippling self-doubt, the internal questions of what the hell am I doing here? Does this sound like you? If the answer is no, please teach me your ways! But if it’s yes, I have been feeling all of these things so hard this past month too, even though blogging has been a “thing” I’ve been doing for the past 20+ years.
Why doesn’t it get easier? Because as humans, we tend to measure ourselves against what is perceived as success, usually defined by the critical mass and the gatekeepers. We may still be in the process of defining what success as a writer means to us, and that can spin us in perpetual self doubt as we compare ourselves to others. It also feels a little more challenging these days when the platform seems to push content from top publications or implements a system of badges that suddenly puts their entire ecosystem of writers in a hierarchy of tiers.
On Monday, Substack announced that blogging was back—and not only was it back, but it was happening right here on this very platform. I get it. From a business perspective, getting big writers (and these are some wonderful people I have interacted with in the past) on board is a huge win, but I was delightfully surprised to see how many bloggers were already on this platform when Substack first came on my radar last year. My main gripe about the good old days of blogging was that it wasn’t a diverse enough collection of voices, so while I love that blogging is back, I also want to see this platform do more. It has an opportunity to champion writers from all corners and perspectives and I hope that newer writers and those with smaller subscriber numbers don’t get lost in the shuffle from less and less reach as more readers are brought in by bigger publications. Finding your footing is a process, and one that often traverses peaks and lows, but if you are struggling with growth, please do not give up. We need your voices here. And for my fellow writers of color, your voice is as important as ever.
I love Substack, but is it still cozy in here?
We can’t forget that Substack is a business first and foremost, regardless of all the warm fuzzies that we may feel from being on a platform that markets itself as the antidote to algorithms. The platform has been pushing out big product releases all year and it seems to be focusing hard on growth. This isn’t the same platform that it was even 10 months ago when I first hit publish.
With the launch of Notes earlier this year, Substack’s own Twitter X-like feed, and the integration of Notes on the homepage of the newly released app, Substack is now also a social media platform. I haven’t invested much time on Notes, save for the occasional restack of my own newsletter or a restack of a restack, but lately it seems that my feed is served to me by…an algorithm(!) and I can’t really make sense of how it’s working. I know that Notes is designed to help with discoverability of new content and engagement with the community, but that too poses a familiar dilemma of too many social platforms/not enough time. It’s driving some weird internal guilt that I’m not engaging enough on there.
As a (former??) product designer, and one who has worked on a creator-driven product, I’m really impressed with how frequent and furious the releases of new features have been. Truly. Having been on the product side of the fence, albeit on a much smaller scale, I understand that line and tension between what investors want vs. what users want, so it’s been impressive to watch the feature rollouts come and see this product grow.
BUT…