Hitting 1,000 Subscribers led to an Existential Crisis
Unwittingly, I'd become focused on the numbers. Hitting 1,000 subscribers had the unexpected outcome of helping me reappraise what I'm doing here on Substack.
The world today encourages us to set big goals and strive with all our being to achieve those goals. But what happens when we finally get there? What if we find the world at the top of that mountain isn’t full of milk and honey after all? What if there’s just another mountain on the other side?
I hadn’t even consciously set 1,000 subscribers as particular goal for this newsletter. It wasn’t something I thought I was fixating on. So when I hit that number just after Christmas and felt a feeling of disillusionment I was very much surprised!
I wasn’t only surprised by my feelings but also that I had been subconsciously driven by those numbers in the background and focused on the ticking upwards towards the big four figure mark.
The strange thing is, it IS a great achievement. I’ve been plugging away at this newsletter now for just over 18 months, I’ve written around 100,000 words across 95 posts and I’ve stuck diligently a cadence of publishing one post a week every week for all that time.
I know people love to see the stats so here they are. Let’s have a quick look before I tell you to ignore them all…
Growth points - here are my theories…
Recommendations begin - Substack’s amazing recommendations feature starts and fuels a surge in cross pollination cross different Substacks. This is the moment when relationship building became vitally important. The impact of recommendations on subscriptions has diminished substantially now but they are still important for discoverability on Notes.
Plateau Hell! - I thought the world had ended. No new subscriptions for almost two weeks. I checked everything. Had I done something silly in the settings? Had I put the wrong post on my homepage? And then….as quickly as the plateau started, it ended and we were off growing again.
Taking Notes seriously - this was the point where I started to really engage with people on Notes and I discovered how many amazing writers there are on there. I would say this is the main reason why I now stand at a 30 day growth rate of over 100 subscribers. Try Notes - its great! Check out ‘s post on Notes here.
So that’s the cold hard numbers…..
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