What I’ve Learned from Two Years on Substack
Lessons learned while building a newsletter business
I had just one subscriber when I sent my first email; myself!
Today I have a gross annual revenue of more than US$15,000 from Substack, with 155 paying subscribers and 3,251 free subscribers across three Substack publications.
After one year of publishing, I was selected to join an invitation-only Substack grow program with a bunch of other Substack creators from all over the world. The program allowed me to have hundreds of online conversations with writers from dozens of different publications.
These days I also help other people get started on Substack.
In this post I share the five most important lessons I’ve learned in my two years on Substack:
- It’s never too late to start
- Quality content is your golden goose
- Some topics are easier to monetise than others
- Marketing sucks but it’s vital for success
- Scalable income is the bee's knees 😀🐝
1. It’s never too late
Some platforms reward early adopters. Medium used to be like that; writers who had been around for the longest got the lion’s…
