What I’ve Learned from Two Years on Substack

Lessons learned while building a newsletter business

Karen Cherry
8 min readNov 18, 2023

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:

  1. It’s never too late to start
  2. Quality content is your golden goose
  3. Some topics are easier to monetise than others
  4. Marketing sucks but it’s vital for success
  5. Scalable income is the bee's knees 😀🐝
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…

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Karen Cherry

Substack writer. Secret tree hugger. Aussie business owner with >$19K revenue on Substack. Refusing to dumb it down.