Four months from my first paid subscriber.
That’s how long it took to hit Substack bestseller status.
Less than 1% of Substack publications ever get there. (At least according to Google).
I’m not telling you that because I think I’m an amazing writer. I’m telling you because most people assume it takes years, and fancy writing, and it doesn’t have to.
Here’s the whole story.
How I Even Ended Up on Substack
My coaching clients started talking about their Substacks on our calls. They were excited. I nodded along and moved on. I had enough projects.
But then a few months later it came up again. And again. And I’m a pattern spotter. Decades in analytics will do that to you. When something keeps showing up, I start paying attention.
So, I spent a bit of time investigating.
My first impression was: this is just a blog. A newsletter that looks like a WordPress post. People are going to pay for this? It seemed crazy.
I’d done Medium for years — same concept, you write, you earn a fraction of a subscriber’s annual fee. Medium never made me real money.
What it gave me was discovery. SEO traffic. People finding me.
I figured Substack would be the same thing.
I set it up. Wrote a couple of posts about making money online. Nothing happened. I went back to my other projects.