[sgpl]

> “The only way a Substack grows is through tweets. I am like 85% serious when I say this.”

This rings true for me as a consumer of tech and tech-adjacent news. Most writers that I've started to follow via their newsletters, I've come across on twitter via their tweets that have gone viral or have been liked/retweeted by people in my network.

Another journalist that I subscribe to via their Substack in Eric Newcomer who also recently published a "Looking Back ..." post [0]. Interesting just to diff it from this post. From my understanding, Eric started writing his newsletter last year without importing a pre-existing list (at least that's the impression I got). His numbers (11,867 free subscribers and 1374 paid subscribers) definitely seems to suggest that Substack's guidance that about 10% of subscribers convert to paid is in the ballpark.

[0] https://www.newcomer.co/p/looking-back-on-newcomers-first-ye... 11867 1374

[notatoad]

in the insterest of "diffing" substack retrospectives, here's Charlie Warzel's announcement today that he's leaving substack for the Atlantic: https://warzel.substack.com/p/galaxy-brain-is-moving

the interesting thing to me is the discussion around "feeding the discourse", and how the best thing you can do to increase your subscriber count is to jump into fights on twitter. it seems like the idea that you grow your substack through tweets is a nice way of saying you grow your substack through arguments.

[meheleventyone]

It doesn’t have to be arguments, lots of people take part in the discourse of the day without arguing. Usually with lengthy threads or other things like the ubiquitous content marketing strategy of asking open ended questions “what kind of vegetable would you be?” and so on. Once you see the pattern it makes a lot of the viral stuff on Twitter a bit eye rolling.

The unsolved problem across all genres of content is still discovery though which is why the single most important activity after you have good content is marketing it. That can be both very time consuming and expensive relative to income to shift the needle on and leads to chasing algorithms around and the strong power law distribution in the results because of all of this gets much easier the bigger your audience is thanks to network effects. The growth of the creator side of the gig economy is largely about that on a personal level.

[santiagobasulto]

This isn’t necessarily bad. Substack has found a great distribution channel that is working for them. The next step is probably expanding to more channels to minimize the Single Point of Failure issue.