How writers, podcasters, and creators are building real communities on Substack
Tips from fellow publishers who have built thriving subscriber communities
More and more people are coming to Substack in search of direct connections with their readers, listeners, and followers. Here, writers, podcasters, and creators can build trusted relationships, distinct from the parasocial fans and low-intent browsers found in abundance elsewhere online.
Since launching Chat, as well as direct messages and surveys, we’ve seen a number of writers and creators find tremendous success using these tools to build real communities that fuel robust businesses. Publications with active chats are growing their revenue at two times the rate of publications without them. This week we also announced new improvements to Chat, including paywalling your entire Chat and improving navigation.
Read more: A guide to Substack Chat, Introducing Chat paywalls
We spoke to some of these writers and creators to inform this guide on how to cultivate a thriving community that helps grow your business and deepen your connection with subscribers.
In this guide, we look at the following strategies:
How launching with a Chat drives conversion
How paywalled Chat threads are boosting paid subscriptions
How regular Chat participation is increasing retention
Launching with Chat drives conversion
Publications that launched with a Chat strategy garnered total subscriber numbers that were 10% higher than those that did not.
Writers and creators are introducing a subscriber chat as part of launching their Substack to spark engagement and encourage paid subscriptions. One in four of our most successful launches in the past year employed Chat to welcome their subscriber base during a launch period.
This tactic works particularly well when you are moving a podcast or publication to Substack from a space that lacks robust community tools, such as a Mailchimp newsletter, a podcast distributed on Spotify or Apple, or an Instagram account.
When the creators of
, a publication that covers the beloved TV show Top Chef, moved their flagship podcast to Substack, they mentioned in their launch post and podcast episodes that community discussions were a key reason for listeners to sign up for their Substack. Soon after, they hosted a call to join their live Chat during an episode, explaining:“When we decided to launch the Pack Your Knives Substack, we wanted to expand our offerings beyond our flagship recap podcast episodes. One of our goals was to create a Pack Your Knives community, where fans of Top Chef could come together and chat about the show, because the two of us aren’t the only ones with strong opinions about who should’ve gone home last week.”
Their Chat drove more than 400 responses in an hour from fans around the world, helping establish their Substack as a destination for Top Chef fans that goes beyond their podcast feed.
More launch examples:
- migrated to Substack from a website without comments, and launched announcing that paying subscribers could now chat with each other. Longtime supporters were happy to migrate to the Substack for the deeper interactions. (They are also hosting mailbag requests through chat.)
When author
launched her Substack, she announced that she would be present in the publication chat once a week for free and paid subscribers, contributing to a very successful launch.- announced a paying-subscriber-only chat as part of her paid perks launch and saw a huge spike in subscribers.
Read more: A guide to switching your newsletter to Substack, How to switch your podcast to Substack, Switching from Patreon to Substack
Paywalled conversations boost paid subscriptions
Publications with active chats are growing their revenue at two times the rate of publications without them.
Some of the most remarkable spikes in paid subscriptions we’ve seen this year have come from writers and creators who introduced a paywalled chat.
In January,
launched a 30-Day Drawing Habit with her DrawTogether Grown-Ups Table subscribers. She wrote daily posts and offered a chat space—mostly behind the paywall—for participants to share their drawings and cheer each other on.
Over the course of the month, subscribers posted over 25,000 drawings in the chat space, and her subscriber numbers doubled. Wendy reflects:
“It was a Herculean task to write, draw, publish, and moderate every day in real time for an entire month, but well worth my little team’s effort. Hundreds of Grown-Ups Table members said the 30 days of drawing was life-changing for them, especially the community element. It was for me too. I can’t wait to do it again next year.”
More paywalled Chat examples:
Lots of investors are using paywalled chats to present special insights and host discussions around them, including Citrini Research, Eliant’s Exploits, Left’s Newsletter, and Godzilla Trader (who gives paid subscribers a “24/7 chatroom” as a top perk for subscribing).
- and are both using paywalled chats for subscribers to get personal with the author and with one another. In her chat space, Elizabeth offers personal musings, invites subscribers to share the “letters of love” they’ve written, and communicates information about subscriber meetups, all via paywalled chats. Suleika encourages subscribers to respond to prompts in a paid-only chat.
- recently started a Year of Writing Dangerously project, which includes a mostly-paywalled chat.
Read more: Paywalling a chat thread
Ongoing chats increase retention
calls her chat “my favorite part of running my newsletter.” She initiates each conversation with short prompts about pop culture topics and live events—“the night of the Oscars, the early-morning hours after Netflix drops a batch of Love Is Blind episodes, or even the day everyone’s Spotify Wrapped drops.” The space is thriving, with some posts getting more than a thousand replies. Hunter says the chat “feels like the roped-off VIP section of a nightclub, or the group chat of all the kids who got cellphones early: you really just have to be there.”Writers and creators who have ongoing chat spaces are 12% more likely to retain paid subscribers.
More from Hunter:
“The chat is a rapid-fire conversation of memes, hot takes, unpopular opinions, ruthless inside jokes, and earned (and sometimes unearned) shade. There’s no better low-effort, high-reward way to engage with all my readers. Sometimes I use it as a scratch pad to work through some ideas (‘would anyone care if I wrote about this?’), sometimes it’s a highly customized well of inspiration (a polite way of saying my audience assigning me to write about a trending topic), but it’s always a meeting point for like-minded pop culture obsessives. ‘Starting the new drop of [Love Is Blind] episodes that released *17 hours ago* only to see 400 messages already in the chat,’ one person messaged. ‘We come to this place for magic.’”
If hosting chats regularly yourself feels daunting, consider letting your subscribers host their own conversations by visiting the Chat section of your Settings page and selecting “Everyone” under “Who can start threads?”
Here are some of the publication chats where subscribers are hosting their own ad hoc conversations themselves:
Many fashion writers, like Subrina Heyink, Meg Strachan, Leandra Medine, and Laura Reilly, have subscribers liberally sharing great finds and sales with one another.
Food writer
encourages subscribers to share tips and tricks in her Chat. has an ongoing thread called the Choy Love Club for paid subscribers to swap food knowledge.- ’s Footnotes and Tangents launched a “slow book group” for reading Leo Tolstoy and Hilary Mantel. Participants jump into the chat to share their reflections on each chapter and discuss them with one another.
Podcasters
offer an open subscriber chat where listeners go deeper on topics together.Superfans of the Knicks nerd out together in a thriving chat space around the publication
. Subscribers even use chat and DMs to host their own trivia challenges.
Read more: How can I moderate my Chat?, How to enable subscribers to host their own chat conversations
I like engaging in chats for some of the publications I read but for my own, I see managing a chat as a distraction to my focus on writing. It’s another thing that drives engagement for Substack but detracts from me focusing my creative energies on my writing.
I like having conversations about posts in the comments of the posts. This allows non-app users to participate more easily. That’s just me. I still love using Substack! Don’t come after me!
Very reasonable and understandable comments. I just want to note that "It’s another thing that drives engagement for Substack" doesn't make sense from the perspective of our business. We are not seeking to drive engagement for Substack—we seek to help writers and creators grow their audiences and make money, since that is the only way we make money. Many writers and creators here love going deeper with their communities through Chat and other means; and for many of those people, Chat is an essential part of not only their cultural work but also their businesses.
I will not rule out the possibility that this is simple a skill issue and I should maybe consider getting good at this 😉
I certainly don't see many of the writers that I follow use Chat much and in all honestly, just keeping up with all the amazing content that is being written, who has time for Chat as well? I also see the strategies outlined in this piece more applicable to "name" writers than the striving Substack scribe. Fostering an active comments section in one's Substack seems a better strategy as well as using Notes. I also think restarting the Substack Go and Goal workshops would go a long way to connecting writers and fostering community - these are sorely missed.
Good morning. I received a phone call today from an elderly subscriber who has paid me three annual fees without ever receiving one email. By looking at my subscriber dashboard, I could see that he entered his email address with a typo when he signed up as a paid subscriber in April of 2022. This morning, he signed up for a free subscription using his proper email address. To make him whole, I comped his free subscription for the next three years and turned off auto-renew on his paid subscription.
This got me wondering whether my subscriber list features any other email addresses with typos. Is there any way for a Substack author to see a list of addresses that were undeliverable so we can troubleshoot these kinds of things?
Well I believe that seeing undelivered emails is known in the “bounced” category. That means the email was sent but it “bounced back” because no one received it.
It was a feature previously, but I haven’t looked it up in a while.
Something similar has happened to me as well ...
For those who use chat regularly, do you always notify subscribers via email (by selecting the "Also send as email" option)? I'm curious if readers find this helpful or if it adds to email overload.
i've never done but this but now i want to try! would be good for live events
Amazing that you get so much engagement without the email notifications!
I think it's probably not best to do this every time, but worth it every once in a while to tell new subs who may not have tried out chat in the app before! Like Hunter said, that may be helpful to do for live events.
I’m changing my life on Substack
I switched from YouTube to Substack in January of this year, and I've never felt better as a creator on a platform where monetization and the audience are private. I don't have to keep asking for subscribers and crying for views, I'm building something good. In 4 months I've gotten 630 subscribers, which is incredible to me.
I’m in the same boat. After grinding away on YouTube for 3 years, I’ve moved over to Substack less than a month ago. It’s a very different dynamic here which is refreshing. I’ve decided writing is actually much more difficult than creating videos.
How refreshing it is to create content here at Substack. They happen to have created the best model for creators to feel at home
If Substack changes your life, you don’t have one.
I haven’t used Chat a lot aside from direct messaging, but it is a feature I want to dig deeper into. Love this post and giving some great examples of how it can build community!
Yes, the DM feature is much more useful than the general chat feature.
I’m interested to figure out a way to use it to its best functionality, but I really need to start using it first.
The general chat feature?
I asked my subscribers after the chat feature had come out and they didn’t seem to want to engage. So I have mostly ignored it for my own community. So do your subscribers actually want it?
For the DM feature?
I’ve mainly used it to discuss potential guest writers. A few times to get clarification on potential opportunities.
Is there any possibility of making video available in the Chat soon? IG stories are a bust and I would love to be able to share video shorts with my paid subscribers to open up conversations.
Great question 👍
I do love the community that I have so far. It’s a lot of fun to know that so many people are subscribed to me. Even if it’s not as big as some other communities.
It’s great to see these updates to the Chat feature. What I love about it is the potential to share pictures and links with subscribers, which you can’t restrict in posts or notes, unless you put them behind a pay wall. I don’t want to paywall some things, but I do want to only share with subscribers. The improved navigation is a great update, it’s been difficult to navigate when clicking through from notifications. I’m looking forward to using subscriber chat more and more!
Maybe someone can help me by describing what they, or their subscribers, like about this chat feature. I've explored it, and I prefer the layout of the comment section. Most of the chats I've seen are not live, so they function more like message boards but with a much narrower and less enjoyable format. I realize that is all subjective, so I am just trying to find out what Chat fans like about it.
I haven't used chat very much, I post sports updates through my notes and/or newsletters that I will write. I've tried doing a weekly Mailbag, but no such luck. Chats just isn't that active.
just wonder, who came up with the name of this platform, which reads backwards: buS- kcatS? The content of this post looks correspondingly....
Suggestions: Please, IMPROVE YOUR GRAPHICS( style of the first picture), which is boring, nothing telling, ugly in fact, all AI generated, there is NO HUMAN MIND OR HAND behind it, in my opinion.. I think a digital computer can still be capable of putting out more nature driven styles.
Who should I contact to get a human response to a question I have? The Chatbot gave me an insufficient answer. Particularly because Hamish gave me a different answer but it was somewhat unclear exactly how it works.
You can ask the Chatbot to pass your question on to a human (when I did so recently, I received an email from a human the same day).
Hmm, okay. I have thought about attempting to send a DM to someone. Because when I asked the question to Hamish, DMs didn’t exist on the platform.
GRACIAS
Engaging with your community makes people feel closer ti the author, thus they are more likely to buy something
It's so good to take out the middleman, the algorithms, the corporate B.S. and just share wildly with others, to spill over and cross pollinate. I've been loving the thriving community blossoming around reconsidering what education is for, what it means to be human, what it means to be an activist, a parent in a time of uncertainty, someone longing to live in real community with a diverse group of committed people striving to be an elder worthy of descending from, etc. We all are longing for home and we will find it where and when we can. https://substack.com/@gregorypettys
Joyap
Love Lots To My Luv.
Luv-lots my love!
The word is associations, not "communities."
First, real community doesn't really exist on the Internet. Everything and everybody is temporary in this realm. We know very little about, and are unlikely to ever meet, the vast majority of people we interact with online. That's not community, it's just barely connection.
Second, real conversations don't really happen on Substack. What happens instead is engagement. You say something, I say something, and then we both rush off to something else. Engagement can be fun for sure, but it's not conversation, or community. Many people here think we're having real conversations because they've spent so much time on social media they've forgotten, if they ever knew, what real conversations are.
Substack's marketing would be more effective if it was more reality based. Too often it feels like watching a commercial on TV. Substack is a great service, you don't really need to hype, hype, hype it in an endless series of self congratulatory happy talk messages. You don't need to talk us in to doing what we're already doing.
interesting. Curious that do you think airchat is making real conversation and what is real conversation?
I really believe Community building using CHATS is the best gift for paid subscribers. By the way read my latest post and share your feelings about the quality, thanks.
https://cryptofada.substack.com/p/top-crypto-investment-insights-unlocking
The problem with Substack is there are more writers than readers,
By chat are you specifically referring to the comments under a post? Or are you referring to something else. I just want to be sure I understand correctly because sometimes you say “chat” and others times you mention “comments”.
Thanks - I have a question about "Chat" vs "Posts" (and/or "threads"). In the Wendy McNaughton example you write: "She wrote daily posts and offered a chat space—mostly behind the paywall—for participants to share their drawings and cheer each other on". Are these "daily posts" posted in the "chat" or are they posted as "newsletter posts" which then engage readers through the comments / thread? I am assuming the daily content was just posted as "chat" - correct? Thanks. Andrew
Any suggestions how to start out with Chat if you have never used this feature before?
These posts are always so inspirational and definitely give you some goals to aim for. Thanks. I'd love to be getting interaction in the hundreds like that on my page, but I'm still relatively new, and I think those sort of numbers are a very long way off! Haha... 😎
Dear Substack. HOW do i reach you for help? One of my subscribers dropped because he could not process the payment. Here is what substack emailed me: Prior status: Paid Subscriber
Reason: billing failed
PLEASE HELP
The insights shared in this article about leveraging Substack's chat feature are incredibly valuable for creators looking to deepen their connections with subscribers. The success stories, like that of the "Pack Your Knives" community, demonstrate how interactive elements can transform a publication into a vibrant hub for fans. It's exciting to see how these tools can not only boost engagement but also significantly enhance subscription growth. https://www.planet-clicker.net
Thanks for sharing your insights on Substack. If you like playing video games you can play at: https://blockblastonline.com
It is very difficult to access Chat on the web. On the web on mobile it is even impossible. Furthermore, on the web the Chat doesn't open within the publication but in a separate page that is some sort of a chat station. Substack, please make the Chat more accessible and intuitive to use.