Now you can find and follow friends on Substack

New features make it easier to grow your subscriber base

Today, we’re making it much easier to find and follow your friends on Substack, helping you explore the network and be discovered by new readers. Since we launched Notes in April, following has been one of the most requested features from writers and readers. 

Following helps writers grow their audience via the Substack network, which is already home to millions of the world’s most valuable readers. We built this feature to help maximize—and not replace—subscriptions, which will always be the most important type of relationship on Substack.

A follow offers a lightweight way to start a relationship with a writer or reader, with the option to convert it into a subscription at any time. By following them, you can stay up to date with what they’re reading, liking, publishing, and subscribing to—through the Notes feed and on their profiles.

To find friends to follow, you can now sync your phone contacts with Substack. Make sure you update the Substack app so you can see what friends are reading.

Update to the latest version of the Substack app here to find your friends.

A subscriber base is the most important asset a writer or creator can have online, since it offers ownership, independence, and the opportunity to earn money. Accordingly, the Subscribe button will remain the primary call-to-action on most surfaces where you encounter writers you’re not already following, including on individual notes and on profiles. However, in addition to the Subscribe button, you’ll now see a smaller Follow button, indicated by the outline of a person and a “+” symbol. You’ll also see Follow buttons on lists of suggested accounts. 

On Substack, a follow is a gateway to a deeper subscription relationship, which implies the ability for a writer to reach a reader directly in their inbox and to retain their email address. You can think of it as like dating before deciding to marry—but we’ll make sure that Substack always takes the opportunity to pop the question on the writer’s behalf.

For example, each time you publish a note, your followers will see it and be prompted to subscribe to your publication. In the future, we’ll make “upsells” to subscriptions easier by automatically notifying your followers about trending posts and other milestones.

In addition to creating this new subscription pathway, the follow feature will help readers more easily share your writing. For example, if a reader likes or restacks one of your posts, their followers may see that activity in their Notes feed. That means that writers will benefit from these new features even if they’re not active on Notes. For example, if you follow

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

and “like” his posts, your followers will sometimes see those liked posts—and the option to subscribe to Kareem—in their Notes feed.

These new features are part of our ongoing work to create a media ecosystem that benefits both writers and readers by bringing publishing and discovery tools together in one place. We have big plans in this area, and you can expect much more to come in the months ahead. We’d really value your feedback along the way. 

To learn more about how following works on Substack, visit our support center.