Grow: How Hetty Lui McKinnon’s community convinced her to go paid
The Grow interview series is designed to share the nuts and bolts of how writers have gone independent and grown their audiences on Substack. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
We invited , who writes , to share insights on launching paid subscriptions with her community’s support from Pledges, and how she’s integrated her Substack into her life as a book author and recipe developer.
What’s your Substack about in one sentence?
Sharing my love of cooking with vegetables with my global community.
Who reads your Substack?
Home cooks from around the world.
My newsletter is firmly rooted in home cooking and creating simple, quick but inventive recipes using everyday ingredients. My readers love to cook, are confident in the kitchen, and are dedicated eaters who love vegetables and experimenting with flavor.
What do you uniquely offer readers?
I offer them my experience as a recipe developer. I know how to deliver a well-written recipe that works, is practical for the home cook, and tastes great.
What’s your content strategy?
Schedule: Once a week, on Sundays at 6 p.m. EST. I hope to give home cooks a leg up with their weekly menu planning and cooking plans.
Format: News, musings, new recipe links from around the internet, and an original recipe. Sometimes I share books that I am reading or movies that I’m watching. Each post follows the same formula.
Paid content: Of my four posts per month, one is free and three are for paid subscribers.
Why did you decide to go paid?
To be honest, when I joined Substack, I wasn’t sure I would ever go paid. I am very busy in my daily life, and I wasn’t sure I could sustain a paid newsletter where I would feel obligated to publish new work on a set schedule. While I was unpaid, I was only posting once per month, so going paid felt like a big commitment.
But Pledges made me think about it. Then, encouragement from fellow foodie Substackers like
, who writes Family Friend, convinced me that it was something I should try. I have never looked back!My Substack has quickly become an important part of my culinary and writing world. All my work—my books, my editorial work, my newsletter—are interrelated, and they all fit together to form the full picture.
Read more: Hetty’s paid subscription announcement post
How did you decide on your paid subscriber benefits?
To Vegetables, With Love is all about building community. The benefits provide access to me and my world.
Over the years, as other platforms like Instagram have become more algorithm-led, authors have gradually found it harder to communicate with our real fans, so creating chats and virtual gatherings is a great way to stay connected and create conversations.
What’s the sharpest insight you can offer other writers about growing a Substack publication?
We should not feel bad about asking others to financially support our work. It took me a long time to realize this because the food world was very different when I first started. We were commonly asked to work for free and did so without question, but our work as writers and recipe developers has value.
While a free newsletter suited me in the beginning, going paid has allowed me to prioritize my own worth, gave me the confidence to do better work, and has also reinforced to me that my community appreciates everything that I put into my recipes and writing.
While a free newsletter suited me in the beginning, going paid has allowed me to prioritize my own worth, gave me the confidence to do better work, and has also reinforced to me that my community appreciates everything that I put into my recipes and writing.
Growth by the numbers
Started on Substack: March 2022
Launched paid subscriptions: March 2023
All subscribers: 25,000+
Pledges before going paid: I don’t remember exactly, but it was enough for me to take notice!
Paid subscribers: Almost 4%
Meaningful growth moments
Before Substack. I have had a newsletter on and off since I moved to America in 2015 from Sydney, Australia. I was very sporadic with sending emails, usually only twice a year. But I restarted my newsletter on Squarespace in November 2021, and it quickly grew.
I have also been on Instagram for about a decade. I am the author of five cookbooks—Community, Neighborhood, Family, To Asia, With Love, and Tenderheart. I am a regular contributor to New York Times Cooking, the Washington Post, ABC Everyday (Australia), Bon Appétit, and others. In 2017 I started an independent multicultural food journal called Peddler. We published seven issues (currently on hiatus).
I signed up for Substack at the end of 2021, but it was a while until my first post. During this time, I was working on my branding for my newsletter with designer Adele Packer. I decided to move to Substack because I wanted an interface that easily showed all my posts in one place, something that looked more like a publication and where all my recipes could be archived in one place.Moving to Substack. I imported my existing newsletter subscribers from Squarespace; the list was close to 10,000. I launched my Substack publication on March 15, 2022, embedded the signup form on my website, and new subscribers came in very quickly. I think launching as a free publication really helped in building my list because it gave people the chance to “try before you buy.” This period was important because it allowed me the space and time to work out what I wanted To Vegetables, With Love to be—to develop my writing voice and settle into a writing schedule that suited my life. It takes the pressure off when the publication is free.
Consistently sharing. My growth was always very steady. You can see it continues to grow with every weekly post. I promote my newsletter heavily on Instagram, which always drives signups. A few days before my newsletter goes out, I post a teaser on Instagram, usually a reel of the recipe. This builds excitement and interest.
Book pre-orders. As part of my Australian pre-order campaign for my new book, Tenderheart, I offered a free six-month paid subscription to my Substack. I comped them so they were the first to have access to my paid posts. It was an experiment. I thought it would be a low-risk way of kicking off my paid subscriptions, with a group of subscribers who were already appreciators of my work.
Today. One of the most important things about my Substack newsletter is the community aspect. Since I moved to the USA eight years ago, keeping in touch with my global community has been paramount to me, and Substack allows me to do that. Unlike a cookbook that takes two or more years to be released or an editorial recipe that is planned months in advance, my Substack offers my readers a unique window into what I’m cooking and passionate about right now. Its immediacy creates a sense of intimacy with my readers. Each week, I’m inviting them into my kitchen. It’s a beautiful, harmonious space, and I look forward to growing my community, one newsletter at a time.
My growth was always very steady. You can see it continues to grow with every weekly post. I promote my newsletter heavily on Instagram, which always drives signups. A few days before my newsletter goes out, I post a teaser on Instagram, usually a reel of the recipe. This builds excitement and interest.
Who are other Substack writers you turn to for guidance and inspiration?
I think some of the best food writing around is on Substack right now.
Ruby Tandoh’s work over at
is probably the best culinary journalism out there, hands down. Her ice cream odyssey in London was gripping.I also love the work of
, the incredible at , and having joined a CSA for the very first time, I’m loving ’s .Takeaways
Great writing is valuable. Hetty’s community gave her the vote of confidence through Pledges to turn on paid subscriptions. As a result, she found more discipline and inspiration, and built a new income stream.
Benefits that match your community. The cornerstone of To Vegetables, With Love is community. Hetty’s paid benefits reflect this, with special access to her and her world.
Experiment. Hetty found a way to integrate her existing workstreams with her Substack in an inventive manner, for example offering those who pre-ordered her new book a complimentary paid subscription.
What questions do you have for
that we didn’t ask? Leave them in the comments!To read more from this series on growing your publication, see our interviews with Katelyn Jetelina, Rob Henderson, Tyler Bainbridge, Melinda Wenner Moyer, Leslie Stephens, and more.
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