Grow: How engineer Gergely Orosz found a new career in writing
Grow: How engineer Gergely Orosz found a new career in writing
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 Gergely Orosz, who writes The Pragmatic Engineer, to share insights on how he developed his voice as an engineer-turned-writer and never looked back.
What’s your Substack about in one sentence?
Big Tech and high-growth startups, from the inside. It’s highly relevant for software engineers and managers and interesting for anyone working in tech.
What do you uniquely offer readers?
A deep dive into a software engineering–related topic on Tuesdays and a timely article on Big Tech and high-growth startups on Thursdays. Plus an ever-growing document collection, which is useful for engineering managers and software engineers.
Free subscribers get one full article per month and additional bonus ones.
Growth by the numbers
Started writing online: I began writing a blog on software engineering in 2015 called The Pragmatic Engineer. In 2019, I started collecting email addresses, sending out a once-a-month newsletter. It took two years for this mailing list to grow to 9,000 subscribers. This blog served as the basis of my Substack.
Started Substack with paid subscriptions: August 2021. It’s safe to say that the “overnight success” of the newsletter was built on many years of writing, a growing number of people discovering the blog and subscribing to a rudimentary newsletter—which was powered by Mailchimp at the time.
Free subscribers: 180,000+
Paid subscribers: Thousands
Numbers are reassuring because they’re easy to interpret. However, I pay just as much attention to the messages that readers send me via email and social media on why they find the publication helpful.
Several readers shared how they are looking forward to new issues, or find the newsletter useful in learning more about the industry and use it to level up their knowledge. An engineering manager shared how the newsletter keeps them up to date with new developments in the industry and even attributed their success in getting a Software Development Manager (SDM) role at Amazon to regularly reading—and reflecting on—the contents.
Numbers are reassuring because they’re easy to interpret. However, I pay just as much attention to the messages that readers send me via email and social media on why they find the publication helpful.
Why did you decide to go paid?
I went paid from the moment I announced my Substack because I already had a decent email list, and I observed a gap in the market I could fill with an in-depth newsletter focusing on the Big Tech and high-growth startup world I’ve been working in for years. I wanted this publication to cover topics from the viewpoint of the people who work at these companies.
What’s your content strategy?
One deeply researched, interesting topic related to software engineering each week.
One topic reflecting on what’s happening in the software engineering world. What are tech professionals working in Big Tech or startups talking about?
The challenge with this strategy is the time to write these articles. They take up my whole week—and often then some!
What’s the sharpest insight you can offer other writers about growing a Substack publication?
Respect the time of readers. There is no shortage of fluffy writing that says very little with a lot of words. And every day, there are more and more newsletters, blogs, and content out there.
Write about something interesting and do this in a concise way. Make it easy for readers to digest what you intend to get across: may this be using short sentences, images, or clever formatting of the text.
What advice would you give other professionals that want to share their knowledge in writing?
It takes time to find your voice. I’ve been writing regularly since 2015, and it took a surprising amount of time to find my own voice. I don’t know if there are any shortcuts beyond writing a bunch.
Writing benefits professionals even if there aren’t as many people reading. My professional career as a software engineer and engineering manager benefitted from the fact that I wrote frequently. Because I did it frequently, this skill became less of an effort. At work, I’d be able to circulate my ideas in writing easier, and it later helped me write longer blog posts and newsletter issues with less trouble.
Read more: Becoming a better writer, especially as a software engineer
Writing can make your ideas spread a lot more. A benefit of writing down my thoughts about various topics is how I can reference these a lot easier. Early on, I would often write posts about ideas I found myself repeating to people. A good example of this was how I discovered how software engineering compensation distribution seems to be trimodal and wrote about it. It’s one of my most-referenced ideas. It would have been forgotten had I not written it down!
Read more: My learnings a year into writing a paid newsletter
What has been a meaningful moment for the growth of your publication?
Substack launching recommendations in April 2022. Recommendations changed the growth pace of my publication, and the speed of growth has not stopped.
It was Substack writer Simon Owens who summarized recommendations as Substack’s unfair advantage in his insightful analysis that I could not recommend more.
I’ve not spent a single dollar on marketing or ads, and yet the newsletter grew dynamically.
For free subscribers, the traffic sources, in order, are:
Substack Discover and Recommendations. The biggest way for new readers to find my publication is through Substack’s recommendations system, launched in April. At the time of writing, 70% of new subscribers per month come from recommendations and Discover, the majority through recommendations. Sixty-five thousand of the 150,000 subscribers came from this source. My newsletter’s recommendations resulted in a comparable number of new subscriptions for other Substack newsletters.
The Pragmatic Engineer Blog. This drives about a fifth as many of the free signups as Substack’s platform features do. Fifteen percent of visitors coming from my blog signed up to the newsletter.
Twitter. I am a frequent user of Twitter, often sharing drafts of posts, as well. In August 2021, I had about 27,000 followers on the platform. This number grew to about 115,000 a year later. About 5% of visitors clicking through from Twitter became subscribers.
LinkedIn. Even though I post less frequently on LinkedIn, the platform drove only 10% fewer subscribers than Twitter has. About eight in 100 visitors coming from LinkedIn signed up to the newsletter.
The Substack app. In what is impressive, the Substack iOS app accounted for almost half the subscribers who found me on LinkedIn.
Hacker News. While being on the Hacker News front page resulted in significant traffic, about 1% of all visitors signed up for the newsletter.
My YouTube channel. Ten percent of people clicking through signed up to the newsletter.
For paid subscribers, the channels they converted from, in order, are:
The Pragmatic Engineer Blog and PragmaticEngineer.com. By far the biggest channel for new paid folks.
Twitter. The social media channel driving the highest number of paid subscribers.
Substack Discover, Recommendations, and the Substack app. Driving about half the number of paid subscribers as Twitter.
LinkedIn. Just below the number of subscribers who came from the Substack platform.
Google. In what is surprising, visitors finding the publication via Google ended up subscribing to the newsletter in similar numbers as all paid subscribers from LinkedIn.
Hacker News. A third of the number of paid subscribers who came via Google.
I’ve not spent a single dollar on marketing or ads, and yet the newsletter grew dynamically.
Takeaways
Writing fuels professional development. For Gergely, writing in the early days helped him organize and access his ideas more readily. As a result, he says his written communication with coworkers improved, and he even wrote himself a new job—as a writer!
Numbers are a signal. Numbers can help you interpret the health and trajectory of your Substack’s growth. But feedback from readers in the comments, via email replies, and on social media helps tell the full story of the impact of your writing in the world.
Respect your readers. As Gergely notes, there is no shortage of fluff content. If you want your work to resonate, there is no substitute for interesting, concise writing.
What questions do you have for Gergely that we didn’t ask? Leave them in the comments!
To read more from this series on growing your publication, see our interviews with Anne Kadet, Category Pirates, BowTiedBull, Justin Gage, Noah Smith, Carissa Potter, Jørgen Veisdal, Anne Byrn, Nishant Jain, Michael Fritzell, Glenn Loury, Erik Hoel, Jessica DeFino, Mike Sowden, Elizabeth Held, Jonathan Nunn, Polina Pompliano, Michael Williams, Judd Legum, and Caroline Chambers.
Grow: How engineer Gergely Orosz found a new career in writing