Starting from scratch: advice on building a career and finding an audience on Substack
Substack’s homegrown talent on building from the ground up
A week after I got laid off from my staff job as a news editor, I sent out my first newsletter.
I must confess that my initial email dispatch wasn’t sent on Substack, but only because it didn’t exist back then.1
When I started my newsletter, I’d been an editor at an online magazine but I didn’t have much of a public profile—a few hundred Twitter followers, no book, nor podcast. What I did have was a desire to leave editing behind and become a full-time writer.
I moved over from Mailchimp to Substack at the beginning of 2019, and things took off from there. In my first year on Substack, my audience tripled. By my second year, I landed a deal for my first book, You’re the Business, as a result of the audience I’d built through my newsletter. My readership is now at 17,000 subscribers, and it remains the largest of all the platforms that I’m on.
I’m not alone in finding success on Substack starting from scratch. When I asked on Notes for stories of writers with no pre-existing audience, the response was overwhelming (nearly 600 replies!). I heard from poets, therapists, and even a sommelier who all started their Substacks with no social followings.
, for example, launched a meal-planning newsletter in Romanian and just surpassed 24,000 subscribers, 500 of them paid.And then there’s
; less than two years after launching , the neuroscientist was able to quit his job in academia to write his Substack full-time. , who writes investment newsletter , started his Substack from scratch as a college student in the hope of attracting an employer. He watched it grow by 100 subscribers a week, and it soon provided a full-time income. , of , recently launched a second publication on a completely different topic—a read-along of Robert Caro’s series on President Lyndon B. Johnson. Web designer started , a serialized newsletter of the gothic novel, as a side project, and it’s since attracted over 230,000 fans. These creators, whom I like to think of as Substack’s native stars, represent a growing community of homegrown talent flourishing on the platform. Some found large audiences and were able to turn their publications into livelihoods; others built confidence in their writing abilities; all have carved a unique creative path on Substack.I spoke with some of the native stars to find out their best advice for going from scratch to success on Substack.
“I didn’t want to write stuff that didn’t fill me with joy”
In the charmingly self-deprecating style that’s come to be the hallmark of his newsletter
, opened our conversation by telling me he was a “semi-failed travel writer.” Fed up with the frustrations of freelancing, he reached a point where he wanted to take his writing in a different direction and find a way to turn it into a new career for himself. “I just didn’t want to write stuff that didn’t fill me with joy, curiosity, and wonder,” he says.Mike had an existing mailing list of 1,000 people interested in his travel writing. But when he launched a Substack about the science of curiosity, hardly any followed him. “Then it was a process of growing it from there,” he says. “My first year was just experimenting with everything.”
Not all his experiments worked out. A “mistake” he says he made early on was trying to act like he had a bigger audience than he did. He’d ask people to comment on his posts, but with a small readership, engagement was limited, so he switched his approach. “I’m small,” he says. “I’m not gonna pretend otherwise.”
Instead, he shared snippets from his newsletter in Twitter threads, writing them with the enthusiasm he had for his discoveries. In February 2022, one of his Twitter threads, a post about the Zanclean megaflood, went viral and reached 10 million people. “I had 6,000 free signups and over 100 paid in about four days,” Mike says.
Now, Everything Is Amazing has nearly 23,000 subscribers and 640 paid. “That was the point when my newsletter became pretty much my full-time job.”
“I don’t have to wait for permission”
While Mike and I navigated career transitions within our fields, newcomers like
and launched successful writing careers entirely on Substack. With traditional routes into publishing becoming harder to break into, Substack empowers new authors. It offers them a direct way to find their voice, build an audience, and develop their craft.Tiffany bypassed the media gatekeepers and launched her newsletter,
, in 2019. “I don’t have to wait for permission to write,” she says. “It’s improved my writing, and built a habit and an audience.”On Substack, she found readers eager to engage with her raw and intimate writing style. She says the regular feedback she gets directly from them helped her grow in confidence and even land a book deal for her debut memoir. “A reader introduced me to my agent,” she says. Her advice to people starting out is simple: be consistent and do Substack in a way that’s authentic to you. “One of the metrics that doesn’t get talked about is that I just keep doing it. This shows how much I love it.,” she says.
Whereas Tiffany pivoted from a marketing career, David embarked on his writing journey after 40 years in finance. He says that writing his Substack,
, is neither a job nor a hobby. “It feels like a vocation,” he says. David and Tiffany exemplify how success on Substack extends beyond financial metrics to personal growth and fulfillment as writers. They both joined the platform specifically to hone their writing and, in doing so, discovered committed audiences who valued their work.David’s Substack has a thriving community. His posts consistently attract dozens, often even hundreds, of comments. I personally discovered him after he left me a thoughtful comment on my own newsletter. David credits his growth on Substack to his active participation in Notes and other writers’ comments sections. He emphasizes that this wasn’t just a strategic move, but rather a genuine passion for engaging with others’ work. “I know how much I like a well-thought-out comment,” he says. “Most writers enjoy that as well.”
“I’m cultivating a community”
Writers aren’t the only creators bootstrapping on Substack.
is a musician based in the Pacific Northwest. “I always had this dream of becoming a film composer,” he says. “But in music, it’s really hard to stick together a living.”He launched his eponymous Substack in September 2021 with a commitment to release one song per month for two years. “There are 24 musical keys, and I wrote 24 songs—one for each key,” he says. “It was an amazing compositional exercise that I don’t think anybody gives a shit about. But for me, it gave me a structure to work in, and it also gave me a portfolio.”
That initial two-year experiment turned into an ongoing project and Fog Chaser is now in his third year on Substack. What started as an email to 40-odd friends and family has grown into a list of 3,500 subscribers, which Fog Chaser puts down to consistent engagement. “I became kind of ‘Substack-first’ over the last couple of years. That’s been a bit of a strategy,” he says.
As a musician, having direct access to an audience is a string that was missing from his digital bow. “On Spotify, I can’t reach the people who follow me—I have no idea who those people are, and I can’t communicate with them. I’m just on a playlist or an algorithm,” he says. “But here on Substack, I’m cultivating a community.”
“You can be anonymous and have a very successful newsletter”
Perhaps the standout example of a popular newsletter that shows how you can successfully build a publication without a pre-existing audience is
, the financial analysis newsletter focused on distressed investing, bankruptcy and restructuring.The authors at Petition not only built their audience from zero, but they also write it anonymously. “It’s almost like being Batman,” one of Petition’s writers tells me. “The anonymity affords us the cloak that we need to say what needs to be said without there being repercussions.”
One of Petition’s writers tells me that the newsletter has tens of thousands of subscribers, significant revenue, and is highly profitable. “I don’t think having a small following or being anonymous are necessarily roadblocks to having a very successful newsletter,” they say. “You don’t need social media necessarily. You don’t need algorithmic boosting necessarily.”
The Petition writer tells me that the secret sauce to building a newsletter from the ground up is conviction. That’s something that became evident in all the conversations I had with Substack native stars. What sets them apart is an unwavering belief in what they’re writing about and their dedication to it.
They say, “If you put out good content that covers a niche area, if you have expertise in that subject matter and you can write it in a way that people will find educational and entertaining—you will find an audience.”
Subscribe to Anna’s Substack A-Mail, and follow her on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.
Do you know another writer who has grown from the ground up on Substack and should be included here? Shout them out in a comment, and share your own story too.
This was July 2017, and Substack would launch in October of that year.
 | A guest post by
|
Share this post