The Substack app is now the most powerful growth machine for creators

All the benefits of network effects; all the autonomy of ownership

For a year and a half, we’ve been quietly cultivating a powerful new growth engine. It’s the Substack app, and it’s now the number one source of all subscriptions on the platform. 

Until recently, recommendations were Substack’s largest growth driver. Recommendations, through which publishers can promote other publishers to their audience, have generated more than 34 million subscriptions across the platform. Product management expert

Lenny Rachitsky

, whose newsletter is the top revenue-earner in the business category, called recommendations “one of the most impactful growth features in history.”

Recommendations continue to grow, and yet the app has now surpassed them as the top source of subscriber and revenue growth for Substack publishers. In the past month, recommendations drove 2 million subscriptions across the platform. The app drove 3 million. While other social media platforms penalize external links, discovery in the Substack app is now generating about the same number of subscriptions as all social media sources combined.

Track growth from the app in the dashboard

The bulk of the growth driven by the app is attributable to Notes, the Home feed, and onboarding suggestions. Now that millions of people have downloaded the app and are making it part of their weekly routine, the growth from these sources is only accelerating. 

The Substack app brings together the best of the inbox with the best of social discovery and discussion, giving people the opportunity to go deep with their favorite creators or browse the entire ecosystem. It blends short- and long-form content, casual and formal. After getting a notification and reading a new long-form post, readers might dip into notes, jump over to DMs, or join a chat with fellow subscribers.  From there, they might use search and the leaderboards to find new voices to fall in love with. They can listen to podcasts, watch videos, and join livestreams with top creators and their subscribers. 

Take it from a happy customer, Meg: 

It’s got the dumb memes and shitposts that I love from other social media platforms, but they’re mixed in with thought-provoking posts from newsletters and good discussions. It feels like my favorite blogs have all landed in one place… 

The chat is also a fantastic app feature, depending on how writers/readers are using it. I can connect with folks who have already been vetted to some degree by subscribing to a newsletter that I also find valuable.

Bottom line: the Substack app is largely keeping what’s good about social media and integrating it with a whole new way of consuming media. 

For creators, the app offers the simplest way to publish posts, start new conversations, and post notes to the feed. And it brings creators into closer proximity with one another, particularly through the communities that form on Notes. In these communities, creators can learn from each other and find opportunities for collaboration. It’s a goodwill growth loop.

We’re still in the early days of building the app—there are many features to add and kinks to work out—but the growth results are already so striking that we have decided to accelerate our efforts to bring more people into the system. For example, one trend we’ve noticed is that subscribers who use the app are much more likely to share, like, comment on, or restack your work than before they installed the app (one test put the multiple at seven times likelier). Those subscribers are also much more likely to subscribe to other writers and creators, which means those millions of people act as a pool of high-quality leads for your publication. You can expect to see us doing more experiments around app growth on an ongoing basis. 

The growth of the Substack app ensures that the core principles of creator ownership and autonomy have a home on the internet. On Substack, you own your mailing list, your creative work, and your payment relationships, and you can export them at any time. While the app serves as a growth machine that you can choose to plug into, it does not keep you locked in the system. All the app’s features—from follows to leaderboards to search—are designed to help maximize the number of subscriptions you get (which in turn helps Substack the company grow).

That’s what makes the Substack app unique. Other platforms optimize for content that can entertain the masses for a millisecond; the Substack app is designed to bring talented creators together with an audience that recognizes the value of their work. That makes the app not just a growth engine for creators but a powerful lever in a new economic engine for culture.