133: A different math for Substack growth
It had nothing to do with writing.
Three different clients. The same question underneath, asked three different ways.
How do I get more subscribers on Substack?
You’ve been publishing consistently. Growth was promising at first. It’s flattened in a way that doesn’t match the effort. You’re starting to wonder if the standard advice is missing something.
All three of them framed it as a discovery problem. As though some specific tactic or notes strategy would surface the people who haven’t yet found them.
That’s the wrong frame.
Your readers aren’t undiscovered. They’re already gathered. They’re gathered around someone whose work looks very similar to yours in many ways. Maybe someone who has spent five years writing about almost-the-same-thing. Someone who runs a publication your ideal subscriber already opens every week consistently.
Growth on Substack comes down to two questions.
Whose audience already overlaps yours?
Does that creator believe your work is worth pointing to?
Most writers approach growth a little bit like extraction.
How do I get attention from someone who has more of it than I do?
How do I shortcut my way into someone else’s audience?
The premise is wrong.
Substack is built on trust and introduction. Every meaningful growth lever on the platform is some version of one writer pointing another writer’s audience toward someone they trust.
Recommendations. Restacks. Cross-posts. Notes attribution. Live conversations.
Earning an introduction is harder than extracting attention. The standard is higher and the timeline can be longer, although it doesn’t have to be. But once you’ve cleared that bar, the leverage is enormous, because every introduction arrives with the host’s accumulated trust riding on top.
Here’s what I see actually working with the people I work with on this.
How to ask for a recommendation
Most writers treat the recommendations system as a favor to extract. A small ask, easily granted, low cost.
The math says this is still one of the highest-leverage growth levers on Substack right now. It is. There’s nothing wrong with asking directly for one.
When we were first building our Substack, I wanted our first 50 recommendations and I went after them agressively. I made it a game. I sent a lot of asks. For each writer, I named specifically what I loved about their work and mentioned I’d noticed them engaging with my notes. The asks were direct.
What makes an ask like that land is specificity. Generic asks get ignored. Specific ones get accepted because they signal that you’ve actually read the writer’s work, that you’re paying attention, that the recommendation isn’t just a transaction.
The people I work with who get recommended without much friction tend to do three things alongside the ask. They comment thoughtfully on the writer’s work for a stretch without an angle. They publish essays that are unmistakably theirs and unmistakably good. And when they reference that writer’s work in their own, they do so with the kind of specificity that makes it obvious they actually read it.
All of that makes the ask easier. By the time you bring it up, the writer already has familiarity with your work, so it doesn’t feel like a request from a stranger.
How to get noticed by writers you admire
Substack Notes has a feature most growth-focused creators underuse. When a writer shapes a thought you’re having, you can credit them by tagging them in a Note, in real time, in front of their audience.
It’s very simple to do. Write a note that opens with a real observation. Attribute the seed of it to someone you admire, and a specific thing they shared that sparked a thought in you. The mention surfaces in their notifications. Some will like it or reply. A smaller number will restack the note to their own audience, which puts your name in front of their readers.
Use caution here: It only works if the feeling is real. If it reads as performance, and on a platform built around taste, this isn’t going to work in your favor. When the credit is honest and specific, it becomes one of the lowest-friction ways to enter the awareness of someone you’d otherwise have to chase for months, likely with minimal results.
Substack Live works even if no one watches live
A client of mine has built a regular Substack Live practice over the last few months. Two conversations a month, mostly with other writers in adjacent fields. She started doing them as a way to make her work visible without the weight of constantly producing essays.
Her subscriber count is up about 25% over that stretch. One Live attendee commissioned her for paid creative work directly out of one of the conversations.
The format is simple. You invite a guest whose work you admire. You go live. The session surfaces in both audiences’ feeds. Your guest’s followers see your name next to someone they already trust. Some of them subscribe.
The live audience itself almost doesn’t matter. The byproducts matter. The recording views that you benefit from months later. The cross-pollination. The relationship you’ve now formalized with a writer whose audience overlaps with yours.
The only real cost is the hour and the willingness to be on camera. That second part is doing more strategic work than most people on Substack realize right now. Love it or hate it, AI lets anyone produce a polished essay a day if they are motivated to. What it can’t replicate is a real person on camera, in real conversation, in front of another writer’s audience. The discomfort of being visible is exactly what keeps most people out, and exactly what makes the move pay off for the ones who go through that resistance.
Write something with another writer’s audience in mind.
This one is probably the hardest. Most will skip it.
Pick one writer whose audience overlaps yours. Then write something with their readers in mind from the first sentence.
It might answer a question their readers keep asking, if you have been observing their comments. Or take one of their ideas and carry it one step further than they have. The form doesn’t matter so much. What matters is the fit. When the writer reads it, sharing should feel natural and like an obvious next step. A favor to their readers, not to you.
Most writers send their work to other writers and hope it gets shared. It rarely does. When a writer shares something with their readers, they’re putting their own taste on the line. Generic work makes their taste look weak. They only share work that they would feel can stand up next to their own in service of their audience.
The principle underneath
Substack growth at the level most thoughtful writers care about isn’t actually a tactical problem, as much as we would all love to just have a simple step by step blueprint to follow.
Honestly, the tactics are easy. You can find them listed for free in a hundred different posts. The bottleneck is whether you’ve done the deeper work that makes the tactics work in your favor.
A writer with a clear voice, a real point of view, and a body of work that rewards careful reading doesn’t need a growth hack. They need to be one degree closer to the writer who has already gathered the readers who would love their work.
And that is work worth doing. Becoming someone worth pointing to for a fresh perspective, or unique viewpoint.
This will get you one degree closer, and the rest will start to take care of itself quite organically.
Most of the people I work with on this came in through someone else's recommendation, or through one of our Sacred Business Stories episodes. The ones who end up getting the best results build their own audience the same way. With a lot of attention on being worth pointing to, rather than looking for shortcuts.
Being worth pointing to is mostly perspective. Publishing consistently is the first step, but the work many writers skip is developing a point of view you can truly own. That perspective gets built through the doing, with a mindset of paying attention and being thoughtful as you go.
Phil
Who We are Celebrating This Week: Veronica Llorca-Smith
Veronica is an author, an Ironman finisher, and a past guest on Sacred Business Stories.
In March 2025 she published The Anti-Procrastinator with Penguin Random House. Today she’s launching the digital course. The premise overlaps with our work: humans procrastinate by nature and become anti-procrastinators by choice, and the choice runs through knowing your default pattern (one of six types) and rewiring it. The course covers the brain science, the diagnostic, and six mental workouts at what she calls the Anti-Procrastinator Gym.
If you’ve been holding a creative project in the journal stage or postponing the thing you’ve been talking about for years, take a look.
Transparency Alert: We do receive financial compensation if you purchase the course from Veronica, but we only recommend affiliates whose work we believe in.
Things I’d Like to Share
Mia Kiraki writes Robots Ate My Homework, one of the sharpest AI voices on Substack. Twenty minutes in, she turned a question back on me that pulled at a habit he'd been quietly questioning.
Memorable Quote
"When you are surrounded with darkness, do not shake your fist and raise your voice and curse the darkness. Rather be a Light unto the darkness, and don't be mad about it." - Neal Donald Walsch
Phil, this resonates deeply.
In a world where information is cheap, it's real relationships and integrity that build a publication.
Thank you for continuing to provide that inspiration.