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I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months
- keikobadthebad 3y agoWell he has 900 now, time for the lambo.
- cranberryturkey 3y agohaha. nice. man i can't grow shit online like the old days.
- allium 3y agoIt was always hard, but it used to be possible. These days, though, you have to compete for visibility against people who are as good at manipulation as you are at actually doing stuff. Platform capitalism has made the “idiot box” age of TV downright civilized in comparison—at least they didn’t eat Tide pods in the trash cable era.
- Andrex 3y agoMaybe not, but what generation added all the "caution: do not eat" labels to everything in the first place? Hmm...
- rchaud 3y agoYpu can throw generative AI/LLM summarization into that heap as well. Previously, juicing one's numbers for platform visibility meant churning out content in a labour-intensive manner. Now, there's no limit to how much marketing garbage they can spew out to try to catch every stray eyeball.
- Donaldzibe 3y ago[flagged]
- benreesman 3y agoAdult humor at one’s own expense or the expense of “public figures” was celebrated, not cancelled, in the halcyon days of yore like 5 years ago. This used to fly: https://jesuschristsiliconvalley-blog.tumblr.com/ https://jesuschristsiliconvalley-blog.tumblr.com/ and the world was better for it. Bravo, Swiftian sarcastic satirical Sir or Madame.
- runamuck 3y agoTaylor Swift writes satire? (Ducks object thrown at my head)
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThere's Swift on Security, and cybersec is half satire anyway.
- GravitasFailure 3y agoWhy not? Britney Spears has a site about semiconductor physics https://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm https://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm
- Loughla 3y agoGod, I love that site.
- benreesman 3y agoYou and me both: the magistrates and noblemen and aldermen serve a purpose, but the current crop apparently read Sapiens or The Selfish Gene or some other airport book instead of their Marcus Aurelius: you’re only mortal, you’re not even Achilles let alone a god. And so they need to be shrunk down to size by someone wittier than they are, from time to time. Which given the demonstrable identical distributions of capability between the kleptocrats and the whole population? There’s someone smarter than the God Emperor of tagging or cloud or CUDA at a UCSD keg party. As for the tightass posers who are sitting on the downvote button of a comment with “I love this” pinned under it: if you think you know more about what’s in and out of bounds concerning humor on HN than a daily user for sixteen years? Well in that case, been a minute pg, hope Jessica is well. Otherwise? Take a long walk off a short bridge.
- ryukoposting 3y agoDarn, I've been doing it all wrong! Guess I need to migrate my entire blog to Substack so that I can have a concept of "subscribers" and the necessary analytics to give me a dopamine rush any time the number gets bigger.
- gowld 3y agoJournaling is great. It helps organize your thinking. Why do you publish, if not to reach readers? If you want to reach readers, why not put some effort into that part too?
- jacquesm 3y agoI write to organize my thoughts and sometimes that writing is useful to others and then I publish it. But that's more like 1:50 or so these days, most of the stuff I do I'm pretty sure nobody would be interested in. Last week's project: to recreate an old Romanian kitchen implement. I highly doubt anybody would be interested in something like that.
- gowld 3y agoI bet there are 7 subreddits focused on topics that embrace old Romanian kitchen implements.
- waldothedog 3y agoI’d be interested, should you ever decide to post that content!
- jacquesm 3y agoHah, serves me right :) It's a wooden mallet/knife combo that is used to mash eggplant, nothing special really but you can't just go out and buy them here. So I chopped one out of a piece of acacia wood and then endless sanding to get it to as close as the original as I could. This the real thing: https://www.dedeman.ro/ro/tocator-pentru-vinete-lemn-euro-sangift-4000-30-x-9-cm/p/3020779 https://www.dedeman.ro/ro/tocator-pentru-vinete-lemn-euro-sa... And here is my clone: https://imgur.com/a/ikAXbyB https://imgur.com/a/ikAXbyB If you want an SVG for the outline let me know (mail in profile). That's four hours of work, most of it spent on sanding, Acacia is pretty hard.
- sirwhinesalot 3y agoPfff, I have like... 10
- mattbrewsbytes 3y ago> So, considering that you’re likely going to fail, at least pick something you’re going to enjoy failing at! This is the golden nugget that got me subscribed. I love satire (and am pumped Jon Stewart is back on TDS) and this is a good perspective to trying out side projects.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoIt's not limited to side projects. "Failure" is the norm. It's what happens nearly every time, all the time. Once you embrace this then you're spitting distance from, "What do I have to lose?" If you don't try, you end up in the same place. If you do try, you also likely end up in the same place. But oh the joy of pulling that slot machine handle and watching the wheels spin. There's simply no joy at all in not trying. So why not try?
- flpm 3y ago+1 The sooner in your career (or life) you get used to failing and learning from it, the more potential (or happiness) you will have.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoI put "failure" in quotes because it's only failure if you don't pause to learn. If you try and come up short but also learning something, then it's not failure, it's a learning experience. So...ya can't learn (read: grow) if you don't try.
- rustybolt 3y ago> "Failure" is the norm. It's what happens nearly every time, all the time. That feels like a very unhealthy perspective on life to me (that seems to be quite common in the US). For example, if you write a book, that can be a major success in itself. The quality of the book has nothing to do with how well it sells.
- rchaud 3y ago
- klelatti 3y agoI have a 'second' Substack set up five months ago. I've never sent an email or mentioned or promoted it anywhere. The main page just says coming soon. * It has 26 subscribers from 123 all time page views, is read in six states and eight countries. * It will eventually be used for a new project.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zero-sharp 3y agoYea well I learned C++ in just 21 days
- throwaway71271 3y agogoddamnit this got me!
- gowld 3y agoSams taught myself C++ in 24 hours. The time frame wasn't even the most impressive part. Sams merging with my ego was the real achievement.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoHaaa! Nice. So, I have a Medium Account since its early beta when your Twitter account was used as your Medium ID. Somewhere down the line, I wrote/sync my articles and a few articles got picked up. It then began to grow and has about 4,500 Followers by the time I abandoned my account. A few people have advised me on how to “spam” and “SEO” and “Affiliate” and others. I'm not keen on it. And no, I have absolutely no idea how it grew.
- allium 3y agoThere’s a bit of sour truth in this. I don’t think it’s Substack’s fault, but the era in which quality content could grow an audience through organic means is over. TikTok is more of a symptom than a driver, but the Internet in this Big Platform, enshittifed era is just as much a wasteland as TV was in the “idiot box” age. Ten years ago, if the powers that be wanted to put you to the big sleep, they had to MOC you. Now, they don’t have to do anything because unless you have the funds and time to build a platform in today’s low-effort, low-attention world, they know you will be ignored.
- u32480932048 3y agoMOC?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- occsceo 3y agoAwesome work here OP.
- u32480932048 3y ago[flagged]
- kebman 3y agoHm, I've got almost 500 subs on YouTube since 2006. I'm equally amazed every time someone subs to my trash. xD
- prmoustache 3y agoI never understood the appeal in platforms like Medium and Substack. But then I am a pathological contrarian and have an allergic reaction to anything any kind of advertising signal to buy, force you to have an account for consultation, subscribe, send like and whatever and tend to avoid most of these platforms. You are free to add an rss xml file to your website though.
- screenothethird 3y ago[dead]
- deely3 3y agoFor me its ok. It looks like this: I found the author that Im imterested in and copied blog url into my RSS reader. Works for Substack.
- foreverobama 3y ago[dead]
- tiborsaas 3y agoYou don't have to deal with any tech stuff, basically that's the appeal. No server management, no separate newsletter service, no nothing. Log in to your account, write and publish with built in monetisation.
- ghaff 3y agoThe monetization is worth pretty much zero for most people. But it's low friction and at least Medium used to have an aura of carrying more reputational weight than a personal blog did. (Which was BS but was the case at least once upon a time.)
- bluejellybean 3y ago> Medium used to have an aura of carrying more reputational weight than a personal blog did. At least within the realm of technical discussion, I'll be continuing to view it as a mostly negative signal. The institution is very rarely the individual, and there isn't value in assigning positive weight when said institution doesn't carry any itself. Increased friction is counter-intuitively a positive here, it shows that the author has at least put some real investment into the presentation of their work. Don't get me wrong, doesn't need to be a fully self-designed/built website, just spending some cash on a domain && Wix template is at least _something_ more than throwing words at a page to profit.
- scrapcode 3y agoTo add to the humor of this post, the author with an engineering background miscalculates 451 - 439 to be 11 new subscribers.
- gowld 3y agoIt's an engineer's dozent.
- marban 3y agoMy newsletter stalled at 5k subs, and writing every single day had a severe negative impact on my life, so I just stopped after 2 years. Life is too short to chase becoming another Morning Brew when you rely on WOM as your sole growth factor.
- taubek 3y agoContent curation and creation is really full time job. Especially if you have a publishing cadence that you don’t want to break. Publishing every day must have been really exhausting.
- lobsterthief 3y agoYes, in publishing we call this “the content treadmill”. You’re publishing into a vacuum; you never know if you’ve published enough, and there’s always more that can be published. Then, your competitors out-SEO you, and you’re constantly updating your existing content to keep up. It’s why I sold my how-to site and I focus now on building tools instead.
- ghaff 3y agoEven if you write fairly regularly it's not the same as a formal cadence. When I was an analyst one of my least favorite tasks was a weekly newsletter we did for one of our clients because you could not just punt on it one week or shove it out a few days.
- gowld 3y agoDid you know your readers even wanted a letter ever single day, instead of once a week?
- marban 3y agoYes, 75% open rate + 'concerned' emails when I missed a day every now and then.
- pipeline_peak 3y agoSo, a +0.97% increase?
- hannes0 3y agoIt's a whooping 9.7‰ increase! Some would say it's even a 27.3‰ increase, but I think that's a lie.
- garrickvanburen 3y agoThe installment #1 of my “For Starters” substack was about how failure is inevitable https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-1-the-end-is-inevitable https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-1-the-end-is...
- Donaldzibe 3y ago[flagged]
- Freedomboy 3y ago[dead]