Substack Math: Adjusting My Expectations Going Into Year Two of This Newsletter

I won't be quitting my job anytime soon. Plus: insights for personal narrative writers with under 500 readers.

If you’re new here, this is a bonus email about behind-the-scenes Substack stuff and setting realistic expectations for growth. If you’re here for my heartfelt personal stories and self deprecation, my regular Wednesday newsletter will be out in a couple days.

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Finishing this post while watching the Seahawks win today.

Last year when early in my Substack journey, I wrote a three-month Stackiversary post with insights for writers with under 200 readers. I’ll footnote that post below if you’d like to go back and read it.¹

I hadn’t planned on writing a stats post for my recent one-year Stackiversary in September, but then I ran across some notes in my journal from November 2022 that reminded me of some early goals I was tracking, and the math that caused me to shift my expectations of what Substack Success might look like for me.

I’ll get to that math in a moment, but first: I emphasis for me, because I think Substack is a different experience for those of us who write personal essays, especially if we came to Substack without an audience already built in. While my writing might cause you to think or nod your head in solidarity or laugh out loud, I’m not sharing anything tangibly useful, like financial insights, recipes, or marketing advice. Writers like me need to be realistic about our earning potential on this platform.

Substack Math

The math that keeps me grounded.

I’m an Idealist. I frequently make declarations to Bryan like, “I’m going to quit my job and write full time for Substack!” while dreaming about gardening in the morning, writing midday, and doing business stuff late afternoon.

But I’m also an Adult Woman Who Knows Better, so I ran some numbers to test my idealism, which you can see written in my journal above. Here are the numbers transcribed:

In November 2022 I had 11 paid subscribers, mostly friends.

• That’s an average of 3.6 paid subscribers per month in the first few months since I launched.

• At this rate of conversion, I predicted I would have 33 paid subscribers by August 2023.

• Substack’s suggested rate of paid conversions is 10%, so I would need 7,000 free subscribers by August 2023 if I wanted to get anywhere close to 700 paid subscribers within my first year.

• The difference between 700 (my ideal trajectory) and 33 (my projected reality) is 667 paid subscribers I would have to conjure out of thin air.

As you can see, my ideal scenario wasn’t very realistic. Given that I have a family, full time job, and that I was building an audience from scratch, I knew immediately that I wouldn’t have the time or resources to hit 7,000 subscribers within a year.

Fortunately, because of therapy and life experience, I bounced back quickly from the Disappointment of Lost Ideals and reset my expectations.

My Current Numbers

In my December 2022 three month Stackiversary post linked below in the footnotes, I said this:

If I continue at my current average monthly subscriber rate, I should have around 300-350 free subscribers by the end of my first year (July 2023). I think? Is that how math works? I won’t be making any leaderboard appearances with this growth pace, but it’s manageable for the time I have available and is a safe baseline expectation to measure against. I’d love to see open rates stay above 50%.

Well I’ll be damned:

I reached 300 subscribers on August 2, 2023! By the end of September, I had 351 subscribers.

This basic Substack Math prediction boosted my confidence and gave me something real to work with in setting expectations. If you’re struggling or feeling discouraged about your experience on Substack, I encourage you to calculate your own growth to date and make a couple of realistic growth predictions based your own history, not on some pie-in-the-sky ideal like I did at first.

Managing your expectations is a mental game. Better to ground it in reality.

Here’s a history of my subscriber growth since the beginning:

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Where I’m at today, October 21, 2023.

1. This is where my subscriber count was at the three month mark when I posted my first annotated growth chart. You can find the annotated details prior to this point in the link to that post in the footnotes below.

2. This is when I first wrote about Bryan’s cancer diagnosis, and we both invited a wider in-real-life audience to subscribe to my Substack for regular health updates. We often joke about how cancer was “good for business” 😂.

3. Slow and steady growth through consistent posting, networking with other writers, and Subtack’s internal networking tools. Pretty boring stuff.

Side note: My paid conversion rate has remained consistent at 5%, so this is the new calculation I’ll consider when attempting to predict the future.

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Here’s a screenshot of my view counts to date:

1. In November 2022, one of my posts was retweeted by someone who had 30,000 followers.

2. March 2023 was a cancer content bump. I was posting frequent updates that coincided with the uncertainty and scariness after Bryan’s diagnosis.

3. August 2023 was when I relaunched under a new name and had several strong follow-up posts after the initial announcement.

4. October 2023 isn’t over yet, but I’m clearly trending downward. This tracks with the decreased time and effort I’ve put into Substack networking over the last couple of months. I’ve been distracted by some other personal projects.

Happy to answer any specific questions you may have about these numbers or my opinions of them.

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My Insights

Overall, I’m pleased with the slow and steady growth — it’s what I can manage with the time I have available. I like the relationship between quality writing, consistent posting, and organic networking, with occasional bursts of luck and serendipity. If and when I want to grow faster, I’ll put more effort into marketing myself. I keep reminding myself I’m here primarily to practice a writing habit, test my ideas, and find the people who want to read my (future) book.

We have to know what we want and why.

Without a clear vision of what success looks like for you as an individual, all sorts of false narratives will creep into your brain and paralyze your creativity.

I write because I’m a writer. I can’t not write. I like that I get to send you weekly emails and share my stories. You’re helping to make me a better writer, and hopefully someday you’ll buy my book or tell a friend to buy it. In the meantime, thanks for being my Substack Bestie.

We have to be realistic.

Most of us are not famous writers. Sure, you might pay Cheryl Strayed or Jen Hatmaker or Nadia Boltz-Weber a few bucks a month to read their personal essays. This makes sense, because you’re a already a big fan and have probably spent money buying their books. I don’t have this reputation. If you’re starting out, you don’t either. Substack isn’t a get rich quick situation - trust and growth is built over time.

I get that most of you aren’t reading every email I send or remembering every detail I write about. That’s cool. I’m already winning because I sat down to write something and sent it out into the world. That’s one level of success for me, in the form of over 75 not-shitty published essays. Yay!

In putting myself out there on a platform like this, I try to compete with myself against my own goals. When I’m in my right mind, this is very motivating. When I compare myself to other writers, I lose confidence and motivation.

What doesn’t make sense, is for me to paywall my posts. If I do, they’ll only go out to 20 people, and maybe 15 people will read them. I want my stories to be read more widely than that, so I keep them free in hopes that down the road I’ll publish a book that you’ll be willing to buy.

I definitely recommend you open up paid subscriptions so people can support you financially if they want to. But in doing so, you have to be realistic about the pace of your paid subscriber growth and what people are willing to pay for.

We have to understand the landscape.

I’m not selling a product, service, or useful information here. When it comes to newsletters that are funny and poignant personal essays, there’s only so many dollars to go around, and I’m the small fish in a big pond. It’s a crowded genre.

In this post from a couple weeks ago,

Alex Dobrenko`

revealed that of his 6000+ subscribers, only 3% or 230 converted to paid. And he’s funnier than me, better looking, and spends more time promoting his work than I do.

Amran Gowani

“has written and published a Substack-based newsletter, Field Research, for two years, during which he has quintupled his audience. But only a couple dozen people have so far been willing to pay for his work.”²

If these two people with thousands of subscribers are struggling with paid growth, I need to set realistic expectations for my own growth. I encourage you to do the same.

We all want to be paid writers. I get it. My possibly unpopular opinion is that even if it takes me longer to make a sustained living as a writer, I’m happier doing it here than I would be on an algorithmic platform. I’m not built for writing click bait.

Agree with my point of view? Disagree? I’d love to hear what you think.

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My primary objectives continue to be: become a better writer, finish my book, and find people to buy it.

Thanks for reading — this was a long one! You get five gold stars for making it to the end! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

When you support me with a paid subscription, I can do things like attend writing workshops or hire an editor. Paid or free, I’m glad you’re here!

This post is uniquely business-y and numbers-y. Be sure to subscribe if you want to get future stories and deep thoughts from me in the future. I’ll be writing about how my kids should do Thanksgiving (in case I die), my life goals when I was 22 years old, the time my three-year-old dropped the f-bomb in front of my very non-swearing mom, and my one career regret. Among other things.

1. My three month ‘stackiversary post:

2. Amran is hosting a zoom discussion on this topic November 17. Details are HERE.