I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months | Hacker News Reader

I grew my Substack from 439 to 451 free subscribers in just 11 months

shadesofgreaves.substack.com

228 pointsvitabenes70 comments

> 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.

It'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?

+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.

I 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.

> "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.

It's VC-driven thinking. For regular people a success could be completing a book, but maybe also having it be successful enough that it opens the door for another book.

If your boss is a VC, success is when you exit with an IPO, full stop. The venture doesn't have to be anywhere near profitability if there's enough hype to sell blocks of shares to pension funds.

> , but maybe also having it be successful enough that it opens the door for another book.

Unlikely. And that's the point. That's okay. To not get to that level is the norm. There's no sense fearing the obvious, the typical, the usual. Again, worst case you end up where you started (had you done nothing).

It's like traveling isn't it? Eventually you end up back at home (i.e., where you started) and yet you're damn happy you left. So yeah, pull the handle on the slot machine and let the chips fall where they may. No reason to be afraid.

You've successfully completed a task. Sure, that's important. Obviously. But if the goal of writing the book is for others to read, perhaps even to sell X (e.g., 500) copies then there's a very good change you will not reach that goal.

That's ok. That's the point. That's the norm. So if you come up short, so what.

My point is, maybe labelling everything you do a failure is not that good for you, mentally. I think this is somewhat ingrained in US culture, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is at least one of the causes for the mental health crisis in the US.

This isn’t satire to me, that’s genuinely great life advice. I use it all the time. For instance, a difficult stressful tech interview was passed with flying colors using that psychological method.

In general parlance (American in particular), a conditional negative (eg “if I got cancer”) is usually verboten, like you cause a side effect (=killing the vibe) even though the condition isn’t materialized. You have to look past that to get the golden nugget.

Assuming you’re gonna fail, you’ll have learnt a lot and enjoyed it. You don’t confuse external opportunity and expectation with your passions and interests. Psychologically it also reduces the stakes. It doesn’t really matter if the outcome is failure or success, the point is that it’s constant.

The satire comment was in general about that author and post, not the specific line.

Failing is learning. Failing in something you don't enjoy isn't fun.

Sometimes one can learn from failures. Other times, most of the time I'd say, failure is failure and one ends up, depending on the failure, with less money, less energy, fewer successes.

I don't like "failing", I don't want to fail so I can learn, certainly for the ambitious person there are failures, losses, things that did not work out on the way, hopefully to success, but selection bias is strong when saying that failing is learning.

And you’ll probably be a lot better at it too. Go the extra mile with less mental stress and so on.

> Jon Stewart is back on TDS

I thought you meant Trump derangement syndrome. Which is also a totally valid statement.

Darn, 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.

Journaling 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?

I 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.

I bet there are 7 subreddits focused on topics that embrace old Romanian kitchen implements.

I’d be interested, should you ever decide to post that content!

Hah, 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-sa...

And here is my clone:

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.

I did put effort into that - I built an RSS feed for my site. In fact, if you use a well-behaved reader with partial fetching, I'll even include the full text of each article.

Why? My most enjoyable project doesn't have any tracking at all, I don't know if it has just 1 (me) user, 1,000 or a million. Every other week or so I get some confirmation that people actually use it and it always is a pleasant surprise, so much more worthwhile than just to see a number go up.

Maybe there is a businessmodel to be made with a platform that shows engagement metrics but they're not the real thing, just a bunch of counters that are incremented regardless of actual use. That way you get to feel good...

I read it was takin' the piss / sarcasm.

The person writes for a living, so having analytics is necessary. Subscribers are the most direct possible audience for a book, which is usually part of how writers support themselves.

>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.

I get what your sarcasm is about but a friendly FYI if you didn't know... the purpose of Substack is writing for subscribers. Building subscribers (and hopefully paying subscribers) is why the founder of Substack created it. (My previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083741)

Stratechery's writer Ben Thompson quit his 6-figure job at Microsoft and was able to make millions per year by writing for an audience of email newsletter subscribers. That's the type of financial success that many writers using the Substack platform are trying to replicate. (https://www.google.com/search?q=Stratechery+writer+subscribe...)

You're not "doing it wrong" because you're not the intended user of Substack. An analogy would be me saying "I guess I'm playing music wrong because I just sat around the campfire with my guitar and sang "99 Bottles Of Beers On The Wall". I guess I need to put my songs on Spotify to get a rush from watching the # listener streams go up."

My mockery of the musicians on Spotify by me playing dumb about not also not putting my music on it -- is irrelevant to those artists on that platform trying to make money.

The author of this thread's article is also trying to monetize his writing. He admitted he's not there yet so wanted to "blow off some steam" -- via some satire -- about the endless advice to "work harder" to grow his audience. His satirical piece doesn't change the fact that he still wants to grow his Substack audience to some success like Ben Thompson.

If people don't know what the Substack platform is actually about, then I can see where it looks like the writers are just there for unhealthy vanity gazing.

I 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.

For 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.

You 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.

The 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.)

> 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.

I've been going back and forth for a blog/website relaunch. My current thinking is I'll just go with a new template on Google Blogger. I've actually been happy enough with that over the years.

I don't cross-post to Medium any longer.

But then aren't people sick of moving from platform to platform? I've read recently some people saying they were fleeing from substack (many presumably were previously on medium) because of neonazi contents being non moderated.

I'd rather pay a little for my own domain and hosting (you don't even have to manage the server and a cms) than having to migrate every few internet dramas.

I remember watching a video from an LA real estate review youtuber where she shared how much money she makes on different platforms, including articles on medium. It ranged from $9k to $30k per month, medium alone. And her content overall wasn't even... sexualized (anticipating the obvious). Neither was she a "stellar" content creator, I mean there was no stupid "show" in each content piece.

She didn't show any sign of being able to set up her own blog.

The appeal is that you get exposure from their readerbase. They ship you a - minor, but still - audience with the chance that it grows larger. It's not about the money and getting subscribers, very few reach that, and every author hates ads (the downside of these platforms, Substack is much better there).

It's about you liking to write, and liking that people read what you write, not income.

They are the modern day "OpEd" of physical newspapers.

You publish there because they already have a large reader base, so that your voice can be heard.

The appeal of Substack is akin to sharecropping on the land of a different feudal lord. Instead of fighting SEO optimizers on Google, you can now be a guinea pig for Substack as they figure out how to make money.

My 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.

Content 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.

Yes, 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.

Even 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.

Did you know your readers even wanted a letter ever single day, instead of once a week?

Yes, 75% open rate + 'concerned' emails when I missed a day every now and then.

You must have been pretty interesting!

I 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.

Yea well I learned C++ in just 21 days

goddamnit this got me!

Sams 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.

Haaa! 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.

Well he has 900 now, time for the lambo.

11 months of posting 3 articles per month: 12 $ (subscribers)

being mentioned on HN: priceless

The installment #1 of my “For Starters” substack was about how failure is inevitable

https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-1-the-end-is...

To add to the humor of this post, the author with an engineering background miscalculates 451 - 439 to be 11 new subscribers.

It's an engineer's dozent.

Awesome work here OP.

Hm, I've got almost 500 subs on YouTube since 2006. I'm equally amazed every time someone subs to my trash. xD

There’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.

MOC?

Adult 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/ and the world was better for it.

Bravo, Swiftian sarcastic satirical Sir or Madame.

Taylor Swift writes satire? (Ducks object thrown at my head)

There's Swift on Security, and cybersec is half satire anyway.

Why not? Britney Spears has a site about semiconductor physics https://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm

God, I love that site.

You 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.

So, a +0.97% increase?

It's a whooping 9.7‰ increase!

Some would say it's even a 27.3‰ increase, but I think that's a lie.

haha. nice. man i can't grow shit online like the old days.

It 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.

Maybe not, but what generation added all the "caution: do not eat" labels to everything in the first place? Hmm...

Ypu 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.

Pfff, I have like... 10

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