The Substack Emperor Has No Clothes
A Clear-Eyed Audit of a 13 Months Experiment
In January 2024, I launched this Substack. I took it to heart to make it a genuine experiment despite my overall dislike towards Social Media..
I hired a designer to build a proper landing page and set up the infrastructure right. I hired a coach to learn the platform’s best practices. I subscribed to the experts, studied their strategies, followed their playbooks.
I even burned out trying to keep up with their advice.
I published weekly. Every post took anywhere from six hours to several days. I wasn’t filling space. I was writing pieces I believed could genuinely serve my readers.
Thirteen months later, here are the numbers.
The investment
13 months. 90 posts. Approximately 110,000 words. A designer, a coach, subscriptions to learn the game. $2,800 in revenue. More than that in expenses. Net negative.
The growth
800 subscribers. 600 came from my existing mailing list. That leaves roughly 200 organic subscribers gained through the platform in over a year of consistent, invested work.
For context, Substack has 35 million active subscriptions and 20 million monthly active users. I gained 200 in thirteen months.
Meanwhile, the platform itself grew from 35 million to over 50 million active subscriptions in 2025. Paid subscribers jumped from 3 million to 5 million. Substack raised $100 million at a billion-dollar valuation.
Multiple writers reported organic discovery dropping 80-90% as the algorithm shifted toward promoting big names. The platform grew. Small writers got buried deeper. That's not a bug. That's the model.
The engagement
Average likes on Notes: between 2 and 10. When it’s two, I can give you their names, they are my besties.
Average comments on a post: 4. Half are my replies. So 2 real comments per post.
Best post ever for comments: 23. Which means 12 from actual readers.
Best Note ever for comments: 15.
Average comments on Notes when I treated it as a full-time job, several hours a day: 5.
The Notes strategy
From April to July, before I even imported my mailing list, I joined a group led by a self-described leading Substack strategist with 40,000+ subscribers. Private sessions at $450 for 40 minutes. Paid subscription at $15 a month with thousands of paying subscribers. I’ll let you do the math on her revenue. In her videos you could see the flat she lives in, the clothes she wears. It all showed. The platform was working beautifully for her. Her product was teaching people how to use it.
The group strategy: read, like, comment, and restack 10 Notes from other participants daily. I grew from 150 to 300 subscribers in four months. But I refused to write empty notes. I placed valuable content in each one and in my replies too. This meant sometimes four hours of work daily. That’s a half-time job.
Add a day of work for each weekly post and writing a book on top, and that’s a full-time job as a writer. Just not paid.
After four months the growth stalled, then backfired. Manufactured engagement doesn’t build an audience. It builds a hall of mirrors.
What Substack did deliver
Writing discipline. I wrote a book during this same period. It comes out in March. The weekly cadence forced a rigor that served the deeper work. Substack didn’t cause the book, but the practice it demanded contributed to it.
A handful of genuine human connections. Not many. But a few people outside my existing circles found me here, and the conversations that followed were real and valuable.
What it didn’t deliver
Discovery. The engine that Substack markets as its core differentiator simply did not work. Almost every subscriber I gained came from my own efforts in my own community. The platform added almost nothing.
Engagement on the platform itself. People read my posts in their email. They don’t come to Substack. They don’t comment. They don’t engage here. It has become an expensive newsletter service.
Notes was a waste of time. Hours of daily engagement for single-digit interactions.
What I’ve come to see
Substack positions itself as a writer’s platform. A place for depth, quality, long-form thinking. That framing is increasingly dishonest. It is social media. More so every month. It rewards the same dopamine patterns, the same addiction loops, the same performance metrics as every other platform.
Let me tell you, the Substack emperor has no clothes.
And the direction is clear. More live video. More content imported directly from Instagram and TikTok. The writer's platform is becoming another feed.
The writers who grow on Substack are the ones who already had audiences, or the ones who play the recommendation game, trade endorsements, stay visible on Notes, show up on podcasts. That’s social media labor. It has nothing to do with the quality of the writing.
And the people making real money? Many of them are selling Substack strategy to other Substack writers. The gold rush economics are familiar: the people who got rich weren’t the miners. They sold the pickaxes.
The irony
I knew the risks going in.
I teach presence. My job is helping people gather their attention back from the world that scatters it. I tried to use this platform without playing the attention economy game. I tried to dodge the shady social media dynamics. The algorithm won.
Spreading a little content very thin across a very large surface.
Like not enough jam on soggy toast.
It barely holds.
And nobody’s nourished.
What’s next
I’m not disappearing. I’m not deleting anything. But I’m done posting weekly.
I'm also making all posts free going forward. If the platform doesn't deliver discovery, I'm not giving it a cut of your support.
The experiment ran long enough and the data is clear. I will continue to write when something needs to be said. I will continue to be here. But the weekly obligation to feed a platform that doesn’t feed me back is over.
I’d rather put that energy into the work itself.
The coaching.
Another book.
Some conversations that actually matter.
If you’re reading this in your inbox, you already know where to find me.
Subscribe — or even better, become a paid subscriber. Once I reach 100 paid subscribers (I’m already halfway there!), Substack will add a tag that could help me gain more visibility.
Engage (free and powerful!) — Visit the website, find the post you enjoyed most, and leave a comment at the end. Extra karma point if your comment is impertinent, sassy or even contains a question!
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
Yup, check, uh-huh, yes, ditto, ditto, yuppers.
The giant sucking sound you hear comes from a handful of growth experts talking about, you guessed it, growing on Substack.
And it’s all numbers, numbers, numbers.
10x this, 5 viral tips, 30 days to 1,000 subs.
The formula is big number + implied shortcut + here’s how I did it.
News alert. Growing on Substack while talking about growth is not the same as growing on Substack.
Of course 1,000 subscribers was easy for you. Try writing about something else then report back.
I’m with you. I have grown as a writer, and I’m finding my voice. For now, this is a place for me to think and write. Plus I have met some very cool people and creators writing about interesting things.
Well said, and I will continue to support your work, as it feeds me❤️