I asked Andrea Chiarelli five questions about his experience growing on Substack. Welcome to The Long Game, where newer writers learn from the seasoned ones.
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1
WHAT SURPRISED YOU THE MOST ABOUT BUILDING ON SUBSTACK?
I landed on Substack like most people, thinking it would be like every other platform I had used. And I assumed that I would need to promote each piece elsewhere, like on LinkedIn, X, or other channels. I also thought that I would need to get shared by bigger accounts to get any real traction.
What dispelled that idea was quite simple. I looked at my subscriber data (after a while of being on the platform, of course) and explored where people were actually coming from. Guess what? The large majority had arrived through Substack’s own surfaces.
TODAY, A MAJORITY OF SUBSCRIBERS LAND ON MY WORK THROUGH RECOMMENDATIONS SHOWN TO THEM AT THE MOMENT THEY CREATE A NEW ACCOUNT.
The platform is doing the heavy lifting, and it is doing it at a point in the reader’s journey I had never even thought about.
That changed my mind about where I should focus my promotional efforts. Basically, an hour spent understanding and earning placement within Substack’s own distribution (recommendations, Notes, resharing other people’s content) turned out to be worth far more than an equivalent hour of other forms of promotion.
On top of that, an hour spent on Substack is literally an hour of learning and talking to amazing people. I can’t think of a more worthy investment of my time!
What I did not change my mind on is the writing itself. My rule has stayed the same throughout: each piece needs to make clear arguments and stop once the arguments are made. That’s about clarity and about making sure that you know what you are saying.
This discipline comes from my consultancy background, and I think it is an important asset:
IT MEANS THAT THE ALGORITHM AND EXTERNAL INDEXING SERVICES CAN FIND ME EASILY AND IDENTIFY WHAT I’M ALL ABOUT, AS WELL AS ENSURING THAT READERS CAN RELIABLY GAIN SOMETHING FROM READING MY WORK.
2
WHAT DO YOU WISH YOU KNEW SOONER ABOUT SUBSTACK’S ALGORITHM?
THE THING I WISH SOMEONE HAD TOLD ME ON DAY ONE IS THAT FOLLOWERS AND SUBSCRIBERS ARE TWO DIFFERENT POPULATIONS.
This is a rather unusual quirk of Substack that I have not seen anywhere else, so it took a while to digest what was actually happening!
In practice, I had started writing Notes and the numbers were moving, so I assumed (as anyone reasonably would) that the people clicking the Follow button were joining my publication and would receive the next post. They were not! Because a follower on Substack gets nothing in their inbox. They may see you again if the feed happens to resurface you, but that is the whole of the relationship.
Every other platform I had used treated a follow as the connection itself, so it took me a very long time to register that on Substack a follow is still good but a much looser connection.
Once I understood this, I changed my behaviour in a pretty straightforward way: I stopped reading the combined figure as my audience.
The email list is the actual audience that you target with your articles/lives/etc., while the follower count is a pool of people who will need more convincing to fully join you on your journey.
Don’t get me wrong, having followers is great! But they are more casual consumers of what you write simply because it doesn’t hit their inbox or reading list. So what happens most often is that followers will engage with my notes, whereas subscribers are more likely to engage with both articles and notes.
ANOTHER VERY IMPORTANT OBSERVATION IS THAT SUBSTACK’S ALGORITHM OPTIMISES FOR ATTENTION INSIDE THE PLATFORM (AT LEAST FROM WHAT I CAN TELL).
So my strategy now is to regularly reshare the amazing things that writers in my network produce through Notes (just check my feed to see examples).
My hypothesis is that this sends the algorithm the message that I am supporting the growth of the platform, alongside posting regularly, collaborating (see the next answer!) and participating in Lives.
3
WHAT HAVE HUMANS DONE FOR YOUR PUBLICATION THAT NO ALGORITHM COULD HAVE DONE AS WELL?
THEY HAVE THOUGHT WITH ME.
Something I keep coming back to is how quickly publishing on Substack turned from broadcasting my stuff into exchange with other amazing minds.
Other writers read my work and I read theirs. We reference each other and push back on one another, in comments and in our own pieces, and ideas travel between publications in ways nobody plans.
Here’s an example: in a recent live talk with one of my collaborators, I mentioned another person’s article that I’d read the day before. My collaborator then ended up writing a full response to that article, which thoughtfully explores and expands the original thoughts. That’s fantastic, if you ask me!
Guest writing has run in both directions for me, and writing with a publication outside my usual lane has been especially interesting: translating my consulting habits (which, I admit, can be annoying!) into someone else’s framework exposed assumptions in my own thinking that I could not have seen from inside it.
MY MIND HAS BEEN WONDERFULLY RESHAPED IN JUST OVER A YEAR ON SUBSTACK.
Readers have done the same work at a small scale. They push back and bring expertise from disciplines I have never worked in, and more than once a comment has become the seed of the next piece.
MY PUBLICATION IS BETTER BECAUSE PEOPLE WHO KNOW THINGS I DON’T KNOW HAVE CHOSEN TO SHARE THAT KNOWLEDGE WITH ME.
All of this changed what I think community engagement on Substack is actually for. I used to feel it was about retention, or as an engine for growth (as in getting more visibility). I do think this is very much true, but now it feels much closer to the reward for writing at all. Which is a beautiful thing to be part of!
The change in my behaviour followed from that. I make deliberate time to read other writers properly and to reshare things that have resonated with me. And I say yes to collaborations for the exchange itself, even when the difference in subscribers is vast. To be clear, I am not saying this to brag. What I mean is come and collaborate with me because the numbers don’t matter when what you’re getting in return is a great exchange with another person.
4
HOW DO ALGORITHMIC REACH AND COMMUNITY REACH WORK TOGETHER FOR YOU, FROM GROWTH TO RETENTION?
That’s a great question to reflect on. Algorithmic and community reach operate at very different points of the funnel and on different schedules.
ALGORITHMIC REACH (LIKE SIGN-UP RECOMMENDATIONS) IS HOW STRANGERS FIND THE PUBLICATION. IT WORKS AT A SCALE NO HUMAN NETWORK CAN MATCH, AND IT NEVER SLEEPS, WHICH IS INCREDIBLE.
Its payoff is volume and serendipity, so in practice subscribers I could never have reached myself through any specific strategy. But the tradeoff is very clear, and it’s intent. Readers who ticked a box during onboarding have made a much smaller commitment than those who arrived after engaging deeply in one of my articles or after watching a live. This does show in open behaviour and in churn.
Do you know something shocking? Every time I post an article (typically once a week), I almost instantly lose 200 subscribers. It feels awful from a personal perspective, but when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense and is currently about 0.2% of the list. Some subscribers had signed up to see my work without having engaged with it and (fair enough) they might realise that it’s not for them.
COMMUNITY REACH RUNS THE OPPOSITE WAY. IT IS SLOW, IT DOES NOT SCALE (ALTHOUGH RECOMMENDATIONS DO SOMETIMES HELP AS A MULTIPLIER) AND IT DEPENDS ON YOU CONSISTENTLY SHOWING UP. BUT THE READERS IT DELIVERS OPEN CONSISTENTLY.
They are the ones who have engaged with me in comments and in lives. They are the ones who regularly send me DMs. Several have my mobile number, and we chat regularly on WhatsApp. We have built assets together and done multiple collaborations.
I WOULD SAY THAT, FOR ME, COMMUNITY REACH REALLY IS THE SOUL OF THE PLATFORM, AND SOMETHING I’VE NEVER SEEN ON OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA.
Retention, in my experience, is an editorial problem more than a growth problem. A predictable cadence and a proposition the reader could recite back (mine is showing people how to think like a [human] consultant in the age of AI) do most of the retention work.
Without that editorial spine, algorithmic growth just fills a leaky bucket and you start losing subscribers very easily.
Remember that less committed readers aren’t motivated to walk by your side on your Substack journey, so they will be very quick to hit that Unsubscribe button if your content isn’t very good or if it doesn’t meet the promise that convinced them to subscribe. On top of that, if you don’t post regularly, many readers will forget about you. And when they receive your next email (possibly one of dozens in their inbox), they might wonder, Who is that guy? That’s another way to lose subscribers easily.
5
WHAT WOULD YOU TELL PAST YOU AT 100, 1K, AND 10K SUBSCRIBERS?
This is a proper question for a consultant, so let me wear my scenario planning hat.
AT 100: THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS BEING ABLE TO FINISH THIS SENTENCE CONVINCINGLY: “THIS PUBLICATION SHOWS YOU HOW TO…”
Everything I later learned about growth built on top of a clear proposition. And nothing moved before I had one.
Treat your first hundred readers as correspondents; several of mine are still commenting a year later, and I am glad I answered them like people from the start.
Also, don’t worry about changing your publication’s focus a bit in the early days. Keep it messy and experiment, because the level of risk is low. If you want to build something sustainable, you need to land on a topic that you actually like thinking and writing about.
AT 1,000: START BEHAVING LIKE A MORE STRUCTURED PUBLICATION.
Fix your cadence and keep it and learn the platform’s plumbing, like where your subscribers come from. Because every piece of growth advice you will ever read was written by someone whose sources differ from yours.
Take your publication’s title seriously: on Substack it does some solid distribution work because it’s what strangers see in recommendations and sign-up screens before reading anything you have written.
Mine was lucky in that way. The Art of Asking Questions was the title of a course I’d developed before joining Substack, and I decided to reuse it for my publication. It turns out it works for two reasons: it’s sufficiently broad to appeal to pretty much anyone, but sufficiently specific to fit what I actually do and talk about.
AT 10,000: THE NUMBER STARTS LEADING A DOUBLE LIFE.
Inside the platform it drifts away from reality because it might now include a growing proportion of people who half-noticed you during sign-up. So you have to judge each piece by the readers who open and engage, since the headline count stopped being a useful mirror some time ago.
But outside the platform, that same number begins to do real work for you: it earns credibility and invitations that no amount of pitching would, and you should let it do so without embarrassment.
What needs protecting at this stage is your time. Starting from here, you can no longer engage with everyone because of scale, so decide deliberately where and how the conversation continues rather than letting the volume decide for you.
I write my articles while my 4-year-old has breakfast and answer messages from my phone throughout the day. I am sure that many others do their writing alongside work and family commitments. You probably know that time is limited, and you can’t afford to let your mind be too scattered.
WHAT ABOUT NEAR-FUTURE YOU AT 100K SUBSCRIBERS?
TO NEAR-FUTURE ME AT 100,000: I RECOMMEND THAT FUTURE ME SHOULD GUARD THE EDITORIAL CORE BECAUSE EVERYTHING AT THAT SCALE AND UP WILL PUSH AGAINST IT.
I might get sponsorship offers, swap requests, and also the temptation to widen the topic until it means nothing.
The subscriber count will be the least informative number on my dashboard. I will need to watch open behaviour and retention instead.
And I will need to keep writing pieces that a single reader can forward to a colleague with one sentence of context.
I THINK THAT THIS MECHANISM, ONE READER VOUCHING TO ANOTHER, IS THE ONLY ONE THAT SURVIVES EVERY ALGORITHM CHANGE.
BONUS: WHAT HAVEN’T YOU HAD A CHANCE TO SHARE YET?
A newsletter like mine is usually framed as an output of professional expertise: you know things, so you write them down. In my experience, the causal link is at least as strong in the other direction.
COMMITTING TO A PUBLIC ARGUMENT ON A REGULAR SCHEDULE IMPOSES A TRULY ENRICHING DISCIPLINE.
The mechanism is simple. When I write, an idea has to stand up without me in the room to elaborate or persuade, which is a pretty ruthless test of whether I actually understand what I’m writing about.
And writing with readers beyond my own niche strips out the professional shorthand too and forces me to think deeply. I think you can easily see how this is useful in your everyday job (and, arguably, any aspect of your life).
Readers then finish the job: they have no stake in being polite (it’s the internet, after all).
EVERY TIME I HAVE TO ACCEPT A HARSH LESSON FROM A COMPLETE STRANGER WITH NO STAKE IN MY LIFE OR MY WORK, I GROW.
And the next time a client or colleague challenges me (usually, not like an internet troll!), my posture will be more measured and robust.
So for anyone reading this with one eye on their subscriber graph, I would love to suggest a reframe, which is pretty much what has kept me on Substack: The writing and the exchanges improve the writer whether or not the numbers move.
GROWTH GAVE ME AN AUDIENCE, BUT THE REGULAR PRACTICE GAVE ME A SHARPER MIND, AND IF I AM HONEST THE SECOND GIFT HAS BEEN WORTH MORE.
The Long Game publishes every other Saturday.
👇🏽Ask Andrea a question.👇🏽
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Great piece, you two. Andrea, you are such an authentic, kind human. I have always appreciated your generosity in sharing your learnings, and your belief that my thoughts and writings are of value.
I really liked this! Andrea is very genuine. Great questions and learn quiet a bit. Can’t wait to see more interviews in this publication