$156,960 Per Year From Substack: Steal This Strategy

.... without writing about writing

Hi Substacker, how are you?

In this week’s post, I clinically dissect a publication with 1,962¹ paying subscribers and $156,960 per year in estimated revenue.

My aim: to extract strategies you can use in your publication.

Not writing about writing

The publication is owned by Paweł Huryn of The Product Compass. He does not write about writing.

I discovered Pawel and learned of his success when he commented on one of my posts.

In that post, Do More Notes Get You More Subscribers on Substack? I explored the subject of note-posting frequency in the context of new data.

Pawel jumped into the comment thread to share what works for him on Notes, qualifying his comment by casually mentioning he has almost two thousand paying subscribers (wowsers!).

That got my attention.

I love collecting insights from writers who are doing better than me on Substack without writing about writing.

There are plenty of creators who are smashing it with thousands of paying subscribers on Substack, but it’s rare for them to interact with other creators - unless they happen to be a ‘Subsack expert’ who writes about writing.

Pawel writes about product management. His publication, The Product Compass, helps product managers do better at work with in-depth topic explorations, step-by-step instructions and actionable advice.

How he grows

Pawel shared his growth strategy in a private chat after I reached out to learn more about his publication (Substack’s awesome for that).

He said he gets most of his subscribers through LinkedIn, where he has 181K followers. He also gets subscribers from search engine traffic (SEO), with more than 2K visits per day (per day!) from search.

In addition, he told me he gets some subscribers from Substack Notes, but that readers who come to him from Notes are typically lower quality - meaning they are less likely to upgrade to paid - than readers from other sources.

I calculated the growth rate of The Product Compass by comparing the total number of subscribers in January (92K) to now (106K). It’s a staggering 61% per year. For comparison, my publication is growing at 25% per year.

Growth chart for The Product Compass, via Six Things I’ve Learned Scaling My Newsletter | The Product Compass

… on using Notes for growth

Here’s what Pawel said about using Notes to get more subscribers (source).

“Your original idea of posting when you have something to say was right. Posting 2-3 times a week is absolutely enough.

Notes can generate a lot of free subscribers, but the quality of those subscriptions is much lower.

Most of those readers just clicked "Follow" without the intention to subscribe. They are already subscribed to 20-50 or more newsletters and are much less likely to be your target audience.

My experience: 92K+ free and 1.9K+ paid subscribers.” Pawel Huryn, The Product Compass, Jan 2025

Pawel’s notes are consistently super-valuable. They are packed with insights for his ideal audience and contain links to resources like downloadable pdfs. Almost every note prompts the reader to click through to one of his posts (long-form posts in The Product Compass), but only after sharing heaps of valuable insights in the body of the note.

Check out Pawel’s notes from his personal profile page.

What about pricing?

In January, when I first met Pawel, he was charging USD$8 per month, but he revealed 70% of his paying subscribers were paying $7 per month.

(Reminder: when you increase the price of subscriptions, your current subscribers don’t pay more, only new subscribers pay the new price)

Annual plans were ten times more than monthly prices but now appear to be significantly cheaper than that. An annual plan is currently 36% cheaper than subscribing monthly. The Founding tier is $250 per year, and called “I can expense this” (cute!).

What do subscribers get?

Free subscribers get one unlocked newsletter issue per month. Paying subscribers get an issue every Saturday.

Paying subscribers also get premium templates, the opportunity to join a private Slack community (1,000+) where they can access help from Pawel, plus 3 video courses worth $447. That’s more than $447 worth of value for just $70 per year.

Let’s talk conversion rates

(Reminder: conversion rate is the percentage of total subscribers who are paying subscribers).

Using the figures Pawel provided to me in January, the conversion rate for The Product Compass is 2%.

That’s lower than Substack’s declared average rate. For comparison, my food safety publication has a 6% conversion rate. Having said that, publications with more than 50K subscribers do seem to have lower conversion rates than mid-sized publications.

Conversion rate benchmarks. Average conversion rates figure of 6% provided by Substack

Conversion rates can be linked to size and speed of growth. For example, you can go all-in, collecting as many readers as possible, knowing just a few will ever upgrade to paid - this is how you get to 92K subscribers - or you can be more specific with your targeting and attract readers who are more likely to pay. Both strategies are valid.

Free-to-paid content

The Product Compass publishes around three locked posts and one unlocked post each month. On the surface, that looks like a free-to-paid ratio of 1:3.

For comparison, my golden rule - backed up by Substack’s advice based on their data - is the opposite: 3:1. The ratio that seems to work best for most publications is three times as much free content as paywalled content.

So is Pawel doing it upside down by publishing so many paid posts and so few free posts?

Nope. In his publication, a significant portion of every paid post is above the paywall. That is, everyone, including new readers from search engines and LinkedIn, can access a huge proportion of his content completely for free.

Some The Product Compass posts have a paywall right near the bottom of the post, some have the paywall in the middle. What is common across the posts I analysed is that they all had a lot of useful, actionable, valuable content above the paywall - we’re talking around 1,000 words or 3+ charts above the paywall in each post.

This strategy works because you need your content to be accessible to everyone in order to convert traffic from search engines and social media into free subscribers. The idea is to show visitors lots of high-quality information before they hit a paywall.

The ‘magic ratio’ of free to paid content is 3:1. Not to say there aren’t successful publications with ratios that are radically different to this, just that this appears to be the sweet spot for most audiences.

Post length

I get asked about post length all the time. It drives me nuts. The only right answer to the question “How long should a Substack post be?” is “As long as it needs to be”. By that, I mean your posts should be as long as they need to be to deliver on the promise you make to your readers.

Pawel promises that The Product Compass will: explore critical PM learning topics and explain how they are connected; focus precisely on what Product Managers need to know; provide step-by-step instructions and actionable advice.

To deliver on his promise, Pawel needs long, detailed posts, with lots of subheadings, deep dives, charts and action points. His posts are typically two to three thousand words each.

Reader engagement and community

If I had a dollar for every time a Substack creator told me they need more likes and comments on their posts - but then couldn’t tell me exactly why - I’d be buying more lattes every week.

Likes and comments - reader engagement - are vanity metrics. Likes on Substack don’t improve discoverability - at least, likes on long-form posts do not. Likes are useful for getting feedback about what subjects most excite your subscribers. And for ego-related dopamine hits. That’s it.

Comments can be more useful than likes if your publication is community-centered. But comments on long-form posts are not a must-have for success. The Product Compass posts don’t get many likes or comments. On average, each post gets around 40 likes and 2 to 3 comments.

So just 0.04% of subscribers like each post, and 0.1% of paid subscribers comment on each post (Reminder: a post with a paywall is not able to accept comments from free subscribers).

For comparison, a publication with 1,000 free subscribers and the same amount of engagement as The Product Compass would get less than 1 like per post and fewer than 1 comment per year.

Is reader engagement on long-form posts a good indicator of success? Nope. But that’s not to say community isn’t an important part of The Product Compass.

Pawel has built a community on Slack where his paying subscribers can interact with him and with each other. This strategy is a great way to monetize community, noting that you need a large subscriber base - say 5,000 or more - to make it work effectively².

The secret sauce

Now that you’ve seen the facts and figures for The Product Compass, let’s discover what its creator is doing to get such phenomenal growth and fantastic revenue from a once-per-week newsletter (which, by the way, is a side hustle).

Based on my extensive experience analysing hundreds of publications - both struggling and thriving - here are the 5 most impactful things Pawel is doing:

1. He has a clear promise to readers, which he explains at the top of his About page and at the beginning of every single post.

2. His content is excellent: high quality and high value and with the appearance of being ultra high effort. The presence of many subheadings, bullet points, infographics and charts helps convey the value to casual viewers.

3. He offers phenomenal value to paying subscribers, with the value of a $70 subscription declared at more than $447.

4. He is serving an audience that is actively seeking to solve problems, make their jobs easier and make their working lives better. This makes it easier to leverage search engines for traffic and makes subscribing a no-brainer.

5. He has a proven strategy for getting new eyes on his work every single day, using LinkedIn and SEO.

There’s more to it, of course. He stays on track and judges his results, he says in a recent post, by focusing on one metric. Not likes or comments but the number of shares per post. The number of shares reveals how much value readers get from each post and is, he says, “directly connected to my growth flywheel.”

He also has great skill at creating compelling headlines and social media posts and shares his knowledge in his post The Secrets of Copywriting | The Product Compass. (paywalled). It’s written for product managers (naturally!), but equally useful for Substack writers.

Key takeaways

My deep dive into The Product Compass has revealed a heap of insights, some of which I’ll be implementing in my publications in the coming weeks. For example, I realised I could be doing way more ‘call-backs’ to past posts which will add value for new subscribers and showcase the huge archive of knowledge I’ve built over the years.

If you’re a new or intermediate Substacker, there are 6 key learnings I want you to take away from this post:

1. Commenting is a powerful way to meet new readers. I discovered Paweł and his publication because of his comment on my post. Without it, I would never have known he existed.

2. Reaching out directly to other creators is a great way to learn from them. Don’t assume that just because someone has a massive audience, they won’t read or respond to your DM request (Reminder: DM = direct message).

3. Your publication needs a clear promise to readers to encourage people to sign up. You need to describe your promise continuously and deliver it relentlessly to grow your subscriber list and to retain existing subscribers.

4. Don’t stress about repeating yourself to your existing readers. Pawel repeats his promise to readers at the beginning of every single post. This is designed to capture new readers, but current readers are not bothered by it.

5. Reader engagement, as measured by likes and comments, is a vanity metric. Publications with more than 100,000 subscribers can have very low engagement rates and still make a huge impact on the lives of their readers and creators.

6. Converting readers to paying subscribers is easier in certain topic areas. Topics that help people make more money, be better at their jobs, make their life easier or improve their health and relationships are easier to monetize. The Product Compass makes its readers’ jobs easier and their lives better, and that’s a winning formula.

Voila! Now it’s time to convert these learnings into action and watch your publication transform. Keep working to create great content, continue to refine your approach, and watch your audience grow.

Have a great week,

Karen

P.S. I’m thrilled to be featured in a new book, $10k Secrets, alongside online writing superstars like Sinem Günel, Nick Wolny, David McIlroy, Veronica Llorca-Smith Derek Hughes and Ana Calin.

In the book, I share my journey to Substack bestseller status, including what worked for me and how I’ve adjusted my strategies to achieve success. Get the book for free by signing up to the new 10k Secrets Substack publication.

1. The figures quoted in this post are from January 2025. At the time of writing (April 2025), total subscriber numbers have increased to 106K.

2. Need more insights from me about specific strategies? My one-to-one calls are fully booked but there’ll soon be a new way to tap straight into my brain. Watch this space.