Holey Cannoli (What I learned from a $1m Substack)
Two big takeaways and a 7 point action plan
Hey there, creator-extraordinaire,
The other day I wrote to you about a writer who has cracked $1 million revenue on Substack, holey cannoli!
I’d love to get to one million dollars per year with newsletters. To be honest, half that amount would be absolutely RIPPER too.
Any-hoo, whenever I find a “successful” Substack I like to investigate it to figure out just how it has become so successful. So I became a free subscriber to the publication, Noahpinion, and created a nerdy spreadsheet where I could record details of his publication: things like post frequency, word counts, visuals, and any other nuggets of knowledge I could extract. I also stalked its writer, Noah Smith, on Twitter and LinkedIn and asked a Substack writers group if they had any inside information.
The exercise was really interesting. Possibly the most interesting (and also really DISAPPOINTING) thing I learned was that there are heaps of Substack writers who look at the success of a publication like Noahpinion and make excuses for it.
… Excuses like “It’s just successful because the writer was famous before he started his Substack. And also, he has an economics degree”. Face palm.
Yes, those things have no doubt helped that publication to go bananas with growth and readers. But that doesn’t mean us lesser mortals can’t learn valuable lessons from it.
After unpacking all the details of the publication, my two big takeaways are:
You need a huge audience to get a massive subscriber list (duh!)
You have to put in lots of work. Work creating excellent content. Work on - and with - your audience.
We can’t all start our Substack journeys with huge numbers of fans from our Bloomberg columnist days like Noah Smith but we all have to start somewhere. Noah didn’t start with 291K fans (his current Twitter following). At some point, he had exactly zero followers.
No matter how many (or how few) followers any of us might have right now, we can all spend time on platforms working to connect with new readers and get our writing in front of new eyes.
And we can all put in the work. Noah puts hard work into every article. His posts are long, they are deep, they are broad. They are expertly edited and full of incredible charts, graphs, infographics and quotes. Each one represents probably eight to ten hours of research, drafting and editing. You don’t have to put that much work into a Substack but I reckon it would be pretty hard to get to one million dollars without working really fricken hard.
Noah doesn’t just pour hours into his content, he also puts hours of work into Twitter. Twitter might not be the nicest place to hang out, but I am willing to bet that at least half of Noahpinion’s readers got to know, like and trust Noah Smith through Twitter. And people are more likely to subscribe to writers they know, like and trust.
Noah puts in the work on Twitter. Okay, he does seem to enjoy it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard work.
I found out plenty of less obvious things too: like what he does with his headers and footers, how he selects his images, how often he asks subscribers to upgrade to paid, how many of his posts are pay-walled, and more.
To get all that information, and see the 7 point action plan I created from my investigation, check out my deep-dive on Medium:
Hope you find it useful.
Have a wonderful week,
Advice I needed to hear. I now feel more conviction about how to approach growing my readership. Stats are good.
Time to get the coffee brewing ☕️
This is useful legwork you've done for us Karen. Thanks for taking a look behind the scenes and sharing your findings. It's especially helpful to put into perspective the kind of work that goes into being profitable with a paid newsletter, and the amount of traffic that needs to be accessed as a foundation to success. Sobering, but useful.