What the Quiet Winners Are Doing on Substack
Hint: they're not chasing viral Notes
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In June 2025, Substack CEO Chris Best told attendees at an event in Los Angeles that more than 50 authors on the platform are now earning over $1 million annually through paid subscriptions alone (via The Verge).
Make a million bucks writing a newsletter? Hell yes!
As someone who makes a modest $25K side income from paid subscriptions (not from writing about writing), I can assure you those 50 people work hard for their money.
And that’s okay: the magic of Substack is that although you absolutely have to work hard to make subscription revenue, you don’t have to work harder to increase your earnings week after week.
A newsletter takes just as much effort to produce for 10 paying subscribers as it does for 100,000.
This is the magic of scalable income, and it’s why I’ve doggedly published my food safety newsletter week after week for almost four years. Not because the hour-for-dollar rate is good (it’s not) but because the rate gets higher week after week, increasing every time someone says “Yes” and upgrades to a paid subscription.
Who are the quiet winners?
Quiet winners on Substack are making substantial bank (>$100K) and not making a fuss about it.
Quiet winners are people like Paweł Huryn of The Product Compass who makes $150K+ per year from subscriptions. His publication is a side hustle; he also has a full-time job. How did I know he was doing well? In the comments of one of my posts he shared his thoughts on getting subscribers from Notes and casually added “My experience: 92K+ free and 1.9K+ paid subscribers.”
I posted about Pawel’s approach in April: $156,960 Per Year From Substack: Steal This Strategy
Quiet winners are people like Adam Mastroianni of Experimental History, who writes about the science of psychology experimentation and Joanna Goddard, who writes Big Salad, the biggest fashion and beauty newsletter on Substack.
Find more quiet winners by checking the Substack paid leaderboards1 (select buttons to choose different categories). Look for creators with a purple badge, who have tens of thousands of subscribers, or a solid orange badge - they have thousands of subscribers.
So what are the quiet winners doing?
I love to reverse-engineer the strategies of successful creators on Substack.. In fact I’ve spent hundreds of hours doing it. When I started here in 2021 (gawp!), it was the only way to learn.
What are the quiet winners doing? While each winning publication is unique, there are some shared strategies the quiet winners are using in 2025 to succeed on Substack.
Tight niches
Tight niches work. With a tight niche, people know exactly what you do, so they subscribe, share (“You have this problem, that creator can help”), and seek collaborations (“You’re in an adjacent space, let’s talk”).
How to emulate this: Aim for people to be able to say about you, “S/he’s the [topic X] person.”
Exceptions: There are super-successful creators whose niche isn’t a single topic. These people have highly recognisable and unique voices, perspectives and writing styles. In effect, their niche is THEM, their brand. Examples: Alex Dobrenko, Badreads and Packy McCormick.
A focus on free subscribers
You can’t make a big impact if you don’t have a big list of free subscribers. Quiet winners know how to convert casual readers into free subscribers and encourage them to upgrade to paid. They know that if you want to grow your paying subscribers, you need to first grow your free subscribers.
Ignoring the dopamine hit of ‘likes’ and comments
Quiet winners know that likes and comments on a post indicate their audience is into it. But they don’t chase likes and comments. Some of the biggest publications get very little engagement on their posts, but the creators are still earning tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars from subscriptions.
Example: Noahpinion has 392K subscribers and averages around 300 likes per post. Do the math: it’s a minuscule proportion of readers.
Keeping burnout at bay
Most high-earning Substacks don’t have community features like active chats. Creators with audiences of 100K+ know that managing a community that big would suck the joy out of their Substack lives.
If you look closely, you’ll also notice top Substackers returning to past themes and recycling older posts. This helps them take time out from the relentless task of making content every week.
Being strategic about paywalls
Effective paywall strategies foster a sense of reciprocity, whereby free content creates trust and builds relationships with readers, making them more willing to support the creator via paid subscriptions.
Most quiet winners leave most of their content outside the paywall, where new readers can find and enjoy it before upgrading to paid.
Exception: Caroline Chambers of What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking paywalls every single recipe and has tens of thousands of paying subscribers. How? By having a super strong offer that will save people time and make their lives better. Her offer: “one ridiculously impressive complete-meal recipe delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning that dirties minimal dishes and requires under an hour of time”.
One ridiculously impressive complete-meal recipe delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning that dirties minimal dishes and requires under an hour of time. The super-solid offer of Caroline Chambers from What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking
Collaborations
Quiet winners make friends with other creators. Collaborations allow you to connect with others’ audiences and help you tap into the powerful Substack recommendations feature.
I recently read a note by a tech bro who claimed the only things you need to do to grow on Substack are to post consistently and give your readers high-value content, bragging he got 100K+ readers by doing only those things.
Rubbish! In the same note, he also linked to an earlier post where he had unpacked his actual growth sources, revealing that 45,000 of his subscribers had come from recommendations from one other Substacker with a huge audience.
If that’s not a good reason to seek recommendations from other creators, I don’t know what is!
How to Get More Subscribers with Recommendations | Karen Cherry
7. Staying in their lane
You won’t find the quiet winners going off topic on Notes, crowing about their subscriber numbers or commentating on US politics, unless that's their niche.
When you stay in your lane, people trust that when you show up in their feed, you’ll be sharing something they want to hear about. And that translates to higher open rates and better subscriber retention.
Focus on creating, not metrics
Quiet winners know there are ups and downs with online business and they don’t sweat over the numbers. For example, if Notes suddenly stops sending as many new subscribers, they don’t freak out.
Changes and plateaus are normal for online creators. The quiet winners don’t completely ignore their numbers but they put more energy into creating fantastic work for their audiences. And that’s how they succeed year after year.
What the quiet winners don’t do
You won’t find the quiet winners doing these things on Substack:
Milestone begging - posting notes that say “Only 13 more subscribers till I hit 1K.” They know begging for new subscribers erodes trust in their brands.
Jumping on every new feature the second it’s released. Quiet winners resist shiny object syndrome and take a more considered approach to new features, adopting them only if they complement their existing offer.
Spamming Notes multiple times per day. ‘Nuff said.
Your mission
Now you’ve learned what makes a quiet winner, I have a challenge for you. I want you to find something a quiet winner is doing and use it for inspiration in your own publication.
Go to the leaderboards and find a quiet winner in a niche completely different to yours, creators you haven’t followed or subscribed to before now.
Sign up for a free subscription and reverse engineer what they are doing.
Ask yourself: How do they paywall? What do their readers seem to love most? Which sentence of their Welcome email really grabbed you? Are they using Substack’s add-on features like Chat and Live or just using the basics? How is their About page organised? What would encourage you to upgrade (or what is a turn-off for you)?
Use these learnings to make your publication better.
Have fun with it and let me know how you go!
Until next time,
The leaderboards are accessible from the web version of Substack, not the app.
Thanks for a great post, Karen. I liked the term of “Quiet Winner”, and the approach to Substack. I agree that basic rule is making each post extremely niches, and focus on free subscribers. I consider the increased of followers more as potential supporters rather than the number of subscribers.
I have recalled the proverb “Haste makes waste”
Your essay reminds me of why I am on Substack. It is because I love to write and I love sharing my ideas and poems and photos with other people. I am meandering along without a niche, one of those writers who is basically selling herself. Thanks for clarifying that for me. I have struggled with the paywall idea and I can’t see myself doing it. I do have a higher rate of paid subscribers than most free Substacks. So I am grateful.