10,000 Substack subscribers in 10 months - all the details you want to know
Spoiler: 95% of my subscribers came from Substack itself, and I don't write about Substack
Ten months ago, I posted my first piece on Substack. It was July 2025 and I didn’t really know much about Substack other than it was a growing platform and I was tired of paying for thousands of people to read my free weekly newsletter on Beehiiv.
I imported a list of 5,381 subscribers (half of what it had been on Beehiiv) which I had acquired through opt-ins and freebies.
Today, I crossed 10,000 subscribers on Substack and only 302 of those original subscribers remain.
This is a huge milestone for me, not least because I genuinely love it here, but because this growth feels earned. When I shared the milestone on my notes earlier someone replied with:
And I couldn’t have put it better myself.
The bit that has genuinely surprised me about getting here is where almost all of those readers came from. The combined audience of 164,500 I have built on TikTok and Instagram over the last four years has delivered fewer than 300 subscribers to this publication, which is to say roughly 2% of the people reading this came from anywhere other than Substack.
The imported list of 5,381 I started with has churned to 302 active subscribers, which means almost everyone in the audience I’m writing for today is somebody Substack put in front of me, not somebody I brought with me from somewhere else.
So to mark the occasion, I want to share what actually worked because I think it’s genuinely useful if you are either thinking about starting on Substack or already on the platform and trying to work out why the growth is slower than you’d like. None of what I’m about to write is theoretical. It is what the data on my account tells me, with the specific pieces, the specific numbers and the specific changes I made attached. Critically I have not grown this publication writing about Substack. I write about business, AI and living a truly rich life beyond just making money.
I think that context matters and I hope you find it useful.
Here’s what I’m going to cover:
The full source breakdown of where every subscriber actually came from
Why you don’t need a huge audience on another platform to grow on Substack
The articles that drove the most growth with the exact view counts and subscriber numbers attached to each one — and the editorial pattern that links all of them together
The two phases of the publication, what changed between them, and the specific shift that turned a slow start into the steepest growth curve of the entire ten months
The clear changes I made that delivered a visible uptick in subscribers that didn’t involve posting more
The strategy responsible for one in four of my subscribers that again, did not involve publishing more
And finally, what I would do if I were starting from scratch again today
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