How to grow by 150 new subscribers a day (without writing about Substack)

What really moved the needle in the last 30 days

Two weeks from now it’ll be exactly a year since I published my first post on Substack.

In the last 30 days alone, my publication added 3,386 new subscribers.

When I first signed up to the platform, I was growing by roughly two subscribers a day.

A year later, I’m adding around 150-200 every day. But what’s interesting isn’t the number of new subscribers. It’s where they came from. Because 90% of those subscribers didn’t come from social media.

Before I get into what’s worked, two things worth flagging upfront.

First, I have a large following on other platforms, which is usually the part people assume explains the numbers. It doesn’t. In the last 30 days, 90% of those 3,386 subscribers came directly from Substack itself. TikTok, where I have 142,000 followers, contributed zero. Instagram, 22,500 followers, contributed seven. My large social audience delivered 10 new subscribers in 30 days. Ten.

Second, Really Rich isn’t a Substack about Substack. I write about what I know: business, money, AI, and building a life that’s rich in every sense of the word. The mechanics I’m about to describe work regardless of your subject matter, because they’re about how the platform functions, not what you happen to write about.

So based on my actual numbers here’s what’s actually been driving growth over the last 30 days — if you’re currently sitting on the fence about whether Substack is worth your time and effort or you are posting inconsistently and feel like you need a kick up the backside to get things really working for you: this post is for you.

1. Notes

I post 8 to 10 Notes a week, unevenly and without a schedule. Treating Notes like a publishing calendar is the fastest way to start resenting it, and Notes written with resentment produce exactly the kind of content that doesn’t do anything.

The thing about notes and your publication is that they have different jobs. Your publication delivers content to the people already in your world. Notes is how people who’ve never heard of you find out you exist. Those are completely different functions, and they require completely different thinking. yes people can find you through recommended posts but notes on the posts is how they even see that your content exists and it’s an important distinction

What I use Notes for comes down to three things:

Personality: Substack is a people platform in a way that’s distinct from anywhere else online right now, and Notes is where a potential subscriber gets their first real sense of whether there’s a person here worth letting into their inbox. Not a content plan. A person. Treat notes as a mechanism to showcase who you actually are and what you value.

Perspective: your actual take, your real numbers, the observation from your industry you haven’t seen anyone else make yet. Not curation. Thinking.

And

Participation: commenting on things you actually read, restacking things that landed with you, showing up in the feed as someone with a genuine stake in more than your own metrics.

This is the one most people skip, and it consistently has the most visible effect on reach. Substack works more like a market than a broadcast channel, and if you show up like someone who’s part of it, the platform starts treating you like you are.

2. Content pillars

If you visit Really Rich, the architecture is immediately obvious.

How To guides like this one that are free on everything from “How to have more audacity”, to “How to be direct without being rude” and “A beginner’s guide to Notion”.

Complete Guides are much more in-depth on topics like How to set up Claude Co-Work and are mini digital products with step-by-step instructions, these are for paid subscribers.

Finally, the Sunday Supplement is a broader overview on everything from business to travel and recommendations published for paid subscribers each weekend. The topics are business, money, AI, systems, and the kind of life design that makes all of it sustainable.

Broad enough that I’m never trapped writing about one thing indefinitely, specific enough that a new reader knows within thirty seconds whether this is for them.
Most people know that platforms reward consistency. The part that doesn’t get talked about enough is how you actually stay consistent, because knowing consistency matters and having a mechanism for it are very different problems. Content pillars is one of those mechanisms. When you know what you cover and the format in which you deliver it, you never sit down to a blank document wondering what you’re supposed to be writing. The architecture answers the question before you sit down to write, and that’s the difference between a publishing cadence you can sustain indefinitely and one you have to drag yourself back to every week.

3. Compounding consistency

In case you are new here, I am a finance girl. And just like interest compounds, so does effort and consistency. The daily growth I am experiencing today is not the result of some viral moment or one post that has taken off more than any of the others. It’s because my consistency is starting to compound.

I have shown up on this platform and published original content for a whole year. But that is only possible because of my underlying system.

The content pillars and structure is part of that. But so is my writing process and tech that ensures I can publish 3 times a week in less than 5 hours AND making the equivalent of a full time salary from paid subscriptions. That’s a pretty good ROI if you ask me.

Here’s a high-level overview of my process:

1. Whenever I am scrolling, reading, walking or talking to just about anyone, I am mentally logging ideas for how-to guides. I’ll think about my perspective, my take and what I would say to my friends if they asked me for advice on the topic. I’ll capture the idea along with my thoughts and some bullet points using a voice note in Claude and then it goes straight to Notion.

2. On a Monday I have a 2 hour block where I review my content calendar and notes and I write my pieces from scratch. I’ll start with the framework of bullet points and then voice note my key ideas straight into Notion. For everything, I always put the reader at the centre of my process and think about what they are getting from this. What do I want them to think, feel or do as a result of reading this? What is in it for them? Then I edit. This takes me around 2 hours to do for both the free and paid pieces.

3. Saturday I have a 3 hour block to write my Sunday Supplement. I write this in real time based on what has actually happened that week and is my most time-consuming piece. I do this because I like it, not because it particularly delivers on subscribers. This is where the creativity comes in and it also lets me expand on other topics that don’t fit into my other categories.

Everything happens in Notion and then Claude Co-Work checks everything for missing sections, overlap in ideas and places I can expand on points from the perspective of a reader.

What really moved the needle

Here’s the punchline you knew was coming… what has really moved the needle for me in the last 30 days is that I started in the first place and I have kept going.

Despite the early days of hearing crickets and the enormous churn of my original email list (only 302 subscribers of my original 5k list remain).

Despite having moments of feeling uninspired and not wanting to write anything at all… I have held on.

And whilst 13,100 subscribers is certainly no mega-audience, it’s still over 13,000 people who trust me with their email address. Who open my emails. Who read my posts. Who comment and engage, and even pay me for it.

One year on and Substack now pays my bills from 5 hours a week of work. Which is insane to write because content creation is not my full time job. But it could be. And that is an incredible position to be in.

And I’m not alone. Something I’ve noticed over the last year is that the people who succeed on Substack aren’t necessarily the best writers.

In the same way the best entrepreneurs are often not the most academically or technologically capable. The people succeed are the people who start. And keep going.

The platform rewards consistency far more than brilliance, which is good news because consistency is a skill and brilliance is mostly luck.

The Substack Summer Challenge

Every month I watch people spend weeks debating names, logos, niches, colours, taglines, whether they need a website first, whether they’re qualified enough to write, whether anybody will care what they have to say.

Meanwhile somebody else publishes a slightly scrappy first post and starts accumulating subscribers. By the time the first person feels ready, the second person has six months of momentum.

The gap isn’t talent. It’s starting.

And if you’ve made it this far into an article about growing on Substack, there’s a reasonable chance you’ve already been thinking about starting one.

Maybe for weeks. Maybe for months. Maybe you’ve even opened an account, stared at the blank page, and quietly closed the tab again. Maybe you’ve even published once or twice and then never again.

If that’s you, I don’t think you need another article about Substack. I think you need a deadline. And someone to give you a gentle nudge over the edge to start and stick with it.

That’s why I’m running the Substack Summer Challenge. Not because you need four more weeks of theory.

Because you need four weeks where somebody drags you out of research mode and into publishing mode.

We start on the 1st of July and for 30 days we’re building Substacks together. Not talking about them. Building them.

By August you’ll have a live publication, a body of work you’re proud of, subscribers arriving every week, a Notes habit, a content calendar, and a publishing system you can actually sustain.

That’s the outcome.

Here’s how we’re going to get there:

Each week you’ll receive a new curriculum post covering the decisions that matter most when you’re starting.

Finding your angle.

Working out who you’re writing for.

Building a publication people actually want to subscribe to.

Understanding free versus paid content.

Using Notes properly.

Creating a content system that doesn’t require twenty hours a week and superhuman discipline.

Growing your publication.

Monetising it.

Thinking long term.

The same systems that helped Really Rich grow by 3,386 subscribers in the last 30 days, with 90% of that growth coming from inside Substack itself.

The same systems that allow me to publish three times a week in five hours.

That’s an important distinction, because most people assume consistency requires becoming a full-time writer. It doesn’t. It requires having a system.

But the curriculum is only half the point.

The part I think people consistently underestimate is momentum. Publishing is much easier when you’re not doing it alone. When there are other people hitting publish alongside you. When there are people reading your work.

Replying to it. Encouraging you. Giving you somewhere to ask the questions everybody has but nobody wants to ask publicly.

That’s why there’s a daily group chat running throughout the challenge. Not as an add-on. As part of the process.

Most newsletters don’t die because the writer runs out of ideas. They die because the writer loses momentum. So we’re solving for momentum.

The summer challenge is only open to Really Rich Insiders which gives you a full year of access to all of my content.

Every Complete Guide. Every Sunday Supplement. Every monthly Intelligence Briefing.

Everything currently inside the archive and everything I publish over the next twelve months.

At £6 a month, that’s £72 of content included before we’ve even started the challenge itself.

Right now I’m only intending to run this once in July.

Honestly, though, the curriculum isn’t the reason to join. The archive isn’t the reason to join.

The reason to join is that four weeks from now you could still be telling yourself you’ll start soon. That you’ll start in September after the summer when you can “focus” but we all know that this will just get pushed down the list when September becomes October, becomes Christmas OR you could have started.

You could have a publication with a content calendar and a system that means you don’t feel like Substack is a guilty after-thought. By August you could have subscribers. Momentum. Proof… Proof that you’re no longer somebody who wants to start a Substack.

You’re somebody who has one.

The challenge starts on the 1st of July.

Click below to upgrade to the annual Insider plan and let’s get started!

If you’re already publishing on Substack, link your publication in the comments. I read them, and so does everyone else here.

If you’re not sure your topic has enough depth to sustain a publication, drop it below and I’ll tell you what I think.