Growing an Intentional Substack Without Losing Yourself
Not a list of hacks or gimmicks—just an honest, intentional account of everything that genuinely moved the needle over my first few months that brought me to nearly 1000 subscribers.
There are plenty of articles on Substack explaining how to grow your publication.
This is not meant to be another one.
I’m not claiming to have cracked the algorithm or discovered some secret formula. I’m also not pretending to have built one of the largest publications on the platform. After about six months, I’ve grown to a little under 1,000 subscribers, including paid subscribers, and I still feel like I’m just getting started.
What I can offer is something much simpler: an honest reflection on what has genuinely worked for me.
Before we dive in, I also want to normalize something.
It’s okay to want your Substack to grow.
Somewhere along the way, we’ve started treating ambition as though it’s incompatible with authenticity. It isn’t. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting people to read your work. There is nothing wrong with hoping to build a community, create opportunities, earn an income, promote your business, sell a book, or simply know that your writing is reaching someone who needed it.
Growth isn’t the problem.
The way we pursue it sometimes is.
That being said, you can have a meaningful community with only 2 subscribers and that can be defined as success here too. It really just depends on your own definition of success. What are you looking to build here? What is success to you? No one can define that but you.
If I could offer one piece of caution before sharing what has worked for me, it would be this: be intentional about who you accept growth advice from.
There are many talented writers whose entire publication is devoted to teaching people how to grow on Substack. Their advice can absolutely be valuable, and I’ve learned things from many of them. Take everything with a grain of salt, so they say. But remember that they’re building a publication about growing publications. Unless that’s the kind of publication you also hope to build, I don’t think they’re always the best people to model.
Instead, find writers who are creating the kind of work you want to create. If you write about philosophy, learn from writers who have built thoughtful philosophy publications. If you write about medicine, relationships, travel, politics, gardening, fiction, finance, or parenting, study the people succeeding in those spaces. Not because you should imitate them, but because they’ll teach you how to communicate ideas like yours to readers who genuinely care about them.
The goal isn’t simply to gain subscribers, it’s to build a publication people want to return to.
With that in mind, here are the practices that have consistently made the biggest difference for me over the past six months.
1. Collaborate. Then keep collaborating.
If I had to point to one thing that changed the trajectory of my publication, it would be collaboration.
Early on, I started inviting writers to contribute to The Art of Staying, a guest series centered around one deceptively simple question: What is the point of all of this?
I had no grand strategy. I simply admired other writers and wanted to create something together. I thought sharing their work to my page and me sharing my work to theirs would increase visibility to both of our pages with communities that already align with the audience I am trying to build. Looking back, I don’t think I fully appreciated what those collaborations would become.
Every guest essay introduced me to another thoughtful writer. Every writer introduced me to another community. Their readers discovered my work, my readers discovered theirs, and everyone walked away with something they didn’t have before. More importantly, those collaborations slowly became friendships. Some of the people I now talk with most regularly on Substack are people I originally met because one of us simply reached out and said, “Would you like to write together?”
I think this is where many people accidentally limit their own growth. They collaborate once. Maybe twice. Then they move on to the next strategy.
But collaboration isn’t a box to check. It’s a rhythm to build into your publication. Every relationship naturally leads to another introduction, another conversation, another opportunity to write alongside someone whose readers may have never found you otherwise. That momentum compounds in a way that’s difficult to appreciate until you’ve been doing it for months.
If you’ve ever thought about contributing to The Art of Staying, I’d genuinely love to have you. There are no deadlines, no pressure, and no expectation that you have everything figured out. Contributions are welcome whenever inspiration strikes, whether that’s next week or next year.
I also believe collaboration should always be reciprocal. If you take the time to write for my publication, I’d be happy to write a guest piece for yours as well. That’s how communities are built. Not through transactions, but through generosity.
Substack has reminded me that writing doesn’t have to be a solitary pursuit. Sometimes the fastest way to grow is simply to grow alongside someone else.
2. The writers who master Notes rarely stay hidden for long. Writing great Notes is an art form—and it’s probably where most of your subscribers will come from.
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