5 Lessons From Hitting 150K Subscribers

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Recently, my newsletter here on LinkedIn hit a milestone: 150,000 subscribers.?

I waffled on whether to write this newsletter about what I've learned along the way. On one hand, self-aggrandizing LinkedIn posts are the worst. On the other hand, a surprising number of people have been asking me IRL for these tips. Everyone these days seems to want to build an audience online, even if they don’t identify as writers or creators.

Why? People are sensing a big shift: individual voices are more powerful than brands; people want to follow people, not company pages or even publications. This matters even if you don’t work in media or marketing. Developing a following online is the biggest career hack today — it’s just easier to succeed if people feel like they know you and think you’re smart.

This is particularly important as it becomes more normal for ambitious people to switch jobs often or just say f'it to full-time and go fractional.?

Ironically, this isn’t why I started this newsletter. I’m just a blogging junkie, addicted to getting that sweet, sweet dopamine hit from reader feedback. This is the third time that I’ve built an audience of 150k. Some fundamentals stay the same — a distinct/funny voice, focused topics, making fun of tech bros for wearing vests (what problem are we solving? Hot arms?). But others are wildly different.?

Here are a few lessons to take with you:

1) Your story and voice matter?

Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed the Substackification of media, as thousands of writers and creators have made a good living starting one-person, personality-driven media businesses.

What changed? Two things: First, monetization platforms like Substack, Beehive, and Patreon and productivity tools like Canva, Claude, and Otter.ai have finally given writers the ability to build a biz without drowning in admin; second, brands have shifted their media budgets to writers and creators.

I try to learn a lot from people who have Substacked their way to success. Some of my favorite advice comes from Max Read, the ex-Gawker writer and freelance journalist behind the viral AI slop story in NY Mag. Three years in, Read makes a good living from his 42,000 free subscribers and 2.6K paid subscribers on his Substack.?

Read compares writing online today to being a “textual YouTuber for Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who hate watching videos.” By that, he means that you need to have an authentic voice and be comfortable sharing your story:?

“[Y]ou have to be pretty comfortable having a strong voice, offering relatively strong opinions, and just generally “being the main character” in your writing. And, indeed, all these qualities are more important than any kind of particular technical writing skill: Many of the world’s best (formal) writers are not comfortable with any of those things, while many of the world’s worst writers are extremely comfortable with them … part of your job as a Substacker is is ‘producing words’ and part of your job is ‘cultivating a persona for which people might have some kind of inexplicable affection or even respect.’”

Being a “textual YouTuber for Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who hate watching videos” is the most accurate description of what I do that I’ve ever read. The editions of my newsletter that perform best are the ones that are:?

A) Driven by a personal story

B) Super voicey — vivid, funny, and a little bit snarky.

Sharing your personal stories in a distinct voice will only become more important as AI slop oozes over the internet like the toxic goo from Ghostbusters. It’s the best way to show that a human created this. The last step in my content checklist is going over every newsletter to make sure there are personal anecdotes and punchy language that feel unmistakably human. If someone thinks AI could have written my newsletter, I’ve failed.

As Read writes, not everyone is comfortable opening up like this, and it’s okay if you’re not. But I’d give one piece of advice: Try it—whether your preferred format is text, video, or audio. Share your story and how it connects to your big ideas. You might be surprised by how good it feels.

2) Resonance over reach?

There’s no magic formula to great content — no perfect amount of words, video format, or hook template. Might you get lucky, and a post goes viral? Sure, but that will have a minor impact on building an audience that cares what you have to say.?

For instance, take this quick post I shared a couple of Fridays ago about FTX fraudster Ryan Salame updating his LinkedIn with his new position in prison. It got almost 140,000 views. Whoo! Does it matter? Not really. My beat isn’t sh*t-posting crypto bros. (It’s more of a hobby.)

I’m much more excited about this newsletter I wrote about why storytelling will be the super skill of the AI age, which only* has 60,000 views. It explores the big ideas about AI, content, and the future of work that I’m passionate about right now, and it earned a lot of thoughtful comments and DMs from readers.?

That’s the metric that matters most — thoughtful comments and DMs from readers telling me that an essay I wrote resonates with them. Those readers will subscribe to my newsletter, read it regularly, and maybe even buy my next book. In the words of my friend Jay Acunzo: Resonance over reach.

3) Consistency matters?

Disclaimer: I’m doing the bare minimum here.?

My goal was to write this newsletter weekly, and while I accomplish that goal for stretches, it averages out to once every other week. That’s the bare minimum you can get away with if you want to build an audience. Weekly or 2x/week is ideal, and part of my motivation for giving up a prestigious full-time job was the chance to take this newsletter seriously.

The other part of consistency is quality — don’t just publish for the sake of publishing. When someone subscribes to you, they’re trusting you with their time. Don’t burn that trust by publishing some BS you whipped up in 15 minutes. It’s better to wait.?

4) There’s no easy button

Ever since I can remember, people have been looking for an easy button for content. First, it was SEO content farms that produced crappy, half-plagiarized articles. Then it was content syndication networks like Newscred that told marketers to just license content from the New York Times for their blog instead of figuring out something original to say.?

Now, it’s generative AI. Let’s just have the giant plagiarism machine do thought leadership for us!?

The problem is that frontier AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llamma are mid by design — they learn to generate text from the most common patterns in their training data, which comprises everything their Silicon Valley overlords could scrape off the internet. Humans then fine-tune them towards safe, inoffensive outputs.?

Generative-AI-produced content isn’t bad, necessarily, but it’s often dull and soulless. I still haven’t seen an output I would enjoy reading. Overreliance on generative AI sucks you into the AI Vortex of Mid.

Writing is thinking, and you’ll only hit your stride if you put in the work and figure out what you want to say. Give it 12 months without any pressure on performance. Audience growth happens in fits and starts and usually takes 12+ months. (Barely anyone listened to the Joe Rogan Experience the first couple of years, and now look at him — he might tip the election to a madman!)?

Plug away and look for those small signs—an appreciative comment or DM, a post that makes you feel really good for having written it.?

Good work takes time. Anyone who tells you they write in-depth posts in an hour or two is probably lying. Everything I write here takes me at least 5 hours all in, and often much more — although it the process gets faster the more consistently I write. You’ve got to love the process of training and honing your creative muscles.

5) Platforms matter — but they’re a double-edged sword

I attribute much of the growth of this newsletter to the fact that LinkedIn promotes it to people in mysterious ways. Built-in distribution is great because you can focus on writing instead of marketing. I’d recommend LinkedIn newsletters to most business writers just getting started because your existing network gives you a jump start, and LinkedIn newsletters go direct to inbox like other newsletter platforms.?

The flip side is that you don’t fully own your audience — LinkedIn makes it intentionally difficult to see who all your subscribers are — and social platforms usually screw over creators eventually. The analytics are also awful.?

For that reason, I’m planning to move the mailing list from my monthly-ish secret newsletter to Substack and invest my time in that platform. Substack combines a lot of the social interaction and discovery of a social platform — it’s like TikTok for literary nerds — while also giving you complete control over your audience. I’ll still publish on LinkedIn bi-weekly, but as I ramp up to a 2x/week publishing cadence, there will be content you can only get on Substack. (Subscribe for free here!)??

I hope this was helpful, and that I didn’t crink my neck from all this navel-gazing. If so, I’ll ask GenAI for a remedy. Here’s hoping it doesn’t tell me to eat rocks.

*I realize this use of “only” makes me sound like an a-hole.?

3 Links

How to Substack (Max Read): An amazing guide if you’re considering making the move to Substack.

Machines of Loving Grace (Dario Amodei): I’m still figuring out how I feel about Anthropic CEO’s 15,000-word techno-utopian essay, but the smartest AI people I know don’t think it’s as ridiculous as it seems.?

Vote Save America: We’re less than two weeks until election day. Double-check your registration, early voting options, and get involved.?

I'm the Fractional Head of Content at A.Team and best-selling co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Click the subscribe button above to join 150k+ marketers who read this newsletter for lessons on the art & science of storytelling in the AI Age, and get this newsletter bi-weekly in your inbox via LinkedIn.

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