Is Substack the Right Place for You?
How it helped me grow, and why it feels like home for fearless voices.
As you know, two months ago I moved Growing Fearless to Substack. It’s been a great experience, and today I want to share why I believe this platform helped me 5x the number of subscribers in such a short time.
I still remember the early enthusiasm for Facebook and Twitter. I could reconnect with school friends I hadn’t seen in decades! I could finally see photos of my cousins’ children and engage in conversations with family members I didn’t even know I had.
But over the years, the social media scene changed. These platforms became powerful tools for marketing products and services. They turned into marketplaces, and the social aspect that once made them so great slowly faded.
Competition for attention among users became fiercer, and the platforms profited from that. In my view, it’s a broken system, like a dog chasing its tail.
Why do I find Substack to be such a great platform?
Because it’s an ecosystem of social media tools calibrated to help you reach new audiences who care about the topics you write about.
The main tools:
Posts — Like blog posts, but also sent as email to your subscribers.
Notes — Short messages, similar to tweets, to help spread your voice.
Chat — A private space, like Slack or Discord, for conversations with your subscribers.
These three tools are complementary. You can quote Posts inside Notes, share Notes that point to Chat threads, and so on, all interconnected.
From the user’s side, they see a feed of Notes where they can like, comment, and follow your publication. They can also subscribe to receive your Posts as email newsletters.
Notes are key to growing your audience: this is where you attract new subscribers and followers.
Subscribers receive your emails.
Followers see your Notes and Posts via the web or Substack’s mobile app.
And this is important: for the past few years, my newsletter had about 100 subscribers. I couldn’t grow beyond that because other platforms limited my content to my existing network, and discovery was poor unless I paid for ads.
On Substack, there are no ads — so they are naturally incentivized to promote content discovery. When your content gets discovered, the platform benefits too.
How does Substack make money?
They offer monetization options for your content. If you earn money through paid subscriptions, Substack takes a small percentage. You can configure several options:
Paid subscribers can access special Chat rooms.
Paid subscribers can access exclusive content.
Paid subscribers can unlock features like starting Chat threads or posting comments.
As the publication owner, you can choose whether to keep these features open for everyone or limit them to paid subscribers.
Another interesting thing:
Because every publication owner wants to grow their audience, the culture on Substack encourages cooperation. It’s common to co-write articles with other authors, restack (similar to retweet), and comment on each other’s content. Active participation helps everyone gain more visibility.
I started on Substack as an experiment: could I build a digital community similar to the real-life communities we’ve created in Aurora Coworking spaces?
I can confidently say, yes.
Just a few days ago, I launched a new publication called Selfies for Peace. Many of the faces appearing there are new to me — people from all over the world that I hadn’t reached on other platforms. With some of them, I’ve already had deep conversations and meaningful exchanges.
This reminds me of my work with SozialMarie: there are many, many people out there working to make the world a friendlier, more humane place.
Before I close this post, let me also express my gratitude to
, who helped me grow my following. This is his latest post:
Would you like to continue the conversation?
I just started a chat for anyone interested to get deeper into the topic.
That is it from me.
With love,
Jose
Substack is really a beautiful place to be. So far am loving it.
Congratulations on making the top 100 rising in business on Substack by the way! I’m new around here but have been blogging for over 20 years so stumbling on this post is helpful—I’ve wondered how Substack will be different.