How Erik Hoel Went From Professor to Newsletter Creator with 40,000 Subscribers - Growth in Reverse

The biggest risk to Substack isn’t that Gmail changes its algorithm or that readers set up automatic forwarding and share accounts. It’s that years from now, each author will have built up so much content that a reader can pay a 1 month subscription, download the archive, and be set on reading material.

Needless to say, competing in the “newsletter” category made life easier. It wasn't perfect: most of the writers we acquired this way did not start paid subscription newsletters, and we generated no revenue off them. But still, it was absolutely worth it. The “newsletter” positioning served as a wedge, and generated a viral distribution loop where ... See more

Substack's primary growth loop is what we call a User Generated, User Distributed content loop within Advanced Growth Strategy program.

when we first started @readwise, all i did for the first summer was write personalized cold emails to anyone who'd expressed pain around their Kindle highlights online it was grueling, rejection-laden work, but in July 2017 we celebrated our first "best day ever": the inimitable @craigmod onboarded, experienced value, and then tweeted about @read... See more