Audience

thinking about growth

published on 6.07.24

The question (edited for emphasis):

I had a question for you, and would love any insight if you have a minute. Thinking through my exposure to your work, I first started reading you on substack, and then found your website and other work. In that sense substack was a successful platform for acquiring a new reader. As I've been starting to write more consistently, I've been thinking through how to start building a list of people I can connect with directly, send my writing to monthly, etc. Substack has always been at the top of my list just because of how many different writers I actively read on there. However, my worry is that the bulk of the readers don't leave the platform (opposite of my natural reaction), which could limit engagement to other types of work. So I've been wondering if I should lean towards a simpler email provider (mailchimp, beehiiv), and keep housing writing primarily on my website, vs bisecting an audience across platforms but having greater potential reach. Since you were one of the main people who led me to start writing essays and posting on Twitter, I was really curious your thoughts on platforms and distributing your work. Would you recommend substack if you were to start all over?

Hey Ron, thanks again for the interesting question... first the usual disclaimer that I am very much in the middle of puzzling with the same game and not someone who has cracked this and is enjoying a wonderfully large audience. With that said...

Why worry about an audience or growing your readership at all? That is something I ask myself a lot, because I think it is easy to adopt popular targets without analyzing them carefully, and popularity is especially easy to aim for without wondering if it is what you really want. Here are the answers I've come up with for myself, and I am sure you'll have your own ideas about this too:

Money: finding an audience opens the door to all kinds of money making possibilities and that allows us to do what we ought to be doing more. Money gives us time to do what we love for a living and gives us more freedom.
Connection: growing the amount of people who resonate with the things we write is one way of making friends and finding peers who are interested in the same things as us. This brings meaning to our work and lives, but also improves our work by giving us new ideas and the abilty to respond to high quality feedback from peers.

I tried to think of another bullet point and honestly couldn't think of anything that didn't feel gross. The one potential non-gross additional thing an audience affords us is influence, the ability to positively change things in the direction we think is best and make a meaningful (and lasting) impression with our ideas. But I think that is contained in connection if you use influence for good purposes (let me know if you think this should be its own bullet point). Curious if you can think of anything I missed that is a good reason to want more people engaging with your work.

Testing the first sidenote ever! What happens when you add a sidenote instead of a footnote? It can live in the margin, right to the right of the content it refers to. It can be long or short because it wraps. Nice!

But those two answers I've come up with are why I want to grow my audience. So here is how I think about doing that:

Focus on getting better first: high quality and imaginative work can't help but find an audience. It may take longer than we'd like for ourselves, but focusing on the work itself is both easier to control and has the built in benefit of being satisfying whether people see it or not (you'll know, and that will feel good). I don't merely bet on "if I build it they will come", but this is my day to day main metric I optimize for (that and enjoying my own work / life).
Spend time on platforms with interesting people: particularly focus on Twitter and Substack. Twitter is the top source of new readers for my Substack. I wouldn't worry too much about the people who don't follow you from one platform to your other channels but instead focus on understanding why the ones who do, do. Having someone enjoy your work on any channel is great and the "true fans" as Kevin Kelly would call them will find your other channels. Those are the people I am looking to connect with anyway and having a base of more casual readers is cool too because they will like some of your stuff more than others and share those. If you do want to optimize for getting Substack folks to another place (like your site or Twitter) I think you could come up with some creative non-annoying ways of encouraging that too (see below about asking for what you want).
Be as consistent as possible: I don't force myself to write a new essay every day at the cost of quality (because that isn't my natural rhythm, though people like Matt Webb do it tremendously well), but I try to be "serious" about my writing and do it often. Frequency not only makes you better faster (see above point) but also increases the chances interesting people find your work. Not just month to month, but year to year. I have begun to really believe in the idea that a large part of success is managing your own psychology (patience for example) and not quitting. Over the long term, you'll have multiple "lucky breaks" that will add up to growth. You said yourself you've started to write more consistently and I think that is the most important thing.
Be small: I am simply aiming for 1000 monthly paid readers (currently at 3) because that is a core group that will support my work who I can more or less still engage with directly. Whatever the number is for you, I'd encourage not having an ambiguous goal like "get super popular on Substack". Paul G's "do things that don't scale" often pops into my head when thinking about growth too: connecting genuinely with less people is better than superficially "connecting" with many. I always remind myself that I want supporters who genuinely love my work, I don't want to attract anyone who might only like one thing and then jump ship. I've said it this way before: you don't want fans, you want peers.
Ask for what you want: you can do this implictly (by sharing it) and explictly (literally asking for things). I share my work frequently and am just now starting to think about explicitly asking people who have liked some of the things I've done to support more of it by subscribing, sharing, etc.
Be legible (but not too much): be clear about why someone might like your work and what you explore with it. Visa V inspired this post explaining what Polymathematics is all about, and I think being clear like this every now and then is very good for finding the right audience. But don't over optimize for legibility at the expense of the wonderful meandering that leads to authentic human creativity. You don't want your stuff to feel sterile.
Experiment: like evolution, the key to finding fitness is mutation (or adaptability). Try things without worrying too much about how they turn out and you are more likely to find some successful patterns.
Hacky stuff: Cross pollinating within a scene is something I enjoy that also has helped my work get read by more people. My monthly roundup posts are good for this too, I tag the people I mention in those and that often results in a bit of extra love for those posts. Writing about other work you love or are engaging with is also good, because you will be addressing stuff with an existing audience who might see your stuff too. Plus, the work you are a fan of likely has fans who will be fans of your work too. Lastly, I am thinking about multiple channels recently too. I have my YouTube channel and have recorded 8 (I think) podcast episodes that I plan to release soon. I think that helps reach people who prefer one media type to another.

So I think posting on Substack is the right current move and still post everything on your personal site too. I currently post the exact same posts on my Substack as my OG blog and have different readers and different engagement on each. For what it's worth, the only people whose writing I directly seek out outside of Substack are: Robin Sloan, Craig Mod, Kevin Kelly, Maggie Appleton, Matt Webb, and James Somers. And for those folks I miss a lot because they aren't constantly in my inbox so I have to remember to go check on their stuff (someone make a better RSS reader please). Email (and the Substack platform) is just so good for getting your work to the people who (at one point at least) wanted to support it. But I think your intuition of wanting to retain your own relationship with people by having stuff on your own site is good so I'd do both if I were you (I am doing both myself).

Collected reading on this topic