🔵 The One Shift That Changed How I Use Substack (Forever)

Way to sound dramatic…

Jul 11, 2025

Brought to you by WriteStack* — I am actually using the premium version right now, and I am loving it so far.

My Medium friends can read this story over there as well.

When I first landed on Substack, I’ll be honest: I didn’t get it.

I came from Medium. Medium made sense. Still does. Write an article, hit publish, the algorithm might toss you some readers. You earn money for their reads. Great!

But Substack?

People kept saying “Start a newsletter!” and I thought, A newsletter about what? I didn’t have a clue why it was suddenly trendy to target people’s inboxes.

Trial & Error

I tried it anyway. Of course. Half-heartedly. And quit a few weeks later.

A few months went by.

Something kept nagging at me. I saw people building audiences. These folks were collecting email lists, talking directly to their people.

So I gave Substack another shot.

This time, I paid attention. I realized the value wasn’t just the newsletter. It was the connection. No middleman algorithm to hide my stuff.

And the system…

Systems

This is important to me. I still run my Substack like a blog first, newsletter second.

Email lists are gold. Yeah, yeah, I know. But wait.

Blogs are pretty great, too. And Substack is a blogging platform, actually. The posts live online forever. It’s a blog. And yes, they land in inboxes too, but that’s the side bonus. And I don’t actually send everything via email. I post daily, I only send emails once a week.

Traps

Of course, when I got serious about building my Substack, I fell right into the same trap that eats so many writers alive: numbers, numbers, numbers.

I obsessed over followers.
I studied what went viral.
I copied headlines that worked for others.

And, not going to lie, it worked. A bit.

Little dopamine spikes. A few extra subscribers. A share here and there. But it was working wrong. For me.

My goals were all surface-level.

Chasing numbers, not real people.
Trying to impress, instead of trying to connect.
Writing to “grow,” not writing to matter.

Social media makes you think this is the only way. More reach. More followers. Faster. Bigger.

It’s nonsense but so loud, you almost believe it.

Progress

I know I’m not alone. For every viral Substack success story you see floating around, there are ten newsletters abandoned in someone’s drafts folder.

Somewhere down the line, I stopped asking “How do I get more?” and started asking “Why am I here?”

Turns out, I don’t want to run a publication for the whole internet.

I grow my list, sure, but at my own pace, for my own reasons. I’d rather have a hundred readers who actually care than ten thousand who never open a single email.

And Substack is not the only place for writers. It shouldn’t be. It’s best when combined with other platforms like Medium and Gumroad.

The Bottom Line

Never mind the platform, hit publish because someone out there needs to read it, not because you need the applause.

If you like your topics and really want to write what you write, people can usually tell.

I still don’t fully buy into the email hype machine. My Substack is still my blog first, newsletter second. And I still use Medium. Because it’s great. And combined with Substack, it’s even better.

That’s my system. My shift. That’s what works for me.