Open your Substack dashboard.

What do you see?

• Subscribers.

• Views.

• Open rates.

• Revenue.

• Numbers.

And if the little line is moving up and to the right?

Hell yeah. We’re growing.

Except...are we?

• Because you can gain 1,000 subscribers without becoming a better writer.

• You can get more views without earning more trust.

• You can publish more without becoming more valuable.

• You can have a Note blow up without making a single meaningful connection.

And you can have a smaller publication while still building relationships, skills, reputation, opportunities, and a body of work that’s becoming harder and harder to ignore.

→ Unfortunately, you can’t see the valued created by relationships in your analytics.

Your dashboard tells you which numbers are growing. But It doesn’t tell you what got stronger. If you only measure what’s easy to count, you can completely miss some of the most important growth happening in your creative career.

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Bigger Isn’t Always Stronger

Rob and I both want our publications to grow.

Let’s get that out of the way.

Subscribers are good, readers are good, and paid members are REALLY good.

Neither of us is going to pretend numbers don’t matter while secretly refreshing the subscriber count; however, numbers only tell you part of the story.

Imagine two creators.

1. One goes from 1,000 subscribers to 10,000.

2. The other goes from 1,000 to 3,000.

Who grew more?

Easy. The first one.

Right? Maybe.

What if Creator #1 has 10,000 subscribers who barely know who they are?

Meanwhile, Creator #2 has 3,000 subscribers, readers who recognize their name, several strong collaborators, people regularly recommending their work, a growing paid community, and clients arriving through referrals?

Now the answer gets messier because we’ve been using size as a synonym for strength.

→ They’re not the same thing.

Some growth is easy to see and that doesn’t make it bad. But other growth types of growth are invisible, and we think creators need to pay attention to both.

The Visible Scoreboard

This is the scoreboard we know how to measure.

• Subscribers.

• Paid subscribers.

• Views.

• Likes.

• Comments.

• Restacks.

• Open rates.

• Revenue.

• Follower count.

• Features.

Look at this feature for example. Rob could tally that as one more feature. But why did Substack decide to feature him on their social media account? We actually don’t know why, and that the argument we’re trying to make.

We screenshot milestones, we celebrate them, we compare them, and we watch the numbers move and use them as evidence that something is working. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The problem starts when those numbers become the only evidence we’re willing to accept because then it becomes really easy to optimize for whatever moves the scoreboard fastest.

• Did the subscriber count increase?

  • Cool, but where did those people come from?

• Did you get a bunch of likes?

  • That’s nice, but do they care about your work?

• Did you get a bunch of comments saying “congrats!”?

  • Awesome, but would they recognize your name tomorrow?

• Do they trust you?

  • Will they come back?

  • Are they going to go out of their way to help you?

Those questions are harder.

There’s no giant number at the top of your dashboard saying: Congratulations! 55 more people trust you this month.

Would be nice though, but that doesn’t mean trust isn’t growing.

It means you need another way to look at growth.

The Invisible Scoreboard

There’s another scoreboard running alongside your analytics.

→ You can’t open it in Substack.

There’s no graph, no percentage change from last month, and no little green arrow telling you things are going well.

However, it might tell you more about the strength of what you’re building than your subscriber count ever could.

We think about this scoreboard in three areas:

1. Capability

Are you getting better at the work?

Your publication isn’t the only thing you’re building.

→ You’re building the person running it.

Think about the creator you were six months ago.

• Can you communicate an idea more clearly now?

• Write a stronger headline?

• Recognize a good idea faster?

• Turn that idea into something worth publishing?

• Understand what your readers actually care about?

• Make an offer?

• Handle a difficult comment?

• Collaborate with someone else without losing your own point of view?

• Get on camera without immediately wanting to disappear into the floor?

→ That counts.

Every article gives you reps.

• So does every Note that flops.

• Every conversation with a reader, even the awkward ones.

• Every collaboration.

• Every Live.

• Every launch.

• Every experiment that works.

• And every experiment that makes you wonder what the hell you were thinking.

→ You learn and then you carry that knowledge into the next thing.

The problem is that capability grows gradually. You probably won’t feel any different when you’re 10% better at writing. But you’ll sure as hell notice the extra 100 subscribers your Substack dashboard waves in your face.

Nobody sends you an email saying: “Congratulations! You’re significantly less awkward on camera than you were eight months ago.”

→ That would be rude honestly, but becoming better at the work makes everything you build next stronger.

That belongs on the scoreboard.

2. Connection

Are your relationships getting deeper?

• A subscriber is a number.

• A relationship has depth.

Someone discovers your work and they like hit like and leave a thoughtful comment. Then you recognize their name the next time and eventually you talk in the DMs.

Maybe you exchange ideas, maybe you start supporting each other’s work, or maybe they become a collaborator, customer, peer, mentor, supporter, or actual friend.

Not every relationship needs to become something bigger, but some will and one of the mistakes creators make is measuring connection only by the number of new subscribers.

spends a lot of time thinking about relationship-building through meeting people, deepening those relationships, and maintaining the connections worth keeping.

That raises a different growth question.

Instead of only asking:

• How many new people found me?

Ask:

• Did any of the people already here get closer?

• Did familiarity become trust?

• Did a casual reader become a regular?

• Did someone from the comments become someone you now exchange ideas with?

• Did a fellow creator become someone you’d happily recommend?

• Did someone start recommending YOU?

• Did you strengthen a relationship you actually care about instead of chasing another hundred strangers?

None of those movements necessarily increase your subscriber count, but they can make what you’re building dramatically stronger because there’s a difference between having thousands of people on a list and having people in your corner.

3. Position

Is your name becoming more valuable in the rooms you’re not in?

This one is harder to see because sometimes you don’t know it’s happening until an opportunity appears.

• Someone recommends your article.

• Someone sends your publication to a friend.

• Someone needs a collaborator and thinks of you.

• Someone asks for an expert and your name comes up.

• Someone trusts your recommendation because you’ve consistently given them good ones.

• Someone sees an opportunity that fits you and sends it your way.

→ That’s position.

It’s reputation, it’s trust, and it’s becoming known for something and you can’t manufacture it by putting “thought leader” in your bio and declaring victory.

Other people decide what your name means. Your job is to give them enough evidence.

• Your work.

• Your ideas.

• Your behavior.

• Your consistency.

• The way you treat people.

• The things you contribute.

Over time, people start attaching expectations to your name.

• “Oh, ask Rob. He’s an expert in relationship-building.”

• “Jessica probably has an article about that.”

• “You two should collaborate.”

• “Go read this.”

• “You should talk to them.”

→ Eventually, something interesting happens like an opportunity seems to appear out of nowhere, except it didn’t.

These things happen later, but only if you put in the work and build the relationships today.

Growth Has A Lag

This is one of the hardest parts of building anything online.

→ We want immediate proof.

• Publish an article and get subscribers.

• Post a Note and get engagement.

• Make an offer and get the sale.

• Do the thing and receive a reward.

And we want it now. But a lot of meaningful growth doesn’t work like that.

You publish something today, someone reads it, and nothing happens.

Then three months later, somebody asks them for a recommendation and your name comes up!

→ You spend months becoming better at something and nothing happens.

Then an opportunity appears that requires exactly the skill you’ve been developing.

→ You build a relationship with another creator and at first nothing happens.

But eventually one of you has an idea. And now you’re making something together, being innovative, and creating your own opportunities.

From the outside, the result looks sudden. It wasn’t.

The visible outcome just came after the invisible growth.

→ That’s why measuring your progress only by immediate results can mess with your head.

You can stare at a slow month and think: Nothing is happening.

1. Meanwhile, your capability is getting stronger.

2. Your connections are strengthening.

3. Your position is getting stronger.

Something is happening. You just don’t have to have a graph confirm it for you.

Run Both Scoreboards

We’re not telling you to stop looking at your analytics. Please look at them.

• If nobody’s reading your work, that’s useful information.

• If subscribers are leaving, pay attention.

• If your paid offer isn’t converting, figure out why.

• If something takes off, study that too.

Numbers give you feedback. Use it, but don’t ask one scoreboard to measure a multidimensional thing.

Track what’s getting bigger and pay attention to what’s getting stronger.

You can even do a quick check-in every month:

1. Capability: What can I do better now than I could a month ago?

2. Connection: Which relationships became stronger?

3. Position: What evidence do I have that people increasingly trust, remember, recommend, or think of me?

Those answers might tell you something your analytics missed.

20% OFF UNSTUCK TO PUBLISHED 💜

Ready to go deeper?

If you’ve been thinking about joining the paid side of Unstuck to Published, now’s a pretty damn good time.

Join annually for $177.60/year (normally $222) and unlock:

1. 📕 The Ultimate Substack Beginner’s Blueprint ($47 value!!)

2. 🎓 My Substack Masterclass — 10 Things I’d Do If I Were Starting My Substack Today ($197 value!!)

3. ✅ Build Your Substack in 90 Minutes Foundational Checklist

4. 💬 Private Community Chat & direct access to me for questions and hands-on support

5. 🔓 Full access to my paid Substack content + subscriber perks

20% off. One year. Everything inside.

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The tools are here. Let’s build the damn thing. 💜

If You’re Stuck Right Now: Build Something That Gets Both Bigger & Stronger

That’s what we want.

• We want the subscribers.

• We want the readers.

• We want the paid members.

• We want the revenue.

• We want the opportunities.

However, we also want the skills to keep creating excellent work.

• The relationships that make this worth doing.

• The reputation that makes people trust our names.

• The people who teach us things we never would’ve figured out alone.

• The body of work that gets better every year.

• The ability to create opportunities we couldn’t have predicted when we started.

Because what’s the point of building a huge publication if everything underneath it is fragile?

Give us both—bigger and stronger.

So yes.

Open your dashboard.

• Look at the numbers.

• Celebrate when they go up.

• Figure out what happened when they go down.

However, don’t let a graph convince you it’s capable of measuring everything you’re building.

→ Some of the most important growth happening on your Substack will never appear there because the numbers can tell you what got bigger.

Only you can look at what you’re building and ask: What got stronger?

→ Before you close this article, run your own Invisible Scoreboard.

Think about the last 30 days.

1. Capability: What can you do better now than you could a month ago?

2. Connection: Which relationship became stronger?

3. Position: What evidence do you have that more people trust, remember, recommend, or think of you?

You don’t need a perfect answer for all three.

Just stop letting your subscriber count be the only answer to: “Am I growing?”

Thank you so much for being here. We truly appreciate you.

— Jessica & Rob

Move first. Refine second. Publish with structure.

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Rob Riker writes The Creator’s Edge, where he helps creators build real relationships, grow an audience of true fans, and turn those connections into a stronger creative career.

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Until you open Creator Match, see a bunch of names, match ratings, subscriber counts, audience numbers, and a shiny Message button and realize:

Okay...now what?

Because finding someone you could collaborate with isn’t the same as knowing whether you should collaborate with them and it definitely doesn’t mean you know what the hell to say when you message them.

That’s where Creator Match gets interesting.

→ Substack can do some of the discovery work for you. It can surface creators whose audiences cross over with yours, show you shared subscribers, and give you information about the potential audience on both sides.

It can even put the Message button right there, but it can’t think for you and the thinking is where the opportunity is.

→ So yes, I’m going to show you where Creator Match lives and what you’ll find there; however, more importantly, I’m going to show you how to evaluate your matches, spot promising collaboration opportunities, and approach another creator like an actual human being because a match is data.

A collaboration is still a relationship.

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What Is Substack Creator Match?

Creator Match is a new feature that helps publishers find other Substack creators who may be a natural fit for collaboration.

→ Substack says it identifies writers and creators with similar audience sizes and interests, then curates potential matches based on how promising a collaboration could be for both publishers.

Creator Match is now available to all publishers.

You’ll find it here: Publication Dashboard → Audience → Creator Match

Once you’re inside, you’ll see your Top collaboration opportunities.

Depending on the match, you may see information including:

• The creator and their publication.

• Their subscriber count.

• A description of their work.

• The strength of the audience match.

• Shared subscribers.

• Potential new audience for you.

• Potential new audience for them.

• A button to message them directly.

You may also see additional context, such as whether someone is already a paid subscriber to your publication.

→ That’s a lot of information packed into one little card and I can already see how people are going to use it wrong.

They’re going to look for the biggest number.

Don’t Automatically Pick The Biggest Creator

Big creator = best collaboration.

Right? Nope.

→ Subscriber count tells you how large someone’s publication is. It doesn’t tell you whether they’re the right person for you to collaborate with.

That’s why one of the most interesting pieces of information Creator Match gives us isn’t total subscriber count.

→ It’s audience overlap.

Before Creator Match, you might find another creator writing about almost exactly what you write about and assume: We probably have all the same readers anyway.

Now you have more information to challenge that assumption and that matters because similar audiences aren’t necessarily the same audience.

→ A creator can operate in your space, talk about similar subjects, and still have plenty of relevant readers who haven’t discovered your work and the reverse can also be true.

Suddenly, collaboration looks a little different.

Read The Overlap Number Differently

Don’t open Creator Match and ask only: Who has the biggest audience?

Ask: Where is there meaningful fit AND room for discovery?

• A large creator isn’t automatically your biggest opportunity.

• A smaller creator isn’t automatically a smaller opportunity.

• And a low audience overlap isn’t automatically a bad thing.

If two creators have compatible work and audiences, but relatively little crossover, that could make a collaboration more interesting because you’re introducing relevant people to someone they may not already know.

However, before everybody starts hunting for the smallest overlap number like we’ve discovered a secret Substack growth hack...low overlap doesn’t automatically mean good collaboration either.

You could have almost no audience overlap because your work has absolutely nothing to do with theirs.

Congratulations. You’ve discovered strangers. So don’t choose a Creator Match based on one number.

I’d think about it in this order: FIT → OPPORTUNITY → NUMBERS

1. FIT

Do your work, ideas, audiences, or perspectives actually belong in the same conversation?

2. OPPORTUNITY

Can you see something the two of you could create or do together that would genuinely serve both audiences?

3. NUMBERS

What does the information Creator Match gives you tell you about the potential audience opportunity?

→ Notice where subscriber count landed. Third.

Because 50,000 irrelevant readers aren’t automatically more valuable than 2,000 highly relevant ones.

Creator Match Did Some Homework. You Still Have To Do Yours.

You found someone who looks promising.

Don’t hit Message yet, go look at their publication.

Here’s a real example from my Creator Matches.

showed up as one of my top matches and this one immediately caught my attention because we’ve already collaborated. I was recently a guest on his Sustainable Side Hustle podcast.

So in this case, Creator Match surfaced someone I already knew made sense for me.

However, if I didn’t already know Vinayak, this is where I’d start doing my homework.

Actually read their work.

• What do they write about?

• What do they care about?

• What have they published recently?

• What kind of conversations happen around their work?

• Do they host Lives?

• Do they have a podcast?

• Have they collaborated with other creators?

• Is there something you genuinely appreciate about how they think?

And most importantly: Can you see WHY the two of you should have a conversation?

You don’t need the exact collaboration figured out yet, but you need something better than: “Substack says we’re a match!”

Yes, they can see that too.

• Creator Match gave you the introduction.

• Give yourself a reason for the conversation.

If Substack shows you a highly rated match that makes you think, In what universe?

→ Skip it.

Creator Match is giving you possibilities. Your judgment still gets the final say.

Don’t Ask Only What They Can Bring You

This becomes especially important if you’re a smaller creator looking at a match with a much larger publication.

→ I can already hear it: “They have 20,000 subscribers. I have 2,000. Why the hell would they collaborate with me?”

Because subscriber count isn’t the only thing you can bring to a collaboration.

• Maybe you bring expertise they don’t have.

• A perspective their audience hasn’t heard.

• A highly engaged community.

• Research.

• A story.

• A skill.

• A great interview format.

• A different audience.

• An idea so damn good that your subscriber count becomes the least interesting part of the conversation.

Creator Match itself gives us a useful reminder here because the opportunity isn’t presented as entirely one-sided.

→ You can see potential new audience for you and potential new audience for them.

So don’t approach someone thinking only: What can I get from this creator?

→ Ask: What could we do together that makes sense for both of us?

Very different energy.

Decide What Kind Of Collaboration Makes Sense

Please don’t send: “Want to collaborate sometime? because now you’ve given the other person homework.

Collaborate on WHAT?

There are plenty of ways two Substack creators could work together.

You could:

• Write a collaborative post.

• Host a Live.

• Record a podcast episode.

• Interview each other.

• Explore the same question from different perspectives.

• Recommend each other’s publications.

• Share and discuss each other’s work in Notes.

And sometimes? Don’t collaborate yet.

1. Talk.

2. Exchange ideas.

3. Get to know their work.

4. See if there’s anything there.

→ Creator Match doesn’t mean you need a joint livestream scheduled by Thursday.

Sometimes it simply introduces you to a creator worth knowing.

Okay, But What The Hell Do You Message Them?

THIS is where I expect a lot of Creator Matches to fall through.

Substack surfaced the creator, showed you the audience information, put a button directly underneath their name, and then you stare at: Message for four days.

Eventually you type: “Hi! Substack says we’re an excellent Creator Match. I think our audiences would be a great fit. Would you be interested in collaborating?”

Nothing’s terribly wrong with that. There’s just almost nothing interesting about it and they already know Creator Match connected you.

Tell them why YOU think the match makes sense.

I’d use four pieces: CONTEXT → CONNECTION → IDEA → EASY NEXT STEP

1. CONTEXT

Tell them how you found them.

Creator Match makes that easy.

2. CONNECTION

Why do you think there’s a fit?

Mention something specific about their work, expertise, audience, or perspective.

3. IDEA

→ Give them something to react to. One idea.

Not a 14-paragraph proposal complete with deliverables, deadlines, and a shared Google Drive.

4. EASY NEXT STEP

Don’t make them plan the entire collaboration before they can answer you.

→ Open the conversation.

Something like: “Hey [Name] — you popped up as one of my Creator Matches, and after looking through your publication, I can see why.

I really liked your piece about [specific thing], especially your point about [specific idea]. I write about [your area], and I think there’s an interesting crossover around [shared idea].

I had an idea for a Live where we could explore [specific topic/question] from both perspectives. I think both of our audiences could get something useful from it.

If that sounds interesting, happy to kick around the idea.”

Notice what’s missing?

“LET’S CROSS-PROMOTE SO WE CAN BOTH GET MORE SUBSCRIBERS!!!!”

→ Please don’t arrive in someone’s inbox waving their audience numbers around like a Groupon.

The information helped you identify the opportunity. The message should still sound like one human talking to another.

Make The First Collaboration Easy To Say Yes To

They replied and they’re interested. HELL YES!

→ Now don’t immediately turn this into a six-week production involving seventeen Google Docs, three planning calls, and somebody’s emotional-support Trello board.

Start small.

• A Live.

• A short interview.

• A Q&A.

• A Note exchange.

• A podcast conversation.

• A collaborative post.

Because now you’re learning something Creator Match can’t tell you:

• Do we actually work well together?

• Do they communicate?

• Do they follow through?

• Does conversation flow naturally?

• Do your audiences respond?

• Did you enjoy working together?

• Would either of you want to do it again?

→ Creator Match can surface potential audience compatibility. It can’t tell you whether you’ll have human compatibility.

You discover that part yourself.

Before You Hit Message, Run This 60-Second Check

Found someone promising?

Ask yourself:

1. Do I genuinely respect their work?

2. Are our audiences compatible?

3. Is there meaningful room for discovery or another clear opportunity for both of us?

4. Can I see something useful we could create or do together?

And finally ask yourself:

5. Would I still want to know this person if neither of us gained a single subscriber?

→ Oof. That last one matters because yes, Creator Match can be a growth tool, but you’re still dealing with people.

If all you see when you look at another creator is access to their audience, you’re probably not ready to hit Message.

Creator Match Is Also A Signal

There’s one more reason I’m paying attention to this feature.

→ Substack built an entire tool around helping creators find other creators.

Add that to Recommendations, Notes, Lives, podcasts, cross-posts, comments, and direct messaging, and there’s a pretty obvious pattern: Substack is giving creators more ways to grow through other people.

When another creator introduces you to their audience, you’re not arriving as a complete stranger yelling: “HELLO PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER.”

→ You’re being discovered through someone those readers already know.

That doesn’t guarantee they’ll care about your work, but it gives the introduction a head start.

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If you’ve been thinking about joining the paid side of Unstuck to Published, now’s a pretty damn good time.

Join annually for $177.60/year (normally $222) and unlock:

1. 📕 The Ultimate Substack Beginner’s Blueprint ($47 value!!)

2. 🎓 My Substack Masterclass — 10 Things I’d Do If I Were Starting My Substack Today ($197 value!!)

3. ✅ Build Your Substack in 90 Minutes Foundational Checklist

4. 💬 Private Community Chat & direct access to me for questions and hands-on support

5. 🔓 Full access to my paid Substack content + subscriber perks

20% off. One year. Everything inside.

👉 Join Unstuck to Published for $177.60/year

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The tools are here. Let’s build the damn thing. 💜

If You’re Stuck Right Now: Creator Match Removes The Guesswork. Not The Work.

Creator Match can surface creators worth looking at, show you useful audience information, and give you a direct way to start the conversation.

That’s pretty damn useful, but it can’t decide whether you respect someone’s work, come up with something worth creating together, or build the relationship for you.

Creator Match removes some of the guesswork. You still have to do the human part.

1. So open Creator Match.

2. Pick one creator who catches your attention.

3. Run them through the 60-second check.

4. Read their work.

5. Find the connection.

6. Bring one idea.

And if it still makes sense?

→ Hit Message because the most valuable thing Creator Match gives you might not be another thousand subscribers.

It might be the person on the other side of the match.

Thank you so much for being here. I truly appreciate you.

— Jessica

Move first. Refine second. Publish with structure.

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The Publisher’s Desk · Conversation 003 | Ellen Newhouse and I talk about what happens when you stop asking “What should I give paid subscribers?” and start asking a much better question: “Who am I helping them become?”

📓 Field Note 003

When sat down with me for Conversation 003 of The Publisher’s Desk, we were supposed to look at her Substack and we did.

• Her About page needed a few things.

• Her paid landing page needed buttons.

• We went through benefits, welcome emails, publication settings, Spotify, article structure, and approximately 35 other places Substack hides things and then apparently expects you to know they exist.

Normal day at The Publisher’s Desk, but somewhere in the middle of all that, Ellen asked a much bigger question.

She’d recently started thinking seriously about her paid tier and she wasn’t sure what people should actually get. This was unusual territory for her.

Ellen has spent more than three decades doing healing work.

In that world, the exchange makes sense to her. Someone comes to her for a session, she helps them, and they pay her. Clear.

But her Substack, The One Who Always Knew, isn’t a healing practice dressed up as a newsletter.

• It’s memoir.

• Music.

• Creativity.

• Reinvention.

• Healing.

It’s Ellen starting an entirely new career in music at 67 and basically telling anyone who thinks they’re too old to start again: Come watch me.

So when people started telling her she should have a paid tier, she had a problem.

What exactly was she supposed to sell?

• More writing?

• Classes?

• Access?

• Sound healing?

• A signed copy of her book?

• A monthly group?

She had plenty of things she could offer, but that’s not where I wanted her to start.

So I asked her:

1. Who is this person going to be in a month?

2. Who are they going to be in a year?

3. What are you helping them become?

Suddenly, we weren’t talking about Substack benefits anymore. We were talking about the person on the other side of them.

Go Backwards

This is where I think a lot of us screw up paid offers.

We start with the boxes.

• What do I put in here?

• What can I add?

• What can I give them every month?

• What would make this worth $15 or $30 or $55?

And before you know it, you’ve promised two workshops, a private chat, bonus posts, monthly zoom calls, a book club, and possibly interpretive dance on Thursdays.

Meanwhile, we still haven’t answered: Why would somebody want any of this?

So I told Ellen: Work backwards.

→ Reverse-engineer the offer and start at the end.

Forget the benefits for a minute and imagine someone stays with you for a year.

What’s different?

Ellen started talking about the women she wants to reach.

• Women who know they’re ready for something else, but haven’t moved yet.

• Women with feelings they can’t quite name.

• Women who’ve spent years taking care of everybody else and have lost pieces of themselves somewhere along the way.

And then Ellen said it. She wants to give them a model of what it looks like to: come home to yourself.

There it was. And the funny thing?

It wasn’t new. It was already all over Ellen’s work.

→ Her About page talks about women reclaiming their voices, creativity, desire, joy, and truth, which she calls it: Self-return.

Ellen didn’t need to manufacture the purpose of her paid tier. She needed to recognize it.

The Benefits Come After

Once you know the destination, then you can ask what might help someone get there.

• For Ellen, maybe that’s a monthly sound-healing experience.

• A Q&A where someone can bring the thing they’re struggling with.

• A signed copy of her book.

• Maybe it’s access to more of the music, stories, and experiences she’s already creating.

Those are benefits, but they’re not the transformation.

The benefits support the transformation.

That’s a distinction worth making before you start piling things into your paid tier because some guy on the internet told you paid subscribers expect seventeen exclusive benefits and a pony.

→ Your offer doesn’t become more valuable because you put more stuff in it.

Your offer becomes more valuable when what you provide has a clear reason for being there, which brings us to the other side of this.

Your Offer Has To Survive Your Actual Life

Later in the conversation, we started talking about Ellen’s schedule because she isn’t sitting around wondering how to fill her Tuesdays.

• She’s writing.

• She’s doing healing work.

• She’s making music.

• And she’s preparing to tour.

So there’s another question that has to come after: Can you actually keep doing what you’re about to promise?

Because we can design Ellen the most spectacular paid membership on earth.

• Weekly calls!

• Classes!

• Private sessions!

• More writing!

• More music!

• More everything!

And then Ellen goes on tour and starts wondering why the hell Jessica talked her into creating a second full-time job. Nope.

Ellen had already told me she didn’t want to spend her time teaching classes. That matters.

→ Your paid tier has to fit the person paying for it, but it also has to fit you.

Otherwise, you’re building an offer for some imaginary version of yourself who has unlimited time, unlimited energy, and apparently never needs to sleep. We don’t know her.

Transformation → Offer → Capacity

That’s the order I’d use.

1. TRANSFORMATION

• Who are you helping them become?

• What changes because they stayed?

• What do they understand, feel, know, do, or have that they didn’t before?

2. OFFER

• What would genuinely support that change?

  • Not what can you throw in?

• What belongs there?

3. CAPACITY

• Can you keep the promise?

• Does this work with your actual schedule, energy, interests, and life?

Because the goal isn’t to build the biggest paid tier.

The goal is to build one that makes sense for the person joining and for the person who has to keep showing up.

So if you’re staring at those little benefit boxes in the publication settings wondering what the hell you’re supposed to put in them, don’t start there.

Start at the end.

• Who are you helping them become?

• Who is the person on the other side?

• What are you helping them achieve?

Then work backwards.

20% OFF UNSTUCK TO PUBLISHED 💜

If you’ve been thinking about joining the paid side of Unstuck to Published, now’s a pretty damn good time.

Join annually for $177.60/year (normally $222) and unlock:

1. 📕 The Ultimate Substack Beginner’s Blueprint ($47 value!!)

2. 🎓 My Substack Masterclass — 10 Things I’d Do If I Were Starting My Substack Today ($197 value!!)

3. ✅ Build Your Substack in 90 Minutes Foundational Checklist

4. 💬 Private Community Chat & direct access to me for questions and hands-on support

5. 🔓 Full access to my paid Substack content + subscriber perks

20% off. One year. Everything inside.

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Resources From This Conversation

Unstuck to Published Articles We Mentioned During the Live:

Conversation 003 Takeaway

→ Don’t start with what you’re going to give them. Start with who you’re helping them become.

Once you know the transformation, you can work backwards to build an offer that supports it—and that your actual life can sustain. 👑

Start at the end. Then build something you can keep showing up for.

Continue The Conversation

Thank you for pulling up a chair at The Publisher’s Desk.

If today’s conversation sparked a new idea or perspective, I’d love for you to continue the conversation by sharing your biggest takeaway in the comments.

↑ Listen to Conversation 003 of The Publisher’s Desk: Start At The End

One of my favorite parts of The Publisher’s Desk is introducing you to thoughtful people whose work I genuinely admire.

I’m super grateful that Ellen’s the first woman to pull up a chair at The Publisher’s Desk.

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About Ellen Newhouse

Thank you so much to everyone who tuned into our Live!

I appreciate you spending part of your day with us. And to everyone watching the replay, thank you for being here too! 💜

Ellen Newhouse is the creator of The One Who Always Knew.

Through her writing, healing work, and music, Ellen explores what it means to come home to yourself—to reclaim your voice, creativity, joy, and truth after years of burnout, caregiving, people-pleasing, reinvention, or simply losing pieces of yourself along the way.

After more than three decades of helping women heal, Ellen is also stepping into an entirely new chapter of her own: building a career in music at 67! 👑🐐

Get Ellen's Best-Selling Memoir

If today's conversation resonated with you, I think you'll really enjoy Ellen’s work at The Woman Who Always Knew. →

The One Who Always Knew

By Ellen Newhouse

Follow Ellen’s music on Spotify!! →

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Thank You

Thank you so much for everyone who tuned into this live, your presence is truly appreciated, and to the people who are watching the replay, thank you!

-Jess, The Creator & Ellen Newhouse

• Publish more?

• Write better Notes?

• Collaborate?

• Comment more?

• Start a podcast?

• Go Live?

• Build a paid product?

• Learn better hooks?

Sure. All of those things can help, but I think there’s something more important than all of them.

→ Become a value creator.

Become the person who consistently gives people more than they expected.

• Write the article that actually answers the question.

• Leave the comment that adds something to the conversation.

• Be the collaborator who makes the project BETTER.

• Create the resource people save.

• Make the introduction nobody asked you to make.

• Solve the problem everyone else keeps talking about.

And when you put your name on something?

→ Make it excellent. Not perfect.

Excellent because one of the best ways to increase your impact, income, reputation, opportunities, and influence on Substack is to become extraordinarily valuable to other people.

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Stop Creating Content. Start Creating Value.

We have enough content.

Seriously. There’s no shortage.

Articles. Podcasts. Videos. Notes. Threads. Posts. Emails. Courses. Guides.

And now AI has made it possible to produce even MORE of it, faster than ever; however, easier creation doesn’t automatically produce better work and publishing something doesn’t automatically make it valuable.

You can publish five Notes today and give me absolutely nothing or you can write one paragraph that changes how I think about something for the next five years.

Which one created more value?

This is why I don’t want you obsessed with becoming a content creator.

I want you obsessed with becoming a VALUE CREATOR.

There’s a difference.

Content fills space.

Value does something.

• It teaches and clarifies.

• Solves and connects.

• Challenges and entertains.

• Saves time and creates opportunity.

• Makes someone think and moves someone to act.

→ It leaves the person on the other side with something they didn’t have before.

THAT is the standard.

Give 10X Value

When I say 10X value, I don’t mean make everything ten times longer.

Please don’t.

A 6,000-word article that should have been 800 words isn’t generous.

It’s holding me hostage. More isn’t automatically better.

I’m talking about the value of the exchange.

Someone gives you their attention.

What do you give them back?

If someone spends ten minutes reading your article, can you give them an idea that saves them an hour?

• Can you answer the question AND anticipate the next one?

• Can you give them the template instead of merely telling them what a template should contain?

• Can you take something complicated and make it stupidly simple?

• Can you give them an example they can actually use?

• Can you connect them with someone who can help?

• Can you make them laugh?

• Can you make them feel understood?

• Can you introduce an idea that changes what they do next?

That’s 10X value.

It isn’t about volume.

It’s about making the exchange wildly worthwhile for the person who trusted you with their attention.

Reject The Cult of Mediocrity

The internet rewards activity.

• Post again.

• Publish again.

• Stay visible.

• Feed the algorithm.

• Keep the content machine moving.

Somewhere in there, we started confusing consistency with excellence.

They’re not the same thing.

You can consistently produce mediocre work.

You can also consistently produce excellent work.

→ Your choice.

I don’t want to publish something because it’s Tuesday and Tuesday is apparently when I’m supposed to publish.

I don’t want to slap something together because I haven’t posted a Note in six hours and OH GOD THE ALGORITHM MIGHT FORGET ME.

I also don’t want to create something merely so I can say I created something.

If I’m asking another human being to give me their time, I want to respect that time.

Will every single thing I create be brilliant?

Of course not. I’m human.

Some things will work better than others and some ideas won’t land.

Sometimes I’ll look back six months later and think: “Well. That could’ve been better.”

Good. That means I’m growing.

However, I never want mediocrity to become the goal because it’s easier.

Excellence ISN’T Perfectionism

This distinction matters because I’ve spent a lot of time telling writers:

Move first. Refine second. Publish with structure.

And I still believe that.

• I don’t want you staring at the same draft for three weeks because you’re terrified somebody might find a comma you should’ve moved.

• I don’t want you endlessly researching because there’s always one more source you could read.

• I don’t want you polishing the personality out of your writing until it’s technically perfect and completely dead.

That’s not excellence. That’s fear wearing a fancy outfit.

Excellence doesn’t mean waiting until your work is flawless.

It means caring about the quality of what you contribute.

• Create.

• Move.

• Experiment.

• Ship.

• Learn.

• Get better.

But don’t use “done is better than perfect” as permission to stop giving a shit.

1. Move first.

2. Refine second.

3. Then publish.

There’s a reason refine is in the middle.

Become A Magic Worker

A magic worker is the person who makes you wonder: How the hell did they think of that?

They anticipate, they notice, they solve, and they bring something nobody asked for but everybody needed.

You invite them into a collaboration and they don’t simply complete their part.

→ They make the whole thing better.

You ask them a question and they don’t send you down another rabbit hole.

→ They give you the answer, the context, and the resource you didn’t know you needed.

You hire them and think: Thank GOD I found this person.

You read their work and bookmark it because you KNOW you’re coming back.

That’s magic. Except it isn’t actually magic.

→ It’s someone paying an unusual amount of attention and caring enough to do excellent work.

Become that person.

Be The Person People Want In The Room

I think this is a better goal than trying to become “indispensable.”

Nobody should have to depend on you, but you can become the person people WANT involved.

• The writer people want contributing.

• The creator people want collaborating.

• The expert people recommend.

• The person whose name comes up when an opportunity appears.

• The person someone mentions when you’re not even in the room.

“You want Jessica for this.”

THAT is powerful and you don’t get there by declaring yourself a thought leader in your bio.

→ You get there because people have experienced your value again and again and again.

Your work creates your reputation before your title ever will.

Value Compounds

Here’s where this becomes a business strategy whether you intended it to or not.

• Excellent work builds trust.

• Trust builds reputation.

• Reputation creates recommendations.

• Recommendations create opportunities.

• Opportunities can create income.

Someone reads your article and it helps them.

Three months later, somebody asks them a question about that subject and they remember you and they send your article.

Now somebody else knows your work.

• Maybe that person subscribes.

• Maybe they hire you.

• Maybe they recommend you to somebody else.

• Maybe nothing happens at all.

You don’t control that part.

→ You control whether you created something worth remembering.

That’s why I’d rather ask: How can I become more valuable to my audience?

Because impact, opportunity, and income are often downstream from value.

Reciprocity Is Human

When someone does something genuinely good for us, we remember.

• Someone recommends us.

• Makes an introduction.

• Gives us an incredible resource.

• Solves a problem.

• Goes far beyond what we expected.

We naturally WANT to respond to that, but don’t turn reciprocity into a manipulation tactic.

I’m going to give them something so now they owe me.

Nope.

That’s not generosity. That’s an invoice you forgot to mention.

Create value because creating value is what you DO.

• Help because you can.

• Make the introduction.

• Share the opportunity.

• Give people more than they expected.

→ Don’t keep score and don’t be surprised when some of that goodness eventually finds its way back to you.

Sometimes it will and sometimes it won’t. Do good anyway.

Excellence Builds Self-Respect

This might be the part I care about most because becoming a value creator doesn’t only change how other people see you.

→ It changes how YOU see you.

Every time you refuse to half-ass something with your name on it, you’re building evidence.

• I do what I say I’m going to do.

• I care about my work.

• I can be trusted.

• I make things better.

• I contribute.

• I create value.

• I finish.

• I keep my standards.

That builds self-respect.

I think self-respect is a hell of a lot more useful than constantly chasing external validation.

• Views fluctuate.

• Subscriber numbers change.

• Notes flop.

• Articles you thought would explode sometimes disappear into the abyss.

However, you can still close your laptop knowing: I did excellent work today.

Nobody can take that from you.

Become A Domain Leader

Don’t tell me you’re a thought leader. Show me.

• Teach me something I didn’t know.

• Solve something nobody else has solved.

• Connect ideas other people haven’t connected.

• Develop a point of view.

• Experiment.

• Share what you learn.

• Create original work.

• Help the people coming behind you.

Raise the standard in your corner of the internet and apply that standard everywhere you show up on Substack.

• In your writing.

• Your Notes.

• Your comments.

• Your collaborations.

• Your recommendations.

• Your products.

• Your community.

Don’t ask how much attention you can extract from each one.

Ask: What can I ADD here?

Do that long enough and people start associating your name with the subject.

→ That’s a domain leader.

You don’t need to call yourself one. Other people will decide that for you.

Before You Hit Publish

I don’t want to give you another content strategy.

→ I want to give you a standard.

Before you publish the article, Note, podcast, video, course, product, or whatever else you’re creating, ask:

• Is this valuable?

• Is this excellent?

• Did I give them more than they expected?

• Did I respect the time they’re about to give me?

• Would I be proud if this were the first thing someone ever saw from me?

You don’t need a yes to every question every time.

But if you’re consistently answering no?

Don’t blame the algorithm. Raise the standard.

20% OFF UNSTUCK TO PUBLISHED 💜

If you’ve been thinking about joining the paid side of Unstuck to Published, now’s a pretty damn good time.

Join annually for $177.60/year (normally $222) and unlock:

1. 📕 The Ultimate Substack Beginner’s Blueprint ($47 value!!)

2. 🎓 My Substack Masterclass — 10 Things I’d Do If I Were Starting My Substack Today ($197 value!!)

3. ✅ Build Your Substack in 90 Minutes Foundational Checklist

4. 💬 Private Community Chat & direct access to me for questions and hands-on support

5. 🔓 Full access to my paid Substack content + subscriber perks

20% off. One year. Everything inside.

👉 Join Unstuck to Published for $177.60/year

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The tools are here. Let’s build the damn thing. 💜

If You’re Stuck Right Now: The #1 Way To Win On Substack

Maybe winning on Substack isn’t becoming the person with the most attention.

Maybe it’s becoming the person worthy of it.

So stop trying to create more content.

Create more value.

→ Become obsessed with excellence and give people more than they expected.

Do work that makes you respect yourself when nobody’s applauding and then put your name on work that proves it.

Thank you so much for being here. I truly appreciate you.

— Jessica

Move first. Refine second. Publish with structure.

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The subtitle?

Why the best place to improve your writing is somewhere nobody else will ever read.

So naturally, today I’m putting pictures of my actual journal on the internet. 😂

I see the irony.

I’ve been using a bullet journal since 2020, and part of what I love about journaling is that it’s mine.

Nobody has to read it, nobody has to understand it, and I don’t have to make it pretty enough to publish.

That privacy is part of the point.

It’s also why sharing these pages feels a little weird, but over the last few months, my bullet journal has become part of something else:

→ How I manage my publishing schedule across three publications.

And that brings me to a question I keep getting:

How do you stay consistent on Substack?

Or, more specifically:

How do you develop a publishing cadence you can actually stick to?

My answer starts before you ever open a calendar.

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Your Publishing Cadence Starts With Knowing Yourself

When people talk about consistency, they usually jump straight to frequency.

• How often should I publish?

• Once a week?

• Twice?

• Daily?

My question is different: What can you actually commit to?

Not what another creator tells you to do, not what sounds impressive, and definitely not what you can pull off for two wildly motivated weeks before you disappear for six.

→ What can you repeatedly come back to?

For you, that might be once a week, twice a week, or every other week.

Maybe you’re in a season where you can go all in and publish daily.

I generally recommend starting with once or twice a week, but you have to look at your actual life.

• Do you have a full-time job?

• A family?

• Other projects?

• How much time do you realistically have to write?

Because a publishing cadence isn’t useful if your life can’t hold it.

→ Consistency starts with making a commitment to yourself that you can actually keep.

Mine just happens to involve three publications.

It Took Me Years To Figure Out This One Page

I’ve been bullet journaling since 2020.

Since May, I’ve also been going to a bullet journaling class every Tuesday and Thursday.

Those classes have helped bring more structure to my life and schedule, but they’ve also done something I didn’t necessarily expect:

They’ve sparked ideas.

I’ll be sitting there working in my journal and suddenly think of an article, see a connection between two things, or realize something I’ve been trying to make complicated could actually be pretty simple.

And somewhere in that process, my bullet journal started changing with the way I publish, but here’s what makes me laugh:

I’ve been bullet journaling since 2020.

I only figured out this particular one-page publishing system a little over a month ago.

Five-plus years of bullet journaling…for a system that basically boils down to a page, some boxes, a pen, and whatever the hell my handwriting is doing that week, but it works.

This is what one of those pages actually looks like:

And no, you’re not supposed to understand all of this. 😂

The point is that I do.

I Needed Somewhere To See My Entire Publishing Week

I didn’t create this page because I wanted a prettier content planner.

→ I created it because I needed to see everything in one place.

Across the page, I can keep track of what I’m publishing for each publication, my Sunday and Wednesday articles, my Friday Live article, topics I’m considering, things I need to cross-post, and ideas I don’t want to lose.

Then there are my checkboxes.

Those little boxes probably shouldn’t be as satisfying as they are, but they are.

Article published?

Check.✔

Live article done?

Check.✔

Next one.

And when I open my journal, I don’t have to ask myself:

What the hell am I supposed to publish this week?

I’ve already given the work somewhere to live.

That doesn’t mean everything happens exactly as planned.

Actually, the pages prove the opposite.

This Is What Consistency Actually Looks Like For Me

Look at it.

• There are checked boxes.

• Unchecked boxes.

• Things crossed out.

• Ideas moved.

• Notes squeezed into whatever space I could find.

• Plans for next week sitting beside plans for this week.

There’s even a giant heart taking up a chunk of one page because apparently that was necessary. 😂

This isn’t a picture of a perfectly executed content calendar.

It’s a working document.

• Sometimes I plan an article and change my mind.

• Sometimes an idea gets moved to the following week.

• Sometimes I get more done than I expected.

• Sometimes I don’t.

The page changes because my week changes and that’s exactly why it works.

→ I’m not trying to protect a perfect publishing streak.

I’m trying to keep publishing. There’s a difference.

Even from week to week, the page isn’t identical.

The structure changes, the topics change, and what I need from it changes.

→ I’m not trying to force myself into a system because I decided once that this was how I was “supposed” to publish.

The system works for me. I don’t work for the system.

Missing A Week Doesn’t Mean You Failed At Consistency

This is where I think we make publishing harder than it needs to be.

We turn consistency into perfection.

• Miss your publishing day?

You failed.

• Need to publish less?

You’re falling behind.

• Take a break?

There goes your consistency.

Nope.

• If I notice I’m getting burned out, I can do less.

• If I need a break, I can take one.

• If I decide I need three weeks away from publishing, I can make that decision intentionally.

But I also want to make another commitment: I’m coming back in three weeks.

→ That’s the part I care about because my journal isn’t a record of me doing everything perfectly.

It’s proof that I keep coming back.

Don’t Copy My Page

I’m showing you my journal because I want you to see the system I actually use.

I’m not showing it to you so you can recreate it box for box.

I’m running three publications. You might be running one.

My publishing schedule might make absolutely no sense for your life.

Good, it doesn’t need to.

Instead, ask:

What do I need to see every week to keep the publishing commitment I made to myself?

Maybe that’s simply:

• The day you’re publishing.

• The article you’re planning to write.

• A space to dump new ideas.

• A checkbox when it’s done.

That’s it.

You can add to it later, change it later, or scratch half of it out next Tuesday if you realize it isn’t working.

I did.

It took me years of bullet journaling to arrive at the page I’m using now and I’m sure it won’t look exactly like this forever either.

And No, You Don’t Get To Read The Rest of My Journal 😂

I’m showing you these pages because they’re part of my publishing process.

That’s where the line is.

Some pages of my journal help me plan articles, some help me think, some spark ideas that eventually become something I publish, and some are mine.

I still get to decide what I share and what stays private.

Which is kind of funny when I think back to that first journaling article.

I told you journaling could make you a better writer because it gives you somewhere to write that nobody else will ever read.

→ I still believe that.

Now I’ve just discovered that the same journal can also help me become a more consistent publisher.

20% OFF UNSTUCK TO PUBLISHED 💜

If you’ve been thinking about joining the paid side of Unstuck to Published, now’s a pretty damn good time.

Join annually for $177.60/year (normally $222) and unlock:

1. 📕 The Ultimate Substack Beginner’s Blueprint ($47 value)

2. 🎓 My Substack Masterclass — 10 Things I’d Do If I Were Starting My Substack Today ($197 value)

3. ✅ Build Your Substack in 90 Minutes Foundational Checklist

4. 💬 Private Community Chat & direct access to me for questions and hands-on support

5. 🔓 Full access to my paid Substack content + subscriber perks

20% off. One year. Everything inside.

👉 Join Unstuck to Published for $177.60/year

Get 20% off forever

The tools are here. Let’s build the damn thing. 💜

If You’re Stuck Right Now: Start With One Question

If you’re struggling to stay consistent on Substack, don’t start with my schedule.

Don’t start with the creator publishing five times a week and don’t start with whatever somebody on the internet told you the algorithm wants.

→ Start with yourself.

What can I realistically commit to?

1. Write that down.

2. Give the work somewhere to live.

3. Build a simple system around it.

And when you don’t execute the week perfectly?

Come back because consistency isn’t publishing as much as humanly possible.

It’s making a commitment you can return to.

My journal isn’t proof that I execute every publishing week perfectly.

It’s proof that I keep coming back.

Mine happens to live on one messy organized page. 💜

Thank you so much for being here. I truly appreciate you.

— Jessica

Move first. Refine second. Publish with structure.

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After doing about eight Lives between us, we sat down to compare notes and pull out the lessons actually worth carrying forward. Consider this the condensed version, but if you want the stories, side conversations, screen shares, and our very different takes on LinkedIn 😂, watch the full replay below.💜

Robyn and I have apparently decided sleep is optional.

Between the two of us, we did about eight Lives recently.

I talked with Virgil Brewster about repurposing content, Rob Riker about relationships, and Chris about what consistent publishing had taught us.

Robyn talked with LinkedIn expert Melanie Goodman about what’s changed on LinkedIn and how creators can use it alongside Substack.

Then there were all the things we were testing ourselves: Subscriber Perks, Creator Match, Recommendations, paid offers, and collaborations.

A LOT.

So for Episode 22 of Unstuck to Finding Your Edge, we decided not to add another strategy to the pile.

We compared notes.

And after all those conversations?

The tools keep changing. The fundamentals really don’t.

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1. Stop Creating More Work Than You Need To

This was my biggest takeaway from my Live with :

Use what you already created.

An article doesn’t have to disappear after you publish it.

Pull ideas from it for Notes. Talk about it on a Live. Turn pieces of the conversation into something new.

Same with a Live.

One conversation can become an article, a Note, a podcast episode, or the spark for a completely different piece.

The point isn’t to squeeze 42 pieces of content out of everything you make.

It’s to stop starting from zero every damn time.

2. A Collaboration Doesn’t Have To End When The Live Ends

and I proved this without really planning to.

We did a Live together.

Then we kept talking and realized something: I’d been publishing every Sunday for roughly three years, while Chris had published every Monday for 52 weeks.

That became:

What 52 Mondays & Three Years of Sundays Taught Us About Substack.

It wasn’t a recap of our Live. It was a completely different article that existed because we collaborated.

→ That’s the bigger opportunity.

A good collaboration can create the next idea instead of ending with the first one.

3. Stop Looking At Everyone As A Potential Customer

My second Live with was about what happens after you make a connection.

You nurture it and you stay open to what it might become.

Someone you meet on Substack could become a customer. Sure.

They could also become a friend, collaborator, peer, mentor, or someone who introduces your work to an entirely new audience.

and I are a pretty good example.

She responded to one of my Notes. That became DMs.

DMs became a phone call and somehow we’re now 22 episodes into a weekly Live together.

I definitely didn’t post that Note thinking, This is how I’m going to find my future co-host.

→ That’s the point.

You don’t know where a genuine relationship will lead.

4. Make Your Paid Offer Easier To Understand & Use

One of the newer Substack features we talked about was Subscriber Perks.

I recently set up the Perks page for Unstuck to Published, but I didn’t create random extras just because Substack gave me another page to fill.

I matched it to what I already promised paid subscribers.

1. My Beginner’s Blueprint.

2. My foundational checklist.

3. My paid community chat.

4. My Substack Masterclass.

Now there’s one place where paid subscribers can find what they’re paying for and that’s the actual lesson here.

→ A paid offer isn’t better because it has more stuff. It’s better when people understand what they get and can actually find it.

And when you change that offer?

Update it everywhere.

→ Your publication settings. About page. Welcome email. Perks page.

Your subscriber shouldn’t need a treasure map to figure out what they bought.

5. Let Substack Help You Find The Right People

We also looked at Creator Match.

For me, some of the recommendations were almost funny.

Substack suggested as one of my top collaboration matches.

I’d already been on his podcast.

Other people I’d collaborated with appeared too.

Apparently the algorithm and I agree, but I think this feature is far more interesting for someone who’s new.

Instead of wandering around Substack wondering who you should talk to, Creator Match can give you somewhere to start.

Look at the suggestions. Check out their work. Decide whether the person makes sense for you.

→ Then talk to them.

Use the algorithm for the introduction. Use your brain for the relationship.

6. Recommendations Are Quiet Growth

During the Live, I called Recommendations the dividends of Substack.

When we looked at my dashboard, 176 of my roughly 430 subscribers had come through recommendations.

One publication, The Dinner Done Club, had sent me 31 and there’s another relationship story hiding there.

The creator behind that publication originally paid me for a one-on-one session.

That could’ve been the entire transaction.

Instead, she later recommended my publication and introduced dozens of people to my work.

→ Which brings us right back to Rob’s lesson.

You have no idea what one relationship might become.

7. Substack & LinkedIn Don’t Need Separate Content Factories

Then Robyn brought us into LinkedIn.

Which was hilarious considering I admitted I’ve basically never used it.

Robyn?

She was teaching people how to use LinkedIn in 2009!! 🐐

Her old YouTube tutorial has accumulated more than 26,000 views, so she recently went Live with LinkedIn expert to talk about what’s changed.

One of the bigger lessons was how LinkedIn and Substack can work together.

You don’t need to write something for Substack and then stare at LinkedIn thinking:

Crap. Now what do I post here?

Take the core idea and adapt it for the platform.

Robyn and Melanie discussed using searchable language on LinkedIn, making your expertise clear, and repurposing ideas from Substack instead of building an entirely separate content machine.

Which sounds suspiciously familiar. We’re right back to Virgil.

Use what you already have.

Click here to view Robyn’s YouTube video about Linkedin from 2009

Click here to watch Robyn’s Live replay with Melanie

So What Did 8 Lives Actually Teach Us?

This was the funny part.

We talked about different platforms, different features, different creators, and different strategies, and somehow we kept landing in the same place.

• Create useful work.

• Reuse good ideas.

• Build genuine relationships.

• Collaborate with people who make sense.

• Make it easy for people to understand what you do.

• Use the tools instead of letting the tools create more work for you.

Substack will add another feature and LinkedIn will change something.

A button will move, an algorithm will change, and three months from now, Robyn and I will probably have another eight Lives to talk about.

But the fundamentals?

Those aren’t moving nearly as fast.

The tools change. The fundamentals don’t.

This companion article comes from Episode 22 of Unstuck to Finding Your Edge, my weekly Live series with Robyn.

Watch Episode 22 above ↑

Which lesson are you actually going to use?

Because collecting another 14 strategies isn’t the assignment.

Pick one. Use it.

20% OFF UNSTUCK TO PUBLISHED 💜

If you’ve been thinking about joining the paid side of Unstuck to Published, now’s a pretty damn good time.

Join annually for $177.60/year (normally $222) and unlock:

1. 📕 The Ultimate Substack Beginner’s Blueprint ($47 value)

2. 🎓 My Substack Masterclass — 10 Things I’d Do If I Were Starting My Substack Today ($197 value)

3. ✅ Build Your Substack in 90 Minutes Foundational Checklist

4. 💬 Private Community Chat & direct access to me for questions and hands-on support

5. 🔓 Full access to my paid Substack content + subscriber perks

20% off. One year. Everything inside.

👉 Join Unstuck to Published for $177.60/year

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The tools are here. Let’s build the damn thing. 💜

Resources From This Conversation

Follow Jess at Unstuck to Published →

Unstuck to Published

Turn your Substack from an idea into a live, paid publication—in 60 minutes, without guessing what to do next.

By Jess, The Creator

Follow Jess at NP Fellow Become The CEO of Your Health →

NP Fellow Become the CEO of Your Health

A mental health & functional medicine newsletter helping you build emotional regulation, mental clarity, and health ownership.

By Jess, The Creator

Follow Jess at Nurse in the Market →

Nurse in the Market

Helping busy professionals understand the stock market through stories, strategy, and education so you can build wealth and talk stocks without needing a translator.

By Jess, The Creator

Follow Robyn at Finding Your Edge →

Finding Your Edge

Helping growing entrepreneurs increase visibility and get featured in Forbes, WSJ, Inc. and more through strategic storytelling and AI search.

By Robyn Levin

Follow Robyn at Rare Finds - Luxury Travel →

Rare Finds - Luxury Travel

For luxury travelers drawn to extraordinary hotels, design, emerging destinations, and the people behind it all. You'll find them here. Go before the crowds.

By Robyn Levin

Scan Robyn’s QR code to access her Youtube channel →

Thank You

Thank you so much for everyone who tuned into this live, your presence is truly appreciated, and to the people who are watching the replay, thank you!

See you next Friday at 12pm ET for our weekly show, stay tuned!

-Robyn Levin & Jess, The Creator

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So, here’s the walkthrough.

Substack lets you create a dedicated Perks page where you can offer benefits to paying subscribers, including downloadable PDFs, discount codes, private links, and community invitations.

For this tutorial, we’re setting up one digital download: a PDF.

No complicated setup. Let’s do it.

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Before You Start

You need to have payments enabled on your Substack publication to access Subscriber Perks.

You’ll also need:

• Your PDF ready to upload.

• A title and short description for your perk.

• An image that’s at least 1200 × 800 pixels.

Subscriber Perks are currently available on your publication’s website, not in the Substack app.

Step 1: Find Subscriber Perks in Your Dashboard

Open your publication dashboard.

Click Settings in the lower-left menu.

Scroll down until you find Subscriber perks, then click Manage.

This opens your Subscriber perks dashboard.

Click Create Perk.

Step 2: Pick Your Perk Category

You’ll see five perk categories:

1. Discount or promo code

2. Digital download

3. Community invite

4. Link

5. Substack Live video

For this example, select Digital download.

Click Next.

⚠️ Important: Choose Digital download when you want subscribers to download a file. If you’re sending them to a resource on another website, choose Link instead.

Substack allows digital download files up to 700 MB.

Step 3: Add Your Perk Details

Now you’re on the Details screen.

Enter a title that tells subscribers what they’re getting.

For example:

The Ultimate Substack Beginner’s Blueprint

Then write a short description explaining what the PDF contains.

Keep it specific. Your subscribers should understand what they’re about to download without having to guess.

Next, upload your perk image.

The image must be at least 1200 × 800 pixels.

Then, upload your PDF in the digital download file field.

Once you’ve added the details, image, and file, click Next.

Step 4: Choose Who Can Access Your Perk

Now you’re on the Audience screen.

Substack gives you three options:

1. Founding plan subscribers

Only founding members can unlock this perk.

2. Annual and founding plan subscribers

Monthly subscribers won’t have access.

3. All paid subscribers

Monthly, annual, and founding members can unlock it.

Choose the audience that matches your offer.

For example, if you want every paying subscriber to receive your PDF, select All paid subscribers.

You’ll also see a New subscribers only toggle. Turn this on if the perk is exclusively for new paying subscribers. You can then set when those subscribers can access it.

If you want existing eligible members to receive the perk too, leave that toggle off.

Once you’ve made your selection, click Publish.

Step 5: Check Your Published Perks page

Now open your publication’s website.

You’ll see a Perks tab in the navigation bar.

Click it.

Your new digital download should appear as a card with its image, title, description, and an access button.

Here’s what my published Perks page for Unstuck to Published looks like:

Eligible paying subscribers can click Unlock to access the perk.

Once a digital download is unlocked, they can access its download.

Free subscribers who try to unlock a paid perk will be prompted to upgrade.

You can also copy the URL of an individual perk and share it directly with subscribers.

That’s it. Your digital download is published.

Two Things To Know Before Offering Perks

1. Check payments for high-value perks.

Substack warns that subscribers may redeem perks before certain direct-debit payments have cleared.

If you’re offering something expensive, check the payment status before providing access.

2. Understand the refund policy.

Before unlocking a perk, subscribers must acknowledge that their subscription becomes non-refundable.

Substack doesn’t honor refund requests after a subscriber redeems a perk, although you can choose to issue a refund yourself.

You now know how to create a digital download, decide which subscribers can access it, and publish it on your Substack Perks page.

Thank you so much for being here. I truly appreciate you.

— Jessica

Move first. Refine second. Publish with structure.

Leave a comment

Work With Me 1:1

Previous Articles & Live Episodes →

Scan the QR code below to subscribe to Unstuck to Published →

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Work With Me 1:1

I’ve been publishing every Sunday for roughly three years.

When we reunited on his show, Typing It Real, we talked about our publishing routines, the friendship we’ve built over the past year, and what we’ve learned about growing on Substack.

Naturally, the question of growth secrets came up.

I wish I could tell you we’d discovered a hidden button in the dashboard that makes subscribers appear.

Believe me, if I found that button, I’d have a tutorial ready by Sunday. 😂

But Chris and I haven’t followed some identical, carefully engineered growth plan.

We write about different subjects. We run our publications differently. We have different responsibilities and different ways of creating content.

What we do have in common is that we’ve kept publishing, even when the numbers weren’t particularly exciting.

We’ve also helped each other launch projects, learned new tools, and developed a friendship that started long before we had any idea what we’d end up creating together.

Looking back, I don’t think one tactic explains our experiences.

It’s the decisions we made along the way.

Some were small enough that we barely noticed them at the time.

Others changed what we thought we were capable of doing and none required us to copy somebody else’s entire publishing routine.

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7 Publishing Decisions That Shaped Our Substack Experience

Looking back, our progress didn’t come from discovering one big secret.

It came from decisions we kept making, one Monday and one Sunday at a time.

1. Choose a publishing schedule you can maintain.

Chris publishes every Monday and I’ve been publishing every Sunday since 2023.

Neither of us chose those days because we believed Substack would reward us for publishing at a particular time.

We chose a schedule and kept returning to it.

When I first started writing online, I came across advice about publishing weekly for two years before expecting to take yourself seriously as a writer.

I decided to give it a try.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about running three publications, hosting Lives, or launching a podcast.

I wanted to write. So I wrote.

Some of my early articles got zero likes.

ZERO.

Substack didn’t even have Notes when I started. I was promoting articles by posting screenshots to my Instagram Stories and adding a link.

That was pretty much the whole operation, but I kept publishing on Sundays.

Chris made a similar commitment to his Mondays. He kept showing up until he’d passed the one-year mark.

Neither of us waited for consistent engagement before becoming consistent writers.

Now, before you decide this means you need to publish every Sunday for three years, let me stop you.

You don’t.

The decision isn’t publish weekly no matter what.

It’s choose a schedule you can realistically keep.

If that’s every Sunday, fine.

If it’s every other Wednesday, also fine.

If you have the time and genuinely enjoy publishing twice a week, go ahead, but don’t commit to five articles a week because another creator told you that’s what it takes to grow.

You don’t know what their calendar looks like behind the scenes.

You don’t know how quickly they write, what other responsibilities they have, or how long they’ve been building their workflow and you certainly don’t need to make writing miserable just to imitate somebody else’s output.

A schedule that looks impressive for two weeks and then collapses isn’t doing you much good.

→ Choose a rhythm you can return to during an ordinary week, when there’s no exciting milestone to celebrate and no sudden burst of inspiration because most of your publishing life will be made up of ordinary weeks.

Your decision: Pick a publishing schedule that fits your actual life, then give yourself enough time to see what happens when you stick with it.

2. Give yourself a reason to write before the likes arrive.

During our Live, Chris and I talked about what keeps us writing.

My advice was to make sure you get something out of the article itself.

• Maybe you researched a topic you’ve wanted to understand.

• Maybe writing helped you work through an experience.

• Maybe you finally explained something that’s been bouncing around in your head for months.

• Or maybe you created a resource you can use again.

Whatever it is, find a reason to feel satisfied when you hit Publish because if the entire value of your article depends on how many people like it, you’re handing your dashboard an awful lot of power over your day.

Imagine this.

You finish an article you’re proud of, you publish it, and you check the numbers a few hours later.

Three likes.

Suddenly, you’re questioning whether the article was any good.

But what changed?

The article didn’t.

You just found out how many people had clicked a button so far.

That number can tell you something about how your work is being received. It can’t tell you everything about what the work was worth.

Here’s an example from my own publication.

I wanted to write a tutorial explaining how to start a podcast on Substack.

Whenever I create a how-to article, I like to walk through the actual process so I can show readers what to do.

So I created a podcast for Unstuck to Published while documenting the steps.

I finished the tutorial. Then I realized I’d accidentally given myself a podcast. 😂

Even if nobody had liked that article, I would’ve walked away with something useful.

I’d learned the process, I’d created a podcast, and I’d written instructions I could refer to again.

Then Chris read the tutorial.

He followed it to turn Typing It Real into a podcast, connected it to podcast platforms, and brought his existing videos into the feed.

He told me the setup took him about an hour.

→ One article gave me a podcast and helped a friend launch his.

That’s a result I can point to without opening my analytics.

Chris has his own reasons for writing, too. His poetry and personal stories include reflections on caregiving and his life with his son, Brayden a.k.a Bray Bray.

Those stories matter to him before anyone responds to them.

And I think that’s an important thing for creators to remember.

You can want subscribers and engagement.

You can want your publication to become a business, but if every article needs an immediate reward to justify the time you spent writing it, the process is going to get exhausting.

Your decision: Before you publish, ask yourself, What did I get out of making this? Give yourself an answer that doesn’t require checking your stats.

3. Build a library of work worth returning to.

This is where consistency becomes useful in a different way.

Publishing regularly gives you the opportunity to build a collection of work.

Not a pile of posts you publish and immediately forget.

→ A library.

Think about what happens when someone discovers your publication for the first time.

• Maybe they find you through a Note.

• Maybe another writer recommends your work.

• Maybe they watch a Live and click through to your publication.

• They read one article and want to know more.

What can they find?

If you’ve been publishing for a while, you may already have an article that answers their next question.

You may have a tutorial they can follow or you may have an older piece that explains why you started writing about this subject in the first place.

That’s one reason I don’t think creators should judge every article as though it’s a separate event with a 24-hour expiration date.

A post can still be useful long after its original publication date.

My podcast tutorial is a good example.

I wrote it to explain a process.

Chris found it and used it.

→ Now, whenever someone asks me how to start a podcast on Substack, I have a resource I can send them.

I don’t need to explain every step from scratch and if the platform changes, I can revisit the tutorial and update it.

That’s a different way of thinking about your publication.

Instead of asking only, How many people read this article today?

You can also ask:

Will this be useful to someone who discovers it six months from now?

Not every article needs to be evergreen, of course.

Some stories belong to a particular moment, but when you’re writing a tutorial, explaining a recurring problem, or sharing a lesson you’ve learned, think about how that article fits into the larger body of work you’re creating.

1. Give it a clear headline.

2. Make it easy to understand.

3. Link to it when a new article touches on the same subject.

4. Bring it back when someone asks a question it already answers.

Your older work doesn’t have to disappear just because you’ve published something new.

And here’s the distinction I want to make:

Publishing consistently doesn’t guarantee growth.

→ It gives you more opportunities to create work that readers can discover and return to.

That’s a reason to keep writing.

A much better reason than believing your 52nd article will somehow unlock a secret level of Substack.

Your decision: Treat your publication as a growing library. Create useful work, connect related articles, and give older posts another chance to help someone.

4. Invest in creator friendships without keeping score.

Chris hosted my very first Substack Live.

I didn’t want to go Live.

I’d been writing online for years, and one of the things I liked about Substack was being able to publish without getting on camera.

Then Substack introduced Lives.

Chris invited me and I said yes.

Fast-forward a year, and I was back on Typing It Real after somehow scheduling FOUR Lives in one week.

I also host a weekly Live show, Unstuck to Finding Your Edge, with .

Apparently, I’ve changed my mind about Lives, but Chris and I didn’t become friends because he had a collaboration opportunity for me.

He’d started reading my health & wellness publication, NP Fellow Become the CEO of Your Health.

As a nurse, I understood some of what he was experiencing as a caregiver to his son.

We started talking and we kept talking.

Over the past year, we’ve shared ideas, encouraged each other, celebrated milestones, and helped each other with projects.

One day, Chris texted me about starting a second publication.

He wanted a separate home for his poetry tips and resources.

We worked together to set up Read & Write Poetry with Chris B. Writes.

Within about 48 hours, he had the publication ready.

Then he went back to his original publication and updated his About page, welcome email, and offerings using what he’d learned.

He sent me the results. I told him they were pristine.

Apparently, that’s my highest form of approval and Chris has helped me too.

We bounce ideas off each other, we encourage each other when we’re working on something new, and we celebrate when the other person reaches a milestone.

That friendship has led to projects neither of us had planned when we first connected, but here’s the part I don’t want you to miss.

We didn’t become friends because we’d calculated what we could get out of each other.

We connected over something personal. The publishing projects came later.

→ There’s a difference between having a friend you can collaborate with and treating every creator you meet like an unpaid business development opportunity.

You don’t need to turn every conversation into a pitch and you also don’t have to pretend you can’t help someone you genuinely like.

• If a friend is working on something you’ve already figured out, share what you know.

• If they write an article your readers would appreciate, share it.

• If you have an idea that would be fun to create together, ask them.

And if nothing comes of it beyond a friendship?

That’s allowed, too.

Your decision: Make room for creator relationships that don’t need to produce a measurable return. Help when you can, collaborate when it makes sense, and stop keeping score.

5. Help your readers connect with each other.

Chris and I both care about supporting other creators.

→ One of the ways Chris does that is through regular prompts in his Community Chat.

On Tuesdays, for example, he encourages members to share someone else’s work alongside their own.

Other days have different themes that give people reasons to participate.

It’s a simple idea.

• Give people something to talk about.

• Make room for them to share their work.

• Encourage them to discover each other.

During our Live, Chris told a story about two people who met through his Community Chat.

One lived in Minneapolis and the other lived in Portugal.

When the first person visited Lisbon, they met for coffee.

An actual coffee. In the same room with chairs and everything. 😂

Think about that for a second.

Two people who might never have met found each other through a writer’s online community.

Then they took that connection into the real world.

Chris didn’t have to orchestrate the friendship.

→ He gave people a place to meet.

They did the rest and that raises a useful question for anyone who runs a publication.

→ Does your community give readers a reason to connect with anyone besides you?

It’s easy to build every interaction around your latest article.

You publish. Readers comment.

You reply and that’s the end of the conversation.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but you can create opportunities for more.

• Ask readers what they’re working on.

• Invite them to share a resource.

• Encourage them to recommend another writer.

• Start a conversation that doesn’t require everyone to talk directly to you.

You don’t need a daily Community Chat to do this.

→ A thoughtful question at the end of an article can be enough to get people talking.

And if you do run a chat, consider whether every prompt needs to revolve around your own work.

Your readers have experiences, ideas, and projects of their own.

→ Give them room to bring those things into the conversation.

You might be surprised by what happens.

Coffee in Lisbon, apparently. 😂

Your decision: Create opportunities for your readers to discover and support each other, whether that’s in your comments, your Community Chat, or through the work you choose to share.

6. Make better use of the content you’ve already created.

Chris and I also talked about turning Substack Lives into podcast episodes and this part of our conversation reminded me how often creators overlook the work they’ve already made.

Let’s say you host a Live.

You finish recording.

Substack creates a replay draft.

You could publish it immediately and move on.

Or you could spend a little time making that replay easier for someone to discover and enjoy later.

1. Give it a headline that explains what the conversation is about.

2. Add a thumbnail.

3. Write a useful description.

4. Include links to the resources you mentioned.

5. Make sure viewers can find your guest’s publication.

6. If you’ve connected your Lives to a podcast, check what will appear in the episode notes.

I write longer companion articles for many of my Lives.

They’re designed to stand on their own, so someone can read the article even if they don’t have time to watch the conversation, but I don’t want an entire article copied into a Spotify episode description.

So I edit the podcast description separately and include links back to the article and my guest’s work.

Chris takes a shorter approach with his Live posts. He includes a synopsis, discussion points, shout-outs, and links.

Different formats. Same underlying decision.

We’re thinking about what happens to the content after the original conversation ends.

• A Live can become a podcast episode.

• A conversation can inspire an evergreen article like this one.

• An article can give you several specific ideas for Notes.

• A tutorial can become a resource you share whenever someone asks the same question.

• And an older post can become relevant again when you publish something related.

You don’t need to create something entirely new every time you want to reach someone.

Sometimes you’ve already done the hardest part.

The material is sitting in your drafts, waiting for you to give it a proper headline and a reason to exist beyond the day you recorded it.

This is also why I encourage creators to learn what Substack’s existing tools can do before adding another piece of software to their workflow.

I built my podcast while writing a tutorial. Chris followed that tutorial and built his.

Neither of us needed to make podcasting more complicated than it had to be.

🫶 Read my tutorial on starting a podcast on Substack:

Your decision: Before starting another content project, look at what you’ve already created. Can you make it easier to find, give it a new format, or use it to answer a question your readers keep asking?

7. Adapt other creators’ advice to your own life.

Chris and I have plenty in common.

We both enjoy writing and we both have regular publishing schedules.

We both like collaborating and helping other creators, but we don’t run identical publications.

Chris writes poetry, personal stories, and reflections on caregiving.

I publish across three different subjects, create tutorials, and host regular Lives.

→ His Monday schedule works for him.

→ My Sunday schedule works for me.

Neither schedule is a universal instruction manual and this is where I think creators can get themselves into trouble.

They see someone else’s results and try to copy every visible part of the process.

The number of articles, the publishing time, the number of Notes, the number of Lives, the number of publications, but they’re copying a routine without knowing what that person had to build around it.

You might learn something useful from a creator who publishes five articles a week.

That doesn’t mean you need to publish five articles a week.

You might love the way Chris runs his Community Chat.

That doesn’t mean you need to recreate his entire calendar of prompts.

You might read my podcast tutorial and realize a podcast would be a useful addition to your publication or you might read it and decide you don’t want to start one.

Both are reasonable outcomes.

The point of learning from another creator isn’t to become an exact copy of them.

→ It’s to understand what they’re doing, decide whether it solves a problem you actually have, and figure out how to make it work in your own circumstances.

Take the idea, test it, keep what works, and leave the rest.

And if your circumstances change, change your routine.

You own your publication.

→ You’re allowed to make decisions about how it fits into your life.

Your decision: Learn from other creators without adopting every part of their workflow. Build a publishing routine around the work you want to do and the life you actually have.

So, What’s The Secret To Substack Growth?

Chris has his 52-plus Mondays and I have my three years of Sundays.

We’ve both published work that received very little attention.

We’ve learned new tools, changed our routines, launched projects, and helped each other figure things out.

I can’t promise that publishing weekly will guarantee a certain number of subscribers.

I can’t promise that every creator friendship will lead to a collaboration and I definitely can’t promise that starting a podcast will make your publication take off, but I can tell you what I see when I look back at our experiences.

• Chris kept publishing on Mondays andI kept publishing on Sundays.

• He invited me onto my first Live when I wasn’t sure I wanted to do one.

• I helped him set up a second publication.

• He used my tutorial to launch his podcast.

• And a friendship that began because he read something I’d written became part of how we both continued creating.

None of that happened because we’d discovered a secret formula.

→ It happened through decisions we made, adjusted, and kept making.

So if you’re wondering what to do next with your publication, don’t start by trying to copy someone else’s entire strategy.

Choose one decision from this article that would make your own publishing experience better.

• Maybe you need a schedule you can actually maintain.

• Maybe you need to stop judging every article by its first few likes.

• Maybe it’s time to revisit the useful work you’ve already published.

• Or maybe there’s a creator you genuinely enjoy talking to, and you should finally ask them how their project is going.

You don’t need to make all seven decisions today.

→ Start with the one that makes sense for you. Then keep going.

One Monday and one Sunday at a time.

🎥 Watch The Conversation That Inspired This Article

Chris and I reunited on Typing It Real to talk about our friendship, publishing routines, podcasting, building community, and what we’ve learned from our time on Substack.

Watch the live replay here →

Chris B. Writes

Typing It Real: Iron Sharpens Iron! Being Consistent & Building Community With Jess, The Creator

It was a real treat to speak with Substack Best Seller and my sister from another mister Jess, The Creator on this episode of Typing It Real…

Listen now

a month ago · 22 likes · 3 comments · Chris B. Writes and Jess, The Creator

You can also follow Chris at Chris B. Writes and Read & Write Poetry with Chris B. Writes →

Chris B. Writes

I share my life adventures as a loving dad and caregiver to my son Bray Bray. I am also an award-winning published poet.

Read & Write Poetry with Chris B. Writes

Learn how to read, write, and feel poetry with award-winning poet Chris B. Writes, without pressure or overthinking.

And if you’re setting up your own publication or figuring out what to do next, that’s what Unstuck to Published is here for. I share tutorials, publishing lessons, and the things I’m learning while building my own publications.

Now I want to hear from you:

Which of these seven publishing decisions are you working on right now? And do you have a Monday, Sunday, or another publishing day you’ve committed to?

Tell me in the comments. 👑

Thank you so much for being here. I truly appreciate you.

— Jessica

Move first. Refine second. Publish with structure.

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You can watch the masterclass, work through the guide, or use both as you build your own publication.

Not a Collective member yet? If you’d like access to this masterclass and the rest of our premium resources, I’d love to have you join us. 💜

👉 Join the Unstuck to Published Collective CLICK HERE

Substack Masterclass: 10 Things I Would Do If I Were Starting My Substack Today in 2026

Four years on Substack, multiple publications, and plenty of experiments later, here’s the plan I’d follow if I had to begin again.

If I were starting my Substack today, I wouldn’t begin by posting five Notes a day or trying to figure out the algorithm.

I’d start with my publication.

When I started publishing in 2023, I didn’t have all the tools creators have now. Since then, I’ve built multiple publications through my own writing and ghostwriting, created tutorials, launched a podcast, experimented with different content formats, and made friends who have become part of my everyday life.

One of the reasons I created Unstuck to Published was to help people get past the confusion that comes with starting a publication.

There are so many features to learn, decisions to make, and people telling you what you should be doing.

I want to make that process easier by sharing what I’ve learned from building publications myself, so you can spend less time wondering where to begin and more time actually publishing.

I’ve tried a lot of advice along the way. Some worked. Some didn’t. And a few things took me much longer to figure out than they should have.

So when my friend Robyn joined me for this masterclass, I wanted to answer one question:

If I lost my publication today and had to start again, what would I do first?

Because when you’re new, the advice comes at you from every direction.

• Publish every day.

• Post more Notes.

• Start a podcast.

• Go Live.

• Turn on paid subscriptions.

• Find your niche.

• Make friends.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, you’re staring at your dashboard thinking:

Okay, but what the hell am I supposed to do FIRST? 😂

I’ve been publishing every Sunday since 2023, and that experience has taught me something important: there’s no single publishing routine or growth strategy that works for everyone.

What works for me might not work for you.

So these aren’t ten rules you have to follow exactly as I do.

They’re ten decisions I’d make if I were starting from scratch in 2026, based on what I’ve learned from building publications, helping other creators, and doing the work myself.

Let’s start with the part I’d get right before asking anyone to subscribe.

1. I’d Build my publication’s foundation before promoting it.

Imagine spending hours writing an article.

Someone discovers it, likes what you have to say, and clicks through to your publication.

They find a vague short description, an unfinished About page, and a default welcome email.

What exactly are they supposed to subscribe FOR?

You’ve done the work to get someone interested in your writing, but your publication hasn’t explained why they should stick around.

That’s why I’d get the foundation in place first.

When someone lands on your publication, they should understand three things within seconds:

1. Who is this for?

2. What will I get?

3. Why should I subscribe?

Don’t make people guess and don’t try to be so clever with your description that nobody understands what you actually do.

Clarity first.

Here’s what I’d set up.

Ready to build your Substack with me? 💜

In the full masterclass, Robyn and I walk through all 10 things I’d do if I were starting my Substack today, from setting up my publication and planning content to finding readers, collaborating, and creating a paid offer.

Paid members of the Unstuck to Published Collective get the complete video, the detailed written guide, and practical exercises they can use for their own publications.

Join the Collective to watch the masterclass & read the full guide.

Upgrade to paid

Before promoting a new publication, I’d work through seven things:

1. Publication name: Choose a name that makes sense for your subject and audience.

2. Publication short description: Tell readers what they’ll receive.

3. About page: Explain who the publication is for, what you write about, and why someone might want to subscribe.

4. Welcome emails: Set up a welcome email for free subscribers and a separate one for paid subscribers if you offer a paid tier.

5. Branding: Choose a recognizable logo and a simple, consistent visual identity.

6. Publishing schedule: Decide what you can realistically deliver.

7. Free and paid offerings: Make it clear what each subscription includes.

You might get through the setup in half an hour if you already know your publication’s name, audience, and subject.

If you’re still figuring those things out, it might take a few days. That’s okay.

I’d rather spend that time getting the publication ready than rush to promote something I haven’t finished explaining.

Your name and your publication name aren’t necessarily the same thing.

During the masterclass, Robyn asked about something that confused her when she first started: the difference between a profile name, a publication name, and a handle.

It’s worth understanding before you set everything up.

1. Your profile name identifies you as the author. It’s the name readers associate with your writing.

2. Your publication name identifies the publication itself. It can be different from your personal name. Some creators deliberately connect the two, though. ’ Chris B. Writes publication is a great example.

3. Your handle is how people find and tag you. Make it recognizable, especially if you want other creators to be able to find you for conversations and collaborations.

Your publication’s web address is another decision. You can begin with a Substack address and consider a custom domain later if it makes sense for your branding.

You don’t need to buy a custom domain to start publishing.

The important thing is that people can recognize you and understand what your publication is about.

Don’t leave your welcome emails on the default settings.

This is one of those details I’d pay attention to from the beginning.

→ When someone subscribes for free, introduce yourself. Tell them what to expect and point them toward something useful you’ve already published.

→ If you have a paid tier, explain what paid subscribers receive and how interested readers can learn more.

And when someone pays, give them a separate welcome email that acknowledges their subscription and explains what happens next.

Think about it.

Someone has just decided they want more of your work.

Don’t greet them with a message you haven’t even bothered to customize.

Your welcome email is part of their first experience with your publication. Make it count.

Your next move: Complete this sentence:

I help ______ achieve or learn ______ through ______.

It doesn’t need to be perfect. You’ll refine it as you go, but if you can’t explain who your publication is for and what readers will get, that’s where I’d start.

Read more

The Publisher’s Desk · Conversation 002 | Rob Riker and I talk about what happens after you make friends on Substack—and why the people who never buy from you might still change your business.

📓 Field Note 002

The Creator Who Never Bought From Him Brought Him $30,000 in Clients

Imagine looking at someone you’ve become friends with online and deciding they’re a waste of time because they’ll never buy from you.

No coaching package. No paid subscription. No sale.

So you move on.

Except that person might become the one who recommends your work to someone who desperately needs it.

That’s exactly the kind of relationship and I wanted to talk about in Conversation 002 of The Publisher’s Desk, recorded during our second Live together on The Creator’s Edge.

Our first conversation was about building relationships on Substack.

This time, I wanted to ask a different question:

→ Okay, you’ve made the connection. Now what?

How do you keep that relationship going?

1. How does it become a collaboration, a referral, a friendship, or something you couldn’t have planned?

2. And how do you make room for business opportunities without turning every person you meet into a potential transaction?

The $30,000 Relationship That Never Became A Sale

Rob told me about a friend he met on Twitter when they both had small accounts.

They supported each other and grew alongside each other.

That friend never hired Rob. Rob knew he probably never would.

However, over time, whenever someone needed help with their coaching business, his friend kept sending them Rob’s way.

Those referrals eventually brought Rob more than $30,000 in client business.

Now, here’s the part you need to hear before you start mentally assigning dollar values to your Substack friends. 😂

Rob wasn’t expecting that outcome. And he was clear that most relationships won’t produce anything like it.

He wasn’t sitting there thinking, This guy looks like a $30,000 opportunity.

They were friends. The referrals came later.

That story got me thinking about how quickly creators can dismiss a relationship when there’s no obvious business benefit attached to it.

Someone might never buy your offer, but they might read every article you publish.

• They might recommend you to a friend.

• They might invite you onto a Live.

• Teach you something.

• Introduce you to another creator.

• Or simply make this whole experience more enjoyable.

And sometimes?

They’re just your friend.

That’s allowed too. 😂

You Can Be Intentional Without Making People Feel Hunted

During the conversation, I asked Rob:

How do you intentionally build relationships that could lead to clients, collaborations, and opportunities without secretly treating every relationship like a business strategy?

Because there’s a difference between being open to opportunities and entering every DM with a hidden sales pitch.

You know the type.

They comment on three Notes, tell you they love your work, and suddenly you’re being invited to a “quick chat” that turns out to be a sales call.

Sir. We were discussing newsletters 45 seconds ago. 😂

Rob’s answer challenged the idea that creators should spend their time exclusively on people who might buy from them.

He explained that buyers find him in different ways. Some discover his content. Others come through referrals from people who have never purchased anything from him.

So if he only built relationships with obvious prospects, he’d miss a lot of the people who help his work reach those prospects.

That doesn’t mean you should befriend people for their referral potential.

It means you can’t predict the entire future of a relationship from its first interaction.

Sometimes The Opportunity Is Already Sitting In Front Of You

Rob also asked me about connecting with larger creators on Substack.

One example was my Live with from Unplugged with Yana G.Y.

I’d followed her work for roughly two years. When she earned her bestseller badge, she asked people in a Substack group chat if they wanted to join her for a Live to celebrate and talk about the platform.

I said yes.

That was it.

I hadn’t spent months DMing her to secure a collaboration. I saw an invitation and responded.

And that’s an important part of this conversation for creators who feel like they need an elaborate networking strategy.

• Sometimes someone is already asking for collaborators.

• Sometimes a creator you admire is looking for Live guests.

• Sometimes a conversation opens a door.

You still have to walk through it.

I could’ve seen Yana’s invitation and talked myself out of responding because she has a much bigger publication than mine.

→ Instead, I raised my hand.

There’s no guarantee that saying yes will lead to some massive opportunity, but saying no because you’ve already decided you don’t belong in the room closes the door before anything happens.

Relationships Need Room To Become Something

A lot of creator advice focuses on the first move.

→ Leave a thoughtful comment. Send a DM. Introduce yourself.

Fine, but what happens after that?

That’s where this second conversation with Rob began.

A relationship might develop because you keep talking about a shared interest. You start exchanging ideas.

You notice an opportunity that suits the other person and send it their way or you realize you genuinely enjoy talking to them, regardless of whether you ever work together and sometimes a relationship changes.

• A reader becomes a customer.

• A customer becomes a repeat buyer.

• A fellow writer becomes a collaborator.

• Someone you met in the comments becomes a friend.

→ You don’t have to force every relationship into one of those categories, but you do have to pay attention to the people you’ve already met.

If you’re constantly chasing the next creator, the next introduction, or the next subscriber milestone, it’s easy to overlook the relationships sitting right in front of you.

A Bigger Audience Isn’t The Only Thing You’re Building

One of my favorite parts of the conversation was talking about .

Rob described Virgil as a friend and someone he learns from.

I could relate.

We’ve both connected with him through Substack, and those conversations have given us ideas and perspectives we might not have encountered otherwise.

That’s another outcome you can’t measure by looking at your subscriber count.

• Someone helps you think through an offer.

• Someone shares what worked for them.

• Someone challenges an assumption you’ve been carrying around.

• Someone makes the work more fun.

→ None of that shows up as a neat little number on your dashboard, but it can change what you do next.

If you’re building a publication that you want to keep writing for years, that matters.

So What Should You Actually Do After Making The Connection?

Start with the people you already enjoy talking to.

• If someone mentioned a project in your DMs, ask how it went.

• If you come across something that would genuinely help them, send it.

• If you see a collaboration opportunity that makes sense for both of you, suggest it.

• And if you have an offer that could solve a problem they’ve actually told you about? You can talk about it.

Being a decent human doesn’t require pretending you don’t have a business. 😂

The point is to give people room to decide whether they want to work with you, while allowing the relationship to exist even if they don’t.

That’s a very different experience from feeling like every friendly message comes with an invoice hiding behind it.

From Comments To Clients: What Happens After You Build The Relationship?

Rob and I went further into building relationships beyond the first interaction, finding collaborators, dealing with negative comments, publishing schedules, and how creators approach their businesses differently.

The conversation also took an unexpected detour into email marketing, Kit, and what people think they’re signing up for when they subscribe to a publication.

(We had THOUGHTS. 😂)

If you haven’t watched the full conversation yet, you can catch it at the top of this article.

And if you missed our first conversation together:

The Creator's Edge

7 Lessons for Building Relationships & Landing Collabs from Rob & Jess

Today I went live with Jess, The Creator to talk about friendships, collaboration, and growing on Substack…

Listen now

4 months ago · 49 likes · 23 comments · Rob Riker and Jess, The Creator

Now we want to hear from you:

Has someone you met through Substack opened a door you never expected?

Maybe they referred a client, invited you to collaborate, taught you something, or became a friend.

Tell us what happened in the comments. We want to hear the stories that started with one tiny interaction.

— Jessica & Rob 👑👑

Conversation 002 Takeaway

→ You never know what a creator relationship can become.

Someone who never buys from you might become a friend, collaborator, mentor, or the person who sends your next client your way. 👑

We must stay open to receive new possibilities and opportunities.

Continue The Conversation

Thank you for pulling up a chair at The Publisher’s Desk.

If today’s conversation sparked a new idea or perspective, I’d love for you to continue the conversation by sharing your biggest takeaway in the comments.

↑ Listen to Conversation 002 of The Publisher’s Desk:

From Comments To Clients: What Happens After You Build The Relationship?

One of my favorite parts of The Publisher’s Desk is introducing you to thoughtful people whose work I genuinely admire.

I’m super grateful that Rob’s the second person to pull up a chair at The Publisher’s Desk.

Leave a comment

About Rob Riker

Thank you so much to everyone who tuned into our Live!

I appreciate you spending part of your day with us. And to everyone watching the replay, thank you for being here too! 💜

Rob Riker is the creator of The Creator’s Edge and Make Friends Get Clients.

Through his writing and coaching, Rob helps creators build genuine relationships that can lead to friendships, collaborations, referrals, and clients—without treating every interaction like a sales opportunity.

Work 1:1 With Rob

If today's conversation resonated with you, I think you'll really enjoy Rob's work at The Creator’s Edge. →

The Creator's Edge

Helping you grow, build meaningful relationships, and make money on Substack.

By Rob Riker

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Thank You

Thank you so much for everyone who tuned into this live, your presence is truly appreciated, and to the people who are watching the replay, thank you!

-Jess, The Creator & Rob Riker

And then…Nothing.

What the hell am I supposed to post?

The problem probably isn’t that you’ve run out of things to say.

→ It’s that you’re treating Notes like a separate content machine.

You write your articles over here. Then you open Notes and expect your brain to produce an entirely different supply of clever little thoughts over there.

No wonder Notes start feeling like work because now you’re basically running two publications: the one where you write your actual articles and this hungry little creature called Notes that apparently needs to be fed every morning.

I think there’s a much easier way to use Notes.

→ Stop starting from zero.

Your next Note is probably already hiding inside something you’ve written, discussed, noticed, or started thinking about.

Subscribe now

Your Articles Have More Than One Job

I’ve talked before about why I don’t think hitting publish should be the finish line.

You can spend hours writing an article, publish it, promote it once, and then immediately move on to making something else.

WHY?

→ There are probably five, ten, maybe twenty smaller ideas sitting inside that one article.

Use them.

• Pull out a sentence that can stand on its own.

• Take one point and add a question.

• Tell the story you cut because the article was getting too long.

• Share the mistake that led you to write it.

• Come back to one part three weeks later because something happened that made you think about it differently.

That isn’t being repetitive.

→ Your subscribers aren’t sitting around with clipboards documenting every idea you’ve ever mentioned and even when someone has heard an idea from you before, you can come back to it with a different story, question, example, or perspective.

One article shouldn’t have to live for 24 hours and then get buried under everything you publish next. Let it keep working.

Work With Me 1:1

Your Readers Are Giving You Notes Ideas Too

This is one of my favorite places to find them.

Someone comments on your article and asks a question.

→ There’s a Note.

Someone disagrees with something you wrote.

Well, hello there. 😂

→ There’s probably a Note.

Three people latch onto one sentence you almost deleted from the article?

→ PAY ATTENTION TO THAT. Most likely a Note!

Sometimes the thing you think is the main point isn’t the thing your readers want to talk about.

Notes give you somewhere to follow those threads without turning every thought into a 1,500-word article.

• Respond to the question.

• Ask another one.

• Clarify something.

• Take the conversation somewhere you hadn’t planned.

• And sometimes one of those conversations gives you your next article.

That’s when Notes start getting really useful.

→ You’re not standing in front of an empty box every morning demanding that your brain produce Content Idea #487.

You’re paying attention to what’s already happening around your work.

Use Notes Before You Write The Article

This works in the other direction too.

Sometimes I have an idea and I’m not sure there’s an article in it yet.

→ Instead of immediately opening a draft and trying to squeeze 1,200 words out of a thought that currently has about 14 words worth of life in it, I can put the idea on Notes.

Then I watch what happens.

• Do people respond?

• Does someone ask a question I hadn’t considered?

• Do people have stories of their own?

• Does the conversation make me want to say more?

Or does the Note get absolutely nothing and quietly disappear into the Substack abyss?

That doesn’t automatically mean the idea is bad.

I’m very careful about making giant decisions based on one piece of performance data.

We’ve already talked about what creator brain can do with that, but the response can give you information.

Maybe the idea needs a different angle, maybe there’s a more interesting question underneath it, or maybe the conversation takes the idea somewhere you hadn’t considered.

Maybe you post the Note and realize: Oh shit. I have a LOT to say about this.

Now you’ve got an article.

Bring Old Ideas Back

Creators have a weird relationship with old content.

We publish something six months ago and start acting like it’s been placed in a museum.

DO NOT TOUCH.

That idea has already been used.

According to who?

→ If you wrote something useful six months ago, you probably have subscribers today who weren’t following you then and the people who were following you probably don’t remember every sentence you’ve ever written.

I don’t remember every sentence I’ve ever written.

Bring good ideas back.

That doesn’t mean copying and pasting the exact same Note every Tuesday until your subscribers stage an intervention.

Look at the old idea again.

Is it still useful? Have you changed your mind? Have you tested it since then? Did a reader ask something that makes it relevant again? Do you have a better example now?

→ That’s not running out of ideas. That’s building on your body of work.

There’s a difference.

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Before You Write A New Note, Look In Four Places

This is the part I want you to remember the next time you open Notes and your brain decides it has left the building.

Before trying to invent something new, ask yourself four questions:

1. What did I publish?
   Look at your recent articles. Is there one idea, sentence, story, example, or question worth pulling out and continuing?

2. What did someone say?
   Check your comments, replies, DMs, and conversations. What are people asking about, disagreeing with, or responding to?

3. What am I thinking about?
   Look at your drafts and unfinished ideas. Is there something you’re curious about but haven’t figured out yet? Put a smaller version on Notes and see where the conversation goes.

4. What have I forgotten?
   Go into your archive. What did you write three months ago? Six months ago? A year ago? Is there something worth bringing back because you have new readers, a new example, or something else to say about it now?

That’s it. You don’t need an elaborate Notes factory.

You need places to look.

Notes Can Be Part Of The Work

This is the shift that makes Notes much easier for me.

Instead of thinking:

I wrote my article. Now I also need to make Notes.

Think about Notes as something happening around the work you’re already doing.

→ Before you publish, a Note can help you play with an idea.

→ After you publish, Notes can keep pieces of that article moving.

Readers respond. Their responses give you somewhere else to go. One conversation sparks another thought. That thought becomes another Note. Maybe eventually it becomes another article.

Then that article gives you more things to talk about.

→ It keeps moving.

Notes stop being this separate obligation hanging over your head and become part of how you write, promote, listen, and figure out what you want to make next.

If You’re Stuck Right Now: You Don’t Need 20 Brilliant Thoughts By Sunday

I’ve seen the advice to batch huge piles of short-form content ahead of time and if that works for you?

Go for it, but I know what would happen if I sat down on Sunday and told myself I needed to manufacture 20 clever Notes before I could leave.

By Note #17, I’d be posting:

Writing is a journey. Believe in yourself. ✨

Someone please confiscate my laptop. 😂

I’d rather have places to look when I don’t know what to post because consistency gets a whole lot easier when every Note doesn’t have to begin with a blank page.

• My recent articles.

• My archive.

• My drafts.

• My comments.

• Questions readers have asked.

• Conversations I’ve had.

• Ideas I’m still figuring out.

I don’t think the goal of Notes is to prove you can produce the highest volume of tiny thoughts on the internet.

→ Use them to talk to people. Keep your articles alive. Play with unfinished ideas. Listen to what your readers are telling you. Bring an old idea back when you have something new to add.

And occasionally?

Post the random thought you had while standing in your kitchen.

It’s Notes. We’re allowed to have some fun here. 😂

So tomorrow, when you open that little Notes box and your brain gives you absolutely nothing, don’t sit there trying to become interesting on command.

→ Open your latest article. Read your comments. Check your drafts. Dig through something you published three months ago.

You’re probably sitting on more material than you realize.

Your next Note might already be in there.

Thank you so much for being here. I truly appreciate you.

— Jessica

Move first. Refine second. Publish with structure.

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Work With Me 1:1

Actually, you really liked this one.

The idea was good. The writing felt sharp. You spent more time on the opening than you’d care to admit. You made the thumbnail. Checked the links. Read the whole thing one last time.

Publish. Then you wait.

A few hours later, you check the numbers.

Oh.

Not terrible, but definitely not what you expected.

So you check again.

Maybe Substack hasn’t sent all the emails yet, maybe people are at work, and maybe Tuesday at 9:17 a.m. was somehow the problem.

You come back later. Still meh and this is where something interesting happens.

The article has been live for less than a day, but your brain is already writing a second article about the first one:

• People didn’t like it.

• Maybe this topic doesn’t work anymore.

• My last few posts did better.

• Am I getting worse at this?

• Should I write about something else next week?

Well, damn. That escalated quickly.

One article had a disappointing day, and suddenly your entire publication is being called into a performance review.

→ I think writers need to talk about this part of publishing more because learning how to write is one thing.

→ Learning how to emotionally handle the response to what you write is another skill entirely.

And if you don’t learn the second one, the numbers can start making your creative decisions for you.

Subscribe now

The result and the story aren’t the same thing

Say your article usually gets 1,000 views in the first few days.

This one gets 600. That’s the result.

600 views.

Everything after that is interpretation.

• “My audience is losing interest.”

• “This topic was a mistake.”

• “The headline sucked.”

• “People don’t want this from me.”

• “I need to change my content.”

Those might eventually turn out to be useful conclusions, but you don’t know that yet.

You have one piece of information:

→ This article performed differently than you expected.

Your brain is probably going to want an explanation for that number.

So it starts looking for one and because you’re emotionally attached to the work, the explanation can get personal FAST.

→ The numbers stop being information about an article and they become information about you.

That’s where things get messy.

Writers are terrible at leaving a number alone

We attach stories to numbers constantly.

• Twenty people liked it?

• Only ten people liked it.

• Three people unsubscribed?

• Something I wrote pissed people off.

• Nobody commented?

• Nobody cared.

• One person left a weird comment?

Apparently I’m spending the rest of Thursday thinking about Steve.

Meanwhile, Steve has moved on with his life.

Rude.

The problem isn’t that you notice your numbers. If you’re building a publication, of course you should pay attention to what readers respond to.

Your data can teach you things, but there’s a difference between looking for a pattern and reacting to an event.

One underperforming article is an event.

Five articles on the same subject consistently underperforming compared with your other work?

Okay. Now we have something worth investigating.

That distinction matters because when you react too quickly, you can end up abandoning good ideas before you’ve collected enough information to know whether they’re actually bad ideas.

Disappointment makes you want to DO something

This is the part I find fascinating.

→ A disappointing result creates discomfort and discomfort wants an exit.

So you start fixing things.

• Change the headline.

• Rewrite the opening.

• Switch your topic for next week.

• Post six more Notes.

• Question your niche.

• Research what everybody else is writing.

Maybe completely redesign your publication while you’re at it because apparently we’ve lost all adult supervision.

Doing something feels better than sitting with:

I thought this article would do better, and it didn’t.

But sometimes that’s all that happened.

→ There may be something to learn from the result.

→ There may also be absolutely nothing you need to change today.

Those are very different situations. You need a way to tell them apart.

The RESULT → STORY → REACTION → DECISION Test

Before you let one article change what you’re doing, walk yourself through four questions.

1. RESULT: What actually happened?

Stick to facts.

Not:

This article tanked.

Try:

This article received 40% fewer views than my previous three articles during the first 48 hours.

Now we have something we can examine.

“Tanked” comes with judgment baked into it.

The number doesn’t. Start there.

2. STORY: What am I deciding this means?

Now write down the explanation your brain supplied.

Maybe it’s:

My audience doesn’t care about this topic.

Or:

I’m writing too much about Substack.

Or the particularly delightful:

My writing isn’t as good as I thought it was.

There it is.

→ Get the story out of your head and onto the page where you can actually look at it.

Then ask:

What evidence do I have for that conclusion?

Not what you feel.

What do you know?

You may discover you’ve built a surprisingly elaborate case from one Tuesday afternoon.

3. REACTION: What is this making me want to do?

This question catches the knee-jerk decisions.

• Do you suddenly want to change your next article?

• Delete something?

• Stop writing about the subject?

• Publish more?

• Publish less?

• Copy something another writer is doing?

• Spend the evening refreshing your dashboard until your eyeballs become raisins?

Notice the impulse before you obey it because your immediate reaction is often designed to make the discomfort disappear.

That doesn’t automatically make it a good publishing decision.

4. DECISION: Do I have enough evidence to change anything?

This is the question that can save you from screwing with a perfectly good publishing strategy every seven days.

Look beyond the article.

• What happened with your previous posts on this subject?

• Did the article attract subscribers even if total views were lower?

• Did people reply privately instead of commenting publicly?

• Did it get restacked later?

• Did readers spend time with it?

• Did it lead to a conversation, inquiry, sale, recommendation, or something else you care about?

• And how long has the article even been alive?

You’re trying to identify a pattern, not prosecute a single post.

Sometimes the answer will be:

Yep. Something needs adjusting.

Good. Change it.

But sometimes the answer is:

→ I don’t have enough information yet.

That’s an answer too.

Don’t confuse performance with quality

This one can hurt.

→ A good article can underperform and an article you threw together in 45 minutes can inexplicably take off while the one you lovingly edited for six hours sits in the corner eating paste.

Publishing is annoying like that.

Performance tells you how the work performed under a particular set of circumstances.

It doesn’t give you a clean measurement of how good the writing was.

Those aren’t interchangeable.

→ A strong article can have a weak headline.

→ A useful article can cover a subject your audience isn’t interested in right now.

→ An article can start slowly and keep getting discovered later.

And sometimes you simply guessed wrong.

Welcome to publishing.

The goal isn’t to protect yourself from ever being wrong.

You need enough emotional distance from the result that you can figure out what was wrong without deciding YOU were wrong.

Give the article time to become data

This is something I’m trying to get better at myself.

I want information quickly.

I publish something and naturally want to know:

Did it work?

However, publishing doesn’t always answer that question on my preferred schedule.

So annoying.

An article can continue traveling through Notes, restacks, recommendations, search, shares, your archive, and people who discover you weeks or months later.

That’s one reason I don’t love making big decisions from the first few hours of performance.

• Give the work some room.

• Promote it.

• Pull ideas from it.

• Talk about it again.

• Let people find it.

Then, look at what happened.

Remember what we talked about recently?

Publish isn’t the finish line.

If you’re going to give an article more than one chance to travel, you also have to give it more than one chance to tell you how it performed.

Create a rule for yourself BEFORE you’re disappointed

This might be the most useful thing you take from this article.

→ Decide in advance what evidence you need before changing your publishing strategy.

• Maybe you won’t abandon a topic based on one article.

• Maybe you’ll compare at least three posts before deciding there’s a pattern.

• Maybe you’ll wait 72 hours before doing a full performance review.

• Maybe you’ll track views, new subscribers, comments, restacks, and conversions instead of judging everything by whichever number looks ugliest that morning.

Your rule can be different from mine.

→ The point is to create it while you’re thinking clearly.

Because post-publish Jessica who just saw disappointing numbers is not always the person I want running the strategy meeting.

She’s emotional, she’s impatient, and apparently Steve is still on her mind.

She can attend. She just doesn’t get the deciding vote.

If You’re Stuck Right Now: Your job is to learn without flinching.

Publishing gives you feedback.

Some of it feels fantastic and some of it doesn’t.

You need both.

If something repeatedly isn’t working, I want to know.

• I want to look at the headline.

• The topic.

• The opening.

• The promotion.

• The timing.

• The audience response.

→ I want to ask what I can do differently next time.

However, I don’t want to rebuild my publishing strategy every time one article disappoints me and I definitely don’t want one number deciding whether I’m a good writer.

So the next time you publish something and the response makes your stomach drop a little, catch yourself before the story starts running.

Ask:

1. What was the RESULT?

2. What STORY did I attach to it?

3. What REACTION did that story create?

4. Do I have enough evidence to make a DECISION?

Maybe you need to change something, maybe you need more data, and maybe your article just had a shitty Tuesday.

Let Tuesday be Tuesday.

Thank you so much for being here. I truly appreciate you.

— Jessica

Move first. Refine second. Publish with structure.

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Work With Me 1:1

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Work With Me 1:1

Schedule two weeks of them in advance, study which time gets the most likes, restack the winners, and try to reverse-engineer the algorithm until your eyeballs fall out.

However, somewhere in all that strategy, it’s easy to forget what Notes actually give you:

→ A way to meet people.

That became one of the bigger themes when Robyn and I sat down for Episode 012 of our Substack Live series.

We started talking about what to post.

We ended up talking about something much more useful:

What happens after somebody stops scrolling.

Because discoverability might introduce you, but a conversation is what gives somebody a reason to remember you.

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Notes Give Your Work More Doors

Before Notes, your Substack publication mostly depended on long-form posts and whatever traffic you could bring in from somewhere else.

Notes changed that.

→ Your articles still go directly to the people who already subscribed.

→ Notes can put your ideas in front of people who haven’t found you yet.

And that means every article you publish can become more than one announcement.

This is where I see writers leaving SO much on the table.

They publish an article.

Then:

“New post is live!”

Maybe they restack it later. Then, they move on.

Nope.

→ One article can give you a week’s worth of conversations without you inventing five completely new things to say.

During the Live, Robyn and I walked through a simple sequence.

• You can tease the article before publication.

• When it goes live, announce it and share the link.

• Later, pull out one sentence or idea that can stand alone.

• Share another takeaway from a different angle.

• Ask a question inspired by the article.

• Then bring the article back later with an ICYMI Note and another link.

→ Same article. Different doors.

And importantly, every Note doesn’t need the link. Sometimes the idea itself should do the work.

Write The Note That Makes Someone Stop

Robyn accidentally gave this one a name during our conversation:

The Note Stopper.