As a creator, it wasn’t a good fit.
I still read Substack every day. Some of the best writing I follow lives there. As a reader, it’s genuinely great: no algorithm between me and the writers I chose, no feed gaming, just people I trust showing up in my inbox.
As a creator, I gave it a real shot and it didn’t take. Not because the platform is bad. Because none of the three subscriber types it tends to produce (adjacent creators being sociable, polite non-buyers, metric-chasers doing reciprocal follows) actually served what I’m building. Growing there means feeding Notes, cross-promoting, performing a kind of gravitas I don’t actually want to perform. That’s a real skill. It’s just not my skill, and forcing it felt like acting.
Compare that to the guy I looked at today: fifteen years in online marketing, 1,600+ subscribers, posting warriorplus review cards under a Substack skin. Barely any engagement relative to the subscriber count, so that list almost certainly walked in the door from somewhere else. He’s not failing at Substack. He’s not really trying to succeed at Substack, he’s using it as one more distribution pipe for content built for somewhere else entirely.
Neither of us is doing it wrong exactly. We’re just proving the same point from opposite directions: the platform rewards a very specific kind of creator, and knowing whether you’re that kind matters more than knowing the platform’s features.