What happens when you build the perfect profile — and no one notices.

My Substack: a polished profile, zero subscribers, one post. Twenty-four hours later — silence. Zero reactions. Zero traffic. Frustrating and oddly infuriating, especially when you recall those eloquent YouTube gurus promising “explosive growth,” “thousands of new readers,” and “total creative freedom.”

Honestly, I knew it wouldn’t be like that. Still, I started publishing. And here’s why.

Everyone I know who tried writing on this platform fizzled out within a few months. The slow—or nonexistent—growth kills motivation fast. So it’s better to understand from the start: Substack isn’t about growth, it’s about community.

It’s not about algorithms or reach. It’s about the few people who’ll stay with you even when everything else goes quiet.

The Platform and the Facts

Substack was founded in 2017 by three writer-developers with a simple idea: to give authors their own publishing channel — without media gatekeepers.

Today it’s a network of millions: over 20 million active readers every month and more than 5 million paid subscriptions by early 2025.

Over 17,000 writers earn real income here, and dozens of publications make over a million dollars a year.

The platform takes about 10% in fees, and its audience is mostly English-speaking — more than 60% of traffic comes from the United States.

But the numbers are deceiving.

Only 1–2% of publications reach any real scale.

For everyone else, Substack isn’t a “market” — it’s a tool: quiet, steady, and demanding a clear strategy.

It’s first and foremost an internal ecosystem, not a platform for the general public. Which means you have to bring readers from the outside — from your own website, where traffic already exists, or from other social platforms. By the way, because of an old feud, X isn’t exactly fond of Substack links and tends to throttle their reach.

So if your goal is subscribers, you need a strategy — not hope. Of course, there’s life inside the platform — small, but active. People come and go.

It feels like if you keep liking, commenting, posting, and engaging in Notes, you might build your own little army. That’s partly true.

But if your goal is monetization, remember: most of the people reading you are also writers. Which means almost none of them will pay for your content — because they’re here to make money too. As a result, the platform turns into a writers’ club, where everyone writes to everyone else and waits for a third person to pay the bill.

So what draws people here when everything feels silent? Paradoxically — the silence itself. No algorithms. No ads. No trending noise.

Here, you can write without looking over your shoulder. You can be sincere, sharp, unpolished. You don’t have to chase likes, and still, you can be heard. Not by everyone, but by those who actually read.

Substack is, in essence, a small publishing house built into a social network. There are Posts — newsletters that go out by email and live simultaneously on your publication’s page.

And there are Notes — short posts, like an internal version of X, but without external reach.

From the outside, it all looks messy: layouts, settings, paid tiers, banners — endless little details. But once you figure it out, the system works surprisingly smoothly.

Posts are sent by email, archived online, and easy to revisit. Notes, in my view, exist mostly for those who already live inside Substack. They keep the ecosystem moving but barely touch the outside world. That’s what makes Substack different from X: if X is a noisy square, Substack is a room with good acoustics — where you can speak softly and still be heard.

The interface, of course, isn’t built for the casual reader. You need to register to subscribe. But once you do, the letters come straight to your inbox — you don’t even have to visit the site.

That’s both the strength and the weakness of this platform: there’s no crowd, but there’s intimacy. Substack won’t give you explosive growth, but it builds trust — and maybe that’s the point.

Substack isn’t a stage for loud premieres. It’s a place for those who want to build connection, not audience. For those who write not for reaction, but for understanding. For those unafraid that their words might vanish into the void — because they know, at some point, the right person will open that letter.