how to make 200k friends and get 35 million reads on substack
STATS you should care about + SALE you should care about
My angels!! To celebrate there being 200k of you, I’m running a 50% off sale for annual plans (the biggest sale I’ve ever run) so that as many of you can access our bonuses (like access to the SYSCA’s ‘close friends’ list, membership to our book club, bonus essays etc) as possible!
I love you so much xxxx
“You should write a newsletter,” my mentor said to me back in 2021, after I told him I didn’t know where to take Shit You Should Care About. I knew what I didn’t want: I didn’t want to build a website, because no young people were visiting websites anymore, and I definitely didn’t want to keep feeding social media sites that didn’t pay me. What I wanted was to be able to talk to my SYSCAhood freely and intimately.
“Ok,” I said, and I decided right then that I’d start writing a daily news update - a very chill endeavour from someone who has only just started recognising herself as a writer (all it took was writing to you daily for YEARS and publishing a fucking book hahahahah.)
As a breathing embodiment of ‘perfection standing in the way of progress’, I didn’t do much planning at all, and sent that first newsletter almost immediately.
This is what that very first edish looked like (sent via Squarespace):
As you can see, some things haven’t changed - I still greet you every morning by calling you ‘lil shits,’ and honestly, all those bullet points about me, and about what to expect from the newsletter have remained pretty much the exact same - I’m so fucking proud of that!!!!!
But, a lot of things have changed, including the fact that this little newsy is now read by over 200k of you, that it’s literally my income (!!!!) and I think there are fewer typos (though I still don’t have an editor so if you see mistakes… not you don’t.)
I really don’t want this edish of the newsy to be self-indulgent, so I thought I’d let you know what I’ve learned, after writing this almost daily for what, three and half years????? Ooooof. Here’s what I know now.
Looking at shit you should care about now, you might think that we’ve always been ‘big.’ That is simply not the case. As I mentioned, I’ve been writing this for about three and half years, and three of those years have been spent trying to get to my goal of 100k subscribers.
I set that target at the very start of writing this newsy, and after being able to grow the SYSCA Instagram quite quickly to over 3 million followers, I figured this would be quite… easy.
It was not.
I want you to take a look at this graph, and then I’m going to explain it to you:
You’ll notice that in December we gained about 100k subscribers - and I’d love to say it was because my writing got sooooo good that everyone just had to read me, or that The New York Times decided to write about the kiwi chick giving young people the news, but it was none of the above.
Reader, it was the TikTok ban.
For reasons unknown to me (but that I am very grateful for), when it looked like TikTok was going to be banned in the US, people came to Substack - and when they got there, I was ready. I had assumed this might happen, so I started being a freak on Notes.
I noticed that the algorithm was prioritising content that mentioned TikTok and that self-promoted your newsletter, so I leaaaaaant in.
Check out these stats:
That’s over 20k new subs just from those notes alone….
Like I said, you gotta play the game.
Despite their missteps and general gaffs (there are no ‘pure’ or ethical platforms under capitalism or while Section 230 exists and that is all I’m going to say on the matter), I do have to hand it to Substack - they’ve built something pretty fucking great for writers.
As someone who has had a JOURNEY with newsletter platforms (Squarespace, Mailchimp, Revue, Memberful, trialling and taking meetings with Beehiiv and Convertkit) I can really confidently say that Substack’s energy spent on putting writers first is unmatched. Regardless of the fact that I have a massive Instagram following (over 3 million people) 60% of our readers found me on the Substack app - this is insane and why the platform is high-key unmatched.
I still won’t lean in to live video tho sorry Substack.
I’ve spoken to SO many newsletter authors about the ins and outs of their finances (transparency is how we get rid of the pay gap and help build a more robust media IMO) and most of them have waaaay less free subscribers than me, and way more paid subscribers.
I have theories on this, because of course I do.
I hate putting shit behind a paywall. I get so much advice about the % of newsletters that should be paid vs free, and how I should be putting some of (if not all of) my daily news explainers/ round-ups behind a paywall because that’s where my ‘value’ is.
But let me be clear right now, that is not going to happen.
The whole reason SYSCA was born was because the news felt inaccessible. Just as I don’t believe the news should be gatekept by using big words and intentionally mystifying terms, it also should not only be rich people who can afford to get high-quality news.
The news is happening to all of us, and we all deserve to know about it. This is the hill SYSCA and I will die on.
This is a lil hypocritical, because when I started this newsy, I wrote it every weekday, for about two years, without ever really missing a day (who remembers my hungover editions?)
And yes, I think I needed to do that to become a staple in your morning routine, joining you in bed or at the office in class or on the treadmill (I mean, how else would we have had 35 MILLION READS) but now… now I think it matters less.
I still write a ‘daily’ newsletter, however you may not have noticed that I do often miss days. My life is busy and so is yours! So it’s probably a nice break for both of us when you don’t have to read about the latest bad things each day. And the nice part of it all is, none of you give a shit 𓆩♡𓆪
This was how I signed off my very first newsletter:
And here’s how I still sign it off today:
Because I do!!!! Thank you so much for being here. There is no me without you, and it’s been the biggest privilege of my life having you here to help my baby grow.
Your handwriting font is looking so cute!
Congrats Luce <3 I have realised that it is a priority of mine to support free media bc I work my big girl job and am in a privileged position because of that, and that has come from uuuu!!!! Srsly the term “support the media you love” has changed my life.
Congratulations on your success, keep it up XX