A few days after I published my Notes formula post (which by the way helped another reader of mine to reach more than 50+ new subs with one note) a reader left a comment asking me to write a template for Chats.
I read it three times.
Because honestly, I should have written this post first.
I started my Substack chat on September 18, 2024. Four months into my journey. My first message was almost apologetic:
21 people replied that day.
That was 18 months ago. Today, my chat is the most active space in my entire newsletter. More active than my comment sections. More active than my emails. My community shows up every Wednesday like clockwork. New subscribers find readers for their own newsletters there. Paid subscribers use it to get direct feedback they can’t find anywhere else.
And I almost didn’t start it until my first year was over.
If you haven’t launched your chat yet, I want you to do it today. Not next week. Today. Here’s the full system I use, the types of prompts that actually work, and the exact templates I come back to every single week.
Why Chat Is Different From Everything Else on Substack
Posts get read and forgotten. Notes get engagement for 24-48 hours.
Chats live. And they help you to be discovered as they are promoted by Substack on people’s home feeds.
It’s the only place on Substack where conversations stack on top of each other, where your readers can talk to each other — not just to you — and where something a subscriber wrote three weeks ago is still visible to someone who joined today.
Chat is one of the most powerful conversion tools on Substack. Not because you’re locking people out. Because you’re showing them what they could have.
I didn’t understand this on day one. It took months of experimenting to build a chat that people actually show up for. But once I did, my paid conversion rate climbed in a way I couldn’t fully explain at first until I traced it back to chat.
Three things chat does that nothing else on Substack can:
It shows free subscribers what belonging feels like before they pay
It creates a reason to open your newsletter every week beyond your posts
It turns your newsletter into a community, which is much harder to unsubscribe from than a content feed
The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. You’ll get my 5 chat formulas, 15 fill-in templates, and the exact 45-minute weekly system I use to keep my chat active without it taking over my life.
