Reading a great book is only the beginning, remembering and applying it is what creates real change. Sumizeit helps you build a daily learning habit with 15-minute book summaries, audio versions, quizzes, flashcards, daily challenges, streaks, and other retention tools designed to help knowledge stick. Instead of consuming information and forgetting it, you’ll reinforce key ideas, build lasting habits, and turn learning into meaningful personal and professional growth, all in just a few minutes a day.
“How do I grow on Substack!?” is the question I get asked the most. Followed by, “Do I really need to write Notes to grow?!”.
That’s why today I give you more insights into where my personal subscribers come from, plus what other writers on here analysed in terms of growth and algorithm changes.
I figured most of my new subscribers came from my email list. The people who already know me, already open my stuff, already care.
But that’s not the truth. From my “My Note Scheduler” article I got 33 new free subscribers. Only 2 of them came from email.
Seventeen came from the in-app feed.
So I dug into where those views came from. On the source Substack labels “substack app,” that post got 578 views. 537 of them were from people who weren’t subscribed to me. Strangers.
My email list, with 4,519 opens, gave me 2 new subscribers. Of course it did. Those people already subscribe.
So the growth wasn’t coming from my subscribers. It was coming from people who had never heard of me, scrolling a feed, deciding in about a second whether I was worth a tap.
That changes what a good Note even is.
The feed got bigger, and your followers matter less
I wanted to know if this was just me, so I went looking at the bigger numbers.
A team at The Writing Edge analyzed 2.9 million Substack posts and 14.5 million Notes going back to 2023.
Notes volume has grown roughly 12x since it launched in 2023.
In the first half of 2026 alone it jumped 47%.
In June 2026 there were 831,000 Notes published in a single month.
More Notes, same hours in the day. So attention got spread thin. The same analysis found average likes per Note dropped from 22.5 in June 2025 to 18.8 a year later. That’s a 16% fall while the volume kept climbing.
The drop in likes matters less than where the attention moved. The giant viral outliers are shrinking. In June 2025 the average Note earned about 7.5 times the median. By 2026 that gap narrowed to 6.3 times. The runaway hits are pulling a smaller share, and the typical Note is earning a little more than it used to. Attention is spreading out.
That’s good news if nobody follows you yet. You don’t need an audience to get shown. The feed hands your Note to strangers either way. What you need is a Note that makes a stranger stop.
Stop trying to go viral. The math is brutal.
The Online Writing Club read through 1.3 million Notes from about 3,700 writers. They found roughly 135 that hit true viral status.
That’s about one in ten thousand.
If your plan is to write the one Note that blows up, you’re planning around a 0.01% event. I’ve watched writers burn months swinging for that, get nothing, and quit.
So forget the viral hit. Aim for the small, repeatable thing you can control: a Note a stranger stops on. You can write for that on purpose.
The format that works on people who don’t know you
When someone follows you, they cut you slack. They’ll read a Note that references your last post, or a half-formed thought, because they trust there’s a person they like behind it.
A stranger gives you none of that. So the format has to carry the whole thing on its own. These six pieces are what that takes.
Front-load the value in the first line. The feed shows a stranger your opening words with your name shrunk down beside them. Your name does no work here. So the first line has to.
Say one thing. Not five. A stranger scrolling can catch exactly one idea before their thumb moves.
Make it stand alone. Cut anything that needs context. “Like I said last week” means nothing to someone meeting you for the first time. Every Note should make complete sense to a person who has never read a word you’ve written.
Be specific enough to be useful by itself. A stranger won’t take vague wisdom on faith, because faith is what followers give you and this person isn’t one yet. Give a number. Give a step. Give a before and after.
Write the last line to be restacked. Restacks are what the feed rewards, and a restack is how you reach the next stranger, and the one after that. So the final line is the one that has to be quotable.
Sound like a person. The feed is filling up with AI-written Notes that are technically fine and completely forgettable. Right now, sounding unmistakably like yourself is the cheapest edge available.
What that looks like in practice
Take a Note I could write the forgettable way:
“Consistency is the real secret to growing on Substack. Keep showing up and good things happen. Trust the process.”
A follower might like that because they like me. A stranger scrolls right past. It’s true and it’s useless.
Now the same idea, built for someone who doesn’t know me:
“33 people subscribed to me from one post last month. Only 2 came from my email list. Seventeen came from strangers in the feed who’d never heard of me. Your next subscriber probably isn’t your follower. It’s someone who stopped on one good Note.”
Specific. Self-contained. One idea. A last line worth re-sharing. Nothing in it needs you to already know who I am.
That’s the whole shift. Write every Note like the person reading it has never met you. Because now, most of them haven’t.
Exclusive Access For My Premium Subscribers:
To help you grow faster, check out the resources waiting for you inside my Growth Library, available to paid members only.
That includes The Wander Wealth Playbook: my complete growth system with four systems, 10 fill-in templates, and workshop recordings, built from two years of growing this newsletter from 0 to 20,000 subscribers.
(If you aren’t a paid member yet, upgrade and unlock the full Playbook, the templates, and everything else in the Library, so you can skip the mistakes I made.)
This makes so much sense. The reminder that every Note has to work for someone who has never seen your name before is especially important.
I think writers sometimes get so used to talking to the people who already know us that we forget there is a stranger scrolling past who has absolutely no idea who Donna, Bianca, Franchesca, Sofia, Jerry, or Dad are. That stranger does not owe us patience. We have to earn the pause.
And I really like the idea of aiming for connection instead of virality. Going viral sounds glamorous, but building an audience one person at a time feels much more sustainable. One good Note. One new reader. One person who thinks, “I want to read more of this.”
That feels a lot more achievable than trying to impress the entire internet before breakfast.
Useful breakdown. Curious if "The Writing Edge" and "The Online Writing Club" studies are public anywhere — couldn't find them.