What I Learned at Substack's NYC HQ About Owning Your Audience
Inside the Notes flywheel: how Substack optimizes for subscriptions and not scroll time
Tonight I spent some time at Substack’s New York office for an in-person session on Notes: part strategy briefing, part creator therapy, and part pep talk for anyone tired of renting attention from platforms that don’t love you back. Below are my takeaways, translated into a practical playbook for those of us building durable, portfolio-style careers around our ideas….
1) Substack’s bet: creators should own the relationship (and the upside)
Co-founder
opened with a diagnosis most of us feel in our bones: traditional social platforms are engineered for time-on-site and ad impressions, not for creator prosperity. Walled gardens hoard reach, and engagement-driven algorithms throttle distribution. You do the work, but tech-giants keep the value.Substack’s counter-model is simple and frankly, quite refreshing:
You own your list, your content, and your relationships.
The platform wins only when you win, (via aligned revenue sharing)
Portability is a feature of Substack, not a threat. (if you leave, your audience goes with you.)
As someone who’s built operating models in HR transformation and M&A, this makes sense to me: distribution without ownership leaves you at the mercy of a platform’s whims. (Kinda like having just one employer…) As I’ve said before, ownership of your list or contacts is key to any well executed strategy.
2) Notes is the growth engine (not a side feature)
Headline: Notes is now the top driver of both subscriber and revenue growth on Substack—outperforming even Recommendations. The app has become the discovery layer for long-form essays, video content, and the people behind the writing.
Key takeaways shared tonight:
500K new paid subscriptions and 32M+ new free subscriptions in the last three months, heavily driven by the app.
App users are 7× more likely to share, like, comment, or restack a post.
1M+ posts are discovered daily in the app.
While other social networks are contracting, Substack is expanding!
Translation: if you publish on Substack but aren’t active on Notes, you’re leaving compounding growth on the table.
3) What “the algorithm” optimizes for (and what it doesn’t)
Substack’s feed isn’t chasing the doom-scroll minutes of your eyeballs and driving you toward ad clicks. It’s designed to optimize for subscriptions and payments: the signal of real value between writer and reader.
“Mike”, the Head of ML and AI at Substack explained how Substack’s algorithm “thinks”:
It builds a lightweight profile of the user (language, location, subscriptions, follows, interests).
It balances discovery with preference, avoiding pigeonholes when your feed narrows.
It grows creators together via cross-audience intersections instead of zero-sum ranking.
It experiments with guardrails to keep feeds fresh without breaking what works.
This is an algorithm designed like a good business system: healthy incentives, clear KPIs, and recursive feedback loops.
4) Note formats that work (because the audience says so)
There’s no particular media favoritism here: text (up to 10k), photos, galleries, short video: the audience decides what wins.
Tactics working now on Notes:
Hook with a timely question or trend, then bridge to your deeper value prop.
Show your work: sketches, frameworks, behind-the-scenes.
Tease & temperature-check your upcoming posts.
Share Social proof: testimonials, milestones, reader outcomes and comments.
This one’s emerging: Cross-post your Substack Notes elsewhere but pull the conversation back to Notes. (Give users on other Platforms FOMO).
Case in point:
(fashion) attributed ~30% of subs to Notes via consistent, on-brand posting. And (health & wellness) made $4,546 from a single note!5) On Substack, community is a growth strategy (not a nice-to-have)
The fastest growers behaved like curators & neighbors, not just broadcasters:
Restack and say why it matters.
Endorse adjacent writers.
Send a direct message thoughtfully.
Show up daily: small posts, big outcomes.
And incidentally, this is how a portfolio career scales: compounding networks of trust, not just a louder megaphone.