Hi everyone! I am a writer in the Fashion and Beauty niche. I launched my Substack with zero publication experience or network, and no public following. I leaned on Instagram to build my Substack following: I started making videos to promote every newsletter I published and using this strategy I went from 0 to 5,000 subsribers on Substack and 1,000 (friends) to 40,000 followers on IG in five months. I think the reason why this worked is that I focus on value-adding content. Hope this helps someone out there - happy to help or answer questions! You don’t need a following to have a successful Substack: you can build them side by side.