Your Stack Is Your Product. You Have To Sell It.

People ask all the time what my secret is. Why did M&A Hunter grow so fast.

There is no secret.

It is hard work. Every single day.

I am here from 8am to 8pm running my stack and my community. That is the easy part. The part everyone sees.

The part nobody sees,

I grind Reddit answering questions, fighting scams, earning respect one comment at a time.

I tease my work on LinkedIn, X, Facebook. Too old for TikTok or Insta.

I actively interact with other writers here on Stack. Cross posts. Collabs.

Here is what people miss.

I just pulled my traffic sources. X is half a percent. LinkedIn and Facebook, basically nothing. Reddit shows 1%, but that is misleading. Public links get you banned on Reddit. All my Reddit work is DM pitches, which land as Direct, not Reddit.

The real number is 82% Direct.

People typing the URL. Opening the app. Coming back without being told to.

Direct traffic is the residue of every Reddit DM, every X reply, every LinkedIn tease, every cross-post. The platform clicks do not measure the work. The Direct number does.

The AI Layer Is Watching Too

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity all clicked through this week. Grok read my stack the other day.

The one worth a beat is jpmc.rogo.ai.

That is JP Morgan's internal AI assistant. Built for their analysts and bankers. Someone on a JPM desk ran a query through it this week, and the answer pulled from M&A Hunter.

That is not a retail reader. That is an analyst at one of the biggest investment banks in the world getting an independent Substack served back as a source.

The JPM research desk has every paid Wall Street database, every Bloomberg feed, decades of proprietary intel, an army of internal analysts. Their AI still surfaced M&A Hunter.

That only happens because the dual scoring framework is differentiated enough to be worth citing. Generic biotech newsletters do not get pulled into Wall Street's AI workflows. Frameworks do.

Same logic for Grok. Same for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity. AI assistants quote work that earns the citation.

Institutional eyeballs are arriving. Quietly. Through the machines.

That is what the daily grind builds. Not just human reach. Machine layer credibility.

No matter how good your work is, no one is going to hand it to you. Nor should they.

Stack offers freedom. But only if you fight for it daily.

That is the whole game.

After some more digging, LinkedIn seems to be the institutional link.

I follow every major healthcare bank there. JPM, Goldman, Jefferies, Leerink, Citizens, Barclays. Post my Stack links there too. Their employees see the posts in their feed because we follow the same accounts.

Analyst clicks through, reads the ticker scores, URL ends up in their browser history or LinkedIn engagement data. Later they query their internal AI and it surfaces my work.

LinkedIn click numbers look tiny on my dashboard but the institutional reach is hiding in there. Different platform, different math.