I see a variation of this note every day. I haven’t been around long enough to have a super informed opinion, but here’s where my mind went:

1. A larger-than-you-think slice of our subs are people who accidentally hit subscribe scrolling the timeline, or accidentally joined as a recommendation from another publication.

2. Many people (especially new users) don’t realize that subscribing is equivalent to signing up for emails. This is not something seen on any other major social platform.

3. Subscribers overestimate how many subscriptions are sustainable from an attention/time standpoint and feel overwhelmed and cut if they are lukewarm.

4. Ultimately, getting someone’s email from a Substack button is probably way less valuable than if they manually input it themselves. Just a huge difference in level of intent.

5. There will always be churn. If it actually concerns you, just benchmark against your average. The goal is not zero. Just look for outlier results to guide you. Zero churn is not realistic for any marketing endeavor— and yes, writing on social media is content marketing.

6. The big tough love message (aimed to people generally, not the OP) is that if so many people are unsubscribing to the point it’s destroying your sub count and you’re “going out of business” then maybe the subscribers weren’t worth anything to begin with. Or your content is mismatched to what people expected, which is very easy to happen when people subscribe based on Notes and not Posts and your topic areas/ “persona” are inconsistent across formats.