I’ll be honest: I’ve had mixed feelings about all the new functionalities on Substack and the seemingly new focus on how to grow grow grow. It goes against a lot of the values I write about in my newsletter, and it’s not what drew me to writing here in the first place.

However at the same time, I’ve been writing a monthly newsletter since 2016. I started on TinyLetter, switched to Substack in January 2019, and introduced a paid option in 2021. That’s a long time of consistently yet gently building an audience. So I guess it does feel quite good to reach this milestone, however arbitrary it is, because I haven’t tried to growth-hack my way here. I just wrote things down that I wanted to say.

In fact I have no sexy tips and tricks on how to get here, except for one: Only hit send when you actually have something to say.