18 month birthday! My Substack is a toddler now and walking around...Interested in hedge funds, trading firms or financial market structure?

A few thoughts without PR spin:

1) It's hard. It was harder to turn on the engine at the start. It was cold. The engine stuttered.

2) Origin stories are great popcorn reading but often actually not that useful. I read so many posts of people saying they had got 10K subscribers within 3 months - often excluded the fact that the newsletter writer was famous, migrating flow from any existing platform - 100K LinkedIn followers, 300K Instagram/X followers or a previous newsletter.

3) Like a business there is a J-curve and the beginning is fun and exciting but when the J curve doesn't move as expected that is the valley of death - low energy, lose focus, sometimes quitting early is the right strategy and sometimes it is the wrong thing to do. It's an art not a perfect science.

4) There is a crazy amount of content out there. You can be not famous and write for a newspaper and people will read it. The distribution of top traditional media is still huge especially for an audience not on social media all day.

5) Balance - You see people post on LinkedIn or X about hedge fund manager's net worth or other clickbait and sometimes you are tempted to copy but often more than a post going viral it's the DM from the insider - the HF founder/top dog on a piece that was less viral but valuable is more rewarding.

A few stats:

61 Substack posts all free to read in the link in the comments below.

An average posts is getting 10K views.

Substack followers

- 1st 6 months total 1,200

- 2nd 6 months total 3,800

- 3rd 6 months total 7,800

Substack subscribers

- 1st 6 months total 760

- 2nd 6 months total 2,800

- 3rd 6 months total 5,400

Subscriber mix

- Geographical location - 103 countries, 35% US including 43 states, 25% UK

- Audience roughly - 50% work at hedge funds/trading firms including several founders/EXCO level members of top 20 firms but mostly PMs/biz dev across more than 100 major hedge funds/trading firms. High penetration within banks and traditional media as well.