I'm Posting 180+ Substack Notes in 60 Days

The experiment I'm running to find out what attracts subscribers

Sloth Habitat - Selvatura Eco Conservation Park - Monteverde ❤️

Ok I had to fight with myself this morning to decide whether to tell you about the Sloth habitat I visited yesterday or my Substack notes strategy.

I know right? Very closely related… 🙄

But in actual fact there is a connection, as prior to starting my new daily posting strategy, I was a bit sloth like myself on Substack for a couple of weeks due to my recent op.

Any organised creator would have scheduled a couple of weeks in advance so as to not lose the momentum, but I’m not a particularly organised anything, and every time I thought about it, the sofa, a warm cuppa, minimal movement, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy looked far more enticing. 🤷🏻‍♀️

But finally my energy returned and when I opened my laptop ready to do a bit of work, I thought it was high time I scheduled a note or two!

While scrolling the feed to see what people were up to, I came across a note that said that the best format for writing notes that attract subscribers is 5 or 6 lines and a bold takeaway. Boom. Done.

It made sense to me, but I thought it would be a good idea to see what was actually working on the platform.

So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole looking at all the notes on Substack with thousands of likes and comments, and was surprised to find the formula evaporated immediately.

The notes were super varied.

Some people were getting massive engagement with long, essay-style posts. Some with single photos and a sentence. Some with deeply personal updates. Some with the punchy five-line advice format the creator recommended. Some with mini-rants. Some with quotes from books they were reading.

There wasn’t one formula. There were lots of formulas. All of them seeming to work for that particular creator.

Which of course meant that the only sensible thing I could do was to run my own experiment, because what works for somebody else with their audience may or may not work for me with mine.

So, in case you’re curious, here’s the format of my 60 day notes experiment…

The Experiment

I decided on 3-4 notes a day for 60 days. One note in each of my three pillars:

• Life on the road. Observational. The world through my eyes. Travel, places, people, small moments worth noticing. (Same flavour as my daily dispatches but in 3-5 line form.)

• Funding freedom. Punchy. Advisory. Three things I’ve learned about building a business online. That sort of thing. Sharp, takeaway-led, useful.

• Ageing disgracefully. Personal. Slightly more vulnerable. Life at 53 with dodgy knees and an opinion.

Plus the odd extra I add through the day.

I’m not interested in going viral, I want to see which format attracts the right readers. In other words who actually subscribes from my notes.

Likes, follows & engagement is great, but subscribers are the key.

Like many of the social platforms, Substack heavily rewards consistency. Every time I’ve taken a break and come back, it’s taken me 2 to 3 weeks of daily posting for the algorithm to start showing my notes again.

So I’m fully expecting lukewarm results in the first 30 days, which means I may have to repost some of my early notes later as I get more visibility.

But this is something worth noting if you’re starting on notes from scratch, don’t measure success in week one. Notes (and Substack as a whole really) is a slow build platform. The algorithm needs evidence you’re reliable before it’ll show your stuff to anyone new. 2 - 6 weeks of grinding away should get you over the line, but only if you’re unrelentingly consistent.

How I’m Setting This Up & Measuring It

1. I’ve been writing daily for the last 30 odd days on the notes app on my phone (as you know), so I have a LOT to say! I fed all my daily posts into Claude and asked it to turn my thoughts into notes in the 3 pillars and 3 voice tones. It did an ok job. I had to do some fairly heavy editing, but it got rid of blank page syndrome.

2. I’m using Finn Tropy’s notes scheduler tool to plan and schedule all my notes. (Affiliate link at no cost to you - genuine recommendation of a tool I use myself.)

3. I’ve created a simple spreadsheet to track my notes, likes, engagement and subscribers.

I have to be honest this isn’t naturally my thing.

I’m not a ‘get into the weeds, track the spreadsheet, analyse the data’ sort of person. I’m a ‘throw things at the wall and see what sticks’ person. Detailed business minutiae makes my soul shrivel slightly.

But sometimes you have to do the unglamorous bit. And tracking what actually works on a platform is one of those bits.

So I’m putting on my big girl pants and doing it for at least 60 days. By the end of it I’ll know the type of notes that attract people to me and that work for my audience, which is more useful than guessing.

A great article I read recently by Olivia Wickstrom of Petal & Hearth (link below) made exactly this point about running experiments on Substack rather than copying generic advice. Worth a read if you’re trying to grow here.

I’ll post a halfway report in 30 days and a full breakdown at 60 of what worked, what flopped, which format brought subscribers, which got engagement but no follows, which fell completely flat.

If you’re growing your own Substack, feel free to follow along. Or run your own version. Your conclusions might be wildly different from mine, and that’s kind of the point.

Either way, the laptop is open again and my inner sloth is hibernating. More on Monteverde & La Fortuna soon, once I come back down from the hanging bridges!

📍La Fortuna, Costa Rica 🇨🇷

The One Habit That Took My Substack from 0 to 21K+ Subscribers

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P.S. Still finding Substack a bit baffling? You’re not alone, it’s taken me a while too. I’ve pulled everything I’ve learned into Substack for Beginners — a no-nonsense guide to getting started without the overwhelm. On Gumroad, or free in the Backpack with a paid subscription.