5 Steps To Launch A New Substack From Scratch In 2026

If you're looking to start writing on Substack, read this:

Mar 15, 2026

I’m done writing online.

That’s what I told myself back in August 2020. I was 8 months into my weekly newsletter experiment, 40 editions deep, and I had barely cracked 200 subscribers. I couldn’t help but think the whole thing was a waste of time.

Look closely at the bottom left: 7 months in, 192 subscribers!

But as you can see from that chart, I didn’t quit (luckily). Just a few short weeks later, things started working, and this chart started its steady climb up and to the right.

Fast forward a few years, and I’ve been able to:

Generate 22,323 subscribers fir Dickie’s Digest (this newsletter)
Build Write With AI to the #1 education newsletter on Substack with 120,000 subscribers
Generate 200,000+ other email subscribers across other educational newsletters (Start Writing Online, Start Ghostwriting, etc.)

So what changed in that 2-3 month period from August of 2020 to October 2020, when things started to accelerate?

Well, I didn’t magically become a better writer. And the platforms I was writing on didn’t magically change.

Put simply, I stopped trying to piece everything together myself and started following a proven playbook.

However, that playbook from 2020 no longer applies today.

AI didn’t even exist back then
Social platforms did not punish links nearly as much
Newsletter platforms all have more advanced features
The only reliable platform for driving subscribers was Twitter
Substack Notes didn’t exist (which is a huge new opportunity)

In 2026, the newsletter landscape is completely different. And that means it’s time for a new playbook.

And so today, I’m going to walk you step-by-step through the EXACT process I would use today to launch a fresh newsletter on Substack.

Having something like the guide would have saved me a TON of headache & wasted time as a beginner.

And rather than just speak from theory, I’m going to use these exact steps to launch my NEW Substack, AI Operator. And I’ll walk through the entire process throughout today’s post.

After 6 years of only writing newsletters here on Dickie’s Digest, I’m making a fresh start with a newsletter that is fully focused on the intersection of AI and internet businesses. More on that later.

So here are the exact 5 steps we’re going to cover:

Step 1: Position Yourself as the Category Newsletter
Step 2: Create An Irresistible Newsletter Offer Stack
Step 3: Generate Your First 10 Newsletter Ideas
Step 4: Drive Traffic With Substack Notes
Step 5: Keep Going Even If The Growth Is Slow

Let’s get into it.

One quick note before we jump in. Today’s guide is enough to get you up and running on Substack by the end of the day. But if you want to fully build your newsletter, LIVE, with me and Nicolas Cole (the mastermind behind the steps I’m going to walk you through), Substack Starter Sprint starts Monday March 16th. Hope to see you there.

But First—Why Substack?

I still remember the process of picking a newsletter platform before I published my first newsletter edition back in January 2020. (We’ve come a long way since then!)

At the time, there were not many other newsletter platforms out there. My choice came down to Googling “best platform to start a newsletter” and picking the first choice. I didn’t overthink it.

6 years later, there are tons of other choices:

Kit
Ghost
Brevo
Beehiiv
MailerLite
Mailchimp
And probably several others I’m unaware of

The truth is, all of these can work. They all have pros and cons.

But at their core, they all have the same basic functionality:

They let you send email newsletters
They host your newsletters on a lightweight website
They have some kind of “internal” discovery engine/social media

However, for this new newsletter, I’m going with Substack. And I recommend beginners do the same, for 3 reasons:

It’s free to use. It costs $0 to run a free newsletter. They only take a 10% cut if you have a paid newsletter, which more than pays for itself from its discoverability features.
It takes less than 30 minutes to set up. You need zero advanced technical skills and can easily publish your first newsletter by the end of the day. Especially for beginners, eliminating all friction allows you to focus on the part that matters: writing.
The Notes discovery feature is the current “arbitrage” opportunity in social media. Since I began publishing Notes here, the growth of this newsletter (Dickie’s Digest) and our paid newsletter (Write With AI) has exploded. Over 60% of our subscribers are now coming directly from the Substack network. And so I want to ride this trend while it’s hot.

Those are just a couple of the reasons. If you want a more in-depth comparison of pros & cons, I’m sure there are plenty of guides out there. But don’t get caught up in the “productive procrastination” of trying to pick the perfect tool from the beginning. You can always change platforms later if you want. All that matters is you start writing.

(Now an important disclaimer here: I’m not affiliated with any of these platforms. This isn’t sponsored by Substack or anything like that. I’m simply laying out my reasoning for the choices I’m making. Feel free to take what’s useful and discard what isn’t. When choosing a platform, the correct choice is the one that gets you to take action!)

With that quick overview complete, let’s get into the first step: Positioning.

Step 1: Position Yourself as the Category Newsletter

Let’s start with a crash course in Category Positioning (and talk about some common mistakes beginners make, myself included).

The main framework here:

Your newsletter name determines 80%+ of its success.

Pick the right one and growth will take care of itself. Pick the wrong one and you will be climbing uphill for your entire career.

So, how do you pick the right name?

Good question—but let’s reverse it. Rather than pick a good name, let’s talk about how to pick a bad name (and just avoid those mistakes).

And as an example, I am going to pick on myself here showing how this newsletter name is no good:

Dickie’s Digest: Every week I share a recap of the best things I wrote, read, listened to, and learned.

Now, this newsletter name and subtitle have been the same SINCE 2020! I have not touched it since I first set it up. And obviously I’ve learned a ton since then, so I can now recognize the mistakes:

Mistake #1 — Naming it after yourself. This limits your total addressable market to people who ALREADY KNOW YOU. If you use this naming convention, no one is going to subscribe to your newsletter from the discoverability features. You are greatly limiting your growth. (And yes, I made this mistake with this newsletter!)
Mistake #2 — Going too broad. Rather than talk about one sub-industry within another sub-industry within a bigger industry, too many new writers go as broad as possible. Rather than intentionally cut readers out by being specific, they try to “cast a wide net” and include everyone. And when you try to write for everyone, you end up writing for no one.
Mistake #3 — Being clever instead of clear. Just because the name makes you smile in the mirror doesn’t mean it’s good. You want to optimize for someone scrolling through Substack, seeing your newsletter name, and subscribing on the spot because they can tell right away it’s for them.

(Yes, you might be able to find counter-examples of people who have successful newsletters and broke these rules. But they are outliers. For every one person who has a big newsletter built around their name, a broad category, or a clever pun, there are 100 newsletters the writer abandoned because growth was too slow.)

The caveat here is this newsletter, Dickie’s Digest, accomplished what I wanted it to accomplish.

It gave me a place to write on the internet and share my ideas in an exploratory way. At the time, it’s exactly what I needed to take action. But now, I want to have a more intentional place to publish writing beyond my own name, in a niche I’ve developed expertise.

So now that I’m starting from scratch, what frameworks should I follow?

Your newsletter is a book that never ends

When you’re trying to come up with a category-defining name for your newsletter, there are 3 pieces you’re juggling.

Your Niche: What industry do you serve (and, if you can, who “specifically”)?
Your Value: Are you saving people time, making people money, saving people money, getting people closer to a goal, or reducing friction?
Your Repeatable, Tangible Value: What “tangibly” are you giving the reader?

The easiest way to think of the value of a newsletter is to think of it as “a book that never ends.”

For example, think of the last non-fiction book you read that you really loved. Remember how it felt to reach the end? I bet some part of you was like, “Aw man… I’m not ready for this to be over! I have more questions! I have more I want to learn! I would love for them to explain XYZ in more detail!”

That’s all a newsletter is. It’s a book, on a topic, that gives you something tangible, that you never want to end.

And so in thinking through the positioning of your newsletter, you want to find a topic that is 1) infinitely repeatable and 2) easy for you create “tangible” assets for.

And with that in mind, coming up with a name is much easier.

How to name your newsletter

There are two core elements of a great newsletter name: Your Main Title & your Subtitle

Main Title = Niche + Topic. The more painfully obvious, the better. Someone scrolling through Substack should be able to read your title and immediately know if it’s for them.
Subtitle = the tangible thing you deliver and who it’s for. This should be a specific, repeatable object. Every TIME PERIOD you get XYZ asset. That’s the promise.

For example, we’ve nailed this with our #1 Education Newsletter:

Write With AI: The leading paid newsletter for ChatGPT & Claude prompts, and how to turn AI platforms into your own personal Digital Writing Assistant.

Main Title = Write With AI. You know immediately whether or not this is for you.
Subtitle = The leading paid newsletter for ChatGPT & Claude prompts, and how to turn AI platforms into your own personal Digital Writing Assistant. Tangible (prompts) and specific outcomes (turn AI platforms into your own personal Digital Writing Assistant).

If you do nothing else but follow those two steps, your newsletter is on a significantly stronger foundation.

Now—let’s apply this to my new newsletter.

My goal is to have a place where I can publish a weekly newsletter sharing one way we’re using AI internally in our portfolio of writing businesses.

There are a few reasons I want this vehicle:

It forces me to turn our internal processes into tangible assets. The more time I spend distilling our frameworks into assets, the more products we can launch, the more problems we can solve, and the more people we can help.
It serves a segment of our bigger audience that is currently underserved. We talk a lot about how to write & create content with AI. But we don’t talk much about the business building side of things. And our audience has signaled a desire for this type of content during our various bootcamps & live sessions.
It allows me to talk about all of the assets in our portfolio through an operations lens. My role in the company has evolved from purely writing & creating to more “operational.” My job is to keep the machine running across every department and properly monetize the traffic coming in. And so I want to share the processes I’ve created that allow me to do so.

So in thinking through the naming convention, I know the name will include AI. I know the name will include “operations” of some sort. And so I narrowed it down to two names:

AI Business Operations
AI Operator

Now, the nice part about rules & best practices is sometimes they are meant to be broken. The first name is 100% more clear—you know exactly what I’m going to talk about by choosing that name.

The second name, however, is still recognizable enough that people who consider themselves “Operators” will know it’s for them. On top of that, I see more and more people calling themselves “Operators” and want to capture the growth of that category term.

And above all, I think AI Operator looks and sounds sick. And ultimately I will wake more excited to write, publish, build a brand around that name, which means I will take more action! (Noticing a pattern here?)

Now, to show a counterexample, there are tons of other names I could have gone with that signaled something similar, but were slightly more clever.

AI Wizard
AI Builder
AI Orchestrator
AI Conductor
Etc. etc.

All of these could talk about the topics I am going to talk about, but would require more cognitive power to understand just from reading the first line. And so while I didn’t FULLY follow every instruction, I didn’t outright ignore them.

Now, how about the subheadline?

Here’s what I went with:

AI Operator: Weekly Playbooks & SOPs from inside a $25m internet business portfolio — steal it, install it, run leaner by Friday.

Breaking down some of the elements here:

“Weekly Playbooks & SOPs” = tangible, repeatable asset they receive on a consistent basis
“From inside a $25m internet business portfolio” = credibility (I am actually using these) and signals a subniche of business (internet business)
“Steal it, install it, run leaner by Friday”
- Steal it → it’s free
- Install it → increased likelihood of achievement
- Run leaner → dream outcome
- by Friday → happens fast

And just like that, AI Operator is born.

If you’re playing along at home, here’s the checklist you can use in positioning your newsletter:

Main Title
- Does it name your niche?
- Does it name your topic?
- Could a stranger discover it without knowing who you are?
- Is it clear over clever?
Subtitle
- Does it name a tangible, repeatable asset? (prompts, SOPs, templates, etc.)
- Does it say who it’s for?
- Does it say how often they get it?
- Does it speak to at least one of: dream outcome, likelihood of achievement, speed, or reduced effort?
The “is this any good?” test
- Could someone read your title and subtitle in 5 seconds and know immediately if it’s for them?
- If a competitor named their newsletter your exact title and subtitle, would you be upset?
AI Operator as the example
- Title: AI Operator → niche (AI) + identity (Operator) — clear enough that the right person self-selects
- Subtitle: Weekly Playbooks & SOPs (tangible asset) + from inside a $25M internet business portfolio (credibility) + steal it, install it, run leaner by Friday (outcome + speed + ease)

Now it’s onto Step 2: creating your Offer Stack.

Step 2: Create An Irresistible Newsletter Offer Stack

With AI Operator properly positioned, it’s time to dive into what’s in it for the reader.

And this is another place beginners go wrong. They (incorrectly) think the newsletter is the product.

It’s not.

The newsletter is the delivery mechanism. The product is the transformation—the problem you solve, the outcome you unlock for the reader, and the tangible asset you provide that allows them to do so.

And if you never TELL people what that transformation is, they’ll never subscribe. Or worse, they’ll subscribe and immediately forget why they did.

That’s what an offer stack fixes.

Your offer stack is the same value proposition, communicated and reinforced repeatedly every time someone engages with your newsletter.

On Substack specifically, there are 4 places you want to communicate your offer stack:

Welcome Pinned Post. The first thing someone sees when they land on your Substack. This is your newsletter’s homepage. Most people leave it blank or auto-publish a “hey welcome!” post that says nothing. It should do one job: make the value proposition so obvious that subscribing is a reflex. Who it’s for, the problems you solve, what you deliver every week, and who you are.
About Page. Same content as the pinned post. Literally copy and paste it. Readers browse the about page when they’re deciding whether you’re worth their time. Give them something worth reading.
Welcome Email. The highest open-rate email you will ever send — and most newsletters waste it with Substack’s default “thanks for subscribing” placeholder. That email should validate the reader’s identity, tell them what to expect and when, and point them toward the next step.
Pre-S Blurb. One paragraph. Top of every issue. Every week. No exceptions. It’s the same elevator pitch, repeated forever. What you are. Who it’s for. What to do if someone forwarded this. The right answer is whatever gets you to do it — even a single sentence is better than nothing.

Now to illustrate what doing this incorrectly looks like, we will again use Dickie’s Digest as an example.

I do not have a Welcome Pinned Post. I have a popular newsletter pinned, which kinda works. But it doesn’t give the reader any insight on the types of things I often talk about.
My About Page has been the same since 2020. And it tries to communicate that I talk about (no joke) 12 different topics.
My Welcome Email is the same as my About Page. Thousands of views per month wasted with no clear value proposition or CTA to one of my products.
I do not use a Pre-S blurb explaining what I do. And that’s because this newsletter is often on a random topic every time, so I can’t even write a congruent Pre-S.

As you can see, I’m not perfect. And I certainly left a ton of opportunity on the table over the past few years making these mistakes.

Luckily, I’ve realized business is just the continuous realization of how much money and growth you left on the table in the past because of how ignorant you were. And now I can grow from these mistakes with my new newsletter.

So let’s build each of these elements together for AI Operator, shall we?

Welcome Pinned Post

The welcome post is your newsletter’s homepage. Pin it at the top so it’s the first thing any visitor sees. But don’t overthink this - you can always make it clearer in the future once you have a more established backlog.

Here’s the template we’re providing for students inside the Substack Starter Sprint:

A warm greeting
Who it’s for (3 avatars)
The 10 biggest problems you solve
What you tangibly deliver every week
Who you are & why they should trust you
Your best starting posts
A clear CTA on what to do next

Here’s what it looks like for AI Operator:

And if you want to model it, you can go check it out here.

About Page

If you’ve nailed your Welcome Pinned Post, you can just copy paste it to your About page.

Sometimes the About page is what people click on first, rather than your pinned post.

So there is no reason to make this any different as they’re both designed to get a random scroller to subscribe.

Welcome Email

The Welcome Email will have the highest open rate of any email you ever send. So it’s worth spending time on it to maximize the chance a reader 1) opens future emails and 2) takes the next action that is best for your newsletter and your business.

Here’s the rough template we’re providing for students inside the Substack Starter Sprint:

Section 1: Welcome
Section 2: Next Steps
(Optional) Section 3: Upgrade to Paid (If you have a paid tier, which AI Operator will not)
Section 4: See You Soon
(Optional) Section 5: PS CTA

If you want to see the welcome email in action, you can subscribe to AI Operator here.

Pre-S Blurb

Last but not least, you need to remind our readers over and over again what they can expect when they’re reading your newsletter.

People are busy. They have a lot going on in their inbox. And so if you can give them a small reminder of who’s emailing them and what they’re getting with every email, they’re more likely to stick around.

For AI Operator, here’s what I’m going with:

“AI Operator is the weekly newsletter for integrating AI into every vertical of your internet business — one SOP, system, or honest breakdown every Tuesday that you can steal, install, and run by Friday. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here: [link]”

And just like that we’re making a ton of progress. So far we’ve:

Made our niche/topic CLEAR in the Main Title
Made the “value proposition” CLEAR in the Subtitle
Reinforced the value proposition in a Welcome Pinned Post
Reinforced the value proposition in our About Page
Reinforced the value proposition in your Welcome Email
Reinforced the value proposition in a “Pre-S” Blurb

This is all the “setup” required to launch a Substack newsletter.

Pretty easy right?

And with this foundation, now we can move on to the next step: generating ideas for our first high-quality newsletter.

Step 3: Generate Your First 10 Newsletter Ideas

Here’s the single best piece of advice I can give you in generating newsletter ideas:

Stop looking for ideas. Start looking for problems.

If you take nothing else away from this entire post, it should be that quote. The more you can focus your newsletter around writing something that will solve a problem for a reader by changing their behavior, the faster your newsletter will grow. I promise.

However, it’s hard to solve specific problems when you’re positioned incorrectly.

When your newsletter is just a diary, you’re not solving anyone’s problems. And when you’re in a big broad niche trying to write everything for everyone, you’ll struggle to find problems that apply to everyone. And even if you do, you’ll never be able to handle every nuance that occurs when you try to write something broad like “How to be more productive.”

This is why the first two steps were focused around positioning.

And it’s what this newsletter, Dickie’s Digest, has struggled with since I began writing it. Even though I was consistent for the first ~2 years of it, the newsletter was always about “whatever I was thinking about” — which sounds romantic until you realize it means no filter, no focus, and no real problems to solve.

On the other hand, Write With AI has published 2x/week for almost 3 years. If it was ALL things AI, we would have run out of ideas. But because it’s WRITE with AI, we have a simpler filter: every prompt, every workflow, every tool we see or use internally that helps us write more effectively with AI is a newsletter issue.

It’s like someone asking you to tell a joke. You’d probably freeze and struggle to come up with anything. But if I asked you to tell me a knock-knock joke, you’d think of one instantly. Even though there are way fewer knock-knock jokes than there are jokes, the constraint makes it easier to come up with ideas.

AI Operator will work the same way. Its promise is “a weekly newsletter for integrating AI into every vertical of your internet business — one SOP, system, or honest breakdown every Tuesday that you can steal, install, and run by Friday.”

That means every element of our business that uses AI, across every department & vertical, is a potential newsletter edition.

Now you might be thinking: Dickie — how am I supposed to come up with problems to solve?

Easy.

There are 3 reliable ways to generate problem ideas, no matter your niche:

The 10 biggest problems in your niche. When you’re positioned correctly, you should be able to identify the 10 most common problems someone might face or currently face. Our Start Writing Online newsletter has written something 2x/week for 5 years now, JUST talking about the 10 most common problems beginner writers face.
Problems you’ve solved at some point. If you want to rely more on personal experience, you can look back on your journey of building expertise in your chosen niche. Every struggle along the way is a problem you could write about. Don’t underestimate how useful it would have been to know what you know now back when you were starting out.
Problems you solved this week. Lastly, if you want to document problems & solutions in real time, you can look back on your calendar and to-do list from the past week. Chances are, you came across a couple of problems and solved them. And that solution would be valuable to someone reading your newsletter. (This is the approach I plan on taking with AI Operator.)

Now, whichever one you choose, the goal is to just list out 10 ideas of problems you could solve.

Don’t overthink this part. Just begin listing problems.

If I was going to brainstorm ideas for AI Operator, here’s what they would be (stream of consciousness).

This process itself could be a full newsletter edition. Overcoming the problem of coming up with useful business content ideas. I think that will be the first edition.
I have a pretty good system for managing 5 different verticals within our portfolio. It was super disorganized in the beginning, but now it’s dialed. I could talk about my process for doing that in one Excel sheet.
This week we saw one of our application funnels was converting at just 28%. Industry standard is 50%+. We redid the whole thing with the hypothesis that we could boost completion rate. If it works, I’ll talk about how I fixed it.
We installed a new sales pipeline process that makes it easier for sales reps to “turn their brains off” and execute a checklist rather than boot up new pipeline ideas from scratch. I could talk about how we did that.
We are launching a bootcamp right now. I could breakdown our launch plan to help someone who needs the ideal scene for what it looks like to execute a product launch
I’ve been experimenting with not using my phone for the first hour of the day. That’s increased my focus significantly. I could talk about how I built the system to do that
And on and on I would go

See how I identify either problems I just overcame, or problems I’m working on that I might have solved?

ALL OF THESE ARE PROBLEMS. ALL OF THESE ARE NEWSLETTER EDITIONS.

Especially if you know how to structure a simple story around it.

Now, a full newsletter writing deep dive is beyond the scope of this newsletter, and something we’ll cover in our Substack Starter Sprint.

For the crash course version, the easiest way to do this is to use the PISA framework:

Problem/Pain. Start with a tangible moment that you or someone who has the problem might experience. Describe, in detail, the surface problem and the deeper emotional experience that comes when you have that problem.
Insight. Expand to the “aha” moment of when you discovered it was a problem. Explain the common reasons people have that problem or the common mistakes that led to it.
Solution. Explain the solution in a step-by-step way, one step at a time.
Asset. Give the reader a DELIVERABLE that helps them implement the solution. A checklist. A prompt. An eBook. A course.

If you follow this framework for every newsletter, readers will keep coming back because you are reliably educating them on a problem & giving them a tangible solution.

To see this in practice, let’s brainstorm the first edition of AI Operator:

Title: How To Generate Endless Business Content Ideas
Problem — Every week I sit down to write a newsletter and stare at a blank screen. It sucks.
Insight — The problem isn’t a lack of ideas — it’s that I’m looking for ideas instead of looking at problems I already solved.
Solution — Every Sunday, open your calendar, go through every meeting and task from the past week, and ask: would someone else want to know how I solved this? Turn those problems into newsletters with the PISA framework.
Asset — An AI prompt that interviews you on what you solved this week & helps you generate a PISA outline based on the most valuable problem.

Voilà. My first edition is outlined.

And now with these two frameworks (identifying problems and expanding them with PISA), you can write a newsletter every week for the rest of your life.

Identify problems. Craft a compelling newsletter around those problems. Repeat forever.

(And for those following along closely, this newsletter follows the PISA framework 🙂)

Alright, now that we have a strategy to write the newsletter, we need to tap into the most underrated traffic source on the internet: Substack Notes.

Step 4: Drive Traffic With Substack Notes

Every so often there is a “new platform” opportunity in the Digital Writing world.

In 2016 it was Quora. In 2019 it was Facebook. In 2021 and 2022, it was Twitter. In 2023 and 2024 it was LinkedIn.

And now, it’s Substack Notes, for a few reasons:

There are more readers than posters on Substack Notes (opportunity for writers)
There are zero ads—their goal is to get you to read a Note, subscribe to a newsletter, and eventually pay. Substack only makes money when writers make money.
Even though there are only 20 million users, they are all there to read & learn.
There has never been a platform better for capturing email subscribers, because the newsletters are just one click away

The growth of Dickie’s Digest is a testament to Substack Notes.

In 2024 and 2025, I published only 10 newsletters. I plugged this newsletter basically NOWHERE on social media, opting instead to drive traffic to our other verticals & lead magnets.

However, I was posting daily on Notes. And just that simple daily posting led to a passive 10,000 subscribers.

Write With AI tells the same story. The curve bends sharply upwards in the middle of 2024 when Notes started to see even more traction. So much so that we stopped plugging our Write With AI lead magnet anywhere else and just relied on Substack Notes to drive growth.

Now, a full deep dive in Notes is beyond the scope of this newsletter—and it’s something we will cover in depth in our Substack Starter Sprint.

But I’ll give you a quick rundown of the strategy I will use to drive traffic for AI Operator:

Number of posts per day: 2. We have an assumption that the max number of notes per day falls around the 2-5 range. I’m going to start with 2 and work my way up to 3, keeping an eye on growth and engagement.
Post times (ET): 8:30 AM ET, 8:30 PM ET. No rocket science here, just something in the morning and something in the evening.

And most of my notes will fall into one of the following proven short-form content strategies:

The Paragraph Post
The What/How/Why Post

The Atomic Essay

The Long-Form + Media
The Restack. I haven’t experimented with this yet, but this is like a Retweet on Twitter/Repost on X where you add additional commentary to someone else’s note.

The Newsletter Teaser. Each time I publish a newsletter, I’ll pull a snippet from it and post it as a standalone note that is valuable on its own, and also link to the newsletter it’s pulled from.

And you can see even more proven formats just by scrolling through my Notes feed.

If you stick to that posting cadence for a year, there is a high likelihood you see consistent newsletter growth.

But that growth is not guaranteed. And it may be slower than you’d like.

Which is why the 5th step is all about creating the right mindset to stick with something, even without seeing results.

Step 5: Keep Going Even If The Growth Is Slow

Last but not least, this is the most important advice I can give to a beginner.

It’s easy for me to toss around big numbers and forget what it was like to start from scratch.

6 months in, I had 137 subscribers. At that point, I was 26 editions in. That’s 5 subscribers added per newsletter, or less than 1 per day!

But that year I made a commitment to myself: I was going to write a weekly newsletter every week for 52 weeks, no matter what.

And so I had to come up with some reframes to keep me going despite feeling like it was pointless. And these will be the same reframes I use this time around in starting a newsletter from scratch.

So if you’re getting started on this journey, remember these ideas:

You get to practice in an empty gym. No one will read your first 20 newsletters — and that is your beginner advantage. You get to put in reps and improve your craft without the pressure of a constant stream of eyeballs.
Think in percentages, not absolutes. Going from 10 to 100 subscribers isn’t +90. It’s +1,000%. Going from 3 likes to 6 is not +3, it’s +100%. Little mental hacks like this make it easy to celebrate small wins early in the journey.
Progress over perfection. Whenever you get in your head about quality, reminder yourself: in the future, you will look back on these and laugh at how bad they are. And that’s okay. Go listen to Joe Rogan’s first 100 episodes if you want an example of this in practice. They were horrible! But 1500 episodes later, he is the biggest podcast in the world.
No one is thinking about you as much as you think they are. The single thing that held me back from writing was the belief that the second I hit publish, a wave of criticism would hit me from everyone I’d ever met. Turns out that wasn’t true — because people were way too busy thinking about themselves to care what I was doing.

Don’t compare your step 1 to someone else’s step 9. Especially on something that compounds exponentially. Instead, find out what someone was doing at the same stage in your journey and model them.

There will be times when you want to stop writing.

There will be times where you question if it’s worth continuing.

And there will be times where you see someone who started writing after you grow way faster than you.

So it’s worth preparing for them by internalizing these reframes.

For me, AI Operator is a fresh start. Sure, I might grow quickly in the beginning as subscribers from this newsletter subscribe over there. But that initial burst will fade. And I will experience the same slow and steady growth I’ve always experienced.

So here’s my plan going forward: I’m going to follow the same plan: publish every Tuesday for at least 12 months before drawing any conclusions.

I know that if I put out a high-quality, valuable, problem-solving-focused newsletter every week for a year, our business will have a reliable new traffic source that creates tons of new opportunity.

Time to launch your Substack!

PHEW—we’ve covered a lot. Just in the last few sections you’ve learned:

Why you should write on Substack in the first place
How to position yourself as a Category Newsletter
How to create an irresistible Offer Stack
How to include that Offer Stack in all the right places
How to identify problems your newsletter can solve
How to write about problems & solutions in a compelling way
How to drive traffic to your newsletter using Substack Notes
How to reframe the slow growth in the beginning into an advantage
And tons more!

Now, this is MORE than enough to get you started if you are a complete beginner looking to get your first Substack published by the end of the day. If that’s all you’re looking to do, great!

However, I know a select few of you reading this want to take a deeper dive and fully take your Substack to the next level.

Because while this was comprehensive, there’s tons we couldn’t cover:

How to create an onboarding sequence for readers
How to monetize by building a paid newsletter
How to use your newsletter as the “engine” of your business
How to nail the 3 core content pillars of your newsletter
Advanced newsletter conversion secrets to maximize every edition
How to build a 30-day Notes cadence that drives the maximum number of email subscribers
How to create a sleek branded asset design for your newsletter (like I did for AI Operator)
And how to do every single step we talked about today, 10 times faster, using detailed AI prompts to handle most of the boring stuff for you