I got a different spotlight with Vinayak Ramesh.
Vinayak is a biomedical research scientist working full-time in Japan. He’s originally from India. He started his Substack, The Sustainable Solopreneur, in January of this year. That’s four months on the platform.
He crossed 300 Substack subscribers in 90 days. That was his six-month target. He hit it in half the time.
How?
Here’s his secret:
“For the past two months, all the articles from my side are collaborative articles. I have not written any solo articles for the past two months.”
Gurus say that growth on Substack comes from publishing consistently under your own name, building your authority, and earning your audience one post at a time, but Vinayak’s been doing the opposite. And it’s working.
What collaboration actually unlocks
So a solo post reaches your existing subscribers and whoever the algorithm decides to push you to. But a collab post reaches YOUR subscribers, AND THE OTHER writer’s subscribers, AND whoever the algorithm pushes you both to.
Why?
Because a Substack collab post publishes to both writers’ lists simultaneously. Both audiences don’t get an email, but they do see it in the app. The post appears under both profiles.
Vinayak figured out something most new writers haven’t. The fastest way to grow when you’re small is to borrow audiences before you’ve earned them.
Every collab you publish adds new readers to your list who came through warm context (another writer they already trust), not cold acquisition. This is why conversion from these subscribers is higher, and my data confirms that.
But you have to do this right.
Collab posts require relationships. You can’t just DM five writers and expect three to say yes. You have to actually engage with their work, comment on their posts, build genuine back-and-forth, and earn the right to propose a collab. The strategy looks easy on paper. The relationship layer is the real work.
Which brings me to Vinayak’s second system.
The give-and-take engagement loop
When I asked Vinayak how he was getting his early growth, he didn’t say notes virality. He didn’t say SEO. He didn’t say recommendations from bigger writers.
He said this:
“Whenever people comment on my notes, I go and reply back. Even if I reply one to two days late, I make sure I reply to all the comments. And at the same time, I go back to their profile, scroll through their profile, and engage back.”
He calls it a give-and-take policy.
Why this works? When you then visit their profile and engage with their content, it’s a connection forming. People become curious, so they come back to your profile because of your engagement.
This kind of loop closing is what Substack’s algorithm is built to reward.
Most writers do one half of this. They reply to comments on their own posts and stop there. Vinayak does both halves, which doubles the algorithmic weight and, more importantly, builds the relationships that turn into collab opportunities later.
I do this as well - every now and then, I visit people’s profiles and engage further is something catches my attention.
The give-and-take loop and the collab strategy aren’t separate strategies. They’re the same strategy at two different stages. You engage with someone genuinely for weeks. You build a real connection. Then a collab becomes natural to propose, because you’ve already done the work of being someone they want to write with.
This is the thing nobody tells new creators clearly. Early growth on Substack isn’t about posting more or working harder, but building a small network of writers who actively want to amplify each other.
What he lost before he found Substack
I want to zoom out here, because there’s a backstory to Vinayak’s discipline that matters.
Before Substack, Vinayak ran twelve YouTube channels. Faceless content, AI-generated voiceovers, paid editors, the full automation stack. At his peak he was running four channels at once, making $2,000 to $3,000 a month, while spending $700 to $800 monthly on tools, editors, and a high-ticket mastermind.
Then in November and December last year, YouTube cracked down on AI-generated content.
One of his channels got a strike for “inauthentic content.” Within days, all his other channels got hit too, because they were connected to the same AdSense account. He lost monetization on all of them. Twelve channels. Gone.
That can happen all the time when you build an audience that’s not truly yours. It happened to me too.
A few weeks ago, my X account got suspended. I think it’s because I talk too much about Substack and ChatGPT and Claude, and not enough about X itself. I filed an appeal and I was not optimistic, but they reinstated my account. Guess how much I trust this platform now.
So when Vinayak talks about building something “sustainable,” he doesn’t mean it in the soft creator-economy way. He means it in the way someone who’s lost everything twice means it.
“I left those client works and started writing my own stuff online,” he said. “I do not want to focus on too much of platforms at once. So for the first three months I did only Substack.”
He’s been wiped out by platform algorithms enough times to know that diversifying too early kills focus, and that focusing on one platform until it’s working is the only sane move.
Make it work on one platform. Then expand.
On accountability
There’s one more thing Vinayak said that I want to flag for anyone who keeps falling off their own consistency.
He told me my Notes Challenge was part of his daily routine.
“It’s kind of a daily ritual for me, just like how I eat and sleep. I have to go to that sheet and put a check mark besides my name.”
Vinayak is a biomedical research scientist with a demanding full-time job (like me). He’s running a Substack business on the side. He has no spare cognitive load. And what he discovered is that the accountability of an external checklist was the thing that turned posting into automatic behavior rather than a decision he had to make every day.
Decisions cost willpower. Rituals don’t.
If your daily writing is still a decision you’re making every morning, you’re going to lose that decision more days than you win it. Eventually life gets in. Burnout creeps in. Someone ends up in the hospital. You take a “short break” that turns into a month.
Vinayak’s system isn’t motivation. It’s a checklist on a shared spreadsheet that forces him to show up because other people will notice if he doesn’t. That’s the entire mechanic. And it’s the reason he’s been consistent for four months while most January starters have already faded out.
The TL;DR version
Stop trying to grow your Substack alone. The fastest path when you’re small isn’t more posts. It’s collaborations with writers whose audiences overlap with yours.
Engage in both directions - reply to comments on your work AND visit and engage on the profiles of people who comment on you. This is what most people do halfway.
Don’t post across five platforms before one is working. If you’re spreading yourself too thin across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, X, and Substack - this is not building, but burning out. Pick one. Make it work. Then expand.
Build external accountability if you’re a busy person with a full-time job. A checklist, a challenge, a shared spreadsheet, a writing community. Whatever externalizes the decision so you stop having to make it every day. That’s why I run my challenges - to help you stay on track.
We also discussed how to monetize a faceless YouTube channel and if that model still stands in the age of AI.
Watch the full spotlight session for the parts I couldn’t fit in here. Vinayak goes deeper on his YouTube, his current thinking on building a Skool community alongside his Substack, and more.
Watch this spotlight as well as all of the previous episodes on YouTube:
Subscribe to Vinayak’s Substack to find more ideas how to grow sustainably: The Sustainable Solopreneur
Yana
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