The TLDR version
If your Substack has stalled and you can’t figure out why, run this diagnostic before you rewrite a single piece of content:
Your content is probably fine. Your positioning is probably the problem.
Positioning isn’t your niche. It’s who the reader thinks you are when they read you. If you’re an expert and you’re showing up as just another writer, you’re leaving your conversion rate on the table.
Build your positioning around what makes you specifically different. Not around what sounds good on a landing page.
Stack your content into clear pillars the reader can navigate. Kathleen’s three: understanding → stabilizing → rebuilding. Borrow the shape, not the topics.
Pick an offer that matches how you actually work best. One-on-one or group. Async or live. Depth or reach. Your conversion rate will thank you.
Don’t delete your quiet subscribers. The person not opening today is often the person buying in eighteen months.
And when your numbers dip (and they will) don’t panic. Diagnose, fix, keep showing up. Prepare for the up.
Watch on YouTube:
Few days ago I went live with Kathleen Thorne RN, LMT
She’s a registered nurse of 30 years. A massage therapist of 18. A root-cause practitioner who looks for patterns most healthcare professionals miss. She’s been on Substack since June 2024, almost two years in at this point.
And she’s with me as a VIP Lifetime member ever since.
A few weeks ago she opened up the custom GPT I built for her, typed out her positioning and her topics and her current setup, and asked it for suggestions. She was expecting something about tone. Frequency. Maybe a content mix adjustment.
Instead, the GPT told her this:
“Everything you’re saying, what you’re doing, is accurate. But your positioning is not.”
That one sentence rewired her entire Substack strategy.
If your Substack feels stuck right now - not crashing, just quietly going flat - sit with that quote for a second. Because it might be your diagnosis too.
The numbers that stopped climbing
Let me give you the context before I get into the fix.
After Kathleen joined me things moved. Within a few months she was making $500 to $600 a month on Substack. That’s real momentum for someone in her first year on the platform.
Then around January-February it went flat.
February was $125. March was $155.
She wasn’t slacking. She was showing up. Writing. Posting. The content hadn’t gotten worse. And I want to stop here because this is the moment where most people misdiagnose what’s happening.
They blame the algorithm.
They blame their audience.
They blame their content quality.
And they start tweaking things that aren’t actually broken.
On the live, Kathleen kept asking “what changed?” And here’s what we landed on together.
Nothing changed about her work. What changed was that the quiet positioning mismatch she’d been carrying since day one finally caught up with her audience. New readers were subscribing to what they thought she was. Then realizing she was something else. Then churning. Old readers weren’t re-engaging at the same rate because the thing they’d subscribed for didn’t quite match what they were getting.
That’s how positioning failures surface.
What positioning actually is (and what it isn’t)
Most people confuse positioning with niching.
They’re not the same thing.
Niching is what topic you write about or, as I like to look at it, what problem you solve. Positioning is who the reader thinks you ARE when they read you. A health writer can niche into “gut health” and still fail at positioning because the reader can’t tell whether they’re reading a journalist, a coach, a clinician, a recovery story, or someone curating other people’s advice.
Here’s Kathleen’s specific version of this failure.
She was writing on Substack about stress, health, nutrition, and disease prevention. All topics that sit squarely inside her 30 years of clinical experience. So far, so good.
But she was showing up on the page as a WRITER - one voice among thousands of other Substack wellness writers. Her clinical authority wasn’t visible in how she framed herself.
The thing that actually makes her different is far from writing - she can order labs, she tracks patterns instead of single data points, she’ll tell you why your “normal range” potassium might not be normal for YOUR cardiac history - none of that was in her positioning.
The reader arriving at her publication couldn’t feel any of it. So they subscribed thinking “another wellness writer,” got a wellness writer, and either stayed flat or churned out quietly.
This is what I mean when I say you can have great content and broken positioning at the same time. The content works at the sentence level. The positioning fails at the who-is-this-person level.
And positioning is where conversion lives.
Here’s a video from the Substack Quest where I go deep about positioning:
How Kathleen repositioned
This is the part I want you to actually use.
She pivoted from “writer” to “expert practitioner who also writes.” Small distinction on paper. Huge consequence in practice.
She built three clear pillars:
One: Stress physiology & disease prevention. The understanding layer. Education grounded in her clinical background.
Two: Stress regulation & applied tools. The stabilizing layer. Practical protocols for people already in the thick of it.
Three: Survival, grief, and nervous system recovery. The rebuilding layer. This is where her lived experience lives.
Huge difference if you ask me.
Kathleen also made a specific business-model decision on the call that I want to flag. She said:
“I could make more money doing Zooms and do a bunch of people, but that’s not how I work best.”
She’s choosing one-on-one consultations over group calls. Less scalable. But she knows herself well enough to know that her conversion, her energy, and her client outcomes are all better when she goes deep with one person than wide with twenty.
That’s what positioning looks like when it’s done honestly.
It’s not just what your content says. It’s what your offer structure actually matches.
The moment she almost threw it all away
Earlier this year, Kathleen deleted about 25 email addresses from her list.
Someone on Substack had convinced her that inactive subscribers were hurting her performance. Her open rates. Her deliverability. The standard list-hygiene advice that circulates in creator circles.
She deleted.
Then she asked me about it. And I said, I hate to break it to you, but those were still your people.
Here’s the logic. The person who’s unsubscribed is telling you something - they’re done. That’s a clean signal, and yes, a clean list. But the person who’s just quietly not opening? They’re not telling you anything yet. They might be busy. Grieving. Broke. Burned out. Between jobs. Waiting for the right moment. Saving up for a bigger purchase.
Some of those 25 emails were going to buy her offer six months, a year, two years later.
You don’t delete those people.
Never make a decision based on someone else’s opinion.
If you’re going to prune your list, do it because YOU decided based on your data, your audience, your funnel, your deliverability. Not because someone on a podcast or in a Note said inactive emails hurt your algorithm.
The person not opening today is often the person buying in eighteen months. They haven’t left. They’re just quiet.
Quiet is not gone.
The one piece of advice she wanted people to hear
Near the end of the live I asked Kathleen what she wanted people watching to take away.
Her answer was short.
“Don’t give up. Make the commitment. Be consistent. Don’t get discouraged, we’re going to get discouraged, but don’t let it stop you.”
And here’s why this lands differently coming from her than from almost anyone else I’ve had on for a live.
Kathleen just had a $125 month. In public. She told me the number on camera without flinching. She could’ve said “a down month” or “a rough quarter” or any of the softer phrases creators reach for when the number is embarrassing.
She gave the exact dollar figure.
Because that’s what consistency actually looks like. It’s the months where your number drops by 75%, and you keep writing, keep showing up, keep fixing what’s actually broken (like the positioning) and you trust the next up-cycle is coming.
You prepare for the up while you’re in the down.
That’s the whole game.
Watch the full live above for the parts I couldn’t fit in here. Kathleen goes deeper on the root-cause approach she uses with her clinical clients, the YouTube + Substack ecosystem strategy that’s growing both her channels at once, and why her Croatian Substack subscriber is flying into Atlanta in May to stay at her house for ten days. (Yes, that actually happened, and it started with a comment on a Note.)
Go subscribe to Kathleen’s publication — she’s one of the most grounded, honest voices on this platform, and she’s doing the repositioning work out loud in real time. That’s rare, and it’s worth watching up close.
Yana
P.S. Kathleen mentioned the QUEST several times on the live — she’s a VIP lifetime member, and going back through the foundations is the exact work she’s doing right now to tighten her positioning. If you want the same system she’s using, it’s here.
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