Late May this year, Lisa Garvey started her Substack. She’s 65.
For the first couple of months she has what most of us had at the start: somewhere around 190 subscribers.
Then this one Note happened:
Brought her almost 700 new subscribers from that one Note alone. 2,500 subscribers in total, in just a month and a half later.
The Substack Note that brought 650+ subscribers
When Lisa read it out loud during the live, you could hear the emotion in her voice. We all could.
That Note came out of the Viral Notes Writer, the custom GPT I built for my paid members.
If you want to get your hands on my GPT, there are three ways to get both:
In the Unplugged Toolbox available for my paid members in the perks.
Get the Viral Notes Writer System course - a 3-hour training on how to use Notes, the GPT and the Claude skill, and also now to grow your first 1,000 subscribers in about 3 months.
And I already know what some of you are thinking, people tell me this all the time:
But Yana, I tried it, but it doesn’t sound like me.
Yet others nail it, go viral and get hundreds of subscribers.
Lisa’s did that too.
And every line in that Note is her life. The children’s home, Los Angeles, Tennessee, 65.
So what did she do differently?
How she writes Notes?
One Note going viral is not a strategy.
Multiple Notes delivering subscribers consistently is.
That’s what Lisa was able to develop for her Substack, and that’s exactly what brought her growth to a whole new level.
Yes she uses my AIs, but she uses them the right way.
Before she asked for a single Note from my custom GPT, Lisa sat down and told the GPT who she is. Her story. Her hopes, her dreams, her fears. The women she wants to talk to and what she wants for them. Pieces of herself she said she doesn’t want the world to know.
“Brutally honest” is how she put it. She gave it EVERYTHING.
How much? Almost 2 pages in a Word document. She’s added to it since, with updates and the data from her Notes, and it’s closing in on 3 pages now.
And she didn’t type it. She turned on the microphone and talked.
I do the same. Voice first, then let the AI pull the key points out of the mess.
Then she did the step most people never do.
She asked the GPT to tell her what it had gathered about her. She read it back. Corrected it. Only then did she ask for the Notes of the day.
And when a Note came back, she went in and changed it until it was hers. She spars with it. That doesn’t sound like me. This is what I’m feeling today, let’s write about this.
That’s the whole method, in two simple steps:
You tell it your real story and your real audience, in more detail than feels comfortable.
You edit every Note until you’d say it out loud to a friend.
That’s how I believe the right way to use AI is.
That is also why I built the tool so it asks for context first.
It won’t write until it knows your topic, your audience and who you are, and I did that on purpose - to stop it from making things up.
But it’s still AI.
And it can only work with what you give it. A one-line bio gets you a one-line-bio Note. Three pages of a real life gets you the Note that goes viral and makes people subscribe.
Marianne McCourt put it in the chat during the live: “It’s a brilliant tool. The more info I give him, the better we both get.”
Yes, that’s it! That’s the teamwork.
Three ways to get the Viral Notes Writer GPT and Claude Skill:
In the Unplugged Toolbox available for my paid members in the perks.
Get the Viral Notes Writer System course - a 3-hour training on how to use Notes, the GPT and the Claude skill, and also now to grow your first 1,000 subscribers in about 3 months.
How many Notes to post?
Lisa works a 9-5, like me. Her day:
Notes go out at around 7 am. She schedules them, because otherwise they don’t get done. I do that too, to make sure I don’t flood the feed of my audience with 10 Notes each day (yes, that’s how many I post).
Lisa stays active about an hour in the app before work, some time around lunch, when she is answering everyone and again when she gets home.
She posts about 4 Notes a day. And one newsletter, on Tuesdays. And every Note ties back to what the newsletter is about - and THAT is exactly what makes the difference between likes and subscribers.
People often ask me what to post on Notes. This is the answer.
But there’s a trap.
The over-education trap
Look.
When you hear “connect your Notes to your newsletter”, the natural next move is to start teaching. Tips, frameworks, how-tos. Educate people about what you do in your newsletter.
And it works.
I did that for months.
But my Notes brought almost nothing. Some months it was about 200 subscribers in total, from all of them.
I was still collecting viral Notes every week, so I knew what was growing on Substack. I just wasn’t doing it myself. I’d decided I had “figured out” Notes.
When you put something aside, it stops growing. You have to watch the data and adapt.
Somewhere at the end of 2025 I looked at the numbers and said, Yana, this is ridiculous.
Most people know what to do to make their Substack grow. Most people fail because they simply don’t do it. I was in that trap too.
The Notes that work let people know who you are. Your story, how you think, what you believe, what you’ve lived, even the thoughts you’d hesitate to say out loud. Those bring subscribers and trust at the same time. The Notes that only tell people what to do bring a fraction of that.
When I changed it, the uplift was immediate.
It was.
What kind of Substack Notes bring subscribers?
Most gurus will tell you that restacks are the signals to the algorithm that make a Note go viral.
My data says something else.
Notes that make a stranger visit your profile are the ones that deliver the most subscribers.
I’ve now analysed 4,553 of my own Notes. The full breakdown, with the 5 templates that bring subscribers without going viral, is here:
Three things from the live that people asked about.
Profile visits are the event. The thing that directly leads to a subscription in my data is a profile visit. Substack made that easy: people hover over your name, see your profile, click. So your job is to write something that makes a complete stranger want to know who this person is. Be a bit bolder. A bit more direct. I get the occasional ouch comment for it, and strangers want to know what gives me the right to talk like that.
Comments, more than restacks. People keep telling each other to restack everyone in their niche. I have no data proving that. What shows up in my analysis, every time, is comments. When you comment on someone else’s Note early, it helps them and it helps you. I had one comment on somebody else’s Note go viral, and it brought me subscribers on its own.
Restack your own posts with a snippet. The Notes that bring 1 or 2 subscribers each, consistently, are quotes from my posts. Write your posts with shareable lines in them, then restack the post as a Note with one or two sentences of your own on top. Never restack it bare. When you’re consistent, those 1s and 2s compound.
My two Notes that went properly viral and brought good subscribers were milestones, about Substack and about the business.
When the algorithm is slow, you show yourself manually. Read others, subscribe, recommend, comment, stay active in other people’s chats. When it doesn’t show your profile to enough new people, you do it yourself.
You don’t have five years
Lisa turns 66 in a few months. She said she told herself she does not have five years to figure this out. So she went and found someone who’d already made the mistakes.
She found me.
And my amazing AI minions.
This is what she shared on the chat in her excitement when she started growing:
Lisa grew more than 650 subscribers from one Note. And many more from other Notes. Her best tips: Be who you are. Talk as you talk. Don’t polish yourself and don’t hold yourself back. Simple words, as if you’re sitting in a cafe with a friend.
And use my GPT.
Three ways to get the Viral Notes Writer GPT and Claude Skill:
In the Unplugged Toolbox available for my paid members in the perks.
Get the Viral Notes Writer System course - a 3-hour training on how to use Notes, the GPT and the Claude skill, and also now to grow your first 1,000 subscribers in about 3 months.
Quick Q&A my AI minions wrote for me
How many Notes a day should I post on Substack?
Lisa posts 4 a day at 7am and schedules them. I post about 10, scheduled a week ahead. Pick a number you can keep up on the side of a job, then spend the saved time answering people in the app.
Do viral Notes bring subscribers?
Only when the Note and the newsletter are the same story. My 10,000-like Note about my mom brought about 200 subscribers because it had nothing to do with what I publish. Lisa’s brought almost 700 because her Substack is about the life in that Note.
What brings subscribers from Substack Notes?
Profile visits. In my data that’s the event that leads directly to a subscription. Comments on other people’s Notes, restacks of your own posts with a snippet, and milestone Notes get you there.
Does the Viral Notes Writer GPT sound like me?
It sounds like whatever you give it. Lisa’s context doc is almost 3 pages and she edits every Note until it’s hers. Ask it what it understood about you before you ask it for a single Note.
If you’re starting now (or restarting), do this
Three things to do if you’re just now starting on Substack:
Figure out the problem you solve.
Turn it into a product or a paid subscription.
Start talking about it in all of your content - Notes are big part of it.
And for the Notes part, do what Lisa did:
Give the GPT (or whatever you write with) your whole story and your real audience. Pages, not lines. Say it out loud if typing doesn’t get it out of you.
Ask it what it understood about you before you ask for Notes.
Edit every Note until it’s yours.
Post at the same time every day, schedule them, and answer people yourself.
Point every Note at the same thing your newsletter is about.
Feed last week’s data and this week’s feelings back in.
It will be slow. Most of the time it was slow for me. And then one day it isn’t, and everyone thinks it happened overnight.
Don’t give up at 190 subscribers. Lisa didn’t.
That’s how you make it work.
Yana
P.S. If you want the GPT Lisa used, it’s in the Unplugged Toolbox.
