How I pumped my new subscribers growth from 300 to 900 per month working just 15 minutes per day.
Stop posting and praying: this is your real growth engine
The old growth model
Let me be clear: if you’re relying on your long-form posts to grow your email list, you’re building a skyscraper on a sand dune.
That “publish and hope” model? It died in 2023. You need to ditch the idea that your latest 2,000-word essay will magically go viral and flood your inbox with subscribers.
Today, you’ll get crickets.
I currently gain between 20 and 50 new subscribers per day. Sometimes even 100. Here’s how my list is currently growing:
It takes me 15 minutes per day.
How?
The real growth engine
Posts are the conversion tool.
Substack Notes are the real growth engine.
But Yana, I still need to figure what works and what doesn't on Notes.
Right!
That’s why I built a custom GPT. I trained it with hundreds of viral Notes from writers with small audiences to make sure viralit doesn’t come from initial audience engagement.
And you don’t have to worry about formatting.
It generates you 4 types of Notes set to go viral:
educational
entertaining
inspirational
growth related
Then, simply edit (if you feel like it) and post.
How to make it sound like you?
All you need is to give it the following:
your topic for the Notes
your audience's aspirations and fears
Plus: any additional context you want to give, for example: a description of you and your topics.
That’s how you make sure you get more accurate texts from the AI.
The more context the better.
HINT: ask it to make the reader feel a specific emotion, for example anger or inspiration.
Watch that video where I talk to
who also uses my GPT and went viral many times, gaining hundreds of subscribers from scratch:But this didn’t happen overnight.
Takes consistency. For months. The moment you think to give up — those are the moments you need to continue.
And it works.
I currently post 3 to 10 Notes per day, takes me just 15 minutes. I did that since the beginning February and just now I start seeing growth.
Before that? 5 to 10 new subscribers per day.
After that? I had days with 100+ new subscribers per day. I’ve gained 884 new subscribers in the last 30 days and more than half of them are coming from Notes:
Of course, I use my custom GPT to squeeze the time to just 15 minutes. Without it, I’d need maybe an hour or more.
Bottom line
Every writer who wants to get paid needs an email list. Right now Substack is the best place to grow one.
Because of Notes.
There’s simply no other place that allows you to grow that many new subscribers FOR FREE!
You don’t necessarily have to build a paid newsletter. You can start by simply writing.
And it works awesome in parallel with platforms like Medium and social media.
All you need is to stay consistent.
Stay Unplugged!
Yana
Kickstart Your Substack Growth:
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Save Tons of Time! Use My Custom GPTs:
The Title Generator that gives me headlines that stop the scroll
The Notes Writer that writes Viral Notes, bringing me hundreds of subs
The Writer Pro that turns my Notes into >90% human drafts (here’s the free version).
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