The TLDR version
If you take one thing from this spotlight with Nikki, take this:
Don’t disappear from Substack for a month. Even when life genuinely demands it, send your readers something short to hold the relationship. Silence breaks the contract. A Note doesn’t.
Build external accountability systems if you’re a procrastinator. A writing community, a challenge with a checklist, a scheduled block on your calendar. The creators who grow aren’t the most motivated. They’re the most systematized.
Make mistakes in public. Perfectionism in private looks like discipline. It’s not. It’s avoidance with better branding.
Slow consistency beats fast bursts. 100 posts in two years got Nikki a viral Note and a book deal. You don’t have to be prolific. You have to be present.
Start sooner than you think you should. The clarity you’re waiting for happens IN the work, not before it.
Watch the full spotlight above for the parts I couldn’t fit in here. Nikki goes deeper on her physical editing process (yes, actual scissors and tape), the difference between teaching macroeconomics to 20-year-olds vs. 40-year-old returning students, and the column she’s launching for paid subscribers called “It’s Not That Simple”, which is one of the best column-name ideas I’ve heard in months.
Subscribe to Nikki’s Substack:
If you’ve ever wanted to understand the economy without the jargon and the gatekeeping, she’s the writer to follow.
Nikki’s book “The Economy Always Gets Better” is now available for preorder:
For Canada: Amplify Publishing
Watch on YouTube:
I got a crazy spotlight with Nikki Finlay.
She has a PhD in economics. She taught macroeconomics for years until a fall in 2018 left her disabled. She’s the writer behind Economics for the Rest of Us, she had a Note go viral with 1,200 likes earlier this year, and her first book is hitting Amazon in late May.
She also disappeared from Substack for a month last year.
When I asked her on the live what the single biggest lesson was from her two years on the platform, she didn’t hesitate.
“Lesson learned. Do not disappear from Substack for a month.”
If you’re someone who’s been thinking “I’ll just take a few weeks off and come back when life calms down,” I want you to sit with this article before you do. Because Nikki’s story is what actually happens on the other side of that break, and the comeback is harder than the discipline.
The cost of going quiet
Let me give you the specifics, because vague warnings about “consistency” don’t actually teach anyone anything.
Toward the end of last year, Nikki posted three times in three months. Not three times a month. Three times total.
There was a real reason. Her husband’s health had been precarious for a couple of years. She’d had knee surgery. Burnout had stacked on top of burnout. She told me on the call:
“It just all came crashing down for a little while there.”
And here’s what she said about what it cost her on Substack:
“That really hurt things a lot.”
Three months of near-silence took her growth, her engagement, her algorithm signal, and the muscle memory of writing every week, and dialed all of it down at once. She came back in January and had to rebuild momentum from a colder start than she’d had a year earlier.
I want to be careful here, because I’m not going to tell you to keep posting through a health crisis. I’m not going to tell you to keep posting when your husband’s in the hospital. Some breaks are non-negotiable, and they should be.
What I AM going to tell you is the part most creators skip: prepare for the break BEFORE you need it.
Schedule posts ahead.
Build a small buffer.
Tell your readers something. Even one short Note saying “I’m taking three weeks, here’s why, see you on the 15th” preserves the relationship in a way that silence doesn’t.
Silence breaks the contract. A short note doesn’t.
How she came back
Nikki is a self-described procrastinator. Her words, on camera, twice. She told me:
“I am a world-class procrastinator.” - as if she was talking about me.
Most creator advice ignores this entirely. It assumes you’re disciplined, motivated, and structurally able to sit down at your desk every morning and produce.
A lot of us aren’t.
And the people who pretend they are usually crash the hardest, because they don’t build the systems that catch them when motivation fails or something comes up.
So here’s what Nikki actually does.
She joined a writing community that meets at 4pm Eastern. Her job, every weekday, is to show up. Cameras off. Mics off. Just the shared presence of other writers working at the same time. Some days they run marathons that go all day. She drops in. Writes. Drops out.
That’s it. That’s the whole system.
She also signed up for my Notes challenge specifically because the deadline forced her to write at the end of the week even when she didn’t feel like it. She told me:
“I think the challenge really woke up something in me.”
Both of these are doing the same job. They’re externalizing accountability. Because here’s the truth Nikki said out loud that most people won’t:
“Naturally, you wanna rest. You don’t wanna work. You don’t wanna push yourself to do hard things. Work is a bad. Leisure is good. You wanna avoid it as much as you can.”
Ok, this is the most honest thing I’ve heard a writer say on a spotlight in months. Most of us, left to our own devices, will pick the couch.
So if you’re trying to grow on Substack and you keep failing to show up, the problem isn’t your willpower. The problem is you haven’t engineered the conditions that make showing up the path of least resistance.
A writing community. A challenge with a checklist. A scheduled writing block on a calendar. A friend who gets a text when you publish. ANY external structure beats relying on your own motivation.
You know me, I lean on data. And the data is brutal on this point. The creators who grow consistently aren’t the most motivated. They’re the most systematized.
That’s why I run my challenges monthly.
“Make mistakes in public”
Halfway through the spotlight, Nikki dropped a line I’m stealing.
“Make mistakes in public.”
She said it in the context of being a perfectionist who finally let go. She still cuts and tapes pieces of paper to edit her book. She has a husband who’s her first editor. She has typos go out in published posts and her readers email her about it. She has, in her words, “posted with five typos and didn’t notice until later.”
And she keeps publishing.
Most new Substack writers spend a disproportionate amount of time on perfecting drafts that no one will ever see. They edit a post for three hours, decide it’s not ready, save it, and never publish it. Then they wonder why their growth is slow.
Nikki’s competing reality is this: she’s at her 100th post in two years. That’s roughly weekly, with the one-month break factored in. She’s not fast. She’s not prolific. Some posts have typos. Some get a thousand likes. Most don’t.
But the volume is steady enough that the algorithm and her readers know she exists. The one viral Note that hit 1,200 likes happened because she was posting Notes regularly. The book deal happened because she’d been writing in public consistently enough to attract a publisher.
Mistakes in public are the price of admission. Pay it and keep going.
Nikki’s book “The Economy Always Gets Better” is now available for preorder:
For Canada: Amplify Publishing
What she’d do differently
I asked Nikki the question I always ask in spotlights: if you could start Substack over, what would you change?
Her answer was simple:
“I would’ve started sooner.”
And honestly? Me too!
She’d been thinking about her book for over a decade. Working on it actively for five years. On Substack for two. And every step of that timeline, in retrospect, she wishes she’d compressed.
If you’re sitting on an idea right now, waiting until you have:
More credibility
A better-defined niche
A bigger email list to bring with you
A finished product to point to
More confidence on camera
A perfect bio
More clarity on your positioning
You’re going to look back in two years and wish you’d started two years ago.
The work of figuring those things out HAPPENS by writing in public, not before it.
Nikki’s positioning got clearer because of the rebrand from “Nikki’s Economic Stories” to “Economics for the Rest of Us” (a name her writing buddy Fleur Hall actually came up with). Her viral Note happened in the middle of writing the book, not after. The publisher contract came WHILE she was still figuring out what her Substack was, not before.
Start now. Refine in motion.
And remember to subscribe to Nikki’s Substack: Economics for the Rest of Us.
Yana
P.S. If Substack still feels overwhelming, check out this link.
👉 Start a discussion in the Unplugged community! Get help or simply introduce yourself and connect with like-minded members, and create meaningful connections.
Kickstart Your Substack Growth:
Get Your FREE High Converting Substack Blueprint
Get a FREE 10-Day Substack crash course to grow your first 1000 subscribers
Join my FREE Masterclass on how to start making consistent $5,000/month
Join the One and Only Substack Quest to build a high-converting Substack
Work with me to get your Substack up and growing
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 and my paid members hundreds of subs
The Writer Pro that turns my Notes into >90% human drafts (here’s the free version).
Or get the bundle with all the tools, now at a very special price ;)
Become an Affiliate:
Earn 30% from each sale. Apply below, I approve everyone.
Apply here for my AI tools & templates
Apply here for the SUBSTACK QUEST courses
Become a sponsor:
Reach thousands of engaged buyers.
More from me:
FREE Daily BiTES: A daily mail with just 3 bullets from the most helpful things I read about writing and making money online with AI
Unplugged: The place to be if you want to grow an AI-powered paid newsletter and create content that sells itself.
