So I had Dave Schoof (winner of one of my monthly challenges) on a spotlight recently.
This is really one of those conversations that I didn’t want to end - we actually went for over an hour and I think we could have easily gone for three.
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Dave has been building something on Substack that I think is a really good example of what the platform can actually be, if you approach it the right way.
Because Substack is not just a writing platform. It’s where you build your entire business.
For the people who don’t know Dave yet, he lives in Switzerland. He’s from the States originally, moved there 13 years ago for love, he’s married to a Swiss French coach, and he’s now a Swiss citizen as well.
His background is pretty interesting - he had a 20-year career in intelligence, then moved into organizational development, and then into coaching, and he’s been coaching for a really, really long time now. His Substack is called The Pivot.
Now, there’s something Dave said very early in our conversation: “I knew nothing coming in. I was treating it like a blog.”
And then later he said, if he had to start Substack all over again, the first thing he’d do differently is this. He said, “It’s not a publication platform. It is an ecosystem or a community or, um, a village.”
Most people who come to Substack, especially people who come from Medium or WordPress or Mailchimp or Kit, treat it like a writing platform.
They write their posts. They publish on schedule. They get a few comments. They wait for growth to happen. And then nothing really happens, you know, because they’re basically waiting for an audience to come and find them. And the whole mindset of “if I build it, they’ll come,” Dave said this himself, that won’t work on Substack. You have to go out.
What’s inside The Pivot
The Pivot is Dave’s framework, and the name itself is interesting.
He calls it like that because he’s not asking his clients to do a 180 shift, you know, to throw away everything they already know. He’s asking them to do what he calls a 45-degree shift - a small turn to make space for something new.
His clients are leaders, founders, coaches - anyone who feels like the success formulas that used to work for them, they just don’t work anymore. He has a very good phrase for this.
He calls it “changing the navigator, not getting new maps.”
Because that’s actually how I think about my Substack coaching as well. I’m not giving people a new map. I’m helping them become a different kind of navigator, you know, someone who can actually read the Substack terrain and move through it.
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On 26th of November Devon Canup and I will co-host a live workshop where he’ll share how he grew with 4k subscribers, 67 paid and 7k in ARR in just 30 days on Substack. Save the date here:
Now, inside The Pivot, Dave is building out quite a lot. For his annual and founding members, he has something he calls Pivot Kits. Pretty cool concept, so I want to share it with you.
A Pivot Kit is basically a bundle of a video, an audio, a PDF, and an AI companion.
All of them focused on one specific just-in-time problem that someone might have. For example, if you’re about to walk into a difficult meeting, there’s a kit for that. If you’re working through a dilemma and you don’t know how to approach it, there’s a kit for that too.
It’s tactical. It’s small. It’s not another course that sits on the shelf. People get it, use it in the moment, and move on.
And then from there, he has an online cohort for people who want to go deeper, and then one-on-one coaching with him for the people who want the full thing. And he’s now building a bigger program that combines an in-person retreat in Switzerland with a six to nine-month online component.
Substack is not just a newsletter. It’s is a business. The newsletter is one piece of it, but it’s really an entire ecosystem of ways people can work with you.
The ritual that stood out for me
Now, I want to tell you about one specific thing Dave is doing that I think is really, really smart, and I’m going to steal it (honestly).
Every Friday, he highlights four people he’s enjoying reading. He links their work. He invites them to drop whatever they want into the comments. And basically, you know, he’s publicly putting a spotlight on four of his favorite writers each week.
So think about what this does. For the four people he features, obviously it’s a huge gift, because he’s exposing them to his audience. For his readers, they get a curated list of people worth following.
For Dave himself, he’s building deeper relationships with the writers he admires, and he’s also telling his audience: “this is who I’m reading, this is my taste, this is my world.” It builds his taste. It builds his network. And it costs nothing to do.
That’s really important.
Because most people on Substack, they think the only way to grow is to pull people toward themselves.
Dave is doing the opposite.
He’s actively pushing people toward others. And of course, when you do that in a generous way, the others come back and do the same for you. Pretty much how the whole platform works, actually.
DMing followers, not just subscribers
Another thing Dave is testing right now that I thought was really interesting, and this one I want you to pay attention to.
He’s not just DMing new subscribers. He’s DMing new followers.
Now, for the people who don’t know the difference, a follower on Substack is someone who follows your profile but has not subscribed to your publication. They see your notes. They can read your posts. But they haven’t given you their email yet. Most creators ignore followers entirely. We only pay attention to subscribers.
Dave is reaching out to his followers with a warm message. Just a hello, like “great to see you here, I’m curious what brought you in, any time you want to ask a question, shout.” Basically a warm handshake. Nothing salesy.
And he said more people have responded than he expected. A couple of them have led to real conversations. Some of them probably became subscribers eventually.
I was never a fan of direct messaging, actually.
But Dave’s version of it is really good because it’s genuine, it’s not transactional, and it meets followers where they are, you know, in that space where they’re still curious but not quite ready to subscribe. That’s a window most of us ignore completely. And it’s a huge missed opportunity.
I’m starting to experiment with something similar in my own publication. Will share more in the future.
The AI thing Dave almost lost
So we also talked about AI, because I always ask about it. And Dave said something that I think every creator should hear, really.
He said he got seduced by AI early on. He went too far in. He started letting it do too much. And he noticed his voice getting flat. He noticed it making weird conclusions. He noticed, basically, that he was starting to disappear from his own writing.
His exact words were, “Never give up your sovereignty.”
I love this phrase, actually, so much. Because it names something that most creators don’t talk about. AI isn’t just a productivity tool, it’s a thing that will absorb your voice if you let it.
If you dump everything into it without pushing back, if you take what it gives you at face value, if you let it make the decisions, you basically lose your voice.
And then nobody has a reason to read you, because you’re writing the same thing as everyone else.
So what Dave does instead is actually really smart. He uses AI as an interviewer. Not as a writer. He does morning walk-and-talks with Claude. Voice exchange, you know, where he’s talking out loud and the AI is asking him questions back. He’s using it to extrovert his thinking, as he calls it, not to generate his thinking.
That’s a really big distinction.
Because when AI is interviewing you, your voice stays yours. When AI is writing for you, your voice becomes AI’s voice. Two completely different workflows, two completely different outcomes.
Watch on YouTube:
So that’s Dave
If you want to see what it looks like to build a real ecosystem on Substack, not just a newsletter, go subscribe to The Pivot. He’s one of those people who’s really showing what the platform can be when you don’t treat it as a writing platform.
And if you want to go deeper into his world, here are a few of the books he mentioned that have shaped his thinking (my affiliate links):
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which he said will always be with him
Anything by Isaac Asimov from his childhood
Conscious Business by Fred Kofman, which actually informs a lot of his coaching work
Also, Dave and I agreed to do a Substack live together soon. We’ll talk about navigating fast-changing terrain and what it actually takes to build a sustainable creator business on top of a 9-to-5.
I’ll share the date when we have it.
Yana
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