Write2Sell: How Long Till A Free Subscriber Upgrades to Paid?

And how long till a paid subscriber decides to cancel? And what does this mean to you?

I don’t think that kind of analysis was ever made by anyone on Substack.

It’s something what we do every month in my 9-5 for the paid subscribers. It’s the core of any subscription business. If these KPIs flop, your business is dying.

So I had to do this for my Substack.

Because here’s the thing:

Big books of Marketing will tell you that a free subscriber needs up to 3 months or up to 20 interactions with your content before they buy from you.

Because they need to get to know you, like and trust you first, where “trust” is the key word here.

But, as usual, I needed to verify this for my Substack.

I tend to avoid working with assumptions or theory.

If there’s one thing I want you to remember from me, this is it:

The answers to all of your questions are in your data. You just have to look.

So I look.

I exported all of my subscribers from Substack and started playing in Excel (you know I’m a nerd). No ChatGPT this time, I can do this by myself. And I prefer to, I just simply love the process, and also I can get a high-quality analysis faster (it will take me too much time to prompt the AI properly).

Some things you need to do by yourself.

So here’s the list of things I deep dived:

1. How many days on average till a free subscriber decides to upgrade to paid?

2. How many days on average till a paid subscriber decides to cancel?

3. What are the most common reasons to cancel?

4. And what to track to take action early?

5. What actions to take?

I needed this data so that I can build my automations properly - you’ll have all this in the QUEST LABS.

Now let’s deep dive…

1. How many days on average till a free subscriber upgrades to paid?

I extracted the numbers right after I made 12 months on Substack. I wanted to have a full 12-month period so that I can also measure churn properly.

You can extract your stats by going to your Dashboard → Subscribers

It gives you a messy file which you can easily open in Excel on your PC. From there, I played with dates and ranges so that I could come up with a table like this: