I got an interesting spotlight with Timi from Taste from the Past.
She won one of my monthly challenges, and the spotlight is how I get to know my challenge winners better and share with you what’s actually working for them on the platform.
Timi is a Hungarian mom. She runs a Substack called Taste from the Past, about her great-grandma who used baking to show love. She started Substack about a year ago with zero subscribers. She posted inconsistently for most of that time. And then she made one decision in April that changed everything.
She decided to post a Note every single day for the month.
By the end of April, she’d added 23 subscribers and 50 followers. Real numbers, not viral spikes. Small, you might think. But for her it’s huge. And the more important thing she gained wasn’t followers.
It was a discovery about her own readers.
The question that broke her assumptions
A few months ago, Timi came across a Hungarian chat where someone had posted a single question:
“What is the food that you cannot really taste anymore or cannot really eat anymore since someone passed away?”
Over 600 people answered.
Almost nobody named the food.
They named the person.
“My mom’s apple pie. The cookie my auntie made when I was sad.”
I paused on that for a second (I think it’s also visible in the video). It sent me back to my mom’s pie. My mom passed away years ago…Timi did make me emotional.
But she was onto something.
The chat host asked specifically about taste and food. And 600 people answered with the names of people they’d lost.
One commenter was a man in his 60s. He said his strongest food memory was a gingerbread cookie his grandma made. She died when he was three years old.
A memory from age three, carried for sixty years, anchored to a person and not to a flavor.
Timi was a food creator at this point. Or thought she was. Her Substack was about recipes from her great-grandma. The format was heritage baking. Everything in her positioning said food.
But the data in that chat said something else entirely.
She tested it on her own readers
This is where it gets interesting.
Timi didn’t take the Hungarian chat as a one-off and move on. She did what any decent creator should do when they notice a pattern outside their own work - she tested it inside her own work.
She asked her audience the same question.
Same pattern. Her readers also responded with names. Memories. Moments. Almost no one named the food itself.
“They came up with some memory,” she told me. “Sometimes they commented, ‘Oh, I never really thought about this,’ or, ‘I never really put it together.’”
That last line tells you something almost no Substack analytics dashboard will ever tell you: your readers often don’t know what they’re subscribing for until you ask them in a way that surfaces it.
Timi thought she had a food blog. Her readers were showing her she had something else. A memory archive. A grief space. A place where people came to feel less alone about what they’d lost.
The food was just the memory trigger.
The repositioning she didn’t realize she was making
Most people, when they realize their audience is engaging with something other than their stated topic, do one of two things.
They ignore the signal and keep writing their original concept.
Or they pivot hard and abandon their original concept.
Timi did neither. She did the smart thing, which is harder than either of the obvious moves.
She kept the food at the center and let the emotional layer come forward.
“They’re more likely to focus on the feelings,” she said. “The feelings that you get from the smell, from the taste, from the memory. So I try not to push too much content about the recipes.”
That’s a tiny sentence. But what it describes is one of the hardest moves in a writer’s positioning. Letting your readers tell you what your real product is.
Most positioning advice tells you to start with clarity. Pick a niche. Write a sentence about who you are. Commit to consistency.
What that advice doesn’t tell you is that your first guess at your niche is often incomplete, and the deeper version of it only emerges through contact with real readers.
You write what you THINK you write. They engage with what they ACTUALLY want. The gap between those two is where your real positioning lives.
Timi found her gap in one month of consistent posting and one question asked twice.
If you’re with me for a while, you’ll know I love to make data-driven decisions. And the truth about Substack positioning is that the data was always there. Most creators just don’t ask the right questions to surface it.
The system she built to keep noticing
Here’s the part of the conversation I was not expecting.
When I asked Timi for a productivity tip, she said something I honestly didn’t expect.
She built a custom Claude skill for engagement analysis.
She fed it her engagement data. The comments. The Notes that performed. The rates. The patterns. Then she asked it to help her see the pattenrs behind the numbers.
“You sometimes just see the numbers, but you don’t really see behind of the numbers, especially as a beginner.”
Translation. Raw analytics tell you what happened. Pattern analysis tells you why. Most creators stop at the first. Timi pushed past it.
If you’re posting consistently on Substack and you’ve never sat down to analyze your own engagement patterns at this level of depth, you’re leaving the most useful information your readers will ever give you on the table.
Your audience tells you who they are in their comments. Their likes are noise. Their shares are softer signal. But their comments are a real signal.
The question is whether you’re reading them.
The TLDR version
If you take one thing from this spotlight with Timi, take this.
Your readers aren’t here for what you think they’re here for. Or at least, the surface topic you write about is rarely the deepest reason they subscribed.
Ask them a question that gets at the emotional or relational layer underneath your stated niche. Pay attention to what they actually name. The gap between what you write about and what they reach for in their answers is where your real positioning lives.
Don’t pivot hard when you find this. Don’t abandon your original concept. Let the layer your readers care about come forward inside the topic you’ve already built.
Use AI for engagement analysis, not just content generation. Your comments are signal. The patterns inside them tell you who your audience actually is, and most creators ignore this data entirely.
Consistency is the precondition for all of it. Timi posted daily for one month and the patterns finally became visible. Without the volume of engagement, there’s nothing to analyze.
Watch the full spotlight session above for the parts I couldn’t fit in here. Timi goes deeper on her great-grandma’s baking technique (the dough as a living creature, no measurements, only feel), how she’s introducing baking to her five-year-old daughter without narrating it, and her preparation for her second daughter’s arrival in less than three weeks.
Go subscribe to Timi’s Taste from the Past. It’s one of the most quietly beautiful publications I’ve come across in this niche, and her audience is doing some of the most emotionally honest commenting I see anywhere on the platform.
Yana
P.S. If you want to get your own spotlight with me, join and win one of my challenges (paid members only). You can watch all Spotlights here.
P.P.S. Timi shared three books that shaped her. Two are available in English. One is Hungarian only (Amazon affiliate links below).
Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (a novel about a man on his honeymoon in Florence, searching for something he can’t quite name; Timi found it in the UK and connected it to her own search for taste, memory, and place)
The Door by Magda Szabo (written in 1987, about a modern writer and an older housekeeper who keeps her past, her traumas, and her memories behind a literal closed door; Timi saw her great-grandma in this book)
Limara’s Bakery (Hungarian title: Limara Péksége: Házi pékek alapkönyve) (a Hungarian-only cookbook focused on grandma-style pastries; Timi credits it with helping her recreate some of her great-grandma’s recipes and understand the techniques behind them)
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