Luke Cadell writes Holistic Healing, a health and wellness Substack. In February this year he had 24,000 subscribers and 258 paid. Today he has more than 1,000 paid, he’s regularly rising in the Health & Wellness Bestseller charts, and he quit his corporate job in July - just by running a faceless Substack in one of the most competitive categories - Health & Wellness. This is the full story of what we changed, what he refused to change, and how my Substack QUEST monetization model works.
It was somewhere around my 43th birthday - this August.
I just got the best birthday present EVER!
My orange Bestseller badge - 1,000 paid subscribers!!
I was on my way to celebrate it when I saw a DM in the chat from Luke.
He just got his orange badge too. Same day.
Coincidence?
Maybe.
But I don’t believe in coincidences.
Become My Next Case Study!
I’m starting the QUEST LIVEs next week with all VIPs - we get together on Zoom for 6 weeks to do exactly what we did with Luke: optimize Substack for a high conversion rate. Book your spot here:
How it all started
Luke first reached out to me in September 2025. He subscribed a few days earlier and wanted to know how to enable Apple Pay so his readers could upgrade more easily.
Back then he had just been on the platform for few months.
He took the standard paid membership of my Substack. Decided to work on his own on the QUEST model, and optimized his publication.
Results?
By October he had almost 7,000 subscribers and 110 paid.
By February this year he was at 20,000 subscribers, adding 4,000 to 5,000 free subscribers every month, with a around 30% open rate.
In health and wellness - one of the most difficult categories on Substack, and online in general. Today you can literally ask AI anything about these topics and you’ll get decent answers.
But politically correct answers - that was Luke’s angle, his MOAT as I call it in the QUEST - the reason why people should buy from him and not ask AI.
Luke doesn’t talk about making money or Substack, which most people believe are the two topics that grow fastest on this platform. They’re not. And Luke is one of the many proofs.
He is also not a celebrity in the US. He doesn’t even use his real name. And in his own words, “I’m just a normal guy, I’m not a medical professional.”
And none of that stopped his growth.
The numbers most people overlook
October 2025: 7,000 subscribers, 110 paid. That’s 1.6%.
February 2026: 20,000 subscribers, 250 paid. That’s 1.25%.
A few days later: 24,000 subscribers, 258 paid. That’s 1.08%.
His subscriber count tripled in four months and his conversion rate fell every single time we talked about it.
He saw that too.
And so he came to me with one simple question.
How do I convert free to paid better?
He had everything implemented. The publication was clean. The automation campaigns were working as per my model, following my methods in the QUEST Labs.
He told me this: “looking to make 5-8k a month, I will never need more than that. I’m not aiming for big numbers, I don’t want to chase money.”
Entirely feasible with that audience. He just wasn’t going to get there on the curve that was pointing down.
So he joined my VIP membership so that I could review his publication and give him personalized suggestions on how to optimize for conversion rate.
I went through his profile, his publication, his About page, his Start Here page, his subscription page, his paywalls, his headlines, his comments, his branding, and all 13 emails of his automation campaign.
The video review came out at 1 hour and 15 minutes - one of my longest.
Unlike many others, Luke started implementing. And he saw the results shortly after. Here’s where he’s standing now:
As you can see, Luke didn’t have some viral moment or luck. He just focused on finding a way to make this work for him.
And he did.
I was just the person who gave him few suggestions, but it was him who did all the work that needed to be done - that’s where most people fail.
Because everyone can find an excuse not to do the work. He didn’t.
Instead was open to hear the improvements and active on fixing them.
Here’s the 3 main reasons why his conversion was stuck which I found during the review.
Reason 1: nobody knew who he was
I went through everything looking for him. Who he is. Why he’s writing this. What he’s tried. Why anyone should take health advice from him instead of from the thousands of other people writing health advice or just simply ask AI.
I found it only once - in the middle of his drip campaign, where he told a personal story about his own experience.
That email was the best thing in his funnel.
Everywhere else? The content was good but the person was missing.
People don’t subscribe for the content.
People pay for a person.
So I told a writer who guards his identity to put more of himself into his publication. His real experiences. What he tried, what failed, why he went down this road at all. He’d spent 5 years experimenting on himself.
That’s the asset, and it was missing on his Substack.
It’s not comfortable. I also told him so on the recording. Most of it isn’t hard work, it’s just internal barriers.
But trust is the thing you build first. Every single time. And you build it in EVERY piece of content, not only on the About page, because new people arrive every day and most of them decide whether to buy within 30 to 90 days.
If you miss that window and it gets very hard to convert them later.
His most viral post was about fluoride in toothpaste. I read the comments. People were arguing about whether doctors should be recommending it at all.
That’s the voice. Controversial, direct, openly against standard advice. That’s his MOAT.
He had it in two posts and nowhere else. So I suggested to make it the core of everything.
Reason 2: he was selling access
Much like most Substackers, Luke was selling “access” and “things”:
Full access to all articles. Access to the chat. A guide with 30 herb explanations. A supplement blueprint that teaches you all about supplements.
Every one of those is specific. Every one of those is tangible. And not one of them tells you what changes in your life after you read it.
People buy outcomes.
Teaching is passive. Information used to be worth paying for, about 10 years ago. Now everyone asks AI.
What AI can’t touch is your experience. Your experiments, your failures, your reasons, your ideas, your opinions.
Your identity.
So the fix was to run every benefit, every call to action, every subscription description and every headline through the same filter: what’s the painful problem, what’s the solution, what’s the outcome after implementing it.
His profile description at the time said “daily protocols to elevate your health and body.” Protocols for what problem, with what result.
Today it reads: helping you optimize your energy, metabolism and longevity through optimized nutrition and daily holistic remedies. 5+ years of research and working 1:1 with clients.
Three named outcomes and a credibility line. Same guy, same anonymity, completely different promise.
His headlines had the same gap.
“Dynamic stretching is a game changer.” For what?
“My personal supplementation protocol.” For which problem?
There are different supplements for different problems, and a reader scanning an archive has 2 seconds to see themselves in the title.
Reason 3: three sales emails is not a sales sequence
Luke had built his drip campaign inside Substack. 10 education emails, then 3 sales emails.
Three!
My sequence runs 10 education emails, then 10 sales emails, then 5 more follow-ups for the people who clicked and didn’t buy.
The last 5 can’t be done on Substack but squeezing the 10 sales emails into 3 is just money on the table. At 60k subscribers that’s A LOT of money on the table.
So I suggested to build it out.
He did. He wrote a 20-email sales sequence using my custom GPT.
And then he deleted it.
On our call in July, Luke told me this:
“I had a 20 email sales sequence, and when I removed the sales sequence, I know I got a lot more. I’m 100% sure.”
He runs 5 or 6 now. One welcome email showing everything he offers, then five shorter ones about the problems and his story.
I build 25-email sequences. But for his audience, in his niche, on his platform, mine performed worse than his.
He was right. I was wrong for his case.
That’s the whole reason I ask people to test instead of listen blindly (including me).
My framework tells you what to try and in what order. It cannot tell you what your specific readers will do, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you dreams.
You have to look at the data and decide based on it. I can only suggest based on your data and that’s what we do in my coaching program, but Luke knew how to do it already.
Results
Shortly after the review Luke sent me this:
Then in August he did the thing that moved it most:
What actually made this work
Most people will read those numbers and decide the growth was the story.
But the growth was already happening in February.
He built that himself, before we ever worked 1:1 within the VIP membership. Probably the QUEST helped a bit, but it’s all on Luke.
What he couldn’t crack alone was turning that free subscribers into a business, and that gap is where almost everybody stays stuck. I’ve watched too many writers sit at 20k, 40k and even 100+k subscribers and earning less than a full time income, publishing consistently, writing amazingly well.
And when I say “you have to sell”, they push back.
Luke wasn’t that kind of person.
He knew what he had to do and he did it.
When it didn’t work as expected, he focused to make it work, he didn’t quit. And when he saw he needs a second pair of eyes he didn’t hesitate to get mine.
To make this work.
This was his entire focus.
And then he even did something else.
Luke argued with me.
He tested what I gave him, kept the parts that worked for his audience, and threw out the parts that didn’t, and then he told me which was which.
This is not a client ignoring their coach.
This is the only version of this relationship that ever works.
The people who fail with a framework are not the ones who disagree with it.
They’re the ones who buy it, read it, agree with all of it, and never run a single test.
Agreement is comfortable.
Testing costs you a month and sometimes tells you that you wasted it.
Luke already worked through the QUEST properly back when he had almost no subscribers and zero proof any of it would ever work.
He built a full 20-email sequence he later deleted.
He rewrote his voice from scratch.
He kept publishing into a niche where nobody was going to hand him a shortcut, without a real name, without a face, without a US audience, without a single post about how to make money on Substack.
Did he make it because he worked with me? No. I showed him what to test, and in what order.
Did he make it because he got lucky with the algorithm? No. He built it from scratch.
He made it because he did the work. On time. And he’s still doing it.
Look.
Everyone has excuses. Most of them are real reasons why to stay comfortable. Wrong country, wrong niche, no name, no face, no credentials, no time, no money to invest in a coach.
Luke probably had all of the above.
But he found the way to make this work for him.
My methods works
I extracted it from 20+ years of building and selling products on subscription in one of the largest telco groups in the world.
I applied it on my Substack and it worked.
I helped Luke apply it and it worked, including the part where he proved one piece of it wrong for him and I changed my advice.
I helped Ellen and it worked.
I’ve seen my paid members apply it and grow, some even beyond my size.
I’ve seen it work across AI, product development, finance, data science, leadership, marketing, mental health, food, medicine, podcasts, even physical products. And now holistic health, under a pen name.
The pattern holds.
But it only works for people who implement it. Who iterate when something doesn’t land. Who keep going past the point where most people stop.
Luke is one of those people. His last message to me was “hope we meet again when we get the purple badges.”
On it now 💪
This happens when you implement what I give you in the VIP.
Yana
P.S. I’m starting QUEST LIVEs next week with all VIPs for 6 weeks to do exactly the same: optimize Substack for a high conversion rate. If you want to do what Luke did, and become my next case study, the VIP is where it all starts.
