How Substack and Its Tools Inspired Me – and Let Me Down

Who: Alex
What: The Open Trails, a newsletter on Substack
Format: content & media · English-language (US / Europe)
Started: March 2026 (ran through June 2026)
Audience: ~300 subscribers (at peak)
Payers: none (never monetized)
Promotion budget: $0
Income: no – it never earned
Status: closed
Channels: your own newsletter, text social media, collabs & shoutouts

What worked: Substack's own tools – long weekly essays, 3 to 4 Notes a day at first, and the platform's mutual recommendations.
The result: 300 subscribers in just under three months; 125 of them from one Note that went viral, and about 25% from recommendations.
The catch: all of it ran on one platform's internal tools – when the algorithm shifted in mid-May, growth stopped within a week.

I trained as a mathematician and programmer. I worked in that field for five years, then moved into business – though my grounding in IT kept paying off and came in handy more than once. I opened an interior design center and studio that has now been running for 35 years. Along the way I've started a number of new projects, some that worked and some that didn't. I've always enjoyed working with words and with communities, so on March 1, 2026, I launched a newsletter called The Open Trails. At first it was about long-distance hiking routes, the Camino, and how they help you deal with burnout and other struggles.

Later I changed the concept and started writing about your own thing – the work you take seriously: how you came to it, why this and not something else, how you grew it, what it changed in your life, the turns along the way, what worked and what didn't. I mean "your own thing" broadly: a business, a profession, a craft, a hobby that became a way of life. Commercial success isn't a selection criterion.

I set the newsletter up on Substack, and almost all of my promotion ran through Substack's own internal tools. My first moves were comments on other people's posts and Notes, often with a link back to my newsletter and sometimes an outright invitation to subscribe. Or I'd do something like this: comment and write that "this is interesting to me, so I subscribed" – and in return, some people would subscribe too. Writing to people comes fairly easily to me, so none of this took much time.

Long weekly posts in the newsletter – essays and stories of 1,200–1,500 words. On top of that, Notes: 3–4 a day at first, later 1–2. And I used mutual recommendations (a separate Substack tool), which brought in roughly 25% of my subscribers. The first month brought 50 subscribers, the second another 100. In all, over two months and three weeks I reached 300 – and 125 of those came from a single Note that went viral. And then everything stopped.

Reposting other people's notes and posts did nothing. As for the Recommendations tool, readers quickly learned to bypass it by hitting "skip." And the people who got subscribed automatically through it turned out to be weak subscribers – they'd stop opening the emails, or unsubscribe.

Outside platforms didn't help either – though that was mostly on me: I had all of 15 contacts on LinkedIn, and my 10,000-member Facebook group is Russian-speaking and about France, nowhere near the newsletter's topic. I didn't use any paid channels at all.

There was a small spike – 125 subscribers – from that one viral Note; otherwise growth was fairly steady but pretty slow, 2–5 a day. Then everything stopped in mid-May, in the third month, and as far as I could tell, nothing had led up to it. I was doing everything the way I always had, but growth had effectively halted.

Digging around online, I found I was far from the only one in this spot. Substack loves changing its algorithms – Notes can be a growth driver today, dead tomorrow, and maybe push you again the day after. As I mentioned, people had learned to skip past the recommendations, and the readers who got subscribed automatically were unreliable: later on they either didn't read the emails or unsubscribed.

For me, Notes went from being my main promotion tool to work I found repellent. It had simply become one more social network – and one at its worst: short texts of 20–150 words straining for virality or hype, saying nothing, written for the sole purpose of a like, a repost, some attention. I came to dislike writing them, and even reading other people's. That was the last straw, and I left Substack.

My reader is someone 30–60 years old, employed or running their own thing, educated and well-read. This is a person who senses their life may need to change – but doesn't yet know what a life truly their own would even look like. Not looking for a plan. Looking for reassurance that there's a way out, and that other people have already come through it.

From my own experience, I can say that Substack's internal tools are extremely volatile – you really can't lean on them, let alone plan your audience growth around them. The same may well be true of every other newsletter service and platform (see the Facebook example).

Right now I can't point to any single channel as a source of steady growth. There may still be some promise in Reddit and YouTube Shorts – I'm going to test that.

How I'd sum up the distribution situation: a failure. My working method now: test fast, and cut ruthlessly.

Found your own audience or customers without a serious ad budget?

Email Alex at [email protected] if you'd like to share yours – he'll send over a short questionnaire, and your answers become a story just like this one, free. Past respondents have picked up real, tracked signups and sales just from being featured.

Subscribe for more like this – full stories and digest roundups land in your inbox about once a week, each one showing how someone found their customers while spending next to nothing on ads.

– Alex, tinyfound