Hey, my friend!
A few weeks ago, our Customer Success manager at Teachable invited us to a Mastermind trip to Rome.
And to be honest, our first instinct was to politely decline.
I had a picture in my head of what a Mastermind like that would look like: Marketing bros in expensive sneakers. Founders one-upping each other on revenue numbers. People treating the room like a stage.
And frankly, that's not our world at Write • Build • Scale
But eventually, my husband and I still decided to go - mostly because the curiosity was louder than the hesitation, but also because we got invited to hold one of the few keynotes during the event to talk about how entrepreneurs can grow their email lists and businesses using Substack:
But what we found in that room genuinely changed how I think about the next decade of our business 😅
Here's why:
30 creators. $40M in collective revenue. And not a single person teaching marketing. Not a single person teaching business.
The experts in the room were teaching aviation, languages, coding, astrology, guitar, piano, photography, philosophy — real crafts, real expertise, real depth.
Some of them have hundreds of thousands of subscribers across platforms.
Yet, we barely talked about numbers because we all had more relevant goals in mind:
We talked about sustainable growth.
We talked about long-term leverage.
We talked about building things we're actually proud of, and scaling them without working ourselves to death.
Here's what I want you to hear:
The rooms you're hesitant to walk into are the rooms you really should be in.
Not because you'll be the smartest person there.
Not because everyone will have it figured out.
But because the conversations happening in those rooms quietly reshape what you think is possible.
We didn't come back home with new tactics or "growth hacks."
We came home with a clearer sense of what kind of business we're actually building and why.
So if you've been sitting on an invitation, a workshop, or a conversation that feels slightly out of your comfort zone, this is your nudge to go.
You might be surprised by what you walk back out with 👋
On that note — Rome reminded me how much shifts when you're actually in the room with people building the same way you want to build.
That's why we just opened 5 extra Founding Member spots inside the Substack Accelerator.
We've onboarded an incredible group of creators over the past two weeks, and since the Founding Member price is going up soon, we decided to make space for a few more creators before it does.
Founding Members get our full Bestseller Guarantee - that's how confident we are about the program.
→ Apply to join the Substack Accelerator
Worth Your Time This Week
→ How to Grow a Substack Publication — our full breakdown of what's actually working right now
→ How to Make Money on Substack — the monetization paths beyond paid subscriptions
→ I Grew My Substack to 50,000 Subscribers — 5 decisions that moved the needle (one of them maps directly to what Rome reminded me of: doing fewer things at a higher level)
Cheers to stepping into the rooms that change us,
Sinem