I quit Substack in 2021, and now I'm teaching how to grow on Substack.
Strange, I know.
But hear me out: Back in 2020, I was two years into writing online.
I’d been publishing on Medium, and I needed a simple place to collect email addresses. Substack did exactly that.
You wrote a post, you hit send, it landed in people’s inboxes, and that was the whole product.
No Notes.
No recommendations.
No app with a feed anyone could scroll through.
No way for a new reader to ever find you.
So as my audience grew, I outgrew the platform because I could only reach people who already knew I existed.
So I left.
Three years later, I came back to a completely different platform.
The old Substack let you publish. The new one distributes your work.
That is the whole difference, and it’s the part almost everyone still misses.
Notes gave the platform a feed, so people can find you without ever having heard your name.
Recommendations let other creators send readers your way.
Chat turned a formal email list into something closer to an actual conversation.
And the app quietly made all of it a place people open and scroll the way they open Instagram or YouTube.
Here’s what I want you to hear:
I wasn’t wrong to leave. The platform just wasn’t ready yet.
BUT I almost missed the comeback, because I’d already decided what Substack was, years earlier, based on a version of it that no longer exists.
That’s the trap.
You write something off once, file it under “not for me,” and never look again.
Meanwhile, it quietly becomes the thing you needed all along.
If you run a business, this matters more for you than it does for a beginner writer.
Substack’s early reputation was built for the writer trying to earn their first few hundred dollars a month.
So if you already have an offer, an audience, and years of marketing behind you, you were never who that reputation was for. But right now, the platform is built with your needs in mind.
And you’re early to the part of the platform that actually fits you.
While everyone is counting subscribers and chasing vanity metrics, you need a channel that sends qualified people toward your funnels and offer.
Worth Your Time This Week
If this got you rethinking what Substack can actually do for you, start here:
→ How to Get Paid Subscribers on Substack. The path from free readers to people who happily pay.
→ How an Italian teacher built a Bestselling Substack. Why a small, specific audience beats a big, vague one.
→ You Had Questions About Notes, We Answered Them. Straight answers to the Notes questions we hear most.
Here's to the things we write off too early,
Sinem
P.S. What’s something you wrote off years ago that you’re starting to look at again? Hit reply and let me know, I'm curious!