Last Sunday, I crossed the finish line of my first marathon.
Less than 2 kilometers before the finish, my husband and two friends jumped onto the course in the pouring rain and ran the last stretch with me.
I've been thinking about that moment all week because it's exactly the shift we've been making inside our business for the past few years.
Every program we run comes with community and live coaching built in, and here's why:
You can technically build your audience, business, and Substack publication on your own.
You can read every guide, watch videos, follow frameworks, and figure it out eventually.
The information is out there.
But "eventually" is expensive.
When you're building in isolation, you don't know what you don't know.
You can't see your own blind spots.
You spend three months refining the wrong positioning.
Six months writing for the wrong reader.
A year on a paid tier that was never going to sell.
You're smart. You're working hard. But there's nobody in the room with you to say, "Wait, look at this part again. You might be missing something."
The people around you change the timeline.
Mentors who've already walked the path.
Peers who give you honest feedback instead of polite nods.
A community that catches the thing you can't see yet, and tells you before you spend another month on it.
That's not a nice-to-have. It's the whole difference between figuring things out in two years and figuring it out in two months.
We just wrapped our largest Substack System launch this week with a record number of new creators joining the program.
The beauty of communities like ours is that every member brings value to others, regardless of their background or experiences.
You can learn something from anyone if you're open-minded. In most cases, we just don't have access to spaces to actually connect and communicate.
The right people next to you don't just make the journey better. They also make it shorter.
That's our whole philosophy at Write • Build • Scale.
Worth Your Time This Week
→ 3 Substack Tweaks That Will Double Your Growth — my newest YouTube video walks through the three changes that have the biggest impact on turning visitors into subscribers.
→ We've Done 100 Substack Lives — Here's What We Learned — the patterns, mistakes, and surprises from running 100 live sessions on Substack.
→ This Stops 99% of Substackers from Growing — the one bottleneck almost every creator hits, and what to do instead.
Cheers to having the right support system,
Sinem