Substack really isn’t a meritocracy. Half of the people telling you to put in work and show up daily never did that themselves. Once you read this article, you’ll start noticing these techniques everywhere.
1. Free paid subscriptions.
Creators can gift you paid subscriptions, at no cost, without your consent. When you want to cancel your subscription, you can’t do so from their profile—you also can’t block them since you have a “paid” or custom subscription ongoing. Even when you navigate to their website to cancel your paid subscription, you’re still a free subscriber after you do so. It’s unethical, but allows people with no morals to increase subscriber retention. Check your subscriptions list on your profile after reading this, you might be surprised at how many of your subscriptions are classified as paid. (I had 3)
2. Email list imports.
Substack gives you autonomy (somewhat) over your audience, so you can import emails or email lists that count as subscribers. If you have email lists from marketing or can simply find them unethically, importing hundreds or even thousands of subscribers is a great way to inflate subscriber counts. Many Substack “growth-gurus” do this to start monetizing products telling you how to get 10k subscribers, even when their audience is completely inorganic. Look for actual engagement and like rates to determine whether or not a Substacker is successful; subscribers mean nothing because of this feature.
3. Free stuff? (mouse trap)
Don’t have an email list? Just use this tip.
Creators giving you free stuff like ‘resource libraries’ or ‘cheat sheets’ do, in fact, make you the product. Gumroad needs you to enter an email to send the free product too—guess who also can see it? The creator who enticed you with free growth hacks can now add you to their email list and/or bombard you with out-of-Substack promotional emails for their other products. The worst part is that you’re much less likely to unsubscribe from a creator who’s offering even more free stuff within email ads you never signed up for.
4. Gifting by email. (synergizes 1 and 2)
What if you have 10,000 email addresses laying around, but you’re afraid that people will cancel their subscriptions once you import them, preventing you from importing them in again? Just gift them paid subscriptions! If none of your 10,000 email users have Substack accounts (they probably won’t), this is even better for you. They likely won’t know or bother navigating to your page to cancel their paid subscription—even if they do so they might forget to cancel their free subscription.
5. Founding member scams.
Founding Member subscriptions usually cost hundreds of dollars annually—with only a few Founding Members you can make $10k a year on Substack. You can get hundreds of people to subscribe to your founding member tier, remove that tier, and lock them into tiers that they can’t downgrade from. Only new subscribers aren’t allowed to join a removed tier, existing paid subscribers auto-renew. The only way for them to fix this is to contact Substack support.
(this is literal scamming)
6. Not-so-limited time offers.
Substack lets creators run timed discount offers with countdown timers. Creators can simply run the same ‘limited-time’ offer perpetually, mirroring the internet guru tactic of always putting 90% discounts on your courses and pretending they’re limited-time. I don’t even think you’ll get banned for doing this, it’s just a disingenuous way of monetizing tiers or courses. Make sure to wait a day before buying into hype.
7. Free/paid swapping.
You can change a post’s access level after publishing. If a post starts going viral, it gets indexed by search engines and promoted massively in-app—the creator can paywall it at any time. This means that anyone who shared the originally free article is basically referring people to a paid subscription, and all the traffic is going to a paid post. Anyone who already read the post likely won’t find out.
8. Non-consensual “rising” inflation.
Remember how Substack allows you to gift subscriptions to any email address in your subscriber list? Anyone can gift all of their free subscribers unlimited paid subscriptions without their consent, making them all considered “paid” subscribers. If you do this, you can get on the rising charts in your category inorganically—they happen to be based on paid subscriber growth. Even publications with hundreds of subscribers can get onto rising leaderboards this way. You can screenshot your thousands of paid subscribers and act like you actually make money from Substack this way!
9. Annual revenue fraud!
If you get subscribers to switch from a $5/month subscription to a $50/year subscription, their contributing annual revenue jumps by the full $50 instantly even though they haven’t paid anything yet as the annual subscription hasn’t triggered. A creator can use that to forge ARR growth, advertising it on notes and using it to sell monetization courses using this tactic.
10. Publication section scam.
Anyone can sell an expensive Founding Member or ‘Lifetime’ tier that promises all future paid content. Once a creator racks in thousands of dollars from people signing up, they can wait a few months and divide their publication into different sections, a feature native to Substack. With several different sections serving as ‘sub-publications’, they can paywall and move important content there, as it’s no longer part of the original subscription. Loyal supporters now have to pay twice to access the same content.
That’s 10 out of many growth tactics leveraged by creators who benefit from not telling you them. Even the most genuine and organic-looking Substackers will sometimes use these. Remember kids, don’t trust everything you see on notes.
A lot of creators try to conceal their usage of these techniques. Which of these have you seen?
1 and 4 synergise a little too well. Most growth substackers probably took in marketing lists and had free stuff along with paid digital products to create brand value, taking people's email addresses along with them. If you actually care about authenticity and quality, DO NOT USE THESE TIPS. Call out people who do.
Wow. I’m definitely the new kid on the block here, and the view is sobering. It feels like we’ve traded the soul of writing for the mechanics of Substack capitalism. Where did the simple joy of sharing one's thoughts go? It’s a shame when the craze for the dollar replaces the simple joy's of writing.