This article is not about AI (feel free to skip this one if you’re here just for the AI stuff—more on that very soon)
This is not the post you expect.
If you expect me to give you a five-ingredient recipe to 10x your success on Substack, this isn’t it. If you expect me to give you a five-page essay on all the things I did to get here and the hard work I put into it, this isn’t it. If you expect me to sell you a course that you’ll pay to feel better but in the end will achieve nothing for you, this isn’t it.
This is pure honesty.
And pure honesty is always bittersweet.
Expect a bittersweet post.
Here are four things I did to reach the much-dreamt 1,000-paid-sub mark on Substack. Take any notes you want; this is free advice that, in my not-so-humble opinion, shouldn’t be free. (There’s an additional special section at the end.)
The first trick in the successful person’s toolkit is to be soon to things that matter.
Substack matters. So I came here soon (mid-2022 is not that soon, but earlier than most makes it soon enough). Great move, you might think, coming here right before the takeoff. Clairvoyant even.
The truth that no one knows is that it happened because Medium forced me to. It was not by choice but by chance.
I was happily writing there when in a sudden business move I didn’t quite understand, they removed the prestigious in-house publications that people could write for (like a Wired or a TechCrunch inside Medium). I had just managed to get into the technology pub, OneZero, when that happened.
Medium left me no option so I came here.
I could say instead that it was all part of a masterfully executed plan I came up with after realizing Substack was the best platform for writers but I’d be lying.
Substack later became more popular so I rode a wave I hadn’t predicted or hadn’t worked for. They rolled out great features, like recommendations, referrals, and general discoverability that pushed up most newsletters that were already here.
It was not talent or effort that put me in the right place at the right time. It was luck.
Some of you might think that’s a nightmare given the bad press generative AI gets among writers (not without reason). But it saved me. I tried many different topics on Medium until I realized that, among the reasonably attractive ones, I knew about AI the most. So I stuck with it.
Had I been totally free to choose, I’d have chosen differently (that’s why I tend to combine AI with cultural, philosophical, or human topics). I like AI, but I’d have made the blog thematically broader with a much subtler focus on technology overall.
My circumstances pushed me toward AI, it wasn’t a prediction.
Did I know AI was such a great topic that would keep getting attention over time? I knew the promises but I didn’t believe them as much as others did. I was lucky enough to stumble upon it early enough to have time to study it deeply. I was lucky to stick to it despite having fallen out of love early on, unconvinced by the progress I was seeing (the pre-transformer era).
I was lucky that instead of a winter we got a summer.
I could say that I saw ChatGPT coming after the success of GPT-3; that I saw the mainstream getting crazy about what the chatbot could do; that I saw the post-ChatGPT era of influencers; that I saw the tons of AI newsletters that would emerge; that, after seeing all of it in my imaginary crystal ball, I decided to start my own AI blog half a year before any of that happened.
But no. I’m no psychohistorian.
If The Algorithmic Bridge predates ChatGPT and most other Substack AI newsletters don’t, it is, you guessed it, the luck of the draw. This is related to the second point above. I was writing about AI in 2022 so I was well positioned to ride the ChatGPT wave, just like I rode the Substack wave (two waves that I should say I’m incredibly grateful for).
is an amazing guy. He’s also the amazing guy who writes the second-best paid technology newsletter, . He recommends The Algorithmic Bridge, which has gotten me, at the time of writing, 4,314 subscriptions out of 23,512 total. That’s 18%. (Hey Dylan, if I ever go to the Bay Area, the drinks are on me!)
My online networking isn’t that good. This isn’t me doing some cold emailing here and there. No. The truth is that when I came to Substack, I was collaborating with another amazing guy, Karl Freund, who, like Dylan, was involved with the semiconductor industry.
As luck would have it, I met Karl, who knew Dylan, who was, at the time, already a well-established writer here at Substack. “Well-established” is an understatement now that he’s climbed to be at the very top of the leaderboard.
Recommendations are a fantastic Substack feature in general—endless thanks to everyone who recommends my work—but getting recommended by the second-best paid newsletter in your category is just a winning lottery ticket.
Have you ever tried to predict the lottery? That’s how lucky I was.
There’s just something else I wanted to say.
