The Number I Never Wrote Down
Reach and audience turn out to be different mechanisms, and only one of them was ever being measured.
Fifty days went by this summer without a single new subscriber to this newsletter. They were the strongest fifty days of publishing it has had.
Eight posts went out in that window. Several of them reached well past my usual numbers, and one hit nearly three times my median. The impressions chart looked like progress. The subscriber count did not move at all, because the subscriber count was not something I was looking at.
It gets slightly worse when you look at what those eight posts were. Five of them were a deliberate series, planned in advance, published on consecutive days, working through a single framework one component at a time. That series was the most considered publishing I did all year. It was also, measured against every other week, the weakest stretch the channel has had, and it sits directly inside the fifty days when nobody joined the list. The most planned thing I made and the emptiest result in the record are the same object.
That gap is the whole subject of this piece. Not because the numbers are impressive in either direction, but because of what sat between them for four months: nothing. No instrument. No record. A field in a template that said pending and stayed that way through every post I published.
What happened in twelve days
Between April 19 and April 30, seven people subscribed to this newsletter. That is thirty-seven percent of everyone currently on the list, arriving inside twelve days. They came from three different directions — some through LinkedIn, some through Substack’s own surfaces, some by finding the address and typing it in.
Sitting in the middle of that window is April 20, the day a post of mine reached about 175,000 people. That is roughly eight hundred times what a normal post of mine reaches.
Some care is warranted about how much weight that number carries, because the honest answer is that it did not mean much to me at the time and means less now. A single spike tells you almost nothing. Whatever produced it might be a repeatable property of the writing, or might be an accident of who happened to reshare it in the first twenty minutes. Without consistency, a big number is an anecdote with good production values.
The twelve days are the part worth looking at, and they are worth looking at for an uncomfortable reason. More than a third of everything I have built arrived inside two weeks in the spring, and I did not know that until this month. Not because the information was hard to get. It took one export and about forty minutes. Because it did not occur to me to go and look.
The plan was never vague
It would be a tidier story if the strategy had been muddled. It wasn’t.
The intent was to build enough standing that a conference programme committee would see me as an obvious invitation rather than a risk. To publish consistently enough that the writing itself became the credential. To move readers off a social platform and onto an email list, so that the relationship with them belonged to me rather than to a ranking algorithm that can change its priorities on a Tuesday and take my distribution with it.
Own the audience instead of renting attention. That is not a bad plan. I would give the same advice to anyone building a practice, a consultancy, or a reputation in a narrow field. Every part of it still holds after everything below.
The problem was never the strategy. The problem was that the strategy contained a load-bearing assumption I never tested, and it took months of writing into the dark before it occurred to me to check.
The assumption was that LinkedIn was the top of that funnel.
The number that arrived free and the number that did not
Here is the part that is genuinely uncomfortable, and it has nothing to do with any individual result.
Impressions were tracked from my very first post. Every one of them, dated and recorded, going back months. I have a small pile of tooling built to pull those numbers, reconcile them against posts, and compute medians. When a post underperformed I knew about it. When one overperformed I knew about that too.
Subscriber conversions were never recorded once. The field exists in my publishing template. It sits directly beneath the impressions field. On every post I have ever published, including the one that reached a hundred and seventy-five thousand people, it reads pending.
Four months of careful data about reach. Four months of nothing whatsoever about the thing the reach was supposed to produce.
There is no story I can tell myself where that was a considered decision. What actually happened is that LinkedIn hands you impressions without being asked. They arrive. They are on the screen when you open the app, formatted and counted, requiring nothing from you. The conversion number required going somewhere else, exporting something, and deciding that the question was worth an afternoon.
One number was free. The other had a price, and the price was small, and I did not pay it for a third of a year.
That is the failure, and it is worth naming precisely, because it is a specific kind of mistake rather than a general one. It is not laziness and it is not innumeracy. It is measuring what is easy to measure and allowing that to quietly stand in for what matters. Anyone who has watched an organisation report on training completions instead of capability, or ticket throughput instead of resolved problems, has seen the institutional version. This was the personal version, run on myself, for four months, by someone who writes about operational discipline for a living.
Where the list actually came from
When I finally pulled the export, the shape of it was not the shape I had in my head.
Substack’s own network — its notes feature, its app, its recommendation surfaces — accounted for just under half of the list. Direct visits and shared links accounted for about a quarter. LinkedIn, the platform absorbing nearly all of my effort, accounted for sixteen percent. Three people.
The channel I had written off months ago as effectively dead, where my posts reliably draw single-digit views, produced almost as many subscribers as LinkedIn did, off a tiny fraction of the work.
The first read on that is obvious and wrong. The obvious read is that I found a hidden channel, that the notes feature is an underrated growth lever, and that the correct response is to go hard at it. That is the version of this essay I nearly wrote.
Then I checked what normal looks like, and normal is worse for me than I expected.
The benchmark that inverts the finding
For newsletters at an early stage, the platform’s own internal network typically drives somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of new subscribers. Substack has reported tens of millions of new subscriptions originating inside the platform in a single quarter. Writers documenting their own growth put notes at sixty to seventy percent of their total.
Against that, my forty-seven percent is not a discovery. It is below average.
This reverses the meaning of the whole table. I did not stumble onto a secret channel. I have been substantially under-invested in the channel that drives most early growth for publications like mine, while pouring effort into one that returns sixteen percent — and I could not have known either of those things, because I was not measuring the output that would have told me.
The finding is not “notes works.” The finding is that I had no idea which of my channels did what, and so I allocated four months of effort on vibes and habit. The specific misallocation is almost incidental. It could have gone the other way and the underlying error would be identical.
Volume and attention are not the same channel
One thing has to be said clearly, because the tidy version of this argument would be that LinkedIn is a waste of time, and that is false.
Sort the list by where each person came from, then ask a second question of every group: how many of them have ever opened an email. Substack’s network, the source of nearly half the list, answers with one person out of nine. Every smaller source answers better than that. The channel supplying the most subscribers supplies the least attentive ones, and it is not close.
That runs the opposite way round from how I had been thinking about all of it. More arrivals is not more audience. It is more arrivals.
So the error was never picking the wrong channel. The error was asking one channel to do another’s job — treating the biggest number as the best one, judging a small attentive source by a volume metric it was never going to produce, and concluding nothing at all about any of them because none were being scored against anything.
None of that is visible from inside impressions. It is only visible on the other side, where the subscriptions are, which is exactly where I was not looking.
There is a further layer underneath it that I have not resolved. Roughly two-thirds of the people on my list have never opened an email from me. Not opened and ignored — never opened, not once. By any ordinary definition they are subscribers, and by any useful definition they are not readers. Which raises a question I had never thought to ask: when I said I wanted to own an audience rather than rent one, what exactly did I think I was going to own?
A list of addresses is not a relationship. It is a permission slip, and the permission is only worth what gets done with it. Owning the channel solves the problem of a platform revoking my distribution. It does not solve the problem of a person deciding, quietly and permanently, that they are not going to open the thing. The first problem is structural and the second is editorial, and I had been treating a fix for the first as though it addressed both.
The obvious objection
Someone reading this is already composing the response, and they have a point.
Nineteen subscribers. Four months. A fifty-day gap that could easily be summer, or topic mix, or the ordinary lumpiness of small numbers. Seven subscribers from one source is not a channel strategy, it is a coin landing heads seven times. Every conclusion above is drawn from a sample that would embarrass a first-year statistics student.
All of that is fair, and I concede it completely. The composition might be noise. The specific percentages will likely look different at n=200, and some of what I have written here will turn out to have been pattern-matching on nothing.
It does not change what to do. This is the only data I have. You work with the evidence available rather than the evidence you would prefer to have later, and the alternative to acting on a rough instrument is not acting on a better one — it is continuing to act on nothing, which is precisely what the last four months were.
And one thing survives the objection intact, at any sample size. The argument here does not actually rest on which channel converts best. It rests on the blank field, and the blank field is not a sampling artefact. Zero measurements is zero measurements whether the true conversion rate is two percent or twenty. I can be wrong about every number in this piece and still be right that I should not have gone four months without collecting any.
What this costs, and what it doesn’t
The practical consequence is smaller than the emotional one, which is usually how this goes.
Practically: some months of effort went to the wrong place, a channel that likely deserved attention did not get it, and more than a third of my readers arrived in April without my understanding why for another three months. That is recoverable. The instrument exists now, and it is deliberately crude — for every post, where subscribers came from and how many of them ever opened anything. Two fields. No dashboard, no attribution model, nothing that requires a tool I have to maintain. The next quarter gets measured that way, the quarter after gets compared against it, and eventually there is enough to say something with a straight face.
The larger cost is that I spent that period believing I was building something and having no way to know. Writing more posts, hoping one of them would catch fire the way the April one did, treating output as though it were progress. Nothing did catch fire. That is not a tragedy, but it is four months of a feedback loop that was never connected at one end.
There is a version of this where the lesson is that you should measure everything, and I do not think that is right either. Most measurement is overhead that makes people feel diligent. The narrower lesson is the one worth keeping: find the single number that maps to the thing you actually want, and record it from the first day, even roughly, even badly. One honest number beats a dashboard.
Better tools have made my work so much better over the last while that I sometimes wonder whether it was ever that good to begin with. That one stays open.
What I would tell someone else
The advice I would give a colleague building the same thing is not complicated, and I did not follow any of it.
Decide what the audience is actually for before you start building one, in concrete terms, so that you know which number tells you whether it is working. Then write that number down every single time you publish, from the first post, before you have any reason to think it matters. It will be zero for a long time. Record the zeroes. The zeroes are what make the first non-zero legible.
Do not let the free metric become the real metric. Every platform hands you something for nothing, and the thing it hands you is optimised for keeping you on the platform, not for telling you whether you are getting what you came for. Impressions are a genuine number measuring something real. They are simply not the thing, and their availability is not evidence that they are.
And when something works — when a post lands or a reader appears or a door opens — resist the urge to immediately produce more of what you think caused it. That was my instinct in April, and it was wrong, and it cost the summer. The useful move was never to write more. It was to find out what had happened.
Things happen fast, then you spend months trying to understand why.
If this was useful, the most helpful thing you can do is forward it to one person building something similar. Replies are read.