How to not grow your audience despite writing for a whole year

A year ago I started a newsletter because I had too many thoughts and nowhere to put them.

I’d just left a startup. I’d just moved to the Netherlands. I was building things with AI for the first time, biking badly through Amsterdam, baking cakes that collapsed in the middle. My head was full and my social circle was empty and I needed somewhere to process all of it.

So I started writing. About everything.

I wrote about vibe coding and spending 50 credits fixing what took 10 to build. I wrote about a Finnish conductor who kept playing encores past 11pm because he didn’t want the music to stop. I wrote about the Dutch tulip industry and how a flower that dies in five days runs a billion-dollar economy. I wrote about friendships fading, about Chinese astrology, about almost spending €500 printing a card game nobody asked for.

33 essays. One year. 7 subscribers.

1. Write for nobody

I enjoyed the act of writing and posting. That was the whole reward. I’d finish a piece, hit publish, share it once, and feel done. I never thought about who was on the other end. I wasn’t writing for an audience. I was writing for the relief of getting a thought out of my head.

I followed bigger creators who treated their newsletters like businesses. Content calendars, engagement strategies, growth loops, clear niches from day one. They replied to every comment, cross-promoted with other writers, optimized their headlines. I didn’t do any of that. Not because I didn’t know I should. Because the work of growing an audience felt like a different job from the work of writing, and I only wanted to do one.

My about page said nothing about who I was. My bio explained nothing about what a subscriber would get. I never asked anyone to subscribe. I just wrote and hoped the writing would be enough.

It wasn’t. Writing is not distribution. And a newsletter nobody reads isn’t a newsletter. It’s a journal with a subscribe button.

2. Have no positioning

But something else was wrong too. A stranger could land on my page, see a post about astrology next to a post about vibe coding next to a post about letting friendships fade, and have no idea what this newsletter was about. Because I didn’t know either.

I was writing five different newsletters under one name.

3. Mistake silence for integrity

People talk about “writing for yourself” like it’s noble. And in the beginning, it is. But after a year of publishing into silence, it no longer feels like integrity and starts feeling like talking to a wall. You can love writing and still need to know that someone on the other end is reading. Without that, the motivation doesn’t just dip but disappears. You start questioning whether any of it matters, whether you should keep going, whether the time would be better spent on literally anything else.

Every creative person I know has hit this exact point. The ones who quit aren’t less talented. They just ran out of evidence that anyone cared.

4. Hope that being yourself is enough

I didn’t want to be one of them. So instead of quitting, I went back through all 33 essays and asked a different question: is there actually something here that’s worth fighting for?

There was. But it wasn’t a thread. There was no hidden theme connecting everything. I wrote about whatever I was thinking about, and the essays came out sounding like me because they came from me. A conductor in Amsterdam, a tulip farm, a cake that wouldn’t bake, a startup I quit, a language I’m still learning to write in.

If you read all 33, you’d get a clear picture of who I am. The problem is, nobody reads 33 essays from a stranger. On a subscription platform, when you’re a nobody, you have to make it ultra clear what someone is signing up for. “It’s all connected because it comes from me” is not a reason to subscribe. Not yet. Not when nobody knows who you are.

So I’m choosing a lane. Not because the other writing was wrong, but because that’s how this works when you’re starting from zero. You earn the right to be expansive. You don’t start there.

5. I was staring at the wrong number

I thought the subscriber count was the story. It wasn’t.

Writing was changing my life in ways I couldn’t see yet.

It’s the reason I started building Accent. I kept writing about voice, about what gets lost when AI speaks for us, and eventually those essays stopped being just ideas. They became a product. More than 600 people signed up, all because I kept writing.

Writing also led me to help other founders think differently about content. I wasn’t trying to become a “content creator.” I was simply figuring it out in public, sharing what I learned, and those posts turned into conversations with people working through the same challenges.

For a long time, it felt like nobody was paying attention. But I kept showing up anyway.

Looking back, that might be the most valuable skill I built. Not writing itself, but the ability to keep creating without immediate validation.

And it wasn’t just Substack. I was writing on LinkedIn, Threads, and Red Note too. I was learning how each platform worked, experimenting with different formats, and trying to build a personal brand for the first time in my life. Every platform started at zero. So did I.

That’s how I ended up getting past something I never thought I would.

The anxiety of posting and seeing almost no engagement. The one negative comment that could ruin my entire day. The feeling that an algorithm was judging my work, and how easy it was to mistake that for people judging me.

I used to refresh the page hoping for another like.

Now I know that most online performance comes down to distribution, timing, and a little luck. It’s rarely a verdict on the quality of your work.

That lesson took a year of posting across four platforms, mostly into silence.

6. Admit you want readers

Finding that thread felt like progress. But it didn’t fix the real problem. The real problem was me.

I treated this newsletter like a creative exercise. Write when inspired, post when ready, never promote, never ask for anything. That felt honest, and safe. Because if I never really tried to grow it, I never had to face the possibility that nobody cared.

Year two is different. Not because I suddenly have a growth strategy. Because I’m done hiding behind “I’m just writing for myself.” I’m not. I want readers. I want this to reach people who feel the same tension as I do. And that means doing the parts I’ve been avoiding: telling people this exists, asking them to subscribe, showing up consistently, and writing every essay like someone on the other end is counting on it.

I’ve been a creator for many years, though the form keeps changing. Screenplays, then interfaces, then products, now AI-built tools. The instinct doesn’t. I’ve moved across three continents since 2017, from China to the US to the Netherlands. Each time, different city, different industry, different rules. The one constant was creating things.

I don’t believe creativity should be limited by the form. Film taught me story. Design taught me clarity. Building with AI taught me that when the tools remove every excuse, you’re left with the only question that ever mattered: do you actually have something to say?

7. Push against the current

I called this newsletter Off Current because I think we need a bit of resistance to move forward. AI pulls everything toward speed, efficiency, zero friction. But the best things I’ve ever made came from pushing against that current. Slowing down, staying uncomfortable, keeping the parts that are hard for a reason.

Including this part. The part where you admit you want people to read your work, and you’re willing to do the uncomfortable thing of asking for it.

I’m not someone who gets paid to share expertise online. I create to survive. I write in my second language, I use AI as assistance but worry about putting out slop, I want to stay true to myself but I also know that to be heard, I have to do more than just write and hope.

If that sounds like you, this newsletter is for you. I'm not someone who has it all figured out. But I'd rather figure it out in public than wait until I feel like I have permission. Writing is how you find your boundaries. It’s how you find your niche. It’s how you find your voice. The only way to get there is to keep posting, even when it’s not good enough, even when you’re not sure, even when nobody’s reading yet.

This is Off Current. Year two.