Reaching 6,000 subscribers and taking the week off

I’m taking the week off to spend some time with my family.

The last time I wrote a newsletter saying I was taking a week off was two years ago. I had just celebrated reaching 1,000 subscribers on Getting Better in less than 80 days1.

Two years have passed. And somehow, that feels like a good excuse to pause and look back at what happened during those two years on Substack.

There’s been a lot. More subscribers and more readers. A newsletter that became a much bigger part of my life than I initially expected.

So, while I’m taking a few days off, I thought I’d look back on what has been.

It’ll be useful for me to write it. And hopefully, there’ll be something useful in it for you too.

Oh yes, I also reached 6,000 subscribers. But if you want to know how I got there, you’ll have to read the rest of this newsletter.

2024 was my sabbatical year: my daughter was born in April, and around the same time, I published my first newsletter post on Substack. This one:

Before launching the newsletter, I had built a small following on LinkedIn by sharing decision-making polls (yes, LinkedIn polls!) and writing about cognitive biases, inspired by the work of Kahneman and Tversky.

Around 30 people would engage with my content every time I posted. Those were the people who subscribed first when I launched Getting Better. The so-called “true fans”.

When I joined this platform in 2024, this was a different place. There was no Gary Vaynerchuk, no charli xcx, no Dolly Parton and no Pamela Anderson. And if you’re on a platform before Gary Vaynerchuk, well, that means you’re probably early.

The platform at that time was still figuring itself out, even though the ambition was already pretty clear: build a new economic engine for culture.

I grew a lot through Notes back then, and interestingly, I still do.

77% of Getting Better subscribers in the last 90 days came from Substack. From the table below you could also see subscribers coming from Recommendations (i.e. from newsletters recommending Getting Better) being a good portion of new subscribers.

But the early days had a different feel.

The algorithm was unpredictable in ways that could work spectacularly in your favor2. The Substack team was constantly experimenting, and the recommendation engine could push you upward, seemingly at random.

But looking back while I was writing this piece, what surprises me most is how little has actually changed.

A note could still go crazy viral. The recommendation engine still finds you sometimes, and one of your newsletters could get tens of thousands of views, out of nowhere.

So at the end of 2024, I had 3,037 subscribers. For someone writing once a week, with no pre-existing audience, and who had stopped publishing consistently on LinkedIn in the meantime, I’d say that was a pretty damn good result.

After 12 months of consistent writing and publishing (from April 2024 to April 2025) I had reached a bit more than 4,000 subscribers.

By the time I reached this round milestone, my sabbatical had been over for a month, and I had already started a new chapter as the Chief Operating Officer in an Italian food-tech scale-up.

So, moving to 2025.

As I was saying, by the end of March 2025, I had started a new job and realized that the weekly cadence that had accompanied me throughout my first year of writing was too much.

So I switched to a bi-weekly cadence. And since April 2025, I’ve managed to publish every two weeks without missing a single issue.

What happened to my growth?

It slowed down, of course. Like any social platform, Substack craves our time and attention. That’s the currency we pay to exist (and grow) here.

I was now publishing half as much, and with a new job pulling most of my attention, I was also less present on Substack: less active on Notes, less time reading and commenting on other people's work.

The numbers reflect that: in my first 12 months on Substack, I grew by 4,000 subscribers (from April 2024 to April 2025). In the following 12 months (April 2025 to April 2026), I grew by only 1,000.

Seeing that curve flatten did not discourage me, but it surely could have.

I don't write to watch a number go up. I write because I want to write the things I write. That's the reward: the writing itself. If new subscribers come along, I'm glad. But that's not what gets me going.

Fun story: one week before starting the new job, two companies/people approached me and offered to pay me to promote their products here on my newsletter. Who knows what would have happened if I’d accepted then.

As you saw from the graph above, subscribers’ growth for most 2025, and for the first quarter of 2026 was flat, but then at the end of March 2026 this post blew up. It was read 50,000+ times, reshared almost 1,000 times, and it brought in more than 800 new subscribers.

Then in May 2026, I wrote a note about that same post, and the note also blew up, as a confirmation, if needed, that you should always promote your work.

You never really know which piece will take off, or when.

So, almost without noticing, I grew to 6,000 subscribers.

Getting Better has become a habit for me. I used to write it every week. Now I write it every two weeks. The cadence has changed, and my life has certainly changed. But the newsletter kept going. This has always been the plan.

But this newsletter has also become a habit for thousands of other people too: readers from 132 different countries. That is still, by far, the craziest stat about this newsletter to me.

This time, I don’t want to share any big learnings. I’ve already done that in the post I wrote after my first year on Substack. Instead, I just want to leave you with a reminder: you rarely notice progress while it’s happening.

You keep doing the work. Sometimes you change the pace, sometimes the numbers barely move (if you’re interested in them, you notice quickly). But you never quit. And then, one day, you look back and realize you’ve reached a milestone that, a few years earlier, would have seemed impossible.

That’s why, every now and then, looking back is worth it.

To the next 6,000.

See you on Sundays 🗓️
Thanks,
Giacomo