I am not a writer.
Okay, let me rephrase that…
Because I have written and published 5 books. I am a USA Today National Bestselling author… but first and foremost, I am a business growth strategist.
So you can imagine, I did not join Substack as a place to “share my slow morning thoughts when the pen meets the paper.”
I move fast. I change lives. I build 7 and 8-figure businesses.
This was the last place I wanted to be a couple of months ago. We had TOO MUCH going on in the business (I won’t bore you with the details, because if you go back and read through my past posts, I’ve told this story a few times before).
The reality is, Substack is a new word in most business owners’ vocabulary.
They probably see it a lot like how I did at first.
Another blog, another newsletter, another social media platform to keep up with.
“No thanks — I’m already working 60+ hours in my business trying to get a dang funnel working.”
They don’t realize, YET, that Substack is literally a GROWTH ENGINE (by the way, if you haven’t registered yet for the 30-day growth challenge I’m hosting starting on September 9th, I will literally walk you through ALL of this step by step).
I can’t blame them though, because I didn’t at first either. No one is thinking about this platform in that way.
But 7 months and 6-figures later, I am.
Because after 14 years in business I’ve learned a thing or two about what moves people from stranger to buyer.
They need to consume enough content to trust that you’re the right person to make their dream a reality.
They need to interact with you personally (especially in the online space, skepticism is at it’s PEAK). People buy from people they know.
And, they need LOWWW friction.
Substack checks all 3 of those boxes. How?
It collapses consumption time. On average, a buyer needs somewhere between 7-11 hours with you before they’ll make a real investment. Now do the math on a platform that wants your message in 60-second increments. If somebody is meeting you one reel at a time, how long does it take to accumulate eleven HOURS of trust? Months. Maybe years. Maybe never, because the algorithm stops showing them your content after they scroll by once.
On Substack, one person sits with one article for 5-10 minutes. They play your podcast in the car while they’re driving. They watch your 60-minute livestream. Substack collapses that trust cycle from years down to WEEKS.
The opportunities for personal interaction. This is the part that shocked me. Substack will tell you which of your subscribers have been opening and reading, ranked by engagement over the last thirty days. It will tell you where each one came from. It will tell you which note or which article brought them in and who exactly it brought. And then it lets you message any of them directly, inside the platform, without buying a tool or building an automation.
I have never had that on any other platform. Email subscribers only exist in the inbox. On Substack, you have DIRECT access to them.
It reduces friction on paid subsciptions. How many of you spend most of your money in the places where your card is already loaded and you don’t have to fill out a form? I know I do. Amazon. Revolve. One click and it’s on the way.
On Substack, a reader never has to the platform to buy from you. In fact, they don’t even have to have a Substack to consume your content. No landing page, no checkout form required. They read something that moves them, they hit upgrade, and they’re in with one click. And they can go from upgrading inside the platform straight into the first real offer in your ecosystem without ever even navigating away, if you set it up that way.
The free-subscriber-to-paid-subscriber-to-client pipeline is practically done for you, with all of its built-in tools and capabilities.
But A) most people don’t even know that exists and B) they assume the investment of time isn’t worth the return.
Substack didn’t blow up for us because we found some revolutionary hack. It blew up because we were already doing the work. We were just doing it in places that never paid us for it.
I will write a post that I pour my soul into on Instagram, and 6 people will like it. And it is a stab to the heart, because I know the thing I’m sharing is important, and that more people need it, but nobody is seeing it and nobody is hearing the message. They are too distracted with clickbait and self-proclaimed experts who have never actually built million dollar businesses, but know how to record a good hook and go viral.
The head of Instagram came out this year and literally said that if you want to grow there, you need to stop thinking about educating people and start thinking about entertaining them.
I wanted to lose my mind.
They want us to be little dancing monkeys performing on the platform so they can sell ads against our content.
So literally, the results we saw from Substack were a direct result of learning the platform and moving what we were ALREADY creating to a place where we could actually get seen and paid.
Same effort. Different address.
Instagram is monetized by holding your attention in three-second dopamine hits so they can sell ads against your face.
Substack has no paid advertising yet. Substack makes money when YOU make money.
When you start bringing in paid subscribers, you become their revenue. So they promote you. They put you in front of people who have never heard of you, for free, because they earn when you earn.
Roughly half of our new traffic over the last couple of weeks came from inside Substack itself. From Substack handing us readers.
You have spent years on platforms that made money when you posted more. This one makes money when you get paid.
Substack was never built for service-based business owners.
There is no historical infrastructure here for scaling sales. The people with the biggest platforms on this app came in as independent journalists, as authors building a community, as bloggers who wanted continuity in long form.
Many of them are brilliant, but almost none of them can teach you a model for turning a publication into a growth engine for a business, because that was never what they came here to build.
It wasn’t what I came here to build either.
So we built it. And then we tested it across three publications, two of which teach nothing about business, sales, or making money.
Below is what we learned. Three things decide whether your Substack becomes a growth engine or another content hamster wheel.
Here’s what’s happening right now:
A lot of very well-intentioned people are hearing the buzz, coming over here, starting a publication, and doing the work to show up. And there is 0 correlation between what they’re doing on Substack and the growth of their actual BUSINESS.
You know what that is? A distraction. A big, expensive, time-eating distraction.
Every time you layer new complexity into a business, you slow the business down, unless the new thing is reverse engineered to build up the primary thing.
You are either diluting or you are multiplying.
Your publication is not necesarily the business model. It is the front of the business. If your Substack doesn’t point at anything, you’ve built a very nice room with no door, no windows.
People come in. They check it out. They stay a while. Some of them love it. Then they leave, because there’s nowhere else to go.
But Substack has 3 built-in tiers, and each one has a job:
Free = discovery.
Paid = instant value.
Founding = the door to your ecosystem.
For us, all roads lead back to our core offers:
Virtual Business School.
Legacy Leaders.
1:1 consulting with my team and I.
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