I bought a Notes tool and it woke me up

There are moments in life that wake you up when you didn’t know you were sleeping. Like when our kids move out, that first day waking up and not seeing their face in the morning, not saying good morning sweetheart. Having to phone to say that.

The day my dad fell and didn’t get up. Chasing the ambulance praying they’d work some kind of magic so I could hear his voice saying I love you one more time.

It’s always time, isn’t it? Time that’s gone. Time we can’t get back.

And sometimes, usually when we least expect it, wondering if we appreciated enough. Treasured enough. Thinking back to the days my child sat in the shopping cart and I could just kiss her head anytime I wanted. Did I appreciate that enough to make up for never having it again? Did I treasure the days as much as I should have?

But let me tell you where all this started, okay? Because life works in strange ways.

I bought a tool to analyze my Notes.

It said we can look at the stats of all our Notes and see what’s working, do more of that. It made sense. Plus, the tool was only $9.99 and it was sold by a woman and I do love me a women coder. I was one, for years. Built one of the first shopping carts on the internet back in 1995 before there was Shopify or PayPal, even.

But my love of beautiful craft won out. I know there’s beauty in clean code, but I leaned away from coding. Went into design and wrote more, more, more.

So, I bought the tool because everyone says the same thing. Notes! Note, notes and more Notes. That’s how you grow here. That’s how you get visible here.

And I get it. When I started on Substack, everywhere you looked, you saw posts. Go to the homepage, it was posts. Go to the explore categories, it was posts. Then Notes started creeping in. First as a page. Then sprinkled among the posts. And now?

Everywhere you look, it’s all Notes. Like turtles all the way down, but Notes

So I bought the tool. And I did learn. Just not what I was expecting.

So, the tool…. the sales page for the tool shows it all pretty. Like this:

I saw that and I was all — ooh, that’s fun. For $10? Sure, I’ll try that.

Incidentally, that’s not an affiliate link. She’s only charging $9.99, I don’t need a piece of that. That’s not my point. Showing you what I learned is the point. And if you think this post is about using Notes better, boy—do I have a surprise for you.

After I bought it, I had a laugh. It is not pretty like the screencap. It’s a CSV file, which means it hit every branch on the ugly tree. All the way down. It looks like this:

But! You can sort the columns, and see what brought subscribers, what got comments, what got clicks, how many impressions each one got. Stuff like that.

Some of it punched me in the face. Like, how does a Note get 19,000 impressions, sixty two comments and not a single click? Not a single person said hey, who’s this and clicked to read more? But I get it. We scroll Notes like there’s buried treasure at the bottom, except there ain’t no bottom, but we sure don’t stop looking, lmao.

It also allows you to make a screengrab of the overall results. Mine wasn’t all nature themes with vines like the screencap on the sales page. It was pink. See?

Honestly, I’m a bit jealous. I wish I had a nature-y green screencap to share, lol. I could have dolled it up in photoshop, but I didn’t think of it until just now.

First thought — What the heck, one comment brought me 132 subscribers?

Here’s what I like about it. Nothing is saved on a server anywhere. The creator has no access to your information. It all happens on your computer. Like — what a joy is that! In a world where everyone wants your information, she didn’t. Nope. Your eyes only.

The program was created by Yuvika Iyer, and here’s her gumroad page in case you’re interested. She wrote a post about how much the tool she made helped her. So I thought hey, who knows, maybe I’ll learn something helpful too.

Here’s what hit me between the eyes first.

686 Notes so far this year. My first thought was holy crap, girl, get a life. Not even kidding. I saw that number and thought man, this is what you’re doing with your one wild and precious life??? Get off Notes, this is becoming a problem.

Then I sorted by type and realized 586 are me re-stacking other writers.

And you know what? That felt good. It did.

Because I don’t restack my own posts. So apparently most of what I’m doing here is sharing posts by other writers. Y’all know how much I love words and writing, cause I talk about it constantly, so to realize the majority of what I’ve been using Notes for is sharing good writing I found — that actually felt pretty good. Yay, me. lol.

Then the math kicked in. And the math says in roughly 200 days I’ve posted 100 actual Notes, where I shared a thought. One of them hit the jackpot and brought me 132 subscribers. (This one.) It was totally a fluke. Couldn’t repeat that if I tried.

So much for “look what worked and repeat it” lol.

But the rest of them? Eee-yi-yi.

80% of my Notes brought me exactly 0 subscribers.

20% of them brought me 5 or more subscribers. The rest did nothing. Well, that’s not exactly true. They got comments. Hoo boy, comments. All the Notes combined, including re-stacks and actual Notes generated a whopping 7,082 comments.

Some people will tell you Notes is a village. It’s a living room. It’s a social gathering and you gotta get in there and reply. Well, I’m here to tell you that is not always going to be humanly possible. Not if you have to work to pay your bills. So don’t stress on it.

I want to tell you the real win from this tool.

But first, I need to interrupt myself to tell you a strange story…

Henri Fantin-Latour was born in 1836. His papa was a painter and started teaching him to paint quite young. And he was good. Oh my lord, he was good.

For most of his adult life, he painted things that would be called realism. He painted still life and portraits. He painted famous people with almost photo realistic detail, at least for the 1800s. Art critics called his work hyper-lucid and objective reality.

And if you were to google his work, you’d see his style, for most of his life.

And then when he turned, I dunno, fifty-ish?

Something changed.

Something changed in a very big way.

He started painting dream like paintings. Mythological. Allegorical. Gauzy, smoky fantasy scenes of nymphs, Andromeda, paradise and work that was just radically different than his work had been up to that point in his life.

He painted one of a red-haired woman with a misty, gauzy background. She has her hand to her head as she’s looking at—something? I don’t know. I can’t tell if she’s nude or wearing a diaphanous gown. There’s a cherub in the corner, peering down at something. Humanity? I don’t know. He called it La Nuit. The night.

He did another one like that, but called her dawn. One laying down, the other standing to greet the day. And always, those smokey, gauzy backgrounds.

I like to think that after an entire career painting realism, he decided to dig deeper. Maybe chase his passions and curiosities while he still had time. I don’t know.

I like to think he woke up one day and realized the clock is ticking. Woke up one day and heard a little voice inside saying Henri, chase what interests you while you can.

Because if there’s one thing life teaches us, it’s that time makes us no promises.

So often, young people live like decades are promised them. God, I lived that way. Do you remember being so young that you didn’t think about growing old? But it seems the older we get, the more it starts to sink in that every day, every year, is a gift.

I don’t know how else to explain the change in his work.

Except maybe chasing the beat of his heart. Chasing his curiosities.

So back to my Notes story. I bought that program because I thought for a mere ten bucks, I’d learn what I’m doing that’s working. And I guess I kind of did.

Except not the way I thought.

What I was most proud of wasn’t any of the Notes that brought me subscribers. It was knowing that in half a year, I shared 586 pieces of good writing and Notes someone else wrote that moved me. Art and essays, poetry and observations on life.

Because like Ram Dass said, we’re all just walking each other home.

Because look, y’all, I’m well over fifty and closer to sixty and words mean the world to me. Why, I don’t know. Born that way. A few months ago, a literary agent reached out and said hey, are you interested in writing a book? Am I, omg. So I’m writing a book. It’s historical fiction and lordy, I hope it does well. So the whole Notes tool came bundled up with the idea I should maybe focus on building a bigger audience.

I truly thought I was going to get this tool and learn to do Notes better.

That is not what I learned at all.

I learned that I spent most of my time sharing your work and it doesn’t bring me subscribers and I don’t particularly care. Because what it brings me is joy. And damn, there’s sometimes a shortage of that in the news cycle, isn’t there?

I do still want to use Notes better. I did notice which Notes resonate and it’s more feminism and less literature. And that’s okay. They both matter deeply to me.

But here was the truly wild part.

After I looked at Notes stats, I went into my Substack stats to see where the heck my subscribers are coming from because it’s sure as heck not Notes. lol. And you know what I found? It’s you. My number one source of new subscribers is readers sharing my work. Referrals—number one on the list. I restack you and you restack me.

Damn near undid me, seeing that. Best $10 I’ve spent in a long time, to learn that.

So thank you. Maybe I’ll learn to use Notes better, I don’t know. I might try weaving more historical stuff into it to find history lovers because duh, those will be the people who will love my book when it’s done. But if not, I’ll still be out there, reading, sharing and restacking because good writing matters. And I know you will, too. :)