Hi friends 🤍
I’ll be going live tomorrow on Substack for our monthly Live Coaching Hour. Think of it as grabbing a coffee with your Substack bff, or a cozy group coaching session. I’ll be walking through questions you’ve sent in about Substack growth, building a creative business, writing full time, living abroad, designing a life that actually feels like yours — whatever’s been on your mind.
Weekly: Downloadable resources. Workbooks, digital tools, and guided rituals to help you live with intention and build the life/business you’re dreaming of.
2x month: Becoming the Main Character in My Own Story. My year-long glow-up across fitness, nutrition, relationships, finances, mindset, and PCOS, with coaches and experts in each area. Twice a month, you’re getting the same guidance I am.
Monthly: Live Coaching. I go live once a month to answer your questions about Substack growth, creative entrepreneurship, living abroad, digital nomadism, and more.
Monthly: On the fourth Wednesday of every month, we host a Networking hour via zoom at 9am PST/ 12pm EST / 5pm GMT. Introduce yourself, share what you’re building, and make one ask. If anyone on the call can help, they jump in. A zoom link will be sent out the day prior each month.
For free + paid subscribers:
Substack Strategy Guides: What I’m learning, testing, and seeing work in real time as I grow Petal + Hearth, so you can apply it to your own publication.
Her Best Life: A series where I ask my favorite Substack creators to share the specific choices and rituals that have shaped the dreamy lives they have today, so you can borrow what fits your own.
Monthly Roundup: Curated recommendations from my life in France to keep you inspired. Books, tools, rituals, and everything I’m loving from this side of the world
For the cost of a monthly chai + croissant, you’ll unlock the full Petal + Hearth experience — weekly downloads, private essays, and access to the growing Member Vault of resources designed to help you romanticize your everyday life.
Paid members, you can drop your questions in the comments below, or shoot me a DM. If you don’t get an opportunity to ask your question beforehand, you can always put it in the chat during the call, and I’ll try to get to as many as possible.
As always, the recording and recap will be sent out the day after, with time-stamped questions, takeaways, resources, etc.
A paid tier doesn’t have to be coaching or career advice. It can be community. Kirsten asked what she could put behind a paywall when she writes about something specific like wine, where it feels like the only option is more content. Your publication doesn’t have to be service-focused to offer something beyond essays. For a wine publication, imagine a monthly Zoom happy hour where everyone tastes the same type of wine together and talks through it, or a monthly PDF deep-dive into a wine region with its history and top wineries to try. (One member, Elena, suggested a weekly meal-and-wine-pairing menu, which I loved.) The same logic applies to any niche: a books publication could run a book club or a monthly reading hour. The move is to think about what brings your people together around the thing you write about. And if you’re stuck, talk to Claude. Ask it to brainstorm community-driven paid tier ideas for your specific niche and you’ll get a great starting list.
Collaborate your way to growth. One of the most powerful things you can do — especially early on — is reach out to other writers for interviews, guest posts, or joint lives. Don’t limit yourself to people at your exact level. I reached out to Jenna Kutcher when she joined the platform for an interview, fully expecting a no… and she said yes! You have nothing to lose except someone not responding.
Make your chat about your subscribers, not about you. I got three questions about chat this session, which tells me a lot of people are either underusing it or struggling with engagement. The biggest shift for me was realizing the chat should not be about you or your publication, and start being about the people in it. Every prompt should give your subscribers a reason to show up and something to walk away with. My weekly cadence: Monday is a weekly challenge. One day I do a welcome post for new paid subscribers to introduce themselves. One day is a networking thread where people share what they’re looking for and others scroll through to see who they can help. Fridays are Friday Finds, where everyone drops a recommendation on a rotating topic. And a practical tip that changed everything: check the “send as email” box when you post in the chat. My reply rate went up dramatically once I started doing that, because most subscribers just aren’t getting notified otherwise.
Understand how notes actually make you money. I get this question constantly when I share my monthly revenue breakdowns. You’re not monetizing notes directly — they’re free. What the revenue dashboard shows you is the original source where each paid subscriber first found you. So if I say: $3K of my monthly income came from notes, this means someone saw my note, clicked through, subscribed for free, and eventually upgraded to paid. You’re not earning money from notes. In this insance, they just act as your source of revenue.
When growth stalls, test and experiment. Early on, I got lucky with a recommendation partnership that sent me 2,000 subscribers. Then that creator stopped posting and the growth stopped with it. So I pivoted to notes, developed a strategy there, and growth picked back up. When things plateaued again, I started unpaywalling some of my best articles to bring in more free subscribers who would eventually convert and, you guessed it, growth picked up again. The moral of the story: if what you’re doing isn’t working, don’t just sit there. Try something new — lives, collaborative events, series, podcasts, the Substack studio. Give each experiment a few months, see what sticks, and keep iterating. Even now, I’m always testing.
Listening is just as welcome as asking! And if you find yourself wanting more personalized support, my founding membership is where you get it: a monthly group coaching call with me on Zoom, a personalized annual audit of your Substack, a feature in front of my whole audience, and a full vault of resources to help you grow.
Hope to see you there 🤍
Love, Olivia
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