Mike Cohen builds the systems behind your Substack dashboard — including the recommendation model I wrote about last fall and the brand-new Substack MCP.
On July 20 at 1pm CT, he’s joining us live to answer your questions.
Drop yours in the comments below (a free subscription is all you need to join in) by midnight Saturday, July 18.
You don’t have to know what a metric is called in order to benefit from a conversation about data. You don’t need to phrase anything the way an analyst would. Just tell me what you wish you could know — about your subscribers, your writing or where your publication is headed — in whatever words come naturally.
Questions like these are perfect:
“People open my emails but nobody ever comments. What does that actually mean?”
“I write two very different kinds of posts. Can I tell which one my subscribers actually came for?”
“What happens to my data when I use AI tools with it?”
Some of what you ask, I can answer right here in the comments this week — I’ll be in the thread every day, and I’ll point you to the answer or show you where it already lives in your own dashboard. And the questions I can’t answer? Those are the good ones. Those go to Mike, because nobody outside Substack can answer them.
As I said last week: no question is too basic. That’s still the rule.
If you’ve been reading along this month, you know we’re spending July on data as a publishing skill that all writers should have a general grasp of.
Mike sits at the center of where all of this is going. He’s also the person behind two things we’ve covered here:
The new Substack MCP — the connector that lets you ask an AI assistant questions about your own publication data, in plain English. I wrote about why this changes what “data skills” means for writers → July 7 MCP post
The recommendation model that reshaped how Substack surfaces posts and publications. My take from last fall on why writers like you were already ahead of it → Nov. Substack algorithm post
And if this week makes you want to run these questions against your own publication, stay tuned for a growing library of MCP prompts — first one here — to help train your AI agent like a publisher. This ongoing prompt library will be a paid-subscriber perk; everything else this week, including the live stream itself, is free.
Ask your question in the comments by midnight Saturday, July 18. (Subscribed as a free or paid read? You’re in. Not yet? A free subscription takes about ten seconds.)
Watch the comments on this post this week — I’ll be answering what I can, daily.
Join us live at 1 p.m. CT on July 20. Free to attend, no paywall. RSVP here
One more thing: if you know a writer who’s been squinting at their dashboard lately, share this post with them. Their question might get answered by the person who builds the thing.
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