Things I've learnt from 1 year on Substack
That can be applied to any new creative venture
Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living.
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I started this newsletter on Substack one year ago
‘In a year from now you’ll wish you had started today’ is one of my five favourite life mantras that I largely attribute to my “success”. It’s about 1) starting the thing and 2) understanding anything worth doing takes time.
And it was almost exactly a year ago (1st June 2023) that I started this reader supported newsletter I named A Day Well Spent, on Substack. I did so without any existing mailing list and by mid-July, found myself writing a piece about how I had grown my Substack from zero to ‘bestseller’ in just 5 weeks.
Twelve months on and just shy of 5000 readers, I really do regard my Substack as a success. It hasn’t earnt me fame, status or mega bucks (although it does afford me an additional income stream which is always welcome in the freelance world). But then those aren’t my personal interpretations of success.
What success means to me is something I’ve written about before and it can neatly be summed up by this Bob Dylan quote, which I came across in Tom Hodgkinson’s excellent book How To Be Free:
“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between, does what he wants to do.”
That’s why my Substack is a success to me.
Because a year in, it has become my most cherished creative outlet that needs not answer to anyone other than myself and my readers, I still want to do it, and I am still enjoying it.
My readers paying me directly for my writing is the kind of direct, personal and reciprocal relationship I value hugely.
It is this financial support that not only allows me to keep this newsletter going for members to continue enjoying, but for it to get better, as spending more of my time writing here very gradually, little by little, becomes more viable.
To each and everyone of my members — thank you.
There were bumps along the way
Particularly early on where – as a data lead person – I got a bit obsessed with the Substack dashboard (I wrote about this in Substack can be cruel but here’s why I love it).
I mean, I’m still obsessed with the dashboard. I look at it as frequently as a crypto investor monitoring their asset performance, except the monies involved are universes apart.
But I’m much more indifferent to the numbers I see these days. If someone asks me how many of those who read my work actually pay for it, I no longer know the exact number without checking. I’m chalking this up as progress.
My relationship with the Substack platform and the creative work I do on here has evolved over the past year, settling into something that now slots neatly into my work life. It took a good few months to get to this point along with much trial and error, but it’s now an integral part of what I do.
The key for me has been making it sustainable so I can be in it for the long game.
Things I’ve learnt from 1 year on Substack
Over the past 12 months I’ve been scrawling random learnings and thoughts about writing this newsletter and being on Substack in the back of my notebook, whenever they have come up.
They are learnings that can be applied to any new creative venture, be that on Substack or beyond. These are things I would have found useful to read during my first year, I hope you find them useful too.
Here are my learnings from the past year.