When Buffer moved its newsletter, The Weekly Scroll, onto Substack a few months back, something shifted in how I understood the platform. Writing about a tool from the outside is one thing; living inside it every day is another. After growing that publication to over 92,000 subscribers and publishing to Notes daily for a month, I tore down my original guide and rebuilt it from scratch. Some of the old advice still held up. Plenty of it did not, largely because Substack itself has changed quite a bit.
What follows is a practical walkthrough for anyone serious about using Substack as a publishing home, not just a side experiment. It covers setup, content strategy, growth mechanics, and the money side, with lessons pulled from creators I interviewed and plenty of firsthand trial and error.
Understanding What Substack Actually Is
Substack is a publishing platform where you write posts and deliver them to subscribers by email. It is free to use, with the option to charge for some or all of your work later. The platform blends newsletter infrastructure with a social layer, giving every publisher a website, an archive, and a profile inside the Substack app where readers can stumble onto you through recommendations and the Notes feed.
The cleanest way to think about it is in three parts: the content you publish, the audience that finds and follows it, and the revenue you can generate if you choose to. Each piece feeds the others, which is why skipping one usually weakens the whole operation.
Posts, Notes, Chat, and Live
Posts are the backbone. They land in subscribers’ inboxes and live on your publication page, and they can be long-form writing, audio, video, or some combination of all three. Substack’s audio and video tools have matured considerably; you can run a full podcast from the platform and get an RSS feed to submit to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else that accepts one.
Video posts can be uploaded as files or recorded directly inside Substack’s Recording Studio, which will feel familiar to anyone who has used Riverside. Every audio or video post generates a transcript you can edit or switch off entirely. Connect your YouTube channel under Settings and Connected accounts, and Substack will push your video posts to YouTube on publish, along with up to two auto-generated clips formatted as Shorts.
Notes functions as Substack’s short-form feed, roughly like X or Threads. Anyone on the platform can post Notes, whether or not they run a publication, and everything is public. A Note can be plain text, text with up to six images or GIFs, or a video up to five minutes long. There is a restack button on every post and Note, letting you repost it to your own feed with or without commentary. Video Notes and clips from your video posts also surface in the app’s media tab, Substack’s vertical short-form video feed launched in early 2025, which behaves a lot like TikTok or Reels but only for Substack content.
Chat is a conversation space for your subscribers, available only inside the app and on your publication page. Only subscribers can see it, and by default you start the threads, though you can open that privilege to subscribers too. Threads support text, photos, image replies, and emoji reactions, making it feel like a group chat more than a comment section.
Setting Up Your Publication the Right Way
Proper setup takes about an hour and saves you months of awkward fixes later. Fill in your profile completely, then configure the publication and its categories. Rewrite the default welcome email so it sounds like a human wrote it. Connect Stripe if you plan to charge eventually. Import any existing mailing list you have, and publish a welcome post plus a first Note before you start pushing out regular issues.
Pick a niche you can describe in a single sentence and a publishing schedule you can actually sustain. This sounds obvious, but most abandoned Substacks die from vague positioning or unsustainable cadence, not from bad writing. Fill in the SEO title and description on every post while you are at it, because Substack articles do rank on Google and those fields are free real estate.
Growth Levers That Actually Work
Most growth happens inside Substack itself, through Recommendations and Notes. Switch those on before you spend hours sharing links on other platforms. Recommendations let other publishers suggest your work to their readers, and Notes put you in a public feed where discovery is baked in. Subscribers and followers are not the same thing, by the way. Subscribers get your emails; followers only see your Notes in the app. You want both, but subscribers are the ones who will actually read your newsletter.
Substack is free until you turn on paid subscriptions, at which point the platform takes 10% plus Stripe’s processing fees. That math matters when you are modeling revenue, but it is also remarkably generous compared to most alternatives. The real question is not whether the fees are fair; it is whether you can consistently deliver something people will pay for.
Stay close to the platform’s own discovery mechanics and you will not need to chase external traffic nearly as hard. The publishers winning on Substack treat Notes as seriously as their long-form work. That is the shift most newcomers miss.
