When I joined Substack in December 2023, I thought it was a newsletter platform.

I wrote 10 newsletters, saw no growth and bounced.

A few months later, I saw writers leaving Medium and treating it as a blog.

Then Substack officially announced they were social media.

• Newsletter?

• Blog?

• Social media?

Which one is it?

After getting over 10,000 subscribers on the platform, here’s what I figured out.

Open rates are a joke

I send daily emails with my regular autoresponder and get a 33% open rate on average.

But on Substack?

I’m lucky if 25% of my subs actually open my newsletters.

One of the reasons is that Substack incentivizes people to opt for app notifications instead of email notifications.

Which defeats the whole purpose of sending a newsletter.

It ain’t automated

I started my first newsletter around 2012.

Back in the day, we used to call the software “autoresponder.”

I like the word autoresponder because it has “auto” baked into it. Read: automated.

The reason is that one of the core functions of an autoresponder is to send… well… AUTOmated emails.

A real newsletter platform sends an automated welcome sequence the moment someone joins. It also allows you to sell stuff on autopilot.

Substack has zero of this. No automations. No segmentation. No sequences.

Substack has you over a barrel

Substack is a great way to get email subscribers. But a terrible way to make money from your newsletters.

I’ve seen creators been suspended for posting Gumroad links.

Here’s what they say in the terms you agreed on when creating your account:

That’s because their business model depends on you selling monthly subscriptions through their platform.

The moment you want to use it as REAL NEWSLETTER (i.e: sell something through an external link) you’re gambling with your account.

Your emails will end up in the promo & spam tab

I love newsletters.

One of the reasons is that you own your audience and are not tied to an algorithm.

But the newsletter model is not perfect.

Why?

Because there are still SPAM and PROMO tabs. Even if your emails are legit.

That’s why you need to build up your sending reputation. In short, it’s signaling to Gmail & co. that your domain is LEGIT.

Every email Substack sends goes out from Substack’s domain. Their servers. Their sending reputation. Their domain authority built up over years of sending millions of emails.

Gmail trusts Substack. But Gmail has no idea who YOU are.

That’s fine while you’re on the platform.

But the moment you export your subscribers and try to email them from your own domain, you start from scratch. No sending history. No reputation. No trust signals.

Your emails land in spam. Or the promo tab.

You spent two years building an audience that was trained to open emails from Substack’s domain. Now you’re a stranger sending from an address they’ve never seen. All that relationship-building, all those open rates, gone.

Yes, you can export the list. You can’t export the deliverability.

So start building your domain reputation from day 1 by sending emails from your own domain.

What Substack really is

How I think about Substack is simple: it’s a blogging platform that notifies some of your subscribers about your latest article.

Some of your articles will get pushed to a new audience if you’re lucky.

But at the end, Substack is nothing else than a platform to build your audience:

• Interact with others

• Post articles

• Post notes

All this is good: But run your newsletter from a real autoresponder.

Newsletters are the backbone of my business.

Whenever I send emails, I make money. Whenever I don’t... Well, you guessed it... I don’t.

The hard part of writing an email is not the writing itself, because AI could do it for you.

The hard part is making them useful.

The whole job comes down to this

Most newsletters try to do everything.

You cram three ideas, two links, a life update, and an inspirational quote into one email. The reader’s brain short-circuits.

A useful email does ONE job.

When I write an email, I share one insight. One story. One point of view.

Simpler to write. Easier to read.

You’re not writing to an email list

An email list can quickly feel impersonal.

You have hundreds of people in a CSV file. You send a broadcast to a thousand people. No one replies. And then you have to do it again tomorrow.

But even if it feels impersonal... You wanna treat it like you’re emailing a friend.

Do you get a blog post from your best friend? No. You get a message. Written to YOU.

So write like it. One reader.

Correctness is for schmucks

English is NOT my first language.

My vocabulary is limited. I stutter. I sometimes ask AI to help me clarify what I want to say so it reads naturally.

After making hundreds of typos, I can tell you that readers don’t care about you being grammatically and politically correct.

What they care about is whether you GET them.

Empathy is just understanding what someone’s going through and showing them you’ve been there too.

Many of my clients tell me my emails feel like I’m speaking to them. That’s because I just try to talk about their feelings more than trying to be correct.

Boring is the real crime

A typo or two won’t kill your newsletter.

But what will kill it is being BORING.

The grey, neutral, “here are five tips”, and “maybe it’s this or that” nuanced garbage.

A good newsletter is PERSONAL and INTERESTING.

Take a stand. Pick a fight with bad advice. Be real. Tell people what you actually believe, even if it costs you a few subscribers.

My emails annoy people every single day. Some unsubscribe. Some buy. That’s fine. It means I’m actually writing something that makes them react.

Showing up beats showing off

I’m a perfectionist.

My instinct is to spend 2 hours polishing everything. Get a 100% score on Grammarly. Ask AI to grade my writing.

Booh.

But I only get 2-3 hours a day before my back goes bonkers. So I don’t have the luxury. I do what I have to do and ship it. Even imperfect.

I email my list every single day because showing up is how you build trust.

So I hit send. Even if the perfectionist is whispering: maybe you should do another editing pass.

A draft in your head doesn’t count. What counts is getting it out there.

The one thing nobody can copy (after AI)

Anyone can google your topic. Anyone can rephrase a tip.

What nobody can do is steal your life.

The 20 years I spent living abroad. The back surgery that has me writing from a recliner. The divorce. The burnout.

None of that came from a writing course. It’s proof I’ve actually lived the thing I teach.

A polished writer with no scars writes hollow emails. A clumsy one with a real story writes the kind people remember.

Pour your actual life into your emails:

• the mess

• the failures

• the weird detours

That’s the part AI can’t generate and your competitor can’t swipe. And that’s what makes YOUR newsletter yours.

I’ve been hearing this for the past 18 months.

“Course sales are down. Course Sales Are Down. COURSE SALES ARE DOWN!!!

It’s time to turn your online courses into coaching programs. Sell services. Blah Blah Blah.”

I’ve been in this business since 2014. What I like about it is the freedom: record something once, sell unlimited copies of it.

I like to create content and let it work for me.

Should you still create content and sell courses? Or flip your entire business strategy?

Should you build a bot?

Some gurus will tell you to turn your online course material into a bot, a prompt or a skill pack.

This makes sense.

But should you start selling ONLY markdown files?

Hell no.

Because this assumes that people only want the outcome. Just give me the finished thing. Do it for me. Push the button.

And for some people, that’s true. They don’t want to learn a new methodology. They just want to know what to do and get it done — in a very mechanical way.

I’ve noticed this with my own email subscribers. Sell them an AI tool that helps them write — less than 15 sales. Sell them a course on the same topic: Boom. 50-100 sales easy peasy.

I didn’t get it at first.

But maybe this comparison will make sense to you:

Now, think about how people cook dinner. Yes, there’s Uber Eats. You can have a hot meal at your door in twenty minutes without lifting a knife (but tapping a few buttons). And yet people still buy cookbooks like crazy. They still watch someone debone a chicken on YouTube.

Why?

Because for a lot of people, the cooking is the point. They don’t want the fish handed to them. They want to learn to fish. They’re curious. They wanna know.

Your niche works the same way.

A slice of your audience doesn’t just want the result. They want to understand how it’s done — so they can do it again, do it their way, and not feel helpless.

That itch doesn’t go away because a new tool showed up.

If anything, the more gets automated, the more people want to actually understand the thing instead of blindly chatting with a black box.

Not everyone’s using AI

Plenty of people aren’t wired that way and don’t want to use AI.

They also don’t want one more app, one more login, one more subscription draining out of their account every month.

They want a person who knows the thing to walk them through it at a pace they can follow.

AI is a bubble

People think AI can do everything.

But big tech still pays humans to train their AI. The machine doesn’t know things on its own. It needs people who actually know stuff to teach it.

So knowing things matters more than ever.

Think of AI like a calculator. A calculator didn’t kill math class. You still need to know what to punch in. And whether the answer makes sense.

A split is coming fast.

On one side: people who only know how to poke a chatbot. They can’t tell good output from garbage. They copy, paste, and hope.

On the other: people who know their stuff. They use AI to go faster. But they stay in charge.

This is why the hunger to learn will go up, not down.

“Dead” is a story people love to tell, and it’s almost never true

Every shiny new thing gets crowned the killer of the old thing.

It makes for a good headline. It gets clicks. It sounds smart on a podcast.

I’ve watched a lot of funerals in this business.

Facebook died the day Instagram took off. Everyone said so. But I still see plenty of people in the streets scrolling a Facebook feed.

Writing died the day YouTube blew up. Why read when you can watch? And yet here you are, reading this.

SEO died the day ChatGPT came out. Nobody googles anymore, they said. People are still pulling in steady traffic from search every single day.

The pattern is always the same.

A new thing arrives, gets loud, and the old thing gets an obituary it didn’t ask for.

Then the dust settles, and the old thing is still standing. A little smaller, a little less hyped, but very much alive and still paying people’s mortgages.

Bottom line

There’s always a way to make it work.

So if you’ve been sitting on a course because the internet told you the door closed — the door’s open. The people who matter still want to learn what you know.

Go build the thing. Launch it. And make money from it.

You don’t need 20,000 email subscribers to make $10,000 a month from a newsletter.

You need 20 subscribers paying you $500 a month. Or ten people paying you $1,000 a month.

I’ve been in this business for 10+ years. And here’s what I can tell you.

Building a profitable newsletter relies on only 3 things:

• Getting people on your newsletter

• Emailing them

• Having something to sell (and delivering on it)

1. Do THIS before you write a single word

Most people start with what they want to teach.

But that’s the wrong end of the stick.

Because people don’t give a damn about what you want. They’ll only care if you make it about them.

There’s a difference between you saying “how to live a healthy lifestyle” and “What’s the fastest way to bring my A1C down?”

Start with who you’re helping and the one problem keeping them up at night.

“Entrepreneurs” isn’t a reader. “Coaches who want to write better” isn’t a reader. “Burned-out corporate lawyers who want to quit and go solo”... now we’re talking.

The tighter you define that person, the more you can charge.

Nobody pays $1,000 to fix a vague itch. They pay $1,000 to make a specific, expensive problem go away.

Wide-known example: A GP charges $80 and sees forty people a day. A surgeon who fixes one thing has a waiting list and charges a fortune.

So before anything else, finish this sentence: “I help [specific person] solve [specific painful problem].”

If you can’t say it in one line, your reader isn’t clear yet. And neither is your paycheck.

2. Plant your flag on ONE platform

In 2015, Gary Vee told me to be everywhere:

• Instagram

• YouTube

• LinkedIn

• Twitter

• Snapchat

• and hey by the way you should also start a podcast.

So I tried. But I burned out and quit. And hating my life as a bonus.

To make $10,000 a month, you don’t need a million followers and a blue checkmark.

So keep it easy. All platforms work if you just focus on it. Pick the one you’re most comfortable with and go all in.

For me, it’s Substack.

3. Publish on these days

Don’t half-ass it.

Building an audience from scratch requires an enormous amount of traction. But you won’t get any if al you do is posting once a week.

Insteda, publish daily.

Publishing daily will help you:

• Become better

• Build a body of work

• See what’s working (and what’s not)

The good news is that you can batch content or use AI to help you write daily content in less than 60 minutes.

If that’s sound impossible to you, you should probably sign up for my newlsetter because that’s how I can help you with.

4. Don’t ask people to join your newsletter

The content you publish has one goal:

Getting people on your newsletter.

Never say “join my newsletter.”

Nobody wants another newsletter. They want a problem solved. So the way you get people hand over their email is to give away a free email course on what you offer.

If you’re an MD and help people with type 2 diabetes get off their meds, that’s your lead magnet.

5. Cheap ebooks are broken

Digital products are sexy.

Create them once. Sell ‘em more than twice.

The problem ain’t digital products. It’s the pricing strategy behind it.

A $17 ebook requires you to make 295 sales every month to clear $5,000.
Same for your stupid $8/Substack subscription.

The best approach when you’re starting out is selling an offer at $500 a month. Or $1,000 if your market has deeper pockets.

The best way I’ve found is in the next section.

6. A simple offer (that fits into your busy schedule)

I won’t sugarcoat my business model.

And yes, charging $500 or $1,000 for an online course is hard.

Adding some personal coaching to it makes it easier. Now $500 buys more than a folder of videos: it buys you in their corner until the problem is solved.

But who wants to add more Zoom calls to their calendar? Definitely not me.

So yes, you can build this offer fully asynchronously.

Here’s how:

• The course carries the theory: 2-3 hours of content people work through on their own time. That’s the stuff you’d repeat to everyone. You just productize it.

• Then you add support by text - email, Telegram, Signal, whatever. They hit a wall, they message you, you reply when it suits you. (I like using instant messaging apps because it allows me to reply with voice notes on the go.)

It’s like a gym membership with a coach on text. The workout’s already up on the wall. You just message the coach when you’re stuck.

The whole thing runs on about 20 minutes a day.

7. Sales while you sleep

I started writing content to be free and wake up to sales without doing anything.

That’s why I love welcome sequences.

Roughly 45% of my revenue comes from automated emails.

When someone joins your free list, they drop into a series of emails that also pitches your offer.

Will everyone take you up on this? Hell no. But the few who do will quietly add a few hundreds (or thousands) to your bank account.

8. Send more emails

Most publishers are afraid of emailing their newsletter.

They think:

• Lower open rates

• More unsubscribes

That’s all true.

But they miss out on one thing: MORE SALES. Because more emails build trust: if someone sees you in their inbox 2,3,5+ times a week and enjoy reading your stuff you’ll start building invisible influence.

Once they like you, they’ll also buy from you.

I email my list daily. And each email has an offer.

Now here’s the part many don’t get: Emails are not essays.

A short 150-word email with an idea and a link to your offer is more then enough.

What’s your excuse?

The playbook is simple (I did not say easy.)

Now, you could make up a bunch of different excuses or start executing.

And if you want my help, you know where to find me.

The best way to grow your Substack is to write about a lot of different ideas.

Problem: Most people don’t have enough ideas.

After creating content for over 10 years, here’s the best way I’ve found to never run out of ideas.

Be warned: you might end up with more ideas than you could ever write about.

The Ideas Are Already in Your Work

Most creators hunt for ideas like they’re rare butterflies.

They’re not. If you actually practice your craft, ideas stack up on their own. A doctor sees patients all day. Each one walks in with a story, a fear, a weird question nobody warned them about. That’s a week of content sitting in one waiting room.

I stumble into five to ten ideas a day. The reason is simple: I’m in the trenches, hitting the same walls my readers hit.

You won’t find ideas by staring at a blinking cursor. You find them by doing the work you want to teach. Then writing down whatever tripped you up along the way.

What to Do When You Have Ideas

I never have good ideas in front of my computer, but when:

• Walking

• Driving

• Or right as I’m drifting off to sleep.

And my memory is garbage. I can barely recall my own phone number. So if I don’t catch an idea the second it lands, it’s gone for good.

The fix took me ten seconds to build. A “content ideas” folder in my phone’s notes app. An idea hits, I dump it in. Done.

When driving, I use a voice dictation app called Letterly

When I sit down to write, I just open my saved ideas and go with the one I’m most excited about.

Look Around

When I first started writing content, I thought ideas all had to come out of my little brain.

But I eventually found that you can simply look at what’s working for others and create your own version of it.

Every niche has topics that keep getting rewarded. More likes. More comments. More reshares. While the vanity metrics don’t say everything, when you’re first getting started, it’s an encouraging way to get validation.

A simple way to see what’s working is to use this free Chrome extension.

(You can watch the quick tutorial that goes with it here)

You’re Writing Content Without Even Knowing It

Every day you answer comments, emails, and DMs.

And every day you flush that gold straight down the toilet.

Every decent comment or reply becomes the seed of a post, email, or note. They go straight into my “content ideas” folder.

Use AI to Find the Boring Ideas (Then Write the Opposite)

If you ask AI for content ideas, I feel a little sorry for you.

It’s a prediction machine. So it hands you the most probable idea. Which means the most recycled, hammered-to-death take on the planet.

Don’t let AI handle your ideas for you.

I tell it: “List the 10 most common angles people write about this topic.”

It coughs up every cliché in seconds. Then I go hunting for the opposite. I ask myself what I’ve watched happen with my own eyes that makes all that advice wrong.

That contradiction is the content idea.

Most writers think AI can only produce slop.

And they’re right. If you let AI write from scratch.

Because that’s when you spend your time:

• editing

• re-explaining

• and correcting robot vomit.

You sit down to save time but end up fighting the thing.

But I discovered a better way.

It’s giving AI your entire body of work — everything you’ve already written — and tell it to write only from that.

Instead of staring at a blank page for two hours, you finish the blog post in twenty minutes. Instead of struggling to write a newsletter, you can write it in 10 minutes. Instead of racking your brain of writign a sales page, you can whip it up in 30 minutes.

And it actually sounds like you.

That’s not a prompt trick. In fact, the “prompts” I use are suprizingly simple.

The reason why it works it’s that the system behind it is different.

Did you turn into a copy/paste monkey?

The advice you see everywhere is: “Just paste your past content into ChatGPT.”

Sure, that works if you’ve written six blog posts, four newsletters, and 2 LinkedIn posts.

I have 2,000+ pieces. You want me to paste all of that? Even if I tried, the AI can only read so much at once before it cuts me off:

And there’s a catch nobody mentions: the more you cram into the AI, the dumber it gets — and the faster you burn through your monthly usage, which pushes you to upgrade and pay more.

There’s a second problem too.

Your ChatGPT conversation is frozen in time. Every time you write something new, you have to dig up all your files and paste it in again. These tiny friction points pile up — and they’ll make you procrastinate. They did for me.

Copy/paste works if you have a thin body of work. But not if you have a lot of content

The Google Drive (but for AI)

The obvious answer was: create a folder and dump everything into Google Drive.

Claude has a “Google Drive” connector. So I dumped everything in, connected it, and tried writing from that.

It didn’t work — and it took me a while to figure out why.

Drive is built to find a file. It matches your keyword.

Here’s what I mean:

Search "protein recipe" and it surfaces every document with those exact words. But search "meals that keep me full," and it draws a blank — even though your high-protein recipes are exactly what you're after.

AI doesn’t work with keyword research. It needs meaning: it has to find the right passage by what it’s about, not by the exact words you happened to type.

That’s also why most note-taking systems fail: they only surface your notes when you search for the exact term.

There’s a deeper reason for that, and it comes down to how your files are stored.

For an AI to find things the way you’d want — by meaning — your content has to be stored differently. It has to be filed by what each piece is about.

If you want to give Ai access to your work in an efficient way, you need something else.

Fine, I’ll build it myself

So I went deeper.

I found that AI works best with vector databases.

I found a handful of YouTube videos showing how to build exactly this yourself — a setup that stores your content by meaning (the part Drive was missing) and wires it into your AI.

The first good one walked through it step by step. Download the template in the description. Spin up a database, layer it on top of your files, sync it to Google Drive. Forty-minute video. “I can do this in an afternoon,” I thought.

Hell no. I could not do it in an afternoon.

I spent the next 4 hours hitting errors, debugging things I didn’t understand, and re-watching the same five minutes on loop. Eventually I got it running. And it sort of worked.

Then the real problem showed up: keeping it alive.

I had to label every piece of content by hand so the system knew what was what. I had to wire up a tangle of Zapier automations to feed everything in.

And because my content lives across so many platforms — newsletters, YouTube, my blog, my courses — those automations kept breaking, and new stuff wouldn’t sync on its own.

I was babysitting plumbing instead of creating content.

Which defeated the whole point. I’d set out to save time, and now I had a fragile machine that ate my mornings and was always one broken automation away from being out of date.

I didn’t want a project to maintain. I wanted a turnkey solution that just worked.

So I built it

I asked myself: how would a perfect system work for me?

First, it’d would know everywhere I post:

It would know my Substack. My YouTube channel. My MailerLite newsletter. My blog. My Medium account.

It would check all my channels every day on autopilot and save everything automatically. It’d be smart enough to know “this is Matt’s latest Substack article” so there’s no labeling, no automations to babysit, nothing to debug.

So I went and spend 30 days building just that.

And I called it “Content Base”. Not a stupid second brain you’ll never use. But a base that embodies everything you published.

You can connect it to Claude and ChatGPT. And most importantly: you own your data. You’re not hostage anymore to these companies. If you want to use another model, you can switch without losing everything,

What changed once I connected it

I imported everything I could find. Every newsletter. Every blog post. Every video transcript. Every course module. Four years of work in one searchable library. Then I connected it to Claude. And started writing.

Four things changed.

1. No more blank page

Usually when I sit down to write, there’s a moment of resistance. What’s the angle? What have I said about this before? Do I have a good story for it?

That friction disappeared.

Now Claude already knows what I’ve said. It pulls from old newsletters. It references frameworks I forgot I’d created. It even resurfaces things I’d buried — “you wrote about this concept two years ago, want me to expand on it?” or “this story from a 2023 newsletter would fit here.”

Newsletters I’d completely forgotten started working for me again. I’m not starting from zero anymore. I’m building on years of my own thinking.

2. It writes in my voice

This was the strange one.

Before, I’d spend 20–30 minutes editing everything Claude wrote, because it sounded off. Generic. Like it was trying to be me and missing something.

After I connected my content, that changed. All I have to do is “Scan my content base to find past articles I’ve written. Then write in that same style”

3. It stopped making things up

This was the BIG one.

Before, Claude would invent things. Fake statistics. Ideas I never had. Frameworks that sounded plausible but weren’t mine. I had to fact-check everything against my own work.

Now, when it mentions a framework, it’s one I actually created. When it tells a story, it’s one I actually told. Because it’s pulling from my real content.

4. I just open it and write

No uploading files. No pasting context. No remembering which document had my latest stuff. No making sure “is this up to date?”

Yesterday’s newsletter? Already in there. The course I launched last month? Already in there. The video I posted this morning? Synced on its own.

And if I want to use ChatGPT instead of Claude, it’s the same library — no extra work. The setup friction that used to kill my momentum is just gone.

The part that stung

After a few weeks of this, I had an uncomfortable thought.

How much time did I waste over the past two years, writing as if my own past work didn’t exist? All those hours prompting from scratch. All those times I re-explained the same ideas. All those moments I forgot I already had the perfect story buried in an old newsletter.

I’d been sitting on a goldmine of my own ideas and using none of it.

Your content library is an asset — probably the most valuable one you have. Every piece you publish is a building block for the next one. Every framework becomes a reference. Every story becomes material you can reuse.

But only if you can actually reach it without jumping through hoops every time. Scattered across platforms and disconnected from your workflow, it isn’t really working for you.

In one place, connected to your AI, current on its own — that’s when it starts to.

I built Content Base to connect your entire body of work to Claude or ChatGPT. Import what you’ve published, auto-sync new content, and just start creating more faster, in less time.

There’s a 14-day trial.

And when you sign up, you’ll also get a free course on how to write with AI and get the most out of your base.

Every content publisher I know wants the same three things:

• A bigger car.

• A bigger home.

• And a bigger audience.

What about you?

Are you checking your Substack subscriber graph like it’s the stock market?

Does every new sub feel like a green candle going up? And every unsubscribe sting like a red one?

Maybe you’ve tweaked your posting schedule, tested new hooks, refreshed the page one more time — because watching the number climb feels like progress.

Hate to break it to you: it isn’t.

153,000 views = $0

One of my YouTube videos raked up 153,000+ views.

But all these views were useless. Because they generated exactly zero customers.

Meanwhile, a handful of videos under 3,000 views brought in thousands of dollars in sales.

That gap forced me to ask a better question. Not “how do I get more subscribers?” but “how do I keep attracting the right ones?”

Those are two completely different games.

And it’s not only YouTube.

I publish daily here on Substack. I also publish daily emails on my REAL newsletter.

And I built a newsletter analytics app that shows me where my revenue truly comes from.

Substack has one of the lowest lifetime-value subscribers across all my channels.

So does YouTube. So do most mainstream platforms.

The reason?

These platforms attract a lot of casual browsers. People who subscribe on impulse, skim a few posts, and never buy anything.

That’s not a flaw in your content. That’s how the algorithm works.

Meanwhile, people who find me through a specific blog post or a swap with other publishers stick around and spend more money.

The size of your list is meaningless if it’s packed with people who were never going to buy.

How to attract subscribers who actually buy

I changed three things.

First, I got brutally specific about who I was talking to.

Instead of writing broad topics that could attract anyone, I carved out narrow angles inside my niche. Like building a second brain specifically for content creators.

Narrow? Yes. But narrow works like a filter.

I saw the exact same thing with a client. He runs a 7-figure ecom business and spent €23 million on Meta ads last year. He wanted to create content for ecom entrepreneurs chasing their first 7 figures. Sounds smart.

One problem: he’s a strategist. He doesn’t run day-to-day operations, doesn’t set up Shopify stores, doesn’t write ad copy. He has a team for that. His real skill is scaling businesses that already work.

Newbie store owners don’t care about scaling strategy. They want quick hacks to make their first sales. Wrong audience entirely for what he actually knows.

So we pivoted. He started targeting experienced store owners who already had traction and wanted to scale. Suddenly he was landing clients at $3,000+ a month.

Same guy. Same expertise. Different filter on who he attracted.

Second, I turned my lead magnet into a bouncer

My early lead magnets were broad. “How to take better notes and boost your creativity.” Sounds useful. Attracts everyone — including people who’ll never spend a cent.

So I got specific: “How to turn your notes into publishable content.”

The first one appeals to anyone who owns a notebook. The second filters for people who actually want to create and publish which is exactly who I sell to.

That one shift changed the quality of every subscriber who walked through the door. Instead of curiosity-browsers, I started getting people with a real goal and a real reason to eventually buy.

Third, I started selling from day one (and stopped apologizing for it)

This was the hardest part.

I used to spend hours crafting free content, trying to “move the free line,” giving away as much as possible because that’s what every marketing guru preached. Give value. Build trust. Be generous. The money will follow.

Sounds noble. In practice, it just trained my audience to expect free stuff forever.

And every time I was about to launch something, I’d freeze up. Afraid of rejection. Afraid people would unsubscribe. Convinced that if I asked for a sale, all that hard-earned trust would collapse like a house of cards.

When I finally flipped the switch and started promoting offers early and often, the freebie-seekers bailed. And I let them.

One subscriber emailed me, furious that I was “emailing too much.” He’d been on my list for 86 days before realizing I wasn’t his guy. Good riddance.

That same week, someone else wrote: “I’ve been following you for a while and knew it was only a matter of time before I reached out. Your recipe works.”

That’s what a healthy list looks like.

Publishing daily will p*ss ‘em off

Last year in April, I went on a daily posting sprint on Substack.

I gained 1,060 new subscribers in 30 days.

It seemed to work.

So I kept going. I then noticed in August that daily posting also made people unsubscribe:

Most people would panic at the dip.

The ones who left subscribed too fast, realized I wasn’t their cup of tea, and bounced. That’s not failure — that’s the list self-cleaning.

You content strategy should not only be focused on GROWING. But most importantly: CURATING.

Each piece you push acts like a double-edged sword: it bonds the right people closer to you and repels the wrong ones.

The goal isn’t a fat number. It’s a tight list that actually wants what you sell.

The ugly part nobody talks about

Say you accept all of this. You know buyers matter more than browsers.

You still hit a wall: which content is bringing in the buyers?

I spent years trying to answer that. UTM parameters. Spreadsheets. Zapier automations held together with duct tape. And even with all of it, at least 30% of my subscribers and revenue stayed completely untracked.

So I’d double down on whatever felt like it was working. High views, lots of likes — must be the good stuff, right?

Wrong.

Some of my quietest pieces — barely any comments, hardly any likes — were the ones quietly pulling in buyers. I’d have killed them off if I’d trusted the vanity metrics.

The scoreboard worth watching

So I stopped staring at subscriber counts and started tracking where buyers actually come from.

Which blog post brought in the person who later spent $500?

Which Substack note pulled in three buyers last month?

Which platform sends customers, and which one just sends tire-kickers?

That’s why I built a small app called BestSubscribers.

It tracks where every newsletter subscriber comes from and ties them back to real revenue — so you can finally see which content attracts clients and which content just collects applause.

You set it up once in about 15 minutes:

Link your autoresponder, your Stripe account, and paste a snippet onto your website.

After that it runs quietly in the background and gives you the right data to look at.

In a glance you can see where your subscribers come from and where your buyers come from.

Once you log into your dashboard you see something like this:

Take a look at the screenshot.

On the left, the vanity metrics: how many subscribers each platform sent you. The numbers you’ve been bragging about.

On the right, the money: how much revenue those subscribers actually spent.

And the first time you see them next to each other, your stomach drops a little.

In this example, X is pumping out subscribers like a fire hose. But barely making a dollar.

Reddit’s the opposite. Fewer subscribers than YouTube. But the revenue? Solid.

Now sit with what that means for a second.

If you’d only looked at the left column (like almost every creator does) you’d have poured your next month of mornings into X:

• More posts.

• More threads.

• More chasing that climbing number.

And you’d have been feeding the channel that pays you the least, while starving the one quietly writing your checks..

BestSubscribers solves this.

It shows where your best subscribers come from so you know what type of content to create next.

If you’re using AI to find ideas to write about, I feel pity for you.

Why? Because you’ll end up with AVERAGE ideas. Stuff that has been written about and hammered down to death. And who wants their ideas to look average?

I use AI every single day to write.

But I’d never let it pick what I write about.

Let me show you how I aim it so it digs up interesting stuff.

Why AI hands you average ideas

Strip away the hype and AI is one thing: a prediction machine.

It looks at your prompt and guesses the most likely next word. Then the next. That’s it.

So when you ask it for content ideas, it hands you the probable — the idea that’s been written most often, by the most people, on the most blogs.

Average ideas make average content. And average content gets scrolled past.

Step 1: Ask AI in to map the obvious

Instead of begging it for “great content ideas,” tell it:

“List the 20 most common angles people write about [your topic].”

Let it dump the clichés. The recycled takes. The advice that’s been copied a thousand times.

This is where you start.

Step 2: Dig where the detector goes quiet

Take AI’s list of obvious ideas and run each one through three questions:

• What do I believe about this that most people don’t?

• What’s the opposite of what everyone’s saying?

• What have I watched happen with my own eyes that contradicts the popular advice?

AI has read every blog post ever written. But it has no life to it. No real first-hand experience.

Your best ideas are the lessons you learned the hard way — the ones nobody bothered to write down.

AI can’t predict that. Because it has never been trained on it.

Now go find your idea

AI can handle you 1,000 ideas with a single prompt. But all of these ideas have been published by someone else.

Instead, use it to find the obvious. Then, turn on your brain to find something worth writing about.

If you want my full process for writing content with AI that actually sounds like you — and doesn’t read like everyone else — grab my free AI-writing course here.

A lot of you “purists writers” will hate me for this.

But I’ll say it anyways: WRITING WITH AI IS FINE.

I do it every day. It’s a core part of my process. I’ve written over 500,000+ words with it, and it helps me grow my audience and income.

So no — using AI isn’t the problem.

The problem is hitting publish on the first thing it spits out.

That raw output tastes like boiled chicken breast. And readers can smell it from a mile away.

I treat the first draft is the starting line. Not the finish line.

AI has never done your job

Most people have NO CLUE what AI is.

It’s a prediction machine. It predicts word chunks based on calculations.

It’s never done the actual work. It’s like a tourist describing a city from a guidebook. Technically correct, but completely hollow. If you’ve lived in that city for 20 years. You know which streets to avoid at night and where the “underrated restaurants” are.

That’s the gap between you and the bot.

The insight that makes a reader stop dead — the “huh, never thought of it that way” — comes from doing the thing for years. Not from a model that scraped a billion blog posts.

So when AI hands you a draft, hunt the obvious lines and kill them. Replace them with what only someone who’s been in the trenches would know.

That part can’t be outsourced.

AI doesn’t have a childhood

AI can write about “overcoming adversity.” It cannot write about your adversity.

It doesn’t have a broken back that won’t let it sit more than two hours. It’s never lived abroad for 20 years and watched a clerk ask for baksheesh to stop slowing down your paperwork. It doesn’t have a divorce, a mortgage, kids screaming in the next room.

You do.

Specific lived moments are the one thing on earth that’s truly uncopyable. Nobody else has them. Not another writer, not the machine.

When your AI draft reads smooth but empty, that’s the hole. Drop in one real story and the whole thing wakes up.

AI is a coward

Ask AI for an opinion and watch it squirm.

It gives you “on one hand, on the other hand.” It hedges. It buries everything in qualifiers so nobody, anywhere, could possibly be offended. It’s trained to be likable. And likable is forgettable.

Standing out demands the opposite.

It means saying what your industry doesn’t want said. Calling out the BS. Planting your flag on one side, even when you know it’ll cost you a few followers.

My daily email annoys people. Good. I write for the ones who actually want to hear it — not the ones hunting for a reason to leave.

AI won’t take that risk for you. You have to. And you have to stamp it with your name.

AI writes in fog

AI loves vague.

“Many creators struggle.” “A significant number of readers.” “This can have a big impact.” Fog. Nothing you can picture, nothing you can hold onto.

Real writing is specific.

Instead of “I have a decent-sized email list” — “I write a daily email to 10,873 people, 33.4% open it.” Instead of “it took a while to learn” — “it took me 100 hours of prompting before AI stopped sounding like a stubborn donkey.”

Specificity is a fingerprint. It proves a real person with a real history wrote this.

When you edit your AI draft, find every vague claim and nail it to a number.

So here’s the deal

AI writes the draft. You make it worth reading.

The typing was never the hard part. The hard part — the expertise, the stories, the stand, the specifics — is the part no model can touch.

And that’s your moat.

Stop worrying that AI will turn you generic. It only does that if you let it hit publish for you.

Feed it the things only you have. Then edit like the draft owes you money.

Post Scriptum

I wrote this article with AI. I fed it with my ideas and my writing style. Was it pleasant to read?

If the answer is yes and want to write content with AI that actually sounds like you…

Then you can grab my free ai-writing course on this link.

If you’ve been using AI to write, you can spot it a mile off.

You read a post and something feels off. Then it clicks: HA! THIS IS AI. Not worth my time. You scroll past. Cuz it reeks like a can of rotten tuna.

But the problem was never that AI wrote it. The problem is the writer never had a style of their own — so they had nothing to hand the machine.

But the problem isn’t that AI wrote it. The problem is the writer never knew how to infuse AI-drafted content with an actual writing style.

If you know how to develop a unique voice you feed AI with it, you can create more content to put your name underneath it, attract a bigger audience, and probably also make more money.

Let’s see how.

1. Use these sentences in your prompts

You can’t think your way to a voice.

Most creators sit down and try to invent one. They strain. Nothing comes. Then they decide they’re “not a natural writer” and quit.

There’s a simpler way. It’s creating a “I wish I wrote this” document.

Open one note on your phone or computer. Every time you read a line that makes you feel something — a jolt, a laugh, a “damn, wish I wrote that” — paste it in.

Then copy what you have in that file and tell AI to mimic these closer in the piece you just drafted.

2. Override AI’s default mode

We all got weird words.

The phrases you use ranting to a mate over a coffee. The way you swear when something’s bullshit. That’s your voice. That’s the part people remember.

But when you write, you go stiff. You want to sound politically correct. It’s like you’re writing for Wikipedia. So you swap “use” for “utilize”.

I first realized this when I was reading Ben Settle’s emails.

He adds weird words like “batshyt” straight into his emails and doesn’t flinch. One word and you know it’s him. No name tag needed.

If you can’t create your own words, find at least some weird words you can borrow.

3. Add this to everything you write with AI

Most AI-drafted content sounds generic because it has no soul to it.

A machine can copy a sentence rhythm. But it can’t live your life.

AI has never had your job. Never made your expensive mistakes. Give it a bare topic and it spits out the only thing it can: the average of the internet.

So stuff your writing with what only you’ve got. The exact numbers. The client who ghosted you. The thing that went wrong.

Specifics are the fingerprint nobody can fake. And that makes the writing yours.

If you’re tired of writing content with AI that sounds like robot vomit, check out my free course on this link.

If you’re still using ChatGPT to write… HAHAHAHA on you.

I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription back in November 2025.

And so far? I’m not missing it.

This might sound dramatic. ChatGPT is what got me into AI writing in the first place. I used it almost every day for over two years.

But here’s the thing: ChatGPT is just a mediocre writing assistant.

And I got tired of pretending otherwise.

This newsletter is sponsored by myself.

If writing GOOD CONTENT with AI piques your interest...

Get your FREE AI WRITING COURSE here

Okay, now back to the show.

The writing quality problem

I don’t know how else to say this:

ChatGPT writes likes a robot trying to sound human.

Everything comes out smooth and polished and... dead.

You know the voice. The unnecessary transitions. The “In conclusion” energy. The way it turns every idea into a five-paragraph essay even when you beg it not to. And don’t get me started on the freakin’ emojis. And the “No fluff” when you asked it to get straight to the point.

I spent more time removing ChatGPT’s bad habits than actually writing.

Claude, on the other hand, just gets it.

The writing is cleaner. More natural. Less “I am a helpful AI assistant” and more like an actual ghostwriter.

Once I tried Claude for writing, going back to ChatGPT felt like switching from a good smooth pen to a broken crayon.

But here’s what kept me stuck

Even though I knew Claude was better, I kept paying for ChatGPT.

Why?

Because I had history there. Hundreds of conversations. Ideas I’d explored. Writing samples I’d fed it over months.

Switching felt like starting over from scratch.

And that’s exactly what it is. When you move to a new AI, you lose everything. All that context you built up? Poof. Gone.

Your new AI is as dumb as the day you met it.

So I stayed. Not because ChatGPT was good, but because leaving felt expensive.

I was being held hostage by my own chat history.

The “data export” is a joke

At some point I thought: okay, I’ll just export my ChatGPT data and bring it to Claude.

Have you ever tried this?

You get a ZIP file full of JSON garbage. Thousands of fragmented conversations with no structure, no organization, nothing usable.

Something designed just to meet Ursula Von Der Leyen’s regulations.

What finally let me leave

The thing that made me quit ChatGPT wasn’t just that Claude was better.

It was realizing that my real asset wasn’t my ChatGPT history. It was my body of work:

• My newsletters.

• My blog posts.

• My YouTube videos.

• My courses.

Sounds crazy right?

But that’s the stuff that actually matters. Not random conversations with a computer.

Once I understood that, the solution became obvious: instead of trying to port my chat history, I needed to port my actual body of work.

So I built a system that imports all my published content into one place and connects it to any AI I want.

Now Claude knows everything I’ve ever written. Not because of chat history, but because it has access to my real work.

And if Claude gets replaced by something better next year? I don’t care. My content goes with me. I’m never hostage to a platform again.

Life after ChatGPT

It’s been a 5 moths now. (Time flies.)

I don’t miss it.

Claude writes better. My content travels with me. And I’m not paying $20/month for a tool that fights me every time I try to write something that doesn’t sound like a crappy press release.

Maybe you’re in the same boat. You know ChatGPT isn’t great for writing. But you feel stuck because of all that history.

Here’s the truth: that history isn’t as valuable as you think. Your real asset is what you’ve published.

And if you set things up right, you can take that with you anywhere.

I built Content Base so you never have to be held hostage by any AI platform again. Import your content once, set up automated sync, connect it to Claude or ChatGPT (or both), and switch whenever you want.

Your AI is always UP TO DATE with your ideas. Not the other way around.

Now, if you’re still hostage to ChatGPT for writing… it’s your own fault.

(And I have no clue why Substack wants me to add more text here!)

Let’s talk about your “second brain” for a second.

Maybe it’s that beautiful Obsidian vault you’ve been building for 3 years. The one with the perfect folder structure. The carefully tagged notes. The backlinks connecting everything to everything.

Or maybe it’s that Notion setup. The one with the color-coded databases. The fancy icons. The $27 Gumroad template you bought because some productivity YouTuber promised it would “transform your workflow.”

How’s that working out for you?

How much content have you actually created from it?

If you’re being honest, the answer is probably: not much.

But hey, your dashboard looks gorgeous.

I’m not saying this to be a jerk. I’m saying this because I did the same thing for years and I wish someone had called me out sooner.

Interesting in creating more content that sounds like you with AI?

Get my free course on this link

The productivity scam

Somewhere along the way, we all got sold on this idea that the path to creative output goes through elaborate note-taking systems.

Capture everything. Organize it perfectly. Let ideas “marinate.” Connect the dots. And then, magically, some day, content will emerge.

So we spend our weekends watching YouTube videos about PKM workflows. We debate Obsidian vs Notion vs Roam. We buy another template. We customize our color palette so our tags look pretty. We set up elaborate databases with 47 properties we’ll never actually use.

We feel productive.

And then Monday comes and we still don’t know what to write about.

But at least our aesthetic is on point, right?

You’re really wasting your time taking notes

Here’s what’s actually happening:

• Every hour you spend organizing your notes is an hour you’re not creating content.

• Every hour you spend tweaking your Notion layout is an hour you’re not publishing.

• Every note you save “for later” is an idea that’s slowly dying in a folder with a nice little emoji next to it.

Every Gumroad template you buy is another way to procrastinate while feeling like you’re making progress.

I have 2,800+ notes in Obsidian. You know how many of them I’ve actually turned into published content? Maybe 10%.

The rest? Digital hoarding. Stuff I captured because it felt important in the moment and then never looked at again.

That’s not a second brain. That’s a second junk drawer with better typography.

The flawed second brain flow

The typical workflow goes like this:

1. Have an idea

2. Save it to your notes

3. Organize it with the perfect tags, colors, or links

4. Add it to your “Content Ideas” database

5. Set a status property to “To Write”

6. Promise yourself you’ll create something from it “someday”

7. Repeat 500 times

8. Feel overwhelmed by how many “To Write” items you have

9. Spend a weekend reorganizing your entire system

10. Buy another template because maybe THIS one will fix everything

11. Never actually create anything

Sound familiar?

We’ve convinced ourselves that the preparation IS the work. That if we just get our systems right, creativity will flow naturally.

It doesn’t work that way.

Your content ideas database with 347 items and zero published pieces is not a system. It’s a pixel graveyard.

What if you skipped the note-taking step entirely?

What if every time you had an idea, instead of saving it to your notes, you just... created something with it?

Not your magnum opus.

Just a piece of content. A newsletter. A LinkedIn post. A Substack Notes. A quick video. Heck whatever feels right to you.

Something that forces you to actually think through the idea. To find an angle. To have a point of view.

Here’s what I started doing:

Every idea I have → gets saved into a content bucket (so I don’t forget it) → becomes one piece of content when I sit down to create.

Not “save for later.” Not “add to the idea bank.” Not “I’ll write about this when I have time.”

Just: create something. Right now. Even if it’s rough.

Why this works

When you force yourself to create with what you save, a few things happen:

First, you actually use your ideas instead of letting them rot in a pretty database.

Second, you develop your voice. Every piece of content is practice. Every published article makes you sharper.

Third, you build a library of finished work instead of a graveyard of half-baked notes with nice formatting.

And here’s the part that matters for AI:

After a few months of this, you don’t have 2,000 random notes. You have 200 pieces of published content. Newsletters with clear arguments. Blog posts with your frameworks. Videos where you explained your thinking.

THAT’S your second brain. Not your notes. Your content. Your freakin’ body of work.

Now AI actually becomes useful

Once you have a real content library, AI transforms from a frustrating chatbot into an actual writing partner.

Because now you can connect AI to your published work. Your ideas. Your actual voice. Your philosophies.

When you ask AI to help you write about a topic, it doesn’t make things up. It pulls from the article you wrote about it six months ago. It knows your frameworks because you’ve explained them in a dozen newsletters.

You’re not starting from scratch every conversation. You’re building on a foundation of your own work.

This is the second brain that actually works: a library of content you’ve created, connected to AI that can help you expand on it.

Not a vault of notes you’ll never use. Not a Notion dashboard that looks good in screenshots.

Actual work you’ve published.

The uncomfortable question

How many notes are sitting in your system right now that you captured more than a year ago and never did anything with?

How many items are in your “Content Ideas” database with the status still set to “To Write”?

How many Gumroad templates have you bought hoping the next one would finally unlock your productivity?

Be honest.

Now ask yourself: was that time well spent? Or would you have been better off just creating something — anything — with those ideas when you had them?

You don’t need a better note-taking system. You don’t need another template. You don’t need to reorganize your tags or folders again.

You need to create more and organize less.

Turn your ideas into content. Build a library of your real work. And let AI help you get more mileage from the thinking you’ve already done.

That’s the second brain that actually moves the needle.

But here’s the problem

Maybe you’re of the 1% who’ll start implementing what I mentioned here.

So after a few weeks, you’ve started building a content library. Newsletters, blog posts, videos, courses. Actual published work.

Now what?

How do you actually get AI to USE all of that when you’re writing?

This is where most people get stuck. You have the content. But there’s a gap between “stuff I’ve published” and “AI that knows my work.”

You could tried copy-pasting your old articles into ChatGPT every time you start a new piece. Works okay for one or two pieces. But try doing that with 200 newsletters. You’ll hit context limits. You’ll spend half your writing time just gathering and pasting stuff.

Or maybe you tried ChatGPT’s memory feature. “Remember that I write about productivity.” Cool. Except it doesn’t actually remember your content. It remembers conversations. There’s a difference between AI knowing you “write in a casual tone” and AI having access to 500 examples of what that actually looks like.

Some people try building a custom GPT and uploading their files. Better. But there’s a file limit. It doesn’t sync automatically. And every time you publish something new, you have to manually update it.

That’s just another system to maintain.

The technical folks try setting up their own RAG pipeline. Vector databases. Embeddings. API calls. If you know what those words mean and enjoy spending weekends debugging Python scripts, go for it.

For normal people like us who just want to post content and get things done faster, that’s not a solution.

What actually bridges the gap

The missing piece is something that:

• Imports everything you’ve already published (without copy-pasting)

• Syncs new content automatically (without you thinking about it)

• Connects to Claude or ChatGPT (without technical setup)

• Makes your entire body of work searchable by AI (without context limits)

That’s the bridge between “I have content” and “AI knows my work.”

And that’s exactly why I built Content Base.

It’s for creators who’d rather build a content library than a note graveyard. Import everything you’ve published, connect it to Claude or ChatGPT, and let AI work with your real ideas instead of random fragments.

No templates required. No color-coding. Not any of that crap.

If you want more info, go here.

Every content guru on the internet is screaming the same thing at you:

Be more consistent! Post daily! Show up every day! BLAH BLAH BLAH

So maybe you’ve tried.

Maybe you’re squeezing content into your mornings before work. Or maybe you’re batching on the weekends. Maybe you also bought some courses or joined some cohorts.

Yet, nothing really moves.

Your list isn’t growing. Your offers aren’t selling.

Doubling your output can just as easily double your waste. If you’re publishing content that attracts the wrong people, posting more of it won’t fix anything. It’ll just speed up the bleeding.

I’m not here to sermon you.

I’m just a regular dude on the internet who learned this the hard way.

I’ve published over 1,000 public pieces of content. Some of them brought in thousands of dollars. Most of them brought in exactly nothing. The difference wasn’t how often I posted. It was what I posted.

There’s a different lever. And it doesn’t require a single extra hour of your week.

When more content attracts more tire kickers

If your content attracts the wrong people, posting more just multiplies the problem.

I saw this with my own Substack Notes. Broad, motivational stuff got likes and shares. But it attracted people who wanted inspiration, not people willing to buy a course or coaching.

More volume of this just means more of those people.

I only figured this out because I started tracking where every subscriber came from and whether they ever bought anything.

Without that data, I would have kept writing motivational notes thinking they were working. (I actually built a small tool called BestSubscribers to do this for my own business because I got tired of guessing.)

A megaphone doesn’t change what you’re saying. It makes it louder. If the message is off, you’re broadcasting the wrong signal to a bigger crowd.

Before you post more, ask yourself: is this attracting people who have the problem I solve and would pay to fix it?

If not, consistency is just a faster way to fill your list with tire kickers.

Here’s what’s silently wasting your time

Likes feel like validation.

I’ve had Substack Notes get 100+ likes and bring in zero email subscribers. Meanwhile, a boring-looking article about how I created a second brain as a content creator attracted high-qualified leads who’re still buying to this day.

Engagement is the most dangerous vanity metric because it feels like traction. You check your notifications, see activity, and your brain tells “Hey, it’s working!”

But engagement without conversion is just entertainment.

The content that actually grows your business often looks underwhelming on the surface.

Fewer likes. Fewer shares. But the right people clicking through, sign up, and buy down the line.

The real move is this

Look at your last 20 pieces of content.

Which ones actually brought in email subscribers or sales? Not likes. Not comments. Subscribers and eventually buyers.

If you don’t know the answer, that’s the real problem.

Most creators have no clue which piece of content brought in which subscriber — let alone which subscribers actually bought something. They’re making content decisions based on feelings and follower counts, which is like driving with your eyes closed and hoping you’re still on the road.

For most people, when they actually track it, it’s 2 or 3 pieces out of 20 that did all the heavy lifting. That’s your signal.

When I audited my own content, I found a few patterns.

One them was that personal stories about solving a specific problem with specific numbers outperformed everything else.

So I stopped writing the “7 tips to make more money” posts. I’m doubling down on what converted.

Fewer topics. Fewer formats. More depth on the stuff that actually moves the needle.

That’s the real consistency nobody talks about.

Let’s finish here

The goal was never to post more.

It was to find what works and do more of that specifically.

Before you create another piece of content, look back. Check which posts brought in actual buyers. Not followers. Not likes. People who pulled out their wallets.

Then kill everything else.

I know it feels wrong to publish less. But I built a six-figure business with a small list by being ruthlessly selective about what I create — not by flooding the internet with volume.

If you want to learn how to attract subscribers who actually buy? Click here

I am publishing on multiple platforms.

Medium, YouTube, Substack, YouTube, my blog.

Some of it was working. I just couldn’t tell you exactly which part.

If someone asked you right now, “which piece of content is actually bringing in people who buy?” — could you answer that?

Most fellows can’t.

I couldn’t for 10 years. And it cost me more than money — it cost me time I didn’t have, spent creating content that looked successful but wasn’t doing a damn thing for my business.

This is what I track now instead, and why it changed every decision I make about where to publish.

What Google Analytics actually measures

Sessions. Bounce rates. Average engagement time. Page views.

It’s all page-level data. It tells you what happened on your website. Not what happened to your business.

I’d open my dashboard every morning, coffee in hand. 247 sessions yesterday.

Cool.

But which of those 247 people joined my email list? Which one eventually bought my course? Where did they actually came from? No damn clue.

It’s like a thermometer that shows the temperature but can’t tell you if it’s raining on your head. The tool was built for a different game. The eyeball game. Ad-supported businesses. Media companies.

Not for creators who sell courses and coaching through an email list.

The funnel nobody bothers tracking

Here’s how a creator business actually works.

You publish content. Someone subscribes to your email list. Eventually they buy something.

Content → subscriber → buyer.

Three steps.

Google Analytics covers step one. Maybe. On a good day.

It can tell you which blog post got traffic. But it has zero idea whether that traffic turned into a subscriber. And it definitely can’t connect that subscriber to a course sale three months later.

Instagram won’t tell you which posts generated subscribers. LinkedIn won’t show you which articles led to sales. YouTube won’t connect views to revenue.

None of these platforms were built to answer the question that actually matters to your bottom line. You’re making strategy decisions based on one-third of the picture. And wondering why nothing’s working.

The moment I started tracking every single subscriber back to the exact piece of content that brought them in, my decisions got embarrassingly simple.

No more guessing. No more “I feel like Medium is working.” I could see the receipts.

Track people. Not platforms.

In 2022, I published an article on Medium that pulled 13,000 views and 271 claps.

Looked like a home run. It barely brought in any email subscribers. And the ones it did? None of them bought a thing.

Meanwhile, articles with fewer than 500 views brought in subscribers who spent thousands on my products.

Same platform. Same writer. Completely different outcomes.

It gets worse.

I have YouTube a video with 153,000+ views that generated zero customers. I have a dozens with tens of thousands of views. And all of these combined can’t hold up to videos with less than 3,000 views that brought in subscribers who spent thousands of dollars in the backend.

If I’d followed the vanity metrics, I would’ve doubled down on the wrong content and killed the stuff that was quietly making money.

I only caught this because I could trace each subscriber back to the content that brought them in — and then see whether they ever opened their wallet. Once you can see that trail, you stop chasing views and start chasing the content that actually converts.

One subscriber from a tiny 27-person newsletter swap who spends $1,500 matters more than 10,000 passive readers lighting up your dashboard. Read that again.

Start before you think you need to

This one’s going to sting.

The creators who struggle later aren’t the ones who started small. They’re the ones who grew without knowing what was working.

They published for months. Built a list of 2,000 people. Then realized they had no clue which content attracted buyers versus tire-kickers. By then it’s too late. You can’t retroactively track where people came from. The data is gone. Poof.

Even if you only have 50 subscribers, knowing where they came from changes everything.

Imagine opening a simple dashboard tomorrow morning and seeing: 14 subscribers from your latest blog post, 6 from that Substack note you almost didn’t publish, 2 from a newsletter swap you did last Tuesday. And next to each source — the actual revenue those subscribers have generated.

Not pageviews. Not sessions. Dollar$.

Now imagine seeing that your blog subscribers buy at 3x the rate of your Substack subscribers. That one insight tells you exactly where to spend your two morning hours before the day job starts.

I wish someone showed me this in 2014. Would’ve saved me years of guessing and a few grey hairs.

Stop staring at the wrong dashboard

The dashboard that feels productive and the one that actually moves your business forward are two different tools.

And you’re probably addicted to the wrong one.

Google Analytics, Medium Stats, YouTube studio, whatever…

All these gives you fake dopamine.

Colorful charts that make you feel like you’re doing something smart. Sessions went up 12% this week! Great.

Did revenue? Did subscribers? Did anything that actually matters?

You don’t know. Because these tools can’t tell you.

Replace session-level data with subscriber-level tracking. Know where your buyers come from. Not just your visitors.

Okay, now here’s the pitch:

I a tiny tool called BestSubscribers to show serious newsletter marketers where their, well, best subscribers come from.

If you’re tired of guessing where your buyers come from and you want to see the full trail — from content to subscriber to sale — you can get started free here.

“Just grow the list.”

That’s the strategy, right?

Everywhere. Every course, every guru, every thread. Get more damn subscribers. And the money will follow.

Maybe you tried.

Maybe you have a few hundred or thousand email subs.

Because after all, you are a hard worker not a lazy dumbarse.

So you post on Substack. You write on Medium. You upload on YouTube.

Yet, income doesn’t.

And instead of questioning the advice, you question yourself. Maybe I need 5,000. Maybe 10,000. Maybe my content isn’t good enough. Maybe I should try a different lead magnet.

Wrong diagnosis. All of it.

List size is almost never the problem.

The problem is that most newsletters are built on the wrong traffic, promoted inconsistently, and flying completely blind on what’s actually converting. You’re failing because you can’t see what’s broken — and you’re “fixing” the wrong thing over and over.

Get these 2 things right (or get everything wrong)

Every creator business runs on two steps.

• Step one: get people on your email list.

• Step two: sell ‘em something.

That’s it.

Every tactic, every strategy, every late-night rabbit hole you’ve gone down about funnels and automations and content calendars — it’s all a sub-decision underneath one of those two steps.

The problem is that when revenue isn’t happening, most creators assume they’re failing at step one. Not enough subscribers. Need more growth. So they pour all their energy there and ignore step two entirely.

Or worse — they’re actually failing at both, but they can’t tell which one because they have zero data on either. They’re just… guessing. Throwing content into the void and hoping something sticks.

You wouldn’t run any other part of your life this way. You wouldn’t keep paying a contractor who “might” be fixing your roof. But somehow, with your content business, guessing feels normal.

It shouldn’t.

You’re filling the list with the wrong people

Here’s something nobody wants to hear: a subscriber is not a subscriber is not a subscriber.

Someone who found you through a viral X note and someone who found you through a 2,000-word article on your blog are two completely different people. They found you for different reasons. They have different expectations. And they buy at wildly different rates.

I’ve seen this in my own business so many times it’s not even surprising anymore.

I have traffic sources that generate hundreds of subscribers who never spend a cent. And I have traffic sources that bring in a trickle of subscribers who buy everything I put in front of them.

If you’re measuring success by “new subscribers this week,” you’re playing the wrong game. A list of 500 people from the right source will outperform a list of 5,000 from the wrong one.

But here’s the part that should make you uncomfortable: do you actually know which of your traffic sources produces buyers?

Not which one produces the most subscribers. Which one produces people who eventually open their wallet?

Most creators have never asked this question. And the ones who have usually can’t answer it because they have no way to connect “where a subscriber came from” to “whether they ever bought.”

You’re optimizing for a number that doesn’t mean what you think it means.

You’ve turned your newsletter into a pen pal relationship

Let’s say step one is working.

People are subscribing. Good people, even. The kind who’d actually buy.

Now you have a different problem: you’re not selling to them.

I see this constantly. Creators who email their list once a week — maybe — with pure value content. Tips. Stories. Insights. Their readers love it. Open rates are great. Replies come in. Everything feels warm and wonderful.

And nobody’s buying anything. Because nobody’s been asked to buy anything.

Rapport without offers is just a pen pal relationship. You’re entertaining people for free and hoping they’ll somehow figure out you have something to sell.

They won’t.

If you don’t tell them clearly and repeatedly that you have something that can help them, they’ll read your free stuff forever and never spend a dime.

The other version of this problem is worse: creators who do sell, but apologize for it. “Sorry for the pitch!” “I know nobody likes sales emails, but…” “I promise I’ll get back to regular content next week!”

LOL.

You just told your reader that your own product isn’t worth their time. Why would they buy from someone who’s embarrassed to sell?

The creators who make real money from their newsletter aren’t the ones with the biggest list. They’re the ones who aren’t afraid to make the ask.

The hidden variable that breaks both sides

So step one is about getting the right people on your list. Step two is about selling to them consistently and confidently.

But there’s a third thing underneath both of these — and it’s the one almost nobody talks about.

You can’t fix step one if you don’t know which content is attracting buyers versus lurkers. And you can’t fix step two if you don’t know whether a bad sales month means your offer is weak or your list is full of people who were never going to buy in the first place.

Both problems require the same thing: knowing which content produces which type of subscriber.

Without that data, every decision you make is a coin flip.

• Should I write more on Medium or Substack? Coin flip.

• Should I do more YouTube or focus on my blog? Coin flip.

• Is my welcome sequence broken or did I just attract 200 tire-kickers last month? Coin flip.

I spent years in this fog.

Creating content, watching subscribers come in, having decent months and bad months with zero understanding of why. Some articles brought in people who spent $500 within a week. Others brought in hundreds of subscribers who never opened a single email after the first one.

Same writer. Same topics. Completely different outcomes.

And I couldn’t see the pattern until I started tracking every subscriber back to the exact piece of content that brought them in.

Once I could see that, both steps got easier. I knew where to publish to attract buyers, not just readers. And I knew whether a slow sales month was a selling problem or a traffic problem.

The guessing stopped. The revenue didn’t.

Stop flying blind

Your newsletter doesn’t need more subscribers. It needs clarity:

• Clarity on where your best subscribers come from.

• Clarity on whether those subscribers actually buy.

• Clarity on which half of the two-step formula is broken — so you stop pouring time into the wrong fix.

Everything else — the growth hacks, the lead magnets, the subject line tricks — is noise until you have that foundation.

I built BestSubscribers because I got tired of flying blind after 14 years and wanted to see the one thing no other tool showed me: which content brings in subscribers who actually buy.

If you want that same clarity before you waste another year guessing, you can get started free here.

Going viral feels like the dream.

One post explodes, your phone blows up with notifications, and suddenly thousands of people know who you are.

Every creator fantasizes about it at some point. Hey, I did too.

But I’ve been creating content for over 10 years. And here’s what that decade slapped into me: viral content attracts the broadest possible audience — which is usually the opposite of who buys.

I have blog posts with hundreds of thousands of views that didn’t attract a single buyer. And pieces on this platform with fewer than 3,000 views that brought in thousands of dollars.

My conclusion is simple:

The content that quietly builds a real business looks nothing like the content that goes viral. And that messes with your head.

Here’s what I track instead — and why the gap between the two changed how I create everything.

More views, fewer clients

When you optimize for reach, you write for the masses:

• Broad topics.

• Emotional triggers.

• Stuff that makes people nod and share and feel smart for reposting.

But the masses don’t buy your $500.00 course. They don’t sign up for coaching. They double-tap and vanish. Poof. Gone. Like they were never there.

The people who pull out their credit cards have a specific, burning problem. They care about whether you can actually help them.

You can’t chase specificity and broadness.

And trying to is what keeps most creators broke and confused.

The numbers don’t lie (but views do)

This one genuinely blew my mind when I tracked it.

I have this YouTube video with 154,000+ views:

But it generated zero customers. Zero. Not one. (So I de-indexed it from my channel.)

On the flip side, other videos on my channel with barely 3,000 views that brought in thousands of dollars in course sales.

If I had looked at my analytics the way most creators do — views, likes, shares — I would’ve doubled down on the viral stuff.

And killed the content that was quietly making me money.

Platform metrics are like heroin.

They give you the illusion you’re winning when nothing’s actually happening.

But none of those numbers told me the only thing that matters: which piece of content brought in someone who actually bought?

Start tracking what pays (or stay blind and broke)

Most fellows are making strategy decisions based on fiction. And they don’t even know it.

They see a post get 10,000 views and think: “This is what my audience wants.”

But they have zero clue whether a single one of those people ever spent a dollar:

• Instagram won’t tell you which posts generated subscribers.

• LinkedIn won’t show you which articles led to sales.

• YouTube won’t connect views to revenue.

I tried tracking this myself for years.

Spreadsheets, janky automations, tracking links with UTM params. Even then, at least 30% of my revenue went untracked.

Imagine opening your dashboard tomorrow morning and seeing: “That article you wrote in March? It brought in 14 subscribers. e of them bought your course. Total revenue: $1,200.”

And right next to it: “That post you spent all weekend on? 47 subscribers. Zero buyers. Zero dollars.”

Now you know exactly where to spend your next two hours.

That’s the difference between creating blind and creating with a map. And when you’ve got limited time to build this thing on the side, guessing is a luxury you literally cannot afford.

Go deeper, not wider

The creators compounding fastest aren’t chasing reach. They’re getting dangerously specific.

A client of mine has a YouTube channel with only 2,400 subscribers. Most of his videos get 1,000 views or less. Yet, he’s pulling in $5,000 a month.

Not because he went viral. Because he’s insanely relevant to a small group of people with a real problem they’ll pay to solve.

That’s the whole philosophy I’ve built my business on.

When you find a topic that attracts buyers, you don’t hop to the next shiny idea. You go deeper. More variations. More angles. You build a library around that one problem until you own it.

That’s what compounds.

Let’s finish here

Viral is a vanity outcome. Buyers are a business outcome.

You can’t optimize for both. And trying to is what burns most fellows out.

The content that makes you feel good and the content that makes you money are rarely the same damn thing. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you stop wasting your mornings on posts that look successful but generate $0.

Track which content brings in subscribers who actually buy — not just subscribers who make your numbers look pretty.

I got so tired of flying blind that I built a tool to solve this myself.

BestSubscribers connects every subscriber back to the exact piece of content that brought them in — and shows you whether they ever bought.

So instead of celebrating vanity metrics, you’re looking at a screen that tells you: this article made you money, that one didn’t, here’s where to focus next.

Start your free trial today

I used to treat Substack Notes like a daily habit:

• Wake up.

• Coffee.

• Write a Note.

• Check it off the list.

Sounds simple, right?

Except, I’m a human. Not an Ai bot that runs 24/7.

So yeah, I’d fall off the horse every other week:

Miss a day. Feel guilty. Promise myself I’d get back to it tomorrow. Tomorrow became next week.

So I tried batching.

Sit down, write 5–7 Notes in one session, schedule them out. That part worked. But the willpower drain killed me.

Logging into Substack every day.

Thinking about it constantly. “Did I post today? Wait, were was that note? Oh this looks interesting. Perhaps should I write about this too. Nah. Let me edit that Note.”

Then came another issue: I live in a totally different time zone. When I’m writing in the morning, 82% of my audience is sleeping.

So even when I showed up, I was shouting into the void.

So I got my hands on a Substack Notes scheduler called StackSweller.

Here’s my process to crank out a week’s worth of Notes (3 notes a day – 21 in total) in less than 45 minutes.

Your Best Notes Are Your Template

Stop reinventing the wheel.

If you’ve been posting for some time… then you already have some data to start with. Even if most of your Notes only get minimal engagement, you can still see the ones that get more engagement than others.

I open StackSweller and sort my past 90 days by “subscribers.” This shows me which Notes drove actual subs. Not likes. Not reposts. Subscribers.

I grab my top performing Notes from the past quarter. Then I create variations (more on that later).

Spy On Your Competitors Like A ******

This is going to be a bit stupid.

But other creators probably already have content that resonates sitting in plain sight.

The problem is that we don’t spend enough time to actually analyze what others are doing.

I use the free StackSweller Chrome extension to scan other creators in my niche.

Not to copy them. But to see what’s resonating.

Then I ask myself: “How would I say this in my voice?”

This a perfect example:

This note got inspired :

Promote your old stuff

As I’m writing this, I have 187 newsletters in my archive:

That’s 187 pre-tested ideas.

I can see what already resonated with my audience and them simply re-promote it.

Then I talk about the big idea and prompt readers to read that piece.

Like so:

Or so:

Or so:

Simple way to fill up your queue, right?

Remix, baby

This is the laziest one-click move I make.

StackSweller has a feature that takes one of your winning Notes and generates 5 different spins on it:

Same idea, different angles.

I pick the 2–3 that feel right, make sure they match my voice, then schedule them out over the week.

Examples:

Or:

Do you see the similarities here?

Test New Ideas (But Don’t Overthink It)

During the week, I capture random thoughts.

A conversation I had. A frustration. A pattern I noticed.

I drop these into my queue to test new angles.

Not every Note needs to be a proven winner. Some are experiments. The key is mixing proven formulas with fresh ideas.

That way, you keep a balance between testing new things, letting your creativity breathe, and also betting on the right horses that have been proven to win.

I schedule everything in one sitting

It takes roughly 45 minutes, and then I close my laptop with this indicator:

This feels so FREAKIN good.

I’m not more creative, more intelligent, or more motivated than you. I’m just more systematic.

Your queue doesn’t fill itself. But it doesn’t have to take all day either.

In 2020, the world shut down. I started a new business.

I’d been doing online marketing since 2012.

But this time, I wanted to build something around my own name. Write about what I know. Help others. Sell digital products. Fund my freedom by writing about my ideas.

And since I thought I had it all figured out, I burned $7,000 on Facebook ads.

Didn’t work out.

Next, I started a YouTube channel. Posted almost daily for nearly three months straight.

Didn’t work out.

Then I tried YouTube ads on top of that. More money out the door.

Didn’t work out.

At that point, I felt like a loser.

After weeks of frustration, something clicked. What if I stopped fighting my nature and just… wrote? I transcribed my YouTube videos, cleaned them up, and posted them as articles on Medium.

A few days later, things started to take off.

In ₄ months, my list hit 3,000 subscribers. I launched my first course. Five figures in the first few weeks.

Since then, I’ve never looked back. The list hasn’t stopped growing. 37,013 people have signed up at one point or another over the past five years.

But there’s one thing I wish I had known earlier that would have made the whole thing much, much easier.

What game are you playing?

There are many games you can play online.

You can play the celebrity game, the money game, the lifestyle game, and probably a dozen others.

I’m in it for the lifestyle. I don’t want to become the next Hormozi.

That’s also one of the reasons I’m running a “faceless personal brand.”

For someone who actually enjoys writing, running a newsletter-based business is the closest thing to perfect. You write, you send, you sell on the backend. Simple. Lean. Profitable.

Every subscriber represents a chance to help someone and keep this whole thing running on my terms — a few hours each morning, from anywhere.

But when playing this game, the quality of that list matters way more than the size.

Because unless you’re playing the “big audience game,” you’re not selling eyeballs to advertisers. You’re selling your own products. Advertisers want reach. Creators who sell their own stuff need trust. And trust only lives in the right, engaged audience, not the biggest one.

And that’s where I found a massive problem.

The question Google Analytics & your platform dashboard can’t answer

After years of creating content and growing this list across multiple platforms, I had one simple question:

Where do my best subscribers actually come from?

Not my most subscribers. My best ones. The ones who opt in, stick around, and buy stuff.

I opened Google Analytics. Fancy graphs. A world map. Bounce rates. Session durations.

Completely useless.

Google Analytics is built for websites. It tells you how many people visited a page. It’s like a thermometer that shows the temperature but can’t tell you if it’s raining on your head.

It doesn’t tell you which article generated email subscribers. It doesn’t connect those subscribers to actual sales. Instagram won’t tell you either.

Neither will LinkedIn, YouTube, Substack, Medium, or any platform you’re posting on.

These tools were built for a different game: the eyeball game.

But not for people like us who sell stuff through email.

271 claps, 13,000 views, and $0

Back in 2022, I published an article on Medium called “If Nobody Cares About Your Writing, Then You’re on the Right Way.”

It pulled in 13,000 views and 271 claps. From the outside, it looked like a home run.

But when I checked what actually happened behind the scenes, it barely brought in any email subscribers. And the ones it did bring? None of them bought anything.

Meanwhile, other articles — some with fewer than 500 views — brought in subscribers who went on to spend thousands on my products.

Same platform. Same writer. Completely different results.

If I had made decisions based on what “looked” successful, I would’ve doubled down on the wrong content. I would’ve written more articles like the viral one and fewer like the ones that actually brought in the right subscribers.

Most creators are doing exactly that right now. Optimizing for applause instead of revenue.

The $81,000 black hole

Because I wasn’t new to all of this, I told myself early on: “I’m going to track where my subscribers come from.”

So I built a DIY tracking system:

• Zapier.

• Google Sheets.

• Ugly formulas.

Duct taping, basically.

It worked… kind of.

I could see some sources. I knew SEO was strong. I knew Medium was pulling its weight. I knew YouTube was underperforming despite 15k monthly views.

But after years of tracking, I sat down and looked at my data. Over $81,000 in revenue couldn’t be traced back to any source. Some of my biggest clients? No clue how they found me.

The DIY system was better than nothing, but it still left a gaping hole where the most important data should have been.

So I built the thing that didn’t exist

I looked for a simple tool that could answer one question: where do my best subscribers come from?

Not another dashboard with 47 tabs. Not a Google Sheets monster that breaks every time you sneeze. Not a website analytics tool pretending to understand email businesses and requiring a $999 enterprise course to get a grip on it.

I couldn’t find it. So I built it.

It’s called Best Subscribers.

Think of it as Google Analytics, but built specifically for creators who grow an email list and sell digital products.

It connects the dots between:

• the content you publish,

• the subscribers you get,

• and the revenue those subscribers generate.

So you can stop guessing which platform to double down on. And start knowing.

As I’m posting this, there’s an early adopter deal.

If you want to check it out, here’s the link…

Most people think their Notes fail because the algorithm hates them.

Sorry. But it’s not the algorithm. It’s your approach.

Here are the 7 things killing your traction and how to fix each one of them.

1. You’re torturing your brain

Sitting down daily to “come up with something” is exhausting.

Your brain needs warm-up time. When you create one Note, close your laptop, then come back tomorrow to create another… you waste half your brain juice just getting started.

Instead, batch a week’s worth in one sitting.

I do it while editing my long-form articles. The fluff I cut becomes Notes. I batch-schedule everything into StackSweller and then forget about it.

The rest of my week is free. No more staring at blank screens wondering what to post.

2. You’re a stubborn creative idiot

Any idiot can grow with Substack Notes.

On one condition:

Stop reinventing the wheel.

Before sitting down to write, check out what works for other creators in your niche.

I use the free StackSweller Chrome extension to export any creator’s Notes and see which ones drove subscribers.

Model the structure. Model the angle. Then add your two cents to it.

I show exactly how to do it in this short video (starting at 1:45):

Build on proven ideas instead of guessing in the dark.

3. You’re measuring the wrong thing

Likes, comments, and restacks don’t pay bills.

76% of my Notes get engagement but ZERO subscribers. And that’s fine. I’m not optimizing for likes, but for people who sign up for my email list.

The problem is that there’s no simple interface to see which Notes drive subscribers.

That’s why I use (again) StackSweller.

There’s a tab called “Notes Analytics” that allows me to filter and see the Notes that actually matter:

Then all the donkey does? Head over to tip #4.

4. You’re not milking your winners till their last drop

Maybe you had a Note that drove 20 subscribers.

Posted it once. Moved on like an idiot.

That’s leaving growth on the table.

Take your winning Notes and create 5–10 variations. Post them at different times.

I told you. It’s stupid simple.

5. You still didn’t get Substack

When I started writing on Substack, everyone taught it was a newsletter platform.

LOL.

Substack officially announced it’s social media.

In case you didn’t get it… social media means having to be “social” and interact with others.

Just publishing your own Notes without engaging with others doesn’t work.

But reacting to random brain farts won’t move the needle.

Instead, create a “hit list” of 10–20 creators in your niche. Comment on their posts daily.

Not garbage comments like “Great post!” Write comments so good they could be standalone posts.

The algorithm learns who you want to attract. People click your profile. You build genuine relationships that lead to recommendation swaps and collaborations.

6. You’re still posting Notes like a donkey

Substack has no native scheduling, so most people force themselves to log in and post.

I tried, and it failed me.

Because that donkey work is not what I signed up for when creating my business.

So what do I do?

I remove friction by using a scheduling tool instead. I batch all my Notes for the week in one sitting. That way, I don’t have to remind myself to post Notes:

In September, I got 463 subscribers posting sporadically. In October, I used StackSweller to schedule everything and never missed a day. I posted 61 Notes and got 792 subscribers.

That’s a 71% increase just from removing friction.

7. You’re winging it every time

Predictability relies on boring stuff like:

• Templates

• Frameworks

• And repeatable processes.

Some days you nail it. Most days you don’t.

So start using templates. Look at content that performed well for others and create your own swipe file.

You can also use the 3-angle framework for any idea:

• Personal story,

• Educational,

• Or motivational.

Example: If you help people lose weight and your idea is “drink water before meals.”

You can create 3 Notes out of it:

• Personal: “I lost 12 pounds after surgery without trying. I was just drinking water to wash down painkillers.”

• Educational: “People who drink 16 oz of water before meals eat 75–90 fewer calories. That’s 15 pounds a year.”

• Motivational: “Your diets failed not because you’re weak, but because you don’t hydrate enough. Drink water before you eat. Do it for a month. Then tell me nothing changed.”

Same idea. Three different Notes.

Stop blaming your brain

Your Notes aren’t failing because you’re not talented enough.

They’re failing because you have no system.

Fix these 7 things. Then watch what happens.

And in case you want more no-nonsense Substack growth tips, check out my free masterclass.