Less than a month ago (precisely 29 days ago) I started writing on Substack and I have so far published 11 articles so I thought it might be the right moment to sit down at my desk and reflect on this past months, give you some backstory, share my quite conflicting thoughts on Substack and kinda give you some stats and data about my Newsletter. So with no further ado, let’s jump right into it!
The Backstory
Well… I thought I could get away with just starting to talk about Substack and how I discovered it but then I realised it wouldn’t make a lot of sense if I just started talking about that if you all don’t even know who I am so let’s get back to the basics shall we;
My name is Donovan T. Diffo and I’m currently a student in Germany, I study software engineering (I know that’s crazy, right?) and as of the writing of this article I’ve still got a couple of years in front of me before I’m done with my studies. I’ve actually known about Substack for at least a year now. The thing is I just never took it seriously. I knew you could kinda get famous through it and make a decent amount of money especially if you were a writer or an aspiring writer but I’m neither a writer nor an aspiring one (at least not currently) so I just always said “yeah whatever…”. That was my sentiment until about a month ago. I’m about to say something that will sound very contradictory to what I said earlier BUT… I kinda love writing and more so I love reading, listening or watching the news (let’s just say I got it straight from my dad). I know the idea of a software engineer writing about stuff that don’t have nothing to do with his field of expertise is just difficult to wrap your head around but I’m of those who encourage anyone to do what they like irrespective of the fact that these things don’t necessarily align perfectly in the broad picture.
I’d like to give special thanks to a friend of mine whose name starts with a “D” ( I don’t have their consent so I won’t disclose the name) for talking to me about their own project that they had in the works because if it wasn’t for me learning about that I never would have taken the step myself to start a Substack.
As a student and particularly a software engineering student I’m used to dealing with data and chunks of information so I did what any sane person would do before launching a Substack and that is studying the kind of newsletters that succeed. The first thing that made me quite nervous is that I’m way younger than the average Substack creators. Obviously not every Substack creator discloses their age so couldn’t run some proper calculations to get a clear cut average age but just from most profile pictures you could tell that this wasn’t a playing ground for Gen-Z. And I get that Substack is unlike Tiktok or Instagram because it’s more serious and focused. You open the Substack app when you want to read informative stuff unlike Tiktok that you open only when you kinda need a timeout or a distraction. I got nervous because I knew that due to my young age I may not have as much of a right to talk about current issues like these elder professionals do. But I didn’t drop my idea nonetheless because no matter what people say I know I have as much the right to talk about current issues as anyone else. I might even add that it could be beneficial to get a fresh point of view from a Gen-Z.
Additionally I equally noticed that the most successful newsletters where those about politics, food and cooking, culture and obviously Substacks from writers. Knowing all this I knew what to do next and that’s all of the above…
I understand why someone would like his/her newsletter to be focused on only one thing. It’s pure logic. If I’m an expert in a certain field I will just talk about it and that’s it. An to be honest I could have gone that route too since I’m KINDA! an expert when it comes to software and stuff related to it. But let’s be honest to ourselves for a minute, shall we; If I started writing about software most of what i will write about will fly over most people’s head because it is way too niche and complicated for a lot of persons. So instead of setting myself up for failure by doing that I decided to talk about other things that I care about like culture and news.
I honestly wanted The Dandelion to be not only some boring news outlet solely discussing politics but I wanted people to find a little bit of everything in my newsletter. And i know that a lot of you might say that if a newsletter covers everything at the same time then it in a certain sense actually covers nothing (at least not well enough). I perfectly know that, I know there’s just so much stuff one person can write about. That’s the reason why I divided The Dandelion into distinct sub-sections to make the site more easy to navigate through and that’s equally the reason I’m not the only one writing for The Dandelion. The Dandelion is equally written by two close friends of mine. One is called Lisa. She is an Art student and we’ve known each other for about 8 months now. The other is Jane and she’s equally into software and she’s a big sport fan. They don’t have their own individual Substacks and haven’t shown any interest in having one so we all write for the newsletter under the name The Dandelion [Writer's club] . I’m obviously still the one who writes most posts and articles but they assist especially when it’s about a topic i’m familiar with.
My thoughts on Substack (and Substack stats)
Well I think I had underestimated how difficult it would be to grow on Substack
As you can see for yourself I’m growing really really slowly and that’s an understatement. Part of me wants to hate on Substack and its algorithm for it being this way because i just keep seeing newsletters that are barely 3 to 4, have only 7 published articles but have 1000 free subscribers already and 3 paid ones. Like WTF? How did they even do that? But deep down I know it’s only being a month and nothing good comes easy. And obviously we all have different paths to success
But it would be a lie if I said it didn’t piss me off each time I see such publications. A part of me almost feels like they shouldn’t deserve to grow that quickly while I’m eating dust. But yet again I deep down know they deserve it and that it will hopefully soon be my turn.
In Conclusion…
I think Substack is all about patience even though sometimes the views and number of subscribers won’t make any sense.
Thanks for reading!