How to get 1,000 Substack subscribers in more than one year

Yippee! Yippee! Yippee!

1. Get mad at your friends for not starting a blog with you in your freshman year of college and finally bite the bullet four years later

Come on guys. I get that it wouldn’t have worked out, and I know the way this happened was probably for the best, but if we’d started a Substack 5 entire years ago, we would’ve blown up when the platform did! You know what? Whatever. I barely even talk to half of these people anymore. I hope they’re doing well.

Still: as far as I can tell, none of them have blogs. So take that!

2. Spend three months writing garbage that doesn’t go anywhere

When I say garbage, I mean garbage. I’ve actually made it a point to leave all of my posts—even the ones I despise—up on my Substack. And many of them aren’t even revised or edited from their original publication!

Will you gain anything from reading them? Absolutely not. But if you want to feel better about how bad you are as a writer, I highly recommend you go back to my old writing and laugh at the pseudoprofundity of it all. My god did young Harjas take himself seriously. And young Harjas is only a year younger than current Harjas, so I suspect I’m going to be having this realization over and over in the future. What a pain.

3. Spend three more months writing garbage that kinda goes somewhere but is still really embarrassing to look at

You thought you could get away with only three months, huh? You think it only takes three months to become a decent writer ? Seriously: three months?? Hell, it took four years of college before I learned how to write decent essays, and it took like 14 years of K-12 before I learned how to write bad ones. Six months isn’t how long it took me to get good at writing, it’s how long it took me to transfer my existing writing skills into this new medium of casual self-help-ish parasocial infotainment phone-attention parasitism. Buckle up, buttercup.

4. Finally blow up, try really hard to niche down, and fail completely

The good news: you get your first success. We’re off to the big leagues, baby!

The bad news: I didn’t write that lottery of fascinations article for fun, gang. I can’t stick to a niche for the LIFE of me. I am utterly undisciplined and inconsistent and the only way I keep at this hobby is striking while the iron is hot and we all know that’s just a copium way of saying I have no moral fiber and have a weak character. I don’t even have a schtick. My schtick is not having a schtick, which is incredibly lame. My schtick is following my heart and writing about such a wide variety of topics that I only attract readers who like my personality (omg they like me for my personality) and then losing readership every time I switch topics. If you’ve been here since the beginning; I guess just like, uh, why?

5. Write 115 posts that don’t really go anywhere

Huh. I wonder how that happened.

6. Get frustrated and go on vacation

Listen man, this Substack thing sucks. I mean, look at our final pre-vacation graph:

Do you know how frustrating it is to slog away without any idea what drives the algorithm and only the faintest hope and prayer of ever being able to figure it out? Do you know how much it sucks to know that literally HALF of your subscriber base over the past year comes from like two pieces that you shat out in like 4 hours each? Do you know what it’s like to muster up the heart to continue poasting throughout the driest drought and flattest plateau of your entire lifetime?

Answer: you do now, because you’ve been living it!

Whatever man. I’m gonna take a break. I’m sick of writing because I feel like I have to. I’ll just go on vacation and only write if my heart feels like it, which’ll probably mean 1-2 posts that get blasted out in under 2 hours before everyone else catches up to my jet-lagged wakeup schedule. It’s fine. I’m over it. I don’t even care anymore.

7. ???

What did I even do?!?!

8. Congratulations!

Yeah so uh, you crossed the 1k mark while at a wedding in the Philippines. I know, you’ve only written like two posts during the last two weeks. I don’t get it either. But you’ve done it! I think it’s now time to write a book, make a course, generally sell out and then screw off to some mountain in the Himalayas?

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Okay, fine. Obviously this post is tongue-in-cheek. 1,000 is an insane number for an email list, and it’s crazy that over 300 of you actually open those regularly. That’s an entire lecture hall full of people. That’s nuts! Thank you all for being here!

And if you haven’t subscribed already, um, consider doing so. But why are you here if you don’t even know who I am? Seems like a weird starter post, but whatever.

Oh, and you can read my actual blogging advice here if you want.