I’m going to say something that includes me too.
We are all approaching Substack the way we approached every platform before it. Instagram. LinkedIn. Same instinct, new logo. We show up, we make a piece of content, we post it, and we hope someone sees it before the feed buries it forever.
That’s an island. A desert island of content.
Right now I’m recording a video. If I dropped it as a Substack live and just hoped it surfaced in someone’s feed — that’s Instagram behavior. I’d be posting and praying, watching it sink down the feed until it’s gone. We’ve done that on every platform since the day we started building online. And we keep doing it because nobody told us there was another way.
There is another way. It’s the whole reason I moved my business here.
Substack is a publishing house, not a feed
Substack is a publishing platform and a media company. You are the creator and the distributor both. And it runs on a hub-and-spoke model — one piece of content sitting at the center, spokes going out in every direction.
This video doesn’t live on an island. The audio becomes a podcast episode that pushes out to every RSS feed — Spotify, Apple, all of it. The transcript becomes an article, and that article can go straight to LinkedIn. The video itself uploads to YouTube automatically the moment I publish on Substack — and if it’s long enough, YouTube chops it into shorts for me. When I finish recording, Substack hands me clips and reels I can drop onto whatever other platform I’m already on.
One recording. Six or seven places. None of it by hand.
If you’re already building on LinkedIn or Instagram — good. Feed those places from here. You cut an enormous amount of the work the second you make Substack the hub instead of one more island to maintain.
Is part of Substack like the old platforms? Yes — the Notes feed. Notes works like every feed you’ve ever posted to. And right now there’s still real organic reach there, even on older posts and notes, which is wonderful. I’m not counting on it lasting, though, and I won’t build a business on posting to Notes and praying. We’ve all lived that movie. The hub-and-spoke is what makes this different.
And then it sells for you
Here’s the part almost nobody understands.
Substack is also your sales team.
It’s the only tool I’ve found where you publish a piece of content and choose exactly who it goes to — the public, your free subscribers, your paid members, or your highest founding-member tier. You pick the audience. But everyone can still see that it exists.
Say I build a full audio training on using the podcast side of Substack to grow your business — I’m planning to — and I set it to paid only. The people who aren’t paid still see the tile. It says: paid episode, upgrade to access. If the title is strong and the subtitle is clear and the thing sounds juicy, people upgrade right then, on the spot, to hear it. The content sells the upgrade. I don’t have to.
And it goes further. When someone lands on my publication — I set mine as my actual website, julieciardi.com — Substack knows who they are. My old WordPress and Kajabi sites never could. They had no idea if the person looking was a brand-new visitor, a free subscriber, or already a paying client. Substack knows the difference. And it changes the call to action and the message based on that person.
A paid subscriber lands on my site and gets teed up to upgrade into the Red Rebelle Room — our founding tier. A founding member lands and gets welcomed home, because the platform actually recognizes her.
I have never seen another platform do that. That’s gold. That’s people upgrading continuously and quietly, while the rest of my day happens. We make sales every single day here without selling — because the platform is doing the work for us.
Don’t stop at “post and pray”
One more thing before I let you go.
I don’t want you hoping and praying on any platform — including this one. Even when you run the hub-and-spoke, don’t just post and wait for someone to respond. Bake the connective tissue into the back end so the next step with you is always obvious.
Then go wider. Substack has a brand-new referral reward system. Other writers can recommend you. You can do joint lives that land in both audiences at once. You can guest-write or guest-speak on other people’s publications. The room to grow inside this one platform is enormous.
And none of the old work goes away. Get on podcasts. Speak in other people’s groups. Put yourself in front of other people’s audiences. We’re not putting every egg in the Substack basket — we’re making Substack the place it all comes home to.
This is what I mean when I say owned platform over rented algorithm. Substack isn’t another island to feed. It’s a publishing house, a media company, and a sales team you don’t pay — built into one place that finally fits the way women like us actually want to work.
Stop building islands. Build a hub.
— Julie
