If you want to see the how behind everything in this post, I’m teaching it live on Wednesday, September 23 at 11am Eastern inside the Substack Soapbox.
I keep saying this. And every time I say it, one of two things happens. Someone new goes, “wait — what?” And someone who’s heard me say it five times goes, “I keep forgetting this.”
So I’m saying it again, because it is worth repeating until it sticks.
Substack is not a social media platform…
AND your audience doesn’t need to be ON Substack for this to become the most powerful content publishing platform for your business.
It is not another place to post and pray. It is not another content hamster wheel with a new logo on it. It is a publishing platform — a website, an email engine, and a salesperson wrapped in one — that happens to have a social media component attached to it.
Once that lands, you use Substack completely differently. You stop treating it like a feed and start treating it like the hub of your entire business — the place your content is created and the place your sales actually start.
I want to show you what that has looked like for me.
The number that made me cuckoo for Substack
I’ve been on Instagram for seven years. Go look — there’s a lot of content over there. I’m not a crazy poster, but I’ve shown up consistently for a long time.
Revenue from posting on Instagram in those seven years: zero dollars.
I started Substack in January of this year. Nine months in, it has generated $70,000.
And I want to be careful here, because the money is not the point. I am not trying to make money on Substack. I’m trying to build a paid lead engine through it. Those are two very different things.
What a paid lead engine actually is
Online entrepreneurship 101 is the lead magnet. You make a freebie, you put it out there, and you either pay a platform to promote it or you spend hours of your life hoping it brings people onto your email list for free.
Substack flipped that for me. My paid tier is $79 for the entire year — it’s called the Soapbox, and it’s nothing, price-wise. But make no mistake about what it is. It’s a paid lead strategy.
My goal is not to keep people in the Soapbox. My goal is to see who’s interested. Who are my people? Who is so interested in what I’m putting out that she’s willing to pay for it?
Because a stranger on the internet is not going to walk into my world and buy a higher-ticket program. She has to get to know me. I have to get to know her. She needs to see the community, get a win, understand what we teach and what we believe. The Soapbox is where that starts. From there, the next room is our $399 founding member tier, the Red Rebelle Room, which comes with a Kajabi community of almost 750 women around the world. That’s where we go to the next level together.
Your paid tier on Substack is where your hottest leads raise their hand. Even if you monetize YouTube, that’s YouTube paying you — you have no idea who your best people are. Here, the best people pay you. They’ve identified themselves.
That is gold.
The part my old email list could never do
I’ve had an email list for nine years. It’s somewhere north of 20,000 people. Out of those 20,000, I could not tell you who’s hot and who’s not. Open rates don’t tell me, and they aren’t even accurate anymore. I was blind to who on that list was worth engaging with, connecting with, giving more to.
Through Substack — and I’m going to keep using that word, through — I now have over 10,000 free subscribers, and almost 1,100 of them are paid. Those 1,100 have raised their hands. They are my people. It’s my team’s job to keep them hot, and it’s something I am maniacal about, because there is nothing more important than the people paying us. Nothing.
One caveat, because I learned it the hard way this summer. You have to have a strategy. I did nothing around my paid tier for three months — I was at the beach house with my family and writing the IGNITE Her Frequencies guidebook — and nobody just wandered in. You can’t put a paid tier up and hope, wish, and pray. Now that I’m back, I’m running the strategy again, and I’m going to show you exactly what it looks like on Wednesday.
Before and after: how one podcast episode gets to you
I’ve had a podcast since 2018. For years, it worked like this. Record the episode. Upload it to Libsyn. Have the team create a blog post on my WordPress site so it existed somewhere for SEO. Then go into ConvertKit — later Kajabi, same thing — and draft an email to tell the list there’s a new episode. That email went to everyone. If I wanted a different call to action for clients versus non-clients, that was a second email. Lots of work, and none of it connected to anything else.
Here is what happens now.
I record a podcast — just like the one this article came from. I upload the audio into a Substack post. I hand the transcript to Claude, which I’ve trained just by talking to it, and it writes the article in my voice. I pop the article in under the audio.
Then I add audience-specific content. A block at the top that only free and not-yet subscribers see — inviting you to Wednesday, for instance. My paid members don’t see it, because they already have access.
When I hit publish, Substack emails all 10,000-plus subscribers. And it knows who it’s sending to. The free subscriber gets the upgrade invitation. The paid subscriber gets invited into the founding tier. The founding member gets asked to share it. Dynamic content, dynamic calls to action, handled behind the scenes — and I created the thing once.
That same post automatically lands on my website. I don’t use WordPress anymore. Julieciardi.com is my Substack publication.
My Wordpress site could never do this.
When someone lands on julieciardi.com — which is the call to action I give on every podcast I guest on, every stage I speak from, everywhere — my website knows who she is. Paid member? Founding member? Free subscriber? Never subscribed at all? It knows, and it shows her the right thing.
My WordPress site could never do that. No website can. Substack can.
And when the post goes live, Substack creates the graphics. The Instagram-sized ones, the LinkedIn ones, the story-sized ones. I don’t open Canva anymore. Your dream people do not need to be on Substack for any of this to matter, either — I promote these posts everywhere. We run Meta ads to them. We pin them on Pinterest. We’ve gone back to blogging, but the 2027 version of it, with a platform smart enough to do the distribution.
Why this matters if you’re a team of one
At the time of this recording, every person on my team works after the sale — client experience, operations, proactive reach-outs. The marketing department here is me. I’m a multi-million-dollar company and I still don’t have a podcast editor.
It’s me, my Claude, and my Substack. And I’ve streamlined the entire process because of it.
Everyone wants to talk about AI agents and AI employees. Substack is one of the most valuable employees I have ever brought onto my team. She’s a salesperson. She’s a website designer. She’s an email publisher. She’s a dynamic content platform. And she works for free.
There’s a compound effect to creating your content here — making it your website, making it your email engine, letting it sort your hottest people for you. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Wednesday
I’m going to walk through all of this on screen — the how — on Wednesday, September 23 at 11am Eastern, in a workshop called Architect Your Substack Publication Using Your Human Design. It’s inside the Soapbox, my $79-a-year paid tier. That unlocks the live training and the replay, a custom GPT we call a Julie Bot built on your Human Design profile, a workbook to use with it, your own Human Design report, and every Substack training and monthly Substack Review I’ve done. If you’re reading this after Wednesday, it’s all sitting there waiting for you, and a member of my team will reach out the day you join.
The workshop alone is worth the $79. I’ll show you why.
Already a paid ubscriber - see you Wed. Need to get your seat? Join us!
I’m cuckoo for Substack. You can tell.
— Julie
