One post. Almost $4,500.
It didn’t go viral. It had half the typical views of my posts. Half. And that one post made almost $4,500.
And it didn’t come from people being on the Substack app or in the Substack feed. 92% of the women who read it came in from email. Email.
So if you came over to Substack because everyone said this is where it finally works — and you set up the paid tier, and you’re posting Notes, and you’re doing all the things, and if you’re honest it feels just like Instagram — I want to tell you where that $4,500 actually came from.
Because it didn’t come from getting found.
Nine years of islands
For nine years I did what most of us do. Instagram over here. Podcast over here. Email over here. Website somewhere else. A sales page on yet another platform. All islands, all on different platforms, and unless I was in an active launch, really not making any money.
It took a heroic effort to make money. A concerted campaign to link all those islands together and create a result. Nine years I did it like that. Most people are still doing it like that.
I have almost 20,000 followers on Instagram. I made $0 there. Wah, wah.
I came over to Substack in January. And I am blown away that finally, after nine years in business, we have a daily sales system. We have created an $82K annual revenue stream in 9 months that feeds our entire business funnel.
But I’m noticing something — in myself first, and now in many, many women. Just because you have a paid tier on Substack doesn’t mean you’re going to make money. Just because you’re on Substack and you’re doing all the things on Substack doesn’t mean the money is coming.
Because most of us came over and brought all the same actions and activities we were doing on Instagram with us.
Someone handed you Notes
That’s also what a lot of people are teaching. How to get visible on Substack. How to get discoverable. Post this many Notes a day so that you get discovered.
It’s the wrong game to be playing.
It’s going to burn people out again, and people are going to get the same results they were getting on Instagram — usually crickets, usually goose eggs in dollars. That was my experience. And I’m already seeing that game come over to Substack. It was a matter of time before the full-time content creators on Instagram came over, and now they’re here, teaching visibility.
I’m not playing that game. I haven’t played it for nine years and I am not playing it on Substack. Most of my women don’t want to play that game. You probably don’t want to play that game. It’s not what you’re here for.
I’m here to wow my paid clients. To over-deliver to them, to give them such value that they get results in their life. That’s where I spend most of my time. And I’m a data girl, a marketer by trade, so I want to show you — with the numbers — that spending your time there is exactly what works.
Eleven days
On September 16, on my monthly Substack Review — the live call where I share what’s new on Substack, my real numbers, and the strategies I’m actually running — I told my paid members I was going to run a micro launch. One valuable thing behind the paid door, that solves a real problem, with a date on the calendar. And I said I’d come back with the numbers either way.
Paid growth had been sliding all summer. July, 41 new paid subscribers. August, 21. The first twelve days of September: four.
Then the micro launch.
113 women joined our paid tiers in 11 days. Not just subscribers — 113 women. 97 of them went into the Substack Soapbox, our first paid tier, $79 for the year. 16 of them went into the Red Rebelle Room, our founding member tier. Over $14,000, directly from Substack to our business.
I want you to really hear two huge things before we go into the data.
Number one: 44 of the 113 came from one post
That post had a podcast in it and an article. And it had half the typical views of my posts. Half the views of my usual posts.
That one post made almost $4,500. And it didn’t come from people being on the Substack app or in the Substack feed. 92% of the women who read that post came in from email. Email. Only about 1% came from the Substack app, site, or Notes.
Of the 44 who joined paid from it, 34 checked out from an email or from my own site. Substack’s own network — the app, the site, Notes — sent seven.
Please let this sink in. The post that sold the most was the post the fewest people saw. Nobody found it. They opened it.
Your people do not have to be active users of the Substack app, or Notes, or anything in Substack, to have this success. They need to be on your list. Email was never the problem. The island was.
Number two: 73% were already on my list
I love looking at where people came from. How long had they been in my world? Were they on my list? Did they go straight to paid? So I pulled it.
73% of the 113 were already on my list before they bought. And when I say list, I mean my list on Substack — my website is on Substack, my podcast is on Substack, my list is on Substack. I barely even use my Kajabi list anymore. Of those, 53% had been on the list for more than three months. 30% for more than six months.
And something I didn’t expect. Not one woman went straight to the Red Rebelle Room, the $399 tier. All 16 of them had been on the list first. Half of them for six months or more.
Then there’s the other 27% — the ones who said, this looks good, I need this, I’m buying. Straight to paid, never on the free list. And even most of them weren’t strangers. They came from my own emails and my own site, touching Substack for the first time the day they bought.
So where did the rest come from? Substack’s own discovery — the app, Notes, search, the profile — sent about 20 of the 113. Another 8 came from other women’s publications recommending mine: Kelly Roach’s, Eva Gregory’s, a few others. That’s not the algorithm. That’s other people’s audiences, which is its own strategy and one I work on deliberately. The other 75 came from my own list and my own site.
So if we just rough it out — two-thirds of who bought needed to be nurtured. They needed to be on the list, get to know me, get to know our stuff. They didn’t hear what they needed to hear yet. Then in September they did. And a quarter of them were ready right away. People are going to be at different buying stages, and that’s exactly what the weekly long-form post is doing in the weeks nobody buys.
The funnel didn’t die. It turned inside out.
The old way was one path on my deadline — ad, download, webinar, countdown timer, buy — and she got pushed through it or fell out. This is surround sound. Articles, podcast, community, live calls, guides, ads, all pointing at the same woman, with the next step always in view. She hears you again and again. And then she decides when.
Someone sharp is going to ask: but you had a deadline. And yes — 57 of the 113 joined in the last 48 hours before the workshop. The difference is what the deadline was doing. The countdown timer in the old funnel manufactured urgency for strangers. The date on the micro launch gave a woman who’d been listening for six months a reason to finally say yes. The surround sound built the readiness. The date just told her when.
What it cost
During those 11 days I also lost free subscribers. About 230 of them. And that’s okay.
On Substack you can sometimes subscribe to a list with one click and not even mean to. I’ve done it. So you’re going to get some people who aren’t really your people, and I think people deselect faster on Substack, which we want. If someone’s not for us, we don’t want them on our list. It’s actually not a problem. It’s a good thing.
What this actually is
This is not a visibility play. It’s an integration play.
Podcast, email, website, checkout pages, even community — all in one place. When I publish, I’m not just hoping and praying that someone on Substack is going to see it, or that I’ve got the perfect Notes strategy. Every long-form piece goes to the list, with the offer baked in, and it’s converting. Which is why one post made $4,500. Which is why 113 women came in over 11 days. And by the way, I don’t even use Canva anymore — Substack creates the graphics automatically. Add another circle to the picture.
Is there a coattail of visibility? Yes, absolutely. I have people coming in through recommendations. Sometimes a Note will bring in some free subscribers. Sometimes a Note might bring in a paid subscriber. That’s gravy. That’s the icing on the cake. I’m not trying to win that game.
The game I’m trying to win is serving people at the highest level, using timeless business principles, with Substack as my integrated publishing platform and business hub. And then knowing there’s a whole wide world out there that’s not on Substack — so my podcast, hosted on Substack, gets pushed out all over the place, and we run Meta traffic ads for pennies to the posts themselves, which has been list building. Then every time I do a long-form podcast article, it goes to that list.
List building. Nurture. Making offers. Sales. The entire client journey in one.
And if you don’t know my whole business model — that’s just the beginning. Those 113 women aren’t the end-all, be-all. Now real humans on my team, not AI, are reaching out, nurturing them, getting them set up. Some of them are going to come into IGNITE Her® University, our flagship program, not by hoping and praying but by over-delivering on what they bought.
You’ve been inside one of these the whole time
You’ve been reading a micro launch. A problem you have, a story that shows it can be solved with the receipts to prove it, and a date.
What I haven’t done in this post is teach the how. It’s a two-hour session, and it belongs to the women who’ve decided they want off the hamster wheel.
On October 7 at 12:00 PM Eastern, live on Substack, I’m teaching the how. How I structure the micro launch. How I’m using Substack as a publishing platform. The sales page — on screen. How I got to $14,000 in 11 days and 113 new subscribers. I guarantee you it’s not what most people are teaching on Substack. Guaranteed.
It’s for paid members of the Substack Soapbox — $79 for the year. The Soapbox is where the Substack trainings live, where the monthly Substack Review happens, where your own reports are, and where this kind of full breakdown — who joined, from where, how long they’d been reading — lands every single month. While you’re waiting for the 7th, there’s already a library in there: getting started on Substack, how to podcast on Substack, and the workshop I just ran, Architect Your Substack Using Your Human Design.
You will burn out playing the visibility game. You’ll get pissed, and you’ll wonder why you came over here at all, because it feels just like Instagram. I really want to save you from that rabbit hole. Your people don’t need to be on Substack. They need to be on your list. I’ll show you the how on the 7th.
— Julie
