7 Months of Tech Adjacent Substack: Great Success! (?)

I've been writing on Substack since November 11th, 2024. Success or... sus'ess? Publication RESULTS, tips, how readers FIND Tech Adjacent, and more!

Late last year, my friend Alex suggested I start writing on Substack. While I don’t take every suggestion and run with it, I had long been neglecting my personal/business blogging. Based on my (minimal) recent post history on jeremyscook.com it was time to try something new.

Was I successful? Can you be successful too? What does “success” mean in this context?… Why even write on Substack? Read on for ~answers to these and other burning questions!¹

And thank YOU for reading!

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Tech Adjacent Substack results (the numbers):

Views per week from November 11th - June 20th

• Subscribers: 400

• Total Views: ~13,000 (Substack doesn’t have an easy way to get this(?))

• Top 5 External View Sources: hackaday.com, google.com, hackster.io, twitter.com, news.ycombinator.com

• Most Popular Post: The Perfect PCB Business Card² (1,562 total views)

• Most Underrated Post (maybe): I thought Dune Series Jumps the Worm Circa 2032 was hilarious… and perhaps even prescient, but so far it only has 159 views. Granted, that’s, like, my opinion man. And fewer people subscribed to Tech Adjacent at the time.³

What are my newsletter goals (the why)?

While I may not have carefully defined this initially:

• Email subscriber growth: Between YouTube, Twitter, and other such networks, something like ~15,000 people follow my work. At the same time, if I post something on network X, Y, or Z, only a fraction of the people that follow me there will typically see it. Having a newsletter, in theory, sends each post to everyone on the list.

• New creative outlet: With my Wordpress-based jeremyscook.com site, I felt largely uninspired. And the Wordpress platform itself has gotten much worse with their weird choice to base everything around content blocks. So why not an email newsletter?

• Contribute to my business (i.e. make money): Ideally I could/can get paid directly via this platform or through ads (see below). The newsletter can also contribute to my overall business (writing about tech and, to a lesser extent selling my creations and services) by putting my name out there for people to find.

Why a Substack newsletter?

• Excellent Editing Platform: Substack is a really good online writing platform, allowing you to just put me thoughts down at a whim when you have the time and inspiration. With a few caveats (e.g. not being able to easily see your total views), it’s perhaps the best I’ve ever used.

• Growth Opportunities: Substack does a good job of promoting your newsletter to others via various features. While I imported on the order of 100 subscribers, the vast majority have come from Substack’s sharing features. Note that new accounts, which might be similar to my growth without Substack, stand at just 13 in 7 months 😬⁴

  

  The ask a question Substack AI assistant thingy is, as you might guess, rather useless.

• An email newsletter, i.e. Substack–in theory–sends each of my newsletter posts out to everyone that subscribes via email, making such subscribers here (theoretically) much better than those on social media platform X, Y, or Z⁵. AND if I decide to go elsewhere, I can (again, theoretically) take my email list and content with me. Pretty neat.

• Get Paid By Subscribers? In… theory this platform allows you to get subscribers to pay you for your content. I turned this on for a short period of time, but after I tried the initial newsletter email signup myself, I found the ask-to-pay dialog to be rathere obnoxious. Off it went.
  -Who is signing up for emails and deciding it’s good enough to pay for them at the same time? Maybe Substack should make that optional (or easier to figure out how to opt out). I’m not keen on asking Mr. Ask a question orange box.

• Get Paid Through Ads/Product Sales! This actually seems like a better model. As you may have noticed I use affiliate links to Amazon when appropriate that pay me a small % of the purchase price of goods at no cost to you.⁶ I advertise my small Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, and I can link to products on my Tindie store⁷ as appropriate.

A list of things to eliminate and increase engagement for 2025

7 months… of newsletter success(?) on Substack?

Have I been successful on Substack? Based on the three criteria outlined above, I would say:

• Email Subscriber Growth: At around 40 subscribers/month (subtracting out initial imported email addresses⁸) I’ve seen far more growth than my rather lackluster attempts in years past. Really, I should have been focusing more on this since I started Internetting, but better late than never I suppose?
  -Result: Moderate success 👍

• A New creative outlet: I’ve been writing for myself a lot more since getting on this platform.
  -Result: Great success 👍👍

• Contribute to my business: I’m certainly putting myself out there, but how this translates into actual business now and in the future is kind of nebulous. Theoretically, I could be doing something more directly productive with my time, i.e. I’m not sure what the marginal cost is, to put things in economic terms.
  -Result: Not sure. Possible success 👍🤨

Tentative tips and thoughts on Substack success

• Post Regularly and Consistently: As you’ve noticed if you’re been following for a while, I post once a week, Wednesday at 11:30 AM Eastern Time. I rarely vary from that pattern, though this post is an exception.

• Recommendations are Awesome: Of the 400 subscribers to this newsletter, over half come from recommendations (thank you!). While I don’t have a huge number of ‘stacks recommending my content, most of those that do seem quite well aligned with what I write about.

  

  Thx so much to those recommending this publication!

• Queue Up Posts: Related to consistency, I never really know when inspiration will strike, or when I will be busy. Right now I have ~10 posts ~ready to go, which means I can write when I want without the worry of missing a deadline. It also means that I can revisit and revise posts with a fresh(er) perspective before the world sees them.

• Lots of Successful Substackers Were Famous Already: Poking around in notes (Substack’s Twitter-like social media thing), it seems there are a decent number of authors who are generally famous/well known, and largely brought their audience with them.
  
  One could argue the same for me (to a much lesser extent) as I imported subscribers from my jeremyscook.com blog (thanks for sticking around if that is you). So who am I to judge? At the same time, you see some of the people with massive pre-existing audiences⁹ giving advice on how to grow here. Which seems a bit silly.

• Paid Subscriptions Seem Burdensome: As alluded to above, I don’t find this worthwhile so far. Do as you will.

Where do I/we go from here?

When I started this blog/website/newsletter, my idea was to give commentary on the world of tech and my solo business, and talk about projects in a high level format (i.e. inspiration, not step-by-step). As I keep writing, I find myself drifting towards talking about my making stuff journey/projects more and more, but hopefully I’ve been able to keep it high-level enough for general “tech-u-tainment.”

There is lot more project-ish content coming up, so hopefully that’s something you enjoy. At the same time, I will continue to publish thought leadership¹⁰ and general thought… leadership that I don’t expect anyone to line up behind pieces as well.

Green light for more posts here!

It’ exciting starting something new, but as a publication matures it tends to get locked into one direction. I will strive to keep things semi-random here, and hope you will stick around to see the results!

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes.

Note that any Amazon links are affiliate

Addendum/Footnotes:

1. Sus’ess - i.e. suspicious success

And if you don’t care about my success/failure on this platform and/or how you can duplicate/avoid this fate, I won’t be offended if you swipe left (or is it right?) on this particular piece of prose. Like the T-800, I’ll be back. But with more tech adjacent commentary, and fewer vintage automobiles driven through Los Angeles police stations. (see footnote #1 here for a more thorough Terminator rant)

Of course, you opened the email/page, so you’re at least a little bit interested. And you made it to the footnotes, and are still reading my ramblings so you’re really engaged. Shout out to Jason and Jan who are known to read the footnotes.

2. This post was featured on popular techno/hacking/news site hackaday.com, propelling it far beyond my other posts:

Would I get more subscribers here if I posted more often? Maybe, but I think it’s important to set a schedule that you can stick to over the long term. Also, if people keep getting lots and lots of random emails from me, I bet they will be less inclined to open them than one email per week that is a somewhat predictable event. Want to see more? Is 1x/week a good frequency? LMK your thoughts!

3. Stats listed here are from a number of days ago. They should be close enough.

4. The Ask a question chatbot thing is roughly useless in my limited experience. They should probably just get rid of it rather than continuing to let it insult our intelligence.

5. The people subscribing aren’t necessarily better or worse*, but “subscriber” on most social media platforms seems to be more like a suggestion than what I would consider a subscription. Imagine if print magazines worked that way… You get a subscription to [whatever publication is still in print], but they only send you the 3/12 issues per year that they/it thinks you’ll like.

Granted, I’m not sure how this applies to people who read on the Substack app.

Unlike the free newspaper that someone continues to throw on my driveway every Tuesday. Conveniently, this is also the day when I take the trash down to the curb.

6. Unless you count the amount of $$ everyone pays on aggregate for Amazon’s advertising campaigns. So no extra money… personally.

7. Tindie, as in “Indie Electronics.” Not to be confused with Tinder, which I understand to be a dating app and/or site. Really glad I got married at a time when meeting people in person was the norm not the exception. OTOH, I saw a comment somewhere that recreational kickball has become something of a mating ritual, and apparently Bumble is cutting headcount. So that might be an improvement if there’s some higher order trend in the in-person dating direction. I’d have to assume pickleball falls into this category too, which appears to be an advanced form of Ping Pong that the Chinese don’t (yet) dominate AFAIK.

8. Thanks for sticking around!

9. Admittedly only one that I know of, but there are likely more.

10. To use a bit of corporate-ese