I’ve built a pretty big following on Medium. It’s enough to make me feel like I know what I’m doing. So when I made a Substack account and hit publish on my first newsletter, I had high expectations.

I opened the dashboard at the end of June to check the numbers. One subscriber.

I looked again a few days later. Still one.

It was my girlfriend.

I laughed at myself a little. Okay, fine. Fresh start. She’s my biggest supporter, sure. But wasn’t the point to start from zero? To see if I could build something from nothing?

A week later, still one subscriber. I thought I’d have more by now. I expected people to find me, subscribe, care. But no one was there. And it didn’t matter that I’d been successful before. That I’d built something before. It felt irrelevant.

Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this. Maybe I should’ve brought my Medium audience over. Maybe I made a mistake thinking I could start all over again.

The only person who kept me going was my girlfriend. Subscriber number one to Writing Wednesdays. Without her support, I wouldn’t have had the motivation to keep posting, and reach 274 subscribers a couple of months later.

That’s when I started using Substack notes as a testing ground. Quick ideas. Sentences or two. Nothing fancy. Just thoughts thrown into the void to see what worked.

Every day, I watched what worked. What got likes. What got comments. What was ignored. People were drawn to vulnerability, to honesty. So I took mental notes.

And then the paid subscribers came.

I’ve kept all of the messages from people who explained why they signed up to the paid version of Writing Wednesdays. To protect privacy, I’ve blurred their names and pictures. However, their words have always reminded me to keep going.

Here are a few examples…

If I were starting from zero on Substack today, this is what I’d do…