How are we failing on Substack?

We brought Techsistence to life last November. 30 editions later — here we are. We put 10 hours in each edition, sometimes more. This equals 300+ hours of work. What now? You tell us.

First of all, I’d like to thank you for being with us. You are the reason why we want to deliver best quality content to Techsistence almost every week. It’s been quite a journey!

This is how Roy — my AI assistant dedicated for Techsistence, understands this project:

Techsistence is a platform that offers insightful content on technology, with a focus on AI, automation, and business strategies for founders and developers. It also shares lessons from various bootstrapping ventures.

It is indeed our mission, to deliver high quality content on technology, paired with actionable advice and very practical approach to tools and productivity.

Our personal goal was to get more exposure with our content, so that we can start building following, gain friends with similar interest and give value to others.

The thing is — it doesn’t work.

Second best guess — we don’t know if it works. But lean towards the former.

Hard work and consistency is our default mode. That is why we just followed our gut and delivered no matter what.

After over 6 months in this mode, here’s where we fall short:

❌ We did not get any platform exposure from Substack

And honestly, we were counting on it. We did not think about the algo, instead we just tried to put 10x content out there and give our best in extensive, detailed articles. I don’t think we ever got featured anywhere nor get traffic from channels other than our own.

❌ We did not get any subs from Substack’s mechanisms

There are some fantastic publications that started recommending us (thank you!) but we gained only 2 subscribers from it:

On the other hand, we’ve recommended 500+ people to other newsletters:

I’ve reached out to all of their authors, hoping they could possibly return the favour, but never got any reply from them.

❌ As a matter of fact… we did not really get any subs

We’ve started with importing our various lists to Substack so that we could unify them here. We had almost 2900 subscribers on those lists. Initial subscriber churn is understandable — we started delivering something new and on regular basis, not everyone will be interested.

But we kept loosing subs for almost four months (!) until we started gaining them again. And yes, we have over 3000 subs now, but this is only a 100+ difference from the beginning. After 6 month writing 10 hours a week on average!

❌ Our other channels don’t work for Substack

We have some following on other platforms like X and LinkedIn. In fact, to put it all together we have over 25.000 followers (probably a lot of them overlapping, but still). Putting information about our new posts, some quotes, or summaries (and even whole articles) brought us close to nothing in terms of clicks and engagement, and those posts were certainly buried down by the algos.

❌ Substack is silent

I have to say, that posting here has been similar to writing a piece of content, printing it, rolling so that it fits in the bottle and throwing to the ocean. We almost never heard back from people reading our pieces. I can’t honestly remember ANY comment below our article or post, not to mention any meaningful discussions or people enriching the articles with their own experiences and use-cases.

And this might be our fault of course. Maybe our articles are just not good and engaging enough. The thing is I don’t see it elsewhere, too. Most of the writers with solid following get some comments and reshares, but they doesn’t seem very deep.

❌ There is no SEO

There are hundreds of pages of content on Techsistence already. Although we do not optimise it for SEO nor stuff with keywords, we try to be consistent with our phrasing and within our niche. We have .com domain pointing on Substack. For months organic search was dead 0, only to rise a bit recently, with irrelevant traffic.

❌ Paid churn is real

Although we got some paid subscribers, they don’t seem to stick. This is also understandable — most of our content is free. We don’t offer much for paid subscribers. Yet maybe this shouldn’t always be the case. There might be people around who are willing to support us even if (or because of that) most of our content is free and accessible to anyone. It seems it’s not really the case.

To make things clear — this post is not to brag about it.
This post is about taking action!

I am open to accepting the scenario, where our content is just not good enough. This could be a valid answer to all those metrics. After all, there’s so much content being put out there every day and the market is really competitive, with tons of talented writers!

On the other hand — without feedback I just don’t know (and I don’t give up easily).

This is why I have a great favour to ask.

Please, help us better understand, why we’re failing here.

Here’s a short survey with questions that will help us make more educated guesses on our content and your needs. We want to serve you better and we feel we’re missing some alignment here.

This is the time to take action — if you care enough for us to get better and start delivering more engaging value and content.

We really appreciate your help. Please, vote in the polls below:

Lastly, the most important thing!

Please, answer this open-ended question in the comment:

What is the one thing we could improve to serve you better here?

Please, don’t be a stranger. We need this advice and motivation to keep going!

Thank you.

Greg, Adam & Alice