Substack Posts: The Substack Techstack
Your creative home base, why publishing rhythm matters more than frequency, and other insights I wish I'd known sooner.
The Biggest Mistake Substack Creators Make
Last week, I shared why most Substack advice backfires: creators keep importing hustle culture tactics to a platform that rewards depth and patience.
The reason this happens is that Substack operates on two completely different systems, but creators treat them the same way.
Today, I want to focus on the first system: your newsletters and subscriber relationships. This is what I call the "tech stack"—your creative home base where you build genuine relationships with people who chose to be there.
The biggest mistake I see creators make with newsletters? Bringing a social media mindset to a completely different medium. They optimize for viral potential instead of depth, write for broad appeal instead of their actual audience, and measure success with the wrong metrics.
Once you understand how newsletters actually work on Substack, everything becomes clearer.
The Tech Stack: Your Creative Home Base
Your Newsletters & Subscriber Relationships
Think of your newsletter and subscriber relationships as your studio, your workshop, your creative sanctuary. This is where you build your actual body of work. Your newsletters aren't just "content"—they're your creative practice, your way of thinking through ideas, your method for building genuine relationships with people who want to be there.
The tech stack operates on what I call "invitation energy." Your subscribers chose to be there. They gave you their email address. They decided your voice was worth hearing from regularly. That's not casual attention. That's intentional engagement.
Because of this, the tech stack rewards depth over speed. Your subscribers aren't scrolling through an endless feed, getting distracted by the next shiny thing. They're opening their inbox specifically to hear from you. They want your full thoughts, your developed ideas, your authentic voice—not your performance of what you think will get engagement.
Here's what this means practically:
Publishing rhythm matters more than publishing frequency
If you publish every Tuesday, your readers learn to expect you on Tuesday. If you publish whenever you feel like it, you're training them to treat your work as optional background noise.
Consistency builds trust.
Frequency builds fatigue.
This is counterintuitive because everywhere else in the creator economy, we're told that more is better. Post daily. Stay top of mind. Never let your audience forget about you. But newsletter readers aren't scrolling through feeds—they're making intentional choices about what to read.
Here's why rhythm works where frequency fails:
Frequency is about you.
Rhythm is about the relationship.
When you focus on frequency, you optimize for your own metrics and growth goals. More posts, more touchpoints, more opportunities to be seen.
When you focus on rhythm, you create a predictable space that your readers can step into when they're ready.
Think about it this way:
Frequency asks "How often can I get in front of my audience?"
Rhythm asks "When does my audience most want to hear from me, and how can I show up reliably in that moment?"
I learned this the hard way when I went through a phase of sending three newsletters a week because I thought it would accelerate my growth. I was thinking about frequency—more content, more chances to engage, more opportunities to grow. Instead, my open rates dropped, and people started unsubscribing. Not because my content was bad but because I was asking for more attention than the relationship could handle.
Your publishing schedule is a promise.
When you keep that promise consistently, people plan for you. They save your emails for their Tuesday morning coffee or their Friday afternoon wind-down. They create space in their mental calendar because they trust you'll be there with something worth their time.
When you break that rhythm constantly—posting sporadically or changing your schedule frequently—you're not just being inconsistent. You're telling your readers not to make space for you. You're training them to treat your work as optional background noise rather than intentional engagement.
The magic number isn't daily or weekly, it's whatever the relationship can maintain (without you OR your reader burning out).
Because rhythm isn't just about when you publish, it's about the quality of attention you can bring to each piece when you're not rushing to hit arbitrary frequency targets.
Your email subject lines can be honest
Unlike social media, where you're competing for attention in a crowded feed, your newsletter is a direct invitation into someone's inbox. Now, yes—"This One Thing Will Change Your Creative Life Forever" might get a higher open rate than "Why I threw away three months of work." But here's what the open rate obsession misses:
what happens after people open?
When you use clickbait subject lines, you're training your audience to expect something you're not actually delivering. You might get the click, but you lose trust. And trust is the only currency that matters in the tech stack.
I've watched creators get addicted to the dopamine hit of high open rates from manipulative subject lines, only to watch their engagement plummet over time. People start ignoring their emails because they've learned that the subject line promises something the content doesn't deliver.
The strength of your relationship with your readers is what determines long-term success, not individual open rates. Honest and intriguing subject lines, paired with consistently valuable content, build that relationship. When people trust that "Why I threw away three months of work" from you will actually reveal something meaningful about the creative process, they'll open it. When they trust that you're not trying to manipulate them, they'll keep opening your emails.
The real metric isn't open rates now—it's whether people are still opening your emails six months from now.
Comments are conversations, not metrics
The people commenting on your newsletters aren't trying to get discovered—they're engaging with your ideas. This creates space for actual dialogue, building relationships, and letting your thinking evolve through interaction with your readers.
I've had some of my best insights come from reader comments that challenged my thinking or shared a perspective I hadn't considered. When someone takes the time to respond to your newsletter thoughtfully, they're giving you a gift—they're helping you understand how your ideas land, what resonates, and what confuses people.
The goal isn't to maximize the number of comments you get.
It's to create the conditions for meaningful dialogue.
Sometimes that means explicitly asking questions. Sometimes it means sharing something you're genuinely uncertain about. Sometimes it means admitting when you're wrong and letting the comments become part of your ongoing learning process.
You can write for your actual audience
Social media forces you to write for the algorithm and hope your audience finds you. The tech stack allows you to write directly for the people who are already there, which means you can delve deeper, get more specific, and trust that your readers will follow your line of thinking.
This might be the most liberating aspect of newsletter writing. You don't have to make everything accessible to everyone. You don't have to explain basic concepts every time you reference them. You don't have to worry about whether this particular piece will "perform well" with strangers.
Your subscribers have given you permission to assume they're intelligent, that they're interested in your perspective, that they can handle complexity and nuance. You can reference previous newsletters and build on ideas over time. You can develop running themes and inside jokes. You can write the kind of pieces that require your readers to think, not just react.
I started writing very differently once I stopped imagining my newsletter being read by the entire internet and started writing for the actual humans who had chosen to subscribe. My writing became more specific, more personal, more useful. Not because I was trying to optimize for engagement, but because I was finally writing for real people instead of an imaginary crowd.
The Newsletter Mindset Mistakes That Kill Your Growth
Here's the most common mindset mistakes I see creators make with their newsletters:
Bringing an optimization mindset to newsletters
This isn't specifically about social media—it's about approaching newsletters with a performance and growth optimization mindset that prioritizes metrics and broad appeal over depth and relationship building.
Signs you're doing this: You're avoiding nuanced or complex topics because they might not "perform well." You're writing to be shareable rather than to be valuable to your specific audience. You're constantly checking metrics that don't predict long-term success (like individual open rates) while ignoring the ones that do (like whether people are still engaged six months later). You're trying to make every newsletter appeal to the broadest possible audience instead of serving the people who are already there.
The result: Your newsletters feel generic and optimized rather than personal and valuable. You attract passive subscribers instead of engaged readers.
Using the wrong success metrics
Newsletter success isn't measured the same way as social media success.
The metrics that matter:
Consistency of opens over time (not individual open rates)
Quality of comments and replies
Subscriber retention (people staying subscribed and engaged)
How often people reference your previous work
Whether your audience grows more engaged (not just bigger) over time
Direct replies and conversations sparked by your newsletters
The mistake is optimizing for social media metrics (shares, viral potential, broad appeal) while missing the relationship-building opportunities that make newsletters uniquely powerful.
Why This Approach Works
When you embrace the tech stack for what it actually is—a tool for building deep, sustained relationships through consistent, valuable content—something interesting happens. You stop competing with every other creator for algorithmic attention and start building something that belongs to you.
Your subscribers become genuinely invested in your thinking. They start referring friends not because your content went viral, but because they've found genuine value in your perspective over time. They engage more thoughtfully because they know you're writing specifically for them, not for the internet at large.
This creates a compound effect that's impossible to achieve through hustle tactics. Every newsletter builds on the previous ones. Every thoughtful comment deepens the relationship. Every consistent delivery builds more trust.
What's Next
This covers the tech stack—your newsletters and subscriber relationships. But remember, Substack operates on two systems. Next week, I'll dive into the discovery platform: how to use Notes strategically without losing yourself in the performance trap.
The discovery platform operates on completely different logic, and most creators either ignore it entirely or approach it with the wrong mindset. Understanding how to use it effectively (without burning out) is the key to sustainable growth on Substack.
After that, I'll share the pattern I've noticed in creators who seem to have cracked the sustainability code—how they create a feedback loop between these two systems that makes their creative work stronger and more sustainable than anything you can build on traditional social media.
About The Creator Retreat🌳
If this resonated—if you're rethinking your own publishing rhythm or craving more depth in how you show up for your audience—becoming a paid subscriber to The Creator Retreat 🌳 is the next step.
Inside the retreat, our workshops and guest presentations offer behind-the-scenes experiments, mindset shifts that aren’t ready for public feeds, and practical systems that help you build something lasting. It’s where we teach from the work, not just about the work.
We offer monthly guest presentations from Substack Creators who are succeeding at this kind of small-slow-growth approach that is authentic, honest, and built in integrity.
If you’re ready to treat your newsletter like a creative home base—and want support from a community and team who are building the same way—we’d love to have you inside.
Become a paid subscriber and get the real-time tools, insights, and support to grow your Substack with clarity and integrity.
Okay, this is crazy Don! Because I was just about to ask questions and post something along the same lines!
Alex, this was such a beautiful and a nuanced post! Really fired up my brain and made me think. Because I've a feeling this comment could become an essay...I'm just putting my thoughts in points lol 😅:
- thank you for saying that about open rates, and comments. I felt a deep relief. I will accept that I keep checking for open rates... though reducing the quality of depth causes so much friction for me. I got really exhausted of reducing the depth....so I finally am who I am, even in notes and that's so relieving! You're absolutely right, the deep connections have just become more beautiful ❤️
- w.r.t consistency...here's where I had a tiny friction and would love to hear your 2 cents if it's okay. I typically end up posting about 3-4 times a months consistently... though again, having a consistent 'schedule' again causes deep friction because of how my creativity ebbs and flows in waves. If the reader knows that I'll publish 3-4 times a month consistently, how important is it for them to know the day and time? And how can I find some sense of balance if it's so?
- Again as Don said, I've stopped writing "for the audience". I write from the creativity, soul, heart first...and then edit it for the people reading it...but then it means polishing or just formatting.
(Well, it became an essay anyways😂...but thank you so much for this essay Alex! Ooofff! I can't wait for the notes one yet!)
P.S.: if you could do a piece about how to invite your subscribers into your paid products/spaces...with the balance, nuance and heart... it'd be really helpful. Because people like me... who're trying to find the middle...put themselves out there, while also not completely hide themselves from 'selling'...it becomes a tough job to find the middle lol.
Alex, this is great! I love how you've paid attention over the course of your writing, and evolved as you learned. I do have two questions/comments.
1. I just posted a Substack Note saying that most people don't remember what day or time you post—the opposite of what you're saying here! But I did qualify that devoted readers who await your post each week may actually know when you post. I can attest that I do not know when even my most favorite writers post. I just read them when I see them. I always keep an eye on the Substack inbox, so I don't have to read something as soon as it comes out; I can read it when I have time.
2. I love the idea of writing not for metrics but to engage, to feed your readers with what they've come to expect from you. And it is awesome that you listened and heard this insight. My one reserve here is that I don't think about what my readers want AT ALL when I write. I'm like a sculptor; I carve what I see in my mind and then those that are drawn to those particular lines stop to have a look. So, it's just a 'cart before the horse' thing; my readers have subscribed because they like how I think and how I express my thoughts. So the relationship is the same—one of deep care and engagement—but I don't have to worry when I'm writing if I've departed from what my readers want.
To be clear; I'm commenting because this is such a wonderfully smart and insightful post, and I wanted to get those two things off my chest and also to say thank you for sharing this, Alex!