54 days in. Here are the real numbers.

Substack Bestiies: the growth update nobody asked for but I’m sharing anyway.

I started this Substack on March 13th.

Today is May 6th. That is 54 days. And I promised when I started Substack Bestiies that I would share the real numbers. So here we go.

the numbers as of today

Total subscribers: 3,339. But let me explain why that number is misleading on its own, because it almost always is.

When I launched, I imported an old email list of about 2,064 people. These are what Substack calls imported subscribers. They did not sign up here. They followed me somewhere else at some point and got carried over. A lot of them have been quietly unsubscribing ever since, which is fine and normal and actually good, because they were never really my audience here.

The number I actually pay attention to is organic subscribers. People who found me on Substack, through Instagram, through YouTube, through somewhere, and chose to follow. That number right now is just over 1,600. Built in 54 days.

Paid subscribers: 60. As of today.

Total revenue collected: just over $1,300.

That is what 54 days of building this in real time looks like.

what the paid split actually looks like

Something interesting happened when I looked at my subscriber data this week. My paid subscribers are split almost exactly 50/50 between yearly and monthly.

29 chose yearly. 29 chose monthly. One person joined the Inner Circle.

That split surprised me honestly. I expected more people to go annual because the annual price is a much better deal. But the monthly option at $3 is clearly doing its job too, which is to make the yes feel easy for people who are not sure yet.

Both of those groups matter. The annual people are committed and the cash hits right away. The monthly people are testing the waters and some of them will convert to annual eventually. And both of them are here, reading, which is the whole point.

where the growth is actually coming from

This is the part I find genuinely interesting because it is not what I expected.

When I first launched I assumed Instagram would be doing most of the heavy lifting. And it is contributing. About a third of my growth comes from Instagram.

But nearly half my growth is coming from inside Substack itself. Notes, recommendations, the onboarding flow, people finding me through search inside the app. Almost 50% of new subscribers are finding me without me having to do anything on a different platform.

That is the thing about Substack that I did not fully understand until I was actually in it. It has its own ecosystem. Its own discovery. People on Substack are already reading newsletters. They are already used to paying for content. They find you, they like what they read, and they follow. Sometimes they pay. It feels very different from fighting an algorithm on Instagram or hoping a YouTube video pops.

Facebook is a whole situation. I could not be recommended on the platform since January, and last week I got locked out completely. That 11% of traffic in my last 30 days of data? That was before the ban. I do not expect to see much from there going forward. Which is a little painful considering it was one of my stronger traffic sources, but also a good reminder that building on platforms you do not own is always a risk.

YouTube is at about 1%. Which means I have essentially not tapped that audience at all yet. That is a future conversation.

what I have learned about growing on Substack specifically

A few things that actually moved the needle, in case you are thinking about building here too.

Notes matter more than I expected. Substack Notes is basically their version of a social feed. Short posts, replies, shares. I have been posting there consistently and it is clearly one of the reasons Substack itself keeps sending me new subscribers. The platform rewards you for using it.

Cleaning your list is not a loss. In early April I deleted a few hundred imported subscribers who had never opened anything. My total number dropped. My open rates went up. My conversion to paid actually improved because I was talking to people who were actually there.

Pricing matters but not in the way you think. I went through several pricing experiments in the first 45 days. What I landed on is $3 a month or $30 a year, with the yearly being the obvious better deal. The goal was to make the decision feel easy, not to maximize revenue per person. It is working.

Consistency beats perfection every single time.

where this is going

The honest answer is I do not know exactly. But I have a goal and I am not hiding it.

I want to make $10,000 a month from Substack and YouTube combined. That is the number where I get real options about how I spend my time. It is not there yet. Not even close. But $1,300 in 54 days, from writing, while teaching full time, is proof that the foundation is there.

What I know is that this model compounds in a way that Instagram does not. Every paid subscriber who renews next year adds to what I have already built. Every free subscriber who warms up over the next few months becomes a future paid subscriber. The list keeps growing and the trust keeps building whether I post or not.

That is what I am building toward. Something that does not require me to go viral. Something that pays me for work I already did. Something that grows even on the days I am exhausted after school and have nothing left.

54 days in. Still figuring it out. Still sharing it here.

If you have questions about any of this, drop them in the comments. That is literally how this section works.

Coming soon on Substack Bestiies: I am going to break down exactly how I priced this thing and why. The experiments, the mistakes, and what I finally landed on. If you have questions about pricing your own Substack before then, drop them in the comments and I will make sure to answer them in the post.

xo, Nyk