He announced the newsletter to his existing Twitter following before it had any formal weekly structure.

“tweeted that I'm launching a newsletter”

He wrote guest posts for outlets that already had his target readership subscribed.

“Guest post on First Round Review and Andrew Chen's blog”

The paid-plan launch was announced in a tweet linking to the paywall announcement post.

“Life alert: I'm adding a paid plan to my newsletter”

He attributes growth past the first few thousand subscribers mainly to a sustained weekly cadence rather than a specific growth tactic.

“Writing useful stuff every week for 9 months”

Other newsletter authors recommending his newsletter through Substack's built-in recommendations feature meaningfully changed his growth trajectory, in his own assessment.

“the recommendations feature is a total game changer”

The week after launching paid, he flagged that gating most content behind a paywall makes growth harder, because it shrinks what non-subscribers ever see of the newsletter.

“Once you go paid, it's trickier to grow”