2023: Mistakes & Pivots

Writing

This year was (drum roll please)…interesting. Yes, interesting. Out of all the adjectives on God’s green Earth I choose interesting.

Interesting. Interesting. Interesting.

I came back to writing after taking a year and a half long hiatus. When I came back to Substack, I thought that I would make Factorial Zero private. It would become more of a journalling outlet. In my infinite wisdom I cut my subscriber list down, because I didn’t want people that I “didn’t know too well’“ seeing my more personal work. So, after my first year of writing where I’d grown to about 30 or so subscribers, I chopped them away. Snip. Snip.

I realized I didn’t want to run a private Substack after one whole week, and, because I have very high intellect, I hadn’t saved the list of the subscribers I’d cut. Why would you?

I started the journey again.

This time, I decided I wanted to be a parody Substack. I successfully tried to overthrow The Onion. I wrote an article-a-day — to keep the doctors away — and published like clockwork…I’m talking Swiss clockwork.

I had a great time writing, but I got too busy, and this too fell by the wayside.

I know there are smart-asses out there. So, when they read “I got too busy, and this too fell by the wayside” they’re going to think (initiating nerd voice), “well, if you really wanted to write you would find the time.” You know what, you’re right. You got me!!! Go back to Fortnite.

I tried coming back to the daily parody pace but it was hard. Turns out, writing something even somewhat interesting (there’s that word again) is difficult. While limiting myself to parody gave me direction, it was a double-edged sword; I knew what I needed to write but if the creative juices were flowing in another genre I couldn’t leverage that.

Beginning of summer is where I started the daily parody articles

Growth was stagnant until the parody truth bombs started dropping. Maybe that content wasn’t half bad? You can see the stall in early September when I took a break. A couple people unsubscribed…I don’t know who you are but I know what you did.

After taking more than a month off, I decided I’d come back to write random longer form articles, which is how I actually first started in 2021.

It’s been a lot of iterating in 6 months.

1. Came back from writing after a 1.5 year break

2. Started publishing daily parody posts

3. Quit.

4. Took a regenerative break…Deadpool without the profanity

5. Came back with big brain long-form articles

It’s been fun + a lot of you have joined me for the ride!

Metrics-wise, we’ve more than 2x’d this year. Not too shabby. If I can keep up this pace for the next 30 years, subscriber growth looks good.

\(\text{Number of Subscribers} = 2^{30} = 1,073,741,824\)

Assuming a (very) conservative 5% turnover to paid subscriptions at $60/year, annual revenues look healthy as well.

\(\text{Annual revenue} = $60 \times (1,073,741,824 \times 0.05) = $3,221,225,472\)

And remember, these are conservative estimates.

Growth

Naturally, a goal of mine is to grow my Substack. I do write just for myself, but it’s a cool benchmark to see if others value what I’m publishing. To do that, social media plays an unfortunately large role.

I initially started with X. In theory, X has the biggest upside for growing a following, but in the trenches it’s like farting into a hurricane. I did some investigation and the metrics just seemed bleak. I looked into accounts that had “viral” tweets.

Why have 4.8M people seen this? The algorithms work in mysterious ways.

This type of tweet would be a best case scenario for anyone without a following. Behind the curtain, even if you mange a post like this, the payoff just isn’t there. This guy has about 900 followers post-tweet. He’s been on Twitter since 2009 so let’s say he had 400-500 followers beforehand. That roughly works out to 100 new followers for every 1 million views: the viability of growth just doesn’t make sense.

I turned to Mastodon: the new wave Democrat-approved X alternative. I gave it a whirl and liked it even less. There’s nobody on there and the content was always about politics. Boring.

Then, I meandered over to Substack Notes (Substack’s own version of X). This has been the most fruitful by a long shot. There’s high community engagement, primarily from other writers at the moment, so hopefully more readers start using it soon. There’s relevant content on there and it feels like a better social media space.

Substack also makes it easy to see if what you’re doing is working, and you can see if the platform is actually helping you.

It’s also really cool to see where readers come from.

Our 55 subscribers are an international bunch!

Looking ahead

Graphs and metrics are fun, but that’s not my focus going into 2024.

I’ll primarily focus my efforts on writing more consistently. It’s way easier to stay in the publishing cadence when you’re not taking a month away from everything.

Aside from putting out decent content, there’s not too much else to do.

The theme of 2024: stick to basics.

Let’s see what I’ll write for next year’s summary.

2024: ____ & ____