the metric nobody checks on Substack
The real number that predicts your income on Substack.
Likes feel good. But they don't pay the bills!
Let’s drop the marketing facade for a second.
Pull up a chair, grab whatever you’re drinking, and let’s talk about a hard truth that took me way, way too long to finally accept.
A newsletter sitting on 40,000 subscribers can pull in less money a year than a quietly built list of 3,000.
Not “can” as in some rare, freak anomaly. This is happening right now!
All across this platform.
While creators are busy flexing the wrong metric in their bios, they are quietly drowning in silence.
Something is fundamentally broken in how we are taught to measure our worth on the internet..!
And I know you’ve felt that quiet wrongness before, even if you couldn’t quite put your finger on it.
Let’s name it today!
The Metric We Flex Is an Illusion
Here is the uncomfortable reality. That subscriber count you keep refreshing?
It tells you exactly one thing:
How many people, in a fleeting moment of time, clicked a button.
That is it. That is the entire story!
It doesn’t tell you if they actually read your words.
It doesn’t tell you if they resonate with your voice, or if your email even survives the morning purge when they’re half-awake, swiping left faster than their brain can process.
You can hit 10,000 subscribers, screenshot the milestone, post it everywhere, and still be speaking to an empty room.
I know this because two of you replied to a note of mine last week asking about this exact trap. I joked that it deserved its own deep dive. And…
Well, this is it!
The Reality Sitting in Your Inbox
Think about your own inbox for a second.
How many unopened emails are sitting there right now? Fifty? Two hundred?
I’m not judging, mine is a graveyard, too.
But somewhere in that pile is a newsletter from a creator who is deeply proud of their subscriber count. 🫤
They have absolutely no idea they are buried under a DoorDash receipt and a 20% off code for sneakers you never bought.
Now, flip the mirror.
Somewhere out there, a real human opened your last email. Or they didn’t!
And this is the part that should genuinely shake you:
You can build an entire identity, a whole “creator brand,” on a number that has absolutely nothing to do with whether a single human being is actually listening to you!
The Psychology of the Wrong Metric
I want to be fair about why we do this. It isn’t stupidity, it’s psychology.
The psychologist Alfred Adler believed we aren’t driven by our pasts.
Instead, we are driven by the story we tell ourselves about finally becoming enough.
He called it the striving for significance.
We all carry this quiet, heavy feeling of inadequacy, and we spend a massive chunk of our lives trying to outrun it.
Subscriber count is a cheap shortcut around that feeling!
It is borrowed significance.
Every time that number ticks up, your nervous system whispers, “See? You matter.” Even if those people never open another email.
Open rate doesn’t give you that dopamine
Open rate forces a raw, unforgiving question:
Are you actually connecting with human beings, or are you just collecting receipts to prove you exist?
There is a phrase that echoes through almost every wisdom tradition:
Energy flows where attention goes.
It’s not magic, it’s just the physics of human nature!
Whatever you feed with real intention grows. Whatever you fake eventually collapses, one quiet, unopened email at a time..!
The inbox is one of the last honest rooms left on the internet. It does not lie!
The Math Behind the Madness
Now, let’s take off the philosophical lens and look at the cold numbers, because the psychology aligns perfectly with the marketing science!
You’ve probably heard of the “1,000 True Fans” concept.
The premise is beautiful: You don’t need a million eyeballs.
You need a small tribe of people who trust you enough to actually show up and pay you.
You can build an entire, unshakeable life on just that.
Marketers know a version of this as the Pareto principle - the 80/20 rule.
Eighty percent of your revenue will almost always come from a tiny, hyper-engaged slice of your audience. The rest is just ghosts wearing a subscriber badge.
So, when you obsess over inflating the badge instead of nurturing that tiny slice, you are literally optimizing for the wrong 80%!
Two Realities, One Platform
Let me paint a picture for you.
This isn’t a specific, named person, it’s a pattern I watch play out every single day here.
Newsletter A has 40,000 subscribers. Their open rate sits at 3%.
That means 1,200 real people are seeing the work.
The other 38,800 are ghosts - people who subscribed once for a reason they’ve long forgotten.
Newsletter B has 3,000 subscribers!
Their open rate is a massive 58%.
That is 1,740 living, breathing humans reading every single week, replying, forwarding, and remembering the writer’s name months down the line.
Look at those numbers again.
Newsletter B, with 13 times fewer subscribers, is reaching more real humans than Newsletter A.
Same platform.
Same amount of time spent building the list.
But underneath the surface, one is a fragile ego project, and the other is an unshakable business.
Now, guess which one effortlessly converts when they finally turn on a paid tier.
Exactly. You already know! 😉
The Good News (Where Your Leverage Is)
Lean in for this part, because this is where the treasure map is buried.
If deep connection beats raw size, it means you do not need to go viral.
You don’t need an algorithm to bless you.
You don’t need 40,000 of anything.
You just need a small, tight-knit group of people who trust you enough to keep opening the door when you knock!
That is a game you can actually win!
Whether you are sitting at 20 subscribers or 200 right now, you can build this.
It is not about being famous. It is about being believed.
Those are two entirely different games, and the second one brings peace, not burnout..!
What We Are Doing Here
I will always shoot straight with you.
My paid tier is actually turned on. In fact, two incredibly generous people have already bought yearly subscriptions just out of the kindness of their hearts to support the work. And honestly? That gave me a massive surge of motivation to keep going!
But here is the truth:
Right now, there is no exclusive “paid-only” content sitting behind a paywall.
I simply haven’t had the time to build it, because my entire focus right now is on pouring as much undeniable, free value into this space as I possibly can.
I do plan to activate the exclusive side eventually. And when I do, it won’t be a recycled Twitter thread or generic marketing fluff.
It will be the raw, specific, sometimes uncomfortable lessons I am learning by building this in public, in real-time, alongside the 220 of you here right now!
If you haven’t subscribed yet, do it now so you don’t lose this signal in the noise of everything else fighting for your attention today. You’ll want to be here for the chapters I haven’t written yet.
And hey, if this newsletter has ever shifted your perspective and you feel like dropping some extra fuel into the engine, the option to upgrade is always there. Right now, it acts purely as a way to back the writing and keep the momentum going. No pressure, no hard sell. Just an open door if you want to support the journey.
Your Move
I’m not going to wrap this up with a neat little bow and ask you to smash the like button.
I have a real question for you, and I want you to be brutally honest with yourself before you answer:
If you had to choose right now between 10,000 subscribers who barely glance at your emails, or 500 subscribers who devour every single word you write... which one would you actually pick?
Don’t just answer it in your head. Hit reply to this email and tell me.
One sentence is enough. I read every single one myself!
Depending on how many of you actually reply today, I’ll decide if it’s worth dropping the follow up piece: the tactical steps I’m using right now to push my own open rates higher on this platform.
No fluff. Just leverage.
Your move.
Here’s a summary of what I just said:
I agree with most of this, and it’s nice to see someone saying out loud that subscriber count isn’t the flex people think it is.
The only thing I’d throw into the mix is that even open rates don’t tell the whole story. Controversially, I hardly subscribe to anyone. 😂 I follow people, read almost everything in the app, disappear down comment sections, recommend writers to other people, none of that shows up in someone’s email analytics, yet it’s where a lot of my trust has actually been built.
The other thing I don’t think gets talked about enough is just, well, the work. Not writing the essay but the human part. Reading other people’s work because you’re genuinely curious. Hanging around in comment sections and having conversations that have absolutely nothing to do with “growth” but everything to do with becoming someone people recognise and trust over time.
I know when I first arrived here I definitely had a little bit of that entitlement of, I’ve written something, where are all the readers then? 🙄 Turns out that’s not how this place works. Nor should it.
I’ve got five paid subscribers now, and of course I’d love that number to keep growing. But I’ve also realised something really freeing: I have to earn that. Nobody owes me their support because I hit publish. They support me because over time they’ve decided, Yep, I want more of whatever this weird little corner of the internet is.
That feels like a much healthier way to play.
This seems important. Really trying to get over analytics anxiety. I found yesterday that there is an option to hide them and just focus on writing, but I been to get over this issue. Thanks. Will read this.