🚨 I Finally Unlocked the SECRET to Substack Growth 🚨

Read this if you want to double your audience overnight

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

👋 Hey, and welcome to my personal newsletter! Every once in a while, you’ll see a new post covering my thoughts and ruminations on various topics and maybe even a little advice for some of your questions!

Every day, someone on here claims they’ve cracked the code to going viral on Substack, “the secret to 10x my Substack subscribers,” which somehow always involves 47 steps, three lead magnets, an Udemy course, and sacrificing a goat to the algorithm.

Hell, sometimes it even involved combining a funnel, a flywheel, and a ferret with a LinkedIn account.

But today, dear reader, I’m going to give it to you straight.

The real secret.

No fluff.
No funnels.
No goats.

After months of rigorous investigation (i.e. writing and watching what happens), I’ve finally discovered the real secret to Substack growth and improving your following, subscriber numbers, and profile:

Okay, for real now, here it is:

🧠 Write regularly
💬 About things you actually genuinely care about
📣 And then talk about it a bit

That’s it.

No cross-promos.
No growth hacks.
No viral thread templates written by a ghostwriter in Bali who is selling it for €10 on a Shopify store

Just you.
Typing.
Repeatedly.

On purpose.
Over time.
With intent.

Welcome to the real secret.

It’s a question that I’ve regularly been asked by people who follow my primary publication,

The French Dispatch

, and who have been wondering how I’ve made it work, how I’ve made paid subscriptions function, how I’ve built my readership, etc etc.

And the answer is always simple: I write about what I care about, what I know, and what I can contribute to the discussion about.

And ultimately, as content producers, we need to recognise a very fundamental thing:

If it’s not interesting or fun for us as writers, then in no way, shape, or form is it going to be interesting or fun for our readers.

As many of you know, I was frustrated by the fact that I simply didn’t see media coverage that was up to the task of explaining the 2022 French Presidential Elections, which usually made a hash of French politics, which led to constant confusion globally, but most importantly, in Brussels.

Part of it was that our glorious language can be hard to understand, but that’s only half an excuse when speaking to a Frenchman like myself.

Alongside this, I had made a New Year’s resolution on one fateful evening in 2021, where I decided that I was going to make the effort of writing something every single week, and use that to sharpen my writing, my intellect, and to give myself a reason to do more research.

I wasn’t doing it to build a profile, I wasn’t doing it to build a reputation, and I wasn’t doing it to become popular or to make money.

I simply wanted to share my knowledge, my language skills, and simply to write. Which, in hindsight, was an outstanding idea, as I’ve been making connections left, right and centre, making friends, sharing experiences, and in my view, contributing to a better world.

So if you want to improve your subscriber numbers, your followship, or whatever other metric you’re keen on:

Just write.

Write about what you care for, what interests you, what makes you passionate, and share your life and experiences with the world and see how they react and respond.

It’s so boring that it might just work.

Hell, it’s why I’ll be resurrecting

Julien’s Newsletter

to return to more personal writing, more regular writing, and to start creating something that will produce more human connections.

Hell, I may even become yet another white guy with a podcast, if you would all be so lucky.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my writing or my work in general, feel free to click on the picture below: