Please Don't Optimize Your Substack
The problem with authenticity and why you should commit Beautiful Vandalism.
On May 15th, exactly 12 months after I went all in on Substack, I woke up to 10,000 subscribers. You might be wondering how I did this. In today’s article, I’m giving away my exact blueprint for free.
If I were playing the same game as everyone else, that is exactly how I would open this essay. We have all seen these posts. They clog our feeds and dominate the trending tabs.
They all look the same. And if you click on the profiles of the people writing them, you notice something fascinating. They are teaching you how to build a massive audience, yet their own posts struggle to get 25 likes. The math doesn’t add up.
Inflating numbers is easy. You can import a dead email list from a failed crypto project, run paid ads to cheap giveaways… or simply lie.
But their scammy practices aren’t the biggest problem here. The tragedy is that honest creators believe that this crap actually works.
You sit there, trying to write beautiful essays about philosophy, or art, or human resilience, and you see the “10k in 12 months” post. You look at your dashboard sitting at 49 subscribers. You conclude your writing sucks and start doubting yourself.
You aren’t doing anything wrong. You’re just not a grifter.
Selling Shovels in a Gold Rush
The problem is when you see this type of content and start to read it, it logically seems to make sense. Since it worked for them, you would assume it must be true.
The people shouting the loudest right now are selling shovels in a gold rush. Their aggressive, hyper-optimized frameworks only “work” because they are selling an anxiety-driven product: status, fast money, and vanity metrics.
People will practically throw their wallets at the screen if you poke at their financial insecurities hard enough.
Yes, their advice works… assuming you lack any moral compass and your goal is to build the same “business” as them.
If you write a thoughtful publication about Roman history, modern poetry, or navigating motherhood, and you apply their high-pressure sales tactics... you will look like a lunatic.
Did you enjoy the eulogy of Tiberius Augustus? DO YOU WANT TO 10X YOUR ROMAN AQUEDUCT KNOWLEDGE IN THE NEXT 30 DAYS? SUBSCRIBE NOW OR GET LEFT BEHIND!
It’s not just wrong, but horribly wrong.
The growth hacker playbook prioritizes immediate extraction over long-term trust. It is at best a short-term strategy, because they need a constant influx of new hopeless victims they can burn through.
The most depressing part of the grifter advice is to turn every aspect of a profile, bio, and about page into a highly optimized sales funnel. If every writer on Substack follows this advice, the platform will overflow with aggressive sales pitches.
By optimizing all the friction out of your profile, you destroy the very magic that made your audience fall in love with your writing in the first place.
When you optimize away all your friction, you remove all the reasons someone might actually care about you. If your work is frictionless, it’s a commodity. And commodities only compete on one thing: who is cheapest and who is loudest. That’s a race to the bottom you cannot win.
The result is what we are seeing across the entire creator economy right now: an ocean of identical, soulless copycats. Everyone sounds the same, and nobody trusts anyone. Worst of all, the promised success is nothing but an illusion.
Everyone Is Authentic Now
We are in the midst of a crisis.
I talk to talented creators every week. They have a profound philosophy and unique worldview. But when it comes to promoting their work they panic. They retreat to the standard marketing practices they themselves despise, and as a result, nobody reads their work. Not because their ideas aren’t good, but because their packaging sounds exactly like everyone else.
They despise the crappy marketing tactics for a good reason. Most of it is deeply inauthentic.
Everyone is talking about authenticity, but few actually are.
It’s not a brand strategy you can slap onto a Substack post. Authenticity is something you are. It is really a byproduct of doing the actual work. Nobody who is actually authentic has to convince others that they are authentic.
Jesus didn’t wander around the desert wearing a backwards trucker hat saying, “Guys, welcome to my channel. Today I’m just showing up, unscripted, trying to be super authentic with my loaves and fishes.”
No. He just lived his philosophy. And that’s what made him such a magnetic person… I mean, he has more followers than every creator on social media. Combined.
The Starving Artist Lie
I know why you still use the marketing tactics you despise. You are doing it because you are terrified. The system has handed you a paralyzing, false choice: Either become a shameless marketer, or accept your fate as a starving artist.
So, pure survival instinct tells you to hold your nose, swallow your pride, and hit publish on content that makes your skin crawl. You think to yourself: “If I just play the game a little longer, maybe I’ll make enough money to finally do my real work.”
It is a lie. The grifters need you to believe this lie so you keep buying their templates. They tell you that ignoring the algorithm is career suicide. Good.
Commit career suicide on their terms, so you can build a business on yours.
Break their rules.
Embrace the Vandalism
We have become a society of skeptics and eye-rollers. We know when we are being sold to, and we know when someone is trying to manipulate us.1
If you want to build a sustainable body of work that pays you for your depth, you cannot rely on logic. Trust is the foundation of any sustainable business. And to build trust, you need to be authentic.
You can’t get there with logic. It’s something people have to feel.
Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years, and it won't change in the next million. We are emotional beings. Nature cares a great deal about feelings, and feelings drive what we do. And right now, what people feel when they encounter the creator economy is — nothing. Or worse, suspicion.
To create a business that resonates with people we must:
Tell a story that honestly reflects the truth of who we are.
Express this truth in a way that doesn’t come across as bullshit to the audience.
It sounds simple. But 90% of creators fail because they let fear dictate their strategy. They want to stand out, but they are too terrified to do something different. They retreat to the safety of templates and best practices, serving up a lukewarm sandwich of average ideas.
We need more creators who possess the courage to commit Beautiful Vandalism.
By that, I do not mean you should break things. On the contrary. You should fix the broken thing by making it more beautiful. You take the walls covered in corporate graffiti and you paint a mural.
You are a writer trying to make another human being feel something. If you do that consistently, generously, and unapologetically, you will not need to trick them into paying you. People will trust you, and as a natural consequence, they will happily pay you to help them get where they are going.
The business was never the point. Making the change you seek to make is.
Go build something beautiful.
P. S. Your business should be a vessel for your life’s work, not a prison of your own making. To do that, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.
I created The Archetype Navigator to help you find that clarity. It’s free and uncovers your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you.
It won't give you 10,000 subscribers overnight. But it might just save you a decade of climbing the wrong ladder.
Say with a fake timer
Love this. Thank you for writing. I’m new on this Substack journey and have felt the pull towards the people selling their templates, funnels and easy promises. Like a moth to a flame! But I’ve resisted and will continue to paint my best mural 💜
If only people knew how easy it was to stand out. When ever someone reads my writing they ask, "how do I write like this", l always say "ditch the templates, you are the template. Write how you want to and people will adjust over time. They will learn to love you for being yourself in a world that tries to squeeze every drop of humanity and authenticity away from us.