I Tried 30 Days Daily Emails on Substack: 8 Lessons That Changed My Publishing Forever
I thought more emails = faster growth. I was dead wrong.
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We’re all trying to figure out what Substack really is.
I mean, is it a blog? An email marketing tool? A social media platform? Some kind of subscription magazine? The confusion is real, and honestly, I was right there with you when I started.
According to Substack themselves, they’re “the subscription network for independent writers and creators.” That sounds important, but if you’re like me, I still don’t know what a subscription network even means.
For me, Substack represented something different. It’s my first real attempt at writing online, showing up and seeing where this journey takes me. I was excited. I was committed but also completely confused about what the platform actually wanted from me.
I came to Substack with a familiar mindset: the mindset of traditional social media and email marketing combined. If you’ve spent any time in content creation, you’ll know that the advice is always the same: consistency is king. More emails, more touches. More touches, more conversions. It’s a numbers game, and the more you show up in someone’s inbox, the better your results.
So I decided to test this on Substack. My plan was simple: write a 300-word newsletter every single day for 30 days. Thirty days. Thirty emails. Surely, I thought, this would build momentum, establish a habit, and show my subscribers that I was serious about this writing thing.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t work the way I expected.
What Went Wrong
About halfway through my experiment, I started to notice something. The usual email marketing playbook wasn’t translating to Substack. The platform felt different. It was different. And the more I pushed my daily content strategy, the more I felt like I was swimming against the current rather than with it.
And here’s what I learned:
Quality shrinks. When you’re committing to daily output, something has to give—and that something is usually quality. By day fifteen, I wasn’t exploring deep ideas anymore—I was just commenting on my daily life, like you’d do in traditional email marketing. That is not what you want when you publish on Substack.
Your content lives on your page forever. This was the realization that hit me hardest. On Substack, every single piece you publish stays there. It’s indexed, it’s discoverable, it’s part of your permanent archive. So while I was frantically publishing daily, I was also building this massive library of... okay, I’ll be honest... mediocre content. Not terrible, but not the kind of work I want people to remember me for.
Ideas have to be exceptional. Related to the above—every piece you publish is competing for attention in a crowded space. An okay idea isn’t going to cut it. An okay article isn’t going to cut it. You need something that actually resonates, that actually adds value, that actually makes people think “yes, I want to read this.”
Titles need to be really good. Your title is doing serious lifting. Unlike traditional email marketing, people don’t know you yet, so it’s crucial your title pulls them in while they’re scrolling through feeds packed with dozens of other newsletters and notes. Your headline needs to make them stop and actually click. Writing exceptional titles every single day? Possible, but exhausting.
Visual design matters more than I thought. I’d been treating images as an afterthought, but they’re not. The most viral articles that I’ve seen have an image that made people stop. A thoughtful image can be the difference between ten or thousands views.
Post length was counterintuitive. I thought shorter emails were better, but on Substack, people are reading in the app, not skimming their inbox. The platform is designed for depth and share-ability. I found that 800-1200 words was the sweet spot—long enough to develop an idea and short enough to keep people engaged.
The emails feel different. This is subtle but important: Substack newsletters feel branded. They have that Substack look and feel. Traditional marketing emails feel personal, like they came from a friend just for you. Substack emails feel like they’re coming through a platform. It’s a small thing, but it changes the purpose.
The platform isn’t built for traditional email marketing tactics. Although it has some, Substack is missing the tools you’d expect from a serious email marketing platform: automation based on events, advanced segmentation, in-depth A/B testing. And there’s a reason for that. It’s by design.
Hard selling, promotional blasts, conversion-focused tactics go against Substack’s Terms & Conditions. The platform explicitly prohibits publications whose primary purpose is advertising products, driving traffic to external sites, or distributing offers and promotions.
The Actual Better Approach
Once the 30-days were over I stopped and recalibrated. Instead of churning out seven different articles per week, I started creating one genuinely thoughtful, well-researched piece. Then I’d promote that one article through Notes (short-form content.)
It felt different immediately. Less pressure. More focus. And the engagement numbers actually started to make more sense. I realized I was building a library instead of an archive. Now, each article adds real value to my catalog. People visiting my page would find substantive things to read, not a sea of filler.
Substack Isn’t Email Marketing
Here’s the thing I finally understood: Substack isn’t a traditional email marketing tool. It’s something else entirely.
The platform is designed for high-quality editorial content. It’s for writers and creators who want to build long-term, meaningful relationships with an audience through great writing—not for businesses trying to optimize their conversion funnels or drive traffic through promotional campaigns.
If you’re on Substack trying to hard-sell or game the system, you’re fighting the platform’s DNA. The Terms & Conditions make this pretty clear. They don’t want publications that exist primarily to advertise external products, drive traffic elsewhere, or spam people with offers. They want editorial content. Real writing. Substance.
The Long-Term Mentality
This distinction matters. Email marketing often is a short-term, conversion-focused game. You’re measuring opens, clicks, and conversions. Substack is a long-term, editorial game. You’re building a body of work. You’re creating a destination that people return to because your writing is worth their time.
My 30-day experiment taught me that you can’t use the same playbook for both. The moment I stopped thinking like an email marketer and started thinking like a writer building something sustainable, Substack started to make sense.
So if you’re considering Substack—or if you’re already on it and feeling frustrated—take this from someone who learned the hard way: align your strategy with the platform’s vision. Create quality over quantity. Build a library, not an archive. Think long-term.
If you want to know more about what is Substack long-term vision you can read my previous article where I talk about their algorithm and what they prioritize for:
That’s when Substack works.
➤ Next week: Most creators are invisible because they’re trying to be like everyone else. Next week, I’m revealing the 3 steps to uncover your unique newsletter personality and why it’s your only real competitive advantage. Read next week’s issue.
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