🥳🎈My Substack Birthday!

Celebrating an amazing first year on this platform

29th February 2024… the day I joined Substack, was over a year ago now. As it was on a leap day, there’s no way for me to neatly mark my Substack anniversary (birthday?) so I have decided to do it after the fact.

My first year on this platform has been amazing and beyond my wildest dreams going in. Thank you to everyone who has made me feel so welcome over the last 12 months. Thank you to those who have liked, shared and commented on my posts and in turn help my page grow. I’ve had so many amazing and enlightening conversations, met so many fine people and made some new friends. I have even managed to accrue a handful of paid subscribers who are kind enough to support me and my writing journey with some of their own hard earned cash. I thank and appreciate those guys most of all.

In this post, I’d like to recap why I am on Substack in the first place but also answer a question that I have been asked by several fellow Substackers in my DMs recently. ‘How do I build/grow my Substack’? I found the question strange each time as I am just an idiot with a laptop and a few hundred Subscribers. What position am I in to give any advice? Sure, I have grown an audience at a rate miles ahead of my wildest dreams and starting projections in a very short time, but I’m not exactly crushing it here.

But the question was asked all the same so I will answer it in the most honest way I can, by revealing how I operate my Substack. It may only be helpful to those who want to go from 0 to 500 subscribers in 8 months like me but hopefully it does help someone. I’m not saying it’s the right way or the only way; just what works for me based on what I have learned.

But take everything I say with a pinch of salt because (honest truth), my growth may have been a complete fluke anyway.

I started this Substack because it was an idea I had for a project for my final university module ‘Professional Practice Portfolio’ which was essentially a ‘Final Major Project’. The final submission was supposed to be some kind of demonstration of my professional practice as a musician as I go out into the music industry to make a living. The problem was, I had become so disillusioned with the state of that industry to the point where I no longer wanted any part of it. There were a few reasons for this.

For one, streaming services (like Spotify) had replaced record sales and were subsequently vacuuming all the money up from right under the artist’s noses. Making a living was alway difficult in the field of music but now it was highly improbable as only the biggest artists make any real money.

Another reason was the complete ideological capture of the music industry by what is colloquially known as ‘Wokeism’. ‘Cancel Culture’ regularly silenced or ‘deplatformed’ dissenting voices like

Winston Marshall

and

Louise Distras

to name just two, and new artists had to toe the party line and affirm the tenets of the orthodoxy just to stand a chance to find and stay in work. That would never work for me as I am not built to keep my mouth shut if I have a strong opinion. It’s not in my nature. ‘If you have something to say, silence is a lie’ (Jordan B Peterson. 2018).

I also commit what the Woke orthodoxy see as the cardinal sin of being a straight white male, (my fault for being born that way, I guess) so many roles rule me out as a candidate at the application stage. I’m not kidding. I have seen so many creative industry and entertainment jobs advertised as ‘hiring only female/ethnic minority/etc candidates’. The BBC put one out exactly like that in 2021 that caused quite a stir and I have seen similar things happening regularly for years now. The most recent notable example was from the Westminster City Council in January, 2025.

And the final reason was artificial intelligence encroaching into the human creative process that was and still is the main reason I adore music. I like art precisely because and to the extent that it describes the condition of being human, so art being made by machines is something I want no part in.

So, I didn’t want anything to do with the music industry proper, but I still wanted to make a living out of making and playing music, and Substack seemed to offer me a potential way out of that Catch 22.

Substack claimed that they are a ‘free speech’ platform when I first heard of them a little over a year ago. Many of the heterodox commenters on YouTube and other platforms that I followed were all ending their videos with ‘follow me on my Substack’ and I started to visit the site intermittently.

Upon checking it out and discovered why all the people whose views were seen as ‘heretical’ were congregating there: Substack was a subscription based blogging platform that was marketing itself as a pro free speech, anti ‘cancel culture’ zone. I had been looking at paid subscription sites for my project, checking out Patreon and Locals, but as I loved writing non-fiction essays as well as music, I thought Substack was the most perfect fit for me.

I had come up with the name ‘The Common Centrist’ (common sense + centrist…get it?) already by then and was mulling over the idea of using it as an online moniker. I searched for the name a few times on Substack and other platforms and saw no-one was using it, but I was paranoid that someone else would have a case of parallel thinking and come up with it themselves. So I started a Substack account in Feb 2024 purely just to lock the name down and didn’t post anything on it for months other than the welcome note and my dissertation (because it was just lying around).

I then became a proactive contributor on the platform last summer after I watched a

Ted Gioia

interview with Rick Beato where they talked about all the things that concerned me about the music industry (Ai, streaming services, ‘cancel culture’, etc). This was the hair that broke the camel’s back and made me first properly investigate this platform that I was hearing about more and more often in any depth.

For my Uni project, I had made a ‘business plan’ that was built around Kevin Kelly’s ‘1000 True Fans’ theory which posits that a creative artist only needs to find 1000 fans who have a deep and vested interest in their art and then convince them to pay them $100 per year for access to it. That would earn the artist a very healthy yearly wage of $100,000 per year.

I don’t need that much to live comfortably and have financial security, which is all I really want money wise. I have no desperate desires to ‘sell out Wembley’, be a millionaire or even become particularly wealthy. I just want to make enough money to keep food on the table for my family, keep the bailiffs from knocking on my door and to afford me enough time to create as much art as I can. That’s all I want.

I didn’t want to charge a fortune for paid subscriptions either so I built my plan around the concept of charging just $5 per month for membership. It is currently less than that, [$4.38 by exchange rate at time of writing] and will remain so for as long as I can afford to.

So I worked out a more realistic yearly monetary number, ($30,000) something my family and I can survive on and divided it up by $5 ($6000). Dividing that number again by 12 gave me my exact target for monthly paid subscribers (500) which I factored into my ‘5 year plan’ for Substack. That’s my target for the end of my five year plan in February 2029: 500 paid Substack subscribers paying a monthly fee of just $5. That will pay the bills and give me all the time I want to write my essays, books, songs and just spend all my time creating things, which is all I’ve ever wanted. My dream. I don’t want a big house, a fancy car or vacations in 5 star hotels: I just want enough free time to make shit.

I ultimately decided not to go ahead with the Substack idea for my university project because I wanted to weigh in on the ‘culture war’ debate in my writing and my university was incredibly and institutionally ‘Woke’. Even though I was assured that I’d get a fair grade on whatever I submitted, I didn’t trust them not to mark me down for any criticism I made of the Critical Social Justice movement, so I did something else.

But I still went ahead with my ‘1000 True Fans’ 5 year plan for Substack after I graduated in May last year and have been using a lot of the advice I collected from gurus of the social media marketing space like Alex Hormozi in my research for the abandoned uni project. Mainly, I started my ‘3 uploads per week, every week, without fail’ release schedule in June and have stuck to it ever since.

This is a golden rule of social media marketing that I found: You need to have a consistent and dependable output of content. There are some exceptions to this rule (like Mauler and Little Platoon who I mentioned in my recent ‘Authenticity’ essay) but they really are outliers. For most people who have successfully built a large online audience, they uploaded on a regular schedule, without fail for years.

People like Chris Williamson [above] of the Modern Wisdom podcast. He committed hard to making podcasts for a living and now has one of the largest podcast audiences in the world and 3.3 million subscribers on YouTube alone. But he did it twice a week for years before he ever had an regular audience of over 1000.

That’s another key to the content creator game, I hear: Commitment & Longevity. 99% of podcasts that start only last 3 episodes, because people quit. Of that remaining 1%, 99% don’t make it to 10 episodes. Meaning, if you make a podcast series totalling only 11 episodes, you are in the top 1000th of a percent.

The main stumbling block for people is they lose patience or confidence in what they are doing long before it has a chance to take off. And instead of committing, they quit. This was always my problem and still is. I have thought about quitting doing this dozens of times because I lack confidence.

But to paraphrase Alex Hormozi, You can’t fake confidence. The only way to get it is to build up as much undeniable proof that you can do ‘the thing’. Collect as many points of evidence to show yourself that you CAN succeed. Make doubt an unreasonable epistemic position to take because you have so much evidence to the contrary. Keep doing ‘the thing’ until you have succeeded a sufficient number of times so that you genuinely believe that you can do it. ‘Outwork your self doubt.’

I took those words to heart when I started getting traction on Substack. I have put out pieces every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the same time of day for over 6 months now and I never missed one. And I have been steadily growing my audience ever since.

The Cinderella story of going from zero to a hundred by means of ‘Going viral’ is so rare that it is essentially a myth. For every ‘Hawk Tuah’ girl, there are hundreds of people who stuck at it for years on years before they ever grew a sizeable audience. Hard work is not as sexy as a ‘rags to riches’ story, but typically it seems that the ones who made it are the ones who stuck with it long enough to get traction. That’s my long term plan. To keep doing what I am doing long enough to build a big enough audience. The key, according to these guys that I am referencing, is sticking with it, not quitting.

Alex Hormozi also talks about having a 13% target for audience growth. That was the metric measurement for success that I adopted for my free subscriber growth and I have exceeded it every month since June when I started my upload schedule. My lowest month was 14%, and my highest was over 200%. The average in that time is well over 30%. This has meant I have smashed through my target goals every month.

The 13% growth projections also put the early small gains into perspective. Seeing the numbers on the page increasing by times 1.13 every month show slow, steady and realistic growth. Yeah, the early months look meagre, but every monthly incremental baby step follows onto the next and before too long, you see a really big number on the horizon and (crucially) a path to get to it. It gives you a target to aim at and stops you from beating yourself up for the slower gains early on.

And as my actual growth has outperformed my +13% projections every month, keeping track of the numbers has allowed me to see how far ahead of schedule I am. Looking at the ‘projected growth at 13%’ number being dwarfed by the ‘actual growth’ number on my spreadsheet has done wonders for my self-confidence. It’s irrefutable evidence that I can succeed; the numbers don’t lie. ‘Outwork your self doubt’ and always track your wins.

But most of all, my advice is to just be you. I know everyone always says this but it's true!

I left out one reason why I want nothing to do with the music industry: ‘Fake It Til You Make It’. I hate that stuff so much. I tried it earlier in my musical career. Tried to become an artist who does all the ‘algorithm optimisation’ stuff. Dress a certain way. Tried to make a ‘brand’ out of myself based on ‘finding my niche’. Tried making music for a specific audience only and boxed myself in creatively speaking.

And I hated myself for all of it. I became so self-loathsome that I swore off any industry that requires it after I read Alexandr Soltzenitsen’s essay Live Not By Lies and it changed my life. The title of that essay is now my life’s mantra and I use it to measure everything I do. My big thing is authenticity, as tired and cliched as that word has become.

And I get told in my DMs regularly that my authenticity is the very thing that draws people to me. As I wrote at length recently, I do believe that ‘Authenticity is the Currency of the Future’ in an increasingly fake world. People can spot an attention seeker whose sole purpose is to get noticed a mile off, so just be genuine: just be you. Write about what you love and are interested in with passion, enthusiasm and most of all authenticity and those with a genuine shared interest will gravitate towards your work.

For every 4 or 5 ‘New Free Subscriber’ emails I get, I also get an ‘Email Disabled’ notification. I’m fine with that. I am curating people who have a genuine interest in what I write and weeding out those who don’t. You can’t please everyone and trying to do so will only result in collecting a load of ‘fair weather’ followers with little to no real interest in you. And you’ll have to keep up a pretence indefinitely as you try appease people who followed you for being someone you are not. That sounds exhausting. It’s much easier to be consistent if you are just being who you naturally are as opposed to masquerading as someone else all the time. So just be you.

Or don’t. There’s no reason to listen to me at all, really. Idiot with a laptop, remember? This is just my perspective; my two cents. I could be entirely wrong. Guess I’ll find out in the remaining four years of my ‘5 year plan’. But if the first year is anything to go by, I think I may be onto something.

Thanks for reading this year and here's to many more to come. Glad to have you along for the ride.

The Common Centrist.