In 2019, I posted every day on Substack for four months straight. My newsletter went from 0 to 4,000 subscribers. It was 100% organic growth with almost zero promotion.
Five years later, in 2024, I started a new, different newsletter on the platform. I again posted every day for four months straight. And again, I did almost no external promotion. This time, I went from 0 to 500 subscribers.
There are various factors at play here. Maybe my 2019 publication was more appealing. Maybe the barrage of new features on the platform, from chat to video to tweet-style notes, has diluted how many people subscribe to a newsletter.
But there is one element I’ve observed repeatedly on several platforms, and it’s undeniable: timing. If you can’t be early and catch a platform’s biggest growth spurt, often, it’s not worth being there at all—especially if engaging on a variety of platforms is only part of a larger, long-term game you’re playing.
I once did the math for this on Medium. As it turned out, a writer who had started in 2018 and posted ten times as many successful articles as a comparable writer in 2016 only grew to about two thirds of his followers. The verdict was clear:
A great writer starting in 2020 will take longer to reach 10,000 followers than a mediocre one did in 2016. This isn’t fair, but it’s still true. On top of hard work, perseverance, and continued adaptation, maybe more so than all of the former combined, you need impeccable timing to grow in a maturing market.
The problem with timing is not just predicting it, which is impossible, but also to execute on it even if you could. Attention has become an ever-shapeshifting beast attracted to new places every month. Feeding those places with your ideas and generosity isn’t a job you can do in a weekend. It’s a massive, often multi-year detour, and even in a best-case scenario, who can afford such detours from the work they actually mean to do?
Call me old-school, but given how hard it is to be early and how fragile its payoff even if you are, perhaps the best way to play social media is to not play at all. Pick your own hill on the internet, and defend it—because that’s something you can be as late to as you want, yet once you arrive there, it’ll pay its own kind of dividends every day.