What Nobody Told Me About Building an Audience

This advice applies to Substack, and pretty much every other platform.

Jun 25, 2025

I was at a coffee shop, working on my laptop when a woman nearby asked what I was working on. I told her I write online and that I’m trying to build an audience. She nodded like she understood, then smiled and replied she’d always wanted to build a following. However, when she tried, no one responded to her writing as the algorithm didn’t promote her much.

So she stopped.

We talked for a while longer. And before she left, she asked if she could have a link to my newsletter. Said she wanted to try writing again, but this time, with more intention. With consistency. With care.

I told her the truth. That showing up is the hardest part, especially when it feels like no one is listening. But as long as she can keep doing it anyway, even just for herself at first, she’ll eventually see success.

When I started writing online, I thought growth would happen quickly.

I imagined people discovering my posts, sharing them, subscribing. I dreamed of the numbers climbing, the revenue growing. And like 99% of writers, I thought if the writing was good enough, the audience would follow.

But that’s not what happened.

I hit publish on my first few posts and waited. I checked my stats, refreshed my dashboard, hoping to see some sign that I was on the right track. Some days I saw 10 views. Other days, just 1. Most of the time, there was nothing at all.

I started to wonder if I had misunderstood something fundamental. Maybe I wasn’t interesting enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe no one wanted to read what I had to say. And in that moment, I started to question everything.

Including myself.

There once came a day where I had enough. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. So, I looked at my writing portfolio, studied what successful writers were doing, and adapted my strategy to align better with what my target audience actually wanted to read.

There was a lot of trial and error during that period of trying to reverse-engineer what made a post “work.” For example, I changed my headlines, experimented with sending times, and posted more on social media. Sometimes it helped a little. I’d see a bump in views, a handful of new subscribers. But no matter how many tactics I tried, I kept coming back to the same feeling. That I was missing something deeper.

I thought growth was a strategy. But it was really a practice.

What I needed wasn’t a better posting schedule. I needed patience. Repetition. I needed to keep showing up, even when it felt like no one cared. Because what I learned is that attention doesn’t come first. Trust does.

And trust is built slowly, post by post.

I once read a line from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It went like this:

“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.”

At the time, I was scared of writing anything too personal. Scared of saying the wrong thing. Scared of putting too much of myself into the work and watching it go unnoticed. But that line made me pause.

What if fear wasn’t something to avoid?

What if it was pointing to the work that mattered most?

I started paying attention to that feeling. When a piece made me nervous, I wrote it anyway. When something felt too honest or too risky, I leaned in. Not because it was comfortable, but because my audience probably felt the same thing.

Over time, the fear didn’t go away. But it became less of a warning and more of a guide. And looking back, the work I was most afraid to publish was often the work that resonated the most (and performed best).

It’s easy to believe that success comes from one big moment. One viral post. One lucky break. I’ve seen those stories too. The overnight growth. The dramatic rise. And for a long time, I thought that was the path I needed to follow. But the truth is, it almost never happens that way.

Most of the time, growth is slow. It’s not a leap. It’s a climb. It looks like writing something you believe in, hitting publish, and hearing nothing. Then doing it again the next week. And the next. It’s also checking your stats and seeing no change, but still choosing to show up.

Today, I have over 7,000 subscribers on Substack and 47,000 on Medium.

But that didn’t happen from one viral piece or lucky moment. It happened through years of hard work. Through writing things that didn’t take off. Through posts that reached 5 people instead of 5,000.

There were days I wanted to quit. Days I thought maybe I had already said everything worth saying. But I kept showing up anyway.

Here’s a piece of writing advice I wish I knew sooner…

You won’t build an audience by trying to go viral. Instead, you build it by learning how to see the people already in front of you. Even if it’s just a few at first. Because those few matter. Not because they’ll boost your numbers or share your work, though sometimes they will. They matter because they show you what’s possible.

An audience of millions is built one by one. So, as long as you keep writing, and putting one foot in front of the other, it’ll only be a matter of time before you reach your goals.

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.” - James Clear

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