Feminist Founders Subscriber-Only Podcast

Welcome to the Feminist Founders audio series event. This is a bonus for paid subscribers of the Feminist Founders newsletter. So if you're here, thank you so much for your support. I'm excited to bring you this series, featuring incredible thought leaders who will share insights about doing business differently in a way that honors equity and social justice. I hope you learn a lot from this. Let's dig in.
Becky Mollenkamp: Hello there, today is a big one. I'm really excited to have Sarah Fay, who is the author of Substack Writers at Work—linked in the show notes. More than likely, you already know her because she has a much larger following than I do, with 10,000+ subscribers who are eager to read her every word about how to use Substack to really boost your writing, grow your Substack, improve the quality of your content, and get more people to pay for your Substack. She's a Substack growth strategist, an author, and faculty at Northwestern University, which was my dream school. If you're interested in how to maximize your own Substack or are just curious about the platform, this is a great one to listen to. You're going to get a lot of wonderful information about writing for Substack, so dig in and enjoy.
Becky Mollenkamp: Hello, Sarah. Thank you for having this conversation with me. I really love your Substack, which is called Substack Writers at Work, where you share amazing tips, advice, and thoughts about writing for Substack. I feel like the best place to start is for you to talk a little bit about how you went from being faculty at Northwestern University and an author of a memoir and other books to writing for Substack about Substack. What was that journey like for you? What made you first get interested in Substack, and why did you choose this specific topic?
Sarah Fay: It's really nice to meet you, and thanks again for having me. So, my journey to Substack is much like many authors' journeys to the platform. I had a book coming out from HarperCollins, and the marketing person sat down with me and said, "You have to start a Substack." That’s what most publishers and agents are telling authors nowadays—this was about four years ago. Like many authors and people, I got on Substack, started writing, and got very little traction because it's hard to gain traction just by writing on Substack. It takes quite a bit of strategy.
The way I ended up transitioning to teaching people how to use Substack was when my agent introduced me to the head of writer relations at Substack. She sat down with me, and this is what they do for a lot of bigger names—they really help them get started on the platform. She said, "This is working, this isn’t—change this, change that," and I did. My Substack took off.
I'm a professor and teacher—I've been teaching for 20 years—so that comes naturally to me. I knew I wanted to start a teaching Substack in addition to my author Substack. At first, I was going to teach something called serialization, for people who want to serialize fiction or nonfiction on Substack. Then I realized, "Oh my gosh, I love this platform, and I want to help other writers use it." Substack is a mystery to many people, and it's very challenging. It looks easy, but it's not an easy platform to succeed on.
So, I went to Substack and asked, "Can I share this with people? Can I do what you did for me for others?" And they said, "Yes, please," because they would help all of us if they could—they’re such wonderful people. I got to know them, they put me in their product lab, and I do have a techie side to me. I did some coding for about 40 seconds, but I enjoy tech. I'm not full-time faculty at Northwestern, just one of the many adjuncts out there. We aren’t treated so well, and even as a successful author, it’s hard to make a good living.
I’m 52 and realize that one day I’ll be older, and I’d like to have enough money to live comfortably when I’m old. I no longer live the starving artist lifestyle I did in New York for seven years.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you so much for giving us a little background on how you've gotten to where you are. It's super helpful, and it makes me wonder if you feel like it's realistic for people who don't have a built-in audience—like you do as a successful, published author—is it realistic or possible for them to grow a Substack following, especially one that generates real or even substantial income?
Sarah Fay: It's the perennial question. People always ask this, and they assume, "Oh, you're an author with HarperCollins, you have a book, and you've been in the New York Times," but that doesn't mean anything. I'm sorry, my friends. It would be nice, but I had a mailing list of 400 people when I started on Substack. That may sound like a lot, and it seemed like a lot to me, but those were personal contacts—people I hadn't talked to in 10 years.
Yes, it is completely possible. Substack is amazing because it's offering creators and people who are influencing culture in different ways the chance to finally be paid for what they do. It pains me to see people creating on Instagram and Facebook, allowing their intellectual property to make Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk rich. What Substack allows us to do is finally get paid for our own intellectual property and creative work.
There's certainly a way to do that on Substack, and that’s what I teach on Substack Writers at Work. Like anything, it’s its own world, and there’s a way to encourage growth on Substack and a way to encourage paid growth. It’s something I absolutely love to geek out on and help people with—that’s basically what I do. It's really my passion to help people earn the income they deserve, especially women and people from marginalized communities. We’ve spent too long giving away our creative and intellectual work for free, and it really needs to stop. Substack offers a financial structure that allows us to do that.
Just to give you a glimpse, Substack takes 10% of any paid subscriptions, but you don’t pay the platform anything upfront—there are no flat fees. And there are no ads, which is very different from other platforms. You rely on subscribers, so you're building a mailing list, which is invaluable for entrepreneurs, authors, or anyone in health and wellness. That’s one income stream Substack allows. You’re also getting paid subscriptions directly from your audience, unlike a platform like Medium, where people are paying to be on Medium, or in traditional media where people pay to get the New York Times and then writers are paid very little by the publication. On Substack, I’m paid by my subscribers directly. I have a relationship with them, and that relationship becomes a community—they're your superfans and your people. It's an incredible opportunity.
I know I sound like a Substack evangelist, but no one has ever presented artists, creators, and intellectuals with this kind of financial opportunity. It’s inevitable for someone who is attracted to Substack to grow creatively and personally. I really want to see people get paid what they deserve.
Substack's pay structure also makes it different because they only make money if we do. As I said, there's no pressure to succumb to ad revenue like influencers do on other platforms. It’s absolutely possible to grow a Substack from scratch. I help people all the time who come to the platform with zero subscribers.
For example, I have a client, David Roberts, who writes a Substack called Sparks from Culture. He writes about class through a literary lens. When we started working together, he had around 300 subscribers, which had taken him two years to build. In the year we’ve worked together, he’s grown to 3,500 subscribers and became a featured Substack bestseller. This growth is about helping people understand their gifts and talents, how to best use them on Substack, and how to communicate that to people. It’s a three-step process: discovering your strengths, understanding how they work on Substack, and effectively communicating that to your audience. Substack is amazing.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you, Sarah. This has me feeling really enthusiastic about Substack. I'm already here, obviously, and I love it, but it also makes it feel like, "OK, this is possible." I don't have to be a big name already to grow a Substack following and potentially make decent money from it. I'm curious—what are the biggest mistakes you see people making on Substack, especially those who are new to the platform or have been on it for a while but aren’t seeing the growth they want? You’ve seen it all, so I’d love to hear what you think people are doing wrong that might be keeping them from getting the growth they want?
Sarah Fay: Yes, it's very common for people to make the same mistakes. The most common mistake I see is people get on Substack, start posting, publishing, and expect to grow instantly. But Substack is exciting because it requires you to get to know yourself—your talents, expertise, and gifts—and then you need someone to help you apply those to the platform. You can't do it alone; I'll go as far as to say that. I say this because I was on the platform for two years without growth.
Many things have changed on Substack since then, but the reason I struggled was that I did exactly that. Then I was lucky enough that my agent introduced me to Sophia, the head of Writer Relations at Substack. She sat down with me, told me what worked and what didn’t on my Substack, and explained how the platform worked. After making changes, my Substack took off. So, you need someone to guide you. Substack is a world of its own.
Don’t listen to hacks or cheap tricks promising a gazillion subscribers in two seconds. That’s not what Substack is about—it’s way more exciting than that. What works is making sure your Substack is entirely you and figuring out the value you offer. I don’t love the word “value,” but it’s true. You need to determine which aspects of your work people will want to pay for—that’s value. There are many things I do that are wonderful but that people won’t pay for, and that’s okay. I don’t expect people to pay for them.
What I see is that once you have someone guiding you and showing you how the platform works, Substack becomes an exciting place of personal, creative, and professional growth. Some people just want numbers, but that underestimates what Substack can offer. If all you want is numbers, stay on social media or Medium—that’s what those platforms are for. Substack, on the other hand, is about building a mailing list. These aren’t just followers.
Yes, we have our own internal social media network called Notes, and you do have followers there, which can be confusing. But as I said, Substack is a universe with its own language. One of my clients said she felt like she had been dropped into France without knowing the language, and that’s how Substack can feel. But what you want to do is look at who you are on the platform, what you have to offer, and how you communicate that to potential subscribers. These are three big things.
I was talking about personal growth earlier. The distinction between followers and subscribers is crucial. On social media, you’re literally paying Mark Zuckerberg with your intellectual and creative work to make money off of you. If Instagram or Twitter (X) shut down tomorrow, all your followers would be gone. Followers are fickle—it’s just a click of a button, and they can disappear.
But on Substack, subscribers are different. They pay you with their email address, which is precious. It’s a much more intimate relationship. You’re not just going for numbers—it’s a different relationship with your audience. Of course, we all want to make six figures, but what makes a successful Substack is that it’s entirely you and you understand that you have a very different relationship with subscribers than with followers. Cherish every subscriber.
On Substack, you’re building a community, a back-and-forth relationship. You’re independent on Substack—unlike Medium, where people are subscribing to the platform, not to you. Substack is just you and your people, and that’s it. You could dislike everything about Substack and the people on it, but it’s still your space. It’s your private corner of the internet to explore your creative and professional work while earning an income.
That’s why I love helping people do this. It’s so exciting to me to empower others—getting money and growth into the hands of people other than Jeff Bezos. The economic disparity in this country is ridiculous. Every time I help a client, I feel like I’m empowering people, especially women and marginalized groups. Often, we’ve been subconsciously told that we don’t deserve money. That’s what I’m trying to prevent. Everyone deserves to be paid for their work. We shouldn’t be giving our work to Mark Zuckerberg for free.
I hope that answered your question, and thanks for listening to my soapbox, but this is what gets me so excited about Substack.
Becky Mollenkamp: You mentioned that you're not on social media because it doesn't meet your high standards for how you want to show up. I think you said it doesn't meet your ethical standards. I’ve noticed that with Notes and some of the things Substack is doing, it feels like they're trying to integrate some social media aspects. Personally, I love it because it’s helped with discoverability, but for some people, it feels like now there’s a social media aspect they have to keep up with. How do you feel about the social part of Substack and the push they're making towards that? How does that align with your ethics or values, and does that change the way people have to interact with or use Substack as writers?
Sarah Fay: First of all, I don't think there's anything wrong with being on social media if it serves you—100% go for it. My ethical objection is that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and others are capitalizing on our creative work and intellectual property, and we’ve gotten so used to it that we don’t even question it anymore. I just don’t want to give Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk more money. They aren’t people I want to support.
I don’t think I’m above social media—give me a good cat video, and I’m in. But I don’t like the structure of it, and I don’t like that it's designed to benefit the owners off the backs of the creators, who get nothing in return. TikTok has creator boosts, and maybe Instagram is doing something similar, but nothing like what Substack is doing. So yes, when Notes was introduced, it was a big change for us. A lot of us went to Substack because we didn’t want to be on social media, and then this social media dimension appeared. For anyone listening, Notes is Substack’s internal social media network.
It’s completely separate, though. I was on Substack before Notes, and the growth was much slower. You can now get on Substack and grow wildly in comparison, thanks to Notes. I don’t want to call it a “necessary evil” because it’s really a lovely version of social media right now. Will it always be? I don’t know, because it’s already looking a lot like Instagram and Facebook. That’s a good and bad thing. It’s not my preferred mode, but I can live with it. And if more cat videos came, I’d be very happy.
The potential downside is that we don’t want to reproduce those social media platforms on Substack. But the good news is, ultimately, I benefit. I make the money, and Substack doesn’t unless I do. Substack takes 10% of our subscriptions—it’s a totally different business model. So even if Notes becomes more like Instagram, I still benefit, so I’m okay with it.
The other good part of it turning more social-media-like is that more people will come over. More people on the platform mean more potential subscribers for all of us. That’s just how it will work. Do I personally like the way Notes was when it started? Yes. It felt intimate and fun, like we were all just hanging out. Now it’s bigger, but that’s okay, too.
Substack is different from other social media platforms because it doesn’t reward frequency; it only rewards engagement. You could post one killer Note a week, get a ton of engagement, and that’s all you need. Whereas other platforms trap you into posting multiple times a day with reels and everything else—it’s madness. Plus, those platforms penalize you if you try to take people off the platform. If you post a link to your website or your book, Meta penalizes you, and fewer followers see your post. Substack doesn’t do things like that. You can take people off the platform whenever you want. Meta wants to trap us on the platform buying ads. That’s what I don’t agree with, and that’s where Notes comes in.
Becky Mollenkamp: Another thing you brought up was about email—that with Substack, you can capture email addresses, but on Medium or social media, you can’t. I got rid of my email marketing platform. I used to be on ConvertKit, but I switched entirely to Substack. As a business owner, not just a writer, Substack is my marketing arm. I wonder if others ask the same thing: Can I do Substack instead of email marketing, or should I use it alongside traditional email marketing? I know you’re not a marketing expert, but where do you fall on that? What are your thoughts on using Substack as a replacement for or alongside email marketing?
Sarah Fay: Oh no, I am the marketing expert, trust me. Especially when it comes to Substack. I don’t work solely with writers at all. In fact, while I love writers, don't get me wrong, I enjoy helping people like you. Substack is an apparatus. As much as I love the platform, the network, and the people who run it, it is the best tool we've ever been given to earn an income.
What I do with people is show them how to use Substack, not just for subscriptions, because paid subscriptions alone may not earn you the income you want or need as a business owner. That’s not necessarily what I would advise you to focus on. It’s a perk, of course—why have an email list on ConvertKit when you could also have paid subscriptions on Substack? Substack offers the best of both worlds.
What I do with clients is figure out their main source of revenue. Is it off-platform? Is it from your small business? From one-on-one clients or courses? Then, Substack becomes the place through which you sell those offerings—whether it's courses, products, or services that make the most money for you.
Before, people used to rely on freebies to get people onto their email lists, then would use these awful automated email sequences. Everyone knows they’re automated—no one’s sitting there thinking, “Oh, this person just emailed me again!” Substack, on the other hand, presents an organic, living, ongoing freebie. That’s what it is. Yes, you can paywall certain posts like a paywall blog, but it's your email system—it’s your email server, and that’s how you market from it. Absolutely, you should be using it for that. That’s what Substack is there for.
I think people still look at Substack as, “Oh, it’s just a place for writers.” It’s not. In fact, they changed their tagline—it used to be “A home for great writing,” but now it’s “An economic engine for culture.” Business is part of culture, so it’s about more than just writing.
Although I’m an award-winning writer, that's not what I geek out about on Substack anymore. Now, I get excited about how people can come to the platform with their dreams—whether they’re a psychologist, a coach, or whatever—and use Substack in so many different ways. That said, Substack doesn’t have all the functionality of traditional email marketing platforms, as I’m sure you know. Unlike ConvertKit, MailerLite, or MailChimp, we don’t have a lot of segmentation. We have some, but not a lot, and we don’t do automated sequences, which I think is a good thing because those are annoying. They don’t create relationships. Email lists should be about relationships, and that’s what Substack excels at and what I think it will do for entrepreneurs and small businesses in a beautiful way.
Maybe I have a Pollyanna-ish view of the world, but I haven’t met people on Substack who are just out to make money at any cost. The people I meet—my clients, subscribers, and the members of Substack Writers at Work—are the coolest, best people I’ve ever worked with. I love helping them bring their work to the world and earn an income. Why should Jeff Bezos have all the money? It doesn’t make sense. Substack is a tool for all of us to use, and people shouldn’t feel intimidated by it. That’s my opinion.
Becky Mollenkamp: The last thing I wanted to ask about is money. You said everyone deserves to get paid—boy, do I ever agree. One of the things I see people wrestling with on Substack is figuring out how much to give and what to charge. Most people are charging $5 to $6 a month, but then they're unsure how much they should be offering to make it worth paying for. Can you give us your high-level advice to wrap up—what should people be offering to make it worth paying for, and how much is too much? We deserve to be paid for our efforts, but $5 or $6 isn’t a lot of money. What should people expect to give, and what have you noticed works best to get people to pay? How do you get them to make that leap from being a free subscriber to actually paying for the efforts you’re putting into Substack?
Sarah Fay: It’s such a good question. And yes, I think going for paid subscribers on Substack is not a bad thing. A lot of my clients and the members of Substack Writers at Work feel guilty about charging, as if there’s something impure about it. But in my experience working with over 600 clients, when you focus on paid subscribers, the quality and value you offer go up because you’re thinking all the time, “Is this something someone would pay for?” The free subscribers will come, but the mindset shift is important—you’re not just putting content out for the sake of it.
I wish there were a one-size-fits-all answer for what you should charge and what to offer for free or behind a paywall, but it depends. This is where my expertise as a marketing and sales strategist for Substack comes in. For example, in Substack Writers at Work, I take people through a paid strategy—what to offer for free, what to charge for, and how to structure it.
A big mistake people make is jumping on Substack and immediately putting up paywalls without a clear strategy. So, I recommend sitting down and asking, “What do I offer?” If you’re offering a traditional newsletter—like an author newsletter or a marketing update—that’s typically something you wouldn't charge for. Substack is a platform for growing your free email list so you can communicate with people. But beyond that, you have to think about what else you’re offering. Is it writing, video, audio, community features? Can you create paid Zoom workshops, threads, or chats? The options are endless, and it’s important to focus on what feels right for you.
Substack is giving people all the features they want and need, but you don’t have to use them all. If you don’t want to use video, don’t use it. Even if someone is telling you that everyone is growing by using video, it’s not true. The only thing that will make your Substack successful—by attracting paid and free subscribers alike—is being entirely you.
The game has changed. One of my clients was worried about being perfect, but that’s not what Substack is about. People are subscribing to you—they’re paying for you, not for some polished performance. That doesn’t mean you have to overshare or be confessional, but you do get to be yourself, and that’s a beautiful thing.
Every time you post something, ask yourself, “Would someone pay $25 for this?” People pay $1,500 to see Taylor Swift in concert, and they don’t complain because they think it’s worth it. She knows her value, and her fans are willing to pay for it. When I say people are paying for you, that’s what I mean. It’s about connection. Taylor Swift makes people feel like she’s talking to them personally. Substack is the same—you create a connection with your audience.
If I could offer any concrete advice, it would be to focus on connection. Whether you’re writing, creating videos, or hosting workshops, make sure you’re connecting with your audience in a way that feels genuine. That’s what people pay for—connection.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you so much, Sarah, for everything you’ve shared. I hope everyone will subscribe to your Substack, which I’ll link in the show notes. Can you tell people where they can learn more about you and work with you?
Sarah Fay: Thank you so much for having me. This was fun! I know I’m a Substack evangelist, but only because I love the possibilities it offers people. Please come to Substack Writers at Work. I tend to give a lot away for free, but I’m moving toward a primarily paid community because it feels right for where I am with 20,000 subscribers now. There’s still a big archive of free stuff, though, and I’d love to have you as a paid subscriber, too.
I’m not on social media, but you can find me at writersatwork.net. I also have an author Substack, and I’m a mental health advocate. My memoir, Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses, was published by HarperCollins, and I serialized the sequel, Cured, on Substack. You can read that at sarafay.org.
I love being centrally located on Substack. It just feels emotionally and existentially right not to be spread out all over the internet. See you around Substack!
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you again for listening and for being a paid subscriber. I really appreciate you!