I ran a 42-day audience growth experiment on Notes. Here's what I did, and everything I learned.
The results will definitely shape my future approach to Notes.
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I may have missed my calling as a scientist.
In Year 11 at school, I once finished top of the class in Physics, completely by accident.
I pretty much guessed my way through the exam.
And when the teacher, beaming from ear to ear, asked why I thought I’d done so well, I made the mistake of telling him just that.
He was not amused.
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Ok, so science was never my forte, especially physics (I suck at maths). But I do love experiments. And what could be better than an experiment involving writing?
If you’ve paid any attention to my ramblings over the last few months, you’ll know how much I love Notes on Substack.
It completely changed the game for me at the end of 2023, skyrocketing my previously-stagnant growth on the platform.
And throughout this year, I’ve often wondered if a system could be applied to my Notes-posting process, just like I did on Twitter back in 2022, when my audience there jumped from just 2 people to 16,000+ followers over 12 months.
So, like the good little newsletter growth nerd I am, I decided to run an experiment right here on my current platform of choice, Substack.
Let’s start with the why.
I wanted to see if certain aspects of Notes had any significant impact on audience growth and conversion (from free to paid). These aspects included:
Note types
Note lengths
Text vs image
Posting time
Posting frequency
It wasn’t an exhaustive list, but it’d give me a fairly good idea of what was working and what wasn’t.
And if I was able to determine what the ideal system for posting Notes looked like, I could replicate it and turn it into a growth lever for my Substack audience.
In short, and as with most of my ventures, I just wanted to see if I could do it.
Next, the how.