First of all, Thank you Laurie Flynn, Janelle Wright, rhonda doruiter, Wallflower Riot, Emma Louise Hudson, Elizabeth Norvell, Human Doing Being and many others for tuning into my live video with Csilla 🌹 Feminine in midlife 💃, it meant a lot x
Nobody tells you the truth about growing on Substack.
They tell you to post consistently. To find your niche. To optimise your headlines. To study what’s working for other people and reverse-engineer it.
What they don’t tell you, and what I’ve been learning, slowly, sometimes painfully, is that none of that is actually the point.
The point is connection. Real, human, sometimes awkward, occasionally vulnerable connection. And if you’re a woman over 40 who has spent years being told to be more polished, more strategic, more algorithm-friendly? That might be the hardest thing you ever learn to do.
I had this conversation live on Substack recently with Csilla 🌹 Feminine in midlife 💃; a Hungarian woman living in Spain, former corporate finance executive, pole dancer, choir singer, and the writer behind Feminine Energy for Midlife Women. We had never met in person. We had exchanged a few messages, and a brief call last week, and within forty minutes, we had covered burnout, joy, vulnerability, perimenopause, and the strange quiet ache of rebuilding yourself after forty.
That’s Substack, when it works.
Csilla’s story: from three subscribers to a movement about joy
When Csilla first joined Substack, she had three subscribers. One of them was herself.
For about six months, she wrote into the void. Posted occasionally. Waited. Nothing happened.
“I didn’t know anything,” she told me. “So I just left it.”
It wasn’t until November last year that something shifted. She decided to actually try, not just write, but show up. She started commenting on other people’s notes and articles. When a new subscriber found her, she would DM them a welcome message and ask a simple question: “What resonated with you enough to subscribe?”
Many people didn’t reply, some did, and those who did became the beginning of something.
By April, she had hit 100 subscribers. Five months, three to one hundred. She let herself feel the weight of that milestone.
And then, on a spontaneous Saturday afternoon, she had an idea: she wanted to ask women a question. Not a complicated one. Not a therapy-adjacent deep dive. Something lighter, but still real: “What are three things that bring you joy? And what do you celebrate about yourself after 40?”
She reached out to about twenty women, ones she had been in conversation with, even briefly. She sent the message by DM. She asked them to contribute to a co-authored article.
Almost every single one said yes immediately.
“I think it’s because the questions were easy,” she explained. “Joy isn’t so vulnerable. Some questions can feel like too much to share publicly. But joy, most women were willing to talk about that.”
The articles went out. Ten women, ten photos, ten voices talking about what lights them up after forty.
In the two weeks that followed, she gained 45 new subscribers.
To put that in perspective: it had taken her five months to reach the first hundred. One article, built on genuine connection and a simple joyful question, nearly tripled that pace.
The most visited article on her publication now has 475 views, a 49% email open rate, 63 likes, and 65 comments. For a writer who was publishing to silence just months before.
What actually made it work
Csilla was generous in walking through the mechanics, and I want to share them here, because this is the kind of thing that gets lost when people talk vaguely about “community.”
Before the article went out, she posted shoutout notes for each contributor. Something like: “Kiran will be the fifth woman in this article,” and then she tagged me. Which meant her audience saw my name. My audience saw it. The circle widened before a word of the piece was published.
On the day of publication, she sent the article to every contributor and asked them to comment, share, and restack. They were in the piece. Of course they wanted to celebrate it.
Every co-author appeared as a guest author on the article, which meant it showed up on each of their pages, regardless of their subscriber count. Csilla’s 100th subscriber had only three followers herself. Csilla included her anyway. Because the point was never about numbers, it was about the compound effect of ten women, showing up together.
She also did shoutout notes after the article, featuring one woman at a time, her photo, a line about what brought her joy. Each one tagged. Each one linking back to the full piece.
Was it a lot of work? Yes, she said plainly. It is not a thirty-minute project, but it was also the moment her Substack stopped being something she was doing alone.
My story: dropping the expert
I came to this conversation from a different direction.
I have been online since 2008: websites, blogs, podcasts, social media, every platform you can think of. I have been on the BBC. I have won awards. I know how to present myself as the person who has the answers.
And none of it built what I was actually looking for.
For a long time on Substack, I did what I had always done: I scheduled articles in advance. I showed up as the expert. I wrote good content and waited for it to find people.
It didn’t.
The shift came when I stopped being the expert and started being myself. A woman awake at 3 am, unable to sleep, navigating perimenopause and loneliness and the strange terrain of midlife. I wrote about not having many close friends. About my non-existent love life. About the gap between how capable I look from the outside and how uncertain I sometimes feel within.
That’s when women started to move toward me. Not because I had the answers, but because I was willing to say that I didn’t. That I was in the middle of it too.
“People don’t want an expert,” I said to Csilla during the live. “They want a human being.”
I believe that more every week.
What I’ve learned about growing on Substack
Around the same time, I started an interview series: first ‘5-minutes with…’, and then 85 Weeks to 50 (I’ll be fifty next October, and I’m documenting the whole journey by interviewing someone over 50 on their journey, week by week, one person at a time).
What I discovered is that people love being asked about their lives. It doesn’t matter if they have five subscribers or fifty thousand. When you reach out to someone, genuinely curious, not transactional, and ask them to share their story, the answer is almost always yes.
I’ve interviewed people from Substack, but I’ve also emailed brands, companies, people I’ve admired from a distance for years. A bodybuilder and boxer in her mid-seventies. People who have absolutely nothing to do with the midlife wellness space and everything to do with what it means to keep evolving.
The secret is simple: most people want to be seen. If you can offer that, even through a short interview or a collaboration, you are giving something genuinely valuable.
And then give credit. Always. Tag people. Restack their quotes. Let them know their words mattered. That generosity comes back to you, not as a strategy, but as a natural consequence of treating people well.
The thing about algorithms
Two months ago, Facebook and Instagram suspended my accounts without warning. Out of the blue. No clear reason. Just gone.
I appealed. I waited. And eventually I thought; “Actually, fine.!
Because here’s what I know now that I didn’t fully understand before: those platforms are not yours. The algorithm is not your friend. You can pour years into building a following somewhere, and it can disappear overnight. I’ve watched it happen to women I admire, and then I watched it happen to me.
Substack is different, not because it’s immune to change, but because what you’re building here is a direct relationship. Your readers chose to be here. Their email addresses exist because they wanted your words in their inbox. That is something no algorithm can take from you.
The shift I made; focusing on Substack and LinkedIn, and nothing else, has brought me more genuine engagement in a few months than years of being everywhere brought me before.
Pick one place. Go all in. Be willing to fail, to learn, to try something that doesn’t work and try something else. That’s not a productivity tip, it’s just what growth actually looks like.
On vulnerability
Someone asked us during the live: “Have you ever been too honest and regretted it?”
Both of us sat with that for a moment. The honest answer is no. Not really.
Csilla posts her pole dancing videos on Instagram. At 47, after leaving a twenty-year corporate career, she is reclaiming her body and her joy in a way she never permitted herself before. That’s not oversharing. That’s healing, made visible.
I’ve written about perimenopause and loneliness and the love life I don’t currently have, not because I’m performing vulnerability, but because I know women are reading this at midnight, wondering if they’re the only ones who feel this way.
They’re not. We’re not.
“When we stop hiding parts of ourselves,” Csilla said near the end, “it heals. It’s not a secret anymore.”
That’s it, really. That’s the whole thing.
What this season is asking of us
Midlife has a way of stripping away the performances we’ve been running for decades. The expert. The capable one. The woman who holds it all together. One by one, the costumes come off. And what’s underneath is just, us. More honest. Less armoured. Occasionally bewildered, often more alive than we’ve ever been.
Substack, at its best, is a place to be that woman out loud. Not polished, not optimised, not performing for an algorithm that will change its mind next month anyway, just real, curious, and connected.
That’s what I’m building here. And if this resonates, if you are somewhere in your forties or beyond, writing into the void and wondering if it’s worth it, I want to tell you: stay. Keep going. Comment on someone’s article today. DM a new subscriber. Ask a simple question and see who answers.
The numbers will follow. But the women you meet along the way? Those are the ones you’ll still be talking to long after you’ve forgotten what your open rate was.
What did this bring up for you? I’d love to know in the comments.
