There's a Substack note that stopped me mid-scroll:
First, because it’s a simple template that works on Notes. Second, I read it three times because it was true. The kind of true that sits in your chest for a minute before you can scroll past it.
That Note was written by Ryan Hennessey from The Unsteady Ascent. And if you weren’t in this year’s Substack Notes Kickstarter Bootcamp, you missed one of its absolute rockstars.
Who is Ryan Hennessy and why his story matters
One year ago, on April 9th, 2025, Ryan showed up on Substack Notes for the first time.
Just a former science teacher from Minnesota who had spent 10 years in public education, burned himself out, was trying to get his doctorate, teaching night classes and one day looked up from all of it and asked himself why.
He had 18 subscribers in week one. Friends. Family. People who showed up out of love, not because he had earned it yet.
And then he just kept going. Every single day. For 365 days.
In this week’s podcast episode he shared with me that his mentor had told him early on:
“Commit, if you’re going to commit, commit to a year. Can you do that of like showing up every single day on Substack Notes?”
Ryan’s answer, looking back:
“It’s the first thing in my life where I’m just like, this is my commitment and I’m going to stick to it. And I stuck to it.”
He didn’t write to grow. He wrote because he needed to
This is the part most growth content leaves out.
Ryan didn’t sit down and build a content strategy. He didn’t study the algorithm or reverse-engineer viral Notes. He wrote because a therapist told him to.
“The way that I actually started writing was in private through a therapist. When I was going through a really dark time. And that’s when like that note about writing is nervous system work — that’s where it actually all started for me was writing when I was in a really dark time, and trying to get myself a little bit of separation, pull my ego out of it, to write the other person’s narrative from their point of view. So it kind of forces empathy and allows you to process it all.”
That was almost 10 years ago. A divorce. The hardest period of his life.
And here’s what got me: even when he wrote about that divorce recently, eight years after the fact, he still found things to work through.
“Even when I was writing about it a few months ago, they’re still like, I’m finding these little charges and I’m finding these things that are going on inside my body and it’s allowing me to work through those that I didn’t even know — like I assumed it was all good and I moved past that and I learned my lessons and it’s great. But you never quite do until you actually go through. And there’s always a little something left there to work through.”
That is someone using writing the way writing was always meant to be used, to understand yourself better than you did the day before.
In our conversation, Ryan also described his Substack this way:
“It kind of was to a large extent a classroom that I felt like the world kind of needed where I could be unfiltered, where I didn’t have to choose my words and I didn’t have to write for anybody other than myself and write about the things that I’m passionate about learning and exploring myself.”
The performance gap that is silently killing your growth
Ryan spent 10 years in a classroom where, in his own words:
“You’re not allowed to have an opinion on anything without fear of retribution from parents and students and admin.”
A decade of shrinking, filtering and performing.
Sound familiar?
Maybe it wasn’t a classroom. Maybe it was a corporate office, a toxic relationship, or a family that had very specific opinions about who you were supposed to be. The result is the same: you learned to perform.
Ryan described it this way and this is the part I keep coming back to:
“There’s still going to be a me that is performative to some degree, that’s going to not say all of the things that are on my mind. Then there’s going to be me that’s more raw and authentic, the one that my close friends and family would see. And for me, I’m trying to close that gap of like, I don’t want to be performing, you know, 90% of my life and then get home and get to breathe and like not be entirely sure who I am.”
That is the whole f*cking point of writing on the internet. if you do it right.
The point is to close that gap.
And he also said something that I think is the most important thing any writer on the internet needs to hear:
“The more distance there are between those two yous, the more friction there is in your life and the more it feels like you have this incongruence that you’re trying to work through.”
The real Substack Notes growth timeline, from 18 subscribers to 8,000
Nobody talks about the slow part. So here it is, honestly.
Months 1–4: Ryan was stuck under 100 subscribers. Four months of showing up every single day for almost no one. During this period he spent twice as much energy engaging with other writers as he did on his own Notes.
“Typically in a day, I would spend twice as much energy on outreach as I would on my own notes. I would be engaging with other writers and commenting on their work and through that kind of building a community that actually supported."
The first click: Around 100 subscribers, something shifted.
“It felt like after I got to 100, it was about two weeks later, I got to 200. And then it was like three weeks later, I got to 500. And then at 500, it just kind of like something hit, right? One or two notes kind of caught fire. And then that fire kind of spread across everything.”
The growth that followed:
“Instead of just getting like one or two subscribers a day, it was like, sometimes it was as much as like a hundred subscribers a day. And sometimes it was like a consistent 15 to 20.”
Today: 8,000 subscribers. 97% of that growth from Substack Notes alone.
“When I compare my notes subscribers to my essay subscribers, it’s like 97% of growth has come from notes alone.”
In my opinion, the algorithm did not randomly reward Ryan. He educated it through consistent behavior and it started showing his Notes to exactly the right people.
The 3 Substack Notes tips that actually moved the needle
Tip 1 — Show up on Substack Notes every single day
Not most days. Every day. This is the non-negotiable.
“The first one we’ve already talked about to death is just that consistency of showing up on notes every single day.”
Ryan also described how he uses Notes as the building blocks for everything else:
“A lot of times that’s what I’ll do is I’ll have the different parts of a story as notes. And when I write a note, I try to keep it just one succinct idea and then put it out there. And what I love about that is then I labor over the word choice and I get it exactly how I want for this little, usually it’s like seven or eight lines and I get it exactly how I want. And then those pieces are the larger part of a story that I’m working on for a long form story.”
Tip 2 — Spend twice as much energy on outreach as on your own writing
This is the most overlooked part of any Substack Notes strategy.
“There is something to be said about — when I kind of get into these lulls of just like I show up for like 10 minutes, I write a note, and then I just sign off of the app, everything responds. So if you’re actually looking at your stats, and you’re looking at your growth. Growth slows as soon as you stop that outward energy. You stop interacting with other people. You stop doing any kind of collaboration because you really are kind of stimulating those connections. And when they are commenting with you and you’re commenting with them, you show up in each other’s feeds. And as soon as that lever kind of dials down, it dials down for them as well.”
Tip 3 — Share the thing you are most scared to say
“Third one would be share the thing that you’re scared to say. I mean, share it, be honest with it. If you need to write from a pseudoname or something to build that muscle, do that. But you’d be so surprised by the amount of people that are actually like they resonate with yourself. Message they feel seen they feel validated even if it’s like your deepest darkest fear you’re not alone in that and it actually is energizing when other people are like I feel seen in that thank you so much for speaking that truth I know that had to be hard and just by witnessing from the readers or being witnessed there’s this profound power of just like an exhale that happens after you put it out into the world and slowly but surely you become a lot more confident in your writing.”
The first time Ryan wrote about his divorce, he hit publish and then:
“I think I went back to the app like three times at night. And I’m like, I can’t, I got to, maybe I should edit this. And I didn’t sleep that night. And I had to like get up in the morning and go for a run to like work through that frantic energy.”
Then the comments came in. And now:
“Each time I share something vulnerable it scares the shit out of me to put it frankly — every time that I do it anyways I gain the confidence in myself to like hold that ground and to continue doing it.”
Substack for Beginners (Substack School) opens May 7, here’s how to get access
Ryan ended our conversation with something I have not stopped thinking about.
I asked him where he would be in a year. His answer:
“I’m going to answer this as honestly as possible, and I don’t know, and that excites me. My life is kind of in this, like I said, following the breadcrumbs, doing the next right thing.”
That is what writing on the internet can give you back. The permission to follow the breadcrumbs, to build something that grows with you instead of something you have to shrink yourself to fit inside.
Ryan’s story is not the exception. It is the template. Show up. Be real. Do the outward work. Share the scary thing. Repeat for 365 days.
But knowing the template and executing it are two very different things. That is exactly why I built Substack School and why hundreds of students have already gone through it.
This is THE Substack for Beginners course. My signature course as a Substack consultant and top 15 #International Substack educator. Totally updated for 2026 — because Substack keeps changing, and so does everything inside.
What’s new in 2026?
Starting in May, I am adding weekly live Q&A sessions with me.
Me, live, answering your exact questions every single week. And if there is something inside the course I do not cover? I will record it and add it. This course breathes and grows, just like your Substack will.
In addition, I’ll open up some slots for 1:1 support and coaching.
The deal — open until this Saturday only:
The full value of Substack School is $499.
Until Saturday, you get it for a fraction of that — bundled with your full annual Club membership.
One upgrade. Everything included:
The complete Substack School course — fully updated for 2026
Weekly live Q&A sessions with me starting in May
Full annual Club membership with everything that comes with it
All future updates, additions, and recorded answers, yours automatically
How do you get access?
Simply upgrade to an annual Club membership. That’s it. You’re in!
Want Substack School as a standalone purchase instead? Just hit reply and I will send you the details directly.
The 6-year-old version of you already knows what they want.
Time to go get it.
Hey, I’m Kristina, the heart behind The Online Writing Club.
I started writing on the internet in December 2020, newborn in arms, during one of the most disorienting and beautiful seasons of my life. What began as a creative outlet quietly became something I never expected: a 6-figure business, a global community of 18,000 writers, dreamers, builders, and work I genuinely fall in love with every single day.
In my corporate life, I’m an award-winning marketing professional and brand strategist. Here, I pour everything I know about writing, growing an audience, and building something real into every post, every lesson, and every conversation.
If you’ve ever believed your story deserves to be heard and want to get paid to be you, you’re exactly who I built this for.
P.S. Go follow Ryan at The Unsteady Ascent on Substack. Read his Notes feed from the beginning. You will understand immediately why he was this bootcamp's rockstar and why I found him on Reddit at 8,000 subscribers and immediately thought: the world needs to hear this guy.
P.P.S. If you love video, here’s our video interview for audiovisual learners.
