Substack's NEW Creator Match: Finally, a Matchmaker for Writers and Creators
The new dating app for publishers who want to collab and grow together
Tomorrow morning, my boy starts school.
Here in Germany we make a proper occasion of it. It’s called Einschulung, and no first-grader is allowed anywhere near a classroom without a Schultüte (I’ll share pictures on Notes.): an enormous decorated paper cone, roughly as tall as the child carrying it, packed with sweets, pencils, and small treasures. (Is this also a thing where you live? tell me!)
My boy’s is packed. It’s standing in the dark hallway next to my creativity room with the blue light at 11pm.
I am, I’ll admit, even more excited than he is. Thank god he fall asleep early tonight.
When I asked him what he’s looking forward to most, he didn’t say the cone with the sweets. He said his friends. Seeing the ones he already knows. Meeting the ones he hasn’t yet.
Which, funnily enough, is exactly why the rest of us keep showing up on Substack.
It’s a social media platform, whatever we tell ourselves about escaping social media, and the reason I come back to it every single day is the people. The writers and readers we already know, and the ones we haven’t met yet.
Substack’s new dating app for creators
As I’m “The Subsatck Queen”, I’m jumping out of my skin excited telling you….Substack just shipped something that helps with both. So let me pack you a Schultüte of my own.
If you’ve been following me for a while you know I’m always refering to Substack as the house I’m building and the home I’m creating. This definetly has to do with my family and I leaving the North Coast of Germany, buying a house with a beauuuuuutiful garden and trying to make it our new home by opening a new chapter…but that’s another story.
Well, today’s news is as if somebody knocks on my new door holding a clipboard and says:
“Hi. I’ve been watching the whole neighborhood. Here are eleven people on this street who read the same books as you, have a house roughly the same size as yours, and would probably love to have you over for dinner.”
That clipboard is called Creator Match, and it’s Substack’s newest feature, currently rolling out in beta. I have early access to it and loooooooooooooove it.
It is, essentially, a dating app for publishers.
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Overlapping audiences on Substack
If you were in one of my lives, you’ll remember me getting a bit evangelical about one lonely little table buried in your Stats: the overlapping audience table. Here’s an example from one of my members:
Direct access: https://www.yoursubdomain.substack.com/publish/stats/audience
It shows you which publications shared subscribers with yours. I love that table. Audience overlap tells you what your readers are already interested in. It’s market research you didn’t have to run. So in this case it says Ellen Scherr from Life Branches is a great collaborator but also the biggest newsletter on Substack: Letters from an American.
Collaboration on Substack has always been the growth lever nobody uses enough. But would you contact this author? Me neither!
Recommendations, restacks, guest posts, joint lives: this is a relational platform, and relationships are the engine.
But finding the right person to build one with meant squinting at that table, guessing, and hoping.
Creator Match takes the guessing out. Substack now does the squinting for you, and then hands you a curated list, ranked by how promising the collaboration looks for both of you.
Reading a Match Card Without Squinting
If you’re a bestseller, you can head to Creator Match in your publisher dashboard and you’ll find a grid of cards.
Direct access: https://www.yoursubdomain.substack.com/publish/creator-matches
Here’s ane excerpt of one of the best people to collaborate:
Funnily, I know all this but I’m also deep in relationship building on Substack for years. Although I have to admit, lately I didn’t find that much time.
Here’s what I did or do with the creator matches:
Derek Hughes is from UK, 50 plus and we’re been “online friends” for years already. I inspired him oto join Subsatck. He did and started his own newsletter business here coming fro Medium where he was also making thousands of dollars but then found out the algorithm could destroy this in a blink. We did the Medium-Substack Kickstarter Bootcamp together I think two years back or so.
Then theer’s Karen Cherry . She’s from Australia. She invited me to join a creator retreat which I had to deny because of my kids and work. I really like her Substack meta stuff but she also built a newsletter about food safety from scratch and crossed $100,000 lifetime revenue with her Substack. We haven’t done a course together but this could be nice.
Veronica Llorca-Smith 🍋 is someone I look up to. She amazes me whenever I see her in my Notes feed. I’d love to be as badass as she is when I’m in my 40s. She’s constantly reinveting herself. I interviewed her already in 2023/2024 when she got her book deal with Penguin Random House and we did two lives together. We tried to do another live but the time difference didn’t allow this.
And then there’s Fleur Hull . My bestie from Down Under. We did the Substack for Authors Summer Camp together and do the Substack for Authors Guide together. I love her as she’s also a struggling mom and an amazing human. We spent 4 days last week together live online but will see each other in May 2027. YAY! So this is collab at it’s best as we also celebrated one year of the Substack Bookstore, Fleur’s baby, with a live together. Fleur is the yoda for indie publishers and together we’re the “dynamic duo” as Casandra Campbell pointed out.
See? I’ve gone before you. Definetly not PERFECT but at least I tried… intuitively and joyful. I wish you the same. So let’s dig a bit deeper into the new automatically generated matches.
New audience, shared subscribers and stars
Each match card gives you a writer’s name, subscriber count, their bio, a star rating, and three numbers that do all the heavy lifting:
Shared subscribers. The people who already read you both. Proof you’re swimming in the same pond!
New audience for you. How many of their readers have never met you.
New audience for them. How many of your readers have never met them.
That third number is the one that makes this feature different.
Substack tells you what’s in it for you but it also…
shows you what’s in it for the other person
This way it’s not a one-way street. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a collaboration. Rather it would be a favour.
Every match gets a rating from 1 to 5 stars, and Substack won’t show you anything below 3. So the worst card on your list is still worth a look.
Gotta run now and get some sleep for tomorrow.
Are you as excited as I am?
Looking for a collab partner before it’s accessible to everyone?
Substack for Authors bootcamper reading this? Make some noise and say HELLO in the comments!
Stackbuddy.io allows you to find one in our 1000+ creator directory and the comments are open. Please say your category topic and then what you’re looking for.
Also let us know in case we can find you on Stackbuddy.io. It’s fun and makes a difference.
Get access to our weekly Friday LIVEs by joining the Club for only $70 (via desktop!) as we celebrate 1 Year of the Substack Bookstore Collaboration.
As annual subscriber, you also get access to the Substack for Beginners Course.
