📩 The results and learnings from Substack cold outreach

One of the effective steps to grow the subscriber list for my weekly sponsored newsletter.

Jan 12, 2025

A week ago, I published 10 techniques to help grow a newsletter, along with examples of lead magnets that can be used to achieve this.

In this issue, I’ll share how I reached out to creators bigger than me, the results and lessons I learned, and a sample of the message I sent.

The article is divided into these parts:

🤝 Introduction to the issue
👋 Ways of reaching out
🎯 How it was going and the results
🎓 Learnings
📝 Examples of templates

🤝 Introduction to the issue

One of my goals for Q1 2025 is to increase the number of subscribers to my weekly sponsored newsletter. To achieve this, I’ve set myself the task of reaching out to contributors who already write publications on niche-related topics such as marketing, social media, business, and sales.

One specific way to grow your newsletter is by using Substack's feature – Recommendations. That’s why I decided to give it a try.

This feature has "passively" brought me 50+ subscribers.

👋 Ways of reaching out

I decided to use 3 ways to let the creators know about mutual recommendations:

The cold outreach in the Substack DMs
The public post via Substack Notes
The Twitter post

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🎯 How it was going and the results

Speaking of cold outreach (DMs), I decided to reach out to creators who are bigger than me (I have 320 subscribers at the moment). These were mostly creators with 1,000 to 20,000 subscribers.

I started reaching out on January 8th and finished on January 10th.

Number of sent messages was ~24.

It was a very short period, but in addition to the results, it also brought setbacks, e.g.:
🤦‍♀️ I messed up the very first message (because I accidentally pressed Enter mid-message, so instead of a line break, I sent it).
🤦‍♀️ I couldn’t send more requests: "Too many direct message requests were created recently. Try again later." – Yes, Substack has its limits.

Despite that, my activity brought some interesting results.

Results:

• From cold DMs: 3 recommendations
• From a Substack post: 4 recommendations – and still getting people joining
• From a Twitter post: 1 recommendation

The accounts are mostly in the range of 1k, 2k, or 5k subscribers.

🎓 Learnings

Honestly, cold outreach is something that I find very difficult to do, but I finally got over it. For about a 3-day experiment, I'm happy with the results.

However, I definitely have my own lessons for myself for the future.

Some takeaways for later:

👉 Reach out to creators who are actively publishing (not inactive accounts).
👉 Demonstrate that you know what the creator's newsletter is about and understand their niche and audience.
👉 Prepare multiple text variations in advance.
👉 Include links to your newsletter so they can read it and decide whether it’s a good fit and makes sense for them.
👉 Include a link to the social network where you have the most followers to build trust and credibility.

📝 Examples of templates

Finally, I am attaching the text of the message I sent out. Whenever I wrote to a creator, I made sure that our topics were related or could complement each other.

This is just one example of how a message can be constructed.

However, when it comes to public notes (Substack Notes), I liked this one from

Philip Hofmacher

, which I am attaching here for inspiration.

That's all for this edition of the newsletter.
I hope some of the lessons learned will be useful to you as you decide to reach out to creators for Substack Recommendations.

If you think this might be valuable to you or some of your friends who are considering starting their newsletter, feel free to send them this article.

If you'd like to be promoted in this newsletter next Sunday, click the link below labelled “Sponsor the next edition.”

All the best,

Nika

📣 Sponsor the next edition!

You can showcase your service or product to enthusiasts who love entrepreneurship. Just press the button!

Sponsor this newsletter

Also, I want to thank my Affiliate partner Ugly Duckling who has helped me grow my Twitter (X). 🐤 If you want to be more interactive there too, look at it.