❄️ 100 ❄️
A huge thank you, plus what I’ve learned from the first month (ish) of WHAT ARE YOU ON
Hello!
Great shafts of light have just split the skies while, somewhere over the knob of our Arcadian hills, the ancients are beginning to chatter.
That’s right. WHAT ARE YOU ON has just hit 100 subscribers.
Whether free or paid, I’m so grateful for everyone who’s signed up, read, liked, shared, commented, or engaged in any erstwhile manner with anything we’ve published so far.
The first month was a ride. For most of the preceding year, I’d been beset with what you might call “undulating mood.”
It wasn’t planned, but September served up a triptych of game-changers: I gave up booze and other unnecessary psychoactives, started WHAT ARE YOU ON, and finally moved house after a synapse-meltingly fraught process.
I turned the tanker around and am, broadly, feeling fit and happy. This has been helped, in no small part, by the reception to WHAT ARE YOU ON. Although the number of subscribers might seem small, growth has been steady and with some notable recent spikes.
I spent a lot of the first month on Canva and Instagram, making snarky carousels. Then I started looking at Substack’s stats backend and realised that, after the initial begging posts, the majority of readers don’t come from there.
The biggest drivers of traffic are as follows: 59% direct, 16% through Substack, 10% Reddit, 6% Instagram. (Twitter and Bluesky are 0.7% combined. Byeeeeeeee.)
“Direct,” according to my editorial assistant and general vibes merchant ChatGPT, consists mainly of subscribers opening emails – plus a smaller number driven by private untraceable shares on WhatsApp, texts, emails, Post-it notes or chalk messages scrawled on beachfront promenades.
I’m assured that this is “good” as it means people are engaged. (If any successful Substackers beg to differ, I’d love to hear the brutal truth.)
That said, the most successful posts are the ones shared elsewhere – particularly by sources within the piece.
The three most successful articles have been:
the Planet’s 5 best Drugs – 662 views.
51% of these came from Reddit, where Dom Trott (who has 70k Reddit karma and is a sage within the online drugs community) posted our interview.
“Treated like table Salt”: why Ket’s so cheap – 416 views.
Written by the fantastic journalist Ella Glover, our first guest post, this benefited from private shares and a surprisingly large amount of traffic from Facebook, where Josh Torrance (a key source in the piece) shared it.
Dopamine on the Dancefloor – 334 views.
The first proper WAYO article, and it showed, with a higher open rate (70%, compared to the current mid-50s average). I also spent an ungodly amount of time making an Instagram carousel that, thankfully, got loads of shares – especially two relatable slides from Dr Rayyan Zafar and Georgia, both sources,
Is there a take-home from all this? I think it’s that, as well as staying engaged with readers and pumping out stuff that plucks the current social-psychopharmacological nerve (try saying that after hitting a DMT vape), shares and engagement – despite me just downplaying their importance – make features fly.
I’ve got a few targets for the rest of the year: getting the first podcast out, bumping up video content and finally working out the paid/unpaid dynamic. (For those who’ve paid: bless you. I know I’m not yet delivering much of a differential between the two tiers.)
But my main aim is to really hit the WAYO USP: publishing features about drugs and our dearly damaged brains that you simply wouldn’t read anywhere else.
To that end, I’m working on a few bangers I’ve been holding back until we found a groove and established whether anyone would actually read this thing. I hope they do your early support justice.
Thanks for reading, and remember to stay hydrated.
David x
