How I Got 10,000 Subscribers in One Month and Barely Hurt Anyone

The "hurt" people will be okay

This is one of those posts you’re gonna want to bookmark, email to yourself, print out in case the internet gets shut down, and remember word for word because the information I’m about to give you is crucial.

If you want to grow your subscriber base, do exactly what I did and you will get to 10,000. There’s just no question about it. This plan is so bulletproof, Kevlar® is suing me for copyright infringement. Here’s my story:

Around this time last year, I was just like you. I wrote earnest fiction pieces from the heart, hit the publish button, and hoped readers would find their way to me. Well, guess what? That didn’t work. After months of pouring my heart out and cranking out Substack gold two to three times a week, my only subscribers were my mom, my girlfriend, and this one guy who used to bully me in middle school. And of the three, guess who was the only one who read my Substack? That’s right: the bully. And everything I published, he’d comment either “this sucks” or “you still suck bro.”

I had to do something different, so I took to the streets.

That’s me in the photo. That’s right - I begged people to subscribe to my fiction Substack. I thought the starving artist thing would work. I thought people would see a struggling writer out there and give him an email address where he can send his heart-string-yanking prose.

I got a few subs. But mainly, I got told to get a job, which I have, but I’m not the argumentative type. One person told me he checked out my stories and wasn’t impressed.

“Your stories never have any strong female characters and are always about some sad sack man who’s unaware of his privilege,” he said. “I mean, really, who wants to read a story about a morbidly obese man who’s never had sex and calls a prostitute who is disgusted by the sight of him? You really should learn to code.”

But those few subs encouraged me to get trying. I was now at seven subscribers. I was on the rise.

My next step took me to the phones.

I used to be a telemarketer and I was pretty good at it. I know people hate telemarketers, but when I did it, I was selling things that actually helped people and I enjoyed telling people why. Nine times out of ten, you get hung up on. But then there’s that one person you make a connection with, they listen to you explain why they should want this thing, and they believe you, trust you, and decide they do want it. It’s a magical feeling and I wanted to make that happen for my Substack. And since my Substack is free, I figured it would be cinch to get people to subscribe.

But since I have that job and a kid on the way, I didn’t have time to make the calls myself. So I hired a call center firm out of India to handle the phone lines.

I gave them a script to read that basically said Toxic Lit has all kinds of cool stories for you and the whole family, so subscribe for free today!

However, the company I hired changed the script a bit and asked about Medicare ID numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, Apple ID passwords, and a bunch of other things that had nothing to do with my earnest tales of growing up in various locales around the country.

But the call center did get the name of my Substack out there, which led to one new subscriber.

Unfortunately, that subscriber only signed up because his grandmother gave every number she had - Medicare, bank, social, and the number of her favorite sexual position - to the call center and they completely wiped her out of everything except her sexual preference. And because my website was used as bait, I’m being sued for everything that woman lost, which has so far totaled to $3.2 million.

I did get that one new subscriber, though! I was still on the rise. I was at eight subscribers. But now that I was gutted financially for the rest of my life, I had to try something big - so I went to Ecuador and took over a TV station.

You might have heard about a flood of gang violence in Ecuador recently, including the takeover of a TV station where gang members took the TV station employees hostage on the air.

Well, there is a lot of gang violence going on there. But the TV station thing was me.

I reached out to the president of Ecuador and proposed this plan: Make these gangs look so reckless and dangerous that they take over TV stations, and you’ll win public approval to crackdown as hard as you want. But the gang that takes over the TV station has to promote my Substack, which mostly consists of stories that lack strong female characters and sad sack men.

Luckily, President Daniel Noboa, a fan of modern literature, was down.

“That’s a great fucking idea!” he said (he went to Harvard, so he talks like that), and then he got me a gang of gun-toting teenagers right away.

I trained the kids on guerilla tactics I googled and watched two Youtube videos about. I also told them to make sure they tell the audience that they will kill everyone in the TV station unless Toxic Lit gets to 10,000 subscribers.

And guess what? IT WORKED!

Those crazy kids got more than 10,000 Ecuadorians to subscribe to Toxic Lit and didn’t even have to hurt anybody very much. I am now the Substacker with the most Ecuadorian subscribers, even though I write in English.

President Noboa has used the TV station takeover as part of his justification to crack down on civil rights, but at least thousands of Ecuadorians will get my stories in their inbox, so that’s a decent consolation prize in my view.

Ten thousand.

What a cool accomplishment, right? I’m pretty proud of myself.

But really, what it comes down to is writing good, posting regularly, and making strangers feel like subscribing to your Substack is a life or death situation.

It’s that simple!

And now it’s your turn. Good luck!