Frequently Asked Questions About Building a Business on Substack

It depends on what stage you're at and what matters most to you right now. Substack's biggest advantage for solopreneurs is its built-in discovery ecosystem — the network recommends your newsletter to other readers and helps you grow without a paid ad budget. That's genuinely powerful when you're starting from zero. Beehiiv has more advanced analytics and automation tools, which are useful once you're already monetizing and need detailed segmentation. My recommendation: if you're under 5,000 subscribers and you want to grow an audience fast without spending on ads, Substack is the better starting point. If you're migrating an existing large list and want sophisticated email marketing features, Beehiiv is worth looking at. The platform isn't the strategy — the offer stack is. Either platform will work if you know what you're doing.

Three things: discovery, simplicity, and trust. Substack's network-level discovery means readers can find your newsletter without you needing a big social media following or paid ads — which is a real competitive advantage for solo operators who don't have a marketing team. It's also simpler to set up and use than most alternatives, which means less time on tech and more time on content and offers. And Substack has built significant reader trust — people willingly pay for Substack subscriptions in a way they don't for many other platforms. For a solopreneur building a newsletter-based business, those three things together make it the lowest-friction path to real revenue. That said, the framework I teach — the portfolio business model — works across platforms. But if you're starting fresh, Substack is where I'd start every time.

Yes. The portfolio business model isn't platform-dependent — it's a revenue architecture. The core system works whether you're on Substack, Beehiiv, Ghost, or even a self-hosted email list. What matters is that your newsletter acts as the lead engine: it builds trust with your audience, demonstrates your expertise, and funnels readers toward your paid offers (digital products, coaching, courses, memberships). The specific platform is a tool, not a strategy. That said, I focus on Substack because its built-in discovery features make audience growth significantly faster for people starting from zero, and I teach from what I've lived — I built my own portfolio business on Substack and grew to 6,400+ subscribers using its native growth tools.

Yes — and it's actually one of the better times to be on the platform. Substack crossed 4 million paid subscribers across the network in 2024, and it's still growing. The discovery features are stronger than they've ever been, the Notes feature has added real social-media-style distribution, and creator payouts continue to scale with audience size. The people who say "Substack isn't worth it" are usually treating it like a blogging platform — posting content and hoping people find it. The people seeing real results are using Substack as the hub of a full portfolio business: combining the newsletter with digital products, high-ticket services, and community. That combination — when executed with the right offer stack — still converts extremely well in 2026. I'm in the Top 50 Substack Business leaderboard and growing. It's worth it.