Zero Strategy. No Niche. Minimal Readers. This Is My Growth Story.

Experts said optimise. I chose anguish.

Cactus by the sea. Tayrona National Natural Park. Santa Marta, Colombia.

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Fifty-four posts. Forty subscribers. One broken heart. Very few comments that weren’t trying to sell me crypto or offer tantric coaching via WhatsApp..

If success is a ladder, I’m currently hanging upside down from the bottom rung, waving a flare and muttering, “I meant to do this.”

Now, I could lie to you. I could say that it’s all part of a slow-burn strategy, a long con aimed at building a deeply curated audience of discerning readers. But the truth is simpler, and more tragic: I’ve been screaming into the abyss with the quiet dignity of a man wearing a tuxedo to his own funeral, only to realise no one else was invited.

Naturally, I turned to the experts.

I asked Co-Pilot. I asked Claude. I even consulted a man named Chad on the internet, who writes as if he’s legally obliged to use “synergy” twice per paragraph. They all said the same thing, more or less: niche down, engage, repurpose, optimise, collaborate, signal, network, perform.

In other words, become the kind of person who reads “Atomic Habits” unironically and has an opinion on Canva templates.

They said I needed a “value proposition.” That I should “solve problems.” That readers aren’t looking for musings, ideas, or cathartic spirals into existential futility. They want solutions. Quick wins. Bullet points.

Well. I have bullet points.

• I once wrote 3,000 words on suits and why anyone who demands one should be exiled to a swamp.

• I dissected the male gaze using Leia, Laura Mulvey and adolescent erections as narrative anchors.

• I got mildly tearful in a Mexican hot spring while being stalked by bats and soul-crushing nu-metal.

• I defended silliness as an act of resistance against a world run by human LinkedIn profiles in loafers.

• I have not, at any point, recommended journalling or turmeric.

But apparently, none of that qualifies as a “niche.”

So I did what any serious creator does: I gave up for twenty minutes, watched three Wilco live sets, opened the fridge, stared into it for a bit, and came back to write this. Because the only growth strategy I can honestly commit to is stubborn persistence wrapped in self-deprecating loathing. It’s a niche, I suppose. Just not one that comes with affiliate links or multi-platform expansion potential.

What follows is my half-hearted attempt at an earnest growth audit, built on chicken entrails, dubious AI prompts, and a near-religious refusal to pander.

1. Find Your Niche

The golden rule of online success, repeated with the same fervour as “Live, Laugh, Love” on the walls of wine-hardened divorcees: Find your niche. Be specific. Solve a problem. Target a demographic so ruthlessly narrow you could slide it under a locked door.

Apparently, people don’t want to read reflections on mortality, rage against the commodification of desire, or travel essays where the emotional climax involves crying in a hot spring while bats fly overhead. No, they want “value.” Tips. Takeaways. Actionable insights. Listicles with numbered promises and little emojis.

To which I say: fuck off.

Because my niche, if I have one, is a kind of existential whiplash delivered in long-form, semi-coherent rants about the quiet collapse of meaning. My niche is people who think “optimise your content funnel” sounds like a threat. My niche is those who’ve read The Road, nodded, and thought, “Yeah, but with better jokes.”

If you really want a niche: here’s one. Emotional clarity for the terminally disillusioned. Think of it as self-help for people who’ve already helped themselves to the last of the wine and are now staring blankly at the void.

2. Engage with Substack Notes

This advice always arrives in the tone of a gym instructor who refuses to believe you're not enjoying yourself. “Just engage! Comment on Notes! Boost visibility!” It’s like being told to smile while handing out flyers at your own wake.

Substack Notes, I’m told, is the great leveller. The secret weapon. The place where real connections happen. What it actually is: Twitter’s sad cousin who got dumped and now lives in your spare room, insisting it’s “working on a new vibe.”

I tried. Once. I posted a pithy thought. Something sardonic and probably involving politics, mortality or the fact that the most passionate public speakers in the country all sell real estate. The only response I got was from a bot offering “mindset coaching” for men over 45 who’ve “lost their edge.” I was tempted, briefly.

The idea of digital engagement as a growth strategy assumes one has the appetite for constant, chirpy small talk with strangers whose bios include phrases like “coffee addict ☕️” or “father. thinker. disruptor.” It’s networking for the spiritually concussed: high-fiving each other with corpse hands and calling it connection.

I’m not here to win the algorithm’s affection. I’m here to whisper elegantly phrased despair into the ears of those who are smart enough to find it.

3. Leverage Existing Content

Ah, repurposing. The masturbatory loop of modern content: repackage, repost, reframe. Turn that long, emotionally raw piece on moral failure into a snappy “thread” about resilience. Clip a line from a darkly funny travelogue and chuck it on Instagram with a sepia-toned photo of your knees.

Let me be clear: the idea of restacking my work makes me feel like I’m taking leftovers from a funeral buffet and rebranding them as artisanal small plates for a silent dinner party no one RSVP’d to.

The problem is that what I write isn’t easily reducible. It doesn’t lend itself to bite-sized consumption without losing all flavour and meaning – like trying to explain grief using a bumper sticker.

Also, there’s a quiet tragedy to begging people to read something you already poured your soul into. “Hey, remember this post from February? It had 19 views, two of which were me checking the formatting. It’s still good! Please clap!”

No thanks. I’ll keep churning out fresh posts like a deranged scribe etching filthy epiphanies into damp monastery walls for rats with an interest in semiotics.

4. Set Clear Goals

The experts say to set clear goals, as if clarity has ever stopped a house fire.

I had them, once. Subscriber targets, engagement metrics, a publishing schedule so disciplined it would make a German bureaucrat weep with admiration. I post every Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. without fail. Sometimes, I even throw in a bonus post like a sadistic teacher who sets homework on the last day of term.

The results speak for themselves. Forty subscribers. A handful of polite responses. Occasionally, a friend texts me to say they “liked the one about suits.”

My mother does not subscribe. My wife does not read it. These are not theoretical failures; they are data points, as reliable as rainfall.

Every post lands like a well-written pamphlet in a locked letterbox. There's no feedback loop. Just the eerie quiet of an empty auditorium after a dress rehearsal no one attended.

What remains is the grind: posting in a vacuum with the blind hope of a Victorian child chimney sweep praying for air. It’s not literary ambition. It’s beautifully formatted despair.

5. Network with Other Writers

This one appears in every guide, as if other Substack writers are waiting to link arms and form a chain of mutual promotion like some literary human centipede.

I have attempted outreach. I have left thoughtful, well-punctuated comments on Notes that said nothing and were praised accordingly. I have nodded along to well-lit posts about joy and creativity from people who write like their target audience is a wellness coach trapped in a calendar.

The response? Silence, broken only by the polite recoil of strangers who weren’t expecting someone to speak without emojis. No camaraderie. No connections. Just digital tumbleweeds and existential cringe.

It turns out that "voice-driven essayist with strong opinions and a mild persecution complex" is not a growth demographic.

I have no reciprocal newsletter swap agreements, no strategic collaborations, and no ambitions to join the algorithmic dinner party that is Substack Notes. My idea of community is someone quietly reading an old post about male vulnerability or Mexican speed bumps and muttering, “Huh.”

That’s enough.

6. Engage Your Audience

Substack encourages questions at the end of each post. "What do you think?" "Have you experienced something similar?" "What’s your perspective?"

I have asked none of these.

Because I already know the answer. Nothing.

There is no audience to engage. There is no flurry of replies. There is no moment when the curtain lifts and the community reveals itself, clapping with small, elegant hands.

A few kind souls have commented, and their existence is noted with genuine gratitude. Otherwise, it's a clean field of quiet.

My wife has never once said, “That one really hit me.” My mum has not asked about a single post. These are the two people most legally or emotionally obligated to fake it.

Instead, I write into silence. Not because I enjoy it, but because I no longer believe engagement is a meaningful sign of value.

If someone reads it – really reads it – and says nothing, shares nothing, vanishes into the digital mist without so much as a pity like, that’s still a win. At least it stuck somewhere. Like emotional shrapnel.

I don’t want an audience. I want a witness.

Why I Keep Doing This (Even When No One Asks Me To)

Every Tuesday morning at 10:00, like the punctual lunatic I am, I fling another blog post into the void. Not a newsletter – let’s not flatter ourselves – but a blog. A personal, unmonetised, algorithm-resistant act of ritualistic oversharing. A ghost light in a long-abandoned theatre.

No one asked for this. Least of all me.

Originally, this was supposed to be training. Reps. A place to limber up while I wrote the novel – the real thing, the serious thing. The thing that would make all the brooding and cultural loathing and philosophical spirals finally pay off.

Instead, this blog became... well, this. A perfectly rendered distraction. A beautifully crafted exercise in professional avoidance. Fifty-four posts later, the novel is not finished, but my expertise in bleak humour and public self-flagellation has never been stronger.

Every time I press publish, I feel it. Not pride – that would imply someone’s watching. Not joy – that would require feedback. It’s more like the satisfying thunk of a pigeon dropping a pebble down an empty mine shaft. It’s done. It’s gone. And I’m still alone at my desk, congratulating myself on a turn of phrase that no one will comment on.

I write for forty subscribers. Forty brave, mostly silent souls. My wife doesn’t read it. My mum doesn’t follow. Friends glance politely at the subject line and immediately forget it exists. I’ve had more engagement from expired yoghurt.

Still blogging. Still uploading these word-shaped sighs into the gaping void, like a medieval scribe illuminating his own suicide note in gold leaf. It's not content, it’s a ritual. A soft, weekly howl. A man reciting his inner monologue to the Wi-Fi router and pretending it's connection. Somewhere between performance and pathology, I hit ‘publish’ and pretend I’ve contributed to culture.

The platforms say I should try to grow my audience. Like it’s a tomato plant. Like I’m gently nurturing a community of curious minds with my weekly dispatches of postmodern despair. Grow your audience, they whisper. Find your niche. Engage. Optimise. As if a small cult of like-minded masochists will suddenly materialise because I added hashtags or adjusted my line spacing.

“Grow your audience.” Jesus Christ. The very phrase sounds like something you do to mould in a damp cupboard. Or a tumour. Or a sentient yeast infection that’s been fed too many listicles and now demands engagement metrics. It’s not growth, it’s bloat. It’s a slow, oozing expansion of half-formed takes and dopamine-chasing fluff, puffed up by algorithms and desperation. ‘Grow your audience’ – as if we’re all just human fertiliser for a content economy that rewards beige opinions in carousels. I’m not growing an audience. I’m trying to survive one.

And yet, the advice keeps coming. Repurpose your content! Leverage your network! (What network?) Be consistent! I’ve been consistent. I’ve consistently poured my guts into posts that disappear with the grace and finality of a body into quicksand.

This blog isn’t content. It’s not scalable. It’s not a “solution” to anyone’s anything, unless your problem is not feeling quite bleak enough on a Tuesday morning. It’s a symptom – a recurring, untreated flare-up of intellectual eczema, oozing prose and sarcasm once a week in a doomed attempt to metabolise the slow collapse of civilisation through clever phrasing and masochistic routine. It’s what happens when you replace therapy with a publishing schedule.

So no, I don’t want to grow my audience. I want to deserve the audience I already have – those few confused souls who find something in here that makes them pause, wince, laugh, and then go very quiet. If three of them nod silently and forward it to someone else who “might get it,” I’ve done my job.

So I’ll keep writing. Quietly. Doggedly. Not for growth, not for glory, not to become someone’s LinkedIn inspiration post about “authenticity in the creator economy.” Just for the bleak, unmarketable pleasure of saying exactly what I mean in a world that’s algorithmically hostile to meaning. This isn’t a brand. It’s a compulsion. A kind of literary self-harm disguised as commitment.

Admittedly, if a hundred thousand subscribers suddenly appeared out of nowhere, I’d monetise the fuck out of this thing, quit my job, hand in my lanyard mid-sentence, and vanish to a beach where the water looks like mouthwash and the mangoes bruise if you breathe on them. I’d write my novel under a rusting ceiling fan somewhere warm and ambiguously postcolonial, eating grilled fish wrapped in banana leaves and forgetting what acronyms stand for. No more winter briefings, no more ‘strategic priorities,’ no more pretending we can fix structural inequality with dot points and goodwill. Just me, the sun, and the smug knowledge that I finally escaped the meeting that never ends.

So until that blessed algorithmic miracle arrives and carries me to my hammock-lined destiny, I’ll keep writing. Grimly. Stubbornly. Not for growth, not for validation, and certainly not for the soulless little dashboard that whispers ‘0 new subscribers’ like a debt collector with asthma. Just for the bitter, exquisite pleasure of saying exactly what I mean, exactly how I want, into the yawning digital void.

And if no one’s listening?

Then at least I died screaming my own name into the wind.

That said… If you are still here, for Christ’s sake share the damn thing. Email it to a sad friend. Post it in a group chat of overeducated malcontents. Leave a comment. Rate me five stars in the Apple Store even though this isn’t an app. Like. Subscribe. Validate me. I am not above begging.