The Substack Growth Skill Nobody Ever Thinks About
It makes growth, engagement, relationships, and even sales dramatically easier.
From November to February, I spent two to three hours a day engaging on Substack.
I was commenting, replying, checking notifications, scrolling notes, finding new creators, and doing basically everything people tell you to do if you want to grow.
And it worked to a degree. In four months, I gained a little over 100 subscribers.
But it was a fucking grind.
The bigger problem was that it wasn’t leading to much meaningful momentum beyond making some new friends.
I wasn’t known for anything. I wasn’t getting shoutouts. I wasn’t making sales. And I wasn’t deliberately building relationships that helped me with what I was trying to accomplish.
Even worse, it never felt like enough.
There were always more comments to write and more creators to find. I wanted better growth, and “more” was the only lever I knew how to pull.
But then I found a better way.
I Stopped Engaging Randomly and Built a System
Right around March, I got much more deliberate about relationships.
Instead of opening Substack and engaging with whoever happened to appear in front of me, I started deciding who I wanted to know and making sure those relationships got my time and effort.
That changed things pretty quickly.
As soon as I started using this system in early March, my growth took off.
Then it slowed down in April and part of May because I put the system on the back burner to focus on a product I eventually shelved.
But once I gave it my focus again, things ramped right back up.
My engagement climbed, subscriber and follower growth picked up, and the relationships I built through this process played a huge role in my product launches and coaching business.
The weird part is that I now spend less time engaging. Yet I’ve somehow become known for my comments, engagement, and relationship-building.
But to be honest, on most days I spend an hour or less engaging. And I actually feel done afterward because I know I spent that hour on the right people for the right reasons.
So now I want to share that process with you. Then I’ll show you one of the first places people get stuck trying to use it consistently, and exactly how I solve it.
The Make Friends Get Clients Process
It’s called Make Friends Get Clients because you build relationships (make friends) that lead to all sorts of opportunities, like collaborations, mentorships, shoutouts, referrals, and, you guessed it, clients.
The whole system is pretty simple. There are five key steps.
Build Your Business Foundation. Get clear enough on what you do, who you help, and what you want to be known for so new attention has somewhere useful to go.
Find the Right People. Identify creators, potential clients, collaborators, and other people you genuinely want to know.
Become Recognizable. Consistently show up around those people through thoughtful, human comments and engagement until they know who you are.
Start Real Conversations. Move beyond comments when it makes sense and actually get to know these people, what they’re building, what they care about, and what they’re trying to accomplish.
Create Opportunities. Keep building these relationships, help people in meaningful ways, and pay attention to where there’s a natural fit for a collaboration, referral, introduction, paid subscription, client relationship, or something else.
Instead of engaging randomly or trying to force an outcome, you’re building good relationships with the right people and creating room for the right opportunities.
Why This Works So Much Better
There are really two things that make this work so well.
Reason 1: Depth
If I leave 100 comments on 100 random people, I might get some profile views, a few follows, and maybe some comments back.
But then tomorrow, I’m basically starting over.
With this system, I’m still adding new people, but I keep coming back to the people I actually want to know. The good relationships get more attention instead of constantly being replaced by whoever happens to show up in my feed.
That repetition creates familiarity. They recognize me, I start conversations when there’s a natural opening, we learn more about each other, and the relationship gets deeper from there.
Reason 2: Goodwill
You don’t just get to know people and wait for them to help you.
You help them.
You encourage them, share their work, make introductions, answer questions, and look for ways to help them win, because you truly like them and want them to succeed.
Do that consistently, and you become someone people know, like, trust, and genuinely want to help.
The people you build these relationships with are more likely to comment on your posts because they care about you. They’re more likely to share your work, introduce you to people, send opportunities your way, and even become customers themselves because they trust you and believe you can genuinely help them.
And then the whole thing starts compounding.
More engagement creates more reach and social proof. More reach brings more followers and subscribers. Those people become new relationships. And every good relationship exposes you to more people you might want to know.
That’s why this system can keep getting easier and more effective over time instead of resetting every time you open Substack.
But there’s one part of this that seems almost too simple to be a problem, until you actually try to do it consistently.
You Need to Find More of the Right People Over and Over
There’s one obvious requirement for all of this:
You need people to put into the system.
It seems easy at first. Heck, you can probably name a handful of people right now.
But finding the right people consistently is not easy if you don’t know how.
And it’s one of the first places my coaching clients get stuck.
When you’re trying to build relationships week after week, you quickly realize you need a reliable way to keep finding people who might actually be worth knowing.
But if there’s too much friction, eventually you’ll just stop doing it.
That’s why there’s a specific skill I want to teach you in the rest of this post:
How to consistently find the right people to connect with on Substack without spending hours searching or constantly wondering where to look next.
I’ll show you who to look for, where to find them, and how to keep a steady flow of good people entering your relationship system.
