I grew to 6k subs in 6 months my career growth newsletter for software engineers
Turning procrastination into productivity. All the lessons I learned from growing my online presence from zero to thousands of subscribers and connections.
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I’m not special, so aren’t you.
I had an itch to do something online for more than 10 years, but I never started
Until I did.
Now I have grown in 6 months from 0 to 6k subscribers in Substack and from 300 to 14k connections on LinkedIn.
And I’m going to give you my learnings so you can replicate it if that’s what you want.
Before starting
#1 “I have the desire, but I’m not taking action”
I had the idea of writing a blog about books 3 years ago. I had the idea of writing a blog as a developer when I read The Complete Software Development Career Guide.
Yet I didn’t start any. They were just ideas.
Around June 2023, my coworker Alex Zajac started his newsletter Hungry Minds. I talked with him multiple times to tap into his thoughts and understand how was he feeling about it. It was inspiring to see someone doing what I wanted to do for a long time.
Needless to say, it took me 3 months to start writing myself. I had the idea of doing my own site and being independent of any platform. Besides being a bad idea to reinvent the wheel, I never did it.
⭐Lesson Learned: Writing online has been a great way to balance engineering vs business. If you only approach with an engineering mindset, you’ll never release anything.
I had my goal to get a post online by the end of Q3 2023. When I saw I was not going to meet it, I pivoted to start writing in Substack. It only took 30 minutes comparing platforms to pick one.
I’ll procrastinate a lot, but I won’t miss my self-imposed deadlines. If I tell myself I’ll launch the first post by a certain date, I’ll do it.
⭐Lesson Learned: Find what’s the best way to trick yourself. And use it to achieve your goals
#2 “I want the shortcut to become good at writing”
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: Read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut”. - Stephen King On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft
I have many interests, writing is just one of them.
I did some trainings at work, and it seemed that writing online would be great to practice. However, I found social media copywriting and newsletter writing are very different than business writing. Each serves a different purpose
The more styles you practice with, the better you understand when to use each one. I see professional writers doing this all the time, usually with smaller side stories
⭐Lesson Learned: If you want to become good at something, force yourself to explore it from different angles. Don’t stick to a single recipe if you want to become a chef.
#3 “I have more things in my life and I don’t want to give up on them”
We all have a full-time job, families, and social plans on weekends.
I didn’t like the idea of having to sneak time out of those activities. I don’t want to make a newsletter to compete for time with them.
I was already reading career growth and productivity books in my own time. The time required to write about that was smaller than if I wanted to write about a completely different topic.
Of course, I felt like an impostor when writing about something I was figuring out. And at the same time, I don’t feel like writing about my times as a student because those times are not fresh in my memory.
It takes time to find your voice, and you’ll only find it by writing
⭐Lesson Learned: Be the guide, not the guru. You don’t need to wait until you are an expert. Even if your insecurity nudges you into talking like an expert, approach it as recording your journey.