When Substack launched in 2017, it was planned to be a sanctuary for authors constructing a target market separately without the backing of an author. The system allowed writers to send long-form e-newsletters directly to customers’ inboxes. Spurred on by the COVID pandemic and fewer typical media opportunities, Substack amassed a big network of authors with 1 million paid clients in 2021 By 2025, Substack CEO Chris Finest reported 5 million paid customers and 20 million regular monthly energetic individuals.

Customers’ cravings for specific niche, community-based experiences on social media is behind the constant growth. Individuals are hungry for willful, slower-paced feeds. Grow’s Q 2 2025 Pulse Study located that 41 % of international social users plan to invest even more time on Substack. That rises to 52 % for Gen Z and 53 % for Millennials.

As Substack becomes a giant platform for developing hyper-engaged target markets, brand names from all sectors are participating the activity. Read on for a step-by-step guide to releasing a brand name Substack, with pointers we gained from introducing Sprout’s Substack, Social Futures

What is Substack (and why should brand names care)?

On Substack, brand names share unique material their fans will not discover on their blog or social, which content is often long-form and personality-driven.

Substack has a distinctive, writer-driven culture. Creating a web content method that really feels belonging to the platform is important for success. Which is why it’s important to clarify what Substack is not For instance, Substack is not a substitute for your current blog, a lorry for project assets, item releases and occasion promo, a competitor to your existing newsletter, or an e-mail listing home builder for various other networks.

Kinds of web content Substack supports

To produce a Substack web content method, it is very important to bear in mind that the system focuses on articles. Blog posts are the fundamental foundation of the Substack ecological community.

Substack uses two core post kinds:

• Criterion messages: A basic write-up or essay layout that features long-form writing. While the article is predominately text-based, it can consist of multimedia material like photos, videos and audio recordings.
• Video articles : A blog post where video clip is the major focus. A video clip blog post generally includes a records or text summary, and can be live or pre-recorded.

To advertise their blog posts and existences, Substack customers can use a range of in-platform functions, which include:

• Newsletters: Writers can hold, publish and send their posts directly to clients’ inboxes from the Substack system.
• Notes : Short-form web content, including message, photos, quotes, videos and links, that appears in the Substack feed. Notes are essential for in-platform discoverability.
• Chats: A team conversation feature within the Substack platform that enables customers to host live, interactive discussions with subscribers.

The advantages of Substack for brand names

Also as Substack’s customer base continues to grow, teams and leaders are unclear if their brand name has a place on the platform. It stands out from other social media networks, and requires sufficient effort and resourcing. Will those investments pay off on a platform that’s still relatively uncharted area for brand names?

When stabilizing the Substack scales, consider these benefits.

Construct a straight, owned audience

When our content group pitched introducing a Substack existence to our CMO, we placed it as a salve to the sting of conventional search trends As organic search habits progressively cause zero-click outcomes, brand names need to expand their circulation and discoverability channels to engage future customers and seal their authority. Substack uses the excellent possibility.

On Substack, you can use a direct, possessed and highly engaged target market– something that’s getting more difficult to locate via internet search engine or social systems.

Distinguish your brand name character & voice

Substack provides brands an unusual opportunity to talk without the constraints of traditional social algorithms or personality restrictions. Long-form material allows groups to embrace a much more human tone, whether that’s analytical, witty, academic, content or deeply narrative. By releasing in a room where visitors opt-in, brand names can explore a more nuanced voice and construct an unique individuality.

Foster neighborhood & brand name commitment

Develop a new channel for thought management & creativity

Substack shouldn’t be a 1: 1 substitute for your routine e-newsletter. The system serves a completely different function, offering brand names permission to decrease and use richer, extra substantive ideas. It’s an excellent channel for sharing founder-led POVs, behind the curtain point of views, initial study, innovative explorations or exclusive guest content that don’t fit nicely into various other platforms. By releasing thoughtful, premium quality material, brands can position themselves as group leaders while also sustaining creative thinking within their teams. The result is a network that reinforces online reputation, broadens reach and showcases the brand name’s most compelling ideas.

Exactly how brands are making use of Substack

To see these benefits in action, take a closer consider some notable brand names already finding their home on Substack.

Joint: No Common Love

Joint, the dating application developed to be removed, hasn’t posted from their brand name’s conventional network social accounts given that 2020 In the five years since, they’ve rather invested in growing their designer program and trying out on emerging systems.

On their Substack, No Ordinary Love, Joint shared 5 blog posts featuring romance of pairs who satisfied using their app, created by genuine writers. The brand includes short chapters in each of their messages, contrasting crucial landmarks in a pair’s relationship to a storybook love. The restricted series additionally included a foreword written by Roxanne Gay.

Offered Substack’s origins as a system created authors, the collection really felt genuine and extremely willful. The branding likewise made it unique from Joint’s common look and feel, comparing the fairytale visual with unwinded photography.

As the Joint group told Forbes , the entire No Ordinary Love universe was created with Gen Z as a muse: the photography style, the writers, the relatable love stories.

Restack this approach: Substack is a play ground for imaginative, long-form content, and Joint’s approach was genuinely out-of-the-box. What’s equally admirable is exactly how they developed their existence with participants of their target audience, making their brand a lot more human and compatible their customer’s needs.

Blackbird: The Supersonic

Blackbird is a commitment firm that rewards individuals who like dining establishments. On their “secret Substack,” the Supersonic, Blackbird develops an area that feels like reviewing the food and society area of your favored newspaper.

In their posts, they include their favorite food takes (” There is no such point as a poor Caesar salad ), and content meetings with famous chefs and leaders in the food sector. They additionally release individual essays where writers share their favorite youth food memories, and a newsletter loaded with top-of-mind newspaper article visitors can require to inspire tiny talk throughout meals.

On their Substack website, the brand name organizes their material with tabs for every collection.

The Supersonic has expanded their client base to 11, 000 subscribers, and frequently obtains talk about their blog posts like, “Quickly my favored read of the week.”

Restack this technique: For brand names taking into consideration Substack, you have to make sure you have the resources to sustain regular material manufacturing. The Supersonic is a fantastic example of what that looks like in truth, with content published weekly (or more often). The brand name has likewise grasped composing people-driven content (v. brand-driven), with distinctive author voices and personality-driven content.

Loftie: Little Publication of Rest

Loftie is a wellness company aiding individuals create tech-life balance through wonderfully designed, stealthily basic items for the home. On their Substack, Little Book of Sleep, the brand name takes on a subject everyone can associate with: obtaining a great night of rest.

Their posts cover every little thing from just how to develop a lasting sleep regimen, to the background of bed mattress and cushions, to how high levels of caffeine, naps and screentime effect our sleep habits. They likewise discuss emerging rest fads– including eating kiwis before bed and the scientific research behind the “morning shed” fad.

Restack this method: Substack newsletters are arranged by groups (e.g., Innovation, Wellness & Wellness), and lots of leading authors locate their specific niches within them. While it can be alluring to speak about whatever that matters to your audience, take a hint from Loftie and slim your focus. It can help you emerge as a professional and stand apart as the platform remains to expand.

Sprout Social: Social Futures

Our group was gladdened to launch our Substack, Social Futures, previously this year (a lot more on how we constructed it in the following area). We like experimenting with timely and editorial web content on the system, like which brand won the celebrity jeans showdown or vacation marketing patterns (and horoscopes) for social marketing professionals

In our messages, we likewise share our proprietary information and My Social network Diet interviews with our favorite social media subject matter specialists. We lately welcomed a guest writer, maker Coco Mocoe, to share her viewpoint on the future of the designer economic climate.

After simply three months, we struck 7, 300 views and a typical e-newsletter open rate of 61 %. While we still have room to expand, we’re profoundly pleased with just how much we have actually attained in a short time, and will certainly continue sharing our greatest lessons with our subscribers.

Restack this strategy: Distribution is necessary to driving sights and subscribers. Utilizing our other social channels and Staff member Advocacy platform helped get words out concerning our visibility. Partnering with makers (via interviews and visitor essays), who in turn amplify relate to their networks, is one more trusted way to sustain growth.

How to construct a brand Substack technique (with suggestions from Sprout’s own experience)

We have actually outlined a workable, step-by-step process brands throughout sectors can comply with to release their very own Substack, based upon what we learned introducing Social Futures.

Step 1: Specify your content approach and emphasis

The very first step is to reflect on what you wish to develop and the distinctive objective it serves. Ask on your own:

• Just how will your Substack web content be various from what you release on social or your blog?
• Exactly how will it attract attention from various other makers and brand names releasing in the same classification?

At Sprout, we saw spaces in our present editorial material that Substack would certainly be the perfect home for. Laid-back, personality-driven interviews, deep dives into our data as it associates with timely trends, quick how-tos and structures, and a suggestions column.

Action 2: Determine who will certainly write for your newsletter

As you establish your Substack beats, you additionally require to develop your lineup of Substack writers. Will you count on an in-house group? Or outsource to designers, like when American Eagle touched Casey Lewis for Off the Cuff?

For lots of brand names, it could make sense to take a hybrid strategy. That can consist of working with visitor authors and producing content meetings, which is the approach we’ve taken at Sprout. Doing so necessary safeguarding budget for developer partnerships in advance, and evaluating how our web content team would certainly balance writing for Substack with production for our other channels.

You could also ask whether you plan to publish mostly text-based content or try out video clip. If on-camera skill and video clip editing and enhancing abilities are called for, that can inform how you staff your Substack.

Action 3: Establish (realistic) objectives and metrics

Substack isn’t a standard social channel, and you can not use a network like Instagram or LinkedIn as a standard when establishing Substack goals. Rather, aim to various other brands on the system (ideally in your market) to establish goals for subscribers, views and open price.

Though you shouldn’t anticipate huge client numbers like you could be accustomed to on various other channels, you must go for your clients to be extremely involved– particularly with your e-newsletters.

When you set goals, assign the duty of “Substack expert” to a member of your team. They ought to run the numbers on a monthly basis to inform your web content and circulation strategies.

Step 4: Describe your distribution and client procurement plans for launch and beyond

As discussed, circulation on other networks played an important duty in expanding our Substack. Make a plan for sharing the news about your launch throughout systems and internally. We very recommend reaching out to your leaders, inner interactions group and social team to construct an all-inclusive strategy.

Our launch strategy consisted of uploading on Sprout’s LinkedIn and Instagram pages, adding our Substack website web link to our Staff member Campaigning for system, and uploading in our advertising and marketing team’s Slack channel.

In this preparation phase, you ought to also take stock of every one of the imaginative properties you’ll need for launch and ongoing distribution (believe Instagram carousel templates).

Action 5: Develop innovative assets

When setting up our Substack, we were surprised the amount of new imaginative possessions were required to construct our website. Right here’s an extensive checklist of every little thing you’ll need to have created or composed simply to establish your Substack existence:

• Logo: A minimum of 256 x 256 px (or 1: 1 element proportion) with a transparent history
• Email banners: Recommended 1100 x 220 px with a clear background, yet can be taller
• Cover picture: A minimum of 600 x 600 px
• Social sneak peek images (will certainly require one for each blog post): At least 1456 x 1048 px, however 420 x 300 px is the minimum
• Regarding tab copy: From a couple of sentences to a few paragraphs clarifying the function of your Substack newsletter.
• Welcome page copy: A sentence or more of text that will occupy on the web page that asks visitors to subscribe.
• E-newsletter header copy: A line of text that summarizes your Substack presence, and will certainly show up in the header of every newsletter you send out.
• Newsletter footer copy: A line of message that urges viewers to share your newsletter with their network that will show up at the footer of every e-newsletter you send out.
• Welcome email duplicate: From a couple of sentences to a few paragraphs thanking someone for subscribing to your e-newsletter. These emails will be sent to all of your new subscribers.

To assist us craft a natural and unique brand for Social Futures, we dealt with our Brand name Creative team. They developed our wordmark, color combination and images, and established the tone for our visual identification based on direction from our creative short.

Step 6: Plan your neighborhood involvement technique

A pointer we’re explore: While Substack messages should be initial, you can try repurposing short-form material, including videos, images and message posts, from other networks into your Notes method.

Action 7: Leave room for trial and error

As we have actually experienced first-hand, you don’t need to have everything figured out from the start. Continue to be adaptable when it comes to setting a cadence, appointing content motifs and also developing distribution strategies. There could be photos you failed to remember to develop or duplicate you neglected to draft (we’re guilty of this) when you set up your website. That’s all right. What’s crucial is that you show up, all set to pivot and shift as you go.

Why Substack belongs in your brand’s playbook

Substack has actually evolved from a writer-first platform into a location where brands can develop much deeper, more deliberate connections with their audiences. Its long-form, personality-first format gives teams an uncommon possibility to slow down, share purposeful ideas and grow an engaged, opt-in neighborhood.

As more brands experiment (and be successful) on the platform, Substack is proving to be an effective network for imaginative expression and owned audience development. By approaching it with clarity, emphasis and a desire to repeat, your brand can carve out its own distinct edge of this quickly growing community.

For extra on whatever Sprout’s content team is trying, discovering and releasing on Substack, make certain to sign up for Social Futures