In June 2005, in a stadium at Stanford University, Steve Jobs, dressed in a black graduation gown, shared the story of his life with the graduating students before him.

At the very end of his speech, he left these young people with a single line: Stay hungry, stay foolish.

He had read it on the back cover of the final issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. It was a photograph of a country road at dawn, with those parting words printed across it.

Jobs called it “sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along.” So what exactly was this book? Carrying that question with me, I set out to explore.

The Whole Earth Catalog was founded by Stewart Brand in 1968. Its starting point was a Dodge truck. Brand drove that book-filled truck all around, out to the rural communes of Colorado and New Mexico, selling books to the people who had moved to the countryside to live.

Back then the internet was still finding its feet. There was no Google and no Amazon. So many questions had nowhere to turn for an answer, and so many goods had no channel through which to be bought. Brand felt that when a person wanted to learn how to build a house, farm the land, fix a machine, or teach themselves something, what they lacked was usually not the ability to do it by hand. It was that no one had told them where the tools were, or what they ought to do. So he made this thick volume, half magazine and half mail-order catalog, with one purpose, to put tools into ordinary people’s hands.

It took no advertising money from manufacturers. Its recommendations came from the editors’ judgment and readers’ suggestions, picking out only what was worth the money and useful to everyone. It was not just a catalog of goods. It was also a book of tools.

The book held all kinds of information. There was the theory of cybernetics, but also listings for plant seeds, water pumps, HP calculators and a whole range of goods, with poems and underground comics tucked in between. What struck me most was that it even printed the broadcast frequency of a radio station in Beijing, China. China had not yet opened up to the outside world back then, yet this book could gather, in such detail, information from the far side of the ocean.

On its opening page Brand printed this line. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Technology, he felt, had granted human beings powers that once belonged only to the gods of myth, so people ought to treat it pragmatically, learning to use the technology in their hands wisely to build a better world. People should have the freedom of information, the freedom to know the planet they live on and what is happening upon it.

It was precisely this thought that led him to choose a special cover for the magazine, the first photograph humankind ever took of the whole Earth from space. Before that, many people had never seen the planet in its entirety. Brand believed that once a person truly saw the Earth as one whole, interconnected thing, they would come to feel a sense of responsibility. We are all on the same planet, and this planet and everything on it are ours to look after.

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So how did it slowly grow so big?

• Through the 1960s and 1970s, America’s counterculture and its “back-to-the-land” movement were surging. A wave of young people no longer put blind faith in big companies and big institutions. They wanted to leave the city and live life over again with their own hands, becoming self-sufficient, close to nature, and doing everything themselves.

• The Whole Earth Catalog focused on the real problems people faced and offered workable solutions and tools. Its criteria for inclusion were plain. It had to be genuinely useful, relevant to self-education, either high in quality or low enough in price, not yet common knowledge, and easy to obtain by mail. Brand never sold his readers out for profit. He paid real, concrete attention to the problems they needed solved.

• It built a community with its readers and invited them to take part in creating it. Anyone who had used a good tool or read a good book could write in to recommend it, and the editors would pick the reliable ones to include. So the information came not from just a handful of editors, and readers went from people who bought the book to people who helped build it.

And so, step by step, it spread from the small circles of the communes into ordinary homes. By 1971, The Last Whole Earth Catalog ran to more than four hundred pages and sold over a million copies. The very next year it even won the U.S. National Book Award.

In 1974, Brand published the last regularly updated issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, a farewell of his own choosing.

Over nearly ten years, the idea the Catalog had championed had already sunk deep into its readers’ hearts. Do it yourself, and do not wait to be told what to do. Similar publications had sprung up one after another, and the Whole Earth Catalog was no longer something rare. In terms of its own run, it had won many loyal readers and reached its peak. But the catalog format depended on enormous manpower to keep updating prices, sources, and editions. It was costly to run, and in print media there was little room left for it to grow.

In the final issue, Brand admitted frankly that carrying on would only grow more and more cumbersome, and it was better to bow out with dignity. He wrote, “This is the last issue. We encourage others to do something similar, and to fill the gap we leave behind.” And with that, he passed on the baton.

That line on the back cover, Stay hungry, stay foolish, was both a word of counsel to his readers and a reminder to himself. Don’t be satisfied with what you have already done, keep moving forward, and even when others believe we cannot do it, keep walking the road beneath our own feet.

The young Steve Jobs kept spurring himself on with this line, from tinkering out the first Apple computer in a garage, to later reinventing music and the phone in forms that overturned everything, doing again and again what others thought could not be done. Thirty years later, he stepped up to the podium at Stanford and handed that farewell, one that had first belonged to someone else, into the hands of the young people before him.

One sentence, one idea, like a dandelion seed, drifting on and on into the distance.

But Jobs was far from the only one the Whole Earth Catalog changed. Far more numerous were the countless ordinary people. In that era, many lived in the remote countryside, and a thick volume like this was almost the only bridge between them and the outside world. The tools, books, and seeds they wanted could be ordered simply by mailing a letter to the address listed inside. The writer Liv Siddall, in Parts of a Whole Earth, retold something her father had told her. For people living on a country farm, ordering by mail from the catalog felt much like placing an order on Amazon today. Page by page it also taught people how to build a geodesic dome by hand, how to lay out a small village, how to give first aid when hurt, even how to sew their own clothes, laying the whole business of “living by your own hands” out plainly before ordinary people.

Anjulie Rao, in What the “Whole Earth Catalog” Taught Me About Building Utopias, wrote about her own mother. At fourteen, her mother bought the catalog in Colorado and soon became a devoted reader. For her at the time, “back to the land” meant a kind of freedom, the chance to build life over again on her own terms. What fascinated her was the sense of “access” the book placed in her hands, a recipe for granola, a set of Japanese building techniques, a little herbal know-how… Following one of its recommendations, she bought a hand-illustrated book called Living on the Earth, and to this day it remains the book that has influenced her most.

Of course, not everyone kept that life up for long. To truly remake your life with your own two hands is far harder than it sounds. But because of this book, in the hearts of thousands upon thousands of ordinary people the same small flame had once been lit, the wish to use their own two hands to tend the life before them into something a little better, bit by bit.

Like that empty road at dawn. When you write something down, you never really know where the work will finally go. But it will always catch the one ride that belongs to it, and be carried far into the distance. And all we can do is live by that line, “Stay hungry, stay foolish”. Stay hungry, and never settle for how things are, stay foolish, so that you dare to walk the road no one has walked, and keep on exploring.

If you'd like to watch Jobs' Stanford speech, here is the link:

I want to share with you a story about someone who only wanted to make one child laugh — and ended up writing a book read the world over.

He refused every letter addressed to his pen name — sent them right back, each with a printed slip declaring that no one by that name was to be found there. He avoided grown-ups whenever he could. But he loved children; the moment he was among them, he relaxed and could spin fantastical stories for a whole afternoon.

On a summer afternoon in 1862, he took the three daughters of Dean Liddell rowing on the Thames. The boat drifted slowly, the girls grew restless, and they begged him for a story — and the ten-year-old Alice asked specifically for one that was as nonsensical as could be. So, pulling at the oars, he made it up on the spot: a little girl chasing a white rabbit, tumbling head-first down a rabbit hole. Alice was spellbound, and begged him to write it down for her.

And he actually did — over the next two years, he copied the whole story out by hand in careful script, page by page, drew thirty-seven illustrations himself, and bound it into a slim little book. Not until November 1864 did he send it to her, an early Christmas gift, with a single line on the first page: “A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer Day.”

It was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The man who wrote it was Charles Dodgson — though the world knows him by the pen name he gave himself, Lewis Carroll.

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At first he had no intention of publishing it — it was only a gift for one child. It was his friend, the writer George MacDonald, who talked him into it: MacDonald had him read the manuscript aloud to his own children, and their delight settled the matter. Only then did he expand the story and send it to print. The book was an instant hit. That, a century later, it would be translated into more than a hundred languages and made into films — he could never have dreamed of such a thing.

A little book meant for one child outlived him, and has never gone out of print. What he wrote for one person came to be read the world over.

In the Victorian era, most children’s books were busy teaching kids to behave and go to bed early. Alice was different. It only wanted one imaginative child to be happy.

Carroll also quietly stitched what he knew best into the story — the absurd logic of mathematics became a mad tea party, then solemn nonsense like “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” He kept no dedicated writing hours; all of it grew out of the cracks of daily life — while rowing, while writing letters, filling the paper with riddles and upside-down verse. From beginning to end, he was thinking of that one specific child, the one who would giggle at a single line.

And that little reader, who had asked for a story as nonsensical as could be, probably without either of them noticing, quietly shaped the strange and wondrous world Carroll created.

Reading Carroll’s story, I understand “write for one specific person” more deeply than I used to.

I used to write with my eyes on the numbers: hit publish, refresh, watch whether the line ticked up; rewrite a headline again and again, thinking only of how to get more people to click. “Write for one specific person” — of course I’d heard it, but it hung in the air, weightless, never landing in me. Until I saw this man who stammered in front of adults sit down and write and draw an entire book, stroke by stroke, just to make one child laugh.

In that moment it hit me: what I’m looking for was never a million readers, but that one — the person I truly want to tell the story to. What people remember is never the thing written for everyone, but the singular gift written for the one person in your mind — a gift you prepared with care.

And it isn’t only Carroll. Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince was, at first, only meant to comfort his friend Léon Werth, who was having a hard time during the war, by offering him some solace through the prince’s pure, tender heart. The things that go on being passed down through the long years were, at the start, often written for just one person.

In the summer of 1863, the Liddells suddenly cut off contact with Carroll. The page in his diary from those days was later cut out by his family; what happened remains a mystery. We only know that from then on, he was never again close to Alice the way he’d been. Yet he kept writing the story. In 1871, at the end of Through the Looking-Glass, he hid her full name, letter by letter, inside a poem.

He no longer needed her sitting across from him. That one specific reader had already come to live inside him.

Maybe this is what “writing for one person” finally looks like: the one you’re looking for, once they truly enter your heart, never leaves. Even when they’re gone, you always know who you’re speaking to.

So I keep thinking of that little book: a man who could barely get his words out in front of adults, writing and drawing stroke by stroke, just to delight one child beside him. He never thought about a million readers. He only wanted to make Alice laugh.

A child’s laugh. So faint you can barely hear it — and to Carroll, it meant everything.

When I open my notebook and set pen to the page, I think of one specific person — someone who still carries a love for creating in their heart. And then I share this story of Carroll’s with them.

The strange thing is, it’s often exactly this kind of thing that ends up remembered by the most people.

Recently I came across a cartoon — a little mouse standing at a ship’s wheel, whistling. I watched it, and it still got me laughing.

So I got curious and went looking into how it came to be — and I want to share it with you: that mouse, and the creator behind the idea, Walt Disney.

Losing Oswald

Oswald was a character Walt created with his animator Ub Iwerks — a lucky rabbit: quick, restless, forever getting into trouble and always slipping back out of it. Walt gave him the name “Lucky Rabbit”, hoping the character would become a good omen for the young studio. When Trolley Troubles reached theaters, audiences loved him, and Oswald became the studio’s first real hit.

Early in 1928, Walt took the train to New York with his wife, Lillian. The trip had one purpose: to secure a bigger production budget for the next run of Oswald cartoons. In his mind it was as good as done — Oswald was selling, the films kept getting better, and asking for a little more to make them seemed only reasonable.

Then he sat down across from his distributor, Charles Mintz. Instead of the easy renewal he expected, Mintz slid a new, worse deal across the table. He didn’t just want Walt to take a smaller budget — he wanted Walt to come work under him, as a salaried employee. Before Walt could recover, Mintz laid out the rest of his cards. The rights to Oswald had belonged to Universal from the start; they were never Walt’s. And most of Walt’s own animators had already quietly signed with Mintz. He said it evenly, without raising his voice, and left no room to move: take the cut, or he didn’t need Walt at all — he could keep making Oswald without him.

Walt didn’t haggle, and he didn’t plead. He heard Mintz out, stood up, said no, and walked out the door.

It was only walking out that door that he felt the full weight of what the trip had cost him. He'd come east sure of himself, never guessing the people around him had already turned their backs. Years of work had been pulled out from under him in a matter of weeks.

The Birth of Mickey Mouse

On the long train ride back to California, Walt began turning over a new character — one that would be entirely his own. He thought back to a little mouse he’d known around an early studio, and that faint old impression became the first shadow of the new one.

He wanted to call it Mortimer. Lillian thought the name too stiff, better suited to some elderly gentleman, and said Mickey sounded livelier — more like a mouse that got into trouble. Walt agreed at once.

This time, the mischievous little mouse was his.

Back in Hollywood, nearly all his artists were gone. Only Ub Iwerks stayed. The two went back to their Kansas City days; they’d started Laugh-O-Gram together, failed together, made Oswald together. When better money lured the others away, Iwerks stayed put.

Walt worked out who Mickey was, and Iwerks made him real on paper. The earliest Mickey — his movements, his face, that spark of life — came out of Iwerks’ pencil, line by line.

The design was almost nothing but circles: a round head, a round body, two bold round ears — easy to recognize, easy to draw. But what brought him alive wasn’t the shape. It was the personality Walt gave him: curious, mischievous, unafraid of trouble; the smallest one in the room, and the first to walk toward whatever went wrong — a lot like the man who drew him.

The idea from the train slowly came to life on paper.

They Don’t Know Your Mouse

Mickey was born, but success didn’t come with him.

The first film was Plane Crazy — a mouse who wanted to fly, riding the excitement around Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. In May 1928 it was previewed, silent, for a small audience. Walt had no distribution of his own, and Mickey was a face nobody had seen; one distributor after another watched it and passed on an unknown mouse.

He didn’t give up. He rushed out a second film, The Gallopin’ Gaucho, hoping a different story might open a door. He carried the reel to the same distributors and got back the same answer — no takers. The same waiting, the same politeness, the same shake of the head, until he could almost say the rejection for them.

The distributors were blunt:

They don’t know you and they don’t know your mouse.

Both films had failed, and the money for them was gone — not a cent of it back. In his brother Roy's ledger, every dollar spent on these Mickey shorts was set down to the penny: Plane Crazy, $3,528.50; The Gallopin' Gaucho, $4,249.73 — and for a studio that could barely keep its lights on, that was nearly the last of everything it had, filled in cent by cent. The money had run dry, and the mouse Walt had poured his whole heart into still had no takers — the distributors' “they don't know your mouse” was like a door that wouldn't budge, shutting Walt and Mickey out together.

But Walt and the few who’d stayed weren’t ready to quit. Not long before, Walt had seen The Jazz Singer. Pictures that talked and sang were making silent films feel old overnight. Walt decided to give his cartoon sound — not music laid under the picture, but sound that was part of the action itself, part of the storytelling.

That film was Steamboat Willie.

Steamboat Willie

Before the film was even finished, Walt ran a test at the studio.

To keep the machine’s noise out, they set the projector outside the window and shone it back through the glass. The picture landed on a bedsheet hung up inside, faintly glowing, swaying in the draft. The animators crowded behind the sheet, watching Mickey’s movements through the shadow and scrambling to make the simplest sounds by hand — a harmonica for the tune, Walt screeching Mickey’s squeaks, someone grabbing whatever was in reach to keep the beat. On the other side of the sheet, a few of the men’s wives had pulled up chairs in the front row: the first audience in the world.

The effect caught them all off guard. On screen, Mickey stood at the wheel whistling, bobbing along with the boat’s whistle; in the second half he banged out sounds on everything within reach. The moment image and sound clicked together, the people on both sides of the sheet reacted almost by instinct. Walt later said that screening was “like an electric shock.”

He carried the finished film to New York to give it a real soundtrack, hiring a seventeen-piece band and a sound man on money scraped together from everywhere. It was harder than he’d imagined. The band couldn’t stay with the picture; the beats slipped again and again — Mickey clearly banging a pot, the sound landing half a beat late — and the money burned down. The first session fell apart.

To keep going, Walt sold his car. Then they tried a plodding little trick: marking the beat frame by frame along the film so the players could follow the picture note by note. One sound at a time, image and sound finally locked together. Walt had proven what he set out to prove — sound could give a picture life — and that was enough to make a distributor give this unknown mouse a chance.

A Room Full of Laughter

On November 18, 1928, Steamboat Willie opened at the Colony Theatre in New York.

The screen lit up. Mickey stood at the wheel, whistling along with the steamboat’s whistle, ears and tail and heels all keeping time, the whole boat seeming to bob to his tune. He didn’t get to strut for long: the big, sour Captain Pete came stomping over, plucked the little mouse off the wheel, and shoved him off to do the dirty work.

Then the real fun began. When a goat swallowed Minnie’s sheet music and ukulele whole, Mickey didn’t miss a beat — he cranked the goat’s tail like a hand organ, and out of its wide-open mouth wheezed an off-key “Turkey in the Straw.” A live goat, turned into a phonograph. From there he pressed the whole boat into service: a yank of the cat’s tail for a screech, a squeeze of the sow for an accordion — goose, piglets, cow, not one of them spared, every last one cranked into an instrument. The whole boat was in an uproar, but Mickey just whistled and kept the beat, turning the chaos into one tight, rollicking tune.

The audience had never seen a mouse like this. It started as a few scattered laughs and quickly ran into one solid wave — knees slapped, people doubled over, the laughter rolling over itself. The sound didn’t feel dubbed onto the mouse; it felt like the mouse was making it, right there in front of you — and joy like that is contagious.

The next day, one reviewer put it simply:

It is impossible to describe this riot of mirth, but it knocked me out of my seat.

From One Theater to the World

The laughter from that night at the Colony didn’t stay in that one room. Soon it spilled past the city and carried far beyond it.

Mickey’s comedy needed no translation. His gags had almost no dialogue — it was all banging, yanking, hopping; a joke made of body and rhythm. So when the reels crossed the ocean and lit up screens in London, Paris, and Tokyo, audiences who couldn’t follow a word of English laughed in exactly the same places. Mickey even picked up his own names along the way: Topolino in Italy, Micky Maus in Germany — but whatever the language, the one making them laugh was the same mouse.

And that laughter happened to land in the years that needed it most. Just as Mickey was catching on, the world outside was caving in. The 1920s, when everything seemed to be climbing, ended in the fall of 1929 — the market crashed, banks closed, factories went quiet; the good times that were supposed to last turned into breadlines around the block and one letter after another that read, Sorry, no work.

The harder the years got, the more people needed something to laugh at — and that was exactly what Mickey gave them. He was only a mouse with no power and no standing, the smallest one around and the one in the most trouble, hauled up and kicked around by the enormous Pete again and again. But he never stayed down. He’d rig something out of whatever junk was lying around and, a moment later, be whistling and strutting all over again. To the people in the dark below, scraping through their own weeks, that was the very thing they wanted to believe about themselves: no matter how bad it gets, you can still laugh. A few cents and a seat in a dark theater — those few minutes were, for a lot of people, the only ones all week they still laughed out loud.

And Mickey’s joy didn’t stay in the theater either. From 1930 he climbed onto the newspaper page, getting into and out of trouble in the morning comics, good for a laugh over a cup of coffee; even the week you couldn’t make it to a theater, you could still find him in the corner of the paper. Before long he stepped off the page and the screen and became something you could hold — dolls, toys, and the 1933 Mickey watch that landed on the counter at Macy’s and sold eleven thousand in a single day. To bring Mickey home was to carry that laughter out of the dark theater and into your own days.

Once, Walt had gone looking for a Lucky Rabbit to bring his studio luck. He never got to keep that rabbit. The luck came instead from the mouse he drew at the lowest point of his life.

That mouse carried his laughter to places Walt himself would never reach, onto faces he would never know. What stayed on the screen was a mouse he’d drawn with his own hands — one that made the whole world laugh.

His name was Mickey.

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

When I first came to Substack, I cared about one thing more than anything else: Growth.

More subscribers. More views. More comments. More signs that my writing had reached someone.

My thinking was simple at the time: if I wrote good articles, they would eventually find the readers who loved them.

But it did not happen that simply.

Many posts were quiet after I published them.

Sometimes I wondered if the writing simply was not good enough. Maybe the title was not interesting enough. Maybe the cover image was not attractive enough.

And of course, some of that may be true. I am still working on improving my writing.

But when my account was barely growing, I started asking myself:

Besides continuing to write, what else can I do?

So I started reading about Substack growth.

Use Notes. Improve your About page. Choose the right categories. Restack interesting work. Comment more.

None of this advice was wrong.

In fact, a lot of it helped.

I started posting Notes more consistently too. Sometimes three to five a day. I tried to make the content richer, and I tried to show up more often on the platform.

But honestly, even now, I still do not think I am doing this very well.

Quality matters much more than quantity.

At first, Notes did bring my account more exposure.

But exposure is not connection.

Many times, there were no likes, no comments, and no replies.

It felt like being stranded on a lonely island, drawing patterns in the sand with a stick, hoping someone far away might see them.

Then the wind came and nothing happened.

Later, I slowly realized that Substack may not be a platform that simply pushes content to strangers through an algorithm.

Many people come here perhaps because they are already tired of endlessly scrolling through feeds on X, TikTok, or other platforms.

They do not necessarily want more and more content chasing after them. They do not necessarily want to stay in a state of reacting quickly, swiping quickly, and forgetting quickly.

So on Substack, content is certainly important.

But simply putting content out there and waiting for an algorithm to push it to more people may not be enough.

That was when I started trying to meet more creators.

But I made a mistake there too.

When socializing is only about traffic, growth, or being noticed, everything slowly starts to lose its taste.

That kind of socializing does not create real connection.

It is also hard to build trust that way. Instead, it can make you feel tired.

To meet more people, I once tried to leave as many comments as possible on other people’s work.

But with that mindset, many of those comments were actually rough.

A thank-you.

A compliment.

A “great post.”

They looked like interaction, but they rarely opened a real conversation.

Comments like that do not bring much value to the person you want to connect with, or to yourself.

They may bring some short-term exposure. During that time, my account did get more daily views.

But still, not many people chose to stay.

Later, I realized the reason was simple:

They came. But they did not find a reason to stay.

That reason can take many forms.

Maybe your content is interesting.

Maybe your article solves a problem they have.

Maybe they believe you will continue to provide some kind of value in the future.

But no matter what the reason is, behind it there is one thing: Trust.

On Substack, subscribing is not a completely light action.

It is not the same as simply clicking “follow.”

Subscribing means someone is willing to give you their email address and let your writing enter their inbox.

And no one easily gives their home address to a stranger.

So I started to feel that what truly matters on Substack is not only how to be seen by more people, but how to become someone people are willing to trust.

Trust often comes from real connection.

So what creates real connection?

I still do not have a perfect answer. I am still learning.

But I have started to notice three things.

1. Make your replies more specific.

If I truly want to get to know a creator, the best way is not to leave a vague compliment, but to carefully read their work and say specifically which part touched me.

A comment like that is not just about showing up. It is about truly responding to a person.

For me, every comment I receive from others makes me happy. Especially when someone can really say what they read, the feeling is completely different.

A new subscriber is, of course, exciting.

But a sincere comment makes me feel even more that what I am doing has meaning.

2. Make your value clearer and more unique.

As a newsletter platform, the most important thing on Substack is still content and value.

For example, Lenny’s value comes from his deep understanding of product, startups, and the industry. His readers know why they read him, because he consistently provides insights that are difficult to replace.

For small creators like us, it may not be easy at first to immediately find that kind of clear value.

I am still searching for mine too.

I believe every person has value. Every unique individual has their own stories, experiences, perspectives, and concerns.

But the question is, we need to slowly find a way to let others know:

What do you care about?

What can you write about consistently?

What can you bring to others?

Why should they come back to read you?

For me, one thing I am fairly sure about now is that I enjoy discovering creator stories, and I enjoy finding interesting and inspiring things inside those stories.

That is also the value I am currently trying to provide.

Also, I am working on some software tools related to creators. If you have ever run into any problems while creating on Substack, or if there is some small problem you wish could be solved, you are very welcome to tell me.

I may not be able to build everything, but I will seriously see whether I can help in some small way.

3. Find what you truly care about.

Is what we truly care about really just the subscriber count?

Of course, subscriber count matters.

No creator can honestly say they do not care about growth at all. More subscribers mean your articles can reach more people. It also means you are slowly building your own space.

But if you had tens of thousands of subscribers and almost no real response, compared with having only a small number of subscribers but receiving thoughtful replies almost every time you spoke, I think I would be more moved by the latter.

Because the latter makes me feel that I am not speaking into empty air.

That kind of response is small, but powerful.

It is a bit like the “ding” sound when you collect a coin in a Mario game.

It makes you feel happy.

So I increasingly feel that what we truly care about is not only the number itself, but the real people behind the number.

What do they need?

Why are they willing to reply?

Why are they willing to give you their email address?

Later, I began using a very simple standard to remind myself:

Be a real person.

A sense of realness can slowly turn a creator from an “account” into a person.

This is also my biggest feeling about Substack now.

At first, I came here looking for growth.

But now, I am starting to understand that growth is not the whole story. What keeps me here is the real connection I slowly find with other people.

Because the longer I stay here, the more I feel that what makes Substack truly special is that some readers and creators slowly emerge from the numbers.

At first, they are just an avatar.

Later, you remember a name.

You know what they are writing about.

You know what they care about.

You know they are also exploring, also trying, and also looking for their own readers.

I am very glad to have come to such a warm platform as Substack.

And thank you so much for reading this far.

If you are willing to share some of your own story, I would be very happy to become your reader.

Do you know Mario?

The cheerful Italian plumber in the red hat and overalls. The face of Nintendo. The character who has jumped through countless games, movies, and pieces of merchandise.

Most of us know him that way.

But long before he became a global icon, he was something much simpler: a practical solution to a very real problem.

Today I want to talk about how that character actually came together.

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From Warehouse Crisis to Jumpman

In the early 1980s, Nintendo shipped Radar Scope, a fast-paced space shooter, to the United States. The hope was that it would catch the same arcade wave that had made games like Space Invaders and Galaxian so successful.

It didn’t.

American players were not interested, and the game sold poorly. Nintendo of America was left with rows of expensive arcade cabinets sitting in storage. They had already been built, shipped across the ocean, and placed into a market that did not want them. Now they were taking up space, tying up money, and turning into a problem the company could not ignore.

The problem became urgent. Nintendo of America needed help from Japan, and the request was very practical: find a new game that could run on the existing Radar Scope hardware and give those cabinets a second life.

That was how the project reached Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyamoto, then a young staffer who had joined Nintendo after art school, was given the assignment. His job was to build a new game that could run on the existing Radar Scope hardware and give those idle cabinets a second chance in American arcades.

The result was Donkey Kong, released in 1981.

The first version of what would later become Mario appeared inside that game. Internally, he was called Jumpman. There was no elaborate backstory and no carefully developed personality. He was a small figure defined by what the player could do with him. Press the button, and he jumps. Move the joystick, and he walks across girders or climbs ladders. The design was direct because the game needed to be understood immediately.

Miyamoto later described the heart of this kind of design in simple terms. What matters is whether the player understands what is happening the moment they press the button. If that connection is unclear, story and visual style cannot save the experience.

Constraints That Shaped a Legend

The hardware of the time imposed brutal limits. The sprite was tiny. Once it started moving, most fine details vanished in a blur of pixels. Subtle facial expressions? Impossible. Complex animations? A luxury they didn’t have.

So the team made pragmatic fixes that accidentally became iconic:

• A red cap to clearly separate the head from the body during motion.

• A thick mustache and big nose because drawing a convincing mouth or facial details at that low resolution was hopeless.

• Overalls (and the signature red-and-blue color scheme) so arm and leg movements remained readable against the torso while jumping and climbing.

  

None of these were artistic flourishes discussed in terms of “brand identity.” They were emergency solutions to visibility problems that had to be solved before the next deadline.

Even the name “Mario” came from a wonderfully mundane office moment. Nintendo of America’s warehouse landlord—an Italian-American businessman named Mario Segale—showed up one day to collect overdue rent. After a heated discussion, the employees jokingly named the mustachioed carpenter after him because of a passing resemblance. The name stuck.

When the World Changed, the Character Changed With It

By the time Mario Bros. arrived in 1983, the world around the character had changed. The game moved him underground, into a maze of pipes, platforms, and connected rooms. That new setting naturally gave him a profession. Surrounded by pipes, Mario became a plumber.

That moment revealed something important about the character. Mario never relied on a detailed biography or a fixed identity. His design was simple, clear, and instantly recognizable. Put him in a new environment, and he could become part of it without losing who he was.

Two years later, Super Mario Bros. proved just how powerful that flexibility could be. Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka were no longer creating a single-screen arcade game. They were building entire worlds that stretched across grasslands, underground caves, oceans, castles, and the sky. Every level had to be carefully drawn on paper before programmers could turn it into code, so each new idea had to be considered long before players ever picked up the controller.

As Mario’s world grew larger, the character himself remained remarkably consistent. The red cap, the mustache, the overalls, the familiar jump—they stayed the same, even as everything around him changed. Those practical design decisions made years earlier had quietly become something much more valuable: they allowed Mario to adapt to new games, new technology, and new generations of players while remaining unmistakably Mario.

That idea echoed Miyamoto’s early concept of “Mr. Video”—a character who could appear in many different games without being tied to a single story. Mario could return again and again, because his identity was built on a handful of simple.

Childhood Wonder as Creative Fuel

What truly sets Miyamoto apart is how he continuously drew from his own childhood while navigating adult constraints. Growing up in rural Sonobe near Kyoto, he spent his days exploring forests, hillsides, and mysterious caves. Those real experiences of discovery and overcoming fear later inspired not only Mario but The Legend of Zelda as well. Even the Chain Chomp enemy came from being chased by a neighbor’s aggressive dog.

Miyamoto always prioritized “fun first.” In Super Mario Bros, the very first stage became a masterclass in teaching through joyful doing. Players learned mechanics naturally by playing, not by reading instructions. Power-ups like the Super Mushroom (making Mario grow big) turned the character into a canvas for playful transformation.

The Quiet Power of Practical Choices

Looking back, Mario doesn’t feel like a character designed in one brilliant flash and then polished. He feels like something that was continuously built—adjusted, adapted, and refined in response to whatever constraint or opportunity stood in front of the team at each moment.

• A warehouse full of dead inventory.

• A crashing industry and skeptical retailers.

• A tiny sprite that demanded clarity in motion.

• Hand-drawn levels and manual data entry that forced careful planning.

None of these were lofty philosophical decisions at the time. They were practical responses to immediate problems—yet together they created something remarkably resilient that could evolve across decades and hardware generations without losing its soul.

Over the past thirty years, even as the Mario series released many different versions, each one kept the sense of fun at the center. As Takashi Tezuka once put it, that focus on giving players an enjoyable experience is what keeps every generation of Mario feeling connected. No matter what changes they made, the goal was always to let Mario deliver joy—and to stay flexible enough to meet the needs of new technology and new players.

As creators, we often find ourselves facing similar situations: limited resources, shifting platforms, and unexpected obstacles. What strikes me about this early chapter of Mario’s story is how those very limitations helped shape something clear, memorable, and fun.

In a way, Mario is still being built today, every time a new player discovers the simple joy of jumping on a Goomba or collecting a shining coin.

What constraints are shaping your own work right now?

Sometimes the most practical fixes quietly become the most memorable parts of what we create.

I’d love to hear your own “warehouse problem” stories or “cave adventures” in the comments. How has a limitation unexpectedly become one of your strengths?

Keep creating and keep jumping,

See you in the next issue.

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At the World Cup opening ceremony, a small creature appeared on screen for about 15 seconds.

Pointy teeth, round eyes.

Its name is Labubu.

For many people, the first time they saw Labubu was probably not in a picture book.

It may have been hanging from someone’s bag, appearing in a phone photo, showing up in a travel post, or sitting quietly inside a friend’s display cabinet.

It seemed to enter people’s everyday lives first, almost without making a sound.

Then one day, it suddenly appeared on one of the biggest stages in the world.

So where did this little creature actually come from?

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Kasing Lung

Pop Mart was what first brought Labubu into my view. But Labubu was not created by Pop Mart.

Its creator is Kasing Lung(龙家昇).

Lung was born in Hong Kong in 1972. When he was six, he moved with his family to the Netherlands.

Entering a foreign country at that age is not just a matter of living somewhere new. The language changes. School changes. The people around you change. Loneliness arrives quietly with all of it.

For Lung, drawing became a way to stay in conversation with the world.

“The ones I like most are tales about spirits and fairies,” Lung writes in the epilogue to The Story of Puca. “They tend to carry a slightly eerie and unsettling atmosphere—something that makes me both like them and fear them.”

He was drawn to Nordic forest tales, and to the elves, monsters, spirits, and small creatures hidden inside folk stories. They were not always beautiful. They were not always gentle. Some carried a hint of mischief, even danger. But they felt alive.

That imagination slowly found its way into Lung’s own work.

In 2015, he published the picture book The Story of Puca, a story set in a dark and mysterious forest.

The main character was Puca, a fairy moving through that strange world. Around Puca lived many small creatures, including a group of cat-sized elves with rabbit-like ears and nine sharp little teeth.

Labubu was one of them.

It was not the hero of the story. It did not arrive with the weight of a future global icon. It was simply part of the forest — one of those little beings that made the world feel stranger, livelier, and harder to forget.

That may be why Labubu feels different from a character designed only to be cute.

Before it became a toy, it already belonged somewhere.

The First Time Labubu Left the Forest

The first company to bring Labubu out of the pages and into the physical world was not Pop Mart, but How2Work, a toy company based in Hong Kong.

In 2015, to mark the release of The Story of Puca, Lung worked with Howard Lee, the founder of How2Work, to produce a small batch of commemorative Labubu figures.

Lee later recalled that they ran out of time before the figures could be spray-painted.

“We ended up not having enough time to spray-paint, and that’s why the first-ever Labubu was fully black.”

That same year, Lung and Lee brought 100 copies of The Story of Puca and 60 hand-painted Labubu figures to a toy convention in Taipei.

Everything sold out.

It would be a few more years before Labubu became connected with Pop Mart.

Lung later recalled meeting Pop Mart founder Wang Ning at the same toy convention several years later. He chose to work with Pop Mart because they shared similar creative values, and because Pop Mart already had a mature production team.

In 2019, Lung began collaborating with Pop Mart to produce certain toy lines based on THE MONSTERS IP.

From that point on, Labubu was no longer just a niche figure known by a small circle of collectors.

It became part of a much larger product world — toys, stationery, accessories, and, most importantly, blind boxes.

Blind boxes changed the way many people encountered Labubu. Before opening the box, buyers did not know which version they would get. That uncertainty created a small moment of suspense, expectation, and surprise.

Labubu’s appearance also evolved during this period.

Earlier Labubu figures had a more square-shaped head and looked more monster-like. Later versions became rounder, softer, fluffier, and more approachable.

For many people, this was the stage when Labubu truly entered their lives.

From the Cabinet to the Street

In 2023, Pop Mart released a Labubu keychain with a plush body, a vinyl face, and vinyl limbs.

Earlier figures were mostly placed on desks or inside display cabinets. A keychain is different. It can hang from a bag. It can travel with someone. It can appear in the street, on the subway, in cafés, airports, and mirror selfies.

Labubu began to move out of the collector’s cabinet and into everyday life.

One by one, influential figures were photographed with Labubu keychains — Lisa from Blackpink, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Marc Jacobs.

Pop Mart itself did not seem to expect the keychain to become this viral. Lung later said he was “both very happy and very surprised.”

But Labubu did not only belong to celebrities.

Ordinary people also began carrying it in their own way — as a bag charm, a styling detail, or simply a small character they liked having with them.

And once people began carrying it, they also began giving it meanings of their own.

Different People, Different Labubus

By this point, Labubu had become more than a toy.

Once it began appearing on bags and in everyday photos, people started encountering it in very different ways.

Anna, a business analyst in Hong Kong, was not originally a toy lover. She first became aware of Labubu because more and more people around her were hanging it on their bags. Later, she brought several Labubus from Hong Kong to friends in the United States.

For her, Labubu was connected not only to a trend, but also to the feeling of seeing a Chinese original IP being accepted overseas.

At Pop Land, WIRED writer Zeyi Yang met a mother whose almost-four-year-old daughter had not discovered Labubu through picture books. She had seen it in short videos and fallen in love with it there. The mother also mentioned that a friend’s daughter had once held a Labubu-themed birthday party, with the room filled with rare Labubu figures.

In that child’s world, Labubu belonged less to the collector market than to short videos, birthday parties, and simple affection.

Then there are collectors like Dong, a Pop Mart customer from Shanghai. He had been buying Pop Mart products since 2018 and had collected most Labubu items. Later, he also began buying new releases and reselling them to other fans.

For Dong, Labubu had become part collection, part market.

The same character had traveled into very different lives.

It could sit inside a collector’s system, hang from someone’s bag, carry a sense of cultural pride, or become a child’s favorite little monster from a short video.

By then, Labubu no longer belonged only to the forest Kasing Lung first drew. It had entered other people’s lives, and those lives had begun to change what Labubu meant.

Back to Those 15 Seconds at the World Cup

Those 15 seconds at the World Cup opening ceremony were not the beginning of Labubu’s story.

Before that moment, Labubu had already stepped out of Kasing Lung’s picture book, become a physical figure, entered Pop Mart’s product system, and been carried into the lives of countless people.

The World Cup simply allowed more people to see it at the same time.

When a character truly comes alive, it rarely stays where its creator first placed it.

Kasing Lung gave Labubu its earliest form.

But the Labubu that came after him has continued to grow inside many other people’s lives.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts :)

Over the past few years, the creator economy has grown faster than many people expected.

More journalists are leaving traditional media to build their own newsletters.

More independent creators are turning their knowledge, passions, and life experiences into real businesses.

But every industry faces a new question as it matures.

When the biggest creators have hundreds of thousands or even millions of readers, along with teams, resources, and established business models, does someone pressing "Publish" for the first time still have a chance to be discovered?

The Creator Economy Is No Longer an Experiment

Ten years ago, many people would have questioned a simple idea:

Can an ordinary person really build a business around their work, ideas, and experiences?

Today, the answer is becoming increasingly clear.

In 2025, the global creator economy reached approximately $252.3 billion and continues to grow rapidly.

Substack is one of the clearest examples of this transformation.

The platform raised $100 million in its Series C funding round, reaching a valuation of $1.1 billion. Its paid subscriptions grew from around 2 million in 2023 to more than 5 million in 2025.

But perhaps the most interesting number is not about money.

From 2020 to 2023, the number of publications on Substack grew tenfold. Today, around 60% of all publications on the platform started after 2020.

Even as Substack becomes more established, new creators are still choosing to come here and press “Publish” for the very first time.

But Success Creates a New Challenge

The more an ecosystem grows, the more competitive it becomes.

More famous journalists, bestselling authors, and creators with established teams are joining Substack.

They bring their existing influence. They also bring millions of new readers.

Today, some of the most successful creators on Substack are earning seven-figure incomes. Some publications have evolved into small media companies with editors, researchers, and business teams. In 2025, Substack revealed that more than 50 creators on the platform were earning over $1 million annually.

This naturally raises a question for many new creators:

When the biggest trees keep growing taller, do the newest seeds still have a chance to reach the sunlight?

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Competition Exists, But It Is Not a Zero-Sum Game

This is what I find most interesting about Substack.

The growth of big creators certainly means stronger competition.

But it also brings more readers.

A reader may come to Substack because of a well-known journalist or a bestselling author.

But they will not read only one person forever.

A reader may discover a new creator through a Recommendation, stumble upon a stranger’s article through a Restack, or come across a short thought in Notes that opens the door to an entirely new creator’s world.

Notes are imperfect. Many creators still feel like they are speaking into the void. Good work can still be missed. But the idea behind them is interesting. Discovery does not have to happen only through algorithms.

Sometimes, it happens because one creator decides to point at another and say:

“I think this is worth reading.”

In traditional media, a page occupied by one voice often meant less space for another.

But in a creator network built on connections, successful creators are not necessarily just competitors.

They can also become new gateways.

The Future of the Creator Economy Is a Trust Economy

I do not believe the future of the creator economy will be free from competition.

In fact, as the industry matures, competition will only become more intense.

The biggest creators will continue to grow bigger. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

But I believe what makes the creator economy truly unique is not that it removes competition.

It is that it creates a new form of value exchange beyond competition: trust.

A reader does not choose to pay for a writer simply because they have the biggest team or the loudest voice.

More often, they subscribe because they trust the way this person sees the world, and the experiences that shaped that perspective.

They trust that this creator will continue creating work they genuinely care about.

That is why smaller creators still have opportunities.

Their greatest advantage may be something much harder to scale: authenticity, closeness, and a direct relationship with their readers.

The goal of a small creator is not to be heard by everyone. It is to be deeply valued by someone.

After all, every creator begins with something no algorithm can fully copy: a life only they have lived.

Through years of consistent creation and genuine relationships with their readers, smaller creators can still find their own small group of people who truly believe in what they do.

A healthy creator ecosystem should not only make the biggest voices louder.

It should also continue creating opportunities for the next person who presses “Publish” to earn their first pieces of trust.

Perhaps this is the question the creator economy must continue asking as it enters its next chapter.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Every creator eventually develops a voice so distinct it becomes like a fingerprint— instantly recognizable.

The creator I want to talk about today is football transfer journalist Fabrizio Romano.

His fingerprint is three simple words:

Here We Go.

Whenever a major transfer breaks in European football, countless fans wait for those exact words to appear. For many, “Here We Go” has become shorthand for “It’s done.”

But is it really just those three words that made Romano a household name?

Before “Here We Go”

Romano’s journey started in Naples, southern Italy. At 16, he was still in high school, writing about Italian football in the afternoons with zero connections and no inside sources.

At 18, he moved to Milan—the city where deals happen. Top sporting directors and agents constantly passed through. Romano started hanging out in the cafés, restaurants, and bars where football insiders gathered. Slowly, he built his network.

That same year he landed his first exclusive: Argentine striker Mauro Icardi moving from Barcelona’s U19s to Sampdoria.

After breaking the Icardi story, Romano stayed in close touch with the player’s agent via Facebook Messenger. Two years later, when Icardi transferred to Inter Milan for over $14 million in a huge Italian deal, Romano was again first with the news.

As his reputation in the Italian market grew, he expanded internationally. He leveraged his growing social media following to earn trust, which in turn gave him better information. In 2015 he reported that Montenegrin striker Stevan Jovetić was leaving Manchester City for Inter. City denied it—until three days later, when Jovetić completed the move.

The Birth of “Here We Go”

So when did “Here We Go” become his signature phrase?

Summer 2019, everyone assumed Bruno Fernandes was heading to Manchester United. Romano kept saying not yet—the deal wasn’t finished. In the January 2020 window, when the transfer finally went through, Romano posted a photo of Bruno and his agent on a plane and captioned it with the words that would soon go viral: Here We Go.

For Romano, timing matters, but accuracy matters more. Nothing is certain until the paperwork is signed.

After the Fernandes deal, “Here We Go” stuck. Interestingly, it wasn’t even his own idea—fans kept texting and tweeting, urging him to keep using it.

What “Here We Go” Really Means

These days, when fans see those three words, they get excited. They know a transfer is basically complete.

But it’s not the phrase itself that excites them. It’s what stands behind it: credibility.

In an era flooded with rumors and noise, Romano still refuses to post until he’s double- and triple-checked. He’d rather be slightly late than wrong.

Before any “Here We Go” drops, there have already been dozens of calls, messages, and verifications.

“If you can be first, perfect. But accuracy is the most important thing,” Romano once said. “If you can do it at the right moment with the right process in international football, it’s something very good.”

He genuinely loves the work and shows respect—for the agents, directors, players, and the fans who follow the market. That respect has been returned with trust.

In the end, what fans remember isn’t really the catchphrase.

It’s the trust Romano earned through passion, persistence, and respect.

Why did a modest Toyota become one of the most recognizable cars in Japanese car culture?

Its name is the AE86.

It wasn’t a supercar. It wasn’t the fastest, most expensive, or most advanced model of its time. It was simply a sporty version of the Toyota Corolla / Sprinter lineup.

Yet many people discovered it not through Toyota’s brochures, but through a manga called Initial D.

This article isn’t just about the AE86, and it’s not a simple recap of the manga or anime. What I really want to explore is the creator behind it: Shuichi Shigeno(しげの 秀一).

He didn’t design the AE86. He didn’t build it.

But through his story, he changed the way many people saw this ordinary little car.

An Unassuming Little Car

The AE86 was a lightweight, front-engine, rear-wheel-drive sports model produced from 1983 to 1987. It came in two main flavors: the Corolla Levin with fixed headlights and the Sprinter Trueno with iconic pop-up headlights.

Compared to flashier cars like the Celica Supra or MR2, the AE86 was modest. It used an older platform, kept things simple, and remained relatively affordable. For many young drivers, that was its biggest charm.

It wasn’t a car you admired from afar. It was a car you could actually buy, drive hard, modify, and truly learn from.

Why Shigeno Chose the AE86

Shigeno’s choice wasn’t random.

Part of the inspiration came from Keiichi Tsuchiya(つちや けいいち), the legendary “Drift King.” Tsuchiya’s close association with the AE86 helped connect the car to drifting, mountain roads, and skillful cornering in the minds of enthusiasts.

The other reason was more personal: Shigeno himself was a big fan. After receiving his first major royalty payment, he bought a black-and-white Sprinter Trueno AE86. When he created Initial D, giving that same car to his protagonist, Takumi Fujiwara, felt completely natural.

How Initial D Made the AE86 Memorable

Before Initial D, the AE86 already had a dedicated fanbase that loved its lightness, rear-wheel-drive dynamics, and modification potential.

But the series brought it to the world.

Takumi Fujiwara begins the story as an ordinary high school student. His family runs a tofu shop, and before sunrise, he drives his father’s black-and-white Toyota Sprinter Trueno AE86 along the mountain roads of Akina to make deliveries.

At first, these drives are not presented as racing. They are part of his daily routine. But through years of repeating the same downhill route, Takumi learns every corner, braking point, and change in the road. Without setting out to become a racer, he develops an unusual feel for the car.

Later, when he is pulled into the world of mountain racing, the same old AE86 begins defeating drivers with more powerful cars and more obvious ambitions.

As the story unfolds, the AE86 becomes more than Takumi’s vehicle. It becomes part of how readers understand him: quiet, underestimated, and shaped by repetition more than words.

Its panda black-and-white body, pop-up headlights, yellow fog lamps, and the image of the car running through Akina’s mountain roads at night became many people’s first memory of the AE86.

Many readers may not know the difference between a Levin and a Trueno. They may not know what a 4A-GE engine is. But they remember that AE86.

The Power of a Creator

Toyota built the AE86.
Shuichi Shigeno helped people see it differently.

He didn’t make the car faster or more powerful. Instead, he placed it in the right story — one filled with repetition, skill, youth, and mountain roads. He turned an ordinary Corolla into something people could emotionally connect with.

That’s one of the most beautiful things creators can do. They don’t always need to invent something new. Sometimes, they simply shine a light on what already exists and help the rest of us truly notice it.

The AE86 became legendary not because it was perfect from the start, but because someone knew how to make people look at it again.

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This week, I want to introduce you to Claire Dinhut, a wonderful food writer and creator behind CondimentClaire.

Reading CondimentClaire has introduced me to countless spices and condiments I’d never heard of before. But what she offers goes far beyond just the ingredients themselves. She uncovers and beautifully shares the rich human stories hidden behind these small jars and packets.

The Stories Behind the Condiments

1️⃣ Shatta (Palestinian Hot Pepper Sauce)

Shatta ( شطّة ) simply means (hot) pepper in Arabic. Over time, it’s become the general term to describe anything spicy from the Levant to Egypt and beyond.

- Claire Dinhut, All About Shatta

Shatta is a “simple” condiment, but it holds deep importance for Palestinian communities, especially in Gaza. London-based Palestinian chef and cookbook author Joudie Kalla describes shatta as “the Palestinian version of sriracha.” Like Gaza itself, “it’s something fresh and spicy and vibrant.”

After 1948, thousands of Palestinian refugees were displaced into Gaza. They couldn’t bring their fields or mountains, but they carried their traditions and family flavors with them. The method of making shatta traveled with these people into their new, often harsh reality.

Despite Gaza’s material shortages and difficult conditions, local chili peppers thrive in adversity and have become a vital ingredient. The process for making shatta is straightforward: Gaza chilies, garlic, salt, and olive oil are crushed and fermented together. The result is a rich, spicy sauce.

Even amid the relentless suffering and ongoing humanitarian crisis, shatta has never left the tables of Gaza. This bright, fiery flavor represents the quiet resilience and steadfast resistance of the Palestinian people.

Today, shatta has transcended its role as a simple condiment. A small jar carries the homesickness of refugees, the toughness of generations fighting to survive, and the unbreakable spirit of the people of Gaza. That burst of heat is everyday life, heavy history, and the enduring, passionate hope of a land that refuses to be extinguished.

CondimentClaire

All About Shatta

Welcome to my new series, MY MEMORY JAR, where I give the stage to flavor lovers around the world to share their community’s preferred condiment…

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9 months ago · 76 likes · 20 comments · Claire Dinhut

2️⃣ Pumpkin Spice

Pumpkin spice is the soul of the classic Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. It’s a warm blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and allspice.

In her piece Pumpkin Spice 101, Claire explores its fascinating history: When Columbus set sail, he was actually searching for these “luxury goods,” especially nutmeg. The spice trade brought enormous wealth — but also colonization, conflict, and bloodshed. The Dutch even traded Manhattan (then New Amsterdam) for the Banda Islands in Indonesia just to control the nutmeg trade.

These warming spices entered Europe through Venice centuries ago and became symbols of wealth for the rich. Today, pumpkin spice has become a distinctly American flavor, yet it carries the complex global story of the spice trade.

CondimentClaire

Pumpkin Spice 101

ONE WEEK UNTIL THE CONDIMENT BOOK!!! Make sure to have your preorders in to ensure best price and speediest delivery. And yes, it will ship worldwide using most of the links here but Blackwells ships for free…

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2 years ago · 56 likes · 9 comments · Claire Dinhut

3️⃣ Salt

In Salt Runs in the Family, Claire tells the story of the Lee-Wilson family and their salt-making journey.

Jesse Lee-Wilson’s parents once ran an aquarium business that slowed down significantly in winter. Looking for year-round work, they turned to the city’s greatest natural resource: the exceptionally clean seawater nearby. Even seahorses, which are very sensitive to water quality, thrive there. They believed this pristine seawater could produce exceptional salt.

To make the best possible salt, Jesse’s father sat in on university chemistry classes and even traveled to Japan to study their deep respect and craftsmanship around sea salt.

The Lee-Wilsons developed their own meticulous process:

Before the water even reaches our Saltcote, it has already passed through two natural filters: a mussel bed and a sandbank, and then we draw it through a charcoal filter too. The salt water is then heated in a vacuum so it boils at a low temperature. Gradually, the water releases steam and turns into a very salty brine. When the concentration of the salt in the water is high enough, we release it into shallow crystallisation tanks and leave it there to allow the sea salt crystals to form. It’s then harvested by hand by our skilled team (shout out to Nigel, Keith and Jim) and rinsed in more brine to remove excess calcium. Our biggest by-product - distilled water - goes into these.

Salt is more than just a seasoning — for the Lee-Wilson family, it has also become a meaningful family legacy.

CondimentClaire

Salt Runs in the Family

Welcome to the 4th edition of my series, MY MEMORY JAR, where I give the stage to flavor lovers around the world to share about a condiment dear to them.I’ve been such a fan of this family business that we’ve even collaborated on a salty pumpkin spice blend…

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5 months ago · 40 likes · 3 comments · Claire Dinhut

4️⃣ Citron

Citron is one of the world’s oldest citrus fruits. It has thick, oil-rich skin with an intense fragrance, very little flesh, but large juice vesicles that burst with a satisfying pop when bitten. It is extremely acidic.

Beyond eating it fresh, making preserves, or drying and grinding it as a seasoning, it also serves as a natural air freshener — its aroma can linger in a kitchen for days.

Its origins trace back to the foothills of the Himalayas. Records of citron seeds appear in Mesopotamia as early as 4000 BCE. Alexander the Great’s army brought it from India to the Mediterranean around 300 BCE, making it the first citrus fruit to reach Europe. Its scientific name, Citrus medica, doesn’t refer to medicinal use but to the ancient region of Media in Iran.

Because citron was the earliest citrus to reach the Mediterranean and had such distinctive qualities, it became a status symbol among the Roman elite.

CondimentClaire

Citron

The Citron, also known as the Citrus Medica, is one of the oldest citrus in the world. I mean unsurprising, come on, just look at those wrinkles and weird bumps! Don’t judge a book by its cover though, the citron is magical. As the first citrus to arrive in Europe, the…

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2 years ago · 45 likes · 4 comments · Claire Dinhut

In the End

Through CondimentClaire, these condiments have become so much more than just seasonings for me. Each one carries deep human stories — of history, resilience, culture, and resilience — making them incredibly meaningful and fascinating.

When you think of Los Angeles, what comes to mind first?

Is it the never-ending glow of Hollywood? The year-round sunshine and beaches of the West Coast? Or the freewheeling, chaotic city of excess we know from GTA V?

A dream factory. A lazy West Coast fantasy. A symbol of romance, glamour, and prosperity.

These are often the first images people attach to the City of Angels. They are simple, direct, and deeply familiar. But once the influencer filter fades, and the cinematic glow disappears, the real Los Angeles has no single answer.

It is dazzling and rough at the same time. Open and restless. Full of opportunity, yet full of confusion. That tension, that constant pull between beauty and disorder, may be the truest background of the city.

What gives a city its soul is not only its skyline, its landmarks, or its reputation. It is the people who live there.

They build the texture of the city through ordinary life. They notice its small moments in their own ways. Together, they piece together a Los Angeles that feels layered, alive, and warm.

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Food Hidden in the Streets

Food is often the most direct way to understand a city.

It is never just about taste. It carries culture, memory, migration, and belonging. People from different countries and regions come to Los Angeles, bringing with them the flavors of home. So sometimes, a city’s diversity is not only found in museums, neighborhoods, or history books. It is also hidden in the menus of small restaurants.

This is the Los Angeles that Jared Cohee records.

Jared is a freelance writer and television installer based in Los Angeles. He is also the creator of Eat the World Los Angeles, a newsletter focused on small restaurants across Southern California, especially places run by different communities and connected to the taste of home. In the publication’s own description, these foods do not just make people hungry. They also bring back memories of “back home.”

Jared is not simply writing ordinary restaurant recommendations. Nor is he only looking for trendy, viral spots. His work feels more like a record of Los Angeles through its small restaurants and the many cultures behind them.

On his website, there is a restaurant map featuring 186 cuisines from different countries and regions.

A corner restaurant. A dish from someone’s hometown. A group of people continuing their lives in a new place.

In Los Angeles, food is not only flavor. It is evidence that the city has been shaped, again and again, by the people who arrived here and made it their own.

Los Angeles in Light and Shadow

A city exists in the light on the street, in the expressions of passersby, in the brief pauses outside a shop window. What photographers do is preserve these moments that are so easy to overlook.

Many times, we do not come to understand a city through grand buildings. We feel its true character through a turn of the body, a street corner, or a beam of sunlight falling across a wall.

This is the Los Angeles that Julia Dean records.

Julia Dean is the director of The L.A. Project, and she is also a street photographer.

Her work is not about presenting a carefully packaged version of Los Angeles. She is more interested in everyday life on the streets, in the people who live here, and in the ordinary but honest moments that make up the city.

The idea of capturing an image that no one else will get, solely because that moment happens only in that instant, on that day, on that street, in front of you, is simply exhilarating.

Through her lens, Los Angeles is not only movies, beaches, and neon lights.

It is also people waiting on the sidewalk. Light passing through downtown. Walls, windows, intersections, and the quiet relationship between streets and crowds.

Photography slows the city down. It allows us to see the ordinary side of Los Angeles beneath the surface of a modern metropolis.

Painting the Los Angeles of the Imagination

Some people capture the streets in front of them with a camera. Others rebuild those streets with a brush.

Real houses, hillsides, tree shadows, power lines, and sunlight can become another city in the hands of a painter. It still feels like Los Angeles, but it carries a stronger sense of personal memory and imagination.

Seth Armstrong is an oil painter who was born and raised in Los Angeles. He later studied at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and also refined his painting practice in northern Holland, before eventually returning to Los Angeles to live and work.

His paintings often move between city landscapes and narrative figures. Through light, realism, and a subtle sense of humor, he presents the city as he sees it.

In Seth Armstrong’s paintings, Los Angeles is often made of hillside homes, roads partly hidden by plants, morning or evening light, telephone poles, palm trees, and quiet houses scattered across the slopes.

He is not painting the loudest side of Los Angeles. Instead, he turns toward the quiet, hidden corners covered by tree shadows.

In its introduction to his exhibition Subrosa, Unit London described the series as an exploration of the hidden reality between the “myth and truth” of Los Angeles. Suburban homes are covered by dense plants, appearing calm and beautiful on the surface. But outside the frame, there are also realities such as wildfires, economic instability, and urban change.

Creators Living Under the Same Sky

These creators record Los Angeles in different ways.

Jared Cohee begins with restaurants and sees the city’s cultural diversity. Julia Dean begins with the street and sees everyday life. Seth Armstrong begins with the canvas and sees the city’s light, hillsides, and imagination.

What they record is not the most typical version of Los Angeles. But perhaps Los Angeles has never had one standard version.

It is more than Hollywood, beaches, and sunshine. It is a city made of small details: a corner restaurant, an ordinary street, a house behind tree shadows, a beam of light across a wall.

Together, these creators make Los Angeles feel more three-dimensional: not just a city to be watched, but a city being lived in, recorded, and constantly reimagined.

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Thank you for reading this far. If this piece brought any thoughts to mind, I’d be really happy to hear from you in the comments.

Do you ever feel this way when posting a Note? You write something, press publish, and then… not much happens.

Not many replies. Not many likes. Maybe just a few quiet views.

It can feel like your words are sitting alone in the feed.

I feel that too. So I started trying to understand how people actually get seen on Substack. In this post, I just want to share a few small things I’ve been learning, and I hope they can be helpful to you too.

1. Notes Are Small Doors

Notes is the social feed inside Substack. It lets writers and readers share short posts, thoughts, links, quotes, images, or small updates without writing a full essay.

A Note doesn’t just reach the people who already know you. Sometimes it travels further and introduces your voice to someone who has never read your work before.

That’s why I started thinking of Notes as small doors. They may look small, but they can be the first place someone discovers you.

Now here’s how to make those small doors work for you.

• Make Note easier to find

  Sometimes, more people see your Note when it connects with something they already care about.

  It could be a recent Substack update, a creator trend, a news moment, or a question many writers are thinking about. For instance, I noticed one of my Notes got far more visibility after tying into the Canvas downtime event. This feels a little like SEO to me: you’re not forcing keywords into your writing, just giving your thought a clearer chance to be found.

• Make Note feel like a small story

  Being found is good, but being remembered matters more.

  Your Note doesn’t need to be perfect. Start with a small, real moment — a morning thought, a small mistake, or something that stuck with you. A useful idea helps, but a personal detail makes people think, “I’ve felt that too.”

  Wes Pearce shared that posting simple, consistent Notes helped drive 70% of his growth by letting readers connect with his real voice.

  That’s the power of a story-like Note: it gives people something to remember, not just something to read.

2. Comments Are Small Knocks on the Door

If Notes are small doors, then comments feel like small knocks on someone else’s door.

Substack is full of interesting writers and thoughtful posts. Sometimes the best way to be seen isn’t waiting for people to find you, but actively going out and engaging with what others are creating.

When you leave a thoughtful comment, you’re doing more than saying “great post.” You’re showing that you truly read, felt, and thought something in response. That kind of comment can spark real conversation.

And sometimes, that conversation leads people to click on your name and explore your publication. More importantly, you also get to meet more interesting people and build genuine connections.

3. Restack Turns Reading Into Connection

Restack is one of the most useful ways writing travels on Substack. It lets you share posts, Notes, or comments with your subscribers and followers, either as they are or with a few words of your own. Substack also describes Restack as a way to start a new conversation in the Home feed.

When you Restack your own older posts or Notes, you give your previous writing a second chance to be seen. Sometimes a post you wrote months ago still carries a useful or timeless idea. New readers may never have seen it, and even returning readers may appreciate the reminder.

Landon Poburan saw this firsthand when he Restacked an older post, and he later shared that it brought him more than 100 new subscribers overnight.

This is why I like to think of Restack as more than a repost button. It is a small bridge between writers, readers, ideas, and different moments in time.

4. Not Competition, But Introduction

Recommendations are another way people can discover you on Substack.

You can recommend other publications to your readers. Substack says this feature is meant to help creators promote and support one another, and the writers you recommend may also be prompted to recommend you back.

I like to think of it less as competition, and more as introduction. You are telling your readers, “Here is another voice I trust.”

And sometimes, that trust travels back. You help others get seen, and slowly, more people may find their way to you too.

5. Posts Are Still the Home

All these small actions can help more people find you. A Note may help someone notice your voice. A comment may start a conversation. A Restack or recommendation may bring your writing to new readers.

But posts are still the home.

A post gives readers more room to understand you. It is where your ideas can breathe, where your stories can unfold, and where someone can decide, “I want to keep reading this person.”

Substack is still built around publishing posts that can live on your publication and reach readers through email, the web, and the app. That makes posts different from the smaller moments in the feed. They are not just quick signals. They become part of the place you are building.

So while Notes, comments, Restacks, and recommendations may open the door, your posts are what make people stay.

They are the room readers return to.

I hope this small sharing is helpful for your own Substack journey.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on building connections here on Substack. How do you meet and engage with other writers in this community?

Have you ever had one of those moments where a minor illness suddenly interrupts everything?

I still remember a time when a simple bout of flu did exactly that to me. One day I was busy with my usual routine, and the next, I just didn’t have the energy to do anything. The emails piled up, my plans were tossed aside, and I spent the day stuck in bed with nothing but my own thoughts. It’s a frustrating feeling when your mind wants to keep going, but your body simply refuses to cooperate.

That experience of being forced to stop made me think about the bigger “pauses” in life. It reminded me of a story I came across recently about Suleika Jaouad.

Finding Strength in Small Lines

At twenty-two, freshly graduated from Princeton, Suleika was full of plans. She dreamed of becoming a war correspondent, moving to Paris, and stepping into a life of adventure. Then, just weeks before her twenty-third birthday, she received a devastating diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia. It was a rare and aggressive blood cancer with roughly a 35 percent chance of survival.

In a matter of weeks, her world collapsed. The open horizons she once imagined gave way to hospital rooms, endless rounds of chemotherapy, and profound uncertainty. She would later call this period her “incanceration,” describing the months she spent trapped in a sterile world, fighting for her life.

In the midst of that shattering upheaval, she began writing in a journal. She called it “a hiding place, a finding place,” where she recorded the concrete details of her days. She wrote about the shifting light on the walls, the voices of nurses, the waves of fear that arrived at 3 a.m., and the small comforts like the taste of ice chips.

Writing gave her something precious when almost everything else had been taken away: a sense of agency. In a reality where she had lost control over her body and her future, the page became a space where she could name her emotions and make sense of the chaos. Day after day and sentence by sentence, she transformed from a passive patient into an active witness of her own life.

While still in the bone marrow transplant unit, she boldly pitched a column idea to The New York Times. That column, Life, Interrupted, was born from her hospital bed and later won an Emmy Award. The young woman who entered the hospital with almost no writing experience had found her voice through the very fire that nearly consumed her. This was more than coping; it was a quiet rebirth that turned suffering into a story.

From Her Room to the World

In early 2020, when the pandemic brought the world to a standstill, Suleika found herself in a strangely familiar kind of isolation. Staying in her parents’ attic in Saratoga, she felt the echoes of her cancer treatment. The lockdowns and the separation from loved ones reminded her of the years she spent unable to leave her room or even open a window.

Instead of retreating into silence, she reached for the one thing that had always steadied her. On April 1st, she sent out her first newsletter from that attic. It contained a short essay and a simple writing prompt, inviting others to create in whatever form felt natural, whether that was a few honest lines, a sketch, or even a short video. She wasn’t trying to build a massive community. She was simply “trying to stay human” in uncertain times.

What started as a modest personal practice quickly grew. People from different countries and backgrounds began responding. Some shared their fears and losses, while others noticed small beauties they had previously overlooked. By the end of the first hundred days, tens of thousands of people had joined her. The project evolved into The Isolation Journals, a creative space for people seeking to transform life’s interruptions into creative grist.

Writing Together in the Midst of Uncertainty

The weekly rhythm became a steady anchor for many. Every Sunday, subscribers received a short essay and a gentle prompt. These invitations were never demanding; they simply encouraged people to notice something in their lives and create from where they stood.

Participants responded in wonderfully diverse ways. Some wrote raw diary entries, while others composed music or took photographs. Many who had never kept a journal before found themselves showing up week after week. Through these shared acts, individual experiences of isolation turned into threads of quiet connection across distances and time zones.

Suleika continued to lead with vulnerability. Even as she faced new health challenges, she kept showing up and sharing her process. Her honest voice helped transform a simple newsletter into a genuine creative community where people supported one another through the unknown.

How Small Acts Become Our Strength

Today, The Isolation Journals has grown to more than two hundred thousand subscribers. What began as one woman writing quietly in an attic has become a global sanctuary.

Suleika continues to face her own battles with cancer, yet she keeps returning to the same simple practice of picking up her journal and showing up. Her story reminds us that we don’t need perfect conditions or dramatic changes to begin.

Sometimes, the willingness to write one honest sentence is enough to create clarity and connection in difficult times.

Thank you so much for reading this far.

The creator in this issue is Jeannine Ouellette, the writer and teacher behind Writing in the Dark.

“Writing saved my life, so I teach writing as if it might save yours.”

Jeannine Ouellette places this sentence near the entrance of Writing in the Dark. It is not loud. It does not try to impress you. It feels more like a note left beside a lamp, waiting for the person who needs it to find their way in.

She also describes Writing in the Dark as a place where we can “write ourselves into becoming.” That sentence has a quiet pull to it. At first, it sounds simple. But the longer you stay with her work, the more it begins to feel like a door opening onto a room where people are allowed to arrive unfinished.

A Room for the Unfinished Self

Before I think of it as a publication, I imagine the room.

There is a table, probably wooden. There is a notebook opened to a page that has not yet decided what it wants to become. There is a cup going cold somewhere nearby. Outside the window, the world is still doing what it always does, rushing, judging, asking people to explain themselves too quickly.

Inside, though, the pace is different.

This is what Jeannine seems to have made with Writing in the Dark: not only a place to learn writing, but a place where writing can happen without the usual panic around it. Her official site calls it a home for writers and creatives drawn to “language, art & truth,” a place where attention, curiosity, vulnerability, and surprise can change not only the writing, but also the life around it.

That might sound like a big promise, but in her world it begins with small things. A sentence. A memory. A detail from the body. A strange prompt. A person who thought they had lost their voice sitting down again, not because they are suddenly brave, but because the room feels safe enough to try.

The Part That Burns

Jeannine’s own life gives this room its weight. Her memoir, The Part That Burns, was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2021 and was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Women’s Literature. Public profiles describe a life shaped by difficult childhood experiences, foster care, family instability, divorce, motherhood, teaching, and long creative persistence.

But this is not the kind of story that should be flattened into hardship and triumph. That would feel too easy, and Jeannine’s work is not easy in that way.

What feels more important is how she looks at what happened. She does not seem to hold pain up as proof that she is interesting. She does not rush to make suffering useful or pretty. Instead, she returns to it through language, slowly and carefully, as if lifting fragments from the floor and turning them over in her hand. Some edges still cut. Some surfaces still catch the light.

That is the strange tenderness of her writing. It does not pretend that broken things are secretly simple. It lets them remain complicated. Grief can sit beside wonder. Fear can sit beside curiosity. A person can be wounded and still be becoming.

In that sense, The Part That Burns feels less like a title and more like a truth about creative life. There are parts of us that burn because they hurt. There are also parts that burn because they are still alive.

The Door She Learned to Close

One image from her story stays with me most.

Before Writing in the Dark became an online home for thousands of readers, there was another kind of room. A classroom. Jeannine has spoken about a period when her life was coming apart while she was teaching at a Waldorf school. Each day, she would step into the classroom, close the door, and begin again. In a profile, she says teaching in that environment shaped her deeply, and she also describes Writing in the Dark as an “open door,” a safe creative space where people can be vulnerable together.

There is something very moving about that image. Not because it is dramatic, but because it is not.

Sometimes survival looks like a person walking into a room and closing the door. Sometimes it looks like deciding, for the next hour, to give your full attention to the people in front of you. Sometimes it is not a grand new life, but a small protected space inside the life you already have.

Maybe that is where the spirit of Writing in the Dark began before it had a name. In a classroom. Behind a door. In the choice to make a space where something fragile could be taken seriously.

A child. A sentence. A beginning.

When the Room Moved Online

Years later, the room moved online. The name she chose, Writing in the Dark, does not try to cheer anyone up too quickly. It admits that the dark exists. It admits that writing often begins before we understand what we are trying to say.

But it also refuses to leave the dark empty.

In one post, Jeannine writes about “befriending uncertainty” and about writing as something more than self-expression or information. That phrase feels close to the heart of her work. She is not asking writers to perform certainty. She is asking them to stay close enough to the unknown that something alive might appear.

This is also why her exercises feel so central to the world she has built. They are not just casual prompts tossed into the air. She has written that the exercises come from years of teaching and from her study of how attention, playfulness, constraints, and surprise can reshape the writing process.

“The exercises are not just writing prompts.”

I like that because a prompt can be a topic, but an exercise is more like a vessel. It gives shape to what might otherwise spill everywhere. It says, start here. Use this object. Follow this sound. Stay close to this scene. Do not explain too quickly.

Many writers wait for freedom before they begin. A free afternoon, a clear mind, a perfect idea. But freedom can be too wide. Sometimes what saves the writing is a small door.

A rule. A form. A limit.

Through that little door, the real voice may slip in sideways.

Fragments That Still Shine

The more I read about Jeannine, the more I feel that her work is built around one quiet belief: broken things are still allowed to shine.

Her author site describes The Part That Burns as a memoir that moves through childhood memory, trauma, motherhood, the body, and the longing for love. That same texture seems to run through Writing in the Dark. The work does not ask people to turn pain into a neat lesson. It asks them to look closely enough that the pain becomes part of a larger truth.

That is a very different kind of tenderness.

It is not soft because it avoids difficulty. It is soft because it makes room for difficulty without making people disappear inside it. Jeannine’s warmth has backbone. It is the warmth of someone who knows the cold is real and still believes in making a fire.

Maybe this is why the community around her work feels less like an audience and more like a gathering. People are not only coming to collect advice. They are coming to remember that writing can still be a way of returning to themselves.

The Tenderness of Staying

There is another kind of image around Jeannine that I find lovely: the ordinary work of making a life. Profiles mention baking, lake cabins, family, painting, hauling, teaching, and writing. These details matter because they keep the story from floating away into abstraction. She is not only a writer in the romantic sense. She is someone who makes things with her hands, carries things, tends things, returns to things.

That makes her creative life feel more believable to me.

There is a tenderness in her work, but it is not fragile. It is a tenderness that has done chores. It has packed boxes, taught classes, raised children, written sentences, revised pages, and kept going through seasons that did not feel easy.

Maybe that is why she can create a space that feels both gentle and serious. Her kindness does not say, anything is fine. It says, I know this is hard, and I will not look away.

That is a rare kind of encouragement. It does not flatter the writer. It steadies them.

The Light Left for Someone Else

Jeannine Ouellette’s story makes me think that writing is not always a path out of the dark. Sometimes writing is the small light we carry while we are still inside it.

She came through silence, memory, motherhood, classrooms, books, and years of teaching. She turned those things into language. Then she placed that language in front of others, not as a performance, but as an invitation.

You can begin here. You do not have to be finished. You can bring the part of you that still does not know. You can become slowly.

That may be the most beautiful thing about her work. Not that she built something large, though she did. Not that many people now gather around her writing, though they do. But that the space still feels like a room with a light on.

A person might enter and not become brave right away. They might not write something good that night. They might only sit there with the page open, listening to the old fear and the small hope living beside it.

But maybe, for the first time in a while, they do not feel completely alone.

And maybe that is where writing begins.

Not with confidence. Not with certainty. Not with a perfect sentence.

Just someone sitting down in the dark, seeing the lamp is still on, and reaching for the page.

Thank you so much for reading this far.

Lately, I’ve been following two creators that I really enjoy.

And while following their work, I slowly realized something:

Not every piece needs to say everything. Sometimes it’s simply about making people want to come back for the next one.

Dracula Daily: Letters Arriving in Real Time

This newsletter retells Dracula in real time.

Every entry arrives on the same date it happens in the story, so instead of reading the novel all at once, it feels like you’re slowly receiving letters from the characters as their lives unfold.

No complicated format. No chasing trends. And yet, the more I followed it, the more I understood why people kept waiting for the next email.

Because what pulled me in wasn’t just the story itself. It was the feeling of wanting to know what came next. The emails are usually short. Sometimes there isn’t even a new one for days.

But the story quietly keeps moving forward, and before long, you find yourself checking your inbox hoping another letter has arrived.

That feeling stayed with me. There was something special about following the story this way. After a while, I found myself genuinely interested in Dracula’s world, almost like I had stepped into it myself and was quietly exchanging letters with the people inside it.

And this was the latest letter that showed up in my inbox 📩

Dracula Daily

Dracula: May 4

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL…

Read more

3 months ago · 4 comments · DraculaDaily

Samgar Renkema: A Small Traveler’s Journey

Samgar posts a small drawing almost every day, and each one feels like a little moment from the character’s life.

The artwork is beautiful, but that’s not the only reason I keep coming back.

What really pulls me in is wondering where the little character went today, and where he’ll go next.

Sometimes he’s just walking down a road.
Sometimes talking to a little sheep along the way.
Sometimes standing quietly in the middle of a landscape.

But somehow, I still find myself opening the next post.

After a while, I start wanting to see where the story goes.

Where he’ll end up.
Who he might meet along the way.
Whether that road ever truly ends.

And today, the little character simply walked quietly through another stretch of road.

That’s exactly why I keep looking forward to the next one.

I want to see what kind of landscape he’ll find tomorrow.

The Story Keeps Going

Even though they create completely different things, they give me a very similar feeling.

One is telling the story of Dracula.
The other just shares quiet little drawings every day.

But both of them make you feel like the story is still going.

The little character will keep walking tomorrow.
Another letter will eventually arrive.

And after a while, you start looking forward to the next.

Not because every post feels perfect.
But because you want to see what happens next.

If you enjoy stories like this — about work, growth, and what’s worth building around — subscribe to read more.

Subscribe now

One is closer to the natural taste of the ingredients.
The other needs time.

These are things I’ve been seeing on Substack.

There’s not much noise there.
People just write about what they’re making, what they’re eating.

It’s all pretty simple.
But it feels good to look at.

I thought I’d share a few of them here.

Salad

Olivye Salad

A very classic Eastern European salad.

It’s something Katie always has on New Year’s Eve.

Everything is diced really small,
then mixed together.

The texture is soft,
but not completely mashed.

It holds together just enough on a spoon.

The color isn’t very bright,
but it feels solid.

It looks filling.
Comforting.

The ingredients are simple too:
potatoes, eggs, pickles,
some diced meat,
and a bit of mayonnaise to bring it all together.

Here it is:

the sunday stack

olivye salad

I don’t want to talk about the fact that christmas is over because it truly will piss me awf. thankfully there’s still new years to hold out for. I know for many people i’s not really a big holiday o…

Read more

7 months ago · 60 likes · 4 comments · katie

Broccoli Apple Crunch Salad

This one is from @eatlikeafarmer.

The broccoli is cut into small florets,
even the stems are used.

The apple is crisp,
cut into small pieces.

There are nuts,
and a bit of dried fruit.

When it’s all mixed together,
it feels like there’s something to bite into.

Not a light leafy salad.

More like every bite has something in it.

Here it is:

Eat Like a Farmer

broccoli apple crunch salad

The minute the calendar switches from January to February, it’s like my brain snaps out of restful winter hibernation mode and jumps straight into OH SH!T SPRING IS BASICALLY HERE mode…

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a year ago · 17 likes · 4 comments · Michelle Aronson

Bread

Greek Olympic Bread

A bread made with ancient grains.

It looks dense,
and full of nutrition.

When you slice it open,
there are air pockets inside.

On top, there’s a layer of pistachio spread and cocoa butter.

The colors contrast slightly.

It feels like something that gives you energy.
Something steady.

Here it is:

Aether Pirates of the Matterium!

It's also damn tasty.

Greek Olympic Bread – Macro & Glycemic Analysis 🏛️🍞…

Read more

4 months ago · 555 likes · 184 comments · clif high

Butter Bread

A few slices of rye bread.

Dark in color.

Laid out one by one.

With a thick layer of butter on top.

Melting slowly
into the texture of the bread.

It just looks really good.

Halloumi + Olive Herb Loaf

A more savory kind of bread.

Feels like something you’d have for breakfast.

When you cut into it,
there are olives inside.

And bits of green herbs.

The cheese has melted a little into the bread,
but you can still see it.

Not completely blended.

It feels layered.
Like there’s more going on in each bite.

Looking at these,
I kind of want to try a few.

Some feel quick.
Some take a little more time.

“Why try to reach this point faster? What’s the rush? Play infinite games. Enjoy the ride. You’ll do great.”

—— Lenny Rachitsky, Lenny's Newsletter《1,000,000》（March 2025）

A lot of work feels exciting at first. Much less of it is worth building around.

The difference, I think, is not just discipline. The work worth staying with tends to reveal itself early: it keeps giving you energy, remains useful, and makes you want to come back.

That is why Lenny’s story feels worth paying attention to. Best known today for Lenny’s Newsletter — a deeply researched newsletter on product, growth, and career read by more than 1.2 million subscribers — he spent the last seven years building exactly that kind of work.

It started with simple notes

It was 2019. Lenny packed up his desk at Airbnb after seven years as a product manager. He left with a head full of lessons, but not with a grand plan for what came next.

As he put it himself:

“After I left, I was just trying to figure out: what did I learn from my time at Airbnb, and what can I take to my next project or startup, or whatever I end up doing?”

So he started writing notes in Evernote. One became a Medium post, and it performed far better than he expected: it landed in Medium’s top few hundred posts, was featured across the platform, and shared internally by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky.

The post drove significant traffic and even earned him unexpected income. In that moment, he realized two things: people found his insights valuable, and writing could actually be a sustainable path.

Inspired, he wrote five more pieces on product management and performance reviews.

A friend then suggested he move to Substack, so he could own his audience and his email list directly. In June, he copied his work over and began quietly.

At the same time, he shared small, sharp insights on Twitter — the same ideas he wrote about. That audience became the foundation for his newsletter’s growth.

The real turning point

Most people wait for a “big break” — a viral hit or a massive endorsement — to decide if a project is worth their time. But for Lenny, the turning point didn’t come as a single burst of momentum. It came nine months in, after 36 straight weeks of publishing.

At that mark, he didn’t just look at his subscriber count. He was looking at the work itself, and what it revealed. Three things had become clear:

1. it was still fun.

2. people were still finding it valuable.

3. he still had many more ideas he wanted to explore.

That was the real signal: not explosive growth, but the fact that the work was still alive after 36 weeks.

“Maybe this could be a real thing.” That was the click. It wasn’t a grand epiphany, but 36 weeks of quiet, consistent proof.

Looking back, Lenny would later describe that feeling simply:

”I found my Ikigai.”

That clarity changed the nature of the work. It was no longer just something he enjoyed doing. It had become something worth committing to.

So he launched a paid tier. For Lenny, charging was a forcing function. An annual subscription was more than a transaction — it was a commitment to keep showing up. He did not charge because he thought he had struck gold. He charged because he wanted to commit to the game.

Once he committed to the work, growth followed in a surprisingly old-fashioned way.

Growth doesn’t come from hacks

Lenny’s growth did not come from a trick.

“There’s no trick to making something like this grow.”

—— Lenny’s Newsletter《500,000》

Most of the usual levers — ads, SEO, referrals, business development — were not the real driver. What worked was simpler: people found the newsletter useful, and they shared it.

The product was the marketing

Lenny did not try to game distribution. He tried to be useful.

He wrote about specific, messy problems people actually faced — how to kickstart a marketplace, how to design career ladders, how product teams really work. Then he made those pieces clear and practical enough to pass on.

Over time, that created a simple loop:

• write about a real problem

• make the piece genuinely useful

• make it clear enough to share

• repeat

People shared it because it was useful.

From 1,000 to 1,200,000

Over time, that simple loop compounded.

The early growth came from his first post, Twitter, and a few strong guest essays. What came after that came from writing useful things every week, then letting Twitter, word of mouth, and later Substack recommendations expand the reach. Lenny’s growth path was quiet and simple. Each step built on the same habit of publishing useful work consistently.

Over time, the newsletter grew into something larger: a podcast, a private Slack community, and a wider recommendation network. But the foundation stayed the same. If people find your work valuable, they want to share it. Recommendations later became a major accelerator, but even that rested on the same base.

That is the deeper lesson. In the long game, growth is not something you hack. It is something you earn.

4 signals

Looking back, what stayed with me was not one big lesson, but a few quiet signals.

They were there early. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But enough to show that this was work worth staying with.

• It gave energy.
  Some work makes you feel more alive. Some work quietly drains you. After 36 weeks, this was still fun for Lenny. He still wanted to come back to it.

• It helped other people.
  This mattered just as much. People were reading the work, sharing it, and finding it useful. It was not just personally satisfying. It was doing something for someone else.

• The feedback felt real.
  Not just attention. Not just numbers. Something more solid than that. A post travels. Someone shares it. Readers come back. Over time, those signals start to mean something.

• It had staying power.
  This may matter most. A lot of things feel exciting for a month. Fewer things still make sense a few years later. What stayed with me in Lenny’s story was not just that he liked the work. It was that he found a way of doing it that he could keep.

Maybe that is the real question.

Not: Can I push through this for seven years?
But: Does this work still give energy, remain useful, and pull me back in?

One last thing

The work worth building around often reveals itself before it scales.
It keeps giving energy, stays useful, and remains worth returning to.

Thank you, Lenny.

If you enjoy stories like this — about work, growth, and what’s worth building around — subscribe to read more.

Subscribe now

“In 2025, my LinkedIn impressions fell by over 50%. But my side hustle doubled to $126K ARR.”

That’s Pawel Huryn, writing about his newsletter, Product Compass.

For most creators, that first sentence would be a crisis. When a platform stops pushing your posts, fewer people see them, fewer people click, fewer people subscribe. The math breaks.

Pawel’s math didn’t break. By the time LinkedIn impressions started falling, Product Compass had 130,000+ subscribers and was bringing in $25K a month. The LinkedIn drop didn’t dent any of it.

He’d spent two years building growth engines before the drop ever happened. This is how he built them.

The Growth Timeline

Pawel Huryn is a product manager based in Warsaw — 15+ years in tech, a decade in product, a stint as CPO. He started writing on LinkedIn around 2020, and by late 2022 he had 80,000+ followers.

“When I started, I already had 80K+ followers on LinkedIn. This helped me a lot.”

— Pawel Huryn, Newsletter Circle interview (June 2025)

In October 2022, he moved his newsletter from LinkedIn to Substack under a custom domain: productcompass.pm. The growth from there was steep. By April 2023, he had 15,166 subscribers. By mid-2023, 57,000. Today, he’s past 130,000.

He didn’t start from zero. But 80K LinkedIn followers and 130K newsletter subscribers are two very different things. The gap between them is the story.

How Product Compass Makes Money

In November 2024, Pawel wrote that his side hustle had hit $126K ARR. By mid-2025, Newsletter Circle reported he was bringing in $25K every month. You can do the math.

The revenue sits on three legs.

Paid subscriptions do the heavy lifting. $15/month or $120/year, with over 2,500 paying subscribers. At $120 a pop, that’s $300K a year — which lines up with the $25K monthly figure. The audience skews senior: product managers at mid-to-large companies, a third based in the US, UK, or Canada. At $120/year, this is the kind of expense an L&D budget covers without blinking.

Sponsorships bring in $2,000 per placement and each one drives 200–500 product clicks or 500–1,000 clicks on free content offers. But he’s absurdly selective about who he works with.

“It’s critical to me that the newsletter will never turn into a billboard. In the last 3 months, I’ve rejected 10+ offers — mostly SaaS tools that didn’t meet the bar. Currently, I work with only two long-term strategic partners and don’t even have the capacity to accept new companies.”

— Newsletter Circle interview (June 2025)

Products round it out: six video courses, a 1,800-member Slack community, 600+ curated PM resources.

One thing he tried that didn’t work: a reverse trial. He gave about 1,000 users free access to the paid tier. “It didn’t work,” he said. That’s the only failed experiment he’s publicly named out of what he calls “hundreds of small experiments.” He tested it, it flopped, he moved on.

What follows are the four engines that made that possible.

1. The SEO Content Matrix

Every day, over 2,000 people find Product Compass through Google. They’ve never seen Pawel on LinkedIn. They’ve never scrolled past one of his infographics. They just Googled something like “continuous product discovery 101” and landed on his site.

Substack’s default URL structure — yourname.substack.com — doesn’t play well with search engines. The platform wasn’t built for SEO, and almost nobody uses it that way.

Pawel built something different. The reason traces back to a decision he made before he even started on Substack. He saw LinkedIn as a single point of failure.

“Those products would drain my time and energy, and they wouldn’t address the risk of relying on LinkedIn — a single partner that could change the rules at any time and disrupt all those ‘diversified streams.’”

So when he moved to Substack in October 2022, he didn’t just move. He set up a custom domain: productcompass.pm.

Owning the Search Results

Google “continuous product discovery 101.” Product Compass is the #1 result. Google “product strategy canvas.” He holds #1 and #2 — the same person, occupying two spots on the first page. Search for anything Product Compass has written about, and you’ll see productcompass.pm. Not a single .substack.com page shows up.

The titles help. They’re written like things product managers actually search for: “Continuous Product Discovery 101,” “Product Strategy Canvas,” “Ultimate Guide to OKRs,” “Step-by-Step.” These aren’t SEO spam — they’re genuine PM topics. But the phrasing is no accident.

Three Years of Compound Indexing

Then there’s volume. In 2022, Pawel published 16 articles. In 2023, that jumped to 65+. In 2024, another 65+. Each one is an evergreen page that sits in Google’s index. Three years of that, and you don’t have a blog — you have a search matrix that covers the core vocabulary of product management.

When LinkedIn’s algorithm changed in 2025, those 2,000 daily visitors from Google didn’t notice.

2. The Inverted Paywall at High Frequency

Most newsletter creators give away most of their content for free and occasionally publish a paid post. Pawel does the opposite. Roughly three out of every four Product Compass articles are behind a paywall.

That sounds like a recipe for losing readers. But open one of those paywalled articles and you’ll see why it works.

The 40/60 Split

Take his OKR article. The first three sections are free — they cover why OKRs matter and what they are. That’s a complete piece of writing. You could stop there and walk away having learned something.

But after those three sections, there’s a paywall. Behind it: 2,446 more words, all covering how to actually do it. The front 40% delivers the concept. The back 60% delivers the playbook.

“I imagine a person who reads my newsletter and ask myself: what can I do to shock this person with actionable value they can immediately consume?”

— Newsletter Circle interview (June 2025)

He described three approaches he rotates between: deliver the value for free but link paid resources inside the article; place value both before and after the paywall; or, occasionally, paywall everything. It’s not a formula. It’s a design decision, made per article.

The 16-to-65 Jump

Here’s the thing about this system: volume is what makes it compound. Every paywalled article with a free preview is a separate entry point — a separate chance for someone to read, like what they see, and decide to pay for the rest. One article a week gives you 50 entry points a year. Three or four a week gives you 150+.

Pawel was nowhere near that pace. In 2022, he published 16 articles. The entire year. That’s roughly one every three weeks.

Why so few? Because he had a full-time job.

“At one point, I was going to give up writing my newsletter.”

— Pawel Huryn, LinkedIn post (March 2023)

The problem wasn’t the newsletter. The problem was doing both.

“Mental health can be an issue, especially when combining the newsletter with a full-time job. You can do it only temporarily. At 40 years old, I can no longer work 60 hours a week. I struggled with burnout while running a startup, and this could happen again.”

— Newsletter Circle interview (June 2025)

A 40-year-old CPO with two kids, doing product management by day and writing a newsletter at night. Sixty hours a week. He’d been through burnout before and could see it coming again.

In September 2023, he quit. “Last week, I decided to resign from my job,” he posted on LinkedIn. “The market looks tough.”

The market may have been tough, but the math changed overnight. In 2023, he published 65+ articles. In 2024, another 65+. That’s roughly three or four a week — and with a 3:1 paid-to-free ratio, that’s 2-3 new paywalled articles every week, each one with a free preview acting as its own acquisition funnel.

How the Pieces Connect

Put the two pieces together. SEO and social bring visitors to Product Compass. They land on a paywalled article. The free portion delivers real value — enough to prove this writer knows what he’s talking about. The paywall promises the operational detail. Some percentage converts.

Multiply that by 65+ articles a year, each with a free front half, and you get roughly 50 active funnels sitting in Google’s index at any given time — running 24/7, no promotion required.

Want to grow your Substack with data, not guesswork? The Stacker breaks down how top creators actually grow — one deep dive at a time. If you found this useful, subscribe to get the next one.

3. LinkedIn Posts That Stand Alone

Open Pawel’s LinkedIn profile and you’ll notice something odd. Here’s a guy with 230,000+ followers who built his newsletter on the back of LinkedIn — and almost none of his posts contain a link to that newsletter.and his posts read like they have nothing to sell. He does link to the newsletter. But the posts don’t need you to click. Each one is a self-contained piece of value: an infographic, a framework breakdown, a concept comparison. You read it, you get something useful, you move on.

The Posts

His PO vs. PM series — three posts purely comparing the two roles — racked up over 1,000 comments combined. Zero outbound links. He posted infographics with no written explanation at all, just an image and a topic. Those got 99 to 124 comments each. A tools list post hit 181 comments. None of these posts needed you to click anywhere to get the point.And this wasn’t a style he evolved into.His earliest posts from 2022 already looked like this — visual, standalone, complete on their own.

Why It Works

When a post delivers complete value on its own — whether or not it contains a link — people share it. Every share pushes Pawel’s name outside his own feed. Some of those people go to Google, type “Product Compass,” and land on productcompass.pm — where the SEO matrix from lever 1 is waiting for them.

He tracks a metric that reflects exactly this.

“My North Star Metric became the number of Substack posts shared per week. It’s a single metric. It reflects how readers get value from the product.”

— Newsletter Circle interview (June 2025)

He does the same thing on Substack Notes.

“Rather than posting links to my issues, I create summaries that provide value without the need to open my full posts. The link to the full post is included as a bonus, without a preview.”

Same philosophy, different platform. The post is the product.The link is a bonus.

LinkedIn now accounts for only about 30% of Product Compass’s subscriber acquisition. The rest comes from Substack Notes, X, and organic recommendations.

“Don’t chase vanity metrics. Address the right audience to get the right engagement.”

4. The AI Pivot

You can read a newsletter’s strategy in its titles.

In 2022, Product Compass articles were called things like “Continuous Product Discovery 101” and “Product Strategy Canvas.” Classic PM topics. In 2024, the titles shifted: “How to Use Claude for Product Discovery,” “AI Agents for Product Managers,” “Building SaaS With n8n.” By 2025, almost every title had AI in it.

The Gap in the Market

ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Within a year, every product manager was asking the same question: is AI going to replace me? The anxiety was everywhere. The useful answers were not.

The AI newsletters were writing for developers and founders. The PM newsletters were still writing about OKRs and sprint planning. Nobody was explaining AI specifically for product managers — how to use it, how to think about it, how to not get left behind. Pawel planted himself in that gap.

Where everyone else was asking “will AI replace us?”, he was writing “here’s how to use it.” He wasn’t just commenting from the sidelines, either. His sitemap shows articles co-authored with Miqdad Jaffer from OpenAI. He’d gone from covering AI to collaborating with the people building it.

Why It Mattered for Growth

The AI pivot explains the other half of the LinkedIn paradox. Levers 1 through 3 explain why the floor didn’t collapse when LinkedIn impressions dropped. The AI pivot explains why the ceiling kept rising.

New readers weren’t finding Product Compass because of LinkedIn. They were finding it because they Googled “AI for product managers” and landed on one of 65+ articles published that year — each one indexed, each one with a free preview, each one designed to convert.

What Ties It All Together

“There isn’t one big lesson. It’s hundreds of small experiments and incremental improvements that compound over time. If I had to pick one, it would be this: look at the data — I check it daily and could quote metrics if you woke me up at 3 a.m. — form hypotheses, and run experiments to maximize your learning speed.”

— Pawel Huryn, Newsletter Circle interview (June 2025)

None of the four levers in this article happened by accident. The SEO matrix took three years of publishing to build. The inverted paywall took dozens of experiments to calibrate — Pawel himself says the reverse trial flopped, and that was just one of hundreds. LinkedIn required a counterintuitive discipline: stop linking to the thing you’re trying to grow. And the AI pivot meant betting half his content calendar on a shift that, at the time, most PM writers were still just commenting on. (That specific window — AI-meets-PM — was open in 2023–2024. It’s more crowded now. But the underlying move — spotting a massive shift and committing before the competition does — that doesn’t expire.)

Each one was a channel — not a hack, not a trick, not a viral moment. A channel that would keep working whether Pawel was online that day or not.

That’s also why he said no to almost everything else. He published a list once: 54+ opportunities rejected — podcast invitations, sponsorship proposals, coaching requests, job interviews. Every hour spent on those was an hour not spent building the next channel.

“Strategy is not about what you do. It’s, more importantly, about saying no to opportunities that might distract you.”

Which brings us back to the beginning. LinkedIn impressions drop 50%, and nothing breaks. The revenue doubles anyway. By the time the algorithm changed, the infrastructure had been there for years.

The Gap in Substack's Toolbox

You sat down on Sunday and wrote five great Notes. Timely takes, thoughtful threads, a spicy hot take you’ve been saving. Now what?

You can’t schedule them. Substack lets you schedule long-form posts — but Notes? There’s no schedule button. At all.

Your only option: set an alarm, open Substack, manually hit publish, and repeat five times throughout the week. Miss the window? Your Note goes out at 2 AM when nobody’s reading.

This is the reality for every Substack creator using Notes. You either publish everything at once (and flood your subscribers), or you become a human scheduler — tied to your phone at posting time.

We built BlogFlyer because we got tired of this. It’s a Notes scheduler for Substack — write whenever you want, publish whenever you choose, automatically.

How It Works

First: Set Your Rhythm

Before you start writing, set up your publishing schedule. It lets you define recurring Time Slots — specific days and times when you want Notes to go out. Pick a preset or customize your own:

• Workday Focus — Mon-Fri intensive, lighter weekends

• Weekend Blast — Light weekdays, heavy weekends

• Daily Focus — Evenly distributed every day

Once set, the Studio sidebar shows your next 14 days at a glance — every slot, filled or empty. You can immediately see where you have content planned and where the gaps are.

Step 1: Write Your Note

The Studio gives you a full rich text editor — currently supporting bold, italic, and images. Links, @mentions, YouTube embeds, and more are coming soon. Our goal is a fully WYSIWYG experience that matches Substack exactly.

Step 2: Pick Your Time

Hit the send button and choose:

• Schedule At — pick from your next available Time Slots or choose a custom date and time

• Publish Now — send it immediately

• Save to Draft — park it for later

One click and you’re done.

Step 3: Walk Away

That’s it. BlogFlyer’s Chrome Extension handles the rest — when the scheduled time arrives, it auto-publishes your Note directly to Substack.

Why a Chrome Extension? Substack doesn’t offer a public API for Notes. The extension is the bridge between BlogFlyer and your Substack account — it’s what makes auto-publishing possible. You don’t need to keep any tab open. Just keep your browser running in the background.

And if something goes wrong? BlogFlyer catches failed publishes and lets you retry with one click. Nothing gets silently lost.

Built Specifically for Substack

BlogFlyer isn’t a generic social media scheduler. It does one thing — Notes scheduling for Substack — and it does it well:

Available now:

• Bold, italic, and rich text formatting

• Image uploads (even HEIC from your iPhone — auto-converted)

Coming soon:

• Video uploads

• Inline links

• Quote other Substack posts

We're building toward full parity with Substack's own editor — what you compose in BlogFlyer is what your readers see on Substack.

Getting Started Takes 2 Minutes

1. Install the Chrome Extension — one click from the Chrome Web Store

2. Link your Substack — the Extension detects your login automatically

3. Set your timezone and rhythm — pick a preset or customize

That’s your onboarding. You’re in the Studio, writing and scheduling, in under two minutes.

Pricing

We believe every Substack creator should be able to schedule Notes. That’s why the free tier is real — not a 7-day trial that disappears.

Starter — Free
15 scheduled Notes per week, up to 30 drafts

Pro — $9.99/mo
Unlimited scheduling, unlimited drafts

Founding Member — $49 one-time (Lifetime)
Unlimited everything, early beta features, direct founder access

The Founding Member deal is our early adopter thank-you — lifetime access for a one-time payment. It won’t be around forever.

We Use It Every Day

BlogFlyer launched two weeks ago and already has 100+ registered users. I’ve personally used it to schedule and publish 23 Notes — the kind of consistent output that would have been impossible if I had to hit “publish” manually every time.

If you’re a Substack creator who wishes Notes had a schedule button, give BlogFlyer a try.

Try BlogFlyer Free →

One More Thing

We’re building something new: Note Inspiration — a way to discover high-performing Notes on Substack, learn what works, and draft your own version right inside BlogFlyer.

Think of it as a research tool meets writing assistant for Notes. It’s just the first of several features we’re building on top of the scheduler.

Coming soon. If you want early access, let us know →

BypassX to keep your links alive on Twitter.

Substack Wrapped to celebrate your milestones.

Substack Downloader to backup your work.

5,000 substackers used them.

We thought that would be enough.

But the deeper we went into this community, the clearer the problem became:

Substack is home to the world’s best minds and stories.

Yet it lacks the infrastructure to help those stories travel.

We saw too many talented writers trapped in the grind—

Pouring their hearts into content that deserves an audience,

but stuck doing grunt work:

scheduling, slicing, distributing...

You have great content. You just need leverage.

We couldn’t stay on the sidelines.

So we acquired SubstackTools.com and made the call:

We quit our jobs. We went all-in.

BlogFlyer is no longer a side project.

It’s our full-time bet on this community.

Here’s the thing about writing:

Deep work demands 100% focus.

But growth demands something else entirely—

scheduling, slicing notes, distributing.

The real killer isn’t the work itself. It’s the switching cost.

Every time you jump from “Writer Mode” to “Manager Mode”—to schedule a Note, check analytics, plan tomorrow’s post—you shatter your flow.

You drain the creative battery you need for the next piece.

So here’s our bet:

Your energy should go to two things only:

Craft. And Connection.

The mechanical work?

The scheduling. The slicing. The distribution.

That’s on us.

Today, we are releasing Version 0.1.

It does one thing:

Visual Note Scheduling + Draft Management.

Why start here? Because Substack Notes is the biggest growth opportunity right now, yet the posting experience is fragmented.

You’re either scrambling every morning for “what to post today,” or you’re hoarding ideas in your head until they evaporate.

• 🧠 Capture Your Sparks (Drafts): Don’t hold ideas in your head. Whether you are reading or walking, save your fragmented thoughts into BlogFlyer Drafts.

• 📅 Visual Command Center (Scheduler): Drag your drafts onto the calendar. Plan your entire week in 15 minutes, then close the tab.

No more “What do I post tomorrow?” No more daily scrambling.

Just batch it once, then forget it.

Here’s what’s next.

This isn’t a feature list. It’s a growth map—designed in the exact order you’ll need it.

Right now, you’re drowning in daily posting.

That’s why we started with Scheduling (V0.1, live today).

Once you’ve got breathing room, the next bottleneck appears:

“What do I write that actually works?”

That’s V0.2: Viral Intelligence.

We’re indexing millions of Substack Notes to show you:

• What hooks are working in your niche right now

• Which topics are trending

• Who the top creators are (so you can engage strategically)

No more writer’s block. No more posting into the void.

You’ll know what works before you write it.

Then comes V0.3: Content Remixing.

Your archive isn’t dead weight—it’s a gold mine.

We’re building AI to automatically turn your old posts into fresh Notes.

Your past work keeps working for you.

That’s compound interest for writers.

Finally, V0.4: Cross-Platform Distribution.

Substack is home. But the internet is the battlefield.

We’ll help you sync your best content to X, LinkedIn, and funnel traffic back.

Omnipresence. Not just presence.

But here’s the thing:

We have limited engineering hours. So you decide what we build next.

Which do you need first?

Option 1: The “Crystal Ball” (Viral Intelligence)

• See exactly what’s working in your niche before you write.

Option 2: The “Time Machine”(Content Remixing)

• Turn your archive into fresh Notes automatically.

Drop a comment: Crystal Ball 🔮 or Time Machine ⏳? Your vote shapes our roadmap.

Leave a comment

Soon, BlogFlyer will be $19.9/month.

But for the first 100 members, we are bypassing the subscription model completely.

Pay $49 once. Own the Foundation forever.

(That’s less than the cost of 3 months of subscription, for a lifetime of value.)

What you get:

✅ Lifetime access to Visual Scheduler + Drafts

✅ First access to new features (Viral Intelligence, AI Remixing)

✅ Direct line to the founders—your feedback shapes the roadmap

👉Get Lifetime Access for $49

You’re joining the founding team.

💡 A quick note:

This covers the core platform (V0.1).

Advanced AI features may be add-ons due to API costs.

But as a Founder, you’ll always get the best terms we can offer.

100 spots. First come, first served.

Not ready to buy?

Get 1 month free instead.

Here’s how (takes 30 seconds):

1. Restack this post ♻️(tag @ so we see it)

Share it to your Notes so other creators can find us.

Share

Quick copy-paste for your Restack:

Substack is for writing. SubstackTools.com is for growth.@ is offering a Free Month for early supporters. Check it out！

2. Create your free account 👤
Go to SubstackTools.com and sign up. It takes 10 seconds.

Sign up at SubstackTools.com

3. DM us your email 📩
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Click the "Message" button below to send @ a private message with your sign-up email.

We will verify it and activate your 1-Month Free Membership within 24 hours.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

Let’s make 2026 different.

No more burnout.

No more grinding on mechanics while your creativity starves.

Start the year with a system, not just willpower.

You write. We distribute.

You create. We amplify.

Because the best writing deserves to be seen.

And the best writers deserve to focus on what they do best.

We’re all-in on this.

If you’re ready, join us.

—The BlogFlyer Team

P.S.

1. The News: We quit our jobs to go All-In on SubstackTools.com.

2. The Deal: Join the Founding Member 100.Pay $49 once to lock in the Scheduler Suite forever.

   👉Get Lifetime Access for $49

3. The Gift: Not ready to buy?
   Restack this post (tagging @ ) to get 1 Month Free.

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