Should Founders Start a Substack?
Substack isn't growing because newsletters came back in style. It's growing because ownership became the moat.
Substack isn't growing because newsletters came back in style. It's growing because ownership became the moat.
Yes, starting a Substack is worth it for most founders, but not for the reason it's usually sold on. The real advantage isn't that newsletters are 'back' or trendy again. It's structural: every subscriber on a Substack is an email address you own, not a follower count sitting on someone else's server, and that ownership is what makes the format worth the effort.
Substack's growth numbers this year back that up, though I'd treat the specifics as directional rather than exact. Traffic reportedly grew 41 percent year over year as of mid-2026, at a time when only a handful of the world's biggest websites grew at all. Active subscriptions reportedly climbed from around 20 million to roughly 35 million. Those figures come from third-party analytics, not Substack's own disclosures, so I wouldn't repeat them as confirmed fact. But the pattern underneath them is real: in an internet built around keeping people inside an app, a platform is growing by helping people leave it, or never be fully inside it to begin with.
Why does ownership actually matter more than reach?
Most of the internet's biggest winners over the last decade got big by capturing attention inside their own walls: a feed, an algorithm, a reason to never leave. A list you own works the opposite way. It doesn't reshuffle based on engagement. It doesn't get buried by what got posted after it. An email sent six months ago still sits in someone's inbox, still searchable, still linkable, long after a social post from the same week has vanished under everything posted since. That's the actual case for Substack: not that it's a nicer place to write, but that what you build there doesn't disappear the way a feed post does.
What questions should you actually answer before starting one?
1. Am I trying to own an audience, or just reach a new one? Social platforms are still the fastest way to find new people. Substack doesn't replace that job, it does a different one. 2. Can I write something regularly enough to justify a dedicated list? A newsletter that goes quiet for three months loses trust faster than an inconsistent Instagram. 3. Does this content actually benefit from permanence? Some content is disposable by design. Long-form thinking, founder updates and real opinions are the kind that's worth a format where nothing gets buried. 4. Am I ready to treat it as a separate channel, not an automatic extension of everything else I post?
That last question matters more than it sounds. I run most of my own content through one repeatable pipeline: film once, edit the raw footage into reels, captions, carousels and a blog article, then schedule all of it out through the platforms I use. Substack doesn't sit inside that loop. It's a separate funnel for me, not something that flows through the same repurposing pipeline automatically. I write there, but the writing and any audio that goes with it is its own extra step. That's a genuine limitation I've found, not something I've solved yet, and I'd rather say that plainly than pretend Substack is one more output my existing workflow spits out for free.
What Substack doesn't fix
Here's the part that gets skipped in most of the enthusiasm around Substack's growth: it only fixes ownership going forward, for whatever you deliberately choose to write there from this point on. It does nothing for the three - ten years of Instagram posts, the YouTube videos, the podcast appearances you've already done, the archive of work that's already sitting out there disappearing the exact same way a buried social post does. A founder who starts a Substack today still has everything they made before that decision scattered across platforms with no lasting home. That's a different problem from 'where do I publish next,' and it needs a different fix.
This is the gap I built The Culo Village for. Substack applies ownership logic to new writing. The Village applies the same logic to everything you've already published across every platform you've ever used, turning old content into something that still has a findable home instead of being buried under whatever got posted after it. The two problems look similar on the surface, both are about content disappearing, but one is about what you write next and the other is about what you already made. Solving one doesn't automatically solve the other.
the bigger claims circulating about Substack right now, like the idea it could cross 50 million paid subscribers, trace back to an informal comment from someone at the company, not a published target. It's a plausible story, not a confirmed one. I'd rather underclaim the hype and focus on the part that's actually solid: an owned list behaves fundamentally differently from a feed, regardless of exactly how fast the platform itself is growing this quarter.
If you're deciding whether to start one, start from the actual problem you're trying to solve. If you want a direct line to people who don't disappear when an algorithm changes, Substack is a reasonable place to build that, as long as you're honest that it's a separate commitment, not a free extra channel your existing content workflow will fill on its own. And if the real problem sitting in front of you is three years of posts you've already made with nowhere permanent to live, that's not a newsletter problem at all. Start by figuring out which one you're actually trying to solve before picking the platform.
Join the Culo Village to republish the posts you have already distributed as individual web articles, then use Culo Creatives in Canva in one repeatable, sustainable workflow.