One Subscriber

It is a Tuesday morning. I am at my desk. I have just published an essay, and I am refreshing my Substack stats for the eighth time in twenty minutes.

The number is one.

One subscriber. A number small enough to be embarrassing if I let it be.

I am not letting it be. I don’t know this subscriber, but I am going to thank them anyway.

The dishonest version of building in public

The most dishonest thing happening on the internet in 2026 is the building-in-public movement.

Most of it is reverse-engineered storytelling. Someone hits a milestone, then writes the journey backwards as if it was inevitable. The one-subscriber month is omitted because it does not fit the arc. The fifty-subscriber month is downplayed because it is not yet impressive. The five-thousand-subscriber month becomes the origin story.

The actual origin is messier. It is quieter. It is mostly waiting.

I have read enough of these polished origin posts to start noticing the seams. The numbers always look like they followed each other naturally. The lessons always sound like they were obvious in hindsight. The struggles are always packaged into neat little arcs that resolve in the next paragraph.

That is not what it actually feels like.

What it actually feels like is a Tuesday morning at your desk refreshing the stats page.

What the boring middle actually feels like

I started writing publicly about a month ago. I have published a website. I have written some essays. A few have done well by my standards, which is a low bar. Most have done nothing. The chart of my engagement is a flat line with occasional small bumps that I have to remind myself are not random.

Here is what a publication day actually looks like.

You write the essay over a few evenings. You edit it more than you wrote it. You hit publish at a time you read somewhere is optimal. The first hour, you check engagement obsessively. The second hour, you tell yourself you will stop checking. The third hour, you check again. The fourth hour, you go to sleep. The next morning, the numbers are roughly what they were.

This is the rhythm. There is no momentum yet. There are only individual acts of publishing.

Nobody who is honest about this stage of building tells you how strange it feels to put real thinking into the world and watch it land in a small puddle. You spent four evenings on this essay. You read it twice before bed. You almost did not publish it because the second-to-last line felt off. And then it goes up, and three people like it, and one person sends a kind reply, and that is the day.

The temptation, then, is to try harder. To optimize.

The trap of optimizing at zero

When the numbers do not move, the temptation is to optimize.

Try a different format. Test threads. Try shorter posts. Try longer posts. Try hooks. Try lists. Maybe write more about AI. Maybe write less about AI. Maybe a different posting schedule. Maybe move to a different platform.

I am suspicious of all this advice now. Not because it is wrong. Some of it is right. But because the act of running these experiments is itself a way of avoiding the harder thing, which is just continuing to publish honestly while the audience is small.

Optimization at zero is procrastination dressed up as strategy.

What actually compounds, as far as I can tell, is the body of work. Not any one essay. The whole shelf. People do not subscribe to a single post. They subscribe when they read three things in a row that feel like the same person thinking.

That takes a year of essays, not a month.

What I have stopped doing

The other thing I have stopped doing is performing the journey.

The “month one update, here is what I learned” content. It is almost always early. A month in, you do not know anything. You have hypotheses. The hypotheses sound like lessons because they pattern-match to lessons. They are not yet lessons. Lessons require survival, and most projects do not survive that long.

I have decided I would rather write about thinking than write about writing. The meta content can wait until the work has earned the right to comment on itself.

This is the only essay I am writing about the early stage of this project. The next time I write about it, the number will have changed, or it will not, but I will have something else to say. Something about an idea, or a book, or a small observation. The work itself, not the work about the work.

What is actually hard

I want to be honest about what is actually hard, since this is supposedly a building-in-public essay.

The hard part is not writing. I write fine. The hard part is not ideas. I have more ideas than time.

The hard part is the silence after publishing. The hour where the post is up and almost nobody has seen it. The compulsion to refresh. The voice that says: maybe this one will not land. The voice that says: maybe none of them will. The voice that says: you are one month in, what makes you think one year is going to be different.

I do not have an answer to that voice.

I just know that quitting it gets the same answer faster.

The only thing I can offer

If you are reading this and you are also thousands of subscribers away from your goal, here is the only honest thing I can offer.

The numbers are not the project. They are a delayed report on the project. The project is what you do today, with no one watching, when there is no clear sign that any of it will work.

That is the part that compounds. Quietly. Over a longer time horizon than is comfortable.

I will see you at the next number.