I Built A Substack Growth Strategy With Claude And Stuck To It For 90 Days. My Subscribers Went from 890 to 2,600.
Two months of flatlining, one AI audit, and a positioning fix that changed everything
I spent over a year reaching my first thousand subscribers, yet it took just 2.5 months to gain my second thousand. And I have to admit — Claude helped me enormously with that.
I started my newsletter by exploring how AI could be useful in running it and building an audience.
On Substack, it’s not enough to simply publish your writing — you need to understand the rules of the game and Substack culture.
To learn this, I read publications about growing on Substack and bought two workshops: one on Notes and one on creating and selling digital products.
But as I tried to implement the workshop recommendations, I kept running into other questions that weren’t covered in the curriculum.
Turning to Substack growth consultants would have been the easy option — they have a lot of experience — but it’s quite an expensive service, and my budget was limited. Since I was already studying AI, I started trying to answer these questions with its help. I used Claude, and it made a genuine difference.
Below I'll share how I worked with Claude and what helped me gain over 1,700 subscribers in 3 months.
My Case: 890 Subscribers and Two Months of Feeling Invisible
In February of this year — exactly 12 months after starting my Substack — I had 890 subscribers, and that number hadn’t moved in two months. After the Christmas break, my Substack felt like it had gone invisible. At first I wasn’t worried; I’d hit plateaus before, so I did what I usually do in those situations.
I started posting 2 Notes per day regularly, participating in Notes boosts, engaging with other authors, and publishing one post per week. Usually a week was enough to revive the account. But this time was different. New subscribers weren’t coming, and existing ones were leaving.
Two months in, I started thinking this might be my ceiling on Substack, and that perhaps it was time to switch platforms.
But before leaving, I decided to run an experiment and bring Claude into it. At the very least, I thought, it would make for an interesting experiment — testing how good Claude is as a social media growth consultant.
Step 1: Letting Claude Diagnose the Problem
The first thing I did was ask Claude to analyze my account (specifically, Claude for Chrome) and tell me why it wasn’t growing and how to fix it.
I described my problem and uploaded all my key metrics from the past two months. Claude gave me its analysis and proposed an account development strategy. From that strategy, two recommendations stood out in particular:
to reduce my activity.
to conduct a positioning analysis, since positioning mistakes very often lead to audience loss.
I already sensed on my own that I was losing connection with my audience — comments had nearly dried up, whereas even in the early days with just 100 subscribers, my posts always sparked interesting discussions. So my next step was to analyze my positioning, identify the mistakes, and correct them.
The first recommendation — reducing activity — felt completely counterintuitive and contradicted most advice from Substack specialists, who generally recommend increasing the number of posts. But I understood that if the problem was with positioning, there was no point in publishing more. All that effort would go to waste.
So I followed this advice. After 2 months of active Notes posting and participation in boosts, I almost disappeared from Substack — only my weekly posts continued going out on schedule, once a week.
Strangely enough, this tactic worked (I wrote about it in more detail in this post). First the unsubscribes stopped, then new subscribers slowly started arriving. In two weeks of reduced activity, I gained 11 people. Not a lot, but for me it was already a win.
After those 2 weeks, I returned to active Notes posting — and one of them unexpectedly went viral. But this was preceded by another action I took following Claude’s advice.
Step 2: Repositioning — The Move That Changed Everything
In analyzing my account, Claude pointed out that my posts fell predominantly into three topic categories and one of those categories generated the most likes and comments. Surprisingly, it turned out that this was precisely the category I was posting least frequently. In other words, I was simply ignoring the main interest of my core audience.
Claude recommended posting more frequently on the topic that resonated most, and also renaming my publication to reflect this.
At that point, my Substack publication was simply listed under my personal name, Alesia Zakharova. I asked Claude to make the case for why I should change that. Its arguments convinced me. That’s how Grow Smarter With AI was born.
After that, also with Claude’s assistance, I rewrote my bio to align with the new publication brand. And literally in the very first week after making these changes, one of my Notes went viral — it got 2,6k likes over two weeks and brought me over 300 new subscribers.
Still Trying to Figure Out Why Your Substack Isn't Growing?
Figuring out how to reposition — what data to collect, which prompts to use, how to turn raw analysis into decisions that actually attract subscribers — took me months of trial and error.
So I documented everything into one step-by-step playbook: The Substack Positioning Playbook.
This is for you if:
You’re writing consistently but growth has stalled
You’re not sure what makes your Substack different from the dozens of others in your niche
You’re getting visitors but they’re not subscribing — or they subscribe and disappear
You know your topic, but you can’t quite articulate why someone should read you specifically
Here’s exactly what’s inside:
Prompts to find your niche if you don’t know what to write about — or can’t choose between several ideas
Prompts to diagnose the mistakes in your current positioning and fix them
Step-by-step instructions for collecting data manually and automatically with Claude for Chrome
Prompts to differentiate yourself from competitors so readers instantly understand why they should choose you
Prompts to analyze engagement by topic and identify what your audience actually responds to
Prompts to write and refine your Substack bio — so it attracts the right readers, not just any readers
What changes after you apply this playbook:
You find your specific angle — the one that makes the right readers think this is exactly what I’ve been looking for.
New subscribers start arriving every day, free and paid, because your positioning finally speaks to the right people.
Your open rates climb, because the people subscribing now genuinely care about what you write.
Comments appear under your posts. Real conversations, not silence.
And your newsletter starts generating income — because when you know exactly who you serve and what problem you solve, monetization becomes the natural next step.
⏳ Introductory price: $19
I’m releasing this at a lower price while the first readers go through it and share feedback. Once I have enough reviews to know it’s working for others the way it worked for me, the price goes up.
If you’re reading this, you’re early.
What Happens After A Note Goes Viral
When a Note goes viral, two things are important to do:
1) reply to all comments — this sustains traffic to your page; and
2) actively publish Notes and posts during this window.
A few numbers:
After that 2,6k-like Note, all my subsequent Notes attracted high view counts. It’s worth noting that I don’t post Notes randomly — I follow a system I developed over a year (I wrote a bit about this in this post).
In the month following the viral Note, my Notes averaged 50–150 likes and 20–30 comments each. Another Note went viral during that time, reaching 1,8k likes.
The next month was calmer — Notes averaged 17–60 likes, though one reached 310 and another nearly 1,000.
In addition, during that first month after the viral Note, several of my posts also became very popular, which I don’t believe was a coincidence. When account traffic is active, the algorithm seems to respond and starts showing posts in the feed too.
That said, it doesn’t mean posts require any less careful work. Far from all of my posts that month became popular.
One post might get over 100 or 500 likes with dozens or hundreds of comments, while the next would get just 32 likes and 1–2 comments — at the same traffic level. So content matters a great deal, not just account activity.
You need to think carefully about both topics and — especially — headlines. Headlines are an art in themselves, which I’ll discuss more in the next section.
In total, the viral Note brought roughly 300 subscribers, while all subsequent Notes each brought at least 1–7 more, and another viral Note brought 100 new subscribers.
People started recommending my account, and a meaningful number arrived through recommendations and reposts of my content.
A month later, subscriber growth continued, though at a slower pace. Notes were getting fewer likes, but I kept replying to comments daily — there were quite a lot accumulated from previous Notes and posts — and I think this kept the account’s activity going.
In the next month, posts became my main engine.
Step 3: Posts — Where Consistency Finally Compounds
First, I focused specifically on the topic Claude had flagged as the most popular with my readers.
Second, I created headlines with Claude’s assistance. In my view, professional tools like NeuronWriter handle this task better than Claude. Even so, Claude can give quite decent advice based on its default settings.
I conducted an analysis of viral post headlines (you can read it in this post) and used those findings when crafting my own. Together, it all paid off. The number of likes and comments grew tenfold compared to my previous posts.
My posts typically got 14–25 likes and around 400–550 views on average.
In recent months, they
have been getting over 1,000 views, and two posts unexpectedly became top performers — 6,460 views and 14,600 views.
What’s also very gratifying is that my old posts started getting read again too, with many seeing increases in views and likes.
Through posts alone, I gained 445 subscribers over the following month and a half.
In the very beginning, posts don’t usually bring subscribers directly — but gradually, as the account grows, they do.
The Full Formula: What Actually Worked
Summing up everything I did over those 3 months, the combination that worked for me was:
Account analysis — identifying the strongest and weakest points
Repositioning based on the analysis results
Renaming the publication
Posting Notes according to a defined system
Participating in Notes boosts
Replying to all comments whenever possible
Publishing posts regularly (once a week for me)
Crafting topics and headlines in line with the new positioning
Does Claude Actually Understand Substack?
In the comments, people asked me: does Claude really understand Substack that well? Claude certainly has access to extensive general information about Substack and growing on the platform, and can provide solid general guidance — especially for first steps. But to get a truly individualized strategy from it, you do need your own account data and the right prompts.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Your Turn
Every Substack is different — different niche, different audience, different starting point. And the longer I do this, the more I realize that some of the most useful insights don’t come from strategies or playbooks. They come from the comments section.
So let’s discuss:
Where are you right now with your Substack — and what’s the one thing you’re most stuck on?
Are you just starting out and not sure how to position yourself? Have you been publishing for a while but feel like you're writing into the void? I read every comment and reply to as many as I can.
I’ve been posting regularly since October 2025. I didn’t know what to write about at first and that slowly envolved to my current main topic.
I use AI as an editor and thought partner. I rarely use for running analysis. I will get your package as soon as I get home. I like AI a lot and I think there is a way to use it while still say that the work is yours.
I’ve enjoyed all of your articles so far. Cheers.
Hi there
,https://jerryashukemegbe.substack.com/p/where-god-listens?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=6204je