Building Community Through Substack Notes

Published: September 2026

Treating Notes purely as a broadcast channel - write, post, hope for likes - misses what actually makes the format work. Notes function best as relationship infrastructure: the place where the back-and-forth with readers and other writers actually happens, which is also, not coincidentally, the thing the algorithm rewards most.

Followers, subscribers, and where loyalty actually sits

It's worth being precise about the distinction, since it shapes what "community" even means on this platform. A useful framework splits Substack's audience into tiers by loyalty: brand-new followers (largest group, minimal loyalty), existing subscribers, subscribers showing some affinity who might upgrade, and paid subscribers - the tier one writer describes as your actual "fans" (Mack Collier). Followers see your Notes in their feed but never get your emails; only subscribers get both. Each channel does different work across these tiers: Notes reach the broadest audience but create the shallowest initial connection, while full posts deepen the relationship with people already subscribed, and direct engagement (chats, replies, DMs) is what actually moves someone from casual reader to advocate. As Collier puts it, "when you cultivate fans, you are cultivating revenue" - community isn't a soft add-on to growth, it's the mechanism that produces it.

A real case study: a 300+ writer support network

One of the more concrete examples of this in practice: a writer built a recurring "Notes Boost" thread, shared twice a week in Substack Chat, where 300+ writers restack each other's Notes and leave thoughtful comments. The entire routine took about 30 minutes a week - five minutes to write the post, the rest spent actually engaging. The writer reports 70-80% of their total growth came from Notes specifically, alongside 900+ new subscribers in a single 30-day period tied to this kind of community activity (Escape the Cubicle). Their own framing of why it worked: "Community beats tactics every single time" - the growth wasn't the result of a clever trick, it compounded because the restacking loop meant "the algorithm starts showing YOUR content to THEIR audience. And vice versa," which lines up directly with the audience-overlap mechanism behind restacks covered elsewhere on this blog.

What actually gets a real conversation started

Community requires two-way engagement, not just an audience nodding along, and specific formats reliably produce that better than others. Open-ended questions - something like "what's the biggest misconception about your industry?" - generate roughly 3.2x more comments than a standard update or announcement. The underlying reason isn't just curiosity: a separate survey found that 63% of subscribers feel more connected to creators who regularly solicit their opinions. Asking isn't a soft, optional touch - it's a specific, measurable driver of the exact two-way engagement that separates a community from an audience. This lines up directly with the tactics covered in getting more replies on Notes - the formats that spark dialogue are the same ones that build community, viewed from two different angles.

Why comments and restacks compound into visibility

There's a direct feedback loop worth understanding here: more comments and restacks mean more visibility in the algorithm, more visibility means more new followers, and more followers mean more potential subscribers. Comments and reposts are reported to matter more than likes specifically because they're the signals that push content into audiences beyond your existing readers - a like stays contained within your existing audience, while a comment or restack is an action visible to someone else's followers too. Community-building activity isn't separate from growth activity here; it's the same activity, described from a relationship angle instead of a metrics angle.

What the scale data suggests, with appropriate caution

A larger-scale analysis of 1.3 million Notes from 13,534 authors found that top-performing newsletters (10,000+ paid subscribers) post 30+ Notes a month, correlating with roughly 10x engagement growth over 12 months. It's worth being careful with a finding like this: it's a correlation, not proof that posting volume alone causes that growth - the newsletters posting 30+ times a month are also very likely the ones already deep into the kind of community-building engagement described above. The volume is probably a symptom of an active, engaged writer, not the cause of the growth on its own.

A practical way to start building this yourself

You don't need 300 writers to get the benefit of this dynamic - a much smaller version works the same way:

• Find 5-10 writers in your niche whose audience genuinely overlaps with yours, the same alignment principle that makes restacking and recommendations effective
• Restack and comment on their Notes regularly, not as a one-time favor but as an ongoing habit - genuine engagement compounds, and a single restack exchange does little on its own
• Ask your own readers open-ended questions in Notes rather than only posting polished statements, since that's the specific format shown to generate meaningfully more comments
• Treat your paid subscribers differently from your broader follower base - a personal reply or acknowledgment to your most engaged readers builds the kind of loyalty that turns a subscriber into an advocate, not just a number

The bottom line

The writers seeing outsized growth from Notes aren't necessarily better writers - they're treating Notes as a relationship channel first and a distribution channel second, and getting the distribution as a byproduct of the relationships. Building even a small, genuine support network of writers you regularly engage with, and asking your own readers real questions instead of only broadcasting at them, does more for long-term growth than any single tactic aimed at gaming the feed directly.

NotesIQ shows you which of your Notes actually spark real engagement - comments and restacks, not just passive likes - so you can see your own community-building efforts pay off in the numbers.