A Substack creator shares how audience fatigue from AI-generated newsletters forced a strategic shift in 2025. Instead of daily content, they introduced weekly paid chats and hands-on workshops. Community became the anchor, reigniting growth after hitting a plateau.
get started. So welcome to the Business Roundtable. And so this initiative is really for us, is really a safe space where we can connect, we can share. I have a loose agenda, but I did the session yesterday for Europe and Australia, and it was steered towards one direction. So I'm not going to pause it or try to redirect. I really want this to be a space where we can all share, ask the questions that we want. And also, depending on who is joining, we will see that it tends to gravitate towards one area. or the other. So I'm admitting quite a few people that, um, that are joining, and I'm just gonna kickstart a little bit with, uh, just giving you an update on my own business, where I am today, uh, the changes that I've seen, especially on Substack, but not only Substack. This roundtable is not only about Substack. And then from there, I would love to know, do you see something similar? Do you see something different? And I think it's a great place to get started. So let's go with that. And welcome, Anna, so lovely to see you for the first time. Rosemary, our poet, fantastic. So a little bit of memory lane. So I started on Substack and pretty much my entire creative business at the beginning of 2023. So for me, the first year was really about figuring out what I was doing, how the platforms work, how I was going to monetize my creativity. Then 2024, it was an amazing year on Substack. I don't know how many of you were on the platform already, but it wasn't very saturated. The recommendations worked great. I started doing things like webinars, for example, had lots of people joining, and I found it relatively easy to join. And then 2025, I actually found that it was quite a, a year of disruption. There's so many changes happening. I think that's pretty much when, uh, AI became democratized, when it really became mainstream. And I started to see a flood of AI. I started to see so many big creators like Justin Welsh and Danko and, uh, Gary Vee and all these, these big names coming. And I started to, to realize that my— the strategy that I had had until then wasn't really working. And so 2026, and welcome, Jelena, first time to see you live. So nice to have you here doing a little bit of an update on, on Substack, my business in general, and then we, we continue the conversation from there. So 2026 for me, at the beginning of the year, I really paused everything and I said, okay, what am I seeing? What is, where's the market going? What are my members telling me? And so I started to ask people, what they liked, what they didn't like. And some of the themes that I heard— first, it was that a lot of people were starting to be just mentally saturated by all this content, all these AI creators sending daily newsletters. So, so they started to say, I have a lot of fatigue and I don't really know what I, what I want, what is good, what is not good, who is real, who isn't real. So fatigue on the one hand. And then I started to find that a lot of people, they were not looking for information anymore because there is so much information with Claude, with ChatGPT, and so on, that they're looking for something more. And I didn't know what that something more was until I started to hear this word coming back, this, I want to be a part of a community, I want to have a sounding board, I want to be with peers, I don't want to be— don't just want to be a spectator, I want to be a part of something. And so putting all of these together, I really changed my strategy. And these are some of the things that I started to do. And then I'll ask you, what your experience is. But I started to write less. I started to really do less volume, but focusing on how to be more intentional. Even the volume with the chat, instead of having like random chats almost daily, I'd have— no, I want to have one weekly chat for my free subscribers that is really a conversation around topics that are relevant for us creative entrepreneurs, and then one for my paid subscribers. And in regards to community, Instead of doing webinars, I started to realize that people were not coming to my webinars because they didn't want to just come to listen to me. They wanted to participate and hear from other perspectives and so on. And so I gravitated from more webinar style to more workshop and mastermind. Last week, I actually did a bootcamp on public speaking and Steve here was, was one of the participants and it was really hands-on. It was really, let's do this together. Let's do exercises, like really a bootcamp. but in the digital space. And so these are some of the changes that I've seen, and the results have been positive, to be honest. I went from a plateau to starting to see that it really resonates with certain people, not with everyone. But I have focused— I have realized that focusing on doing less but being more intentional and really having community as the anchor of everything that I do is helping me generally overall with growing my business. So I'm going to kick things off there. And because I see that Magdalena is nodding a lot,
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