Not anymore.

Every framework I have ever built is probably sitting in somebody’s AI chat window right now. They can look something up with ChatGPT and instantly get access to all of the information they need.

You know what is scarce though?

PROOF.

Somebody actually showing you how to do the thing they are teaching you.

So we ran a test.

Since our last Substack breakdown we shared in June, we’ve added:

• $30,000+ added in annual subscription revenue

• 170+ new paid subscribers

• And, we are approaching $100K in annual revenue on Substack.

In today’s roundup I want to share a little bit about the specific campaign we launched, why it worked, and what you need to know if you’re struggling to crack the code on paid subscriber growth.

PS: if you are looking for a full A-Z breakdown of getting started (and the strategy we deploy WEEKLY on Substack), don’t miss our LVE Substack 101 training on Wednesday at 7:30 pm EST.

Every annual subscriber gets access, and it is the training I wish somebody gave me in month one.

I keep getting the same questions from people who are technically on Substack but haven’t actually built on it yet:

What do I charge for my subscription tiers?

How often should I be posting?

What do I use Notes for?

Do I need to use XYZ feature?

Wednesday we will go through all of it, from start to finish, with time for questions at the end, including:

• All the platform setup basics: features, what role they play, and how to use them

• How to set up and price your paid tiers

• An optimal posting schedule (free vs. paid)

• Notes, and their role in lead generation, sales and growth

• A daily sales system you can follow every day to build connections and grow on Substack

• The basics of collaborations

• How to run effective paid subscriber growth campaigns

If you are a free or monthly subscriber, upgrading to annual gets you Wednesday’s class:

I'm IN!

Now… let’s get into the details from this past month’s growth, because you will 100% want to use this in your own strategy!

Below, we’re breaking down:

• The exact mechanics of our build-in-public campaign, and why it sold

• The resource drop that had a slow start, and the reason it stalled (this one costed us, and I’d rather you learn it on our dime)

• The campaign strategy we have now seen enough times to plan around. If you have been struggling to go, this is going to change the game for you.

• Three platform updates that change how you should be building right now.

Read more

We’ve got you covered! ✅

On July 29th, my team is hosting a 2-hour Substack 101 LIVE traning where we will cover EVERYTHING you need to know to get started:

From navigating the platform, to setting up your publication, to overall best practices, to the daily cadence we follow to grow our subscribers each week.

ALL annual subscribers get access {if you’re not an annual subscriber yet, upgrade below for just $180 for the entire YEAR!}

I want in!

This bonus ends TUESDAY, so upgarde now to lock in your seat!

-Kelly

(PS: already an annual subscriber? Check your email for the subject line “Substack 101: Here’s your Zoom link!)

Why is her team building these Substack tools?

Where did this obsession come from?

Fair question. Here’s the honest answer.

I don’t teach trends...

I teach SALES.

That is what I’ve done my entire career, from cold-calling and going door to door in the heat, to leading sales teams, to building an eight-figure company with no debt, no investors, and no outside funding.

Everything I put in front of you is help you get in front of the right people and make their dreams come true.

To sell with total conviction and integrity.

To shift your mindset around sales as an act of service and stewardship.

And when I find a tool that can help you do that simpler and faster, you bet I’m going to shout about it from the rooftops.

Substack does it better than anything I’ve seen in YEARS.

Upgrade Now

And when I discovered that, trust me… I was NOT looking for a new platform.

It turns out publishers want to see you building an audience on Substack, which was the sole reason I ever decided to get on here in the first place. Monetization was NOT the original goal.

I handed the entire strategy off to a member of my team and asked them to figure it out. 😂

So, alongside the 1000 other things we were working on in the compay, we decided to run a simplified version of The Miracle Hour here on Substack every day (which if you’re not familiar with my work, is our daly sales strategy that we implement across every other platform too).

And then…

Our publication started making money. Fast

$6K in a week.

$30K in a few months.

Then $30K more.

And now, in less than a year, we are earning more than $80 thousand JUST from subscriptions alone.

We have built an audience of NEW subscribers here that have also purchased products, memberships and programs from us… and that is an entirely separate line item.

Substack is fueling our business growth, and a few months ago, we had no idea what the heck it even was.

Naturally, we had to tell our clients about what we saw happening.

Within a few weeks of sharing about Substack, we had one client who went all in and made over $50K in a few months.

Another hit $6K in their first WEEK.

Another generated 100+ paid subscribers in a few weeks.

Others ranking as bestsellers within their respective industries, some ENTIRELY unrelated to business growth.

Today we are ranked among the fastest-growing paid business publications in the US, a ranking based purely on how fast we add paid subscribers, not on follower count or vanity metrics.

We could have kept all of this to ourselves. We didn’t have to teach it.

But staying quiet would be a failure to do my actual job.

If the single fastest way for the people I serve to build a trust-based, owned audience is sitting right in front of us, keeping it to myself is just negligent.

Inevitably, you’re going to learn Substack one way or another.

Either you learn it from me, in a way that allows you to build into your business so it actually feeds your ecosystem, or you learn it somewhere else in a way that cannibalizes your business, overwhelms you, and distracts you from the real work.

And, I’d rather you learn it here.

What I’ve discovered over the last few months is that Substack is the ultimate trust-building offer. It’s the front door of your whole ecosystem.

When you start adding paid subscribers, the platform starts pushing more traffic to you, which brings more subscribers, which triggers even more reach.

It is a self-fulfilling loop that shortens your sales cycle and lowers what it costs you to acquire a customer. Our Substack feeds our Virtual Business School membership, and VBS feeds Substack. That’s by design.

People see me talking about it nonstop and assume I’m chasing something shiny. I’m not.

I was a nine-year late adapter on Instagram, and I never broke through.

I refused to get on Tiktok, no matter how many people I could reach there, because it simply wasn’t aligned with my values.

I refuse to dumb myself down for the algorithm. Substack is different.

Substack is about depth. Real connection. Sharing your perspectives, thoughts and value and getting paid for it by people who actually want to stick around and consume.

So here’s what we’re doing about it.

We already built this by “accident.” Now, we’re doing it on purpose.

When we started The Sacred Art of Selling publication, we had no promotion plan, no strategy. We genuinely knew nothing.

It hit about $13K in 60 days. Around $30K in 90 days.

That was us knowing nothing.

So I asked myself: if we did 30K in 90 days with no plan and no strategy, what could we do now that we actually know what we’re doing?

I think we can do it in 30.

So we’re going to find out.

Starting from absolute zero.

Zero subscribers, zero paid, nothing on the board.

0 to 30,000 in 30 days, in TWO brand new publications.

Will we hit it? I don’t know for certain. That’s exactly why I want to document the journey with you.

So, if you aren’t yet a paid subscriber, this is your chance to upgrade to get the weekly real-time updates of exactly WHAT we are employing to grow to $30K in 30 days.

Are you up for the challenge with us? If so, subscribe now:

Upgrade Here

And, we’re doing it in a niche that has nothing to do with helping people make money or grow on Substack.

I hear this pushback often:

“Sure, it works for you because you teach business.” Or, “It only works if you teach people how to make money.”

So we’re going to kill that objection on purpose.

Our clients doing this are in medical, finance, human design, speech pathology, and every niche you can name. Your niche is plenty big.

The publication we are building from zero has nothing to do with business, marketing, or making a dollar.

It’s called Founder Girl: Bloom & Build, and it’s my passion project. It’s about raising courageous, confident daughters who go out into the world and lead. How we, as parents, pour into the next generation of girls.

My daughter and I run a club for girls ages 7-17, and I’ve wanted her to build her work somewhere other than traditional social media. I’d been praying about exactly that.

That same day, , our company president, sent me a voice note saying we should do a build a Substack publication around the parenting mission and the Courage Club.

I got goosebumps. It was the answer to a prayer I had prayed hours earlier.

So Madison and I are building Founder Girl together. She’ll use it as a place to connect with parents who want to empower their girls to learn the skills not taught in school: sales, marketing, confidence, leadership, money and more.

She’ll use it to grow the brand and mission, off social media, in a place I actually feel good about.

Simultaneously, Danielle is also running the same challenge for her new publication, Worth the Follow.

She’ll be talking about personal brand strategy for founders, and how to create content that actually makes you worth following.

By the way, you can subscribe to both HERE:

Founder Girl: Subscribe Here.

Worth the Follow: Subscrbe Here

How to follow the whole thing:

We’re going to show our growth and implementation strategy in real time, and you get a front row seat:

Every single week over the next 30 days, I’ll be sharing:

• What we actually did to grow

• The result — the real number, from zero to wherever we’ve climbed

• One action you can take to do the same thing in your own publication

That’s the whole format. What we did, what it produced, and how you copy it.

Upgrade to come build alongside us. And make sure to subscribe to Founder Girl & Worth the Follow, so you can watch the challenge unfold from the outside too.

Do you think we can do it???

Let’s go!

Upgrade Now!

And, my team ran the campaign 100% while I was away in Italy for 2-weeks with my family, completely offline.

I want to show you exactly how they did it, because while most writers are treating paid growth like a volume game, it is entirely possible to convert the list you already have with the right strategy.

We stopped asking people to pay for the promise of future value, and started handing them something the moment they said yes that was worth the price on its own. Then, we made it time-sensitive.

So let me break down the exact three-part play step by step (and because most of you do not help people grow on Substack, I am going to show you how to model the same play regardless of your industry: whether you are a health coach, a brand strategist, a CPA, a speech therapist… you name it).

Read more

BUT…

While most obsess over how to get more and more paid subscribers, they spend virtually zero time thinking about how to retain those subscribers.

Substack is getting competitive, and fast:

An article by Readless reported that in Q1 2026, Substack crossed 8.4 million paid subscriptions in Q1 2026: a 68% jump from the 5 million milestone reported back in March of 2025.

That growth is a massive opportunity and a massive threat, all at the same time.

But that math’s gotta math…

In that same article, they call out that at the average $5 to $15 price point, if you subscribe to just five paid Substack publications, you’re spending $300 to $900 per year just on paid newsletters.

More creators launching paid publications means readers will have to make calls about what they decide to keep vs. what they cancel.

Which means if you want your income on Substack to keep growing, you need MORE than a paid subscriber acquisition strategy…

If you want your publication to be the one that NEVER gets cut, your strategy needs to be two-fold…

And today’s article is a breakdown of exactly how to cultivate the kind of FOMO that keeps your readers on their toes about what you’re delivering to them on an ongoing basis, so they STICK AROUND!

Substack email open rates average 44%, which is about 2X the industry standard.

Your subscribers are reading; the question is whether you're giving them a reason to stay once they've paid.

I’m about to break down OUR retention strategy, where you should be focusing, and exactly what’s been working recently.

Want the full playbook - upgrade to paid if you haven’t already!

Already a paid subscriber? Let’s dive in!

Read more

And I had zero strategy.

I have been creating content for more than a decade. I had YEARS of built up intellectual property, and a lot of my best work locked behind programs we were no longer selling.

When I decided to get on the platform, my team was already at max capacity. We had plenty of initiatives to focus on, and we weren’t about to add Substack to the list.

I decided that the best use of our time would be to repurpose that content and follow our Miracle Hour strategy here on Substack — that was it.

We wouldn’t put much more effort into it, because it just wasn’t a top priority for us.

Until we saw the insane growth that came from showing up with barely a strategy…

We realized there was a goldmine here: that Substack was kind of having it’s TikTok-circa-2018 moment.

Fresh energy, real consumers, and a breath of fresh air in the social media world that was becoming increasingly…robotic.

AI-generated videos everywhere on my feed.

The same trending sound video after video.

Automations taking over the comments (yes, tools like Manychat are convenient and strategic and I use them on my own account to capture leads, but they should never be a total replacement for human connection).

So… without further ado, we committed.

Because everything that we’re seeing, teaching, and experiencing real time is exactly why it made total sense to shift our efforts here.

Premium buyers are tired of the noise.

More than half of the activity you’re seeing on social is made up of bots.

And relationships, analog marketing strategies, and buying from people we actually trust (and not just random “experts” we discovered online) are so back.

And for founding members, I decided to document the growth process, the lessons, and the strategies we are employing in real-time.

This monthly deep dive is one of my favorite things I get to do for you — and this month, I have a lot to share as it relates to: live video, notes strategy, and driving more Substack algorithmic discovery on your page.

So…let’s get into it!

Read more

What’s been even more amazing is that, in the process of growing our own little Substack Community, we’ve had clients implementing the exact strategies we are breaking down here for our founding members of Thought Leader HQ… and the results have been insane:

Since our last Substack monetization post, we’ve had some exciting wins ourselves: officially reaching #1 rising in the business category, and driving our highest paid subscriber count in a 24-hour period (woo!)

So, in today’s roundup, I want to share a little bit of behind-the-scenes of how we did it (keep reading ‘til the end, because we’re also linking our top posts + 15 highest converting notes that drove the greatest number of paid subscribers to our Substack publication so far!)

Let’s get into it…

Read more

Most of what I share publicly here is thought leadership: reflections on faith, leadership, identity, integrity in selling, and the inner mechanics that drive sustainable success.

But, every month, I also publish a private recap for our founding members that serve a slightly different purpose:

They are an intentional “behind-the-curtain” look at how we are actively building, growing, and monetizing this Substack in real time – in preparation for the release of my upcoming book, The Sacred Art of Selling.

I create these for two reasons.

First, because many of you are not just readers; you are builders, leaders, and creators with meaningful intellectual property of your own.

You want to see the inner workings of how a strategy is actually being executed, what’s being prioritized, and how decisions are being made when values, audience trust, and revenue all matter at the same time.

Second, because transparency is important.

Rather than positioning Substack as a “magic” platform or oversimplifying what it takes to make this work, these recaps exist to show you the full picture: what we’re testing, what’s working, what we’re refining, and how this platform fits into the larger arc of the brand and the book that’s coming.

These exist for those who want to discern whether Substack belongs in their own ecosystem as a bigger strategy – and if so, how it might be modeled in a way that’s aligned, sustainable, and still rooted in service.

If you’re new here, this is your invitation to see how we’re using Substack as more than a publishing tool, but as a long-term relationship, distribution, and monetization asset.

If you’re a founding member, this is part of my commitment to ongoing transparency as we continue building this together.

Read more

How can I share deeper thought leadership, continue building meaningful relationships with my audience, and leverage already-existing intellectual property that I want to get in the hands of more people, without adding complexity?

If you follow me on social media, I’ve recently talked about the fact that I did not plan on initially monetizing this platform or even talk about why growing it is a smart move if you’re a deep thinker with real intellectual property.

I was actually advised to join Substack as part of my book proposal process for The Sacred Art of Selling, and I did so hesitant to add another layer (and without any real expectations).

However, after a few weeks of consistent effort, I have been shocked by the growth, ease of use, and capabilities of building passive income while sharing meaningful content that I have not used to it’s fullest extent.

I wanted to give my audience an opportunity not only to follow along with my writing here (which mainly consists of faith leadership content, the inner mechanics of success, business reinvention, and perspectives around sales as an act of service and stewardship), but an opportunity to peak behind the curtain of how we're building this community in real-time, so that you can discern whether or not it belongs in your own ecosystem.

This monthly recap for our founding members, is my commitment to transparency around that second piece.

This is not theoretical, or formal “best practices.”

This is a guideline of how we are actively using Substack in our company, in real-time: what we’re prioritizing, what the team is executing daily and weekly, and how this platform fits into the larger arc of the brand and the book that’s coming.

My hope is that this gives you both clarity and discernment around what’s possible for you, what it actually takes to succeed here, and how you might model this in a way that makes sense for your own work.

Now, before I get into any of the mechanics, I want to be clear about the spirit in which this work is being done:

For me, sales has always been about stewardship.

It’s about using the gifts, experiences, and insight we’ve been entrusted with to serve others well and to activate real, lasting transformation in their lives.

Substack has become meaningful, because it allows that exchange to happen in a way that feels congruent with my values: intentional, and rooted in trust.

What we’re building here is not just another revenue stream. It’s a means of empowering people to shift their mindset around sales, business growth, and being market facing daily — so that they can more confidently share their gifts with the world and impact more lives as a result.

It is actively creating a ripple effect.

So, let’s get into exactly what we’re doing here, why, and how you can model this based on your own priorities and goals:

Read more