How do you grow up your newsletter?

I would tend to disagree with this, but it depends on the situation. There are tons of really popular newsletters on Substack despite the limited "customization" options. I personally watched my co-founder grow his newsletter on Substack to hundreds of subscribers within a couple weeks. We were subsequently able to turn that subscriber base into a pretty active Discord community. It turns out that a page's CSS usually isn't the reason why most people subscribe, they tend to be much more motivated by a newsletter's content.

In terms of marketing the newsletter, we found that a good place to start is by genuinely engaging with a highly active community that is curious your topic. Your newsletter's topic doesn't need to be the core thread holding everyone in the community together, but it has to be close enough that those people get curious when they hear about it. By "genuinely engaging", I mean don't just pop into a subreddit and have your first post there be "I wrote a newsletter you'll like". These overtly self-promotional posts tend not to get much traction and can sometimes even be shunned by the community (depending on the situation).

So the tactic we used to gain our initial subscriber base was to engage in one particularly small (but active) subreddit. We would ask questions, answer questions, and have real conversations. Occasionally an opening in the discussions would pop up where it made sense to mention our newsletter naturally. Those posts drove a lot of subscribers (and still do as people run across the posts!).

The point of this tactic is that it helps you build up some reputation/authority with your target audience. It also really helps you understand what kind of language does well with them (esp if you haven't previously been active in the community). Different communities have very different subtleties in how some posts are celebrated while others are ignored.

This tactic also tends to work a bit better than Twitter and Facebook channels in the early days. This is because your initial social media network usually isn't typically interested in your topic. They're considered "low quality" traffic. One post tends to tap out all the people that are going to sign up. As you really grow your network, this aspect can change though (esp on Twitter where your followers are more aligned in their interests).

But, note this community engagement tactic doesn't work forever! Eventually, every marketing channel dries up once it's been exhausted. To deal with that situation (and to pick your next marketing channel to level-up your growth), I'd recommend checking out the book "Traction: How any startup can achieve explosive customer growth". It's great!

Use convertkit they are offering a free plan right now i really like their landing page its working great for me i have generated 24 emails on first day of my website launch by sending people to blog post and having a offer at the home page it just work if you like i can share my landing page

I will try to add some "hot" content. Thanks!