How I hit 50 Subs on Substack in under a Month. Gave me an idea for Substack users!

Last week or so I decided to pursue food writing on Substack and started a newsletter regarding food in my local area: https://thefoodiemapslv.substack.com/
I know 50 subs isn't a ton, but I am thrilled by the immediate progress that I have seen. I wanted to share my strategies and an idea I had.

How I've been able to grow so quickly

Effective FB Activity

I have been thrilled by everyone's support and have found much success in sharing in various FB groups. I found that when I bring up the newsletter while providing other value, I saw the highest conversion rates. For example, when someone asks for a sushi recommendation in my area, I respond with my honest recs and then link to where I talk more about sushi in the newsletter. Just wanted to share this advice with everyone since this is such a repeatable strategy :)

Gaining Traction on IG

Also posting to Instagram has been valuable since this is where most of the foodie community is active. In addition to announcing newsletter posts on IG, I also post pictures of food and repost other content. The IG page almost doubles as both a foodie IG and newsletter IG. In other words, I have tried to be a part of the community as opposed to an outsider looking in.

Using both IG and FB to funnel traffic has been a great strategy. This may be inherent to the foodie community, but I still wanted to share.

The Idea

While working on this newsletter, an idea stumbled into my head. Like I mentioned, I have been creating IG posts for each issue I release manually in PS and it has become quite time consuming, but also valuable for growth. I am thinking of creating a service that would automatically create an image and post it to IG announcing the release of a new Substack issue.
Writers could pick an image template, and the service could fill in content from their latest Substack issue and get in on Instagram.

On Twitter, some one shared with me that mailchimp has something similar: https://mailchimp.com/help/publish-social-post-send-email/ but it is not quite as automatic as I was thinking, since they do not cover creating the post.
I wanted to gauge interest from Substack users and see what the community has to say.