SubShark

In December 2021, I made a commitment to myself that I would publish one post on Substack every single Sunday. I began asking friends and family to subscribe, and was able to rack up my first 20 subscribers in roughly 2 weeks. I also began posting my content on Reddit + Twitter and was able to grow to the 50 Subscriber mark in roughly 2 months, but thats when things started to plateau...

At this point I was only picking up 1-2 subscribers per week, and was looking for any growth hack or traffic source I could find. This is when I read a stat about Morning Brew using a referral program to gain >1.5 million subs, and couldn't stop thinking about it.

I searched everywhere for a referral program tool that could be used for Substack, but the only ones I could find were expensive and not built with Substack writers in mind.

That's when the lightbulb went off.

If I'm looking for this tool, other Substack writers must be too.

Now all I needed was a technical co-founder to build it, but more on that later.