50,000
5 lessons learned from building Market Sentiment
This week, we hit an incredible milestone: 50,000 readers.
Given that I have been working on this for five years, it seems like a good time to reflect on some of the lessons I've learned while building Market Sentiment. If you're considering building on Substack or are simply curious about this path, I hope you find this helpful.
People always ask how I got going with this, so here is a rough timeline:
First post: Reddit post on Jim Cramer on WallStreetBets → Got 8,000 upvotes and 1,100 comments.
First 1,000 subscribers: Came from various Reddit posts
Next 10,000: Growing our Reddit community to 30K
Next 40,000: Twitter, Substack recommendations, and Substack Notes.
1. Follow your curiosity
Seems cliche, but the only way you can write a report every week for 5 years straight is to be really interested in doing the work. Otherwise, you will burn out and stop. It’s unlikely that you will find 100% overlap between what your readers want vs. what interests you. Ultimately, it’s about finding a good balance.
Reports like What if Buffett never bought Apple? or the Lindy effect in investing was purely curiosity-driven. The reader might or might not find it useful, but you write it because you want to write it.
On the other hand, articles like the sequence of return risk and simple portfolio series are written with the reader in mind who might find a particular investing strategy interesting, irrespective of how I think about it.
Finally, you can also find a good midpoint where you can add an interesting angle to a trending topic, like how we connected tariffs with stagflation.
2. Choose your path
Not everyone will like your work, and that’s ok. I am not a stock picker and consider asset allocation more important than asset selection.
Jason Zweig, a renowned financial journalist and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, once shared a piece of advice from his father about the three ways to make a living:
Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you'll get rich.
Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you'll make a living.
Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you'll go broke.
The first is the easy path: sell hope. Everyone wants to find the next big thing and is willing to pay top $ for it. The second is the tougher path: Your job is just to inform and hope your readers make the right decision. It’s a slow grind, and I am fine with that. You just have to be clear on what path you are choosing.
3. Writing is only half the job
While some argue that quality is all that matters, I disagree. Nobody knows you exist unless you get eyeballs on what you are writing.
Case in point: Even though I believe that my reports were far better after 2023, we grew more in 2022 than in 2023 and 2024 combined. The only difference was that Elon changed the Twitter algorithm, and our reports that used to get 500 to 1000 clicks per week went down to < 50. Even the mighty Doomberg had to leave Twitter in mid-2023.
In one of the pettiest moves imaginable, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has blocked all links to the popular publishing platform Substack on Twitter, an almost direct acknowledgment that people would rather blog elsewhere.
80% of our readers used to come from Twitter. Now it’s less than 10% — a real-life example of platform risk.
You can always write for the sake of writing. However, expecting to build an audience purely organically is a long shot. Spend as much time as you spend writing on distributing your work.
4. Monetization is hard
Substack tells you that 4-5% of your readers will convert to paying subscribers. That’s very unlikely unless you have exceptional writing or are already well-known. None of the authors I know personally has more than 2% conversion. For Market Sentiment, it’s 1%. (Now you can estimate our ARR). So, if you launch a paid newsletter, expect a really long time to get meaningful revenue.
The other option is to run sponsorship. While it’s scalable and easier to do than asking your readers to pay, it comes with concentration risk. You will be dependent on a few companies for your revenue, and marketing is the first budget to be cut during a recession. For example, Morning Brew’s revenue dropped to zero during March’20.
5. A bit of luck goes a long way
I got really lucky that my very first post went viral. It was lucky that I started Market Sentiment at the peak of the pandemic, when everyone was on social media all the time. It was also lucky that we were in the right place at the right time by joining Substack a year before they launched recommendations. Half of our readers have come from Substack recommendations.
But luck only takes you so far. Consistency is much more important than virality in this line of work. Of the 280 reports I’ve published, fewer than 10 have gone viral. Yet on average, each report is shared ~20 times. That means our reports have been shared ~6,000 times just on Substack — not because of virality, but because we kept showing up week after week.
Veritasium has an excellent video on this.
To everyone who reads this newsletter, has subscribed, or has simply shared a post with a friend or colleague, thank you. Your support has made this possible.
The best is yet to come.
huge milestone, congrats.
Congratulations on the milestone! I enjoy reading!