I Automated My Substack
Here's what happens when you start using AI agents. Not to write in your place, but to eliminate everything that steals your time before and after publishing.
If you’ve already been around Substack for a while and use it as a marketing tool, then you can skip straight to the section “How I Automated My Substack - and How Far You Can Take It.”
If instead you’re fairly new around here, then the next few lines will help you answer the question you’ve probably already asked yourself.
“Why Substack?”
In the last few years, Substack has become an increasingly popular platform among creators, solopreneurs, and in general companies that make communication one of their most important assets, and the reasons are several.
Among these, the one that caught my attention too, is the ability to acquire the contacts of people interested in what you write, making an important distinction between the typical followers of a social media platform and subscribers - just like those of a newsletter.
And Substack’s uniqueness, in my opinion, lies precisely in this fusion between the two worlds.
On one hand it has all the characteristics of a blog that ranks on search engines, complete with a mini CRM you can use to send your articles by newsletter to the “subs” - as subscribers are called around here.
On top of that, at the same time, it comes with a feed that lets you connect with other creators and view their content, just like a classic social media platform.
With the not-so-trivial difference that it’s all organic and designed to stay that way.
Unlike the various Facebooks and Instagrams of the world, to name a couple, Substack doesn’t make money from advertising, nor from access to a paid plan to never have to see it.
So what does it make money from?
From how many subscriptions you manage to sell within the platform itself.
Once you start creating content on Substack, in fact, you can restrict access to premium subscribers by setting up actual paid plans however you like.
This lets you dedicate your most interesting articles or in-depth pieces exclusively to certain people, just to give an example, offering a concrete reason to pay you.
I’ve met several Substackers who have tens of thousands of premium subscribers and, without even considering the sale of other services or products, I can assure you that from subscriptions alone they have a “pretty interesting” recurring income - translated, they earn staggering figures!
And Substack takes a small cut of all those thousands (millions) of paid subscriptions activated within the platform.
Going back to the concept of organicity, the consequence of this approach is that Substack PUSHES its creators’ views to help them sell more.
Because it’s in its own interest - the more you earn, the more the platform earns.
If you think about it, it’s the exact opposite of what other social media do, where you’re the one who has to pay to appear on someone else’s screen.
This is why - not just for me - Substack is destined to become THE social media platform, and not just an outsider where you find interesting content.
Yes, because at least today, on this “social blog” you only find people creating content people are willing to pay for.
As irresistible as cat videos may be, would you spend €10 a month to lose a few hours of your life staring at them on your phone?
I’d hope not, just as I believe you might instead put that same amount toward following someone who teaches you things that would actually improve your life.
The numbers and growth of Substack seem to suggest my reasoning makes sense.
What I Do on Substack
You don’t need to be a marketing genius to understand that organic visibility - the kind that doesn’t need constant paid boosts to work - is an element that can significantly help a brand grow.
In the early days of the Google era it was clear to me that appearing among the top results when people searched for my product or service would be a gateway to success, and on that thesis I laid the first building blocks of a company that in a few years would become a multi-million euro business.
Don’t get me wrong, Substack isn’t the new Google - especially in an era where questions are increasingly being asked of artificial intelligences - but it still lets you reach an ever-growing audience through what you write - as long as you keep producing “raw material” that others can feed on.
If your content talks about finance, you’ll reach people interested in that topic.
If it talks about botany, same thing.
If it talks about art, guess who you’ll reach thanks to the algorithm?
Clear enough, right?!
And when you start communicating regularly with people in your target audience, sooner or later you can also sell products or services related to that same subject.
On top of that, articles published on Substack - as I mentioned earlier - tend to rank on Google itself and other search engines, offering additional visibility, and who knows whether in a while Substack might not also become one of the sources AI systems draw from when searching for information.
There’s no way to know, but I’d be willing to bet a coin on it.
Finally, there’s the “client list“ element, the most important of all - as far as I’m concerned.
If there’s one thing I believe I’ve hammered home more than anything else when I’ve trained other entrepreneurs, it’s precisely the power inherent in owning the contact details of people interested in your business.
On Instagram, having 100,000 followers doesn’t mean having 100,000 potential clients, but at most a good bunch of people who occasionally see a story or a post of yours.
On average, less than 10% of your audience.
When instead you own the email and maybe even the phone number of someone who has shown genuine interest in what you say and do, at any point you can write to them/call them to pick up the relationship again, and potentially get to a sale.
And the moment a person subscribes to your content by leaving you their details, the intentionality behind it is much stronger compared to a simple “follow”, and it’s no coincidence that the average open rates of a newsletter are considerably higher than a measly 10%.
“The money is in the list“
said a very wise man once, and I couldn’t agree more.
Which is why, the moment I decided to come out of my shell after embarking on - and testing in the field - a new professional career, Substack was the most logical choice I could make as a source of organic visibility.
It’s a long process that will require a lot of work to get where I want to be, but already in the first few months it has allowed me to generate contracts with new clients, collaborations that could go on for years and a growing reputation for yours truly, confirming the project is on the right track.
After all, well begun is half done...
How I Automated My Substack - and How Far You Can Take It.
Granting that I’m far from being viral on Substack, that doesn’t change the fact that the work behind my blog needs time to get done.
Writing for just under 300 people (as it currently stands), in fact, requires the exact same effort as doing it for 30,000.
If anything, maybe even more, since that audience is one I still have to build, article after article.
On the other hand, every single activity of an entrepreneur, like that of any professional, has aspects that can be delegated:
to other professionals
or maybe to an artificial intelligence.
Maybe you’ve already read my recent article about the team of AI agents I “hired” to automate part of my work and my wife’s, and if you will, what I did with my Substack is a sort of chapter 2 of the story.
Let’s go step by step from day 0 to the modus operandi I follow today.
In the beginning I wrote every single note by hand, publishing it between one work task and another, and setting myself reminders to remember to do it with a certain minimum frequency.
Then, I got into the habit of feeding the notes and articles I wrote into an AI project, so as to “train” it on my style and my way of thinking.
The moment the database became consistent enough, I did something seemingly simple.
I asked the AI to sort my original notes by dividing them by type (angle), topic and interaction rate - the latter being data I communicated to it each time a note was more successful than average - and from there to create an outline to schedule them on specific days and times of the week according to criteria I indicated in the prompt.
So I no longer wrote live, but directly in the AI project I used to organize content distribution.
In terms of “scheduling“, in this phase I used simple Google Calendars where I saved the note I had to publish at that hour of that day in the description, so I could simply copy and paste it onto Substack at the right moment.
This way, organizing the work and deciding what to publish and when had become decidedly simpler, especially considering that the more the weeks went by, the more the notes to manage increased, making manual planning more and more confusing and occasional.
The next step was asking the AI to periodically rework some original notes while keeping their meaning and message, but with a slightly different look, and to extract new notes from my articles.
Some may not like this much, but when you write 27 Word pages of an article and ask an AI to pull out a couple of sentences that retrace some of its passages, I find it’s anything but creative “blasphemy”, but rather a good use of technology - and of my time.
In marketing some call it the pig technique, that is when you use the pieces to make more things out of them.
A video can become an article - and vice versa.
An article can become several notes - and vice versa.
Several articles can become a book - and vice versa.
The pig technique. Gets the idea across, don’t you think?
Now we’re getting closer to “the present day”.
The turning point was when Substack introduced the ability to schedule the release of notes directly from the platform.
A step forward I’d dare call historic, and which kicked off two fundamental developments.
The first was the disappearance of the Calendars with the notes in the description.
Every week, I started taking just under an hour to schedule all the notes for the following seven days, obviously continuing to jot down the new ideas that came to mind directly in the chat of the dedicated AI project.
Then, I started “playing” with the agents.
If I’d managed to automate scheduling for my wife’s social media, what was stopping me from trying to do it for my own content on Substack too?
The second development I mentioned a moment ago was precisely turning this idea into a concrete process.
Today, through a software I developed personally, the weekly planning document - which I already generated before - is absorbed and used to schedule every single note with a single click.
I no longer have to press 6 or 7 buttons to get Thursday’s note scheduled for 5:00 PM, just as I no longer have to do it for the other 34 notes I plan every week.
My work on Substack has now become:
writing - STRICTLY BY HAND - the articles in Italian, which is my mother tongue, and scheduling their release directly on Substack according to my personal content calendar
translating them through an LLM into English and Spanish, with manual review and correction included - though the further I go, the more it happens that I don’t have to touch anything
scheduling their sharing on Meta and LinkedIn through another dedicated AI agent
feeding the database in the AI project dedicated to Substack with the new notes that come to mind, every time I have an idea, as well as with the articles I write week after week
asking the LLM to create a new batch of weekly notes based on the updated database
telling Daniele, my AI marketing manager, to launch the sequence of the subagent dedicated to Substack scheduling to program the new notes
interacting with other creators on Substack, reinvesting part of the time gained thanks to the procedures above
Before reaching this kind of organization, I spent almost every day hours literally losing myself inside Substack, which, mind you, is a wonderful platform in so many ways, but it really required a great deal of time and energy.
This way, beyond the creation of content - which remains the only part that wouldn’t make sense to delegate - at least for me, but for others it might be different - everything else has been optimized to the maximum so I can dedicate myself to what really counts inside and outside Substack, without wasting time on mechanical and repetitive activities like clicking the same buttons 200 times in sequence.
That, fortunately, is now Daniele’s job.
Maybe reading these lines you’ve already thought of a way to improve my workflow - if so, go ahead and write it to me in the comments, I love learning and reasoning about new things! - or maybe I’ll have been the one to inspire some tip for you to optimize your own way of working on Substack.
Or in another part of your business, why not?!
The message I want to convey to you is that you don’t necessarily have to become “strong with AI”, agents or some other next-generation software.
The point is that your time, like mine, is limited and it’s right to ask yourself (as often as possible) whether we’re using it in the best way.
Especially if you’re an entrepreneur, you should cut to the bone everything that is repetitive and mechanical, and that doesn’t necessarily require your time, which would be better invested in:
analysis
strategy
and all those thinking activities that can allow you to maximize your business.
Between working 14 hours doing “what’s needed” and working less than half that doing only what you can’t truly delegate to someone or something, there’s a difference that could draw the line between building the business of your dreams and wondering why so many make it and you don’t.
It’s not about working more, but about understanding how to work better, and I’m the first who had to learn this lesson the hard way many years ago.
There will continue to be moments more demanding than others, bad days, and obstacles you’d have gladly done without, but as long as you keep asking yourself whether you’re using your time in the best way, believe me when I tell you that things will keep getting better.
In my newsletter “The Free Entrepreneur“, every two weeks I share episodes from my work, my life and, more generally, experiences that have taught me something worth telling.
I do it partly to remind yours truly of the direction I want to keep going in, and partly to show others too that there’s always a way to become (more) free.
If you haven’t already, you can subscribe at no cost to “The Free Entrepreneur” from here.
Growing and helping others grow, always.
Ilias Contreas - The Surfpreneur 🌊
P.S. If you liked the article, found it useful or, maybe, it pushed you to make an “uncomfortable” reflection, then let me know with a like or a comment! Thanks!