How to Use Substack Recommendations to Grow Faster
Recommendations: A free, built-In growth hack by Substack
Back in April 2024, I received a message from
. He told me he’d seen my publication on the leaderboard and wanted to swap recommendations.Wait—what?
David McIlroy, the guy with over 6,000 subscribers, three Substack publications, and a voice that echoes through every writing podcast each week… was asking me—a tiny publication in comparison—to recommend him?
I was flattered. Of course, I said yes. I was already reading and enjoying his work, so it felt like an honour.
But something tugged at me. I went poking around the Recommendations tab on my dashboard and got another shock.
Turns out
, the creator of I Would Rather Be Writing, was recommending my publication, and I had gained 41 subscribers from his audience.Walter is a Medium star, a booster, and a brilliant writer. I’ve admired him from afar. And here he was, quietly sending readers my way.
I didn’t even know.
I still don’t know why.
Maybe he liked one of my pieces at some point. Maybe he saw potential. I didn’t dare ask him, just in case he realized it was a mistake and changed his mind!
But those two moments did something important. They woke me up to the power of Substack Recommendations.
This quiet little feature, tucked away behind the scenes, was doing more for my growth than social media, SEO, or shouting into the void ever did.
And yet, most writers don’t even think about it to grow their Substack.
Substack Recommendations is not just some nice-to-have courtesy. It’s a free, built-in growth engine—and when used well, it can introduce your work to hundreds (even thousands) of new readers who are already primed to subscribe.
In the next section, I’ll show you how the whole system actually works—and how to make it work for you.