A lot of you have asked how I built Longevity Decoded from zero to 40K subscribers in twelve months while working a job, with two young kids at home and trying to practice the health lifestyle I preach.

The honest answer is longer than a Notes reply.

And I believe in people to sharing knowledge, growing an audience and increasing their impact.

So I’m writing it down in a newsletter called Grow Your Authority Newsletter.

But I want to be specific about the numbers because the version of this story that gets told most often is the inflated one, and the inflated version is useless to you.

Twelve months ago, in May 2025, I started Longevity Decoded with zero subscribers.

For the first few months, basically nothing happened.

By August I had a few dozen subscribers and was wondering if I was wasting my evenings.

Late September a small bump showed up. Through October, November, December, and January it was a slow steady climb.

By late February I was at around three thousand subscribers and quietly wondering if the ceiling was about ten.

Then in late March something specific changed. The list went from about seven thousand to over thirty four thousand by mid May.

Here’s why

For the first ten months I was running about one third of the system. I was writing the newsletter. I was barely posting Substack Notes. I was not networking with other publications for recommendations. Those two missing pieces are most of the engine.

In late March I started doing all three. Notes daily, mined from the newsletter drafts, edited by hand. Real conversations with other publications: reading their work first, commenting genuinely, then proposing recommendation swaps once the relationship was real. A small contribution came from Threads. The bulk came from Notes plus Substack recommendations.

The mechanism was concrete. Three things I’d been neglecting, started doing properly, in the same week. Six weeks later the list exploded.

And it’s not just about number go up.

These are real people who you can help with whatever service you offer.

Most stuck professional newsletters are stuck for the same reason: the two missing thirds of the engine.

So that’s what this newsletter is.

The system, in order. Positioning. The Notes engine. The recommendations engine. Headlines and welcome sequences. The operating rhythm that fits around a real job. Monetisation when you’re ready for it.

AI shows up where I actually use it: ideation, research, drafting, fact-checking, and image creation. The voice is mine. I read every piece aloud before publishing. I verify every cited fact.

Here you’ll learn how to:

• Position a Substack that signals authority on day one

• Run a Substack Notes engine that compounds week on week

• Earn recommendations from publications you actually respect

• Write headlines and welcome sequences that hold up at scale

• Open a paid tier without breaking the trust you’ve built

• Keep the whole thing alive on the hours a working professional actually has

What you get as a free subscriber

• Occasional free articles and notes

• Access to the free content above the paywall on articles.

What you get as a paid subscriber

The toolkit underneath the writing:

• Paid-subscriber articles below the line on each issue. The working templates, swipe files, and checklists I actually use, with the fields filled in.

• Q&A access in Substack Chat. Ask me about your positioning, your homepage, your stuck point, your first paid post. I answer.

• 50 Substack Notes templates. A swipe file across the five hook families and the three modes. Each one labelled, ready to adapt to your niche. (coming soon)

• The Substack Notes Playbook. The deeper reference behind the templates. Anatomy of a Note that travels. The Hook/Feeling/Authority triad. The 10-5-1 daily rule. The mining-three-Notes-from-every-issue pattern. (coming soon)

• The 90-Day Step-by-Step Guide to Your First 1,000 Subscribers. A Notion guide that walks you through it day by day, with the decisions, the checkpoints, and the honest post-mortems. (coming soon)

I’ll keep adding to the paid tier as the work earns it.

The point of running a paid tier from day one is that the toolkit grows with the publication.

Subscribe now

Who this is for

Professionals and knowledge workers building a Substack alongside the day job, including doctors, lawyers, therapists, coaches, consultants, academics, financial advisors, senior PMs and designers, founders with a day job etc.

The About page covers who this is and isn’t for in more detail.

One ask

Reply and tell me where you are. Started and stalled? Sitting on the idea? Already growing and want to monetise? I read every reply. The next stretch of issues will be calibrated to what you tell me.

Welcome.

Adrian

For ten months, Longevity Decoded grew like nothing was happening.

I shipped an article every Wednesday.

I answered comments.

I followed the advice you read in every Substack-growth post: be useful, be consistent, the newsletter will compound.

The newsletter did not compound.

Ten months in, I was at around 4,000 subscribers.

Slow, steady, going nowhere fast.

Then, in the final six weeks of year one, the subscriber count went from 4,000 to 34,000.

The thing that changed was not the newsletter.

The articles in those six weeks were not better than the articles in months four, five, or six.

The thing that changed was that I finally took Notes seriously.

This piece is the teardown of what actually happened.

Out of the 779 original Notes I wrote, twenty did roughly 90% of the work.

Pulled in subscribers.

Drew restacks from larger publications.

Created the long-tail attention that keeps a publication compounding while you sleep.

The first half of this post is the story and the system: why Notes, not the newsletter, is the growth engine in a publication’s first six months, and how I would set the cadence if I were starting today.

The second half, behind the paywall, is the teardown itself. Twenty Notes, each one shown with the stats, the underlying reason it worked, and a reusable template stripped of my medical specifics so you can rewrite it for finance, law, software, parenting, fiction, gardening, or whatever your reader actually cares about.

Let’s start with the part that took me ten months to understand.

Why Notes, not the newsletter, grow a publication in the first six months

This sounds backwards.

It isn’t.

The newsletter is the proof asset.

It is the thing a stranger reads before they decide whether to subscribe.

The About page is the trust gate.

The pinned post is the audition.

The newsletter doesn’t find new readers, though. Substack’s email-only distribution is, for most professional publications, small. A new subscriber arrives because someone with an audience put your work in front of them. On Substack, that almost always happens on Notes.

Notes is the discovery layer.

Every restack carries you into someone else’s followers. Every comment from a writer with a larger publication exposes you to a slice of their feed. The Notes algorithm rewards what gets restacked, which means the best growth move on the platform is to write Notes that other writers want to put their name on.

The newsletter you spend Tuesday night on does almost none of that work. The Notes you write in fifteen minutes on a Sunday evening do almost all of it.

The mistake I spent ten months making was treating Notes as the warm-up act for the newsletter. They are not. In months one to six of a publication’s life, the order is reversed: Notes are the show, and the newsletter is what the show points at.

How to grow with Notes

You do not need a 6 hour course on this. You need a rhythm. Three rules.

Post daily for the first ninety days. At least one Note a day (I wrote several), seven days a week. You can batch write and schedule them.

The platform’s algorithm rewards presence more than it rewards individual brilliance. A mediocre Note posted today is worth more than a great Note posted in a fortnight.

Write to the restack, not the like. A like is one person liking a Note. A restack is one person putting their own audience on the line for you. You are writing for the restack. Read every Note you draft and ask: would a peer in my field be willing to put their name on this? If not, sharpen the line that would make them want to.

Audit on Sunday. Once a week, open the Notes analytics, sort by restacks, look at your top five. Look for what they had in common. Then write three more Notes that do the same move on different topics. The audit is mechanical, but only if you have a taxonomy that lets you see what the move actually was.

Three rules. Daily cadence. Restack as the unit of value. Sunday audit. Everything else is variation on those.

The teardown below gives you the details.

What the teardown below does that the rules above don’t

Rules are a frame. They do not write the Note for you.

What writes the Note for you is seeing the exact thing that worked, in the exact words it worked in, on a publication that looks roughly like the one you want to grow.

That is what the next 4,500 words do.

For each of my top 20 Notes, ranked by a composite score that weights restacks 5× and comments 3× over likes (because restacks are what actually distribute you to new readers) you’ll get:

1. The Note itself, exactly as published.

2. The stats: likes and restacks, so you can see the shape of what works.

3. Why it worked: the underlying mechanism the reader’s brain responded to. The structural move. The line that did the heavy lifting.

4. A reusable template with the specifics of my medical background stripped out, so the structure travels to any professional niche.

By the bottom of the post you will have a labelled inventory of the nine moves that show up in almost every Note that worked, and a workflow to run them through your own publication this week.

This is the post I wish someone had written for me when I was ten months in, staring at flat analytics, wondering whether to keep going.

If you have been writing Notes and they are not moving, the question is almost never effort. It is almost always pattern. The patterns are below.

You don’t have to monetise this. But the teardown is the asset behind the paywall, and the templates are designed to be rewritten and posted by tonight.

Here’s to your growth and success,

Adrian

Get my top 20 notes and steal the templates below:

Read more