You Don't Have a Growth Problem. You Have a Clarity Problem.

Why I unsubscribed from every growth-hack Substack I could find — and what I built instead.

I have a complicated relationship with the word “growth.”

And I say this as someone who, not that long ago, subscribed to every single growth-hack Substack I could find. I’m talking double digits. I wanted to crack the code, find the formula, do the thing that would make my little corner of the internet feel less like shouting into a cave and more like, I don’t know, an actual conversation.

(I know. I know. I shouldn’t have fallen for the trap!)

For a few months, the advice felt genuinely exciting. Someone had cracked it! There were steps! The steps had numbers! And then, slowly, the steps started looking familiar. And then VERY familiar. And then I realized I was reading the same four ideas — post consistently, know your audience, write good subject lines, write daily Notes — dressed in slightly different fonts, delivered with slightly increasing urgency, by people whose main qualification was that they were doing exactly what they were teaching.

Which, to be fair, is a qualification. But it started to feel like being taught to cook by someone who had only ever cooked for people who were learning to cook. Y’know?

So I unsubscribed from all of them.

And then I did what I always do when something frustrates me enough: I sat with the frustration until I understood what it was actually about.

Here’s what I figured out. The growth-hack genre isn’t really about growing. It’s about optimizing. It assumes you already know what you’re doing and why — it just wants to help you do more of it, faster, to more people. The question it’s answering is: how do I get bigger?

Which is a fine question. But it’s not the first question. And for a lot of us on Substack: the ones who are writing because we genuinely have something to say, not because we’ve identified a monetizable content funnel (I cannot type those words without my eye twitching a little), it’s not actually the question we need answered.

The question we need answered is:

what am I even doing here?

Not in a crisis way, but rather a clarifying way. Because I think a lot of Substack writers are doing something real and important and genuinely useful, and they have absolutely no idea how to articulate it. They know they write about grief, or slow living, or creativity, or parenting, or dogs, or how to XYZ or the weird intersection of all of that. But they couldn’t tell you, in two sentences, what their reader comes looking for or what they leave with. And without that clarity, growth advice is kind of useless. It’s optimizing an engine before you’ve figured out where you’re trying to go.

So a few weeks ago, I built something.

It’s called The Resonance Map. Three modes. Free. No sign-up. No tips. No subject line formulas. No constant emails.

Mode 01 asks you four questions about your own Substack — not what your niche is or what your posting schedule looks like, but things like: what would you never write about, and why? And: when a post really lands, what did it actually do for the person reading it? The answers generate what I’m calling a Resonance Statement — a two or three sentence mirror that reflects back what you’re actually doing, in your own words, just organised into a shape you can hold.

Mode 02 asks you about your reader. Not their demographics. Who they are inside. What they’re carrying when they open your post. What they believe that most people around them don’t. What they need that they’re not getting anywhere else. The output is a Reader Portrait — a short paragraph that feels like a real person, not a marketing persona. (There’s a difference, you know that, right?)

Mode 03 is different. It doesn’t generate anything. It just teaches you how to find your people — not by following the algorithm, not by cross-promoting with everyone who has more subscribers than you, but by feel. By searching for worldviews instead of topics. By following the trail of commenters. By showing up genuinely in other people’s spaces before you ask for anything.

I know, it’s revolutionary and groundbreaking, right? (not). The growth gurus are shaking in their boots! (they probably aren’t, I just wish they were!).

But here’s the thing I actually want to say. Most of us don’t have a growth problem. We have a clarity problem. We’re fuzzy on what we’re doing, who we’re doing it for, and what we’re actually offering when someone clicks subscribe. And no amount of headline optimization fixes that.

The village doesn’t need more experts. It needs more writers who know what they actually believe and can say it clearly. That’s what this helps you do.

The Resonance Map won’t give you 1,000 subscribers by Friday. But it might make the subscribers you have feel more like the right ones. And in my experience, that’s where everything else starts.

You can check out The Resonance Map here:

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