Substack Notes
Substack Notes is Substack's short-form feed where writers post text, links and images to their subscribers and the wider network, functioning as a discovery layer that drives readers toward their longer newsletter posts.
Launched in 2023, Notes exists to solve Substack's structural problem: newsletters are excellent at retention and terrible at discovery. Email has no feed, no reshares and no browsing. Notes adds the missing surface. When a reader restacks your Note, it surfaces to their subscribers, and Substack's recommendation graph pushes it further to people who read adjacent publications. The subscribe button sits right on the Note, so the distance between someone seeing you and subscribing is one tap rather than a click-through to a landing page.
It looks like Twitter and behaves differently in one important way: the audience is almost entirely readers and writers who already pay for newsletters. That shifts what performs. Dunks and engagement bait do less well than a specific observation, a passage cut from a draft, or a genuine disagreement with something you read. The strongest Notes usually read like the most interesting paragraph of a piece you have not published yet, which is also why they work as a testing ground for what to write next.
The realistic expectation: Notes is a smaller pond than X or LinkedIn, and Substack does not publish reach or algorithm details. What is consistently reported by writers is that conversion per view is unusually high, because a view comes from someone who already reads newsletters. Treat it as a subscriber engine, not a volume play.
Frequently asked questions
What is Substack Notes?
Is Substack Notes just Twitter for newsletters?
How do you grow a Substack with Notes?
Post Rewriter — Turn a paragraph from your newsletter into a Note that stands on its own. Open the free tool →