I built a fast-growing paid newsletter on Substack, accidentally deleted it, and had to rebuild from scratch.

One morning, in what was meant to be a quick tidy-up session, I accidentally deleted my entire Substack publication. A global Top 50 business publication that made $50,000+ GAR. The whole thing.

I had gone into the backend trying to remove a podcast section from my homepage. I typed in “podcast,” the danger zone came up, and naturally, I assumed it was just for the podcast section. I typed in "Hype Yourself" (the name of my podcast, but also the name of my publication) and then watched with creeping anxiety as my entire newsletter disappeared before my eyes.

By that point, this wasn’t a hobby newsletter I had knocked together on a whim. It was a paid membership I had built into a real revenue stream. I had live classes, directories of opportunities, hundreds of paying subscribers and a business model I hoped would one day replace the income from the boutique PR and branding agency I used to run in London.

The irony is that I had started the newsletter because I wanted a simpler, more writerly business. What I got instead was a brutal lesson in platform risk, audience ownership and how quickly momentum can vanish when your growth is tied to infrastructure you don’t control.

Where it all began

Me, my partner, the dog and our two kids tested living in France for three months in December 2021 and, by April 2022, had sold our house and moved over properly. We ended up living on a mobile home campsite because it was the only place that would let us rent long-term with English payslips.

The day we bought our house here I fell pregnant and frantically rushed to get as many clients through before my self-employed maternity leave as I wanted to give myself some time off. A photographer friend took a photo of me on my phone while I was breastfeeding. 

That photo really stayed with me. It reminded me that I didn’t want to go back to the same hustle with clients.

My husband landed a flexible remote job with Adobe and suddenly I had the space to rethink things. I had already been building a newsletter on Mailchimp since 2019 and testing writing for small business trade publications and Medium. I had also created a few courses on Thinkific.

My childhood dream had always been to be a writer. What I hadn’t properly worked out was how writing alone could turn into a business.

Then, I attended a class on why to launch a Substack, and, to be honest, I completely drank the Kool-Aid.

I paid for classes and one-to-ones with Substack experts. Some of it was helpful. But the thing that actually grew my newsletter turned out to be far less glamorous than the Substack success story everyone was selling at the time.

The truth behind the fast growth

When I switched on paid subscriptions, I had two goals. One was to become a bestseller on Substack.