The Come Up Quarterly Review
how we got here, and how it's going!
Hey — Alex here, from The Come Up.
As part of our growth efforts, I’ve decided I’m going to begin sharing the journey of scaling out the publication.
It’s inspiring for all these business owners to share their stories, so I figured, it was only right that we share some behind the scenes too.
How We Got Here…
I started The Come Up because I was frustrated with business content that was—excuse the term…‘overly reductive bullshit’.
Having built a number of businesses myself, when I would read a lot of this stuff, I honestly just got pissed off at how easy it made things seem…
Things like:
“How I made $10M in 10 minutes on Twitter”
or
“how to seller finance your way to an empire…”
No shade to anyone, it just seemed disingenuous and oversimplified.
Like a sugary snack that maybe got you excited for a minute, but didn’t actually get you understanding what it ACTUALLY took to get there.
It seemed to miss all the little moments of self-doubt or ‘WTF have I done’ moments that got in the way.
Turns out I wasn’t alone, and the ‘TikTokification’ of entrepreneurship has caused a lot of people to either underestimate the effort required, or think “WTF is wrong with me? They make it look so easy!”
This is why The Come Up has never been about subscribers or revenue, but instead, sharing awesome stories about awesome people.
It’s something we do because we love it.
If this newsletter has taught me anything, it’s that it takes a combination of willingness to fail, comfortability with uncertainty, and the desire to jump into the unknown, often leading you to solve problems you never even knew existed when you started.
Anyway, that’s how we got here—now an update on how it’s going…
Creating Process…
This year was about ironing out process—and addressing the need to create a strong system for interviewing, editing and publishing so we could increase the frequency of our interviews.
I’m happy to say this has really worked well—getting Angus on board has been invaluable as he edits the final interviews you all read.
With that in mind, we’ve decided it’s time to ramp up production, and commit to weekly interviews for Q4.
Some may go straight to the website and skip email, but the goal is to share more stories now that we’ve successfully built a strong pipeline and editing process.
Growth…
To date, I’m measuring success by 2 metrics:
number of publications per month (process)
new subscribers per month (growth)
All growth to date has been organic.
Precisely $0 has been spent on marketing or ads.
To date in 2024, we’ve averaged an 8.6% growth rate every month, slightly below my arbitrary target of 10% per month.
Our best month was in July at 15%.
Our worst months were May (3%) at 3% and August at 4%.
Both of these down months we hit production delays and only got one issue out.
They also coincide with the launch of new consulting clients and vacations, so I’m not beating myself up about it.
I’m not worried about boasting 10,000% growth or 100k subscribers, because, having helped set up a lot of similar publications with my consulting business, I’ve seen people claim they have 10k followers the day they launch.
That is to say—a lot of people are full of sh*t, and I’m not worried about playing that game.
That said, if you want to help us out, feel free to share with someone you think might enjoy reading!
Here’s a chart with our growth dating back to more uncertain times in 2022:
A few big spikes, and long lulls when I wasn’t as active, but as of Jan 2024, we’re seeing consistent growth.
This coincides with when I finally committed, mapped out a plan and executed consistently.
The lesson? Consistency matters.
New Strategies for Q4:
To date, all growth is organic, through three channels:
Referrals from other amazing Substack publications
readers sharing (thank you!)
The goal for Q4 is to double down on these channels, make a more concerted effort to reach out to other Substack writers, tweak LinkedIn content to get more engagement, and maybe be more intentional about asking our readers to share our content with people they think may enjoy it! 👀
Additionally, we’ve added Angella to the team who is running net new marketing experiments—things like posting excerpts and quotes on Pinterest, and publishing test content across TikTok & Instagram.
That should help inform a more ‘all-out’ strategy for Q1 2025.
Content Tweaks…
For now none.
That said, we’ve gotten SOME feedback that some of the interviews run long, and people would enjoy an audio version.
Audio & Video are big priorities for 2025, but since this whole operation is fully self-financed by my mortgage fund, adding new content streams is still a future plan.
We’re currently not making any money from ads or paid subscriptions (you’re welcome!) but we’d love to hear if this is something you’d feel is worth paying for!
And with that said—if you have any feedback on how we can improve our content please let me know.
You can always respond to this newsletter or reach out to me directly!
That’s the update—see you end of Q4.
We appreciate you opting in and helping grow this community together!