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1K to 10K Was Harder Than 10K to 100K

The Story

By May 2023, Extra Focus had reached 59,000 weekly subscribers (Source 1).

Looking back across the trajectory, Jesse names a pattern that runs against common intuition: “Growth has definitely been exponential. Getting from 1,000 to 10,000 felt a lot harder than getting from 10,000 to 100,000.” (Source 1).

The early growth wasn’t built from one platform. The newsletter started in early 2021 (Source 1) on the back of essays from the Ship 30 for 30 daily writing cohort (Source 1). The first 1,000 subscribers came primarily from a repackaged PDF, the “ADHD Strategy Guide”, promoted on X and TikTok (Source 1). After that, X became the dominant funnel: “It’s where the majority of my subscribers have come from.” (Source 1).

The compounding happened on top of consistent X output. “Outside of the newsletter, I mostly started just by slowly building an audience on X by first sharing all of the atomic essays I wrote for Ship30for30, and then writing more quippy quotable tweets… A lot of it was just repetition, and learning from what connected with people and what didn’t.” (Source 1).

By the time he switched the newsletter back to Substack in January 2023, he was seeing “a lot of growth directly from there” (Source 1) and “some incoming growth from Instagram and YouTube, but those are much smaller channels for newsletter growth.” (Source 1).

Jesse’s own retrospective on whether he’d change anything: “Honestly, I don’t know if I would do anything differently! I’ve been very fortunate over the past couple of years. Maybe stick with Substack from the beginning?” (Source 1). He had detoured through ConvertKit between Substack runs: “I started with Substack and then switch to ConvertKit when I hit 1,000 subscribers… ConvertKit was great for some things, but I never really pursued sponsorships much so it was ultimately a pretty large expense over the long run.” (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

The flat-feeling year is the dangerous year. Most creators quit somewhere between 1K and 10K because the slope feels linear and the work feels endless. Jesse stayed in the loop — small bets on X, atomic essays, lead magnet, repeat — long enough for the compound interest to start. By the time it visibly arrived, the curve looked exponential in retrospect. Two practical implications: (1) don’t optimize for speed in the 1K → 10K segment; optimize for not stopping. (2) The metrics that matter at 1K are different from the ones that matter at 10K — tweet hit rate, lead-magnet conversion, email open rates — and the only way to find them is to be in the system long enough to see the second derivative bend.

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