A Year Below One Thousand Subscribers
The Story
Packy McCormick wrote the Not Boring newsletter for over a year without hitting 1,000 subscribers (Source 1).
On April 2, 2020, he renamed the newsletter from “Per My Last E-mail” to “Not Boring.” On April 7, he had 602 subscribers. By early May he reached his goal of 1,000 (Source 1).
Then the growth curve bent upward. One year after hitting 1,000, he reached 50,000 subscribers. Eight months after that, he hit 100,000. As of the Growth In Reverse analysis, the Not Boring community had over 183,000 people and brought in more than $3 million per year (Source 1).
The growth timeline shows a classic hockey stick. A long, flat period of slow building followed by an explosion that made the early struggle almost invisible in retrospect.
Lesson for Creators
Most newsletters that become massive had a period where they looked like failures. A year of writing to fewer than 1,000 people is demoralizing, but it’s also the period where the voice, the format, and the audience-fit get refined. Packy’s story is a direct counter to the “if it hasn’t worked in 3 months, pivot” mentality. The year of slow growth was the foundation. The explosive growth couldn’t have happened without it.
Related
- The Product Hunt Launch That Tripled His List — the initiative that broke through the slow growth
- The In-Laws Basement with a Baby on the Way — the personal stakes during the slow period
- Word of Mouth Beat Everything — Lenny Rachitsky: same lesson that quality and patience win
- From Side Hustle to One Million ARR — Alex Garcia: contrast with faster early growth trajectory
- The Elon and Cathie Wood Retweets That Doubled His Following — Yossi Levi: a different style of inflection point, contrasting with Packy’s slow-build curve
- CDG Was Built With Zero Paid Marketing — Yossi Levi: another organic-only build that paid off in year two
- Two Years of Free Before the Paid Switch — Tom Orbach: same patience-pays-off pattern, applied to monetization
- First Question Is Monetization, Not Subscribers — Nathan May: the counterpoint — set 3-6 month kill criteria so patience doesn’t become stubbornness
- 1K to 10K Was Harder Than 10K to 100K — Jesse J. Anderson: same flat-feeling early segment, framed as the hardest part of the curve
- The Nine-Month Wait, 200 Posts — Olivia Wickstrom: same Substack-side patience pattern, with month 9 and 200 posts as the concrete inflection