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Eighteen Months at Four Hundred Subscribers

The Story

CJ Gustafson started Mostly Metrics in December 2020. For roughly the next year and a half, almost nobody read it. “Not at first, I mean like the first two years, nobody listened to me. I was writing into the abyss” (Source 1).

His co-host on Rough Draft described the same window in numbers: “It took CJ a year and a half to reach 500 subscribers. Then, in the following year, his newsletter skyrocketed from 500 to 27,000 subscribers” (Source 2). CJ’s own framing of that early period: “At the start, I was getting single-digit views on some of my posts — like, literally, my dog and maybe my mother-in-law were the only ones reading it” (Source 2).

The Niche Pursuits write-up confirms the same shape of the curve: “For nearly two years, CJ’s newsletter had just 400 subscribers. He admits it was tough, but he kept writing because he believed in the process” (Source 4).

He kept writing because the writing was for himself before it was for anyone else. “I wasn’t sure where it was going, but I kept writing because I needed to get those ideas out of my head” (Source 2). And: “the writing was for me at first. It was a way to exercise this muscle of how to talk about businesses, business models and metrics cause I was learning so much” (Source 1).

The compounding payoff after that runway: “I’ve posted my timeline before. I think it took me almost two years to get to 400 subscribers. And then after that I broke through and went from 400 to 40,000 in the next two years. Now I’m on 65,000” (Source 1). The Growth In Reverse deep dive charts the same trajectory and adds the most recent number: “In just 4 years, he’s grown his newsletter to over 59,000 readers” (Source 3).

Lesson for Creators

The flat part of the curve is the curve. Eighteen months of single-digit views looks like failure from the outside and feels like it from the inside, but it’s the period where the writer turns into someone worth reading. CJ kept showing up because the act of writing was the reward — documenting what he was learning, exercising the muscle. The audience showed up later, on its own schedule, and then it compounded. If he had quit at month twelve, the next 65,000 readers would have gone to someone else.

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