The Most Underrated Feature on Substack.

If you have a Substack, you already have access to one of the most underused growth tools on the platform—Recommendations.

Here's what my dashboard looks like right now:

68 Substacks are recommending me. That has brought in 167 subscribers total.

On the outgoing side, I am recommending three Substacks and I have sent them a combined 729 subscribers.

The writers recommending me are not doing anything wrong. They're just small. Most of them have a few hundred subscribers, maybe less. When they recommend me, their audience sees it but a small audience means a small number of new subscribers coming through, no matter how warmly they endorse me.

This is why the number of people recommending you matters far less than who is recommending you.

One writer with a large, engaged following recommending your Substack will send you more subscribers than fifty writers with 200 subscribers each but most people don't think about it this way. They chase volume, trying to get as many recommendations as possible when what they should be chasing is quality and how well their audience overlaps.

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Think about writers in your niche or adjacent to it who have a following you respect. They are not necessarily the biggest names on the platform. Just writers whose audiences would genuinely benefit from reading your work too.

That's the person worth building a relationship with. That's the recommendation that will actually move your numbers.

Building relationship with them is not complicated, but it does take time.

Subscribe to their Substack. Read their work. Leave genuine comments that shows you actually read it and thought about it. Share their work when it resonates with you. Engage consistently, not just once.

Writers notice. I have over 20,000 subscribers on my Substack, and I still notice who engages with my work consistently. I see who comments, who shares, who responds to my notes. I know who my people are. So when someone I recognise reaches out one day asking if I'd be open to recommending them, my answer is very likely yes because the relationship already exists. They're not a stranger making a cold ask. They're someone I already know.

The recommendation itself is not a big deal for me to give. 98% of my subscribers come from Substack app it self. What matters is whether I trust that my audience will find value in what I'm sending them to. That trust is built over time, through consistent engagement, before anyone asks for anything.

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I am recommending three Substacks right now. One is a friend. One is someone I have a professional relationship with that is growing to become a friendship. One was purely a business decision & recommendation swap.

These are different kinds of relationships. But in all three cases, I knew their work before I recommended it, and I believed in it genuinely. That is important. Your recommendation is your name attached to someone else's work. Do not put your name on something you haven't read or don't believe in, no matter what they offer you in return.

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A Few Practical Notes.

1. Don't cold pitch a recommendation swap.

Reaching out to a writer you've never engaged with and asking them to swap recommendations is the fastest way to get ignored. Build the relationship first and if you ever ask, it should feel natural not transactional.

2. Reciprocity is not guaranteed and should not be expected.

I recommend those writers because I genuinely think my audience will enjoy their work. Sometimes they recommend me back. Sometimes they don't. That's fine. The goal is to send your audience somewhere good, not to collect reciprocal endorsements.

3. Smaller accounts can still be worth recommending.

If a writer with 500 subscribers is producing genuinely excellent work that fits your audience, recommend them. It costs you nothing, it means a great deal to them, and your audience will appreciate the discovery.

4. The feature compounds over time.

The 68 Substacks recommending me now did not all come at once. Some of those relationships took months to build. The 167 subscribers from recommendations will keep growing as long as those recommendations stay active.

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Recommendations work when they are genuine.

Build real relationships with writers whose work you actually respect. Engage with them before you need anything from them.

Recommend them because you mean it and when the time comes that someone with a following worth noticing decides to recommend you back, it will be because you earned it not because you asked nicely at the right moment.

It is less exciting than a viral post and slower than a paid campaign. But it works, and it costs nothing except time and genuine interest in other people's work.

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Everything in this article is doable. It just requires consistency and time — two things a lot of writers genuinely don't have, especially if Substack is running alongside a job, a business, or a life that doesn't slow down.

If that's you — if you know your newsletter could be doing more but you don't have the bandwidth to show up consistently, build relationships, and write issues that actually convert readers into loyal subscribers — that's something I can help with. I ghostwrite Substack newsletters for Founders, Executives and Personal brands: issues, welcome sequences, and full newsletter management.

If that's something you'd like to talk about, click on My Newsletter Services or you can also reach out below 👇

💌: idowuf42@gmail.com