I hit a million views a month on X and Threads

Until a few months ago, I hadn't posted on social media consistently in 4-5 years.

I originally started posting on social media to promote my first book, The Self-Taught Programmer. I built a decent following on Instagram, got 3K followers on what was then Twitter, and created a Facebook group for self-taught programmers that's still active today with 360K+ members.

Everyone following me was there for programming content, and I wanted to talk about marketing, which meant every marketing post I published would land in front of software engineers who didn't care.

But I was writing my third book, The Self-Taught Marketer, and I was determined to test the ideas in it publicly to prove they work.

So I started posting on Substack. It gave me a fresh start on a platform where nobody knew me.

My first post on Substack Notes got no traction.

Neither did my second.

I studied what worked for others relentlessly, and eventually posted something that got engagement. I went from 0 to 700 followers and 500+ subscribers fast.

The problem is that Substack sells you a dream that sounds amazing until you run the numbers yourself.

Substack has around 30 million users a month. X and Threads each have hundreds of millions of users. The best people I know on Substack, who started when I did, are picking up maybe 2-5 subscribers a day.

That's where the math breaks.

Even at 5 subscribers a day, the generous case, that's 1,800 a year. Maybe 3% convert to paid if you're lucky, at $10 a month. Now you're making $540 a month for a year of work.

The only way the numbers work is with an expensive product on the backend: consulting, a SaaS product, or something else that sells for thousands of dollars.

But most people on Substack aren't running profitable businesses. They're writers who bought the same dream I did: thinking they could get thousands of paying subscribers, without realizing it takes 3-5 years to get there. If it ever happens at all.

So I decided to demote Substack. It still has value, but it's a terrible discovery engine. To feed the top of my funnel, I needed a platform that could reach more people.

That's what led me to Threads.

The reach shocked me almost immediately, especially coming from Substack, where the algorithm pushing you to 1,000 people is a massive win. Within my first 5 posts on Threads, one got 400K views.

So I leaned in. I studied what worked and what didn't, refined it constantly, and built up to posting 6 times a day. Then I did the same thing on X.

My strategy: start conversations and give other people the opportunity to show off their work.

My biggest posts on both platforms have started genuine conversations with my target audience.

Is AI good at marketing?

Anyone raising funds for their startup?

Drop your startup URL.

The result? Over a million views a month across both platforms. And the best part: the people seeing my posts are business owners. My content led directly to a fractional GTM leadership role at a venture-backed startup, which covers my monthly expenses, so I can spend years building a real platform. Because that's what it takes.

I'm still figuring out how exactly I'm going to monetize the funnel I've created outside of fractional GTM work.

I'm almost done with The Self-Taught Marketer, and I'm very excited to publish it.

I built an internal tool that helps me generate ideas for posts on X and Threads. Now I'm experimenting with turning it into a SaaS product.

I'm not sure exactly what I will do.

But I think this is what founder-led marketing looks like in 2026 when it is done well.

Start with attention, find a way to pay your bills that gives you infinite runway, and experiment until you find a product that wins.