Hi I’m Angela 🧸A product growth marketer who exists in the space between caffeine highs and retention lows.
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Last week I published a piece breaking down Substack’s growth engine. It looked at how writer and reader behavior form loops that sustain the platform. Among the comments, one stood out.
Jennifer Houle, who writes about rethinking HR systems, left this reply:
Really like how this breaks down growth as loops instead of hacks. It captures the long game of trust and compounding better than most takes I’ve seen.
At first glance it is a kind note. Look closer and it tells me a lot about who is on the other side of my writing. She is not looking for surface-level tactics. She wants frameworks that explain cause and effect. She cares about long-term trust. And she is willing to engage publicly when something resonates.
That one reply functions as a data point. Treating it seriously changes how I approach my work.
What a single reader tells you
When someone takes time to comment, they are signaling what matters. In Jennifer’s case:
* Frameworks beat one-off tricks
* Long-term loops feel more useful than short-term spikes
* Clarity makes an idea worth repeating
This is not just her preference. These patterns often repeat across readers in different fields. A product manager, a recruiter, or a founder may have different day jobs but share the same mental model:
“Show me something I can apply and reuse, not a clever story I will forget tomorrow.”
From one reader to many
Treat your publication like a startup.
Find where your users are. Listen to the problems they are facing. Think about how you can provide practical help and real value.
Writers often imagine an “ideal reader persona” (AI tool users, startup founders, HR professionals). The risk is building a picture too abstract to be useful. Starting with a real person works better. One reader gives you signals, and those signals often map onto a group.
When Jennifer reacts to 《Substack’s Growth Engine》, I see overlap with product people who value compounding.
When she praises the focus on loops and the long game of trust and compounding, I see a concrete signal about the kind of growth problems readers care about—sustainable, behavior-driven growth rather than chasing hooks and traffic.
Different roles, same set of problems.
That is where the real opportunity lies:
Designing solutions for a concrete pain point, which then reveals the group of people who share it, instead of guessing what an abstract “ideal reader persona” might need.
Go to the front lines
The best signals do not always arrive in your inbox. Readers live in other places. They complain on Reddit threads. They trade notes in X communities.
They leave comments under product reviews. These conversations are raw, shaped by the problems people are actively trying to solve. When you track those moments, you see the same themes surface across roles. Product managers, HR leads, and founders may frame it differently, but the underlying tension repeats. That is the ground truth worth building for.
If you want sharper content, go there. Scan forums. Read comment sections. Note the phrasing people use when they describe their frustrations.
Those exact words often make stronger starting points than anything you brainstorm on your own.
Think of it as field research. Your readers are already telling you what they need. You just have to be in the room where it happens.
Turn signals into a loop
Once you see comments and conversations as data, writing becomes a feedback loop:
* Publish a model or framework
* Watch which part gets highlighted, replied to, or questioned
* Extract the signal from that interaction
* Feed it back into the next piece
The loop compounds. Readers feel heard, content improves, and engagement grows as relevance does the heavy lifting.
Why this matters
Writing into the dark feels lonely.
Treating each comment as a signal creates structure and direction. It grounds your work in reality. One reader becomes a prototype. The prototype reveals patterns. Patterns guide content. And the cycle continues.
Growth in writing is not only about reaching more people. It is about designing with real people in mind. Each reply, each highlight, each public reaction is part of the dataset. Pay attention, and the work scales in ways that still feel personal.
Still alive in market, and your self-doubt?
Cool. Most great products start right there.
If you survived this dispatch without mental breaks, Anchor sends caffeine.
Recommend this colony log to your fellow survivors.
