The best of Smarter Substack
Smarter Substack Weekly Recap | Mar 15, 2026
Smarter Substack delivers three curated Substack resources to your inbox every weekday.
This week, 856 creators are becoming Smarter Substackers.
🏅 This Week’s Top 5
New on Substack: Draft Notes, Hide Revenue Stats, Pin Multiple Posts, and More — Seven updates in one drop: save Notes as drafts, pin multiple posts to your homepage, export stats as CSV, center/justify text, hide revenue counts, syntax-highlighted code blocks, and a new live video dashboard.
I Analyzed 100+ of My Substack Posts with ChatGPT — Here’s What I Learned About Virality and High Engagement — Yana G.Y. ran a comparative analysis between her viral posts (100+ likes) and her flops. The patterns she found are surprisingly specific and easy to replicate.
$27K on Substack — Karen Cherry shares the decisions behind 225 weeks of publishing, 255+ paid subscribers, and $27K in yearly revenue — all from a food safety newsletter. Proof that niche expertise and clear promises beat audience size.
Your Substack Homepage: Why Less Is More (and What’s New) — A 32-minute walkthrough on homepage design, navigation, and the new multi-pin feature. Covers how to turn your homepage into a subscriber conversion tool instead of a cluttered archive.
Introducing the Substack Recording Studio — Substack launched a built-in studio for pre-recording solo videos or conversations with up to two guests, complete with auto-generated clips, editable thumbnails, and publication branding overlays.
This Week’s Top 5 is sponsored by WriteStack.
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❓ One Question:
🤔 Food For Thought:
You don’t need a massive audience to build a real business on Substack. You just need to be incredibly useful to a specific group of people.
Karen Cherry built $27K/year from a food safety newsletter. Not a huge niche. Not a viral topic. Just consistent value for the right readers.
What’s the one thing your audience keeps coming back for?
Hit reply and tell us!
Enjoy your Sunday, and see you Monday.
— Smarter Substack