Medium and Substack: my experience so far

I started writing on Medium in October 2021 and stayed consistent. My story count exceeds 700. The Medium enhanced stats extension shows a total reach of almost 600K and 300K reads.

My first viral story happened already in the first month of writing on Medium. I’m a little embarrassed about it in light of what happened just several months later, but it’s okay. I don’t delete or sterilize my past writing. Everything I wrote, even if it sounds different as time goes by — is the output of my creative mind. By the way, finding that story just now so I could copy the link took a lot of scrolling. I’m a little in awe of how much I produced. I’m not commenting on the quality but the quantity is impressive.

I never had a niche, and I still don’t. My strategy was “build it, they will come,” and it largely worked, though it’s all relative, of course. I benefited, cynical though it sounds, from the Russia-Ukraine war because my stories were read a lot in the early months of the conflict, and I got a lot of followers. But I don’t feel like I “milked” the topic. I wrote when I had strong feelings and something to say. Otherwise, I continued to cover a variety of topics: running, family, entrepreneurship, current affairs, pop culture, and life in general.

Early in my Medium journey, I promised never to write about my earnings. I find such stories by other authors meaningless and annoying. So I won’t. That’s not to say I don’t care about earnings. In some months, my Medium money significantly…