LinkedIn Switched Off My Account Three Days Before I Launched Here. A Year Later, I’m a Bestseller.
Rebuilding from zero - Actionable insights, lessons and growth strategies
Three days before I published my first post on Substack, LinkedIn switched me off.
There was no warning. My account was restricted and everything went with it. The 38,000 followers. The 30,000 connections. The 135 recommendations. Years of relationships, articles, posts and proof, all sitting behind a wall I had no way through.
I had been planning to start here for a while. The timing decided itself.
So I rebuilt from nothing. Twelve months on, The Link Tank is a Substack Bestseller, which was the single goal I had set myself for the first year. I built it the same way I built on LinkedIn, organically, without paid promotion.
I am not going to give you my exact figures. The revenue confessional has become its own genre, and it is not one I want to write.
What follows is more useful than a number anyway; it is what a year of building in public, twice, on two different platforms, has actually taught me.
What’s below: why losing my LinkedIn account turned out to help me, who is really reading on Substack, the one habit that drove most of my growth, the decision I would change, and the principle I would not.
The lesson I learned the hard way, before I even started
1. Never build a business on ground you do not own.
The lesson I learned the hard way, before I even started
1. Never build a business on ground you do not own.
For years I poured everything into LinkedIn. The relationships were real and the results were real. None of it belonged to me. A single restriction removed my entire audience in an afternoon, and there was no appeal that gave it back on my timeline.
Substack is different in one respect that matters more than any feature. When someone subscribes, I have their email address. That connection moves with me. No platform decision can sever it overnight. If you take one thing from this piece, take that. Own the relationship, not just the following. Your LinkedIn is important. Make sure that you have secured the relationships built there on an additional platform. Email, Substack…the choice is yours but ensure you make it!
What to do about it: Audit where your professional reputation currently lives. If the answer is one platform you do not control, you have a single point of failure. Start moving people you reach there onto something you own, an email list above all. Add one line to your LinkedIn content that points readers to a newsletter they can subscribe to by email, and treat every new subscriber as an asset no algorithm can take back.
2. Being forced to start was the best thing that could have happened.
I would have kept putting Substack off. There would always have been one more LinkedIn post to write first. Losing the account removed the choice. I had to commit fully from day one, with nothing to fall back on.
The momentum came from the constraint. I would not recommend the method to anyone. I would recommend the urgency it created.
What to do about it: Manufacture the constraint deliberately. Pick a launch date inside the next fourteen days, not next quarter. Announce it publicly to your network this week, with the exact date stated, so that not launching now carries a visible cost. Write your first three posts before that date arrives, so launch day is publishing, not writing. Commit to a fixed number of posts for the first month, eight is a sensible floor, and put those dates in your calendar as fixed appointments. Then remove the obvious escape route by telling one named person whose opinion you care about to check you have published!
Who is actually reading on Substack
3. This place is full of senior professionals, not the people I expected to find.
I arrived assuming Substack was the home of essayists and creatives writing about their feelings. That is not who I have met. My readers are lawyers, advisers, technical architects, founders and senior operators who are here to get better at business development. They want sharper thinking, not performance.
That reshaped what I write. I stopped softening things for an imagined audience of hobbyists and started writing for the people who are genuinely here. The work got more direct, and it performed better for it.
What to do about it: Before you decide Substack is wrong for your field, test it for an afternoon. Search the platform for the three or four terms your clients would use to describe your work, and read who is publishing under them. Look at which publications in your sector hold a Bestseller badge, which signals that paying readers exist. Then import your LinkedIn connections and write one piece pitched at the most senior reader you want, not the average one, and judge it on the quality of the replies rather than the volume of likes.
What actually drove the growth
4. Notes did most of the heavy work.
Long-form articles build trust and convert. Notes are what brought people to the articles in the first place. They are where new readers find me before they have any reason to subscribe.
5. Volume and consistency beat any single clever post.
I publish to Notes three to five times a day. I do not do this by sitting at my phone all day. I batch and schedule using WriteStack, which means the cadence holds even on the days I have client work or am away from my desk.
Consistency is the part most people underestimate. One brilliant Note will not build a publication. Showing up every day, for a year, will. The scheduling is what makes daily output survivable alongside a consultancy.
Top Strategies for your Notes:
Repurpose a LinkedIn post that already performed well. What earned engagement on one platform usually earns it on the other.
End some Notes with a real question. Replies push your Note in front of people who never followed you.
Reply to your own Note with the follow-up thought. It keeps the Note active and rewards anyone who came back.
Post when your readers are actually awake, not when it suits you. Check your stats for the hours your audience shows up.
Open with a specific number or detail, not a general claim. Precision earns trust faster than a sweeping statement.
Take a position other people in your field are avoiding. A clear stance stands out in a feed full of agreement.
React to something happening in your sector today. Timeliness pulls attention that an evergreen tip cannot.
Leave a substantive comment on a larger account’s Note. A thoughtful reply puts you in front of their whole audience, not just yours.
Share a reader’s question or result. It gives you proof and relevance in a single Note.
Let some Notes give without asking for anything. A Note with no link and no pitch builds the goodwill that makes your asks land later.
Restack every note 12 hours later to resurface it in the feed
The decision I would change
6. I would have set my paid tier lower at the very start.
I have always priced at a point that reflects the value and protects my credibility. I sit higher than many people here, deliberately, because I serve a senior audience and I am not interested in competing on cheapness. I would not change that overall.
What I would change is the entry point in the earliest weeks, before I had a body of paid work to point to. A slightly lower starting price would have let more early readers cross the line and experience the paid tier, at the precise moment I most needed proof that people would pay. I confused holding a premium position with making the first step difficult. They are not the same thing, and I would separate them next time.
What to do about it: Set your standing price at the level your expertise justifies and leave it there, because a low everyday price tells senior buyers your work is cheap. Then open a separate, time-limited founding-member offer for the first few weeks only, at a clearly reduced rate. Name it, give it a fixed end date, and say plainly that it closes. That lets early readers experience the paid tier and gives you the first wave of paying subscribers you need as social proof, without training your audience to wait for a discount. When the window shuts, return to full price and do not reopen it casually.
The principle I would not change
7. Ninety per cent of my content stays free.
This is the question I get asked most. Why give so much away? The answer is that generosity is the entire engine. It is how I built on LinkedIn, and it is how I have built here.
Free content is what earns the trust that makes the paid tier worth having. People do not pay for access to a stranger. They pay to go deeper with someone who has already proved, repeatedly and for free, that the thinking is worth their time. Reaching Bestseller status in a year, organically, tells me the approach works. I have no intention of closing the doors now.
Where The Link Tank goes in year two
The first year was about proving I could rebuild what I lost, on ground I control this time. That is done.
The second year is about depth. More of the frameworks I use with consultancy clients, made usable for readers building their own platforms. More on the relationship between LinkedIn and Substack, which only started working for me once I stopped treating them as two separate jobs and started running them as one system. Better tools, built for the specific problems senior professionals run into here.
If you have read this far, you are exactly the person I am writing for. I would love you to come with me.
To mark the first year, I am opening the annual plan at 30% off for the next 72 hours. It is the entry point I wish I had offered at the start. Anniversary subscribers also receive The Instant Content Kit for LinkedIn + Substack, normally £49, included free. If The Link Tank has earned a place in your inbox, this is the moment to go deeper.
Thank you for the clarification about the initial pricing.
I remember listening to you last year during a Brenda Meller's workshop where you explained the higher price.
It's helpful to now have a different insight.
Over the last couple of weeks I feel like LinkedIn is throttling my posts. 400 impressions is considered good… very wary of investing in a platform after Twitter turned into X. Substack is different.