Is Quantity Over Quality When Trying to Build Traction Effective?
The Truth About Chasing Volume and How to Do It Without Burning Out
If you’re like me someone who’s heard advice like “just publish a lot,” “put enough volume out there,” or “saturate the market to break the algorithm,”
Or if you’re publishing article after article, but your stats and subscribers just aren’t improving.
I highly suggest you finish reading this article. And I mean all the way to the end, especially if you consider yourself a beginner.
Like anything else, following advice without a plan or understanding of what you are trying to do can quickly lead to burnout.
I've seen it happen to many talented writers, including some who started around the same time as me, who ended up quitting because of it.
To save you the time, energy, and frustration of making the common mistakes that come with chasing quantity, I want to show you how to make the most of your efforts.
Let’s start from the beginning.
My 60-Day Sprint
If you’ve been around here a while, you might know: I used to publish a long-form article every single day when I first joined Substack.
I did it for 60 straight days. That means 60 articles in 60 days.
Even now, those 60 posts make up half of all the articles I’ve written on this platform.
But the question to ask is always impact they have and not how many are there.
If I had to estimate, those two months contributed to about 70% of my overall growth, not in terms of followers or subscribers, but in terms of me becoming the writer I am today.
In terms of Substack stats and numbers, though, that daily publishing sprint probably contributed to just 5% of my growth, max.
Imagine this: I was writing long posts every day, and they’d get maybe 4 views. Even after a month, some of them barely reached 13.
In my first two months, I had around 40 subscribers… and I had already published 60 posts.
Looking back, those numbers honestly seem a little depressing. But to my past self? They didn’t matter because I had a goal. And subscribers weren’t part of it.
That’s why I survived. Because my efforts were paying off. My goals were being reached.
When I started, I had four main goals:
To gain credibility
To learn how things work on the platform
To improve my writing as fast as possible
To build a solid character
They are what I call the Healthy goals of a beginner.
Let’s discuss them one by one and learn why they are essential to understand if we want to commit to prioritizing quantity over quality.
1. The Goal to Experiment and Learn the Platform
If it’s your first time on Substack or honestly, any platform it’s a game-changer to take the time to actually learn the platform early in your journey.
Why? Moving forward, you'll have a clearer, more efficient, and more growth-focused strategy.
The type that will have you get results directly proportional to your efforts.
Now, don’t stress if you don’t know what you’re doing at first. Don’t worry if it’s right or wrong.
In fact, focus on making as many mistakes as you can.
Because by doing that, you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t. And once that trial period is over, you’ll move forward with fewer wasted steps and more clarity.
For example:
Most people treat Substack like just another blogging tool. But if you actually spend time inside it, writing, publishing, using all the features, you’ll quickly realize: this platform is so much more than that.
When I started, I didn’t know any of that either.
All I knew was that I didn’t want to “just write”but still, I treated Substack like a basic blog. And for two months, I got barely any results. You saw the numbers earlier.
Turns out, I was missing out on about 70% of the platform’s value. I wasn’t tapping into it at all.
A big mistake on my part.
But it wasn’t a wasted mistake.
Just to share, here are the things I completely ignored at the start:
The power of Notes
Subscriber Chat
Engagement tools like restacks, likes, comments, and replies
Recommendations
Optimizing my profile and publication site
Supporting features like the Welcome Email... and honestly, the list goes on.
Those were just the surface, individual components
Learning what each feature is was the first step.
Learning how to use them came next.
Learning how to make them high-performing took even more trial and error.
Then came the real challenge:
Making them all work together harmoniously
Streamlining my workflow so my efforts and content weren’t scattered
Turning a messy process into a system that made sense
Because even great ideas can fall flat if everything is disorganized.
Structure is what turns effort into real progress.
Writing every day forced me to engage with all of this. I wasn’t just publishing, I was immersing myself in the ecosystem.
You can’t play the game unless you know the rules. Like a game, Susbtack is like that.
And learning requires sacrifices.
For me, I sacrificed time and effort. A ton of them.
And in the process, I had to let go of a few things in my life outside of Substack.
2. The Goal to Learn About Your Writing
There are two major parts to this:
Learn how to write better and faster: The basics of writing online.
Learn what to write: Find your niche and your voice.
As a beginner, I had to figure this out by doing it every single day. That meant going through this cycle daily:
Ideate → Write → Edit → Publish
It was in no way easy. I had no structure or system in place, and here’s what that looked like:
At night, after a long day of life happening, I had to squeeze out an idea from my brain.
Some days, I had a list of ideas and half-written drafts that helped.
But on others, I faced a blank page and zero inspiration.
I had to publish something the next day, no excuses.
So in the morning, I’d find time to edit while juggling the rest of my day.
Then repeat again at night, drafting another post for tomorrow.
It was messy. It was random. My early publication was all over the place strategy
Just survival.
But it gave me two major outcomes:
📈 1. I Improved My Writing Fast
I didn’t just want to write, I wanted to get better at writing. And the a fast way to do that?
Daily reps: the continuous process of testing, feedback analysis, and iteration.
During those months, besides learning “How to write” I also learned “How to Learn Writing Faster”.
What does Learning Writing Faster mean?
It means I can now easily spot my previous mistakes, I learned where to look for them and then was able to fix them on to the next.
Basically I have improved my pattern recognition.
🔍 2. I Discovered What I Should Be Writing
I’ll say this again and again:
To reap the seeds you’ve planted, you need to stay long enough for them to grow into trees and bear fruit.
And that’s not a short journey.
So, in deciding a topic to commit to, go ask yourself first:
“Can I write about this consistently, not for a month, but for years?”
That’s the real test of a niche.
No matter how talented you are or how much potential you have, it means nothing if you don’t stick around long enough to fulfill it.
You won’t last if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing.
My two-month sprint was one big experiment:
What can I write best and What can I stick to?
Here’s how I narrowed it down from three interests (YOU CAN SKIP THIS PART IF YOU WANT):
Biology (I’m a microbiologist)
→ I liked it, but writing required intense research and referencing papers. Too time-consuming for daily content. I know I can’t stick to it in the long run.Productivity
→ I’ve been in this space since university. It’s relatively easy to write about from personal experience. Feedback is also good, but not as good as the nextt one, but I still do it occasionally.Writing about Systems in Writing
→ This is where I got the strongest response.
→ People DM’d me, left comments, and some even donated.
→ I enjoyed it the most, and it helped others the most.
✅I knew I could write about this for a long time.
3. The Goal to Gain Credibility
One of my earliest goals was simple:
I wanted my publication to look established, even if it technically wasn’t yet.
Not because I wanted to mislead anyone.
Not because I was trying to appear “bigger” than I was.
But perception plays a huge role in how people engage with your work.
When a reader stumbles upon your page, they make a silent judgment: Is this writer serious about what they’re doing? Can I trust them to show up? Are they worth following long-term?
And that’s what I wanted to signal from day one.
I wasn’t trying to act like I had it all figured out. But I did want people to land on my page and feel like, “Okay, this person isn’t just testing the waters, they’re here for real.”
So I made a decision.
If I wanted to be seen as credible, I had to look credible.
That meant showing up. Filling my publication with articles. Creating a strong first impression through volume, consistency, and depth.
So I went all in..
And while I didn’t go viral, I noticed something:
People trusted me faster.
They saw a backlog of posts to scroll through. They got a feel for my voice. They saw the commitment.
4. The Goal to Build the Habit of Showing Up
To train myself to show up.
To build the habit.
To become the kind of person who writes even when no one’s watching.
It wasn’t just about the articles. It was about creating a foundation to make writing feel like brushing my teeth: Not negotiable.
It was also about building and reinforcing my character,
The kind of character that will carry me through everything, no matter what.
This is probably something most of us, just like me in the pas,t tend to overlook:
The importance of character.
I’ve come to accept a harsh truth: I won’t survive this path if I don’t have a solid character.
My thought was:
If I could show up every day for 60 days…
Then showing up once a week would feel easy.
I intentionally front-loaded the difficulty. I wanted to do something hard, on purpose, so that future consistency wouldn’t feel intimidating. And it worked.
But here’s the honest part:
After those 60 days, I was exhausted.
And was more or less burned out, I stopped writing completely for two months.
Not because I wanted to quit.
But because I had to shift my focus I was preparing for a microbiology certification exam. And I knew I couldn’t give 100% to both at the same time.
I didn’t want to put out half-hearted content.
And I didn’t want to fail the exam because I clung too tightly to my publishing streak.
So I paused. I prioritized.
And that was the right call for me at the time.
And after I have settled my other goal.
I went back right in.
And here is where the danger of quantity shows up:
I was only able to come back because I knew I did not fail.
If your only reason for doing it is to hit some stats or subs metric, burnout might break you.
Thinking you did so much, but still no results.
“I am publishing every week consistently but still crickets”
Sounds familliar? These are the usual lines of those who thought they are failing or their efforts are being wasted.
Not because it actually is but they have just the wrong metrics. They were looking elsewhere when their success is right in front of them.
That was a lot. Let’s do a quick recap before moving on..
If you want to focus on quantity, some healthy goals will include:
✅ Learn the platform
✅ Sharpen your writing
✅ Find your niche
✅ Build credibility
✅ Strengthen your character
But wait
We haven’t addressed the real question yet:
Quantity Over Quality When Trying to Build Traction: Is it Effective?
The answer?
Yes, of course it still is.
But there are prerequisites so that this “quantity” can mean something.
Quantity by itself will not help you much in gaining traction, unless you have a strategy behind it.
That strategy needs:
✅ Understanding of the platform
If you don’t know how Substack works your efforts won’t land as well as they could.
✅ Knowing your message
If you don’t know what you're trying to say, what kind of content will you plan? You'll write a lot… but it won’t stick. Your message will feel scattered.
✅ Abilit to Stick to your plan
Any strategy, no matter how brilliant, is useless if you can’t commit to it long enough to see results. Consistency is what brings clarity over time.
Without these, what you’ll end up with is:
A pile of disconnected posts
An unclear message
And a habit that drains you more than it builds you.
Ok cool—I have DETERMINED my four. So I’m safe I can use the Quantity over Quality mantra.
But wait.
If you're a complete beginner, you most likely don’t have those three yet.
Plus, I even said I got those three from doing the “Quantity over Quality”
This is kinda getting confusing, or … am I lying to you?
No—and that’s exactly the point of this article.
The point is: the only good way to take on a quantity over quality strategy is if you’ve also set clear, realistic expectations for what this strategy will help you accomplish.
Because strategies, even if they're the same, mean different things depending on where you are in your journey.
The strategy of quantity over quality might look one way for someone with a thousand subs…
And it might look different for someone with just a hundred.
And that’s something most writers don’t say when they tell you:
“Just write more.”
Here’s what you need to know to set proper expectations:
You need to know where you currently are.
You need to define what the next level looks like for you.
Then, set your goals based on those two points—
and create your own metric of success that aligns with your goal.
If you fail to recognize these things, the very strategy you’re hoping will help you grow might end up being the exact reason you quit.
I used the quantity over quality formula to help me gain those prerequisites, and now I am using it again, but this time it won’t be quantity OVER quality, it is Quantity AND Quality.
Quantity has helped me to get the things I need to achieve quality, but I had to pay for the very expensive price of time and effort.
If you have noticed, the three things needed for a strategy to work, which I mentioned here, are more or less the same things I talked about in my article
“4 Things to Stop Being Invisible on Substack.”
To be seen, you need to:
Show up consistently
Have a consistent message
Network
Diversify
And this is exactly why seasoned writers or those coming from other platforms have a big advantage in gaining traction, even if they don’t import their email lists.
It’s because they can leverage quantity in a very efficient way.
They’ve already tested their message and their systems and even built their character; in short they already have a solid strategy and are certain that they can stick to it.
Now, they only need to focus on learning the platform, which often doesn’t take them long either, and produce enough quantity to make their message stick and break the noise.
The early days are definitely hard—especially when you’re walking in the dark, still figuring things out, just trying to find your way to where you want to go.
BUT YOU WILL GET THERE.
That’s all for today! I appreciate you so much for reading up until here! 😊 If you think this article could help someone, feel free to share it or like it it really helps expand its reach to help others as well. 💌
Frey.
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✅ Exercises to help you practice and apply everything in real time
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