I run a newsletter about money, so let me start by being honest about my own numbers.
This publication has 2,199 subscribers. That is the number Substack shows me, the number I could put in a bio, the number that looks like a real audience.
Here is the number that is actually true: 874.
That’s how many of you have ever opened an issue or clicked a link. The other 1,325 — sixty percent of the list — have never done either. Not once. Not the welcome email, not the dad jokes, not the day I put a thousand dollars of my own money on the line in public. Nothing.
I am going to send those 1,325 people one plain email asking if they still want this. Then, about two weeks later, I am going to remove everyone who didn’t answer.
I want to tell you why, because the reason is the same reason I’ve spent thirty years telling people to open the envelope they’ve been avoiding.
A number you don’t look at is not an asset
When I ran a nonprofit credit counseling organization, I watched thousands of people walk in carrying a number in their head that had nothing to do with reality. The credit limit they had “available.” The house that was “worth” what the neighbor’s sold for. The retirement account they hadn’t logged into since the market did something they didn’t like.
Every one of those was a real number. None of them was a true one. And the gap between the two is where people get hurt, because you make decisions based on the number in your head, and life bills you based on the one on the statement.
My subscriber count is exactly that kind of number. It’s real. It’s on the dashboard. And it is not true.
If I plan around 2,199, I’ll write for people who aren’t there. I’ll read a 17 percent open rate as a failure of the writing, when the honest math is that roughly 45 percent of the people who actually receive and see this thing open it — which is a completely different problem to solve, and a much happier one.
What the 1,325 are actually costing me
Not money. Substack doesn’t charge me by the free subscriber, so this isn’t a bill I’m dodging.
What they cost me is signal.
Every time I test two headlines against each other, the results come back muddied by 1,325 people who were never going to open either one. Every time I ask “did that issue land?” the answer is diluted by sixty percent noise. I’ve been trying to steer a car while looking at a speedometer that’s stuck.
There’s also the conventional wisdom in the email world — and I’ll label it that, because I haven’t tested it myself — that mailbox providers watch how people treat a sender’s mail, and a sender whose messages mostly sit unopened starts landing in more promotions tabs and spam folders for everyone, including the people who want it. If that’s even partly right, the dead weight isn’t neutral. It’s pulling the live readers down with it.
Why not just leave them? Bigger is bigger.
Because I know what the temptation is. I’ve felt it every time I’ve looked at that dashboard.
It’s the same temptation that keeps a person paying the minimum on a card they’ve stopped looking at. The same one that keeps a family in a house they can’t carry because selling would mean admitting the number. Nobody wants to be the person who makes the total go down on purpose.
But a smaller true number beats a bigger false one every single time, because only the true one can be acted on. I would rather know I’m talking to 874 people and get better at talking to them than keep telling myself a story about 2,199.
How I’m doing it, so you can hold me to it
One warning email, plain, to only the people showing zero activity. Not to you — if you’re reading this, you’re not on that list. It says: still want this? Open it, click anything, and you stay.
About two weeks of waiting. Some mail apps hide opens from the sender, so I’m giving people a real window, not a gotcha.
Then I re-run the filter live — never from an old list — and remove the addresses that are still at zero.
Then I watch what happens to the open rate on the next five issues. If I’m right, the true number goes up. If I’m wrong, I’ll tell you that too.
Your turn — the same audit, on your own money or even your own subscribers
You have a 2,199 somewhere. Everybody does.
It might be a subscription you haven’t used since spring. A savings account earning a rate you’ve never actually checked. A “budget” that lives in your head and has never once been compared to a bank statement. A debt balance you’ve rounded down for so long you’d be surprised by the real figure.
This week, pick one and look at the true number. Don’t fix it yet. Just look. The looking is the hard part, and it’s the part that turns a number you carry into a number you can use.
If this was useful
Send it to the one person you know who is proudest of a number they haven’t checked lately. They’ll know who they are.
I’m Steve Rhode. I’ve been helping people with money trouble since 1994, I ran a nonprofit credit counseling organization, and I filed bankruptcy myself in 1990. This is what I’m seeing and what I’d tell my own family — take it as input, not instruction. Only you know your whole situation, and nobody, including me, gets to tell you what to do with your money.
The smaller, truer list starts in a couple of weeks. If you’re still here after that, I’ll know you meant it. That’s a better thing to build on than any number on a dashboard.