Stop Waiting for the Op-Ed. Start the Substack.
The Executives Who Started Are Already Ahead. Here’s Their Advice.
It used to be enough to let the work speak for itself. You built things, led teams, made decisions that mattered and the reputation followed through rooms, referrals, and relationships. That system worked for a long time. It does not work the same way anymore.
The executive visibility and content landscapes shifted, and fast. AI-generated articles, ghost-written LinkedIn posts, and algorithmically optimized thought leadership have made it nearly impossible to tell who actually knows something from who simply sounds like they do. The noise is louder than it has ever been, and most of it is indistinguishable.
Which means the thing that cuts through is not more content. It is a human being—a specific one, with a specific point of view, writing from a specific body of experience that no language model can replicate.
That is why executives are starting newsletters. Not because it is trendy, and not because someone told them they needed a personal brand. Because the inbox is one of the last places where a reader chooses to slow down—and the executives who show up there consistently, with something real to say, are building the kind of visibility that compounds.
You have spent a career accumulating perspective that other people would genuinely pay to access. The question is whether you are going to let it stay in conference rooms.
Why Executives Are Choosing Substack, and Why It Is Working
Substack now supports over 50 million active subscriptions globally, with writers collectively earning $450 million in gross revenue in 2025 alone. Nearly 100,000 publications earn money on Substack as of early 2026—double the number from just twelve months prior. The platform reached a $1.1 billion valuation after its July 2025 Series C, and average email open rates sit at 44%, roughly twice the industry standard for traditional marketing email.
When someone subscribes to your Substack, they are not scrolling past you. They came to read. That kind of attention is increasingly rare—and it is getting rarer on the platforms executives have relied on longest.
LinkedIn organic reach dropped nearly 50% in a single year, according to the 2025 Algorithm Insights Report. Engagement fell 25%. Follower growth collapsed 59%. A post that reached 10,000 people in 2024 now struggles to reach 4,000 with the same audience. Company pages fared worse: brand content reach fell between 60% and 66% from 2024 to early 2026. Social platforms are built to rent you an audience, not give you one. The moment the algorithm shifts—and it always shifts—the reach disappears with it.
The inbox is yours.
The Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report put a number to what most executives already sense: nearly three-quarters of decision-makers find thought leadership more trustworthy than traditional marketing, and more than 75% said a single piece of it prompted them to research something they were not previously considering. A newsletter delivers that material directly, to people who raised their hand to receive it. That is a different kind of reach than a post that lives and dies in a feed.
The Permission Problem (and How to Get Past It)
The most common thing that stops executives from starting is not a lack of ideas. It is a deeply conditioned instinct to wait until the thinking is complete.
Decades of institutional life reinforce a particular kind of communication: polished, reviewed, approved. You do not send the draft. You send the finished thing. Writing in public—while you are still working something out, while your thinking is still evolving—can feel counterintuitive at best, reckless at worst.
Lenny Rachitsky, whose newsletter became the number-one business publication on Substack after seven years leading product at Airbnb, said it plainly when he launched a fellowship for senior operators: “The best operators in the world are too busy doing real work to have time to write publicly.” He built a program specifically to unlock what they already knew. The obstacle was never the ideas.
Being in-process is not a liability. It is the differentiator.
The executives who build real audiences on Substack are not the ones who have everything figured out. They are the ones willing to write toward an answer rather than waiting to arrive at one first. Ana Andjelic, former Chief Brand Officer for Banana Republic and Esprit, has built The Sociology of Business into one of the most respected brand strategy newsletters on the platform by doing exactly this—publishing original analysis, honest observations, and frameworks she is actively developing, week after week.
The audience does not want a finished product. They want access to the thinking.
What Your Career Already Gave You
You do not need to generate content. You need to excavate it.
Every executive has a decade-plus of material sitting in their experience. The question is not what do I know? but which part of what I know is most useful to the people I want to reach? Those are different questions, and the second one is harder—but it is the one that produces newsletters people actually read.
Start with the things you got consistently wrong early in your career before you understood them. Not failures exactly—more like misunderstandings that got corrected by experience. Those tend to be the most useful things to write about, because they describe a transition the reader is likely navigating right now.
Then think about what your industry does not talk about honestly. The gap between what gets said in presentations and what actually happens in practice. The decisions that look simple from the outside and are genuinely difficult from the inside. The things your peers know but do not say in public. That tension is content.
You do not need a perfectly defined niche or a fully articulated point of view before you start. You need one honest observation and the willingness to see where it goes.
The Mechanics, Without the Overwhelm
Getting a Substack off the ground takes about twenty minutes. Showing up consistently is what takes longer.
Name it clearly. Your Substack needs a title that signals what you cover, not just who you are. Your name might get people to open once; a clear topic keeps them. Think The Sociology of Business (brand strategy), not something vague about leadership wisdom.
Pick one frequency and protect it. Weekly is the standard for a reason—it keeps you in the inbox without overwhelming readers or yourself. Bi-weekly works too. What does not work is irregular: it signals that you are not sure this matters, and readers take that cue. Rachitsky, who spends ten to twenty hours on each post, put it simply: “If it feels like a job, you’ll quit.” Write about something you are genuinely curious about.
Write shorter than you think you should. The executives who struggle most early on write as if they are producing a whitepaper. Substack is a letter format, not a report format. Start with 400 to 600 words. Say one thing well. Leave people wanting the next one.
Free first, paid later. Your first job is to prove to readers—and to yourself—that this is worth reading. The paid layer comes after you have built the habit and the trust. Do not let the monetization question slow down the launch question.
Link to your existing channels. Substack and LinkedIn work well together. Your newsletter drives depth; your LinkedIn posts drive discovery. Cross-promote deliberately. Use both, not one or the other.
They Already Made the Move. Here's What They'd Tell You.
Brandi Copeland — The Employee Experience Edit
Copeland spent more than six years at NBCUniversal leading employee experience for over a thousand early-career professionals before founding her own advisory practice. She brings fifteen-plus years inside Fortune 100 organizations to the small and mid-size businesses that rarely get that level of thinking. The Employee Experience Edit is where she puts that experience to work in public—writing about the people strategies that actually drive performance, retention, and growth.
On building executive presence on Substack:
“Consistency matters more than I expected, and finding your voice takes longer than you’d think. I’ve never considered myself a writer, so Substack became a place to document my point of view while I was launching my business.
Slow growth turned out to be a gift because it gave me time to step into my authority without the pressure of a big audience watching. You get to figure out what you want to say and how you want to say it before everyone’s paying attention.”
On getting started:
“Take your time learning the platform before you worry about growing on it. Start by engaging with writers in your space, or people you just find interesting. Read their work. Leave thoughtful comments. Restack the writers who are sharing things worth reading. Then show up consistently with your own. A note or two a day and a post once a week or every other week will do more for your growth than you might think.”
Carolyn Regan — The Vital Shift
Regan spent five years at Racepoint Global—first as Senior Vice President of People, then as Chief People Officer—before launching her own leadership coaching and consulting practice. She brings more than two decades of experience working with senior leaders and organizations through transformation, and four years as Director of Global Talent at Weber Shandwick. The Vital Shift is where that career’s worth of perspective on leadership, work, and life reinvention becomes public.
On building executive presence on Substack:
“Substack isn’t LinkedIn. The moment I stopped thinking of it as a place to announce things and started treating it as a place to think out loud, everything shifted.”
“The audience here is different—more human, more curious, more willing to read long-form. What I’ve learned is that presence on Substack isn’t about broadcasting authority; it’s about extending your thinking into the world and inviting people into it. It feels less like a stage and more like a conversation. The readers who find you here aren’t looking for your credentials. They’re looking for your perspective.”
On getting started:
“Before you write a single word, take a power pause. Ask yourself: who am I becoming through this newsletter? Because Substack is not the place to lead with your initials. Leave the MBA and the C-suite titles at the door. What people come for is your thinking, your real observations, your experiences—the things you’ve lived through and learned. We are all more interesting as a human than as a title. And I’d push you to rethink the phrase ‘executive presence’ itself.”
“It tends to mean owning the room—outer power, posture, positioning. The Substack community asks for something different: inner power. Bringing your inside thoughts out. Being present with your audience, not performing at them. The executives building real followings here aren’t the loudest ones. They’re the most honest and real ones.”
The Long Game: When Substack Consistency Compounds
The below newsletters did not launch with built-in audiences or publishing teams behind them. Like the examples above they started as one person—with decades of corporate experience, hard-won perspective, and a decision to stop keeping it inside. What they have built since, measured in hundreds of thousands to millions of subscribers, is what happens when you plant something consistently and refuse to walk away before the harvest. The roots were always there. They just needed somewhere to grow.
Ana Andjelic — The Sociology of Business [ Ana Andjelic ]
A brand executive and Doctor of Sociology, Andjelic has been publishing original frameworks on how brands connect business with culture for years—weekly, with a paid tier for deeper work. The newsletter has tens of thousands of subscribers and has been recognized as one of the best single-operator publications on the internet.
Lenny Rachitsky — Lenny’s Newsletter [ Lenny Rachitsky ]
After seven years leading product and growth at Airbnb, Rachitsky launched a newsletter to share what he wished he had known earlier. It now has millions of subscribers and is the number one business newsletter on Substack. The lesson is not scale—it is that deep operational experience, communicated honestly, compounds.
Ethan Mollick — One Useful Thing [ Ethan Mollick ]
Mollick is a professor at Wharton who writes about the implications of AI for work, education, and life—not from a pundit’s perch, but from inside active research and practice. The newsletter has hundreds of thousands of subscribers. His willingness to share provisional thinking, week after week, has made him one of the most trusted voices on where work is actually going.
The Visibility You Are Leaving on the Table
It used to be enough to let the work speak for itself. For a long time, it was. The reputation followed the rooms, the referrals, the relationships. That system has changed—and the executives who are building something durable now are not waiting for the next room. They are showing up in the inbox.
You do not need to be ready. You just need to start.
If you are an executive who has been circling the idea of a newsletter and want to think through your specific angle, what you would cover, and how to build it into your current schedule without adding to the noise—a 1:1 Visibility Strategy Session is designed for exactly that. Or, if you want to work with ongoing support and accountability, Tend by Brand Anew is the monthly membership built for executives building in public.
