I stopped writing "Here's What I Learned" notes. Here's What I'm Writing Instead.

I stopped writing "here's what I learned" notes and started writing "here's what's dumb about me" ones. Here's the experiment.

Every growth guide says the same thing: post value. Give tips. Teach something in every note.

So I did. Three notes a day, every day—a quick tip, a discussion question, a soft pull toward whatever I’d written that week. It worked well enough. Notes alone brought in 39 new subscribers last month on a publication that started under 100. I’m not complaining about that number.

But when I went back through a month of my own notes looking for the ones that actually got restacked and replied to—not just liked—a pattern showed up that I didn’t love: almost none of my best performers were tips. If you’re building on Substack and want more than the newsletter itself, [Affiliate Blogging Academy] is where I’m posting the raw experiment as it runs, not just the cleaned-up conclusions.

The tip trap

Here’s the thing about a well-crafted tip: it’s useful, and useful is forgettable. A reader nods, maybe saves it, and scrolls on. Nobody restacks a tip because they *recognize themselves* in it—they restack it because it might be handy later, which is a much weaker trigger.

Compare that to the handful of notes I’ve posted that weren’t tips at all. One admitted I still get a flinch of guilt every time someone clicks one of my own affiliate links, like I got caught doing something, even though I’d recommend the product to a friend for free. Another was just: I have a folder of half-finished “ultimate guides” I abandoned because I got bored of my own expertise halfway through writing them.

Neither of those teaches anything. Neither has a lesson at the end. They’re just admissions. And they consistently outperformed my tip format. Notes on replies—because a reply to a tip is “thanks,” and a reply to an admission is “wait, me too.”

The test I’m actually running

Instead of guessing, I rebuilt my four-week Notes calendar with a built-in comparison: two Notes a week, on different days each week, swap the usual morning tip for something dumb, embarrassing, or self-doubting—with zero lesson attached. No, “...and here’s what I learned.” Just the confession, full stop.

The rule I had to enforce on myself was harder than it sounds. My instinct on every one of these was to soften the ending into a takeaway, because a takeaway feels safer to publish than an unresolved admission. Every time I caught myself adding “...and that’s why I now—“ I deleted it back down to just the confession.

Eight of these are running across the next four weeks, starting this coming Monday spread across different weekdays, so I’m not accidentally just measuring “Tuesdays perform better.” At the end, I’m comparing restacks and replies against my standard tip-format notes from the same slot—not against likes, since likes are the easiest metric to inflate and the least connected to actual subscriber growth.

Why this might matter more than another “best AI tools” list

If you’re rotating through niches the way I do—AI tools, affiliate marketing, digital products, blogging—it’s easy to default every note to “useful information about the niche.” That’s the safe choice, and safe choices are why most newsletter Notes feeds start to sound the same after a while.

The uncomfortable version of this advice is: your most useful Note this week is probably not your best-performing one. The one that gets restacked is more likely to be the one where you admitted something a little unflattering about how you actually work—not how you’d like people to think you work.

I don’t have the final numbers yet. I’ll post the actual comparison—restacks, replies, and whether any of these confessions Notes drove real subscriber growth versus just engagement—once the four weeks are done. If you want to see the results when they land instead of guessing whether this holds up, that’s exactly what I’m building [Affiliate Blogging Academy] around: the actual experiments, not just the polished conclusions after the fact.

**P.S.**—If you want to try your own version of this test before I’ve even published the results, pick one note a week, write the most mildly embarrassing true thing about how you actually work, and post it with no lesson at the end.

That last part is the hard rule—no takeaway, no silver lining, just the admission.

I’ll be doing the same on [Affiliate Blogging Academy] if you want to watch it happen in real time.