Substack Notes Distribution for Developer Tool Founders

There is no advertising auction on Substack Notes. No placement is for sale, no CPM exists, and a proposal that quotes one is describing restack farms or a swap spreadsheet. What moves a Note is a restack from an account whose readers already trust it, and what turns that reach into a list is the subscribe page underneath. This engagement buys those two things plus the paid acquisition behind them, for developer tool companies where the person writing is an engineer. How the writing works: The Notes calendar comes off your engineering work, not your marketing calendar. A Note describing what broke in production on Tuesday, with the trace and the fix, does more than the release announcement it replaced. For the first fortnight we sit read only in your release and incident channels, pull the material, and draft in the founder's or DevRel lead's voice after a recorded voice session. They approve every Note before it publishes. Nothing goes out under a name that has not read it. Three distribution surfaces: Substack Recommendations, negotiated by hand, declining any reciprocal whose audience already overlaps yours by roughly half, because that trade returns people you have. Restacks from writers we have followed for months, approached with one specific Note and no swap attached. And paid traffic to the subscribe page, which for a technical readership means Reddit and Meta rather than X. The number we manage to: Signups are not the deliverable. Every source is cohorted by its thirty day open rate, and any source under thirty five percent gets cut, including per subscriber recommendation networks that will happily keep billing. In practice this removes about a third of the raw volume during the second month, and it is the reason the list still opens in month nine. We agree a ceiling on cost per thirty day active reader before any spend starts, and we stop rather than exceed it. The welcome sequence carries more conversion than anything we buy, so we write the welcome email and the subject lines of the first three sends with you. That is where the reader decides whether the Note was representative. Not included: We do not write your long form posts. Ghostwritten technical essays from an agency are detectable by exactly the audience you want, usually within two paragraphs. We do not run engagement pods, buy restacks, or open second accounts to restack the first. We do not take ownership of the publication, the domain or the Stripe connection, and we will not accept admin where contributor access is enough. Media budget is billed to you directly, never through us. Not for you if: The publication has fewer than about twenty posts. There is nothing to distribute yet, and the honest first step is six months of writing without us. Nobody at the company will publish under their own name. A distribution practice cannot fix an anonymous brand voice on a platform built entirely on people. You are chasing paid subscriber revenue on a consumer newsletter, which is a different craft with different economics and we are not the right shop for it. Your product is aimed at buyers who do not read, in which case put the money into documentation and integrations. Working language is English, with German for DACH facing publications. Reporting is a written note every second Friday with the cohort table attached, and one call a month. We do not send dashboards nobody opens.