My initial reaction to the first Substack Go event today was to appreciate that they are trying to bring people together to form communities of interest. I’m curious when they will go old school over at Substack and start keeping a list of authors by topics like a catalog. Maybe we will see the return of the blogroll. Things opened up with a Substack community organizer talking about the programming and giving a rousing welcome to everybody across the globe that was in attendance.

81 other people from all over the globe were at the kick off of the Substack Go with Katie from the 81 other people from all over the globe were at the kick off of the Substack Go event series with Katie from the community team. I was a part of the very first Tolstoy hour event. Apparently, we are being connected to a squad of other writers to work together and collaborate. I’m pretending this was some type of Hogwarts sorting hat magic. I ended up being sorted into a small group of about 5 other writers. We got dropped into a Zoom breakout room to talk outside of the large group.

We opened by sharing our names and what we write about. Obviously, I shared that The Lindahl Letter just hit one year of weekly publishing. You can find that collection of thoughts here: https://nelslindahl.substack.com/ 

Bringing a collection of writers together will yield some fairly predictable results. We talked about the following topics:

• Writing routines
• Editing 
• Deciding what to write
• Growth hacking? Building your subscriber base
• How to keep in touch

During the event I subscribed to several different Substack newsletters. I learned about a Discord group called, “Substack Writers Unite.” Summing up this very first Substack Go event would be as easy as tagging it as an introductory meet and greet. Nothing was recorded and the conversations were decent. I’m looking forward to the next event on Friday morning.