Why Every Brand and PM Should Monitor Substack for User Insights

If your product or brand team isn’t monitoring Substack, you’re missing one of the richest streams of user intelligence available today.

Forget generic surveys.

Forget shallow social listening.

If you want real user intelligence, stop scrolling X and start reading Substack.

Substack is a criminally underrated market research tool.
It’s where users, builders, and domain experts go deep. Every post is essentially a long-form research report, not buried in dusty PDFs no one wants to read, but shared as living, breathing narratives.

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Hi, I’m Karo 🤗.
Each week, I share awesome insights from the world of AI product management and building in public. If you’re new here - welcome! Here’s a peek at what you might have missed:
- 4 AI Coding Terms That Everyone Gets Wrong But Shouldn’t
- Where To Find Emerging Product Voices on Substack in 2025

A huge thank you to everyone who read, commented on, and shared my last post!

Substack = Deep Dives at Scale

On Substack, we write:

• Walkthroughs of real workflows and experiments: step-by-step guides that show how to get value from your product.

• Workarounds: So valuable! Every workaround is a feature request in disguise, proof of what your product should already be doing.

• Emerging patterns: the unexpected behaviours that start to appear across multiple users.

• Error-handling notes: the bugs, the fixes, and the “don’t do this or you’ll regret it” lessons.

• Living FAQs: answers to the questions that come up again and again, built directly from real-world use.

You can’t buy this level of insight from a traditional research firm. It’s raw, experiential, and tested in real-life projects.

We’re not just venting.
We’re building a public knowledge graph of product experience.

More Than Opinions: Verifiable Sources

Unlike Reddit rants or fleeting X threads, Substack sits at the intersection of narrative and accountability.

The authors aren’t hiding behind weird usernames or corporate walls.
No floatingbaloon98. No “please schedule a call to even start talking to me.” We’re real people, using our real names, just one tiny DM away.

And the posts don’t stand alone, they’re part of a transparent ecosystem:

• Research process: we show our work, document the steps, trade-offs, and thinking behind every experiment, so others can replicate or challenge it.

• Citations & sources: everything is traceable, verifiable, and open for scrutiny.

• Github repos: many of us document our processes in open-source code.

• Community feedback loops: you can see what worked, what didn’t, and how others are iterating on top of it.

  Joe Mills
  said it best:

Becoming the internet’s reliable neighbour by Joe Mills.

Brands can’t buy that kind of global, organic reach.
It only happens in ecosystems built on trust and collaboration.
And because thousands of us are writing simultaneously, the scale is staggering.

Substack Amplification Bomb

Here’s the part brands often overlook: Substack has its own built-in Amplification Bomb.

• Every article is a fuse: When we publish, we’re not just talking to our own readers. We’re lighting a fuse that can ignite across the entire network of writers.

• Amplification by other authors: Every article I share amplifies at least one other writer - sometimes ten or more - catapulting the idea into new corners of the network.

• Amplification by the whole community = network effects in action: That’s the real magic: the ever-compounding network effects.

  • Each of my posts sparks hundreds of reactions: restacks, likes, and comments.

  • Some posts (like this one) reached 1.90× its baseline, meaning 90% more people read it purely because of community-driven sharing. Insane.

  • And even more insane? It doesn’t stop. Some posts get restacks months after they’ve been published.

• All of it is public and transparent, which means anyone can see exactly how far the message traveled.

• We also share case studies analyzing post performance.

• We’ve even built tools to make monitoring easy - such as StackDigest by

  Karen Spinner

Sentiment shared about your brand doesn’t just live in one lonely newsletter.
It ricochets across the network, gets translated into new contexts (and sometimes new languages!), and travels across industries and continents.

This is transparent, compounding, and unstoppable. You can literally watch the blast radius.

The Amplification Bomb Framework

If you’re a brand (or agency) that wants to trigger this effect intentionally, here’s the repeatable playbook:

1. Identify Your Spark

   • Pick one clear, compelling insight: a user story, a product walkthrough, or a counterintuitive finding.

   • Make sure it’s actionable and rooted in lived experience.

2. Seed the Network

   • Share it through a trusted Substack writer (or a set of them).

   • Position it as part of an ongoing conversation, not a one-off announcement.

3. Build in Reciprocity

   • Reference or restack other writers. This primes them to amplify you back.

   • Every citation = another fuse lit.

4. Track the Chain Reactions

   • Monitor restacks, reactions, and cross-posts.

   • Each signal tells you where your message is gaining traction and where to double down.

5. Reinforce the Blast

   • Engage publicly: comment, clarify, share follow-ups.

   • Turn the ripple into a wave by keeping the energy alive.

6. Leverage the Transparency

   • Package the visible proof of amplification (charts, screenshots, translations) and use it in your brand reporting.

   • This is your ROI story, and it’s undeniable because it’s all in the open.

Brands that learn how to activate the Amplification Bomb are engineering network effects in plain sight.

“We’re good, we’re already monitoring YouTube.”

Fair, but I wonder… if YouTube was enough, why are companies like n8n and Make making millions off user-built workflows that transcribe, remix, and repurpose those very videos?

The issue isn’t the videos themselves; many are high-quality, high-value productions. The real insight comes from the context, experimentation, and trust people layer on top. And that’s exactly the kind of intelligence Substack captures. If not first, then best.

The Takeaway for Companies

If you’re serious about understanding your users, your competitors, or the cultural edge of your industry:

• Monitor Substack: It’s the new early-warning radar and ignoring it means leaving free user research on the table.

• Understand Substack’s unique culture: this isn’t “influencer culture” - it’s practitioner collaboration culture. We’re domain experts learning in public, sharing the what, the why, the why not, and inviting others to question and learn alongside us.

• Amplify authentically. When you share or respond in a genuine way, the Amplification Bomb kicks in, and you become part of the conversation.

The future of brand intelligence is verifiable, human-first writing at scale.
And Substack is where it’s already happening.

Deep-Dives Worth Checking Out Today

From optimistic to more critical, all authentic experiences:

• For teams at Google: Nano Banana: Everything You Need to Know About Google’s Viral AI Editor by

  Daria Cupareanu
  and
  Michael Spencer

• For teams at OpenAI: GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (aka Research Goblin) is shockingly good at search by

  Simon Willison

• For teams at Lovable: Vibe Coding 101: 23 practical tips to build functional prototypes by

  Aatir Abdul Rauf

• For teams at Replit: I Broke Replit So You Don’t Have To by

  Karo (Product with Attitude)

• For teams at Netflix: Why Netflix Struggles To Make Good Movies: A Data Explainer by

  Daniel Parris

• For teams at Anthropic: 20 Tips to Master Claude Code in 35 Minutes (Build a Real App) by

  Peter Yang

• For teams at Figma and Canva: Pricing Retrospective: How Canva, Figma, and Adobe evolved their pricing by

  Rob Litterst

• For teams at Notion: Google and Notion unveil major new AI Agents for product teams by

  Rich Holmes

👉 Looking to improve your prompts? → The Self-Improving Prompt System
👉 Learning how to code with AI? → Best Spec-coding Guides
💪 A few genuinely awesome ways to support Product With Attitude 🤗

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