Practical: Getting started with Substack Chat threads
Building community beyond your Substack Posts and Notes.
What we’re doing here Getting started with the Substack chat feature. Understanding what the chat is, why it matters for building community, and how to set it up, including how to create threads that are exclusive to paid members.
✓ Already using the chat and feeling confident with it? You’re ahead of the curve.
✗ Not sure what the chat is or how to use it yet? Watch this screen share.
Just landed here and ready to shape your Substack world? I built an entire second Substack from scratch, and documented the entire process just for you. START HERE. Subscribe and let’s do this together, step-by-step.
There’s something that happens in the chat that’s different from the posts.
It’s more immediate. More conversational. More like sitting in a room with your people rather than writing into the void. And if you’re not using it yet, you’re missing one of the most powerful ways to deepen the relationship with your community.
The Substack chat is three things at once.
A community space — where your subscribers can show up, introduce themselves, ask questions, share what’s landing for them, find their people within your people. A living, breathing, conversational layer underneath the formal structure of posts.
A resource hub — where you can create threads and pin resources — free guides for all subscribers, exclusive paid member content, things you want people to be able to find and return to without scrolling through everything.
A behind-the-paywall layer — where you can offer insight, vulnerability, and thinking that lives in a different register than the posts. A more intimate space. A place where you can be more raw, more experimental, more in process without it feeling like a formal publication.
Think creatively with this. The chat is still relatively new territory for me so I am still discover what it can be for my world, I will feed back once I’ve got to grips with it.
