100,000 Subscribers and My Personal AI Prompt Library

Plus 6 lessons from growing this newsletter from 0 to 100,000 readers

Nov 20, 2024

Dear subscribers,

We just hit 100,000 subscribers! To celebrate, I’m offering my personal AI prompt library for annual subscribers only.

Let me show you what’s inside this library and share six lessons from growing this newsletter from 0 to 100,000 subscribers.

My personal AI prompt library (with real examples)

Here's the thing about AI prompts — they're useless without the examples.

Anyone can write a prompt to “make a viral social post” or “edit a newsletter.” But the magic happens when you show AI exactly what “viral” and “good” means.

That’s why I included my best examples in my prompt library to help you:

Extract insights from long podcasts, YouTube videos, and articles.
Create viral posts using my best LinkedIn and X posts (1M+ impressions).
Edit newsletter articles using my best-performing articles.
Craft compelling headlines and YouTube thumbnails using the best examples.
Turn raw transcripts into polished articles with my best interviews.

…and more.

I use these exact prompts to create content for 300K followers. So use this library to:

Skip the trial and error by using what’s already working for me.
Save hours every week by just pasting my prompts into your favorite AI tool.
Get real time updates as I plan to add new prompts for creators and PMs before year-end.

Upgrade to annual now and I'll send you the link to the library in the welcome email.

Unlock My Personal AI Prompt Library

I’ll also send existing annual subscribers a link to the library later today.

Finally, I plan to offer more paid subscriber benefits in the coming months. Let me know what would be most valuable to you in this poll:

Six lessons from growing this newsletter to 100K

Growing this newsletter to 100K over 3 years has been one of the most fulfilling things that I’ve done. Here are 6 lessons if you want to do the same:

1. Show up every week

There's no shortcut. To grow, you have to produce quality content every week. I spent about ten hours weekly between the Wednesday post and Sunday podcast, mostly during early mornings and weekends.

Yes, it's basically a second job. But I keep showing up because I love to...

2. Chase your curiosity

I couldn’t sustain this if I didn’t write about what I was curious about.

This curiosity has led me to write about product management rants, growing a creator business, and using AI to save time. I also started the YouTube podcast to explore my curiosity further with amazing founders and product leaders.

I probably would’ve grown faster by picking one niche, but that would’ve killed my curiosity. My niche is simply what fascinates me 🙂

3. Don’t waste people’s time

If there's one niche I want to be known for, it's for delivering more value in less time.

I’m not interested in writing 5,000+ word essays when 500 words will suffice.

I obsess over cutting fluff and only keeping content that had clear value. AI has been a game-changer here — I feed it my best posts, and it helps trim my first drafts to their essence.

4. Use smart lead magnets

See that 15,000+ subscriber spike in 2022? That came from my "7 Days of Crypto" email series during the crypto boom.

A great lead magnet solves a specific problem for your target niche and makes them hungry for more.

Lead magnets are a great way to bootstrap your email list from scratch. Check out my step-by-step guide on creating one.

5. Grow with others

Substack's recommendations feature accelerated my growth starting in 2022.

But the real benefit is meeting other talented writers like Alex Xu. Alex’s advice and support has been amazing to me.

Find your Alex, and it’ll 10x your growth.

6. Automate and delegate

Creating content with a full-time job and two kids means making sacrifices. To stay sane, I'm ruthless about automating and delegating tasks:

I automate with AI editing newsletter posts, generating YouTube thumbnail copy, drafting social posts, and more (all these prompts are available in my AI prompt library).
I delegate to others tasks like video and podcast production. I also recently started working with Jeston Lu, an awesome UCLA undergrad who helps me with transcript editing and other tasks.

Finding and training people to do this work takes time, but it’s been worth it.