Supporters
Readers, peers, and friends who engage, join the conversation, share your work, recommend your publication, and may become paid subscribers or buyers.
Make Friends Get Clients
Build the Relationships That Make Your Substack Easier to Grow and Monetize
Make Friends Get Clients is a three-month, hands-on 1:1 coaching program for serious creators who want more reach, subscribers, paid readers, book sales, referrals, and clients.
Instead of publishing, commenting, and hoping the right people eventually notice you, you’ll deliberately build relationships with supporters, influential creators, and potential clients—so more of the right people find you, trust you, and are more likely to buy from you.
3 months · Hands-on 1:1 coaching · $2,000
Why growth stalls
You Can Grind on Substack Without Making Much Progress
You can publish good posts, write notes every day, leave thoughtful comments, answer every notification, and promote what you sell.
But if not enough of the right people know you, trust you, or care about what you’re building, the results can stay frustratingly small.
Your posts get a few likes. Subscriber growth stays slow. You promote something and hear almost nothing. Then you go back to creating more content for the same small group of people.
If you want to grow on Substack, your work needs regular engagement. Likes, comments, and restacks give Substack more reason to show it to other people. That’s one of the main ways new readers discover your work and subscribe.
But you probably don’t need better content to make that happen. You may simply need a handful of real supporters who consistently engage with and share what you create.
And the most reliable way to create those supporters is to build genuine relationships with them.
The people who create momentum
The Right Relationships Make Everything Else Work Better
Make Friends Get Clients helps you deliberately build relationships across three groups.
Potential Buyers and Clients
People who may eventually become paid subscribers, book buyers, coaching clients, or customers for your services.
Influential Creators
Established or well-connected people who can expand your reach, reputation, and revenue through restacks, recommendations, collaborations, introductions, and referrals.
As you build more of these relationships, you stop relying on hope every time you publish content or promote an offer.
You have real people around your work who recognize your name, trust what you do, want to help you succeed, or know you’re someone who can help them.
Why relationships are so valuable
This Skill Is Worth More Than Most Creators Realize
Relationships are not valuable only because they produce more comments. They help people discover you, trust you, talk about your work, and buy when you have something relevant to offer.
Paid subscriptions
Growing a paid publication requires people to discover it, enjoy being part of it, tell others, and decide it is worth paying for. Relationships help at every step.
5 extra paid subscribers per month
At $100 per year, that adds up to $6,000 in subscription revenue over a year.
Workshops and lower-cost products
You don’t need a massive audience to fill a small workshop. You need enough of the right people to trust your work, pay attention when you launch, and tell others who would benefit.
10 seats at a $100 workshop each month
That adds up to $12,000 in revenue over a year.
Coaching and services
You don’t need an enormous audience. You need enough of the right people to know what you do, trust you, and think of you when they need help.
1 extra $2,500 client per month
That would be $30,000 in additional revenue over a year.
These are examples, not guarantees. But they aren’t ceilings either. Relationships are only one part of building a successful business, but they can keep creating reach, trust, referrals, and sales for years. That’s why even a modest improvement can make this skill extremely valuable.
Message Rob on Substack
Send me “MFGC” and tell me what you’re building.
The complete system
How Make Friends Get Clients Works
The system has six parts.
This isn’t transactional networking. You’ll learn to genuinely help and support people without expecting anything in return. But that doesn’t mean you can’t recognize genuine interest, start sales conversations, and present your offer without forcing it.
Foundation
Make sure your goal, offer, Substack, and content are clear enough that the attention and relationships you build have somewhere useful to go.
Find
Deliberately find supporters, potential buyers or clients, and influential creators worth knowing. Stop relying on whoever happens to show up in your feed.
Comment
Become recognizable through repeated engagement. Learn to write comments that help people get to know and like you.
DM
Move the right public conversations into the DMs to make them more personal. Get to know the person, let them get to know you, and see whether there is a real connection worth developing.
Support
Help these people in ways they genuinely value without expecting anything in return. Strong relationships grow faster when people feel understood, appreciated, and supported.
Be Ready
Know how to explain what you do and what someone should do next when they show interest, offer to help, ask for a recommendation, or need what you sell.
This is not a rigid funnel where every person gets pushed toward the same outcome.
Some relationships become friendships. Some create regular support, recommendations, referrals, collaborations, paid subscribers, book buyers, or clients. And some simply become friendly acquaintances, while others naturally drift away.
The goal is to build genuine relationships without forcing every person toward a sale. By building stronger relationships with more of the right people, you create more opportunities to sell to those who are truly interested.
Make it repeatable
Turn It Into a Daily System
Understanding the process is not enough. You need to keep meeting new people while moving existing relationships forward.
Your exact system will be adjusted around your goals, available time, current relationships, and biggest bottleneck.
Here’s what will make all the difference. You’ll stop opening Substack and reacting to whatever shows up. And you’ll know who matters, what to do next, and what work will move your relationships and business forward.
Your outcome
What You Should Have After Three Months
Most importantly, you should be able to sit down with the time you have, know exactly what to do, and feel confident you’re doing enough to build relationships and grow on Substack.
- A repeatable system for continually meeting the right people.
- Stronger relationships with supporters, potential buyers or clients, and influential creators.
- Better comments and more natural DM conversations.
- Better judgment about who deserves your time and how to move each relationship forward.
- A relationship spreadsheet that keeps important people, follow-ups, and opportunities organized.
- A realistic daily workflow you can continue after coaching ends.
- A stronger network that makes future engagement, reach, recommendations, referrals, collaborations, paid subscriptions, and client opportunities more likely.
Why coaching matters
The Framework Is Simple. Executing It Well Is Not.
You can understand that you should find people, comment, DM, support them, and stay consistent in a few minutes.
The harder questions show up when you actually try to do it:
- Is this person worth prioritizing?
- Did that comment create a connection, or was it just another comment?
- Is it too early to DM them?
- What should I say without making it feel forced?
- Should I follow up, support them, wait, or move on?
- Am I spending too much time with friendly peers and not enough with potential clients or influential creators?
Those small judgment calls determine whether you are genuinely building relationships or merely spending more time engaging.
That is why Make Friends Get Clients is coaching rather than another course.
What you receive
Three Months of Hands-On Help
You get support while you build the skill through real interactions with real people.
During the first week
Build Your Foundation
- Clarify what you want your Substack and relationships to accomplish.
- Make sure your offer, positioning, profile, and content support that goal.
- Set up your relationship spreadsheet.
- Identify the people you should prioritize.
- Build your initial daily and weekly system.
- Get out of preparation mode and into actual relationship-building.
Throughout the three months
Apply It to Real Situations
- Calls whenever we need them to solve problems, review progress, or practice together.
- Ongoing DM access for questions, feedback, and situations as they happen.
- Direct reviews of comments, DMs, potential connections, activity, and your spreadsheet.
- Loom or video feedback when showing you is more useful.
- Weekly accountability so you keep showing up instead of slowly drifting away from the work.
- Relevant templates, resources, and lessons without a rigid curriculum.
You will spend most of your time doing the work. I will help you identify mistakes, make better judgment calls, stay focused, and improve faster than you would through months of guessing.
Message Rob on Substack
Send me “MFGC.” I’ll ask a few questions and help you determine whether the program makes sense for you.
Why learn this from me?
I Had to Learn This Twice
I’m Rob. I’ve spent almost two decades studying social skills in obsessive detail—first to improve my own, then for six years writing about them and coaching other people, before eventually moving into business coaching. That background helps me break relationship-building into specific skills and notice the small details that determine whether genuine connections develop.
But it still took me years of creating content and trying to grow online before I understood how much easier everything became when I deliberately built the right relationships.
For five years, I worked my ass off writing to gain roughly 500 email subscribers. While I was grateful for every one of them, I barely made a handful of sales.
Then I spent two years grinding on Twitter and gained almost no traction.
Eventually, someone reached out to me and started a friendship. It made me wonder what would happen if I stopped focusing only on content and deliberately started building relationships.
That’s when everything changed.
Those relationships helped me grow an audience of more than 34,000 people on Twitter, become friends with much larger creators, and build a six-figure coaching business.
Then I started relatively small again on Substack. During one stretch, I added only five subscribers in an entire month. I deliberately focused on building relationships again, and not long after, I gained 80 subscribers over a 30-day span and started receiving more restacks, recommendations, referrals, product sales, and coaching opportunities.
Now I help other creators develop the same skill without spending years figuring it out by accident.
Probably right for you
If You’re Serious About Building a Business
- You publish competent content consistently.
- You have something to sell or a clear monetization direction.
- You want more reach, trust, paid readers, book buyers, referrals, collaborations, or client opportunities.
- You will deliberately practice relationship-building instead of waiting passively.
- Improving this skill could be worth meaningful time and money to your business.
There is no minimum subscriber count or revenue requirement. Your seriousness, consistency, commercial direction, and current bottleneck matter more than your size.
Probably not right for you
If This Isn’t Yet a Business Priority
- Substack is primarily a hobby for you.
- You have no monetization direction and are not actively developing one.
- You are not prepared to publish and engage consistently.
- You mainly need beginner help using Substack or writing competent content.
- You want a shortcut that removes the need to genuinely care about people.
- You already get the relationships, reach, opportunities, and sales you want.
Investment
$2,000 for Three Months of 1:1 Coaching
You are not buying three months of information. You are getting three months of hands-on skill development, feedback, accountability, and help making better judgment calls as you apply the system to the real people and situations in front of you.
To get started with coaching, do the following:
- DM me “MFGC” on Substack.
- Tell me what you write about, what you sell or plan to sell, and where you feel stuck.
- We will talk through your situation and determine whether the program is the right next step.
I will not push you into coaching. If I do not think it is a good fit, I will tell you.
Message Rob on Substack
3 months · 1:1 coaching · $2,000
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a large audience?
No. There is no minimum subscriber count.
You do need to be serious, active, and building toward something people can eventually buy. Relationship-building can be especially useful while your audience is still small because you do not need to wait for a large audience or the algorithm before you start.
Do I need an existing offer?
You should either have something to sell or a reasonably clear monetization direction you are actively developing.
That could be a paid publication, book, coaching offer, consulting or service, course, community, or another product. You do not need a perfectly validated offer, but you should know what you are trying to build well enough that we can identify the people most relevant to it.
Is this only for coaches and consultants?
No. The same core skill helps creators selling lower-cost offers. Paid publications and books need reach, recommendations, word of mouth, and readers who care. Coaching and services depend more heavily on trust, familiarity, referrals, and relevant client relationships.
The mix of people you prioritize will change based on what you sell.
Does this replace good content or a good offer?
No. Relationships can help good work reach the right people sooner. They cannot make unclear writing, weak content, or an offer nobody wants suddenly work.
If your foundation needs a reasonable adjustment, I can help with it. But Make Friends Get Clients is primarily a relationship-building program, not a writing course or complete offer-development program.
Is this networking or cold outreach?
No. The goal is not to collect contacts, manufacture favors, or pretend to care about people so you can pitch them later.
You are learning how to identify people you genuinely want to know, create repeated positive interactions, have real conversations, support them meaningfully, and present your offer to those who are genuinely interested.
Can I learn this on my own?
Yes. The framework is understandable and you can improve through practice and trial and error.
Coaching helps you shorten that process. You can get feedback on what you are actually doing, correct mistakes faster, work through specific judgment calls, and stay consistent long enough to develop the skill for yourself.
What if I’m not sure whether I’m a fit?
DM me “MFGC” on Substack and tell me a little about what you are building.
I will help you figure out whether Make Friends Get Clients is the right next step. It will just be a conversation.
Message Rob on Substack
Send me “MFGC” and tell me what you’re building.