What Comparison Costs in My 40s

Why I want to tell you about my sudden jump in subscribers

For anyone who pays attention to other people’s subscriber numbers and judges themselves for not doing or being enough because they aren’t growing as fast …

I get it.

I hate falling into the comparison trap. It was the biggest reason I didn’t want to go back to Instagram and Facebook after taking a year off.

As damaging as I know comparison to be … and even though I know that what we see online usually isn’t the whole story … I felt so much more peaceful not being part of those platforms because it was really hard not to compare.

Peace has become increasingly important to me at this stage of my life.

For my entire adult life (and now that I think of it, most of my childhood too) I sacrificed my peace trying to maintain an external appearance of success that I thought would make me more acceptable and loved.

I didn’t realize I was doing this at the time of course, but I can see it now looking back.

I don’t want to live that way anymore.

Comparison made me look at my life through the lens of everything I hadn’t done yet or must have been doing wrong and wondering why I didn’t have more to show for myself.

And those thoughts could steal my peace real fast.

Then I came to Substack.

I connected with some incredible women who started their publications around the same time as me and were writing about perimenopause and midlife reinvention too.

Some of them grew faster than me, and that made me wonder what I was doing wrong. Some of them grew slower than me and that made me feel like I must be doing something right.

And as much as I don’t want to admit it, there I was comparing myself again and it didn’t feel good. So I took a step back to refocus on my WHY for being here in the first place.

I came here because after going through the biggest transformation of my life, I wanted to share my story with others who might be going through a similar experience during their perimenopause years. I wanted to create a space where we could talk about our experiences openly with people who understand.

That matters so much more to me than how quickly the number at the top of my profile page grows.

Which brings me to something I want to share, because you may have noticed that my subscriber numbers recently jumped from 927 to 2.7K+.

It’s not because I found some secret to growth.

It’s because I recently closed down my Kajabi account which had been my online home since 2017. It’s where my entire business lived, including my email list.

I love Substack so much that I’ve decided to go all in here and make this my primary online home. So when I closed my Kajabi account, I decided to bring some of my email list over to Substack with me.

Ok, I’m going on a tangent … if you’re not a Substack user feel free to skip this part

I’ve heard murmuring through Substack about the question of whether or not to bring your list over here, so if you’ve been wondering that same thing I want to share my thought process and what ended up happening when I brought my list over.

First, the arguments for not bringing your list …

You could end up with low open rates and low engagement in your notes, even though your subscriber number looks big.

There’s also something about the energy of the community you’re building here. The women I’ve talked with (myself included) want their subscribers to be energetically aligned. They don’t just want numbers for the sake of numbers. They want real people who want to be part of the conversation.

I considered both of these things when deciding whether or not to bring my list with me.

I didn’t want to tank my open rates and I didn’t want one of those accounts where the number at the top of the page looks impressive, but there’s crickets in the notes.

But I also spent many years building my list and many of the people on it had been clients and members of my community, and even though I changed business directions, I knew some of them would like to stay part of my world.

The steps I took before uploading my list to Substack

Before closing down Kajabi, I emailed everyone and let them know the switch to Substack was coming. I asked them to unsubscribe if they didn’t want to come with me and let them know that otherwise I’d be bringing them over to Substack.

But I actually didn’t bring everyone with me who stayed. When I exported my list from Kajabi there were about 9,000 people on it. I used Kajabi’s analytics to export my list by groups of people who were most active to least active.

In the export, I could also see things like last engagement date and where that person came from; for example, were they part of my Facebook group? did they attend a live event? were they in my membership? were they a past client?

Before uploading my list to Substack, I removed all the people who hadn’t recently engaged with my emails. I also removed all the people who came into my world through cold marketing channels like, for example, a giveaway I was part of that sent me new subscribers - if those subscribers didn’t show any additional engagement with my business besides through that one giveaway, I removed them.

By the time I was done cleaning up my list, there were only about 1,800 people left. Those are the people I imported to Substack.

When I imported the list, I sent them a welcome email letting them know they made the cut and that they could unsubscribe at the bottom if they didn’t want to receive my emails - no hard feelings, I did completely switch topics from branding to the sacred initiation of perimenopause after all!

A few more people dropped off.

A couple days later, I sent out my next post and waited …

Then the next week, I sent another post and waited …

I expected my open rates to go down after importing a bunch of new subscribers from my previous business, but what surprised me is that my open rates actually went up!

Before the import, my open rates were hovering around 31%. After the import, my next two posts had a 44% and 42% open rate!

I still don’t have a whole lot of data (only 2 emails since the import), but so far, I’m pleasantly surprised!

One last thing I want to highlight is that importing my email list did absolutely nothing for my notes engagement. The people engaging in notes are Substack users, whereas most of the people I imported are not, and they probably don’t even know notes exist because my emails send them straight to my publication.

Notes are important to me because it’s where I connect with the amazing community of midlife women sharing their stories on Substack and it’s what drives most of my new subscriptions. So I make a point to keep showing up and engaging in notes.

Okay, back to comparison…

You won’t be seeing this kind of behind-the-scenes Substack post from me very often. But I wanted to share my experience with importing my list because I hear a lot of conversations about whether or not to do it, and I hope my experience is helpful if you’re currently deciding what to do.

But more importantly, I wanted to tell you the story behind that number.

Because if past me saw someone else’s publication suddenly grow by almost 2,000 people, I’d probably wonder what they figured out that I hadn’t.

And if I was already feeling vulnerable (hello to almost every woman going through perimenopause and midlife!), I might even make their growth mean something about my own worth.

I might not know they’d spent years building a business and an email list somewhere else and that those subscribers had simply moved from one home to another.

I think that’s one of the most dangerous things about comparison. We take the tiny piece of someone else’s story that we can see and compare it to everything we know about our own.

I’ve done that with so much more than subscriber numbers.

I’ve looked at other people’s careers, relationships, bodies and lives and wondered why I wasn’t further along.

And it cost me a lot of peace.

These days, my peace feels too valuable to keep handing it over to someone else’s timeline.

There will always be someone growing faster. Whose life looks more figured out from where I’m standing.

So when I find myself comparing, I try to remember that I don’t know the entire story. And even if I did, I believe we’re each on our own path, having the experiences we’re meant to have that are shaping us into who we’re meant to become. And for each us, that looks different.

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What about you?

Where does comparison sneak up on you the most these days?

How has your relationship with comparison changed as you’ve gotten older?

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Next week I’ll be sharing my first Everyday Alchemy post, all about my favorite ritual for dry, perimenopausal skin. Stay tuned!

Hey , I’m Jessie May!

At 39, perimenopause turned my life upside down and eventually became an awakening I never saw coming. Now I guide women through the whole arc of this initiation, from sitting in the void of not knowing what’s next, to finding our voices as we emerge into who we’re becoming.

I love creating spaces where we can talk about what this time feels like with people who understand. Thanks for being here, I can’t wait to get to know you!

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Ways I can help

✨ Substack Coaching - For women who want to turn the experiences they’ve lived through into a meaningful Substack publication that helps others feel less alone.

✨ Perimenopause Initiation Coaching - For women waking up to themselves through the initiation of perimenopause.

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