Substack turned live video into a feature every publisher can use, not a perk reserved for its biggest names. If you write on Substack and haven't touched Live yet, you're sitting on a distribution channel most of your competitors aren't using.
Substack Live raises one real question: is it worth your time, given who can use it, what running one actually looks like, and whether it moves the needle on subscribers instead of just eating an afternoon. This guide walks through eligibility, the exact steps to go live from mobile or desktop, who should be able to watch, and the formats that turn a live session into new subscribers instead of an empty room.
One number worth having before you start: WriteStack has close to 100 verified reviews from Substack writers across multiple review platforms. The scheduling tools writers usually compare it to have none we could find anywhere close to that.
Table of Contents
- What Is Substack Live?
- Who Can Use Substack Live
- How to Go Live on Substack, Step by Step
- Choosing Your Audience: Public, Free, or Paid Only
- What Happens During and After a Live Session
- Substack Live vs. Notes vs. Posts vs. Chat
- Content Formats That Actually Work on Live
- How to Promote a Live Session So People Show Up
- Common Substack Live Mistakes to Avoid
What Is Substack Live?
Substack Live is a built-in video streaming tool that lets writers broadcast to their subscribers directly inside the Substack app and website, with no separate streaming software required. Substack rolled the feature out to every publisher, not just a beta group, in January 2025, according to TechCrunch's coverage of the launch, framing it as a way for creators to have real-time conversations with readers instead of only one-way posts.
Once you go live, subscribers get a notification (email, push, or both depending on their settings) and can join from wherever they read you. The session records automatically, gets a transcript, and stays on your publication as a replay after you end it. A live isn't a one-off event that disappears once the call ends. It becomes another piece of content sitting in your archive, findable the same way a post is.
Compare that to running a live on a third-party platform and then trying to funnel that audience back to your Substack. Here, the audience is already there. You're not building a new list, you're activating the one you have.
Practical rule: treat every live session as a post you're writing in real time. If you wouldn't publish a post on the topic, don't go live on it either.
Load a week of Notes announcing your next session before you even pick a date. Start with WriteStack and the announcement is already queued by the time you've settled on a topic.
Who Can Use Substack Live
The subscriber threshold
Substack requires publishers to have at least 10 free subscribers before Live becomes available, according to Substack's own setup documentation. There's no cost to use the feature itself once you clear that bar, and no separate application or approval process. Ten subscribers is a low floor, which means Live is realistically available to almost anyone who has published consistently for a few weeks, not just established writers with large lists.
That matters for how you should think about timing. Waiting until you have thousands of subscribers to try Live means waiting past the point where a small, low-pressure audience would have been the easiest place to practice.
Devices and apps supported
You can go live from the Substack mobile app (iOS or Android) or from a desktop browser. Desktop also supports RTMP streaming, which matters if you already run a podcast setup or software like OBS and want production quality beyond a phone camera propped against a stack of books.
Most writers don't need RTMP for a first session. A phone with decent lighting and a stable connection covers the basics. Save the RTMP setup for when a format is worth repeating and production quality is actually holding you back, not before.
Practical rule: start with your phone. Test the production-quality RTMP setup only after you've confirmed people actually show up to a basic session.
How to Go Live on Substack, Step by Step
The steps differ slightly depending on whether you're broadcasting from your phone or from a desktop setup, but both paths end in the same place: a scheduled or immediate broadcast your subscribers get notified about.
Going live from the mobile app
- Open the Substack app and tap the orange "+" button on your home screen.
- Select "Live" from the menu that appears.
- Grant camera and microphone access if you haven't already.
- Add a title. This is what subscribers see in the notification, so treat it like a headline, not a placeholder.
- Choose your audience (covered below), then start the broadcast.
Going live from desktop and RTMP
- From your Substack dashboard, click "New Post."
- Select "New Live Video" instead of a standard post or note.
- Choose to go live immediately or schedule the session for later.
- If you're streaming from OBS or similar software, select the RTMP option and connect using the stream key Substack provides.
- Confirm your audience setting and title, then go live.
Whichever path you use, do a 30-second test run before the first real session. Check your audio levels and confirm your camera is pointed where you think it is. Nothing kills momentum faster than the first three minutes of a live spent fixing a settings problem in front of the people you were trying to impress.
Choosing Your Audience: Public, Free, or Paid Only
Every Substack Live session lets you pick who can watch: everyone, including people who haven't subscribed yet, all subscribers, or paid subscribers only. This is one of the few places on Substack where a single toggle changes whether a piece of content functions as a growth tool or a retention tool.
If your goal is new subscribers, open the session to everyone. Substack surfaces public lives in discovery surfaces the same way it surfaces posts and notes, so a good public live can reach people who've never heard of your publication before that day. If your goal is deepening the relationship with people already paying you, restrict it to paid subscribers and treat it as a perk, the same way you'd treat a private section they can't get elsewhere.
A publication just starting out usually gets more value from public sessions, since there isn't yet a paid tier worth protecting. A publication with an established paid tier should mix both: occasional public lives for reach, regular paid-only lives to justify the subscription price.
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Explore Smart SchedulingPractical rule: run public lives when you're trying to grow, and paid-only lives when you're trying to retain. Mixing the two goals in one session usually serves neither.
What Happens During and After a Live Session
While you're live, viewers can comment in a running chat, and you can screen-share if you're streaming from a computer, which is useful for walking through a document or slides instead of just talking at a camera. Reading the chat out loud and responding to specific names is what makes a live feel different from a podcast recording. Ignore it and you've made a worse podcast.
Substack generates a full transcript of the session automatically. After you end the broadcast, the recording stays on your publication page as a replay, transcript included. That transcript is worth more than it looks. You can pull quotes from it for a note, turn a strong segment into a short post, or repurpose the whole thing as a written recap for subscribers who'd rather read than watch fifty minutes back.
The part people don't expect: if you publish that recap as a post, running it through WriteStack's Note Generator turns your own words from the transcript into a week of Notes instead of a blank page. It reads what you've already written, not a prompt you have to invent, and WriteStack is the only Substack tool that also schedules Chat posts, so the follow-up conversation about your live can be queued before the replay even finishes processing.
Substack Live vs. Notes vs. Posts vs. Chat
Substack now gives writers four different formats, and it's easy to default to the one you're most comfortable with instead of the one that fits what you're trying to say. Here's how they actually differ in practice.
| Format | Best for | Time investment | Discoverability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Post | Long-form, evergreen ideas | High (hours) | High (email + archive + SEO) |
| Notes | Quick takes, engagement, staying top of mind | Low (minutes) | High (network feed) |
| Chat | Ongoing discussion with your most engaged readers | Low, but recurring | Low (subscribers only) |
| Live | Real-time connection, Q&A, events | Medium (30-60 min session) | Medium (public or subscriber-only) |
Notes are what most writers reach for daily because they're fast and the network rewards frequency. Posts still do the heavy lifting for search traffic and the archive readers browse months later. Chat holds the ongoing conversation between the bigger pieces of content. Live asks for more from both you and your audience than any of the other three, which is exactly why it works for the moments the others can't carry, like answering reader questions in real time or talking through something with too many layers for a 300-character note.
Content Formats That Actually Work on Live
Not every idea that works as a post works as a live session. The formats below hold attention because they give the audience a reason to watch in real time instead of waiting for the replay.
A reader Q&A works because the value is the immediacy. Readers submit questions ahead of time through a note or a chat thread, and you answer them live instead of in a post they'll skim past. A live writing or editing session works well for craft-focused publications where readers want to see the process, not just the finished draft. Watching someone actually cut a paragraph teaches more than reading advice about cutting paragraphs.
Guest interviews borrow the guest's audience, the same logic that makes recommendations effective for growth: their readers show up because they trust the guest, then some of them stay for you. Behind-the-scenes sessions work for anyone building a business in public, whether that's a writer talking through subscriber numbers or a creator walking through their actual workflow. A live discussion of a recent post gives your most engaged readers a reason to show up twice for the same idea, once when they read it and once when they get to argue about it with you directly.
Practical rule: pick a format with a built-in reason for someone to be there at that exact time. If the content works just as well as a recording nobody needed to watch live, it probably belongs in a post instead.
How to Promote a Live Session So People Show Up
A live session with no promotion is a recording nobody watches until it's a replay nobody remembers to check. Substack sends an automatic notification when you go live, but showing up in someone's feed at a random moment isn't the same as them planning to be there ahead of time.
Announce the session at least a day ahead with a note that states what it's about and when it's happening, with a reason worth blocking the calendar for, then follow it with a same-day reminder. Notes perform differently depending on when you post them, and checking WriteStack's engagement heatmap before you schedule the announcement, and the day-of reminder, can be the difference between a note that gets seen and one that gets buried under everything else in the feed.
Don't stop at notes. Pin the announcement to your profile for the day leading up to the session, and mention it in your next regular post if the timing lines up. If you run a Chat thread with your most engaged readers, drop the details there too. That's a smaller audience, but it's the audience most likely to actually attend and ask good questions once they're in the room.
If you're trying to convert live viewers into subscribers, don't leave that to chance either. Say the ask out loud during the session, and follow up with a note afterward pointing to the replay for anyone who missed it. WriteStack's Fans view shows which readers actually showed up and engaged, so the personal follow-up goes to the people most worth sending it to instead of everyone on the list.
Practical rule: promote once a day ahead, once the morning of, and once during the session itself. Three separate moments, not three copies of the same note.
Common Substack Live Mistakes to Avoid
Going live with no promotion is the most common mistake, but it's not the only one. Writers also go live without a clear topic, treating the session as an open-ended hangout instead of something with a defined start and end. That works for an established, highly engaged audience that already wants to hang out with you. It rarely works to attract new subscribers, who need a reason to click before they know whether they'll like you.
Another frequent mistake is picking a session length that outlasts the content. Thirty minutes of substance stretched to ninety minutes loses viewers well before the end, and the transcript inherits all that padding, which makes it less useful when you try to repurpose it into a note or a post afterward.
Skipping the audience setting is a third mistake, and one of the easiest to make by accident. A growth-focused live restricted to paid subscribers by mistake reaches nobody new. A retention-focused live opened to the public dilutes the sense that paying subscribers get something extra for their money. Set it on purpose every time, and double-check it before you hit start.
The last mistake is ignoring the chat once the session starts. New viewers watch the first two minutes of engagement to decide whether to stick around. A host who's talking into a void, not responding to a single comment, signals that nobody else is really there either, and people leave.
Substack Live won't replace notes or posts as your main channel, and it shouldn't try to. Used well, it's the format that turns readers into people who feel like they know you, which is a different kind of growth than a subscriber count going up. Start with one low-stakes session and build from what you learn.
Load the announcement and the day-of reminder for your next live in one sitting. WriteStack schedules both, plus the recap after, so the live session is the only part you actually have to show up for.