A better Substack dashboard

one that tracks your relationships, not your publishing

My Substack routine: Check my subscriber number. Refresh. Check again.

Spend an hour in Notes and comments.

Excavate something to share. Reply. Meet new people.

And the intelligence I get back from Substack for all of it? My email open rate.

Substack focuses on your publishing. Nothing focuses on your relationships.

Here’s the problem, IMHO

Every day as I’m having good conversations here - and I hope this isn’t just me - I honestly lose track of individual people and the actual nuggets of what was said. My best phrasing, their best stories. I put my phone down, talk to my kids, go to work, and the conversation doesn’t go into my long term memory.

And oh, the people!

Obviously the ones I’ve talked to 200 times I remember. Alyssa Fu Ward, PhD, Xian, my first Substack friends.

It’s the people I’ve talked to ten times that I mix up.

…Sorry, can I say this? I have a bunch of super smart coaches for ambitious pivoting moms in my orbit, and sometimes I have to pause and remember - who did I talk to about imposter syndrome? Who did I talk to about bullet journaling? Which one has the same tech startup trauma story? Who did I riff with? What do we share?

Who should I talk to about my next project? Who should I introduce to each other?

In May I asked how everyone else keeps track:

And in June, here’s the detail that made me laugh when I read Substack’s own explanations of how its feed works (thank you Casandra Campbell, and Mack Collier for your take too) … the algorithm already knows.

Discovery here runs on relationships. Who engages with whom, who introduces whom, who boosts whom. The platform is already mapping your relationship graph and ranking the whole feed with it. You’re the only one who can’t see the map!

It's 2026, and creators can have nice things. Right?

So my delulu self, in a moment of late night brainstorming, decided to spend June building one, one piece a day, in public. If you were here, you watched it happen.

May 29th: Proof of Concept

What Orbit is (…for right now)

It’s early, it’s a V1, and I hope in 30 days it will be different than it is today.

Orbit has four parts.

Part 1: Your orbit. Who your people actually are.

Everyone you’re in conversation with - not just a subscriber count - sorted into the worlds you actually live in. (My May question answered itself: the moms, the gardeners, the builders each have their own corner now, and I can finally see who’s who.)

What’s more interesting is sorting by who’s new, so you can go read their writing while the relationship is warm.

And sorting by who’s drifting quiet - the person you loved talking to in April, the would-be collaborator - surfaced before you notice three months too late.

And sorting by how close you are, who subscribes, the size of their audience. My favorite discoveries so far: writers I’ve admired for years sitting at the edge of my orbit, and people I’m genuinely close to who … never subscribed.

Part 2. Your words: everything you’ve said, searchable.

Every note AND every comment, findable again - which matters more than it sounds, because Substack gives you no way to search your own comments at all!

I’ve written 878 of them; until recently they were lost to the sands of time.

Now, I have what I said, whose post it was on, who engaged back - and, of course: which of those comments led to profile views or subscribers.

Part 3. Your momentum.

Perhaps this part exists because I love a good data visualization.

I’m graphing how much you’ve been showing up over time - commenting, connecting, welcoming - and how it’s trending. The hours you spend in Notes finally have a picture!

And I’ve kept in a bunch of artsy visualizations:

Part 4: Just ask Orbit.

The part I use most, honestly: Orbit connects to Claude, so you can ask - “who did I talk to about podcasts?” “who should I riff on this new idea with?” - and get a real answer drawn from every conversation you’ve ever had here.

Plus, it means Claude now has everything I’ve actually published, verbatim.

What’s in a name?

Feel free to roast me for saying this as a Substacker but… I don’t want to build a community? It’s so. hard. to run a community - online or IRL. Been there, done that.

I like to think of each of us more like planets - or stars, perhaps? - each with our own gravity, orbiting each other, pulling in and out of each other’s space to build on each other’s ideas.

It’s not that I’m a creator and everyone else is listening. We’re all stars and all planets, each with our own momentum.

In turn, I assume for all of you, your audience is not subscribers, followers, strangers.

It’s relationships, and depth, and what you’re saying to who.

At the end of the day, I’m resisting calling this a CRM, though the shorthand is helpful.

It’s more like … relationship memory. A smart friend.

So, have I convinced you?

Right now, I’m setting Orbit up one person at a time, on 30-minute Zoom calls.

(Though fair warning, Daphne Mavroudi-Chocholi and I ended up riffing for much longer than 30 minutes, until it was absolutely bedtime, so… that’s a risk you’ll have to take.)

You bring your Substack, I bring the dashboard, we look at your orbit together.

I want to know: how do you remember the people you meet here? How do you keep up with who responds to your notes? When a friend goes quiet, do you notice?

Comment or reply and I’ll reach out to set up time!

And if you’re thinking “my Substack is too small for this” - your real Orbit is probably 100-200 people no matter how big your list is. If you want to build relationships here, you’re exactly who I want to talk to.

We’re not just going to look at your followers number - we’re going to look at who your true people really are. Come find out.

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