Growth is a short daily routine: a few people to follow and a few posts worth a reply. Pressmark finds and ranks them and gives the reasons. You do the following and the replying yourself.
Never automated#
Pressmark never follows, likes, restacks, comments or replies for you. There is no button that does any of these on Substack. You open the profile or the post in your own browser, act there, and mark it done in Pressmark. This keeps your account safe and your voice yours.
Seeds and recommendations#
People come from seeds:
- Add a writer. Type an address such as name.substack.com.
- Import my publication's recommendations. Reads the recommendations on your own publication and adds those writers as candidates. It runs as a task and shows its progress.
Discover and the new-follower review#
Discover new writers (a link at the top of Growth) searches Substack's public directory for your keywords and lists publications you may not know, with the keywords they matched. You can add one as a writer to follow or choose Never with this publication. Set the keywords and the audience filters first. See Your publication profile and Discover.
Further down Growth, New followers to review flags accounts that look automated. Pressmark only flags them. You decide whether to keep or flag each one.
Feeds and ranking#
Refresh feeds and rank reads the public feeds of the people you have, within the limits of your safety preset, then ranks everyone again. The Cautious preset reads fewer pages per hour and waits longer between them. See the Safety page for the numbers.
Ranking uses your goals as weights. A person scores higher when their topics overlap with your posts, when they published recently and often, and when your own recommendations point to them. The score is for ordering only. What matters is the reason, written as a plain sentence under each name, for example "Writes about pricing, which your posts cover too."
The follow queue#
Fill my follow queue moves the best candidates into Your follow queue. The number is limited each day by your safety preset, and Pressmark tells you how many more can be queued today, even before you fill it. Filling the queue only lists people. It never follows anyone for you.
For each person you can open their profile in a new tab. After you follow them in Substack yourself, press I followed them. Press Skip to set someone aside; skipped people are kept in a closed list, and you can bring one back. For people you follow, record whether they follow you back with Yes or No.
The reading queue#
Each morning Pressmark builds a short list of recent posts from the people you follow and the feeds it knows. One batched run of the claude command line reads the candidates together and writes, for each post:
- the key argument in a sentence or two,
- a suggested angle for a reply, and
- related articles of your own, with the words they share.
The queue is built at the time you set in Settings, 08:30 by default. That time falls inside the Cautious working hours (08:00 to 20:00), when its feed refresh is allowed. The line at the top shows when it was built. Build now builds it on request.
The model gets only the queued posts' text (title, author and about 900 words). Your own posts and drafts never go to it; related articles are found on your Mac. Mark each post Read, Dismiss or Replied. Replying is always yours to write. Pause everything on the Safety page also stops the morning queue.
Related articles#
The related articles come from your own library and are found by matching words on your Mac, not by the model. They are there so a reply can point readers to something you already wrote, only where it adds something.
Capture from the clipboard#
Found something outside your feeds? Copy its link, press Paste in Add something you found, then Add to the queue. If your Mac does not allow Pressmark to read the clipboard, paste the link into the field yourself. You can add a title or the text if the page is behind a login.
If the queue says to sign in#
Building the queue uses the claude command line. If its sign-in has ended, the page shows a notice. Open Terminal, run claude, and type /login. Then press Build now again.