How to Get Sponsors for Your Substack (Media Kit Guide)

Published: September 2026

Substack does have an official tool for this — it's called Creator Kit — but it's gated behind a subscriber threshold most writers haven't hit yet. That doesn't mean you can't pitch sponsors before then; it means you need to know what a good pitch actually requires, with or without Substack's own tool.

What Substack's Creator Kit actually is

Creator Kit is Substack's built-in feature for packaging your publication for brand partnerships — it can include your audience size, publication stats, featured posts, reader testimonials, and your preferred sponsorship formats, plus a record of past partnerships. Eligible publishers get a Sponsorships tab in their dashboard, and if there's a potential brand match, Substack's own team may reach out by email.

The catch: it's only available to Bestseller-status publications, or those with at least 100 paid subscribers. If you're not there yet, the official path simply isn't open to you — which is a real gap for a lot of growing writers who are otherwise ready to talk to sponsors.

What brands are actually buying (it's not your subscriber count)

A useful reframe from a breakdown on Substack sponsorships (The Monetizer): brands aren't primarily buying raw impressions. They're buying four things — trust in your publication's credibility, taste reflected in your editorial voice, context around what your specific audience cares about, and access to a community that's hard to reach any other way. The same piece is blunt about the tool itself: "a Creator Kit is not magic" — having the feature doesn't replace clearly articulating who your audience is and why a sponsor should care, and a lot of pitches fail on that positioning rather than on numbers.

That's genuinely good news if you're under the 100-subscriber threshold: a smaller, sharply-defined audience with real engagement can be a more compelling pitch than a bigger, vaguer one, if you present it well.

What a good pitch needs, threshold or not

Whether or not you qualify for Substack's own tool, a sponsor pitch that works generally includes:

• Real numbers, not vanity ones. Subscriber count matters less on its own than engagement — likes, restacks, comments, and how consistently readers show up.
• Your top-performing content, not just recent content. A sponsor wants to see what resonates with your specific audience, not a random sample.
• A clear description of who your audience actually is — the niche, the shared interest, why they're valuable to reach — not just a number.
• Specific sponsorship formats you're offering, so a brand isn't left guessing what buying from you would even look like.
• Reader testimonials or engagement proof, if you have them, since trust is one of the four things brands are actually buying.

Where NotesIQ fits — and where it doesn't

To be clear about the distinction: NotesIQ's Media Kit feature is not Substack's official Creator Kit or its sponsorship-matching marketplace — it doesn't submit you to Substack's own brand-matching program, and it doesn't require 100 paid subscribers or Bestseller status to use. What it does is turn your real stats — subscriber count, top Notes, and engagement — into a sponsor-ready one-pager you can export and send directly to a brand yourself, with no watermark, whether or not you've hit Substack's own eligibility bar. It's built for the exact gap above: presenting yourself professionally to a sponsor before Substack's own tool is even available to you.

If you later cross the 100-paid-subscriber threshold, both can coexist — Substack's Creator Kit for their in-house sponsorship program, and a NotesIQ Media Kit for pitches you send yourself.

The short version

Substack's own sponsorship tool exists, but it has a real eligibility gate. Below that gate, the fix isn't waiting — it's presenting real engagement data and a clear sense of your audience directly to sponsors yourself, which is a pitch you can put together regardless of subscriber count.

Build a sponsor-ready one-pager in one click. NotesIQ's Media Kit works from your real stats — no subscriber minimum required.

Sources

• Substack — How do I set up a Creator Kit?
• The Monetizer — how to get Substack sponsors