Nicolas Cole's $20-a-month Substack on category design made $150,000 a year, but the real money came from readers asking for one-on-one advisory work. Those personalized engagements turned into multi-million-dollar deals paid in cash and stock.
We wanted to start a paid newsletter on the topic of category design. So we did that and the Substack grew. I think the Substack maxed out at like $150 grand a year. That was not the win. The win was multiple of our readers were CEOs or founders who loved the paid newsletter so much that they reached out to us and said, I love everything that you are teaching me inside of the paid newsletter, but I would like you to apply all of the same information to me specifically. The revenue gap between those two opportunities was astronomical. It's like like, would you rather pay $20 a month or pay us millions of dollars in stock options and cash? And people did because it wasn't just the information. It was, I want to get on a call with you and I want you to tailor the information to me. And that is a completely different product.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
