Beyond Paid Subscribers: How to Make Money on Substack

Welcome to another pop-up edition of Creative on Purpose Live. Uh, today I just on a whim decided to hop on and talk a little bit about thinking beyond paid subscribers on Substack and how you can make money on Substack without a large subscriber base and even without any paid subscribers. And I'm going to illustrate this by just kind of sharing my experience. I've been— I'll be celebrating my second anniversary on Substack in August next month and what I've accomplished even before I had 1,000 subscribers and before I had any paid subscribers. And I'm still only at like 55 paid subscribers at the moment. So I'm not even a bestseller, but I've been able to build a really successful business that has helped me reach my annual revenue number., by the middle of summer over the last couple of years. I hit this number right before the end of June this year, and I think last year I actually hit my annual revenue number at the beginning of June. So how did I do this? And how, you know, how— hopefully by sharing a little bit of my story, you'll find some things that you can take away and implement, uh, in your own business as you're trying to to grow a Substack that becomes, you know, not just an audience builder for you, but also a revenue generator without getting hyperfocused on paid subscribers or resorting to, you know, sleazy, slimy, scammy, tricky digital marketer tricks and hacks. So just to give you a little origin story for how I came to be on Substack, uh, About 5 years ago, I accomplished what I thought was the dream of building a 6-figure business, digital business, using the standard online guru digital marketer model of creating a power offer, building a funnel, using Facebook ads and YouTube ads and Google ads to drive business. And what I learned through that process is that You know, sometimes when the gods want to punish you, they grant your wishes. So after spending over a decade trying to build a business that funded and fit the lifestyle I wanted to live, I actually accomplished that only to find that building my business the way that the online gurus and digital marketers tell you to build it made me create a business that I didn't particularly like. To be in, working with a lot of clients that I didn't particularly enjoy being with. And so, uh, I, at the end of the 5 years, I basically just kind of burnt out and blew up my business. And when I entered Substack, I was literally trying to figure out, like, what am I going to do? How— what's— what is the next iteration of Creative on Purpose, which has been my brand for a over a decade at this point. And what does a business that is built that aligns who I really am and what I'm really good with and where I really belong look like? And how can I build that business in a way that I make a very comfortable living but not an exorbitant living? Doing work I love with people I care about, working just a few hours a day with clients that I really love. And so what happened was, you know, I've been aware of Substack for a long time, but I had ignored it because I had kind of promised myself that I was going to launch any new platforms and that sort of thing. But I saw my friend and mentor Nick Peterson experimenting with Substack, and by following his experiment, I was able to kind of reverse engineer, what I, I interpreted what, you know, what, what he was up to, which was Substack has this really powerful network effect built into it. It's an inherent part of the platform. I think it's probably, um, one of the foundational components of the platform is it is— it has a bunch of built-in mechanisms that help more people more of the right people, learn about your publication, subscribe to your publication, and do that with the greatest amount of ease possible. And that was something that I had really struggled with, with my business, you know, operating my business off my own website, creativeonpurpose.com, and trying to build a list and doing the usual thing, you know, generating, creating lead magnets and trying to get people to give up their email address for some sort of freebie and then putting them into some sort of email sequence that warmed them up for some sort of offer. Was really slow going for me. It took me 10 years to get about 500 subscribers. I was averaging, you know, 1 subscriber a week or less. And as soon as I moved to Substack, even though I didn't have any idea what my new business was going to look like, what it was going to offer, I started to add a subscriber a day to my list. And I started with 500 subscribers that I imported over from my website, creativeonpurpose.com. I didn't really— I turned on paid subscriptions early on and I got some paid subscribers fairly quickly, but not, not many, but, you know, got some people in at the founder level and at the monthly and annual level. And it wasn't until I got those subscribers that I started to figure out like, oh, what am I going to offer this, you know, these people? But here's one of the, the, the fundamental things that I started with and one of the reasons why I think I had success very quickly and early with leveraging Substack as my primary gathering place for having meaningful, valuable conversations with people that were already interested in how I might help them accomplish the things they wanted to accomplish and solve the problems that they wanted to solve is that I, even though I didn't know exactly what my new business was going to look like or what my new offer was, I was approaching it from this place of what I now call the forever offer, which there's articles about this on the Substack, but, you know, instead of a power offer or a no-brainer offer, I mean, let's face it, you know, power or pressure is not a great way to build a business that you're proud of. It's better to sell from a place of presence than power or pressure. And, you know, I'm not interested in working with people that have no brains, so I don't want to create a no-brainer offer. Instead, I just had this I started to write about things that I found interesting, that were interesting to me, and I thought would be interesting to people that had already learned about me and my, uh, through my, my books. I have, at that point, I already had over half a dozen books on Amazon. Um, I had a 7-year tenure, uh, working with Seth Godin and the Akimbo Workshops as a head coach. So I, you know, I had some reputation, I had some visibility coming in. That I was able to leverage. And I basically had earned a reputation with a small group of people based on my ability to reason from first principles, to think in systems and optimize system reliability and help people close the gap between where they were and where they wanted to be with their businesses. And it really didn't matter if it was a brick-and-mortar business or a creative enterprise or a freelancer thing or a bootstrap thing, a digital thing or a brick-and-mortar thing. It's just something that I had done many times in my own life. I've operated a brick-and-mortar music store and guitar studio. I had a 30-year career as a professional musician. I had some success as a blogger and a broadcaster and an author. Doing something that most people would call coaching. And so I didn't have a power offer or a no-brainer offer. I just had this reputation as being the kind of person that is authentic and honest about what they're capable of and what they can and cannot accomplish. A person that had an interest in helping people define what they actually wanted, usually around a business, and establish the 2 or 3 things that are necessary to get that enterprise off the ground and funding and fitting the lifestyle that you actually want to live. And I didn't— I just started selling one-off coaching sessions, sometimes coaching, you know, month-long coaching packages. I created offers pretty much on demand as people commented on the things I was sharing, as people started asking questions and asking for insights about their particular situation. I just looked for the trends. I looked for the patterns. And When it was appropriate, I would first help people for free, just delivering value, turning all of my innovative perspectives and principles and approaches to building a business into information that they could actually understand and apply to their own situation. And when people sought help with implementation, when they sought some sort of deeper level of proximity and access to me and the help that I could provide them with, I just started creating offers that would help those people, sometimes one at a time, sometimes in groups and so forth. So, you know, the fact of the matter is I think a lot of folks get on Substack because they love this idea of, oh, I'm already writing a blog or I'm already writing emails. I can, I can offer it on Slipstack and I'll achieve, you know, the dream of recurring revenue by selling, you know, a monthly subscription for $10 or $5 or whatever you've chosen to do. It's going to take you a long time to build up the numbers required to earn any kind of actual, you know, any kind of monthly recurring revenue that actually makes a significant difference in your life. It's taken me almost 2 years to, um, reach a $6,000 annualized revenue number on Substack just through my paid subscriber community, um, you know, which is $500 a month. It's not nothing, but it's not, not something that I'm going to be able to retire on anytime soon. Um, but instead focusing on How can you leverage the two fundamental things that I think Substack is best at? The first is quality of audience. People, you know, regardless of, you know, what you think about the live feature or the notes feature or the podcast feature or whatever, uh, most people that come to Substack are readers, and readers by and large are better prospects for those of us that don't want to try to attract people that are simply searching for distraction and ways to avoid doing work that matters with people they care about on Facebook, right? So, you know, having achieved a lot of success with Facebook ads, I will tell you, you, you will attract a lot of people that you really don't want to, want to necessarily work with. And by moving my the center of my marketing web to Facebook— or I'm sorry, to Substack— I've been able to attract a much higher quality of audience and leverage the network effect to grow that audience with greater, uh, velocity and ease. And I haven't done anything but repurpose content that I've— or repurpose ideas that I've, I've been talking about for years anyways. So that is one way to think about it is don't worry so much about how do I get people to become paid subscribers. Worry about how can I deliver so much value and initiate profound transformations for free with people that they can't help but number one, even jealousize the work that you do and get more people to pay attention to it, but also make it a no-brainer to reach out to you directly for assistance, accountability, implementation help, collapsing time to target help by working with you at, in some level with greater proximity and ease. So the first step is launch a Substack and talk about the things that matter to you. Launch a Substack that aligns with who you really are, what you're really good at, and where you really belong. What are your core values? What are your guiding principles? What are your non-negotiables? What are the talents that you are just inherently, innately good at? What are the skills that you've learned in school and on the job that align with your values and your talents? And how can you leverage those skills and talents to help people achieve aspirations that they want to achieve or solve problems that they want to solve? If you simply start generating content that is truly helpful, provides actionable insights, and deliver in a way that I call is done with empathetic antagonism, meaning that you share these insights in a way that helps people feel seen, heard, and understood, but also gets under their skin just enough to create tension more attention about staying stuck and staying put and staying where they are, and instead inspires them to take an intentional action to become the kind of person they want to become, to build the kind of business that they want to build. That's the, that's the real magic trick for me is— excuse me— talk about things that you want to talk about, share as much of your framework, process, approach as, you know, whatever your blueprint framework roadmap, whatever it is that you call it, give it all away for free. Nobody's going to pay you for your information. They will pay you for access, accountability, and help with implementation. They will pay you to help collapse time to target. And that's how you can launch a Substack with no business model, uh, with— without any kind of clear power offer or no-brainer offer, without some sort of complicated funnel or bespoke signature framework that you're trying to sell, and generate the most effective and efficient offer and means of helping people achieve aspirations and solve problems with the least amount of effort, with the least amount of time and attention on your end that actually helps them accomplish things that they want to accomplish with the greatest amount of ease and velocity. I'm thinking that I will probably— so actually, let me pause here for just a second because this actually reminds me of the the workshop coming up. So if you are subscribed to the Purpose Driven Prosperity Model, I'll just drop the link in there if you're not already subscribed to it. If you want to check it out, you can check it out, become a subscriber if it makes sense. Uh, we are doing a workshop tomorrow called Cash Flow Catalyst Campaigns. These are two campaigns usually run as email campaigns, but they can be run as direct messaging campaigns or posting and broadcasting campaigns or any other way that you want to implement them. They are way too— two campaigns that I have leveraged for the last several years that I learned from Nick Peterson, who is the founder of the Guardian Academy, and Laurel Portier, the queen of the $7, uh, or I'm sorry, the, the the Queen of the $7 Facebook group, but also the $5 Facebook ads. I learned these campaigns from them, actually, mostly from Nick. Laurel implements them and puts her own unique twist on them as well. And they're basically ways that you just are able to attract the right people to your offerings if you have them, or to your community, if that's what you're building, or your— maybe it's just, you know, to your paid subscriber community, to your Substack free subscriber community, to a mastermind of some sort, to a group coaching program, one-on-one coaching program, or digital products and services like courses and so forth. You can, you can use these campaigns to do that. And the campaigns are founded on empathy and compassion. You make sure that you clearly express that you see here and understand the kind of people that you serve, the kind of people who you help by helping them achieve aspirations or solving problems. You offer them real value. You actually help them identify and clarify the problem that they actually have and the fact that they possess everything they need to succeed in achieving what they want to achieve, and you give them a roadmap that helps them get started. Because again, people are not going to pay you for your information. They're not going to necessarily pay you for your insight. In fact, they won't pay you for information or insight. They will pay you for implementation. They will pay you to collapse time to target. They will pay you to help them save money, time, attention, and effort and accomplish what they want to accomplish with greater ease and velocity. So if you would like to learn these two campaigns, they're called the Silver Bullet Campaign. It's a kind of a variation on Dean Jackson's 9-word email. And then the Be Helpful Campaign, which is just a way of leveraging industry or other deadlines that help people to, you know, understand that there's something that they need help with and that you're going to help them with it. And again, without any landing pages, without a website, without an email sequence or a lead magnet, you can actually leverage the whatever size Substack audience you have by leveraging these campaigns. You can actually generate revenue in a matter of days or hours. It has never not worked for me, and it has never not worked for any of the people that I have taught it to who have implemented it with the intention and integrity that, that I know works. It works because it's always worked the way that anybody has ever sold anything, the way that anyone has ever built a sustainable business is to help, is to create a product or service that solves a problem or achieves an aspiration with the greatest ease and velocity and does it in a way that expresses great intention and integrity, because that's the only way you can build a sustainable business. And you can, you know, if you want to spend your time learning all the online guru and digital marketer tricks and hacks, that's great. If you want to become a trickster and a hackster, trickster and a hack, and you know, you want to burn through an audience really quickly. The campaigns that I'm sharing can be used as ace card strategies, you know, that you only use once a quarter or so. But there's also ways that I've learned to implement these as ongoing, as an ongoing strategy that just keeps that keeps growing my Substack audience, that keeps adding paid subscribers to the Circle and Inner Circle community, that keeps moving people up my offer hierarchy into, you know, low-ticket, mid-ticket, and high-ticket offers. And I'm not a big fan of high-ticket offers. I don't have any kind of $10,000 mastermind or anything like that. The most that you'll ever be asked to invest in yourself is $1,000 a month, and you get a ton of access and implementation. Person help from me for that. And there's ways that you can do that, um, for, for a lot less. Um, one of the mindset tricks— it's not a trick— one of the mindset, um, postures that I've adopted that has really helped me is something that I learned when I was a guitar teacher. I always, when I was onboarding a new student into my guitar studio, I would tell them at the very beginning My job as your guitar teacher is to teach myself out of a job as quickly as possible. I wanted to identify what students wanted to accomplish, and I wanted to design a, um, a teaching program and a practice program for them that would help them accomplish that as quickly as possible, knowing that if I could— if I delighted them and fulfilled that job, they would tell their friends and tell their family and tell their neighbors about me, and I would never lack for students, um, and I would just increase the legacy of the number of guitar players that I created in, in this little town that I live in, uh, and I did that as the most expensive guitar teacher in town, uh, in, in a town that had a lot of— has a lot of choices for who, who you learn guitar from, um, and I feel the same way about coaching. My job as a coach is to coach myself out, out of a job as quickly as possible, to help you identify and clarify what it is that you're actually trying to accomplish, what the ideal vision of your lifestyle is that you're— you, you want your business to fund and fit around and to get you there as quickly as possible. If I do that to the best of my ability with the maximum amount of effectiveness and efficiency that I'm capable, I don't think I'm ever going to lack for more business. And this has been true from the very moment I launched here on Substack, a little, less than 2 years ago with less than 500 subscribers. So that is my little riff-rant about, um, getting started on Substack, uh, and, and getting started with very few subscribers or no subscribers, maybe no paid subscribers, and leveraging all the assets and features and benefits that Substack makes available to share the difference that you make in the way that only you can make it with as many people as possible so that you can attract the right ones into your subscriber community, maybe your paid subscriber community, and into your— into whatever offers that you have that will help people act upon and implement the information and inspiration and insight that you share through your Substack. I see a lot of folks have tuned in. So Kevin and Habib and Betty and Kat and Bree and Penny and Celeste and Katarzyna. I hope I'm saying your name correctly. Jeff Cato, Coach Jovi, and Alice, great to have you here. If anybody has any questions, I would ask them now. If you are watching this now or in replay and are not yet subscribed to the Purpose Driven Prosperity Model, there's a link in the comments where you can go learn more about, about what it— what the Purpose Driven Prosperity Model is all about and that the transformation on offer and information about our vibrant little growing community of difference makers. And if you are interested in learning the Cash Flow Catalyst campaigns, That event is happening tomorrow at noon Eastern, and you will need to raise your hand for an invite if you want to attend live or, and/or have access to the replay when it's over. It's not going to be published publicly. So if you haven't yet, ask for the, ask for the invitation to the Cash Flow Catalyst campaigns. So it looks like, doesn't look like anybody has any questions. So either I bored you to sleep or I delivered everything that I wanted to deliver today clearly and accessibly. So since there's no questions, I'm gonna go ahead and hop off and get on with my day. I hope that you all have a great week. And for Alice and Penny and Bri and the others that are members of the circle, I'll look forward to seeing you on our call Wednesday, or I'm sorry, tomorrow, or Wednesday or Friday. Thank you, Habib. Appreciate you being here. Appreciate you all. And go get 'em. Onward.