I Doubled my Substack Revenue (96 Weeks on Substack, $12 K)

Here’s what I learned

At my old job I had to beg and plead to get a 5% pay rise in one year. My newsletter revenue is growing by 5% per week

Yesterday I hit $12K in newsletter revenue. It feels so good.

The money is great, but the growth is better.

• 96 weeks of publishing;
• 125 paying subscribers;
• $US12,000 in yearly revenue;
• 184% growth in 33 weeks (that’s 5% per week)

I have been on Substack for almost two years, so this isn’t an overnight success. It’s the growth which makes this exciting. My newsletter revenue doubled last year and is on track to almost triple this year.

The growth I’m experiencing is like getting a 5% pay rise at a ‘real’ job every single week, without doing any more work. It’s insane! (insanely good!)

Same amount of work + more money = scaleable income

Last year I shared lessons I learned on my way to $6.5K in 65 weeks on Substack and gave you a sneak peek into the experiences of other paid Substackers whom I met during an invitation-only Substack “intensive” program.

65 Weeks on Substack, $6.5 K

Definitely check out that article if you want to learn why I started my newsletter, what kept me going during the first few months and what worked for me on my way to $6.5K.

The dreaded plateau

Plateaus are common in newsletter growth. They are the flat parts in the graphs you can see above.

You’ll notice some pretty long plateaus — times when my paying subscriber numbers did not increase —in my revenue graphs. I even had some ‘dips’ last month, times when the number of paying subscribers decreased temporarily.

Those times do not feel great.

The problem with a plateau is that when you are in the middle of it, you don’t know whether your numbers will ever start growing again. It’s scary. My paid newsletter is a niche B2B topic (B2B = ‘business to business’), and so the audience is not enormous.