How To Make Zero Money With Your Substack
Why you should leave money on the table.
It’s now my tenth year in business and for almost eight of those, I’ve been running my own branding and design studio. I can tell you exactly what it looks like when a beautiful idea gets murdered.
Usually, it happens in a Zoom call. My team brings in a strong, creative concept. It’s beautiful. But then the clients get their hands on it. They start questioning if the colors are right for the audience. Is this even increasing the conversion rate? The logo has to be bigger. And then they want to cram in the legal disclaimer and those three irrelevant product features.
By the time it gets to the public, the beautiful idea is dead, buried under a gazillion pounds of corporate logistics.
I bring this up because right now, I see the same thing happening to the creator economy. Here the murder happens
If you spend any time online today, you are completely surrounded by grifters and hustle-bros practically screaming at you through your screen to monetize your passion.
You post a picture of a delicious, crusty loaf of sourdough you baked. Maybe you knit a scarf… or you show your mother-in-law a rosary bracelet they made from broken jewelry.
It doesn’t take long until someone says: “You should monetize this.”
The gurus of the internet (aka. the 23 year old in matching t-shirts showing up in your YouTube ads) have convinced an entire generation that you are leaving money on the table, if you don’t monetizing everything you are remotely talented at. Otherwise you must be a fool or a failure who doesn’t possess the mindset necessary to win.
It is officially time to tell these people to go to hell.
The Only Grinding I Care About
I have a slight obsession with specialty coffee. It’s my favorite morning ritual. I love the sound of the grinder and the moment the water touches the grounds. Even before the freshly brewed coffee hit my tongue, I feel alive.
But I am also an entrepreneur with a terminal case of builder’s brain. At some point the thought of turning it into a business came to my mind. I started coming up with all kinds of ideas. I created packaging designs and logos, researched the sourcing, and imagined even having a small café.
After a few days, I had an epiphany. A coffee business would completely bury my love for coffee under logistics and overhead issues. Most of the time I wouldn’t spend on the parts I actually love. Instead I would be managing inventory and desperately trying to game the Instagram algorithm so people would buy 12-ounce bags of dark roast.
I decided right then to keep it as my unproductive guilty pleasure that keeps consuming time and money.
A hobby is an idea in its purest form.
It exists simply because doing it makes you feel alive. When you slap a $5/month subscription fee on your hobby, you introduce commerce. And where commerce goes, clients follow. Suddenly you have a boss. You are dealing with “The Algorithm.”
The Algorithm is the worst, most sociopathic client in history. It doesn’t have a worldview. Or empathy. Or taste really.
Making something beautiful gets replaced by open rates and click-through performance (not to mention dropping emojis in comments). Everything has to be optimized to get the metrics growing. The presence and joy that once filled you with passion are gone.
You guys know this pain better than anyone. Many of you left corporate meat-grinders, burned-out agency jobs, and restrictive niches because you felt like a parasite. You came to the creator space seeking authenticity. But if you drag the very metrics and pressure you were trying to escape into the spaces you use to heal, you are slowly dying another death.
Leave the Money on the Table
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of making money from creativity. Branding has been very good to me, and getting paid to sit in a room with your feet on a desk coming up with ideas is arguably the best job on the planet. But there is a radioactive strain of hustle-culture BS going around today that tells us that every single creative act we perform must be thrown onto the great conveyor belt of capitalism.
We’ve swallowed this cultural lie that if a hobby isn’t making you money, or building your personal brand, or expanding your content ecosystem, then it is somehow a waste of your time.
There will always be people out there who look at you with genuine pity when they find out you aren’t cashing in on your talents. To the hyper-transactional minds of the internet, you are just a weirdo leaving money on the table.
I’ve sat at that table. It is crowded, the coffee is mediocre, and the people sitting there are only speaking in marketing hieroglyphics about MRR and churn rates. The whole gig sucks down infinite reserves of brain juice without giving one real satisfying moment holding any gravity or substance.
If walking away from that table makes you a weirdo, then I highly suggest you buy a weirdo hat, put it on your weirdo head, and happily walk out the door. Let them have the table. You get to keep your soul.
Let Your Job Pay the Damn Bills
Most people in the creator space will tell you to hate your 9-to-5. They will tell you to escape the matrix and be your own boss. I want to offer you a different view on this.
Your day job is your patron.
It’s the Medici family of your own private Renaissance.
Because your job carries the burden of paying the mortgage and buying the groceries, your creativity is fully free. It doesn’t have to appease an algorithm. No pressure to use fake timers to trick strangers into buying your ebook just to keep the lights on. You don’t have to water down your voice or put a click-bait title on it.
Dopamine fades, but that kind of depth compounds.
By removing the financial pressure from your art, you create a space where you can actually be authentic.
You're Allowed to Just Do Things
Every good story runs on conflict, and the bad guy in this story is the belief that every minute of your existence must have a return on investment.
We live in a system where human attention is mined, processed, and sold to the highest bidder. In that kind of world, holding onto a piece of your heart simply because you enjoy it beats is a rebellion. Maybe it’t a form of beautiful vandalism that we most need right now.
Great work, whether in business or in art, never comes from conforming to the perfectly curated status quo. You have to step outside the madness. Greatness requires the sudden cessation of stupidity. And trying to monetize every moment of your life is incredibly stupid.
So here's your creative brief, since they are still haunting me.
The objective: Experience joy without a metric.
The target audience: You.
Shut the laptop. Turn off the phone. Forget your personal brand for five fucking minutes. Go outside, or into your kitchen, or down into your basement, and do something so unproductive that the internet wouldn’t know what to do with you.
P.S. We are drowning in content creators. We need more artists who are beautifully alive. To be real, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.
I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save your sanity.
I see it this way too.
I do work as a cook, 5 evenings out of 7, every week. And as you said, the kitchen is my patron.
Plus, I get to make real food with my hands, to feed real people -as if IRL
I too have written a small declaration on my substack, about the same thing you're talking here, and hung it up, front-page, under the title 'Why I Don’t Offer Paid Subscriptions'.
And to be honest, by putting this little manifesto out there, I freed myself.
Glad you're voicing this as well!
🙏
There is a reason why I've not turned on the monetisation features and I am happy with that. Don't want to turn writing into a job. I write because I enjoy it (most of the time anyway lol).