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While I share money-making strategies, nothing is "typical", and outcomes are based on each individual. There are no guarantees.
Let me just put the number on the table, since that’s probably why you clicked.
About $1,400 a month. From Substack. Starting from zero paid subscribers four months earlier.
Now, before you go thinking I cracked some code, let me tell you what really happened, because the honest version is more useful to you than the highlight reel. I didn’t have a plan that worked on day one. I had a plan I thought would work, watched it not work, and adjusted in real time. That’s the whole story. The number at the end is just where the adjusting landed me.
So here’s how it actually went, month by month.
Month one: throwing spaghetti
My first paid subscriber came in on January 10th. I remember the date because it felt like a real milestone — somebody actually paid to read my stuff.
When I first found Substack, I genuinely could not believe people were paying to get other people’s blog posts. That’s really what this is, when you strip away the fancy word. They call it a newsletter. It’s a blog post that lands in your inbox. And people pay for it.
But that first month, I wasn’t charging much of anything yet and I wasn’t sure what was going to work. I was writing articles. I was writing little posts — notes, they call them. And not much was happening.
And that’s the honest beginning. The start is quiet. You’re throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, and most of it slides right off. I tell everybody in my coaching group the same thing: unless you already know your niche cold and you know it’ll work on this platform, you have to play around first. I did too. Everybody does. And I’ll be honest — the quiet part is where most people quit, right before the thing that would’ve worked.
The thing that changed everything
Then I wrote a note that told a story.
Not a strategy. Not a list. A story — about getting divorced and starting my life over again. And it went viral. Really viral.
And here’s why that matters for your numbers, not just your feelings: when a note takes off on Substack, people read it, and then a chunk of them just click subscribe. Some of them don’t even stop at the free subscribe. They click straight to paid. They’re already bought in. They read something true, they felt it, and they decided they wanted more of whatever I had.
That’s the engine. The note is the front door. I cannot say this enough — I built this through mastering notes. Not the articles. The notes. The articles are where people go deeper once they’re already in. But the notes are what bring them in the door in the first place.
Month two and three: I almost wrecked it
Now here’s where the line on the chart did something I did not enjoy watching.
I had all these people showing up for the storyteller, and I responded by going right back to teaching how to make money online. Here’s how to do Pinterest. Here’s how to do YouTube. Click, click, click.
And I’m watching the dashboard, and it’s going backwards. The dip. I’m actually losing subscribers.
That was the lesson that cost me something. They didn’t come for the listicle. They came for the real-time experience — what I’m testing, what I’m learning, what I’m living through right now. So I changed course. I even renamed the whole thing The Real Time Creator, because that name is the promise. I’m going to show you what I’m figuring out, as I figure it out.
I went back to story-first. And the line started climbing again.
Month four: the bestseller line
By month four, almost to the day from that first paid subscriber, I crossed 100 paid subscribers. On Substack, 100 paid is the threshold where you officially become a bestseller.
And that last month was something else. My free list went from a literal handful — five subscribers — to over five thousand. The annualized revenue line on the dashboard went nearly straight up.
Let me explain that “annualized” word, because it confused me at first and it’ll confuse you too. Substack doesn’t show you what you made this month. It takes each subscriber’s payment and multiplies it out over a year. So if somebody pays $8 a month, the dashboard counts them as $96 of annualized revenue — what they’d be worth if they stayed a full year.
So when I do the real math — take the annualized number and divide by twelve — it comes out to about $1,473 a month. And I want to do that math out loud, in front of you, instead of just throwing a clean number at you. Seventeen thousand six hundred seventy-eight divided by twelve. That’s the real monthly average. I’d rather show you the arithmetic than have you wonder if I made it up.
How the money actually works
Here’s the structure, because “I make $1,400 a month” doesn’t tell you how.
I charge for a paid subscription. Free subscribers get a preview or one free article a week. Paid subscribers get the full articles, plus I’ve layered in some bonuses — I’ve got free ebooks in there now, I tested an ebook-of-the-month idea. Honestly, the bonuses don’t move the needle as much as you’d think. People are mostly paying for me and the writing, not the extras. But the extras are a nice little bump of value.
Some people pay monthly. A good number pay for the full year up front to get the discount. That’s actually why my monthly take looks lower than the annualized figure suggests — a chunk of that money came in as one annual payment, not twelve monthly ones.
And one more honest note. A lot of people will tell you that you have to reply to every single comment to grow. I don’t believe that. If somebody asks a real question — what software did you use, how did you feel when you first got divorced — I’ll come in and answer. If they just say “me too, I love this,” I’ll drop a heart on it to acknowledge them. But I did not build this through engagement, and I’m not going to pretend I did. I built it through the notes.
Is it worth it?
For me? Absolutely. It’s a no-brainer.
It’s genuinely easy to check in on my articles through the day, answer the comments that deserve answering, and keep the notes flowing. The platform is free. The only cost is my time and my willingness to show up.
And I’ll tell you why this kind of income matters to me beyond the dollar figure. I ran a marketing agency for years, and I know what it feels like to be the last one paid — everybody else gets their check and the person whose name is on the door waits. I built everything after that so no single thing controls whether I eat. Substack is one more leg under that table. That’s what this number really is to me. Not rich. Free-er.
Now the part I always say, because it’s true and because you deserve the truth. There’s no guarantee. Nobody’s figures are the same as anybody else’s — not the niche, not the effort, not the timing. I’m not promising you $1,400 a month. I’m showing you what’s possible, and what it actually took. If the trajectory holds and each quarter mirrors the first, this could be $5,000 a month by year’s end. Could be. I’ve seen people with annualized revenue in the hundreds of thousands. I’ve seen one at a million. So the ceiling is real. But your results depend on your niche, your effort, and a hundred individual factors I can’t see from here.
If you want to try it
Here’s the rhythm I’d give you: three notes a day, one real article a week. That’s it. Learn how the notes work, because the notes are the discovery engine. Lead with the story. Let the strategy ride inside it.
Go dabble. Play around. See if you could add a few hundred a month — or a few thousand — to what you’re already doing.
If you want the full playbook — the free-versus-paid setup, how I write the notes, how the paywall actually works — I put all of it in my Substack 101 guide. You can grab it here: https://loriballen.com/product/substack-101/
And if you want to watch the real-time version of all this unfold, come find me at The Real Time Creator on Substack. That’s where I test, fail, and figure it out in public — one note at a time.
Income disclaimer: I’m sharing my own results, which are not typical and not a guarantee of what you’ll earn. There’s no typical income, no guarantee, and no fast track. Your results depend on your niche, your effort, and a range of individual factors.
