I got an interesting spotlight with Chad Boswell.
He won one of my monthly challenges, which is how I get to meet challenge winners and share what’s actually working for them on the platform.
Chad has been in online marketing since 2005. Twenty years. Web design, agency work, affiliate marketing, freelancing, deal-making. He’s seen every iteration of how creators monetize online.
He has fewer than 100 Substack subscribers right now, but he is just getting started.
He’s also generated 3,000 paid signups through one bonus he added to someone else’s product offer.
If those two numbers feel like they shouldn’t belong in the same paragraph, that’s the point of this article. Most of what you’ve been told about Substack monetization is built on the assumption that you need a big audience and your own product. Chad’s proof that neither is true.
Here’s what he’s actually doing.
The strategy that pulled 3,000 signups
About a year ago, Chad watched 200 people in his community buy into a licensing offer. The product was a set of templates. The seller offered them with one specific setup in mind.
Chad looked at the offer and noticed something missing.
He uses Systeme.io for his own email and funnel building. The templates the seller offered weren’t built for Systeme.io. There was a gap between the product 200 people had just bought and the tool a chunk of them were already using.
So Chad rebuilt the templates in Systeme.io himself. Then he offered them as a free bonus to anyone who signed up for Systeme.io through his affiliate link.
Then he sat back and watched what happened.
“I ended up getting a lot of people coming over to Systeme and signing up for paid accounts. I cracked my first thousand through Systeme, and now I’m about 3,000 now.”
3,000 paid Systeme.io signups from one bonus he created.
Here’s the thing.
Chad didn’t create the original product. Someone else did. He didn’t build the offer. Someone else did. He didn’t even build the audience the offer was selling to. The original seller had already done that work.
What Chad did was identify the friction point between the original product and the way real users wanted to use it. Then he filled that gap with a small, targeted, free bonus that triggered a paid action on a different platform he gets affiliate commission from.
That’s his entire mechanic.
You don’t have to build the engine. You have to find an engine that’s already running and add the part that’s missing.
The ALF principle
Halfway through our spotlight, Chad gave me an analogy I’m not going to forget. He’s a toy collector. So he framed it through toys.
There’s a company that makes action figures. They don’t invent their own characters. They license popular brands or older brands that people still love. They take ALF. They take old cartoon characters. They make them as collectibles using their own production skills.
“And then people like me come along like, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s an ALF sitting on the shelf. I gotta have this in my collection.’”
The company doesn’t own the IP. They license it. They use their own skill (production quality, design, distribution) on top of someone else’s existing recognition and emotional pull.
The result is a real business. A profitable one. Built entirely on other people’s creative work.
Chad calls his version of this “piggybanking.” He says it’s how he’s structuring his whole Substack going forward. Find successful IP, license it, use his own skills to build something around it.
I think that’s genius.
If you’ve been stuck on Substack waiting for the right original idea to hit you so you can launch your paid newsletter, this is the reframe you might need.
The right idea might not be yours.
The right idea might be someone else’s idea you’ve noticed is underbuilt, mistranslated, missing a feature, or not reaching its full audience.
If you’re with me for a while, you know I lean on data. And the data on Substack monetization is brutal on this point. The fastest paths to revenue almost never involve creating something brand new. They involve identifying something that’s already working and finding the gap where you can add value to it.
The way to be different is to find an old thing and make it easier, faster, or cheaper for the buyer. That’s what multibillion-dollar companies are doing all the time.
The Brazilian translation case study
Chad gave a real example.
There’s a guy called Travis Sago who has a book in English. He got a reader who noticed there was no Portuguese translation. So he got the licensing rights, did the translation work, and put the book into the Brazilian market.
He’s sold over 1,000 copies. Done over $5,000 in revenue in a few months. He pays Travis a licensing commission and keeps the rest.
Read that again. The guy didn’t write the book. He didn’t build Travis’s audience. He didn’t create the marketing system. He found the gap (no Portuguese version), got permission, did the work, and now has a real income stream.
This is what piggybanking looks like in practice.
If you’re sitting on language skills, design skills, technical skills, regional knowledge, or any niche expertise, there’s almost certainly a successful product out there that’s incomplete for the audience you can reach. Your job isn’t to invent the thing. Your job is to spot what’s missing and propose the partnership.
Why this can work on Substack specifically
Substack might be the best platform ever built for this kind of business.
Here’s why.
When you build a relationship with an audience on Substack, you’re building it under your name. Not behind a logo, not as a faceless brand. People subscribe to YOU. So when you say “I found this product and I think it’s worth your attention,” your audience responds differently than they would to a paid ad or an SEO-optimized affiliate review.
Chad doesn’t need 10,000 subscribers to make this work. He needs the right people who trust him enough to follow his recommendations.
This is the difference between trying to monetize attention (which requires scale) and monetizing trust (which requires depth). Chad’s model is built on the second one.
Most creators want to be known for their own original work. Their own framework. Their own product. The piggybanking model says maybe you don’t need to be. Maybe the most profitable thing you can build is a position where you’re the trusted curator and packager of other people’s work, with deals that pay you for the role.
That’s a different identity than “thought leader.” But it might be a more sustainable business.
The mindset shift Chad named
Near the end of our spotlight, we were talking about why most creators don’t make money fast enough to sustain themselves.
He said this:
“When I do something for the money, it doesn’t do nearly as good as when it’s not about the money. When it’s about genuinely helping people, the money kind of comes.”
That line could land as a platitude. It doesn’t, when you look at his actual business.
The Brazilian guy didn’t translate Travis’s book to make money. He did it because the gap existed and he could fill it. The money followed.
Chad didn’t create the Systeme.io bonus to extract commissions. He did it because he saw 200 people who’d just bought something incomplete, and he wanted to help them complete it. The 3,000 paid signups followed.
This is the actual mechanic underneath all of his stories. Find the gap. Fill the gap. The money is a lagging indicator.
When you make money the leading indicator, you stop seeing the gaps. You only see the transactions. And the transactions don’t happen, because nobody trusts a creator whose primary motivation is visible to them.
The TL;DR version
If you take one thing from this spotlight with Chad, take this:
You don’t need to create your own product to make money online. Most of the fastest paths to revenue involve licensing, packaging, translating, repurposing, or adding bonuses to products other people have already built.
Find the gaps. Look at successful offers and notice what’s missing for a specific subset of buyers. Then build the bridge piece. The bridge piece is often where the real money is, not the original product.
Piggybanking is a real business model. Toy companies do it with IP. Translators do it with books. Affiliate marketers do it with bonuses. Substack creators can do it in multiple ways, he’s about to cover in his newsletter The PiggyBANKING Newsletter.
Stop chasing the subscriber count and start chasing the deals. Chad’s fewer than 100 subscribers don’t matter when he has 3,000 paid signups, a Skool community, and 50/50 revenue splits with product creators. Subscriber count is one metric, but it’s not the only one.
And money is a lagging indicator. Find the gaps. The money follows.
Watch the full spotlight session above for the parts I couldn’t fit in here. Chad goes deeper on his Skool community (PiggyBanking Brand Creators), the integration between Substack and Skool (I’m closely watching), his thoughts on deal-making vs freelancing, and the framework he’s using to shift his whole business away from trading time for money.
Go subscribe to Chad’s Substack, No Paycheck Needed. If you’re a freelancer or service provider who’s tired of trading time for money, his content is built for you.
Watch this spotlight as well as all of the previous episodes on YouTube:
Subscribe to Chad’s Substack to find more ideas how make real money online: The PiggyBANKING Newsletter
Yana
P.S. Chad shared three books that shaped his approach (with my Amazon affiliate links):
Dotcom Secrets by Russell Brunson (the book that shifted his marketing thinking; still relevant even though it came out in 2015)
Make Them Beg to Buy From You by Travis Sago (this book is the source of the “piggy banking” concept Chad uses)
Deals Over Clients by Tony Teegarden and Travis Sago (the framework for moving from trading time for money to making deals)
And one creator he mentioned worth following: Charisse Tyson, who travels around the US doing missionary work with elderly people and writes about it on Substack. Chad’s a subscriber. So am I.
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