Monthly Round-Up: April'25 Earnings Report

I finally made it to the $5,000+/month mark, and this is what made it happen.

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If someone told me I’m gonna reach $6k per month just by running a newsletter and I’m gonna reach that in less than 12 months, I’d laugh.

I’d laugh out loud in May last year.

Because back then I was confident in my Medium progress, I knew about Substack but I was convinced I had to bring my subscribers there. I knew nothing about Notes. Or the business potential of newsletters in general.

I only understood the subscription business very well, because that’s what I do for more than 15 years.

Turned out that was more than enough.

Now?

It’s a business that delivers a full-time income for most of the European countries, I believe also for the US. At least that’s what Google AI says:

And you know what I like most? That this business model can be replicated to pretty much any niche. You don’t have to “write about writing”. Meta content is actually very limited in growth potential, but most people are blinded by the fast initial growth spike. I explained this in detail in this video from the QUEST.

I never intended to stay in the meta, but more on that in the Outlook part below.

As usual, this is what I have for you today:

• Content: strategies I implemented and their outcome

• Distribution: platforms I used and how they performed and why

• Monetization: what I did to sell, how much I earned (total & by channel)

• Outlook: what I plan to start, stop, change or continue in the future, and why

Let’s begin!

Content & Distribution

So many things happened in April.

My first course on Viral Notes

Following my new subscribers growth increase (I tripled it using my new Notes strategy & my custom GPT), I created a course about it, which I enabled for paid and VIP subscribers.

Free subscribers and well as paid subscribers who want lifetime access, can have it from my new school I launched on Teachable, dedicated for the QUEST.

This course also replaced all of the materials for my all-famous Notes Challenge.

Back to daily writing

I went back to daily writing on Medium, but not for the money. As I mentioned here, few months ago I started experimenting with social media and paid ads as an external growth source for Substack. So far nothing impressive to talk about, except the 21% conversion rate of subscribers coming organically from Medium, read more here:

So I decided to double down on this one. I’ll publish a dedicated article breaking down the results of my social media experiment in the near future, for now, it’s only worth mentioning that I decided to automate this past except Medium, but more on that when I’m ready with the implementation.

Collaborations

If you don’t partner with anyone on Substack, this is the time to consider it. And actually start doing it.

I started being more active with these opportunities, to help others and also to get more exposure for myself.

It’s worth mentioning that I do get a subscriber spike during most of the live sessions. I wouldn’t give too much importance to cross-posting, but affiliates among Substack creators are something that more people should explore. I believe Substack is redefining this category as well.

So far I was considering affiliate business to be just promoting external offers, but I found that the offers from other Substack creators can be much more relevant. And profitable. Especially when you don’t ask people to explicitly buy - a lot of us have awesome freebies I love to share with you.

Substack QUEST

The QUEST is evolving at a slower speed than I’d initially intended, but due to some intensity in my 9-5 I found it hard to publish it all, at the quality it needs to be. Excuses, I know, but that moment is over and I’m now ALL focused on delivering it in full. By the end of June you should have the complete QUEST and some more perks that come along with it.

Monetization

In April I hit my $10k in ARR milestone.

I also faced a lower conversion rate - from 6.5% to 5.9% due to virality, but this is now recovering. I’m now at 6.1% and still growing faster due to my Notes system.

The Kit sequence I launched to help gain more paid subscriptions (instead of doing promotions every month like crazy) continues to deliver consistently.

What about my earnings?

I’ve got another all-time high, this time crossed the $5k/mo mark.