Phew, what a month.
I mean August.
And also September, but in August I was absolutely crushing it.
I got my orange bestseller badge.
I made almost $40k in total revenue.
And I passed the $100k/year milestone for this year.
So it’s official: I now run a six-figure business on the side of my 9-5 job. Can you believe it? Honestly, it still feels a bit surreal to me.
I know, I know, you’ll ask again how I do all this, so I decided to run a live Masterclass and invited Kristina God, MBA to join me because she also runs her Substack business on the side. This Friday we’ll share everything we do behind the scenes and give you exact steps and tools on how you can implement. You can join us here 👇
For today, as usual, I have all the specifics about the last two months:
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 in September and what’s still cooking
Let’s do this!
If you want to reverse-engineer how I grew to $5k-$10k a month, scaled to consistent $20k/month with Substack at it’s core, these Monthly Round-Ups are your biggest source of truth. I document everything - what worked & what didn’t, and everything in between.
Content & Distribution
Last roundup was pretty boring - same old $20k/month, nothing new, just keep the engine running.
It was the same story in August, up in till 14th.
And then….I hit the 1,000 paid subscribers mark! First I celebrated with a Note. It went viral. Brough me hundreds of new subscribers.
But I haven’t got the badge yet - I got about 100 comped paid members which don’t count towards the badge numbers.
100 is a LOT. I was growing with about that number per month, and I needed to get my orange badge in August, so that I could celebrate my birthday properly.
So I decided to start a promotion for my paid tier.
I usually don’t do these because of my automations, but my birthdays are always an exception. And this time it was not just another birthday promotion.
I decided to do it properly:
with a deadline set at the end of the month
a significant price increase after that deadline, and
a new, revamped paid membership launching on 1st of September
Here’s what I did in a nutshell:
I announced the new paid membership, valid as of 1st of September:
Launched the next big thing in the QUEST - QUEST Lives for VIPs only. I go live on Zoom for 6 weeks, every three months, where I help my VIPs implement the Quest strategies and optimize Substack for a high conversion rate.
A new GPT / Claude skill for VIPs inside of the QUEST Lives. It combines all my thinking, my QUEST strategies, everything I published, my courses and my experience into a self-coaching tool and a sparring partner. Imagine having my brain available to you anytime you need to talk through a decision. It has three modes - self coach (a virtual coach Yana), sparring partner (based on the QUEST) and a Substack optimizer (based on all of my VIP reviews I’ve done so far, and the QUEST LIVEs). My VIPs are impressed:
And they use the f-word A LOT:
The Unplugged TOOLBOX: A growing library of tools, worksheets, templates, cheat sheets, SOPs, including my custom GPTs and Claude skills (I call them my minions). Some of those I already shared with my VIPs and coaching clients. It also has the Unplugged Hall of Fame with all of my viral Notes and those from Unplugged paid members - so you see what currently works on Notes. VIPs will have access to my personal custom GPTs & Claude skill library - I shared this for the first time. It has two versions - for standard paid members and for VIPs.
Paid member perks: huge discounts and special offers from other Substackers, and my collab products I create with some of them. VIPs now have the right to have one offer there, which I will promote as paid member perk.
Monthly calls for all paid members. Live on Zoom we get together to talk about all things Substack. We do it on Saturdays so that my Asia friends can also join. If you’re a paid member you can book your spot here.
This came with a significant price increase, especially in the VIP (from $210 to $600 a year), as it requires a lot of my time - it’s now my group coaching program.
Of course, I also started daily emails, but this time I wrote them differently.
I tested a new approach for a sales sequence which actually worked pretty well - it brought 202 paid members (from the 371 I got this month) within 19 days and I sent a total of 16 emails from Substack, not Kit.
I’ll deep dive into this on the Monetization masterclass I’m doing on Friday with my friend Kristina God. Book your spot here, you have two more days:
For now I can only say that a lot of people unsubscribed, but I expected that. And I got some pretty big fuck-up due to a Substack bug, but shit happens and even with it, it worked amazingly well. You’ll learn everything on Friday.
Last but not least, I also pumped up my ads budgets so more people come into the funnel.
Results?
All of the above got me a total of 371 new paid subscribers joined this month.
On August 21st, just 3 days after my 43th birthday, I finally got it:
I’m now one of the ONLY 3 Substack experts with an orange badge 🤩
August was my first $30k month (almost $40k to be exact - see numbers below), which pushed my total revenue for 2026 to above $100k and made it official:
I now run a 6 figure business on the side of my job!
Who does that?! 👀
And in September I reached another huge milestone: 20k subscribers in total:
I honestly thought that September will be slower in revenues - normal after a big promo push, but it wasn’t.
Let me give you the actual numbers with the full breakdown.
Monetization
Ok, now the most juicy part, I know you might be scrolling down to see this exact part.
Here it is.