Monthly Round-Up: May & June'25 Earnings Report
I finally reached 5k subscribers. An ALL TIME HIGH conversion rate. And an ALL TIME HIGH monthly paid subscription revenue. Here's how...
I’m obsessed with numbers.
If you wonder why your business isn’t growing, your data has the answers. You just have to look.
And the answer is usually very simple: either stop doing what’s not working, or do more of what’s already working. Or both.
So it’s time for some numbers review and recap.
It’s heen a while since I posted my last monthly round-up, as I wanted to finish the SUBSTACK QUEST and that was my sole priority.
So today I’m bringing the data for two months in a row.
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 May and June.
My Viral Notes Writer is Working
I continue to grow with highly engaging Notes, few went viral. Even though Substack might be slow lately, my strategy is working. I’ve more than doubled my monthly subscribers growth.
Going from ~280 in January to ~680 in April is huge for me. It was due to some viral Notes but also my new strategy, bringing me consistently subscribers from high-engaging Notes. That’s how I’m now at ~480/month.
I just recently updated the Viral Notes writer custom GPT to reflect the latest viral formats. We’re now with version 3.0, get it from here.
I described my exact strategy and how to use the GPT for Substack and beyond (because yes, it also works for social media) in this course (included in paid membership):
📍The Viral Notes Writer System
Time for the first bonus course in the 📍Substack Quest: The Viral Notes Writer.
Take it if you haven’t already, it’s included in your paid subscription.
On the content side, I focused mostly on strategy and mostly on the Quest. It’s now complete (with just few more bonuses left) and my prices are now up (as I initially stated). That’s on Substack, but my focus was to develop additional growth channels - yes, you guessed it - I’m thinking social media.
Actually, not just thinking.
Since the beginning of this year I have been testing the effect of organic growth from manual posting on X, Bluesky, Facebook and LinkedIn. Oh, and Medium - I now treat it as social media.
Social Media, Automations & AI agents
Last month I made an analysis of the effectiveness I was surprised to see the conversion rates of free to paid subscribers from some channels.
See for yourself:
Do you see these conversion rates?!
Notes - 14% (ok, this I already expected as it is Sustack organic)
Medium -21% (That’s a surprise, more than Substack!)
X (Twitter) - 36% (this I didn’t expect)
That’s huge!
But the numbers are too low. I need more data.
The problem is I don’t have the time to manually post all this.
So in June I finally implemented a make.com automation with AI agents I created to translate my Substack posts into multiple social media posts, different for every platform.
I’m now on Facebook, X, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. I’ll be setting up also Instagram and Threads (I’ll be writing about this in the Quest).
That’s a major milestone for me.
Why do I invest all these efforts in this?
Many reasons:
I don’t want to count only on 1 growth source (Substack)
The only way to scale to bigger numbers is with paid ads (if you know how to do them properly, which I have the confidence that do), and social media is a sweet spot, followed by google search
What’s the connection with paid ads? Well, only people who actually know how paid ads work, can tell you that they are hugely influenced by the organic content of the advertising account.
It’s a strategic move I always wanted to make, and now is the time to do it. It’s now live and working for my BiTES newsletter on Kit. I’m still testing it, and of course, once I find a proper strategy for implementation for Substack, I’m gonna publish it in the Quest.
Collaborations
May and June were all about collaborations for me. I’ve got many of them:
lives
affiliates
guests posts
interviews & podcasts
If you don’t partner with anyone on Substack, this is the time to consider it. And actually start doing it. It drives your growth. You also help others grow (which I believe is important).
Monetization
In June I finally hit the 5k subscribers milestone.
But the overall growth has slowed down, which is what recovered my conversion rate. I’m now actually ALL TIME HIGH with 6.7%
Yet, I’m still growing faster than last year 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, even with slow growth (!!). Downside: I have to update it from time to time as my content changes. But at least I don’t do all the promotional stuff manually.