How to Get Rich on Substack
How to Get Rich on Substack
Explaining how I rapidly built a hefty paywall
Recently the indefatigable and impressively slender
released an intriguing article called How to Get Big on Substack.This manual contains lots of helpful hints for growing your subscriber count, and if that’s your primary goal here I’ll offer it my full-throated endorsement.
Unfortunately BB’s guide isn’t especially useful if your ultimate goal is to monetize your Substack so you can quit your retarded bug job and establish yourself as a dedicated public intellectual like the good Dr. Hanania.
This makes sense in light of his metrics; currently the precocious lad boasts an impressive 2700 subscribers, but only grosses $10k per annum from Substack.
Meanwhile I have 1900 subs and currently gross over $22k:
And this disparity only grows starker when you consider I’ve been active on the site for a much shorter period—BB joined Substack in early 2022, while I joined this year.
So how did I become so much better than Jews at making money?
Keep reading and you’ll find out.
Step 1 — Find a patron
When you’re still a small fry on Substack it’s absolutely essential that you attach yourself to a successful big chungus eceleb account who’ll promote your stuff and provide useful feedback as to what works and what doesn’t.
If you don’t do this you’ll need to spend many months dutifully reply-guying your way to a few hundred subscribers simply to establish the necessary runway for your good shit to go viral. This is an enormous waste of time.
So who should you choose to cultivate as your patron? And how do you convince them to invest in you? That’s where you’ll need to exercise your own judgment and adjust your tactics to the situation, because it’s vital they’re a good fit for your publication.
For me the choice was obviously Hanania—both because we share a history with the Alt Right and because the entrepreneurial feller lets you pay for a meeting with him.
Thankfully I managed to impress Hanania enough for him to promote me aggressively in my first months on Substack, which in turn got me seen by
and led to his viral X post that reestablished me as a public figure basically overnight. But my sessions with Hanania were also indispensable to learning the best ways to drive engagement, how to build a robust paywall, and how to remain *just* within the mainstream Overton Window of Substack dot com. These insights saved me a lot of iteration in my early months on the platform, allowing me to grow very explosively.Anyway your mileage will obviously vary, but if you run in the same circles as me and want quality feedback on your stuff I can emphatically recommend booking RH.
Alternatively you can feel free to DM me and we’ll work something out.
Step 2 — Start your paywall immediately
Lots of Substackers assume they need to reach some arbitrary milestone—500 subs, 1000 subs, whatever—before they start their paywall.
This attitude is completely understandable and entirely wrongheaded.
You want to start your paywall ASAP, for several reasons:
It connotes status and makes your content seem valuable / exclusive / professional
It allows you to experiment with different monetization strategies and develop a solid intuition for what people will pay for
It establishes a comfy safe space to write about embarrassing shit where you’re generally free from the haters and losers
It lets you assemble a cadre of diehard fans who’ll feel special and more invested, and will generally promote your shit a lot more aggressively than Freefriends will thanks to the famous Ben Franklin Effect
It lets you start building an exclusive community chat for Paychads that reinforces (4) and serves as an increasingly valuable marketing vector
It will earn you an Orange Check much faster, which makes marketing easier in all sorts of ways (people are more likely to come on your podcast etc.)
Step 3 — Balance growth and monetization
Early on in my Substack career I observed the articles that earn me free subscribers and build my reputation as an interesting thinker are never the same articles that compel people to invest in a paid sub. And yet I wouldn’t have any prospective Paychads without that constant influx of new followers!
This means that to make money on Substack you can’t simply focus on monetization; you need to focus on growth and reputation as well. That requires you to consistently produce solid content that inspires people take you seriously as an intellectual.
Thankfully BB’s article already does a great job covering what that looks like, so I won’t dwell on this topic. I’ll simply note that in my opinion the optimal ratio you should aim for is two growth articles for every one monetization article.
So what are the best kinds of monetization articles?
Step 4 — Offer practical advice
Folks will praise you to high heavens for a brilliant treatise on metapolitics.
They open their wallets when you show them how to do something useful.
To that end seduction and making money are always the most obvious candidates, but anything you’re talented at will suffice if you have the literary chops.
The only catch is you need to offer some unique perspective on the topic, which is why adding in a compelling autobiographical narrative is always useful.
It’s also smart to position your ideas as dark esoteric knowledge normies can’t handle.
Which brings me to…
Step 5 — Sex sells!
Perhaps the most hilariously effective monetization tactic is to write something really compelling and then drop a paywall immediately before you get to the salacious or sexually provocative part—refer to this article for a demonstration of this tactic.
We can actually generalize this point into the following step: