Monthly Round-Up: November'24 Earnings Report
November was the month of becoming a Bestseller and another all-time high.
It’s Christmas and it’s time to look at the numbers for November’24.
I was thinking these days: What a Year!
I started being consistent with my writing in February this year. This is my first Christmas online :) and it’s exciting!
I can’t wait for 2025, I have so much to build on Substack and beyond.
Back to November.
As usual, this is what I have:
Content: strategies I implemented last month and their outcome
Distribution: platforms I used and how they performed
Monetization: how much I earned in total and a breakdown by platform
Outlook: what I plan to start, stop, change or continue, and why
Let’s begin!
Content & Distribution
If October was a blast, then November was a blast-er!
So many things happened!
First: I became a Bestseller! Finally reached my 100 paid subscribers and got so much joy from that fact!
On the content part:
Introduced the all-new awards in the Writing and Notes Challenges: I select the most active members in each challenge to win a spotlight session where they can talk about their Substack. The first session is now live - watch my conversation with Daniel here.
a new Ask-Me-Anything podcast where I talk about Substack strategy and answer your questions - for all subscribers. Listen to the first episode here.
Kicked-in all new subscriber benefits - the above, plus:
a 30-minute strategy call for paid and VIP members
a custom-made GPT trained to write like you - for VIP members
Launched new prices:
monthly fee increased to $18 from $9
yearly fee increased to $60 from $36
VIP fee increased to $180 from $120
I got deep into Notes to research what’s going viral, and I got some valuable insights and results (more about this in future posts).
Why more benefits for free subscribers?
I was overdoing it. I was paywalling way too much. I saw much less new free subscribers coming, which I considered a consequence.
The challenges: those are about community. The more people join the better. Still I kept the guides, templates and tools behind the paywall and the prizes are only for paid members.
Monetization
On the promotion and selling part:
I wanted to test an “all-in” one-time payment offer, so I created Lifetime Access as my Black Friday offer. I had to do that on Gumroad since Substack doesn’t have that feature (yet).
I limited the spots to 30, because for Substack they’re not “paying subscribers” but “compensations”.
The process: I get a sale from Gumroad and I manually assign lifetime access as “comp” to the email address.
I did not sell them all, but I see this as a successful promo since I saw a good amount of interest. I’ll do this again in the future (let me know if you’d like to buy this kind of offer). Here’s the link to the promo page if you’re interested.
I so much hope for Substack one-time payments to be introduced. I believe we all really need that.
Because I got so excited about my Bestseller badge, I ran a 24-hour flash sale promo distributed over the email to free subscribers only.
I wanted to test the price elasticity, and I got my answers.
I’ll most probably won’t do that in the future, because I don’t believe sales promos should be leading your sales strategy.
What about my earnings?
Medium is no longer the main source of income (finally!), and it’s declining as expected. I’m maintaining the publications there for the writers who still believe in the platform and work hard to gain traction. I’ll continue to help in any way I can.
With that said, and because of the Lifetime Offer, November was another all-time high for me, reaching new records.
It’s now a stable 5-figure business (annualized) hopefully on it’s way to grow to a 6-figure.
It took me:
13 months to start writing consistently
6 months to reach $800/month on Medium
5 months to reach $1000/month on Substack
3 months to become a Substack Bestseller with no external audience
If I can, anyone can.
All it takes is to figure what kind of value you can deliver, start doing it and stay consistent.
Results will come.
Here’s the split by channel: