I earn $263,000 in annual revenue from my Substack side hustle. It's an incredible bonus to my writing career.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Amy Suto, a 32-year-old freelance writer based in San Francisco. It has been edited for length and clarity.

In June 2023, I started a Substack documenting the realities of being a working writer. People kept asking me, "How do you get these jobs?" In the same year, I published the book "Six-Figure Freelance Writer" to answer that question.

As my business grew, I became too busy to take on every client and started running out of people to refer them to. I remember working remotely in a café in Paris and realizing there had to be a better way to connect talented writers with clients.

Beyond the job board, we've built a community for writers. We publish free resources, host interviews with bestselling authors, and run a long-running interview series called "The Guest Stack," where we ask successful Substack creators how they built their audiences. Guests often share those interviews with their own readers, which has helped us grow.

What I'm proudest of is that we've built this almost entirely without paid advertising. We've spent less than $100 on ads total, and that was only as an experiment. Figuring out how to earn that organic traffic has been the real magic.

Add BI in Google so our reporting is easier to find when you’re searching for what matters.

We optimize headlines and articles for search so people can find us through Google and AI search engines, and we use social media and Substack Notes to reach new readers. Threads and LinkedIn have been other growth channels. I've found that if you're a writer looking for readers, written-first platforms tend to perform much better than video-first ones.

The first year and a half was a slow, steady build, but once we launched our writing job board, growth accelerated fast. We charge $19 a month for standard membership, $550 a year for founding membership, and we also offer a free version. We crossed six figures in annualized revenue around the middle of 2025 and have more than doubled from there.

Today we're a top-20 business bestseller on Substack, with more than 58,000 subscribers. We earn more than $263,000 in annual gross recurring revenue.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned is to invest in genuinely valuable free content

My advice to anyone starting a Substack is to write about the thing you genuinely can't stop talking about. The beauty of the platform is that niche interests can thrive. Some of the most successful publications are personality-driven newsletters run by individual writers and artists with highly engaged audiences.

It feels like a gift to have crossed the 1,000 true fans mark. We hear from subscribers all the time who landed jobs through the board. We also run panels where people who landed those gigs explain how they did it. We're expanding the discount partnerships with brands, too, so the membership keeps paying for itself by providing the tools people need to do the job well.