The Best Monetization Model For Small Substack Newsletter Creators

Even a small audience can make you $5,000 a month on the side

If you’ve got a small newsletter… then everyone’s got a plan for your money:

• Create a course, sell it on Gumroad for $49.

• Charge a monthly subscription for your articles

• Send DMs. Book sales calls. And run a Skool community.

All these versions are selling a version of “success” I don’t want.

I started this to be free. Not to turn into a community manager. Or make $300 on the side.

I want a full-time income writing about what interests me, and working ~2h a day.

The $8 subscription model is a bad joke

Substack wants you to believe that recurring revenue is the dream.

The problem isn’t the concept of recurring revenue. It’s that the numbers don’t work. Substack itself tells you that ~5% of your free subs will turn into paying subs.

Ok.

And how much are you charging? 8 lousy bucks a month?

Do the math.

If you want to make $5,000 with this, you’d need 625 paid subs a month. So you’d need 12,500 free subscribers to make this work.

And once you’re relying on subscriptions, you’re managing churn every single month.

People cancel. You replace them. They cancel, you replace them, forever.

There’s something that works better.

How much should ya charge?

This might surprise you.

But selling a $50 offer and making 15 sales is as hard as selling one $1,500 offer.

The reason is that you need to convince 15 different human brains. (And if you have kids, you know how stubborn human brains are.)

Convincing ONE brain is radically easier.

That’s why, especially when you’re starting, you should not try to “scale”. You should start small and charge more.

Counterintuitive but true. For two reasons:

First, you’ll make more money.

Second, it forces you to dial in your “marketing.” If you can’t come up with a $1,500 offer, then the pain you’re solving might not be as painful as it is — so it forces you to go back to the drawing board and come up with something solid.

But there’s a problem with these high-ticket offers.

How to sell your high-ticket offers

Usually it comes down to having a sales call.

And who the hell wants to take on sales calls?

Definitely not me.

A sales call isn’t 15, 30, or 45 minutes.

It’s the DM/email back-and-forth to book it. It’s the fact that you need to update your calendar to a messy schedule. It’s the bandwidth it takes to “read the script” you’ll use. It’s showing up live, on camera, performing enthusiasm for a stranger who might say no.

It’s the knot in your stomach when people tell you: “I’ll think about it.”

Multiply that by the number of calls you need to hit your income goal, and you’ve built yourself a part-time job with a calendar that owns you.

I ran coaching the normal way for a while too. Calls with clients. Which meant time zones. A client in Sydney wants 9am, a client in London wants lunchtime, and I’m trying to fit both into a GMT+4 time zone where I like to work in the mornings and stop working at 11 AM.

That’s not freedom. That’s a new prison.

Neither model is built for the life I actually want

I’m not chasing an 8-figure business. I don’t want to manage a team of 7. I don’t want a tentacular company.

I want a small, quiet operation that runs in my spare time.

That means:

• NO sales calls clogging my calendar.

• NO DM negotiations that drag on for days.

• NO panic attack every time someone hits unsubscribe on an $8 subscription.

What I actually want is freedom. Not a cheaper version of the “high-ticket” offer. The same $3,000 offer, built differently.

I call it the Freedom Offer.

What the Freedom Offer actually is

It’s an offer that you can sell for $1,500-$3,000 without having to cold pitch or jump on a sales call.

The Freedom Offer is a mix of two things:

First, a course component. That’s the theory. It doesn’t need to be huge. 1-3 hours is more than enough.

Second, a coaching component.

The reason why combining the two is simple: a course component frees up your time from repeating yourself. The coaching component allows you to charge more for the offer than a “standalone” online course.

Delivering the course doesn’t take up a single second of your time.

So let’s take a look into the coaching component:

It’s totally asynchronous: Email, Telegram, Signal, Loom, whatever you’re already using.

Someone hits a wall, they message you, you reply whenever it suits you. Voice notes work great here too. You can knock out replies walking the dog instead of sitting hunched at a desk waiting for a Zoom link to load.

Why “no time zones” isn’t a minor detail

This is the part people undersell.

Async isn’t just convenient. It’s what makes the whole thing scale without eating your life.

A call-based offer has a hard ceiling.

There are only so many hours in your day, and every client eats one of them, live, at a specific time that has to work for both of you. Add ten clients across three continents and you’re not running a business anymore, you’re running air traffic control.

A Freedom Offer has no ceiling like that.

Someone in Melbourne can message you at 6am their time. You reply at 8pm yours, after dinner, after the kids are in bed, whenever you actually have a free twenty minutes. Nobody’s waiting on you in real time.

The clock just isn’t part of the transaction anymore.

What this actually buys the client

I want to be clear about something, because people hear “no calls” and assume it means “cheaper” or “less support.”

It doesn’t, and it isn’t.

Think of it like a gym membership with a coach on text. The workout’s already up on the wall. That’s your course, recorded once, in an afternoon. They don’t need you to walk them through every rep live. But when they get stuck, actually stuck, they message you, and you’re in their corner until it’s sorted.

How the simple funnel looks

Now, let’s bring all of this back to Substack.

Substack is where you post content: one or two long-form articles per week, one to three notes a day, a handful of interactions with people who target the same audience.

Once someone subscribes to your Substack, it means they want to hear from you and gave you permission to email them.

The next steps come down to sending regular emails that promote your Freedom Offer.

Most people will say no. But you’ll only need 2-3 yeses to hit $5,000 a month.

This month, I’m opening 12 spots to help you build your Freedom Offer, grow your newsletter and grow your newsletter to $5,000/mo.

It’s not free. It’s not cheap.

But if you’re serious & interested, you can apply here.