Business Insider Profiled My $263K Substack Side Hustle

On October 1, Business Insider published a profile of my Substack side hustle, and the headline leads with a number: $263,000.

That’s the annual revenue of Make Writing Your Job, the newsletter and writing job board my husband Kyle and I run together. The piece is an as-told-to essay written by Kaila Yu from a conversation we had about how it all got built, and you can read the full profile on Business Insider here.

The short version: Make Writing Your Job has more than 58,000 subscribers and earns more than $263,000 in gross annualized recurring revenue. It took about three years to build, and it is still my side hustle.

What the Business Insider Profile Covers

Kaila asked how a newsletter I started in June 2023 turned into a business, so the piece walks through the whole arc. A few of the things it gets into:

• How the job board started. I was too busy to take on every client who came my way, I’d run out of writers to refer them to, and in 2024 I began posting those jobs for my subscribers instead.
• The slow part. The first year and a half was a steady crawl, and growth took off once the job board launched.
• Where our paid subscribers come from. Most of them found us through Substack itself, and for writers, written-first platforms like Threads and LinkedIn have done far more than video.
• What it costs to join: there’s a free version, a $19-a-month membership, and a $550-a-year founding membership.
• How we grew it almost entirely without paid ads: search-friendly headlines, social media, and Substack Notes.

There’s more in there about what Kyle and I want to build next for writers, including the in-person coffee meetups we’ve started hosting. I’ll let the piece tell the rest.

The Fine Print Behind $263,000

Headlines love a big number, so here’s the context I gave Business Insider. That figure is revenue, not my take-home pay.

$263,000 is gross annualized recurring revenue. Substack takes 10%, Stripe takes its processing fees, and we keep roughly 85 cents of every subscription dollar before our own expenses. Kyle and I both take a salary out of it. It was also never meant to be our only income. My main income still comes from memoir ghostwriting, which is why the headline calls the newsletter a side hustle.

It wasn’t fast, either. We crossed six figures in annualized revenue around the middle of 2025, two years in, and more than doubled from there. I haven’t missed a week of publishing since I started, and showing up every week is a big part of why the newsletter grew.

Want to Build a Substack Like This?

For the step-by-step version, start with my guide to growing a Substack, then read how to get paid subscribers and what my weeks look like as a full-time Substack writer. And if you’re a writer looking for work, Kyle and I also built 🛋️ CozyJobs, a jobs platform with thousands of jobs on a board updated daily.

Journalists and podcast hosts: the rest of my interviews live on my press page, and the numbers are in my press kit.

Thank you to Kaila Yu for writing the piece, and to every one of you who reads, subscribes, and shares the newsletter. Kevin Kelly wrote that a creator only needs 1,000 true fans. You’re mine, and then some.

So how about you start writing about the thing you can’t stop talking about? That’s the advice I gave Business Insider, and it’s the advice I’d give you over matcha.

-Amy

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