Confession: I LOVE spending money and

I’m also...kind of tight in some ways?!

And before you say “Nikki, you literally own a go on holiday 217 times, I know. Stay with me, because I hold both of these truths at once:

I will happily spend £1,000/night at a luxury hotel where I will get pampered like a queen and have memories to keep for life. Like, this genuinely brings me joy.

But you will NEVER catch me buying a £10 bottle of water at the airport. What do you mean, £10? For water?? Offensive, honestly. I’d rather dehydrate on principle.

After 10+ years of studying wealthy people I noticed a trend:

The wealthiest people I know are wildly picky about how they spend their money -

because they want their money going toward things they ACTUALLY care about. Which brings me to...

The Value-to-Pleasure Ratio (aka How Rich Girls Actually Spend)

If you’re new here, this is a framework I live by, so let me give you the official definition:

Every pound you spend should be buying you one of two things:

• Value = it’s helping you save time, make money, unlock opportunities, grow etc.

• Pleasure = it’s giving you happiness, connection, peace of mind, etc.

Ideally, every new purchase does both.

My golden rule is that before every purchase, I ask: how much value or pleasure does this actually give me?

I run every. NEW. purchase. through this filter. And if it doesn’t give me 1 of the 2? I’m not buying it.

The problem is, I am (as you know!) verrry Type-B, lazy by nature, and would rather eat supermarket sushi than have to audit my recurring expenses every month.

Which means my email inbox is a black whole of subscriptions I forgot I was paying for, invoices people owe me, and un categorised business receipts (i’m my accountant’s literal NIGHTMARE)

The entrepreneur part of me HATES this. (And is a little ashamed to admit it, if i’m being real)

But the lazy part of me decided to train Claude to solve this financial issue FOR me, while I go to my 12pm Hyrox class.

Basically, I gave Claude access to my email inbox and had it build a spreadsheet of every charge/expense/receipt it found (including the ones I forgot about 🫠)

• the money leaking out (duplicate charges, forgotten free trials, sneaky price hikes)

• the money people owe me (unpaid invoices, found)

• all organised + categorised for me so I can decide what’s worth paying for and what’s NOT

In less time than it took me to make a homemade Cosmo, Claude found me £637 in recurring monthly subscriptions that I did not need to be paying for!

I also have this Claude hack scheduled to run for me 1x a month, on autopilot, so I never have money leaking out of my business again.

Today I’m walking YOU through the exact setup for this Claude hack because I am willing to bet money (the money Claude just found me, specifically) that there’s at least one charge in your inbox right now that you totally forgot you were paying for.

What This Hack Actually Is (In Plain English)

I’m going to walk you through the exact playbook so Claude can tell you...

💸 The subscriptions you forgot you’re paying for — found, listed, and flagged for cancellation (even ONE forgotten £30 subscription = £360/year back)

💸 The duplicate charges — tools billing you twice, prices that quietly crept up, “free trials” from months ago that never ended

💸 The invoices that need to be paid (or worse — the ones where people owe YOU that you forgot to chase)

💸 Tax season, handled — every expense pulled, organised, and categorised for your accountant = deductions you’d have completely missed

Most people are leaking £100+ a month without knowing it. I’m about to walk you through the whole thing, every click. But first...

🔒 The Good Stuff Is Below

Upgrading to paid is basically the cheat code for everything I teach. For less than the price of a bottle of wine, you get the stuff I don’t put anywhere else on the internet:

• The exact setup + copy-paste prompt that finds you money — every click, every screenshot, done in minutes

• The monthly autopilot version — so Claude finds you money every month, forever, without you lifting a finger

• The tax-season version — every expense categorised for your accountant = deductions you’d have missed

• The entire Claude hack series + full paid archive, instantly unlocked

• Bonus resources + tea I don’t share anywhere else

The full step-by-step is below for paid subscribers — including exactly what to click, what to type, and screenshots of every single step 🎀

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Because despite what the internet tries to sell you, you do not need to become a full time personality to build a profitable online business, and you definitely do not need to be “super confident on camera” before you’re allowed to start making serious money.

You can be shy, low key, introverted, and STILL make amazing money online.

(I honestly think more people would be making money online if they knew this.)

One of the biggest lies people believe about online income is that visibility has to mean constant personal exposure. 🤳🏽

It doesn’t.

There is a HUGE difference between having a business and building customer trust, and making your face the product.

And for a lot of women, the problem isn’t that they’re lazy, inconsistent or incapable. It’s that they’re trying to force themselves into a business model that doesn’t suit their personality.

That’s why faceless content is so powerful.

It lets you build trust, attract your ideal people, and make sales without your literal face becoming the centrepiece of the business. It gives you room to be strategic instead of performative.

And yes, before anyone says it, I know I show my face online!!

But I also have an entirely faceless income stream, and you’re reading it right now. I wish more people knew this option existed.

If I wanted to build an online business as a private girl starting from scratch today, this is exactly what I would do. 👇🏽

What faceless content actually is

Faceless content isn’t just “never show your face.”

It’s content where your value is the main thing people are there for.

The transformation is the hook, but the substance is the draw. Your taste, your storytelling, your point of view, your results, that’s what makes people stay.

Your face and name can be absent but the content still needs to make someone think:

• “Wait, this is exactly what I needed.”

• “She gets it.”

• “I trust her.”

• “I want more.”

• “I would pay for this.”

That can look like:

• Substack articles

• voiceover reels

• screen recordings

• slideshows

• tutorials

• Pinterest pins

• educational carousels

The goal isn’t to feel anonymous and robotic, it’s to create connection without overexposure.

What I would actually do if I wanted to make money online without showing my face

Personally? I would start a Substack. (Again.)

Part of the reason I started this Substack in the first place was to diversify my audience away from social media, and build an income stream that wasn’t reliant on whether or not I’d washed my hair that day.

I think it’s one of the best options for women who want to build a business without showing their face, because it lets you grow an audience based on your ideas, your perspective, your expertise, and your ability to help someone get a result.

You don’t need to be on camera constantly, you don’t need a giant production setup, you don’t even need a clean house.

You can write strong, useful, searchable content that builds trust and attracts the right people.

So how would I use Substack to make money without showing my face?

2 ways:

1. With paid subscriptions (offering more extensive articles, tutorials, access to a group chat, and other subscriber only perks behind a paywall)

2. Using my Substack to grow my audience outside of social media, and funnel people to my digital offers

(I currently do both.)

FYI, when I talk about “faceless content” I’m mainly talking about Substack, but there are loads of other routes too:

My Digital guide Internet Money Method definatkey works as a Faceless Sell.

Faceless videos, day in the life vlogs with a voiceover, screen recordings, tutorial content, photography, Pinterest.

But if I were choosing the cleanest, simplest, laziest option, I’d go for Substack first.

The biggest misconception about making money online

A lot of people think: “If I don’t show my face, no one will trust me.”

I completely disagree.

People do not buy because they saw your cheekbones. They buy because they trust that you can help them. They buy because your message is clear and your offer is specific.

They buy because you understand the problem they’re struggling with and can explain a solution in a way that feels simple, desirable and believable.

Your face is not the business model. The transformation is. 💗

Someone with 500 aligned readers and a very specific offer can absolutely make more money than someone with 50,000 random followers posting pretty little lifestyle clips with no real point.

That is why I always say you do not need more followers nearly as badly as you need a better offer and clearer messaging.

🔒 FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS: The Faceless Framework

(This post is free to read up to this point. The framework below is for paid subscribers)

Inside the paid section of this article, I’m sharing:

💗 My exact, simple Substack business model

💗 What I personally would sell if I wanted faceless income (and how much I’d charge per offer type)

💗 What the most profitable Substack niches are

💗 The exact formula for choosing your niche

💗 Which platform, IMO, is best (and most profitable) for faceless content

🎁 PLUS> My Claude Prompt Vault (Worth £27) The exact prompts I use to get Substack off the ground

If you’re interested in making money without showing your face, you can get my exact Framework & Claude prompts for less that a bottle of wine.

Paid subscribers also get access to my full archive and live workshops and Q&As. 😘

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39 people pay me £9 a month to read what I write.

I started this Substack on the 1st of July 2026. Not having a clue really what I was doing or where to start, Ive been showing up on social media for years now and I’ve grown but its been a slow ass slog.

I was one of these people in 2020 who laughed at everyone doing stupid dances on TikTok and thought ‘cringe’ but today look at those people who all have fucking empires!!…

So I fully intend to jump on the ‘Substack train’ before it leaves the station full.

Today is 1st of August 2026. So I’m exactly 1 month into my journey, and in that month 524 people subscribed for free and 39 of them decided I was worth £9.

That is £351 a month, right now, from a standing start of nothing. And remember, those £9’s are monthly revenue so this is recurring monthly income,

I know, not exactly life changing yet. But my goal is 200 paid subscribers by Christmas, and 200 x £9 is £1,800 a month.

That pays my mortgage. And my car. With some left over for a few Cosmo’s too!.

Subscribe now

I’ve put that goal in writing literally everywhere and shouted it to anyone who’ll listen. I am not quietly deleting it if I miss.

So this is me documenting the whole thing in public, month by month, and this post is everything I’ve worked out so far about how to actually do it.

1. Make your page look like a magazine/website, not a default blog.

Example from: The Monetizer ⬇️

First impressions count, even here. When someone lands on your Substack from a reel, you have about two seconds before they decide whether you look legit or like you set this up on your lunch break.

Now you can actually design the thing. Fonts, colours, the way your posts sit on the homepage in that clean grid that makes you look like a proper publication instead of a Word doc someone emailed you.

This is also why every single post needs at least one image. The homepage pulls those images into the grid. No image, no grid, and your beautiful custom page looks like a spreadsheet.

2. Write it so people can skim read

Nobody is reading this like it’s a novel. They’re reading it on their phone, one shoe on, kettle boiling, half watching the telly. Attention spans are fried and that includes yours and mine.

So write for that. Short paragraphs. One idea each. White space everywhere.

If you’ve written a fat block of text, break it up, because a wall of words gives the eye nowhere to land and people bounce.

Drop in visual breaks where someone would naturally pause. You can grab little divider PNGs off Google and paste them in as images if you want to get fancy.

The point is simple. Make it easy to skim, and the people skimming will actually get to the end. The ones who get to the end are the ones who pay you.

3. Link your other articles the pretty way 🎀

Quick tactical one that took me too long to figure out. When you want to link to another one of your posts. Simply paste the full link on its own line and Substack turns it into one of those nice preview cards with the image and the headline.

Like this ⬇️

Looks better, gets more clicks, and quietly sends people down a rabbit hole of your other work. Which is exactly what you want.

4. Write for SEO so the app finds you for free

Here’s the bit most people miss. Substack isn’t just an email list, it’s a search engine and a recommendation machine. People find you inside the app without you doing a thing, if you give it something to grab onto.

Put the words people actually search into your title and subtitle. Fill in the SEO description field when you publish, don’t leave it blank.

Name your sections and tags with real search terms, not clever ones. Cross-link your old posts so the app sees them as connected.

And post on Notes, because that’s the front door lot sof new readers come through.

Do this and you grow while you sleep.

SEO is complex and exhausting- So as a cheat code I built a prompt for it.

⬇️ One of the Claude Prompts I use to get Substack to pay my Mortgage. ⬇️

(Tip: You’ll get the rest when you upgrade. Worth £27 alone.)

⚡️ That’s the free stuff.

Here’s what’s behind the paywall.

So much value above but getting paid from Substack is like a puzzle, learn the next 5 things in depth below. That’s where the real strategy sits: And for less than a bottle of wine a month (£9) you can steal it all.

• 🎁 My Claude Prompts Vault- The exact prompts I use to write tag lines, find my voice, content pillars, titles, welcome emails, create reels from articles and more…

  (These alone are worth £27)

• The anatomy of a paid post and precisely where I drop the paywall so people actually upgrade.

• Why I picked content pillars instead of a niche, and why that decision alone doubled what I can write about.

• Turning paid on from day one with a free upgrade, and why waiting is the biggest mistake I see

• How I treat every single article like a mini launch. And the exact steps I take to promote it.

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She wasn’t recording the video specifically for me. She was just sounding off, crying, expressing her feelings and pain and needing someone to hear it, even if no one heard it she was filling the void because that’s what you do when the pain gets so big you don’t know what else to do with it.

I watched the whole thing. And it took me back to exactly where she is right now. That stage of realisation. The one where the initial shock of losing someone so suddenly has passed and the actual reality that they’re gone and never coning back hits.

I told her the truth: it’s going to get harder before it gets easier. Not because I wanted to scare her. Because nobody told me that, and I wish they had.

So this post is for her. And for anyone else who’s in it the thick of it right now, who are having ok days and days where you cant get out of bed, you might have no idea what’s coming, or why you feel the way they feel, or whether any of it is normal.

It is. All of it is normal.

I lost my partner Ben to suicide on the 9th of October 2020. I’m nearly 6 years in and out the other side, so Im talking from the realest perspective you can get, I’m not going to sugar coat what that year looked like. Nobody does you any favours by sugar coating it.

The first few weeks.

I spent the first two weeks on my mum’s sofa.

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. Every time I started drifting off to sleep my body convulsed, arms and legs jolting me awake, because my brain simply would not switch off long enough to let me rest. I’d never experienced anything like it. It was just my body short-circuiting because it couldn’t process what had happened.

Then came the sleep paralysis. Waking up unable to move, unable to open my eyes, completely conscious but completely trapped. Terrifying doesn’t cover it. I started to believe it was spiritual. I started talking to him in those moments because what else do you do.

Those first weeks are a blur. I can’t tell you the order things happened. I can’t tell you what day certain things happened. Grief does that. It scrambles the timeline and you just exist in it, one hour at a time.

What I can tell you is that the shock is actually a gift. You don’t know it at the time, but the numbness that comes with those first weeks is your brain protecting you. Because what comes after the shock is worse.

The part nobody warns you about.

Around month three, four, five, the shock starts to lift.

And that’s when it really starts.

Because the shock was keeping you slightly above water and now it’s gone and the full weight of what’s happened lands on you all at once. They are not coming back. Ever. All the things you never said. All the questions you’ll never get answers to. The fact that you will never, ever hear their voice again unless you play an old voicemail, and even then you’ll hate yourself for doing it because it makes it worse.

It’s physical. Grief is an actual physical thing that lives in your chest, throat and stomach. People don’t tell you that. They talk about it like it’s an emotion. It’s not just an emotion. It’s your whole body, not your head.

I remember Mother’s Day 2021, 5 months in. My girls were teenagers, which means they were being thoughtless and self absorbed as usual, I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything more at that age. But Ben would have sorted Mother’s Day. He always did. flowers, breakfast in bed, lovely written cards and a nice Sunday roast in my favourite little pub. None of that happened, the kids were just arguing and had gone to zero effort, no one was there to guide them and I really felt it.

He’s really gone. He is actually really gone.

In fact I found a video I made from that exact day! 14th March 2021

I cried all day. My mum told me I was getting worse, that surely I should be ‘healed’ by now. I was so pissed off, how can you tell me how I should or shouldn’t be feeling?!

There is no timeline. Anyone who gives you one can quite frankly fuck off.

What the rest of the year looked like.

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For about 7 years I did everything you’re supposed to do on Instagram.

Posted every day. Showed up in the comments. Built an audience of 35,000 women who actually liked me, messaged me, told me I inspire them or I’d got them through some rough weeks. How much money was I making? Zero Not a slow month. Not a quiet patch. Nothing, ever, for seven years. I had nothing to sell, no sales funnel and no clue how to monetise an audience.

Then I came across Caitlin. A bit younger than me, a mum, based in the US, sat at 33.7k followers. So near enough exactly the same size audience as mine. And she was doing $13-$15K and a month in digital sales.

Which meant it clearly wasn’t the followers. I had the followers. I had loads of bloody followers, same as her, and I was making nothing.

That was the moment it landed that I was doing something wrong.

So I did what everyone does. I bought a course. And when that didn’t work I bought another, and another and somewhere in the middle of the third one I realised I still couldn’t answer the simplest question there is.

What am I actually meant to do tomorrow morning to make money?

Not in theory. Not “build your personal brand and the rest will follow.” Tomorrow. Between the school run and lunch, with the laptop open and no idea where to start.

If that’s where you are, you’re in the right place, because I stayed there for a very long time.

Here’s what got me out.

Eight months ago, I started Ghost Mode Growth with 0 followers:

One brand new Instagram account, one PDF, and one ad.

I started learning about digital products. Went deep on it. Found a system, named it Internet Money Method, a low ticket guide you buy, rebrand, and resell, and I thought: this is actually genius. So I set up a brand new account, Ghost Mode Growth, blocked everyone I knew, told nobody, and just started building in the background where nobody was watching.

Ghost mode. Exactly as it sounds.

I had 70 followers when I made my first sale. My ads had been live for less than 24 hours.

£27. Not exactly life changing. But it meant it worked.

Revenue has doubled every month since. And it’s flying, I’ve honestly never looked back.

Eight months in, 1,200 followers on Ghost Mode Growth, making sales daily.

1200 followers doing what 35,000 couldn’t.

And Now I’m Doing The Whole Thing In Public

Every pound in, every pound out, from here until it either hits £10,000 a month or falls over.

No team. No agency. No media buyer on retainer. No mysterious mentor who “changed everything.” Just me, £50 a day in ad spend, and sweating my tits off every time I raise the budget or have a zero sales day.

I’m 45, single, with two teenage daughters. This gets done around the school stuff, the housework, the dating, the gym, and making content for my other account, which is a full time job pretending to be a hobby. There is no version of my life with a spare four hours in it.

Which is exactly why I think it’s worth watching.

Everyone shows you the finish line. Nobody shows you the middle. You get the Stripe screenshot, the “£100k month” reel, the carousel of five tips that are somehow both true and completely useless. What you never get is the boring bit where someone tried something, it didn’t work, and they tell you why.

That middle bit is the only part that would actually help you. It’s also the part nobody publishes, because misery doesn’t sell a course.

I’ve Already Wasted The Money So You Don’t Have To

None of this is theory. I’ll show you the actual thing.

The sales page I dragged from 1.5% conversion to 4%. The real page, before and after, and exactly what I changed to do it.

The email list that’s grown from 300 to 2,500 people that now brings in 30% of my monthly revenue. Which means if Instagram vanished tomorrow, a third of my business would still be standing. That’s the only reason I built it.

The ICP work I got wrong for months, writing to nobody and everybody and wondering why nothing landed.

The ads I’ve killed, the ones I should have killed sooner, and the ones I let run, and the money I set fire to learning the difference.

The ads that aren’t trying to sell anything. The ones I run for leads, traffic and engagement, and how they feed the account and the whole ecosystem of sales sitting around it.

I’d rather be useful than impressive. Partly because useful is rarer. Mostly because impressive is piss easy to fake and I can’t be arsed keeping track of what I claimed.

Two Goal- Out There Publicly

• 200 paid subscribers here by 31 December.

• £10,000 a month from Ghost Mode Growth by next summer.

Both on the record. If I miss them, you’ll watch me miss them in real time. I’m not vanishing until January and reappearing with a soft-focus post about how the journey was the real reward.

🎀 Psst. You’re About To Hit A Wall…

Upgrading is the cheat code for everything I show and teach here. For less than a bottle of wine, you get the stuff I keep hidden from everyone else on the internet, because I’m not sticking it on Instagram with my full name attached.

Here’s what unlocks the second you upgrade:

• The receipts. Screenshots from Ads Manager, SamCart and Stripe. Real spend, real revenue, the good months and the bad ones that had me awake at 3am.

• My copy and paste prompts. Hooks, ad copy, Substack articles, content. The exact ones, not a freebie version.

• My templates. Including content for the gram, emails for your list, the sales page I dragged from 1.5% to 4%. Steal the structure.

• The full archive, unlocked instantly. Every paid post and series, ready to binge.

• A Bi-monthly live call with me. Ask me anything. And I mean anything.

• The BTS bits. The messy stuff, the chaos, the days it all falls over and I drown myself in Spicy Margaritas

• And the rest of it. What this actually looks like at 45. Building a business round two teenage daughters, trying to find the love of my life, travel the world, keep the house tidy and achieve the body of a 25 year old. All at once without losing my mind.

The full thing is right below this line, and it’s for paid subscribers only.

7 days free if you fancy a nosy first.

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Subscribe now

I know. I know. Get your pitchforks ready. But stay with me, because this is the story of the date that went really, really well, right up until it didn’t.

The Porsche driver

He drove a Porsche 911. 48 years old. No kids. Good business, turns over £1.2 million a year, he told me himself. Funny, made me laugh, sexual chemistry, had his shit together, real alpha energy. Which mattered, because I hadn’t dated in a while. I’ve been heads down building the business and honestly didn’t want the distraction. But he asked, I said yes.

He picked the place. I don’t love eating on a first date if I’m honest, feels a bit awkward, I’d rather sit there with a couple of cocktails and skip the food. But he wanted to eat, so we ate.

Now here’s the bit you need before the bill lands. I am an alpha woman. I pay my own mortgage, my own car, my own bills. My kids don’t go without a single thing. I take them away at least twice a year, on my own money, without anyone’s help. I don’t need a man for any of that, I’m not just after a ‘free meal’ thank you very much.

But I need to look up to my man. I need him to bring alpha energy, because I already bring mine. Call me old fashioned, I like a protector and a provider. There is nothing I hate more than a freeloader, or a guy who doesn’t push me to be better because he isn’t better himself.

And Then, The Ick

So when the bill came, £120 for the both of us, hardly a dent for a man on his money, this had nothing to do with affordability, I did what I always do. I offered. “Do you want me to pay half?” Not because I want to pay. Not because I expect to be asked to. Because I was testing him.

Yes. Testing him. Shoot me. It wasn’t a wealth test, it was a chivalry test.

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My Take On Jessie Jean, Three Margaritas Deep.

I was three margaritas deep and one sales page finished when I sat down on my sofa at 10:46pm and started doing what I like to call ‘research.’ Otherwise known as doom scrolling.

You know how it is. You open your phone for one thing and forty minutes later you’re four videos deep into someone’s life you didn’t know existed an hour ago. That’s exactly what happened to me last week.

This is episode one of what’s going to be a weekly thing now, my honest takeaways from the Yap Challenge as I go through it. So settle in.

A video popped up from Rachel Jova, creator of DWA, someone I actually respect in this industry. The title had me before I’d even pressed play. She was exposing some girl I’d never heard of who’d started a new Instagram page seven months ago and in the last 3 weeks made $1.2 million from her first course launch. Rachel wasn’t dragging her. She was dissecting her, which is worse if you’re on the receiving end and better if you’re watching from the sofa. But the title did its job. I clicked.

And that’s how I found out about Jessie Jean and the Yap Challenge. Which, now that I know her name, explains a lot, because I genuinely cannot open my phone without her popping up. Everywhere I look, it’s Jessie Jean.

I won’t lie to you. The first thing I felt wasn’t happy for her. It wasn’t inspired. It was jealousy, straight up, unfiltered, the kind that makes you feel a bit sick.

Because here’s the thing. I’ve been building online for years. Years. My Nikki Mascaro page has 35,000 followers and reaches 2.5 million people a month. And for the longest time I had no idea how to actually make money from it. A year ago I was looking at people with Linktree links in their bio and thinking that was sophisticated. That’s genuinely how far behind I was. It wasn’t until last October that I bought Rachel Jova’s course, DWA, and finally started properly learning about digital products, funnels, canva, all of it. Six months ago I launched Ghost Mode Growth from zero and one product, completely self taught. Revenue’s doubled every month since.

So when I saw a woman start from scratch seven months ago, make $1.2 million in one launch, close the doors, wait three weeks, then open round two and do another $5 million on top, I didn’t feel motivated. I felt robbed. Over $6 million total, and I sat there doing the maths on how many years I’ve been grinding for a fraction of that. How has this nobody done this.? What does she know that I don’t? What am I doing wrong?

It’s not even just the numbers. It’s the imposter syndrome underneath it. I’ve got 35,000 followers and 2.5 million people looking at my content every month, I get a lot of love on my page, and still, some days, I’ll sit down to write and think, who actually wants to hear from me. I’ll get proper content block, proper writer’s block. Meanwhile Jessie Jean pulls it out the park every single time, knows exactly what to say and exactly how to make her audience feel seen, loved and heard. That’s the bit that makes me want to throw my phone across the room. And also hate her a little.

“She sold the course before she'd written it. Read that again. That's not a shortcut. That's genius.”

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I’m Nikki Mascaro. And this is the book I never finished.

Right, I'll warn you now. This one's about me. Bare with it, because if you see any part of yourself in here, that's exactly why I'm telling you.

If you’ve found your way here, you’re either already part of the Mascaro Mayhem on Instagram, a customer of Ghost Mode Growth, or you’ve stumbled across this and something made you stay. Either way, welcome to Nikki’s ICs. My Inner Circle. The place where I say the things I don’t say anywhere else.

Let me tell you who I actually am. Not the bio version. The real one.

I’m 45. Tattooed. Gym obsessed. I drink, swear and chat shit. I’m a mum of two teenage girls (Ella 18 & Amelie 15) who think they know everything (they’re not entirely wrong). They’re essentially entitled mini versions of me, and I know that’s entirely my fault, so we’re moving on quick. I’m forever single, which is a recurring theme we’ll definitely be coming back to. My standards are high. Unreasonably high, some might say. Nobody has met them yet. There are dating disaster stories coming to this page that will make you feel considerably better about your own love life. You’re welcome in advance. I’m based in the UK, I’m entirely self-taught, I have built everything your about to read from scratch, no business degree, no investor, no safety net and absolutely no chill.

I grew up in Telford, left at sixteen, and I’m going to skate straight past that because there are definitely some stories from those years that deserve their own post. I lived in Essex for nearly two decades, got married at twenty seven, had my girls, got divorced at thirty four, and in 2017 I moved back to Telford. Fresh start. New chapter. All that.

And then I met Ben.

That’s a story for another post. A big one. The short version is this: I loved someone who was very hard to love, I lost myself somewhere in the middle of it, and on the 9th of October 2020, I lost him. Suicide.

Grief does things to you nobody warns you about. I’m not going into it today, but I will. Because its part of me and pretending it isn’t would make everything else I tell you feel hollow.

I never thought I’d smile again after that night. The years that followed were an ugly mess. I’m talking partying, drinking, taking drugs. No focus. No direction. Just a lost version of myself taking up space in her own life. I knew I had potential. I just couldn’t find it under everything else.

This page is the rise from the ashes. But I’m not skipping the fire, because the fire is the point.

Then my sister suggested Hyrox.

I signed up in September 2024 with my friend Clare as my doubles partner, she’d never seen the version of me I was about to become. We only met just before Ben died, so she had absolutely no idea what she was getting herself into. What she got was me treating a fitness race like I was preparing for the Olympics.

I wrote training schedules. I obsessed over splits. I did her head in completely. We fell out multiple times because I was putting too much pressure on her. At some point she looked at me and said: this is Nikki 3.0.

I just found an old post from the 26th of January 2025, the morning of our race. Me being vulnerable, talking about why Hyrox meant so much to me. You can even see Clare comment 'Nikki version 3.0' under it. Check it out here.

Hyrox Reel

(One thing you’ll learn about me: I keep receipts. Always. Facts, screenshots, proof. Everything I say, I can back up. Just in case someone wants to lie about something they said or did in 1964, I’ve got the receipts. Challenge me)

Anyway back to Clare; She was right.

1.0 was before Ben. 2.0 was the lost years after. 3.0 was this, whatever this was, the version of me that had somehow remembered she was actually strong, competitive and found that deeply inconvenient for everyone around her.

That race in January 2025 didn’t just give me a finish time (which was 1hr 40mins btw: pretty shit after all that effort) It gave me back my drive. My competitiveness. My belief that I could actually do hard things again. And here’s what I’ve learned: anything you do is everything you do. When you start showing up for one thing with total commitment, it bleeds into other areas of your life.

I started reading again. Self development books that had been sitting on my shelf for years collecting dust, taking action on the things I’d been procrastinating about for 3 years that had been living rent free in my head. My mindset shifted completely, and once it shifted, it didn’t go back.

I’ve done four more Hyrox races since then and I’m not stopping.

Six months ago, I started Ghost Mode Growth with 0 followers:

One brand new Instagram account, one PDF, and one ad.

I already had my Nikki Mascaro Instagram, sat at around 26,000 followers at the time. Women mostly, 35 to 55, fitness, lifestyle, the chaos of real life. But I’d never made a penny from it. I had nothing to sell, no sales funnel and no clue how to monetise an audience.

I started learning about digital products. Went deep on it. Found a system, named it Internet Money Method, a low ticket guide you buy, rebrand, and resell, and I thought: this is actually genius. So I set up a brand new account, Ghost Mode Growth, blocked everyone I knew, told nobody, and just started building in the background where nobody was watching.

Ghost mode. Exactly as it sounds.

I had 70 followers when I made my first sale. My ads had been live for less than 24 hours.

£27. Not exactly life changing. But it meant it worked.

Revenue has doubled every month since. And its flying, I’ve honestly never looked back

I’m six months in, 1,200 followers on Ghost Mode Growth, making sales daily, and I’ve now officially connected both accounts because the overlap is real. The women on my Nikki Mascaro page, a lot of them want out of the nine to five. They’re on maternity leave wondering if there’s another way. Looking for a side hustle or something they can build after 7pm when the kids are in bed. They’re boss bitches who just haven’t fully backed themselves yet. I’m here for all of them.

And now there’s this.

Substack feels like the missing piece.

I love writing. I always have. And I’ve realised that what I actually needed is a place to tell the full story. Not the (2200 max character) instagram caption version. Not the 30 second reel version. The actual version, with all the context, mess, opinions and emotion I have to water down everywhere else

When Ben died writing became my therapy. It seemed to help putting everything down on paper, my thoughts, my grief, my rage, all of it. In 2021 I was approached by someone writing a book called ‘The Real Pandemic” about the lives lost to suicide in 2020, she invited me to write a chapter. I did. It was raw. Written so close to the loss that it still hurts to look at. The book never got published in the end. I always thought I’d write my own. I never finished it.

So this is the book that was never finished. This is where the full story lives.

I chose Substack over a podcast because, honestly, the last thing the world needs is another pastel, self help, ring light podcast. I’d rather write. And Substack in 2026 feels like ground floor TikTok in 2020. I intend to be on it before everyone else figures that out.

My public goal: 200 paid subscribers by 31 December 2026. Starting from zero. Today is day one. I’ve already put this in my free playbook for making money online, so I can’t quietly delete it now. (Haven’t got the playbook yet? Grab it here.)

I don’t know exactly what I’m charging yet. I don’t have it all figured out. But that’s kind of the point. You’re not joining a polished finished product. You’re joining the journey. The building in public.

Nikki’s ICs, my Inner Circle, get the real stuff. The unfiltered opinions. The behind the scenes. The dating disasters. The how I fund my lifestyle with no 9-5. The things I wouldn’t post publicly.

But you’re not just here to watch me do this. You’re here to build with me. I’m going to share tips, progress, and the things that worked. I’m going to share the fuck ups and the things that didn’t. Whether you want to create an income of your own, or you just want to follow my journey, or just need someone to be honest about how messy the middle bit actually is, this is your place.

Come on then. Let’s go.

Nikki x

P.S. There are stories in here I haven’t told yet. The night the police knocked. The lost years. The chapter written for a book that never got published. The dating disasters (oh, the dating disasters). They’re all coming. Subscribe so you don’t miss them.