I’m honestly overwhelmed by the response to Sustainable Side Hustle so far.

We’ve already reached #5 in India, around #184 in the U.S., and we’re breaking into the Top 50 in the UK.

For a brand-new podcast, seeing this happen so quickly feels pretty amazing.

So first of all, thank you to everyone who has already listened, followed, downloaded, reviewed, shared, or supported the launch in any way. ❤️

And if you haven’t had a chance yet, I’d really appreciate your help. Here’s the easiest way depending on what device you use:

If you have an iPhone, iPad or Mac

1. Open the Apple Podcasts app

2. Search “Sustainable Side Hustle”

3. Make sure it says by Vinayak Ramesh

4. Follow the show

5. Listen to the launch episodes and download/save them

6. Scroll down to Ratings & Reviews

7. Leave an honest star rating + written review

Apple supports ratings and written reviews directly inside the Podcasts app on iPhone, iPad and Mac.

If you DON’T have an Apple device

You can still support the show — you do not need to install anything.

1. Open your normal browser on you desktop and go to podcasts.apple.com

2. Create an Apple Account and sign in

3. Look for Sustainable Side Hustle by Vinayak Ramesh

4. Follow the show

5. Listen to the launch episodes in your browser

You can sign in, follow shows and listen normally. The one limitation is that Apple currently does not provide the normal “Write a Review” flow through the web player, so if you don’t have access to an Apple device, don’t worry about the review. Listening and following still helps me a lot.

And if you do have an Apple device, I’d especially appreciate the review after you’ve listened.

Every bit of support helps us keep climbing the charts and, more importantly, helps the show reach more people who might actually find these conversations useful.

If you enjoy the show, please also share it with someone who might like it.

Thank you again for all the support. ❤️

Let’s see how far we can take this 🚀

Vinayak

Each episode I sit down with someone who built real income from a side hustle while still working a day job, and we get into the exact moment their income became real, and what they decided to do next, stay in the job or leave it.

If you’ve got 2 minutes, here’s what would help most:

1️⃣ If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the Apple Podcasts app. If you’re an android user, use your PC/laptop, go to podcasts.apple.com in your browser instead, you need to sign in or create a free Apple ID first (a Gmail address works fine for this)
2️⃣ Search for: Sustainable Side Hustle

3️⃣ Download all the 8 episodes and give it a listen if you can (they are short ones)
4️⃣ Leave a quick rating and review, with a couple of honest sentences about what resonated with you the most!

Reviews are what actually get a new show in front of new people, so this is the single biggest favor you could do for me right now.

And as a small thank-you for supporting the launch, I’d love to give you two of my products for FREE:

🎁 Substack Note Starter Pack

🎁 Substack Growth Engine

Just DM me after you’ve supported the launch and I’ll send them over.

Thank you so much!

Vinayak Ramesh
Host of Sustainable Side Hustle

Our winner is with $65 bid!

Thanks to everyone who participated!

The password to unlock the PDF is “benjamin”.

Before you can have 99 sales like Kenneth… or 139 sales like Travis…

You gotta have an OFFER people actually want. 🎯

Here’s what Travis did.

One Saturday morning, with his second cup of coffee…

He ran a little experiment on his group.

Wrote up a little 2-page document in Google with a PayPal link.

Posted a photo and two sentences.

30 minutes later… first $99 sale.

By the end of the hour… 6 buyers, $600 in PayPal.

By Monday at noon… 139 sales.

No video.

No 1,500 word post.

No funnel.

No replying to a hundred comments except to say “thank you for buying.”

A two-page doc that took under ten minutes to write, and one goofy photo.

Here’s why it worked:

He didn’t focus on something clever he thought would sell.

He focused on the present pain his people already thought about at least once a day.

And he sold it without making the one mistake we hinted at yesterday.

It became a no-brainer offer.

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🏁 So today, our EVERYONE-CAN-WIN (ECW) Auction is LIVE.

Up for auction: the tools to build an offer your readers actually buy. 👇

💥 A clearly different, clearly desirable, clearly doable offer: pinpointed to the one daily pain your readers already grumble about, in their own words.

💥 Wrapped in a plain little Google doc no bigger than 2 pages: the same kind that pulled $1,309 into Rebekah’s account in her first 7 days. No design degree. No big tech stack.

💥 The Second Helping Campaign that took Kenneth to five figures: where nearly 1 in 5 buyers say yes to a second offer minutes after the first. Build the offer once, get paid twice. (And it doesn’t even have to be something you created.)

💥 The words that get “Paid!” and “I’m in!” and “Heck yeah!” rolling into the comments: no funnel, no webinar, no pitch that makes anyone squirm.

💥 The two words the whole method is built around: Worked for Travis, Kenneth, Rebekah and anyone else who follows this.

💥 And you keep all of it: the doc, the method, the whole kit to fire up again and again.

One offer between $99 - $999 (under $99 works too :)...

Aimed right...

Readers saying yes.

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Here’s how our ECW Auction works:

Bidding starts at $1.

👀 There’s a SECRET RESERVE AMOUNT 👀

✅ If the reserve is hit → EVERYONE who bids gets in for the RESERVE AMOUNT (even if the winning bid is more!)

❌ If the reserve is NOT hit → the highest bidder takes the whole enchilada solo.

🕐 WHEN: Starts 10 AM. Ends ??? (when we think we’ve topped off.)

⚠️⚠️ How do you know we won’t change the SECRET RESERVE AMOUNT?

Glad you asked! 😀 We linked to a password-protected PDF: download it now.

Behind the password: an illustration of ONE US bill.

Is it $1?

Is it $5?

Is it $20?

Is it $50?

A hundo?

$2? 😅

Could be any one of those… but it’s ONLY ONE!

After the last bid, we announce the PASSWORD, which reveals the secret reserve amount. We can’t change it once you’ve downloaded that PDF. You hold the receipt. 🔒

Make sense?

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🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

BONUS AREA: Watch this space 👇 The higher the bidding goes, the CRAZIER the bonuses get!

BONUS 1 UNLOCKED!!

🎁 Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You: 5 Preselling Secrets to Take Even Complete Strangers From Cold to Sold Before You Ever Make an Offer

Try to change what people believe and talk them into buying?

That’s the slow road to broke.

But shine a light where they haven’t looked yet and their focus follows the light.

Focus shifts, thoughts shift on their own, behavior shifts right after.

They end up wanting the thing before there’s ever a pitch.

And they credit you for it.

All you did was give them a new place to look.

It all starts by asking one question:

What needs to happen BEFORE an offer is ever made?

Answer that, and you quickly close the gap between what they think about daily and your offer.

The winner gets this bonus and maybe everyone else too.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

QUICK HOUSEKEEPING:

Bidding opens at 10 AM EST TODAY in the comments below this post. No bids before then count.

Before it opens, post any questions you’ve got. We’ll get them answered.

⚠️ One important thing ⚠️ — we’re gonna have a blast, but make no mistake, it’s a REAL auction. If you bid, you’re expected to bid and pay with integrity. Everyone here will see it if the top bidder doesn’t come through. And we don’t take bids in the DMs. The only bids that count are posted right here in this thread, where everybody can see them.

Your auctioneers,

Chad & Vinayak

📆 Our Build an Offer Your Readers Actually Buy Auction is tomorrow, Wednesday, August 19th at 10 AM EST.

And the winner walks away able to build an offer their readers actually buy.

But let’s name the elephant sitting in the room.

Because there’s a quiet little voice a lot of writers are hearing right about now…

“What if I win this… and my offer still thuds?”

That’s a valid concern.

The truth is if a writer is making this one mistake with their paid offer…

It’s going to likely bomb.

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The auction winner will find out what that is.

I could blurt it out here…

But, it wouldn’t mean much at this point.

What I can tell you now is…

This isn’t about writing more.

It isn’t about a bigger list.

It isn’t about becoming a better salesperson.

If bidding hits our secret reserve price…

Every bidder gets to fix this before they ever launch an offer.

So they can begin creating offers from $99 to $999 (and yep, under $99 works too)…

And hearing “I’m In!”, “Heck yeah!” and “Yes!”

👉 Auction opens Wednesday, August 19th at 10 AM EST.

👉 Download the secret reserve PDF here (it’s password protected.)

👉 Drop a 💥 in the comments of the post if you’re in for $1.

See you there.

Your auctioneers,

Chad & Vinayak

P.S.

Here’s a hint: the thing that makes people say “I’m in!” just happened in this post 😉

Enough Hex Yeahs came in to make this real.

So it’s happening. 🎉

🏁 An EVERYONE-CAN-WIN Auction.

Here’s what the winner walks away with 👇

A clearly different, clearly desirable, and clearly doable offer that people actually say yes to.

Aimed dead-center at the ONE thing those readers chew on every single day and would gladly pay to make it stop.

Not the product the writer wants to sell.

The thing their people are quietly, daily fed up with.

Something they can wrap up in a plain Google doc that fits on two pages.

No writing 50 more articles and hoping.

No becoming an expert copywriter first.

And no pushy, awkward, “standard sales” shiz that makes a person want to shower afterward.

Just a genuine offer, handed over easy.

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The same kind of doc that put $1,309 in Rebekah’s pocket in her first 7 days.

PLUS the Second Helping Campaign that bolts another chunk of cash on top by thanking the folks who JUST bought and handing them one more thing to say yes to.

(Psst… that second thing doesn’t have to be something THEY created either.)

Build the offer once. Get paid twice.

Now here’s the part nobody likes to sit with…

Staying put has a price too.

Another six months to a year hitting publish and getting 1 to 2 sales.

Watching the subscriber count creep up while the bank account doesn’t budge.

Pouring weeks into a launch that thuds.

Holding off on making any offer because they don’t know how to narrow down their expertise into a clear offer.

The buck to bid is cheap.

Another year of no sales ain’t.

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Here’s how the EVERYONE-CAN-WIN Auction works:

We will post the official auction Wednesday at 9 AM EST.

Before 10 AM, comments and questions are welcome.

At 10 AM, bidding kicks off in the comments section of the post.

Bidding starts at $1.

Bids jump $10 max at a time.

👀 There’s a SECRET RESERVE 👀

✅ Reserve gets hit → EVERYBODY who bid gets in at the reserve amount.

Even the folks whose bid was lower.

❌ Reserve doesn’t get hit → highest bidder takes the whole thing solo.

⚠️ “How do we know you won’t move the reserve on us?”

Fair. 😀 Attached is a password-protected PDF: download it now.

Behind the password: an illustration of ONE US bill — the secret reserve.

Revealed AFTER the auction wraps up.

$1?

$5?

$20?

A hundo?

Only ONE.

After the last bid, we drop the password and reveal it.

And it can’t be changed once you’ve got that PDF.

You hold the receipt. 🔒

🕐 STARTS: Wednesday, August 19th at 10 AM EST.

Ends when we feel we’ve topped off. ⏲️

What to do right now:

👉 Mark the calendar. Wednesday at 10 AM EST.

👉 Drop a 💥 in the comments if the $1’s in — helps us know who’s actually showing up.

👉 Start thinking about the audience you want to build this for.

See you at 10 AM EST on the 19th.

Your auctioneers,

Chad & Vinayak

UPDATE: The auction is going down! Go here for the deets!

Quick story about a guy named Kenneth who decided to celebrate his 41st birthday with style.

Not with cake.

With an offer.

99 sales at 41 bucks a pop. 🎂

That’s a heck of a birthday gift.

Here’s the part that gets me…

Most folks can’t scrape 99 LIKES on a post.

Kenneth pulled 99 SALES.

IDK how many people were in Kenneth’s audience…

Personally it doesn’t matter much to me.

What matters is he aimed the offer dead-center at the one thing his people actually wanted.

Then wrapped it in something they could buy in about four seconds.

No big franken-funnel.

No webinar.

No eight weeks of coaching on the hook.

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But here’s where Kenneth got sneaky…

Right after those 99 folks bought, he turned around and thanked them and offered a SECOND helping.

Almost one in five buyers said yes to another offer.

That little move carried him to nearly five figures.

Now picture that pointed at a writer’s list…

An offer their readers reach for a card to buy.

Aimed at the ONE thing those readers chew on every single day.

Built in an afternoon.

Wrapped in a plain Google doc that fits on two pages.

👉 Very often, all it takes for a writer to finally move a dollar is aiming at the RIGHT pain.

So here’s the deal.

Our poll is still live.

If we get 15 or more peeps saying “Hex Yeah! I’d bid a $1”… bidding kicks off AUCTION style.

Starts at $1.

And the winner doesn’t just walk with the two-page offer…

They get the Second Helping Campaign too.

That’s the Kenneth move.

The thing that bolts another chunk of cash on top by thanking the folks who JUST bought and handing them one more thing to say yes to.

Psst… it doesn’t have to be something they created either.

Build the offer once.

Get paid twice.

Where things stand so far: 9 Hex Yeah votes and 3 Maybes. 💥

Fair warning: if this isn’t a pain writers actually want to fix, no worries.

We’ll drop the auction idea.

Maybe reach out to the folks who voted Hex Yeah and hook them up.

Here’s what to do next:

Go to our poll and let us know…

👉 Would ya bid AT LEAST $1?

BTW…

Since we’ve never done something like this on Substack…

Turns out we can’t see who actually voted. 🤦

So when you vote, kindly drop a comment too and let us know it was you…

Even if it’s that you’d rather buy a lotto ticket.

Helps us put a name and face to the vote.

Your auctioneers,

Chad & Vinayak

UPDATE: The auction is going down! Go here for the deets!

A few weeks back, and I had a suspicion about you…

That you wanted to make money from your writing for a while…

But every time you went to start selling, you’d freeze.

46 likes.

A pile of comments.

Most folks scored themselves 5 to 10.

Chad reached out to a few who commented.

The replies that stopped us?

Were the peeps who’d already launched something.

Poured their blood, sweat and tears into it…

…only to hear crickets.

Maybe a few sales.

Nothing to write home about though.

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Here’s what took me way too long to learn…

It’s not usually the words we use that hold up sales…

It’s what the offer got built around.

Most launches sell the thing the writer thinks is impressive…

Not the thing their readers are quietly, DAILY fed up with and would happily pay to make stop.

There’s a way to figure this out that doesn’t require a masters degree in offer making.

No creativity required either.

Just 5 areas to score using a simple tool.

Score high on all 5?

A buyer frenzy is likely.

Rebekah whipped up her offer using this tool…

…and instead of fumbling around with a funnel or web page?

She threw it into a simple Google doc.

BOOM!!!

She generated $1,309 in sales in her first 7 days.

Over $1,000 in a week ain’t too shabby and she’s just getting started!

It worked because she wrapped that daily pain into an offer built around two words.

These two words work best for offers between $99 and $999.

I’ll tell ya what they are… 😏

But not yet.

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Idea 👇

💥 We give one writer the tools to build an offer their readers reach for a card to buy…

Even if they already launched an offer that didn’t sell like they’d planned.

One aimed dead-center at the thing their people are chewing on every single day.

💥💥 They’ll walk away knowing how to spot that daily pain and how to wrap it up so it sells.

No funnel.

No 1,500 word article trying to convince them.

The whole thing fits on two pages. 😏

Crafted around those same two words that put $1,309 in Rebekah’s bank account.

And we’re doing it AUCTION style. Bidding starts at $1.

First time running one of these on Substack.

What could possibly go wrong? 😆

So here’s my question to you…

Quick note — We can't see who voted or what you picked, so drop a quick comment below after you vote. Helps us find you! 👀

Your auctioneers,

Chad & Vinayak

🎧 Listen now: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube

There was a day I sat down at my PC, looked at my whole game library, and never opened it again.

No taper, no plan, no new year new me thing, just done being that guy, so I stopped, and that was that.

I didn’t manage the habit down. I stopped believing I was that person, and somehow the behavior followed a few days later, like it needed time to catch up with a decision I’d already made without telling it.

Mick and I sat down to record episode three of The BangBroskies Podcast and landed on that same idea from two completely different directions. It comes down to the actual sentence you use out loud when someone asks what you’re building, and what that sentence trains your brain to believe about you whether you meant it to or not.

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What We Actually Talked About

For a long time I described what I was building as a side thing I was messing around with, the kind of sentence you say so often it stops sounding like anything at all. Turns out that sentence was doing more damage than I realized, and it’s a big part of why I stayed stuck on a few of the wrong things for way too long.

Mick made the case that you have to be a little delusional before you’ve got any actual proof, not lying to yourself, more like getting a few steps ahead of your own evidence. He also asked me something I still haven’t fully answered, whether Bezos would’ve ever called Amazon a side thing to anyone. Try picturing that conversation! I couldn’t.

There’s a one-word fix in there too, the thing you’d miss if you weren’t paying attention, plus where I actually messed this up for years and where Mick’s version of the same thing played out completely differently, through public speaking of all things.

I’m not going to walk through all of it here. Full episode’s on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube below.

Subscribe now

Next Up

What do you want us to cover next? Drop it in the comments.

Listen & Subscribe

🎧 Spotify:

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts

▶️ YouTube:

If you’re listening or watching on any platform, a follow/subscribe takes two seconds and helps push the show to more people. We’re building this from zero.

Go subscribe to Mick too if you haven't already.

P.S. You don’t need a bigger result before you’re allowed to take yourself seriously, just change the sentence, starting with whatever conversation about it you have next.

P.P.S. Is there a sentence you’ve caught yourself saying that was working against you the whole time and you only just noticed? Tell us in the comments.

Feeling pretty good about it too. Hit publish, lock the phone, go make coffee like a man who doesn’t check notifications every four minutes.

Come back twenty minutes later.

Zero.

A flat, disrespectful, personally offensive ZERO.

Fine. Whatever. Maybe it’s a timing thing. I check again before bed like a crackhead checking a slot machine that already ate my money.

Still zero.

And look, we’ve all built the same little conspiracy theory in that moment. The algorithm’s broken. Substack hates me specifically. Mercury’s in retrograde. My niche is cursed. Anything other than the boring possibility that this happens to almost everybody and there’s an actual reason for it.

Turns out there is a reason. I just needed something with more patience than me to go find it. I collaborated with Orel to find it.

runs WriteStack, a tool built around helping Substack writers actually stay consistent with Notes instead of posting in bursts and going quiet. He's the one who dug this analysis: growth numbers on 1,340 Substack creators, each with at least ten tracked Notes over at least a month, 570,000+ Notes between them, ranked by free subscribers gained per week, then close-read down to the two extremes, the fastest-growing 150 creators against the slowest-growing 148.

Here’s the number that kicked the whole thing off.

25 vs 0 — Median free subscribers gained per week: top decile of creators vs. bottom decile.

The top decile of creators in the dataset gains a median of 25 free subscribers a week from their Notes. The bottom decile gains a median of big ZERO. Literally zero: half the creators in the slowest-growing tenth didn’t convert a single free subscriber from any Note in their entire tracked history.

Quick note on how this was measured, because it’s worth knowing before you trust anything below: growth is free subscriptions attributed to a Note, using Substack’s own attribution data, summed per creator and divided by weeks active. Free subscriber counts are private, so every number in this post is either a cohort aggregate or explicitly rounded, nothing tied to an identifiable account. Public numbers like reactions and restacks are shown as measured.

So here’s what came back. Five things. Five ways to quietly torch your own growth without ever noticing you’re doing it. I’m calling them the Substack Cardinal Sins.

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Cardinal Sin #1: Nobody’s Seeing Your Note

The first thing that showed up reading both piles side by side wasn’t tone, or topic, or hook style. It was silence. Slow-growing creators aren’t writing worse Notes that people read and scroll past. Most of the time, nobody sees the Note at all.

Across the ~3,500 Notes in the close-read sample, 50.2% of Notes from the slowest-growing cohort got zero reactions. Zero, exactly, no rounding. In the fastest-growing cohort, that number was 2.5%.

And it’s not one unlucky post dragging the average down: 45% of slow-growth creators, 66 of 148, had more than half their sampled Notes land with zero engagement. Eleven of them had every single Note in the sample come back at zero.

Here’s the part that got me. Once a Note does get seen, the conversion math isn’t different between the two groups. In the fast-growing cohort, reactions and free-subscriber conversion on the same Note correlate at r = 0.53, and 39.3% of their Notes converted at least one free subscriber, versus 1.7% for slow-growers. The problem was never really the writing. Most slow-growth Notes just never took off the runway.

Substack’s Notes feed works like any other social feed, deciding what to show based on recent signals, meaning have you gotten engagement lately, are you posting often enough to register at all. An account that posts sporadically and gets ignored stays stuck in a low-reach loop, because the feed has no current reason to show it to anyone new.

The check: pull your last 15-20 Notes and count how many got zero reactions. More than a third, and the fix isn’t a better hook on the next one. It’s rebuilding reach, which is exactly what sins #2 and #3 are about.

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Cardinal Sin #2: Assuming Posting More Means Diminishing Returns

I always figured posting more would just spread everyone’s attention thinner. So all 1,340 creators got split into four groups by how many Notes they post per week, with median growth measured in each.

The most-frequent posters grow 22 times faster in median terms than the least-frequent ones. Look at that last column too: subscribers gained per Note doesn’t drop as frequency rises. It’s basically flat from quartile 1 to 2, then it climbs in quartiles 3 and 4. Posting more isn’t spending down some fixed pool of goodwill. Each additional Note is roughly as effective as the last, and the more of them exist, the more chances the feed has to surface one.

Rhythm matters on top of raw volume too. The analysis also measured how evenly spaced each creator’s Notes are, the coefficient of variation in the gap between posts, where lower means steadier. The steadiest quarter of creators grows at a median of 1.33 subs/week. The burstiest quarter grows at 0.53-0.55, less than half, even when their average posting gap looks similar on paper. Post daily for two weeks, vanish for a month, and you reset whatever reach you’d built.

The cadence rule: aim for at least one Note a day, most days, rather than a burst of ten in one sitting followed by a week of silence. If daily isn’t realistic, pick a frequency you can sustain for months without a multi-week gap.

This is, not coincidentally, the exact problem WriteStack was built to solve: queuing Notes in advance so your rhythm stays steady even on the days you don’t sit down to write. More on that at the end.

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Cardinal Sin #3: Linking Out Mid-Note Like It’s 2011 Twitter

One tactical difference showed up clearly and repeatedly: outbound links. Notes containing a link, to a newsletter, an external site, anywhere off-platform, averaged 4.95 reactions. Notes without one averaged 22.89. A 4.6x difference. Slow-growing creators used links in their Notes at nearly double the rate of fast-growing ones, 11.0% vs. 5.7%.

The likely why: this is the same pattern every social feed shows. Platforms suppress content that tries to route attention off-platform, because keeping people on-platform is the whole business model. A Note that links out competes with Substack’s own goal for that feed slot, and it gets treated accordingly.

The workaround: write the Note as a complete, standalone piece of value. If you want to point people to your newsletter or an external post, put the link in the first comment, or your bio, not the Note body. Let the Note earn its own reach first. Route the conversion after.

Cardinal Sin #4: Posting Constantly Without Saying Anything Specific

Sin #2 showed that posting more grows faster on average. But “on average” hides a real exception, and it’s an important one. 34 of the 430 creators (7.9%) who post more than 10 Notes a week are still growing at under 0.3 subscribers a week. High output alone guarantees nothing.

Reading those stuck-despite-volume Notes next to the rest of the high-frequency group, a pattern showed up fast. They write in abstractions. Motivational language, generic advice, sentences that could belong to almost any account in almost any niche, often closing on a hollow rhetorical question:

Compare that with the small opposite group that turned up: 10 of the 1,340 creators (0.75%) post fewer than 2 Notes a week and still grow more than 5 subscribers a week. Their Notes trade almost entirely in specifics, a number, an age, a named tool, a concrete claim you could fact-check.

One creator in the fast-growing cohort posted a single Note that did more for their subscriber count, by itself, than most creators in the slow-growth cohort saw across their entire tracked history combined. It wasn’t a hot take or a viral hook. It was a direct pitch, who this newsletter is for, and why. Specificity, not frequency, did the work.

The rewrite prompt: before posting, find the vaguest sentence in your Note and replace it with a specific number, date, name, or claim. If nothing in the Note could be fact-checked, it’s too abstract to convert anyone.

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Cardinal Sin #5: Sounding Like a Feed Instead of a Person

On top of the behavioral findings above, there’s a smaller but consistent structural gap between the two cohorts. Fast-growing creators write Notes that run a little longer, break into more paragraphs, and lean more first-person.

None of these gaps are dramatic on their own, and second-person usage barely moves at all between the two groups, which is worth flagging since “talk to the reader” is advice you hear constantly. The more reliable signal is first-person: fast growers write from their own specific experience noticeably more than slow growers do. It’s the same specificity finding from sin #4, just showing up again over here.

The swap: read your last Note back and count how many sentences start with “you should” or a general claim. Rewrite one or two as “I” statements grounded in something you did or noticed. It reads like a real account with a real person behind it, not a general-purpose feed of advice.

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The Growth Audit

The checklist version, if you want to run it against your own account:

1. Check your reach. Look at your last 15-20 Notes. If more than a third got zero reactions, your problem is reach, not writing quality.

2. Check your cadence. Are you posting most days, or in bursts followed by silence?

3. Check for links in the Note body. Move them to the first comment or your bio instead.

4. Check for abstraction. Find the vaguest line in your last few Notes and see if it could borrow a number, name, or date instead.

5. Check your pitch. If you haven’t posted a plain, direct “here’s who this is for and why” Note recently, that’s often the single highest-converting thing you can write.

Reach and cadence are the two that hit me hardest, mostly because neither is about being clever. They’re about showing up on a schedule I can hold, which is exactly the kind of problem I built the Substack Growth Engine to walk through. If sin #4 is more your gap, the Notes Engine Pack is a set of done-for-you Note frameworks built on the same idea the data keeps proving: a real number beats a general opinion, every time.

Every figure in this post comes out of that single analysis. 1,340 creators, 570,000+ Notes tracked between them, roughly 3,500 read line by line by a machine that never once got bored or decided its niche was cursed. And if sin #2 described you a little too accurately, WriteStack is a tool built specifically to keep your Notes queued and consistent even on the days you don’t feel like writing. Worth a look.

Subscribe to Orel here

P.S.

Somebody reading this has a Note sitting in drafts they’ve talked themselves out of posting because it feels too plain. Post the plain one. The data’s pretty clear on which one works.

Dataset, for the record: 1,340 Substack creators with at least 10 tracked Notes over at least 4 weeks, covering 570,000+ Notes total. Growth metric: free subscriptions attributed per Note, summed per creator and divided by weeks active. Close-read sample: roughly 3,500 Notes from the 150 fastest-growing and 148 slowest-growing creators, plus targeted outlier cohorts. All subscriber figures are shown only as cohort aggregates or explicit ranges, never attached to an identifiable account. Public engagement figures (reactions, restacks) are shown as measured.

UPDATE: The auction is going down! Go here for the deets!

I suspect you’ve been wanting to monetize your Substack for a while now.

The subscribers are coming in.

The writing is getting better.

People are actually reading it.

And somewhere in the back of your mind, a question keeps showing up:

“When am I going to make money from this?”

But every time you sit down to figure out what to sell — nothing. You freeze.

What if selling felt less like pitching and more like offering much needed relief to readers?

I don’t know, maybe my radar is off today.

Do me a quick favor?

I won’t be able to sleep until I hear from a few of you.

Drop me a reply with a number between 1 and 10.

1 = You must be talking about someone else. I know exactly what I’m selling and my readers love me for it.

10 = Are you a mind reader? I want to make money from my writing by offering my readers real relief from something they struggle with every day.

My friend and I are thinking of putting something together — and I want to make sure it actually solves the right problem before I say more.

Suspiciously yours,

Chad & Vinayak

Leave a comment

It doesn’t start as a lie.

It starts as something kind of beautiful. The idea that you could build something once -- put in the work, put in the research, put in the late nights -- and then watch money come in quietly while you’re asleep. Royalties hitting your account while you’re dreaming about something else. A business that doesn’t need you to show up every single day.

That idea got me into Amazon Kindle Publishing (KDP).

And look, I actually wanted to be an author. That part was real. I wanted to create something, put my name on it, see it out in the world. But somewhere between ‘I want to write a book’ and ‘I’m going to publish on Amazon,’ something shifted. I found the keyword research tools. I started looking at what was trending. And suddenly I wasn’t asking ‘what do I want to write?’ I was asking ‘what’s selling?’

Different question. Completely different answer.

So I found a niche that looked solid on paper -- good search volume, low competition. I hired a ghostwriter to write the book, put a pen name on the cover, and launched in a category I had zero genuine interest in. The model works, by the way -- people build real catalogues and real income with KDP. You just have to actually care about what you’re building. That part I skipped entirely. (Oopsie daisy!)

Three months and $2,000 later, I still wasn’t profitable. No email list. No brand. Nothing that was actually mine. Just a book I didn’t write, in a category I didn’t belong in, selling to people I’d never meet.

That’s when the thought I’d been avoiding finally showed up:

had a different version of the same dream. Different path in. Same reckoning at the end.

For him, the idea of freedom looked very similar -- but the execution was much different. He had the dream of becoming a 7-figure founder who didn’t have to rely on the corporate path.

That’s exactly why he enrolled in his college’s Engineering Entrepreneurship Program his senior year and launched a business with some of his friends. The excitement of getting it off the ground that first year was palpable -- designing and building the product, creating a business plan, going door to door to get their first sales.

But it quickly became more of a backdrop after they all launched their engineering careers. Something they were maintaining on the side, rather than being completely passionate about. And even maintenance felt heavy for the 3 years until they finally let it go due to failed funding.

The most defining moment -- the one that told him it wasn’t going to work out -- was coming home after a day of door-to-door sales and bursting into tears. He had quit his job months before thinking the business was going to save him. Turned out, it just showed him how much he had hated his life for it.

That’s when he came to the question:

“Am I the one running the business or is the business running me?”

Welcome back to Monday Models -- where I pull apart what is actually working in the solopreneur world, and sometimes what is not.

I’m joined today by -- a transformation coach who helps you redirect your energy before burnout does it for you.

We built wrong things from different directions. We are both here to help you skip a few of the expensive lessons we had to learn the hard way.

This is not a hustle-bashing post. It’s not a ‘slow down and smell the roses’ post. It’s something more specific than either of those.

It’s about a pattern we both noticed -- in ourselves, and in everyone around us. High-achievers tend to build the wrong things. And then they defend them. And the reason why is more interesting than ‘they picked the wrong niche.’

The Achieve-and-Escape Loop

(The cycle that keeps high-achievers building the wrong things)

Vinayak

Let me ask you something slightly uncomfortable.

When you picture yourself six months from now -- after the new thing takes off, after the income streams start stacking -- what are you actually picturing?

Is it freedom? The time? The money in the account?

Or is it the identity?

Because here is a pattern I started noticing in myself, and I’ve since seen in enough other people to know it’s not unique to me:

A lot of us are not building businesses. We are building introduction lines.

You know the feeling. You’re at a party, someone asks what you do, and the person who says ‘I work a 9-5 job’ sounds one way. But the person who says ‘Oh, I’ve got a couple of bestsellers on Amazon, a YouTube channel sitting at 100K subscribers, a SaaS tool I’m building on the side, and a six-figure coaching business in full swing’ -- they get a completely different reaction. Raised eyebrows. ‘Wow, how do you manage all that?’ A kind of quiet respect that the standard answer doesn’t produce.

And I want to be really careful here, because ambition isn’t a character flaw. Building multiple things isn’t bad. But I’m asking you to be honest with yourself about the actual engine behind it.

Because when ego is the engine, your decisions start looking a specific way.

You choose KDP because ‘self-published author’ sounds impressive and ‘passive royalties while you sleep’ sounds incredible. But then you don’t write the book you actually care about -- you run keyword research and find a trending niche. You pick the topic the market wants, not the topic you have any genuine relationship with. And you tell yourself it is strategic. It is optimised. It is smart.

What it actually is: you’re chasing the outcome (income, identity) while avoiding the alignment question entirely.

So the book goes up. The ads start running. And three months later, when you’re $2,000 deep and still not profitable, you don’t quit. That would be admitting you picked wrong. Instead you buy the course. You redesign the cover. You learn about ACoS and optimise your bid strategy. You find every possible reason the problem is the execution, not the container.

Then KDP doesn’t work, and you need a new vehicle. You haven’t figured out what went wrong -- you just can’t sit still without something to point to. So next I went for YouTube automation. Built twelve channels. I actually thought scale would solve the problem that alignment created.

It didn’t.

What nobody tells you about building the wrong thing is that you don’t just build it -- you defend it. Every time I wanted to quit, I told myself I just needed to be more patient. The sunk cost becomes the reason to stay. The loop tightens. And every time you defend it, you go a little further from the honest question you should have been asking from the start.

And the honest question is this:

Is the thing I’m chasing a real pull toward something? Or is it the feeling I want to have when people ask me about it?

I’m not saying your answer is wrong. I’m saying you need to know what it is.

Dido watched the same trap spring from the inside. Four years of it.

Dido

So, as I mentioned before, I had stayed with this side business model for 4 years. And the majority of the time, I felt like I was forcing myself to even maintain it. There were months that went by that I couldn’t even focus on it, and this only made me feel guilty inside. I felt that I needed to always be on in order to maintain the exterior image of being an entrepreneur, a dream I had always had when I was younger.

The thing is I didn’t really feel connected to the business from the start of it. My co-founders and I went into creating the product very fast without a lot of ideation. The execution was there. But the passion was not.

The thing is, I just didn’t understand that it was actually a lack of passion when I was going through the motions. I thought it was normal to hate doing work for your business, because all the successful people talk about working hard for years on a vision until you can start enjoying it. This misconception was the main reason why I didn’t want to let go of it, even when it wasn’t working.

But eventually, in year 3 of having little to no sales, the feeling shifted towards the sunk cost fallacy. I thought I was in too deep to make a pivot, and I didn’t want to risk losing the progress and hard work that I had put into it. The attachment was both a fear of losing what I had already built along with a fear of the unknown of starting over again to try something else.

And stopping completely, by choice, would have meant that I would have to admit failure. And as a high achiever, my pride would not let me do that. My identity was glued to the title of an entrepreneur, and I needed to see it succeed in order to feel validated. Of course, that never came, because the design was built externally without much of a thought for what mattered internally.

Before you commit more to something you’re already in -- or before you start the next new thing:

• Question 1: Is my excitement about what I’m moving toward, or what I’m moving away from? (Be honest. Both feel the same from the inside.)

• Question 2: Would I still build this if nobody could ever be impressed by it -- if it never came up in conversation, if no one ever knew?

If the answer to both leans toward escape and external validation -- you’re not building a business. You’re building an identity prop. Which is okay to admit. It’s the first step to building something real.

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The Alignment Blind Spot

(Why you can be productive inside the wrong fit for years without noticing)

Vinayak

So here’s what happened with YouTube.

I built twelve channels. Different niches. AI-generated scripts, outsourced editors, automated uploads. I had the whole operation running. On paper it looked like a machine. In reality it looked like a part-time job I had not signed up for.

And the thing about YouTube automation that I didn’t fully understand until I was already deep in it: the model requires you to be there. All the time. Managing editors. Reviewing scripts. Checking analytics. There’s nothing passive about it. The name lies to you -- ‘automation’ suggests a system running without you, but what it actually is, is a system that cannot run without you noticing every problem immediately.

That model and a full-time day job don’t coexist. Not sustainably. Not without one eating the other.

And then four of my channels got demonetized in the same week.

My first reaction, and I want to be really honest about this: was relief. Not devastation. Not even frustration. Just this quiet, almost embarrassing sense of: oh. okay. maybe I do not have to do this anymore.

That reaction was trying to tell me something. I wasn’t listening.

My ghostwriting journey has the same story in a different chapter. Good clients. Decent money. Work I was capable of. But every new client felt like reporting to a new boss, and I already had one of those at my day job. I had built a second job to escape the first one. Which isn’t exactly the freedom playbook I was looking for.

And here is the part that took me the longest to understand about misalignment:

I was executing. I had content calendars and spreadsheets and SOPs. I made detailed plans to grow both of these things. Spent real time on them. But the plans never got followed through. I would sit down on a Saturday morning for ‘content day,’ open the spreadsheet, feel absolutely nothing, and find something else to do.

I spent a long time telling myself I was undisciplined. That other people were outworking me. That I just needed better systems or more accountability or a different course.

But here’s what finally broke through that story: I noticed that the moment I sat down to write for my newsletter, I lost track of time. I was not checking the clock. I was not negotiating with myself about whether to start. I just started. And an hour would pass without me noticing.

That’s not a discipline difference. That’s an alignment difference.

Laziness isn’t selective. If you’re lazy, you’re lazy about everything. But if you show up easily for some things and drag yourself to others -- that’s not a personal failing. That’s information about which container fits.

The other thing I had to learn the hard way, across multiple failed models, is that the business has to fit inside your life. Not the other way around.

YouTube automation sounds great until you are managing multiple channels and it is a second full-time job. The model that works isn’t the one with the best income potential on paper. It’s the one you can actually sustain without burning out or resenting it.

That sounds obvious. But I promise you -- when you’re inside the passive income dream, when you’re convinced the problem is just execution and not fit -- it doesn’t feel obvious at all.

For Dido, the misalignment stayed invisible for years. It didn’t look like failure. It looked like a full calendar.

Dido

During the latter years of the side business, I noticed something. And that was that I was staying busy with it in order to escape other parts of my life that I didn’t enjoy at the time (career). It became more of something to avoid that sinking feeling that I was doing something wrong.

Eventually, somewhere along the way I was doing things only to maintain what was already there. The passion to innovate had been lost. My days looked like physically building out the product with co-founders on weekends, and handling customer quotes/doing door to door sales during the week after work. Although I did enjoy the door to door part, mostly everything was a blur during this time, and I was just going through the motions.

The issue that makes this more convoluted is how it ties into ego. Looking busy is not only a way to escape, it also looks good on the outside to others. My friends thought that I was living the life since I barely had any free time. I leaned into that and seeking external validation fueled a lot of the late nights working on the business. The more tired I was, the better, because I could brag to friends about how hard of a worker I was.

It wasn’t until the 4th year of the business that I finally became aware of what this cycle was doing to me. This was the period after I quit my job and tried to go all in on it. Once I wasn’t trying to escape something else (career), I realized just how much I hated doing all of this. In the end, my co-founders and I did not get enough funding to scale it properly, which is when we finally decided to let it go. This was when I was finally free to self-reflect and realize that the whole design of the business was misaligned and causing all of these issues to occur.

• Do you protect your best hours for this -- or does it get what’s left over after everything else? (Scraps of energy on a tired Thursday night are not the same as showing up fresh on a Saturday morning.)

• Do you talk about it without being asked? Not to promote it -- just because it is on your mind and it is actually interesting to you? (If you’ve got to remember to mention it, that’s a signal.)

• On a hard day -- the kind where you are tired and it would be genuinely easy to skip -- do you show up anyway? And when you do, does it feel better or worse after? All hard work is hard. Misaligned hard work feels hollow even when you do it perfectly.

None of these are pass or fail. They are diagnostic. If your answers are mostly ‘scraps of energy, never mention it, feels worse after’ -- that’s the information you need. Pay attention to it earlier than we did.

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The Question That Changes Everything

(Shifting from ‘is this working?’ to ‘is this me?’)

Vinayak

Substack was different from day one. And I’m still not entirely sure I can explain why. Which is, I think, the point.

With KDP, I could explain everything. Market data. Keyword volume. Royalty margins. Competition level. I had a spreadsheet, I had arguments, I had a plan. I had answered every ‘but why this?’ question before anyone even asked.

With Substack, I just started. Because I had something to say and I wanted to say it to people who were going through the same thing. That was the whole logic. Not a passive income play. Not a scalable content machine. Just: I’ve been making expensive mistakes for a few years and maybe some of that is worth sharing honestly.

I started protecting time for it without planning to. Saturday evenings just started being newsletter time. It wasn’t on a calendar. There wasn’t a system. It just started happening. I’d be at the gym and find myself thinking about what I wanted to write that night. I’d get home, eat, and before I’d consciously decided anything, I’d be at my desk.

That is the difference between dragging something and carrying it. When you’re dragging it, you need to remind yourself. You need to build systems to force the behaviour. When you’re carrying it, it kind of just goes where you go.

650+ subscribers in six months. Not viral by any standards, but here’s what that number actually represents: 650 people who found something worth reading in what I was putting out, without me having a big audience or a big following to start with.

More importantly -- and this is the part I couldn’t have predicted when I was running Amazon ads -- it feels like mine.

Not the subscriber count or the income potential. The actual writing. The specific way I think through ideas and put them on a page. The conversations in the comments. The weeks when I don’t feel inspired but I write anyway and it comes out fine.

This is the first thing I’ve built where a hard day makes me want to show up more, not look for an exit.

And I know now that that specific feeling -- the difference between dragging and carrying -- is the only early-stage signal that actually matters. Not the revenue or the growth rate. Just: does this still have your attention when it would be completely easy to stop?

For me, with this -- YES!!! That’s enough to keep going.

Dido

There were a few months after I had let go of my side business that I was in an in-between space not knowing what to do with that feeling of emptiness. I initially went into a state of panic trying to fill it up with anything I could find: panic applying to jobs, putting on music, eating a lot of junk food, etc.

During this time, I read a few psychology books as well, as I was desperate to understand why this was happening, and that I couldn’t get a grip on myself. Turns out, it was my resistance to the unknown that was truly causing this feeling of anguish. I was so familiar with fight or flight that I couldn’t get myself to slow down -- even when I had nothing else going on in my life.

The shift for me came pretty dramatically. It was through a transformational 14-mile walk in the rain. To summarize, it was the first time in my life that I chose to accept the pain I was in instead of run away from it. Seeing the pain as something that shows evidence of who I am rather than evidence that I am not enough.

For you, the shift doesn’t have to be as dramatic, as you can do the same but build it up slowly through smaller steps. The question was no longer ‘what can I do to maintain this life for others?’ but more of ‘what is the life that I always wanted but never had the courage to go after?’

Before, I had truly only been living for external validation. There wasn’t much thought that went into the design of my first side business. My co-founders and I built a product as fast as we could, shipped it out, and went straight to selling. The idea looked good on paper, but we never gave a second thought about what the actual future of it would look like.

After, I asked myself the second question, and I started to think about what would actually fulfill me in a business. Not what would make me the most rich. Not what would give me the most validation. Not even what would give me status. And I chose coaching specifically for many reasons.

One, a lot of people in my life have told me that I am a good listener and empathetic person and I seem to always be the person to go to for advice. Two, being able to connect with people on a deep level is something that I have a lot of fun doing, and energizes me as well. And three, the specific coaching (to help high achievers stop running into burnout by designing a life they don’t have to escape from), gives me a solid purpose to help the people who used to be in my exact position years ago.

Work With Dido

Looking back at this, my first side business didn’t check any of those 3 boxes -- not aligning with my strengths, my values, or something I genuinely enjoyed (other than the door to door sales aspect -- the only part of the business where I got to connect with people).

And now that I have done more than half a year of coaching, I am super happy with the decision. It has grounded me and feels a lot more sustainable. Meanwhile building out a community to funnel it through Substack has been super fun as well.

A quick exercise you can do in 10 minutes:

• Write down your last 3 projects or side hustles.

• For each: Was I excited to start this, or relieved to escape something else?

• For each: Am I talking about this to inspire others, or to convince myself?

If the pattern is mostly escape and self-convincing -- that’s the hangover. The audit doesn’t fix it. But it makes it undeniable.

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CONCLUSION

Here’s what we kept coming back to while writing this.

We didn’t escape the hustle hangover because we found better strategies. We didn’t optimize our way out. We didn’t find the right niche, the right model, the right course.

We escaped by finally asking a different question.

For Vinayak, it started with noticing the difference between what he was running toward versus what he was running away from. The new thing always felt exciting until it didn’t. And the gap between launch day energy and three-months-in reality kept showing up in every model, every channel, every client. The signal wasn’t failure. It was that nothing ever felt like his.

For Dido, it took a 14-mile walk in the rain to stop running entirely. Not from the business, but from the question he’d been avoiding for four years. Not ‘how do I make this work?’ but ‘does this actually fit who I am?’ Once he asked it honestly, the answer was obvious. It had probably always been obvious. He just hadn’t been willing to look at it.

Different entry points. Same destination.

The hustle hangover isn’t a willpower problem. It isn’t a discipline problem. It isn’t even really a strategy problem. It’s a design problem. You can be incredibly hardworking, incredibly smart, and incredibly committed, and still be building something that was never going to fit, because you never asked whether it should.

You cannot hustle your way into alignment.

So here’s the question we’ll leave you with, and we mean it as a real one, not a rhetorical one:

Sit with that one. Really sit with it.

The answer is in there. It’s probably been trying to get your attention for a while.

If this resonated:

Dido is a transformation coach that helps high achievers prevent burnout by designing a life they don’t have to escape from. His publication is called Trials, Tribulations, & Torches, where he writes about how to re-direct your energy before burnout does it for you.

Subscribe to Dido

Vinayak writes about building income streams alongside a 9-5 -- without burning out or giving up the life you actually want. His newsletter is The Sustainable Solopreneur.

Subscribe to Vinayak

P.S.

What’s the hustle you’re most glad you walked away from or the one you stayed in too long? Drop it in the comments. We’re both reading every one.

Traffic is there. It has been there for weeks. But the sales number is exactly the same as last month.

You rewrote the headline. Added another testimonial. Told yourself you just need more people to see the page.

Here is what nobody told you: the problem is not the traffic. It is not the testimonials. It is not the headline.

It is something else entirely.c

Here is everything & I covered.

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You Are Not Selling a Product

This is the part most of us skip.

Dominic’s framework starts with one idea: you do not sell a product, a service, or information. You sell an emotional transformation. Point A to point B.

For an email course, you are selling the feeling of waking up to sales notifications while the rest of the world is asleep. For a coaching program, you are selling certainty in your own decisions, not more knowledge. For Dominic’s service specifically, he is selling the feeling of finally being taken seriously.

When you write your sales page as a list of features, you are answering the wrong question. Your reader does not care what is in the box. They care what their life looks like after they open it.

The Mirror Effect: Make Them Feel Caught, Not Pitched

This is the piece of Dominic’s framework I keep coming back to.

He calls it the mirror effect. Your sales page copy should reflect back the exact behavior your reader is experiencing, not a vague description of their problem.

Generic version: “Are you struggling to convert visitors? This coaching program will help you attract ideal clients.”

Every word of that is forgettable.

Mirror version: “You rebuilt the page last Tuesday. You shared the link. You watched the analytics. 43 visitors. Zero sales. You closed the laptop without telling anyone.”

The second version makes someone stop and think, “How did you know that?”

That is the goal. Not to sound clever. To make the right reader feel seen.

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The 5 Faulty Beliefs Blocking Your Sales

Dominic walked through five beliefs that creators hold that quietly kill conversion. I am putting them here because I had at least three of them.

1. “My content just needs more time to work.”
Good content with a broken conversion system still produces zero sales. You are driving traffic to a dead end.

2. “If my product is good, people will just buy.”
They will not. A reader who lands on your page does not automatically follow the path to checkout. The page has to take them there.

3. “I need more traffic before I fix the page.”
This is the one I raised my hand for. If the right traffic is landing on a page that doesn’t convert, adding more traffic just gives you more proof that the page doesn’t work.

4. “I just need the right template.”
He copy-pasted a landing page that was converting for someone else. It didn’t work for him. Different context, different audience, different trust level. Templates are starting points, not solutions.

5. “Someone less qualified than me is succeeding, so the market is rigged.”
You can be right about this and still make zero money. Being right and being profitable are different problems.

How to Close: Give Them Two Paths

This is how Dominic structures the end of every sales page.

Path A: Do nothing. Stay exactly where you are. The problem does not go away and the cost of doing nothing compounds, financially and emotionally.

Path B: Take action. Here is what changes.

Make the inaction feel real. Not dramatic, not manipulative. Just honest. Because sitting with a broken sales page for another three months is a real cost, even if no money leaves your wallet.

The Tools Dominic Shared

Substack Profile Generator (free)
This one is for anyone who still has their publication name on their banner and nothing else. Dominic built a simple tool that asks you four questions (your topic, your outcome, your social proof, your lead magnet) and generates a banner hook, bio, and welcome page subtitle you can paste directly into Substack.

You can try it here: Substack Profile Generator

Landing Page Diagnostic ($17)
This is Dominic’s newest product. 50 checkpoints to find exactly where your landing page is losing conversions, in under an hour. What makes it different from a checklist is that Dominic explains why each element works or doesn’t. You walk away understanding the logic, not just following a list.

Find it here: Landing Page Diagnostic

One More Thing (The Meta-Story)

Dominic built his Landing Page Diagnostic using my Digital Product Launch Kit. He said it took him about four hours from zero idea to a finished product with a live Gumroad page.

His product is now $17. Mine is $1. He told me to raise the price. I probably will.

But if you are still at the “I don’t know how to even start building a digital product” stage, that $1 kit is where I would go first. It is the exact process Dominic used to go from no product to a live landing page in one weekend.

Grab it before I raise the price!

About Dominic

Dominic runs Click to Client on Substack, and specializes in rewriting sales pages for coaches and consultants. His thing is not just fixing the copy but explaining why each change works so you can apply it everywhere else.

That’s it for this week.

If your Substack bio still says “writer, thinker, builder of things” and nothing else, try the FREE Profile Generator. It takes three minutes.

And if you have a Gumroad page sitting at zero conversions with actual traffic coming in, the Landing Page Diagnostic is probably the most useful $17 you will spend this month.

See you next week.

Vinayak

P.S. Dominic’s biggest insight from the session: you cannot sell against someone’s belief. You can only shift it, slowly, with proof and story. That one line reframed how I think about every piece of content I write.

🎧 Watch / Listen now: YouTube · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Most people who start a side hustle do it for one reason: freedom.

More time. More money. More control over their life.

Six months later, they’ve cancelled plans, skipped the gym, stopped doing the things they actually loved — and the business still isn’t making real money. They didn’t build freedom. They built a different kind of prison and called it ambition.

That’s what this Episode of The BangBroskies Podcast is about.

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What We Actually Talked About

What life-first business really means.
Not low ambition. Not working one hour a week and hoping for the best. It’s designing the business around your life — not the other way round. Mick put it simply: build around your fulfillment first. If you wake up dreading what you have to do, something is structurally wrong, not motivationally wrong.

What our real days look like.
No polishing it up. Vinayak has a full-time job, hits the gym, makes dinner, and is left with one hour at night — mentally drained, staring at a blank screen wondering what to write. Mick juggles a day job, accounting exams every three months, family time, and carves out 90 minutes for the business before switching to study. This is what “building on the side” actually looks like for most people.

The context file hack.
Vinayak’s fix for the “I’m too tired to think” problem: before closing the laptop, leave yourself a note — what you did, where you stopped, exactly what to do next time. It’s like prompting an LLM with a context file. Next session you don’t waste 30 minutes thinking. You just pick it up and go.

Mick stares at walls. On purpose.
His non-negotiable is doing nothing. No phone, no input, just letting the brain process. He frames it like a machine: you wouldn’t run a computer for years without restarting it. Our brains are the same. The staring isn’t laziness — it’s maintenance. And it resets the dopamine baseline so the hard work feels less hard by comparison.

The non-negotiables conversation.
Vinayak’s: salsa classes once a week, golf, walks without his phone, learning Japanese — because he lives in Japan. Mick’s: doing nothing to process, dancing to release energy, walking 5x a week, and sleep — seven to eight hours, non-negotiable, no hustle culture guru is convincing him otherwise.

Is life-first just an excuse to go slow?
We got into it. Mick’s honest take: yes, it can become an excuse. If you protect your life but never actually water the business seed, it won’t grow. Life-first still requires non-negotiables for the business — things you do every single day regardless of energy or mood. The balance isn’t soft. It’s intentional.

The fake rich creator problem.
Someone rents a Lamborghini, a mansion, packs a year’s worth of content into one day for £2-3k, and spends the next twelve months appearing wealthy. You see it, feel behind, buy their course. Mick’s been around long enough to see this pattern clearly and it’s still running in 2026.

The real question to ask yourself.
Not “how many hours can I work?” but “is this input leading to the output I actually want?” You can spend 10,000 hours on the wrong thing and get nowhere. Grinding hard at the wrong lever is still just grinding.

Next Episode

Mick is teasing the identity shift — the beliefs you have to change about yourself before any of this actually sticks. That one’s going to be good.

Watch & Listen

▶️ YouTube:

🎧 Spotify:

🍎 Apple Podcasts:

If you’re watching or listening on any platform — a follow or subscribe takes five seconds and genuinely helps push the show to more people. We’re starting from zero and every one counts.

If you enjoyed this conversation, go follow Mick— his Substack is where he goes even deeper on the psychology and identity side of everything we discussed today.

P.S. Drop a comment below — is there something in the life-first business conversation we didn’t cover that you want us to dig into? We’re building the next episodes around what actually matters to you.

This is the window. This is where the newsletter gets built.

I have a full-time job as a research scientist. I live in Japan. I get maybe 10 to 15 hours a week to build something on the side. The standard Substack growth advice assumes I have none of those constraints.

Post every day. Engage for hours. Be everywhere. Go all in.

I can’t. And I suspect you can’t either.

Welcome to Strategy Sunday — this is the series where I break down the decisions and systems behind building sustainably as a solopreneur.

Today I am joined by William Leroux, who runs BeBetter and the Newsletter Growth Lab community on Skool.

William has grown to 1,500+ subscribers while training as a student athlete five times a week. He analyses top Substack creators every week and reverse-engineers how they reached 10K and beyond. He knows the strategies inside out.

I know what it looks like to actually apply them when life is already full.

William brings the playbook. I bring the proof that it works with constraints.

Let’s get into it.

Why Most Growth Advice Fails Busy People

— Vinayak —

The standard playbook for growing on Substack goes something like this: post daily, engage for hours, build your personal brand everywhere, and eventually the subscribers come.

It works. I am not going to pretend it doesn’t. For people who can go all in, it absolutely works.

But it was not built for people like me. And it was probably not built for you either.

Here is what nobody tells you: the problem is not that you are lazy or not consistent enough. The problem is that you are applying a system designed for a completely different set of constraints.

I have tried to follow the hustle playbook. It cost me money I didn’t have, energy I couldn’t afford, and months of feeling like I was failing at something I hadn’t even started properly.

The shift that changed everything was not finding a new hack. It was accepting a different definition of what progress looks like.

That is the mindset layer underneath everything we are going to cover in this post. Hold it in mind as you read William’s strategies, because the strategies work. But only if you believe that your pace is legitimate.

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The Smart Growth Strategies

— William —

Overwhelmed.
Scrolling.
Stressing.

That was my usual day as a student, always between working, training, studying and…

surviving. (literally)

I had no time. No energy.
At least, that’s what I told myself.

Because deep down, what I really wanted was simple:

→ write
→ express myself
→ build a real community of readers

Not just write for fun… but create something that could actually change my life.

And now?

I built it.

→ A 1500+ subscribers community
→ Real people: friends, fans, members
→ And that feeling of finally being proud of something I created

On top of that:

→ I built a Skool community for ambitious writers
→ I wrote my first book
→ I’m developing my first AI system for Substack

So the real question is…

How?

How did I go from 2 subscribers…
to 1500, while feeling overwhelmed, busy, and low on energy?

That’s exactly what someone asked me.

And honestly… the answer sounded boring.

→ “I worked hard”
→ “I built discipline”

Cool… but that doesn’t help anyone.

What actually changed everything was this:

I built a daily system.

A system that helped me:

→ grow consistently on Substack
→ create better content
→ and slowly build offers around it

A system I wish someone gave me when I started.

And most importantly…

→ A system you can follow at your own pace
→ Even if you’re busy (like I was)

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So let’s get into it.

(And if you want the shortcut to your first 1k… check the end 👀)

Strategy 1: Know Your Schedule Better Than Anyone

You think you have two hours a day. You don’t.

You have the two hours you tell yourself you have, the ones where half the time disappears into your phone, a snack you didn’t need, and “just quickly checking” something that takes 40 minutes.

Be honest. That “30 minutes in the morning + 1 hour at night” schedule? It might actually be 30 minutes because you procrastinate and won’t admit it. (Hi, me too.)

The first step isn’t a productivity hack. It’s just honesty about where your time actually goes.

Once you know that? Cut the break. Put the phone down. Use the 15-minute rule, just start for 15 minutes, and suddenly you’ve got a real 2-hour window.

But here’s the thing no one tells you: 2 hours going the wrong direction is 2 hours lost.

So once you have the time, you need to use it right. Here’s how I think about it:

• Want more subscribers? Interact, interact, interact. Before writing, before replying to anything, go find your reader. Every single day. (Yes, you can schedule your content in advance to make this possible.)

• Want real engagement? Talk to your readers. DMs, chat threads, Lives. The more they know you, the more they’ll show up for you.

• Want more time? Research and schedule your content first, before doing anything else.

That’s it. Same hours. Better direction.

(Next up: what to actually research, and who to ask.)

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Strategy 2: Research What Your Audience Actually Wants Before Creating Anything

Most writers are guessing. The good news? You don’t have to.

Your subscribers, even the few you already have, read you for a reason. They clicked something. They stayed. Why not just... ask them what their problem is? What solutions they’ve tried? What they actually want more of?

Do this with at least 20 conversations.

Find the common struggle. Find the common solution. Find out what they love and hate in a newsletter. Gather those answers, and you’ll have better content in a week than most writers figure out in a year.

And here’s the bonus nobody talks about: when you collect the exact words your readers use to describe their problems, you can plug those words directly into your writing. Suddenly your newsletter sounds real, specific, and like it was written for them, because it was.

Research isn’t a step you do once. It’s what keeps your content from being a guess.

(Now let’s talk about what happened when I actually did this, and what it did to my open rates.)

Strategy 3: The 72 Percent Open Rate Approach

Yes, 72%. No, I didn’t believe it either.

Here’s what happened. I took one week, just one week, to genuinely re-engage my most active subscribers.

I talked to them. I did real research. I ran a Live. I showed up like a human being instead of a content machine. Then I sent one email.

72% open rate.

Was there some luck involved? Probably.

But here’s what I know for sure: talking to my readers didn’t just boost a number. It brought them together. It made the content I sent actually aligned with what they needed, because I knew what they needed because they told me.

The one thing most writers get wrong?

They treat email like a broadcast. Write, send, repeat. But your subscribers aren’t a list. They’re people who trusted you with their inbox.

When you show up like you know them (because you’ve done the research, the conversations, the community-building), they open. Every time.

Stop broadcasting. Start talking.

(Which brings me to the thing that makes all of this possible faster, community.)

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Strategy 4: Why Community Accelerates What Solo Writers Can’t Do Alone

You can build alone. But you’ll build slower, doubt yourself more, and miss feedback that would’ve saved you months.

Today I talked to a grandma. She didn’t know me. I didn’t know her. We just started talking, and it ended up being the best conversation of my day. That’s what community does.

It brings in people you’d never have found on your own, and they give you something algorithms can’t: real human connection and honest feedback.

A community, whether it’s with readers, fellow writers, or people further ahead than you, is the single biggest asset a writer can have for long-term growth.

Not the short-term subscriber spike. The sustainable, “I’m still here in three years” kind of growth.

That’s exactly why I’m part of the Newsletter Growth Lab. It’s a community of writers who are building seriously, sharing what’s working, getting feedback on their content, supporting each other through the slow weeks, and growing together. If you’re building your newsletter and doing it alone right now, this is the place to change that.

You can join the skool community here

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How I Applied These Strategies With Real Constraints

— Vinayak —

William’s strategies work. Here is what they look like when you have a full-time job and maybe 10-15 hours a week on a good week.

On Audience Research

I cannot spend hours in comment sections and forums every week. So I do it in batches. One hour on Sunday, reading replies to my posts, checking what questions people ask in DMs, noting which posts get restacked. That one hour tells me more than a month of content would without it.

On Posting Consistently

I batch everything on weekends. Saturday is research and writing, Sunday is editing and scheduling. Monday to Friday I spend 20 to 30 minutes replying to comments and DMs. That is the entire content operation.

Done is better than perfect. Shipped is better than stuck in drafts. I remind myself of this every single week.

On Engagement

I cannot engage for four hours a day. So I changed the goal. Instead of trying to reach more people, I try to go deeper with the people already reading. Reply to every comment. Answer every DM. Make people feel seen.

Depth over volume. Every time.

On Growth

Four to five new subscribers a day. That is my current pace. It is not viral. It is not impressive on a screenshot. But it is consistent, it compounds, and it does not cost me my sanity or my weekends.

I also lean heavily on collabs. Every collaboration I have done has been worth more than a month of solo content. New audiences, new relationships, accountability to actually ship. It is the highest leverage thing a busy writer can do.

On Using AI to Fast-Track the Process

I use AI to speed up first drafts, repurpose content across formats, and do in 20 minutes what used to take two hours. The goal is not to replace my voice. The goal is to spend more of my limited time on thinking and less on the formatting.

The system does the heavy lifting. I steer it.

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What This Looks Like for Different Constraints

— Vinayak + William —

The strategies adapt. The principles don’t. Here is what sustainable newsletter growth looks like across different life situations.

If you have a demanding full-time job

Your edge is specificity. You write from lived experience in a way that someone building full time cannot replicate. Use that. Write about the tension, the constraints, the real numbers. That honesty is what makes people subscribe.

Batch everything. One focused session a week is worth more than scattered 20-minute attempts every day.

If you are a student or athlete with a packed schedule

You always have time, you just need to make sacrifices. The students who succeed aren’t the ones partying every Friday. Your goal is to optimize your schedule and use every gap intentionally: small actions like Notes, comments, and DMs fit between classes, while your deep writing should be paired with your studies. If you didn’t study, you don’t write, use writing as a reward, not an escape. Have clear time blocks for everything, and yes, do your homework during lunch. It’s not easy, but let’s be honest… it’s the only way to make it work.

If you have kids or family commitments

The goal shifts from maximising output to protecting your best hour. Find the one hour a week where you have the most energy and protect it like a meeting you cannot cancel. Everything else is a bonus.

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The Mindset Layer Nobody Talks About

— Vinayak —

Here is the thing that sinks most people who try to build a newsletter around real life.

It is not the strategy. The strategies exist. William just gave you several of them.

It is the gap between what you expected growth to look like and what it actually looks like.

You post consistently for three months. You do everything right. And you have 47 subscribers.

That is not failure. That is early. But it feels like failure because you were sold a different timeline.

The hardest part of building slowly is that there is no moment where it suddenly feels worth it. The wins are quiet. Four subscribers today. A reply that says this changed how I think. A collab that reaches 200 people you never would have met alone.

You have to decide in advance that those things count. Because they do.

If this resonates, I will share more as it comes together. Drop a reply below if you want to be notified when it is ready.

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Conclusion

— Vinayak + William —

Growing smart means growing in a way that fits your actual life.

Not a watered-down version of someone else’s system. A system built around your hours, your energy, and your timeline.

The strategies William shared work. The proof is in his numbers and in the creators he analyses every week. The key is applying them with intention, not trying to do all of them at once with time you don’t have.

Pick one thing from this post. Apply it this week. That is the whole instruction.

If you’re reading this with a full-time job and slow growth, I want you to walk away with this:

You don’t need more time. You need to use the time you have honestly, on the right things, in the right order. Talk to people before you write for people. Build in public. Show up consistently, even imperfectly.

And don’t do it alone. The Newsletter Growth Lab exists for exactly this, writers at every stage helping each other figure it out faster.

Start small. Start honest. Start today. Join Now!

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If You Want to Go Deeper

From William: Join the Newsletter Growth Lab on Skool where we go deeper on all of these strategies with a community of writers doing the same thing.

From Vinayak: If you want to start monetising while you grow, even with a small audience, here are the tools that will help:

The $9 Digital Product Playbook (FREE) — How to create and sell your first digital product even with a tiny audience.

The 3-Hour Digital Product Launch Kit ($1) — AI prompts that walk you through the entire process in one afternoon.

The No-Brainer G-Doc Offer Blueprint ($9) — The exact framework for structuring an offer that sells itself.

If This Resonated

We both write about building online without burning out. If this post was useful, consider subscribing:

Subscribe to William’s newsletter: BeBetter by William Leroux

Subscribe to Vinayak’s newsletter: The Sustainable Solopreneur

P.S.

We are both still building. This is not a shout out from the mountain top. It is notes from the climb.

Drop a comment with your biggest constraint when it comes to growing your newsletter. We read every one. And your answer might become our next post.

(A like or restack means more than you know. It puts this in front of the person who needs to read it today.)

🎧 Listen now: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

I have been wanting to start a podcast alongside this newsletter for a long time now.

And I kept putting it off.

Not because I didn’t have ideas. Because I was waiting for the perfect ones. Waiting until I had the right format figured out, the right content angle, the right setup. Waiting until I felt ready enough to actually start.

Sound familiar?

Three months passed. Nothing happened. And then I thought about it — I am literally doing the exact thing this podcast is going to tell you not to do. I was consuming, planning, researching, and calling it preparation. Classic.

So I called up Mick, and we just said — let’s start this raw. Done imperfectly is better than waiting for the perfect moment. And honestly? That idea is kind of what this whole show is about.

Oh, and yes — we are fully aware of the irony. We are rage-baiting you into never getting rage-baited again. You’re welcome.

Meet Mick. Meet the BangBroskies Podcast.

You know me. Mick runs Hanker Life — a Substack about breaking social programming and building your identity from the ground up. He is a finance guy by day, a deep thinker by nature, and the kind of person who will say the uncomfortable thing out loud while everyone else stays quiet.

Together we are launching the BangBroskies Podcast — a show about building the life you actually want, not the one someone else’s blueprint designed for you.

If this sounds like something for you, it would mean a lot to have your support early. We are two guys starting from zero and every subscriber, follow, and listen genuinely helps push this to more people.

🎧 Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Episode 1: The Consumption Trap

The first episode sets the tone for everything.

We talked about why most people feel stuck — not because they lack information, but because they are drowning in it. The consumption trap. You feel like you need one more course, one more framework, one more podcast before you can actually start. But the gap between knowing and doing never closes from the outside. Only from doing.

We talked about survivorship bias — why the only voices you hear in this space are the ones who made it, and why that quietly distorts everything you believe about what actually works.

And we talked about how your brain compares your chapter one to someone else’s chapter twenty. You open your phone in the morning, spend the first twenty minutes inside someone else’s highlight reel, and then wonder why you feel behind before the day has even started. That is not motivation. That is a trap — and it is perfectly designed.

Don’t just listen. Do something with it.

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What to Expect Going Forward

Mick brings the psychology, the neuroscience, and the why behind why we do what we do. I bring the experiments, the tools, and the honest results — good and bad. We are not always going to agree. That is intentional. Because there are no universal truths here, just different paths and honest conversations about what is actually working.

Every episode will give you something to test, not just something to think about.

Listen & Subscribe

If you have made it this far, come find us:

🎧 Spotify:

🍎 Apple Podcasts:

▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBangBroskiesPodcast

Following the show on whichever platform you use helps us more than you probably realise — it pushes the podcast to new listeners and keeps us going. Takes five seconds. Genuinely appreciated.

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P.S. Next episode we are going deep on life-first business design. My argument: most side hustles fail because people shrink their life around the business instead of designing the business around the life they actually want. That one structural mistake is behind most burnout and most failed side hustles. Mick may agree. He may push back hard. We genuinely don’t know yet — and that is kind of the whole point. See you there.

P.P.S. We are building this show around conversations that actually matter to you. If there is a topic you want us to dig into — side hustles, solopreneurship, mindset, life design, or anything in between — drop it in the comments below. Your question might just become our next episode.

You have a good week. Something sells. Someone finds an old post and buys. You feel it for a moment and then it passes, and by Monday you are back in the machine, wondering if it was a one-off.

I run The Sustainable Solopreneur around a full-time research job. Ten to fifteen hours a week is all I have. And one of the things I have noticed is that the anxiety does not go away just because the numbers are moving. If anything it gets louder, because now you have something to lose.

The question I kept sitting with was: what would it look like if the business did not need me to be present every single day for it to hold together? Not passive income in the fantasy sense. Just income that does not punish you for being human.

I have been following CP’s work for a while now. He thinks about this problem differently to most people in this space and when he pitched me this piece, I said yes immediately.

Welcome to Strategy Sunday.

This is the series where I break down the decisions and systems behind building sustainably as a solopreneur. Today I am handing the floor to CP, who has been building in public and documenting something I think a lot of us need to hear about.

About Today’s Guest: CP

CP runs CP Leveraging AI on Substack, where he documents how he is building AI systems that handle the thinking side of a content business, not just the writing. He has been building in public for months, sharing the architecture decisions behind what he builds as he builds it. If you have ever felt like you are the only strategic brain in your business and it is exhausting, his work will resonate.

You Made the Sale on Friday. By Monday It Felt Like a Fluke.

Friday. 6 PM. You check your Gumroad dashboard and there’s a sale.

You didn’t post that day. You were busy — a work deadline, a family thing, one of those days where the content plan just didn’t happen. But someone found an old article, clicked through, and bought.

For about four minutes, you feel it. This is what it’s supposed to feel like.

Then Monday comes. You open your laptop. The weekend was quiet. No new sales. And somewhere in the back of your mind, without even meaning to, you start doing the math — the posts you missed, the emails you didn’t send, the visibility you let slip. The sale on Friday starts to feel less like proof and more like a fluke.

You Already Make Money. That’s Not the Problem.

Most people reading this have already figured out the first part. You write. People read. Some of them buy. The mechanics are working — at least enough to count as real.

The problem is that everything you’ve built is still attached to you showing up.

There are actually two layers to the trap. Most people see the first one — income stops when posting stops. Almost nobody talks about the second one — the thinking stops too, and the thinking is what was holding everything together.

Not just your time. Your attention. Your judgment. The daily decision of what to write, whether it’s any good, whether it fits the audience, whether now is the right moment to push the offer or pull back and build trust. That decision — the small, invisible, exhausting one — is happening inside your head every single day.

I felt this hardest in March. Took a week off for a family thing. Came back to find the numbers hadn’t moved much — still solid — but I’d spent the entire week away knowing I wasn’t posting, and the math was running in the background whether I liked it or not. What am I losing by not being there? The week off was supposed to be restful. Instead it was just distant anxiety.

That’s the trap. And it’s not the one most people talk about.

Subscribe now

The Difference Between Income and Presence-Independent Income

There’s a version of your business where the income is real but fragile. It depends on you posting consistently, deciding what to post, monitoring what worked, and adjusting accordingly. Miss a week and the numbers dip. Miss a month and you’re rebuilding from a lower floor.

This is where most writers live. It’s not failure. It’s actually pretty good. But it’s not what was promised when people started talking about building an audience and monetizing your writing.

The promise was income that works for you. The reality, for most people, is income that works because of you — specifically, because you keep showing up and keep thinking.

The gap between those two things is not about posting frequency. It’s about what happens to the decision-making layer when you step away.

When you’re present, you’re making hundreds of small calls: this angle not that one, this week not next, this offer for this audience right now. Those calls compound. They’re why your content gets better over time, why your conversion rate improves, why you gradually build an audience that trusts you.

When you step away, those calls stop. And the income follows them out the door.

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The Strategy Tax: The Cost Nobody Calculates

Here’s what nobody calculates: the cognitive overhead of running a content business is not a side effect. It is the business.

The writing is 20% of it. The other 80% is everything that happens before and after — what to write, why this angle and not that one, what the numbers are telling you, what to try next, whether the audience is warming up or drifting away.

Take a week off and you lose the writing time. That’s the visible cost. The invisible one is the two weeks it takes to get back into the rhythm of knowing what’s working, what your audience needs right now, and where to push next.

That re-entry tax is real.

And most people absorb it silently, every time, because they don’t have a name for it.

Call it the Strategy Tax. It’s the price you pay for being the only strategic brain in the room.

Every content creator running alone pays it. Every week. Whether they take a week off or not. It’s the hours spent deciding, second-guessing, and re-calibrating — not writing.

And the week off just makes it visible.

The Layer Most Writers Never Build

There are two ways to reduce the Strategy Tax.

The first is to get better at making decisions faster. Most content advice is secretly about this — the frameworks, the templates, the content pillars. They’re all trying to shortcut the daily decision-making. Some of them work. None of them eliminate the tax entirely, because the judgment still lives inside you.

The second way is to build a layer that holds the strategy when you step away.

Not a content calendar. Not a bank of pre-written posts. Something that understands what’s working, knows what the audience responds to, can see when the signal is strong or weak, and knows what move to make next — without needing you to check in.

I spent two months trying the first way. Content templates. Decision frameworks. Pre-planned angles. They helped with the paralysis but they didn’t solve the core problem: I was still the system. When I stepped away, the system went with me.

So I built the second layer instead.

It watches three things. First: what content actually moves the needle. Not vanity metrics — actual signal. Which pieces get the replies that turn into conversations? Which angles make people ask “where do I start?” vs. just liking and scrolling? Second: the audience temperature. Are people warming up or drifting? Is the offer timing right or are they still in trust-building mode? Third: the gaps. What questions keep showing up that I haven’t answered yet? What pattern am I seeing in the DMs that suggests a new direction?

Most writers never build this layer because it seems advanced. It isn’t. It’s just different. Instead of writing more content, you’re building the system that tells you what content to write, and why, and when. The layer doesn’t replace judgment. It holds the signal so judgment can actually land somewhere.

Once it was built, everything shifted.

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What It Looks Like When the Week Off Costs You Nothing

I took four days off last month. No posts. No strategy sessions. No checking what was performing.

I came back on Thursday morning.

The layer had flagged two notes from that week that performed differently than the others. Both used presence-trap framing instead of AI-tool framing. The audience was clearly tightening around that angle. The layer had that noted — not as a hunch, but as a pattern across replies and DMs. It had a draft direction waiting for the next essay based on what was landing.

It had also logged the DMs that came in while I was gone. Three of them. One asked specifically how to start building something that didn’t require daily posting. That became the core question for the next piece. The other two were just warm signals — people who were following the journey, not ready to buy but definitely watching.

I didn’t spend two weeks re-calibrating. I spent forty minutes reading what it had already figured out. The thinking was all there. I just had to trust it and keep moving.

The income didn’t spike that week. It didn’t have to. Nine new subscribers came in while I was gone — normal for a week. The offers didn’t move but they didn’t need to. The layer held. Everything stayed on track because the strategy didn’t depend on me being present to run it.

That’s what presence-independent income actually looks like. Not a dashboard that grows while you sleep. A system that holds the strategic thread so you don’t have to pick it back up from scratch every time you need a week to breathe.

The week off didn’t cost me anything. Because the layer that usually lives in my head had somewhere else to live.

Income that doesn’t punish you for being human.

The week off is just the test. The question it answers is whether you built something that holds, or something that only works when you do.

Most writers, when they take that week, discover the answer is the second one. Not because they failed. Because nobody told them the layer existed.

Now you know it does.

The next question is whether the system is already holding the thread — or whether the next week off is when you find out it isn’t.

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You’re making money. But you’re paying for it in hours you can’t get back.

Donna is an AI system that audits your Substack, analyzes what’s actually working, and generates content in your voice — so you focus on growth, not on deciding what to write next.

We’re opening 5 spots for Substack creators already making money but stuck in the content grind. I’ve been writing about this publicly for two months — if you want to see what the system actually looks like before you reach out, the link below is where to start.

DM me and I’ll give you free access to Donna for 1 month in exchange for your real results.

→ See what’s coming and subscribe to get early access

A Final Note From Vinayak

What CP is describing here is the next layer of what I write about every week. The sustainable part of solopreneurship is not just about working fewer hours. It is about building things that hold when life asks something of you.

I am still building that layer myself. But reading CP’s work has given me a clearer picture of what it actually looks like in practice.

Go subscribe to CP at cpleveragingai.substack.com. He builds and documents in public and the thinking is worth following.

P.S.

Have you ever taken time off and felt that background anxiety the whole time, the math running whether you liked it or not? Drop a comment below. I want to know how common this actually is.

P.P.S.

This newsletter will always be free. But if you want to back the mission — you can contribute here. Every contributor gets a shout out in the next edition. This week's goes to Terry Darling, the first person to back this newsletter — thank you, it means more than a coffee's worth. ☕

I went to the nearby golf practice range, set up my ball, took a big swing, and watched it travel about 80 metres at a 45-degree angle directly into the net on the right side.

The guy in the next bay pretended not to notice.

I have been playing golf for just over a year now. And I want to be completely honest with you before I say anything else: I am not good at it. My handicap is the kind of number that makes experienced golfers do a very polite smile-and-nod when they hear it. I mis-hit balls regularly. I three-putt greens I have no business three-putting. I have had holes where I would rather not say how many shots it took.

And yet I show up every week. Because something started happening around the three or four month mark that I did not expect.

Golf started teaching me things.

Not motivational poster things. Not generic “trust the process” things. Specific, uncomfortable, actually-useful things about building a newsletter, creating products, and growing something real when you are a regular person with a full-time job and a limited number of hours.

I run The Sustainable Solopreneur newsletter on the side. I have around 400+ subscribers. I have a few digital products on Gumroad. I collaborate with other writers on Substack. All of this happens around my day job, on evenings and weekends, in stolen windows of time.

I am not someone who has built a six-figure business and is now reflecting on the journey from the top. I am in the middle of it right now. And somewhere in the last year, I started noticing that the lessons showing up on the golf course were the same lessons showing up in my business.

Welcome back to Wisdom Wednesday.

This is the series where I slow down, step back from the tactics and the strategy, and share something more personal. Not frameworks. Not step-by-step systems. Just honest reflections from the middle of building something, shared the same way I would share them with a friend over coffee.

Today that reflection comes from the golf course. Six things the game taught me that I could not have learned anywhere else.

Let’s get into it.

Lesson 1: Swinging Harder Almost Never Helps

Here is the first thing that surprised me about golf.

If you try to hit the ball as hard as you physically can, it almost always goes wrong. You tense up, your timing falls apart, the club face twists slightly, and the ball flies off somewhere it was never meant to go.

The shots that actually travel far are the ones that look almost lazy. Smooth, controlled, unhurried. The power does not come from effort at the moment of impact. It comes from the mechanics being right throughout the whole swing.

When I see someone building online who decides to post seven times a day, be on every platform simultaneously, run DM campaigns, launch a course, record a podcast, and start a YouTube channel all at once, my first reaction is not to judge them.

That approach can work. I want to be clear about that. If you have a team, if you can afford to outsource content, if you have a VA handling repurposing, if you have budget for ads, then yes, more output across more channels genuinely does mean more growth. Plenty of people do it and do it well.

But if you are a solopreneur. If you have a full-time job. If you are doing this in the hours that exist after work, after family, after everything else, then trying to do all of that at once is the hard swing. It looks like effort. It usually goes sideways.

What has worked for me is doing less, better. One platform. One clear focus. One post per week that I actually spent time thinking about. The content that has compounded for me, the posts that still bring in new subscribers months after they were written, those came from slowing down enough to write something worth reading. Not from hitting publish as fast as possible.

The internet is already full of people publishing as fast as they can. The ones who stand out are usually the ones who slowed down long enough to be worth remembering.

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Lesson 2: One Bad Hole Does Not Ruin the Round

In golf, every hole you play adds to your total score. There is no erasing a bad one. If you take seven shots on a hole where three is expected, those extra four shots are on the card permanently.

You can only play the next shot.

I had a hole like that early on. Seven shots on a par three, which just means a hole where you are expected to get the ball in with three shots. My playing partner watched me struggle through it, then said something very simply when I walked off the green:

“Forget it. It is already written down.”

He meant: there is nothing you can do about that hole now. Getting upset about it, dwelling on it, letting it poison your mood, none of that changes the number on the card. All it does is make the next hole harder.

I kept bumping into this exact same pattern in my newsletter.

The post that I spent a week on and got less open rate. The post I was proud of that nobody shared. The product launch where I refreshed Gumroad for two days and nothing happened.

Every one of those felt, in the moment, like a sign that something was fundamentally broken. My instinct was to panic. Rethink everything. Spend an afternoon comparing my numbers to people doing better.

The thing is, everyone has these. Every writer I have spoken to who has built something real has had months where nothing worked. Issues nobody opened. Products that did not sell. The ones who kept going did not do so because they found a way to avoid bad holes. They did it because they stopped letting each bad hole contaminate the next shot.

The bad post is already written down. The question is what you are doing this week.

Lesson 3: You Are Playing the Course, Not the Other Players

Most recreational golf is scored against the course, not against the other players. Your score is just: how many shots did it take you to complete all the holes? The person playing next to you could shoot brilliantly or terribly and it would not change what you needed to do on any single shot.

When I play my best rounds, I am thinking about my own shot. Where do I want the ball to land. What angle gives me the best approach to the next hole. What club makes sense for this distance.

When I play my worst rounds, I am watching my playing partner. He just hit a long drive so I try to match it. He made a bold shot over the trees so I attempt the same thing even though I know I should take the safe route. My decisions are driven by what he is doing rather than what my game actually calls for.

Honestly, I do this in my newsletter too and I have to catch myself every time.

I follow writers in the same space who have 10,000 subscribers. I see their engagement. I read about someone’s launch. And without realising it, I start thinking I should be doing whatever they are doing, even when what they are doing is built for a completely different situation.

A creator with a full-time team can post every day. Someone who went viral once has a different starting point than someone who did not. A person writing in a completely different niche, with a different audience, for different reasons, is playing a different course to me.

Their score is data. It is not instructions.

The posts that have performed best for me came from ignoring all of that and asking one simple question: what do the people who subscribed to me specifically actually need to read this week? Four hundred people chose to receive my emails for specific reasons. What does this particular group of people need from me right now?

That is your course. Everyone else’s scorecard is interesting to glance at. But it does not tell you what shot to hit next.

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Lesson 4: The Practice Does Not Show on the Scorecard, But It Shows Up in the Round

Golfers spend a significant amount of time at the practice range, hitting ball after ball, working on their technique. None of this practice appears anywhere in your actual round score. You cannot add “practiced for two hours Tuesday” to your card.

But it shows up anyway. In the shots that feel easy instead of forced. In the decisions you make without panicking. In the technique that holds even when the pressure is on.

I made a mistake in my early months of building online. I treated anything that did not produce a published piece as wasted time. If I was not writing, I was not building. Everything else felt like procrastination.

This is the equivalent of a golfer refusing to ever practice because practice does not count on the scorecard.

The reading I do, the newsletters I study, the ideas file I add to whenever something interesting crosses my mind, the half hour I spend thinking through what a reader might actually need before I open a blank document, none of this produces a post directly. But all of it makes the posts better. The thinking time, the observation, the quiet accumulation of things worth saying, that is the driving range.

I also want to say something slightly uncomfortable here: AI has made the output side of content creation very fast. You can generate a first draft in minutes. What you cannot shortcut is having something worth saying in that draft. The practice, the reading, the thinking, the real experience you bring to a piece, that is the stuff AI cannot replicate for you. That is your driving range and nobody else can do it for you.

The round score reflects everything that happened before you teed off. Invest in your range sessions even when they do not feel productive.

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Lesson 5: Measure Yourself Against Your Own Last Round

Golf has a handicap system designed to let players of very different skill levels compete fairly. Your handicap is calculated entirely from your own recent scores compared to the difficulty of the course. It only cares about one thing: are you playing better than you did before?

It does not factor in what anyone else shot. It does not care about the professional golfer on TV. It does not compare you to your playing partner. Just you, getting better or not against your own baseline.

I grew from zero to 400 Substack subscribers in three months. Is that fast or slow?

Genuinely, the answer depends entirely on who you compare to, which means the question is almost useless as a measure of anything real.

Compared to some newsletters that never make it past 50 subscribers, it is fine. Compared to the top 1% of Substack creators, it is tiny. Compared to my own month-one baseline where I had zero, it is accelerating.

The only number that tells me something actually actionable is the one I compare to my own last round. Did this issue get a better open rate than last week’s? Are more people replying than they were a month ago? Is my subscriber growth consistent or dropping?

Every other comparison is just watching someone else play their game on their course with their resources and trying to figure out what it means for yours.

Lesson 6: The Mental Game Is Most of the Game

Ask any golf instructor where their students lose most of their shots and they will tell you: it is not the technique. It is the head.

A short putt is when the ball is very close to the hole, maybe two feet away, and you just need to tap it in gently. You have made this shot hundreds of times in practice. There is nothing technically difficult about it. And yet somehow on the actual course, on the actual round, when it counts, people miss it. Not because their putting technique broke down. Because they stood over the ball thinking about missing it.

I do this in building too and I suspect you might recognise it.

Every time I write something that feels too personal, I hesitate before publishing. Every time I share a number that is smaller than I wish it were, there is a version of me that wants to wait until the number is bigger and more impressive before writing about it. Every time I put out something that might look naive to someone more experienced, I feel it.

None of those hesitations have anything to do with the actual quality of what I wrote. They are the equivalent of standing over a two-foot putt thinking about missing it.

The writers I respect most, the ones who have built real audiences, almost all of them started sharing before they felt ready. They wrote about things that felt too personal. They posted numbers that were not impressive. They put things out when they were still figuring it out, because they trusted that doing the work was worth more than waiting until they felt confident enough to show it.

That is the mental game. You can have something genuinely worth saying and still lose it to the overthinking. Or you can hit the putt while the thoughts are still happening, trusting that you practiced enough to make it.

I am still working on this one. Probably always will be.

But I keep showing up to the course.

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Bonus: The Game Rewards Patience More Than Talent

I want to end with something that I think about a lot.

I have played rounds with people who are clearly more naturally gifted at golf than I am. Better coordination. Quicker to pick things up. More athletic background. Better instincts from the start.

Some of them stopped playing after a few months because progress felt too slow. The improvement was not coming as fast as they expected and it stopped feeling worth it.

I am still out there every week, hitting balls sideways, occasionally hitting them beautifully, slowly getting better.

The people who are still writing on Substack in two years are not going to be the most talented writers who started this year. They are not going to be the ones with the biggest initial networks or the cleverest strategies or the most natural charisma on camera.

They are going to be the ones who kept showing up when the round was going badly. The ones who treated a bad month as a bad stretch of holes rather than a reason to quit. The ones who measured their improvement against their own baseline instead of someone else’s.

Patience is not a personality trait. It is a competitive advantage. And it is available to anyone willing to use it.

One Last Thing

I wrote this on a Sunday evening after coming back from the practice range.

I hit some good shots. I hit some terrible ones. My technique is inconsistent. My scores are still embarrassing.

But I drove home thinking about what I want to write next week, which collabs I am excited about, and what I want to build in the coming months.

That feeling does not come from the scores. It comes from showing up consistently at something that challenges you and choosing to find the lessons in it rather than just the results.

Still working on my swing. Always will be.

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If You Are Building a Newsletter and Want a System Behind It

Everything in this post comes back to one idea: having the right system behind you makes the game easier. Same is true for Substack.

The Substack Notes Starter Pack ($1) is 30 fill-in-the-blank Substack Notes templates across 6 categories: hooks, stories, value posts, social proof, product notes, and engagement. Pick a template, fill in the blanks, post. Done in 5 minutes.

The Substack Growth Engine ($9) is 23 detailed AI prompts covering newsletter growth, digital product creation, and converting readers into buyers. Built for solopreneurs with 3 to 5 hours a week. Not one-liner prompts. Full structured instruction sets that produce usable output on the first run.

P.S.

Which of these six lessons hit closest to home for you right now? For me it is the mental game. I know what I need to do. I just need to stop standing over the putt thinking about everything that could go wrong.

Drop yours in the comments. I genuinely want to know.

P.P.S.

Have you ever picked up a hobby as an adult that unexpectedly taught you something about your work or your business? Golf did it for me. I am curious what yours was.

Share it below. Some of the best conversations on this newsletter have started in the comments section.

The pitch was electric. Build a blog, get paid to travel, land hotel sponsorships, work from anywhere. I love travelling, it is one of my non-negotiables in life alongside golf, and the idea of turning that into income felt like everything coming together at once.

I did not stop to think. I bought the course.

Three thousand dollars. On my credit card.

I paid the installments for months. I started a blog. I went through the course material. Eight months later, I walked away from travel blogging completely and never looked back.

The course itself was genuinely good. Well structured, practical, detailed. But I had bought it before I knew whether I actually wanted to blog. I had bought the vision in the pitch — the hotel stays, the free trips, the lifestyle rather than the reality of the work. And the reality of blogging, I discovered slowly and expensively, was something I did not enjoy at all.

That $3,000 bought me a lesson I could have learned for free.

This is not a post about whether you should invest in yourself. You should. The most successful people I study pour money into courses, masterminds, coaches and programmes. Self-investment is one of the highest-return moves a builder can make.

The harder question is knowing which one you are doing before you hit the checkout page.

Welcome back to Monday Models!

This is the series where I break down the models, strategies, and frameworks that solopreneurs can actually use to build sustainably alongside a full life. This edition: the self-investment model — how to think like a venture capitalist before you swipe your debit/credit card.

I am joined by from Money and Mindset. Shalini built financial freedom through simple systems rather than motivation. She writes about building wealth and career growth without burnout. She is, as I told her directly, significantly better with money than I am. Which is why this collaboration makes sense.

Shalini takes the financial architecture side: what the VC model actually looks like when applied to self-investment, and how to run the numbers before making the call. I take the behavioural side: how courses get sold, why smart people still fall for the urgency trap, and the simple test I now run before spending anything significant.

What Investing in Yourself Actually Means Financially

[ Shalini ]

Warren Buffett said the best investment you can make is in yourself. I live by that every day.

But the important thing most people miss is..

An investment gives you a return whereas a purchase gives you a feeling. Both are fine. But you need to know which one you are doing before you part with your money.

I’ve certainly fallen into the trap of purchasing for the feeling and learnt from my mistakes.

Here is the financial lens I use to cut through the emotion and make a decision as to whether I am investing or impulse buying. Every investment should meet these 3 criteria.

1. It should solve a specific problem I am trying to solve right now:

Not a problem I might have someday. Not a lifestyle I would like to have. A real, current, defined problem. The more specific, the better. “I want to be smarter about money” is not a problem. “I have been meaning to start investing for two years and still have not opened a brokerage account” is a problem. Investments solve problems. Purchases buy hope.

2. It should have 10x return potential

The best self-investments are asymmetric. You put in $1,000. The skill you build generates $10,000 over time. That math has to make sense on paper before you commit. If you cannot articulate the return in concrete terms, the decision you’re making is not financial, it’s emotional.

3. You should be ready to take the value the course provides

This is the most important one and yet most of us skip it.

Think about the treadmill. Less than a quarter of people who buy one use it regularly. They bought it with every intention of using it. But, life happened, motivation faded. The equipment sat there collecting dust.

A course is not an investment if you are not going to do anything with it. The question is never whether the coaching program is good. The question is whether you are in the position to act on what you learnt right now.

This is where the three resources come in: time, money, and skill. Think of them as the three legs of a stool.

Early in your journey, you likely have more time than money. Use that time. Do the work manually. Try things with free tools before you pay to shortcut them. In the process, you’ll build skill and skill is what eventually makes your money work disproportionately harder. The goal is to stop trading time for money and start using skill to generate returns your time alone never could.

Almost always, you are better off investing time before money, especially when you’re starting something new

The clearest financial signal that an investment is real: you have already been doing the thing consistently, you know exactly what is slowing you down, and this purchase solves that specific problem. That is an investment. Everything else is a purchase dressed up as one.

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Why Smart People Still Fall for the Urgency Trap

[ Vinayak ]

This was four years ago. I knew nothing about email marketing back then. I had no idea how launch sequences were constructed or why they made me feel the way they did.

I understand it now.

I have spent the last couple of years working as an email copywriter, studying how campaigns are built and why they convert. And looking back at the travel blogging course purchase, I can see exactly what was done to me.

Most coaches send one or two emails a week to their list. During a product/course launch, that changes completely. Emails come every day. Sometimes more. Each one builds on the last. Early emails share value, build credibility, plant the idea. Then the testimonials start arriving. Someone quit their job within 30 days of joining. Someone made their first $1,000 within 24 hours. The success stories stack up deliberately, one after another.

Then the bonuses get revealed. Five of them, if you act now.

Then the payment plans because money should never be the thing standing between you and your transformation.

Then the deadline. The price goes up at midnight. Thousands of people are already inside. You are watching them pull ahead while you sit on the fence.

The final email does not ask you to buy. It makes you feel guilty for not having bought yet.

I did not know any of this at the time. I just felt the pull of it and thought the feeling was my own decision.

What was actually driving me had nothing to do with the deadline. I saw the pitch, imagined the life it described — free travel via sponsorships, hotel invitations, a creative business built around something I already loved and I was sold before I had read half the page. The emails and the countdown timer were just the mechanism that got me to act on a decision I had already emotionally made.

Eight months later, I was not that person. I was not a travel blogger. I was someone paying off a credit card bill for a course that had taught me something I could not use.

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The Framework — Questions to Ask Before You Buy

[ Shalini ]

Before you spend anything significant on yourself, run through these seven questions honestly.

1. What specific outcome am I buying and by when?

Vague outcomes are a red flag. “I want to grow my business” is not an outcome. “I want to learn Facebook ads so I can run campaigns for clients by Q3 and add $2,000 a month” is an outcome. If you cannot fill in the specifics, you are not ready to buy yet.

2. Do I love the idea of this — or the actual work?

This is the question most sales pages are designed to prevent you from asking. A great pitch sells you a vision: the travel, the freedom, the income, the lifestyle. None of that is the work. The work is the blog posts, the SEO, the Pinterest pins, the algorithm. Before you spend money entering a field, ask yourself honestly: do I want to do that work on a Tuesday afternoon when no one is watching and nothing is going well? That is the version of this you are actually buying.

3. Is money the right resource to invest right now — or is it time?

Think about the three resources you have: time, money, and skill. Early in any new pursuit, you almost always have more time available than you have clarity about the problem you are trying to solve. Spending money before you have that clarity is premature. Paid tools and coaching are powerful — but only when you are specific enough about your sticking points for them to actually help. If you are still in the exploration phase, invest time first. Money comes later, when you know exactly what it is buying.

4. Have I done the free version first?

Almost everything you want to learn has a free path in — YouTube, podcasts, communities, books. Spending 60 to 90 days with free resources does two things: it confirms you actually enjoy the work, and it surfaces the specific problems you are stuck on. That clarity makes the paid investment, when you do make it, a much sharper decision. A bit of struggle is important. You need to do the hard thing first to understand the value of help.

5. Am I buying because I need this now, or because a deadline is making me feel like I do?

Urgency from a sales page is not the same as urgency from your situation. If the only reason you are buying tonight is the countdown timer, close the tab. The need will still be real tomorrow if it is genuinely real.

6. Can I actually afford to lose this money?

If this goes on a credit card and makes next month tight, the risk calculation changes entirely. Investing from financial stress is not investing — it is gambling with money you cannot afford to lose. Real self-investment happens from a position of stability, not desperation.

7. Would I still want this if I waited 72 hours?

Most impulse purchases do not survive 72 hours of calm thinking. Most real investments do. If you want it just as clearly on Thursday as you did Monday — that is a signal worth listening to.

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The Free Test First

[ Vinayak ]

After the travel blogging experience, I made myself a rule.

Before spending significant money on learning anything, I have to try the free version first. For long enough to know whether I actually enjoy doing the work — not just the idea of the work.

If I had spent two months attempting travel blogging with free resources first, I would have discovered what nobody in the sales pitch mentioned.

Writing is the easy part. The rest is a full operation. A self-hosted WordPress site to build and maintain. SEO research for every post. Pinterest pins to publish consistently if you want traffic. Multiple social platforms to manage. Tools to pay for. And the Google algorithm, which does not stay still long enough for you to catch up with it before it changes again.

I was naive. I had completely underestimated the scope of what travel blogging actually required. That is not the course creator’s fault, the course covered all of it. I just had not tried any of it before handing over $3,000, so I had no idea whether I was willing to take on those challenges or not. You only find that out by doing it. And doing it costs nothing upfront.

That discovery would have cost me nothing but time.

Instead I paid $3,000 to learn it eight months later.

The courses are not going away. The masterminds will run again. If a programme genuinely solves a problem you are already trying to solve, and you have already tried solving it with what is freely available, then spending on it makes sense. That is a real investment decision.

If you are buying a course to enter a field you have never tried, because a pitch made it look irresistible, that is a different situation. Give yourself the free test first. Try the thing for sixty, ninety days. See if you still want to do it when no one is pitching you on the vision.

There will be another launch. Another cohort. Another set of bonuses. THERE ALWAYS IS!!

What you will not get back is the months you spend paying off a purchase that did not fit where you actually wanted to go.

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The Playbook

[ Vinayak ]

Self-investment is one of the most powerful moves a builder can make. The people doing this at the highest level invest heavily in their own growth, consistently and deliberately. This post is not an argument against spending on yourself.

It is an argument for making that decision with your head, not your heartrate at the end of a launch email.

Before the next purchase: run the financial framework Shalini laid out. Ask whether you can afford to lose the money. Ask what specific outcome you are buying and when. Then ask yourself honestly whether you have done the free test. Whether you have tried this without paying first and found you wanted more.

If the answer is yes to all of that — buy the course. Invest in the mastermind. Pay the coach. Those investments compound.

If the deadline is the only reason you are buying tonight, close the tab. It will still be there. And so will you, with more information and a clearer head.

[ Shalini ]
If there’s one thing I want you to walk away with, it is this.

Wealth is not built by spending more on yourself. It is built by spending right on yourself. Identify the difference.

The most expensive investment you will ever make is the one you were not ready for. Because you had not done the work to know what problem you were actually solving.

Want less things. Specifically, want less things that promise to transform you overnight. The best investments are boring. They solve a specific problem, they compound quietly over time, and they require you to show up long after the excitement of buying has worn off.

Before you spend money, spend time. Before you spend time, get clear on the problem. The money decision is actually the last decision — not the first.

If this way of thinking about self-investment resonated, drop a comment below. What is the most expensive course or programme you ever bought and did it pay off? Genuinely curious. The answers always surprise me.

writes about building wealth and career growth through simple systems. Find her at Money and Mindset.

Here’s how Shalini built financial freedom working in a 9 to 5:

Shalini: Money and Mindset

We Both Work 9-to-5s. Here Are The 2 Ways We're Building Real Wealth.

Most people think building real wealth means either grinding 80-hour weeks running a business or getting lucky with crypto. Both are terrible strategies. If you want to build wealth while keeping your sanity and your 9-to-5, stocks and real estate are your best bets…

Read more

6 months ago · 15 likes · 13 comments · Shalini and David Oliveira

writes about building a sustainable side business alongside a busy life. Find him at The Sustainable Solopreneur.

If this resonated, subscribe to both:

Money and Mindset & The Sustainable Solopreneur

— Shalini & Vinayak

P.S. — I want to be clear about something. The $3,000 I spent was not wasted. I learned things from that course. The problem was not the course, it was the decision that led me there. That is the distinction worth carrying into the next time something expensive shows up in your inbox.

A restack on this one puts it in front of someone who is probably staring at a sales page right now, trying to decide. They need the framework more than the hype. Send it their way.

A posting schedule. A weekly routine. A tool for every step of the process. I had done what every creator, every productivity guru, every “build your online business” course told me to do.

I had a system, and for a while, it worked.

Content was going out on time. I was showing up consistently. It felt like I finally stopped overthinking and started doing.

Then, slowly, without any single dramatic moment, I stopped. The system just went quiet. The tabs stayed closed. The schedule sat untouched. One skipped week became two, became a month.

I have done this more than once. Across different side businesses, blogging, affiliate marketing, content creation, publishing. Each time, the early weeks felt like proof I was serious. Each time, somewhere around month three or four, the system quietly collapsed.

And each time, I told myself the same thing.

I am just not built for this.

That thought is the most expensive lie in the side hustle world. And I believed it for years.

Welcome back to Wisdom Wednesday!

This is the series where I skip the frameworks and talk honestly about the inner work of building something real alongside a full life. No step-by-step formulas. No recycled advice. Just real reflection on what it actually takes to keep going.

This edition is about the moment every builder eventually hits: when the system stops working. Why it happens, what it actually means, and what we tend to get completely wrong about it.

That’s why I’m joined by from The House of Rhythm.

Willemijn writes around a deceptively simple idea: linear systems assume you’re always the same. Rhythm works with how you actually move. She writes about the architecture underneath our work and lives, and she has a way of naming things that most productivity writing conveniently skips over.

In this post, I handle the experience side: what it looks and feels like from the inside when a system starts to break. Willemijn handles the structural side: what’s actually happening underneath that shift, and what changes when you design around how you actually move.

Why Systems Feel Like They’re Working (At First)

[Vinayak]

What makes this so confusing is that the system did work, at first. It tells you that you are serious. You have a schedule. A process. A routine. You are someone who is building it.

That distinction matters enormously in the early weeks, when there is no audience, no revenue, and almost nothing external to prove the work is real.

So the system becomes the proof.

And for a while, it genuinely works. Content goes out. You show up. You hit your targets. The structure gives you clarity, the output gives you momentum, and the momentum gives you something to hold onto through the days when the results still haven’t shown up yet.

BUT! {There’s always a but!!}

What nobody mentions about that phase: it is partly real, and partly borrowed energy.

The system is real. The output is real. But a significant part of what keeps you going in those first weeks is novelty. The fresh-start feeling. The satisfaction of finally having begun. In week one, the system runs on motivation. In week three, it runs on habit forming. By week eight, it has to run on something else entirely.

Most side hustle systems were not designed for that “something else.”

They were built by full-time creators with different schedules, different energy budgets, and no competing demands on their attention. Using them with your constraints is like running demanding software on hardware it was never designed for. It will run. For a while. Until it doesn’t.

There are ways to build a side business that actually survives your real life, not an idealised version of it. It comes down to a few simple rules and principles. Something I’ve been exploring more deeply in my own work.

By the time the system cracks, something else has already shifted underneath it.

That’s where Willemijn comes in.

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What’s Actually Happening Underneath

[Willemijn]

What Vinayak describes isn’t failure, it’s exposure. Not of your discipline, but of the system itself. For a brief moment, it reveals what it actually requires to keep running: continuity, stability, a version of you that moves in a straight line.

That requirement is rarely made explicit. It sits underneath the system as an assumption. Work is organised as if thinking, creating, and executing can happen at the same level, in the same moment, repeatedly. As if energy holds steady, and variation is the exception rather than the rule.

Most structures are built around fixed timing, visible output, and continuous availability. They assume you can show up in the same way, at the same time, regardless of what is actually available to you.

But underneath that surface, that system that we are all moving in, something else is moving. Not in a straight line, but in cycles. Periods of intensity, followed by slower phases where things settle, integrate, or simply stop.

These shifts are not interruptions. They are part of how capacity actually functions. And yet, these systems became standard not because they are accurate, but because they are visible, measurable, and easy to organise.

The friction starts where those two layers meet. Not because the system breaks, but because there is no place within it where that variation can exist without being interpreted as loss. A slower phase does not register as part of a cycle. It registers as a deviation and met with judgment. That it is your fault. Sometimes from the environment, almost always from ourselves.

So the system doesn’t collapse in one moment. It becomes harder to return to. Not because the work changed, but because the structure was never designed to hold how it actually unfolds.

What you experience as inconsistency or a personal flaw is often something else entirely: a system that cannot contain the way you move.

You’re not inconsistent. Your system is.

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The Story We Tell Ourselves When It Breaks

[Vinayak]

The moment a system stops running, most people do not examine the system.

They look inward.

I am not disciplined enough. I do not want it badly enough. Other people are just wired differently.

I have had this exact conversation with myself across different side businesses, different formats, different years. Each time the outcome was the same: I concluded it was a character flaw, went looking for a better system, started strong, and repeated the same cycle three or four months later.

This loop is exhausting. And it is built on the wrong diagnosis.

Here is what was actually true: I was trying to maintain a system designed for someone with no competing demands on their time, energy, or attention. And I was attempting this while holding a full-time job, managing side hustle commitments, keeping up a social life, and occasionally navigating a week where everything decided to go sideways at once.

The borrowed system was never going to survive those weeks. Not because of a personal failing, but because it was not built to. It was built for a version of you that has unlimited fuel and a predictable life. That version does not exist.

Real life, for most people building something on the side, looks like this: no two weeks are the same. Energy rises and falls. Motivation runs high after a small win and runs dry after three months of invisible progress. The morning you planned to create becomes a morning you are just trying to get through. And some days, Mercury goes retrograde and takes a toll on your mind for no reason!

A system that only works on good weeks is not really a system. It is an aspiration.

And the cruellest part is that the self-blame loop makes everything harder. Because once you have decided you are not built for this, you stop redesigning the system and start trying to redesign yourself. You add more discipline. More pressure. More habit trackers. More six-week challenges. And the system still collapses, because the architecture was never the problem you were solving.

This is not a discipline problem. It is an architecture problem. Architecture can be fixed.

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What Changes When You Design Around How You Actually Move

[Willemijn]

When you have tried everything, the doubt starts to shift.

Why can’t I stay consistent?

Why am I tired without knowing why?

Why does this seem to work for everyone else, but not for me?

That question feels personal. But it isn’t.

What looks like inconsistency is often something else entirely: a structure that does not hold how you actually move.

So instead of trying harder or reaching for another productivity system, I started redesigning the underlying structure. A blueprint that works with my rhythm, instead of forcing me into one that isn’t mine.

When you redesign the architecture beneath your work, the experience of work changes immediately. Not because you became more disciplined, but because the system stops asking for something you cannot sustain.

Most systems are built around one dominant state: Action. Output is visible, measurable, and therefore prioritised. Everything else is expected to fit around it. Clarity is squeezed into small moments between obligations. Flow is fragmented. Release is postponed or ignored entirely.

When you redesign the structure around your rhythms, this is where the distortion becomes visible. Your system is not moving in one line. It is constantly shifting among four states: Clarity, Flow, Action, and Release.

Not as steps, but as conditions. Each requires a different kind of attention, a different pace, a different form of capacity.

These rhythms are not missing. They are collapsed into one demand.

So you are asked to decide while executing. To create while being interrupted. To recover while staying available. And when that fails, it is interpreted as inconsistency.

What changes is not the work, but the distribution of these states.

Clarity is no longer reactive. Flow is no longer interrupted. Action is no longer endless. Release is no longer negotiable.

And for the first time, capacity becomes visible. You can see when something is full, not because you feel exhausted, but because the structure shows it. Work stops where it should. Rest no longer needs to be justified.

Nothing becomes easier. But everything becomes contained.

Flow stops being something you try to reach. It becomes something that can happen, because the other rhythms are no longer in the way.

Not because you adapted to the system, but because the system finally reflects how you actually move.

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What We Both Know Now

[Vinayak]

If your system has quietly collapsed on you, I want to say something plainly.

That was not proof that you are not cut out for this.

It was proof that the system was built on the wrong assumptions.

Most side hustle advice was not designed for people with busy lives. It was designed by people who removed their constraints and packaged the result as universal guidance. It is not. And the longer you keep trying to fit your actual life into someone else’s system, the longer you delay building one that fits yours.

The goal is not to never have a bad week. The goal is to build something that is still running when the bad week ends.

Slow and still here beats fast and gone. Every single time.

[Willemijn]

When it becomes visible where the system does not hold, it becomes difficult to keep treating the problem as personal. What looks like inconsistency is often something else entirely: a structure that cannot contain the way you actually move.

Because the work itself does not unfold in one continuous line. It shifts between moments of clarity, flow, action and release. Not as steps, but as different conditions. And when those are treated as one, the system will always rely on you to compensate.

So the question is not how to stay consistent within the system, but whether the system can hold how the work actually unfolds.

writes about rhythm, linear systems, and the architecture underneath work. She has developed The Blueprint as a structure that works with how you actually move. She publishes at The House of Rhythm.

writes about building a sustainable side business alongside a day job. He publishes at The Sustainable Solopreneur.

— Willemijn & Vinayak

P.S. — I have been in that “I’m not built for this” loop more times than I want to admit. Writing this post was partly for me too. If you have ever rebuilt a side hustle after walking away from one, I genuinely want to know what made you come back. Drop it in the comments. It might become the next Wisdom Wednesday.

P.P.S. A restack puts this in front of someone who is probably sitting with a dead tab open right now, wondering whether to try again. That person needs to read this.

I have been deep in collab season for the past couple of months, which has been great, but also means I have not sat down and written something purely mine in a while.

So here I am back with Tools Thursday edition.

Before I get into the product, I want to say something I think a lot of us feel but rarely talk about.

We are living in the most information-rich era in history. AI can literally help you build a business from scratch. Every tool, every framework, every shortcut exists and most of it is free or close to free. And yet most people are still stuck. Still not starting. Still not shipping.

I think about this a lot. And I do not think the problem is laziness.

I think it is what happens when you try to drink from a fire hose. There is so much coming at you that you just stop swallowing. New AI update. New trend. New creator saying do it this way. You end up consuming everything and executing nothing.

Information without execution is just noise.

I am not immune to this. I feel it too. There are things I keep postponing. Workflows I know I should build but have not touched. Even with all the AI tools available to me, the mental block is real. I know exactly where that paralysis comes from because I live in it sometimes.

But I am a few steps ahead on some things. And when I figure something out, I try to package it so you do not have to go through the same back and forth I did.

Sometimes what you need is not more information. You need someone to hand you the system and say: do it in this order, now go!

That is the whole idea behind this product.

Fair warning: this post is partly promotional. I am sharing one of my own products today.

But the reason I am writing it now is not because I planned a launch. It is because the reviews started coming in and I could not help sharing them.

This is a building in public update wrapped inside a Tools Thursday recommendation.

Let me tell you the whole story.

The Backstory

For a while I had been thinking about putting together a prompt pack. Something that would make the whole process of building a digital product faster. Every time I sat down to create something I would go back and forth with AI, figure out the right prompts, refine them, build a structure. It worked but it took time.

I kept thinking: if I had all of this in one place, in the right order, I could probably do the whole thing in one sitting.

But of course I kept postponing actually making it.

Then one day I had plans to go out. Rain cancelled everything.

So I sat at home, opened my laptop, and thought: okay. Today is the day. I am going to build this prompt pack.

Two hours later it was done and live on Gumroad.

That experience became the product itself. I had just done the exact thing I wanted other people to be able to do. Go from idea to live in one afternoon.

Now about the pricing. I originally thought about giving it away for free.

But I have seen how free things work. People download them, they sit in a folder somewhere, and they never get opened. The file just gathers digital dust.

So I charged $1. Not because I needed the money. Because when you put even a tiny amount on the line, something shifts. You actually open it. You actually do the thing.

One dollar is the price of accountability. That is it.

What Is Inside the Kit

15+ copy-paste AI prompts covering every step from zero to live Gumroad listing. In order. No jumping around.

Step 1: Find Your Idea

Prompts to brain dump your expertise, validate whether there is actual demand, and pick the right product to build first. Most people get stuck here for months. These prompts cut through that.

Step 2: Create the Product

Structure, content outline, quick-start guide, all generated using prompts tailored to four product types: PDF guides, templates, checklists, and prompt packs. Pick your format and follow the matching set.

Step 3: Set Up Gumroad

Product description, FAQ section, thumbnail brief. All done for you. Fill in the blanks and you are live.

Step 4: Launch and Announce

Social posts, email to your list, soft-sell comments. The full launch sequence. Not just the creation part. Most people skip this and then wonder why nothing sold.

Quick note on how to use this with AI:

The first response AI gives you is never your final output. Use the prompts to generate a draft, then push back, refine, add your own story and experience. The people who get the most out of AI are the ones who keep going past that first response. Treat it like a conversation, not a vending machine. You will be surprised how much better the output gets when you just keep going.

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Why I Am Sharing This Today

This product has been live for over a month now. I have not really pushed it hard. But the reviews started coming in and reading them genuinely made me want to write this post.

Three people picked it up and left reviews. All three actually used it and shipped something. That is the thing that got me.

Patrick’s review:

Mick’s review:

Dominic’s review:

Patrick purchased it and had a live Gumroad product the next morning. Mick said it would have saved him hours of experimenting with random ideas. Dominic said to just follow the instructions and you can have your first product in a weekend.

I built this because I was fed up watching people overthink their first product for months. The problem is never the idea. It is always the gap between having the idea and actually having something live. This kit closes that gap.

Three people used it. Three people shipped. That is all I needed to write this post.

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Is This For You?

Yes, if:

• You have been thinking about a digital product for a while but keep putting it off

• You have skills or knowledge but no idea how to package it into something sellable

• You want a clear step-by-step system you can follow in one sitting

• You are comfortable using AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude

• You can block two to three hours this weekend to actually execute

Not for you if:

• You want a magic button that generates income without effort

• You want someone to hold your hand through everything

• You expect your first product to be perfect or make you rich straight away

Your first product does not need to be perfect. It needs to be live. There is a real difference between those two things.

Get the Kit

The 3-Hour Digital Product Launch Kit is $1. Grab it here.

Once you have a product live, the next challenge is writing an offer page that actually converts. That is a different skill and it is where most people leave money on the table.

The No-Brainer G-Doc Offer Blueprint ($9) gives you the exact framework for structuring an offer that sells itself. Get it here.

Kit gets you from zero to live product. Blueprint gets you from live product to actual sales. That is the full loop.

P.S.

, , , if you are reading this, thank you. Genuinely. Seeing people actually use the thing I built and ship something because of it is the best feeling in this journey so far.

Would you guys mind dropping a link to your Gumroad product in the comments? I want people to see what one afternoon with the kit actually looks like in practice.

P.P.S.

I am already thinking about what to build next and I want your input. What is the biggest pain point you are dealing with right now in your solopreneur or content journey? What do you wish someone had just packaged into a simple resource for you? Drop it in the comments. I read all of them and your answer might become the next product.