This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Amy Suto, a 32-year-old freelance writer based in San Francisco. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I started my career in Hollywood as a TV writer. By 2020, I was ghostwriting memoirs and traveling the world with my partner, now husband, Kyle Cords, to work with clients. Kyle was also a freelancer.
In June 2023, I started a Substack documenting the realities of being a working writer. People kept asking me, “How do you get these jobs?” In the same year, I published the book “Six-Figure Freelance Writer” to answer that question.
As my business grew, I became too busy to take on every client and started running out of people to refer them to. I remember working remotely in a café in Paris and realizing there had to be a better way to connect talented writers with clients.
That idea eventually became “Make Writing Your Job,” where writers can find opportunities and build sustainable careers, and it has become a successful side hustle for Kyle and me.
In 2024, I added the “Make Writing Your Job” job board to my Substack
I started posting writing opportunities from clients I couldn’t take on myself. It took off almost immediately. Kyle and I realized there was a huge demand, so we decided to expand it and scour the internet for freelance writing opportunities. I knew firsthand how scattered they were, and I wanted to make them easier for writers to find.
Beyond the job board, we’ve built a community for writers. We publish free resources, host interviews with bestselling authors, and run a long-running interview series called “The Guest Stack,” where we ask successful Substack creators how they built their audiences. Guests often share those interviews with their own readers, which has helped us grow.
My Substack grew because I showed up every single week
Since I started, I’ve never missed a week of publishing. Social media has been a huge tool for bringing in subscribers, but the majority of our paid subscribers have actually come through Substack itself. The platform still has a lot of organic discovery, and it reminds me of the early days of TikTok or YouTube, when creators could grow without already having a massive audience. I always tell writers and other creatives that now is a great time to get on the platform.
What I’m proudest of is that we’ve built this almost entirely without paid advertising. We’ve spent less than $100 on ads total, and that was only as an experiment. Figuring out how to earn that organic traffic has been the real magic.
We optimize headlines and articles for search so people can find us through Google and AI search engines, and we use social media and Substack Notes to reach new readers. Threads and LinkedIn have been other growth channels. I’ve found that if you’re a writer looking for readers, written-first platforms tend to perform much better than video-first ones.
It took us about 3 years to reach roughly $263,000 in annualized gross recurring revenue
The first year and a half was a slow, steady build, but once we launched our writing job board, growth accelerated fast. We charge $19 a month for standard membership, $550 a year for founding membership, and we also offer a free version. We crossed six figures in annualized revenue around the middle of 2025 and have more than doubled from there.
Today we’re a top-20 business bestseller on Substack, with more than 58,000 subscribers. We earn more than $263,000 in annual gross recurring revenue.
After Substack’s 10% fee and Stripe processing fees, we keep roughly 85 cents of every subscription dollar before our own expenses. Kyle and I both take a salary out of it, but it isn’t our only source of income, and it was never meant to be. We run it because we love it.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is to invest in genuinely valuable free content
This has been our biggest growth strategy. Not everyone is ready to subscribe right away, but if you consistently help people, many of them eventually become paying subscribers.
My advice to anyone starting a Substack is to write about the thing you genuinely can’t stop talking about. The beauty of the platform is that niche interests can thrive. Some of the most successful publications are personality-driven newsletters run by individual writers and artists with highly engaged audiences.
I often think about Kevin Kelly’s essay, “1,000 True Fans”
It argues that creators only need about 1,000 people who genuinely value their work and are willing to support it to reach a full-time income.
It feels like a gift to have crossed the 1,000 true fans mark. We hear from subscribers all the time who landed jobs through the board. We also run panels where people who landed those gigs explain how they did it. We’re expanding the discount partnerships with brands, too, so the membership keeps paying for itself by providing the tools people need to do the job well.
In the future, we have many ideas for how we want to continue supporting the writing community
Kyle and I are still freelancers, and we also work on CozyJobs, our job platform. We’ve talked about hosting a residency in San Francisco or putting together a conference. Recently, we’ve also started hosting in-person coffee meetups in different cities to give people a chance to connect offline.
I’ve published multiple books, including my latest, “Write for Money and Power.” Writing books remains an important part of my career, and the books send readers to my ghostwriting work.
Building our Substack has been an incredible bonus. It’s a side hustle, and my primary income still comes from freelance memoir ghostwriting. We feel genuinely lucky, and I’m incredibly grateful to the platform and the readers who’ve made it possible.
