I’m Quitting Substack

What 138 days of writing taught me. Why this isn’t working. Where I'm taking my writing next.

Building an audience is really, really, really hard

There is a correlation between the consistency you show up, the volume of things you produce and the growth of your audience. It requires you to become a content machine. The more consistently you show up, the more you publish, the more your audience grows. That’s the correlation. But the trade-off? Burnout.

You can romanticize it. Tell yourself, “I’m not doing it for the numbers; I’m doing it for my why.” But here’s the real question:

Have you already reached financial freedom?

Or do you live in a system like early-2000s poor but sexy Berlin, where money wasn't necessary to live a rich life (and sometimes not even to pay rent)?

If the answer is no, and you still need to generate income every month, you’re left with two options:

1. You write because you enjoy it.
Your income comes from somewhere else. And like most hobbies, you’ll dip in and out, do it when you feel like it. That means you won’t be consistent, you won’t produce in volume and you won’t build an audience.

2. You write because you hope it becomes your income.
In this case, writing is the job. You need to show up every day. You need to care about the numbers. You need to optimize.

It’s the difference between going for a swim because it helps you decompress...
And training to be an Olympic swimmer.

The swimmer hires a coach to fix their stroke. They study angles. They track times. They show up even when they don’t feel like it. They build the mental strength to perform under pressure.

For a professional athlete, swimming is a daily obsession towards optimization, or in other words: it’s a full time job. For me, swimming is a leisure activity that helps me decompress, or in other words: it’s a hobby.

The key difference: obsession.

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The game is rigged (but not against you personally)

After 138 days of this experiment, here’s the truth:
Treat something like a hobby, and it will feel good.
Treat it like a job, and eventually you’ll get good.

The catch? We’re programmed to treat our full-time jobs, the ones we do for someone else, as our daily obsessions. Even people who don’t particularly enjoy their jobs end up putting in the hours. Five days a week. Eight hours a day. Week after week. And that repetition, that sheer volume of time, turns them into experts, whether they intended to become one or not.

The truth is the more time you spend on something, the better you get. And the better you get, the more valuable your skills become: in ways people are willing to pay for.

And in today’s world, those rewards go disproportionately more to people using the analytical (left-brain) side, working in STEM fields (science, tech, engineering, math). These are the highest-paid roles. The ones making to the list of most wealthy.

But if you’re right-brained, drawn to creativity, humanities, art, and social sciences, the game gets harder. The financial system we live in pushes you toward a job and a steady paycheck. And your art becomes the side note.

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Not all hope is lost: you can make money writing

Here’s what I’ve learned over five months, after reading, researching, and watching others build writing-based income:

No Audience Required

These models don’t require visibility, just skill and access to clients:

• Freelance & Client Work: Ghostwriting, journalism, UX writing, scripts

• Editing & Writing Support: Proofreading, book coaching, content strategy

• Corporate or Technical Writing: Internal docs, whitepapers, training manuals

• Publishing a Book: With an original, unique fresh perspective (otherwise, to get a publishing deal a large audience is required).

• Grants, Fellowships, Contests: Funded time to write or create

Reality is that these options are all full-time jobs. You write for someone else, which means putting in the time to find those clients.

There’s only one avenue I find appealing: writing a long-form book. But I don’t see me having an original and crisp take like “Surround by Idiots”. Not yet.

Audience-Based Writing

These streams need some audience, but not always a big one.

Small/Niche Audience

• Paid Newsletters & Memberships: A few hundred loyal readers is enough

• Courses & Workshops: Teaching your expertise

• Digital Products: Prompts, templates, kits

• Self-Published Books/Zines: You own the process and profits

This path is interesting, but tricky. I’d need to define my niche, understand their problems, and build something meaningful. None of what I was able to do in the past months. And the hardest part? Selling. I think of Substackers turning every post into a pitch. That’s not the writing life I want.

Larger Audience

• Affiliate Marketing & Sponsorships: Ads that often requires scale

• Speaking or Consulting: Based on your thought leadership themes

• Syndication & Licensing: Repackaging essays, frameworks, IP

Now this sounds closer to what I envision for myself, especially the thought leadership angle. That’s where I’d love to spend my time. But of course, we circle right back to the beginning: building an audience is hard. It’s slow. It’s a grind. I know because I’ve been doing it for 138 days… and I have 45 subscribers to show for it.

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So what now?

Reading all this, the logical conclusion would be to quit. Seems like the odds are stacked against quitting my full-time corporate job for a writing-based life.

But here’s other perspective:

I’ve felt like I’ve been dedicating my whole life to this. But have I?

Let’s get analytical:

• I wrote 49 posts

• Let’s estimate I dedicate 1.5 hours writing + 1 hour follow-up per post (promoting, answering comments, planning, etc)

• Which amounts to 122.5 hours total

That’s 15.3 days over 5 months.
If mastery takes 10,000 hours, I’ve done 1.23%.
At this pace, I’ll need 30.4 years to get there.

A full-time job gets you to mastery level in 3.4 years.

I know this isn’t an exact science, it’s a rough estimate exercise. But it’s my way of showing myself that maybe the answer isn’t to quit, but to commit more intensely. To stop treating writing as a hobby and start honoring it as a daily obsession.

Which, if I’m honest, it already is. I read looking for structure, for finesse, for awe. I devour biographies trying to reverse-engineer how others cracked the code. Writing is the one habit I’ve kept since I first learned how, so if we’re counting the hours, it’s very likely I’ve already crossed 10,000 hours of the art mastery. Now I just need the hours to achieve the business level mastery.

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Time to Pivot

In my years as a startup founder, and watching countless others fail or succeed, one thing became clear: startups don’t fail because the idea is bad. They fail when the founders stop pivoting. The ones who keep going, who stay stubborn about the dream but flexible in the path, are the ones who eventually make it.

Like Henrique, who started with a VR company and ended up building a corporate card company. (Read about Brex here)

So that’s what I’m doing: pivoting.

Instead of focusing all my energy on building an audience here, around this personal journey, I’m shifting more of my writing to another corner of the internet (a space I opened years ago but never consistently nurtured) where I explore leadership questions.

These five months here taught me something very important: I can move from idea to publish much faster when I let go of perfectionism. Writing regularly helped me unlearn the need to polish endlessly.

I might come back to this space, maybe when I have something more personal to share. Or not. Only time will tell.