Is There a Mass of Money in Substacks?

Josh Spector was blogging before most people even knew what a blog was. Over the span of a decade, he started and abandoned several of them, often before they had a chance to amass much of an audience. But in 2011 he got more serious about audience growth for a blog he ran that focused on teaching standup comedians how to market themselves, and to help drive traffic to it he launched a newsletter.

Pretty quickly, he grew addicted to the newsletter medium, and a few years later he merged a couple of newsletters he was running into a single list and renamed it For the Interested. Since 2016, he’s been sending out new issues each week featuring ideas to help creators to produce, promote, and profit from their creations. For the Interested now has over 25,000 subscribers, and Josh recently launched a paid spinoff newsletter.

I recently interviewed Josh about how he grew his audience, the role his newsletter plays in his consulting business, and why he thinks so many writers are approaching paid newsletters the wrong way.