Chasing the elusive dream, part 1

The quest to work for myself with a sustainable income has begun. Is it possible?

When I grow up, I want to be a professional shitposter.

For pretty much my entire life, my main nemesis has been anxiety. Growing up it was a lot more crippling - I would play alone on the playground, video games by myself, and live in my imagination just fine… But if I had to socialize, it was all over. Most of my childhood videos are of me having meltdowns - at birthday parties, easter egg hunts, the dinner table, you name it. People were scary. Everything was scary.

This carried on, slightly less each year, throughout my teenage years - for example, ordering food at a restaurant was still quite anxiety inducing. I was mostly just a tiny, shy kid who kept to himself and a few close friends. Then between high school and college I ended up developing panic disorder, which I wrote about in this article, and while I’ve worked on it a ton, it’s definitely something I still fight from time to time.

But if I actually am truthful with myself, anxiety is the main thing holding me back in life from achieving what I want to achieve. I don’t dislike my job as a software engineer, and I’m alright at it I suppose, but I feel most right when I’m doing creative things - writing music, making art, making videos, making video games, creating content, writing articles, etc.

And at some point in the next few years, I’d like to take the plunge and jump fully into it.

Or not. Or maybe. I dunno. I’m scared.

Well, alright, maybe baby steps then. I got really far away from doing anything creative during the pandemic years, unfortunately, and so I made it my new years resolution to start doing more creative stuff again this year, which started with this newsletter. The response to it has been way above my expectations, and I am extremely thankful for all of your support. Then, just recently, Twitter finally accepted my subscriptions application, and many people have been subscribing to my Twitter as well…

…So perhaps there’s a chance!

I thought I’d start documenting my progress toward my goal of being self-sustaining with my creative works, for two reasons - one, to have some check-ins and hold myself accountable for how realistic it would be to jump fully into this, and two, because I know that others are curious about doing something like this for themselves, and it helps to see the “behind the scenes” for some baseline.

Current Status

My goal is to generate an income working for myself that is sustainable enough to live comfortably. Since this right now it’s all just side hustles (with my main source of income being my engineering job), I would need to make enough sustainable revenue to justify doing the side hustles full time. Currently, I work in the bay area, which unfortunately is one of the most expensive places in the entire world to live. So I broke it all down in one of those goal chart things with where I could potentially live relatively comfortably on various levels of income:

Mom’s basement here I come!

My ARR net right now is projected to be around $19,336, with around $13,836 from Twitter and around $5,500 from Substack.

My Twitter account currently has 2.15 million followers, and I don’t have any other relevant platforms or ways to advertise other than Twitter.

Substack

With Substack, I’ve been writing weekly-ish articles since the middle of January, with 14 articles total now, and advertising them only by posting them on my Twitter account. The substack tweets are usually my least popular ones 🤣

As of this moment, I have 2,771 total subscribers, with 60 being paid (much ❤️ to you all!), which equates to a gross revenue of about $6,764. After the platform and payment processor get their cut it ends up being around $5,817 - then accounting for failed transactions we can estimate around $5,500 to be safe.

I’ve been giving out my articles for free and only have the community aspect - i.e. comments and the very occasional thread - as subscriber’s only content. I’m wanting to strike a balance between giving my paid subscribers content worthy of subscribing, but also making sure not to gate content too much.

Twitter

Right at this moment on Twitter, I have 664 subscribers, who are paying $3 each. I haven’t been paid out yet and don’t understand the math, but this is what Twitter is telling me my monthly revenue will be:

So this means I receive about $1.74 from each subscriber after Twitter, Apple, Google, and Stripe’s cut.

In the 5 days I have had subscriptions available, I have done quite a few subscriber only tweets, a subscriber only AMA Twitter spaces, and have additional perks planned for subscribers such as virtual meetups (along with continued subscriber only tweets and weekly spaces). It’s actually been quite fun! It’s turned into a nice, supportive, organic community - I especially like seeing people respond to and encourage each other!

What’s next?

In the near future, I think I’ll keep on with these two platforms much the same as I have been doing, without any major deviations, but I do need to be thinking towards the future for additional things to add value for my subscribers and potential future subscribers, as jumping into the deep end right now only lands me in my mom’s basement!

There’s also not really any good way of projecting future numbers since this is all very new, especially Twitter - I think it’s probably good to be realistic about this rather than too optimistic, and see what the growth trajectory looks like after some time, so I can project out where things might plateau.

I have many random thoughts on how I could add more value to both platforms - perhaps some podcasts for subscribers only here, or music, or sneak peeks of other creative things I might try to work on. And otherwise, perhaps I’ll try writing a book? …I should probably consult some experienced people about that idea, though, my gut tells me it’s a rather crazy endeavor to take on…

But either way, I’m incredibly, immensely grateful for the support - you all are helping make it possible for me to follow my dreams, and that is an incredible gift that I will never not be appreciative of. So, I’ll keep on keeping on - at least, in little baby steps at a time :)