Chasing the elusive dream, part 2

Making a sustainable income for yourself is hard. The wall has been hit. What now?

I still wanna be a professional shitposter.

A few months ago, I started a quest - I wanted to see if it was possible for me to be a professional shitposter, working for myself with a sustainable income, enough to be able to take care of myself where I live. I wrote an article here about my status, but there was a lot unknown at the time as all my endeavors were quite new.

I didn’t really have a strategy at the time either, but since everything was nicely growing I thought I would maintain status quo and see how that played out, so I could see what the ceiling of that would be. I think I have an idea of the ceiling now, though, as I’m probably right at it!

The Numbers

April 17, 2023

Substack

• 14 articles, 2771 subscribers, 60 paid, $6,764 gross revenue, $5,817 after platform cut, $5,500 estimate accounting for failed transactions, ~$458/month

Twitter

• 2.15 million followers, 664 subscribers paying $3/mo each, $1,992 gross revenue, ~$1,152/mo after platform / apple / play store / stripe cut

  

Expenses

• None

Total

• $458/mo Substack + $1,152/mo Twitter → $1,610/mo

June 26, 2023

Substack

• 28 articles, 3025 subscribers, 62 paid, $6,850 gross revenue, $5,891 after platform cut, $5,550 estimate accounting for failed transactions, ~$462/month

Twitter

• 2.17 million followers, 819 subscribers paying $3/mo each, $2,457 gross revenue, ~$1,425/mo after platform / apple / play store / stripe cut

  

Expenses

• Squarespace: $21/mo

• Squarespace custom domains: $40/mo

• Squarespace business email: $6/mo

Total

• $462/mo Substack + $1,425/mo Twitter → $1,887/mo - $67/mo Expenses → $1,820/mo

A little progress, I guess... Better look out, Columbia!

What’s it all mean?

I hit some milestones - 3000 Substack subscribers (thank you!) and at one point I reached 1050 Twitter subscribers, so that was pretty neat!

A few interesting things happened since I wrote the first part of the elusive dream series - first, Substack and Twitter started feuding, leading to substack articles being restricted on Twitter and me considering switching platforms for this newsletter, which I wrote about here. I can clearly see that has limited this newsletter’s growth and reach - growth has been pretty flat since that happened, as the above graphs show pretty clearly.

Another thing that has happened is my Twitter platform has been shrinking. Presumably this is due to bot cleanup (and I am absolutely certain I have a ton of bots following me, due to the amount of spam I get for every tweet), though changes seem to have affected my Twitter reach pretty substantially as well for whatever reason. The algorithm is pretty mysterious and I’m not super interested in “growth hacking” and chasing the ever-changing algorithm around, but it definitely doesn’t seem like I have the reach I previously had while doing more or less the same thing.

April vs June numbers clearly show this:

So, now what?

With growth generally stagnating and my main platform’s reach reducing, it doesn’t seem like we’re going in a promising direction to be able to achieve that elusive dream, and that has been somewhat demotivating. But, there’s some hope still:

• Twitter continues to work on creator tools, with a focus on videos and streaming, which could be a good way to expand my platform

• Twitter is also closer to paying out its revenue sharing, and I’ll share those numbers once they come in

At the moment, considering it is my main platform, it still seems like focusing on Twitter for creative content creation is the right direction, while also maintaining this newsletter for long-form content. I am most interested in live streaming, specifically live streaming some VR endeavors and trying to build up a community, and if I could do that easily on Twitter I think that would be a lot of fun and hopefully grow the platform.

I haven’t really tried anything major in awhile, but it does seem like I will have to if I want to reach my goals! The only new thing I’m attempting is I opened up a business email for potential sponsorships at business@billym2k.net, and we’ll see if that leads anywhere. I’ll do another check-in a few months from now if y’all wanna follow along - as always, I immensely appreciate everyone’s support!