why i’m writing less and earning more

the $5/hour math that changed everything i thought i knew about building on substack

For three years I wrote on Substack every single day, and for three years I was paid $5 an hour to do it.

One post took me a minimum of one hour to write. Published daily that’s 30 hours a week, 120 hours a month, and at 60 paid subscribers giving me $10 each, I was taking home $600 a month for work that required me to be vulnerable, creative, consistent, and frankly very good at what I do.

Less than minimum wage in most countries. For writing that people actually wanted to read.

Then I started managing other people’s Substacks. One publication takes me two hours a week to manage. I currently manage four, which is eight hours a week and 32 hours a month, at $60 an hour. That’s $1,920 a month, for words I didn’t have to pull out of my own chest.

I’m not telling you this to complain. I’m telling you because it’s the kind of number that forces a decision. One that explains why you’ve seen less of me here lately.

When the economics of a thing stop making sense, inspiration doesn’t disappear overnight — it just quietly stops showing up.

My Substack publication, originally called The Art of Intimacy, started in November 2023. The name attracted the wrong crowd (people who read the word intimacy and thought it was a euphemism for sex) so I rebranded to Intimate, which is about vulnerability, connection with self and others, modern dating, the real dynamics between men and women.

Over three years I built it to 1,400+ subscribers.

For a while I was approaching the bestselling badge. I had 60 paid subscribers. I was writing daily and I was proud of what I was building, and I was also being paid $5 an hour to do it.

Then I started managing other people’s Substacks and I'm paid 60$ an hour.

What I learned in the process of managing other people’s Substacks is that the people really making money on Substack are almost never the best writers.

They’re the ones who arrived with an existing Instagram audience of 100k, 500k, a million followers, and essentially transferred that trust onto a new platform.

Or they’re business coaches selling you on how to make money while they make their money from telling you how to make money, a model that works and requires zero original thought.

Or they’re affiliate link aggregators calling themselves curators, inserting commission links into every post and earning on volume.

None of these are writing. None of these are what I came to Substack to do.

I came here because Medium collapsed and took its writer revenue program with it. I wanted a platform where I owned my readership, where no editor could tell me to soften my voice or follow rules that had nothing to do with good writing, and where people would pay to read me — Hakima — not a filtered version of me that passed someone else's approval.

What I found is that writing for the sake of writing, even good writing, even writing 1,431 people actively chose to follow, does not monetize well unless you’re already an influencer people want to follow into any room.

I am not that. Not yet.

On top of all of this, I have a copywriting business that has always been my main source of income and I have been building a tarot reading brand that excites me in a way no project has in a long time. My life outside of writing got richer, fuller, and more demanding all at once. And since recently, I started managing other people’s Substacks.

Writing less here turned out to be a symptom of living more, which I refuse to feel bad about. Something had to give, and the thing that gave was posting here for $5 an hour.

Here is what nobody tells you about Substack: if you have no products to sell, no affiliate strategy relevant to what you write about, and no existing audience on Instagram or TikTok that already trusts you enough to follow you anywhere, paid subscriptions alone will not save you.

You can be a really good writer with 1,400 people who chose to follow you and still be earning $5 an hour. I know because I was.

Today, I know more about Substack than almost anyone who started when I did. That knowledge sitting inside my publication, posted into the void, was worth $5 an hour. That same knowledge, sold as a service, is worth $60.

What changed wasn’t the knowledge. What changed was the container I put it in.

I will keep writing on Substack, just more sporadically than before. Intimate hasn't changed: modern dating, male and female behavior, how people emotionally respond to each other. That’s still what this is. So don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere, I’m just no longer posting daily to earn $5 an hour.

In the meantime, if you’ve been thinking about starting or relaunching your own Substack, I now help people do exactly that, using everything three years on this platform taught me. If that’s you, message me directly. And if you know someone sitting on a Substack idea they haven’t acted on yet, send them this way.