Wannabe Press Income Report - Q3 - 2024

This was a wild quarter, so this is gonna be a wild income report. I honestly don’t even know how to conceptualize it, but I'm gonna try.

Hi,

This was a wild quarter, so this is gonna be a wild income report. I honestly don’t even know how to conceptualize it except in charts. So, this is the quarter I went hard on a daily email and sent over 3.3 million emails in the past 90 days.

You can find all our previous income reports here.

Our plan was to find a willing ad strategy and brand strategy to keep churning people through out ecosystem and allow for the high churn that comes with a daily. You can’t keep a daily going unless you can create a repeatable ad strategy that brings in more subscribers than you burn every day.

Instead, this happened.

We started the quarter with 54,388 in Convertkit and ended it with 42,097 a decrease of over 12,000 emails…but at least we didn’t make any money for the privilege.

No, that’s not true. We made about $1,200…and it only cost us about $1,200 to be on Convertkit, not including ad spend, so I guess that’s something. Looking at this graph makes me want to cry, but then I look at our Substack graph…and WTF is happening here?

So, what the universe is trying to tell me is that even with losing 12,000 subscribers in Convertkit, I gained almost 7,000 in Substack? What is even happening here. That’s a differential of 19,000 subscribers!

I have built whole business on fewer subscribers than that differential. On top of that, I gained more than 300 paid members in the last quarter.

So, it’s actually been a good quarter? According to these two charts it certainly seems that way.

But wait, before you get too optimistic, we still turned a loss this quarter…

But it’s down from a $36,000 loss in Q2…

It’s almost like you made $25,000, right? Except you literally can’t pay bills with a smaller negative differential because it means you still have less money than you did three months ago.

But if that’s true, then why is there more money in my accounts than there was three months ago!

What is even happening here?! Was this a good quarter? A bad quarter? An absurdist mathetician’s wet dream?

The only answer I have is yes…it’s all of those things.

I thought I would become more like Lord Business as I got more successful, but instead I’ve become much more like Princess Unikitty.

Everything is fine. 

Everything is chaos. 

There is a burning, festering rage right below the surface. 

Overall, I was reminded how much I dislike advertising this quarter. I thought it would save us in the long run, but it just added more stress as I had to become a brand ambassador and clip my wings to make sure I didn’t offend anyone.

I’m happy to talk about things I like, but when I have to justify my excitement monetarily, well that’s not something I love. I don’t even like affiliate marketing for that reason. I’m probably not going to keep going much with advertising past the third quarter unless I can find a way to make it make sense to an advertiser even if nobody clicks on it.

I do think there’s something to be said for brand advertising, and getting seen by 20,000+ eyes every week has some value, right? I’m not sure, but if I have to be yoked to metrics, I’m not interested in doing advertising right now, which is probably a problem, what with advertising behind such a good source of revenue for publishers.

I feel like all this year has taught me is exactly what I knew, yet forgot, before this year, and puts me in a place where I am just as confused as I was at the end of 2023, which sucks and feels like a hollow victory.

For paid members, I’ll get into the nitty gritty below. If you want to see exactly what these numbers mean, then I invite you to join.

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