I Made Over £100K on Substack, and the Journey There Delighted and Surprised Me in Equal Measure.

There is a moment I keep coming back to...

Not the moment the number tipped over £100,000 (which I realised just the other day).

The moment is when I felt the weight of what I built and my relation to it. I wanted to put it all down and my nervous system didn't know how...

How it started

I didn't arrive on Substack with a plan to build a business.

I arrived because I had fallen in love with the platform and could not find anyone explaining it in a way that felt human. Most of the advice I came across was cold, metric-heavy, hustle-forward. It made Substack feel like a machine to operate rather than a space to inhabit and a universe to build.

So I started teaching it the way I wished someone had taught me. I created the thing I wish existed and community flocked around the articles and tutorials I wrote.

What I did not expect was how much that approach would matter to people. One reader told me:

"I love listening to your relaxed take on building a Substack following organically. It is actually relaxing for my nervous system, versus creating panic or FOMO."

I read that and thought: yes.

That is exactly what I was trying to do.

The building blocks I stood on to clearly see the vision.

I genuinely could not stop thinking about Substack and what it made possible for writers who had never thought of themselves as being allowed to have an audience.

Someone in my community described it recently as feeling like;

"being invited into a supportive creative space where I could find myself as a writer, see myself as a writer and creator with something to say that matters."

That is the space I was trying to build. It took a while before I understood that building it slowly was not a failure. It was the method.

What the money was made of

By the time I crossed six figures, the income had come from several directions at once.

Sparkle on Substack, my membership for writers who want to grow their audience with intention, has been the most consistent thread. It is where I do my most concentrated teaching, and where the community that has grown up around this work lives.

My book, How to Build a World Class Substack, co-written with Russell Nohelty. One member told me that attending the workshop we ran together and implementing a single tip led to her more than doubling her paid subscribers, and her annual income from Substack, in three days.

My YouTube channel, which works away in the background, bringing people into my world every day whether I am at my desk or not.

And courses and coaching, for people ready to go deeper.

None of these things exploded - they compounded over time...

The parts that surprised me

I thought the hardest part would be the technical side. Setting things up. Working out the platform. It was not. The technical side turned out to be the easy part.

The harder thing was trusting that what I was doing was enough. That the pace I was working at was right. That showing up consistently without going viral still counted for something.

It did. One reader, writing about her own journey, put it this way:

"A year ago I had none of these things. No writing practice, not publishing anything regularly. Now I have a writing practice, and a creative practice, and I feel more creative than I have felt in a long time."

She subscribed to Sparkle on Substack on the 5th of January 2024. She wrote her testimonial months later. The work between those two dates was hers. But she wanted me to know I had been part of it.

That is the surprise I didn't see coming. Not the income figure. The accumulation of those moments.

What this kind of teaching actually looks like

I have thought a lot about why the approach I take seems to land the way it does. I think it comes down to this: I genuinely do not believe that hustle is the answer. I do not believe that growth has to come at the cost of your nervous system, your voice, or your values.

Someone in my community described the way I teach as feeling "not like being taught, but like being gently guided to your own inner knowing."

Another wrote: "There is no hustle culture in it, and that is so important to me and how I show up in my Substack, my business and my life."

That is the intention behind everything I make. You are not here to become a content machine. You are here to build something that is genuinely yours, that serves your readers, and that you can sustain over years rather than weeks.

Joyful, sustainable growth. That is the phrase I come back to again and again. It is a belief.

What I would say to you now

If you are at the beginning of this, or somewhere in the middle and wondering if it is working: it is probably working more than you think.

The people who eventually become your most loyal readers and subscribers have often been watching for months before they do anything. They are not impulse buyers. They are people building trust slowly, and they will arrive when they are ready.

Your job is to still be there when they are.

One member of my community put it better than I ever could:

"Stay true to what works for you, be generous and openhearted with others. Claire's phrase 'we have time' always settles me."

We have time.

That is the thing I most want you to carry away from this. Not a strategy, not a funnel, not a revenue target. Just that reminder, when it feels slow, when it feels pointless, when the numbers are not where you want them to be:

Claire Venus is the founder of Creatively Conscious and the creator of Sparkle on Substack, a membership for writers growing their audience with joy and intention. She teaches Substack setup, audience development and growth at @creativelyconsciousuk on YouTube.