Substack Built This: The Newsletter Economy Bets on Itself
He has a Substack, a list of 40,000 subscribers, and a direct debit that hits his account on the first of every month like clockwork.
There is a writer somewhere in a studio apartment in Brooklyn who earns more than the editor-in-chief who rejected him three years ago. He has no office, no masthead, no HR department. He has a Substack, a list of 40,000 subscribers, and a direct debit that hits his account on the first of every month like clockwork.
This is not an anomaly. It is, increasingly, the model.
Bloomberg's live event in New York in late May put three of Substack's most serious financial voices on a single stage — James van Geelen of Citrini Research, Sam Ro, the man behind The TKer, and journalist Jasmine Sun. The conversation was nominally about markets. But the real story underneath it was structural: the independent creator economy has arrived in finance, and it is not leaving.
Here is the mechanism. Traditional financial media was built around scale — millions of readers, ad rates priced on volume, institutional relationships that shaped coverage. The Substack model inverts every assumption. Small audience, high trust, subscription revenue that doesn't require an advertiser's approval. Van Geelen doesn't need to soften a call on a stock because a bank is buying a full-page ad. Ro doesn't need to publish at a frequency dictated by a traffic algorithm. Sun doesn't need an editor's sign-off to be contrarian.
What they do need is something harder to manufacture: credibility. The newsletter economy has no floor. The barrier to entry is near zero, which means the noise is deafening. What separates the 40,000-subscriber operation from the abandoned Substack with eleven posts and a ghost list is the same thing that separated good analysts from mediocre ones in every institutional setting I ever worked in — the willingness to be specific, to make calls, and to own them publicly when they go wrong.
AI is accelerating the shake-out. Van Geelen, Ro, and Sun discussed it at length in the podcast that followed the live event. The tools that can summarise, paraphrase, and repackage will commoditise the generic. What survives is judgment. Perspective. The particular voice that reads a Fed statement and hears what the statement is avoiding.
My call: the independent finance writer with genuine expertise is entering their best decade. Institutions are trusted less. Algorithms are trusted less. A person with a track record and a name attached to their opinions is worth something again. If you are sitting on expertise and a story to tell, the infrastructure now exists to monetise it directly. The only question is whether you have the discipline to show up consistently when no one is watching the clock for you. Check the Malta employment guide if you are weighing this against conventional employment — the comparison is worth running honestly.
The studio apartment beats the masthead. For now.
