Your Subscriber Count Is A Vanity Metric

And rent is real.

‘If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.’
Earl Wilson

There’s a special shade of orange Substack uses for its growth charts.

Do you know it?

It’s a bright, optimistic, happy colour, and it’s been artfully designed to trigger the same receptors in your brain as a slot machine. You open your dashboard, you see the line going up and to the right, and you feel, well, validated.

You think, ‘It’s working. I’m making it.’

Then you tab over to your banking app, and it’s not so much fun anymore.

The orange line says you are a media mogul. The bank balance says you are unemployed.

This cognitive dissonance, the gap between Audience and Income, is where most creators die. They starve to death while standing on a stage, receiving a standing ovation from people who haven’t paid anything to be there.

Let’s break the spell of the dashboard.

Let’s stop looking at the subscriber count as a score and start looking at it for what it actually is. A liability.

The liability of free subscribers

This runs counter to everything the Growth Gurus chirp endlessly at you on X. They tell you to ‘build the list.’ They tell you ‘attention is the new oil.’

They’re lying.

Attention is not oil. Attention is a fire hazard.

A free subscriber is not a customer. A free subscriber is a stranger who’s vaguely agreed, some time in the past, to let you shout at them once a week.

In exchange for this permission, you incur Audience Debt. You feel the pressure to perform. You spend hours writing, editing, and formatting to keep them entertained. You worry about your open rates. You censor your more radical ideas because you don’t want anyone to unsubscribe.

You’re working for them. But they’re not paying you, and likely never will.

If you have 10,000 free subscribers and zero revenue, you don’t have a business. You have a very loud, very demanding volunteer job. You’re running a charity for doomscrollers with internet access and time on their hands.

The maths of the ‘starving viral’

Let’s look at two hypothetical creators.

Creator A writes about ‘The Future of Work.’ They write sweeping, philosophical threads that get retweeted by venture capitalists. They have 25,000 subscribers. Their Revenue Per Subscriber is $0.00. They pay their rent by dipping into savings and telling their parents that ‘big things are coming.’

Creator B writes about ‘HVAC Repair for Small Business Owners.’ Their writing is dry. It has typos and is formatted like a dog’s breakfast. They have 400 subscribers, 85% of them from the northern hemisphere where people have winters. They sell a $50 PDF called ‘The Winterisation Checklist.’ 10% of their list buys it every November. They make $2,000 in a weekend.

Creator A is famous.

Creator B is solvent.

Which one do you want to be on the 15th of the month?

The internet is piling up Creator A corpses. They die chasing vanity metrics. They optimise for width (how many people see me?) instead of depth (how many people trust me enough to whip out a credit card?). They build a massive machine that consumes energy but produces nothing but noise.

They would make more money refilling greengrocer shelves at night (maybe they do, to make ends meet).

So…

Stop building a media company and start building a shop

This is The Banana Stand.

The name may be a dated meme, but the philosophy behind it is dead serious. We’re not here to fuck spiders. We’re not here to ‘express our inner truth’ (save that for your gratitude journal).

We’re here to run a shop.

A greengrocer doesn’t care if 10,000 people walk past the window and give a thumbs up. The greengrocer cares a lot about the three people who walked in and bought bananas.

This thinking demands a fundamental shift in your priorities. And in the process, forgetting most of the Growth Guru kruft you’ve been fed for years.

Stop obsessing over your headlines and start obsessing over your offer.

Stop checking your Growth and start checking your Conversions.

If you posted an article today and nobody bought anything, you did all that work for free. Return on Investment equals zero. That’s bad business in anyone’s terms.

The occasional misfire is fine. I get that. If nothing else, they build goodwill. Doing it every week is suicide.

The month of death

Here is the only metric that really matters. You won’t find it on your Substack dashboard.

When do you run out of money?

I don’t mean a vague sense of ‘I have a few months.’ I mean a specific month. October. January. December. Or best of all, never.

If you don’t know the month, it’s like flying a plane with the fuel gauge taped over because looking at it makes you anxious.

‘What gets measured gets managed’
Peter Drucker

This is truth. You can’t fix a situation you haven’t quantified with cold hard data.

Most creators hide from this number. They treat their finances like a magical mystery box. They hope that if they just write one more viral post, the money will somehow manifest.

But hope is not a strategy. Hope is an opiate.

Wake up.

Look at the numbers, as ugly as they may be.

Know exactly how much your Tax Drag is (the money you owe the government that sits in your account pretending to be yours).

Calculate your True Hourly Wage to know if all your vaunted expertise earns you less than a street cleaner.

Look, these figures may be awesome. You could be making serious bank. Or not. If nothing else, knowing these numbers helps you find and focus on the areas of your business that give the best return on your time.

The ask

I’m not going to ask you to share this article. Exposure doesn’t pay my bills, and it doesn’t pay yours.

I’m going to ask you to audit yourself.

Look at your last five emails. Did you ask for the sale? Did you offer a solution to a painful problem, or did you just offer ‘content’?

If you’re tired of guessing, I built a tool for this. It’s not pretty. It’s a Google spreadsheet.

It asks you to input your cash, your revenue, your burn rate, and your taxes. It spits out your Month of Death in bright red text.

It costs AU$36 (inc GST).

That’s the price of four lattes and a croissant to share.

Or, it’s the price of sleeping through the night because you finally know exactly where you stand.

Welcome to your Banana Stand. Get back control of your cash.