I’ve always written on Interspace because I’m a fintech nerd and enjoy writing. What started as a way to learn to write compelling fintech Twitter threads (and recover from the burnout of my hyper-growth startup career) became one of my favorite interests. Making the complex simple and reconstructing thoughts to fit single 280-character tweets that engage someone to page through 10+ tweets at a time was incredibly captivating.

As my posts became more frequent, Twitter’s algorithm favored shorter takes or singular ultra-long tweets. With worsening search features, I moved my over-engineered fintech tweets to Substack to become over-engineered fintech posts.

The format worked better than Twitter threads and allowed me to expand my thinking to longer essays with more data, charts, links, and multimedia. I found it easier to broaden my writing interest from fintech to AI, governance, and technology. Eventually, Substack’s limited features and theming became a blocker, so I moved my newsletter from Substack to Beehiiv.

For customization, brand equity, and product innovation, it’s the clear choice for any newsletter creator. Beehiiv is better in almost every way except for Substack’s stubborn network effect around its recommendations feature that generates subscriptions. Beehiiv will get there eventually as it launched Top 4 to provide the Recommendations network effect, and it’s better in every other way, but it’s worth noting Substack’s lone standout feature.

Moving to Beehiiv prompted me to think about monetization and rethink my approach. I didn’t realize this at first. As a full-time operator and because writing has only been an interest, I never considered monetization. But money is a strong incentive for focus in a busy schedule. When folks like Sheel Mohnot make ~$50K / year for posting interesting content (alongside a full-time VC job) and CJ Gustafson left a lucrative career as a high-powered CFO to run the Mostly Metrics newsletter with ~200,000 subscribers, I wondered about the potential.

Broadly speaking, there are two main ways to monetize attention:

The playbook for Option #1 is simple. Get as many people to read and subscribe to your content and price it to maximize subscribers and optimize revenue. We can derive key unit economics from Lenny Rachitsky of Lenny’s Newsletter. In under 5 years, he went from 0 to 1.1M subscribers. His paid subscription is ~$10 / month (often a corporate L&D expense). With 15,000 free subscribers and 500 paid members (~3.3% conversion), he was netting ~$65K/year before fees (Substack takes ~20%). At 1M, he should be netting ~$4-$5M / year in gross fees. That’s a lot of money.

I now have about 1,000 subscribers. With a conversion rate of ~3%, I’ll have 30 paid subscribers at $10 / month, resulting in about $300 per month if I started now. It’s a start. To do subscriptions well, you must gate information between the free and paid newsletters to make paying feel worthwhile. I’ve seen folks limit the number of posts for free vs. paid, provide special content for paid subscribers only, and/or exclusive events for subscribers. You don’t need everything at once, but there needs to be some gating or your free subscribers won’t convert.

That sounds like a lot of work, and it interferes with what I started this newsletter to do: inform and distill complex concepts into digestible essays.

I don’t want an entrance fee for information I’m trying to make accessible.

With advertising, the approach is different. Advertisers pay for attention and engagement, so the goal is less about convincing an engaged audience to pay for information access. Instead, the goal is to build a large or engaged memberbase worth spending money to promote products to.

Advertisers will pay per impression or qualified engagement, with CPM (cost per 1,000 units) as the primary metric and the units being measured as views or engagements. Values range between $5 - $10 per 1K impressions. Twitter recently started monetizing with CPMs at ~$4 per 1,000 qualified impressions (engagements: likes, replies, reposts). Twitter engagement is lighter than a blog post, so we will use a YouTube or Pinterest CPM instead. If I ran generic ads on my blog posting ~2-3x / week at ~$15 per 1K engagements, I will earn ~$180 per month.

That said, I don’t want to charge for information access or dilute my content quality with generic ads. So this isn’t a realistic option for me.

One way to do this is to spend more time with brands and advocate for them as a product user (paid influencer) or through sponsored posts. Given the Interspace community comprises operators from major fintechs and exciting startups, I could work with brands to craft narratives that explore topics interesting to readers and appealing to brands.

How much could that accrue for my newsletter? Packy McCormick, of Not Boring, charged ~$5K per post and ~$20K for a sponsored deep dive when he had ~36,000 subscribers ($140 per 1K subscribers). I could charge at least ~$150 per post and $500 for a deep dive. Adam Ryan of Workweek suggests Packy might charge $200 CPM or ~$160 post-fees. At 2-3 posts per week and ~1 deep dive per month, that might be $2,000 monthly.

I would need to maintain my post frequency and ensure my brand partnerships resonate with Interspacers. I would need to find the right partners who believe in our vision, and have a network of fintech operators to choose from.

But the incentive alignment is there, the content can remain free, and there can be a win-win when I am sponsored by products I use, people and thought leaders I respect and services I trust.

This is the way.

With that in mind, Interspace is going sponsored over the next few months and some future content may be sponsored with explicit sponsorship tags and guidelines.

As always, content will remain now and forever free. And while sponsors may pay for my posts, editor ownership will always remain with me; brands choose the types of content they want to sponsor but will never get direct editing privileges.

Ultimately, I want to align incentives and ensure writing stays a focus of mine when other priorities in life become increasingly in demand of attention. Help me make Interspace the priority because I have so much more to share.

If you want to reach the leading minds in fintech, stratfin, tech, AI and politics, respond to this email and we’ll make it happen.