I Had My Best Year Ever on Substack. I Don’t Think It Counts.

Or: how I accidentally grew a newsletter while everything else was on fire. Part 1

Look, I thought 2025 was going to be the year of my newsletter. You know the fantasy: consistent publishing schedule, steady subscriber growth, maybe finally cracking the code on this whole “monetize your writing” thing everyone’s been doing since like 2019.

Instead, 2025 became the year I live-blogged my parents’ caretaking at 47 while simultaneously trying to convince myself I still had a career.

I didn’t even realize this was happening until December 9th at 2:47 AM (classic insomnia hours), when I asked an AI to help me categorize my post titles and the AI basically went “dude, you’ve been writing about eldercare and survival tactics for twelve straight months.”

Fifteen posts about caregiving. The “Days” series documents my journey from unemployed (356 Days) to employed (422 Days) to employed but drowning in dementia logistics (615 Days). Multiple posts about ADHD coping mechanisms because my brain was already a trash fire, and then someone dumped an entire eldercare bureaucracy on top of it. I post about AI tools because I was basically using Claude like some people use Xanax.

The sandwich incident. The 4AM doorbell saga. The missing wrist guard. The AARP hat that my dad was convinced burglars planted. Nobody knows my father’s birthday. My mother going dark—twice, because apparently one post couldn’t contain that particular nightmare.

This wasn’t a content strategy. This was me screaming into the void with bullet points and paragraph breaks.

And somehow—somehow—I had my best year ever as a newsletter writer.

(The universe has a fucked up sense of humor.)

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The Numbers (Without the Bullshit)

Let me give you the stats that supposedly mean I “made it”:

Publishing:

• 49 posts in 2025 (compared to 16 in 2024)

• That’s more than triple my output

• Maintained around two posts/week for most of the year

• No missed weeks since June, literally the longest continuous anything (!) I’ve done

Growth:

Newsletter stats (as of 2025):

• 459 total subscribers (109 new subscribers in 2025 — my highest year ever)

• 41 paying subscribers across multiple plan types

• Low-to-mid four figures in annual recurring revenue, up from ~$1,000 ARR in 2024

• High retention — only seven people have churned out of 45 who have ever paid

Engagement:

• 66.3% average open rate (industry standard is supposedly 20-40%, so either my audience is weirdly loyal or they’re hate-reading)

• 2.19x reopen rate (people are opening my emails MULTIPLE TIMES, which is either deeply flattering or concerning)

• 312 superfans who’ve opened 20+ posts (that’s 65% of my engaged readers, which seems statistically insane)

• One person has opened my newsletter 610 times across 66 posts

• That’s 9.2 opens per post from ONE HUMAN BEING who apparently has my writing on some kind of bookmark rotation I can’t even comprehend

By every metric that newsletter gurus care about, I fucking crushed it.

I tripled my output. I grew my revenue by 80%. I maintained consistency through a year that included: prolonged unemployment, getting hired at a start-up, getting laid off after what felt like fifteen minutes of actual employment, and immediately sliding into full-time caregiving for two elderly parents whose collective memory couldn’t hold water if you welded the bucket shut.

I should be writing some smug “How I 10x’d My Substack Revenue” thread right now.

Instead, I’m having second thoughts about my entire newsletter monetization strategy.

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Part 2 drops next week, where I explain why having my best year ever made me want to burn the whole thing down.