Noah Smith profile — Noahpinion, 280K+ readers, 14,500 paid subs, $1.3M net/year, #2 Substack Business chart, ex-Bloomberg Opinion, and why he declined the NYT Krugman replacement.
Asmongold (Zack Hoyt) profile: 3.4M Twitch followers, 6M+ YouTube subs, co-founder of OTK Network and StarForge Systems ($19.3M revenue), $9-15M net worth.
NikkieTutorials has 15.1M YouTube subscribers, 2.43B views, hosted Eurovision 2021, and proved authenticity is the ultimate creator moat.
Justin Welsh built a multi-million-dollar one-person business with no employees, no office, and no funding, and publishes the numbers to prove it.
Hank and John Green turned Vlogbrothers into Complexly, a production company, direct-to-fan label, and conference that predates the creator economy itself.
Bari Weiss turned a Substack newsletter into The Free Press, an independent publication with 1M+ subscribers and its own infrastructure and masthead.
Lenny Rachitsky built the dominant product-management publication in the creator economy: a seven-figure newsletter, podcast, and cohort-course business.
Nathan Barry bootstrapped ConvertKit, now Kit, into a $30M+ ARR business without venture capital by building email software around creators, not marketers.
Matt Yglesias left Vox in 2020 and built Slow Boring into a multi-million-dollar political newsletter, the template other senior journalists copied.
Packy McCormick built Not Boring and Not Boring Capital as one openly disclosed loop: the newsletter finds deals, the fund invests in them.
