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There’s a stage in almost every business when doing your own design makes perfect sense.

You’re figuring things out. You don’t know whether the business will work yet. You open Canva, make a banner, pick a couple of colors, throw together a logo and get on with your life.

Fine.

But eventually something changes.

Your experience gets better. Your offer gets stronger. You start charging more. Maybe you’re trying to win consulting work, attract clients, sell a product, get booked to speak, build a newsletter or find a better job.

Meanwhile, your LinkedIn profile still looks like something you cobbled together on a Sunday afternoon three years ago.

That’s when DIY starts getting expensive.

Because if you’re highly credible at what you do, but your profile makes you look amateur, people have to get past the presentation before they can discover the expertise underneath it.

I recently talked about this with graphic designer , who has been designing professionally since 2010 and says he has completed more than 10,000 projects through freelance platforms alone. He spent more than a decade specializing in infographics before noticing a shift in 2024: clients kept asking him to fix their LinkedIn banners, then their profiles, then their entire LinkedIn visual presence. Eventually LinkedIn rebrands became a bigger part of his work than infographics.

And the people coming to him usually aren’t beginners. They often have years of experience, plenty of proof and expensive offers. Their profiles just don’t look like it.

Your profile shouldn’t make people work this hard

Hristo described something I see constantly in marketing audits.

He lands on someone’s LinkedIn profile and has to inspect the banner, headline, About section and Featured section before he can figure out what the person actually does.

His clients often have the experience and the offer. What’s missing is clarity. The profile doesn’t communicate the level they’re operating at.

And yes, during our conversation I said that if you’re an experienced professional selling high-ticket work, you probably don’t want to show up with a design that looks like your six-year-old made it.

I stand by that. 😂

This is where I think people misunderstand professional design. They assume the purpose is to make everything prettier.

Pretty is nice. Pretty doesn’t pay the mortgage.

The job is to make what people see match the quality of what you actually do.

If I’m considering hiring you for a $10,000 engagement, your profile is giving me information before I ever read your case studies. I’m forming an opinion about how established you are, how much attention you pay to detail, whether you understand your own market and whether your business feels like something I can trust.

That may be unfair.

It’s also how humans work.

Give your banner three seconds

Hristo has a very simple rule for LinkedIn banners:

Someone should be able to understand what you do within about three seconds.

His advice is to stop trying so hard to sound clever. The banner should make it easy to understand what you do, who you do it for, what outcome you create and what the visitor should do next. He also recommends a clear call to action.

I’d add one more question:

Why you?

That’s where a lot of beautifully designed profiles still fall apart.

You can spend thousands on photography, fonts, brand colors and a gorgeous banner and then plaster this across the top:

Helping ambitious leaders unlock their potential.

Okay.

You and approximately 47,000 other people.

The designer can make a weak message look expensive. It’s still a weak message.

Hristo actually refuses to start designing a LinkedIn profile until the messaging is clear. He sends clients a questionnaire first so he understands their brand, goal, ideal customer and positioning. Only then does he start working on the visuals.

A branding problem is sometimes a design problem. Sometimes your design is accurately presenting a business nobody understands.

Fix that first.

Your LinkedIn profile actually has two jobs

One of the most useful things Hristo said during our conversation was that a LinkedIn profile works in two stages.

The first happens before anyone visits your profile.

They encounter you somewhere in the feed — perhaps through a post or a comment — and see a tiny profile picture and the beginning of your headline.

That’s it.

In stage one, the challenge is that photo and mini-headline should make them interested enough to click.

Then they enter stage two. Now they see your banner, complete headline, About section, Featured section and everything else you’ve built around the profile.

Now the challenge is to make them understand it in 3 seconds and like it enough to follow you.

Your branding doesn’t begin when somebody lands on your profile.

Your little round headshot is wandering around LinkedIn without you.

Every time you comment on someone else’s post, there it is.

This is one reason Hristo often puts a contrasting color behind a client’s profile photo and coordinates it with the banner. He considers the photo and banner parts of the same visual system, and the contrast helps the image stand out.

I’ve seen this myself. When you’re scrolling through a long discussion and nearly every headshot has a gray, white or neutral background, a bright orange or yellow background jumps out.

You’ve bought yourself a fraction of a second of attention.

Sometimes that’s enough.

Your face is part of the trust equation

I asked Hristo why he often puts another photograph of the person inside the banner when LinkedIn already has a profile photo.

His answer was that he doesn’t do it every time, but faces naturally pull our attention. The person becomes a visual hook before we begin reading the text.

I think there’s another reason this is becoming more important.

We are operating in a growing trust deficit online.

AI can produce the headshot, article, infographic, comment, testimonial-looking graphic and polished company copy. It can make a one-person operation look like a multinational corporation before breakfast.

People are getting more suspicious about what’s real.

So I’m increasingly interested in human signals.

Show your face. Look like yourself. Smile. Let people see your eyes. Give them some indication that there is an actual person behind the business.

Hristo told me he recently changed his own LinkedIn photo from a more serious pose to one where he was smiling because he wanted to appear more approachable and easier to work with.

That sounds like a tiny decision.

For a service business, “Would I want to spend an hour on Zoom with this person?” is a perfectly legitimate part of the buying decision.

Treat your Featured section like a storefront, not a trophy cabinet

Then we got to one of my LinkedIn pet peeves: the Featured section.

People tell me they want clients.

I open their LinkedIn profile.

Their Featured section is empty.

Or it contains a post from 2024 that got 1,700 likes.

The featured section should tell the visitor: What exactly am I supposed to do next?

Hristo describes the Featured section as his “online store.” His recommendation is to keep it focused — generally no more than three important destinations — and use it for things that can actually move someone forward to connect with you off of LinkedIn:

a website,

offer,

booking link,

newsletter or,

for someone job hunting, a CV.

I love that framing.

Someone discovers you in the feed. They click your profile. They like what they see.

Now what?

Because their phone rings. Their kid needs something. A Slack message pops up. They close LinkedIn.

Tomorrow they vaguely remember that they saw “some interesting woman who did something with marketing.”

Fantastic.

Give people somewhere to go while you still have their attention.

I’d also account for different levels of buying intent. Someone who met you 90 seconds ago may not be ready to book a €5,000 engagement. That’s where a useful newsletter, assessment or quiz can earn the next interaction.

Personally, I’m much less excited about another downloadable PDF called 17 Secrets to Whatever. We’ve all downloaded enough PDFs to populate a small digital landfill.

I’d rather give someone something interactive that produces an immediate result.

The point is to continue the relationship outside your profile.

Make LinkedIn and Substack one engine

Hristo’s experience with Substack will probably sound familiar to anyone trying to use more than one platform.

He joined, started posting regularly, got some traction, then stopped. Between LinkedIn, client work and everything else going on in his life, Substack had started to feel like another job.

When he came back, he approached it differently. His goal now is to make LinkedIn and Substack work as “one engine” instead of running two separate content operations.

I’m doing the same thing.

I have zero interest in doubling my workload because I happen to use two platforms.

A LinkedIn post can become the starting point for a deeper Substack article. A Substack article can turn into LinkedIn posts, Notes, clips and comments. This live ran on both platforms. Now the same conversation is becoming a video, this article and several shorter pieces.

LinkedIn also gives you an obvious bridge between the two: your Featured section.

Put your Substack publication there with a strong thumbnail. Someone discovers you through a post or comment, checks your profile, then has an easy way to join your newsletter. The traffic can move the other way too. I’m already getting LinkedIn connection requests from people who tell me they found me on Substack.

This is why I’m not very interested in debates about whether LinkedIn or Substack is the better platform.

They are different yet complimentary.

LinkedIn is very good at discovery. Substack gives people somewhere to spend more time with your ideas and, importantly, gives you a direct relationship with readers through email.

Use them together and reuse the work.

The article you’re reading is a pretty good example. It will live on both LinkedIn and Substack, came from one live conversation, and will produce several more pieces of content before I’m finished with it.

One conversation. Maximum mileage.

AI made mediocre design incredibly cheap

This part of the conversation became especially interesting because Hristo has watched AI affect his own profession.

His old infographic niche has been heavily disrupted. Ten years ago, if you wanted certain kinds of graphics, you needed someone who knew how to design them. Today you can generate piles of graphics almost instantly.

And for plenty of situations, “good enough” really is good enough.

The problem comes when everybody uses the same tools to produce the same look.

Hristo described AI-generated images as “the new stock images.”

He’s seeing the same fatigue with AI graphics that we’re already seeing with generic AI writing.

I think he’s right.

LinkedIn right now can look like Las Vegas met Los Angeles and they decided to build a Canva template together.

Too many fonts. Too many colors. Too many icons. Every centimeter fighting for your attention. Apparently white space has committed a crime and is no longer allowed.

Hristo pointed out that premium brands tend to go in the opposite direction: cleaner design, more restraint, more space.

That’s where professional design becomes more valuable, not less.

The availability of cheap design doesn’t eliminate the premium end of the market.

It makes the difference easier to see.

Good design is an amplifier

This was probably my favorite way Hristo described his work.

Good design is an amplifier.

A redesigned LinkedIn profile isn’t going to rescue a bad offer.

You cannot redo your banner, disappear for twelve months and then complain that LinkedIn failed to send clients.

Hristo was very clear about that. If you already have experience, an offer, a product, leads and activity behind the profile, stronger design can amplify what’s already there. Consistent colors and fonts also build recognition over time; he’s deliberately kept his own visual identity consistent so people can recognize his content while scrolling.

I’ve seen businesses spend enormous amounts on visual identity systems while ignoring the fact that their positioning is boring, interchangeable or confusing.

A beautiful beige website cannot save you from sounding exactly like everyone else.

Design and positioning have to work together.

So when should you stop DIYing?

I wouldn’t tell a brand-new freelancer with no customers to spend thousands on a giant brand package before they’ve proved anyone wants what they sell.

Use Canva. Test things. Change your mind. Make some ugly stuff.

But keep an eye on the point where your business has moved forward and your presentation hasn’t.

If you have real expertise, a defined offer, proof that you can deliver, and you’re asking people to trust you with meaningful amounts of money, DIY starts getting expensive when it makes your business look amateur.

That cost won’t arrive as an invoice.

It shows up in the person who clicks your profile and leaves.

The prospect who can’t immediately figure out what you do.

The potential client comparing you with someone whose business looks substantially more established.

The visitor who likes your work but has nowhere obvious to click next.

The years you spend becoming excellent at something while your public presence continues underselling you.

You’ve already done the hard part.

Make sure people can see it.

Watch the full conversation with Hristo Butchvarov

Stay In Touch

Follow Hristo:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hristo-butchvarov

Substack: https://substack.com/@hristobutchvarov

Website:

https://hristobutchvarov.vercel.app/#Hero

Follow Krista / FU Money Plan:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristamollion

Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/unignorablebrands

FU Money Plan: https://unignorablebrands.co/start-here

If you’re building a personal brand, growing on LinkedIn, selling expertise, or trying to make your online presence match the quality of your actual work, this conversation is for you.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this conversation.

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The goal is simple: to make sure no single employer, client or platform has too much power over your life.

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The truth is, the name I had in the back of my mind all along was FU Money Plan. I hesitated because I worried people would focus on the name instead of the idea. Eventually I decided to stop tiptoeing around it and just use the name I actually wanted.

At first, I planned to keep FU Money Plan separate from my existing business. Then last week I changed my LinkedIn profile completely and went all in.

Scary? A little. Exciting? Very.

From the outside, it probably looked like a sudden pivot. It wasn’t. This has really been nine years in the making.

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At 38, I found myself unemployable.

I had spent years in marketing, become CMO and co-owner of an eight-figure agency, and worked with brands including Apple, HP, Google, Samsung, and Sephora.

Then my life changed. I got divorced, sold my shares in the agency, and decided the responsible thing was to find a full-time job.

I took the search seriously. I hired three career coaches, rewrote my résumé, learned LinkedIn, networked constantly, went to events and coffee meetings, and submitted more than 200 applications.

I still couldn’t get hired.

That period did a number on my confidence, but it taught me something I hadn’t understood before: a surprising amount of my professional reputation had been attached to my title, my agency and the companies I worked with.

I was reminded of that recently when I wrote about a moment six weeks after leaving my CMO title, when someone who used to take my calls immediately didn’t even recognize my name. That was when I started to understand how much visibility had belonged to the title rather than to me.

When your title disappears, you find out very quickly how much of your professional value actually belongs to you—and for many people, the uncomfortable answer is very little: no IP, no audience, no independent income, nothing that can leave with you.

I had to figure out how to replace my income outside a 9-to-5. Over the years I tested 12 income streams and made six business pivots across consulting, products, courses, communities, fractional work and other experiments.

Some worked. Some were terrible ideas.

An expensive education, basically.

I found my way through it, but I never really stopped thinking about the 38-year-old version of me who had absolutely no idea how any of this was going to work. A mother of four, trying to get through one day at a time. Too young to retire, too many responsibilities to simply stop, and nobody else financially responsible for getting me through it.

And I know I’m not some bizarre edge case.

People hit their own version of that moment every day: a layoff, divorce, burnout, a baby, a major client disappearing, a business changing, a career that felt secure right up until it wasn’t.

The advice I received during those years wasn’t especially useful either:

“Get another job.” “Get remarried.” “Get a real estate license.” “Open an Airbnb.”

Most of us don’t think seriously about having options until we need them immediately. We were raised to believe that the stable paycheck was the safety plan.

Right up until somebody else turns it off.

The Person I Think About Most

Whenever I think about why I’m building FU Money Plan, I think about my mom.

She was a brilliant academic and a world traveler. She wanted to teach English abroad and write children’s books that would be translated into other languages. But eventually she came home, took a job at the post office, and kept telling herself, “One day.”

One day she would travel again. One day she would write the books. One day she would do the things she really wanted to do.

That day never came.

And I was her daughter, watching it happen.

I wrote about her recently on LinkedIn because she is still one of the people I think about most when I think about FU Money. Read the post about my mom. ❤️

She didn’t need some fantasy version of wealth. She needed more choices. More room to say, I’m going to do this now instead of someday.

As a kid, it broke my heart watching her work that hard and still have so few choices. I think that stayed with me more than I realized.

Going back to a full-time job after having a baby because you want to is one thing. Having to go back because there is no financially viable alternative is very different. The same goes for staying in a job you hate, keeping a client you can’t stand, or postponing something you care about because you simply don’t have enough options yet.

That is why FU Money Plan is so personal for me.

I want people—and especially women—to have more ways to earn, more things they own, and more room to make decisions without one paycheck deciding everything.

What FU Money Actually Means

Let me clear up one misconception early.

FU Money does not mean becoming so rich that you never have to work again while you sit on a beach congratulating yourself.

It also doesn’t mean building 11 income streams and somehow working twice as much as you did when you had one job.

And it definitely doesn’t mean rage quitting on Friday and hoping you figure out the money part on Monday.

None of those sound particularly free to me.

My definition is much simpler:

You may still have a job. You may consult. You may have active income and work very hard at something you genuinely enjoy.

The important part is that you have other ways forward.

If the job disappears, you’re not starting from zero. If a client becomes unbearable, losing them doesn’t wreck your finances. If you want to pause, change direction or say no to something, you have enough room to make that decision based on what you want rather than what you desperately need to do for money.

That’s FU Money.

The Most Dangerous Career Number Is One

You can earn $200,000 a year and still be in a surprisingly fragile position if all of it comes from one employer, one major client, one paycheck or one platform.

The more useful question is: what happens if that income disappears tomorrow?

Would it be inconvenient, or would it immediately change every financial decision you make?

We spend a lot of time thinking about how much we earn and not nearly enough thinking about how dependent we are on where it comes from. I wrote a full piece about this recently — The Problem With Building Your Entire Financial Life Around One Job — because a paycheck can look stable right up until the day it isn’t.

And the problem doesn’t magically disappear when you become self-employed. You can leave one employer, start consulting and still be just as exposed if one or two clients account for most of your revenue. Build an online business almost entirely on one platform and you’ve recreated the same risk with a different logo.

The goal of FU Money isn’t necessarily to quit your job or stop doing client work.

The goal is to make sure no single source has too much power over your life.

That’s what I mean by reducing the risk of one.

This is where the idea of a portfolio career becomes useful. I don’t mean collecting five jobs. I mean building a working life around a mix of expertise, reputation, relationships, owned assets, outside opportunities and income, so your livelihood doesn’t rest entirely on one institution.

I wrote much more about this in The New Job Security Is a Career Portfolio. The New Job Security: The Career Portfolio.

You Probably Already Have More Value Than You Think

If you’ve been working for 5, 10, or even 30 years, you’ve probably built up a lot more value than your résumé shows.

I mean the problems you know how to solve, the mistakes you can spot before they happen, and the decisions you can make quickly because you’ve already seen some version of the situation ten times before.

You probably have processes you don’t even think of as processes anymore. Ways of working that feel obvious to you because you’ve been doing them for years.

That’s career capital.

The problem is that most of us build it inside somebody else’s business. We bring our experience, judgment, ideas and relationships to the job, help build the product, team, processes, client relationships or brand, and when we leave, most of what we helped create stays there.

That’s when a lot of senior people have a pretty uncomfortable realization:

I know a hell of a lot. But what, exactly, do I own?

Take the title away and now you have to figure out what people would pay you for outside that company.

For most experienced professionals, there is plenty. Maybe it’s deep knowledge of a market. Maybe you’re unusually good at fixing one very specific problem. Maybe you’ve developed a way of making decisions that saves companies months of trial and error.

Sometimes the valuable part is narrow. Sometimes it’s the weird combination of several things you’ve learned over the years.

Find the part that travels with you.

But there’s another problem: having expertise doesn’t automatically mean the market knows you have it.

I built one of my businesses, The Recognized Founder, around exactly this problem. I call the distance between the reputation you’ve earned and the reputation the market actually sees your Recognition Gap.

That’s also why visibility and demand are part of the FU Money Plan. Once you know what you want to earn, what you want to sell and how you want to work, people still have to know you exist—and understand what they can hire, buy or refer you for.

I wrote much more about that in The Recognition Gap: Why Credible Founders Stay Invisible. The Recognition Gap: Why Credible Founders Stay Invisible.

So What Can You Build That Stays With You?

At first, you’ll probably still need active income. That might come from a job, consulting, advisory work, client projects or some combination of those things.

Active work does two useful jobs: it pays you now, and it shows you what may be worth turning into something you own later.

Because the work is often where your best ideas come from.

You start noticing the same questions people ask you. The same problems you solve. The same process you keep using. The same advice you give over and over. The same things people are willing to pay you for.

Some of those things can eventually become what I call authority assets: things built from your expertise that belong to you and can keep creating value beyond the original piece of work.

A framework. A diagnostic. A methodology. A workshop. A newsletter. A book. A course. A template. A tool. A community. Even a body of ideas people begin associating with your name.

They usually don’t begin as beautifully packaged intellectual property. They grow out of doing the work, noticing what repeats, and gradually turning that knowledge into something you can use more than once.

The Awkward Question: Will Anybody Pay?

Eventually every idea has to survive one fairly brutal test:

Will somebody pay for it?

I recently asked both my LinkedIn and Substack audiences what they were struggling with most, and the same answer came up in both places: finding people who will actually pay.

During the live, people were basically saying, Okay, Krista, enough theory. Where do I find the clients?

Fair question.

But I think people jump to client acquisition too quickly.

Before worrying about where to find buyers, you need to know exactly who needs what you do and what is happening when they finally decide the problem is worth paying to solve.

“Business owners” is too broad. So is “executives” or “women over 40.”

I want to know what’s going wrong, what they’ve already tried, how long they’ve been putting up with it, and why they would spend money on this now instead of six months from now.

Once you know that, marketing gets easier. You’re no longer staring at everyone wondering whether they could somehow become a client.

Your content gets easier too because you can stop trying to be vaguely useful to everybody.

That’s when someone reads something you wrote and thinks, Yes. This is exactly where I am.

I also think people wait far too long to test whether there’s real demand. They build the offer, website, course and funnel first, then finally start talking to buyers.

I’d rather know much earlier.

Maybe the problem isn’t urgent enough. Maybe you’re talking to the wrong person. Maybe they want the result but hate the way you packaged it.

All of that is useful information before you spend six months building.

And a big audience doesn’t automatically fix this. People can follow you, like your posts, subscribe to your newsletter and still never buy anything.

Attention is useful. Demand pays the bills.

At some point, you need evidence that your expertise solves a problem someone cares enough about to spend money on.

What Will It Cost You in Time?

Finding something people will pay for solves one problem. It can create another one pretty quickly.

I’ve seen experienced professionals leave demanding jobs because they want more control, then recreate almost exactly the same situation with clients. Now they have sales calls, delivery calls, proposals, revisions, follow-ups, admin, content and several people who all think their project should come first.

On paper, they have more income streams.

In reality, they’ve built themselves several jobs.

That’s exactly what I don’t want FU Money to become.

If you’re already working hard in a full-time job, I’m not going to tell you to go home and spend every evening building another full-time business.

This is also why I’m cautious about the phrase passive income. A lot of passive income is remarkably active while you’re building it. Sometimes afterward too.

I’m much more interested in leverage: gradually separating at least some of your income from the number of hours you personally have available.

You can still have a job. You can consult. You can do hands-on work you enjoy and get paid well for it.

I just don’t want every new dollar to require another completely new chunk of your time.

Because if building more income takes every evening, every weekend and all of your mental space, I’m not convinced you’ve improved your life very much.

More money at the expense of your entire life is a lousy FU Money Plan.

That’s FU Money

The name is cheeky. The idea behind it is practical.

You may stay in your job because you like it. You may leave. You may turn down the client who looks like trouble, take a break, change direction or give yourself time to work out what comes next.

Savings and investments matter. So does income. But I don’t think FU Money is simply a magic number sitting in an account somewhere.

I want to know that if one source disappears, I have another way to earn. That I know what people will pay me for. That I’ve built some things I can take with me. And that not every new dollar requires another hour of my life.

Most of us spend decades creating value for companies and clients.

Eventually it’s worth asking:

How much of what I’m building actually stays with me?

FU Money means having more than one way forward—and enough control that one job, client, platform or paycheck doesn’t get to make every decision for you.

And yes, someday it may give you the ability to tell someone to F off.

Hopefully you won’t need to use it very often.

Prefer to watch?

I recently went live for about 25 minutes to explain what I mean by FU Money, why depending on one source of income is so risky, and how I think about turning what you already know into income and assets without creating another job for yourself.

If you’d rather hear me talk it through, watch the full conversation here. 👇

How Much FU Money Do You Actually Have?

If you’re reading this wondering where you stand, take the free FU Money Assessment.

It will show you where you’re most dependent today and what you may want to strengthen first.

TAKE THE FREE FU MONEY ASSESSMENT →

https://unignorablebrands.co/assessment-signup

Want Help Building Your FU Money Plan?

This is the problem I built the FU Money Plan cohort to solve.

Over four weeks, we’ll look at what you already know, where you’re too dependent, what people may actually pay you for, and which income or business models fit the way you want to work.

I deliberately kept it practical. No library of 47 videos. No pile of worksheets you feel guilty about falling behind on. Just 4 steps.

Each week has one main question to work through, followed by a live session where we make decisions and keep moving.

By the end, you should have a clear plan for the next 12 months: what to monetize, who it’s for, what kind of offer or asset makes sense, and what you can safely stop wasting time on.

Find out more at FUMoneyPlan.com.

If you’ve spent years building expertise and know there’s more you could do with it, but you don’t want to lose another year building the wrong thing, that’s exactly the problem we’ll work through.

I want you to make more money without giving up more of your life.

Otherwise, we’ve just created another job.

About Krista

Krista Mollion is the founder of FU Money Plan. She’s a former CMO and co-owner of an eight-figure agency who has spent more than 20 years building brands and businesses, working with companies including Apple, HP, Sephora and Samsung.

She has tested 12 income streams and made six business pivots across consulting, services, products, courses, communities and fractional work. FU Money Plan grew out of what she learned along the way: how to turn experience into income, IP and assets you own without simply building yourself another job.

Follow Krista on LinkedIn and subscribe to FU Money Plan on Substack for more on building income, ownership and options without giving up your life to do it.

Questions? Send me a DM or email to hello (at)unignorablebrands.co

Get more from Krista Mollion | FU Money🪂 in the Substack app

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I wanted to have him on because his story is a pretty extraordinary example of what can happen when you figure out what you’re good at and turn it into revenue.

FROM $147 TO $10K MONTHS

In his mid-20s, Ayo was a college dropout with a felony conviction, working 12-hour shifts at an electronics factory for about $10 an hour.

He quit after six weeks. Around that period, he has said he was flat broke with just $147 to his name.

He eventually got a job managing a video store, moved into marketing and started writing online.

And then he kept writing.

That decision eventually led him to Medium, where he became the highest-earning writer on the platform for six months in a row and earned at least $10,000 a month for 19 consecutive months.

What makes his story especially interesting to me is what he did next.

He used the audience and expertise he built through writing to create books, courses, a writing community, consulting, coaching and other offers.

Those businesses went on to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars beyond what he earned directly from writing. He eventually left his job to write full-time and says the business he built from his skills and interests has now generated more than $2 million.

Today he writes Monetize Your Mind on Substack and teaches other people how to turn what they know into income.

So when Ayo talks about whether you can actually make money writing online, he has quite a bit of evidence.

FROM AN EIGHT-FIGURE BUSINESS TO STARTING OVER

My story starts at almost the opposite place.

By 30, I had pretty much everything I thought I was supposed to want. I was CMO and co-owner of an eight-figure creative agency, married with three kids, living in San Francisco and making very good money. I’d been working in marketing since I was 20 and assumed I had my career pretty well figured out.

Then at 38, my life blew up.

I got divorced, sold my shares in the agency and liquidated assets. Suddenly I had to figure out how to support myself and my family again, so I did the obvious thing: I tried to get a job.

I hired three career coaches, rewrote my résumé, fixed my LinkedIn profile, networked constantly and applied for more than 200 jobs over two years.

Nobody hired me.

Meanwhile, I was raising four kids, watching my savings disappear and eventually accumulating debt.

So I started making money with what I already knew how to do.

Over the next several years, I tried consulting, services, coaching, courses, communities, digital products and content. I’ve tried 12 different revenue streams and made six pretty major pivots.

Some made a lot of money. Some were complete duds. A few taught me that making good money from something doesn’t mean you want to spend your life doing it.

That’s really where FU Money came from.

I know what it feels like to make a lot of money and still have a life that depends on continuing to work a certain way. I also know what it feels like to suddenly lose most of your financial options.

Now I’m much more interested in helping people build income they have more control over: more than one way to earn, things they own, and assets that can keep producing value after the original work is done.

Which is one reason I wanted to talk to Ayo.

Our stories started in very different places and eventually led us to something similar: figuring out how to take a skill we were good at and build a profitable business around it.

WHEN YOUR MAIN PLATFORM CHANGES THE RULES

Ayo and I had something else in common.

We both spent years putting most of our time and effort into one platform, got very good at it, built large audiences and were rewarded for it.

For Ayo, that platform was Medium.

At his peak, he was the highest-earning writer on Medium for six months straight and getting between 500,000 and one million views a month. For 19 consecutive months, he earned at least $10,000 a month directly from the platform.

He eventually grew to around 120,000 followers and says he made close to $500,000 from Medium altogether.

But Ayo did something smart while all of this was working.

He started building an email list early.

While Medium was sending him traffic, he was also using lead magnets to move readers onto a list he owned. Eventually that list grew into the tens of thousands. He was also writing books and starting to build products.

That turned out to be pretty good timing.

Medium changed how stories were distributed and how writers were paid. Ayo eventually saw his Medium income drop by about 80%.

By then, he had other things to sell and an audience he could reach somewhere else.

My main platform was LinkedIn.

I was part of LinkedIn’s creator program and was named a LinkedIn Top Voice three years in a row. That brought more visibility, credibility and opportunities. I grew my audience to more than 77,000 followers, and at my peak it wasn’t unusual for a post to reach 50,000 to 100,000 people.

That visibility turned into money too. It helped lead to six-figure brand deals, clients and other business opportunities.

So focusing heavily on one platform worked extremely well for both of us.

Then LinkedIn changed too.

Back in 2018, LinkedIn openly said its biggest creators were getting a disproportionate share of attention. It changed the feed and shifted about 8% of the engagement going to the top 0.1% of creators toward the bottom 98%.

And the feed has kept changing ever since.

By 2025, the drop in reach was hard to miss. An analysis of 3 million LinkedIn posts found that median reach had fallen by more than 47% in a single year.

I eventually did my own deep dive into LinkedIn’s newer algorithm because I wanted to understand what had changed.

DIFFERENT ORIGINS, SAME DESTINATION: SUBSTACK

That’s part of what brought me to Substack.

LinkedIn had been very good to me. I built a large audience there, found clients, landed opportunities and saw firsthand how much writing online could change a business.

I had no intention of leaving. I still don’t.

But I had become very aware of how much of my visibility and business depended on decisions I had absolutely no control over.

One week a post could reach 50,000 or 100,000 people. The next week, something just as good could reach a fraction of that.

I didn’t want so much riding on one platform.

So I started exploring Substack.

Part of the appeal was simple: if someone subscribed, I had a much better chance of reaching them again.

I also wanted to see what would happen if writing became part of the business itself instead of mainly being how I marketed everything else.

Ayo had already gone through his own version of this with Medium.

Medium didn’t disappear. LinkedIn didn’t suddenly become useless. We had both simply reached the point where it made sense to build beyond the platform that helped us get there.

When too much of your income, audience or business depends on one company deciding to keep showing your work, you have less control than you think.

If you’re trying to build more income and become less dependent on one employer, client or platform, that’s exactly what I write about here.

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THE 33,000-SUBSCRIBER PROBLEM

Despite coming from different worlds and different platforms, there’s one thing Ayo and I agree on 100%.

If your goal is to build a profitable solo business, relying on Substack subscriptions alone is a very hard way to do it.

Ayo explained it in terms of volume.

Say you charge $10 a month and want to make $10,000 a month. You need 1,000 paying subscribers.

Using Ayo’s assumption of a 3% free-to-paid conversion rate, you’d need roughly 33,000 free subscribers to get there.

That is a hell of a lot of people.

And first you have to find them.

You have to write consistently, publish Notes, promote your work, collaborate, build relationships and keep growing month after month.

Can it work? Obviously. There are people making very good money from paid subscriptions.

Ayo’s point, and mine, is that people seriously underestimate the volume required.

He told me he’s seen Substack accounts with 30,000 subscribers and massively viral posts making around $1,000 a month.

His description of what went wrong was perfect:

They built the attention infrastructure without the business infrastructure underneath it.

And before the diehard writers come for us, neither of us is saying you shouldn’t have a paid tier.

Ayo literally said, “Keep your paid tier. It’s fine.”

If your dream is to write all day and you’re delighted that people will pay you to do it, fantastic. Life does not have to be one giant ROI calculation.

But if you came here because you want to build a serious source of income, you should understand the math before deciding subscriptions are going to get you there.

YOU DON’T NEED 30,000 SUBSCRIBERS. YOU NEED AN OFFER.

Ayo told me about a woman with just 67 Substack subscribers.

She had a higher-priced offer. She networked, collaborated, sent DMs and actually talked to people.

She signed clients.

Meanwhile, someone else can spend years building an audience of 30,000 people and still struggle to turn all that attention into meaningful income.

I think a lot of creators have the order backwards. They assume they need to build the audience first and figure out the business later.

So they keep writing, posting Notes and celebrating every new subscriber, while the question of what anyone might eventually pay them for gets pushed further down the road.

Ayo has spent years working with creators and sees this repeatedly. Growing the audience won’t magically tell you whether you have something people will buy.

His advice is to test much earlier.

He has created programs by writing the sales page before building the program. If enough people were willing to put down a deposit, he built it.

You don’t have to start with a $3,000 or $5,000 offer either.

Offer a consulting call. Put together a workshop. Create a small product around something people already ask you about. Describe it, put a price on it and see what happens.

You’ll learn a lot faster from someone pulling out a credit card than from another thousand people clicking Subscribe.

And please don’t sit around waiting for people to magically reach out and ask how they can give you money.

If you want to build a business, eventually you have to make an offer.

SO, CAN YOU ACTUALLY MAKE MONEY WRITING ONLINE?

Absolutely.

Ayo found writing almost by accident, went all in on Medium and eventually became the highest-earning writer on the platform.

I spent decades in marketing, built my audience on LinkedIn and came to Substack much later because I wanted writing itself to become a bigger part of my business.

We arrived here through completely different routes and ended up agreeing on quite a lot.

Writing can create attention, credibility, relationships and opportunities. A platform can completely change your career. Ayo is living proof of that.

But a large audience on its own can still make very little money.

Ayo earned hundreds of thousands of dollars directly from Medium and still kept building. He created an email list, books, courses, a community, coaching and consulting. So when Medium changed, he still had a business.

That’s probably the biggest thing I took away from our conversation.

Take advantage of the platform while it’s working. Become excellent at it. Build the audience and enjoy the opportunities that come with it.

Then build something you control around that attention.

Because 30,000 subscribers who never buy anything can be worth considerably less to your business than 67 people who actually need what you know.

Ayo’s story obviously doesn’t mean everyone who starts writing with $147 in the bank is going to build a $2 million business.

It does show what can happen when you find a skill that fits you, get very good at it, and then figure out more than one way to make money from it.

WANT MORE?

If you want to read more from Ayodeji, go find Monetize Your Mind on Substack.

I especially recommend his story about going from $147 in his bank account to building a business that has generated more than $2 million. There’s a lot more to his story than we could possibly cover here.

And thanks to everyone who joined us live. This conversation could easily have gone another hour.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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