In 2025, creator Amie Tollefsrud, better known as Lazy Millionaire, was burned out. She had generated more than $12M selling online courses but wanted to try something new.
A year later, she reports $500K in annual recurring revenue from her more than 186K subscribers on Substack.
We spoke with Tollefsrud about how she built the business. Here were her three tips →
1) Monetize immediately: Unlike platforms with audience thresholds for monetization, Substack lets creators offer paid subscriptions from day one.
“When you are charging for something, it sets the standard that your time and the publication is valuable,” Tollefsrud told us. “It also makes me write better articles because I know people are paying for them.”
2) Repurpose what you make: Tollefsrud starts with a Substack article, then adapts it into long- and short-form content that points audiences back to the publication.
“If you already have a podcast or YouTube channel, it’s so easy to repurpose a lot of the content you've already done into a Substack article,” Tollefsrud said.
3) Build recurring revenue: Tollefsrud says her $500K annual earnings figure excludes brand sponsorships, affiliate marketing, or product sales. For her, subscriptions provide a more predictable income stream.
“[With other revenue streams], you never really know when you'll get paid,” Tollefsrun said. “I say: ‘Substack is the guy that you marry, [everything else is] a weekend fling.’”
Zooming out: Tollefsrud already had an audience of more than 500K on other platforms, but she told us most of her Substack subscribers discovered her on Substack itself.
“A large majority of the people who subscribe to me found me on Substack,” Tollefsrud told us. “So not only am I bringing people who already follow me on Substack, but I’m reaching an entirely new audience I wasn’t before.”
Different audiences live on different platforms. Repurposing content to reach an untapped fanbase can be the difference between $0 and $500K.
