Her Fat Positive Newsletter Earns $175K Per Year

Virginia Sole-Smith is the founder of Burnt Toast…

A popular newsletter, podcast, and community about body liberation, parenting, and pop culture.

Why burnt toast? 🤔

Because this is a newsletter about rejecting diet culture, and that also means rejecting perfectionism.

Virginia started her newsletter in 2016 but it sounds like she was mainly earning a living as a freelance writer until 2021 📝

She wrote in a recent interview…

I was writing a parenting column for Jess Grose at the New York Times, and I was doing a lot of work for Medium.

Then, in January 2021, they [both reorganized]. Those were two anchor clients that I lost, and I was like, “Oh, here we go again. I need to find new anchor clients.”

But before she went looking, Virginia decided to try out paid subscriptions for her newsletter.

Fast-forward almost 3 years and she now has over 3,500 paying subscribers at $5/month or $50/year 🤯

That adds up to at least ~$175,000 in annual revenue.

Virginia writes…

I knew there were people who were making full-time incomes on [newsletter platform] Substack, and I could see the potential for it.

What I like about it is that your income can increase without your workload increasing.

With freelancing, in order to make a lot of money, you just have to keep working, working, working. It’s all about how many projects you can take on, which, in some ways, the sky’s the limit, but also, we need sleep. There’s a cap on what you can do.

True, freelancing can be a tough grind, but it’s also a great way to get started working online, as you can earn a living from it pretty quick 🤑

In Virginia’s case, freelancing paid the bills until she’d built up a big enough audience to earn a living from her newsletter.

Virginia also has a decent-sized audience on Instagram (45K followers), but she says that hasn’t helped her business much…

My biggest drivers are direct and Google, which means most of the way Burnt Toast is building is people texting it to their friends. Mom chats and mom Facebook groups are what my career runs on.

It’s other moms saying, “You need to read this. This will be so helpful.” It’s hard because how do you market to people’s texts? You don’t.

Also…

I give a lot for free… My most successful issue recently was an essay about dressing for the book tour. That was about showing up fat and being visible, a thinky essay, an emotional piece about clothes.

See that piece here: What I Wore On Book Tour

💡 My biggest takeaway from Virginia’s story: for every movement there is likely a counter-movement.

You see lots of people promoting diet and fat loss on social media nowadays. And Virginia is making a good living pushing back against that trend.

Is there a popular trend out there that rubs you the wrong way? Could there be a business opportunity there? 🤔

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