Holy crap, Medium has covered ALL my startup costs and operational costs for running my company

I get paid up to $0.39 per minute somebody spends reading my stories!?!?! As it turns out, writing about the company is more profitable than running the company 🤣. Here is what I did and my exact earnings.

Keep in mind that not everybody or every story makes this amount. Instead earnings vary based on the amount of time they spend on your articles / how much time a user reads stories per month. If a paying user only reads your story in a month, then you will get paid more per minute they spend.

Earnings of $0.35 per minute on Jan 19th
Earnings of $0.39 a minute on Jan 20th

Since I published the story, I had days with over 2,500 minutes of user reading time. Sadly I didn’t turn on the paywall feature until after the bulk of the traffic, after I hit a few hundred followers mark. If I had turned it on from the beginning, at these levels, I might have earned $12,000 in January alone for this one story -- caution paywall. If you send me a private message, I'll be happy to share a link that doesn't require the paywall.

So how did I get here and is this something you can do as well?

Honestly, for me it was by chance. I am a huge fan of transparent and virtual companies. Companies like GitLab, or PostHog. A handful of us who were at Google decided to start a company. We deeply missed some of the internal Google tools like their “go/” links. It tuns out all commercial offerings were waaaay too expensive so I built a SaaS company in a weekend to provide this service and ended up building a fully featured and automated company, Goto Tools.

I was floored about how simple it was, and decided to say as much in a story on Medium (the above graph shows this one story’s earnings.) Many people enjoyed the story, and it continues to get minor traction as many people are exploring how to create their own company.

Can you do this as well? Of course you can, but I suspect it won’t be worth your time unless you are willing to put in the effort, but I dare you. Whatever you do, please don’t try to build a bot that posts formulaic articles. The world has enough of these. If you do want to give it a try, I highly suggest you join Medium. I’ve been a member since 2020 and have enjoyed many good articles and it supports those authors. Fair warning, I do earn some referral fees if you sign up from my link. If you don't want to subscribe through me, just go directly to www.medium.com