Design your Substack like a category, not a content stream
The 5-step framework to turn your newsletter into a business that earns belief, revenue, and word of mouth.
This is a 🏴☠️ Founding Members–Only 🏴☠️ post. Founding Members get access to the Pirate Eddie Bot to ask category design questions, weekly actionable insights, the full library with 20+ audiobooks 150+ mini-books, and more. See the Founders Deck here.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Eight weeks ago, Pirate Eddie and his wife Kristen launched a brand-new Substack, Big Island Memory Making.
They started the joint venture with zero subscribers and a mission:
A family designing their next chapter together before the empty-nest era—turning a love for Hawai‘i into a living case study in Category Design.
For Eddie and Kristen, this isn’t a side project. It’s a map to their next adventure. A way to stay connected, create together, and design the next stage of life with intention.
As of publishing, the newsletter now has:
65% of annual breakeven revenue
16 posts published with momentum growing
190 total subscribers (a handful of paying subs)
The real win is the model—a proof point of everything we preach inside Lightning Strike Marketing.
Today, we’ll dive into what’s really working.
Below, we break down five moves Eddie and Kristen used to turn a blank Substack into a profit-positive flywheel, so you can apply them to your own newsletter.
In the spirit of radical generosity, this post also comes with two treasures:
A free copy of our newest book, Lightning Strike Marketing—the complete playbook for turning marketing into a profit center
A chance to have your Substack newsletter reviewed and recommended by Category Pirates (which has brought in 1000s of readers for other newsletters)
These perks are available only to our Founding subscribers. If you’re not yet a Founding Subscriber, upgrade here to unlock these bonuses and the full Founders Vault with our 5 full-size books, 200+ mini-books, 28+ audiobooks, weekly Founder posts, and the Pirate Eddie Bot.
We’ll walk you through the Substack moves first, then explain how to get the bonuses.
5 Moves To Build A Profit-Positive Substack Newsletter
We’ve written how to differentiate your content in the How To Write A Top 1% Business Newsletter mini-book.
Now, let’s break down how to turn writing into revenue, belief into momentum, and a side project into a profit machine.