I'll put my tentatively final thoughts up front: starting a paid Substack probably isn't worth it. I've seen some estimates that the Substack conversion rates hover around 10%. With the same number of unpaid subscribers, there may be about 50 paid subscribers. Third, much work goes into keeping the conversion rate high and the unsubscribe rate low. To make $10,000 per month, I would need 2,000 paid subscribers and about 40,000 total subscribers.