Hacking Substack: Inspiration From My Recent Birthday Journey

Psychedelics, a shift in philosophy, and a deep pricing experiment

If you have listened to my podcast Plantscendence you probably know that every year for the past several years I do a “journey” on my birthday. I’ve had a number of epiphanies on these journeys. Two years ago - I had a strong affirmation of the “sacred feminine” and how filmmaking (and all the creative arts) are a manifestation of the sacred feminine - and as such it is important to support the work of other filmmakers. This led me to work even harder to help filmmakers connect their films with audiences which lead several months later to the creation of the 8 Above Distribution Lab.

On this year’s journey, very strong questions came up to me around my Substack. Here’s the short version: I’m tired of trying to monetize this Substack in ways that don’t feel aligned. I found myself asking, “What am I doing here, really? Why am I paywalling this work when most of it is meant to serve?” And the honest answer is… I’m not sure it’s doing much good.

I had inspirations around the “gift economy” (a term I have some familiarity of - not the least because my artist wife has been immersed in matriarchal studies in support of her art practice for the past several years as for her “Disentangle Patriarchy/Re-imbody Equality” project).

But I came to realize that a pay what you want model would be more appropriate. (yes still on my journey) I have a fundamental issue with the subscription model at the heart of Substack. Ultimately subscriptions are a form of “rent” - and subscriptions turn creators into landlords over their creativity. Netflix is a landlord, The New York Times is a landlord, Spotify is a landlord. The proliferation of SAAS (software as a service) aka Zoom, MS Office, cloud storage is all subscription/rent. People are now not only paying rent for their housing but they have a pile of rent for so many aspects of their lives and their businesses. If you want to support writers on Substack - how can someone afford 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 paid subscriptions. Unfortunately late capitalism and tech enshitification has led us to this as a leading/dominant form of monetization.

NOTE: I didn’t spend my whole journey thinking about Substack. My facilitator didn’t name me “Dancing Bear” for nothing. And yes I am going to start that over 35 weekly dance club in NYC that will run from 8pm-Midnight and I will be DJing there within 2 years!

This is not to say Substack is terrible. There are a lot of benefits - it does allow people who write/create earn something from their work (although for the vast majority Substackers this is sub gig labor wages). More importantly, I have experienced a positive network effect where Substack and its network has helped me build my audience. Thanks to all of you, my audience on Substack has grown from 6500 when I launched September 2025 to over 9000 now. My Mailchimp newsletter never achieved that rate of growth. (I know it would grow more if I ever posted on Notes!)

Because of the social nature of Substack and there is a large community of filmmakers on there, for now - I want to try to make this project work on Substack. What I wish Substack had was a pay what you want model which I know other platforms such as Patreon have. (note - I’ll be reaching out to then about this)

For the time being, I am going to try to hack the Substack model into a Frankenstein pay what you want model. Currently on Substack, the minimum you can charge per month for a paid subscription is $5 a month. The minimum you are allowed to charge per year is $30. Then there is a founding level that I had randomly set at $500 and someone actually generously subscribed at that level. Thank you!

So here’s the plan/hack:

Starting now, nearly all posts on 8 Above will be free.

I do pay a small crew of humans to help make these posts happen (project management, editing, writing drafts, transcriptions, graphics). Your contributions help keep that engine running.

So the exceptions: our big webinars — like the New Platforms and New Distributors sessions — because those take more time, effort, and back-end work. But everything else: most of the case studies, strategy breakdowns, field notes, essays — unlocked. I’ll be experimenting with pricing of the larger webinars as well.

So if you’ve found value here and want to support this work this is what I’ve set up:

• For the next week I am going to run a 75% discount - $1.50 a month or $15.00 a year. I’m going to run this for 5 days. I will experiment with similar discounts in the future.

• If you want to pay a bit more - you can still subscribe for $60 a year ($5 a month) or you can subscribe for $6 a month.

The one way that Substack allows you to pay what you want is that it allows people to subscribe to the Founding level for anything between the annual subscription fee up to the Founding level. I have bracketed these at $60 and $500 If you want to pay at this level, all you need to do is click Founding and change the amount. (Next week I’m going to drop this to $30 (the lowest allowed annual subscription-$500 and above).

So that’s the experimental hack: if you want to pay a little, you can. If you want to pay more, that’s welcome. And if you’re just here for the insights with zero pressure — the door’s wide open — you don’t have to pay anything.

The takeaway? I’d rather people read this stuff than paywall it in hopes of a few bucks. This project was never about building a paywall fortress — it was about sharing tools, strategies, and solidarity for navigating an evolving media landscape.

If you’ve read this far — thank you. I hope the work here has been useful, grounding, even occasionally inspiring.

Warmly,

Jon