Moving to Substack + You can now get me to write more with a paid subscription

Posted on Jul 25, 2025 in English Posts | 0 comments

For the last approx. 3.5 years, I’ve been splitting my time between my emotional coaching practice and working for a local startup. I’m still doing the coaching, but I felt like it was time to move on from the startup, which left me with the question of what to do with the freed-up time and reduced money.

Over the years, people have told me things like “you should have a Patreon” or have otherwise wanted to support my writing. Historically, I’ve had various personal challenges with writing regularly, but now I decided to take another shot at it. I spent about a month seeing if I could make a regular writing habit work, and… it seems like it’s working. I’m now confident that as long as it made some financial sense, I could write essays regularly as opposed to just randomly producing a few each year.

So I’m giving it a try. I’ve enabled paid subscriptions on my Substack; for 8 euros per month, you will get immediate access to all posts and once-a-month reflective essays on my life in general that will remain perpetually subscriber-only. Most other paid content will become free 1-2 weeks after release.

I also expect to shift my posting predominantly to Substack now – WordPress is a little annoying at times, and while I could crosspost my content here once it became free, it feels like an annoying hassle that I don’t feel like doing. I do expect to post a fair chunk of my content on LessWrong once it becomes free, though.

For now, I commit to publishing at least one paid post per month; my recent writing pace has been closer to one essay per week, though I don’t expect to pull that off consistently. I intend to continue writing about whatever happens to interest me, which tends to be heavy on topics like AI, psychology, meditation, and social dynamics.

If you like my writing but those perks wouldn’t be enough to get you to become a paying subscriber, consider that the more paid subscribers I have, the more likely it is that I’ll continue with this and keep writing essays more often. Generally sharing and linking to my content also helps.

In the past, there have been people who have wanted to give me more money for writing than the above. Finnish fundraising laws prevent me from directly asking for donations – I need to present everything as the purchase of a service with some genuine value in return. Right now, trying to come up with and maintain various reward tiers would distract me from the actual writing that I want to focus on. Even just having a tip jar link on my website would be considered soliciting donations, which is illegal without a fundraising permit, and fundraising permits are not given to private individuals. That said, if someone reading this would like to support my writing with a larger sum, nothing prevents me from accepting unsolicited gifts from people (kaj.sotala@gmail.com reaches me).