The pleasure of staying small.

On building big, learning what it costs, and why I’m keeping Unsubscribe small.

Dec 11, 2025

Welcome to issue #048 of Unsubscribe. Each week, I send one essay that helps you step off the default path to build a life you love, supported by work you enjoy.

Back in December of 2021, I was at my parents’ house in Cleveland, Ohio, because my mom was going to be having hip surgery.

At that point in time, I’d been writing on Twitter for about two months and had grown a small following of maybe 10,000 people. As I was having coffee in their kitchen, I wrote a short thread sharing eighteen creators I thought were doing interesting work online at the time. Without realizing it, I included only two women and sixteen men. It wasn’t meant to be malicious or intentional. It was simply an oversight on my part. The kind of mistake you make when you’re new to a platform, you’re rushing around, and you’re not thinking about how everything you post will be scrutinized.

I posted it around 8 a.m. and then went about my day, getting my Mom prepped for surgery, coming home, making dinner, and eventually helping my Mom get back into the house.

At 10 p.m. that night, my father screamed from the living room downstairs and woke me out of deep sleep. My mom had crashed after taking some sort of medication post-surgery. She was slumped over at the table, completely unresponsive. I jumped out of bed, ran downstairs, called 911, and followed that call up with one to my mom’s best friend, who’s a nurse. I was frantic. The paramedics showed up, revived her with Narcan, and rushed her to the ER. My father and I followed in the car behind them, more shaken up than either of us had likely ever been.

I sat in the ER waiting room for what felt like hours, not knowing if my mom was going to be okay. My hands were shaking, and I couldn’t sit still. So I did what I always do when I’m anxious and need a distraction.

I opened Twitter.

The thread I’d posted that morning had gotten some serious traction. Over 2,800 reactions. But when I noticed one particular retweet, my stomach dropped.

A University Professor from Harvard had taken offense to my oversight and retweeted it to their audience. Underneath her post, hundreds of people were calling me every name you can imagine. Sexist. Misogynist. Piece of shit. People were screenshotting it, quote-tweeting it, telling others how I was “part of the problem.”

And I was sitting there in an emergency room, terrified about my mother, watching strangers tear me apart for a mistake I didn’t realize I had even made.

The truth is that I’m a big boy, and I can certainly handle criticism. It was less the criticism and more just the timing. Frantic, panicking, and dealing with a genuine family emergency, while the internet mob had their way without any insight as to who I am as a person. They just saw a thread that fit a pattern they were angry about, and I became the latest target.

I wasn’t a person to them. I was a brand that, in that moment, needed to be destroyed.

That was my first real introduction to what it actually means to be a “big” creator.

Like any mistake in the 24/7 online world, it passes pretty quickly. I thought about defending myself, but I realized it would just add fuel to the fire. So I blocked the person, went to sleep, and basically never thought about it again.

So over the next few years, I kept growing. I built my Saturday Solopreneur newsletter to 175,000 subscribers, my LinkedIn following to over 800,000, and my Twitter (now X) following to 555,000. I’ve helped thousands of people start and grow their own businesses and built a more successful business for myself than I ever thought I would by simply writing on the internet.

But the bigger I’ve grown, the more I’ve started to understand what happened on that ER waiting room day.

When you’re big online, you cease to be a person. You’re a thing people project onto. A brand they expect to behave a certain way. And a target when you don’t.

And there’s this really interesting thing that happens as you hit certain growth milestones. You plateau and start maintaining.

Every week, I send an email to 175,000 people. And every week, a percentage of them unsubscribe. When your list is that big, the math gets pretty brutal. Losing one percent of 175,000 subscribers is 1,750 people, and that’s a pretty common number to hit “unsubscribe” when I send out an email. Which means I need to gain 1,750 new subscribers every single week just to stay at the same number I was the week before.

I could run ads to replace them or push even harder on social media. I could trade subscribers with other big accounts. I could create more content, find new platforms, and probably hustle my way back to growth.

But that’s a never-ending game of muscle and horsepower. More effort, more content, more strategy, just to avoid going backward.

And honestly? I don’t really want to play that game anymore.

Because I’ve realized that “big” doesn’t actually mean growing, it means running as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.

There’s something else I lost by getting big that I didn’t expect to lose.

When you have 175,000 people reading your work every week, you can’t really experiment as much anymore. You can’t just change your mind about what you want to write. You can’t be vulnerable in ways that might make people uncomfortable or confused about what they signed up for.

You’re expected to stay in your lane and deliver on the promises you made when people subscribed. To be the expert who has it all figured out and can teach them how to figure it out too.

The piece I wrote a few weeks ago about trying to finish my life instead of experiencing it? I couldn’t have written that for the Saturday Solopreneur. It’s too personal. Too raw. Too much admitting that I don’t have everything figured out.

Most creators I know would never admit to struggling with the exact things they’re supposed to be teaching people how to overcome. Admitting failure or personal struggles can be suicidal for your business and your income. People don’t want to learn from someone who’s still figuring it out. They want the expert with the answers!

But I’m not interested in being inauthentic just to protect my subscriber count.

At 175,000 subscribers, I have to be “expert Justin.” The guy with the playbook. The guy who’s built the business and figured out the systems can teach you exactly how to do what he did.

And that version of me isn’t entirely false. For the most part, I’ve figured out social media, marketing, business building, networking, and more. But it’s also not the whole truth either.

The truth is that I’m still figuring a lot of things out. And the bigger my audience got, the less I felt “allowed” to admit that.

So I started Unsubscribe here on Substack.

It’s small in comparison to my other newsletter. It’s currently around 28,500 subscribers. I don’t promote it very often. There are no aggressive growth tactics. I’ll be turning off paid subscriptions soon because I don’t want the pressure of monetizing it.

And I can write whatever I want here.

I can be vulnerable without worrying about whether it’s going to cost me business. I can admit when I’m struggling with something. I can write about things that have nothing to do with solopreneurship, business strategy, or how to grow your newsletter.

I can change my mind about what interests me. I can experiment with topics I’ve never written about before. And I can be the version of myself that’s still figuring things out instead of having to pretend I’ve already figured it all out.

Could I figure out how to monetize this again someday? Most likely. But I feel absolutely zero pressure to do that or grow it or turn it into anything other than what it is right now. A place where I can write and think and be honest without worrying about the consequences.

That freedom is worth more to me than the growth ever was.

I think a lot about what happened in that ER waiting room four years ago.

At the time, I thought the lesson was about being more careful. About how I had to think through every post, anticipate how people might react, and protect myself from getting torn apart again.

But the real lesson is actually quite different.

The bigger your audience gets, the less you can actually be yourself. At 175,000 subscribers and 1.5M followers, I’m a brand. People have expectations about what I will write and how I will write it, and what kind of person I am supposed to be for them.

Here, with a lot fewer subscribers, I get to be a person. I can write things that surprise people or challenge their expectations or just honestly reflect where I am right now instead of where I’m supposed to be.

And I’m realizing that being a person is where I’m having the most fun.

I spent years building systems to grow an audience. I know exactly how to do it. I have the playbook. I can teach other people how to do it. I could apply everything I’ve learned to Unsubscribe and grow it to 50,000 or 100,000 subscribers in the next 12 months if I wanted to.

But I don’t.

Because eventually it will come with the maintenance just to be stagnant. The pressure to stay in my lane and never deviate. The inability to be vulnerable or experimental or honest about the parts of myself that don’t fit the brand people expect.

I’m choosing to stay small here because small gives me the freedom to be whatever writer I want to be on a weekly basis. To talk about whatever pops into my head when it’s time to sit down at the keyboard.

So here’s what I’m wondering this week.

What are you chasing right now that might actually make your life worse once you get there? What goal are you working toward that might cost you the exact thing you’re hoping it will give you?

And if you’ve already gotten there, if you’ve already built the thing everyone told you to build, are you allowed to choose something different?

Leave a comment and tell me. I read every response.

I appreciate your time.

What are you chasing right now that might actually make your life worse once you get there?

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?