The Value Capture Gap: Why the Smartest Experts on Substack Stay Broke

Your insights are worth more than $5

A few weeks ago, I met a doctor on Substack.

Not a “wellness creator.” Not a woman who read three books about cortisol. An actual MD.

She can read your labs.

She can see what’s happening in your bloodwork that no coach on this platform can see.

She can do telemedicine. She can prescribe medication.

She can take a tired, foggy, burned-out professional and literally change the trajectory of their health.

You know what she asked me?

“How do I make money with this?”

My face when reading this

There’s a company called FitScripts that charges $35,000 per client for vitality work.

Lab analysis, protocols, and ongoing support. Thirty-five thousand dollars. For work she is more qualified to do.

The part that gets me?

I had been personally searching for someone who does exactly what she does. Me. A guy with money, a real problem, and a credit card.

I wanted someone to actually read my labs instead of glancing at them for 90 seconds.

I wanted real guidance from someone with real credentials.

There are thousands of people out here like me.

She’s wasting her talent on $5 subscriptions — surrounded by a sea of demand from customers willing to pay her thousands, and she just couldn’t see it.

She’s Not Alone

I’d love to tell you this doctor is an unusual case.

She’s not. She’s the most common story on this entire platform.

For the past two years, I’ve worked with coaches, corporate professionals, and experts across every category you can imagine.

And almost every single one of them suffers from the same disease.

I call it the Value Capture Gap.

The Value Capture Gap is the difference between what your skills are worth and what you’re actually charging for them.

Look at the pattern from a client I have worked with.

A UX expert who knows how to tie design decisions to the business metrics that PM teams and execs care about — knowledge that saves companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad product decisions.

He packaged it into a $10 ebook.

A coach helping people heal trauma — work that changes the entire arc of someone’s life. She was charging $5 a month and throwing in free live sessions.

A resume expert who could reroute someone’s whole career. $50 reviews.

And then I run across a medical doctor who can do what a $35K-per-client company does. Wondering how to monetize.

And every one of these gaps exists for the same reason:

Experts price against other creators. Buyers price against the cost of staying stuck.

Why Smart People Undercharge

The smarter you are, the wider your gap tends to be.

The doctor has read ten thousand labs — of course it feels obvious to her. That’s the cruel side effect of mastery.

The one person on Earth who finds your knowledge unremarkable is also the person setting the price.

If you came from corporate, it’s worse. You’ve never actually priced your own knowledge — your salary did it for you. But your old employer billed clients $300 to $500 an hour for your brain.

Now you’re charging $5 a month for the same brain.

A $5 price tag is tantamount to apologizing for the existence of your ‘business.’ It makes “yes” so painless that you never have to feel a real rejection.

The most expensive thing you can possibly do? Charge low prices.

Pricing Teaches People How to Think About You

If someone offered you a Louis Vuitton bag for $5, you wouldn’t think “what a deal.”

You’d think “fake.”

The price would destroy your belief in the product — even if it was real.

Now look at your own page. Ten, fifteen, twenty years of expertise that companies pay thousands for — selling for the price of a gas station coffee, with a “buy me a coffee” button underneath like a tip jar.

You’re positioning yourself like a panhandler for knowledge your counterparts charge 1,000X for.

And your audience is taking notes.

Many of you remind me of my BFF — Freebie Fiona.

Her audience loves her tips. They save her posts, download her guides, and say “OMG thank you sooo much,” in her comments.

She’s everyone’s favorite helpful internet friend.

That’s the problem. She’s a friend. Not a guide.

When her readers hit a problem they’d pay real money to solve, they go hire someone else — because Fiona trained them.

Every free tip and every tip-jar button taught her audience the same lesson: say thank you, not “how do I pay you?”

Your pricing IS your positioning.

Teach your audience you’re a $5 expert long enough, and they’ll fight you when you finally try to charge what you’re worth.

The Part That Should Actually Bother You

Maybe you don’t care about the money. A lot of experts don’t — they got into this work to help people.

Fine. Then this is the part that should keep you up at night.

Underpricing shrinks your impact.

Think about what you do with advice you pay $5 for. Do you rush out to go implement it, or does it sit on your shelf?

I remember I had bought all of these books on anti-inflammation diets, gut health optimization, better sleep, etc.

I couldn’t be bothered to read them and just paid someone to tell me exactly what to do instead.

Mind you, these were problems that were affecting my life in a bad way, but I was willing to fix them until the stakes were high enough and I got real expert help I deemed worth it.

I know a bunch of really smart health creators on here, but then I go see some 15-minute-long article behind an $8 paywall. Even though I could easily afford the subscription, it’s not worth the money for me. Would rather buy a snackwrap.

The $5K client shows up to every call. Does the work. Reports back. They have skin in the game, so they act. The $5 buyer downloads the PDF, skims half of it, and forgets it exists by Thursday.

So the real tragedy of the trauma coach had nothing to with her bank account. It’s that $5 a month practically guaranteed fewer people healed. The low price made her advice ignorable.

The cheap option isn’t the ethical option.

If you genuinely care about impact, underpricing is the most irresponsible thing you can do with your knowledge.

The Staircase to Nowhere

“Honestly... I don’t even feel like I’m worthy of doing this,” she said.

A year or so ago, I hosted a virtual summit with dozens of guest speakers. One of them had everything going for her on the surface. Thousands of followers. Tons of engagement. From the outside, she had a thriving writing business. That’s why I invited her.

Turns out, she had zero customers.

Her writing was excellent. Her audience was real. But she had built what I call a staircase to nowhere — a big audience with no buyers in it, climbing higher every month toward a door that doesn’t exist.

When your audience won’t buy, your brain offers you a comforting diagnosis: I just need more subscribers.

That diagnosis has a twin: “I’ll monetize later.” Once I hit 1,000 subscribers. Then 5,000. Then after the redesign.

The threshold keeps moving because the threshold was never real. You’re kicking the can down the road out of fear.

Waiting isn’t neutral.

Every month without an offer builds an audience optimized for free content subs, and trains them that you’re free.

“I’ll monetize later” can lead you right up the staircase to nowhere.

So you double down on growth.

You write two articles a week instead of one.

You write 5 notes a day instead of 3.

You hop on 97 Substack lives to build community.

The audience just keeps getting bigger than your bank account. It’s maddening. I have met creators with 100,000+ followers who make essentially zero.

Your obsession with subscriber count is not the cure for the Value Capture Gap.

People with the right model don’t need huge audiences.

One of my clients makes $10K a month with 2,100 subscribers.

Another signed $10K in clients with 1,400.

Another turned a $5 subscriber into a $5K client with a list of 243 people.

The summit speaker never figured that out. Her last post was February 4, 2024.

She didn’t fail loudly. She just quietly concluded the whole thing was pointless, and disappeared. And she had a topic and audience that, from the outside looking in, seemed successful.

If you knew how many of your favorite creators were broke, you would stop being obsessed with subscribers.

It’s sad. I see so many otherwise successful people fade out because they’re not built for the content treadmill.

You’re not a content creator. Why are you playing the game like one?

That’s what the Value Capture Gap actually costs. Not just money. Careers.

You’re Pricing Against the Wrong Thing

Remember the sentence I told you to hold onto?

Experts price against other creators. Buyers price against the cost of staying stuck.

Here’s what it looks like in the wild.

The doctor was pricing against other creators. Wellness newsletters. $9-a-month health coaches. Substack tip jars. That’s the comparison set in her head.

You know what her buyers are comparing her to? Chronic fatigue. Declining health. Years of medical uncertainty and doctors who won’t give them more than seven minutes.

The UX guy priced against ebooks. His buyers were pricing against six-figure product mistakes.

The trauma coach priced against subscriptions. Her buyers were pricing against decades of suffering.

You’re both looking at the same offer and seeing completely different numbers — and the buyer’s number is almost always bigger than yours.

That gap between the two numbers? That’s your Value Capture Gap, sitting there uncollected.

Investment vs. Cost

There are two numbers in every transaction:

Investment — what someone pays you.

Cost — what it costs them to NOT solve the problem. Financially. Emotionally. Mentally. Physically. Spiritually.

Experts who charge $5 are staring at the investment. “Who would pay me $5,000?”

Buyers who pay $5,000 are staring at the cost. “What does another five years of this problem do to my life?”

Remember the doctor.

While she’s agonizing over what she could possibly charge, the person across from her— me, that week — had been calculating something entirely different:

How much money am I losing because I can’t function at peak?

What’s another decade of brain fog worth?

What it’s costing me to not be present with my friends, my family, my kid?

Won’t delve into detail, but for me, my health stuff was ruining my life, so it was worth every penny to fix, which I did, with someone else.

$5K is irrelevant to the right customer.

My client who turned $5 subscribers into $5K clients. She reached out to the same people paying her $5 a month and offered them $5,000 of real transformation — and they said yes.

The only thing that changed was the size of the door she built for them.

People can’t pay you for what you don’t offer.

So What Is Your Substack Actually For?

Not paid subscriptions. Not tips. Not a “buy me a coffee” button.

Your Substack is a trust-building, gap-exposing engine.

The purpose of your content is not to deliver answers. Tips and how-to content attract freebie seekers and tire-kickers — and put you straight into the friend zone with a 🔥 emoji as your paycheck.

The purpose of your content is to help the right reader see three things:

1. Where they actually are.

2. Where they want to be.

3. Why they can’t close that gap alone.

When your writing does that, something changes. You stop attracting fans and start attracting buyers. Your audience stops saying “great post” and starts saying “how do I work with you?” A list of 243 people starts outperforming a list of 20,000.

That’s the game. Not growth. Value capture.

The Door

The hard part is already done.

The doctor already went to medical school. The UX guy already spent fifteen years in the trenches. You already built the expertise. Years of it.

Expertise people are actively searching for — I know, because I was one of them, credit card in hand, looking for someone exactly like the woman who couldn’t see me.

What’s even wilder?

Some of those buyers are already subscribed to you. Reading you every week. Waiting for a door worth walking through. My client’s $5K clients were her $5 subscribers the whole time.

You are not one more skill away.

You are not one thousand more subscribers away.

You’ve already built something worth far more than you’re capturing.

You’re just selling it through a door the size of a mail slot.

So Here’s a Door

If you’re an expert, coach, or corporate professional who wants to ramp up now — not “later,” we both know what later means — here’s exactly what I’m offering.

A 15-minute Gap Call.

15 minutes on the phone with me.

I’ll ask you a handful of direct questions about your expertise, what you’re selling right now (or the offer you don’t have yet), and what you’re charging for it.

By the end, we’ll have put a real number on your Value Capture Gap — what your knowledge is worth versus what you’re actually capturing.

Then one of two things happens:

If I can’t help you, I’ll tell you straight and point you toward someone or something that can.

If I can help you, we’ll book a longer session and map the plan together: where your business should be a year from now, where it is today, and exactly what’s standing in between.

That’s it. 15 minutes. You’ll know your gap. I’ll know if I can close it.

[Book your Gap Call →]

Because that doctor is still out there, sitting on $35,000 of expertise, wondering how to monetize.

The only question is how much longer you’re going to wonder with her.