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Mostly Media at Three Million With No Full-Time Employees

The Story

Brian Morrissey at The Rebooting opened his profile of CJ Gustafson with the number: “Mostly Metrics did about $3 million in revenue last year. CJ has no full-time employees, and he makes more in profits than Semafor, which just raised at a $330 million valuation” (Source 1).

CJ confirmed the figure in his own year-one-as-a-full-time-creator retrospective: “Mostly Media generated +$3 million in revenue across newsletters, pods, reports, and dinners this year, more than doubling compared to when it was my side gig” (Source 2).

The business breakdown The Rebooting recorded: “In just two years, sponsorships have become 90% of the business… The business breaks down to 40% newsletter ads, 40% podcast ads, 10% private dinners, 10% research reports” (Source 1).

Working without full-time employees is a deliberate structural choice. Brian Morrissey: “For now, CJ is focused on keeping Mostly Metrics as lean as possible. He jokes his goal is to never have full-time employees. This is becoming more common. I have also gone down this path, mostly because it preserves optionality. These businesses, if set up correctly, do not require the same layers of coordination and administration that tend to bloat media companies” (Source 1).

CJ in his own piece walks through the team without contradicting the no-FTE framing: he names Sales Guy Matthew, Producer Ben (“the Martin Scorsese of B2B”), producer “Stevey Stoves,” accountant Michelle from PartsTech, and podcast ops lead Sarah. “I’ve assembled my version of the B2B Avengers” (Source 2). The model is contractors and partners, not employees.

The pre-launch worry he had walked into 2025 with: “My biggest fear was there would be no incrementality of going all in. That there wasn’t extra juice to squeeze, growth to be had, dope-er articles to write if I made this my full time gig” (Source 2).

What actually happened in the first year solo: “The podcast listenership tripled year on year. The newsletter growth remained consistent at about 1,000 net new subs per month (it’s hard to grow at a faster rate once you hit a certain size). We held 10 completely full CFO dinners. And we launched two new mediums — Looking for Leverage (a newsletter for PE portco CFOs) and Mostly Growth (GTM Strategy pod with buddy Kyle Poyar). Both are growing and make money” (Source 2).

The philosophy he’s running on, captured in his own quote inside the Rebooting piece: “Everybody celebrates the guys who sold their media business for $75 million, but nobody celebrates the people who are clipping off $5-10 million a year and get to keep it forever” (Source 1).

The structural read in The Rebooting: “You run a business not to sell it. You run it as part of your overall life, and instead of looking for a big lump sum, you focus instead on cash flow. Mostly Metrics should generate several million dollars a year in profits. There’s no need to sell to PE when you have those kinds of economics” (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

A media business doesn’t need to be a media company. CJ proved that one operator with a contractor stack can clear $3M in revenue with margins that a $330M-valuation media institution can’t match. The decision he made — and that most creator-businesses default away from — is to optimize for cash flow forever instead of a lump-sum exit. Employees create coordination overhead, headcount risk, and an implicit obligation to grow into them. Contractors keep the operator’s hands on the work that produced the audience in the first place. The valuation discount that comes with no enterprise asset is the price you pay to never have to sell.

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