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Writing His Way to CFO

The Story

In a 2023 Newsletter Circle interview, CJ Gustafson said publicly that the newsletter he was writing on the side had landed him the CFO role he was doing during the day: “Writing Mostly Metrics helped me land my first CFO gig and dream job at a high-growth tech company” (Source 1).

His own explanation of how that happened: “I was writing Mostly Metrics and it got me on the radar of a VC firm that was recruiting on behalf of their portfolio companies. So by putting myself out there, and writing about things I knew really well and was very passionate about, it helped get me on the radar of like-minded people. I think they read my stuff and said wow this guy (nut) talks about financial metrics in his spare time. He’s passionate about the space” (Source 1).

The compounding effect didn’t stop at the job offer. CJ described the same loop on the What Worked podcast: “I had been incubating Mostly Metrics in the background. Like I said, I’ve been writing online for four years and it actually helped me get that first CFO job” (Source 2).

Then the writing changed the next stop too. The CFO role he got was at PartsTech, and he stayed long enough to sell it: “In two and a half years, we quadrupled revenue, which was cool. We got to profitability. We built a durable company that could stand on its own. We raised a series C and then we sold it” (Source 2). He confirmed the timing in his own retrospective: “In January of 2025 I was lucky to help sell PartsTech, the tech company where I was CFO” (Source 3).

The newsletter that started as a personal notebook became the credentials document that opened both jobs. CJ named the effect directly: “Writing Mostly Metrics has given me a sort of superpower – people think I’m smarter than I am. And it’s just because I put myself out there and try to make complex stuff in the finance world simple” (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

A newsletter on a topic you do for a living is the strongest resume artifact most professionals will ever build. It’s verifiable. It’s dated. It compounds. CJ wasn’t writing for a job; he was writing to remember what he was learning. The job arrived because writing in public turned his ordinary domain knowledge into a public signal that the right hiring manager could find. The cost was nights and weekends. The return was a CFO role he had no other path into and a successful exit two and a half years later.

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