Mostly Metrics

CJ spent his career in operating roles—working in sales at Theme Software, then moving into security at pre-IPO company Sneak, where he built out the first FP&A group and lived through COVID-era hyperscaling and fundraising. By September 2022, he realized something was missing: there was no operator voice in the media space talking to people actually doing the work in the CFO office. He'd spent years documenting what he learned, worried he'd forget the playbooks that had taken him from zero to success. That fear of forgetting became the seed.

In December 2020, right as COVID hit, CJ launched Mostly Metrics as a Substack newsletter. The first months were brutal—just his mother, his dog, and his wife reading. But he had a system: he'd write about a topic (like top metrics for vertical software), extract five keywords, then maniacally search Twitter for those keywords and respond to tweets with insightful commentary linked back to his article. He got banned from Reddit groups. He posted everywhere. It was grunt work, but it was working.

The real breakthrough came through partnerships. CJ reached out to B2B companies like Ramp and DataRails, saying: "I'm a practitioner in the trenches. I enjoy writing. I have real experience to speak about. I'm willing to do this for free to get my name out there." These weren't paid deals at first—they were plays to build credibility and get in front of audiences. Then in 2022, Brex reached out and offered him a lump sum "in the middle of" $1k and $10k for six posts. For the first time, someone was paying him for his writing. "If you've ever made a dollar online for the first time, it's a real holy shit moment," he said. That validation mattered more than the money.

CJ learned that sponsorships work best as relationships, not transactions. A single post might generate clicks, but brands need repeated exposure. He now structures deals as 3-6 month commitments with multiple touchpoints: newsletter posts, podcast reads, webinars. His sweet spot is $5-10k minimally per post, but he bundles them into $100k+ quarterly partnerships. He also discovered that evergreen content—his bread and butter on metrics and FP&A—compounds over time. Posts from months ago still drive organic traffic and sponsorship value. He's careful not to monetize everything, either. When he interviewed Brex's chief strategy officer Art Martinez, he ran it sponsorship-free because he wanted to put a smart person in front of his audience.

Mostly Metrics hit 35,000 subscribers in 1.5 years, with a 46% open rate (roughly 16,000 opens per post) and 5-7% click-through rates (800+ clicks per post). Of those subscribers, 7,000 are actual CFOs—60% of them at SaaS companies. Companies like Brex, Ramp, Abacom, and others pay sponsorship fees for access. He also launched a podcast, Run the Numbers, through Turpentine Network, which handles guest sourcing and cross-promotion across a portfolio of business shows. He's still working full-time as a CFO at Parts Tech but plans to go full-time on media within three years. His end game isn't just monetizing content—it's what he calls "content to commerce": building an actual product business for an audience he's already earned.