Ghostwriting for founders

The claim

“I’ve spent the last 3 months ghostwriting for $40,000 per month. I thought I would ghostwrite forever. Then I realized where the real money is…”

@TaylinSimmonds (Taylin Simmonds), 2 February 2023, 841,831 views¹

“Your fastest path to $10,000 per month: Ghostwriting. • You don’t need a huge audience • You don’t need “advanced” skills • You don’t need to invest in up-front costs It’s a career path with the least amount of risk.”

@Nicolascole77, 14 December 2025, 5,587 views¹

A ghostwriter here writes social media posts that go out under a company founder’s name, usually for a fixed monthly fee called a retainer². This page judges the scheme, not the people who tweeted.

The sums

Income is clients times monthly fee. Tools cost about $230 to $460 a month (our estimate)¹⁸.

One round-up of price guides puts a freelance retainer at about $500 to $4,000 a month for 8 to 12 posts². Those are sellers’ asking prices, not a survey, and we did not open the four guides themselves².

Twelve clients at $1,750 is 144 posts and about 216 hours a month (our estimate) at the guide’s 1.5 hours a post, which is assumed, not measured². People’s own accounts imply fewer hours, such as six clients beside a full-time job⁹, but none is measured. A full-time month is roughly 170 hours (our estimate), so $20,000 a month for one person needs higher prices, less time per post, or staff.

A retainer can be cancelled, and we found no measured figure for how long clients stay.

What happens to most people who try

Nobody has measured it.

The nearest figure is for all freelance writers: in a 2025 survey of 350 in the US and Europe, 19.4% made over $5,000 a month and 3% over $10,000⁶. People chose whether to answer, so this is no random sample⁶.

An email-tool seller reports an average reply rate of 3.43% on its users’ cold emails (emails to strangers), and a reply is not a client¹⁷.

Rest of World reported Filipino virtual assistants producing executives’ LinkedIn posts with AI tools, advertised at “$4 to $7 an hour” (general assistant listings in one country, not ghostwriting alone)⁶³. So the generic end of this market is very cheap.

The upside

Founders do pay for this⁴⁰. Two cases were checked by a third party:

• Windmill Growth, a LinkedIn content agency. A site that reads payment records showed $121,947 a month from 81 subscriptions on 8 October 2026⁴⁰. It is a team, its main plan covers more than writing, and only revenue is checked, not profit⁴⁰⁴¹.
• An anonymous founder said in 2022 that he made about $200,000 in a year writing tweets for investors; Business Insider says it reviewed his bank statements³². He already had 20,000 followers and investor relationships, and this was before AI writing tools were common³².

The rest are people’s own statements:

• A marketing professional profiled by Entrepreneur reports $9,000 to $12,000 a month from six clients, four years after starting at $300 a client; no payment records are shown⁹.
• The $40,000 a month in the tweet above was an agency with a team³⁷⁶². The rest of that tweet’s thread says a mentor “even gave me 3-5 warm leads per MONTH” (introductions to likely buyers) and ends: “Ghostwriting is a short term cash play. The big money is in your personal brand.”⁶²

What it takes to compete

• A way to reach buyers. The fast, high figures came with an audience, a network or supplied leads³²⁶². The tweet that says “You don’t need a huge audience” comes from a writer who, by his own account, was “the #1 most-read writer” on Quora before he began¹¹⁰. The slower case sent 20 personal messages offering a free sample post to executives “in industries I already understood”; two became paying clients within two weeks⁹.
• Knowledge of a field. That separates a writer from the cheap AI-drafted work⁶³.
• Starting low, and time. $300 a client at first, $1,200 to $2,500 four years in, and about five months to predictable income⁹.

Early checks (our judgement): can you name 20 executives in a field you understand? Has anyone paid you within a month or two? Do clients renew? Can you raise the price?

Who else makes money from it

By our labels, which were not all re-checked, 18 of the 33 tweets lead to a course, cohort (a group that takes a course together) or coaching offer¹.

Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush run Premium Ghostwriting Academy, whose checkout shows $300 a month¹²¹³. Its page says “2,000+ Ghostwriters And Counting” and gives no typical or median result¹³. In a 2021 interview Mr Cole said his agency, which sold ghostwritten articles and had about $2 million a year in revenue, paid each founder about $100,000 a year; of the course business, then about six months old, he said “last month we just did a hundred grand in revenue”¹⁰¹¹. Those figures are his own, and his accounts of the agency differ between tellings.