☕ How to Add a "Buy Me a Coffee" Button to Substack

Or: How I Spent 9 Hours Making a Coping Mechanism Button While Accidentally Taking Out Home Insurance

You know when you decide to do something tiny like “oh, I’ll just pop a coffee link on my homepage,”
…and then 9 hours later your screen is blurry, your toast is cold, and you’ve accidentally taken out a home insurance quote?

Yeah. That.

This is the real tutorial: part actual guide, part breakdown diary, 100% unhinged honesty.

☕ Step 1: Decide to “just quickly” add a coffee button

Your thought:

“This’ll take five minutes tops.”

Reality:
9 hours, 6 button attempts, 1 nervous system in tatters, and several moments of wanting to scream into your inbox.

🌀 Step 2: Discover that “adding a button” isn’t actually a thing

Substack has no obvious tool for homepage buttons.
There’s a "button" block, sure — but it only works inside posts.
So you try the logo uploader (bad idea), try HTML (doesn’t work), and stare at your screen until your soul leaves your body.

Then it hits you:

“What if I just… trick it into looking like a button?”

🧠 Step 3: ADHD side quest time (bank login edition)

You need to add payout info to your Buy Me a Coffee account.
So naturally, your brain goes:

• Log into bank ✅

• Forget PIN ❌

• Trigger identity selfie tilt thing 😵

• Take out a home insurance quote for reasons unknown

• Remember what you were actually doing

• Can’t upload bank info now because… waiting for PIN

You sit on the floor and wonder if this is how billionaires start out.

🔄 Step 4: Rebrand your life

The original goal? “Buy Me a Coffee.”

But let’s be real — coffee doesn’t even touch this.

So now it’s:

Buy Me a Coping Mechanism
More accurate. More honest. More you.

💻 Step 5: Hack Substack’s homepage like a boss

This is where it finally clicked.
You don’t need a coded button. You don’t need to embed graphics.
You just need to manually add a homepage link and tell it what to do.

🧠 What you actually did:

• Went to Settings → Pages and navigation → Homepage links

• Clicked “Add Link”

• Added:

  • Title: ☕ Buy Me a Coping Mechanism

  • Subtitle: Support the chaos with caffeine – it helps!

  • Group: Fuel the Chaos (important — required or it won’t show)

  • URL: https://buymeacoffee.com/MindFullOfIt

• Saved it

Boom. You now have a visible, live, working, Substack-friendly “button”
—no code, no widget, just big brain chaos energy.

🖼️ Bonus: Add your pink button image (optional)

1. Go to Settings → About Page → Edit

2. Upload your glorious pink coping mechanism button image

3. Click the image → Add your Buy Me a Coffee link

4. Save it

Now you have a real link on the homepage, and a fake button image in your About page that behaves like a real one. WINNING.

🧍 Step 6: Physically leave the room (multiple times)

You:

• Go to make tea

• Forget tea

• End up holding the dog’s toy while Googling “can stress make you taller”

• Return to your laptop and whisper “we go again”

🤯 Step 7: Realize people actually like your work

You’re building something honest. Raw. Human.
And people? They’re vibing with it. They’re following. Sharing. Smiling.

It’s overwhelming. It’s scary. It’s weird.
It’s also exactly why you needed a coping mechanism in the first place.

💖 Step 8: You're not charging (yet), but support is everything

Right now, MindFullOfIt is 100% free.
You don’t want to gatekeep the good stuff.

But if someone wants to say thank you — not with a subscription, but with a coffee?
You’re here for it.

Later:

maybe worksheets. Maybe consults.

For now:

This button and a lot of unfiltered honesty!

🏁 Final Step: Look what you did!

You:

• Created a working support button using only the Substack link editor

• Named your link group Fuel the Chaos

• Embedded support without touching code

• Made it accessible, clear, and fully you

And you did it while forgetting tea, resetting your PIN, dodging identity theft, and probably holding a dog biscuit.

You absolute legend.
Now go admire your chaos-fueled homepage.

🎤 Mic drop

And that, my friends, is how you spend nine hours doing what should’ve taken five minutes.

But now? Now you’ve got a button, a banner, a system, a vibe, and the entire tech journey immortalized in pixels and prose.

If you made it through this post without:

• rage-quitting,

• throwing your laptop, or

• ordering a stress hedgehog off Etsy…

Then congratulations: you too are officially part of the Fuel the Chaos Crew™.

Thanks for sticking around. Thanks for cheering me on. And thanks in advance for the coffee/coping mechanism.

I’ll be here — covered in paint, holding a flag, probably still editing something.

Lastly go to upload, accidentally hit X, panic and Thank the Substack Gods for Auto save!!!

MindFullOfIt💖