10 Writing Side Hustles & Audience Building Strategies For College Students | Espresso Hour Q&A E5

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Double Espresso Hour, where the running joke is, this is going to be much shorter than an hour. Because I don't know about you, Cole, but I've had plenty of caffeine today. We're back after a nice little break over the holidays. Kind of think about what the game plan is going forward for the Double Espresso Hour, and that game plan is going to be a weekly episode released every week for the rest of the year. So glad to have you all back. Glad you beared with us over the holiday break. And we are ready to dive right back in. First question today, Greg asks, how are you guys thinking about YouTube? Curious if shorts are on your agenda? So I have some thoughts on this, but, Cole, I'll let you start. What's your takeaway from our first four or five YouTube videos, this channel, and what we're thinking about in the future?

I think our takeaway is we got really excited about YouTube. YouTube has tons of potential. And then when you really start drilling into it, which we did, we drilled into it for three weeks, pretty hardcore. You realize how much time and attention YouTube requires in order to be good at it. And I think once we both kind of noticed that, it raised the question of is this the best use of our time? Is this the best use of our efforts? And this is one of the questions we get asked all the time in ship 30, which is, when should I expand to a second platform? When should I expand to a second niche? And you start to realize that all of the opportunity is on one platform, one niche. Simplicity is velocity, keeping things as simple as possible. So, yeah, I think the short, long, short answer is we decided to deprioritize it.

And it's worth thinking about why we started making videos on YouTube. First, it was we had the idea, we wanted to get to execution quickly. So we said, we're going to make personal YouTube videos and we're going to put some videos on our own channel. And the goal there was so many people were getting to know us via Twitter, but missed out on that kind of element of before. People might join ship 30, they might want to learn from us in a different platform. And this is just how trust is built on the Internet. I know that if I'm about to purchase something or join a course or join a program, I go look at that person's organic channels, right? Their Twitter, their LinkedIn, their YouTube. And so for us, YouTube was a way of just creating another way for someone to build the relationship with us. And that's still the goal versus using YouTube as a way to grow an audience through YouTube. I think there's two different sides of the coin there. One is you have a platform like Twitter and LinkedIn. How can you basically show people that you're a real person via video? Or are you going to make YouTube your primary distribution engine? The level of work that's required to make YouTube your primary distribution engine is 100 times more than Twitter and LinkedIn. Especially as two guys like us who are better writers than we are on camera, I think we got a lot better in the short five or six weeks. And this, you know, is going to serve us well. So instead we stepped back and said if the goal is simply for us to provide a way for people to learn that's not via text, what can we do? And so that's how we landed on this podcast. It's kind of a minimum level of YouTube specific effort that still generates the upside of the platform. People get to know us, we get to get better on camera, we get to get better at talking through these ideas. It's fun, right? But we're not going to go down the rabbit hole of high quality Ali Abdaal, Matt d', Avella, that kind of production level quality yet. And that's I think where we landed on this too is the beautiful part about running an Internet business is there are infinite number of ways you can grow. We could be on Instagram, we could be on TikTok, we could be on whatever, right. We could expand. And when you extend the time horizon and say we're going to be playing this game for a long time, we will eventually, I think, Double down on YouTube, especially when we build the shipyard, which we could talk about some other time, but for now we're going to deprioritize it and focus on the podcast as our YouTube kind of platform of choice. Have this on the podcast feed, but also have the video version.

Yeah, the one, the one wrap up I would say too is this really speaks to the importance of understanding which platform is your primary. Because if YouTube's your primary, you think about how to use Twitter and LinkedIn very differently because you view those as kind of the secondary. They're republishing platforms, right? Whereas if Twitter or LinkedIn is your primary, you view how you use YouTube very differently. Like that's why we're not going to put the same amount of resources into YouTube because we view it more as a republishing channel or a trust deepening channel as opposed to a Primary, almost like TV show or station. Right. So that's, that's why it's really helpful to know which platform you want to treat as the primary and then everything else sits in a different priority context.

And we'll throw on the screen or in the show notes. I wrote a quick takeaway from my making 10 YouTube videos and it was doing YouTube well as a full time job. Titles and thumbnails matter a lot and they're an endless rabbit hole and you really need someone focusing them on them full time. And I know the best YouTube creators have full time thumbnail and title analytics, a B testing. It's just an incredible amount of work if you want to do it well. For anyone who's aspiring on YouTube, the two things I learned filming are script, the opening hook, word for word, read that because that's the most important when you're thinking about retention and, and then use bullet points to talk over things. And then the number four was there's simply no tighter feedback loop than recording and watching yourself on video. So in the 10 videos that I made, my ability to talk to a camera basically 10x because I made a video where I had scripted the whole thing out in my head and was reading that in my brain, quote unquote while looking at the camera and basically made a five or six minute long video where I did not blink a single time. And I learned that the hard way only after watching the video when There are about 20 comments like, hey, this was a great video but you didn't blink for six minutes and there's just no tighter feedback loop to improve. And I'm so glad I did that though. I'm so glad that I made those 10 videos because I would have gone years without developing the skill of being able to look at a camera and have a conversation, look away, blink, talk naturally. So I count that as a win. And that's kind of how I think about taking on new projects in general. Where I got this from Tim Ferriss. But when I take something new on, I think about how can I set this up in a way where even if I don't stick with it forever, I'm going to build skills. So my skills were I learned how to script YouTube videos, I learned how to think about YouTube analytics, and I learned how to talk to a camera. And it took me four or five weeks and I'll take those skills with me and come back to them when we come back to YouTube. But all in all, I'd call it a success because we learned what we want to do with it.

This is one of my favorite frameworks this year, which is accelerate failure. And it's a. It's a. It's a great example of that, because the average person will sit down and strategize for six months how to crush YouTube before they make a single video. And then it's not until you get into video four that you learn the painful lesson. Oh, and you have to blink, right? So that's why I love. I. I've been just training myself to think this way, is you want to accelerate to that moment of failure where you go, I messed up. Because the sooner you do that now, every video afterwards, you're like, oh, I remember to blink. You know, and if you apply that to everything, just, you get so much better, so much faster. All right, so Danny had a great question, and he's probably one of our, if not the most consistent shipper in ship 30. He did 500 straight days of consistent writing, which is incredible. And he goes, you know, I did ship 30 for a long time. I made my first dollar on the Internet. I wrote and published for 500 straight days. I got a promotion as a result of my writing, and I created an ebook about it. What do I do next? First of all, this is a great problem to have. You know, way better to have this problem than day one. How do I start? And second is recognizing that this is the beginning of the game. It's not the end of the game. So there's. The more that you do something, the more proficient you get at it, the more opportunities you unlock. And I think humans have kind of this natural bias against that idea where we think that the more we do something, the less that we have. But it's actually. It's the opposite. It's the better you get, the more that you have. And so, for example, you know, for Danny here, I would definitely recommend saying, okay, well, you have one ebook. What's stopping you from having 10? What's stopping you from having 50? You know, what's stopping you from turning that into a course? What's stopping you from turning that into your own business? There's so many options that you have, and I like thinking of your niche and the things that you build inside of that niche. Digital products, courses, a community, if you want the connections that you make. I like thinking of it as digital real estate. And the more that you build in that niche, the more you're creating this landmass of education, of knowledge, of stories, and that digital real estate portfolio is going to take care of you for a long time. It's going to pay you, it's going to introduce you to people, it's going to unlock more opportunities for you. So I think the work has just begun. I do not view it as like, I've run out of things to do.

Yeah, let's pull on this for a little bit. So we talk about this as creating your opportunity flywheel, which are when you have a niche, you have a consistent writing habit, you started to build an audience, and you have some kind of owned channel, like an email list. There are a ton of things that you could go and do. You could create a course, you could write an ebook, you could launch a service based around that. You could launch a coaching program, you could launch a SaaS product. Right. These are all the different ways that you can monetize on the Internet. And it's worth exploring what Danny could do here. So how would you kind of advise which one makes the most sense? If you already have an E book, would it be asking readers of the ebook, hey, is there anything you'd like to learn from this? I think it would depend on what the ebook was about, but I just like painting the picture of all the different ways you could potentially monetize that one asset and really just monetize the fact that you were writing every single day and have built up an audience in a newsletter.

Yeah, I feel like the easiest way to think about this is, do you want to go vertical or horizontal? So if you have one ebook, you know, vertical would mean. Well, you have an ebook on this topic, say it's 5 bucks, 10 bucks, 20 bucks. And then vertical would be that same topic as the ebook, but higher level. So you turn the ebook into a course, it gets more on that topic. Or you turn that ebook into a service, it's more on that topic. Right. You're like drilling deeper or you're building in that one specific vertical. Whereas the other option is you could go, well, I have one ebook that's doing well, but I think that there's other problems that I could solve. And an easy way of testing that would go, let me go horizontal, let me do a different problem for a different ebook. How could I have five ebooks all speaking to different problems? And that'll teach me more about what people need the most help with. And then when you have the answer there, then you can drill deeper, you can go vertical. So I like thinking of it as vertical or horizontal. Which way do you want to build?

It's probably worth going horizontal, in my opinion. If you're not 100% sure about what it is you're doing. So I'll tell you my quick background story. Before ship 30, I monetized online in three ways, or really four. So four different ways. I earned a couple dollars on the Internet before ship 30. Number one was I had some sponsors of my newsletter that I think I probably had four or five hundred subscribers. And I did a sponsorship with four Sigmatic, the mushroom coffee company. And so they sponsored an edition of the of the Digest back in the day. And I made a hundred, two hundred bucks off that just based on saying, hey, I talked about that coffee a bunch in my newsletter. They ended up sponsoring it. Would you guys, you can use this link. I get a kickback, etc. So that was the first way. Second way was I created a podcast compendium where the original writing challenge I did on Twitter was writing and publishing a Twitter thread on a podcast that I listened to that morning every single day for 30 days. At the end of that, what were people asking? Hey, could you collect all these notes somewhere? So I did. I collected them all into a big notion page with three takeaways, links to YouTube, Spotify, and iTunes. And I made six or seven hundred dollars on that in the first week when I launched it on Twitter. Because I said, hey, if you've been reading all these podcasts, right, you might find this valuable. And there, that still gets, you know, a $20 buy every once in a while on Gumroad, which is kind of funny.

And doesn't it feel great?

Just feels amazing. You do work that continues to work for you for a long time. I also did ghost writing. So because I was writing threads, people were reaching out saying, hey, could you write threads for me? I didn't know that was a thing. I didn't know that was a world. But earned money. So provided a service, created a product, did sponsorships. And then unrelated to all this, I was a computer science and math major in college, and so I was writing a substack newsletter, and I was so frustrated with the lack of analytics that I built a web app that would look at my open rate, it would look at my number of subscribers per week. So this was 2020. So substack was very new and it didn't have any of the analytics it has now. So you didn't see unsubscribes or total number of subscribers added after each one. So I created this nice little grid, reached out to, like the top 50 Substack writers at the time. And it's funny, to look back was like, Paki Lenny. Those guys were all interested in doing it because they were beginners on substack that wanted this data. And I was like, this is going to be an awesome SaaS product. They'll pay 10 bucks a month. And I never ended up monetizing that, but that was. I was working on that. At the same time the initial ideas for ship 30 came out. So I tell that story because I went horizontal in a big way, found one thing, and then doubled down on that one thing. So if you're kind of at that stage in your journey where you aren't sure where to go, I would always think product first over audience. Because once you think product first, then you can go, how can I create valuable content around that that hypes up the problem that I then solve with the product? So just like reminiscing on that back in, in 2020. So that was around November 2020, when I was doing all three of those things a little over two years ago. Lock and change, a lot can happen.

You just said it and I kind of. It's a little bit of a detour, but I kind of want to say it. So that phrase of build just distribution and then you can build anything, I actually disagree with that because I think a lot of the focus or a lot of times people talk about building an audience as like, well, once I get a bunch of people paying attention to me, then I can do whatever. But all of that ignores the, yeah, but what, who are those people? What are those people interested in? And so the way you just described it, I actually agree with more, which is start with the product, start with the problem, start with the thing that you want to build, and then go create content and education that attracts the people that would be interested in that type of thing.

I have a reframe. It's not build distribution, it's build trust. Build trust and then build whatever you want, right? Because if you have. And the way to build trust is to solve a specific problem for someone, right? Where now you and I have built up trust with everyone who's taken ship 30 and people who read our stuff, where we could probably launch tangential things like journaling products or other things related that are basically monetizing that trust. But instead of thinking build distribution, slash, build an audience, only write, you know, threads about Google Chrome, extensions, things like that. You're not building trust, you're building followers that just click and they're not ever going to buy from you. So the reframe is, am I trying to build an audience or am I trying to build trust? The easiest way to build trust is to successfully solve a problem for someone, right? So pick a problem, double down on that, build a big vat of trust, and then say, hey, if you trust me on this, I bet you trust me on this too. And then I'll solve that problem. So I think that's a helpful reframe for people. All right. Almar asks, any tips on how to build an audience as a college student on Twitter? First, this is just so cool to see that people are interested in college. On getting to start this, I would do anything, anything to go back into a started writing in 2016, 2017, 2018 versus 2020, because all you're going to do is kickstart the compounding. I look around at 20 year olds who've built products and things like that. I'm just like, you're just setting yourself up with a suite of skills that are going to pay you forever. So I'll start with don't focus on building an audience. Focus on building skills and learning and build an audience as a byproduct of you learning those skills. So call you kind of talk on the curation versus creation, but I like to paint that as the lens of don't focus on building an audience. Focus on building skills that make that audience a byproduct of just sharing and learning what you're doing.

Yeah, I mean, Dickie, could you imagine if we were 20 right now and we both took ship 30? I would have dropped. There's a 95% chance I would have dropped out of school because I was making like six figures as a 20 year old on Twitter. And the crazy thing is that we see it all the time. We see young people now doing that. And I think the biggest untapped opportunity, and especially for a young person, this is what I would do. I would not rush the process of being a quote unquote creator. Because chances are if you're 18, 19, 20, like, yeah, if you've fiddled around with things like, you might have some interesting frameworks on your own, but chances are you have way more to learn than you do to share. And that's not meant as, as a condescending comment. That's just like, you have so much more opportunity to learn versus to share. Where, where's the value? Right? And so if I was 20 years old right now, I would focus 100% on curation. Specifically, I would go to big creators in industries or domains that I'm personally interested in. So say I'm 20 years old, I'm a college student. I have kind of a personal interest in graphic design. I would go find all the biggest creators related to graphic design, and I would curate their work. I would be like, here's what this person. Here's their 10 best frameworks for designing web pages. You know, eight tips from this person for designing a digital product. I would just. I would just consume their content and teach myself, and then I would create content, crystallizing my learnings and curating their best insights. Because A, that's going to accelerate my own learning process, and B, that creator is probably going to see it, which means they're going to retweet it or they're going to share with their audience. Over time, people are going to come to you because of your ability to curate other people's insights. And then when you get the attention of one or two creators, you then can reach out to them and go, can I work for you for free? And now, at 20 years old, you basically just got the ideal internship that would have taken someone free four plus years to get. You just accelerated the whole thing. You're gonna learn more, you're gonna learn faster, you're gonna have greater access to opportunities. That's what Juan did. Juan, who edits our videos. That's exactly what he did. Cole DM'd us. Boom. You have a job. Here we go.

I'll share a couple things. Cause I got started with this exact thing. I was curating experts that I wanted to learn from. And I'll share a couple pieces of advice that I wish I knew when I was doing that one. If you are doing a good job curating the insights of someone, it is 100% a value add. Now, whether or not that person sees it is a function of how busy they are. And so there was stories that I ended up telling myself when I was doing that curation of am I being annoying? Like, am I starting? Am I curating this person's insights and doing a thoughtful job? And then they don't respond. Did that mean they saw it and were like, I don't want to do deal with this? 99 point. I'd say 100% of the time the answer was no. They just didn't see it. Right? So don't fall into the trap of like, oh, I did this work and then I put it out there and I didn't get anything from it. Always start. And this goes back to what I said earlier. You are going to learn no matter whether they pay attention to it or not. And so that is what you really want to focus on, is write this almost purely as a way to learn. The best way to do that is to learn in public because that's going to force you to distill and really think through it. The exponential upside is if they find it or if they see it, then they are, you know, you unlock new opportunities. But don't go into this saying I'm doing this because I want Dickie or Cole to see that I'm curating their stuff. Instead, go in skills first. If they never saw this and I didn't even publish it, I'm going to learn. That's enough upside for me to do it. And then anything else that comes after that is purely a bonus.

Next question, Dickie, how do you manage your energy? I've actually noticed a handful of people ask this question. I think everyone wants to know how the machine gets it done on a daily basis.

So I like this question because where I think it goes immediately is like, how do you deal with when you're tired versus energized versus you know, what do you do? And kind of the short answer is I don't manage my energy in that way. I have remarkably stable energy levels on a day to day basis. And so I don't think about, hey, I'm going to be tired at this time. That means I'm not going to do this or if I'm feeling tired, I do this. I try to instead set my life up in a way that guarantees that I feel a certain way at a certain period of time throughout the day. So I don't think about energy levels as a much planning my day around the blocks of getting work done. So I know I tend to do my best thinking in the morning and my best managing in the afternoon. So right away I set up. That is my way of thinking of I want to spend the first X number hours of my day, usually from 5am to about 1. I don't have my phone, I'm not really talking to other people. I'm doing the deep focused work and getting my exercise, that kind of thing done early in the morning. Because I know as the day goes on I'm going to be less focused, I'm probably going to be a little bit more tired and not as able to kind of do the deep thinking that I think is required to move the needle forward. So with that lens I go, okay, what do I need to do to manage my energy throughout the day or the way I prepare to make sure I can do that. So that's going to bed and waking up at the same time, eating similar things throughout the week, where I know that my body just gets used to it. And then since I do so much of that deep thinking in the morning, I prioritize being off screens for about an hour. I prioritize waking up and going to bed at the same time during the week. And those are the small kind of tweaks I do where I don't have to manage my energy because I feel relatively the same throughout basically. Basically every single day. And that is the goal. Like, it's to feel energized and able to do things consistently every single day at the same time is the way I. I organize most things.

I love that there was. I don't know if I ever told you about this ticket. I was listening to this podcast a while ago with LeBron's trainer, and he was explaining all the different ways that they take care of LeBron. I mean, I forget, but he spends millions of dollars on his recovery and body and everything every year. And my takeaway, and I think about this all the time, is this trainer said, the number one thing that we focus on is not what to do, it's how to always be constantly in recovery mode. So I think oftentimes there, you know, athletics is an easy way to think about this, but this is certainly true for everything. And writing is very mentally demanding. Like, when I'm writing a lot in a day, I'm exhausted. And I think oftentimes people think about managing energy or managing their personal resources in terms of, like, how do I do more? Whereas my takeaway from that podcast, and I try and work on this a lot, is how do I do less or. Or open more space so that I'm always recovering. Like, every time I do something, what's the recovery for that? And I think if you focus on that part of it, you inherently have more energy. Whereas if you're always focused on doing more, doing more, doing more, you're never allowing yourself to then reset and have more energy to play with.

And last one for Cole. Could you elaborate on monetizing your writing as a skill? So people think of this idea of, how do I monetize my writing? And I think you have some good answers on this. So how would you answer that?

Yeah, it was funny. I was doing some writing maybe like a week ago, and I think this probably inspired a tweet that prompted this question, which is, I said, if you want to get better at reading, read a lot. If you Want to get better at writing, write a lot. And if you want to get better at monetizing your writing, than try and monetize your writing a lot. And something that I've noticed, because my degrees in creative writing, fiction writing, something that I notice in the writing world is people will spend all day, every day, reading and sometimes writing. And I think that's the first step, is like, yeah, does reading make you more aware of things? Sure. But it's order to become a better writer, you have to write. Like, reading doesn't make you a better writer. Someone gives you a notepad, you're not going to know what to do with it. So the first step is going from consuming to creation. But then the next step, and where I see the fall off, is people spend all this time writing, writing, writing, and then they're like, and I don't understand why I'm not a millionaire. Because of my. Right, because of my writing. And you have to understand that the writing is one skill and the making money as a writer is another skill. They're two different skills. And so you can't spend all day just focused on the sentences and the paragraphs and the adverbs and the metaphors and then go, and where's my money? Right? Like, are you reading any sales letters? Are you studying any copywriters? Are you trying to sell any products on your own? How many email marketing sequences have you written? How many funnels have you created? Right? How? Like, where are your reps on the money side? And over and over and over again, I hear this, like, it's like, accepted as conventional wisdom where people go, oh, no one makes a living as a writer. You can't make money as a writer. And it's like, everyone who's saying that only practices the writing side. They don't practice the making money side. And if you invested even a little bit of time in the business side of writing, you would realize that, like, there's never been a better time in history to make money as a writer ever. And so I feel very strongly about this, that you have to see them as two different skills.

So let's list out for anyone listening who's interested, what are all the ways you can monetize writing? I'll just rattle some off. You could write email sequences. You could write Twitter threads for people. You could write landing pages. You could summarize podcasts for people. You could write YouTube scripts. You could write cold DMS for people. You could. What else?

I mean, so all that's on the service side and I also think, you know, if you're sitting there and you're like, well, I don't want to do any of those things, which, first of all, I would encourage you to because they're going to teach you a lot. And second, if you go, well, I want to be a novelist, I want to be a mystery writer, I want to be a fiction writer, whatever. Again, the most of the writers who say, you can't make any Money have written one book, go write 10, right? And then how much time did you spend marketing the book? What did you do? How many reps did you get in? Or I think of Amazon. You know, Amazon's. There's a totally different marketplace between a book that can be published anywhere versus Amazon kdp. So it's exclusive to kdp. It's exclusive to Amazon. How many mini books have you written? Have you, have you tested the differences between those two things? Have you tried building an email list? What's your social media like? Like, there's all of the marketing side of writing that I noticed it in school. I see it in college programs all the time. People go get their masters in fiction writing or they get their master's in nonfiction writing or their master's in journalism. There's no talk about how to monetize writing, whether it's as a skill, as a service, or as a product. And so you can't sit there and say, no one makes a living as a writer, or, it's impossible for me to make money as a writer and never practice making money as a writer. It's a skill.

And so we'll Finish with these 14 easy writing side hustles you can start during the 2023 recession. This thread you wrote, I think is awesome, and it's worth just listing these out so people can think. Here are a bunch of ideas you could run with if you're an up and comer and you want to earn a dollar via writing. So, number one, get paid to extract the best one liners from someone's podcast. Hey, if you're listening to this and you extract the best one liners from the Espresso Hour, throw them in a Google Doc, reach out to us and we'd love to hear from you. With a lot of these, the important thing to recognize Cole and I'll chat you this so you can see them too, is you can do all of these things for free the first time. And then if you do that, then people will say, hey, I'd love if you did this for me more often. Right? You need to prove your value first with some kind of free service. And then people can say, okay, now that you've done that, I trust that you can do this in the future. And then I'll come back to you for that. Right? So you can get paid to summarize someone's podcast, turn them into Twitter threads, summarize someone's podcast, condense them down into a blog post, transcribe someone's podcast, put it in a blog post, then string all those together into an ebook of the 20 best takeaways from this podcast. Right? Turn someone's podcast or YouTube channel into Twitter. LinkedIn, Quora, medium long form stuff. Take someone's long form YouTube videos, rescript them into 10 shorts per video, 10 just based on those ideas, rewrite a company's best blog post into a free email course. That one I think is extremely valuable. If someone said, hey, I went and saw that you could turn these five blog posts into an email course, I'll do it all for you. I actually did it for you. If you want me to do it for another one, I'll do it for X. Right? Provide value upfront for free. And then people are going to pay you in perpetuity. And no one else does that. I know you feel very passionately about that goal, and I do as well, is people go, I would never work for free. You have to work for free to build the skill, to build the trust. And then because we get tons of people reaching out to us, say, hey, I'd love to write for you guys. And we don't answer because we don't the amount of work that it would take for us to vet whether or not you're qualified to write for us is a lot versus someone who said, hey, I wrote you guys an email course based on your podcast. Here it is proof of work, trust built. And then we decide whether or not one it was good enough. And we could be constructive in the feedback saying, hey, thanks for doing this. If we were to pay you for this, we would have wanted X, Y and Z kind of improved upon. Keep, keep up the good work. Here's five other people that you could do this for that we think would be up your alley and might pay for this. Right? So we're always going to respect a hustler who comes to us with a ton of value and send them something positive, even if we don't end up using them in the future. But it's not, hey, I need to come up with this big offer and reach out to all these people. It's do the upfront work for free. The people who are going to pay you in the long run are going to respect that value and just get used to learning and doing projects where the only upside is to learn. And all the extra upside getting paid, all that is just kind of the cherry on top.

Just as a small story to drive that point home, how we got our two investors in my first company was by doing free work. Free work is something that in theory, you can use all throughout your career. And when I met these two guys and we were thinking of, you know, maybe we want to raise a little money and maybe we want to grow the business, I didn't ask them to be paying clients day one, I was like, I see that this could be an opportunity. So here, why don't I do the service for you for free, see if you like it. And I did. And I worked. I was already working 12 hour days and I literally stayed up till 10 or 11pm doing their free work just to make sure they loved it. And they did. And then three weeks later, they put 100 grand into the business. Right. So it just goes to show that the, the free work mentality is, it doesn't mean devalue yourself. It doesn't mean like get taken advantage of. It means recognize that A, you're putting your best foot forward, B, you're trading that time for more potential upside opportunity, C, you're signaling what type of person you are. You're like, I don't care about the short term outcome, I care about the long term outcome. And anyone who's accomplished is going to respect that and they're going to think of you differently than all the other people that are just chasing the short term. I want my $25 right now. So, yeah, that list is great, Dickie. We can link to that in the show notes. But there are so many ways that you can make money as a writer and all of them will teach you how to write things that people are willing to pay for. I'm such a firm believer in this is like you. It's. You don't make your fortune as a writer just fiddling with adjectives all day. You have to understand what people are interested in and how to frame the value in a way that they care about.

Said in one sentence, work for free, build the skill, provide the value, and that'll pay dividends for you a long time in the future. Boom. That does it for another episode of the Double Espresso Hour. If you're watching this on YouTube, leave a comment with a question you want us to answer next time. And if you do that within the first hour of the video being posted, we will make sure to get to that in the future. Also you can get your questions answered on Twitter. We tweet this out every single Sunday. Respond to that tweet to get your question answered in the next one. And if you're on YouTube, leave a comment like this video. If you're on the podcast feed, we'd greatly appreciate if you left us a five star review. Hit that subscribe button. That's the way we grow this podcast. And lastly, if you could forward this episode to a friend that you think would find it valuable, that's the other way we grow this. We're trying to get this to 10, 20, 30,000 subscribers in the next couple months and you guys can help us all do that. So that's it for this episode. We will see you guys next week.