2023 Recap: Business Wins and Lessons + Future Goals (Our Plan To $10M)

Boom.

Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour where the running joke is this is going to be much shorter than an hour because we are once again hyped up on caffeine for this end of year episode. How we doing?

We're fantastic. I the caffeine's really hitting me.

We're loaded up today. We got a packed episode today. We want to recap everything that went down in 2023 across our different businesses. We're going to talk through wins, we're going to talk about losses, we're gonna talk about what we learned, lessons, realizations, and then end with a rattling off brainstorm of everything we're excited to build in the year ahead. But before that, make sure you stick around to the end of the video because we're going to unveil a secret word where if you leave a comment with that word, we will pick one lucky winner for free enrollment into our upcoming Ship 30 for 30 cohort that launches on January 1st. But enough of that. Why don't we dive in? Where should we start?

Well, I was just going to say real quick, that's our 20th cohort. It's our 20th anniversary.

20Th anniversary cohort.

That is why I can't believe we've done 20 of those.

Believe we've done 20. And this is going to be our biggest best yet. We got some surprises, we got some sneak peeks, we got some bonuses. So be sure again to stick around to the end of the video where we are going to unveil that secret word.

So let's rattle off high level bullets. These are the wins of the year. And then we're going to go through each one in depth, talk about, you know, what we learned, what went well, what, what didn't go so quick. Rattling off, we launched a successful group coaching program that was our premium ghost trading academy. First time we had ever done that. We built our first asynchronous product in a month. Basically that was full stack Writer. We doubled the business profit at the same time that we saw, you know, a lot of other creator led businesses where we saw a lot of people saying like, oh, I feel like courses are out or courses don't work anymore or cohort based courses don't work anymore. We have some nuances we want to share there, but you know, we, we doubled our business this year. We hired seven new team members while maintaining our, our culture, which is nuts, you know, especially once you cross five team members, the business changes. Once you get up to 10, the business changes. So I think We've done a good job there. We've experimented with different podcast styles. If you've been following EspressoHour for a while, then, you know, we've. We've changed this around a handful of times. We built the V1 of our dream production studio. So here we are in the shipyard. Yep, super cool. We brought our entire team together in person for the first time, which was a lot of fun. It was the first time we had met a lot of them. They had met each other. We built a paid newsletter to a quarter million dollars in annual recurring revenue. That's right.

With AI that's accelerating now as we go.

Yeah, I think that has a lot of potential. This next year, we shut down a part of our business. This was March.

April.

April, yeah.

So.

So we'll talk a little bit about that. That was a painful part of the year. Max Pain.

Max Pain Month.

We learned the power of collaborating with other creators. So we'll talk a lot about that. We had a couple things come through this year that had a big impact for us and shows a lot of potential in the future. We invested over $80,000 in our own education, which we'll talk about. We start from scratch. Basically learned how to hire and train an entire sales team and take a.

Sales call if you're me.

Dickie's a sales call. And. And then lastly, we'll talk a bunch about this. We really refined our. Our content. We like thinking of it as a content supply chain. So all the different ways when we write something, how it gets transitioned into different formats, how it gets posted across different platforms. So that'll be fun to dig into. What a year.

Yeah, what a year to list all that out. And I think it's important. Well, just a level set of how we kind of like to do reflections. It's just get clear on what happened. Most of the things this year, like we called those wins, but there were some that weren't quote unquote wins. We just share, here's what happened. And then once you list all of that out for your business for the year, you can then start to reflect on what you learned or what you realized about the world or anything. It's the same process we're using for our personal reviews where you just list out what happened for the year, list out what you learned. And I think that it's so simple that most people overlook the return that you can have when you just sit down. So we encourage everyone to do this same process for yourself, even if you don't have a YouTube channel or a podcast to do this take a minute, probably takes a bit longer than a minute. But sit down and just list off what's everything that happened in your business this year. And then right away you'll start to look for patterns and things will emerge of what you learn that you can reapply next year. Because if we go about the next year, how we hope to, it's going to be applying a lot of the lessons and realizations that we'll talk about once we just jam on some of these wins. And what's cool is we also have a video for a lot of these where we can link to that and you'll see it pop up around here. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of whatever we end up talking about on the wind side.

Yeah, I feel like a cool place to start. And I immediately just sort of looking at the bullets that we have here. I remember we had a conversation this, I think it was January, the very beginning of the year. And you know, you, if you have a business, you might have been asking yourself the same thing. You know, the beginning of the year is when. When you're always asking, what should my big priority be, what should I focus on this year? And at the time, the only business that we had, if you think about how many new things we've built, all we had was ship 30. And then after ship 30, we would upsell students into the captain's table, which is like our alumni program gives you free access to ship all the future ship 30s. We have a bunch of blueprints in there, bunch of educational resources. Right. So that was the business it ship 30 upsold to captain's table. And we had a conversation this January where we really asked the question, what do we need to do to double or triple ship 30. And we had sort of looked at it and gone. We've done like almost everything that we can do there. There were only a couple levers that we could push or pull to continue Growing Ship 30. And the question that we asked was if we want to double the business this year, the business being or the triple. The tripling question. Yeah, if we want to triple the business, is it do we need to triple some metric in ship 30 or do we need to go build something new? And that conversation, I mean, I remember we spent a long time talking about this and thinking about it and really it was do we double down on chip 30 or do we go build something around ghost writing? And where we ultimately landed was I think we need to do something different. We should go build pga which became our premium ghost Trading Academy. And that ended up being the right decision. But at the time it was extremely uncertain.

It felt uncertain to give ship 30 less attention because that was the driving.

Force behind was the core business.

Exactly. But at the same time looking back and if we were to distill a framework from it, which one was going to force us to learn something new and we should take that path because I I'm thinking more and more about these last three years of our entrepreneurial journey of what have been the decisions we've made that have forced us to learn something new. And each time we've built a new product or built a new vertical, we've had to go learn an entirely new thing. And so we can repeat that in the year ahead and we'll talk about what we're excited about at the end of the video. But that ended up being the right choice because of the skills that we had to learn that now we can go reapply to any other business where if we'd spent this whole year just trying to market ship 30 more we wouldn't have leveled up. We might have increased the business and sure. But I know that we're both far more biased to pick the path that leads to more progress on the skill side. And that I think is the meta framework of what we ended up choosing.

I think pairing with that something we did really well in hindsight was the moment we knew we needed to do something different to really grow the business. We didn't sit there and go let's just figure it out ourselves. In the same conversation, when we said we should go build a group coaching premium Ghostwriting Academy, we also made the decision to spend $68,000 joining a mastermind. We got gave us the blueprint.

We got on the phone on the call that day. I still remember sitting in we work it was like, so we're going to do this. So we're going to do this. So when you want to have the call, why don't we just call him right now?

Yeah.

And we called him right then enrolled and that we'll talk about in the lessons realizations. But making that decision that forces you to level up was so important for us. And yeah we were if we did anything right this year as we made fast decisions and then did not double think on any. Yeah, we didn't go back and go oh, was that the wrong series? Like nope, we've made it time to move forward.

And especially too you know, this is why so many people will say Half the point of charging for education products is if you give it to someone for free, they're not going to do anything with it. But if you pay for it, you want to get your money's worth. Right. And so if we hadn't joined that Mastermind, it, I could see a path where we get one month into building PGA and we're like, oh, this is a lot of work and we don't really know what we're doing. Let's just go back and, and just keep doing ship 30. Right. It would have been very easy to reverse that decision. But because we committed and said we're going to spend $68,000 on this mastermind, we went into the whole year being like, this is the only thing we're doing, we're going to get that 68,000 back. And another cool like, lesson in realization that we'll talk about is, and we did like every time we doubled down on ourselves, you know, we spent 68,000 on a mastermind and then turn that into PGA, that's now multiple seven figures.

So the return, you have the ability to turn any investment into a positive return if you make that part of your identity. I'm the type of person that when I invest in myself, I make sure it's positive.

Yeah.

Because you kind of can make that choice. Because there's probably plenty of people in that mastermind who joined and have seen far less of a return than we.

Oh yeah, Far less.

So.

So that was really cool. And group building a group coaching program. Totally different business model. Like, I think something that Dickie and I realized very early on launching PGA was that the feedback loop cycle for ship 30 is quarterly. Right. Because we were running a cohort every quarter. And so if you would make a change, you wouldn't really see that show up until three months later. Whereas with pga, because it was evergreen and it was a group coaching model and people were joining every day, all of a sudden we were getting feedback loops every 24 hours. Right. And so I think also tapping into something new made us realize if we were going to create another new business tomorrow, it wouldn't be a cohort based course. It was a great place to start. But it would be another group coaching program.

That is an interesting idea of looking at your business. And what is the feedback loop? So just for example, ship 30 runs on a quarterly cycle, which means every day of the marketing cycle happens once every 13 weeks. But for PGA, since there's weekly enrollments, it's every seven days. Now for a software business or A digital product business. It could be every single day you.

Have that feedback or every hour.

Right, Exactly. So just an interesting idea there of what is the feedback loop of your business and how, how can you shorten that down? Because the faster you can iterate each time, the faster it's going to grow.

Yep.

So group coaching programs, really, really interesting. It's already given us some ideas of future things that we can build and want to a lot, a lot learned. Second one was we built our first asynchronous product. So you want to talk a little bit about that?

So we went into the early part of the year. We had ship 30 and captain's table as a co op based course. We launched PGA and then we got into the later part of the year where we scaled PGA from started kind of in February, but really started in May, May, April, June, July, August, September. And then as we were getting closer to Black Friday we, we realized that from last year we learned a bunch of lessons around what works and what doesn't during that time of year. And we decided to learn from that lesson and create our first asynchronous product which was Full Stack Writer, which was a smashing success. We filmed a little bit talking about that during the countdown to that launch. But this was a different type of product again.

Yeah, totally different.

Again as we. What I like about talking about these is you start to see the patterns just in. During our conversation here because once again we chose the path of learning how to launch something new and we've learned so much from that. Where now I feel like our skill set just in the last six to seven months is much higher because we've chosen to launch different things that now we have a better understanding of how to create in the future.

Yeah.

And it's worth reiterating that it wasn't, you know, Full Stack Writer wasn't just a new product. The reason it was so new is because a, it was at a different price point. You know, ship 30 and cowork based courses tend to sit in that. You know, we, we like to think of it more in the probably 500 to $1,000 range. There's some cohort based courses that are a couple grand. Right. But usually it's, it's $500 to like 2,000 would be a, a cohort based course. Premium Ghostwriting Academy group coaching training programs. Higher ticket. Right. More hands on different value prop than a cohort based course. But an asynchronous product is typically more low ticket. It's anywhere from 100 bucks to maybe 400. 400 bucks, right? That's about the sweet spot. And full stack writer, it was 350 bucks. And so it was a new price point. It was a new. Like, we hadn't done an asynchronous product really. So it was, you know, prerecorded video and text. And it was also the first time that we did the model of it not being evergreen, but it was open cart, closed cart. So there was a lot of. It was a completely different way of approaching the marketing. Cause you're doing this buildup and then you open sales for five days and you tell everyone, hey, you know, it's not gonna be available after five days. And then you close the cart. And so that was the first time we had done those three things. And we learned a ton by doing that.

And I think the mindset that served us well throughout all of this was this is not the last time we're going to do it. It's the first time. So we just wanted to put something out there where with pga, we had to make the decision that this might not be the last or this is not going to be the only time we build a group coaching program. So let's go learn the skill. This is not going to be the only time we launch a paid newsletter that we'll talk about. We really built three different types this year. It's crazy. And when you go in with that learning attitude of worst case, this flops and I learn a ton because then I can do it better in the future. It really took a lot of the pressure off this year of, oh, if this doesn't work, like the business is ruined, it's no, we're going to go try and launch a bunch of new things, see what feels good to do, see what we can learn from it. And then now, as we head into the next year, we are starting with such a better skill set foundation on top of all the team members we've added and everything.

Yep.

Which sort of leads to. So this, this next one of doubling the business profit. I think it's worth reiterating that we've. We've basically followed the Hormozy playbook to a T because in the beginning when we just had ship 30, you know, Hormozi's whole framework and something that we just sort of like we were doing this intuitively, but it didn't really click until I think we heard it vocalized, where it's just, you know, one offer to one specific person and get leads from one platform, you know, 1, 1, 1.

Until you're at a million.

Until you're at a million. And so the first year we had ship 30, it was literally right on Twitter, drive people to our newsletter, pitch them on ship 30. And we did a million dollars the second year. You know, the second step from that playbook is, okay, well, now you need.

An upsell or some kind of extension of customer. Customer value.

Yeah. So. So some sort of backend or what's the next thing? And that's what really had us double down and lean into the captain's table.

Right. And we thought that that was going to be the most lucrative way of extending customer LTV. And we spent about 18 months thinking that was true until we realized, okay, maybe it's actually not. Not the best way. And that's what led to the increase of product creation. Cadence was, okay, if this isn't maybe the perfect way, because it's not that specific of an offer. It's harder to scale to this many people. What are the different ways that we could say, hey, everyone who took ship 30, who wants to continue learning from us?

We.

What is the most lucrative vehicle to go and do that?

Yeah, that's what we learned. And. Aha. And I just want to share this with everyone. Part. Part of what made captain's table a challenging vertical for us to scale is that ship 30 attracts lots of different types of people. And so when your front end attracts lots of different types of people, it's really challenging to come up with a backend that appeals to all of those different types of people. Right. Because each of those archetypes have different problems. And so we basically had a catch all front end. And then we were trying to solve the catch all with a like. And then we're solving all these problems on the back end.

Right, Right.

And we learned that in a very painful way. I can't tell you how many different iterations we did of captain's table. It was brutal, but we learned that that doesn't work very well. And so even though we doubled the business from year one to year two by adding on this backend and we hit a ceiling, we were like, oh, there's nowhere to go from here. Right. And so we talk about this a little later. Might be worth just jumping into it. Like, we basically. This was April, you said. Right. So in April of this year, as we started building the group coaching, we realized, you know, this has. This has the potential and way more upside than captain's table. The way that we had it engineered at the time, it was Much more hands on. We were doing live calls like it was. It was a very different product than it is now. And so we made the decision to basically shut that down and really reduce that down to just what. What was most valuable to the people coming out of ship 30. And that was painful. Like April. April was our lowest revenue month in a year, year and a half.

The way that it sequenced out right. Was during February and March. We started the beta group of PGA and built that and fulfilled on it. Then we had the April Ship 30 cohort, where the bandwidth to fulfill on that cohort was not. We were not able to do anything on pga despite having huge success on the month or two before.

Yeah, the month. The month or two before was like, this will be a smashing success. And we couldn't give it any attention.

We couldn't give it any attention. And we had to take a near term revenue hit, saying if we did, you don't decide to lower the price of Captain's Table and lower the fulfillment on it into, hey, the main offer now is you get lifetime access to ship 30, which people still love and still took up. And we had higher conversion on it, ironically, after doing that and simplifying it. So we had to sit there in April and it literally felt like chewing glass.

Yeah.

It was horrible.

I remember the whole. And if you look at our revenue chart for the year, it's so funny to look at it now because if you cut the chart there, it's like, did the business just die?

Yeah.

Is it dead?

It was like off a cliff. Off a cliff.

And I remember sitting there at the end of April, like, this is this. And trying to communicate that to the whole team, communicate that to one another. It sucked. And we've had that now twice of June in 22 and April in 23, where if you showed most people that revenue chart with it ending right there, you'd be like, oh, yeah. So the business just ended there.

Yeah.

The market, every single time, it was dead point. New high score one or two months after.

Yep.

Which is exactly what happened. And that. It was one of those. You had. We knew we had to take one step back to go three steps forward. And the fact that we believed in ourselves enough to do that, like, I. Props to us. You know, it's hard.

There were many days where I was like, looking at Cole, like, I know this sucks.

And you get in your head about it. You know, I'm like, I just moved to Miami.

Yeah.

You know, like, oh, no, this is.

You know.

But we. We pushed through and sure enough, two months later, best month ever. Two months after that, best month ever. Two months after that, best month ever. And we had to get that. That's one of the hardest things about the entrepreneurial journey is you get to these plateaus where you realize you in order to get to the next level, the first step is you probably need to stop doing something. And we had to. We couldn't just like, there were no more hours. We couldn't just plow forward and be like, we're going to leave everything the same, but still build pga. We had to deliberately shut down one thing to make time for another. And it worked. It worked. It was the right decision.

So again, more lessons and realizations there as we go down the list here. Next. We hired seven people this year.

Yeah, those huge.

And brought them all together in person.

We hired. So maybe you want to rattle off the different roles.

So put. Put on the spot here. But in order. We hired three sales reps. Yeah. We hired a sales success coach. We hired a student success coach for pga.

Yeah, we all of those for pga.

We hired a content marketer.

Yep.

Internal for us. We did a lot. And I think the thing here is when you're hiring and you're moving that quickly, it can be very easy to a start. Start getting lazy with people you hire. Like, you hire someone and they might not be the right person, but you're like, I don't really have time to think about the fact that they're the right person or not. And so all of a sudden, your culture just starts to erode. And I think despite growing so quickly, I mean, again, PGA went from, yeah, we did the beta cohort, but PGA basically went from a cold start to multiple seven figures in revenue in like six months. And so hiring people that quickly, I think we did a really good job of maintaining, you know, our three core values.

Well.

So because we came into the year, I was just looking back this note here. Plan and discuss Q3 or 2023 Q1. And so I just flipped through that of like, what were we focused on and looking at during that time? Number one was team and culture. And we sat down and we're like, okay, what are we going to think about working style, communication. Looked at each of our team members of like, are we using them to our highest potential? And then discuss what we're willing to do on the how much? So we should have looked through this. But like, it was interesting to sit down. Of all the different things we're thinking about at the beginning of the Year.

Yeah.

Because yes, we hired seven people. But that was from the realization, and this is a big one, 90% margin businesses sound great, but they're extremely fragile. And we thought, oh, we're running this business, got a great margin, like we must be doing everything right. And then we started to talk to a few, talk to a few people in the space and they're like, yeah, you're really running a 50% margin business. And then the other 40%, you're just paying yourself to do all those jobs.

Yeah.

And that is not sustainable. It's stressful, it's harder to do. And once that clicked in a big way for me of like that extra 40%, you should actually just look at all the roles you're playing, put a salary to them and realize that you're just paying yourself to do all those jobs.

And I, in the beginning, I think that's an amazing place to be. You know, like if you're working a full time job and you have a 99% margin, side hustle, selling your time, best case scenario. Right. Or if you're a solopreneur and this is your first business, first time working for yourself, that's an amazing place to start. But Dickie and I both want more for ourselves and we, and we know that we're capable of more. And so we're constantly asking, what's the next thing that we can learn? How do we grow? And especially once you start adding team members, even when we just had two or three people, we started to question, well, what's the defensibility of our business? Right. Because now it's not just about you, it's about there's another person here, you know, and so I think the bigger, it's almost like a self fulfilling prophecy where the bigger the team gets, the more you have to ask yourself, how do I make the business more defensible? And as you think about how to make it more defensible, you inherently don't make decisions where you're the bottleneck.

Right.

So yeah, it forces you to think bigger.

Yeah. And I was looking back at that document, we decided on our core values during that meeting. And I remember being like, oh yeah, this kind of doesn't matter because we don't have a big team.

But it ended up, it ended up.

Mattering huge because it was ingrained into our culture by the end. Just think about, we filmed that episode where we were like, okay, how are we going to build this culture as we scale? And it's putting the slack emojis in it's. Making sure everyone uses the verbiage that we're using. And now that's been just stamped into the brains of everyone on our team. That's how we operate.

You know, Side note, I really think. And this would be so fun to write about at some point. We'll put it in some product at some point. But I really think one of the best things we did was create those three emojis.

Yeah.

Our entire culture revolves around three emojis. It's a brick, which is every time someone does something, that's like, extreme ownership.

Here's what I'm doing. Here's my day ahead.

Yeah, like, you gotta do it right? It's. You're laying another brick. You have a little emoji of, like, a sports car.

2023 Bentley Continental GT.

A little Bentley, which is speed. You know, relentless tempo. Relentless tempo. And so it's. Whenever you're doing something where, you know most people will be like, oh, we should do this, and then the other person's like, cool. And then no one ever does it. And on our team, we meet about.

It next week, it's like, okay, decision made. Great. Here are the three steps I just took to get us forward. Boom. That's on the calendar. Closing the loop. That's done.

Yep.

And all we do is react with that emoji, and it's just. Oh, yeah.

Reinforce it. And I feel like just. Just because of that emoji and that core value, you notice how many times in Slack, you can see it in the thread. Someone's like, we should do this. And then the next comment is, is, it's done. And. And then it's a little friendly. Yeah. It's gamified.

It's like, I want to do things faster, so I get the reinforcement of that feedback loop. It's a very subtle reward. And then the last One is a 20, 20, 20 Lakers championship ring, where our third core value is championship energy.

Yep.

Or anytime someone just jumps in slack like, yo, what's up, y'? All? I'm feeling good. Here's what I'm doing today. Here's a big win. Or something like that.

Or going above and beyond.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And so literally every action that happens on a daily basis is one of those three emojis. And you can just see it being reinforced over and over and over again.

We have a bunch more of emojis, too. Whenever we find something, like, during the most boring periods of the year where we were. We were scaling and just talking about slaying bores, getting Them. So we put a little bore emoji, and it was like, anytime Cole and I were like, all right, man, we're strapping in for four more hours of boars here. We would just spam that to one another. Or when we had to context switch a lot, and we put the Jay Z1 German engineering right back and forth, back and forth between things. That's a really underrated way of having fun.

Super underrated.

Like, okay, yeah, this is boring. Or, yeah, this is taking a lot of energy. Or, yeah, xyz. But it's fun because we have a Jordan Belfort emoji with the sunglasses on when the closers make a deal. It's a lot of fun.

It is a lot of fun. So highly encourage. Even if you have a small team, even if it's just one other person, there's something about having your own emojis, and it's not. This is the thing about gamification, right? It's not just the emoji. It's what it stands for. It's like, what is the core value that's being reinforced with this?

And then when we brought everyone together in person, it was so interesting to feel that while they were here.

Uhhuh.

There was no complaining. Everyone took care of their bodies. Everyone was high energy. Everyone was like, okay, cool, let's make sure we're implementing these things before we even go home. It was. We built a culture in Slack and Zoom and then brought everyone together, and it was. There was no change. Everyone was operating with those core values. And it was so cool to see.

It was amazing. We could talk about team for forever.

Yeah.

Okay, so next one is experimenting with different podcast styles. So just a cool thing, you know.

This is like 30th episode of espresso Hour. We had ups and downs throughout the year where we're like, let's deprioritize this. Like, when we went month mode in May and November, we didn't film in because at the end of the day, this is like a documentation process. Now I look back, I wish we would have filmed something during it.

We were so brain.

Our brains. It'd be funny to be able to watch that.

Like, we should have just, like, welcome to another episode of.

Because. So for anyone unfamiliar, like, we both love steak. Cole and I love a good steak. So we put at the end of our November sprint, going to our favorite Korean steakhouse, and everything was done. This was when we were building Full Stack Rider. We made a reservation for 5pm on Tuesday before the product went live.

P.m. that's right.

Yeah. 5pm Tuesday. We're like, it's done. There's nothing else we can do. And we both, like, limped to the restaurant, sat down across from each other, like four brain cells and just, like, grunted across the table like, the steak's good.

Yeah.

I can't wait to go to bed.

Ordered. Ordered two. Two bright pink mocktails. Yeah.

It's like, dude, I don't want to drink at all. I want to go to bed so badly. That was like a hemp mocktail.

Yeah.

We're exhausted. But, you know, I am really happy that we've maintained this. And I think one of the coolest things and makes us very excited for 2024 is how much signal we've gotten from people who watch or listen to Espresso Hour. And, you know, I mean, it's not like our episodes are going super viral or anything, but the people that watch and listen, the amount of like, I don't even.

It's resonance.

Yeah, the resonance.

No, I put that in the lessons in real estate.

It's incredible.

Yeah. The audio and video makes such a difference relationship with your potential audience.

Yeah.

There's something about people read our stuff and then they hear us or just see us, and it's way different. And I recognize that with everyone that I look up to, I actually engage with them most via video. There are very few people who just write that. I'm like, oh, I love that person.

Yeah.

You know, there's something about the relationship, the parasocial that you build, being able to look at people and hear from them all the time.

Yeah.

So this is. This has been a really fun vehicle for us, but we also see it, you know, paying dividends for our businesses too. Like, we can't tell you how many times someone would get on a PGA call and be like, I listen to Espresso Hour every week. That. That is way more important than having episodes get a million views.

We underestimate how many. So Ali has this great point where he looks at the total number of listening hours or watch hours between his Deep Dive podcast channel, which has like one fifth of the subscribers as his main channel, but gets double the listening time.

Ah.

So from a relationship building perspective, you're really optimizing for number of hours spent with you. Right. And so to the extent that people read our stuff, but then listen to this episode, like, if you're listening to this right now, this is probably going to be an hour and a half long. And you multiply that by 2000, 3000 I don't know how many people are watching this. 2000? 3000? Sounds like not very many, but then you multiply by how long the video is. Yeah, it's a lot of time.

Yeah.

So really cool. Goes a long way in deepening the relationship. Which brings us perfectly to the next one, which was we built this entire place this year.

That was nuts.

So we have a video for both the lessons and realizations from hiring our team that we can link to right around here. We had another video early on in the year where we were doing that game planning for the types of hires. Remember we made that spreadsheet of like each role. Which one are we going to hire for? It feels like a decade ago.

Yeah.

But we'll link to both those. And then we also have that reveal video of our shipyard production studio, which, you know, we did. We did it this year and we know we're going to do it again next year, I think.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I've gotten a bunch of questions ever since I posted that atomic essay. People are like, what's going to happen to the shipyard? Because I'm planning on moving to Arizona this next year and we're just going to pack it all up and rebuild it and move it somewhere else. And I think a cool realization this sort of dovetails into. This became a forcing function for us to have our first team meetup. Having a space like this was also a forcing function for us to have our first premium ghostwriting mastermind. And I think seeing like those three pieces together, having a studio, bringing the team together and holding a mastermind, really showed us how much more is possible. It made us immediately go, okay, the next shipyard we build probably going to be twice as big.

It needs a gym. It just needs a gym.

It needs a gym and it needs another section where we can do green screen stuff. And it was really funny because when we got this place three or four months ago, I remember thinking, like, you know, this. This is a lot of space. Like, this is, you know, it's not a huge room, but it's a big room. And. And then we had the whole team out here and you had 12 people in here. And I was like, we grew out of this in three months, just, you're done. And. And so combining that with we want to do more in person meetups with our team because we saw so much benefit from that. It was also just really fun and really enjoyable and then pairing that with also the fun and enjoyment and benefit of the Mastermind. And. And both of us, I think, walked out of that realizing this is something that we could do for a long time.

Long time.

And. And it's really enjoyable. And so, yeah, those three things together, it's just going to be that more.

And we got back together in person more.

Yeah.

You know, that was another big benefit is we spent more mornings together, which led to faster iterations on everything. And I, I think we continue. We've known that for years and we continue to underestimate its importance every single time. We talk every day for. Because, like, there's multiple times where we've been in a heads down build mode and we don't really get together except for like 10 minutes at the gym for a couple days at a time. But there is something about just the hour together where it's like, okay, this loop, this loop, this loop.

Cool.

Move that faster. Where.

Yeah.

It's just the speed is real.

The inverse is almost always true too. If we don't talk.

Yes.

For like a week or two weeks, all of a sudden we both have this feeling of like, what are we doing?

Yeah.

Where's the business going?

Where are we? That's so true.

So that's something we've learned now. This is what, our third. Our third year. So, yeah. I think going into year four, we are so much more knowledgeable about how to maximize.

Yes.

Each other as well.

All right, next. A lot of wins there.

Yeah.

Built a paid newsletter to 250k in ARR in 6 months.

It's crazy. So quick story on that. Just to show you how, like, relentless tempo. Right. Start paying attention to how often you or someone else in your life says, I should do this. Oh, I'll do that tomorrow. Or, oh, I'll do that next week. Our default is, we should do that right now. Like, and so we were in Cabo for the first Mastermind with the eight.

Figure boardroom during April during Max Payne Month.

Yeah.

So when everything was falling off a cliff, of course, in the back of our brains we're going, what else can we build? Right. And somehow out in Cabo, maybe it was the weather staring at the ocean. Right. And it just clicked and it was like, you know, it would be really amazing if we took all the things that we talk about with writing, but just paired each idea with a ChatGPT prompt. And literally at the mastermind, while we had a million other things going on, Created the substack, wrote the first.

I remember writing them on the little. I wrote two posts because you're like, you should start writing on this because there's a New vehicle for you. I'm like, yeah, yeah. And so we got off the first flight, they landed in Mexico and then we had to take that two hour flight from.

Oh yeah, we were sitting in the airport.

Yeah. And I was like writing it and I wrote it on the plane. I wrote two of them and I was like, okay, cool, two more done. When can we post? And then we, I haven't written one since.

And we created the, the graphic for like the graphic that goes each one in canva in like still using it 12 minutes. Right. So it's worth. I, I just love pointing that out because so often people build these businesses up in their head and they think, oh, I have to do all of this preparation. And we literally came up with the idea, created the first couple versions of write with AI and published them at the mastermind within 48 hours. And now it's just repeat through infinity.

And now it's all about scaling it. And we hit a little bit of a ceiling, said, okay, how do we change this? And we have no clue where this goes. So we once, yeah, as I wrote that down, realized we started three different businesses this year. Right. Started group coaching, we did Async product and we did a paid newsletter. And now we go, okay, interesting one. We know how to sell our method on all that, which means we can educate people on. Here's exactly what we did and what we learned from it going and doing all this. And this one's just very exciting because we're going to duplicate that process to a couple new newsletters in the year ahead.

Yep.

This I'm really excited about. I think we've really cracked the code on what makes a really effective and profitable paid newsletter because not every idea is built for it. And the framework for how we think about what ideas work well for paid newsletters versus the ones that don't is really starting to crystallize. And so already we've doubled down like Write with AI is working. So we've doubled down on now a second vertical fiction writing with AI and it's the same idea applied to a different vertical. And we see a path for building a portfolio of these paid newsletters. And then of course, one of the asynchronous products that we're probably going to build in this new year, how to build a paid newsletter and a free and paid newsletter. Right. So you can see how all of these models start to revolutions. Revolutions. They all work together.

You want to jump to learning the power of cross collaborations.

Yeah. So I think the so two funny stories with this. So we had two videos with Ali Abdul this year that went nuclear. The first was a podcast I recorded with him last.

Last Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving last November in London. And we recorded that podcast at 7 in the morning. I was out till, which is 1am.

Eastern because of the time change. So you were just taken on by a thread.

Obliterated. And I was out the night before till like midnight, 1am with Alyssa and her friends and wanted to go to Sohouse, like, you know how it goes. And so I literally got six hours of sleep. And it wasn't high quality sleep because I had had a tequila or two. And then I wake up the next morning and I go grab a coffee because I'm like, I gotta get ready for this. And this was the only time that Ollie had for us to record. And he was like, we either make this happen or we don't. I was like, let's do this. So woke up, got a coffee, drank it on an empty stomach, no breakfast. And I remember sitting in that, there was like a two hour podcast. And I remember the whole time my stomach is just like, couldn't be more empty. My leg is like bouncing under the table. I thought I bombed this thing. Yeah, I called him.

So I called you that that day. I was like, yo, how'd it go? He's like, dude, honestly, I do not my best work. I think I bombed that, man. Like, it's a bummer. I'm really. I don't feel good about it. Like, I was out late. I'm like, it is what it is.

And they didn't. And they didn't publish it.

Pushed it a bunch, right?

Yeah, they didn't publish it for like nine months. And I thought, because nothing got communicated. I thought that I did so bad that Ali didn't have the heart to tell me that it was so bad that he decided to scrap it. So in the back of my head I'm like, that was wasted effort and it's never coming out. Then all of a sudden, one day I. I was on a trip somewhere, I can't remember where, and you texted me and you were like, have you seen this? Oh, yeah.

You're like, dude, why is all this blowing up?

Like, I don't know, my book sales.

You're like, dude, I don't know what happened, but art and business, book sales are exploding. I'm like, interesting. And you're like, dude, it just shows the power of like having this little dividend all the time. And I'm like, I guess that doesn't make Any sense at all why they'd be spiking? But like, three days later, I'm like, Nicholas Cole, YouTube. And I look up that video with ali, it's got 150,000 views. I'm like, yo, have you seen this?

Yeah.

Now it's over half a million. I mean, that episode has done more for multiple parts of our business than almost anything else, to be fair. I mean, I know I didn't really feel this way, but I've gotten so many DMs and emails from people saying how helpful and how valuable it was. So obviously it has to be a good episode. It's not just like, I'm on Ollie's channel and all of this happens.

Yeah. It's like the fifth most viewed one behind, like, Stephen Bartlett.

Yeah.

It was clearly very helpful for people, which was amazing signal for us and drinking our own Kool Aid. The success of that interview is what has inspired one of the next books I'm going to publish, which is Writer Career Paths, because that's exactly what we talked about in that episode. So that was the first one. And then the second one was I was at a wedding in Colorado like two months ago, and I remember you texted me going, have you seen this video that Ali just put out?

Yeah.

And I was like, no. And you texted it to me and it's essentially 20 minutes breaking down all the big ideas in the art and business of online writing.

Yeah. Basically calling you a genius for 20 minutes. Like, if you watch the full video, it's like Nicholas Cole. Nicholas Cole.

Which I didn't know was happening.

No.

And so that is how Ali does his long form podcast. When I was talking to him about my episode, it was, I want to have some kind of vision for how I can take this to the main channel through this episode. So yours, for example, was how to make $10,000 as a side hustle. I think it's like the name of his video. And it's just writing.

Yeah.

Somehow.

Yeah.

So both of those. I mean, I don't think. Well, a. I didn't even really know that the second one was happening. And the first one I thought they just scrapped because it was so bad, but it's a great example that those weren't super planned out. It was just an opportunity. And we've gotten to know Ali over the years and we'll swap insights on each other's businesses and we've just talked. And then the opportunity came up to go on his podcast. And then now we've seen so many good things. Come from that. We see people enrolling in PGA that go. I watched that interview, that podcast, and it was super illuminating. And now I want to become a ghostwriter. Now I want to take ship 30. So our takeaway from this is. Okay, we've just scratched the surface. We should be doing stuff like this with so many other big and especially tangential creators.

And you can look at just who we've already done it with. Justin and Dan should have updated new interviews two years after we had our last one with them talking about their business. That is the lens I want to use, though. Is anyone we talk to for an interview style. It's like, I don't want to hear your story. I don't want to hear any of that. I want to hear what your business doing. What have you learned over the last couple months and where are you headed? Just like we're doing right now, but like a mini review.

Yeah.

And I think that would be very valuable for us to learn from them and also the audience. If you're interested in Espresso Hour, you probably want to hear what these other creators are doing just on the business side with all of it.

Yep.

Agreed.

I think the last one is just learning 1. How to hire and train a sales team. That was the biggest single skill that I built this year. I like to reflect on the end of the year. What skills do I have this year that I did not have last year? And as we talked about at the beginning of the episode, if we had only gone the scaling of ship 30, I would not have built the skill.

Not even close.

Any. By any means. And that was. We recognized that if we were going to build the group coaching program that we wanted to build, the skill bottleneck and skill deficiency that we had was creating a sales script, hiring a sales team, managing that sales team, and scaling it. So we invested in the education to get the ideal scene to allow us to do that, executed that roadmap, and here we are.

And I think it's asked us to grow. Not, you know, so there's always the hard skill and then the soft skill. So the hard skill was how do you train other people on sales? Right. That's the hard skill. The soft skill that we've also had to learn is how do you continue to manage and empower those people? Right. Because by having a sales team that inherently has asked us to show up in a different way, we have a different cadence with them. We work with them through a different capacity. We're always. There's a whole different component than just the hard skill, which is another way that we've grown.

Right. Leadership from a management perspective is probably the second biggest skill I built this year. So awesome to see that and reflect just how that was literally a zero eight months ago. Now I feel like I could do it for any program out there.

Yeah.

Lastly, last win of the year, we refined our content supply chain, starting to specialize across different platforms. So for the first two years we only wrote on X. You used to be Twitter, now X we expanded to LinkedIn and a little bit on Instagram, where it's people will probably be interested in our approach to this. First it was just start posting consistently on that platform.

Yeah, that was it.

That was it. Just start, start posting consistently on LinkedIn. We really started in 2022 on LinkedIn and then stopped a good bit at the beginning of this year. Cause we're like, oh, we don't really know. We don't have the. We're. We're putting our attention in other places. Looking back, that was a mistake. We should have just figured out how to build that system then. But now that we've posted consistently for about four or five months across those platforms, the next iteration is to tailor our content to the platform. So first just start posting, then figure out how to post well there. And that's really where we're at from a LinkedIn and Instagram perspective is we've posted on there a good bit. Now we just need to optimize how we are. As I say that it makes me realize with YouTube, we just need to first start posting again. On the video creation side, we can optimize later. And this is a lesson or realization for anyone watching. Just start on whatever platform you're looking to build on so you can gather the data to get better at it. Because otherwise, if you're waiting for the perfect type of post to guarantee you go viral from day one, you're not going to get the number of iterations or gather the data necessary to actually optimize the platform. So it's start posting and optimize later.

And it's worth, you know, remembering that the data isn't always. It's not just the external. Did it perform well? Who's engaging with it? Is this a topic that resonates? Right? Like that's part of it, but the other data that you need to capture is where's your skill bottleneck? Like the. I recorded one. I remember right when we set up the studio, I was like, I just need to get a rep in. And I recorded one YouTube video. And then I hit publish and I watched the video and I realized that I was doing some awkward, weird thing with my fingers. The whole time while I was talking, I was doing like this. I was like, dude, chill out. And I needed to do a rep to get the data to be like, stop doing that. Okay, next video, we're gonna learn faster. Yeah, learn faster. So it's not always just what's going viral. It's also your own skill bottleneck as well.

All right, so heck of a year.

Crazy year across the board. Real quick, Shameless plug. Part of LinkedIn and Instagram is we've been trying to figure out, you know, because so much of what we do is writing how do we create visuals? And we weren't really loving the creation of carousels in Canva and things like that, so we went and built a solution. So in Typeshare now, you can create decks that are basically carousels, and you can create the deck in Typeshare and then Upload it to LinkedIn as a PDF carousel, or you can download the images and post them on Instagram as well. So now that we've created the mechanism that we want to use now we can start to scale on these platforms even more.

Very exciting. A lot. And we're doubling down on those in the year ahead. So we'll continue to post on X, but really ramp our intensity on LinkedIn and Instagram because we have a lot of ideas that we want to share there.

Yep.

Okay, so that was the recap, and that's how we started this reflective process. We just wrote down everything that happened, because as we did that and as we started to talk through it, some patterns have emerged that we think we would have loved to have known at the beginning of the year, which is always the way I like to reflect is, damn if I came into the year. What do I know now that I wish I knew then? And as we head into the year ahead, what are the meta frameworks that we can reapply as we start to scale again into 2024? So I'll rattle off this list and we can just jam on each of them again. All right, so number one, work in defined sprints of Monk mode or maintenance mode with a start and finish line. We'll talk about that one. Every reinvestment into the business is positive if you're the type of person who makes that a true statement. The importance of surrounding ourselves with an all star team. We learned a ton. We've recognized that most of the time when scaling something, you're Just a fixed number of hours and slang bores, we call it away from getting there. Another realization of how many leaps of progress came during a time when we met up every single day. We talked a little bit about that one. Uh, this next one. The value of a mastermind is normalizing success to the people of. For the people ahead of you. Huge stomped out of that mastermind. And we'll talk about that one. Uh, slogs are necessary before taking the next level. That was April for us. This was a cool one. Audio and video develop a much deeper 360 degree resonance than just text. And then lastly, we can build anything we want, but we need to set the clear constraints for what that means in the year ahead. So want to start at the top?

Yeah.

To be honest, I think this first one might be my favorite. I mean, a couple of these really jump out. But working in defined sprints. So this year more than. More than any other year. And this next year, I think we're by necessity going to have to do it even more. Because this next year I have a lot of life milestone things. I'm getting married, I'm moving again. There's all sorts of things that are happening that are gonna disrupt our sprint times. And so this year was the most clarity we had over what needs to get done and how much time do we have to get it done and then how can we set a milestone to go? And no matter what, it's done by this time, PGA was a forcing function for that. We did the beta cohort. We had people sign up and I was like, I have 30 days to make the whole curriculum. It's happening.

You got sick as hell and you're like, MJ flu game. I have a cohort live session to give tomorrow. I feel horrible, but I have to create the curriculum. Yeah, there was no way around it.

And we did, and we did it anyway. Same thing with Full Stack Writer. We picked a date. We said, this thing is going live on this date. And we pushed as hard as we could. And no matter what, we pushed that product live.

And then in May, when we hired and trained the sales team, we have a video. Our three or four weeks of Monk Mode. Here's what we learned where we limped into that video at the same time. Like, I didn't shower for about three weeks. A little long there. It's exactly what it felt like. And I remember how many things I literally let just rise around me of chaos and just said, nope, not dealing. Not dealing with it. Not dealing with it. By the end that was the single biggest leap of the year came during that time.

I now have. Because this is really crystallizing for me, I now have proactive conversations with my wife about this, really, that when we're going into a sprint, I'm like, I'm letting you know that for the next four weeks, all of these things are no longer going to happen. I am just not going to do that. It's not going to. And she's also learned to be really compassionate and understanding with me going, this isn't forever. I'll. I'll cut you some slack for this month, but after this month, you better believe you're gonna go break down all those boxes and take, take out all the recycling and, you know.

Exactly. And it's as I was looking at that the returns on those periods were so high that I look at all the other times where we were kind of in the middle of things that we could have ramped things way down.

Yeah, we should arrest.

And so here's, here's a big insight that I had this morning. Not only do you want a defined start and end date when you're in a sprint, but when you are recovering, you want a clear start date for the next one where it's like, I'm resting for this start date.

Yeah.

Right. So it's okay. January 1st, we're getting after it, you know, and so during the holidays, we're conserving because I know when day the intensity is going to ramp back up. I. Yeah, that's been a, A nice of. Cause when you're kind of sitting around in maintenance mode, it's uncomfortable for people like us who. It's like, I just want to get there. So if you know when it's going to start back up again, you can kind of like count down. It's like, I see it, I know it's coming. Here we are soon.

Well, and it forces you. I think it really forces you to rest in that period because if you don't, if you don't have a. This is when you need to turn it on again. I've noticed in myself what happens is I just, I take my foot off the gas and then I just sort of sit around and I like fall into bad habits where you don't fully rest. Like, oh, I'm just scrolling on social media more. It's like I'm not deliberately and intentionally allowing myself to rest. Whereas we're going into the holidays here and I know we're going to turn it on in January. And so I'M very conscious. Like, soak this up right now. You know, make the most of this rest period.

Where we can be even better is telling our team that too. It's like, hey, I know, you guys. It's going to be a slower period. We're about to take things up another level again. So here's like, the starting line is January 1st.

Yeah.

We have a little bit of rest time heading into the next two weeks and then it's go time.

Yep.

The second one I like a lot.

Of.

I think we've done this intuitively since the beginning. But, you know, every reinvestment in yourself or the business ends up being positive. If you're the type of person who makes it positive. We've done that really intuitively. But now just seeing it crystallized that way gives me a lot of confidence in us continuing to do that. Like, I think us signing up for this mastermind was the first time that we really leaned into that. But now I think because we understand this quality about ourselves, we're going to do this more and more often.

Exactly. It's very. It's empowering. It's. Every single time we have hired a new team member, invested in production quality or invested in education, we have taken a significant leap forward in our business.

Yes.

At any time we should know what's the next thing? Where are we investing that next money and how. Because every time we did that, it just brought us to a new level. It said, oh, we have two new sales reps. We better learn how to train them. Oh, we invested 68. Can a mastermind. We better go soak a lot out of that. Oh, we just got this studio. We better film videos for our entire course and really get as much value out of it as possible.

Yep.

So it's interesting to look more and more at those investments we made this year that forced us to level up and how we can continue to make those next year.

Yep.

Which, yeah, also leads well into. I think we both have just realized the benefits of having an all star team. And we've talked about this a handful already, but, you know, just the trend of solopreneurship and being like, I don't want employees and I don't want to work with people. And I get it because I went through my phase of that as well. But when you work with all stars and people that really have extreme ownership over what they do and people that bring things to the table that you might not necessarily have or you might not be as great at that thing, it just makes you realize the, like, the bigger our team has gotten, the more that I realize how much more we can do. Because now it's not just limited by your and my skill set.

Yes.

You know, exactly.

So, Daniel, Katie, Andrew, Ash, Justin, Juan, Connor, Artia, Tristan, Jamie. Shout out, y'.

All.

If you're listening to this, we have the best team.

We have an unbelievable team. We have a full video here of everything we learned from our last time having them all here in person. But we're so grateful for you guys, grateful for everyone that's become a part of this team. We know the team's going to continue to grow. So you're in on the ground floor as we take things up another level. But just so cool to see that entire group come together this year. It's been a lot of fun.

Yep.

Another lesson takeaway. You know, you're a fixed number of hours away from anything. This has helped me tremendously over the past couple years, especially being a ADD creative. Like, I'm all, there's always a shiny object.

You know?

You know that. You know better than anybody. But this helps really remind me that there's always an end. Whenever you're focused on something, it doesn't mean you're going to do that forever. And you're a fixed number of hours away from proficiency or from crossing the milestone or from standing up a new vertical.

And.

And once you internalize that, you start to realize that nothing is actually hard. It's all just hours.

Right.

And you can either tell yourself those hours are hard or you can tell yourself, oh, they're just hours and they're not gonna go anywhere. I just gotta go do it.

Work just needs doing. Hormozi says all the time. I like that one of, we know what it's gonna take to get there. One thing I think about in the gym all the time is you are a fixed number of bicep curls away from having the size arms you want. The problem is you just don't know what that number is, and it's probably more than you think.

Great point.

Right? So most things in business that's true. You are a fixed number of hours away from getting there. The problem that keeps most people from actually getting to that point is it's an uncertain number, which means you're probably showing up just chipping away, and you don't really know how many hours away you are. And you underestimate how much effort and intensity that takes.

That's a really great point. And so how do you solve for that? You need to go into Every single encounter going, I don't know how many hours this is going to take. And it's probably more than I think, which means I need to give this a significant amount of my attention until the point where it becomes revealed to me how many hours it took.

Right.

And I think this is. You didn't write this down, but this was something that we were talking about a couple of days ago that I loved, which is if you're. If you're starting to do something, full immersion is. You want to just share that real quick because I love how you put that.

Yeah.

We recognized. And this is my single biggest takeaway of the year, is that immersion beats consistency in the beginning of anything. And so I look at this year. When we learned how to build the group coaching program, it wasn't like I was spending an hour a day on that course. Course.

No.

It was like 12 hours a day.

I listened to that literally for 12 hours a day for two weeks. It was the second I got up. I still remember it was no fewer than 30 minutes. Like, time to play the recordings. I'm gonna go for a walk and listen to this thing because it's purely. How quickly can I inhale that information so I can get to work on whatever it is I need to build.

Yep.

And so I think applying that to any skill, I already know when I choose to learn Facebook ads, I'm going to chain myself there for 12 hours a day for three weeks, and I'm going to merge. I'm like, okay, I know how this works. Great. Let's go do it.

Yeah.

And that's, again, only built by evidence from the last times I built skills like this. It's just get that information ingrained in my head as quickly as possible.

I really. When we were talking about this, I liked your example of meditation a lot because I think there's. The conventional wisdom is a little bit each. Start small, start small. You know, and like, yeah, like, there's a. There's a nugget of truth somewhere in there. But really, if you want to start a new habit, it's not, oh, I should do this for 15 minutes a day. You're like, I should do this all day, every day for the next two weeks and completely immerse myself, because then my working knowledge of what needs to happen here is going to level up by 10.

I think languages are another great one.

So my language is a good example.

My working framework on this is anything that is not limited by biology, you should immerse yourself in as quickly as possible. Because the counterexample. If you're trying to run a marathon, running for 20 straight hours at the beginning is going to hurt you more than it's going to help you. But taking a language class for 20 hours on the first day, you will make more progress than if you did one hour a day for 20 days.

Yep.

Because you can then repeat that. So that's my general framework. And I want to apply that to as many areas as possible this upcoming year.

Yep.

And just because I can hear the potential objection in my head, you know, if you're someone who has a business and you're. And you go, well, I don't have the time to do that. Well, no, the fact that you have your own business means that you are the one who decides where you invest your time. And you need to figure out what the one thing is that you need to immerse yourself in to uplevel the business. If you don't have your own business and you go, I'm working a full time job, I have a family, I have kids, I don't have the time. And you need to recognize that somewhere in your day you do have the time, even if it is an hour. But you're not immersing yourself in one thing. You're trying to chase five or 10 different things. And all of our big phases of growth meant saying no to everything else. I liked your other one of a nice end of the year reflection question is, what are all the things you're gonna say no to this next year? Because your no list needs to be long in order to pick one one thing to immerse yourself on.

And so I can already see how many things we're going to have to say no to in the year ahead. And as you grow, the things you say no to are only going to get more lucrative, which is another big problem. Every time I see, hey, an opportunity that might make us an extra 25, 30k, I'm like, oh, two years ago, that'd be amazing.

Uhhuh.

But now we have to say no to things like that.

Yeah.

Okay, next. Every leap of progress during the year came when we were meeting up consistently in progress person. We've learned that time and time again. But we can also recognize that the returns on that time come from when we're doing it with intention. And so when we are away from each other, which will probably be for a couple months throughout the year, just recognize that that's not going to be.

A period of intensity.

Intensity, Right. But we know, again, I really like this idea of having a start date for our sprints where I can sit, I'll be much more peaceful during a period of maintenance if I know when the clock is going to start ramping up again.

Yeah, right.

Because I'm just. I can conserve. So as we go throughout the year and we navigate the different life transitions we're both going to make, we'll get to feel that.

And I think, you know, this next one. The value of a mastermind is normalizing success. That's almost the. The elevated version of just like how the more that, the more time we spend with each other, I think we normalize things for ourselves. It kind of goes back to the newsletter that you sent me where it's like, just find one other person.

Oh, yeah.

And you will. You really just need to find one other person. You hold each other accountable and you massively up level in your life. But a mastermind, is that compounded. And you all of a sudden walk in a room and I remember going to Cabo and we were in this room and I was like, everybody here makes more money than us and they're not that much smarter than us. So what's the problem? What's the problem?

Literally, it's a knowledge and ideal scene bottleneck.

Yeah.

And so the value, as much as the education was the value, it was the normalizing of, oh, we could do this. Right. And I think that there's so much value there because we emerged angry. That was the only emotion, the only emotion we felt at the end of April because we had our worst month. We then walked into a room or everyone made more money than us and we left there just angry. That was the only feeling I had. It's like, how?

How is this possible?

And it worked. And so we intend on finding new ways to continue to normalize success above us from here.

Yeah.

Normalizing success is a topic I would love to dig into more because I really do feel, and I see it in ship 30. I see it in PGA. I see it whenever I talk about pricing. I see it whenever we talk about entrepreneurship. The biggest bottleneck to people's growth is often not the hard skill. It's literally their own belief in themselves. And what part of the benefit of joining communities or masterminds or group training programs or whatever it is is when you see so many other people doing the thing. All of a sudden your identity, it is easier for your identity to adopt doing the thing than to no longer or to not do the thing anymore. Right. And so you're forced to acclimate yeah.

The environment is. At the end of the day, what's going to shape you so the more that you can surround yourself with people, make it easy to just make it a normal thing that your business does. A million dollars a month.

Yeah.

Like, how. How could you spend more time with.

That many people in that room? That was normal. You talk to anyone. So what are you doing? We're doing half a million a month. Next person, what are you doing? Oh, we're doing 600k a month. Like, that was normal. And so when you see that as normal, you don't build it up in your head anymore. And then you stop spending so much time going, how am I ever going to get there? And you start spending time going, well, all right, we need to do these couple things, which leads to, you know, slogs are necessary. Right. Like, a lot of we. Something that's really crystallized for me building our businesses is you have creative periods, and then you have slog periods, and you have these periods where you're building new things. It's really exciting. It's always fun taking something from 0 to 1. And then once you stand it up, you have to move into phase two, which is not creating anything new, and it's cleaning up what just happened, and it's refining and it's digging into people's problems, and it's. It's all of the necessary stuff to get to the next level.

Can I break you some news? That's going to be January.

Oh, this is probably going to be January, February, March. See?

March, April, May. What? Well, we haven't talked about this, but we have operated in parallel a lot where one of us have. Has been sprinting harder for different parts of the year. Like February and March was you building the PGA curriculum. And then May was. Get the sales guys going.

Yeah.

And it was like, we could build off one another. And then November, I think we were both in sprint mode, but parts of the summer I was off parts of, etc. So it's interesting to think, like, are one of us in monk mode more than the other during different parts? Because, like, March, April, May. I know if I'm doing paid, I'm gonna be purely in that monk mode. Whereas that, you know, we don't know. But it is interesting to think about that balance of, like, okay, no one talk to Dickie because he's taking the course for the next week.

Yeah, let him.

Let him cook.

Let him cook. Let him cook. I also like this one a lot. Just audio and video. Develop more resonance. You Know, as much as, obviously we're big believers in writing, and writing is such a powerful vehicle, there has been something very fun and very cool about having a mechanism.

Yeah. If you're watching this right now, chances are you like us better than the average person. Otherwise you probably would like. You probably would have clicked away here, you know?

Yeah.

So this. This has been a great creative vehicle. I'm excited to double down finally.

It took six months, but now I feel we have our calendar relatively clear where we can start to crank out more videos.

Yep.

This one I love just paying or paying for the ideal scene. I mean, we talked about it with normalizing success, but now this is my go to lens. Now whenever I pick up something new, my first thought is, who knows all the things I don't? And can I just go buy an hour of their time for them to.

Tell me these 20 questions?

Exactly.

And we're going to continue to invest in anything we do. Like the YouTube coaching. There's 20 different tips and tricks that you'll never discover on your own. But if you hire a high quality YouTube coach, they're gonna help you speak better, they're gonna help you edit better, everything. So we're probably gonna invest in that along with a paid advertising course, because those are the two things that if we get an ideal scene, we're gonna go execute on.

Yep.

I feel like with this one, people always like to make it about money, where they're like, oh, I don't wanna spend the money to do that. First of all, the time is gonna cost you way more than the money. So just know that. But I. And I noticed this within myself too. I don't think that it's really a time or money thing. I think what it really is is an ego thing where when you step into something, it's like you. You have to admit to yourself, I have no idea what I'm doing. And that's part of that is, I think, the bigger friction point. And then we just rationalize it with money.

I love saying, I don't know anything.

Yeah.

It's like my favorite thing is stepping in a new game and saying, all right, beginner mindset. I am horrible at this, but in three months, I will be really good. And the more that I can optimize my whole life around doing that, I'm going to continue to be pretty happy. And that, again, was another longer realization I had this year.

Yep.

Which leads us nicely to this last one. Yeah, we can build anything we want, which means we need to set some constraints for the year ahead of what we're actually going to. To build.

Yep.

You, you can build anything, but you can't build everything and only one thing at a time. Yeah, that I think of all of the lessons in the past three years, I think the biggest one is you can only build one thing at a time. Because every time we've tried to build multiple things at a time, the, the irony is when you tell yourself, I'm going to try and do multiple things at a time, that that isn't actually ever what happens. You always end up picking one thing. But then you beat yourself up because you said you were going to build five things. So you might as well learn the lesson. You can only build one thing at a time.

Which leads us into the last part of this video, which is what are we excited about for the year ahead and what do we want to build?

Yeah. So rapid fire. First we're going to double down on PGA and PGM. That is clearly the most exciting vertical. Ship 30 is still amazing. We love Ship 30. We love the role that it plays. We love that it's an entry point for so many people. People into our ecosystem. But PGA and PGM has the most upside. Second one, growing our reach on YouTube. That's something that we really want to do.

We have a lot of videos in the works where every single thing that we've written about, we're ready to double down on. We talked about that in our shipyard reveal video. But it's really a number of hours away from having 200,000 YouTube subscribers again, which is very freeing. It's. You're just. We don't know what number video it's going to be, but we know that if we make X number of videos and we get better on every single one, we could have a million YouTube subscribers.

Yeah.

Period. Full stop. And a story. Because if you can build an audience on one platform, the ideas are going to transfer. You just have to figure out the best way to communicate them.

Yep, agreed. Third is we're going to Double down on LinkedIn and Instagram. So LinkedIn is an obvious one, especially for group coaching programs like PGA. LinkedIn is such a great platform for that. Instagram. It'll be interesting to see how much attention and effort we end up giving it. We just know that it's a really powerful platform for reaching the people that we want to reach. There's so many freelancers who use Instagram, obviously. So that'll be fun.

We'll see.

We don't really know. We just know that we have ideas that are worth sharing and we're going to put them on there.

Fourth, obviously, the success of Full Stack Writer I think changed the way that we are thinking about new products. Products. So we have a couple asynchronous products, low ticket that we think have a lot of potential going into 2024. I think we're also sort of piecing together this framework where, you know, we're juggling ship 30 happening on a quarterly basis roughly PGA is evergreen always moving. And then we have a couple pockets in the year that are a little slower, especially when we're between cohorts. And so we're learning if you're between a ship 30 cohort, those pockets are really great for doing asynchronous product launches like we did with Full Stack Writer.

Yep.

And so we have two ideas for that. One, an offer creation deep dive. All the different offers that we've created. How you can figure out which is the best type of offer from a writing based perspective. Really excited to dive into that one. And then the other, a free newsletter marketing guide. How to basically run an entire business on the back of just a newsletter, but without selling sponsorships only.

Yeah.

Basically everything we do, we've never once sold a sponsorship. So we want to show people how to use that Playbook and Convertkit and stay tuned for that one. Sounds like we're going to build that one during the summer and we'll see.

It's already marinating somewhere back there.

Yep.

All right.

This one I threw in there because I do think that this is something we're going to take on towards the end of the year if everything is aligned, which is taking this shipyard and moving it across the country to Arizona.

I feel kind of bad. I'm like, we got all set up. Let's go back. But at the end of the day.

Like, what did we do? We bought furniture and put it in a room.

Yeah, exactly. We can move all this.

Yeah.

It's not going to be hard.

And I think creating, I mean, as.

Long as we can work. Yeah. More. More content of we move the shipyard across the country. These couches are great. Everything that I think is the best part is, yes, we spend a lot of money on this, but every single one of these we're going to be able to use for 20 years.

Right.

You know, every single thing here is going to help us scale. So I feel good about it. I think we will add Jim and something to whatever.

I think so if Daniel's going to be there too.

It's like we Got to have a place for him to squat the house.

Oh yeah, and maybe we'll probably need a little kitchen as well. Yeah, because the steak's not going to cook itself.

Steaks aren't going to cook. Amen.

Another one. I'm really excited about this. The expanding our paid newsletter portfolio. Right. With AI has shown. Shown a ton of signal. We just launched fiction writing with AI I think there's another three to 10 verticals that we could add there. So it'll be interesting to see what order. We're also going into it with this mentality of, you know, start an idea, see what works and double down on your winners and cut your losers. Right. So not every paid newsletter that we launch I think is going to be a smashing success. But we're going to treat this like a mini, like VC firm, you know, like our own internal portfolio.

Yeah, we want to get that to a million dollars a year easy.

I think, I think we'll get there this year.

I hope so. That'll be fun. Second to last, collaborating with other creators. We already talked about this, but we'd love to do some cross collaborations with other people in the writing space. We have a bunch of ideas, so stay tuned. Hopefully they can come here or we could bring a set to them if we needed to. But I just like the idea of having more breakdowns of writing based businesses, period. I'm not really interested in the writing habits of people. I want to know how these writers are monetizing their writing.

Agreed.

High level. That's what I want to figure out. And I think if we want to figure it out, there are a lot of people who want to learn it as well.

Yep, agreed.

And then lastly, this is my fun side hustle. Shiny Object for the year is creating this fiction writing vertical. We're going to start with fiction writing with AI and then I also have been working with a couple people from Amazon Original Stories. So a huge publishing house, obviously not in a book deal capacity. We're working with them separately and just talking through different series ideas. And the big thing that I want to combine here is fiction writing and storytelling with business models because I think the, the greatest opportunity in fiction writing is yes, it's on the story side, but really it's on the business side because so many writers come up in a world where they're never introduced to how to monetize. So I'm really excited to play at that intersection.

We got our work cut out for us. Man.

2024 is going to be wild.

Going to be a Lot of fun. Oh, man.

Can't wait. Can't wait.

Dear future us, if you're watching this.

In a year, how'd it go? How'd it go?

Did it work? You know, if we were to. I think we're going to be sitting here in a year having doubled the business again. Yeah, that's a low goal for us.

That's the base case.

Maybe we have a hundred thousand YouTube subscribers. That'd be cool. That would have more than that. We could have two. We could be in Arizona filming this.

We probably will.

Completely different spot.

Yeah.

You know, I think PGA is going to be five times bigger and I think PGM is going to have 50 plus people in there that are all scaling their ghostwriting business.

You know what we should do next year? We should do like a live reaction to this, so.

Oh, that would be cool.

We just put this up on the screen and we're watching it right now, so. Hey, future me, I hope you had a good year.

You know, I hope I get better looking.

Yeah, yeah, that would be great. I already know that's going to happen, so. What a year. Thanks everyone for watching the espresso hour. Throughout this year, it's been a lot of fun for us. It's something we want to double down on in the year ahead. Continuing to document everything we're doing on the business side every single week. We have some more ideas in the work for some content reviews I think would be a lot of fun. Or we do some reactions, some more Q and as more YouTube, just more. It is the year of doing more across the board, but more of fewer things. If we could summarize it, I think that's going to be it.

Yep.

Continuing to do fewer things, but just really ramp the volume on everything across the board.

Simplicity is velocity.

I'm excited.

Secret word.

Secret word is domination. So the secret word for today is domination or dominate. One of the. Some dominating. Dominating, whatever. But again, don't just comment the secret word down below and say, oh, the secret word is dominating. You got to use it in a sentence. That way the people don't catch on. But one lucky winner will win a free spot on board the next ship. 30 cohort.

Our. Our 20th cohort. Tversary.

Yes. Or if you're watching this and you haven't hopped aboard, should be a few days left before the January cohort set sail. We would love to have you. And you can use code espresso for $250 off going into the next cohort. So another little golden gem for there for anyone who's watching who wants to redeem that. What a year, man. What a year we got.

Thanks everyone for tuning in and we will see you in the new year in 2024.

So if you're on YouTube, leave a comment, hit the like button, hit subscribe, hit the notification bell. If you're on Spotify, a huge, huge ask for you. It will only take a couple taps of your thumbs. Will be just leave us a five star review. Take a screenshot, share this on your Instagram story, share it on your Twitter post. Whatever it is, just let one friend know about this who's interested in digital business or writing in some way. It helps us grow the channel. But that's all we got for 2,023. Here's to 2,024 and we'll see you all in the next one. Have a good one, y'.

All.