#252 Nicolas Cole - How To Make Your First $10K Writing Online

We said, we'll do some free articles for you. We'll go straight.

Some free articles.

If you take a look at our P and L and you help us figure out, like, what do we do with this thing that we're building? And we get on a call and we show him the P and L and he goes, well, have you guys considered running this profitably? And we were like, no, we hadn't considered running it profitably. And that was such an insane moment where I realized how much I didn't know that I didn't know. You should build a hybrid agency. You should be partially services and partially digital products is more profitable. The other benefit, though, is when you launch digital products, what happens is a bunch of people buy them. 90% of them go, cool, this was great. Thanks so much. 10% of them go, damn, this seems like a lot of work. Could I just hire your agency to do this for me? And then you create a little flywheel. So not only did you make your agency more profitable, you also made it more defensible.

Before we start this video, I have one small favor to ask of you. If you've been enjoying the US Tour so far and all the effort we put into making these videos as best as possible for you, please hit the subscribe button down below so we can help more people every single week. Thank you. Tell me about the 10x choice. Writers and ghostwriters have to make the 10x choice.

We use that language to say, when you get to around 10 grand a month, you have a decision to make, which is basically, do you want to stay around where you're at and optimize for life, you know, work life, balance, as people call it? Or do you want to scale to 100 grand a month, but you probably won't have much of a social life in the short term, you know, because things are always harder and take longer and are more expensive than people think. That's just a great rule of thumb. Like, anytime you do anything in life, assume it will take twice as long and will cost you twice as much. And when you're deciding what you want to do with your business or working for yourself, you can't have this expectation that it's all just going to happen tomorrow, you know, and. Or your ignorance tax and how expensive it's going to be to pay down all of the things that you don't know about the thing that you're trying to do. It always takes longer and it is always more expensive than you think it's going to be.

What was that for you. So what are the big highlights that you had to pay down yourself in ACORN stocks?

Well, I'll. Okay, so this is something. My previous co founder, when I was building my ghostwriting agency and I, we used to joke about this all the time. We built our ghostwriting agency from me and him in his apartment, just us sitting on the couch, from zero to $180,000 a month. We had 80 clients at any given time. We had a T. Eventually we grew it to a team of 20 plus writers, editors, salespeople, and. And we did all of that in 18 months. So there were stretches where I was hiring two full time people every month, month after month, for 10 months in a row. And the whole way up, me and my co founder, we thought. Which was a huge mistake. We thought we were building a Silicon Valley high growth tech company. And in reality we were building a small business and a service company on steroids. Yeah, we were just growing quickly and we just were really good at cold outreach and sales. And so we thought the name of the game was make top line revenue go up as fast as possible, screw every other metric and literally. And the faster you grow, the more successful you will be. Now if you asked me, Cole, can you define what success actually looks like? At that time, I wouldn't be able to give you a clear definition. I just thought that's what startup founders did. They made top line revenue go up and then at some point someone was going to cut you a check and then you were going to sell this thing. And then you could run off to Bali for three years and like get into marathon running or what, you know, whatever you do when you sell a company.

And that's literally me.

Like, we all know the stereotype, right? Okay. That's what I thought I was going to do. And in reality, the complete opposite happened. And we grew way too quickly. And I remember it was like the last three months we were running our agency and we were so burned out. We just didn't ever pause. And we never took money off the table. Me and my co founder paid ourselves like eight grand a month. And then every other dollar we made, we reinvested into the business to hire the next two people because we had so much demand. And we just thought, this is going to go on forever. And at the very end, we hadn't made any money. And in order to cover our payroll because a bunch of this was like 2018 and a bunch of our crypto clients churned. So we attracted all these huge crypto companies that raised all this money with ICOs, and then they all churned at once. And so we had to lay off, you know, six employees or whatever it was. And we didn't want to lay off more people than we really wanted to because we knew we would be able to generate more demand and we just needed to get through this hard time. And so what me and my co founder did is we cut our salaries again. And so there was a point where we were the two lowest paid people in the entire agency, which just made us resent the business. And we weren't pulling cash off the table. And the business top line revenue was going up, but our net worths were we both had like ten grand to our name and that was it. And it wasn't increasing. And so we ended up talking to this client. He was one of our earliest clients and he had built and sold his agency. And we said, hey, can we do a trade with you again? He was working on a new business. And we said, we'll do some free articles for you. We'll go straight. Some free articles. If you take a look at our P and L and you help us figure out, like, what do we do with this thing that we're building? And we get on a call and we show him the P and L and he goes, well, have you guys considered running this profitably? And we were like, no, we hadn't considered running it profitably. And that was such an insane moment where I realized how much I didn't know that I didn't know, because here this person was pointing out the most obvious thing in the world, which was, hey, you both would be a lot happier if you made two or three different decisions and just ran this more profitably, maybe with a smaller team, and stopped obsessing over top line revenue. And we both, me and my co founder just looked at each other and we were like, we did this all wrong. We spent three years building this thing the wrong way. And you don't. A lot of times you don't know that until you're in it or until you're doing it. Which is why I'm such a big proponent in just paying for the answer. Like, just pay someone else to go. What is the ideal scene? What, what should this look like? Can I, can I pay you to be a coach? Can I pay you to be a mentor? Can I pay you to train me? And we do it too. Like, me and Dickie signed up for this mastermind program two years ago. It's $68,000 and we've paid for it two years in a row. So we've invested whatever 140 grand into our own education. That's a shit ton of money. But the return we've gotten on that is millions and millions and millions of dollars. And we got there in a fraction of the time. And so it's like, I'm not just saying, oh, other people should invest in their education. Buy my course. Right. I'm saying we do this too and we see the return on it. And the first time I did that was buying a book for 20 bucks or buying a, you know, a walkthrough guide for 100 bucks or listen to.

A podcast and then going on from there and graduating up. One question I have on that agency is that 80 clients or 60 clients to 180k a month, that's just retainer based, I imagine.

Yeah, they were each paying us like three to five grand a month.

Would it not have made a little bit more sense to have some sort of like Rev Share performance based as well? So let's say, for instance, the 180k could stretch to 300 and then the team could come down because that's kind of like how we've done it. The reason I'm saying this is because, I guess, foresight. More employees, more employees, more employees. And then I took a step back to say, could we economize or maximize the LTV of each client, which was more like performance based on top of it.

Yeah. So let's jam on Rev Share in a second. But if I could do this over, and this is now, as I'm mentoring other ghostwriters who are scaling in agencies, this is what I tell them to do. Because I lived the bad version of this. What I would do is I would build an agency to around three to five people and maybe five, 10 max. Like 15 clients. And around there you're going to get to approximately 40, 50, 60k a month. That is an amazing sweet spot. When our agency was there, we were essentially out of the work. Me and my co founder were each making 20 grand a month and I was working three hours a day because I just had to make sure that the team was going. That lasted about two weeks. And then we were like, let's keep growing, you know, So I would deliberately pause there. Then when you get there, what I would do differently is I would then start launching digital products. Because there's a couple interesting things here. One is, services are linear. The more clients you get, the more people you need to hire. And both, both lines just follow each other. Digital products are not linear and they have, in theory, unlimited upside. And for the most part, you don't have to hire anyone. And if you do, you're hiring one person for every 500 customers or whatever it is. Digital products are also 99% margin. So if you're at 50 grand a month running an agency and then you go, well, what's the difference between 50 and 100 grand with services versus 50 and 100 grand, that extra 50 coming from digital products, it is way more profitable. So now I point out to ghostwriters and train them and go, you should build a hybrid agency. You should be partially services and partially digital products. It's more profitable. The other benefit, though, is when you launch digital products, what happens is a bunch of people buy them. 90% of them go, cool, this was great. Thanks so much. 10% of them go, damn, this seems like a lot of work. Could I just hire your agency to do this for me? And then you create a little flywheel. So not only did you make your agency more profitable, you also made it more defensible, even more. Yeah, because. Because it's very easy. The problem that we ran into is it's very easy to sustain an agency that has five or 10 clients at a time. Like that is not that much cold outreach. Each month, you know, one client turns a month, you gotta get a new one in like that. That's a very easy thing to sustain. What's very hard is when you have 80 clients at a time. And when someone. It's not just one or two clients churning, it's like you would have five clients churn a month, you know, because that's just natural. The average agency churn is three, four, maybe five months. Like most agencies don't retain clients longer than six months. And so you have to bake that into the business model. And so how much harder is it to sustain 80 clients a month versus 8 clients a month?

It just seems like a lot of bloat. Right. Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally.

To go from 100k a month to 200k a month, it's just an. It's just bureaucracy. Going to have a HR department. You're dealing with all these issues which you don't have on a product site, on a product suite. Now, those numbers for the average person seem like wild. Especially the. The common knowledge between writers is that like, writers are broke.

Right.

And if their writers are broke, unless they're doing the right thing. And it's even same with podcasts. Right. I remember in the early days I was interviewing a lot of the big agencies, and they specifically told me that you can't make money from a podcast. And my thesis on that is it's not people can't make money, it's you can't make money if you change how you do it. Right. You can obviously do it. So what are some of the bigger opportunities for Reuters right now in 2024? Like, would you get people started on LinkedIn versus Twitter? Building that audience, building that brand.

The funny part about a question like this is there is so there's so much opportunity that people can't wrap their heads around it. So I am such a big proponent in this idea that the more specific you are, the easier it is for you to dominate that specificity. Like, I'll give you a great example. A lot of people think, I could make money writing, ghostwriting for people on Twitter, slash X, whatever we're calling it now. Or I could make a bunch of money ghostwriting carousels for people on LinkedIn. Yes, that is true. But I think you would make more money if you said, I only ghostwrite viral threads on X for entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs in this industry. And when you really start going down the rabbit hole, you realize, like, pick an industry like fintech is a great example, or biotech medicine. If you don't understand how that industry speaks, you are not going to write about that industry very well. Right. And so what is the delta between someone who has a tremendous amount of knowledge in an industry, what I like to call an information advantage, versus someone who doesn't know very much about that industry, and all of the rewards? If you just sort of pull the conversation back for a second, all of the rewards that come from any of these verticals in the creator economy, all of the rewards go to the top 1%. They just do. I mean, that's true for most things in life. Like NBA players make 30 million. Right. A year or whatever the crazy number is. And then the person who plays right after college or whatever like the lower league is, they make a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that. Right. And so the same is true for the creator economy. If you dominate a specific niche, you will be able to charge a premium. You will make a tremendous amount of money. Everyone else who doesn't do that is sitting here going, oh, it's so hard to make money as a writer. It's so hard to make money as a creator. Well, yeah, because you're not there. You're not at that level. And I think it's both like, the Pro. And the con of the digital world is it is so easy to start, but it is an extremely difficult game to master. And so you see all these people playing the game and your expectation is, I take two steps and why aren't I making six figures a year? Why aren't I making seven figures a.

Year, six figures a month?

You know, and so it doesn't help when you see the youtubers be like, I make a million a month working three hours a day. First of all. No you don't. No, you don't. You work 18 hours a day and.

You make a fraction.

Yeah. And like that's what your company maybe does. Top line, like what's your take home? Cash. That is. I could go on a whole rant, but it drives me nuts. It drives me nuts how much people talk about business, but they round up everything. Round up everything and they leave out the context. The context is what matters. I don't care if your E commerce company does a million a month, tell me what your take home is. If your E commerce does a million a month, but your take home is 10 grand a month, like cool. Like you won in one area and you really lost in another area. And I hate that they don't give you that context because what happened? The reason that frustrates me is because that trains the next generation of entrepreneurs to set these unrealistic goals. Not realizing that you're not getting the full picture, which I think is just a disservice to the next group of people trying to build something.

Dude, I watched your podcast with Greg and Dicky on that and that was the first time I'd heard that concept. And he was saying it was you and Dicky were saying. I was like, okay, revenue minus expenses, minus your co founder split minus tax, minus the business expenses for the next month, you're left with a fraction, right? And it's like, it's, it's like a double edged sword because I'm going down kind of rabbit hole. But I think in one way the guys that are flaunting big numbers is a good way for people to get started. Because now people that are younger, like, fuck, I need to be doing this. So it gets them in the door. The extreme example is like Tate, right? Tate. Telling you that you're like broke and you're end up on the street at 17 is bad in one way. But it's also good in one way because you have some guys who as we were discussing are 17, 18, 19 getting started. But the problem is now there's no realistic expectation. And they're just. They feel that they actually feel depressed because they're not making six figures a month. So it's not funny. It's like a different. Whereas, like, you're 34, I'm 28. When I was 21, dude, when I was 17, I was playing Call of Duty. Like, that's literally the reality, right? There was nobody, nobody said it was possible, even if it was still kind of a lie. Whereas when it's a lie.

Yeah, I mean, so I think a good metaphor is like bodybuilding, you know, why, why do, why do most people start bodybuilding? Well, when I was, you know, a senior in high school and, and I didn't know I had celiac disease, I was undiagnosed. I was super skinny. I didn't have a pound of muscle on my body. It was just skin and bones. And why did I want to get into bodybuilding or why did I want to just go to the gym? Well, it would have been great to have a girlfriend, you know, it would have been great to feel like you were getting attention or something, build confidence. So I understand that in the beginning you sort of need to dangle the shiny objects to get someone started, right? And then of course, as you get going, you realize, like, the gym is a great metaphor as you get going. I stopped thinking about, well, am I going to get attention from girls? And I started thinking more about how can I set a personal goal? You know, what do I need to improve my habits with? Like, how, how can I be more consistent? And I made it more inward focused. Entrepreneurship is the same thing. That said, though, I guess it just depends on what you feel like you need as an individual. Like, who am I to say what someone needs to get started or not get started? If that's helpful for you and that inspires you, go for it. I just feel like there's a bit of a line where it's like, motivate, dangle the shiny object. But you're using terms in a very gray area and all of a sudden now people can't delineate between what's truth and what's not.

Well, that's why they're trying to bring in like regulations and laws around agencies and around, like info products specifically, which is around urgency, scarcity. If you don't have five slots left, don't say it. You know, and that's been coming in, in the uk, I think it's been coming in the US as well. So there is guard rails being put on for the right reason. For the right reason. Tell me about how to become a category of one in your niche.

Such a rabbit hole.

Did you read the book category of one? Have you read that?

So no, there's a funny story with that book. So at the time I was working on what would later become Category Pirates, which was a paid newsletter all about category design and category creation. And I built it with two guys, Christopher Lockhead and Eddie Yoon. And at the time, Christopher was a client of mine at my agency. And for those who don't know, I mean, Christopher is like the OG category design guy and has worked with massive, massive companies doing this. And Eddie sort of the same in the Fortune 500, Fortune 100 world. And I was working with Christopher and that book comes out and he read it and he, in not so many words, was furious by it and was like, this is such a poor representation of what creating and designing categories actually is and the skill and how do you do it? And that was a lot of that was what inspired us to build Category Pirates. No way was because both of them. And then I sort of drank the Kool Aid and became a disciple. They felt very strongly that category design was so important. And it's such a thoughtful methodology and the people, no shade to the person who wrote that book. It's just the education that was out there around category design was a fraction of what actually went into it. And so we started Category Pirates and in a year we built that TO a Top 5 paid newsletter on Substack. We created a really interesting publishing model that I'm still obsessed with, where basically you treat the paid newsletter as the engine. We would write these really long paid newsletters. They were so long that we started calling them mini books. Each paid newsletter was like 10,000 words. Most people don't know Amazon has an entire category, they don't call it this, but an entire category essentially of mini books or short reads. And so what we started doing is we would write the paid newsletter, long form on substack, then we would take it, upload it as a mini book on Amazon, which double monetize the content. So now you're tapping into a different ecosystem. Then we started turning the mini books into audiobooks. So now you have a third revenue stream because now people can listen to them on Audible. And then every six months, we would group the mini books together by topic and we would put them together into larger print books, which was a fourth revenue stream. So in a year, I mean, we built this publishing company to multiple six figures in revenue and completely dominated the Category Design education world. And we monetize the same content four different ways. And whenever I explain that, people are like, wouldn't readers hate that? No. We got thank you notes from readers going, I love the substack. Now I can listen to it on Audible and now I have the print copy on my desk. And if the top writers on substack all did that, they would all double what they're making. And I explain it and I don't know what it is. It's like they either don't want to or they think that it's hard, but it's not. You can do all of that with, like, free tools on the Internet. It's.

It's like repurposing content. Right.

Completely.

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Yep.

But it's. It's less to do with you and who you are. It's more just to do with their appetite towards consumption. Some people will listen to audiobooks, vice versa. Right. So it's almost like you need to meet the players where they're playing, meet the users on their own field. Does that make sense for the specificity?

Yeah. And everyone's faulty belief is I can't say the same thing twice. And if you realize all of the biggest creators that dominate any specific niche, they all say the same 10 things over and over and over again. And like that that's again, going back to the conversation of paying down ignorance tax. So much of this you don't understand day one. And even if I explain it to you day one, it's not going to click. And that's okay. A lot of times these things get crystallized as you take steps. But one of my favorite examples is Ryan Holiday. Like Ryan Holiday is the epitome of category of 1. He doesn't talk about anything other than stoicism. And every day I write medium articles about stoicism, I write Twitter threads about stoicism, I make YouTube videos about stoicism. And how many times has he said, Marcus Aurelius, 10 Takeaways of Stoicism or whatever. Right? All of his success can be boiled down to the fact that he got hyper specific. He repeated the same 10 big ideas that were resonating with people over and over and over again. And he just kept doing it for a decade. And now every time he comes out with a stoicism book, he becomes a bestseller. And the game is really that simple. The challenge that people have is they think that in order to be successful or in order to be great that they can or should pick multiple things. And in reality, you can't get great at multiple things. You can get mediocre at multiple things. But all of the rewards come and they float up to the people who get hyper specific about one thing and then that's the only thing that they do, or that's the majority of what they do over a long time horizon.

So I heard you mention to Ali Abdaal people calling themselves like the guy in their niche, but you were saying that was a bad thing. So how would that difference from the stoicism example for Ryan Holiday?

Yeah, so this is a really important distinction. And this is, this is where whenever I see other people, like, it's cool. I notice more creators now and more writers now are implementing some of these category design strategies. They just haven't done their homework. And it's almost like, it's like you've picked up a lightsaber, but you don't know how to use it. You know, you're just flinging it around all over the place. I'm like, okay, so let's slow down. Let's, let's do some, some practice swings. When, when you call yourself category guy, you know, I am the category guy. You are mistaking the point of being a category leader or, and, or creating a category. Ryan Holiday doesn't say, I'm the stoicism guy. Ryan Holiday says I'm going to talk about stoicism. So he's evangelizing the topic. He's not evangelizing himself. And so when people say I am this guy, or I am this gal or whatever it is, they think that the point is for them to create a category for themselves. Like, they are the category and you are not the category. The topic is the category. And if you are the person evangelizing that topic, people inherently see you as the leader. Like, I don't say I'm the digital writing guy, I just say I'm going to talk about digital writing all day, every day. And as a result, people associate me with that category. And the thing that people miss is you actually want other people to evangelize the category with you. Like, you don't, you don't want to say, I'm the stoicism guy. And no one else can write about stoicism. You actually want the opposite. Because if other people start writing about stoicism and they get into the category, it brings more readers into the category. What happens? The reader inherently asks themselves the question, well, who's the leader around here? And then they get, they go, oh, it's Ryan Holiday. And so the more people who write about stoicism actually make Ryan Holiday more.

Famous, and it elevates the category as a whole.

Exactly. Right, exactly. It grows the category, which is good, right? Exactly. Like, I want other people to say, I am a digital writer. I want other people to say, I am a ghostwriter. I want other people to say, I have a ghostwriting training program. Because all of that grows the attention of the category. And when the category grows and more people come into it, they inherently all flow to the top and go, well, who are the top players here? Which brings more people to us.

That's so interesting, because when I was, like, younger and probably just more insecure in general, when I'd see people like pop off as podcasters, I'm like, why the fuck am I not doing it right? But now, just as I've gotten older and wiser, I'm like, this is great for my podcast and also for my business because the more viral videos are in, podcasting just elevates the influence and authority of podcasting as a medium. And now everything you see, like Instagram is a podcast platform now. You go onto your Explore page, you. YouTube is a podcast platform now. Whereas someone who's playing a finite game would look at that and think, fuck sake, I'm not the best. Whereas an infinite game player would think the category is Improving this is net positive. It's the same with the ghost writing. Right? Like I am. This would be a good question on. This is like, people are making a lot of money from writing now, and they're. When they're positioned well, of course they're hitting the right criteria. There's the opportunity. Do you think that opportunity wasn't there 10 years ago? Because in the podcast space, it wasn't there 10 years ago?

No, it was always there. Everything is just louder now. And something. I was. I was writing about this recently, but we all forget that our feeds are a very small snapshot of reality. So if you're in that pocket of Twitter or that pocket of LinkedIn, you. You go into that algorithm, you open your feed, and you think, everybody's doing this. This is oversaturated, and there's no opportunity. In reality, you just flipped through 30 posts, right? That is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the amount of content on that platform. And so you're getting a skewed perspective. You think something is oversaturated, and in reality, less than 1% of 1% of people are doing it. The other thing is, I started ghostwriting in 2016. So we're coming up on almost a decade ago. And back then, I remember when I was starting to ghostwrite, I had a bunch of people tell me, you know, ghostwriting has a really bad connotation to that word. You know, if you're a ghostwriter, it sounds like you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing. And there was a big stigma around hiring a ghostwriter. And I remember just thinking, you know, maybe, but we have so much demand for our agency that I just think this is gonna keep growing. And now it is 10 times or 100 times more popular for someone to say, oh, I'm getting into ghostwriting. So many more people are saying, yeah, you can make money as a ghostwriter, but a lot of times, the advantage. You come from the finance world, so you understand this, right? The opportunity is always when you buy the company before everyone understands it, right? And the same is true for skills. Like, the reason why ghostwriting was so lucrative for me was because I bought the company before anyone else thought it was a good idea, and I acquired the skill and I started doing it, and anyone else who did that at that time probably would have seen similar results. I still think that the same is true today, though. Everyone's like, oh, it's 10 years later, it's oversaturated. I don't Think so. I think AI is going to reduce the barrier to entry for all of these platforms. It's going to make it 10 times easier for very mediocre writers to be able to produce reasonably high quality content. And the thing that everyone misses is every business is going to need someone to understand how to leverage all of those tools. So it's not going to destroy writers. It's not going to kill the idea of having a career as a writer. It is going to create ten times more writers.

And then the question becomes how to become differentiated and add in that extra element of your own personalization and whatnot. We can get to the AI purpose, and that's very interesting. I think what's most unique about your scenario is just the time you've played in the game. Like, what's kept you in the game? High, as low as agencies coming in and out building the digital products. But the underlying asset, like, you've been there for 10 years, what's kept you in that game? And why do you think most people don't stick beyond six months to doing something like this before they just completely give up and go sideways?

I mean, that's a hard one because each person's reason for starting or stopping is their own. You know, I can only speak for myself one, I just love writing. I'm obsessed with it. It's the only thing I've ever wanted to do. I was never good in school. I played sports growing up, but I got injured. At one point I thought I wanted to play video games professionally because I played World of Warcraft as a pro gamer in high school and bodybuilding. I thought maybe I would want to compete. But then I got injured. I've had other interests, but writing was always the only thing that at the end of the day, that's what I really wanted to do. And I love it because it's an infinite game that I can play until I'm dead. Like, you can't lift weights until you're dead. Usually, like, there are tipping points, you know, you can't be a professional athlete for 30 years. Most people aren't even CEOs of companies after their 60s or 70s, right? Like, at a certain point you go, I'm done. But a lot of writers produce some of their greatest work, like right before their deathbed. You know, they're writing till they're 80, till they're 90. And I love that idea where my time horizon doesn't have to be five years. Like a professional athlete, it can be 50, 60, 70, 80 years. I also Think, too. It depends on what your motivation is like. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make money on the Internet. I've wanted to make money on the Internet. I wanted to build a life for myself, and I also wanted to learn these skills. I think they're universal and really great skills to have. But my ultimate goal is not to just build Internet businesses and go on podcasts and talk about making money on the Internet like, I love it, right? But. But that is not my ultimate goal. My ultimate goal is how can I be the greatest writer of my generation? And fundamentally, in order to do that, you can't just write nonfiction books about how to make money on the Internet. I think you need to acquire all of the skills. I want to write sci fi books. I want to write nonfiction books. I want to write hardcore literature. I want to write poetry. I want to show the breadth of what a skill set can do. And I treat making money on the Internet as the engine that allows me to do that on my own terms.

It's a vessel.

Yeah, it's a vessel. And it's what gives me the energy. Literally and metaphorically. It gives me the energy so that I don't have to play the game of, well, now I need a book deal, and my publisher's telling me what I can and shouldn't write. And they say in order to sell copies, you have to position yourself this way. I don't care about any of that.

Oh, man, I have so many questions here. It's actually wild. Okay. Do you think traditional.

Yes.

Books. Do you think that's a scam?

Yes.

Why is it a scam?

So the metaphor I like to use is equate it to raising money. As a startup, I know all about it.

It's a scam.

Okay, so. So here's the thing. So there are certain types of businesses where you need venture capital, right? You can't build Uber without venture capital. I understand that, but the vast majority of entrepreneurs are not building Uber, and they are not trying to build Uber.

Even SaaS companies, you know, even micro SaaS.

And so, yeah, and micro SaaS especially, like, if you raise 10 million bucks, that means that your measure for success is this thing better get acquired for 100 million minimum, right. Or this thing better grow to a billion and go public, though, every time you raise money, your chances of success do not go up. They go down. It becomes harder. The goalpost keeps moving. Right? Whereas if you built a company and, okay, fine, you need a little bit of starter capital, you have some friends, maybe they throw in 100 grand. But like, that's, that's all that you raise, that's all that you do. Well, that is a much easier bar to meet. And you would rather, this is the part that I think is hilarious, is that you would rather have a micro SaaS company that does 3 million a year, that pays you whatever, 100 grand a month, then you pay yourself 100 grand a year salary. But try and play the I'm going to have a nine figure exit game over the course of eight years, nine.

Years, ten years, finite game.

And it's just so much harder. And I think again, like, I made all these mistakes too, building my agency, thinking that was the game. But I think in hindsight, it's funny that I thought, oh, I need this big exit when I didn't even know what it felt like to make 40 grand a month. You know, like people think they need $100 million. If you made a million a year, you wouldn't know what to do with it, you know? And so you see all these numbers and everything gets hyperinflated and you're like, oh, I need more than I actually do. And most of the time you learn the hard way that, okay, yeah, sure, if you're just dead set on I want to build the next unicorn and that's your life's calling, go do that. But it's a lot easier and it's a lot more enjoyable to just build something that cash flows you and provides a great life and you don't have to raise a bunch of money for that. So all of that is context for the book deal question. Book deals, are you raising money for your book? Your book is the product and the book deal is an advance, AKA an investment for your product. Okay? So the expectation is the publisher gives you 20 grand. And what's funny is they're actually not giving you the 20 grand to live on. That 20 grand isn't actually supposed to go into your pocket. The 20 grand is supposed to be used to create the product, which, okay, maybe buys you some time to write the book and, or marketing the book. And most writers don't realize that when you sign a book deal, the average royalty that you're getting on that book is around 10%, 12%, maybe 15%, depending on what you negotiate. So let's say it in the inverse. A publisher just invested 20 grand into your business, which is your book, and they just took 85% ownership. And if you put that in the context of raising money for a business, every single person would go that is such a bad deal that it's not even worth me using brain power to explain to you why that's a bad deal. But every single day in the publishing world, people say yes to that. And whenever I start pointing this out, they all come back with the same objections. They're like, yeah, but the publisher makes it higher quality. Really? What are they giving you? An editor, a designer? Okay. Do you know you can actually hire all of those people? All of them at the big houses want to freelance. I know because I've hired them, so that's not that expensive, you know. And then they go, well, the publisher helps me get in bookstores. All right? Have you ever walked into a bookstore? How many books are in a bookstore? 303 million books get published a year. So what do you mean your book gets into a bookstore? They don't put every book in a bookstore. What they do is they go, we're going to try to put your book in these five stores in Arkansas. And if those books move copies, we might move them over to another nearby state. And then we open the market. We open the market. We open the market. So what happens is writers point to people like James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, you know, or Mark Manson, author of the Subtle of Not Giving a Fuck, and they go, well, it worked for them. And that's sort of the equivalent of pointing to someone who just won the lottery and saying, I'm going to take financial advice from that person, which makes absolutely no sense. And I feel so strongly about this because I cannot stand the cognitive dissonance of, I, I want to make money from my writing, but I don't want to make business minded decisions. It's like, well, then you can't sit there and expect to have all of the rewards that come to the people who actually understand the underlying business of it. And it's not that hard.

And there's two sides there I think I want to kind of really dig into is the fact that the marketing and like broadscape marketing. Right. If you're a writer and you have an audience and you've built the audience because you know what they want and what they need, you, you can market to them. Does that make sense through your book? Because these are the lessons you pull out. Let's say Dan Cole, for example, I've read his book. The lessons that are in the book are all on Twitter.

Exactly right.

Because he was able to market his own book because he knew what his ICP basically needed and wanted. Right. And the reason I'm saying This is because I spoke with a book publisher quite recently in the uk and to your point, it was the review process, the design process. I already have designers and I can get a reviewer on fucking upwork. Right. And the big question that I had was marketing. I was like, what are you physically going to do as part of a book funnel, which I want to ask you on, on to, to promote this book, if I was to do this? And they said, we don't do that. We don't do the marketing. And I was like, so me, who's built a relatively decent sized audience, not really huge, but just an audience, has an email list and so on, who's spent those years doing the marketing, they're not going to do the marketing. So I was like, what am I actually getting? Which is the reviewer who's just a basic copywriter that's gonna review it. So I spoke with my friend Will Brown as a result, who's brought a book called how to 10 million self published. He was selling on average the same amount of copies as Hormozi when he released a book, just like per day or whatever it was per week. And I asked him about the exact same thing and he was like, dude, it's just marketing 101. He was like, I marketed in my book the same way I marketed my courses because I understand marketing.

Exactly right?

So the whole thesis behind the tradition, the traditional book, book publisher, was just torn down because when you're someone who can market, you do the fucking marketing for yourself.

Yep.

Which is interesting. Right?

So a couple of things to unpack there.

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Thank you back there. So one, if you want some signal, Hormozi didn't take a book deal. And I think he's one of the most articulate and smart business people on the Internet today. And so I pay a lot of attention to what he does what other people that I respect do, and that's all the signal you need. Like, he could have gotten a $3 million book advance. He didn't. He didn't take that. Why didn't he do that? Well, if you do the math on his books now, his books have made him probably over 10, $20 million at this point. So if this is the part that writers like you have to put on your entrepreneurial hat for a second. If a publisher is going to give you 100 grand, the only reason they're giving you 100 grand is because they think that they're going to make at least a million off of it. And so you have to ask yourself the question, if the publisher is going to give me 100 grand, that's because they think that there's 10x plus upside. Why wouldn't I just take that bet on myself? And it's like it almost doesn't matter how big the advance is. If you play out the math over a long enough time horizon, and it doesn't even have to be that long, five years, 10 years, 15 years, you will almost always make more when you own the book.

No one thinks about that, though. No one thinks about beyond six months.

But this is why. And I can't wait. Like, I'm planting all the seeds when I do podcasts and stuff, stuff now. But I promise you, 10 years from now, I'm just gonna, every month I'm gonna drop screenshots of my, my book library and it's all gonna be self published and I'm gonna be like, I'm making your massive advance that you get once every five years, every month.

Question for you on this, though. So you speak a lot about royalties and what you make on the front end of the book, but have you considered, like the book funnel on the back end within the ecosystem? So you have the books about how to write online, how to get started with ghostwriting, but that feeding into ship, 30 for 30, that feeding into your high ticket program. Do you think about the book in terms of that book funnel, which is kind of how I was thinking about it, versus the royalties on the front end?

Yeah. So a painful realization, and this is coming from a. I studied creative writing in college. I studied literature. I really love the art of writing. So it pains me to say this, but the most effective way to monetize your talents as a writer is not books, like books as a business model suck. Because if you think about it a, you're price capped. How much can you charge for a book? 20 bucks, 30 bucks, maybe 50 bucks for a hardcover or something. So you're price capped. You can't charge more than that. It's a one off purchase. You have no recurring revenue. Most people only buy a book once, maybe they buy it twice because they gift it to a friend or something. Right. And so if you have domain expertise, we'll just talk nonfiction for a second. If you have domain expertise and you really know how to do something, the least effective way to monetize that would be to write a book about it. You could take though the same exact content and drip it out into a paid newsletter and all of a sudden charge 200 bucks a year. Or you could take the same exact content, put it into a bunch of modules, record videos of you talking through all of the content and charge 300 bucks for a video course. Right. Or you could take all the same content and put it into an experience and charge 800 bucks for a cohort based course. And the beauty here is you can actually do all of it. Like I wrote the book the Art and Business of Online Writing. We then took that book and basically duplicated a lot of the frameworks into a paid newsletter called Write with AI, where we said, here's the framework, now we're going to give you a chat prompt to automate it. Then we took a lot of those same frameworks and that became the foundation of the curriculum in ship 30. And so you can monetize the same ideas 10 different ways. That's actually the point. That's the whole point of the game.

Right.

Most people don't have a gazillion ideas. They have like five or ten really important ideas. And then you just find all the ways to talk about those 10 ideas and monetize them as many ways as possible. Right. And so yeah, books can fit into that ecosystem. A lot of times in nonfiction, you're really just writing a book for credibility and you don't need a traditional publisher to do that. Like I self published the Art and business of online writing and I got all of the same benefits of having a book and having that credibility without giving a publisher 85%. And that book, by the way, makes me like five to 10 grand a month every month on Autopilot.

And that's actually scaling up. Right. Because it's becoming more influential. The bowl, the book, as, as time has come on, it has actually got more of an impact. That's what's interesting.

Yeah, it sells more now than it did in 2020 when I published it.

So that's A good question on that. It's a good point, is like, is that your influence and authority growing and the category growing?

Yes.

And that's contributing to more sales.

It's the category growing. But it's also just. You want to know what the marketing strategy is for your book. You talk about it a lot. Like everyone thinks there's some secret button on the keyboard where you go, I launch a book and I press this button and that's the marketing strategy. And really it's like, what was Dan Ko's marketing strategy? Well, he made 500 YouTube videos and then he took the best ideas and he put it into a book. And then he talked about his book in all of the future YouTube videos or like in the link in the description or whatever. What did Hormozi do? Hormozi created a bunch of content. He took a lot of the ideas, he put it into a book, and now every time he records a long form, the book is sitting on the desk in front of him. And that is the whole game. And I think writers have this miraculous ability of talking themselves, talking themselves out of doing the work they always want to look for, well, what is the strategy? What's the next thing I can do? And in reality, the most effective thing you can do is literally just talk about that same idea more.

That's very interesting because like, that's the. If you think about creative people, like designers. I met Christo last week and we were talking about like the designer brain that, you know, the graphic designer who doesn't release their portfolio and as a result gets no business. It's the same in terms of writing, which is like, yes, you need to do the writing, but you also need to be the entrepreneur to break it into your. It's like Dan Ko's book is a good example. It's this product market fit. You've got product market fit and now you can write more things and have it as a low ticket, front end offer for your ecosystem and the backend offer as a result. Question for you on your own writing style and even creativity, is that so you've been in the game with 10 years, you've produced a lot of volume. How do you maintain your creativity yourself and keep it new and novel?

I mean, I don't know if I could turn it off, you know, I mean, I have notes on. I have a note on my phone called Book Ideas and I probably have a thousand titles in there. I have another note that's content ideas, you know, things I want to write a newsletter about Or a thread about or something. I probably have 2,000 ideas in there and every day. And this is what's funny. I need to find a way of articulating this and communicating this. But at any given time, I am working on 10 different projects in my brain. Like yesterday I was working or I was driving to the gym. And as I was driving to the gym, this is literally what I do on a daily basis. As I'm driving to the gym, I was listening to a podcast. On that podcast I heard a word. And that literally one word gave me an idea of like a sub idea I want to talk about in a future book that I want to write called the Art and Business of Category Copywriting, which I also have a note on my phone that I've been adding to for three years. And as I'm driving, I pull up to the light, red light, I pause the podcast, I find the note, I jot down the one word, I jot down a sentence of like, this is the idea. Don't forget, that light turns green. I keep driving. And then I get to the gym and it happens again. And I jot down another thing before I go to the gym. And then in the middle of me lifting, I'm listening to music, I hear a word, it makes me think of something. I pull out my phone, I jot down a note. I am doing that 20 times a day. And what's happening is I have just different notes. And by the way, for everyone listening, this is not organized at all. Don't ask me for the the Perfect Notion dashboard. I mean, these are like disaster looking notes.

It's a good way to frame your content system and content pillars look to get in new ideas.

Yeah, get in new filters.

Right. To filter in new ideas.

Totally. And something that I've been experimenting with over the past couple years is I will have a larger idea that I'm thinking through and I'll create a note for it on my phone. And every time I see something or every time I see an example or something that I want to reference, I just jot it down in that note. So by the time I sit down to write my next art and business book, I'm just going to pull up this note and I'm going to have 300 different examples that I've collected over the past three years and a lot of the thinking will have already been done.

Question for you on that. So you familiar with Turning Pearl by Steven Pressfield?

No. I know Steven Prescott, but I haven't read the book.

You should read Turning Pro. It's a really good book. It's small, like 120 page. It's where all these books are, very small and narrow. He talks about like, basically the concept of turning pro is when you leave the amateur mindset. It's not about results, it's about how you frame it. Right. So you're a writer, everything you do is geared around that. Your values, your system, you believe in writing, you believe in it as an expression, the business model, everything. Right. It's like your ecosystem and then you hold yourself to a high standard. That's the concept of turning pro. Whereas before you're sitting at home eating Cheetos playing World of Warcraft.

Yeah.

You know, you're not, you're not all in. But the reason why he wrote it is because he was procrastinating loads and he was in his mid-40s and 50s and he had an alcohol problem. He had a. He just couldn't find that thing that stuck. You're kind of the opposite and I'm kind of the opposite too, whereby we just fucking keep rolling with ideas, keep trying shit. Why do you think people get stuck in that ridiculous level of procrastination versus falling forward and failing forward?

That's the million dollar question, right? Is why do people get in their own way? My. My personal belief, and this is part of the issue that I take with so much of just business y content on the Internet is so much of the content talks about whatever thing you're trying to do. We'll use business as the example through the lens of only hard skills. It's like you aren't building your business because you don't know how a funnel works. Like, okay, and is that true? Yeah. There is an element of truth to that. You need to know how to do some of these things and maybe you're stuck and you don't know what the next step is and whatever. My personal belief is that underneath all of those more surface level objections that someone is telling themselves is something interpersonal. It is. It's not. I'm not moving forward because I don't know the next step in my business. It's the root of that, which is I'm not moving forward because, you know, I. I'm afraid of failure. And then it's the root of root of that, which is I'm afraid of failure because, you know, I had a really challenging relationship with my parents when I was growing up and they had really high expectations of me. And I've never really addressed that or worked through that. And I'm a huge proponent of therapy. I've been in weekly therapy for 15 years, whatever, at this point. And I think of it like the equivalent of going to the emotional gym. You know, it's like waiting until you're super overweight and unhealthy and going, well, now I need to go to the gym. That's how most people think about therapy. They're like, my marriage is blowing up now I need to go to therapy. I look at it the opposite. I go, I want to be proactive and I constantly want to be looking for what are. What are things that are going on in me where I might be getting in my own way. And I feel like most people, the reason they're not making progress isn't because of the surface level, hard skill deficit. It's because of something underlying that they haven't addressed. And I'm telling you, it doesn't matter how many videos you watch on YouTube explaining how to build a funnel, if you don't address the relationship you have with your parents, you're not going to build the funnel.

You know, dude, I'm. I'm quite similar to you in that way. I've been in therapy for quite some time. Not because I have problems, even though I have a lot of problems, but because it's allowed me to think true. Why I'm doing way things that I'm doing. Yeah. And to make those changes when I need to and make the observations when I need to as well. Can I ask you about alcohol?

Sure.

You still not drinking?

I mean, I'm. I'm currently in a life chapter where I'm just not really. Like, you talk about turning pro. Like two years ago, I just sort of made the decision when I started seeing ship 30 accelerate and I started seeing what Dickie and I could do together. I just sort of made a decision. Like, I already treated myself as I want to turn pro before that, but I really started to dial in and I think of myself and I think of what we do. Like we are pro athletes. Like, I take care of my sleep, I eat really healthy. I very rarely drink. Like, maybe if I go to a wedding or something.

Yeah.

But yeah, when I was younger and I was, you know, 18, 19, 20, I had a lot of substance abuse problems and same. I mean, it's hard right? At that age. It's like, are you just. Are you just being a teenager slash early twenties someone, or, you know, are you actually abusing it? I was definitely abusing it, but I.

Have the best angle on that. So When I was in university, I had a conversation with someone and the way we kind of thought about this was it's all about not making your college habits your life habits. So for me, I stopped at like, I got into the game of like drugs, alcohol, early 18 probably, and then I was out of 23. But most guys kind of got into the 23, but I remember I'd reached that wall and a lot of people along the way, they didn't make it out, man. Yeah, they just ended up becoming potatoes and vegetables, you know. So it was.

Did you get into bodybuilding after?

I was before that. So I was competing when I was like 20, 21.

Oh, really?

Yeah. And I was competing at a pretty high level. And for me, bodybuilding was a point where I was like, do I want to do this forever? And I. If I wanted to do that decision, I'd have to go down to ped route. I had a coach at everything. I just. It was. My decision was I didn't want to do that. I wanted to get into the. I wanted to have a career, have a business and so on.

Same.

But I guess bodybuilding kind of complemented that to many ways, like, you know, to kind of parody lifestyle and stuff. But I kind of got out of that at 23, 24. But then at 25, I stopped drinking. And that's when I was like, okay, I was interviewing people like yourself, and I was like, why am I not progressing the way this 21 year old is progressing? And it's because they made those decisions. And for me, it's probably been about a thousand days now.

Wow, congrats. Yeah, that's awesome.

But to be honest, dude, like, you know, we talk about. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but you said, like, was it those things that you just do when you're 18, 19, 20? For me, I don't think I was because now that I look back and like, I was surrounded by substance abuse and alcoholism all of my life, but I'd never seen it. Like my just my. Your brain protects you, right? So it protected me from being exposed to it, thinking that it was normal. Growing up in Irish culture, everyone's an alcoholic, right? So then when I had become older, I was like, wait, that isn't normal at all. And I had got into the game of parodying because I thought it was normal. And yeah, Ireland takes things to an a whole level, whole different level with this spread just because it's shrouded in the celebration. It's the football, it's the national sport, it's DJs that come in, it's the clubs, it's cold, let's go drinking. We can't go out and see each other. Let's go to the club, you know, so I've been through just all of that to the point that I don't look back at it and think, oh, I want to go for. I want to go to this party or not.

What?

Not. Because I just had done it all.

Yeah.

For a very long time.

Yeah. You said something important, which is, you know, you can take that same scenario. You can aim it in a negative direction or a positive direction. If you normalize what's normal to you with anything in life, it does become normal. So if you're surrounded by partying and that becomes normal, you don't think anything of it. But the same is also true where if you normalize hanging out with people who have made a hundred million dollars, all of a sudden that doesn't seem scary or impossible to you. You've normalized it. And I feel like, you know, I lived in LA before Miami, so this was two places ago. And I think that is probably the biggest benefit I got of living in LA was I was surrounded by so many insanely successful people that it just normalized it for me. I was like, oh, you've all made $100 million. Why can't I? And I think so much of growth depends on who you're, who you surround yourself with and who you compare yourself to. And the larger the gap, the more inspired you are to work. Like, a mentor of mine is arguably the most successful sales copywriter on the planet. He's made a gazillion dollars. He has the sickest house ever. Like, his house in West Hollywood was so cool. And just by the nature of us spending some time together and us building a relationship, every single day, I wake up and I'm like, well, if he can do it, there's no reason I can't.

And what's interesting is because they're so natural too. Right? It's a natural relationship that you had. Probably quite similar. Yeah, exactly. In terms of. Well, on an emotional level, you're quite similar. So on a logical level, why can't we get to that point?

Yeah. And you start to project yourself outward and realize, you know, the person ahead of you has just been doing it longer. They've put in more hours, they've tried more things, they failed more times. You know, so much of this really just comes down to effort. And people don't know what true Effort.

Looks like and patience with that. Just in terms of you've been doing it 10 years. I've been doing podcast stuff, specifically about four and a half years. The guys that are much further on. Cody Sanchez says, like, do it 30 years. Right. Eric mentioned 20. 30 years is when you're gonna really see that progress. That's super interesting, man. We could go forever. I genuinely have a ton of other stuff. I'd love to do a second podcast another time. There's a bunch of other shit. But I want to say a big thank you, man. Hope you enjoyed the session.

No, this was awesome. I'm glad we can make it happen. I, you know, I just moved here to Scottsdale and it's really interesting. There's a whole pocket of entrepreneurs here that I don't think most people know about. I didn't know, but it's really cool. I'm starting to get tapped in here, which is nice.

It seems to be just growing more and more. Even the Uber that was coming in, like, the guy was like, yeah, it's in North Scottsdale. There's just a ton of like wealthy people after blowing in from LA in different parts of America. But honestly, man, this is my favorite city in all of America.

Yeah, genuinely, real quick, what do you like about it?

I like that it's not like new money. I like that it's like old money. That guys are just a bit more. They've been through the game a little bit older, they're not flashing, super flashy, flashy. And the lifestyle here is really good. The weather is really good. It's nice, it's clean, you know, it's healthy.

There's a lot, there's a lot of great food here.

Gyms are really good. Whereas I feel like in New York it's like a rat race, everyone trying to one up each other. LA is a bit virtue signaling. Right. Whereas here I just think it's kind of chill.

Yeah.

You know, it's a good lifestyle because I, I feel that someone like yourself, and hopefully myself, when you're more intrinsically motivated, it's less about where you are, but it's also nice to be somewhere where other people are. Whereas I felt sometimes like in Dubai, for instance, which I was highly considering moving for a very long time, it's just who has the biggest dick, you.

Know what I mean?

That's it, right?

You know, and you're competing against like international oil money and stuff. So you're going to lose, you're going to lose that competition.

Even people that are your age, though, right? It's. We're kind of chasing the wrong metrics. I thought I said about this yesterday, which is like, is it all in a matrix? Are we all just in different pockets of matrix of the Internet space, the Twitter space, the LinkedIn space? Is it all just that system? That's another podcast that actually is a podcast in itself.

Anytime. Thank you. Anytime.

Appreciate it, bro.