278: Nicolas Cole — Harnessing the Written Word for Profit

Today I'm talking to Nicholas Cole, co founder of ship 30 for 30 and prolific writer. We discuss the importance of writing for indie hackers and how it can change their lives. And we look at different ways of writing and the shelf life of content and then delve into the evolution of writing skills and the journey of writing a book. Do you want to overcome self limiting beliefs about writing? Tune in today. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com more on that later. Now here's Cole. Hey Cole. Welcome to the show. You're the co founder of ship 30 for 30 and that's one of the most impactful writing courses that I've ever seen, which is awesome. Now for people of my background, engineers, developers, coders, makers, shipping mostly means deploying software and writing for other people. Well, that's by far not as important to many indie hackers as writing code and I think that's unfortunate and that more indie founders should write. So what can we do today to convince these busy people out there coding away that writing can change their life?

That's a good question. I don't think you can convince anyone to do anything unless they understand what it leads to.

Right.

So instead of framing it as how do you get someone excited about writing, I think a more productive or helpful question to ask the person is what do you want? What's the outcome that you want? Because nobody wants to go to the gym, but everybody wants the results of going to the gym, right? Nobody wants to eat healthy, everyone wants the results of eating healthy. And writing is sort of no different. A lot of times the process of writing isn't always easy or enjoyable or fun, but the outcomes are worth it. So I think it just starts with what's the goal, what's the outcome? And if you're a developer, if you're an indie hacker, if you're a solopreneur, this sort of doesn't matter what archetype. Every person in every industry wants some version of the same things, which is, I sure would love zero customer acquisition cost on the thing that I'm building.

Right?

You want zero dollar cac. Every person wants, when there's a broader conversation happening in their industry, they want to be seen as someone who has a helpful opinion or you know, the thought leadership sort of. They want to be seen as that person who can help and, and foster and participate in whatever that broader narrative is. Everybody wants, quote, unquote, passive income. So how do I build something that's going to pay me a dividend over time, which you can do through software you can do through books, you can do in all sorts of different ways. Everybody wants some sort of either status or money outcome. And I think the thing that we're really on a mission to help people understand is that writing is probably, you could make the case, writing is the most effective vehicle for accomplishing any of those things because it is infinitely scalable. You know, 50% plus of the whole Internet is text and it has this very, very low barrier to entry. It's a lot easier to learn how to write than it is to learn how to create short form video or start a podcast or, you know, like writing really is the easiest but most scalable vehicle if you think about it that way. And I also think there's a little asterisk on that. I also think a lot of people misunderstand what it means to write. I think every people look at creation as, as forward moving as if I'm going to start creating on LinkedIn, I have to create on LinkedIn forever. If I'm going to start writing on the Internet, I have to write something new every day forever. And in reality, that's not how I think about writing. I think about writing actually in the opposite direction. I think about it as if I invest time in building a library that's a library I can use over and over and over again. And a really easy example is I've started reposting a lot of my old long form content on Twitter, slash X right now. And just this morning I saw someone comment and go, how do you have so much time to write so much long form every day? And I'm sitting there going, you have no idea that I'm posting long form essays that I wrote seven years ago. And you have no idea. And that's the point is I've built a library that now I can reuse over and over and over again. So long winded way of saying, right, it's you can't convince someone of the vehicle unless they understand the outcome.

That is a wonderful way of phrasing it and I very much agree with this. Because you leave traces, right? You leave traces of things that you've thought about and you leave these traces in the public sphere where people can actually find them, comment on them and interact with you. Which is again leading to all these things that you want. More customers, more reputation, more engagement with the community, a higher status or more income. I really like this. I like the rephrasing. It's not the writing part that matters. It's understanding that through writing you get to these goals Better and more easily. That's very interesting. So you just touched on something that I want to dive into because I think when people that come from a technical background think about writing, they think about instructing. They think about, oh, here is how to write an open source library for that particular framework, or here is how to solve this particular error with this solution. And they think about the kind of manual style writing, which in the software world often is something more. You know, this is going to be useful for the next three months or six months until there is a completely new way of doing this. Because technology just revolves so quickly right throughout this whole cycle that we're all in. So what you just said is that you reuse content from seven years ago, kind of evergreen stuff. So do we have to kind of think about writing in different ways? That what we create has a different shelf life?

Yes. Yeah, that's a great question. And it's something I think a lot of people don't, don't consider when they sit down to write. So the first thing is. So that instruction manual type of thing, I actually think that that is one of, one of the biggest, like top three biggest opportunities for writers on the Internet today. Because if you think about how many things. Just think about anything that happens in your life. A perfect example. My espresso machine broke this morning. What am I going to do? I'm going to Google how to fix my espresso machine, right? And it might be a video, but it also might be a really helpful walkthrough blog post, right? And so informational, highly actionable, even educational text based content is really, really valuable. And I think it's often looked at as boring. But in reality, you know, something I've learned with ship 30 because ship 30 caters to beginners. It caters to. I've really never written on the Internet before. How do I get started? And it has really humbled me and made me realize that making things simple is difficult. If you want to explain it to a beginner, you can't. You have to have a level of clarity of someone who's mastered it in order to really explain it in a way that a beginner can understand. But, and I kind of, I didn't really realize this until very recently, but I put this dot together that I'm, I've learned that I'm very good, or maybe I've just practiced so much that I've acquired the skill, but I'm very good at writing this actionable, educational, instructional, quote, unquote content. And my very first writing job ever was when I was 15 years old, 16 years old, and my parents told me I needed to get a summer job. And the first thing that I did, because I was a really competitive World of Warcraft player, and the first thing that I did was I went online and I started searching for. I literally think I typed in World of Warcraft jobs. How do I get paid to do this video game? And I stumbled across a site that said they were looking to hire writers to write walkthrough guides. And my very first writing job, they used to pay me, like, I don't know, 25, 50 bucks an article, and I would have to write a walkthrough guide of, here's how to go through this dungeon. Here's how to explore this zone. And I didn't really realize that that was my introduction to, quote, unquote, writing on the Internet or even monetizing writing. I love this. I got paid to write.

Oh, that's awesome.

You know, and so, yeah, a little bit of a tangent, but I just. I think that that sort of content gets glossed over a lot, and in reality, it's probably one of the biggest opportunities you have as a writer.

Yeah, let's stay on this tangent, because I used to be a competitive World of Warcraft player as well. And how. I want to know who you were writing for. Like, what. What site was that?

Oh, I don't. I mean, all of those old sites don't even exist anymore. I don't even remember, but it was like some little indie. Okay, the real question is Hoarder Alliance.

Oh, I was Hoard back in the day.

Okay. That was the right answer. What did you play?

I was an undead rogue, and I had a great time. How about you?

Yeah, I was an undead mage. There we go. We would have been. We would have been great friends.

I think we should. We should still be friends in the future about this and maybe do. Do you still play? Like, that's. That's a question that I. I really would like to know. Yeah, my. My.

My honest answer is every once in a while, yes. This past weekend, I just watched the whole. The whole Blizzcon.

Yes.

Of the thing.

Me too.

And then. Okay, right. And they shared all these announcements, and I'm like, I am so busy. I don't have time for this. But at the same time, I'm like, I could squeeze a weekend in.

Yeah. Yep, yep. Yeah, I feel the same way. And it's like whenever they announce a new expansion coming in the future, you just like, oh, Do I really want to put in these, like, 10 hours to get from current, like, to the current max level and prepare for the next 10 hours?

It's like 50 or 100 hours.

It's. Yeah, it is a lot of work, particularly if you want to play multiple characters. But I digress. The thing is, World of Warcraft allowed me something similar. It wasn't writing, it was speaking. Like, the fact that I can speak English in any fluent capacity is mostly due to being a raid leader on World of Warcraft, because I had to. And back in the day, it was vanilla.

Right.

I had to get 40 people to just coordinate their most basic movements to not all die in the fire.

Right.

That was the idea. So to have a grasp of what people are doing, what people should be doing, communicating this clearly. That's what I learned from the game as well. And if writing was your avenue, or if World of Warcraft was your avenue into writing, even better.

Right.

It's a complex ecosystem of things that you need to do. Like, particularly those guides that you wrote. I probably read a couple of them back in the day.

Yeah, you never know.

You never know. And that's the fun part, how connections happen now, retroactively, maybe. But this is really cool. It's also interesting that you started writing so early, because to me, writing was never on the table. I was always a software engineer. My writing was purely for the machine. I never wrote for people. It was after I built and sold a SaaS business that I noticed writing is catharsis. I can actually take my many problems that I have and just write them out and think in writing about solutions. Put that into a folder and maybe publish it one day. I didn't with this one, but later, after we sold the business, I took my cathartic writing and turned it into something that was actually accessible to other people. So it's. Writing is, to me, a way of thinking kind of calcified into something. You can share it with other people. So. And you do this spectacularly well. Like, you've published, like, what, 10 books at this point? I was gonna say, like, you. You've done a lot of work to get to the point where you are in being able to communicate clearly what writing is about, because you have written so extensively now. If you look at your books over time, have they gotten simpler?

Yes, significantly. A lot of these things, you don't. It is really, really hard to understand a lot of this stuff in the beginning. And it's really hard. Even if someone explains it to you. It's very Hard for you to get it until you've crossed certain milestones of reps. Because there were a lot of things that I look back on that, you know, I studied fiction writing in college. I had a lot of teachers tell me things that went in one ear and out the other, and then it didn't click for me why they were telling me that till eight years later, you know. And so, yeah, my, my writing has gotten simpler. My writing process has gotten faster. The way I wrote my first book is completely different than the way I write books now. Everything is different. And I, and I really equate it a lot to. I grew up playing hockey. My, My first dream was I wanted to play in the NHL. And then I got injured and that was never going to happen. But I. I'm a really big believer in studying pro athletes because I think that there's a. There's a mental discipline and there's also a habitual discipline that is really unique to sports. And I, Ever since I was a little kid, I feel like ever I fractured my spine playing hockey when I was like 14, and then I fractured it again when I was 17. And ever since then, and I always knew I wanted to write. I don't know why, but ever since then I really made it a point to think I was like, if I'm not going to play hockey, then I'm going to write as if I'm playing hockey, you know, And I've always treated it that way. And I think that's something that I don't. I talk about it a little bit. I don't know how much it comes across or, or how much people gather that. But I treat my writing like an athlete. And I train every single day. And I, at the end of every year, I'm. I'm constantly asking myself the question, like, okay, my, my right hand is more dominant than my left hand. What do I have to do to cross train? And I'll. I'll put myself through exercises and learning phases that, like, make no sense to the average person. But to me, I'm like, this is what I need to do to improve this one small aspect of my craft.

You know, look like I've done some crazy things.

I've done, like, everything from like, reading the. A page or two of the thesaurus every morning, or I'll read books in genres that I have absolutely no real interest in, but I'll do it just to learn. I'll. I'll take certain books and highlight, like, I'll grab a handful of highlighters and, and go through and be like, okay, which sentence or even which word in a sentence is communicating the voice, which sentence is moving the plot forward? Which sentences, like, just so I can really understand how something's being built, I, I'll get very in the weeds with it. And I think those are all the little things, especially in our world of digital writing. And you know, I'm sort of in this ecosystem now of solopreneurs and course creators and you know, indie hackers and like, we're all in this sort of weirdly like co related space building in public. One part of me really resonates with that because I've always been very digital first and digital forward, and the other part of me feels very out of place in that because I think unlike a lot of other people who build followings, especially build followings off of their writing and things like that, like, I don't spend a lot of time studying other people's Twitters. I spend a lot of time studying Pulitzer Prize winning authors or reading literature or putting myself through these weird writing sprints just so I can improve some part of my craft. Like that's, that's the part where I don't really feel, I don't meet very many people that I can really like, dig into that with, you know?

Yeah, it's a different kind of writing too, right? Like if you, if you have a book that it's, it's so many thoughts all in a synthesis with, with other thoughts communicated very clearly, very extensively. And if you contrast that with like Twitter, where people just blurred out whatever they think, like, obviously the quality of writing is different, but I guess that's where it starts, right? Because when I think about writing books, you can't write a book out of nowhere, or at least I don't believe you can. You have to have your thoughts in order to even be able to attempt writing a book. And for many that starts with blog posts or fragments or long tweets.

Right.

So is it more important to you to focus on the ultimate outcome of books, books, of writing books? Or can writing for founders, for solopreneurs also happen without necessarily wanting to write a book at the end of, I don't know, the year or their work life? Or do people need to write books? That's kind of the question.

Yeah, I don't think people need to write books. And if you're being really objective about it, books are not the most profitable or efficient or effective vehicle for monetizing your writing. They're really not. Like, if you'd go hour by hour somewhere else. The, the thing, the thing that I struggle with, with this question, and it's not you asking it, it's like I, I struggle with this question in general because I have put in so many hours, not just practicing, but, but really studying and thinking deeply about all these different writer career paths. And I'm starting to get to a place where I sort of feel like I equate it to being like a really high level, proficient chess grandmaster. And I can feel myself starting to get to a point where I have supreme clarity over whatever the goal is. What are the steps to get there? And sort of like you're playing chess, you can see 10, 15, 20 moves down the line. And I find that most of the time when people ask a question like, do you think this or this? You know, the, the challenge with that.

Is.

They'Re looking at it as if it's one step. They're like, you know, I, I'm not writing a book. I make the decision to write a book, you know, and in reality, it's actually, there's 30 steps between that and the moment that I start to break it down and I try and really, like, go, okay, that's where you want to go. Here are all the steps to get there, and here's why each one is important. I tend to notice. I'm not saying you do this, I'm just speaking in general. People's eyes sort of glaze over and they're like, I didn't want all that. I just wanted you to tell me that if I write a book, then it's all going to be okay and my mom's going to be proud of me.

Right, Right.

And like, that's. I can feel like every day that goes by, I feel that challenge increasing because I find fewer and fewer people act like most people who say they want to write a book don't actually want to write a book. They just want to say that they've written a book.

Right.

Or most people that want to build a audience on the Internet, it's like they don't actually want to write short form content five times a day every day for four years in a row. They, they just want half a million people applauding them.

Yeah, that's a gym metaphor.

Right?

Like, people, people want the, the body that the gym, the regular gym activity gets you, not the gym activity itself completely.

And like, I don't, I don't fault anyone for feeling that way because I know that there have been many times on my own journey where I misconstrue the process for the outcome. And I probably have said the same thing, but that's. It's a really hard thing to figure out how to educate people on, which is like, the thing that you want is completely doable, but it's going to require you to slow down and understand the steps in order to get there. And I love this mantra. I say this all the time, which is the shortcut is the longer road in disguise. You know, so whenever someone's like, no, no, no, just tell me. Like, it's like learning a musical instrument, and they're like, I don't want to learn the chords, Just tell me how to play Freebird, right? Like that. It seems like a shortcut, but really what you're doing is you're doing yourself a disservice. And now you're on the longer road, and you don't actually understand how to get where you want to go. And so, circling back to your question on books, I do not think everyone needs to write books. You know, it. It certainly is the. The most productive vehicle, but I love it. And I think there's a lot of money to be made in writing books. But I also really, really enjoy the format. And so that's why I like having this contrast of Internet businesses that are very. They're much more efficient and much more profitable than trying to earn a living writing books. But that allows me the luxury and time and no stress to go do the thing that I really enjoy that also may have upside potential.

Yeah, yeah, I think you're 100% right. Like, the. A lot of. I mean, that's just a general human nature. We want to have the thing with the cake and eating it too kind of thing.

Right.

We want to do. Do less and get more. And writing the book is still kind of a status symbol for many, and I think it shouldn't have to be.

Right.

People could easily go through their life and build reputation and credibility without writing books. It's just that it's a great vehicle for communicating that with people. I've seen what you just explained to me with the software businesses and that as well, a lot of people who write really good books are people who don't intend to write books, but are just experts in their field, and then they notice that they have a lot to share, and then they start writing. That is something like. Brennan Dunn is an example for this. He's recently written this as Personal. He was on the show, too, and he explained his whole process, too. I don't think he ever set out to write that book. Really. He just set out to build a really good marketing tool and understand the whole email marketing space really well. And then it turned out that now he has something to teach. And I think that in reverse is also what keeps many people from writing. They believe they don't have anything to teach, even though they are experts in their field. That's also something I want to talk to you about. How we can overcome this kind of weird, self limiting belief that even though we're experts, we shouldn't write because somebody else also may have written about this topic before. So how can we get people to start just sharing? Doesn't have to be a book, doesn't have to be a newsletter, but just generally sharing their knowledge more easily.

Yeah. So it's a great example of sort of speaking to my brain. Immediately goes to like, I can give you the super action. Like, I can tell you exactly how this plays out. But the reality is that someone at the very beginning of their journey, not only do they not need all of that explanation, but they also don't want it.

Yeah.

You know, and they can't hear it yet. And so what I've learned is for someone who really is step one, there's really only one thing you can do to help them, which is encourage them. They're not ready for some advanced framework. You got to just go, hey, you should start sharing. And it's kind of up to them to take the first step and go on that journey. Now, the advanced version and the real framework from here is recognizing that. Okay, so first let me say this. This is what most people would say as their framework. Well, the key and what makes you different is you just have to speak from the heart and you just have to be authentic. And as long as you're authentic, the world will hear your story. And there is nothing about that that is actionable. Like, that doesn't actually mean anything.

Right.

And that's what drives me nuts, is all of the quote unquote, best writing advice is literally just different versions of that. You have to be authentic, unlock your creative genius. What does that mean?

Right.

And so really tangibly right there, there's all sorts of frameworks you can use here. Like, what are all the different points? So get super in the weeds. What are all the different points of differentiation when it comes to writing? Well, one point of differentiation is simply the way that it's organized or it's formatted.

Right.

So you could take a New Yorker article and you could keep all of the same Content. But if you reformatted it to look like a buzzfeed article with a bunch of bulleted lists and sub heads and all that, it's completely different. And some people prefer differences on the formatting side.

Right.

Other people prefer differences. Or you might find a point of differentiation in terms of the voice. Okay, but here's the thing. How do you define voice?

Right?

And voice is really just a combination of different variables. And those different variables are word choice.

Right.

Sentence structure, pacing, and rhythm.

Right.

This is why I love when people are like, ChatGPT will never be able to write like a human.

Yeah, I will.

If I. If I define the voice and I give it rules, ChatGPT is going to write like me. So there's.

All of.

You can get really in the weeds with these things. And that's why I love studying literature. And I bring out all the highlighters and I'm like, I want to go word by word. How did this get constructed? But that's not what most people need in the beginning.

Right.

What they need is for someone to just go, you got this. I would love to hear from you. Or. Where I started on Quora was answering a question. I found Quora really helpful because I didn't have to write. All I had to do was answer a question. And that was way lower barrier to entry for me. And that's where I always start with people. I had this joke because I used to do ghost. My first business was I had a ghostwriting agency. I ghostwrite for all these executives. And over and over again, the executive that I was ghostwriting for would go, I don't know what I want to say about this. And then I would just say to them, well, what do you think you would say about this? And then they would say it. And then I'd be like, great, so we should probably just say that then.

Yeah, Right.

Everyone already knows. You just have to give them the container. You have to ask them the question. And answering a question is way easier than going, here's a blank page, now go make art out of it.

It's like a permission thing, right? People need to give themselves permission to actually state their responses. They don't want to have the blank page problem where they don't know where to start. Just a little trigger is all people need. That's an interesting thing. And I've seen the same. If you look at the. I mean, the book side, the complexity of a book, let's just leave that aside and look at writing for social media, on Twitter, or just like Building a presence, building an audience, whatever that might be. People are deathly afraid of the empty Twitter prompt because they don't know, first off, what do I need to write to need.

Right.

That's even the perception that people have because they need to write. And then is it going to resonate with people? Are people even going to read it? There are so many fears and limitations that people have before they even start writing. It's not even published. It's not clicking that button. It's even putting any sentence up there. And I found personally, for myself on my own journey and for the people that I try to help with this, that going to where other people are already having a conversation is the best way of dealing with this. Like literally participating in a conversation, which then also teaches you to be a conversational writer, which is great, because that's what people like to read. Like, as if it was a conversation with you. So engaging with others that already have something to share, that have questions that need help. I think that's a great start, a starting point for writing.

Yeah, you could say that an even easier place to start writing on a platform like Axe or LinkedIn or whatever, is not you broadcasting, but you just replying to other people's questions.

Exactly. Yeah.

Right.

And, yeah, I am a big believer in what is the simplest action. Simplicity is velocity. So how do you do the simplest action? But there's. There's an underlying layer to all this, and it's something that I've started writing about more, which is I'm a big believer in therapy. I'm a big believer in personal development. And the reality is, we can talk all day about what makes an effective headline or, you know, how do you format a post really well so that it's skimmable. But the reality is, if there's an underlying issue of you have a really brutal inner critic, and every time you sit down to write, your, you know, your internal narrative to yourself is really hurtful and toxic. Well, it really doesn't matter how much we talk about headlines, because that's the root issue.

Right.

And so something that I try and I guess de stigmatize, especially in the world of writing, which is dependent on you sharing, you have to recognize that, though, that's. It's two sides of the same coin.

Right.

It's like you have the hard skills, which is the writing, but then you also have that underlying. I like thinking of it as soft skills, which is, well, and what's the relationship you have with yourself? You know, and every time you sit down to write, do you have your mom and dad sitting on your shoulders being like, nobody cares about you, why would anyone want to listen to you?

Right.

Well then you're never going to hit publish. And so I think both of those are really important and you sort of have to ping pong back and forth and figure out at any given time what's the real bottleneck. Is it a hard skill bottleneck or is it a soft skill bottleneck?

Do you consider journaling a way to deal with this or do you actually have to like seek a mental health professional to deal with this stuff if you have this inner critic in your life?

I mean this, I would hardly say that I'm qualified to give a true objective answer. But I'll just speak for myself. I've, I've been journaling for a long time. I, I try and make it a point to journal almost every single day. I think it's an incredibly helpful vehicle to a hear yourself outside yourself and B, I use it often to just, I think of it like getting the gunk out like before I write something for real. I like just getting the words moving and it's a low pressure environment. But, but I, I will say I think that there is a tremendous difference between you processing through within yourself in a journal and you processing through with someone else. And I've seen the benefit that that's had for me. Some, some people have the complete opposite perspective and that's fine. But I think that there's something that happens when you get outside yourself that's very different than you just sitting in your internal vacuum.

Yeah. Yeah. Generally I would say writing nowadays with the digital community that we have and just in the place in which we write, that's it's not a solitude thing anymore. Right? Like you don't have to write all by yourself. You don't have to be in the cabin in the woods kind of writer anym. In fact that actually is hurtful to the quality and the perception of your writing. I think you posted something recently saying that you should write with your readers. You should write for and with your readers. And I think that's important to understand because for most people writing coders in particular, the writing code is a very solipsistic, very isolated activity. But I don't think it has to be for writing long form prose or even mid form, short form, whatever it might be be. So how can we approach other people and form communities with them as writers, as people who want to write?

Yeah, something that's been clicking recently is because I have this conversation with people all the time. I mean, we. We talk about it in ship 30, which is hundreds or thousands of writers. But I also see it with people in my life, friends. You know, I'm always giving feedback or sharing, like, everyone wants to write now. And so I tend to get asked a lot of these questions. And something that has really clicked for me recently is that a lot of times people think about writing from the perspective of I. So here's what I want to write about, or here's what I think other people want to read, right? And it's very selfish, in a sense. And then most beginners go through this loop, right, where they're like, I want to write this. And then they put it out into the world, and they're like, nobody's paying attention to me. And then they get really upset.

Right?

And I think you have to get through that initial. I think of it like the starting zone phase. You know, you got to get out of the starting zone for you to ultimately realize that it's a lot more productive to think about it from the perspective of you.

Right?

So not I, but you, the reader. And it goes back to what I was saying, writing with executives, people. People go, I don't know what I want to say. And then you just ask them the question, so what do you want to say? And then they say it. And so if you think about your writing not as, here's what I want to say, but you think about it more as, what do you need? Oh, I just have to tell you the thing that you need, right? And. And it's such a simple thing, but we make it so complicated because it's so simple. We literally can't step outside of ourselves and go, what does the other person care about? You know, And I see it. I mean, it's really easy to pinpoint if you just watch most conversations. Most people don't ask the other person questions, right? And that is a very clear signal of you're. You're in your head, and you're like, it's my reality. It's my thoughts. I'm what matters. I'm the main character. And in. And really, the other person's the main character. And if you want people to read your writing, you have to realize, like, just think about it super objectively. You want an external result, right? So you want something from the other person, which means the thing that you're doing has to be in service of them.

Yes, exactly.

Right. Yeah.

And. And I. It's. It's so simple, but it Takes people a long time to, like, really shift that way thinking in their head. And then once they do, like, massive growth because all of a sudden they're solving someone else's problem or they're helping someone else.

That's it. Right. Like, I think we've been conditioned to think of writing as art, as an expression of self, where we should actually have thought of it as, like, a product, a productized self. Like, it's a business thing. You try to find product market fit. That's the idea.

Right.

You try to figure out what your market needs, and you write the thing they need and then they consume it. And that's what guarantees results, not your artistry.

Yeah. And I would. I would even clarify that language a little bit, which is if you think of it as product market fit, you're. That language, I think, on a. On a very unconscious level, still trains the person to think, I have a product and I have to go fit it into someone else's brain.

Right?

Yeah. It's a pushy phrase. Yeah, you're right.

But. But if. If we have to, you know, use that structure, I would clarify the language and call it more something like, like, reader problem fit. Like, you're not starting with you. You're starting with the other person, and you're not starting with. Here's what I want to say. You're starting with, well, what's their problem? What's their question? And every time I go down this rabbit hole, inevitably someone then goes, yeah, yeah, okay, that makes sense for, like, marketing, typewriting. But I don't think that that's true for storytelling. I don't think that's true for fiction. I don't think. Okay. What you don't realize is that Harry Potter answers a question, and the question is, what is life like for middle schoolers who go to wizardry school?

Yeah.

And the reason you read that book is because you're interested in that question and you're interested in the author's answer to that question. And so, again, like, everything starts with, it's not about you, it's about the reader. And every, like, every once in a while. I've recently been going down the. The rabbit hole of David Foster Wallace, really eccentric writer and. And interesting in a lot of different ways. But I think what people have missed about even someone like him who is a very unique literary writer.

Right.

And most people think, oh, he just sat in a room and was just brilliant. And then we're all obsessed with his voice and we all applaud him.

Right.

But if you go listen to interviews with him and you hear him talk about his writing. Infinite Jest. And all of these things that he dug into started with, here's what's going on with my generation. A lot of. A lot of his writing was speaking to readers who he felt were struggling with growing up in a world that was starting to be dominated by TV and media. And you never sat in silence anymore. And it created this strange discomfort in the human soul. It really had nothing to do with him. It was his observation of what other people were going through and by extension, what he then was going through. And so it. I like, I love bridging that gap where whenever I talk about these things, it's so easy for people to just jump to, like, well, you're just a marketer and that's. I guess it's just marketing writing. And you don't understand that the. The marketing or business writing is just the easy way of being able to talk about it. But the reality is all of these principles also exist in the highest forms of literature. But it's hard to jump there without losing someone's right. Like, it's hard for them to follow you there.

It sounds like. Let me mirror this back at you. It sounds like you're looking at a writer not as a generator of wisdom, but as a kind of a conduit between a question and an answer.

Yes.

That's a wonderful visualization. I really enjoy this because that also makes it so much easier to just do it because, you know, there's a question and you know you have answers that you could potentially give to people. Like, you don't have to be super smart. You just need to answer this one question as a writer.

Yeah. And also to clarify, you as the conduit don't always have to be the source of wisdom or brilliance. One of my favorite examples is Ryan Holiday has now dominated this category of stoicism.

Right.

He invented stoicism.

Right, Right, exactly. That's the example that I use. And everyone looks at someone like him and goes, well, yeah, but he's an expert. Okay. Like, what was his credibility for writing? The obstacle is the way credibility was literally, I read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. And so a lot of times when we talk. This is a core principle in ship 30, we talk about all the time, which is when you sit down to write, you as the conduit. Yeah, you could write from personal experience, but you could also write from curated experience. Ryan Holiday's entire career is not based off of his insights. That's based off of Marcus Aurelius's insights that he's a conduit for, and he makes it very easy and accessible for other people to access. And there's value in that.

Right.

And so, yeah, same thing is if you want to write about a topic, you don't. It's not like you were born. Another favorite example, Tony Robbins wasn't born the Tony Robbins. You know, today, Tony Robbins started out as a sales trainer and he was the conduit for. I went and learned all these things and now I'm going to make them accessible and share them with other people. And, you know, so, yeah, it could be either.

Yeah. And throughout, like Tony Robbins, great example. I think we still have some cassette tapes from the, like, late 80s somewhere in this household here.

Right.

Like, he's been around for a long while and what he's been teaching also shifted over time. Like, it's not that he had to know everything from the start, but he shared. He shared he had things to say then and he learned new things and he shared them again in later books. Like, Tony Robbins is one of the reasons that I got into understanding, or wanting to understand financial investments or financial lucidity, whatever you might want to call it, just being aware of what investment is. I kind of accessed that through his writing, and I'm glad he did that.

Right.

He might not be the world's foremost expert on it, but he wrote it in a way that was accessible to me and that's all I really needed. And he has the gift to write in ways like that. But I don't think everybod loves Tony Robbins either. Right. Some people would rather read, like, more academic books on this issue. But that doesn't mean that Tony Robbins contribution is not an important part in people's lives.

Yeah, I use this. I, I think this is a helpful way of looking at it. You ever, you ever have a friend recommend a book and they're like, this was the best book I've ever read in my entire life. And then you open it up and you read the first page and you're like, I, there's no way I'm finishing this. There's no way I'm reading this.

Right.

And a lot of times people misunderstand what's happening there. What's happening. There's a framework in chip 30 we talk about called the 4. A framework which is. Most writing can be reverse engineered back into these four different buckets. It's either actionable, aspirational, analytical, or anthropological. And what's happening in that moment is your friend loves aspirational books and you hate aspirational books. You love actionable books.

Right.

And so it's not that one person thinks the writer is good and the other person thinks the writer's bad. It's that you as readers have different expectations. And if you start with that, when you sit down to write as a writer, the real goal over time is for you to have supreme clarity over, well, who exactly is my reader? Because if you start like the average person goes, I want to start writing about real estate. Okay, well, you're going to attract very different readers. If you write about actionable, here's how to buy your first property. Or if you write analytical, here's what's going on in the economy and real estate trends over the next 25 years. Or aspirational. I was dead broke, my life sucked, and then I got into real estate and everything changed.

Right.

Those are three completely different experiences as a reader. And so as a writer, it's about you figuring out, which one do I enjoy writing about. Some people enjoy aspirational, some people enjoy actionable.

Right.

And which one attracts which type of reader. And then over time, your efficiency becomes, I know how to not only create actionable content, but I know what my actionable readers want from me, which is like a self fulfilling prophecy. It's that, it's that virtuitous loop where it keeps spiraling in the right direction.

Ah, that's great. And it also, and let's maybe pivot a little bit to the actionable part here that can make you money. Right. At that point, when you have the capacity to write in a style that is really needed and wanted by certain people, you don't necessarily even need to write for yourself. And I think you mentioned ghost writing earlier as well. I find this a very interesting feel because I had very negative opinions about it in the past, let me be perfectly honest, because I. Yeah, because I didn't think about it much, I didn't reflect on it much, but I have since. And I feel that if somebody can write and can write in a style that is really conducive to people understanding what they write about, then writing for somebody else who needs that style and to talk about a topic that they care about is a perfectly fine occupation. Like, why wouldn't it be? So I think that is also part of productizing yourself as a writer. You don't need to necessarily build your own literary career. That's not the only way to write. You can also do other things. So maybe let's talk a bit about the ways that you can actually make money from writing.

Yeah, I mean, the big two are so using the language, productizing yourself. So productizing yourself. I equate more with creating digital products around your writing. So that's one side of the barbell. You could do that with books, you could do it with courses, you could do it with digital downloads, you could do it with paid newsletters. Those are all different vehicles for productizing yourself and productizing your knowledge. The other side of the barbell is monetizing your talents as a service, right? And again, this kind of goes back to the seeing 15 moves on the chessboard, right? Because the thing that people misunderstand with these two, with these two paths is productizing yourself as a writer is very difficult in the beginning. So the benefit of productizing yourself with, in creating some sort of digital product is that it is, quote, unquote, infinitely scalable. If I have a paid newsletter, the effort it takes me to write one paid newsletter is the. Is identical If I have one subscriber or I have 100,000 subscribers, right? That's the benefit of it. As a result, your profitability or your financial ceiling is significantly higher. The challenge is that in the beginning, in the short term, it's much harder to make a dent in your income, right? Because if you're selling a $20 a month paid newsletter, you need a lot of volume, you need a lot of people subscribing for you to feel that on the other side, if you're providing writing as a service, it's a whole lot easier to find one person who's going to pay you five grand a month, right? Rather than find 100 people who are going to pay you 20 bucks a month or whatever, whatever it is, right? But as a service, you have a lower ceiling. So you can get to six figures very quickly providing a service. But then, you know, especially through ghostwriting or things like that, like, it's going to be hard for you to get above 30, 40, 50k a month without suddenly hiring other people and building an agency and doing all of those things. And so pro con, depends on which one you want. The thing with ghostwriting, and I think you'll appreciate this metaphor as a engineer, most people think what ghostwriting is, is the writer goes to someone and says, I will write for you. You're just going to put your name on it. And in reality, that's not what's happening. What's happening is the person who would be your client has a lot of knowledge so they've been in their industry for, you know, 10, 20, 30 years. They have a significant amount of knowledge, but they have a bottleneck called I don't have the time to write. And I often, not always, but I often don't have the skill set to write. And the writer has the complete opposite problem, right? The writer goes, I don't have 30 years of knowledge, but I have the time and I have the skill set. And what I realized very early on is that there's a magical combination when you pair those two types of people together, because the writer is really just doing the manual labor that the thinker, the client, doesn't have the time to do, can't rationalize doing, and often doesn't have the skill set to do. And in a metaphor, it's sort of like you being a CTO and you being like, I have to write every line of code in my startup, otherwise it's unethical.

Right?

And that's not what we do in software, right? The CTO is like, I'm going to give you the ideas, I'm going to give you the frame, and then all you developers are going to do the manual labor of writing the code. And that is identical to what's happening with a client and a ghostwriter. The client gives the thinking, the ghostwriter goes, great, I'm going to take this transcript, I'm going to form at it, I'm going to simplify it. They're doing the manual labor.

This is such a nice explanation. Thank you so much for making this so obviously clear. What a beneficial, almost symbiotic relationship that can be in the best sense of the word.

Yes, it should be symbiotic because you as the writer get to accelerate your knowledge because you're tapping into someone who has pattern recognition of multiple decades that you don't have. And you as the smart person go, yeah, you know, I'm the founder of a hundred million dollar startup. There's no way I could rationalize sitting here writing all this stuff. My time is too valuable. But that doesn't mean that your knowledge isn't valuable and that it wouldn't be appreciated by other people.

Right?

So it really is a magical combination. And, and I am, I mean, I started the first ghostwriting agency for founders and executives back in 2016. Like, I've been on a mission trying to educate people on this because I think, I think it's so sad that you have all these smart people who have these incredible careers and then they retire and their knowledge just evaporates. No one knows what's in their brain. And I see that as a. As a detriment to the compounding of knowledge in our society. Yes.

Oh, that's. That's. It is. It is a big problem, like, Particularly as, like, the artisanal skills are being lost.

Right.

That. That's. That's a big problem, too. As things shift to the digital, there's a lot of lack of the actual artisanal insights. And I even noticed this in my personal life. In the family, there are a lot of stories that aren't written down. There are even just the things that hold us together, the narratives that we have in the family, if they're not written down, they are often lost with generations too. I kind of forced, in the best sense of the word, my grandmother to dictate, like, a book's worth of stories into, like, Dragon Natural speaking, like, that weird Windows software that we could install on her old laptop. And she was sitting there for weeks and months just dictating a whole book into that thing. And she has passed away since. But I still have the stories. The family still has these stories. Like, there's power in retaining these kind of stories. And that's just in the family, a very small unit of people that care about these things. It is so much more important to do this on a. On a social level.

Right.

On the level of a society where people pass away without passing on everything they've learned in a lifetime. I really like this. And if ghostwriting is a way of doing this, of extracting this information and putting it into a shape where other people can consume it, if I had known that that was a writing career a couple of years ago, I probably would have tried it out, maybe in my native language, maybe in German, maybe in English, because, you know, writing is just thinking and translating. Well, you can fix that with professionals, you know, but it's such a wonderful thing, man. And I'm really happy you're bringing this into the focus of what you're working on and how you share it, what you talk about on Twitter and all these other platforms, and I follow you for this. You bring this out. You explain it so well. I really, really enjoy it. If people want to find out more about these things about you, in particular about ghostwriting, the thing that you offer, I think there is something out there where you help people with this. Where do people go to learn more about this?

Yeah, I think my. My most active platform is Twitter. Slash X. At this point, I don't know what we're calling.

Yeah, what are you calling this again?

It'll take us a year for it to crystallize. Yeah, but, yeah, like six months ago, we launched our premium ghostwriting academy, which trains people on how to become ghostwriters. It's all the same things that I was doing for years as a ghostwriter and I built my agency off of this. That's sort of if you want to go the route of monetizing with a service. And the fastest route to monetizing your writing is providing a service. Like, you will get to 10 or 20k a month by providing a service significantly faster than you will creating a digital product. And so the framework and the model that I try and educate people on is, I think it's worth doing the service first. You know, get yourself to a point where you're comfortable and you're getting paid to practice. Like, that's a huge benefit of ghostwriting. You're learning, you're learning about the industry, you're learning what works. And then once you get to 10, 20k a month as a ghostwriter, you can start to experiment with the other side, which is creating digital products that are more infinitely scalable. And then it becomes a fortuitous loop.

Right.

Is the people consume your digital products and then go, oh, you know, a lot, I would love to hire you as a client. And then your clients give you the money to reinvest in your digital products and then it just goes round and round.

Yeah, that's quite the flywheel there. That sounds like a really good career path. It reminds me a lot of the stair stepping approach that Rob Walling has about software businesses. Right. Where you start with a couple service oriented things, you build plugins, you try to go to a more productized thing, but you try to stabilize your income path first and then you go for the big SaaS.

Right.

The big automated thing that makes money forever. That's kind of also this loop. I see a lot of similarities there. Yeah, go ahead.

No, that's the same thing. You know, it's. Everyone wants to start by going, I'm going to build the next Uber. And in reality, you should probably figure out how to make a widget for Chrome first.

Yeah. And that also scales in different ways, Right? Maybe not as much, but it also, and you said this, it allows you to train yourself skills. Like you need these coding skills along the way, you need these writing skills along the way. You do smaller projects, you graduate into bigger projects and more sustainable things. Man, thank you so much for going through the world of writing, the world of Making a living of writing, which is also a very important thing to me as a writer and to the people that are listening and maybe just intrigued what that is. Thank you so much for explaining all of this today. That was a wonder. Wonderful, wonderful insight into all of these themes.

Yeah, these are great questions. A lot of things I haven't gotten to fully jam on so well.

I'm looking forward to articles and books around those topics then in the future.

Coming soon.

Oh, man. Thank you so much for being on the show. That was wonderful.

Thanks for having me.

See you in World of Warcraft.

Yeah, see you in the expansion.

That's right. Bye bye. And that's it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor, acquire.com imagine this. You're a founder who's built a really solid SaaS product. You acquired all those customers and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue. That's the dream of every SaaS founder, right? Problem is, you're not growing for whatever reason. Maybe it's lack of skill or lack of focus or lack of interest. You don't know. You just feel stuck in your business, with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire and you started working on the business, not just in the business. And all those things you did, like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach, they really helped you to go down this road. Six months down the road making all that money, you tripled your revenue and you have this hyper successful business. That is the dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this. And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who's facing this crossroads. This problem is common, but it looks different every time. But what doesn't look different every time is the story that here just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don't do anything. So if you find yourself here already at this point or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option. And that is selling your business on acquire.com because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It's certainly better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list they've helped hundreds of founders already. Just go check it out@try.acquire.com arvid and see for yourself if this is the right option for you, your business at this time. You might just want to wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It's always good to be in the know. Thank you for listening to the Bootstrap founder today. I really appreciate that. You can find me on Twitter Vedkal A R V A D K A H L and you'll find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you want to support me and this show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. Get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let me know. It would be interesting to see and leave a rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com founder. It really makes a big difference if you show up there because then this podcast shows up in other people's feeds and that's I think, where we all would like it to be. Just helping other people learn, helping and see and understand new things. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.