In this solo advice video, Nicolas Cole—now a 35‑year‑old entrepreneur running an $8 million‑a‑year business— reflects on nine costly financial mistakes he made in his twenties and offers concrete guidance to avoid them. He recounts quitting a copywriting job at 26, building a ghostwriting agency, and scaling rapidly without personal cash reserves. The mistakes include: (1) taking on business risk before de‑risking personal finances; (2) growing revenue while neglecting personal earnings and cash‑out; (3) bringing on investors without a clear use‑of‑funds plan, which shifted goals toward unrealistic growth; (4) chasing every hype cycle (apps, SaaS, crypto, remote‑work platforms, AI) instead of focusing on a sustainable niche; (5) constantly comparing oneself to peers, leading to distraction and shortcut‑seeking; (6) allocating newly earned cash to high‑risk assets like altcoins, NFTs, and speculative bets; (7) angel investing for status despite low odds, illiquidity, and opportunity cost; (8) spending on luxury goods and experiences before securing a runway of cash and financial freedom; and (9) believing in fast, easy, lucrative paths, which he counters with a rule of doubling time, effort, and cost. Throughout, Cole intersperses actionable tips—save a year of runway, pause growth when revenue doubles, raise prices, keep cash reserves, prioritize low‑risk investments (e.g., S&P 500), and focus on long‑term skill building. He also promotes a free masterclass for aspiring online writers. The video’s purpose is to help twenty‑somethings avoid these pitfalls and accelerate wealth building.
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If you're in your 20s and you keep comparing yourself to some kid on Instagram recording videos in a rented Lamborghini, this is for you. Alright? I am 35 and I run an 8 million dollar a year business. But when I look back on my 20s, there were nine money mistakes I made that kept me from becoming a millionaire a whole lot sooner that you do not want to repeat. And I don't mean oh, I should have bought less coffee and saved my pennies, okay? I mean, if you make these mistakes, they are going to cost you a ton of money for years into the future. And the first one is taking risks before you've de risked yourself. So let me paint you a picture. When I was 26 years old, I quit my full time job as a copywriter to work for myself as a ghostwriter. And very quickly I started making really good money, like 10 or 20 grand a month. But I was still living in a rundown studio apartment. I hadn't upgraded my own life yet, and I hadn't let enough time go by to pad my bank account and stack my savings. You know what I did instead? As soon as I started making good money, I went to one of my best friends and convinced him to quit his full time job and go all in on building a ghostwriting agency with me. And I offered to pay him a salary out of my own earnings just to minimize his risk. Meaning I was taking on all the risk myself. In hindsight, this was a stupid decision. And if I had just worked for myself for the next year and padded my bank account, I would have had a quarter million dollars in cash by the time I was 27. Instead, before I de risked myself, I increased my risk and basically didn't save money for the next four years. The second mistake is growing your business's revenue but not your personal earnings. So me and my friends start this ghostwriting agency, right? And we were growing like crazy. Eight months in, we had 10 full time employees, we had dozens of clients, we had over a million dol in annual revenue. But because we were growing so quickly, we didn't really take money out of the business. What we did was we just kept plowing cash into hiring the next handful of employees because we were trying to keep up with demand. And when you're growing, that makes sense. We just learned the hard way that you shouldn't do that forever because you usually don't grow that quickly forever. What we should have done every time we doubled the team is we should have deliberately paused. We should have turned clients away started a wait list. Or really what we should have done is we just should have kept raising our prices until people started laughing at us. Because if we had done that, then we could have made more money. Yeah, but really we could have taken cash out of the business and de risked ourselves. But we didn't do that. Instead, we basically just kept trying to grow as fast as we possibly could, which meant sacrificing our own personal earnings. And sure enough, about a year later, this big crypto crash happened. In 2018, we are watching Bitcoin falling below $6,000 overnight and the bitcoin bloodbath continues as the cryptocurrency is stuck below 6,000. Bitcoin was overpriced, it's still overpriced. Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin down more than 20% in the month of June, falling below $6,000 and trading right around overnight. We lost like a third of our clients. We had to lay off almost half the team and basically we stayed stuck in a perpetual cycle where we hired too many people too quickly and it cost us. Perhaps personally. Which is why the advice I give every ghostwriter inside our premium ghostwriting academy who wants to try to scale themselves into an agency is you should deliberately pause every time your monthly revenue doubles so literally. Stop growing. Clean things up. Raise your prices, Build efficiencies. Take some chips off the table. De risk yourself personally before continuing to climb the mountain and take on more risk inside your business real quick. If you want to write online but aren't sure where to start, click the link in the description of this video and check out startwritingonline.com this is a free masterclass I put together, sharing all of our most helpful frameworks for beginners, like proven hooks to capture your target readers attention. Where to write online to get the most distribution on your work and little growth. Hacking tips to build your social audience and email list faster over 100,000 writers have gone through this free masterclass and many even send us emails afterwards thanking us for sharing such valuable information for free. So click the link below this video to check it out and make this year the year you start seeing success from your writing online. The third mistake? Bringing on investors without clarity of what to actually invest in. So to add insult to injury, about halfway through building our ghostwriting agency, which again, keep in mind, I was 26 years old. This was my first business. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. But about halfway through I met these two tech founders who had sold their last startup for a gazillion dollars. They thought the idea of our agency ghostwriting for founders and executives was really brilliant. So they offered to invest and full transparency. They were great, super smart, really connected, extremely generous, good hearted. I love those guys and I learned a ton from them. But if I'm being brutally honest with myself, letting them invest was a mistake. First of all, we didn't really need the money. Agencies are cash flow machines. It's not like we were trying to build some new SaaS platform. Second, once we had the money, we didn't know what to spend it on. But third, and the real reason I kind of regret this decision is because just having them on board changed our goals. So instead of building a really great cash flow business that made me and my co founder amazing money, we did the opposite. We thought we had to turn this agency into a billion dollar company to make our investors happy, which it's not something they told us that was just an expectation we put on ourselves. So this led to us making all kinds of bad decisions, all in the name of growth. And yeah, we grew top line, revenue kept going up, but our personal earnings actually went down and down and down all because we bought into this lie the startup world perpetuates where as a founder you think you're supposed to give up everything just in the name of making your company grow as fast as possible. When I started my second company a few years later with Dicky Bush called Ship 30 for 30, I was adamant about doing the opposite. We, we had tons of people offer to invest and we turned all of them down and instead we pulled as much cash out of the business as possible de risking ourselves massively before even thinking about scaling or building something bigger. And shocker, that business became extremely lucrative for us. The fourth mistake you don't want to make is chasing trendy business models. So I am now old enough to have lived through a handful of different hype cycles. I remember in 2013, right when I graduated from college, if you said you were building an iPhone app, people would throw money at you. Then I remember in 2016 apps were out and SaaS was in. If you said you were building SaaS, people threw money at you then I remember in 2018 if you said you were building anything in crypto or blockchain related, people threw money at you then I remember in 2020 when the pandemic hit, crypto was dead and anything you could do from home, whether it was ride a peloton bike or join a remote community platform like clubhouse, people threw money at you. Then I remember a few years later when the pandemic was over, that whole trend fell off a cliff and in 2022 got replaced by ChatGPT. If you said you were building anything with AI, people threw money at you. Every three to five years there is some new technology hype cycle. And when you're younger and you don't have the pattern recognition of having lived through multiple different cycles, you think the right decision is to jump on the bandwagon. And yeah, there are people who do and who capitalize and who make tons of money, but it is not the majority of people. It is a small handful. And then the rest get replaced or give up two years later when that hype cycle runs out. Instead, a much better strategy for getting rich earlier in life is just picking an interest and not getting distracted. I've been talking about writing online for a decade. Were there other trendier business models and topics I could have chased? Sure. But did I need to? Of course not. Hundreds of millions of people still need help writing online. They needed help 10 years ago, and they will still need help 10 years from now. So a much better strategy is just staying the course. Because I promise, what goes up eventually comes back down. Which leads to the fifth mistake. Comparing yourself to your peers. Nothing breeds distraction like comparison. Meaning the more you compare yourself to other people, the more likely you are to get distracted, the more likely you are to find shortcuts instead of just committing to your path and staying consistent. And the more you try to find shortcuts, I promise, the more time you will waste. Shortcuts always end up being the longer road in disguise. Which leads to the sixth mistake. Investing your hard earned money into high risk assets. So when you start making good money, especially at a young age, you think the best thing to do is to keep the good times rolling. You think you should double down. You want to put your new money at risk? Let me tell you something. A mentor told me so for context. This guy is one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs of the past decade. You use his app every single day. And he took his company public for billions of dollars. When I was in my late 20s, I was having lunch with him in LA. He was actually a ghostwriting client of mine and I was asking him some questions about money. And the thing he said to me that completely changed my perspective is he said, cole, when you're an entrepreneur, you are already living in a constant state of max risk. There is nothing higher risk than owning your own business. Especially when that Business employs other people. So when you take cash out of that business, you do not want to go. Then put that cash into something high risk too. Your business is the high risk bet. Your cash should be your safety net. And before I had heard that advice, I was doing all sorts of stupid shit with my money. I was investing into trendy altcoins I'd heard about on Reddit, I was buying NFTs, I was angel investing into my friends startups, thinking it was cool because now I could call myself an angel angel investor. Looking back, these were all just such stupid decisions. And I made them. Because going back to mistake number five, I was trying to find a shortcut. I didn't just want to get rich, I wanted to get rich quick. And guess what? All of those shortcut bets went to zero. And I would be a whole lot richer today if instead of trying to find the shortcut, I just took my cash and let it sit in S and P500. Which leads to the seventh mistake, which is angel investing. I mentioned this in the last mistake, but it's worth highlighting on its own. I cannot tell you how many 20 year olds who start making good money tell me they are now angel investing. And I get it because I did the same exact thing. Calling yourself an angel investor sounds cool. Being an investor in a company makes you feel important. Getting to put the logo of the companies you've invested in on your website is a status symbol. I get it, but that doesn't make it a good decision. First of all, most angel investments never make you any money. I've probably done 15 angel investments or so at this point and only one has made me any money. And it wasn't even a lot of money. It was barely worth it for the time it cost me. Second, angel investments aren't liquid. So even if you do end up accidentally investing in a company that blows up, you don't get your money out until the company gets acquired or goes public, both of which are extremely unlikely outcomes. So great, you made a bunch of money on paper, but you can't do anything with it for five or 10 years. And that assumes the company actually crosses the finish line and doesn't die at some point before that. What's really funny is the more money I've made, the less I actually want to invest in other people's companies as an angel investor because I've learned the odds are not in your favor. And so you have to realize that the biggest benefit of angel investing is just status. Just makes you feel cool. Is that worth writing a $25,000 check or a $50,000 check for. I don't know, maybe, maybe later in life once you've made your money. I get it. Sort of like playing startup roulette and gambling, which is fun, but doing this in your 20s is idiotic. And I kick myself every day for writing those checks, thinking I was going to get rich quick. Which leads to the eighth mistake. Buying belongings instead of buying freedom. So trust me, I like materialistic stuff just as much as the next person. I am a sucker for watches. I love high end sports cars. I want to stay at five star hotels and fly first class or even private. I get it. And I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting or enjoying any of these things. And side note, anyone who says these types of luxury purchases aren't worth it has never driven a Ferrari 488. Okay, that car is a work of art. However, it is a huge mistake to start loading up on high end belongings and balling out on five star experiences when you haven't even bought the most valuable asset of all, which is your own freedom. So before you do any of these things, you, you should have at least a year of Runway just sitting in cash. And any big splurge you make should be less than 5% of your total net worth at any given time. Ideally closer to 1 to 3%. Why? Because I promise you, there is no worse feeling in life than having a few cool luxury items. A Rolex, a nice car. But you feel like you can't make the decisions you want to make or take the risks that you want to take in your business because you're constantly stressed out about money. Then all those luxury purchases just make you feel stupid. And lastly, mistake number nine. Maybe the biggest mistake of all. Thinking there's such a thing as fast, easy and lucrative. So over the years, I have trained my brain to recognize these statements. When someone says something will be fast, it probably won't. It'll probably take a while. When someone says something is easy, it's not. It'll probably be harder than you or they or I think. And when someone says something will be lucrative. Yeah, maybe it is. But not right away and certainly not for sure. I have yet to find anything in life that is fast, easy and lucrative with no work. Making money always takes work. Making money always means acquiring new skills. And making money always takes time. So as a good general rule of thumb, however long you think it's going to take, and however hard you think it's going to be, double it. Assume it's going to take twice as long as assume it's going to be twice as hard and assume it's going to be twice as expensive. And that's okay because that's what makes it lucrative. The hard work is the moat. The fact that you're willing to work hard is why you will be the one who unlocks the reward and other people won't. So I made these money mistakes and they cost me a ton of money. And I'm sharing them with you. So hopefully you don't make the same mistakes I did.
