Early 20s Syndrome, Paid Newsletter Empire, and Focus Framework

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour, where the running joke is, this is going to be much shorter than an hour because we are once again hyped up on caffeine. It's Friday. I'm feeling good. And we got some new hats, dude.

New hats.

We got our new premium ghost riding hats. Very cool. Printful, man. It takes about eight seconds to make these. I went in Canva 2 emojis, put them on a hat, and these turned out amazing. So I want to become a Printful wizard, where if we have an idea to put something on a hat or a mug or give something away, it's boom, done.

Is Printful. Do they also do the print on demand, or is it just the design?

That's what this is. So I literally drag a file from Canva into this, they render it, and they send it to you right away on anything, and then you can buy it. So what you can do is you create a Shopify store that then you connect your products to. So it inter. Like, Printful is a Shopify integration. So if we wanted to make a ship 30 or PGA merch store, we would just come up with the idea. When you make it in Printful, you connect it to Shopify and say, put this on my Shopify page. And then it handles all the backend logistics of it.

Wow, that's so cool. I didn't know that.

All right.

We also just did a ad for Printful.

So, yeah, Printful, shout out. Printful. Sponsor the podcast.

Dickie and Cole Shill Printful. That's our affiliate code. Feel free to go use it. That's amazing.

The only ones we're getting sponsored by are Mountain Valley, and until they hear this and see us and sponsor the pod, I. I don't want anything else.

I did two other podcasts this week. At both times, I was, you know, have my Mountain Valley. And I picked it up and it was like the logo was, like, right on the screen. I was like, I should be getting paid for this.

I got a Twitter comment the other day that was like, the shilling of Mountain Valley is getting out of hand. And I was like, I'm just. What? I'm just drinking water, dude. This is. I'm not sponsored in any way. It's not athletic greens here. Yeah. Okay, so let's dive into it. I woke up with two potential ideas, and I think we're going to go with the second one, but maybe we'll save the first one for another one. I saw an interesting tweet from Andrew Wilkinson. That was. Every entrepreneur I talk to feels this. I'm not reading verbatim, but it was something like every entrepreneur I talked to feels like at any time everything they're doing could come crumbling down and they have no clue what they're doing or something like that. And that feeling never goes away. And where my head goes is when I see a item, I think of a list of items always. And so I was like, what are the feelings of kind of entrepreneurship that you expect to change or go away or that kind of loom? And I think we should do that in another episode of, like, you know, the feeling that you could be doing more or the feeling that you're not doing the right things, or that everything's going to come crumbling down or that everyone else is having more success than you. Some of those inner game things that I think you deal with as you progress could be a cool episode and, and newsletter. But I think today we want to do a little bit of a public brainstorm on what we're going to get up to over the next month to two months through the lens of we have travel, we have. It's summer, it's a little bit busy. I think you and I are going to be strapped in a little bit more come September, October, November. And so putting some pieces together now for when we're back here in Miami, really full time for at least three months.

Yeah. So I'm game to dig into the second one. We can bounce around if we touch on the first one, too. But it makes me think about. So I was, I was having the same conversation with both our sales guys this week. And, you know, they're 24 and 25. And I was explaining to them that this is the first time in my life when I've ever felt like I could see beyond six months at a time and really be able to project out with. With a reasonable amount of clarity. I'd say like 70, 80% of this is what we're going to focus on. You know, these are my priorities.

I've got.

This is all my travel that's laid out. These are the weeks or months that I know I'm going to be strapped in, dialed in, good to work. These are the weeks when I'm just going to be in maintenance mode because I'm juggling other things. And we were talking about this because, you know, in your 20s, you're in this, my mentor used to call it early 20s syndrome, where you're just constantly in a state of, where is this all going? Where am I going to be? When does the empire get built? When do I become a millionaire? When am I worth $100 million? When do I buy the jet? You know, And I was explaining to them that especially in your 20s, you barely know what you're doing five days from now, let alone five hours from now, you know, and so you have to be really reasonable with yourself about what you can anticipate. And just now, you know, now I'm 33 and I was telling you the other day, I was just sort of looking at the next six to 12 months and I'm like, wow, Like I kind of know what is going to happen roughly, and I know what the schedule is going to be and the priorities are going to be. And so I think the meta exercise for us today and what would be valuable for anyone listening is this is what we have on our list that we can do. How do we think about deciding what to do? Because going back to your first topic, right, it's like one of the looming things in entrepreneurship is you always have things you can do, you always have more to build. You always have the never ending list of ideas. So it's actually the art of entrepreneurship is actually more about discerning between what you shouldn't do and then picking one thing and doing it well versus just going, I'm going to do everything and then you do nothing.

I'm going to work backwards on those two points because I think they're both worth touching on. The first is a helpful framework that we've been using when presented with new opportunities is I used to let it kind of stress me out of, oh, I should be doing that and I'm not doing that and oh, this person's doing this thing and that's working for them. Now I've reframed it as nice. That means we're going to be able to grow forever because the list of new things that we are eventually going to do in the future is very long. And so rather than, oh, we're not doing this, that means we're not going to be successful. It's despite not doing all those other things, we've been able to get to where we are now. So let's project forward and say, nice, we can continue this path because we'll knock that one off, we'll knock that one off and lock that one off. And that's been a helpful reframe where now I look at shiny objects as future opportunities and it just continues to compound the confidence that you can do this forever. And it's not going to go away and you're going to have continued new things to build and new things to try.

Yeah, I mean, I said inverted. How terrible would it be if you reached a point in your business and you, like, hit a new high score, but then you were confronted by the fact that you're like, wow, I hit that. But I'm now out of things to do. I've done everything. There is no more lever to push. There are no more ideas. And I think, like, I actually like thinking about it more that way because it, it helps me realize how ridiculous that is and how much better it is to have this really massive later list. Because the bigger the later list gets, the more confident you should get in knowing you can grow forever. You always have the next thing to do.

And your ability to execute each item on that list is only going to get better as you knock down more things in front of it, you build more skills that make it easier, faster, more leverage, all of that. Then on the early 20s, this also deserves some kind of writing because the way I think about this is your first couple years in those early 20s. As I think back to mine, right when I started at blackrock, right when I started, just in the corporate world or in the real world is each of those years, I almost think about it as you have this path right from age really 0 to 22. If you went to college, you know the exact guardrails, and then you take all the guardrails off. And so each year people think of, oh, it's just another year. But so Much happens from 22 to 23, 23 to 24 as a percentage of your real world growth that it feels extremely uncomfortable where once you get into 27, 28, each new year is only 10%, 20% of your kind of real world career. But that first year it's 100%, it's all you have. And then that second year, it's still 50%. Right? You've only been in there for two years. So each, the amount of growth that happens in that time, I think becomes extremely uncomfortable because you're confronted with, wow, I really could go and do anything. And now I have to make those decisions of where I'm actually going to go. This is not the perfect framework, but that's how I think about it, is it's not just the same amount of growth from 14 to 15 or 21 to 22, but that 22 to 25 range. Because I remember very clearly thinking, what the hell am I doing? Am I going to be doing this forever? Am I going to be living here forever? Do I like this? Do I hate this? Do I like these people? I'm hanging out with everything. You're just confronted with the guardrails being taken off and you're kind of on your own. But no one has it figured out in the early 20s. Where I keep going is I hear people talk about, in my 20s, I did X. When I talk to older people and they talk about this long decade as like, yeah, I did that, I did one thing, I, I did this, I spent my twenties, this, and I don't even think about it right. But when you're in your 20s, it's every single day feels a little bit like there's so much going on. So I'm just trying to extend the time horizon. And a lot of this. It's fun to hear you talk to our, our 24 year old sales guys because I'm only 27, so I'm like listening in, like, what's Cole saying to these guys? Because a lot of that still applies to me. And they're in terms of entrepreneurial years, which I think are different than just corporate years. When you're kind of building your own thing or working for a small startup, it's you kind of start over. I don't look at it like I've been working now for five years out of college. I'm like, I've been working full time now on entrepreneurship for a year in three months. So I'm like listening in as you give this advice to other people too.

Yeah, no, I, I totally agree with that. And I do think that is where I have a bit, maybe more pattern recognition or a bit more quote unquote experience than most people because my entrepreneurship journey started when I was 26, you know, so 27, 28, 29, 31, 32. So I have, you know, seven, seven and a half years of entrepreneurship working years, you know, and, and that is, that's like seven years working for yourself and building your own things is sort of like, you know, 30, 40 years, I think working for a big company and just sort of like you're just, your learning is so compressed. But something I wanted to share because this came up when I was talking with one of them is, you know, I'm just, I'm feeling a high sense of urgency. I just want to know where everything's headed. And like, you know, my, my personal goal is like, I want to make $10 million, you know, and I'm like, okay, why don't we set a goal of making 100k, you know, just saving 100k, you know, at some point in your 20s, just make that goal. And then when I said that, the reaction was like, sure, why not? And I was like, what do you mean why? Why not? Does that seem like intimidating? And he was like, yeah, yeah, it just seems like a big number. And I was like, so wait, you. 10 million seems reasonable, but 100k seems intimidating. And I think ever since this conversation, this was like two days ago, and I can't stop thinking about it because I think so many people way overestimate how much money you need in order to be happy. They just, they're like, I need $100 million or I won't live the life of my dreams. It's like, okay, no you don't. And then what's even more interesting is when you, the reasonable goal and you're like, how about we just get up to having 50k in your, in your, in liquidity, just, you have 50k to your name, 100k. It's almost like by making the goal more realistic, it becomes more intimidating because now you have to actually confront the fact that it's like, whoa, wait, I don't actually know how to save 100k. I don't know how to do that in my life. But, but I can throw 10 million out there because it seems so outlandish that it's like this dream, like it's. They're so disconnected. And the follow up point is, as we were digging into it, I was like, you need to understand that if you save, you know, and I use save as in liquidity, S&P 500, you know, something that's just loosely liquid, right? If you save 100k in your 20s, two things happen. One, your whole perspective around time shifts. Because now you know that you have 100k sitting in the background, which means you are no longer making decisions day to day. You can start projecting out a little bit further and you can start making decisions for three months from now, or six months from now, or a year from now, because you have that buffer, you have that Runway. And the only way you can ever really start building is by changing your perspective of time, allowing yourself to take bigger bets. And the only way you can change your perspective of time comfortably is going, I have this foundation that I can stand on. And then second, and this is what I was trying to explain and I wanted to plant the seed now, because I'm really now going through it even in my 30s, is like, if you're in your 20s, and you have 100k saved up, and then you go out to the bar, and you meet your friends for Taco Tuesdays, and they're all like, I really. I need to move out of this shithole apartment. I'm trying to get a new apartment, but I don't have the two grand in order to put down the security deposit. And, like, you're listening to their life, and you're going, whoa. I am now in a completely different stratosphere. I make decisions differently. I have a different level of freedom. I have a different level of autonomy and choice. And then if you do that in your 20s, and that's uncomfortable, it's like you need to. You need to confront the discomfort of realizing you've unlocked a higher level of privilege and choice and freedom than your peers. Because when you get in your 30s, it gets worse. And then when you get in your 40s, I imagine it gets worse after that because everything scales, right? It's like, in your 20s, it's like, your friend can't get the apartment. You can. But in your 30s, it's like, I can get the house I want. My friend can't get the house he wants. You know? Or it's like, I can hire a nanny for my kids. My friend can't hire a nanny. Like, all of a sudden, the problems really start. Like, the disconnect gets bigger. And so, anyway, just all these things have been swirling for me in that, like, if you do nothing else in your 20s but put your head down and save your first hundred K, you will set yourself up for a very different life thereafter.

Charlie Munger said it. Said that first 100k is A. But you got to do it. You got to do whatever you can to save the first 100k. Granted, that was a while ago, so it might be a little bit more at this point, but it's. It's. It's funny to have, or it's not funny, but I like our team perspective, because if you, me, and then them, and it's different ages where we're all about five years, four years apart, you know? And so a little bit different of perspective I'm learning a ton from you is I watch you navigate engagement and marriage and all of that in the background, while I just have fewer responsibilities than I know what to do with. So it's good to see other perspectives and learn from what you're up to as well.

I was just gonna say, and I love having Katie on the team. Katie's got kids, and so whenever I see Katie, juggling kids and everything that we're building, like that inspires the shit out of me. I'm like, well, if K can do it, I mean, I, I don't even have the kids yet, so there's no reason why I can, you know. So I agree. Having that age spectrum in a, in a company, but especially a small team is really cool.

We're all learning from one another, which is great. Okay, so our framework for deciding what to do next. I put together that notion doc and I sent it to you. And I want to intro the thinking with two paths you can take at any point in a business that I think sets the foundation for our conversation. You can really do two things in terms of choosing what to build. You can build a new product that becomes a new revenue source, or you can make more money from your current revenue sources. It's like top level, we have X products for sale. We can figure out how to make more money from those products or we can create a new product. I think that's like the immediate decision. And you do that analysis of which one of those. Right. That's the hardest decision. Most people go, no, no, no, no, I'll do both. Like I'll start marketing this one more and I'll start building this one more. You can't, you can't do it. We've learned that the hard way of trying to do that. You can either make more from your current thing, which has its own process of bottleneck analysis, what to work on within that, do you need more leads, more conversion, or tighter operations on those things, or do you need to go build something new? So I sent you that doc of, well, to make that choice, you should probably evaluate all the new things that you could go do and all the current things that you could optimize and start to think about which one's going to take a certain amount of effort, which one's going to have the longest compounding revenue increase, which one takes the least effort, which one takes which one requires more people to hire. So I want to just drove that framework out there because that really from the highest level is the business decision you're making. First of, are we going to spend more time on our current thing or are we going to build something new?

I love that as a focusing question. I think there's some real opportunity in terms of the paid newsletters we've been experimenting with and like sort of a paid newsletter portfolio. But I think that's a, that's like a whole new thing and that's a Longer term thing, I think about it more like we have three verticals right now. We have ship 30, we have one off paid webinars or like we could even lump in like a new mini cohort or like some sort of like tangential product in there. And we have pga and I guess for now with the one off stuff. But I think like longer term it would be great to think of that as like a whole separate bucket. Almost think like mini publishing company and you have a handful of paid newsletters that all sit under this little umbrella.

Well, why don't we call that as one of the things? Because I think as we look at other opportunities that should be something we evaluate. Well, let's just say we have ship 30 a thing. We have PGA, we have newsletters and then we have one off products. Okay. And then there could be a new bucket if we wanted to. Right? That's a whole thing. If we wanted to do this right, that would be a whole new bucket.

So what, what's your take on what we have that's existing and is our. Is our current bottleneck right now we have more to build and optimize in what we currently have. Or have we gotten to the point where it's like now we're ready for something new?

Well, here's here. Here's where it gets fun. First, there's not going to be a perfect answer. Second, the way I think about it is what is the. I listed out all the new things we could do, right? Because just putting that out there of where could we deploy new efforts and it's. We could launch the back end to the ghostwriting program where it's helping you scale your ghostwriting agency to 50k a month. That's an entire lift. That's a big project. We could spend similar amount of time writing our digital business newsletter that we want to do that goes on the back of espresso hour limited resources. Could we build those in parallel potentially? Is it something we should just start doing? You know, that's the trade off. We had that idea for Fix my offer Mini Cohort, right, Where we did a group coaching. Everyone comes in, submits their offer, gives us all the numbers of their traffic, their email, whatever it is. And we do like a big roundtable where we talk about each one. Everyone gets to learn from one another, right? You get access to the recordings, you get to see other people in other niches and other businesses. Think about theirs. I would love to attend something like that. Right. You think about the amount of effort that that takes compared to the other ones, it's a lot. What's the revenue upside? We'd have to model that out. We could go hard on YouTube for six months, two or three videos a week, bang them out. High quality stuff that takes as much effort as the other things. What would that do for us? Right. So those are I think kind of our new bucket. And then optimizing our current is you look at. Okay, well what are we doing currently? I think we've reached the optimization point of ship 30 where the incremental effort there beyond fulfilling like hell on the program. When people join, giving them an amazing experience where they tell their friends the newsletter, start writing online guide, that's kind of done. Pga, we figured out that the bottleneck is just number of people going through the email course. Right. We look at the entire roadmap of someone figuring out about us to joining and you can model out each point. And it's pretty simple solution. We need more people going through the EEC and seeing it. So how do we solve that bottleneck? Well, to optimize that, we could do paid ads to the newsletter, we could sponsor other newsletter newsletters or we could have some kind of webinar that we drive a bunch of traffic to talk about something valuable and then have people fill out the application there. All of those opportunities take about not the same amount of time. Some have less, some have more, but you can't do all of them. And one of our favorite frameworks is you can do anything you want in business, but not everything and only one thing at a time. So of this whole list, you kind of need to pick one and we have to have the discipline to pick one. I'm always of the camp of you will never regret optimizing your current thing a little bit too far. That is always the lowest hanging fruit. The lowest hanging fruit is never to go build something new. It's to optimize your current thing. And so I look at it as that's where we should start.

Why?

Because when you optimize your current thing, you more than likely don't have to hire anyone new. Your current team can continue to fulfill. You likely don't have to do anything crazy. It's probably just hours. There's not that much creative thinking. It's usually a pretty straightforward solution to keep knocking down those bottlenecks. Right. If we started running paid ads to the EEC and had a predictable way of generating new email subscribers, that solves a lot of our problems. So that's why I think it's the most Important one. But what's interesting about that is. God, it's like a 10D matrix, right? Because that takes upfront work, but then works for you forever versus all the other ones that when you start a new product, require ongoing maintenance. So a lot of optimizations you build once they work forever, new products take an extended period of time. So that's another reason why you should optimize before you go build something new. It's if the thing I'm currently working on is going to continue working for me in the future, what can I build that's going to continue to compound along with it rather than going having to start from zero on something else?

Yeah, this is like a 10D matrix. There's so many different, like, decision trees in my head right now. So. Okay, so here's what's interesting. Because you wrote up this notion doc, I'm staring at it while we talk. So as I look at each of the things on this doc, what's going through my mind, just to make the process clear, clear for anyone listening is I'm trying to figure out what is dependent on what and what would be more valuable if we did after something versus before something. You know, like in, like, what's the order? You know, I had a mentor who used to say, give 10 entrepreneurs the same resources and they will all end up in different places. Because it's not actually the resources, it's the. It's the decisions and the way you stack them that changes the outcomes. So here's what goes through my mind. Dickey. Couple couple things. So one is going hard on YouTube, which we've sort of. That's been on our later list for like a year and a half, you know, and right now, if you think about it, the bottleneck to that is we have a studio that's completely empty in the process of being built. Could we start by just doing it on zoom here? Yeah, but it's like we already know that the return of doing it in the studio versus just doing it, you know, more janky style here is going to be way higher. So the bottleneck of going hard on YouTube is studio being finished. Realistically, that will probably happen like fully finished. I'm gonna, I'm just gonna say September 1st.

Yeah, that should be the goal.

I think we might be able to like start, but like, let's just say September 1st.

Right.

So if we say we can't start that until September, the interesting follow on with that is that this, you know, digital business newsletter idea, the way that we've been Thinking about it is using these Espresso Hours as the spontaneous sort of more creative jams. See what comes up, you know, see what frameworks we unearth and then we crystallize them in this newsletter for people so that you can really get the compressed versions. And then that also crystallizes it for us which allows us to then go create more content on the back of that that isn't really dependent on the studio. So if we were going to like set the foundation, this could come earlier so that we have it up and running by the time the studio is going.

Right.

The thing about the Fix My Offer mini Cohort. So what goes through my mind on that is I think that the, the most likely funnel for that is going to actually be Espresso Hour business newsletter Fix My Offer. Right? And so something that I think we've Learned in doing ship 30 and like all the tangential thing like I think about the Jet Ski, remember when we did the one cohort of the Jet Ski and it was like that small group. So I think the, at least the model that I've really internalized is if you want to create some sort of new cohort based program, I really, really think the best way to do it is not invest in anything up front. No, no fancy landing page, no fancy like, you know, email segmentation. Like literally nothing. You just take where's my audience and go. It's going to be on Zoom for these days. Like sign up here and here's some info like version 00001 and just do a cohort so that we can learn what worked, what didn't work. Do people like it? People not like it, you know, and so if you think about like when could we run that experiment? That's probably not going to happen until you know, we could say late September or October, maybe early November. That's sort of the window. And if it's not, then that it would happen next year, you know. And so even just like putting these pieces in and if we say optimizing our current thing, which is where we landed, like we can do this now.

Couple things on that. If you would like to subscribe to that digital business newsletter where we take the frameworks we talk about here, really crystallize them in how you can apply them to your digital business. Leave a comment, let us know. We're looking to name it. If you have any naming ideas. We're playing around some. We're not going to drop them here, but we're workshopping it and if you'd be interested in that kind of fix, my offer group, everyone talks about what they're working on. They show their numbers, they show everything. And we just talk about how you can get more leads, better conversion, tighter operations across everyone. Let us know too, because those are some of the things we're thinking about doing later in the year. But I like that sequencing, right? We can't do YouTube until September. We'll then have the choice of if we do that or just continue to do espresso hour digital business newsletter where what's the bottleneck to YouTube? Having scripted videos. How can we write those scripts ahead of time with the newsletter? Right. If we're formalizing a lot of the things, we can then start to basically create a YouTube content plan before we even get there via our newsletter, via our podcast.

And so I guess the final point where my now, you know, watching all this sort of click into place, this leaves open. So there's a block right now. So it's, you know, how long is it going to take for us to set up sponsoring newsletters or paid ads to our newsletter? You know that. I mean, we work fast. I don't think that that's going to be a month long project. And, and if it is a month long project, you know, it's, it's going to only. You can only do so many hours at a time because you're going to have bottlenecks, whatever. And then if you think a little bit further into the year and if we're like, we've got. I know that once, let me put it this way, I know once we have that studio, you and I are going to be itching to ramp up content. So like all of a sudden our focus is going to go, yeah, we want to spend more time in here. We want to be doing this. Which means I think now July and August, rest of July and August is. And then through like all the way through the end of August is our time to build the bridge product from the EC to PGA. And our time to get the V1 of the mastermind up. Because if we get, if we like push and get that done now, the whole rest of the year like benefits off the back of that. Whereas if we don't, it's like you miss the window and then shiny objects studio's done. We want to go hard on content and then it's like, oh, we got to circle back in February to go do that. It's like, no, no, no, this is the time to bust it out.

And it makes even more sense to have better backend monetization and fulfillment vehicles. When you go, let's go make a ton of more content, you always want to strike the balance. But you, when faced with the choice between more content and a better monetization stream, when you know that content is likely going to work right, it's delayed gratification. Build, do the hard work up front. And then you know that every second you spend on content afterwards is more valuable because you've built up more equity on that. So that makes sense to me because I do think that we. And then you go into the who, not how question. If we start sponsoring newsletters, does that have to be us or could there be an agency? I think there's a huge opportunity for agencies. If you're listening to this and you want a free business idea, it's you help people sponsor other newsletters and that's all you do. You audit the creative, you, you manage the payment, you, you find the niche newsletters, you do the communication like a done for you newsletter sponsorship, you show the reports, all of it. Not sponsoring. Like, we don't want anyone to sponsor us. We want to go buy sponsorship slots in targeted newsletters. And I think that's an incredibly valuable agency if you can get that right.

It's a lot easier to make money when you have money. You know, it's like, it's just a flywheel. But I think it's. What's also interesting is from an idea perspective, when you have a business, it's so much easier to come up with business ideas because you're constantly confronted by problems. You know, and yesterday we were talking about that Dickie and we were like, how does no one have an agency that just specializes in this? Like, where is this? And that's often where the best ideas come from. So I also want to point that out where, you know, literally start anything, just start building anything. And as you build it, you're going to go, I need this thing. Why doesn't it exist? Great, there's your next business business idea that, there's your next scaling idea, there's your next department idea.

And then on here is also going hard on IG threads. But again, that doesn't take very much effort. We can build a process around just passively building on there and seeing what happens. So that brings us to optimizing our current thing. And so this bottleneck analysis has already been done when you choose to optimize something. We talked about this in the identify iterate identify inhale iterate framework where you got to identify the bottleneck you inhale resources to solve it and then you iterate the process of solving it. That's talk about a newsletter we're eventually going to write. It's that framework or when you pick something, how do you identify what the actual bottleneck is? So we looked at every metric, we got it all on a spreadsheet and go, oh, here it is, very clear as day. How do we solve that? We need more people to see it. What are all the ways we could get more people to see it? Listed all those out and we settled on we're going to experiment with some paid ads on Twitter and meta and Instagram to our email course. Just calling, hey, freelance writers, start positioning yourself as a premium ghostwriter. Here's a free email course. I've seen zero people on earth zero run paid ads to an email course. It's always to a vsl. So I'm very interested to see what the uptake is and if we're, and.

If we're wrong and if it doesn't work, we'll just go make a VSL in a weekend.

And so again, what's the upside? Downside. We talked about making convex bets and downside. We pay X amount for an agency and we learn that paid ads don't work to EECs. Otherwise we're going to go years thinking how could we do that? Right. It's also something we can do in parallel because we have an agency do it rather than us doing it that allows us. So because you look at this list, if we could hire an agency to do the sponsorship too, then we only have to focus on the new things. Where are our best efforts spent on creating those new things that then work for us forever rather than maintaining a system that does not work for you forever that you have to continue running. So that's another framework of if I'm the one reaching out to all the sponsors and doing that work, that by definition means I'm not working on the operational side of the Mastermind or on the Bridge or the webinar, other things like that.

This is such a fun game.

And what's so cool about this podcast is we would have done this meeting anyway in private. That's why I wanted to do it, because this is exactly how we think about things. Right Friday morning we usually grab some espresso and we talk about it. I'm like, let's just do this decision making and walk through this matrix because we just threw a lot out there and hidden underneath there is a very clean framework that we could re listen to. This multiple times and say, okay, let's actually write about this and share it with other people. Because there's like the V0, which is us just getting the idea out there, and then there's the crystallization. And then from there we've talked about turning that into a tightly formatted, edited, scripted YouTube video. And that's our long term way to talk about this. It's podcast V0. Write it up to crystallize, film, something high quality, on and on. That flight will spin.

All right, well, in typical Friday espresso meeting fashion, you ready for my shiny object idea?

As is tradition, we always. We always end on. On something where I love it because you go, you preface it because you know it's going to. It takes something else in my brain. You go, all right, complete shiny object here.

Yeah, well, I learned. I learned. Yeah, I learned early on. It was like our first year working together. I learned that if I didn't preface it, you, I think you heard it as like, I was telling you that this should be a priority, and then you would get super anxious being like, no, no, no, no, no, we can't do this right now. So I've learned now I just preface and go, this has no priority. But it's on the later list. Okay. Okay. So I've been thinking a lot about. I think there's a tremendous opportunity in building a paid newsletter portfolio. I think about it through the same lens of, you know, most people don't know that one of the largest publishing companies in the world is Agora Publishing. They were the first ones to really pioneer the paid newsletter category 20 years ago. They were the early ones being like, subscribe to this newsletter, get stock tips, you know, whatever. And how they scaled. They scaled, you know, to over a billion dollars is they just created all of these super niche newsletters. But each niche, you know, in some way was tied to helping people improve their life, make more money or not lose money. And then the model was very simple. They would, like, have their style guide, they'd hire the writer, the writer would own that newsletter, and then it would just be added to their portfolio. And as we've been talking about the idea of, like, who not how, you know, old me, that idea would have just defaulted to, like, how many newsletters can I write? Which is just not sustainable, you know, and now I'm thinking more like, who's the person that we could hire where we empower them with the whole playbook? It's the Tesla. We don't make cars. We make factories that make Cars. And we give them the playbook for finding really niche creators that are growing, creating that. The framing of like, what's the positioning of the newsletter? That's where you and I could help and be highest leverage. Creating the style guide of like, how does that newsletter operate? But then part of the big benefit is they plug into our whole ecosystem. We can drive traffic, you know, we can. There's a lot of things we can do to support. But then you think about how where that model goes is each of the paid newsletters basically like covers your costs or maybe is a little profitable. But then you can start helping those creators launch Async products on the back end of them. And I think, like, there's something really interesting about, you know, when you think of defensibility of a business long term. It's like, how do we juxtapose the fact that we have these like pillar programs that do really, really well, but they're. It's very like centralized, you know, it's like, oh, we have one program that does half of the revenue of the business, you know, juxtaposed by this portfolio of smaller assets that are each cash flowing a little bit, you know, and have longer term potential. And there's something I really like about the, the defensibility of that and the compounding of the attention that, that we and they would get in the same ecosystem.

And this is Shiny Object Friday, because I look at this list of all the other things that we just talked about doing, it's like, no, we gotta do this. I'm like, damn, that sounds sick. I want to go do that.

And Dickie, here's the best part. It's just a bullet point. This is one bullet point.

This launch paid newsletter portfolio, like on our to do list. That's how. But that's the thing. That's how our brains work. It's like, all right, let's make this list. It's like, you know, reach out to accountant, follow up, like post YouTube video launch, ghostwriting Mastermind newsletter portfolio. And it's like, they're all there. It's just bullet points. And we started to recognize, okay, we're no longer allowed to talk about projects and bullet points. We have to put them on a page and we have to put them.

On the later list.

And then you have this big long space to just dump ideas. And so I do think we should do that because what that allows us, once we have that playbook. So first off, if you're listening to this and you would really like to run and operate that leave a comment, let us know. Reach out to us. That's how to be honest, we're going to find that person is someone who goes, I love newsletters. I'm going to do that.

I'm in.

Let's go. Reach out to us. Second, I like that lens because then we can spot People in Ship 30 who are talking about a niche topic and go tap in right now. Let's go. Let's get you. Let's get you up and running. We're going to. You skip the whole game. Like, we'll tap you into our network.

You're. You're totally right. I. I feel silly for not even, like, create, like, doing that bridge in my brain. But, yeah, ship 30 then becomes this massive sourcing for us. And what I've always found is that people with the most compelling niches, like, fail to realize it themselves. Like, I did that for years. Like, for years. The niche of, hey, Cole, you should probably go write about digital writing, like, was staring me at the. In the face, and I was just like, no, I don't think that that's going to work. You know, and so that's what's cool, too, is now we've built up all this pattern recognition, and we do it, like, think about how many cohorts we see a shipper, and we're like, that niche is going to crush, you know, so then we have a vehicle to spot it, fund it, empower it, grow it. It's awesome.

Add it to the later list. As is tradition. Good. That was good. A lot of good stuff there. A lot of good stuff to distill. Anything else top of mind?

I mean, no, this is. I think this is one of the cool parts about this podcast, and it's sort of doing our meetings in public because I feel like we just had a meeting and I feel like we now know what to go sprint on. I feel like I kind of have my. Again, this is how the rest of the year is going to go. This is the priority list, you know, and I'm actually glad because I hadn't really admitted it fully to myself. I'm glad that we've crystallized, once that studio's done, we're going to want to hang out in that studio, and we're going to want to create in that studio. So now I'm motivated to go, what can I crank on and get off the list? So that when that day comes, it's like, we did it. Now we can move into the next chapter. Love it.

All right. This is a good one. If you enjoyed this, let us know. Leave a comment. Send us a dm. If you're on Spotify or Apple, give us a five star review. Take a screenshot, put this on your Instagram story, put it on your Twitter page, send it to a friend. That's the way that this podcast grows. If you're on YouTube, leave a comment. Subscribe like, hit the notification bell. As always, if you leave a comment with your three biggest subscribers. Takeaways. So this is not just passive learning, it's active learning. Take a second. Take 10 minutes, distill what we talked about. Leave a comment. You can get access or enter the competition to join the next Ship 30 cohort for free. But we're also going to start to give away some other things, maybe some hats, maybe some swag to those who leave comments. We do this because one, it helps us when people leave more comments. Two, it helps you learn when you actually listen to something like this and you don't just turn it off and go, that was nice. But if you actually put some of them into practice, because that's our goal. All about action here. No fluff, just tactical advice. So if you enjoyed this style where we do maybe a monthly meeting where it's like, all right, here's what we're going to do for the next month or the next three months, let us know as well. But that's all I got. Any last things, Cole? That's it. Boom. See you guys next week. Have a good one. Y'.

All out.