How Khe Hy Went From Wall Street Burnout to Fulfilled Solopreneur By Writing Online
31 Mar 2022 · 69 min
This is a podcast titled "How Khe Hy Went From Wall Street Burnout to Fulfilled Solopreneur By Writing Online" featuring a detailed conversation primarily between Dickie Bush, Khe Hy, and Cole Schafer. The discussion explores Khe Hy's journey from a long career on Wall Street to becoming a successful solopreneur through writing newsletters, coaching, and creating courses centered around productivity and Notion. The conversation covers topics such as starting a newsletter, overcoming imposter syndrome, audience growth strategies, and the philosophy behind Khe Hy's work. The content is an in-depth interview-style talk recorded in 2022, focusing on personal transformation, entrepreneurship, and online writing.
Welcome to the Digital Writing podcast, where we talk about using writing to capture, keep, and monetize attention. If you're looking to build an audience, start a business, and scale yourself online, you're in the right spot. We're pumped to have with us. Kay. Hi. Today we're going to dig into a ton of stuff, writing, newsletters, Twitter, all that good stuff. But I'll start with a quick story of actually how I met K, which was I was. So this was two years ago, a little over two years ago, January 2020. So I was 24 years old, and I was kind of exploring online and reading and had been, you know, silently lurking on Twitter and newsletters for a long time. And I came across across K's blog, and he had this one post that talked about how he started his newsletter. And I remember reading it and thinking, wow, this is awesome. As I dug into his story a little bit, I saw he worked at blackrock, which at the time was where I currently worked. And just a few days after that, he was putting in or putting together a meetup in New York City, right up the street from my office. So I said, okay, I got to go to this. And I very vividly remember walking out of the office, kind of surrounded by some sad faces. It was 7:30pm People, like, buckling down for a late night, and was like, okay, I'm out of here today. And I went over to the meetup, and here I see K just happy as hell, smiling, talking about all this fun stuff he was doing and the fact that he had worked at Blackrock for 13 years. I still very vividly remember that moment and thinking, dang, this is. That's a path I want to take. And so I got to chat with Kay a little bit, and he said some words that to this day changed my life. It was, write a newsletter for 52 weeks in a row and watch it change your life. And I took that to heart, went home the next day, published my first newsletter that Sunday, and here we are two years later. And I can point. I mean, the reason we're on this call, the reason I no longer work at BlackRock, the reason I'm kind of in control of my own situation now, don't have a boss. Is all because of that few words of advice from Kay. So first off, thank you. And this is a pretty cool full circle moment to come all the way back around.
Oh, man, this is awesome. Thank you, Dickie. Thank you, Cole. Thank you, Daniel. Thanks all of you for taking the time to chill with us today. I'm honored. One thing Dickie's missing about that story was, let's remember January 2020, right? Because we all know what happened in February 2020. And so there was, like, in this bar, there was, like, so much, like, yelling into people's ears. Like, I think what I said, like, I probably, like, landed a few little spit bubbles at his ear when I was like, start a newsletter would change your life. Because it was so loud and dark and so. So, yeah, that was. I always remember that, too, because I'm like, oh, my God, that was the last time. That was the last meetup I did. I still haven't done one since COVID And so, like, that. That day has. In addition to what you shared, which is an incredible store and trajectory that that specific day has. Has a. Has a lot of, like, emotional significance to me. Yeah.
And it really started everything. And that was almost before it was kind of cool to write and start a newsletter. Like, January 2020 was before everyone was stuck inside for the next, you know, four or five months, where everyone started to kind of get on the Internet. So you were ahead of the curve on that front for sure. So why don't we start there with. I know your kind of origin was you started a newsletter, and you were just sending it to your friends, and from there, you kind of latched onto a few things. Can you talk just a little bit about. Spend a few minutes on the origin of rad Reads and why you started it, where it came from, that kind of thing?
Absolutely. So rad. The word rad is my homage to, like, 90s skate and surf culture, to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that I grew up watching. And it's like, a little bit of me, like, thumbing my nose at Wall street where, like, I just wanted, like, when I left, I wanted, like, all these older, mostly men to have to say the word rad, like, often. And so I was like, okay, like, that's why I'm going to name my company Rad Reads. And we should talk about, like, naming things. Rad Reads, actually. Very good alliteration. I didn't know it at the time, but it actually is, like, a good name. Um, and so I worked on Wall Street. I worked on Wall street for 14 years. 13. 14 years. Uh, I had a third of a life crisis. I kind of looked around, and I saw the people that were 10 years older than me, and. And I was having a great career, and I'm like, I don't want that life, you know? And they had, you know, two x fives and they lived in Summit in Chatham, New Jersey. And they commuted and they, like, took their beer, like. Like for, you know, their beer at Grand Central or Penn Station. And, you know, every night I was just like, it's not a bad life. Like, their kids went to great schools. They had amazing vacations. They stayed at Four Seasons and all that good stuff. And I was just like, this is not for me. I would like to opt out of this trajectory, but I had no idea what I was going to. I was. I mean, I majored in computer science and economics, and I worked in this, like, very niche part of finance all my life. I never identified as an entrepreneur. I never identified as a writer. I never identified as a creative person. I was just like, I'm the finance guy that's, like, good at numbers. And so I was like, I need to quit. And we could talk about some of the projects I had going. This was almost seven years ago now, so it's a long time ago. Like, you said. Well, you said this is before people had newsletters. Think about 2015, right? That was like, four years before Substack, right? So, anyway, so I had this. I decided I was going to quit. I took 18 months of savings. And this is very different than the path Dickie and Cole have taken. I'm less familiar with Cole's story, But I took 18 months of saving. I talked to my wife, and I was like, can we light this money on fire? And what I mean by that is, can k experiment with things for 18 months, and if it goes to zero, then our family is okay. We had some savings. That's the good thing about Wall street. Thirteen years will give you the ability to light some money on fire, um, and give us 18 months to try things out. And I knew myself that I didn't want to chill. I didn't want to party. I didn't want to. I wanted to travel just a tiny bit to get it out of my system. But I wanted to do stuff. I wanted to do cool stuff. And so that's where I had this little newsletter. It was 36 people on a Gmail BCC. It was link blogging, you know, eons before Substack existed. And I just started sending. I set one issue. I can remember the articles. There's an article on Elon Musk. There was an article on, like, Louis CK Being interviewed by Marc Maron. There was an article on first principles Thinking. There's an article on Atul Gawande on, like, confronting your mortality, which is ironic. Like, seven years later, A lot of the themes that I still write about. Right. So it's kind of like on brand without even knowing it. And I hit send with a Gmail BCC famous last words at the bottom. I don't know when I'll do this again. I don't know when I'll have the time to do this again. People started saying, hey, this is really good. Do it again, please do it again. And that started off the journey. So there was that 18 months of experimentation catalyzed by a 36 person Gmail BCC newsletter.
And so you, that was all you had at the time when you stepped away. It was a 36 person newsletter in 18 months of hey, I'm going to go figure this out.
Yes. Which is very different than what you have when you quit. And so I commend that.
It is quite different. And you know, I'm still inspired by that. So can you walk us through a little bit of that 18 months of what you explored and how that led to eventually? Cause I want to dig into your, your 10K philosophy and some of the things you do, some of your core things that you think about. But what was it about that 18 months for you? What'd you explore?
Yeah, so the cool thing was that I had, the money thing was off the table because like we had put a safe container around what we were willing to do. So that was like, I mean, I still have a lot of issues with money as an entrepreneur and cohort based courses, but that was. So that was resolved. And so then it was really. It's going to sound kind of cliched, but it was just like, what makes me happy? Like, I'm going to do things that make me happy. And that involved hanging around people that made me happy. And they were, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of creative folks, a lot of people who, you know, there were a lot of people quitting finance back then too. You just, they weren't as vocal as you and I. So, you know, hanging around folks who inspired me writing this newsletter. And the thing about the newsletter, I never really thought it was going to become a business and it's still kind of not the business. But the thing about the newsletter is that it gave me like these little lily pads to jump around. Right. So I had this newsletter and I was just writing link, link, blogging, summarizing five articles. Okay, then I need a name. It was like, oh, like how do you come up with a name? Like, I read some books and posts about coming up with a name. It's not the easiest process, right? Then it came up with a name. Then I'm like, oh, shoot, I need a landing page. I'm like, oh, but I don't really. Like a kind of new HTML. It's like, so what makes a good landing page? Like, what's a sign up flow? Like, where do you put your logo? Then I'm like, oh, I got to put words on this landing page. So I have to think about copywriting. And then like, oh, well, how will people find this landing page? Like, on social, on search. And so like, just these little hops from like one lily pad to another. I don't know what is up with my wiring, but I found it super fun. And what I loved about it was that you had real time feedback on it so you could change the headline of your landing page and see if, like, more people signed up or less people signed up. I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool. Like, it actually had a lot of similarities to investing.
I was just gonna say that.
So I started to do all these things and then there was like a few watershed moments. We could talk about them all. But the first one was, I think my newsletter probably hit like 500 people within couple six months just through word of mouth. And someone reached out to me and said, kate, you seem to have figured something out. Can you coach me and my management team on happiness? I'm like, huh? Like, a, I'm not a coach. B, I guess I've been happy, like, since I've been doing this thing. C, I don't know what, how I would do that, how I would charge, what that even looks like. Sure, sign me up. And so, and the first thing I said, I remember, like, you know, I've worked with a lot of coaches, and that's actually a big part of my journey and like, staying sane. But I remember saying to this person, like, I've got a list of really good coaches. They're like, no, we want you. I'm like, oh. And it's like, yeah, we've seen you. And then this is what it hit me with the newsletter. I'm like, what do you know about me? Like, other than I worked on Wall Street? He's like, I've seen your thinking evolve over the last six months. And just from summarizing other people's articles, I didn't even have the courage to write my own blog posts. So he gave me a shot and I went in and I'm like, oh, damn. It was a hedge fund manager. So I kind of threw A kind of high price. And he was like, sure. And that was a moment I knew I didn't want to become a coach, but that was a moment where I'm like, oh, I might not have to go back. Because that was like this nagging fear is like, I'm going to screw this thing up and I'm going to have to go back. And so when someone offered like, and to all of you, like making that first transaction, getting that first buy, whether it's like a 199 ebook, a $30 coaching session, whatever, consulting session, that is just such a boost of confidence. And you're like, oh, damn, I have something. I didn't think I had anything people wanted other outside of finance. And I had something. And so that really started to catalyze. So I did like coaching and the newsletter and that kind of like through the whole 18 months out the window because I wasn't, I mean, depending on the month, but I was kind of covering my living expenses at that point with coaching. And so it kind of made the 18 month thing kind of kind of meaningless as long as I wasn't like trying to save more money in that, in that specific phase. So that was like the first moment and that was like the first couple of years.
There's a couple things I just want to double click on here. One is, you know, this, this idea of someone believing in you early. You said you wrote, you wrote your first couple emails and you'd get an email back going, oh, this is so important. You know, I remember I started writing online as a teenager and some guy commented on my first gaming blog ever and said, oh, I'm really looking forward to reading more of your stuff. I mean, I thought I just played Madison Square Garden, you know, like I, that it just was huge to me. I didn't even know that was an automated message at the time. He was just commenting on that to everyone.
Right.
But it like, it gave me that feeling. So I guess I'm just curious too, like when that happened, why did that impact you so much and did it need to keep happening to motivate you? Or was it just, it happened once and you were like, I'm off and running.
Yeah, it's a great question and it's a great feeling. Like if you could see my arms, like I got goosebumps thinking about, I still keep all the notes people send me. I have something I'll drop it in called a jar of awesome. And anytime someone sends me a nice note, I just keep it in the jarbox. And then I used to go back and read them. So it's been around.
That's so smart.
Seven years now. It's like, if you want, like, happiness and joy on command, like, there's no better way than to keep a jar of awesome because you realize that we're just. We're just like, you know, our happiness is just this, like, collection of, like, little micro moments. It's actually not like, catching the huge wave or like, getting the first sale or like, things like that. So about the human interaction of it. But so to answer your question, I was a. I was like a lot of imposter syndrome. I'm like, what? Like, this guy's like 20 years older than me and this and that. And, you know, I quit this job and I wasn't like, I could talk about it confidently now, but, like, I wasn't confident that I had made the decision, the right decision for like a couple of years. Right. And every day it felt slightly less risky, but I was, like, not sure that, like, I walked away from, like, a pretty high salary for nothing. So that was one thing. Like, there was an imposter syndrome. That was the first one. And by the way, the imposter. For those of you who are struggling with imposter syndrome, like, who am I to be writing about this? Who. Who am I like to. Like, why should people listen to this? Like, it, it goes away, but it doesn't go away. Like, you're going, I still feel it before I hit send. I'm like, ah, you know, and someone will challenge me. They'll be like, you know, for every nice note, there's an occasional like, f off. Like, who do you think you are to command expertise on this topic? But to go back to your point, Cole, it was awesome. And it still is. Like, much of my career as an entrepreneur is motivated by things that bring me joy. Again, that's going to sound like super woo, woo. But that's the truth. If it doesn't bring me joy, I don't do it. If it brings me joy, I double down on it. And that's been a formula that has worked for me. You know, I'm touching wood. And the interaction, these micro interactions, like you probably see on my Twitter feed, like, I try to, like, if people say nice things, like, I try to respond. Like, I can't always respond to everything, but I want to, like, I want to lift people up. I want to, like, be the cheerleader. I want to support people. I want to celebrate their wins because people have been doing it for me. Hmm.
I think a big lesson from that too is you only needed one person to give you an idea of a monetization opportunity. And instead of thinking, oh, if I need to go create a big plan and all this, you just said yes, and then you figured it out from there. Right. Versus and that shows the power. A lot of people think they need this big audience to tell them, hey, I, I need a big audience and then I can sell a product. Really, you need one person to say, I have a problem, you solve that problem and then you put your solution on the Internet and that's all it takes.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And there have been. That's one thing that, like, I move. I'm pretty risk averse. It might not sound it based on my career trajectory and the decisions that I've shared so far, but the one thing that I have done extremely well and I've made a lot of mistakes, which we should talk about them, is when something works, I like run as hard as I can and double down and I ship. And I just keep going at it. And I keep going at it. I don't overanalyze. I'm okay to ship faster versus lessening the quality slightly. I'll make that trade off. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. And so that is something that has served me really well and in all these little experiments that, that kind of landed me closer to my main, my main thing now.
So couple some tactical questions I'd love to ask.
You.
Might be familiar, might not. So big philosophy of ours is right on the Internet. Don't start a blog.
Right.
The newsletter is an interesting, it sits between those two worlds. You started with a newsletter which typically I tell people, don't do that because you have no reach.
Right.
So you have the ability to capture emails. But how are you going to reach.
Lots of new readers?
So A, if you started with a newsletter, how did you get your readers? And B, went along the journey like now where else do you write to kind of drive people to that?
It's a great question. And people always ask me, you know, knowing what you know today, if you were to like restart from zero, what would you, where would you start? And I, I wouldn't start with a newsletter. I would start, I would start with something that has a built in viral loop. And so that would be either Twitter, YouTube or TikTok. I would not podcast, I would not blog. I would maybe se. I, I have some strong views on SEO. I think it's pretty awesome. But it's a very different philosophy. Search engine Optimization and blogging. Instagram. I hate Instagram, so I have no comment on it. So that's kind of. That's what I would do differently. So I think times have changed too. And you, you and your community are kind of on the leading edge of that with social where I would have never, you know, I mean Dickie tells that story, but it's like, it's a flattering and nice story. But what he, what he forgets to add to that story is like where I really made my. Did all my damage was on Twitter, not with the advice that you gave me. So yeah, so we should add that to the. To the story, you know, with a little revisionist history.
What's funny is I have taken that advice and kind of turned it where now when people ask me the same thing, how do I get started? I don't say write a newsletter for 52 weeks. I say write and publish something every day on Twitter for 30 days.
Yeah.
So it accelerates the feedback loop a little bit because. But I needed to go through that, I think to make that realization. And so at the time it was the exact advice but.
And I needed to, I needed to see what you guys were doing and to hit some of the plateaus on growth. So I answered the second part of your question, Cole, to be like, oh, okay, I need to like figure out how to acquire new custom new new readers. So in the early days, Cole, the what? There were a few things that worked. 1. And they're all anchored by one principle. Like, I wrote stuff that I knew people would be excited to receive. So like, it was good, it was good, it was thoughtful. You could tell that I put in a lot of effort into it. And so a few things happened from that one. It got forwarded around a lot. So a lot of the growth was just organic word of mouth. Still to this day, there's a pretty. And that organic growth compounds like as obviously as your audience grows. That was one. The second was not a strategy by choice or intentional, but it worked out really well is because of what I was writing, journalists started following me. And journalists, a few of them wrote big pieces about me. So again, it was like nothing I could have predicted at the time. And I've actually tried to recreate that effect now with like, I've failed miserably. But basically there was like a good story like senior guy who leaves Wall street with no plan, willing to talk. Like that's pretty rare in that industry. Like people usually are very tight lipped because they want to keep the hold the option of going back. Not that I would talk shit or anything. Sorry if I, if I curse occasionally. So journalists heard of it, I had a good story and I was adding value to them. So they were reading my email and they were forwarding it amongst themselves as well. And so my story got picked up without any effort on my part by Bloomberg, cnn. And what was the. There was a third big one, Barron's. And then I got asked to speak at a Wall Street Journal conference. I bet that those four things took my newsletter. They all happened within the span of six months. They took my newsletter from like maybe 2,000 subscribers, organic word of mouth to like 15,000 in six months. So those were the big needle movers. And then there were a bunch, a few podcasts that I got on that really just like accelerated the growth. Like the early days of Patrick o' Shaughnessy's podcast, Invest like the best. I was on the reboot podcast twice with Jerry Colonna and one like sleeper. He's not super public, but he's a phenomenal writer. His name's Ozan Varol O Z A N V A R O L. He's not on social. He's kind of like Cal Newport. Like not on social at all. Or Maybe he's on LinkedIn, which doesn't count. But he, he invited me on his podcast and I think like, I think I got like 800 subscribers after that episode. And this is a guy with no social. Like, so those were a few of the ways that that happened. And then we could talk, we should probably talk about it at some point. I also learned SEO in the process search engine optimization. And it's something I really believe in. And search engine, it's like, just like, it's like a high paying bond. Like every day just like new subscribers show up in your account. It's like YouTube, but just like it's YouTube for the web basically, which is so funny to describe it that way versus like YouTube being Google for search. But SEO, I learned SEO. SEO is a little bit, it's harder to just like build a personal brand through SEO. So a lot of my SEO grew through writing about notion. And that's still like a lot of our traffic comes from writing about notion. And so that's, that's, that's been the acquisition strategy. And then now I'm really like trying to use Twitter. I'm trying to emulate what you guys have done. I'm good with words. I don't like high production video, high production audio. Like I would if I was like, 20 years old and had all the time in the world and no kids and, like, a full head of hair. Like, I would, like, do YouTube, but I'm 43, I got two kids. Like, I'm a sleepy head. Like, I just. I don't. I don't have the hustle in me to. I see what it takes, and I don't have the hustle in me to do YouTube.
All right, so here. Go ahead, Cole.
Just as a. I don't. Rounding out question, did you do a lot of writing at BlackRock? Because nothing.
So this.
This is what's interesting. One of the first things I noticed, Dickie, when I met you was your ability to take complex or lots of different ideas and distill them down and explain your thinking. And I thought, okay, this must be like a hedge fund sort of thing. You got to explain, why am I buying this asset versus this asset? And your ability to distill. The reason I ask is because it is very rare that someone who has a completely different career for 13 years just goes, I'm just going to start writing. And just, you know, all of a sudden attracts all these people. So I'm curious, like, how you were maybe training that muscle before you got started.
That's a. That's a. That's a really great question and an astute observation. There are a few ways. And again, all of this, please take everything I'm saying. Like, it seems so clear now, but while it was happening, I had no idea what was happening.
Hindsight, right?
Yeah. So, like, please take everything I'm saying with, like, there's probably a lot of revisionist history as I'm describing it, but here are. Here are a few threads that relate to that. One was, I love being a manager. I'm one of those rare people in corporate America that, like, loved managing teams. I love one on ones. I love writing up people's performance reviews. I love investing in my people. I've always liked that. Maybe like my mom, my sister, and my grandmother are all teachers. So there's this vein of, like, mentoring and teaching. Like, I used to. If you worked on my team, I used to highly recommend that you read David Allen's gtd and then I would sit with you to make sure you actually understood the concepts. So if you think about what I write on the Internet, it's not that different than what I just described. It just wasn't in the medium of writing. Right. And then I would say the last thing is. And my wife, if she were here, would disagree with me. Is that I'm pretty empathetic. And I, like, I just love to observe the world around me and just take notes. I'm like, oh, this is so weird that, you know, like. Like, I made a note that, like, to look up what's on your sweatshirt, because I've never seen that before. I'm like, okay, cool. Like, and I might just Google that when I, like when we get off the call, like, what is think? You know? So I think just, like, observing the world and being curious about it. And I think that's. There's. Those are a few of the things that you do see in finance. Like, if you're a good investor, you're kind of, like, looking at all these pieces and trying to see, like, how they all fit together. Um, you're always looking at how other people act, like, how they make decisions, like, from, like, a risk management perspective. And then there's like, the management piece of, like. Like, teaching juniors, you know, how to do something really complex. But it wasn't through the medium of writing.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, because one of the things I notice is so. So many people go, I want to be a writer, or, I want to. I want to start writing. And the hardest lesson is that it's really not about the writing. It's about the thinking. So that's why. That's where my question comes from is, like, it seems like you had already done a lot of the thinking and you distilled it over years.
Right.
And then all of a sudden you go, okay, now I'm just going to share the thinking, which is way easier than. I haven't thought about this thing yet. But I think I can assemble adjectives in a really great order.
Right.
The two are not the same. So I think that's fascinating.
Yeah. And I think there's two just, like, observing great writers. Just they observe the mundane details of the world, and they find them super interesting. Like your sweatshirt. I'm just super fascinated by your sweatshirt because I think it looks cool and it's different. From what. From what I normally see in sweatshirt.
It's think different. It's the apple thing. Yeah.
See, because I think there was a skate brand from the 80s, from the 90s called Think Skateboard. So I'm like, oh, maybe it's like, retro skateboard sweatshirt. But. But again, it's like, it's such an insignificant detail, but it actually isn't. Right. I could write three essays off the. The conversation that we just had about your sweatshirt. Right.
If you can synthesize and extract some sort of meaningful takeaway or lesson.
Curiosity. Right. Like, curiosity would be an obvious one. Right.
So writing is 95% blocking the Internet and noticing your surroundings. You can do those two things. You can pretty much write forever. So that's a great example. All right, let's talk notion, 10k work. How you kind of stumbled into going from the newsletter to coaching to now your flagship course, writing about notion, coining the term 10k work. And I'll give you kind of my interpretation of the ideas that you share are you found your own unique combination of. I use notion to almost create a lens through which to view my ideas, but then I also have this philosophical side of all my lessons learned from working at blackrock, working on Wall street, chasing happiness, finding happiness, all that. And you've been able to combine them in a very unique way. And I think that's what resonates with people. So where did notion and your relationship with that start? And how did you kind of weave in 10k work into what is now your flagship product?
Yeah, it's. It's a lot of luck and a lot of, like, spaghetti thrown against a wall. Like walls full of spaghetti. So let me just. Let's. Let's. Let's break down the timeline just so people can kind of, like, see what happens. So I'm doing coaching probably for. I've been out for five, for seven years. So I'm doing some, like, mix of coaching and writing for probably, like, the first for. Right. And that's kind of keeping me afloat. It's growing my audience again. It's a very different story than Dickie and Cole's story where, like, he quit and, you know, he had already built this product that people really dug. So four years of, like, three or four years of coaching, and I've always been, like, a productivity nerd. Systems design, lifestyle design. And I think that where I was really starting to find my voice as a writer were around these, like, philosophical questions. So the informal motto. So the mission of Rad Reads is to help people live more productive, examined, and joyful lives. And the informal motto is come for the productivity, stay for the existential. And one thing that I realized was that whether you're talking about online businesses, whether you're talking about how many books you want to read, whether you're talking about financial independence, retire early, whether you're talking about notion, you're actually talking about a deeper human desire or a deeper human insecurity. Right? And maybe they're actually both sides the same side. Two sides of the same coin. And I was starting to really figure this out in my writing. And for those of you who followed my writing for a while, there's always just like, why do you want this thing? Why do you do this thing? Like, why are you tricking yourself? You know, what is the source of your desire? What is the source of your hurt? What is the source of your pain? But in a way that, like, brings in, like, I don't know, if you take Encanto, right? The. The sister, the really strong one that bears the burden of the world on. On her shoulders, right? There's. There's a hundred stories to write off that character, right? So you could say, like, why is it so hard to carry the world's burdens on your shoulders? Or you could say, like, did you relate to that part in. In the Luisa song where she says, like, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever, right? That. That was a skill that I was, like, acquiring and I found so joyful, right? So people like, I want to be more productive. I want more time. Like, why do you want more time? Right? They're like, I want some more time with my kids. Like, what's stopping you now, right? And so there are these questions beyond that, right? People always ask me, what's the best productivity book to read? I say, the denial of death, right? Our quest for more time, to extract more, More minutes out of the day is rooted in a secularist. That's me, like, fear that once this is done, this, this shit's done, right? I got nothing to grasp to other than GTD and notion, right? So that I started to realize that there was something happening there again through, like, what Cole had mentioned earlier, people would just reply. They're like, yo, this, this shit slaps like, this, this, like, really hit hard what you just wrote, right? I asked things like, would you be a better parent if you were less ambitious? Right? That's something a lot of parents can relate to. The trade off between ambition, personal ambition, ego, right? We all have egos and the need to provide and to need to set a role model for kids. So anyway, I started to realize that these threads were coalescing in my writing. And this is like, this is why it took me so long. Like, I don't think you can discover that overnight. It took me years to realize that. But I also had something that was more tangible that people were interested in, and that was like, notion and GTD and productivity systems. And I could write about Superhuman and text expanders and Alfred and Zapier and all that stuff until Like, I get it. I could hang with the best writers in productivity in the world and I could do that. And so I was like, well, how do I take the thing? Like, that's the candy. Like, people want the candy. Like, the productivity. Like, the philosophy is the broccoli. Like, they know they want it, but no one wants to eat it. So you've got to like wrap the broccoli with chocolate, right? And I was figuring out how to like produce broccoli wrapped chocolate wrapped broccoli. Broccoli. And people were like, damn, this shit tastes so good. So. So that's what I had figured out. Then came Notion. Notion comes along as an app. Like, I mean, it's been around for five years, but I discovered it three or three and a half years ago. I'm like, this is just cool. Like, as a productivity nerd and as a systems thinker, I'm like, whoa. Like, I've been waiting for this app for years. Like, I used Omnifocus for a long time. I'm like a GTD Acolyte. But I saw someone. I don't really. We've modified GTD to work for today. But I was just like, this is so cool. And guess what was happening. There was a rocket ship called Notion, right? And so I just started making Loom videos on Notion and posting them on Twitter, right? Because I'm not going to do the high production YouTube stuff. It actually lend itself really well to screen sharing, right? Because you're just like, watch me click this and this and this and this. And then Loom actually came out at the same time too. Like, all these stars aligned at the same time. And Notion was this rocket ship. And again, from timing and showing up, I became one of the world's expert on Notion, which, by the way, has like 25 million users now. A ridiculous number. So then people came to me and they said, hey, we see you do all this stuff on Loom and you write about it in your newsletter. We can't do. We can't figure it out. Like, I don't know. For those of you who are not super tech savvy, if you open Notion, it's literally just like a blank cursor. And then you have people that are recreating the entire Pokemon universe with linked databases. And it's just a blank cursor. Help. And that's where my friend Tiago, Tiago Forte from building a second brand, he was just like, he. This whole time, he was just like, hey, launch a course, launch a course, launch a course. And I didn't want to launch a course on like chocolate covered broccoli because like that's a hard thing to get people to buy even with like a heavy dose of chocolate on the wrapper. And so, but notion, you're like, I will teach you how to be the best in the world in notion. People wanted to buy that. And so I fired up a class together. It was 500 bucks. I think 19 people signed up. They were like my super users. They've been waiting so long to buy something from me. I hadn't asked them for money in five, four years. And I'd been delivering value every single week. I think I took total 17 weeks off in four years. And so I gave them the Notion course and they loved it. And I did it again. And I did it again. We should talk about copywriting fell into that formula and then something happened where they're like, okay, Kay, this is the journey of productivity. Notion is cool, but it's not like solving these existent, these bigger questions I have. It's not helping me quit my job. It's not helping me complete projects that I started. It's not helping me avoid procrastination. It's not helping me be more creative. Like, it's just like a cool system. And so then I had the confidence because I'd done it enough times and my voice was really starting to come out and teaching, I had the confidence to like flip it and be like, this is a course on lifestyle design on how to live a more productive, examined and joyful life. And we use Notion to implement our system. And that's, that's when the course took off. You can like learn Notion courses are a commodity now. They're like 99 bucks. There's nothing, there's like a hundred people offering them. So it's a toll. It should be free. So thankfully we made that pivot and it leaned into something that is like 10 times more exciting for me to talk about. Right. The chocolate covered broccoli. And so I'll stop there. I didn't even answer the 10k work question. But I think that that's like a very important framing which was like, I think this is what you shall. If you're looking to sell us, sell a course or sell info product. Like it's much easier to sell people a skill and then as you get better then you can sell them a personal transformation. Right.
I was, I was actually going to say to mirror this back, like what I'm hearing is your product is the tangible thing. What do I get right, here's 10 notion templates. What do I get? Here's how to use this platform.
Right?
But the engagement and the ladder is the intangible. Well, what do you think about it, you know, and what questions are you asking me? And it's, it's more of a deeper relationship. Where I notice people fail is they have flipped, they try and sell the product. That's like the intangible. I'm going to help you be happy.
Right?
It's, you can't wrap your hands around it. What am I, what is it? What am I getting?
Right?
And so it's really helpful to start with the tangible and then move up into the intangible. That's where the engagement and the relationship comes from. But if you start there, people don't know, well, what are you giving me?
That's, that's a, that's a really, really good point. And to further that, there's another saying is like, people tend to, people tend to buy painkillers over vitamins, right? So they'll buy things that will eliminate pain versus better. People actually don't buy a better version of themselves as, as often as you think. And that's more of like a writing and marketing tactic to, to observe. But absolutely. And to be honest, I needed the confidence. Who was I to be like, I'm going to teach you how to live your life? I'm like, no, I'm going to teach you how to use a productivity app that I know better than most people in the world. And that was a great starting point. I couldn't have made that leap without the years of writing, which was like the crystallization of the thought, thinking and then the gateway product that was just like, there's a very clear exchange of value. Don't come for this nebulous concept of happiness or fulfillment or whatever and then kind of bleed those other concepts in over time.
Yeah, Alex Formosi has a great one. It's sell people what they want to give them what they need, right? So they're not going to know that what they really need is to ask the five big questions of why they want more time. What they want is more time. So sell them that, that's what you're going to give them, but then give them what they need in the long term in the product. So, okay, so from there, right, let's talk about the rad reads, Business, 10K, that kind of thing. You started to talk about copywriting a little bit. Why don't you walk us through right now how you think about the Role kind of your newsletter and Twitter and your overall. We talk about kind of a creator funnel, right? Which is you're creating a lot of content. You are, you have different offerings, you share valuable stuff. But there's obviously people who want to throw money at you because they love what you, what you're doing, what you're saying. So how do you think about right now, the different kind of acquisition of a customer and then we can go from there on. Like, I know you've probably run what, seven or eight cohorts by now and are starting to scale the team and I'd love to talk about that a little bit.
Yeah. So we've run, we're getting, getting ready to launch our 10th cohort in May. May 3rd. So for those of you who want to lead a more productive, joyful and examined life, like it's an amazing, amazing, amazing course. So that's our core business is that course. We run it three times a year and it's like 80% of our revenue. And then the other business that's new and it's probably not worth talking about on this call, but we started a consulting business because for two reasons. One is people took the course and they were like, can you teach? It's more like workshops, corporate workshops. They're like, can you teach this to my boss? And then we wanted to diversify the revenue streams and the launch. As you all know, the launch boom, bust cycle is not for the faint hearted. Like we make three. We make 80% of our revenue in three weeks each year and we have a team of six. So like it's, it's takes some, it's not, it's not easy. So those are our products and our acquisition. I wish we had a clearer acquisition strategy. Our goal is to add 75 email subscribers a day. And we failed that goal. I think we hit like 60. We just did our quarterly okrs. I think we hit like 60, 68 or something. Uh, and so here's how we think about the funnel. Um, their SEO is about 45 leads a day. Um, one YouTube video brings in about five leads a day. Or we have this like massive GTD video that has like 200,000 views. It's just like a zoom call like this. So SEO and YouTube, but these are more notion specific queries. So that's, that's like the chunk, the main chunk of regular subs. We, I try to do one event a week. So these events bring in a lot of new subscribers. Yesterday we did one with On Deck where I presented the 10K framework. And it that just from that event, it brought in like 75 new subscribers in addition to the 45 that we just get through SEO. So we do events, about one or two, one half to two events a week. And I love events. Like you can tell I like talking, I. No prep required, like just, you know, shop for an hour. So events. And then we do email partnerships, email swaps. So we swap our placement for our newsletter into someone else's newsletter and we try to do two of those a month. And those depending on the size of the audience, sometimes they can get like 200 new subscribers and sometimes they get like five. So we've got to like be a little strategic about that. I try to go on people's podcasts. It's a little bit harder to measure the impact of that, but we're trying to do some more kind of analytics around that. But it hasn't, I haven't got on any big podcasts, so it hasn't really been a meaningful part of the strategy. There's word of mouth, which is still, I can't break down exactly of that 45, what's word of mouth and what's SEO. And so that's kind of like our core. But it's hard to grow beyond that, right? I mean, it takes a lot of work. And so there's a, we call them 10k questions, but there's a 10k question that we ask ourselves as a company is how can we grow rad reads without K's involvement? Right. So that immediately knocks off YouTube. Right? Because I would just need so much of my time and my face and all of that. But Twitter, I don't go strike my threads yet, but I might down the road. Newsletter blogging, newsletter blogging, SEO, that could all be ghost driven. And so we're starting to explore how can K step into a more editorial role and be like, this is the piece that I want to see. This is how I understand it's going to work and travel and then have someone else write it. Right. So that's kind of part of our strategy. We're just really refining our SEO strategy to like basically plant like the 10k framework, like on the edges of like the Eisenhower Matrix and the edges of the of GTD and the edges of the Ivy League method and the edges of goal setting and prioritization and kind of like we have decent domain ranking. So. So we could do that. But it's probably, it's going to be like a long SEO is a long, long slog. But then once it Once it works, it's like compound interest. Like it's just like every day, boom, boom. It's like a cash machine every single day. It delivers a new lead and it doesn't require a ton of maintenance. So we're going to lean a little bit heavier into SEO. I'm going to play around with Twitter. I'm having a lot of fun with Twitter thanks to like following what you guys have done. It's been pretty effective. I had just following what you've done. I started, I decided to get active on Twitter on February 21st and I had 17,000 subs. And this morning we like crossed 21,000. And so I'm trying to do like, I follow the, I have all these text threads from Dickies, like do this, do this. Learn how to make sure you nail your hook. I like put them all in like a little notebook and I just like schedule these tweets and I think about them. It's part of the strategy. Like any of this, whether it's SEO, email newsletter, blogging, Twitter, what I've learned is just like have a strategy, do it consistently. Don't like willy nilly it, like when you feel like writing it, sit down and treat it like you would treat a meeting, like you would treat a one on one. And then just like, like iterate, learn and observe. So does that answer the question on acquisition?
And it's so. Yes, exactly. And the overall goal is to get newsletter subscribers. For the most part they're opting in via your notion pages or GTD pages are probably sent some kind of lead magnet and then are they dripped into your regular Saturday newsletter that you send to everyone or what's it look like from there?
So we have two onboarding sequences. They're not the best, so we're, we're, we're fixing them. But one of them is kind of a more like here's how to hit your goals. Like work like email workshop. It's like three emails a week for I think four weeks. It's, they're really detailed emails. They basically like took our best blog posts and like we turned them into emails. We've got this like legacy notion drip thing where you kind of like learn notion and like, like 10 days. The engagement rate on both of them is through the roof. It's like 65% open rates like towards the end of the sequence. And then we drip them into the Saturday newsletter. Once they've gone through both of Those, we are Q2. One of our big initiatives is to like tear those, they're Quite old. And we've learned so much since to tear those down, make them like better design, like have a true story. Like when we wrote these, we didn't really know what the product we were trying to like nudge people towards was. And now we have a clear vision of what that product is. So we're going to like plant seeds, like with the language, with the framework, you know, with interviews that we might have with other people. So we're kind of like rewriting those from scratch. One thing I'm really focused on so that we talked about the top of the funnel, but the thing that I'm really focused on now is like the middle of the funnel, which is, okay, we got you in, but like what's the likelihood that you'll become a student? And that's a tricky, tricky question. I haven't. Right, because you've got to like measure purchase intent, you've got to measure engagement, you've got to measure like just general interest and the things like that you write about. Like for example, if I write a lot of, if people click on a lot of my financial related essays, like that doesn't like, it's not overlapping with the content of the course. So there's all these kind of analytics that I don't know how to do. I'm not from this world. And it's actually, I think we've really benefited from having a beginner's mindset where people like do this little thing on SEO. And I'm like, I don't think that's the little thing that I think it really helps us see like the big picture of what we're trying to accomplish with all of these like, tactics. But we're also really good at getting into the weeds. And then the last thing I'll say we should talk about copywriting if we have time, is that I've made the commitment to grow a team. And so we have four. We have like a team of seven, four full time ish employees. I have almost a day of one on ones every day, every week now. You know, we're fully asynchronous. We have like very, very detailed ways of working. We don't send each other emails internally. I think I get like 17 Slack messages a day. So like we, we're completely async. And I was actually writing our quarterly roundup. That's just the kind of stuff you have to do when you have a team, like actually like write a quarterly roundup. But I was saying that to use hedge fund terms, our organizational design is Our alpha. So the way we work as a team is one of our competitive advantages. That's actually very hard to replicate. That's a whole separate conversation on the business that.
Yeah, I think we'll have to have you back on that stuff because that. I definitely have some questions. So let's talk copywriting. Yeah, talk about, you know, so it's funny to me is when I stepped away from finance, it's. I was learning copywriting throughout my entire, you know, two or three years there. And the number one thing it did for me was people read every single email that I sent. Because I knew how to write an email subject line, how to write very concisely. And I developed this lens of. If you sent me an email with an unclear subject line, like, quick thoughts, and opened with a wall of text, I immediately archived it. It was just gone. Right. And that was probably, you know, a reason by the end that I was ready to get out of there, because that's about 90% of what consent is. I'm sure you remember. So what role is copywriting played for you?
How.
How do you think about it in your everyday, you know, I'd love to hear you because I have a lot of thoughts.
I. So, like, you said in that in your tweet, like, I knew nothing about. I'm not from this world. Like, I know nothing about marketing and funnels and copywriting and SEO. Like, I just learned it like, you know, the lily pad. Like, just like, another time to jump on the copywriting lily pad and figure this shit out today. So that was. So I knew nothing about copywriting, but here's like, something super. Like, I think it was after our third cohort. I think the third cohort did, like, 25 grand or something like that. Um, and between the third and the fourth cohort, I was like, okay, I need to learn how to sell this thing. Cause I was just, like, listing a bunch of features. I'm like, you'll learn how to do formulas. Like, you will learn how to do this. Um, and some, you know, some other entrepreneurs had planted the seeds of copywriting. So I basically, like, took it as copywriting intensive with Billy Bross. You might know him. B R O A s. And my mind was blown because he. He has an approach where he teaches you the prince, like, direct mail type stuff, like, right. Headlines out by hand. He doesn't write it for you, he doesn't edit for you. Like, he barely reviews what. You know, like, he just kind of, like, he makes you do it. And I think a lot of people go into copywriting courses thinking that, like, someone's going to do it for them. And like, it just doesn't work that way. It's so nuanced. So I took this course, this intensive, it was pretty pricey. And then after I'm like, I need more of this. And I hired him one on one. So it was like the single biggest financial investment that I've made in the business other than full time employees, because he's not cheap. And from the third to fourth cohort, it tripled in revenue. Nothing else had changed. It went from 25k to 75k. And I'm like, oh my God, like this. And I had some very strict rules for myself around copywriting. And the biggest one was like, I didn't want to write copy that made people feel shitty about themselves. Like, I would poke the bear here and there and be like, you know, it's kind of funny that you say you want to do this, but you really, like, if we looked at your screen time, hours, like, you're really doing this. Like, I'll poke the bear here and there. But I didn't want to be like, your life, suck your life, suck your life, suck your life, suck your life, suck by my course, like, that was not the philosophy. And a lot of like read some sales pages out there. There's a lot of that out there. And I did not. I had like, repulsed by that. So anyway, the thing about copywriting was that it's a little bit like 10k work, which is, funny enough, we haven't talked about. It's a little bit like the rule of thirds. If you're a photographer, it's just like one of these things, like once you see it done well, you cannot unsee it. And so if you just understand the first principles of it, you're just going to see it everywhere on the back of a bus. Airports are like copywriting. I have so much fun in airports because I learned more about SAS copywriting than in any other place in the world is an airport. Those ads, right? I always say there's an HSBC ad and there's like a little boy in a developing country, like with a dove flying out of it. And it's like, make your dreams soar. I'm like, it's a fucking bank. They're like, make your dreams soar. Like, what the hell are you talking about? You're a bank. I'm like, but that ad is good. Then you layer in the photography, like, whoa, there's like something resonated in Me. And you start to really see that everywhere. You see it on Twitter, right? Like, you see who gets it. And so I learned the principles of it and I just practiced the crap out of it. Like, it's the good thing about the Internet. Like, you can literally practice. You can get so many shots on goal. Copywriting, like you could get like 50 a day. The only limitation is your time. And so there were just all these opportunities for shots on goal. It could be a single tweet. Right. Email subject line is the perfect, perfect test bed for copywriting because you see the open rate. Right. What's the point of writing a really great email if no one opens it? Right. It still blows my mind. And I used to do this too. It'd be like rad reads 233. I'm like, why would I click that? That sounds so corporate, so uninteresting. And it doesn't tell me what's in it for me, the reader. Right? Right. This week's rad read is going to be how many business books would you read parentheses. If you had a year to live? Whether you care about that topic or not.
Yeah, there's some urgency.
That's great. So. So, yeah. And. And it's fun. I mean, I think again, a lot of these things, I feel super blessed that I find SEO and copywriting fun, but I find YouTube not fun. So I just don't do it. Right. I find Facebook paid ads. Like, hell on earth. Like, I'm not. I haven't logged into Facebook in three years. Like, why would I do Facebook ads? Like, maybe at some point I'll have to do it. But a lot of this is, you know, especially if you're in this kind of. You've de. Risked yourself like, like Dickie has where you're doing this. Like, you still have the COVID of a full time job in healthcare. And the. If you're living in the US like that's, you know, that's something like, do these experiments, like, take these shots on goal. Like they're there. They are free. They didn't exist before the Internet. Right. How could you practice copywriting before the Internet? You would have to write letters to people or buy ads in the New York Times. That's it. Think about how lucky you are now that you could just. You could. My challenge to each of you is to do three copywriting tests today. Right? Three copyright. You all have Twitter. I know that because you're part of this community. Three copywriting tests today. That's my challenge. Tag me in it. If you want, and I'll give you a review on what you could improve.
The biggest takeaway with copywriting for me is it teaches you how to communicate value. And that's all you're doing all the time. I loved your response. So I wrote a thread of how I learned copywriting, and it was. You realize life is sales, right? You're either selling your product to customers, you're selling your product vision to employees, or you're selling your company vision to an investor. And then you said, or you're selling your.
Your.
Yourself in your Hinge bio. And I thought that was hilarious. And that's true as well. Like all you're doing. People think copywriting is, oh, it's only for sales pages, but it's for text messages, emails, every single thing you do. Wherever you're putting the written word out there, you're just learning to communicate because concisely. And so I think it's a skill that I. I'm personally of the view it's the most valuable personal skill you can learn because if you can write copy, there's. You can make six figures doing anything. Yeah, you're just a walking. Minimum six figures. And then from there, it's however you want to apply it to. To really start to scale it.
And then it gets fun. Like, we had our most. Our most popular series when we sell our coin course, has a 50% open rate. This is sent to 33,000 people. It's purely marketing. I'm not. It's unabashed marketing. But what we did was we took this very common copywriting framework which is called the Tale of Two Men, which basically contrasts two people that do. They're like the same, but they do one different thing, and then their lives are completely different. It's a very old copywriting framework from the Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal.
I'm gonna try and find it.
It's there. If you just do Tale of Two, it's there. It's like the top result WSJ. So he's two characters. They like. They were like college roommates or something. And it's just a formula. Right? Then the formula is two people start at the same place. One of them does something differently and ends up in a completely different place. It's a very simple formula. It's very hard to execute on. But again, once you see that formula, you actually start to see it in a lot of different places. It's actually a very common, common tactic. Like, you might actually even see it in, like, Tom and Jerry or like, you know, you have these like, juxtaposition of rich, good and bad. Rich dad, poor dad. Right, Great example. You see it everywhere. You just understand that one framework. Now, it took me two years to figure out how to incorporate that framework into our marketing. But when we figured it out, it's like it's almost going to like open up a new product line for us or a new source. Like, we basically, we had like $10 Tim and 10k Tina. So we juxtaposed like these two productivity nerds against each other with a lot of literations, map them into our framework. And the thing is just hilarious. It's just so funny. I'll try to find one because I don't share them because they're not blog posts, their emails. And each one takes about 10 hours. So they're like many chapters of books. But they are so. And I'm like giggling while I'm writing them because I'm taking these two characters and bouncing them off of each other and it's just fricking hilarious.
I think I was going to say it's 10k Tim and $10 or $10. $10 to Tim and 10k Tina. Cause I read them and remember them resonating.
So that just to the point that you can make like, I hope that you're hearing that this is not some, like, you know, you hear copywriting and marketing. You hear this like these like, manipulative, like dark arts and like messing with people's brains and like being an evil person. I'm like, you know, I wrote you a marketing email and you didn't get it. And you emailed me making sure that you were still on the distribution list for the marketing email. Right. You can make it fun. You can make it yours. You can make it like people want to read it. And by the way, you're still selling, right? So that was like a big block for me to get over that. Like, marketing equals bad, right?
Yeah. The way I like framing this for people is that sales copywriting is just telling the truth. You're not selling anyone, right? If I go to UK and I go, hey, be honest, right? You're not being productive because you're actually, you actually have this fear.
Right?
That's not. You like pulling some psychological trick. You're just being honest. You're just telling the truth. So I think it's really helpful for people to remember that. Yeah. It's not like, oh, if you use this adjective, everyone buys your course. All of a sudden it's like, no, you just, you have to tell the truth and tell the truth in a way where the person goes, wow, like, you ever tweet something and a bunch of people comment and go. I feel really seen right now. I feel uncomfortably seen.
Right.
That's what copywriting is.
Totally.
This is awesome. Kay, you've got. I love hearing your story. And I love. I'm glad. Another. We saved another person from Wall Street.
We did it. Thank you. Thank you all. I'm good. If you want to take one or two. I'm good on time. I defer to. To y' all as the host.
Sure. Let's take a couple questions and then. And then we'll get out of here. Oscar asks, do you have any good book recommendations for copywriting aside from practice?
You know, I didn't really. I didn't. I read one. I got coached. So I. I don't really read a lot of nonfiction books. So the one that I tried to read that was like, okay. Was Dan Kennedy's the Ultimate Sales Letter. Um, I have seen breakthrough advertising, but it was a little bit too dry for me, honestly. And I'm. I'm not lying. It's like, when I want to practice copywriting, I do advanced Twitter search on Dickie's timeline, and I just, like, observe what he's done. And I shared that tweet 3 thread where I, like, deconstructed, like, five of his formulas of, like, his Twitter formulas. And that. That's, like. That's how I learned. It's just like. Like, I find, like, a good formula, like, copywriting. This cool thing about it is for a left brain person, it's very analytical. Like, there's a lot of formula, like, very clear formulas on what works. Like A Tale of Two Men, which is a bit more nuanced, but it's still formula. So I. I'll just go and. And player, like, look at what other people have done. But the ultimate sales. Ultimate sales letter was, like, kind of help. I think Dickie would be a better person to answer this question.
Yeah, I actually wrote this the other day. I. I think the boring letters and writing that works. And the ad week copy. Yeah. Adweek copywriting handbook. Those three. They're my three go tos. And then the fourth is stop reading books and start writing copy.
Um.
Cause once at that point, you could read 20 of them and kind of pretend that you're doing it. But go take three legendary sales letters, write them out by hand, and do that every day for a month, and you'll be a good copywriter. Seriously, because once you see it and feel what works from there, it's very easy. Like, like you said. I mean, I think the easiest way to learn is actually just to write on Twitter because you have baked in constraints. You have 280 characters. You're competing for attention, and it's all text. Right. So you can't. You're going to have to learn, and you're going to very quickly learn whether this block of text. Oh, that had no one read it. Okay, I probably shouldn't do that, but when I do one line, three bullets, one line, everyone reads it. So there's something right there. It becomes a little bit of a game. So that is my copywriting advice.
I'll give you one super quick story. A friend of mine had a design course, and he sent me a test headline, and the headline was remixing your ideas. He's like, what do you think? I'm like, dude, you want my honest opinion? It's terrible. And I gave him. And we were just over text, going through some ideas, and it was a class on illustration, and I said, how about this? Learn how to draw parentheses. I like the parentheses at the end so that you don't have all the same unsplashed pictures as everyone else. He was like, it was the most open email he's ever said. Think about the difference. Remix your ideas or remix your drawing. Like, what does that even mean?
It's clever versus clear. Yeah. You can't be clever, period.
Yeah.
All right, well, I think that's it. We got a lot. We got through a lot. This was really great. Kk where can we send the people? Where can they find you?
Yeah, so, yeah, drop in. I'll drop in this template if you want to use, like, let me see.
The template that we use people listening on Spotify too.
So, yeah, Radreads Co Solopreneur is like a template that we use to, like, manage all of our ideas and work workflows. If you just head over to Twitter, follow me on Twitter. She just do Twitter. K he K H e H Y is probably the fastest way to find me because my handle is too long as my first full first name. And then just Radreads co. And most importantly, come say hi on Twitter. I know that there were a lot of questions that I didn't answer. I was half joking about LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is a very powerful medium. Just the corporate side of me just can't go there. But, yeah, I'm just honored. I've learned so much from. From this community, from Dickie and from Cole. And it's just. It's just cool, man. I just. Things like this remind me why I love the Internet. Like, this is just awesome.
Well, thanks for being here. And again, thanks for that legendary advice you gave me back two years ago. We are on this call, so pretty cool. Full circle moment.
Really appreciate it.
And we'll send people over to Rad Reach if they want to learn more.