How to Make $10k/Month as a Writer - Nicolas Cole

Hello.

Before you check out this episode of Deep Dive, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about an exciting new project that we are running this summer and it's called the 1K Challenge. And it's basically a six week bootcamp to help you on your journey to financial freedom. The whole idea is that in the six weeks we are going to be helping you make your first thousand dollars online. So if you are a beginner to the world of financial freedom and you haven't yet made at least a thousand dollars on the Internet, and you would like to join this six week live bootcamp where I teach you stuff and we tell you exactly what to do and, and we give you accountability and community and support that you need to get started, then there will be a link in the show notes or in the episode description or wherever you happen to be listening to this to join and get more information about the challenge. I know lots of people that listen to this podcast are interested in the business side of things and maybe if you have a desire for financial freedom, time freedom, creative freedom, then you'd like to get started on the journey and if we can help at all on that journey, then that's cool. And if not, then, then that's also totally fine. Either way, I hope you enjoy this episode.

There are so many people that are now realizing that they all need to build things on the Internet. So we used to live in an analog world, now we live in a digital world.

What you're about to hear is a conversation between me and my friend, Nicholas Cole. This is Cole's second time on the podcast. The first time around, we talked about five paths to make a million dollars as an online writer, or rather as a writer. And that episode did super, super well. And today we're talking about the fastest path to $10,000 a month as a writer.

So your fastest path as a writer to 5K as a side hustle, you know, 10K, 20K, replacing your full time income and then some, is to just go find one person and go, I can help you solve problems in your business.

We talk about how to craft the perfect email and the sort of energy that it takes to sell and how sales is really the same thing as education and a bunch of mistakes that we see people make when pitching us their various.

It seems like the longer road to go, I have to go educate and talk to a hundred people. Well, yeah, in the beginning that is the longer road instead of just, you know, trying to automate the whole process and defer to technology. But if you Skip that step. You think you're taking the shortcut, and then guess what? Shortcut ends up being the longer road because you skipped the whole learning.

Cole, welcome back to the podcast. How's it going?

Great, man. I'm always happy to be in London.

This is going to be fun. So in part one that we did, which people absolutely loved, we went through your entire backstory and kind of a surface level overview of how to make, you know, how to make money online as a writer.

Yeah.

In this episode, I was hoping we could go a little bit deeper into this because you teach people how to make money as ghostwriters, and we want to teach people what is their fastest path to actually making money as a writer, because a lot of people still kind of think that writing is a thing that can't, like, you can't really make money from it. I've just published a book. Traditional publishing people are like, oh, do I find an agent? Do I get a book deal? What do people get wrong about making money online as a writer?

Okay, most fun question on planet Earth for me. So let's. We'll start with the mistake. So the mistake that writers make, I think, is thinking that you need to have a ton of attention in order to start monetizing. So everyone thinks, step one, I need a million followers. So already wrong. Because if I told you tomorrow you had to go give a speech in front of a million people, you would have an anxiety attack. You don't need a million followers. Second is they go, okay, well, maybe I don't need a million followers. I just need a hundred thousand. Or I need 10,000. Reduce the number.

Okay, still 1,000 true fans, right?

Yeah. Okay, so still wrong. And the reason, you know, there's all these different paths you can take to monetizing your craft, any craft will use writing as the example. The. The fastest path, though, is not selling a product, it is selling a service. Because if you think, and everyone in the creator world talks about selling digital products, right? Selling ebook, you sell a course, you sell cohort based experience, whatever it is, right? But that's not actually the fastest path because most of those products, if not all of them, are priced in a couple hundred bucks or less. Or if you're selling an ebook, it's like 10 or $20, right? So the lower the price point, the more volume you need. So it sounds really easy to go, okay, well, I can make, you know, five or ten grand selling a $200 course, for example, but you have to play that out and go, okay, well, how Many of those do I need to sell every month in order to sustain 5, 10, 20k a month. Right. You need volume.

Yeah. I mean especially with a physical book like.

Or a physical book is.

My book has sold a lot of copy. Well, you know, it's like 200,000 copies, but I still have that many. I still haven't paid off the advance. And our royalty percentage is, I think I'm allowed to share this about like 10, 15%.

Oh, you got focused.

Yeah, we got 15. We got a good deal, we got a decent deal, we got 15%. But it's like I make maybe 1 pound 50 every time I sell a book.

Yeah, no, it's a horrible.

So I need to sell a lot of books to make a living as a professional writer. If the thing that I was making money from was selling books.

Yeah. And by the way, so. And I'm happy to jam on this because I love the whole traditional versus self publishing.

Yeah. We should get nut on here as well, you know.

Yeah. Like just do a roundtable. Because the reason why there's the whole cliche, nobody makes a living as a writer is because of course it's going to be hard to make a living as a writer when the thing that you're selling is priced at $20. There's no recurring revenue. Most people buy a book once, they don't buy it again. And then your deal in that is you get 10% of the revenue. So you're not even getting all $20. Right. You're getting $2. And so then that leads to the cliche, well, nobody makes a living as a writer. Right. And that's wrong. And so your fastest path, if you're sitting there, and I think so often people have this conversation where they go, I want to make money. Every option is available to me. Well, no, every option isn't available to you. There's usually one thing you're trying to optimize for in your life. And if you're working a full time job and you're like, I want to get out of my full time job, your number one concern is how do I replace my full time income? Right. So your fastest path to replacing your full time income is not selling products because products take longer because you need to build an audience in order to sell them and you need to sell them in volume. It's much easier to go find one client that is willing to pay you three grand, four grand, five grand to do something for them. So it's actually monetizing through a service. So your fastest Path as a writer to 5K as a side hustle, you know, 10K, 20K, replacing your full time income and then some is to just go find one person and go, I can help you solve problems in your business. Okay. It's not to go be some viral creator. You can do that. Just do that later.

Fine. Okay, so how do we do that? Let's say I am, let's rewind. We'll, we'll do a bit of role play. Let's say I'm 26 years old, I've been working two years as a doctor.

Hi. Young Ali.

In the, in the UK's National Health Service. And I'm like, you know, I quite, you know, I think I enjoy this medicine thing, but you know, if I project out 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, will I continue to enjoy it? I'd love to have, man, if I could have 5k a month coming in, I'd be able to quit my job and be able to take my gap year, be able to travel around the world and then I could always come back to medicine later if I feel like it.

Yeah.

But I sort of feel like, but like, I don't know, I just went through med school. I don't really have any skills other than the stuff around being a doctor.

Okay. So this, I mean, I wrote a.

Lot of essays in medical school, but.

Yeah, this will be awesome. Okay, so step one is you have to identify your information advantage. So most people, this is, this is how they start. They go, I'm not happy, I've decided I want to do something different. And then they just let their imagination run wild. And they look at you today like, you know, Ali, this world renowned, 5 million plus YouTube subscribers, productivity expert, they're like, I want to be that.

Yeah.

Okay, first of all, you didn't start there, right? That, that is where you're ending up now. That's not where you started. So your, your goal is not to just imagine and think. You know, what, what is the, the most legendary version of myself and how do I go be that tomorrow? Because that's not how the game works. It is so much easier to start by asking yourself a question. Where do I already have an information advantage?

What do you mean by information?

So information advantage is you've been working as a doctor for three years, Right. You graduated medical school, whatever. You inherently know more about that subject than someone who hasn't had those experiences. Right. It's inherent. The problem is we all take the knowledge that we have for granted.

Yeah. Because everyone I know is Also a doctor. So it's like big whoop being a doctor, right? Yeah. It's not a big deal.

Yeah, yeah. So to, to, to the classmate sitting next to you, you're like, I don't know anything, or I don't know anything different. Right. But remove yourself from that classroom and you actually know a lot relative to the entire population. Right. So step one is recognizing in yourself what information do you take for granted? Because that information is what allows you to go help someone. So thinking of it in the reverse, if I run a biotech company, for example, do I want to hire someone who speaks and understands medicine and that, and that, you know, health and wellness industry, or am I just going to go hire some random person that has no idea what any of those terms mean? So the misunderstanding and why I say that ghostwriting is the fastest path to monetization is because anywhere you have an information advantage, you're already fluent in that industry.

Okay. So at this point, a lot of people, a lot of, A lot of medics I know, and this was me back in the day, would have said, okay, I have an information advantage in that I got into med school, so why don't I just do tutoring for people to help them get into med school?

Yeah. Okay, so now think about who you're selling to.

Yeah.

So tutoring, who are you selling to? Well, you're most likely selling to broke college students or people in med school. Right.

Or their parents if they're applying to med school and the parents are rich.

Yeah, yeah. But tutoring is already price anchored to a certain thing. Right. Like most people, like, how much are you willing to pay hourly for tutoring? Most. Most tutoring in the thousands of dollars per hour. So the second thing is you have to go, okay, I have an information advantage. Now, who is the most, like, what's the right word? The. The. The most affluent customer. Right. Well, it's a biotech startup that just raised $30 million. Right. Or it's an executive for a pharma company or it's. Right, all of those businesses, to them, five grand is nothing, ten grand is nothing. But if you go pitch, you know, a parent of a kid who needs help via tutoring, 10 grand is a lot of money. Right. So the second thing is going, okay, I have an information advantage now. Who are all the customers that would be willing to pay me a premium to help them solve something in their business?

Yeah, this is already, I think, a massive, like, sort of mind blowing thing for people to realize that different people value money at different levels differently. And especially businesses value money at a completely different. Completely different way than individuals do.

Yeah.

How did you first appreciate this sort of disparity in how people think about money?

Well, I mean, the honest answer is I just undercharged for a long time until it became so painfully obvious to me that I was undercharging. You know, like, when I was first starting out, I remember charging 25 or $50 an article and thinking, you know, the jump from 25 to 50 was a lot. I was like, oh, I'm charging a lot. And then the jump from 50 to 100 was a lot. And there was a story that I tell sort of often in our programs is there was a moment where I was pitching a ghostwriting client. I was probably 27, and we met in this restaurant in L. A. And he was hiring me to ghostwrite this white paper for. For a crypto startup they were trying to launch. And I remember going into the meeting being like, okay, how much should I charge? I mean, I'm going to throw outrageous number in the air. And I remember I mustered up the courage. I was like, I'm going to char ten grand to write this white paper. And we're sitting in the meeting, and he. We. It all goes great. And then he goes, all right, so what's the damage? How much is this going to cost me? I said, it's going to. And at the last minute, I almost backed out, you know, but I was like, it's going to cost ten grand. And I, like, waited. And he looks at me and he goes, I just want you to know that I was prepared to pay three times that. But you already said the number, so ten grand it is. And I walked away from that meeting going, I have no idea how to value my value.

Yeah.

And I think that's something where it doesn't matter. I see it in our ghostwriting academy all the time, too. We. We train ghostwriters to build and write these educational email courses for people. We go, you can sell this for five grand, no problem. No matter how many times we tell them, you can sell this for five grand. There's a large percentage of people who, the first time they pitch it, they. They can't even get the words five grand out of their mouth because they're so. They can't conceive of someone being willing to pay that. And it's usually only until you experience it a couple times where you're like, wow, everyone's saying yes to a thousand dollars. Like, maybe I should charge more. Right.

Nice. Okay. So quickest path to making money. I. I guess sort of zooming out from writing in general, it's. It's find a small number of people to pay you a lot of money.

Yes.

Rather than find a very large number of people to pay you a small amount of money.

Correct.

And I think, you know, one of the issues that people often think is if you're a young person and you don't have much money, chances are the people you know are also young people who don't have much money.

Yeah.

And so you're really anchored towards thinking, my goodness, I can't believe people are paying 97 for a course. Wow. Man, these American scammers are so, so good at taking money for like, 97 for it. Why would anyone pay that?

Yep.

And they've just paid, like, had tens of thousands in college fees and all that kind of stuff at the same time.

And it's all. I mean, there's so many different ways to approach this conversation, but like, for example, 10 years ago, I probably bought my first online course. I remember spending a hundred bucks or 200 bucks going, I can't believe I just spent that amount of money on this. Last year, we joined a mastermind for $68,000. So you have to sort of build the skill. This is something I want to write more about, which is spending money and investing money in yourself is a skill. And you can see it with people that make a lot of money, but they still have spending habits as if they were broke. You know, they constrain themselves. And I think a lot of, A lot of entrepreneurs or founders, they almost take this pride in, you know, I don't drive a nice car. I drive a Prius, you know, or I didn't. I didn't get the nice apartment. I. I still have my little quaint one bedroom. And that's fine. Like, I'm not advocating for lavish spending. But also, you have to realize that in some way you're also holding yourself back because you're not building the skill of going, I trust myself to spend 68 grand because I know I'm going to get an ROI from that.

Yeah, yeah. It reminds me of a moment, it was like a year or two ago where I was talking to Tintin, my YouTube producer, and we'd hired this guy to do like graphic designs or something. And, you know, I thought it was going to come out to like $1,200 or something like that. Cool. But whatever, you know, the guy was really good. $100 is a, is a bargain. Then we Got the invoice and he charged five grand. And I was like, oh. And it's just like, oh.

Because.

Because we arranged it over like Twitter DMs. I didn't quite realize he was charging per asset rather than per platform. And then I said to Dan, our finance guy, like, yeah, five grand, cool, whatever, you know, just pay the invoice.

Yeah.

And Tintin, remember, remembers that moment vividly thinking, wow, to Ali Abdaal, there is no difference between $1200 and $5000. And that being like a fucking mind blowing moment for him to be like, holy shit. An entrepreneur with a multimillion dollar business really values money spent on business stuff.

Yeah.

A completely different rate. If I was spending my personal money, I would value it very differently. But if I was spending business money, it's like, because it's kind of open season.

Yeah. And, you know, I understand why that's hard to wrap your head around, because honestly, that's something you really only understand as you build things that generate more resource and as you hire more resource and as you deploy more resource. Right. Like, we both were gamers growing up. I saw that note in your book, by the way, where you were like, I was a World Warcraft addict and I read that and I was like, oh, I love this. It made me such a fan. But that is really the whole point of video games, you know, And a video game is just the deployment of resources to an end. And I think when you're starting out, I remember being 25 years old, living in Chicago in a dumpy studio apartment. I had no resource. I had like $100 in my checking account. Right. So you can't fathom or understand how other people are deploying resource when you don't have resource. Which is why it is actually so important to listen to conversations like this or surround yourself with other people or even like do free work for people that have thriving businesses. Because just you being in their presence and you just like your team member saw you make that decision that changed how they thought about it. When you do free work for someone else and you see them make that decision, you're getting paid in pattern recognition, you're getting paid in experience.

Yeah. I remember vividly as we were talking about World of Warcraft. You know, there's the area Ghostlands in the Burning Crusade where I remember when I started playing during Burning Crusade and I had like a level 14 Warlock and there was this quest to kill one of the Silver Elites that would net you 14 silver. And I was like, 14 silver. Oh, my God, I can buy that ostrich and that ostrich and that ostrich. The three different colors. Oh, my fucking God. And you get to level 80 or like, and then you go into a main city and you right click inspect people who've got like, level 80 gear. And you're like. And then as I got to level 80 and started doing the stuff and started finding a way to use auctioneer and prospecting and jewel crafting and all that to make money, I ended up spending 18,000 gold on like one of the motorbikey mountain type thingies, the Meccano chopper or whatever it was. And I still vividly remember how amazing it felt to be making that 14 silver and thinking, oh, my fucking God, this is incredible. And then fast forward like two years later, and I was spending 18,000 gold on this. On this new motorbike thing. And I think that speaks to this idea of. Yeah, you're just. Over time, you learn to deploy the resource more effectively.

Yep.

Or almost like in a.

Have you.

Have you read the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson?

No, but, you know, I just. I just got turned on to his library and I'm like, starting to go down the library.

Final Empire. Brandon Sanderson.

Okay.

But it's like in all of these stories, it's like you've got the. The hero who starts off as like a little kid in the village, like, you know, Anakin Skywalker and Tatooine or whatever.

Yeah.

And he's like. He's a bit shit. He's not very powerful. And then over they learn, eventually they get dominion over the galaxy, and now they're like fucking teleporting from one planet to another. Whereas when they were a kid, they were just sort of stuck in this little village on one planet, and it's just sort of this power curve, which really is also a thing in entrepreneurship.

A hundred percent.

Yeah. That's what I find so fascinating about speaking to people who are like, have bigger businesses is just. They're just thinking on a completely different level.

And they're. Okay, just sticking with the metaphor. Right. It's like in, wow, when you get to level 60, 70, 80, and you complete a quest at that level, you get paid way more gold. Right. So you complete a level 80 quest, they're like, oh, congratulations for bringing us the 10 boar skins. We give you nine gold and 87 silver. Right. But when you complete a Quest at level 14, you're getting paid 10 silver or 14 silver. Right. So the second thing in this whole, you know, like, what is your fastest path to 10k a month? I would actually, and I do, I often advocate for the step before that, which is you shouldn't even try and charge for the first thing that you do. You're level one, right? Like you having 10 copper or 0 copper at level one makes no difference. You can't buy anything with 10 copper anyway, right? So a lot of people, whenever I talk about the ROI of free work, everyone comes back and they're like, no, you should get paid what your worth is and your value and you should never do free work and don't let people take advantage of you. And I'm like, you're thinking about it completely wrong. In the beginning, free work is basically a marketing cost. It is a way to remove all friction and get yourself paid in experience, credibility, pattern recognition. Right? So all of a sudden you don't have the constraint where you go, all right, I'm going to charge three grand for this. And someone goes, no, okay, want to know how you remove that barrier? You don't charge three grand and you just say, I'll do it for you for free. And everyone thinks, no, that's a short term loss. But if I told you you're going to go pitch that service for three grand and it's going to take you nine months to get someone to say yes. Or you could pitch it to someone for free today, do a project, and then the next month have something to point to that you can ladder up to a client. Month two, which one would you take? And it's only in hindsight or once you explain that that person goes, oh, I would do the second path, but that's not what most people do.

Yeah, yeah, we talked about this in our, in our last pod as well. And after that, I've had so many people reach out to me with it.

Well, like, it's kind of good.

It's good that we're sort of putting it on the map a little bit to be like, guys, the ROI on free is astronomically.

Yeah. And we might say no, or we might not open the DM or the email, but if they go do that for 50 people, someone's going to say yes. You know, and you have to realize that in the beginning, getting paid in cash is actually not the most valuable thing for you. You want to get paid in confidence. I can do this. You want to get paid in building a network. Oh, now I know someone who can introduce me to other clients. There are a lot of things more valuable than getting paid 100 bucks or a Thousand bucks.

Yeah. But when you're at that stage, it sort of feels like when you're at level 14, the. The 14 silver feels like, oh, my God.

I know.

It's so much money.

And you have to. That. You have to fight that. And I think that's why so many people, if you have built something successful, like something I think about all the time is if I, you know, if every social platform went to zero tomorrow, if my business went to zero tomorrow, if everything went to zero, would I be able to do this again? And, yeah, of course. I think I could. And I think you could too, because once you have the skill, you realize that all of those things aren't the thing that made you you. But when you're first starting out, you can't wrap your head around that. So you think the title is important. You think the amount of money is important. Those things aren't what are important. What's important is whether or not you build the skill. What's the fastest path to building the skill? Do it for free.

Nice. Okay, so I'm 26. I'm a doctor. I have an informational advantage in, like, the medical. Ish area.

Cool.

And I know that I. And. And now I'm like, okay, maybe I shouldn't do tutoring, because tutoring is anchored to, like, I don't know. I was. I was giving a talk at Cambridge a few. A few weeks ago, and some guy came up to me afterwards. He was like, you know, you know, I've got a side hustle as a tutor. And I'm like, okay, how much do you charge? And he was like, oh, it's, you know, it's. It's quite a lot of money.

I was like, oh, how.

How much is a lot of money? And he. He felt really cagey about saying it because his friends were right. He was like, charge 45 pounds per hour?

Yeah. I was like, yeah.

Oh, okay. 45 pounds per hour. It is very much, very much anchored to a lot of money.

It's like the Wolf of Wall street series. So we gotta bump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket. Okay. Like, yeah. And you won't. And again, you only know that when you increase pattern recognition. Hanging around other people, building things bigger than you, no different than you and I are constantly looking for. Well, who's built something bigger than we've built? Right? So, yeah.

This is why, when I saw your video about the Cole Gordon Mastermind, I was like, damn, maybe I should pay 68,000 fucking dollars for this frigging mastermind. And you guys were like, yeah, we kind of got the value from it from day one. And then all the rest of it was a bit of a waste because we knew what we had to. What we had to execute on. And I was like, interesting.

But if you think about again, it's like, does it matter if we got the value over the course of a year or one day? No, it doesn't matter.

And you know, in some ways, one day is even better because it saves you time.

Yeah.

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So, I mean, okay, first is recognizing that there is an unfathomable amount of opportunity on planet Earth that most people just can't wrap their heads around. So what usually happens is someone goes, all right, I've decided I want to provide this skill. They go talk to one person, that person says no, and then they'll come back and they'll go, I guess it just doesn't work for my niche. It's just too saturated. There's just no. There's no opportunity. Okay, first of all, you haven't deployed enough volume to know whether there's enough opportunity. Second is there are so many people that are now realizing that they all need to build things on the Internet. So we used to live in an analog world, now we live in a digital world. I don't think that there's a business owner on Earth who doesn't understand that their life would be better, easier, and probably more profitable if they had a growing audience, if they had an email list, if they had a way of educating customers on autopilot. So we all know that. And every single day that goes by, more and more founders, more entrepreneurs, more business owners, more creators, more podcasters, YouTubers. Every single person goes, I should probably build myself more on the Internet.

Okay.

So that mega trend increasing. So all you have to do is go, I'm going to go help the category of person who every single day that goes by, that is growing. So going to any business owner, any creator, anyone, anything that is tangentially related to your information advantage. And in my opinion, another mistake that gets made is people go, well, so what are all the most popular writing gigs?

Yeah.

So for a long time the most popular ones have been SEO articles, blog posts, basic content marketing, stuff like that. Right. So part of the game is always going, well, where is the growing audience? In this case, that would be the growing customer base. And what is the not popular yet, but the increasingly popular skill that they all want. And so for every business owner or creator or anyone, right. There's three things they all want. They all want help putting out more content.

Yep. Especially on LinkedIn, it seems.

Okay, so just. And we'll get more specific. They all want help creating text based content, usually first, and then it becomes video or audio. Right. They all need help moving that rented audience to an owned platform, AKA email. Right. But the best way to move them to an email List is not to say, come join my newsletter. The best way to move them is to give some sort of free value where they exchange their email address for something. So the best vehicle we found are educational email courses. Then once they're on your email list, well, you don't just want them to go through the educational email course and then they're done and you never, you talk to them again. Right. They need a weekly newsletter because that weekly newsletter nurtures them for a prolonged period of time and then they inevitably buy your product or service. Every single person needs those three things, which means all you have to do, you could just pick one of them and you go, I'm this person with an information advantage in this industry or this niche and I specialize in one of those three services and you need one person and they will pay you three, four, five grand per project per month, and congratulations, you either just replaced or at least hit like 50% of your full time income.

Okay, so I'm a junior doctor. I have an informational advantage in medicine. I know, I like writing. I used to write essays in med school and I liked, you know, I had a personal blog back in the day and blah, blah, blah, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so I'm thinking, okay, who could possibly want to pay me five grand a month to help grow their LinkedIn presence? And yeah, it would probably be a big pharma executive, maybe the CEO, maybe someone in the CC suite, maybe someone who's the VP level or director level or whatever.

Let's go simpler than that. The family friend of yours who's a doctor and they have a small business practice, they have a private practice and.

They want to create content on LinkedIn to help promote the fact that they're like a shoulder and blah, blah, blah, surgeon or whatever, dermatology, that kind of thing.

My dad's a spine surgeon. Okay, so how does my dad get more people to know that he's a great spine surgeon? You either put your name up on Google and hope. Yeah, that's one strategy, which is what most of them do. Or you go, I'm going to start taking this into my own hands. I'm going to start educating people, right? What are, what are the reasons people have back pain? What are the ways to get rid of back pain without surgery? If you have surgery, how do you recover faster? What foods should you eat? What exercises should you do? Right? So it doesn't take very long. You start thinking through it and you're like, okay, well that's pretty easy. And I bet your information advantage would allow you to do that. And how many doctors are there in the world? Like a lot, right? So you don't need all the doctors. You need one doctor.

Okay, and so what am I pitching then? Let's say I come up with a list of three family friends who are all doing private practice in. One's a spinal surgeon, one's a radiologist, and one's a dermatologist. And I'm like, you know, sweating, thinking of sending these emails. What am I saying?

Okay, so this is awesome. So irresistible offer script. We'll just do it like word for word. Okay? So I'm going to stick with the spine example because I'm familiar with it. Okay? So first thing is you have to do your homework and understand, well, what is, what does this person do and what do they specialize in and what's their problem? So another big mistake. Most people will go apply for a job on upwork or fiverr, right? When you do that, what you're effectively doing is raising your hand going, I have no control, I have no pricing power, I have no leverage. I am applying for the job. You tell me what you need and I will do whatever it is that you ask, okay? As a result, that is why you have no pricing power. Because the power dynamic is wrong, right? They are the boss, you are the employee. In order to charge more, you have to flip the power dynamic. You have to go to them and you have to educate them on a problem they didn't know they had or a problem that they know they have they just haven't gotten around to fixing. Right? So you go to the doctor, you go problem. You want higher quality customers, you have a private practice, you want more people who are interested in back surgery, but like a specific type of back surgery. So for example, my dad specializes in minimally invasive spine surgery. Okay? So it's like that's the type of person you want to attract, right? The, the, the problem though, is that you don't know how to find them, they don't know whether they can trust you or not, et cetera, right? The reason that problem is happening is because you have a website that isn't optimized for anything and it would be really easy to find those people on LinkedIn. You just need to start creating content, right? And the ultimate negative consequence of that problem is that until you start educating people, you are going to be your, your business strategy is you're just going to sit there and you're going to hope that customers walk through the door okay, so if you start with that, like, little mini problem script, it's impossible for the other person to sit there and go, I'm not listening. Right. Of course they're listening, because you just educated them on the whole problem of their business, which is not hard. Okay, Then once you've educated them on the problem, because they can't care about the solution until they care about the problem. So you first anchor them in the problem, then you go. The solution to this would be if we started educating people on minimally invasive spine surgery on LinkedIn, be really easy. Here's some sample topics. Right. The benefits of doing this is that we would be able to start reaching people that would either be interested in this or would maybe know someone who's interested in this. And then ultimately, we could move that social audience over to our email list, and we could even run, like, localized ads if we wanted to, against that email list. We could do retargeting. And the ultimate positive outcome of that is if we do that, you will have significantly more control over lead flow for your business. Problem script, solution script. And then they go, okay, that all makes sense. So how much? So you have to go through all of that before you go, oh, no problem. So we can create social content for you every month. It's three grand a month. I take care of the ideas, the writing. All I need is about 30 minutes of your time. Once a month, even, we do a quick recap, call, go through all the content that we've created, look at the analytics. You've already written a book, so I can pull a lot of the content from that book, and that's it. Happy to help.

And is this all in a single email? Like, how. What does the process of setting that look like?

So that would be the call. So to get them on the call is you start. We have a phrase we talk about all the time, which is in the beginning, your niche is your network, so you have an information advantage. Your niche is the fact that you have a family friend who's a doctor. Yep. Okay, great. That's the first person you should go pitch, because they are most likely to answer your text or answer your email or answer your call. Right. So the first thing is you open with problem. Hey, no, it's been a long time since we chatted. Uncle, you know, uncle whoever.

Yeah.

Quick question. I was thinking about your business. You know, how do you typically get customers? You know, is that something that you've been thinking about? You know, are you struggling to get leads in your area? Tell me about what's been going on? Okay, that could be a text message, that could be an email.

And then Uncle Johnny might reply to that.

Yeah.

Saying, oh, yeah, it's actually been kind of hard. We advertise on Google but nothing happens.

Exactly.

That sort of thing.

And then you go, cool, I've got a couple interesting ideas. Why don't we hop on a call together and I'll walk you through how this works. I found something that I think would be really beneficial for your business. Uncle Johnny goes, all right, cool. I got 30 minutes on Thursday. And then you go through Problem, script, solution. Here's what I would do for you. So that is significantly easier than going, how do I build an audience of 100,000 people and sell 200 courses a month, every month, forever? Right.

What if Uncle Johnny doesn't reply to my text?

Then you just chalk it up, you give up, there's no hope for you. And you should just never try and say, that's it your niche. There's no opportunity. Right. Obviously, that's not the takeaway. The takeaway is go talk to more people. How.

How many more people? Like, what's your sense of how many emails? Like, assuming I was going to go cold, like, I'm reaching out to local doctors in my area who I only have a tangential connection to, I. E. The fact they live in my area, how many emails does it take to get a response, to get a. Get someone on a call? Do you have a sense of what these numbers are?

I would say so. Even still, I would not recommend even opening the door of cold leads until you have fully exhausted warm leads. And the way I think about leads in general is I put them into two different categories. I call them leaks and faucets. So a leak is someone who goes, you know, my, my sink is leaking. Help me. Right. So a leak is someone who has the problem that you can help. A faucet is someone who goes, my faucet's running fine. I don't need your help. But I know lots of other people who do. So they become a conduit to other people. And so one of the biggest missed opportunities is people go, well, I'm going to go pitch, you know, all these cold leak. No, you should start with all the people that you know and then go to each of them and go, do you have a problem? If, yes, I can help you, or, hey, I'm trying to grow my ghostwriting business. Do you know anyone who needs help creating content on LinkedIn or anyone who is creating on LinkedIn but needs help moving that audience over to an email list. Right.

That's interesting. Like, I remember coming across that line some. Somewhere it might have been one of. In one of your books and often messaging someone or emailing them and saying, hey, do you know someone who's looking for this?

Nobody does it. It's the easiest thing.

Either they know someone or Chancellor, they'll be like, oh, actually, I could kind of use some help with that myself.

Yes.

But it feels like a more gentle pitch than, can I help you grow your content on LinkedIn or whatever?

Yes.

It's like, do you know anyone who might be looking for this?

You are. Yeah. I had a mentor in Chicago who used to say, you are never selling anything to anyone. You are giving them an opportunity. And so when you think about outreach, whether it's to your network or cold leads, you don't want to approach it through this lens of like. Like pitching, because that's not. Everyone knows when they're getting pitched. Right. So the whole methodology that I'm a firm believer in is you want it to all sound like free consulting. Everything that you do, every text message, every email, every phone call, every zoom call, it should all feel like, hey, I see what you're doing. I just. I can't help myself. Like, you're making a mistake. I. I just wanted to point it out and help you do with it what you will. I just wanted you to know. Right. And when you do that, the other person can't help but go, well, ah, you just educated me on a problem, and now I know I have this problem. And then inevitably they go to you and say, so is that what you do? Then you go, oh, yeah, no, that. That is what I do. I specialize in that. And they go, can you help me? And you go, sure, I'd be happy to help. Right. So you're almost. You're not pitching them and going, buy from me.

Yeah.

You're educating and, like, guiding them until they're forced to go, I need someone to help me. Is this what you do?

Nice. That sort of takes the fear out of selling, because even in the way I'm describing, and I'm using the word pitching, which, yeah, no, even subconsciously, has a certain energy about it that feels like I'm trying to sell something.

Yes. If I. If I was. If I had an agency that did, I don't know, provide some service right now, and I was trying to get you as a client, even here on this podcast, I wouldn't hit you. I would just drill into yeah, Ali, like before this, I took an hour. I thought about, I went through your whole funnel. You know, I just want, I just wanted to point out to you, right, like, there's like these 10 things you should do and inevitably we're going to get off the pod and you're going to go, okay, so that sounds like a lot of work. Any chance I could just hire you and your team to do that? Right. And that, that piece, that skill, if you understand the power of that and you build that skill where you don't talk in sales, you talk in education, you will make money forever. Because that, that is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is not someone going, you know, do I want to buy from you? Yes or no. The bottleneck is that the person doesn't usually know the problem that they have.

There's a friend of mine who does some really high end consulting for these sort of big fashion brands and stuff, and I was asking him about how he lands these deals and he was like, oh, yeah, I just go in and I just teach them about what's wrong with their supply chain and how AI can potentially help. And then I leave it at that. And on the way out, one of the executives will sort of walk me to the lift or to the elevator or whatever, offer me a coffee and say, hey, so can we engage you or something? And he's like, those are the magic words that I'm looking out for. But I never get any impression that that's what I'm going for.

I mean, just. It's a lot like dating, right? Like, what's the fastest way to get someone else to deny you or say no to you? You go up to them and you're like, do you want to go out on a date with me? Right? No. That's not usually how you get someone's attention, right? How you get their attention is you're in a busy place and you lean over and you know, you see someone attractive and you're like, I want to talk to them. You don't open by pitching. You open by going, you know, the brick chicken here is actually really good. And then they're like, oh. And you're like, but don't get the, don't get the fries, though. They do this weird thing where they put this like, like aged parmesan on it. And you think it's going to taste good, but it's not going to taste good. And all you're doing is educating them. You're just like, hey, I saw that you're having this experience I just want to make it better for you. And inevitably, they go, interesting. Now they're hooked. Now they start talking to you. The same is true in business. The goal is never to sell. The goal is to educate.

Yeah. And there's, like, I think there are people that do this well, and then there are people that do it less well. Like, I've started increasingly getting emails and dms. Like, every other Instagram DM I get is someone, like, giving me some sort of neg about how they've been through my funnel. And, oh, Ollie, did you know you're leaving $4,000 a day on the table? And this sort of stuff? And I'm just, like, off. Like, they've all taken the same course.

Yeah.

They're all running the same. The same kind of script.

Yeah. So there. There are ways to not do it well. But to be honest, a lot of it comes down to tone. You could say the same thing, but the way that you write it or, like, something we talk about in PGA all the time is actually sending looms. So you're sending a loom to personalize it more. And the tone that you use, if you start the loom, and it's like, hey, I've got this exciting idea for your business, and, like, pitch, pitch, pitch. Right. The other person can feel that, and within 30 seconds, they're like, I'm out of here. Right. But if you open the loom, this is, like, this was such a huge lesson for me building my agency. You basically talk to every single person as if you've already been friends for 10 years. And that's. That is an energy. Right? It's not like a trick. It's just an energy. And you just hit them up and you're like, hey, John, really love what you're up to. I was just going through your site. Big fan of your industry and what. What you're about, by the way. Like, I've. I've been really interested in spine surgery for a long time. My dad's a spine surgeon. Fun fact. So I have this kind of, like, knowledge about it. But I was just going through your funnel, and I, like, I noticed a couple things. Just wanted to point them out for you. I hope this is helpful. Like, that tone comes off very differently. Right. And so. So many of these things, they're not hard. It just is. You just need someone to point it out to you, and then you go, oh, that makes a lot of sense. Why me? Pitching is like turning people off in the DM because people don't want to Be pitched. They want to be educated.

Nice. That's good. As you're saying that, I'm thinking of, you know, there's a bunch of YouTubers that are like, a lot of people are going to YouTube as a source of Organic Legion. And the ones who I gravitate towards are the ones who are 27 minute long video loom walkthrough explaining how all their systems work. And it's a. Oh, and oh, by the way, we do this for clients. If you're interested. There's a link down below and I'm like, nice.

Yes.

Like it just makes perfect sense. And there's almost this sort of very casual, you know, I've got the cookies, I don't need you to have. I don't, I don't need you to buy the cookies. But like, I know you want them. And it's this weird kind of push pull.

Yeah.

Where it's like, hey, I'm just being very casual about this, being very friendly about it. I'm not trying to sell you anything at all. Sort of vibe.

It's very reverse psychology. But, but also it can be summarized, I think really simply in abundance mindset or scarcity mindset. When someone is overly pitching you, right. You, you pick up on this scarcity that they have, right? Because they're like, I need this client, which inevitably makes the other person feel like, well, why do you, do you need clients? Because no one wants to work with you. Right. And then you like get turned off from it. But an abundance mindset is like, hey, I'm good on cli. I'm actually full.

Yeah.

I just wanted to point this out to you because I think it would be helpful and that abundance makes the other person feel like, well, if a lot of people want to work with them and if they're so abundant with what they have, it must be really great. I do want to work with them. So it doesn't, it actually doesn't matter whether you're full or not. It doesn't matter if you have 10 clients or not. It's the energy of, are you operating from scarcity or abundance? Nice.

Yeah, this is reminding me. So there's, there's a team member of ours that we hired recently, Kaelyn. She's our community manager for productivity Lab. And I did like a sort of very casual pod with her the other day because we were waiting for Cal Newport to show up. And so she and I just kind of did a kind of bonus episode of the pod and she, she was explaining how when she Moved to London, like, three years ago. She joined our YouTuber Academy knowing she wanted to be in the sort of Ali Dal orbit because she's a YouTuber as well and stuff. And she came to one of our meetups, and I remember this conversation where she came up to me. We had a very pleasant conversation for, like, two minutes. She mentioned a video that I. That I had seen of hers, and then she left it at that. And I didn't hear from her for, like, two. Two whole years until she applied for one of our jobs. And I remember that interaction being like, oh, yeah, I remember her. She came to one of our. One of our meetups. She seemed cool. In contrast, there's this other guy who's been coming to every single meetup for the last, like, two years who seems clamoring to get a job with the Alibal team.

Yeah.

And the energy around that is so radically different where I'm like, I'm already. I'm so turned off by this guy. Someone's clamoring for a job.

Yeah.

Whereas with her, I was just like, oh, it's just chill. Like, yeah, she seemed normal. She. And she's applied for a job and she's made the shortlist. Great, let's interview her. That kind of thing.

Yep. Yeah. Again, a lot of it is energy. It's not that you shouldn't follow up a million times. I'm a huge advocate of keep following up, but it's the way that you do it. It's the energy of it. Right. And are you coming at it from a place of, like, I swear I can help you. Where are you coming at it from? Like, again, hey, I'm just reminding you I'm here anytime you want to chat. You know, more than. More than happy to help. Those just come off so radically different and little. Just because you said it, like, an amazing growth hack for finding clients and finding opportunities is you just said, it's like, if someone wanted to be in your orbit, there's actually a really easy way to be in your orbit. It's called be a customer. Right. So if someone wanted to pitch me as a. To offer a service. Right. And I knew that they had purchased ship 30, my likelihood of reading and responding to that email and, like, genuinely considering it is 10 times higher than someone who hasn't. Right. So amazing growth path. Just go find all the people who run communities and have courses and know and have all of the opportunity. Go pay $97 or $150 or whatever the cost is for one of their Products be a customer, and the likelihood that they will listen to you is exponentially higher.

Yeah. Yeah. Whenever someone opens an email or anything with a hey, I. I was part of YouTuber Academy Cohort 3 or something like that, I'm like, of course I'm gonna read it. There's no world in which I wouldn't read that. Like, yeah, I think similarly, when. When you. When emailing people who've written books, if you've actually read the book and just sort of leading with, hey, you know, I read your book two years ago. I loved A, B, C and D. You know, then they're way more likely to read that than a random email.

Yeah. I mean, all of this stuff, it's like, we all know this. It seems so basic in a lot of ways. Is. Wouldn't it make sense to do your homework before you talk to someone? Yes. You know, are they more likely to respond to you if you clearly understand their business or their industry? Yes. So that's why starting with information advantage is really easy, you know, and then with all of this stuff, by far the biggest problem is people just don't do enough volume to see they. They talk to four people, and those four people say no, and then they give up.

Yeah. Yeah. So we. I was asking about this. What's. What is a good amount of volume before throwing.

What we tell people in PGA is if you're starting warm with your network, you should begin by making a list of 50 people. 50. Five.

Zero.

Yeah, five. Zero leaks and faucets.

I was thinking five.

Yeah. No, five is like, you took, you know, one step into the starting zone and, like, killed two bores and then are like, why don't I have all the epic gear? Right. So starting warm, you should make a list of 50 people that you know that either might need your help or might know someone who need your help. If you're going cold minimum, you need to reach out to 100 people. And I don't mean go get some software tool where you scrape emails and then just copy, paste, spam, send 100 emails or 100 DMS. I mean, identify 100 quality people, do your homework on each one, send them a message if they respond, create a loom problem script, outcome solution script, pitch them. Right. Like, you should go through that entire process for each of them, and only then should you go, okay, I genuinely did my homework and genuinely educated 100 people. And zero said yes. And even at that point, it doesn't mean that it doesn't work. It means you have a problem. You Have a bottleneck somewhere in there. And your job is to identify that bottleneck, remove it and do it again. Do it again.

What are your thoughts on using ChatGPT to automate some of this outreach and stuff?

I think the big misunderstanding with AI is everyone wants to automate things they've never done before. You can't automate something that you haven't done. And even if someone tells you how, you don't understand it so you're not getting the full value out of it. So this is one of those just like first principle beliefs that I have, which is the metaphor I like using is if you were to run a marathon, you would train with ankle weights so that by the time you ran the marathon, you would take the ankle weights off and it would be easier. Right. So whenever I'm doing something, I always ask myself, what is the, what are the ankle weights? So in the beginning it seems like the longer road to go, I have to go educate and talk to a hundred people. Well, yeah, in the beginning that is the longer road instead of just, you know, trying to automate the whole process and defer to technology. But after you do that, you are significantly more educated about the process, how to do it well, what drives the outcome, what are the mistakes that then allows you to leverage tech. But if you skip that step, you think you're taking the shortcut and then guess what? Shortcut ends up being the longer road because you skipped the whole learning. Yeah, you know.

Yeah, I started getting a bunch of these sort of clearly chat GPT generated emails and it's almost like, I'm sure you've gotten this as well, where you can kind of just tell when someone is purely copy pasting something and it's just like the tone is a bit off, the start is off, and it's just, it's just an immediate archive from the inbox kind of response. But yeah, as you say, someone who's learned the skill of doing it and is showing that they have done the work because most, well, at least some people kind of know what a ChatGPT generated paragraph sort of looks like. Sort of sounds like there's something about doing the work that really helps you stand out, which itself, which then sort of becomes the shortcut. The shortcut is actually just doing the work.

Yeah, yeah, shocker. You know, my, my default is the coffee shop test. If, if you sat down in front of that person at a coffee shop, you both decided to meet up. We're grabbing coffee at 3pm okay, cool. And you said what was in that email out loud, what would happen? Like, that's the question every person should ask themselves. And if, and if just like you started laughing and you're like, oh, I couldn't imagine saying that email out loud. Right, That's a problem. And so if you're sitting there and you can't even with a straight face go, I wouldn't say this email out loud. That means you're not doing the work. The goal is for someone to open that email and go, like I read, I get cold pitched via DM and email every day, probably 20 to 50 times a day. And I read every single one of them because I try and keep my DMs clean and I try and keep my email clean. And the reason I don't respond to 99% isn't because I don't know who the person is. It's not because it's cold. It's because their message is not helpful. They are not educating me. They are not. They didn't do the work right. So I love, it's like when people are like, Facebook ads are dead. Email is dead. Cold outreach is dead. No, none of those mediums are dead, period. And they all work for people who do the work.

Nice. Okay, what else do people need to know on this road to making 5 to 10k a month as a writer?

I think so. Last thing I'll say is, and we can talk about creator economy, digital products, and sort of what it's like being a creator in today's world. But I think that one of the mega trends is more and more people are realizing the power of being what I'll call hybrid creators or building hybrid agencies. So the first business that I built was a ghostwriting agency. I grew that from zero to about 180,000amonth in 18 months or so. And in hindsight, one of the biggest mistakes I made was there was a certain point in that business when we were doing like 60 to 80k a month. We had five full time team members. We had about 15, 20 clients. Me and my co founder were completely out of the business and we were both making 20 grand a month, working like an hour or two a day, just making sure that the team was running that we didn't. It was our first business. I didn't know how good we had it at that time, but that was the sweet spot. And what we should have done at that point is not continue scaling with services because services are linear by nature, right? Like you generate more revenue because you land more clients. So to service those Clients, you need to hire more people. And people are static costs. You're paying salaries usually. And so we didn't know that. We just thought, okay, well, we're just going to grow forever. It's not what happened. And if I could go back, what I would have realized is that that was the sweet spot where it didn't take that much effort to keep replenishing clients when they would churn, you know, so you could maintain profitability and like the health of the business. But then because I had reclaimed all my time, I was only working in the service part for an hour or two, that's when I would have started building digital products. Because every digital product thereafter has no marginal cost. So it's. It's pure profit. Right. And so if you think of the difference between, you know, a service company, a ghostwriting agency doing 100k a month purely in services versus one that does 60k a month, and then the other 40k is coming from digital products, the second one is wildly more profitable. And then there's a flywheel that happens. The flywheel is that, yes, a lot of people will buy the digital product and go, well, I don't need your agency because you just told me how to do it. That's fine. But a good percentage of your customers are going to get educated and go, oh, this is actually harder than I thought it was. Can I just hire you to do it for me? So you just monetized the sale, which creates the flywheel. Your digital products are profitable, which educates customers to become service clients. Right. And it just keeps going and going. So I think that this mega trend of hybrid companies, or hybrid creators, hybrid agencies, I don't see very many people doing it or talking about it yet, but I think these two worlds are going to intersect.

Okay, this is good because the next thing I wanted to talk to you about was to riff on a business idea that we've been having over the last week.

Okay, let's do it.

So what do you think about. Okay, so we want to start an agency that is done, fully done for you video for businesses where the business does not even need to provide the talent. We can do that. So essentially what we want to do is create Talking Head Educational YouTube videos or LinkedIn videos or videos for their documentation or videos for their ads or whatever, using The Ali Abdal YouTube formula, which is you get someone who sits in front of a camera and says stuff with the occasional shit happening on screen and like a nice edit and like nice background music and stuff, basic talking head Educational stuff. But for businesses like software companies who want to do documentation or ads or LinkedIn, probably not LinkedIn, because I would need to be under the founder's personal brand, potentially. What do you think of this?

Okay, so I actually think that's a cool idea because you've found a solution to the number one problem, which is most often people at those companies don't have time, don't have the skill, don't want to build the skill, all of that.

Right, yeah, we found that with hey Friends, which is the agency that we started in partnership with Hunter Hammond and Cyber Bloom. And we were targeting individuals and also like executives and stuff. But we found that people really suck at talking to a camera. Yeah, it's not making the time for it. People have all sorts of emotional issues dealing with speaking to a freaking camera, even though they're the executive of a freaking multi deca million dollar company. It's like, like, why is it so hard to talk to the cameraman? Yeah, but apparently it's really hard.

So you, you found a great, a great solution. So two things that immediately come to mind though. One is I think if you hire one person, one talking head, you run a couple risks. So one of the risks is, I think of it like the podcast deals that Spotify did with what's her name. One of them was Alex Earl and the other one was call her daddy. Call her. Yeah, who's the host of that? Okay. But yeah, right, where the talk, the talking head, the person outgrows the situation and then they want to leave, they want to negotiate. Right. That is a risk. Another risk is when you rely so heavily on one person, it makes it then hard to deal with that situation if you need to transition. So what I would do is actually frame the channel not around a person, but around a category of idea. So if it's like a fintech startup, it would be like fintech advice or whatever. And then I would hire as contractors, like three different people. So that way from the beginning, you've.

Set the process exactly. It's not one brand channel, it's not a personal YouTube channel. There's multiple personalities. People are not that wedded to the individual. They care about the advice.

Yes. And then from there I think, you know, if you're taking care of the scripting, you're taking care of the editing and everything. The only thing I just, I know because I ran into it with ghostwriting. The only thing that you're navigating is then the type of team you're dealing with. Like for Us with our ghostwriting agency. What would happen is we'd get 10 cooks in the kitchen. Like the executive would want to weigh in on the writing or the script. Right. And then the head of marketing and then the marketing intern and then. So the solution that I have found to this is you have to basically walk in and say, not just we're going to create these videos, but we are going to create these types of videos. Like very specific. Like one video a week is going to be like pure tutorial walkthrough, you know, Another video a week is going to be like trend watching. And you basically give them the rules for the formula up front. And you're like, each of these videos has these set of rules, which reduces the amount of subjective decision making for each of them. So that way when their head of marketing comes in and is like, you know, I don't think we should. That I don't like that intro. Right. Well, that I don't really care if you like that intro or not. Like there's a method, you know, and so you have to educate them on that method. So that way, which reduces the amount of edits, which sort of just defers more and more of that trust to you in the beginning.

Nice. What do you think a reasonable price point with this for this would be.

How much, how much volume?

Dunno. That's a good question though. Yeah.

How quickly do you think you could grow a channel and how much volume would you need to do to grow a channel reasonably?

Well, the goal wouldn't be to grow a channel. The goal would be to produce the videos that could go on their website or on. It's like channel growth would be a happy bonus rather than something that we would lean, that we would sell because. Okay, it's just impossible.

It's too hard.

It's too hard to get.

Okay, I'm going to give you one of the things that we learned too, which is then I would anchor it all around long tail searching. And basically what you're selling them. Again, this is like pricing hierarchy. Right. You're not selling them volume of videos, you're selling them a specific library of content.

Yes.

So you're like, you want to rank for these terms and phrases. You want to build dominance in this industry in this niche. One of the month, one you go and do an audit. You're like, these are all, you know, these are the top 30 long tail things that people are searching for that are related to your business at the end of six months or at the end of one year together. We are going to have built this niche library. And because they're buying an asset and an outcome which is divorced from time and effort. Nice, right? That is what allows them to go, okay, so how much is that? Now you can throw a number in the air because how do you value that library of content? Well, now we're. It's a completely subjective. So you could charge 50 grand for that, 100 grand. Right. It depends on who you're pitching. And then at the end of the six months, what do you do? You go, hey. Our team took some time education. We identified another niche that you could build dominance in. It's tangentially related. We went ahead, did some free work for you. This is, these are the next 30 videos that you could make. I think this would allow you to scale your dominance. Do you want to do another six months? It's anchored to time, but it's not really time that they're buying. They're buying the library.

Nice. That's good. Yeah, because that makes sense. What? We don't want it to feel as if like we are going to grow their YouTube channel.

Yeah, no, that's not. Because now you've removed that part of the conversation.

Yeah.

You're like, followers don't matter. We are going to rank for these and these are going to show up in YouTube search, they're going to show up in Google search.

They can be embedded into your website, which improves the SEO thingy of your thingy page. Because Google owns YouTube and.

Exactly. So even just notice this conversation. Right. The more that we talk about the education component, it's like, hey, did you know that embedding these videos on your website is going to increase the searchability and performance of those sites? Most people are going to go, no, I didn't know that.

Yeah, we noticed that your brand is already doing posts on LinkedIn. Did you? We can also repost the same content on LinkedIn. And now you've built a content library on LinkedIn. Did you have LinkedIn videos growing by 58 zillion percent every year kind of thing.

So because like the framing is everything and because you've anchored it to an asset and an outcome library. Well, now you can go to a startup that just raised 30 million bucks and go, it's a hundred grand and it'll take us six months to build. Do you want this?

That's a pretty good offer.

This, this is like an enterprise agency offering, you know, like, yeah, you could do it for smaller companies and maybe you have like a paired down offer. But if I were you like, where people go wrong with pricing is they, they pick two packages that are really close to each other. So they're like package one is five grand a month, package two is seven grand a month. Well, for a business owner, there's actually no pricing threshold between those two. Yeah, I don't care if it's five grand or seven grand. That to me, that's the same number. Right. So what you want to do is if you were to create two different packages, you want to widen the gap. You're like, the five grand a month is for small businesses or creators. The 50 grand a month is for, you know, enterprise tech companies. Well, now there's a pricing decision.

Nice. Yeah, that's interesting. So we could even reach out to companies, companies that really should have video content. A company like Salesforce really should have a shit ton of tutorials on their own YouTube channel that are actually good.

Yeah.

A company like HubSpot should really, you know, the HubSpot are a bit more modern, so they are sort of doing it. But we could literally go through. Well, okay, how? Well, what comes to mind is we just go through the Fortune 500, look at all the YouTube channels and see. Or the NASDAQ, which is like for tech companies. Look at all the YouTube channels, see, which are the ones that we could make a compelling pitch to see if we can get a warm intro to that person. Or alternatively, we start with our existing network. We reach out to, for example, Penguin or macmillan or any company that's ever sponsored our stuff. How would you go about. Well, this.

So now like what we're talking about is the conversation we've been having just on this is the level 80 version, you know, and we were talking about the level 14.

Yeah, I want to get the 100k contract.

Yeah. And so where do you start? You start your niche is your network. You start with the people you know first.

Yeah.

And then you exhaust that list.

Even if they might not be the right. Right people for the 50k offer or what.

Yeah. Leaks and faucets.

Yeah.

Because then you know anyone.

Yeah, of course they'll know people. Yeah, yeah. And they'll be far more likely to hold on a call with us. Be like, yeah, of course I'll talk to you.

Yeah.

Or CMO kind of thing.

I can tell you because at my agency we, we had some of like the biggest tech companies in the world and as soon as you start getting up to like Fortune 500 or like multi billion dollar companies, those are very different deals. Oh, and like you can do it, but there's more red tape. Sales process takes longer. Like in my opinion, the sweet spot is you actually like. Do you know the site Crunchbase? Yeah. Okay, so Crunchbase publishes, you know, companies that just raised any amount of money. If I were you, I would target companies in the 10 to 100 million dollar range, either in value or in revenue. It could be valuation, money raised, it could be revenue, whatever. Because that range is where you're not so big that you have 10,000 employees, you know, but you're not small where you're like penny pinching. That, that, that general range and that's a big range, but that general range. A lot of those companies are like, we know we want to do video. We're still small enough to move quickly. Let's just write the check. Let's just do it.

Yeah. So what sort of, what sort of size checks were you charging in the agency back in the day?

Oh, I mean, our highest offering was like five grand a month. Like that was one of my biggest mistakes was going, we literally had companies get on the phone and go, we love your pitch. Do you have anything more expensive? And I was like 26 years old. I didn't know. I was like, no, I thought five grand was a lot. We, we land, we landed one of the biggest enterprise tech companies in the world. Like, they have as many employees as like small countries. And they literally said, we don't do, we don't work with vendors for five grand a month. Like our smallest vendor is like a hundred grand. So they prepaid for a year, a whole year up front. Just because they like that was the only way to get the deal across.

Wow.

And like that experience taught me so much about just, I mean, you're talking to a company that does 30 billion in revenue. You know, it's like, it's crazy. And so if I were you, I would have two offers and I would have one that caters to the smaller creator, but it's still sort of premium. Like five grand a month, 7,500amonth. You know, smaller sized business. Maybe even like a company doing like 10 million would say yes to that. But then I would also have a super ding dong version that's like, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50K a month.

Yeah.

And then you go pitch that to $100 million companies.

If you guys didn't have your own long form YouTube video strategy. What is the sort of thing that, that if hypothetically me or someone on my team were to say, hey guys, you know, will do, we'll do long form. Long form video for you. What are the sorts of things you and Dickie would be thinking about?

Like all the things that we're talking about. The first thing is I would 100% do it for a start writing online channel, like all of that beginner stuff I've written a gazillion times. I have all the content, I've already done all the thinking. Like me creating those videos is actually sort of low leverage, you know. And so creating a branded but faceless, if you will channel that just does all of that education on autopilot. That's really interesting to me.

Yeah. How much would that be with you? In theory?

I'd say, I mean if it was like three grand a month, I would pull the trigger. Like no questions asked. I'd be like, let's just try it.

Okay.

You know that, that to me is just a. Yeah, let's see what happens. I think our pricing cap would probably be around ten grand a month. Ish.

Before you would start thinking, oh, okay, might as well just do myself kind of thing. Or.

Yeah, that's already worth doing. Yeah, it would. From there it probably wouldn't be a money decision. It would be a priority decision. It would be like, if we're going to spend 20 grand a month, what's the ROI of that? Doing this relative to something else.

Oh, something else. We could spend 20 grand a month. Yeah, fine.

Or should we just hire two people internally to do it? Right. Because then I can start paying full time salaries and. Yeah, okay, nice. But you have to. One of the benefits of pitching larger companies is that the larger a company grows, the more taxing it becomes to bring something internally because you know, you have to train them and you have processes and your head of HR needs the process and like, so it actually is easier to sell to those larger companies because they're not real. Like they can't do the rationalization of, well, we could just hire five people. It takes too much bandwidth for them. Whereas for us we have a small team. Like I could hire two people and train them relatively easily.

Yeah, okay. Oh, that's interesting. Nice. So 10 to 100 million. Start off with the network. Until we have exhausted that and going.

Back to everything we've talked about, if I were you, I would consider just doing the first one. You could do it for free or just like do it for five grand.

Yeah, do it super cheap for like payment or something. They'd probably be down.

Exactly. And like learn. Figure out where your inefficiencies are. Figure out what it's worth to the client. You can, you can power level all of the learning by doing it for one person.

Nice. That's a good idea. I'm thinking if we did reach out to the publisher and they were like, you know, you guys should really have your own YouTube channels where you do.

Yeah, of course they should.

Intros to all of the books that you're publishing.

Have you seen their YouTube channels?

No, I haven't.

No shade, but they're pretty bad. Like publisher. Yeah, it looks like, like, like a writer's house from like the 90s, you know, the sound is horrible. Like everybody needs help with video. So it is a great service. It's just, I would really, I would not connect it to audience growth. I would anchor it to library. You're buying an asset. And I would pitch larger companies that have the means.

Nice. Easy enough. One thing I was going to want to ask you about, so I, I've been an avid listener of the Espresso Hour.

Really?

Which is a great podcast. Like, thanks. Half my team listens to it on the regular. And we're always like, oh, you know, these guys talked about this thing last week because it feels so relevant where we are. Because I think your business and ours, and it is at least in a similar order of magnitude. So the sort of stuff that you guys are thinking about is ridiculously relevant to what we're thinking about. And there are so few business podcasts that are talking about, talking about, how do you go from seven to eight figures?

Yeah.

And like the actual process of doing that. But one thing I'm curious about is why do you care? You know, you're getting married or you're married now, just got married money, you can chill. Like, why do you care about growing the business?

A lot of, I mean, I think it's true for anything in life, but I just want to know that I can, you know, I, I, I've built multiple seven figure companies now. And I won't lie, I really want the, the eight figure. Like I want to just know that I could do that. That feeling might change after we hit, you know, 10 million. By the way, this drives me nuts. I hate when people say I built a X million dollar business, but they're doing it on lifetime revenue versus annual revenue.

People say that.

Oh, all the time. It drives me nuts. They're like, I built a $5 million company. It's like, no, you built a million dollar company and you've been in business for five years.

Oh, I did that with a video that I made five years ago. I was like, how I built a million dollar business in med school. I was like, if you add up all of the revenue for like seven freaking years, you get to just about a million.

Okay, I'll excuse it because it was a beginner mistake. But I see people, I see people who know what they're doing doing that. And I'm like, why? Why it's frustrating to me is because you're educating aspiring entrepreneurs on the wrong thing. You're setting an unreasonable expectation. You know, and our goal, like, I don't. We've already done 10 million in lifetime revenue. I want to build a 10 million a year business.

Yeah.

And are. I'm hoping that we will do that by the end of this year. And so, yeah, I just, I want to know that I'm capable and that I can do that.

So it's kind of like a video game.

Yeah. Why not?

Just playing on very hard difficulty.

Why do you want to.

Honestly, it's a video game thing. It's like, you know, I'm playing Horizon Forbidden west on PS5 at the moment and I'm playing on very hard difficulty. Ultra hard is a bit too grindy and a bit too hard, but very hard is, you know, I'm like trying to kill the thunderjaw for like three freaking hours on a Saturday. But when I kill it, it feels satisfying. And I'm like, is this what they said about, Is this what people meant when they said you should relax more and not work and stuff? It's like. But it's just kind of nice. It's like playing at level 80 rather than level 50.

Yeah. You know, I don't. Maybe I'm interpreting what you're saying correctly, but it's like, I don't need to build a billion dollar company if that happens. Cool. But to be honest, when I think about that, that feels like way more responsibility than truthfully, I want to deal with. I'm too creative. I don't think I want to live my life managing that. Not that I could. I love when people say that. Like, it'd be so easy. I'm choosing not to build a company.

I don't want to go to the gym because I don't want to get too big. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so I understand the irony in what I just said. But. But yeah, I think like once you build a seven figure company, you're like, okay, what is it? What does it look like to build a multi seven figure company? Cool. Did that. And then it's like, okay, what does it look like to build an eight figure company? And then from there I'll reassess and, you know, do we want to continue? But I learned that lesson really painfully with my ghostwriting agency, which was sometimes you growing too quickly is a huge problem. And something Dickie and I talk about all the time is what's the tipping point? Like when does the business. Yeah, you're growing. Or you might reach, you know, 20 million in revenue or 30 million in revenue. But you will probably cross these tipping points where now you have, you know, 20 people to manage. 30 people, 50 people, 100 people, maybe. That size of business, A, might not even be as profitable. Right. And B, it might not be as fun. So you sort of have to decide, like how big of a business do you want to build? And is the size of that also giving you the other things you want in your life? Is it fun?

Yeah.

To make you happy. Is it still profitable? You know?

Yeah. And how much do you care about like building to sell?

I don't want to sell. I, I'm, I much prefer the idea of building cash generating machines, you know.

Rather than a big sort of like 5x revenue exit or something.

Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, okay, I sell my company for 20 million bucks. Okay. You know, 50 goes to Uncle Sam. So I got 10 million, you know, and then I put that in what, like a 5% account and then I, and then I make like, you know, what is that, 400k a year or something? Like that's actually a lot less than I make. So, Yeah, I have 10 million bucks, but my lifestyle is actually less than what I have now. So why would I want to sell? Same argument, by the way, I make for book deals. Like, why, why take the advance when you know the publisher is going to make, or they're going to try to make 10 times that on your book. Maybe a different path is just self publishing the book and you, you don't get a lump sum up front, but you might generate more in royalties over a longer time horizon.

What do you think I should do for my next book?

I'm so glad you asked this. So I, I've been wanting to talk to you about this. So first of all, I'm like, halfway through your book, I want to pay you a compliment. And I feel like this is going to come off as a backhanded compliment, but I don't mean it that way. It is way better written than I thought it was going to be. And not that I thought you were a bad Writer or anything, but very often I will read self help books and it's just really, it's very mindless. I am not finding your book to be mindless at all. Thanks. It's. It's really cool. And I like the combination of research and personal story. And I also think the categorical difference of grinding productivity versus feel good productivity, like how you set that up in the beginning. Very smart. Thank you. Very smart. So one of my questions was actually, what was your book deal and was it a one book deal? Was it a multiple book deal?

Yeah, it was one book deal with Penguin having the right of first refusal on future deals for life.

Do you know for how long?

But it just means that if I do go try to publish it, I have to give them the option to buy it first.

How long is that clause in effect for? Do you know? Like if you do that once and they take it, do you have to give them first right of refusal for all the books after that?

I'm not sure I should look at the contract.

That's an important piece to know.

But I think I can choose to self publish the next one if I wanted to.

You can?

Yeah.

Okay.

I just have to give them the option of buying it, but I don't have to accept their offer.

Oh, okay. Then that's fine.

It just means that if Penguin versus, I don't know, Simon and Schuster were bidding, that Penguin would have the right to dibson it.

Got it. Okay. So before I give you my perspective, what do you think you should do and how are you thinking about this?

Yeah, so this is going to be very insight baseball. So if anyone feels like leaving the podcast at this point, by all means, please do. I am not sure. So thinking out loud, by the way.

I feel like this is what I wanted to talk to you about for mine. So we'll just keep it going.

Great, perfect. Yeah, that's fine. I'm not sure. So obviously there's value in traditional publishing. In my case, the goal was to have an asset that was to be seen as a legit guy rather than quit. Just a YouTuber and all of that stuff.

I think you accomplished that big time.

Yeah. So the prestige, the New York Times list, the Sunday Times list, the fact that it's traditionally published with Penguin, blah, blah, blah.

Congrats on New York Times, by the way. I haven't said that.

Oh yeah. We must see each other.

But congrats.

Thank you very much. So all of that stuff is done and now for future books. I know I want to write future Books. And I also quite like to the fact that I had an editor who was nice. They had like the in house Penguin designer made the front cover. I hired an external designer to make 50 variations and we couldn't find anything better than the COVID And the COVID turned out to be really nice.

It's a great cover.

Thanks. Penguin landed us like 36 different language translation deals. It's in bookstores. People are sending me pictures from like freaking Taiwan, from like random bookstore in Austin. You know, all over the world people are sending pictures of this book in different translations. And I hear that that sort of stuff doesn't really happen if you're self published unless you become like a David Goggins or something like that, which just seems unlikely. So there's part of me that's like, I like the freedom that Paul Millard has, making like 400 grand already from his book sales of the Pathless Path. I like the idea of doing smaller books. I really want to do a book around. I don't want to say the title because normally I'm not productive of ideas, but when it comes to book titles I'm pretty productive of ideas. But I want to do a series of books in Hampton. Feel like I have more freedom and that the stakes are lower. But also I like the idea that, you know, there's a big publisher behind it who then is doing the publisher machinery to get it into different languages and into different bookstores around the world, which is kind of cool.

So just to summarize, what, what do you feel like the publisher did that you wouldn't be able to do specifically. Good point. The translation deal. Translation, I would say, I would say the bulk translation deal because fun, fun fact, by the way, right now I am negotiating the, the Korean rights for art and business of online writing, which is self published. So you can do translation deals. It's just they're, they're emailing you. They're not emailing the publishing.

A handful of people have emailed us being like, hey, do you have a Slovakian deal? And I'm like, do we have a slot yet? Yep, turns out we do. Sorry. That kind of thing.

So it's possible and that you can do that. But you know, doing a bulk deal, like they go out and sell it in 36 languages, that's something that a publisher does that an individual typically cannot. Okay, so that's one.

Yeah.

But like what else, what else do.

You feel like the translation thing and the bookstores.

Okay, so do you know the data of how many copies were bought? Online versus in store.

And that's a good point. No, but just looking at what we already have, it's like 90 10Amazon versus everything else.

Okay, so.

And everything else also, like Barnes and Noble, it's unclear as to whether it was bricks and mortar or online sale. Yeah, A big chunk of those were probably online as well.

The. The Megatrend in books is that. It's funny because everyone, whenever they talk about book deals, it's like, I want to get into bookstores, but the trend line is that book spot in stores is going down and books bought online is going up. Something else that I have found a lot of people don't know is you talked about, you know, the designer in house creating this amazing cover, and you work with an editor. You can hire all those people.

Yeah, so we did hire an external editor. We also hired an Excel designer.

Yeah.

So that's.

So even people in those houses want to freelance on the side. Or they used to work in a big five house and now they freelance on the side. So also, this argument of, like, taking a book deal and you get access to these specialized people, it's not true. You can get access to them. Just reaching out to them and going, do you want to freelance? So, and then another thing was I read the whole analysis that your team did of the marketing, which was fascinating. That was really cool that you did that. Do you care if I share some of those numbers? So one of the things, I was shocked that you only spent like, 25 grand on marketing. I know that's not counting labor costs, but that was like the zoom and some paid newsletters and stuff.

It was very minimal marketing.

Okay, so like 25 grand to generate the outcome that you did. And that probably isn't really what moved the needle. What moved the needle is your organic audience, by far. Right?

Yeah.

And what did the publisher do?

They landed a few things. Like, we got Good Morning America because of the publisher. We got like the Today Show, Australia because the publisher. We got a few. Like, we got the Financial Times piece, that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Okay. So status symbols.

Yeah.

You know, which, by the way, the thing is, I have probably spent 3,000 hours reading about traditional publishing contracts. I've read the nerdiest books on, like, the history of publishing, how it's evolved. Like, something that I've really wanted as a writer is to be as educated as possible about what is happening in this industry, how do deals get structured? What are the incentive structures? Right. What are the benefits of taking a traditional publisher versus self publishing all these Things. And so when you really, like, list them out, the publisher really isn't doing that much. What they're doing is a. They are giving you the ability to play the New York Times game. Yep, that's it. If I go sell a million copies tomorrow, but I'm not with a publishing house, New York Times doesn't care. Right. So Ponzi scheme, they give you access to the game, right?

Yeah.

Okay. In literature also, you can't win awards, so you can't really win the Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize or anything unless you're with big five A Gatekeeper. Okay. So you can't play that game. Bookstores. So a lot of people don't know how bookstores work as businesses, but basically what a bookstore is trying to figure out is they have inventory and they're like, well, what books should we carry? Now, just because you accept a book deal.

Yeah.

Doesn't mean that they're going to get you in every bookstore. Right. Because how many books does a bookstore hold?

Yeah. Like small numbers.

Like in the grand scheme of things, 300. Yeah.

Whenever I walk into a bookstore, I'm.

Like, is my book there?

And the answer is usually no. Like, I've never seen it in a bookstore.

Okay. So there's the irony.

I've seen Instagram stories of people who've seen it in bookstores.

Yeah, exactly. So, okay, so they're not going to get you in every bookstore. Right. And the bookstores that they get you in, what happens? It's almost like, like an old school algorithm. So what they do is they pick these markets and they go, okay, we're going to target these couple bookstores in this localized area, and they have a rep from their house that goes to the bookstore and goes, hey, here's the deal, Ali Abdul. Sure, you don't know who this person is, but we just signed this huge book deal with him. He has 5 million YouTube subscribers, so he's going to push the shit out of this thing. Right. And they're basically selling to the bookstore your ability to market, to bring people to the bookstore. And that is how the bookstore decides, well, what books should we carry? Right. So already if you're an author, you're like, okay, how much leverage do I have? And even if I sign a book deal, the publisher's not putting me in every bookstore. So how much leverage do I have that the publisher can go market to the bookstore, saying, this author is going to drive in person sales? Right. So all of these variables work together. So when you start listing all these things out if you were to just be really brutally honest, like who got you New York Times? Was it you or was it the publisher?

The publisher unlocked the ability to be on the list. But it was really our audience that drove the sales to get on the list.

Yes. Okay, so then you start doing the math. So okay, you got the status symbol. Once a New York Times bestseller, always a New York Times bestseller. So you don't need to play that game anymore. Right.

I don't think there's much value being at two times New York.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's like five times or like to embarrass the thing or whatever.

Exactly. So now you start doing the math on a self published book and you go, okay, what's the difference between. We'll just use round numbers. What's the difference between a million dollar advance and a 10% royalty versus $0 advance but 100% royalty. Right. And if you start like, okay, so how many copies you sold? 200,000. Yeah, okay, let's just be super generous and go 100,000 of those are from in bookstores, which the publisher did for you. Right. So we'll say you're responsible for driving 100k copies and you sell your next book for 10 bucks as an ebook, 20 bucks in print. And again just, we'll use round numbers, $10 is the net and you sell a lot of them through your own website and. Yeah, some through Amazon where like the split is 60, 40, whatever. You've already made your million.

Yeah.

100,000 copies, 10 bucks a copy. Yeah, you've already made a million. And that's in the first year. So what happens then? Year two, year three, year four, year five. And like nobody does the napkin math, but it doesn't, it almost doesn't matter how big the advances is that when you take into account the higher royalty and if you're someone who has an audience and continues pushing it. Right. You go from marketing the book that you don't really own, you own 10% of it, to marketing your library that you have majority or all ownership over. And the royalties start outpacing the advance.

Yeah. And the advance you have to pay off anyway through the royalties. So it's not even free money, it's just.

Yeah, yeah, most, most authors, even if they get a million dollar advance, they don't ever see a royalty from their book. So they, they, they just went, I'm going to take the million up front. And sometimes that's the right decision. But if, if you just want to write one book, if you were like I'm one and done. You made the right decision. You won the status game, probably got a really nice advance. You're. You're good. Right. But if you actually enjoy writing and you want to build a library, well, you should own the majority of your library. I love when people are like, nobody buys books. Okay. How do you think all the publishers make billions of dollars? People buy books. It's just the publishers convince writers that there's no money in books, which is why the writers all go, sure, you want to take 90% of my product, no problem. And then they just slowly accumulate a library over the years and over the decades.

Yeah. And it's like, okay, so it sounds like you think self published is the way to go.

I would. So I think from both a content and a digital product perspective, we'll just take a different lens.

Yeah.

If you ran an experiment, a public experiment, and said, here's all the math on my traditional book, and then I do it again, and you put forth the same resources, but you do it all yourself. And then you do a postmortem. Here are the differences. First of all, I think from a content perspective, that would crush. Second, it would teach you a ton. And third of all, you could probably bundle all of that into a digital product that monetizes it. Again, being like, I'm going to walk you through my whole publishing process.

I also like the fact that if you're self published, you can give away books.

Yeah, you can do a lot. So in Dickie and I got offered a book deal like a year ago or something, and I was. The contract was nuts. I was like, I can't believe you think people sign stuff like this. Like, it was so predatory. And they were like, this is standard language. Like, I don't understand what you have a problem with. And I was like, you want lifetime representation of everything that I write forever? They were like, yeah, most writers have no problem with that. I'm like, get out of here. And so, yeah, I just, I think that in the long run, because you have anyone who is building an audience, I would really stress test the value of taking the money upfront versus extending the time horizon and going, you're. You're a creative person. You're going to want to create things for the next 50 years. So what does it look like when you own your library for 50 years?

Yeah, I wasn't even vaguely thinking of, like, the money. I've, like, initially what I said to the publisher was, oh, I don't want an advance. I just care about the Royalties, because I don't. I don't need the cash flow. And they were like, great, perfect. And then I was told, actually that's bad idea, because if there's a big advance on their P and L, then they're going to put more effort into.

Exactly.

Kind of thing. And so the money up front was really more of a. At least they've got some skin in the game.

Yeah.

Kind of idea.

Yeah. And for. So another flaw of traditional publishing, Right. Is that forces them to actually be incentivized if they. Part of the. Part of the reason why so many writers vent about their publishing deals is because the publisher goes, well, we don't really believe in the book, but hey, you're willing to sell us 90% of it, so we'll give you a 10 grand advance. But when they do that, they have no incentive to actually go push it. So the only reason that you are taking the big advances to basically put their nose to the grindstone being like, now you have to push it.

Interesting.

You want to talk? I would love to ask you some questions about writing the book, actually. Yeah, sure. Okay. So first of all, productivity and self help is one of those things where it's hard to reinvent because it's like, how many times can you talk about the same thing? You know, which is why I think I like going into the book. I was sort of like, we'll see, we'll see, you know, And I was really pleasantly surprised. How did you come up with this lens of feel good productivity? And you reference a lot of studies in it. Were those studies that you had read and then they. That is what gave you the idea? Or did you sort of start with the idea and then you went and found research that supported it?

Yeah. Okay. So the backstory is that initially the book was titled the Productivity Equation, which was modeled off of a skillshare class that I did that was about productivity equals meaning multiplied by output, multiplied by fun or something like that. And I always had this fun construct within whatever. I would teach about productivity on YouTube and stuff. And initially when publisher A approached me, they were like, we'll just give you a book deal site unseen. You don't even need a proposal, just sign the book deal kind of thing. I took ages to sign the papers, and just before I was signing them, when they were sort of hassling me about it, I spoke to a writer friend who said, you know, who's your agent? And I was like, I don't have an agent. And she was like, you need to don't sign this thing, talk to an agent, I talked to an agent, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then we sort of renegotiated that deal with publisher A. And then it came to writing a proper proposal for US Publishers because apparently US publishers don't. Don't like books where they're not at least jointly publishing it at the same time. Because if the US publisher is playing second fiddle to the UK publisher, then they don't like it or something to that effect. So then we had to write a proposal, a proper proposal for the US publishers. And so I wrote the Productivity equation and sent it to a couple of editors. And basically the feedback was that, this is terrible. It's not going to sell because no one wants to read a book called the Productivity Equation. It just sounds boring as fuck. What's the idea? And there was this guy, David Moldauer, who was super helpful. He's the guy who also did James Clear's proposal and also has worked with a bunch of other. Our other friends in that WhatsApp group. He basically said, yep, it stinks. But come on, man, like, if you had to boil it down to one thing, you know, you're successful, you're a Doctor, you're a YouTuber, like, what's the one thing? And I was like, oh, I just find a way to make everything fun. And he was like, that's the book. That's a cool concept. And he's like, I don't think anyone's gone into productivity from that angle. So like, why not just do that? And initially it was like, okay, well maybe that's the thing. And then it became the productivity game and they became all about gamification and stuff. And as I was initially, I made the mistake of outsourcing the research. So I got a research assistant who was kind of reading a bunch of papers and stuff and feeding me insights. And I'd sort of come up with this framework around like, okay, well what do video game designers do? Like, why is wow addictive? And how do we apply that to productivity? Blah, blah, blah. And then I started writing and realizing I didn't quite have the material and I couldn't really make the case that like, fun was the thing. And then I started reading the papers myself and then I was like, oh, okay. The guy who I hired had an English background. He didn't have a science background. So he's trying to read all these psychology studies. He doesn't probably didn't even know how to actually access them because of the logins and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, the journals.

So when I started getting into the journals myself, that was when I sort of went on a bit of a rabbit trail to see, like, what is the evidence that. Is there evidence backing up this sort of fun idea? Because there was the Happiness Advantage by Sean Acker, which is the idea that success comes from happiness rather than the other way around. It's not that happiness leads to success. It's that success. No, it's not that success leads to happiness. It's that happiness leads to success. So I knew there was some stuff there, so I sort of followed up his thingies and eventually came on this broaden and build theory that I talked about in the introduction. Positive emotions are like the thing that, like runs this upward spiral of productivity and positivity and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, this is it. Finally there is like a thing that I can hang my hat on to be like, there is evidence that positive emotions drive productivity, which is not quite the same as fun. And so then it became a bit of like a balancing act. Be like, okay, how much do we lean into the language of fun? Or how much do we lean into the language of positive emotions? And eventually the positive emotions thing made sense. And then in the shower one day, I was thinking, positive emotion. Productivity. Positive productivity. It sounds a bit. Shit. Good vibes Productivity. Well, there's a book called Good Vibes, Good Life by Vex King, so I can't do that. What's another word for good vibes? Feel good. Feel good. Feel Good Productivity. Feel Good Productivity.

Oh, shit, it's got a box to it.

Feel Good Productivity. Then I hopped on, made a loom to send to my agent, editor and team to be like, guys, I think.

I've got a title.

I think it's Feel Good Productivity. What do you think? And everyone was like, yeah, that's like the first of the 5,000 titles we've tested so far that feels as if it lands. And so it was like that kind of idea.

Fascinating. Yeah. I remember there was a. I forget where in the book. It is like somewhere early on where you are referencing, you're making the case for this and then you're referencing all the different, different studies or different books that you were reading. And each sentence that you had pulled referenced a researcher talking about play in their work. And every sentence was had the word play or playful in it. And that's where I started to really be like, oh, okay, I understand how this is all being connected together. And it's cool because I think with things like self help, just Broadly, a lot of the. The secret to positioning or differentiation is finding that through line in lots of different things and pulling it together. And I feel like this through line was. I keep pointing over here because you have a copy of it on your bookshelf. And I keep looking at it is. That's. That was a really interesting through line to find. And I feel like it all seems to. It's how it always is, right? It's like, it's. It seems to make so much sense now. It doesn't seem like it made a ton of sense in the beginning.

Yeah.

How much. How much did you discover this either through just writing and reading and exploration or are you. Were you an outliner? Did you, like, have an idea? Start with an outline, refine the outline. What was that process like?

Yeah, you know, it. I think the first half of the book has a strong through line. The second half doesn't really, because the title, Feel Good Productivity, only came about, like, two and a half years into the process. And so it was always going to be play power. And people like, those were always the chapters in part one. But initially, because I started with an outline and it was like, part one was about energizing and part two was about procrastination. Part three was around, like, burnout and stuff. I think we managed to make it with that through line. But if I had my time again and another five years and I knew the title of the book was going to be Feel Good Productivity, it would have had a way stronger through line because I'm sure I could have found a lot of really good stuff that really pushed that message. But because the title sort of came towards the end of the process, then it was a case of trying to almost retrofit what we already had, knowing that, like, okay, well, there's all this stuff around burnout. There's all this stuff around, like, procrastination and emotions and stuff. And like, I guess we can do a little bit of literary sleight of hand and saying that, like, you know, feeling bad makes you procrastinate, so feeling good makes you productive. And it's like, it's not quite that simple, but with a bit of hand waving and a little bit of, like, shoehorning in a block quote or something that, like a pull quote that really emphasizes the feel good angle. Maybe it can work. And so it felt a little unsatisfying once that title. It's like trying to come up with the title of a YouTube video. Once you've made the video, it's like yeah, well, it's always way harder than starting with the title. And so, Yeah, I don't know what your original question was.

Okay, so on a. That's one of the biggest things that we teach in all our writing programs too, is like, if you start with the title, the title is what dictates all of the content.

Yes.

But if you start with the content and try and retrofit the title, it's impossible.

Nightmare. Yeah.

So actually, so it's interesting that the, the next book you write, it's like you should spend a disproportionate amount of time on the title.

100%.

Because that's what I tell the whole.

Every author. I know this now. Whenever someone's like, yeah, I'm two years into the process and we're still thinking about the title, I'm like, no, I can feel the pain. And they're all like, yep, I know.

Yeah. Because literally the, the title or the subtitle completely changes so many. The stories you tell, the research you pull, the advice you give.

I would have had no idea about this had I not been through the process. Because if someone had told me this three years ago that, oh, yeah, you should really think of the title first. I listened to the publisher where they were like, oh, in 80% of cases, the title comes later and stuff. I was like, okay, okay.

So this is another thing I've learned that publishers, they don't really have a framework for books. They sort of do. Like, I can tell that they all think that the key to self help is go as broad as possible. And the challenge of going broad is that it becomes less and less tangible and less and less specific. And so what happens is you have a lot of these self help books that come out with nothing to hold on to. So they'll be titled like Limitless.

Yeah.

Whoever's book is named Limitless is named. Right. So it'll be Limitless and the subtitle will be like becoming your best self. And it's like, I don't know what, I'm signing up for your book, actually. And I think it often happens on accident. I don't want to take away from what you did, but I think it often happens on accident where your book title is. Actually, I've been formulating this. This framework around like the perfect book title. Like, what is the perfect book title?

Yeah.

Your main title is actually a category of productivity.

Yeah.

So as much as possible, you actually want to define a categorical difference, Right, Sure.

Like slow productivity. Cal Newport.

Exactly.

He's Defining a category.

Exactly.

He's not trying to be productivity, he's trying to be slow productivity.

Exactly. And so on accident or on purpose that you did that, which is literally 90% of the game, because people that read the book title then go, I intuitively understand this isn't about all productivity. And I've already seen there's a book on slow productivity. So different niche or subcategory. What is Feel Good Productivity? So you're being specific, but it's also really broad. Like, everyone wants to be productive and everyone wants to feel good.

Yeah.

So one of the keys that I found to book titles is how can you make something both specific and broad at the same time? Feel Good Productivity accomplishes that. Then the subtitle has to tell you what you're going to get. Right. And so the subtitle, it's like, how.

To do more of what matters to you.

How to do more of what matters to you. Right. Okay. So it actually is accomplishing that. So you see Feel Good Productivity and you go, oh, this is a how to book. So we accomplished that. Right. And then it's like, well, what does the person want to learn how to do? They want to learn how to do what matters to them. Right. If you don't have those two pieces, if you don't have the category differentiator.

Yes.

Multiplied by. And what are you actually telling me? Yeah, there's a reason why those books don't move, you know? And so now your job, when you go do this on your own the next time is like, how do you take that general framework and go, now let me apply it to something different, and then spend like a year just doing nothing but workshopping the title and the subtitle.

I agree. I completely agree. Do you think I should lean into being the productivity guy? I think, I think in Snow Leopard, you talk about this kind of the whole, like, you know, Ryan Holiday equals stoicism kind of thing. And if you ask people, what's the word that you would associate with Ali Abdaal? That word is productivity. That's a really good word. It's a really high value word to be associated with my name. And so do I want to go? I don't know, feel good fitness, feel good relationships, Feel good spirituality, Feel good parenting. Or do I want to go, productive relationships. Productive parenting. You know, that sort of idea.

Okay, so this is an awesome question. This is going to be very advanced. So anyone who's listening, we're just going to skip straight to level 80. Okay. All right, so first of all, I think it's funny, this growing trend. You see it on Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube where everyone's like, I am the broad category guy.

Yeah, the writing guy.

The writing guy. The productivity guy. Right. Okay, the thing that everyone needs to internalize is that when you're thinking categorically the goal, you are not what's important. Like, the goal is actually not how do I grow the category of I'm the productivity guy. The goal is how do I grow the category itself? And I am part of it.

Fine. Like, Ryan Holiday grew stoicism, Right?

So he doesn't go, I'm the stoicism guy. He goes, I'm going to evangelize stoicism. And because I am doing that more than anyone, you associate me with that category. Okay? So every person who does the guy thing, I'm like, you already misunderstood the idea. Right. Second of all is your book title. You stumbled upon something which is, it's not all productivity. It's feel good productivity. Right. So if I were you, I. Your mega category is not productivity. You're not the productivity guy. It's feel good productivity. Then the question is, okay, so you own that now. You've planted your flag. Now, what are all the subcategories of feel good productivity? So what are all the other things that can go within that umbrella?

Feel good productivity for parents, Feel good productivity for writers, Feel good productive for students.

So you can go the.

You can go the.

For who?

The miracle morning for. Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you could go. You can niche down within that category by audience. Yeah. You could niche down by outcome. You could niche down by problem. You could niche down in all sorts of different ways.

Okay, what do you mean by problem or by.

So I think that the mistake would be. Well, I actually think you could go multiple different ways. Typically, it's very hard. So there's an old book called Positioning. You ever read that book Positioning?

I've read it ages ago, but I need to read it by Al Rice.

Al Rees, and Jack Trout. Yes. And they have this. This concept called line extension or brand extension. Right. Which is, you know, Google becomes known for search, and then they go and take the Google brand and they bring it over to social, call it Google plus. And it doesn't go anywhere. Right. Because typically you can't just take a brand and then extend it into other categories. Right. So I think the mistake would be you thinking, well, I'm Ali Abdaal and I've been successful in productivity. Now let me just go jump to a different Mega category. And just think, I'll be. Yeah, right. You can sort of make the argument though that it's not fully line extension if you're extending. Not the brand Ali Abdaal, but you're extending the category so of feel good productivity. And that's where you could go. Feel good relationships, you know, feel good fitness, whatever.

Sure.

But what I would think about first is what are the categories that are most closely related to productivity? Like relationships isn't the closest. Next category. So what are some other.

I mean, motivation would be why? I mean, I guess, like how do you define categories?

Time management. Time management, like that's a subset of product. Productivity is so wide you're sort of going like, what are the largest subcategories within productivity?

So yeah, time management would be big one. Procrastination. Motivation, definitely. Increasingly, discipline is a lot of.

So like, for example, like feel good discipline. Like that's interesting.

That's interesting.

Yeah. And, and that, that is like a one deviation away. And you're not. Yeah, I'm full of them. And so that's not you going, I'm Ali Abdul. I can be successful at anything. That's you taking your already successful flag in the ground and going, I'm just going to extend it to this little territory that's right next to me.

Yeah. Feel Good Discipline would be an interesting book to write.

And so that's.

It almost writes itself.

Exactly.

Just based on that title.

It writes itself. And something that I, I always look for, especially with book titles, is how do you take two words that shouldn't be in the same room and put them in the same room? And feel good and discipline usually are not put together. So inevitably you just created some magic.

When a person's like, feel good in relationships. I mean.

Yeah.

Like so vanilla.

Exactly. So you're looking for that dissonance.

Oh, that's good. Anything else?

Yeah, I think just to like crystallize it though, if I were you, especially because of how successful this book has been and I sort of seen how you've adjusted some of your branding to like sort of be all cohesive with this book and the book title and.

Everything, website redesign stuff as well, I.

Would, if I were you, I would 100% double down on the mega category of feel good productivity and make everything fall under that. And literally, I honestly think no one has really executed this better from a categorical lens as Ryan Holiday with stoicism.

Yeah.

And that's your whole goal is just Ali Abdul comes second. Feel good productivity comes first. How do I build a suite of products and a library of IP and books.

Yeah.

That falls within that category.

So if I did a book called something like I don't know how to actually enjoy your work or something like that, how to. How to actually enjoy your 9 to 5 or something, that's almost like extending the category of feel good productivity.

Yeah, sort of. Yeah, you could do that. The risk that you run with that is. It's very similar to that book, the book that you just wrote. And so same like with our pricing discussion where people like put prices together. Most people, if you look at like Mark Manson's actually a good example of this. His second book and his first book are actually very similar.

Yes.

And so when you read the first book, you're sort of like, I don't know that I need to read the second book because it's so, you know, and so when you're thinking about the library, your goal is like, how do I create something that is farther away from my first book from. From a concept perspective.

Yeah, good point. Yeah. So Feel Good discipline would be one of them. Where people can appreciate that those two are actually different books. But they're close. They're related enough that like. Okay, yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. You know, or like Feel good conflict resolution. You're like, oh, I. That's interesting. Like, conflict resolution usually feels stressful.

Yeah.

You know, so what would that look like? So you have, I mean, you. It doesn't get much bigger than. The irony of Feel Good productivity is that you've niched down without niching down because it's still so wide.

Yeah.

So you've. You found something that's. The magic is like finding something specific that actually doesn't rule a lot of people out, but immediately forces people to go, well, do I want slow productivity or do I want Feel good productivity?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Part of the reason to have blocks on the book cover was. Was also that, like, I could imagine a world where all of our books had like, blocks. Blocks, like colored blocks in different configurations. And so I was sort of like mocking up Feel Good parenting being like the blocks are a bit higgledy piggledy to look like kind of a toddler's blocks.

Oh, that's cool.

Feel Good fitness is like the blocks are like a barbell or something or something to that effect. It would just be cute if, like the whole thing could have like the whole library could have a sort of video animated reconfiguration of the blocks that would result in the things. But. Yep, that's going really, like, no one cares.

So something else to think about too is if you wanted to experiment with that library, you could not deploy a ton of resource. And you could write smaller ebooks or even print books on Amazon within those different verticals and then look for the one that outperforms the rest. And then go to the publisher and go, I'm ready to do round two. I've written five different feel good category ebooks. This is the one that's clearly working. Let's do a book deal that's even bigger than the first one, but is basically that book expanded. Because Atomic Habits is just blog posts expanded. Mark Manson's book was a blog post expanded. Right. So they are interested in the expansion of ideas once they're proven successful.

And I guess kind of riffing on that. Maybe it would also be useful to just do a video talk called Feel Good Discipline.

Exactly.

The subtitle of, like how to actually how to Blah, blah, blah, whatever. Whatever the subtitle would be. And see how that does.

I mean, so a book I'm working on right now is based on our first episode together. Because the title, I forget even the title, but it was like five. Five ways to make a million dollars as a writer or something kind of thing. And that, because it performed so well, sent me down the rabbit hole of well or five paths to make something like that. And I was like, oh, it'd be really interesting to do a book around the different career paths and how each one pros and cons of making a million dollars as a writer. Like, how do you make a million as a literary writer?

Yeah, that's cool.

You know, and so, yeah, you should take all of these ideas and just run it through the lean writing method. Create a video on it, create Twitter threads on it.

Feel Good Discipline. That's a good sign.

Starting to percolate.

Yeah, that could be quite a fun book to write.

The best part is I only take 10%.

Yeah. Nice.

Cool.

What about hybrid publishing?

I hate it. It's a hedge. I think anything in life, almost anything in life that is a hedge means.

Except hybrid agency.

Except hybrid agencies. Exactly. Hybrid agencies. The word is in a different context. But hybrid publishing is like, you don't know whether you're playing the New York Times game or the self publishing game. You've picked a weird middle ground.

How many copies is Art and Business of Online Writing sold?

I don't know.

How many or like, how much have you made from it?

Yeah. Number of copies? I don't know, but I've probably Made like a quarter million from it. Something like that.

Self published.

Yeah.

So you just get royalty checks every month or every quarter. How does it work?

Every month on Amazon and I sell like 20% of them through my own website, so I'm getting 100% of that sale.

Oh, just like through like a gumroad store or something? Yeah, like that.

Yeah. And what's wild is when I wrote, I wrote that book in 2020, I had been writing online for a while, didn't have a huge audience. The advance I would have gotten for that book probably would have been about 20 grand.

Yeah.

Maybe I could have talked my way into getting like a 50 grand advance just because of where I was. But if I had done that to date, I probably wouldn't have made much more than 50 grand. So it's interesting too to look at that decision in hindsight and go, not only have I completely eclipsed whatever that advance would be, but I'm making way more.

And if you sell on Amazon, so like how, how much do you personally take home from each sale? Like, do you have a sense of what those numbers are?

I've read this so many times and I always forget the exact numbers, but it's something like depending on ebook or print book, it's somewhere in the ballpark of, I think print is like, it's one of the two. It's either print is 30% and ebook is 70% or it's flipped. But it's a, it's a percentage of the same.

And have you got an audiobook for it?

No. And that was one of the biggest missed opportunities. I've just been so busy and we've been building our companies, but that's on my to do list for this year. It's. If I had done the audiobook with it, I probably would have made another 250, which is really frustrating to look at in hindsight, but you know, yeah, okay, golden question. Maybe it's a good one to, to end on. Was writing this book daunting? And how did you overcome the constant inner critic? Did you have an inner critic? What was that like?

Oh yeah. All the, like all the way through. I thought I had gotten over imposter syndrome and stuff because I'd been doing YouTube videos for so long and, and all that. But as soon as it came to writing a book, there was something about that, that.

Why do you think that is scary? Why is that so daunting for people?

I think for me, a big part of it was that when you write a book, you're really putting out a thing into the world saying that like, I think what I have to share is sufficiently valuable. Whereas when you put out YouTube videos, like, I mean everyone in the dog's putting out YouTube videos. Like it's not a, it's not like a major. You aren't sticking your neck out that far by putting out a YouTube video. I mean still people think they're putting out a YouTube video, sticking their neck out, but putting out a book where in particular strangers can then review it on Amazon and Goodreads publicly and can actually share what they think about it.

Even though people comment ridiculous things on YouTube videos.

Yeah, but it's a YouTube video. Like no one, like it doesn't have a rating. YouTube videos don't have a rating system. I think it was part of it was the fear of what if people don't like this? And then that will be public knowledge that it is shit. And that is really scary. Which was a big part of like second guessing myself. Also the books I read. I was sort of comparing my shitty first drafts to like Dan Pink's final draft and thinking, gosh, it's so good. How's it so good? And yeah, well when I got the book deal I was 26 and I kind of thought like who the fuck is going to listen to a 26 year old dude like talk about, oh.

Wow, I didn't realize it was four years ago. Wow.

Yeah. And so yeah, it was a lot of these sorts of things and like I've never really done anything interesting. Yeah, I mean I was a doctor but like big whoops, so was everyone I know, you know, that kind of thing. And like, yeah, I grew a YouTube channel but like, you know, it's not like I missed the beast levels of YouTube channel. And yeah, I grew business but like you know, it's, it's, it's only a seven figure business, you know, that sort of thing. It was all sorts of like my credential is only X and there are 5 million other in the world, 5 million or more people in the world who also have credential X. So why is it interesting like who am I to write this book?

So then how'd you get it over the finish line? Did you like hire a coach or anybody to help you?

Yeah, so we had, I had a writing coach initially in the early stages and then had a external editor outside of the publishing house about halfway through the process. She was great, Rachel. She sort of project managed the whole thing and a lot of my conversations with Rachel and With Kate, my agent, were like emotional, supporty type conversations where they were like, don't worry, everyone goes through this. Yep, it's fine. You don't have to read the reviews. Also, the book is genuinely good, so don't worry about it. Like we tell you if we thought it was shit. Like, don't worry, we're all professionals. We've done this before. The publishers have done this before. We know when a book is bad. We're not going to let this be bad. Don't worry. A lot of that.

So that is a big value. You know, I understand then why a lot of people want that. That hand holding.

Yeah. You know, but you can hire that up.

You also can hire that. Yeah, interesting.

And then a big part of it was along the way I had to remember to take my own advice. And whenever I would really struggle with the book, it's because I flipped into treating it with too much seriousness, just taking it too sincerely. Sorry to just, just taking it too seriously and thinking this is a big heavy thing. And it was the times where I really embodied this idea of like, what would this actually look like if it were fun? Like, what does the feel good version of this look like?

Drink the koolaid.

Exactly where I would be like, you know what? This is literally the shit I'm writing about. And like, okay, let me actually. Okay, cool. So let me, you know, get a walking pad for my desk. Let me kind of do this, like dictate this bit while I'm going for a walk around Hyde Park. Let me do this bit in the coffee shop. Let me have like a co working party with friends. Let's take the whole team to a team retreat in Wales and get a big ass Airbnb where the goal is no one's allowed to do any work. And so the team's all hanging out and I'm just sitting there grinding on this book because I have to get a chapter out every day. It was things like that that made the process more enjoyable that ultimately helped to get over the finish line.

What of those things are you planning on doing this next time?

A big part of it is the intense sprints. I found that the most productive times in the book journey were where I had like a whole week or two to just think about the book, the whole stuff around. Like, well, if you write for three hours a day, then that's as much as anyone can do in any reasonable length of time. And then that if you write a thousand words a day, that out extend it out compounds, blah, blah, blah. I didn't really make much progress because the startup costs of rebooting it back into my RAM and, like, trying to figure out, like, where. Where was I? And like, okay, where's. Let me bring up all those tabs on freaking zotero and scriveners that I have. It's like, well, what was that study again? By that time, it's like, it's time for my coffee and poo. And then it's like, I can't be asked to write anymore. But on the weeks where I just had nothing to do other than write the book, or on the whole days, or I had nothing to do other than write the book. Yeah, I screw around a bit in the morning, I go to the toilet three times, but I still have another seven hours to write the book.

Yeah. So that's. You know, I'm actually really glad you said that because one of the things I beat myself up about most often is, you know, because I'm running a company, you know, there's a lot to do, and I will get very down on myself being like, you didn't do your personal writing today. Yeah, I did eight hours of work writing, you know, but I didn't get my personal writing. And I actually think, yeah, it's funny, you. Sometimes you just need to hear it from someone else, but I think you're totally right is it'd be better to just immerse yourself for a week rather than try and do 30 minutes a day. Yeah. Which is so interesting because that's counter to everything we talk about in ship 30. But I think especially when you're juggling so many different types of pursuits or projects, like, immersion is almost always better.

Yeah, I think so. I was gonna say, it's like, I also realized this. That's a big part of what Cal talks about in slow productivity. Like, the more projects you have going on in parallel, the more the administrative overhead costs of each project add up. And so actually just carving out a whole day to just do one thing means that you don't have to deal with all of the other bullshit that would otherwise be associated with running a business and building a team and stuff.

Yep.

So, yeah, I'm very bullish on these short sprints of intensity to just turn it into a party. Like, go to. I. I see why writers go to a cabin in the woods. In the woods for like a week at a time or a month at a time. I'm like, you know what? That would actually be kind of fun.

Maybe I'm gonna come full circle Because I always trash the cabin in the woods, the chapeau and the cord cob pipe. Maybe I'll come full circle and go, you know what? There is a place for a cabin in the woods after all.

Yeah, I think editing is nice to do in, like, small drips and drops. Because editing, it's like the goal is to see it with fresh eyes and to like.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Especially the first draft, the writing itself, and also the really meaty edits where it's like, okay, I need to immerse myself in this for a whole week just to see the whole picture and then be able to slot things around.

Yeah, you have to hold all that stuff in your head. Well, congrats again on New York Times bestseller. Thank you very much. Enjoying the book, but you also sort of talked me out of reading the second half, so we'll see if I finish it.

Although a lot of people have said the chapter nine, the final chapter, is their favorite one.

Really? Maybe you'll. Okay, skip ahead and if you watch to the end of this video, we'll give you a bonus.

Yeah. Do you have any bonuses this time around for people who are watching to the end of this episode?

You know, they know where to find us. We're always giving away free stuff. Not too worried about it. Just happy. Happy I got to see you here in London. Yeah.

Thanks for coming by. And if someone's watching this on YouTube, you can click here for the first episode that we did, which goes into more detail about the backstory and laser bit more of the groundwork. Good stuff.

Awesome.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the itunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and.