How To Make Your First $1 Online in 2025

I have sold over $10 million worth of digital products on the Internet. And today I wanted to answer a bunch of questions related to how to make your first dollar online. What you should create, how you should find customers, and what you should sell them. So let's dive into the first question Virgilio asks. I've been following ship 30 for less than a month now and consistently writing every day for more than a month. What would be the most realistic way for a total beginner like me to earn my first dollar online at this stage of my writing career? So don't feel like you have to monetize right away. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is thinking, I just started doing this thing now. How does this make me money? And in reality, a lot of times, the money comes later in the process, and the money is always the result. It's not the goal. The money is the result of a skill. So you can't really monetize something that you don't know how to do yet. So in the beginning, the best thing that you can do is just continue building the habit, especially with writing. Just continue building the habit, continue building your library. Because the longer that you write for and the larger your library grows, the more these answers just start to scream at you. Like, it becomes very apparent how you should monetize. However, if you're sitting there going, cool, okay, thanks, Cole. I appreciate it. But really, how do you make money as quickly as possible? Very, very simple. This is a huge framework we repeat in chip 30 constantly. It has to do with your writing. It has to do with monetizing your writing really has to do with monetizing anything. The first thing that you're doing is that you need to pay attention to what's working. Okay? So you should never try and monetize something that you haven't already tried to do in its most atomic form. You want to start small, and then you want to double down on wherever you see signal. So if you've written 30 days in a row, you've written 30 short pieces. For example, which is the goal of ship 30 for 30. The first place you start is by going through what you've written and asking yourself the question, which thing performed the best? Which thing got the most likes? Which thing got the most comments? Which got which thing got the highest quality comments? Which thing did someone comment and ask me a question. Wherever you see signal, that is where you should start directing your effort. Then when you figure out, okay, I've written 30 things, this one topic is clearly the One that resonated with people. And I'm not saying that something that you wrote has to go massively viral. I'm not saying that. I'm saying look for the thing that literally got two more likes than everything else. Or look for the thing that where one person asked you a high quality question, they left a high quality comment. That is enough signal. And then what you should do is wherever you see that signal, you go find someone who has that problem. It could be the person who commented, it could be someone in your life that you know, could be a friend, it could be a family member, it could be an uncle, doesn't matter. Find someone who has that problem and go talk to them. And the goal of talking to them is to better understand that problem. So usually within a problem there are lots of other problems, right? So I'll give you a really simple example. Say you have a problem and you go, I don't know how to do my laundry, right? Well, there's probably 10 problems within that problem. Like maybe a problem is you don't have a washing machine. That's a problem, right? Or another problem is you don't know what detergent to buy. That's a problem, right? Or you are so busy in the week that you can't find a good pocket of time to do your laundry. That's a problem. So whenever you figure out where a problem is, it's never just that problem. It's always problems within problems. And a lot of times you only know what the problems within that problem are when you go and talk to someone. So you have to go talk to someone. And we repeat this all day, every day in ship 30. Every time we do, people go, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they don't go talk to people. So I'm telling you, you can try and circumvent it, you can try and ignore it, you can try and postpone it, but this is the fastest path. You just go talk to someone and find someone who has those problems. Then you help them solve it manually. So you're not trying to build a product, you're not trying to scale to the moon. All you're doing is you go, I found one person who I can help. I talked to them about their problem, we dug into the problems within that problem and then I took the time to help them. So that might mean hopping on a zoom call and walking them through what they need to do. It might be putting together a really in depth email and sending them an email going, this is what I would do if I were you it might mean if it's someone local going over to their house or meeting up at a coffee shop or getting together and going, I will help you solve this problem this afternoon. You solve it manually. And then after you solve it manually, you look back, you reflect on everything that you just did and you reverse engineer it into a digital product. So everything that you just said to someone on a zoom call, you now go put in an ebook. Everything that you just explained to someone in person, for example, you reverse engineer it, you put it into a long notion doc, you record a video of yourself talking about it and then you sell that. And I think so often people jump to, you know, what's this incredible product I need to go build? And really, if you just break it down, that's not the right way to think about it. The way to think about building products is by starting with a person, starting with a problem, helping them solve it manually, and then reverse engineering everything you just told that person into text, video, whatever the medium is. Question number two, Sanada asks, is it worth earning your first dollar online if it costs you more time than it's worth? So this is a really interesting question and it reveals a lot of people struggle with spending time on things where they aren't sure of the immediate reward. And so this is sort of a meta concept that I want to start with, which is most things in life where there is an exponential outcome inherently come with A, a lot of slog in the beginning, a lot of time where it's not working or you're not sure how it's going to work. Right. And B, they always come with some element of quote unquote risk. And a lot of times that risk doesn't mean I'm risking some huge amount of money or I'm risking my full time job or I'm risking something that I currently have. In examples like this, the risk is just I'm not 100% sure this is going to work. And as a nice just rule of thumb for yourself, I think about this all the time when I'm launching new, new ventures. The more uncertain you are about the outcome, the quote unquote riskier it is, but usually the more upside there is as well. So you sort of want to retrain your brain to realize that that uncertainty is actually a signal that this has a lot of upside and a lot of potential. A different problem or a bigger problem is when you look at an opportunity and then you realize, or you ask yourself what is the upside here? And when you, if you say to yourself. There is 100%. There is 100% guarantee that I will unlock this outcome. Chances are the outcome is fairly incremental because anything that is that guaranteed doesn't have an element of risk. And if something doesn't have an element of risk, then chances are there isn't a lot of upside. Right. It's probably a commodity at that point. So that's sort of the high level way of thinking about it. Specifically, you know, is it worth doing something to make your first dollar online if it's not worth the time to make that dollar? So said, more specifically, would you go work for 10 hours to make $1 online? Well, it depends on your time horizon, because in the short term, within those 10 hours, is a dollar for 10 hours of work a good return on investment? No, it's a horrible return on investment. But the upside and the potential is that when you take the 10 hours, for example, to learn how to make a dollar on the Internet, now every hour you put into your machine starts to scale exponentially. Right? And that's sort of the beauty of Internet money or building digital businesses is as they start to work, there is no marginal cost. You don't have to buy canned goods. You don't have to pay to ship physical products, Right? So it might take you 10 hours or 100 hours to make your first dollar online. But as you keep building, you might get to a point where one hour of work yields you $5,000 or $10,000 or $100,000. Right? Like, just to give you some context, it probably took me, I'm not exaggerating, it probably took me 100, 200 hours to figure out how to make my first dollar on the Internet. I spent a lot of time trying to understand what is this Internet game. And this was back in 2014, okay, but now our businesses are at a point where if I sit down and I spend four hours creating a product, well, that new product, for example, could make us 50 grand, 100 grand, a quarter million dollars, four for five hours. 10 hours of work on my end. And then I have a team that helps me take it from there. So that's the whole point of putting in the work. In the beginning is in the beginning, it's a horrible roi. But as time goes on, every new hour you put into your digital business, the upside gets larger and larger and larger. All right, Cole asks. I always love seeing a fellow Cole out in the world with no experience ghostwriting and. And no clients. What type of prospects should I target for my first clients? I have Natural interests in sales, mindset, fitness, history, and productivity. Okay? So first I just want to point something out, which is I tend to notice that beginner writers, beginner ghostwriters, they say exactly what just got said here, which is, I have interests in. And then they go on to list 3, 4, 5 of the biggest categories on planet Earth. So they're like, I'm interested in history and productivity and mindset. Okay, well, mindset literally doesn't get any bigger. If you are a human being with a brain, you're interested in mindset, right? So total addressable market for mindset. Eight billion people, right? History. Okay? So anyone who is a human being that probably wants to in some way be aware of. Of the fact that we have grown as societies over time, you're interested in history. So total addressable market. Eight billion people, right? And the reality is you don't need 8 billion people. You need 2 people. And so it's not helpful to start with these giant mega categories. It is much easier to start. And these are two frameworks we talk about in PGA a lot. First, you start wherever you have an information advantage. Okay? So, for example, I clicked on Cole's bio here, and it says over $5 million in sales for professional organizations. So we'll just call it sales as a. As a category. That is where you have an information advantage. That is where you should start. You should not, until you have successfully monetized wherever you have your current information advantage, go looking for other categories, because it's pointless. Why would you do that? Why are you giving up your most valuable asset, which is your information advantage? That is the thing that allows you to monetize and allows you to monetize quickly. Second, another framework we talk about in PGA all the time is that in the beginning, you don't actually need to pick a niche. In the beginning, your niche is your network. It is literally anyone that you know or anyone that you know that knows someone who needs your help, okay? Because in the beginning, you don't need a gazillion people, and you don't even need to crystallize what your niche is gonna be. All you need is one person to say yes or one person that you can help because, you know, this goes back to just first principles, thinking. But you can't. There's no point in trying to figure out how to optimize your business when you don't have a business, right? There's no point in trying to figure out, well, what is my forever niche? When you haven't even pinpointed Your first niche. So often I notice that whenever someone's getting ready to start something, they jump to the highest level question possible. And in a metaphor, that would sort of be like you saying, I want to learn how to swim. What is Michael Phelps Olympic routine? Well, it doesn't matter. You can't even get from one side of the pool to the other, Right? So you need to start by just doing the thing. And the easiest way to start by doing the thing is to just look at your existing network. And whenever I point this out, people tend to say, well, I don't have a network. Okay, so what you're saying is you actually don't know any other human beings. You've never spoken to another human being in your life, Right? And then they go, oh, no, no, I guess I have. Right, okay, so you have friends, you have family members, you have co workers, you have current bosses or managers, you have previous bosses or managers, you have previous places you've worked. And then you have all of the extensions of all of those people. So who are all the people that your family members know? Who are all the people that your friends know? Who are all the people that your managers know? Who are all the people that the people you used to work with know? And whenever you start to go down the rabbit hole, you realize that you know or have access to everyone that you currently need. And it's like you can just hear. It's like faulty belief gets stacked on top of faulty belief. Because then people go, well, yeah, but I feel like in this case, you know, sales is really saturated. I feel like there's just so many people in sales. Okay, so what you're telling me is that every single person you know and every single person that they all know are 100% up to speed on sales, they absolutely do not need help? No, of course that's not true. Right? So you don't need everyone. And the perception is always that every single niche is saturated. And that is both true and false at the same time. Every single niche is saturated, and every single niche is full, full of opportunity. So much so that if 10 people came to you tomorrow and said, I would love to work with you, you couldn't actually say yes to all 10. So it doesn't matter if a niche is quote, unquote saturated, because if even more than three people said, I would love to work with you, you would be completely overwhelmed. Right? So everyone always conflates how much they need, when in reality, you need one person. Especially in the beginning, you need one person, because that One person is going to allow you to practice. It's to going. Going to allow you to build experience, acquire confidence, right? So that's the thing to solve for. So to recap, how do you find that first opportunity? One, you start with what's right in front of you. Where do you have an information advantage? You monetize that first. And second, your niche is your network. Someone in your life needs your help, or someone in your life knows someone who needs your help. And it's pointless to go down the rabbit hole of what are all the ways that I could generate leads and drive traffic and conversion and blah, blah, blah. None of that stuff matters. Literally, just open your phone and go, who do I know that I can help? Which sort of leads to the next question Anthony asks, how does one manage to create content for social platforms while building a paid offer, building all the assets that support those offers, landing pages, email sequences, et cetera, putting out a weekly newsletter and dealing with the responsibilities of a paid gig? So, short answer is, you don't. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that just because there are infinite options, they should do infinite things. And when I look back, I have such a distinct memory. I think about this every six months. It randomly pops back into my head. I have such a distinct memory of being. I was probably 25 years old. I was trying to. I was working at this ad agency for two and a half years. I really. I hadn't figured out where this was going yet. I was writing on Quora, I was seeing a little bit of traction, but I wasn't really making other money. I just was very uncertain. And I have this very distinct memory of sitting in the office and opening my journal and outlining my content strategy. Because I thought, oh, I'm going to build a content strategy and that's going to get me out of this job. And I remember building this content strategy for what am I going to post on Facebook, what am I going to post on Instagram, what am I going to post on Twitter, what am I going to post on Snapchat, what am I going to write my weekly newsletter about? What am I going to make my YouTube channel about? And I spent hours and hours and hours outlining this master plan of all these different things that I was going to do. And guess how many of them I did. I did none of them. And I did none of them well because I was spending so much time trying to figure out all the things that I could do rather than just doing one thing really well. And that Memory haunts me because I look back on that version of myself, I'm like, you idiot. Just pick one thing and just dedicate all your time to it. And so you are not supposed to do all of these things. All of these things are just options. And really, when you find something that starts to work and when you begin to direct all of your efforts into one direction, you know, my co founder, Dickie and I use this framework that we call just in time versus just in case. You don't sit there and go, well, let me learn how to write a newsletter just for the sake of learning how to write a newsletter, or let me go build a landing page because I think I need a landing page. That is just in case learning. You're like, just in case I need this later, right? What you want to do is just in time learning. So you start writing on one platform. You see a little traction. You see a data point, you double down on it. Someone comments, you DM them, you talk to them, you understand what problem they have. You find the problems within the problem. You hop on a zoom call, you help them solve it. You reverse engineer everything that you just said into a product. You write more about that topic, you drive traffic to that product, and then you just repeat. And you're always doing the next thing and the next thing and then the very next thing that you need. You're not doing all these things just because you can. Okay? And Just for context, ship 30 for 30 is a great example of this. Ship 30 is about as simple of a funnel as you can get. And building that business was very simple. You know, I have a mantra that simplicity is velocity. And so for context, Dickie and I started writing on a platform. Twitter, slash X. We then wrote exclusively because the data was telling us to keep doubling down on, you know, in this direction. We wrote exclusively for one type of customer, someone who wanted. Wanted to start writing online. And then we just presented them with one offer, which was ship 30 for 30. And in the beginning, we didn't even have a landing page. It was literally just DMing people being like, hey, do you want to be part of this Slack community? And then just in time, when we finally were like, oh, we need to build something, we built our landing page just in time. And then people were like, oh, we're not buying. We realized that we had a bunch of people in our abandoned cart. Just in time, we built an abandoned cart sequence. And then we had a bunch of people on our email list, and they weren't buying. So we were like, oh, just in time. We should build a FOMO sequence. We should build a sales sequence. So you're always just building the next thing, but a lot of times you. You don't need nearly as much as you think you need. Simplicity is velocity all right? Crystal asks, I've already built a daily writing habit, but since I'm starting off with curation, do you think choosing a niche that I'm interested in but have no experience is the wrong move toward making my first dollar online? Short answer is yes. I'm not really sure why, but I find, broadly speaking, most beginners, when they sit down and they ask themselves, okay, I'm ready to go on this journey. You know, what should my niche be or what should my product be? They start from this place of every single topic category on Planet Earth is an option. And the reality is that's not really true. Okay? Especially for you. You don't just go pick something that you've never done and have no experience in and go, I now want to go build a business in that niche. You can, but just recognize that there is so much that you need to learn going into that journey, right? You're like, I don't know anything about that niche or anything about that industry. I have to go learn all the terminology. I have to go learn all the problems. I have to learn what solutions people have tried but didn't work in the past. You have to go through so much learning just to get to a baseline of now. I can start to help people, right? Which is why so often I harp on this idea of, sure, you can do that later, but start where you have an information advantage. Because a, you have to pick something in order to begin learning all of these skills. You can't learn these skills without aiming them in a direction, so you might as well aim them in a direction and pick something that you already are proficient in from a knowledge perspective, right? And then as you get going, you will learn more and more advanced skills. And as you acquire those more advanced skills, you can eventually then decide, do I want to keep moving in this direction or do I want to apply those advanced skills and in a different direction, Do I maybe want to move to a tangential niche? But if your goal is to monetize as quickly as possible in the beginning, you want to start with where you have an information advantage. And if you say, I don't want to do what I already am proficient in, I want to pick something different, then you have to be really, really honest with yourself about the fact that you just extended the amount of time it's going to take you to get up to speed by 6 months, 12 months, 24 months. Because you can't just go from zero to, I'm making money on something that you've never done before and you have no knowledge on, Right? So you can do it. But the mistake that I see people make is they go, I'm going to pick something I've never done before. This is a shiny object niche, and I'm really excited about it, and I want to go pursue it. And then they also have this faulty expectation within themselves of, and I should be able to monetize this tomorrow. No, you just picked the longer road. You pick the harder road. So it's okay. But still set expectations accordingly and realize you're not going to monetize that thing for a year, two years, three years, and that's fine. Just be honest with yourself about it. All right? Soichi asks, when do you make the transition from running a ghostwriting agency to other big projects? I noticed many people like you guys or JK Molina start off with ghostwriting agencies, but eventually move on to bigger businesses. This is a great question. It's something I notice a lot of people struggle with. I see it actually in PGA and also in our Mastermind Velocity, the moment that you start to achieve something is the moment when you will think, I should do something different. And that is the problem. That is the biggest mistake you can make. That is the biggest moment of distraction. Because once something starts to work, it's human nature. You think, oh, this is easy. I should do something different. And in reality, the moment something starts to work is when it is most crucial that you don't do something different. As soon as you start seeing progress and you start unlocking outcomes was the whole thing that you started this journey to do. That is when you have to be relentless about saying no to every other option and continuing to double down. And I see this, especially with this question. I see people in our Mastermind, for example, who, you know, they started at zero. They got into ghostwriting in pga. They land their first client, they're making five grand. They start landing a couple clients. Now they're at 10 grand a month. And then they go, I'm at 10 grand a month. I'm killing it. I think I want to go start a publication, or I think I want to go get into E Commerce, and they immediately want to jump to something different, and I have to remind them. And I go, you just hit 10 grand a month. Do you really think that 10 grand a month is the highest capacity of this business model? Probably not. You have literally just scratched the surface. Why would you go start over and pick something different? It's one of the biggest mistakes you can make at this point in the journey. So I find there's really only two scenarios. When it's time to move vehicles. It's when you've. You've successfully acquired all of the skills that you want. So you've done this thing for so long that you go, you know what? I'm not really learning anymore. I've plateaued, and I don't really see a path forward. I'd like to not just do something different, but learn something different. I think one of the most helpful frameworks in making decisions isn't like, what should I do? But rather, what do you want to learn? And then whatever you want to learn or focus on next usually is what dictates the decision. Okay. Or the second scenario is you've outgrown the business model. And I find that most people think they've outgrown the business model much sooner than they actually have. The reality is that most businesses can and should grow way further than you think. And wherever you choose to, quote, unquote, give up or move on somewhere else, you have to recognize that the reason that you're stuck there isn't usually because of the business model. It's because you lack knowledge or the lack skills in order to move from the level that you're at to the next level. Like, for example, when I was building my ghostwriting agency, we scaled all the way up to about $180,000 per month. So we were doing a little over $2 million a year in revenue. Ish. And at that moment, my co founder and I, we had acquired a ton of skills. Like, I had ghostwritten for hundreds and hundreds of people. I could GhostWrite pieces in 20 minutes. We trained our whole sales team. We could close people on the phone in 15 minutes or less. Like, we acquired all of the skills. And we, we were like, all right, we are really proficient in this at this point. But the question that we had to ask ourselves was, what are the skills required to go from running a $2 million agency to a $10 million agency? And is that the type of business that we want to run? And ultimately, the conversation that my co founder and I at the time had was, that's not the type of business we wanted to run. Services. Just, there were things about services at that level that we didn't love. I loved services. Getting to 10 grand a month. It was. It happened very quickly. And I think it's the best path to go from zero to ten. Ten grand a month, especially with ghostwriting. I even loved it going from 10 grand a month to 50, 60. 80 grand a month running a small agency. But once the agency started to cross a hundred grand a month and the operational complexity, especially with the number of people that you needed, began to go parabolic, I no longer enjoyed it. It wasn't the type of business that I wanted to run. So it made sense in that moment to change and go, you know what? This isn't the vehicle for me. I want to do something different. Like, for context. At that point, all I was doing was managing people. I wasn't getting to write. I wasn't getting to create anymore. And as a writer, I really missed that. Difference between my agency and the businesses we have now is I get to write and create all day long. So that was a huge deciding factor for me of which business model do I really want to commit to? But we pushed that first business really far before we made that decision. And so whenever I see people ask this question, I tend to notice that they start asking this question when they've just barely scratched the surface of one business model. And I'm telling you every time that you jump to a different business model, you're starting over. So all the progress that you just worked so hard to make, now there's no compounding. And every time you switch business models, you start over, you start over, you start over. So you want to avoid that, and you want to postpone that as long as possible, and you want to take whatever thing is starting to work and push that for a very long time. All right, Kusai asks, how did you make your first dollar online? I've shared this story in the past, but I'll give you the nutshell here. Back in 2014, I started writing on this website called Quora, and contrary to popular belief, I did not log in and have 50,000 followers. I started at zero, just like everybody else. The first 50 things I wrote went nowhere. And everything that I explain how to do in ship, 30 for 30. And everything that I talk about here, that's the same thing that I did. I wrote something, it got no views. I sat there, I blamed the platform, I blamed everybody else. And then I tried again, and then I tried again. And then eventually something got one like or one comment. And then I just kept doubling down on the topics that were working. And then eventually, a year later, I became the most read writer on all of quora out of 200 million users. And all I did was just follow the data. I just kept doubling down on. Oh, that topic seemed to resonate with people. I'm going to write about that more. And one of the topics that I wrote about or one of the ones that I noticed got the most viewership was sort of this intersection between fitness. I was into bodybuilding at the time, so I wrote a lot about fitness and was talking about my own fitness journey and mindset. It was a really nice sweet spot for me. And I answered this question called. I think the question was something like, is it possible to change so much that you no longer recognize yourself? And at the top of the of the answer that I wrote, I put a before and after photo. Me in high school. I was really skinny. I was undiagnosed with celiac disease. I didn't know I was allergic to gluten. I was severely underweight, I was always sick. I had this concave like S curve in my spine. And then on the right was me, you know, I can't remember seven, eight years later. I had been bodybuilding for a couple years and I basically put on 70 pounds of muscle and looked absolutely the. My, my new self looked like I had eaten my previous self. And I wrote this really short answer and explained, yeah, it is possible to change so much that you no longer recognize yourself. I don't remember that kid on the left anymore. And it went massively viral, landed on the front page of Reddit and instantly the comment section. And then my email, because I had my email like in my bio or something, started all getting flooded with the same two questions which was what is your workout routine? And what do you eat? And almost every single person who emailed me was like a 15 year old to 28 year old guy who said, I look like that kid on the left. So that was the moment where I realized, oh, monetizing writing is not about me sitting here writing something that I think is amazing and then putting it out into the world. That is not the way to think about it. The way to think about monetizing writing is to start in reverse and go, who is the person I can help? What question do they have and how can I answer their question with some sort of product? And as soon as that clicked for me, I will never forget, I got home from work, it was a Friday. My inbox was flooded with these same two questions over and over and over again. And I spent the entire weekend launching my first website, which is nicholascol.com, which is the same domain that I have today. And writing two like 15 page ebooks about here are my workout routines and here's what I eat every single day. And on Sunday night I put them up for sale. I appended the original Quora answer with a link to the product on my website. I priced each book at like 10 or 20 bucks or something like that. And then Monday morning, I will never forget, I was sitting in our Monday meeting at the full time job I was working at and in my pocket my phone just keeps buying, buzzing over and over and over again. And it's just stripe notification after stripe notification. And that first day I sold I don't know, like two grand worth of these fitness and nutrition ebooks. And that changed everything for me. That was how I made my first dollar on the Internet. But more importantly, that was the moment that I understood that I am not what matters. The reader is what matters. And if I start with what the reader wants and what the reader is interested in and what problems the reader has, and then I just use writing as a vehicle to help them to answer that question, to solve that problem. Monetizing is very easy. It wasn't until that moment that that's when that clicked. Which sort of leads to last question. Sarah asks, if you had to start again, what three things would you do differently to earn your first dollar online? So to sort of build on this story, I made a couple huge mistakes when I created that first ebook and I made my first dollar. That's how I made my first thousand dollars. It's how I made my first five grand. And I think over the years those ebooks went on to make, I don't know, maybe like 20 or 30 grand in just like little residual sales every month. But the three mistakes that I made were one, I put them up for sale and then I never did anything with them. So I created this product, people were buying it. And then mistake number one is I didn't talk to a and they were all buying through my website. So I had their names, I had their phone numbers, I had their email addresses and I could have and should have emailed every single one of them. At least the first hundred and gone. Hey, thanks so much for buying my ebook. Out of curiosity, what else are you struggling with? What other problems do you have? How are your workouts going? How's your nutrition going? I should have offered. Hey, do you want to jump on a quick call sometime later this week and we can just talk? I just want to better understand what you've tried in the past and what hasn't been working. If I had done that, they would have told me all the other problems that they had. And all of those problems I could have monetized with other writing products. Right? So that was the second mistake is I didn't know the other problems that they had. So I didn't know what else to help them with. And I didn't know what other products to create. Which led to the third problem, which is a, I literally just didn't create any more products. So overnight, I have this answer go massively viral. All of my data is saying, hey, if you write more about this topic, people are interested in it. I create a product that makes me five grand, like, instantly. And then I make the biggest mistake of all, which is I just sit there and I look at it and I go, that was cool. And then I don't iterate and I didn't do anything with it. And now looking back, I mean, talk about a hard lesson and a hard thing to look back on. Sometimes I just want to smack myself because I could have and should have made millions of dollars selling fitness info products back in 2014, 2015, 2016. I watched a couple years later so many people do this, and I was way ahead of the curve and I didn't even know it. I like stumbled into this and I should have monetized my knowledge and monetized the audience that I was building on. Quora so much better. And I just didn't because I didn't take the time to get to know my customers. And this is one of those painful lessons that I've lived. But I also see how many other people make this mistake too. And it seems like no matter how many times I point it out, it goes through in one ear and out the other. And people go, yeah, yeah, I understand, I should talk to my customers. And then they don't do it. And then they sit there and they're like, I don't know how to grow my business or I don't know what other products to create. Well, you would know if you just emailed the 10 people that bought your first thing and talked to them. And if you don't have the first 10 customers, do lots of free things and go find that person in your life that has that problem and go talk to them. So much of entrepreneurship, I'll just leave you with this. So much of entrepreneurship and writing and monetizing your writing and building digital businesses and all of this, like, the hardest thing of all is really internalizing that you aren't the smartest person in the room. It's untraining your ego to believe that you're supposed to have all the answers. You're not. A lot of the best entrepreneurs are relentless about ignoring their own wants and needs in many ways and starting with what does the other person want or need? And the only way to know that is to talk to them. And this is where it becomes such a powerful flywheel. Where with digital products like I see this now in the portfolio that we've built, every person who goes through ship 30 for 30 in some way interacts with us. We have them fill out surveys. We do onboarding surveys. We do offboarding surveys. We have a community. They leave comments. There are so many ways for us to gather signal pga, same thing. Slack. We see questions in different channels. We have people jump on live sessions. We see what questions they ask. We see what problems are annoying them, what they complain about. So we have now built these product ecosystems that on a daily basis, make me realize that I will never run out of things to help people with, because I'm surrounded by problems, and I'm surrounded by things that people are annoyed with, and I'm surrounded by questions. And as long as there are problems and questions, there is more content to be created and there are more products to be created. And so the question is, how do you get that flywheel going? And the only way to get that flywheel going is to start by talking to one person.