This is a YouTube video titled "I Told Writers At My College To Start Writing For Free, In Order To Make Money As A Writ" featuring Nicolas Cole speaking about his advice to aspiring writers to start by writing for free to build opportunities. The content includes a conversation between Nicolas Cole and another speaker discussing the value of offering free work to remove friction and gain experience, recorded in March 2025.
I went back to my college. I was meeting up with a professor. He happened to be teaching a class at the time. And he was like, hey, as long as you're here, why don't you come talk to the class, share some of your lessons learned? Because he had kind of seen some of my Internet writing and was like, oh, wow, starting to be some traction here. And I go in front of the class, and he's like, all right, Cole, why don't you tell the aspiring writers here how they can start making money from their writing? And I literally said, don't start by trying to make money from your writing. Do it for free. Everyone in the class looked at me like I was crazy. And my teacher jumped in and he was like, well, no, no. I think what Cole's trying to say is, you know, charge your wor. Charge, like an hourly rate or something. And I was like, no, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying start for free, prove you can do it, and then the opportunities will just waterfall all over you. The reason people don't do that is because they're so afraid that they're gonna get taken advantage of, or they're so afraid that they're doing something wrong. When really, if you offer to do something for free, what you're doing is you're removing all the friction if someone DMs you and goes, I wanna write for you. This is how much it costs. You now have to allocate time and mindshare to think about whether or not that's a good idea, which you don't have to do. But you can easily remove all that friction by just going, hey, I already see what you're doing. I've already consumed 30 hours of your content. I've already extracted these five threads and these five blog posts for it, and if you want more of it, let me know, mate.
This would be, like, literally my dream come true. If anyone wants to DM me with that exact message, how incredible it would be if someone actually did that. And the amount of emails I get from people being like, bro, what's the best business idea? I'm like, God damn it. Exactly.
