Making Your First $1 Online, Pivotal Career Moments, and Leaving Twitter? - Espresso Hour Q&A E2

Boom. Welcome to another episode of the Espresso Hour, where the running joke is it's much less than an hour, probably around 20, 25 minutes. Because we are hyped up on espresso. Let's get right into the first question Amor asks. Would love to know how you both made your first dollar on the Internet. So, Cole, tell us that story.

Let's see. First dollar on the Internet was probably 2014, 2015. I had an answer on Quora go viral. Someone asked the question, is it possible to change yourself so much that you no longer recognize yourself? And story goes, obviously didn't want to write anything that day. I was still working my 9 to 5. I had like 15, 20 minutes before I had to catch my train back home. So I pushed myself to write a very quick Quora answer with a before and after picture at the top. Me, when I was a teenager, super skinny, really scrawny, had this S curve in my spine. Was really depressed as a kid. Didn't know that I had celiac disease Till I was 18. So I was sick all the time. And then on the right was a picture of me like eight years later as a bodybuilder. Just 180 pounds shredded. Didn't even look like the same person. And it was just a really quick post. I hit publish, caught my train home. And by the time I was living with two roommates at the time, and by the time I walked through the door, one of my roommates came up, came up to me and said, do you know you're on the front page of Reddit right now? And in the 45 minutes between leaving the office and getting home, my answer had gone viral. Was already doing hundreds of thousands of views. And that weekend I grinded to basically turn. I created two digital products on all the questions, all the same questions people were asking me. My inbox was flooded with the same two questions. It was all, what is your workout routine? And what do you eat? And 90% of the people asked me those questions were skinny, scrawny guys, just like I had been before. And so for 48 straight hours, I just stayed up, made two ebooks, launched my first website. That was the weekend that I bought nicholascole.com Monday morning, put those two ebooks up for sale. I remember sitting in my Monday meeting, our like all hands meeting, and my phone just kept buzzing in my pocket. It was like, stripe notification, stripe notification, stripe notification. And I was like, it was the most mind blowing moment ever. It was, I think I made three, four or five grand in that first week. Cause I just connected the link to the ebook, to the original Quora answer, and the rest is history. That completely changed the way I thought about packaging expertise, using digital products to answer people's questions. That was the beginning of the end for me. I quit my job like eight months later.

So much on that story. I think the number one talk about that feeling of the first dollar, like, what is that? Because I have a very specific memory of when mine hit. But for you, what did you experience when that first dollar.

You know, honestly, it was. I felt like I was experiencing a, like, unfair. Like I had just found a cheat code in the system because I was sitting in that Monday morning meeting with all the other employees. But in that moment I realized that I was getting paid in addition to everyone sitting there, because I had this other thing working for me at the same exact time. And it was the weirdest, like, most surreal feeling where everyone else there was like, this job is my paycheck. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, this job is part of my paycheck, but I'm making money elsewhere. And that like the moment that got unlocked, it was. It was like there was no going back. I was like, well then why can't I do this all the time?

My story is similar in that I created, basically packaged up a bunch of stuff I had already done or already known. So my first dollar came October 2020. I had just finished writing 30 Twitter threads in 30 days and each one of them was on a podcast. So I had a nice habit. I'd wake up, I'd go right outside, I'd have a podcast queued up from the night before. I listened to it on a walk, I'd take notes, let it kind of sit throughout the day. And then I was still working at blackrock at the time. So full time job throughout the day that would wrap up at like 6:30pm I'd eat dinner. And then after dinner I would write that thread of whatever my top five takeaways were for that podcast and did that every day for 30 days as part of. I've kind of told this story of I was going to give up writing online completely, said, I'm going to do this. Just put 30 ideas out in 30 days, see how it goes. Otherwise I'm kind of done. At the end, a bunch of people, as I was publishing them because I had my 28th one went viral. We talked about that on the first episode. And then people said, is there any way, like we could find all these threads that you wrote. And that was one of the best decisions I ever made in terms of so many of the life frameworks that I use right now. I can point back to learning during those podcast episodes because I was writing about them, I understood them so much better. And then at the end, people were like, oh, can. Can we find these? And I'm like, yeah. I mean, you could go through my whole Twitter and just find all the threads. Like, go for it. And they're like, yeah, but that would take a long time. So I go, well, what if I packaged it up into this podcast compendium? And they're like, we would buy it instantly, right? Because I done think of the amount of effort and time that I had saved. All those people who were interested in learning, they'd been following along. So I just took all my Twitter threads, turned them into a big notion page, took my, like, top three takeaways from each of them, and put it up for sale for 20 bucks. Put it on Twitter. I mean, talk about imposter syndrome. Being terrified to charge money for something. Because I was talking to everyone and they're like, yes, we want to buy this. I'm like, but the information is out there. Like, you could just go on Twitter. And they're like, yes, but it's not all packaged up. And I had a huge breakthrough that I still use to this day, is that people don't pay for information. They pay for implementation, packaging, speed, or outcomes. So the what they were paying $20 for was not all the information that was on my Twitter. It was paying for their own time to then not have to go gather all that information and then they download it all for free. Like, the amount of effort it would have taken them to, first off, listen to the podcasts, right? If they were going to do all that and download the takeaways, that'd be a lot. But then to go through my Twitter and do it as well. So for $20, the value exchange was huge. So I put that for sale, and I was. So I was working for BlackRock at the time, and when I saw $20 hit as a stripe notification, I knew it was over. It was that feeling of something I created out of thin air. Someone across the world just bought it, and that money is now going to me it and then waking up the next day. So I think I made four or five hundred dollars in the initial launch. I think I had 800 Twitter followers at the time. And the amount of freedom that unlocked you just don't take it back. And to be honest, I think I say this a lot about making any kind of Internet money. It's you make your first dollar and then you make your next, however many you make. Chasing that feeling of having that first dollar again. Because to this day, there's nothing been as sweet as that very first one. You just, your understanding of the world changes. You're like, oh, this is a thing that I'm not trading time. I can create something that works forever. I don't even have to know the person, right? It's crazy. So that was my story. Pretty similar in terms of it was work that I'd already done and people paid for the amount of time that it was going to save them.

You know, there's some cool reframes in this idea of making your first dollar on the Internet. Like, you know, the average working salary of someone in America, you know, probably falls in the ballpark of, I'm gonna guess 50, 50 to 70K. And that comes out to, we'll just round numbers, you know, 60k salary, around 5k a month pre tax. And what's nuts is if you make a digital product that earns you an extra 500 bucks a month, you just gave yourself a 10% raise. And most people work really, really hard to get like a 2% raise, you know, so think about how much you have to work just to get an incremental 2% when you can build something of your own that you have more control over. You have a lever you can push and pull and. And it's a larger. Makes up a larger size of your monthly earning. It's nuts.

Well, here's even a bigger reframe is most people operate on that 50k salary at like 5% margins, meaning they take home. So say you make 50k in a year after tax, and after spending, that might be. You save 500 bucks a month, you know, so call it what, whatever that comes out to. Let. Let's make it easy and say you make. You save five grand on the year. So you operate 10% margin, right? You take home 10%. If then you create a digital product that makes 500 bucks a month, you double your take home, right? So you go from taking home five grand to taking home ten. You literally doubled the profit of your business, essentially. And I think that's almost the more powerful reframe is that most people operate at such a slim margin that to double their savings, making a digital product that does that is not like, not unfathomable. A lot of people think, oh, I got to make 100 grand if I'm going to, if it's going to be worth it. But no, you can just double your monthly savings with a couple hours of work.

I mean, that was, I mean, and then we'll, we can jump to the next question. But that was literally my situation. I mean, I was not making very much. I was working at an ad agency, maybe making, I don't know, 40k a year, you know, and I was living in Chicago. So after I paid my rent and bought my groceries and bought my train pass and everything, I was maybe able to save 50 bucks a month. For me, building a digital product became the way out. I was like, oh, I just went from living off of everything I'm earning, right? Like, there's no end I have. And I was living in a shithole apartment, you know, like an absolute, like, dumpster. And the digital product all of a sudden allowed me to start saving 200 bucks a month, 300 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month. Like, that was a life changing outcome for me.

Same same with me in New York. I mean, making 100k a year in New York, you are losing money on a net basis. Once you add up rent, if you're going out doing anything social, I mean, rent, tax, all that 100k does not get, if anything doesn't go very far, nothing. Right? So I was that first dollar, I was like, okay, that's, that's it. All right, next question. Pauline asks, are you bullish on the new Twitter? How are you pivoting to make your business future proof in terms of platforms? So you want to start on this one?

Yeah. I mean, first of all, the brutally honest answer is we have no idea. You know, we'll see how things play out. So, short answer is yes, bullish. I think it'll do. Well, that said, we started diversifying to LinkedIn maybe six months ago. That's also just proven to be a really interesting and great platform. There's just not a lot of high quality creators on LinkedIn. So if you are even a moderately competent creator, you'll probably get good distribution on LinkedIn. But there just really isn't a world where really solid organic, especially education content. Like, I could, I could almost see maybe entertainment content getting throttled a little bit, but there just really isn't a world where great education content, organic, goes down. You know, like, if anything, it's gonna stay the same or it's gonna get a lot better because great organic content is what makes the platform valuable. So I don't, I think either way, it's probably going to be positive for us, but I don't know that that's going to be true for everyone.

I agree. I mean, I'm pretty bullish on Twitter in general. I think Elon is an incredible entrepreneur where he's going to figure out how to turn this into a profitable business, right? You don't turn something into a profitable business without adding value in some way. And to me, how do you create value on Twitter is you monetize the value that's being created. And the value that's being created is the educational content. It's the high quality either journalism of like boots on the ground, the real time information, or the education. So he's going to look at all those and say, okay, how do I get people to come here for those things? How do I get people to share that kind of information and incentivize them? So to me, I think it's never been a better time to start building on Twitter because Elon's not going to turn this thing to zero. He spent a lot of money on it, right? This is an investment. And to me there's just no path for him profitability wise to not be investing in the people creating content on it. I think he's going to take the YouTube playbook. I saw a bunch of comments of like, what is YouTube doing? Right? And as we've been creating more on YouTube, their analytics are sharp. They have generous advertising dollar shares where it's like, you don't have to be doing very much to then start earning revenue on there. The distribution of high quality content is crazy. I think he's going to look at YouTube and say, why isn't Twitter the YouTube of a text based platform? Right? Why isn't text based information with a world class algorithm monetization system, all that? So I'm extremely bullish on it. I think you have a very vocal minority of people who are pushing back on things he does and you just have to kind of ignore that in terms of I think people want a trusted source of high quality information and there's no better platform to do that than Twitter.

You know, something I haven't seen a lot of people talk about with the whole Twitter blue $8 a month thing. So two pieces here. One, I always find it ironic when people say that that's expensive and it's not just Twitter. I mean, this happens every time a social network decides to even breathe. We're going to charge for something. You know, everyone leaps in and goes, that's too expensive. But the irony is, you know, we spend $8 on a coffee and don't even think about it. And we use these social networks for 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 hours a day. And if you read even one thing that impacts your life, 1%, not even 1%.001%. Right. The $8 pays for itself. And so I'm a big fan of moving Twitter to some sort of subscription model because A, I think Facebook really proved how dangerous a social network 100% reliant on ads can, can get. B, the value is absolutely there. Like, you're really missing something if you think that social network isn't worth $8 a month. I mean, think about what you spend your money on versus how you spend your time and attention. And then third is again, going back to the organic content question. Higher quality users through a subscription model puts even more emphasis on the importance of quality content, which means those great creators are going to get disproportionately rewarded and even more not even through money. Like screw a rev share, just through attention and distribution and all of that. So to me, that flywheel gets really interesting where you go like, is, is Twitter still going to be a great place for creators? It's like, yeah, because now you're going to have so much more transparency and clarity over who is reading your content.

The reason I think people are pushing back on the $8 is because the majority of people use Twitter horribly. It angers them on a daily basis. So now it's I have to pay $8 to leave angrier or in a worse mood or to argue with people versus us. We use it in a very constructive way to educate, to connect, to learn. Right. So I, of course I'm going to pay $8. I would pay $800 because of the value Twitter creates for us. But I understand why people don't want to pay $8 because most people, Twitter is a net negative addiction for them. They go on there and they leave in a worse mood. And so the idea that now they have to pay to do that, I get why they don't want to. But at the same time, this is.

Yeah, exactly. This is why I think it's such an amazing forcing function. Because even if the number of users drops by half, right. They lose half their users. It means the ones that stay actually want to be there, which probably means net net, it leans more. I'm giving value versus taking value. And because it's a subscription model, the revenue model is way more consistent, way more reliable than an ads model. And so you're moving from a I want as many users as possible, monetizing eyeballs model to a. I just want the quality users who are going to give, give and reciprocate value here. And even if there's less of them, you're going to be more profitable. It's going to be a better business, it's going to be a better platform. Like, I, I really hope that it works because it's just gonna mean more good things for the people who use it.

Well, agreed. On all fronts. So, long story short, we're bullish. We're continuing to write there. We think it's never been a better time to start building an audience there. Because if you're, if you're making a bet on it being better in the future, why wait? Right? Because either, worst case, it gets worse and then you've lost out on a little bit of time, but best case, you're catching a wave before you even more people start to come here. So that's our take on Twitter. We're still right in there.

All right, Adam asks, in your writing journeys, what were the pivotal moments that defined your direction and ultimately your first successful niches? What was yours?

Mine came after the original ship 30 by myself, where we shared that earlier of writing 30 threads in 30 days. And then I tweeted out, does anyone want to join me on the next one? Like anyone looking to build a daily writing habit, start writing online, put out 30 pieces of content, we can pop that tweet up. And the response was overwhelming. The number of comments saying, yes, I would love an accounting accountability group. I've tried to write, I've tried to publish, I've tried all these other things. None of them have worked. And that was a very pivotal moment for me because I realized the power of creating a niche around the things you've done over the last two years. So to me, I'd started writing online only nine months before that and took the steps that most people really struggle to take, which is actually getting started. And to me, that had become a very obvious thing, like, oh, you just kind of put your ideas out there or you hit publish, or you, you know, realize that the people you think are judging you aren't looking at you at all. And I had all these solutions in my head because I'd solved that problem, but there were clearly so many other people who had not solved that problem. So by tweeting that out and the response, I immediately go, there's a solution here. What are all the things that have worked for me? And that's the whole power of The Internet is every experience you've had, every habit you've built, every life transition you've gone through. We talk about this with the two year test. You just look backwards and you reflect on all those things. And every single one of them is a niche you could build around. Right. Every single one of them is a product you could build. Every single one of them is an ebook or a course or a newsletter. You have the opportunity to pick all of those. And the scale of the Internet guarantees there are that many people. There are way more people than you think would be interested in those things. Like if you had told me two or three years ago that you were going to start a course in community around helping people publish their first piece of writing and write every day for 30 days. Like, I'd say, how, how on earth did that come about? But it came from, I solved the problem for myself. I identified that if you have a problem that you've solved, there are so many people with that same problem who have not solved it. And so every single person listening to this right now is sitting on that kind of information where they could easily turn that into a product or course or audience or whatever it is. And so that was a very pivotal unlock for me, was like, oh, I don't have to go create very much new stuff. I just need to go solve problems for myself, then package those solutions up, give them the people behind me, continue to level up as I go.

Yeah, there's a huge difference between sitting in a room trying to come up with an idea. You know, it takes you a while to realize that's the unproductive way of going about it versus just putting things out into the world, paying attention to what questions people ask, what problems present themselves, problems that you're experiencing, and then just building the solution for that. That's such a better path than closing your eyes and being like, what's the next big idea?

Yeah, how about you? Where is. What was that pivotal moment?

You know, I was. So while I was reflecting on this question, I realized that probably one of the biggest pivotal moments for me was when I quit my job in 2016, I was writing for Inc. Magazine. I was making a couple thousand bucks a month writing for them. I was getting paid per page view, so I would get paid based on how many page views I brought in. And I knew the viral formula. You know, like, I pretty consistently knew that I was going to generate like 2 to 4 grand a month doing that. And that was maybe half of my full time salary. So I was like, you Know what? I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to spend eight more hours per day writing. I bet I can cover the other half. And I had this realization, you know, you quit your job and all of a sudden, you know, two weeks later, that paycheck doesn't hit your account, you know, and you have this little freak out moment and you're like, oh, wait a second, I just lost the thing that was paying for my whole life. And I freaked out for a couple days and then realized, okay, I either was going to dust off my resume or go, you know, crawling back, asking for my job again, or I was going to figure it out and start landing some clients and moving forward. And the pivotal moment for me was recognizing in that moment, I had had probably around 100 million views on my content and none of it really mattered. Like, like it was cool. It was a. It was a really cool thing to be able to say, you know, And I had maybe 50,000 followers on Quora or something, and I had tens of millions of views. But like, the money had stopped. I didn't have my full time job anymore. And now I needed to figure out how I was going to cover the other half of my rent. The real breakthrough for me was I needed to generate money for myself. So I started changing what I was writing about. And I started writing about how if we worked together, I didn't even have any clients yet. If we worked together, these are the things that I would help you with on the writing side. Landed one ghostwriting client, landed two ghostwriting clients, landed three ghost writing clients. And all of a sudden it went from writing about ghost writing because I was trying to market my skills, saying, hey, I can write for myself. I bet I can write for you. To. Then that led to not only building a stable of ghostwriting clients, but then ended up building a whole ghostwriting agency. And that was like, that was really the first time when I discerned the difference between views for the sake of views and writing very specifically to generate a goal. You know, I want to attract a certain type of client or I'm going to write because I want to make this amount of money or whatever it was. And it kind of made me realize, like, all those hundreds of millions of views were just vanity metrics. Like, they were great, but that's not what was putting food on the table, you know?

Yeah, we talk about this. It's reacher resonance, right? Reach is why a lot of people write Twitter threads about Google Docs or Chrome plugins or things like that, yeah, a lot of people are going to see that, but they're not going to connect anything either financially or loyalty wise to you. They're just like, you're providing commodity information. You might as well be a company running an SEO strategy. You're not doing anything that's creating a deep relationship and people don't. If the ultimate goal with an audience is to build some kind of financial situation, the last thing you want to do is just put out junk food style content that is just getting people to, to read because they're not going to do anything with it. So next Chris asks, what would be your number one focus for the first 90 days of a digital business? How would you answer this?

I feel like we have the same answer here, but just relentlessly talking to people. If one person buys your thing, you should make it your mission to go become friends with them. I haven't written a lot about this, but right after I quit my job and before I started my ghostwriting agency, I actually tried to build a course. And the course was about teaching CEOs how to be thought leaders. And that's what ended up kind of moving into it being a service instead. I realized there was more money short term in providing it as a service. But when I did that course, it's fascinating to look back on now. We launched it and it was, it was successful. I mean we made like we, it was my co founder at the time, we tried doing this course first. We made like 10 grand in the first month. And what's shocking is we both like looked at each other and we were like, oh, this is a failure. Because our expectations were so high, we kind of assumed like, oh, if we do this, we should make a million dollars in the first month. You know, and in hindsight, I look back on that and I'm like, that easily could have been a million dollar course. It's just our expectations were so high and then we never talked to anybody and we never stopped to ask anyone who was buying the course or going through it, what did you think? What other questions do you have? What, what was the most helpful module? What other problems would you want help solving? You know, and in hindsight, it's so easy now for me to see, oh, if we had just done those things, there's no reason why that couldn't have been really, really successful. And instead, you know, we made 10 grand in a month and then had like, I don't remember 50 people go through it or whatever. And then we just stopped and it's like, it's wild. I think that experience is actually way more common than most people realize, is they create something, they get a little bit of traction and then they just don't do anything else. They just don't talk to their customers, they don't ask follow up questions, they don't get to know them, they don't, they, they just kind of sit back and are like, well, if I didn't become an overnight millionaire, I guess it's not working. It's like, no, it could have, it could have made me a millionaire back then, but I just chose to stop. So that was a, that was a tough lesson to learn.

I think it's when you hit publish on some kind of digital product, realizing that it's the start and not the end is a big aha moment that I've had. And so your first customer, you want to extract everything you can possibly get out of that because they bought. But for every one person that buys, there were 50 that didn't. And your goal is then to figure out how to tweak your offer to get more people on it. A couple ways you can do this. When someone buys something from you, you should set up every kind of automation where you directly reach out, especially in the beginning. And I would create a calendly and have one on one interviews with every single person that buys something from you. And you can ask them some really good questions. Two of them you should definitely ask are what is the number one thing you're looking to get out of the course or product or book? Like why did you buy this? Get their actual words because they're going to tell you what their problems were, what they've tried in the past, you know, why they think this was going to work versus other things. You're going to get feedback on pricing. But almost the more important question is did anything have you on the fence about buying? Because when you do that, they're immediately going to say, yeah, I thought, you know, it didn't have this and I overcame that. But I would have liked to have had that module in here. Or I thought it was a little bit pricey, it was a little bit out of my range, but I went for it anyway. Once you start to gather the things that are keeping your buyers back, you just go tweak your offer and remove those things until you continue to do that survey. And it's like nothing had me on the fence. I saw this right away and I bought it. Right, that's what you're going for. And so you can do that with One on one interviews of every single person that buys, asks them what they're looking to get out of it, what had them on the fence. Because then that's how you tweak and improve. I mean, we've talked about this. The original ship, 30 cohort, I had 30 one on one interviews, 30. I asked what worked about this, what didn't work, what was the best part, what was the worst part, what would you remove, what would you add? Was anything like did anything make you want to give up or did anything have you on the fence from joining or if you were recommending this to a friend, what would you say the best and worst parts are? There's so much information and people over, they underestimate the amount of information you can extract from one person. Right? Because if you can just get the five or six things that they had to say, so many other people agree with that. It's not like you need 100,000 people to do this mass survey. You need one buyer and they're going to tell you so much, right? So never think that, oh, I only had six customers. Like this is done. If you go listen to everything those six customers say, you improve your offer, you improve your ebook, you improve your course, whatever, anything you're creating, those go such a long way. So don't underestimate the power of one on one interviews talking to every single customer who buys something from you.

Yeah, you said it quickly. But I want to reiterate it because this is such an important point. One of the biggest benefits of doing those one on ones is that your early customers are literally going to give you the sales copy. They are going to say it out loud for you, you know, so take your landing page and when a customer is like, this really helped me overcome imposter syndrome. You take that, you copy it, then you go to your landing page and you go, this will help you overcome imposter syndrome, right? Like literally copy paste the words that the customers are saying. Because if one person that bought from you is feeling that, chances are 10 more people, 100 more people, a thousand more people are also experiencing that. The whole secret to writing great sales copy is to use the exact words your customers and prospective customers are already saying or are thinking. So how do you do that? Right? You go get all of that from your early customers. So that's where it's like the answer is right in front of you. You just have to block the time to go collect it. It's that easy.

And marketing speak, they call this voice of customer data, right? So the voice of your customer. If you just riddle your sales page with all of that, I mean go look at the ship 30 landing page. Every single big header on there is something someone said to me in a one on one interview. Right? Either something they wanted, something they struggled with, something that other things they tried in the past used but didn't work. You can mine so much from those interviews and maybe we should create something about how to host those because we've been sharing a lot on that of create a calendly every buyer. Hey, want to book a call with me? Here it is. Right? I'd love to ask you these six questions. That's going to iterate your offer so quickly. So a lot of power there. First 90 days, talk to your customers.

Fun, quick little rabbit hole. If anyone wants to go, go down it. So the advanced version of the, you know, customer voice exercise is not just what are they saying but also mirroring the tone in which they say it. This isn't always true, but like it's a, it's a really awesome technique for when you're dealing with very specific type of audience relative to an interest. So. So the fun rabbit hole is if anyone wants to go dig it up. The early marketing for Discord did this amazingly. The way that Discord communicated with customers on their site, they weren't just saying the things that customers were saying, they were saying them in the same vernacular that customers would. So like the sign up button, I don't remember what it was exactly, but broadly it was, you know, instead of saying sign up for Discord, it'd be like stop getting pwned noob. Right? Because their whole everyone they were trying to reach were all gamers. And that was their niche that they were going after. They've since broadened out. But Discord's early landing pages were amazing because they weren't just in the customer's head, they were talking to them as if they were a gamer themselves too. So immediately the gamer didn't even have to read the sales page. They were just like, oh, you're talking to me. Just like all my peers talk to me. Fascinating case study of mirroring that voice and tone of the person you want to reach.

All right, last question. Lisa asks, can a good short book be written in a week to 10 days? If so, how? So I got to witness Cole write a 16,000 word ebook in two to three days over the last week from start to finish. So I'm gonna let you take this one away because I think you got some good stuff. To share?

Yeah. Short answer is yes. The nuance is, this is really only possible if you're writing about something that you have strong familiarity with. Obviously, if you sit down and go, I want to write about something that I know nothing about, the answer is no. And the answer is also, why are you trying to write about something that you know nothing about? You know? But if you're familiar with a topic, you can absolutely write a short book, mini book in a week or less. I do it every week, essentially. And there's a couple keys. One is you have to prep the whole thing in advance so you do not start writing. You use the technique we talk about called prepping the page. And basically you go, I want my mini book or short book to talk about these four big ideas, right? We'll list out what are the four big ideas, okay? Each one of those becomes a section. Each one of those becomes a chapter, whatever it is. So think of those as your containers. Then within each container, before you even start writing, what are all the sub ideas that you want to talk about? So you're like, okay, big idea number one. These are the five things I want to make sure that I touch on. Okay, great. List those out, right? So by the time you start writing, you should already have all the containers in front of you, and then all you have to do is expand the containers. And we have a really great model for this, which is there's a really easy way to expand anything you want to write about. And you use these content blocks, and for us, there's 11 of them. So you can expand anything by going, let me give you some tips. Let me give you steps. Let me give you reasons. Let me give you mistakes, lessons, stories, frameworks, benefits, examples, questions, or resources. Okay, so let's do just a quick example. Say the section that you're talking about is the importance of getting started meditating. Okay, great. How do we expand that section? Here are some tips on how to get started meditating. Here's a couple steps to do your first meditation, right? Step one, you should do this. Step two, you should do this, right? Here's a couple reasons why you should start meditating. Here are the mistakes most people make when they start meditating. Here's the lessons that pay attention to as you start meditating. These are the things that you're gonna want to take away. Here's a story of when I first started meditating, right? So as you go down the list, you realize what maybe was just a single sentence where you're like, I want to make Sure. I talk about this. You can expand it infinitely like that. One sentence can be expanded into an entire chapter if you want to, just by going down this list and going, okay, well, can you. Can I give the reader some, some tips? Can I give them steps? Can I put this into a framework? Can I list out the benefits? All right, so the whole key to writing long things quickly is building the compressed version, prepping it. Here are the big ideas, here are the sub ideas within the big ideas. And then when you sit down to write, you already have clarity over which container you're writing in. And you know, I can expand anything using these 11 columns content blocks.

I want to double click on how important this framework is because our whole lean writing approach is you put out a rough idea and then once that idea has been validated, it's on you to learn how to expand it into something that is valuable to people rather than just a short form outline. As we're making YouTube videos, right, we're expanding Twitter threads and other pieces of content into longer form things. And every bullet that I end up expanding, I'm just running through this list. Could I share a quote? Could I share a story? Could I share benefits of doing this? Could I share steps? Right? This is the cleanest way to effortlessly go from short form to long form. Just look at these, say, okay, this one makes sense to add a framework. Here's the way I think about this. Bang. Explain it. If you were sitting on short form things that have been validated, follow this playbook because it goes far beyond just writing books, right? You can expand any idea with these proven approaches, and you follow it. Results are going to take care of themselves. You don't have to overthink and come up with some super compelling narrative. Just pick one of these, lay it out, move on to the next thing.

Yeah, it works. This is, I mean, Dickie, you said it, but I've been using this framework for the past two years maybe, and the amount of volume I've been able to produce using this, easily 10x anything I've done before, and I was doing a lot of volume before that. But this, what this prevents is you writing 15,000 words and then going, oh, now I know what I'm trying to say. No, you, you should know what you're trying to say from the very first moment because you listed out, these are the things I want to say, right? And if you don't do that, you're going to go waste 30 hours writing a bunch of words that at the end, you end up scrapping because you didn't actually understand what was your North Star? What were you trying to build?

I'm going to turn this in a tweet form so we can pop it up on the screen here so you can see all of the 11, 12, 13, whatever. We come up with ways to expand proven content and hopefully put into practice. Boom. That does it for this week's Espresso Hour. Hopefully you got a lot of value out of those questions. If you have a question that you'd like us to answer on the next episode, you can leave a comment below or. Or you can look at our Twitter accounts. On Monday, we'll tweet something out where you can respond and we'll make sure to answer your question in the next one. If you're watching on YouTube, toss the video a like subscribe so you don't miss. If you're listening to this in the podcast version, subscribe, leave us a five star review. Those go a long way and we will see you on the next one and we'll be just as caffeinated for that one and so hope you are as well. That's it.