In this 2026‑year‑kickoff video, Nicolas Cole hosts a content‑creation marathon with guest author Mike Chatfield. The session opens with a behind‑the‑scenes look at an ambitious production schedule (multiple long‑form videos, shorts, ads) and a quick technical mishap with a teleprompter. Cole then reviews 2025 business performance: $8.16 M top‑line revenue, $964 K ad spend, team growth from 12 to ~35, increased webinar activity, and lessons about underestimating effort and cost. He shares insights from his conversation with Chatfield, highlighting the power of volume in writing (Chatfield’s 60 published books) and the iterative learning process of fiction writing. Cole outlines his 2026 goals across three domains: writing (700 hours of creative practice, two fiction and two nonfiction books), business (break the $10 M revenue mark, move from multi‑seven‑figure to eight‑figure scale), and personal life (optimizing health with training, therapy, NAD IVs, sleep tech, and aiming to start a family). The video blends production logistics, strategic reflections, and personal accountability, serving both as a progress report and a public commitment to ambitious targets for the coming year.
Chapters
Foreign. We are kicking the year off with our most ambitious content day yet. We've got, I don't know, six long form videos scripted out, 20 shorts, 30, 30 ads. We got a buddy here, special guest. I'll introduce you to here in a second. And yeah, you know, we got big goals for the year. I'm gonna recap some business numbers from 2025 if you're curious. You want to know how we did, and then I'll talk a little bit later in this video about some of my goals for the year ahead. Mike, you want to say hi to the people? Sure. We are in the presence of greatness today. This is Mike Chatfield. He is an extremely successful sci fi fantasy litrpg author. You have a big book tour coming up, which is exciting. What cities are you going to?
So we're going to be doing east coast, west coast. We're going to be doing this for the two week curse, which is awesome because we finally got a trad published deal, which is amazing because, like, going from indie to trad is so, so difficult.
Yeah.
It's like going from, you know, starting with, hey, how do I string together these sentences, how do I make these paragraphs to how do I finish a book? Right.
How many books have you written, you think at this point?
Okay, so I think I published 60 books.
And then 60 books. Just to reset your bar. Okay. Not six, six D. But also the.
Other thing is, is like there's so many books that I've written but never finished, so there's probably like another like 10, 20, right?
It's 100. That is an insane level of output. And. And again, just to reset your bar, Volume wins, you know, just every time. Right, right, right. Volume wins. Volume wins. So, yeah, we were having lunch and I said, we're doing these content days. If you're in town, you should just come by, see how we film our content. Things that maybe he could pick up for his content. Things I can learn from him as I start to explore fiction. So, yeah, love having you. Thanks for stopping by.
Thanks for having me Cheer.
What are we looking through right now, Huey? We're trying to set this teleprompter up right now, but I had it the wrong way, so there we go. Nope, I had it the right way.
Very small thing. I am going to move that pool cleaner because you can see that. See, You gotta not be afraid to get your hands dirty, you know? All right, that seems better. Testing my eyesight here. Yeah.
Are you.
Is it? That's. We're gonna try It Okay.
If not, we can also push it forward.
We might. We might need to bring it a t. All right, so quick recap of 2025 just to give you some context. So in 2025, we did $8,155,862 in top line revenue. That might sound like a lot, but at the same time, we also spent $964,230 on ads, which is way more than we spent the year before that. And we nearly tripled our team. So we went from 12 people to, I think we're up to 34, 35 people. So revenue went up, costs went up faster. So this was definitely a big year of reinvesting in the business. We made a ton of investments in team and increasing quality of content and expanding platforms, ramping ads. These were all things that we weren't really doing two years ago. So this past year was definitely a year of paying down some ignorance debt. There were a lot of things that we went into it thinking, oh, this will be so easy. And I have to keep reminding myself, anytime you think something's easy, it's not. It's going to be hard. Anytime you think, oh, I won't have to spend that much money on this, you end up spending like 10 times more than you thought. You know, anytime you think something's going to happen really quickly, it doesn't. It takes a long time. Another thing we did this past year was we ran a ton of webinars. This was the first time that we really ran a webinars to cold traffic from ads. And we did a monthly webinar almost every month this past year. And we ended up ramping that to two webinars a month. And then at the end of the year, we ended up running this whole big, like three day challenge that was basically like a longer form webinar. So we did a ton of stuff in 2025, and it was a successful year in the sense that we learned a lot. But I think our goal for 2026 is we really want to try and push the business to the next level of maturity. You know, like now we have all of these things in place. We've expanded the team, we've expanded capacity, we've expanded our skill set. That means that the ceiling, in theory is way higher. So we've created all this space. Now we got to grow into it. So big year ahead. Let's go.
That looks great.
Get writing clients. 2026 challenge.
Oh, oh.
First lit RPG novel.
Oh, dude, congratulations.
Actually, we changed the they kind of messed up the printing because you see how this isn't centered. Oh, yeah. So I ended up removing the border because it looks like a card, you know, But I removed it because, like, the printing was just too variable.
Wait, this is a deck builder?
Yeah.
Oh, nice.
Yeah, I love. So the same guy who designed the COVID is the guy who, who did all of the dungeon crawler Carl cover redesigns.
Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You did a great job. Looks. Looks really cool. And then inside we did like buttons and stuff. So it's got that, you know, sort of gamer analog, eight bit feel. It's awesome.
It's. It's hard to tell how much work it takes to do all of that.
Oh, a ton. Yeah.
Because everything, like every graphic has to be custom made. Especially, like, you've got these like, title parts here.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, any of this, all of that has to be custom made. And then someone, as they're like, going through, has to put in every single life part, which is just like super fun.
So check it out. I mean, I think my next one's gonna be way better, but first one, first one's the hardest.
You know what the thing though, is, is, like, it's. When I started writing, I was just like, I'm just gonna keep writing more and more books and if I learn two, three things from each book, then it just gets better.
Yeah. Eventually it'll get good.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I was like, you know What? Like, after 10, I might be able to like, understand how this writing gig works. And it honestly is like, every single time it gets better. But every single time, like, when you read your own stuff, you get surprised with the level of like, who wrote this? Like, this is a really good book. And like, if you're far enough removed from it, you're like, I don't know, it's like really fun, but weird.
Okay, so on that note, so second gift. This is, this is the first book I ever wrote. It's non fiction. It's a memoir.
Okay.
But it's about how I became one of the highest ranked World of Warcraft players in North America. Yeah. And this is. To date, this is my favorite thing I've ever written. And I have that same experience anytime. Every year I reread it and every year I look back, I'm like, whoever wrote that was cooking at the time. So I think as a gamer lit RPG writer, you'll enjoy it a lot.
Oh, no. Like, and it's, it's super cool. Like, we all have these, like, segments of our lives, where we look at. We're like, man, that was such a cool segment of, like, our lives.
Yeah.
Like, what. What the heck of, like, what was going on at the time, but also, like, living in that moment. I think that's, like, stories that you get to live with, right?
Yeah. Yeah. But no appreciate. I hope you enjoy it, bro.
Yeah, no, I will definitely be reading these. I gotta go re. I gotta go fly, so I will be doing that.
Do your thing. Yeah. There you go. Two new reads for the plane.
Yeah.
When I was in Vegas with Hormozi's team at the workshop, that was like, one of the biggest things they were stressing to us is your ads will perform better if you base it off of what's working with organic. And it sounds so simple and obvious, but I feel like the challenge is being disciplined enough to build up.
What's the status? What's going on right now? We got one more horizontal.
Right.
This is the last one of the day. I thought we were actually. I thought we were actually doing less than last time, but we're doing more. We're just a lot more efficient. So what do you think? Orion. Locked in.
Almost done. Anything go wrong today?
Nope. Come flawlessly. Just perfect.
Everything is perfect.
10 out of 10. We love the natural light in here. It's been pretty easy for our.
For us.
Made our job easy.
Yeah, this is. This is a great spot.
Aside from starting outside, actually.
So that was the big. So we started with a, you know.
Difficult, you know, high, high sun in the morning, but, you know, we figured it out.
Yes, sir.
Little learning curve in the beginning. Yeah.
Maybe throw in what that shot looked like by the end. By like 0.7. I was like, Foreign. We're almost there. End of the day, we've. We've gotten through a ton of long form, a bunch of VSLs, bunch of things. Promoting our upcoming Get Writing clients challenge. But real quick, I guess just to end, I wanted to share some big goals that I have for myself and for our business in 2026. This is a good accountability mechanism for me, and also this will be cool to look back on and see if I achieve them. So one of my big goals in terms of writing is to actually log. And I was doing the math on this 700 hours of creative writing practice. So that is. It might sound like a lot, but it's actually not. So that's two hours per day, seven days per week. So, I mean, two hours a day, that's. That's light work for me at this Point. So really it's just about consistency and protecting that time. I also want to publish two fiction novels this year. So that's a big goal of mine is starting to trend more and more in a direction of fiction. And then also two nonfiction books. I already have one that's done. I'm hoping to publish that in March, maybe April. I'm aiming for March. It's called Writer Career Paths. And then ideally I want to write the next art and Business of writing related book. I won't share what it is yet, but the next book in that series later this year. Business goals. Our big goal is to hit eight figures in revenue this year. You know, we've been at the 7 multi 7 figure range for a long time. Last year we did, you know, 8 million. Our goal this year is to break 10 million. I think there's something very psychological too about, you know. Yeah, I know how to build a seven figure multi seven figure business. But I really want to cross that eight figure mark. And even just for myself, like, no, okay, now I know what goes into building an eight figure business. So I don't really have any particular reason for that goal other than I just know that we're capable of it and so we should do that and then life goals, honestly, just like stay healthy. I've really dialed in my health a lot over the past couple years. I've invested a ton in personal training and physical therapy. I've been experimenting a little bit with peptides. I've been doing like vitamin IVs. I've gotten really into doing IVs with NAD. I'm not a scientist, so go down the rabbit hole and learn about that yourself. But I really am a big fan of NAD for recovery. And I've also my sleep, like I got an eight sleep temperature controlled mattress. I have, I think it's called Drowsy. These really nice eye masks. I put that thing over my eyes and I am out. I have a really nice silk pillowcase. Like I've invested a lot in my bed and every night I crawl into bed and I turn to my wife and I just go, I love my bed so much. So it is worth investing in your bed. I mean that's where you spend like a third of your life, you know, so health and everything. I've been feeling really good. Really. The big goal is me and my wife have been trying to get pregnant, you know, and I'm really hoping that this is the year I would love to become a dad. This year, you know, I turned 36 here in a couple months, I really feel like I've crossed that threshold where I've built up enough skill and I trust myself to monetize that skill. And I've proven to myself that I can provide for myself and provide for the family that I'm trying to build over and over and over again. I've proven to myself that I know how to build businesses. I feel like the only thing that's really left is, you know, start a family and take that next step. So I'm really, really hoping that happens this year. So positive intentions for that and otherwise? Yeah. I mean, 2025 was great. Learned a lot of hard lessons in terms of building and scaling and growing our business. But overall, this is the healthiest I've ever felt, the sharpest I've ever felt, the most dialed in I've ever felt, the most that I feel like I can push myself and work really, really hard and still not get burned out and show up and do it another day, the next day, the next day, the next day. So I'm feeling really dialed in now. I just. It's like we just gotta keep building new skills, keep reinvesting in ourselves and keep growing. So this has been a great day. We're gonna wrap up in here, and I will see you next time.
