The $50,000 AI Ghostwriting Offer No One Is Talking About

From a brain perspective, like digital brain, like what does this actually mean? So first of all, you have historical content, which really means like going back and just organizing things that you've already done. Then you have net new content. So these are all the ongoing things. So for example, like with AI Call, the moment that we finish this PGA Hot Seat call, we take this recording and we upload it to AI Call. So, so there's an ongoing nature where it's like all new things get added into this quote unquote digital brain, right? But then you have the prompting component, which is like making sense of all of this content because AI is smart, but, but AI like I think something that I've really learned over the past year is I kind of thought, okay, if I just keep giving AI more, it will get smarter. And that's not really what's happening. Like, AI already has a tremendous amount of existing context. And so, so like, if, if I'm doing ongoing content, if I upload a new hot seat, for example, the reality is like really only 10, 20% of that has any sort of like value in the digital brain because maybe I answer a new question and then maybe that new question gets added to the bank of AI call. But like so much of these calls is me repeating the same thing I've already repeated 100 times, right? And so, so more of that isn't really making the AI smarter. It's just giving it like lots of different options. If that makes sense, you know? So that means that a big part of the value is if they're gonna use this digital brain, a big part of the value is prompt writing. And that's where I think that will become a whole new career path. Like I think a lot of ghostwriting and copywriting and content writing, it's all gonna converge into prompt writing as a reflection of that. So you're gonna ghostwrite for a client and then you're gonna transition into prompt writing to make use of the digital brain that you built for them based on all the things that you ghostwrote for them. You know what I mean? So I think this is important to understand, just like tangibly. Okay, so if you, if you build this, like, what does that actually mean? You have historical content, which is just organizing. You have ongoing content, which is like processes, like how do I make sure that new stuff is always getting uploaded? And then you have prompting, which is what are the different use cases for using this digital brain and how do you build the prompts or the workflows that actually like silo the thinking, you know, because you have different prompts for short form versus long form versus types of emails versus whatever. Okay. So the way, the way I would think about this in terms of offers is I think there's a couple of different ways of thinking about this. One is like building the digital brain. So think of this, this would be like a big project. Now what goes into this project? What goes into this project is like phase 1, you organize everything you've done. Phase 2 is you create a system internally for them to upload net new content on their own. And phase 3 is you create prompts to be used for different use cases with the digital brain. So it's like, okay, we have a short-form prompt and we have a long-form prompt and we have a LinkedIn prompt and we have a newsletter prompt and we have like sales emails prompt, right? So you're, you're basically like building this, this big repository, okay? So from a work perspective, the project is essentially let me build all the assets that replace me, okay? And so if that's the case, what do we think we should charge for this?

A lot of money.

A lot of money, right? Like if you think about, you're basically like, all right, I'm gonna build you a brain that after X amount of time I am no longer needed. I would anchor to, okay, so this should at least cost like minimum 6 months, probably closer to 12 months of what I would normally charge. So how much were you charging working with this guy?

$3,000 per month.

Yeah. So that's like $36K for the year, right? Like minimum, minimum. I would say something like this should be somewhere in the ballpark of like $30K to $50K. For sure. Okay. Now, here's what's really interesting. For everyone here who's like, "Okay, cool. Sounds like a cool project, but then wait a second. I just replaced myself." Okay, well, first of all, you're— I want to point something out. You're getting paid a premium to replace yourself. How many people in the world do you think there are that are willing to pay you a premium to replace you? A lot. There's a lot of businesses, right? And so don't view this as like, oh my gosh, there's no opportunity. It's like, no, no, no, you have a 5 to 10 year arbitrage opportunity where everyone's like, wait, I want my digital brain. And you can provide that. You can help them do that, right? Now here's the second irony. The second irony is, and I have watched this happen for 10 years building businesses and being in the technology space, I guarantee you that if you build this, when it's done, they are going to still want to work with you to manage it.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. And this is where the second offer is. Maybe it's some component of the above, but your work transitions, your work goes from just like the doing to the doing or the writing goes down and the management goes up. So you, you do less, but you manage more. So right now, what are you ghostwriting for this client?

5 LinkedIn posts per week. And he is waving a lot of ideas of right now trying to go deeper with the potential of going wider to the point where we could ghostwrite a book.

Okay, so this is a great example. Right now you're doing 5 LinkedIn posts per week, right? Okay, this is where— this is why it is so like foundationally flawed when people sit there and think AI is like, there are going to be no more jobs. No, no, no, no. This is how the job is going to transition. Right now you're getting paid $3,000 a month to write 5 LinkedIn posts per week. This is going to go to the digital brain. The digital brain will write those 5 posts a week, and maybe they even build some agents to help with posting and tracking analytics. Like, maybe they just go full-blown, like, automation, right? So what is your job transition to? Your job transitions to managing the agents who write the 5 LinkedIn posts per week. And then because the amount of time that that takes you is so small relative to the doing before, you also can manage the agents who write the emails, and you also can manage the agents who cross-post to multiple platforms. So the doing goes down, which opens time, which allows the management to go up. You can take on more. And this, this is what is going to happen inside of every single business. Where I see it happening already every single day.

The tricky question, I guess, then becomes Um, how do you charge or price this kind of transitional work? Because, um, some context which I had in the note, he point-blank told me if a ghostwriter approached him today, uh, asking for 3,000 per month for LinkedIn posts, he would not hire anyone because of all the AI capabilities, but he's deliberately staying with me because we have the 2 years of context. So he wants to continue working with me. The goal is not to get rid of me. And he keeps talking about the exactly same things that you're talking about, this transitional work of freeing up time to then amplify it in different other ways. But then how do I look at it in terms of, I don't know, pricing? Timeline is still a little vague for me.

Yeah. So first of all, again, my point of view is that 99% of the time when a client says something to you, they don't know why they just said what they said. And I'm sharing that from years of pattern recognition. And I will tell you that this person, and they said, if a ghostwriter came to me today, I would not hire them. I would just use AI. That is a lie. That is not true. What would happen is a ghostwriter today, like pretend you don't exist. A ghostwriter, digital AI-powered ghostwriter today would go to this person and go, hey, I think we should build you a digital brain. And then after we build you the digital brain, I can manage even more of the output for you. So you don't have to go hire 5 ghostwriters. You can hire one. And I can manage the output of all of them, and I'll use all the historical content that you've created up to this point. The person would say yes.

Would the pricing increase significantly if you were to break it down to monthly? And then also, isn't this a form of, uh, context switching in a way where You know how you advise always to stay within one lane. This sounds like exponentially exploding your scope.

So a couple things. One, like Damian, your question in the chat, what if we don't want to be in the digital brain business? You don't have to. That's why I prefaced all of this, everyone, with like, this is not— this all isn't gonna happen tomorrow. This is like one client out of millions who's like, oh, okay, I want to be on the cutting edge over here. Everything is just an opportunity. You don't have to do anything. Okay. Second of all is don't make it more complicated than it is. If a client said I wanted to do this, I would be like, all right, so I will build you a digital brain over the next 6 months. Here are the things that are going to go into it, and we're going to treat it as a project and it costs 40 grand or 30 grand or whatever you want to charge. And if you pay all up front, I'll give you a little discount, or you could break it up and pay it per month. And it's a 6-month project. It's the same pricing mechanisms we talk about, right? And then after I build you the digital brain, we will transition our retainer and go from $3K a month for 5 LinkedIn posts per week to $3K a month. But I will manage the LinkedIn posts and I'll manage the cross-posting and I'll manage the email. You decide. But the point is that the doing of the work goes down, which creates time, which allows you to manage more work.

Let's say I was to do exactly that. Would that mean that the ideal scenario also would involve me writing, for example, those emails manually first before it's part of the digital brain? Or because I haven't done it for him, for example, or because I have all the frameworks from PJ and Ship30, technically, with all the context I have already, I can just go straight into AI-generated versions while I manage them.

I mean, to be honest, that is a great point and just full transparency with everyone here, like, that is the val— that is going to be more and more the val— I'm thinking about this every single day. That's going to be the value of paying for and investing in really high-quality education programs. Because the reality is like, if you weren't part of PGA, yeah, I would say you should go any asset you want to create, you should go create a handful of them first yourself, build the bank, build the prompts from scratch. Right. But like, you actually don't need to do that. They're like, oh, I need a newsletter. You're like, okay, I'm just going to copy paste the newsletter prompt from inside PGA because that one is fucking awesome. Right? And so like for everyone here, that, that is going to be the value of education programs going forward is think about you, you see an opportunity like this and instead of you having to do everything from scratch, you can literally just copy paste all of the stuff from inside here and go execute on it. Now to your point on context switching, which is a very important point, yes, there are components of this that are completely different than just your LinkedIn service. This is where it becomes a completely subjective and independent question you need to ask yourself. My opinion is I feel really strongly it— like, both things can and should be true at the same time. I think you should fight very hard to not context switch, and you should just keep doing the same thing over and over and over again. And I think one client or 10% of what you do or 15% of what you do can be something that is outside of that context if it's something that is forward-leaning and you see yourself maybe wanting to do it. Like, when I look at this, I don't see a, like, new and different offer. What I see is a vehicle for you to build a lot of new skills that we know are going to increase in value over the next 10 years. I see that as a really productive trade.

I honestly kind of start thinking now that this could be something for myself as well.

Totally.

Because if I use my client as a guinea pig in a way or vice versa, I have even more context to build and I have even more freedom because I am the editor and everything to expand to Substack, which I mean, today is a bootcamp, so I'm excited for that. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. How, I guess, do I communicate to him the whole let's build a digital brain for real and try to replace myself and go into this management mode? Or is there a different way I should communicate it? Because obviously this is not as clear to him, fairly new to me. And I have been working with him for 2 years, so we have a certain level of content that's been generated.

Yeah, I wouldn't think of it so much as like, don't solve problems you don't have, you know. Whenever, whenever I'm presented with opportunities like this, and by the way, just for so everyone knows, like, this is sort of like, don't, don't confuse the word I'm using But like, this is sort of like Management Consulting 101, where when companies hire like management consultants, the goal is not to work with them forever. The goal is like to help them do something and replace— like they want the management consultant to replace themselves, you know what I mean? So like, don't view this as some like net negative, like my job is threatened. You like view this as just another service. And so if I were you, I would frame it as, hey, you want to build this digital brain? I can help you build it. It's going to be these 3 things. And then when we're done, if you want to just take it internally and you want to, you want to run it and you want to manage it ongoing, you can do that. Or if you want me to continue managing it and you want me to take on even more work by using the digital brain, I'm happy to do that too. So you just, you give them the option, right? And I will tell you, 9 times out of 10, the person ends up in a place where they go, Well, this was so great and yes, I want to keep working with you. You know?

Okay. I guess the last question is how the hell do you build a digital brain like that? Is it worth going into cloud code?

No. No. The reality is like I would not— for everyone here, with this sort of project, you should not and you are not signing yourself up to learn how to code so that you can do some completely different skill set. No, no, no. All this is, all this is, is organizing text. It's just written content. It's just Markdown files. And so that means like you would go to the client and say, look, you're responsible for building the codebase and however you want to build this. I am responsible for assembling all of the content. I will organize everything into like a big master G-Drive with organized folders. I will set up a system, maybe you can work with someone on their team to set up like a simple Zapier automation or something to take all call recordings and dump them into a folder, right? I will write the prompts for all of the different things that you wanna create out of this thing. You are responsible for English. They are responsible for code and however they wanna manage it. Makes sense.

I guess. I mean, I'm still wrapping my head around Cowork after the bootcamp.

All Cowork— I mean, Cowork is a great example. Cowork is literally just reading, like, if you connect Notion, it's just reading Notion documents, you know?

So, ideally, from just a technical perspective, I would have a setup on the local files and Google Drive. The Google Drive is in some form either shared or connected between me and their team. And then I just need to figure out how to continuously connect the ongoing new content context and then the prompting. Yeah.

Yeah. And the prompting, especially if they're using cloud code for everything, like you, probably, I mean, maybe they'll have a different process or different way of doing it, but either they can take all the files and just put it into their backend system, or you can just take a bunch of prompts and build skills, and they can just upload skills right into their Claude database. But like, you're responsible for English. That's the important takeaway.

Realistically though, if I kind of have him set up and cowork already for myself. It's not really reflected in anything like Drive, but it's all sort of living in Notion as well. This wouldn't take too much time to actually build out, right? No more than a month, maybe even less.

Yeah. Yeah. The organizing, historically organizing is like, it's not that it's hard, it's that it's tedious. And it's that the way that these systems work a lot better is if you export everything as Markdown files and not like Notion pages or PDFs. And that's, it's really just like tedious shit. That's all it is.

And when it comes to prompting, um, should it be as direct as here are specific Claude skills you can upload to your Claude coworker or whatever? And this is your prompt, you know, it will generate the content for you. And then if you want, I manage that as an ongoing service. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Because even still, I literally just had a buddy text me this last week. He texted me and he was like, hey, do you know any good— and I forget the word that he used, but he didn't say writers. He was like, do you know any good like content editors, basically, like AI can write a lot of it. I just need someone to be quality control. And that's, that's where all these career paths are going to go is like you're, you're not going to get hired just for your ability to sit there and write words. You're going to get hired to be quality control for all of these different things that get created. But you can only— this is, this is the part that people miss, though. You can only be quality control if you know how to write it in the first place. You can't manage something that you've never done before, you know? So like, that is, that is fundamentally why, going back to the client being like, I would never hire a writer, okay, that's not true. You would, you would, because you can't, you can't have someone be the manager and be the quality control for something that they have no idea what is good and what is bad. And the only way to learn if something is good or bad is for you to be the one to do it. Does it make sense?

Okay, this makes sense. And this was a lot of gold. It's so weird because my other clients are completely fine with my setup to the point where half of them reschedule half of the calls. Like, they're happy with it. They're not as tech savvy. But this came out of nowhere and I immediately connected it to your YouTube video. It's crazy that this is happening.

Yeah. Yeah, and it's gonna keep happening. Like, all, all of these things, it's— the writing's on the wall. Like, this already is what's gonna happen. It's just, it's just people expect it to be like 0 to 1, like it's all gonna happen overnight, and it's not. It's gonna be one client here, and then 6 months later, one client there, and then 6 months later, 2 clients ask for it, and then 6 months later, 4 clients ask for it, you know? Like, it's gonna be a slow transition. Well, great question, Rowan. I appreciate you asking it, thanks.

Thanks, man.

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