Viral Tweets, Morning Routines, and 10x Newsletter Growth - Espresso Hour Q&A E1

Welcome to the Double Espresso hour, where we're going to answer your digital writing questions. But the joke is it's not going to be an hour. It's going to be about 15 minutes because we are both hyped up on plenty of caffeine. All right, why don't we just kick it off with the first question? So you asked a good one. How do you drink a double espresso and still function? For me, I have a pretty personal saying that there's no such thing as too many stimulants. And if there's one of something is good, more of something is better. So why drink a single espresso when you can have a double espresso? It served me pretty well. Very rarely do I regret having too much caffeine. So have you ever retired it?

Because. Because I've definitely regretted it in certain times.

I feel like whenever I feel over caffeinated, I end up just blaming it on something else and be like, no, no, it couldn't have been the four espressos that I had. Like, no way. That's the actual problem. That's. That's usually what I go with.

All right, so what was your first viral tweet? Let's see who asked? Who asked this one? Rodney. Rodney asked, what was your first viral tweet?

You remember, my first viral tweet was a thread on biology Sreena, Boston. I had listened to seven or eight of his podcast episodes. This was two years ago, back in September 2020. I listened to a bunch of things he'd written and. Or a bunch of things he'd said. And I wanted to distill everything I learned because the guy just, you know, he lives 30 years in the future. So I wrote a thread. This was actually my 29th thread in a row. The first 28 all sucked, but I'd committed to writing, publishing a thread every day for 30 days. I still remember that 28th one, ironically. Got almost no engagement. And then the 29th one, I hit publish, went to bed, woke up, it went viral. So that thread seriously changed the trajectory of my digital writing journey. So I can point a lot of good things back to that. And I think the lesson of that one is you never know what's going to go viral until you hit publish.

There's always a turning point. I feel like that's true for everyone. There's always one piece that all of a sudden it makes you realize how large the scale of any of these social platforms are. I tried digging through my analytics. I think my first viral thread was my ghostwriting templates thread. It went way viral. It was the most viral thing I had written on Twitter to date. But the thing most people don't know because it's hard to see and assume this happens now, but it probably took me seven or eight months of writing threads on Twitter to figure out how to write a good thread. It took a long time. And then once this thread popped, I saw that the format of it and I just kept using that format over and over and over again. It was like I found one thing that worked and I was like, okay, let me just go hammer this home. A lot of things I wrote after that didn't go as viral, but it was a really helpful like template for me to follow in the beginning.

What would you say some of those takeaways were? Like what, what makes in your opinion now the thread framework work?

The, the hook stands out. I, I've reused that hook so many times. It's the topic 101. So it said ghostwriting 101 at the top. Then it was this massive amount of credibility. You know, over the, over the past X years I've written for y founders, CEOs, Grammy winning musicians. All this stuff just packed all this credibility into it. And then I had this great sentence that was the secret or the thing that most people don't know. I use the same five templates every time, which is true when I sit down to ghostwrite. I use the same five templates every time. And I basically used that stack, you know, 101 topic credibility block, twist, like plot twist. Oh, I didn't know. Oh, but there's something under the surface here. And then I actually just use these five templates, these frameworks, these tips, these whatever. I use that stack over and over and over again.

I think that works because it's. I've done something impressive, but it's not as difficult as you think. And here's why.

Exactly.

Right. I think everyone sits on some piece of credibility like that where they've done something that from the outside a lot of people might think is very difficult or unrealistic or unlikely. And then you kind of throw the twist in there that actually it's not what you think. Here's why. It kind of piques that curiosity that people just, just kind of have to keep reading.

Yeah. And that's. It speaks to. There's kind of four hooks that I use over and over and over again. And one of those hooks is really difficult thing made super easy. Anytime you tell someone this is a really hard thing. And you know it's hard, but I know how to make it easy. It's really. How is the reader not going to give you their attention? Because they have always thought it's hard and now you're telling them that it can be done easily. It's one of those techniques that just always works.

Yeah. When you position something like that, I like to think of it as the cost of not reading feels larger than the cost of reading. Like if someone has done something difficult and they've simplified it down for you, that it's going to save you a lot of time. It almost feels like if you scroll past that, you end up losing out because they went and did a bunch of work and you're not going to cash in on it. So I like to keep that one in mind. All right, next question. Alex asks, what does your perfect day look like, including the double espresso? So why don't you go first?

Mine is pretty similar. Like almost every day now, I tend to wake up very early when I'm feeling ambitious. It's 5am Typically I wake up around 6 or 6:30, get in a solid writing session. Anytime from, call it 6, 6:30, up to about 11, you know, lunchtime, kick all that off with espresso, obviously, make myself a quick breakfast, usually have lunch. Either dicky with you or I'll have it with my fiance. Just kind of hang out for an hour, relax, get in another solid writing session, you know, maybe 1 to 3:30ish, hit the gym, come home, have dinner, hang out. I love spending time with my dog. And then usually I will end the day with another writing session, another like hour and a half, 90 minutes, two hours before bed. So all in all, it's very common for me to get in like six to nine hours of solid writing a day.

And I think that takes a lot of people by surprise that you can write that much. But I've gotten to witness it firsthand. For the last four or five months we've been working together where it's like, no, you can really just sit down and absolutely crank out an entire book worth of words in three or four days. It's very, very impressive. I've gotten to witness that.

And it wasn't always that way. I like reminding people that it's like going to the gym. You have to work up to that level of endurance. You don't just show up to the gym, day one and go, I'm going to work out, you know, for three hours and run seven miles. And no, it Takes a long time to build up that amount of endurance. But what about you, Dickie?

So my I've experimented with tons of different routines in the six months since I left Blackrock. And I've settled on one that's really working for me, which is wake up at 5 and immediately out the door to get my body moving. I've tried going 5am Wake up right over to the desk. It just doesn't. I don't feel as productive, I don't feel as good doing that. I like to get my body and brain moving so I'll do 60 minutes of cardio. I also learned that from Andrew Huberman that caffeine within the first 90 minutes is pretty ineffective. And for a long time I was drinking caffeine within a few minutes of waking up and never really understood why it didn't hit me that well. So now I wait until I get back. So what I do now is wake up five right out the door for some kind of cardio. Whether that's a run, whether that's going right to the gym, doing like a skier or an erg or assault bike, something to just get the heart rate elevated, a little bit of mobility. Then I come back, I eat breakfast. I used to intermittent fast, but I've kind of done away with that because again, learning more and more about the health stuff, I feel much better when I have caffeine after a meal. So I'll eat a high fat, high protein breakfast, keep carbs out of my system in the morning because my brain turns a little bit to mush the second I start to kind of have rice or things like that. I just kind of feel slower. But then it's 6:30 and I try to work for four straight hours from 6:30 to 10:30 and have no interruption, nothing outline that task the night before. So I sit down at the computer and it's like boom. I immediately pick momentum up based on where I left off the night before from 10:30 to 11 kind of open up the open loops because managing different things and different people and different projects, it's like the second I open slack, my day kind of completely changes from having that four hours of quiet focus time to okay, I got to respond to this person, I got this meeting, I got this. So I try to. I have nothing scheduled, call wise or interruption wise before 11:11 to 3:30 is usually some kind of meeting, some kind of managing, some kind of like collaborative work. And then I'm headed to the gym around 3:45 to lift from there till 5 5:30 back for dinner, like just like you, right around that time. And then I leave the evenings open. So from seven onwards, it's kind of blank. If I want to just sit on the couch and watch college football, that's totally open. If it's, I'm inspired and I want to crank out a writing session that's open. And that part of the day is very similar to the morning where I will leave notifications off, I'll turn my phone off and try to just kind of protect my headspace a little bit during that time. So that's been working really well. But again, these things change all the time. And I think that's what's fun about building something on your own is you have the freedom and flexibility to make your own schedule. Sometimes that uncertainty is a little bit too much. Where it's like, I'd love to have my whole day mapped out all the way. But it's been definitely an experiment.

It's been really fun. Now that we're both in Miami together, it's been really fun watching you structure your days too, because I. I've learned a lot from how you make those decisions. It also reminds me when I was building my first company, I did not give myself that time in the morning. And I would literally like roll out of bed immediately, be checking emails and walking down the street to get Starbucks like caffeine in the first 20 minutes. Immediately responding to the day versus doing that like some sort of deep work. And it was horrible. It was like the most unhealthy I'd ever felt. And I feel like now retraining that, and you've helped me retrain that a lot as well, has been really, really great.

I think no matter how good things are going in your business, you are always going to open up notifications to some kind of fire, right? So the longer one, realizing that and two, like recognizing that opening up fires at 5:30am versus 10:30, very rarely are they like daily fires where that five hours would have mattered. And that's definitely something I've learned that the notifications that I end up checking and responding to at 10:30 are, we're no more urgent than they would have been at 5:30. So I might as well keep things off for that five hours. And every time I reflect on my week and think about the big things, we move forward. It's always, I either did it in those last two hours of the day during a quiet time, or those first five hours where nothing was. I could soak on something that entire.

Time that to me, that's probably the hardest top three, one of the hardest skills to learn as a creator, slash creator. That evolves into a business owner, which is feeling the urgency to respond to everything, to react to everything, and recognizing that 90% of it is not urgent. Protecting your headspace and protecting your time and knowing I can get to this tomorrow, my well being matters. I need to shut down for the day. Like, I didn't do that for three years. And it was very, very taxing.

Yeah, it's the paradox of. It's like the. The business owner treadmill. You technically could be doing something at any time to drive the business forward and getting comfortable with the fact that you're not. Versus when I was working at BlackRock, it's like I literally could not do anything at a certain period of time to help move the team forward. So it's much easier to shut off. But we're learning. We'll figure this out as we go. All right, next question. Carly asks, at what stage should you launch a product or service? An e book, a guide, something like that? Cole, how would you answer that one?

To me, I have a very clear answer. But the irony is that, Dickie, you defied the laws of physics with this answer with yours, because you did launch a digital product first, which I. I think is very rare. To me, the easier answer is, when should you launch a digital product? It's after you've done the thing as a service. And there's a couple reasons. A, a service is a lot easier to make money on in the beginning. It's way easier to convince one person to pay you $3,000 than, you know, to get a bunch of people to pay you $30 second is. Services are basically your opportunity to get paid to learn all the problems that people find for you to solve. So instead of you going and doing that as a side hustle for free at night, trying to assemble this digital product where you don't really know what's most helpful to people. A service is your way of getting paid to do all of that. Learning when it's time to create a digital product is when you've done the service enough to the point where you know all the problems, you know all the answers, you have some of your own frameworks for solving them, you understand the process for solving them. And now you just find yourself doing the same things over and over again manually. Because a digital product is your ability to productize yourself. So you know how to solve people's problems, but instead of solving them with time as through A service, you can solve them through assets, which can be a digital course. It could be an ebook, a book, a community, some sort of other more scalable vehicle. So to me, that. That answer is easier for more people. But recognizing there's an asterisk there, which is some people just out the gate create a digital product and they under. They. They figure out how to make it successful, how to scale it. It's just. That is a rarer and more difficult path.

Yeah, my first digital product actually wasn't ship 30. It was a podcast compendium. And I thought I was going to be the podcast guy. So my first digital product, and the way I think about this for launching them, is launch something way before you feel qualified to do. Because I spent all of 2020 listening and learning from podcasts. And my thing on Twitter was I would tweet out summaries of them, and every single time people would ask in the comments, hey, do you have like a list of all these summaries? Right. I love that you're saving me a lot of time doing these takeaways.

1.

It was very beneficial for me because just like you said, with the service getting paid to learn, I was basically building an audience while learning. Right. So the free upside of putting my summaries out there on the Internet was I was attracting a group of people who were interested in those same things. So I launched that podcast compendium as just a. Hey, people were asking for it because I was giving away a ton of free value. And I think that's a very easy way to think about. Lightweight digital products are if you are creating content or sharing writing or sharing tips on something that's helping people for free, they're going to pay for the packaging of those ideas. So the way I keep in mind, any kind of digital asset for sale is people don't pay for information. They pay for packaging, accountability, speed, outcomes, those kind of things. Right. So an ebook is really just a way to save people time. And so if you take all your valuable free stuff, package it up into an ebook, and say, hey, I put all this out there already, but if you want to pay $10, it's going to save you probably five hours at least of going and aggregating that, and that immediately becomes a far more valuable trade off.

This is, I think, yeah, I mean, a. The cool thing is that both paths work. You know, you can go the services to product route, you can go the digital product to. Maybe you end up providing a service down the road. And like, it's all Interchangeable. The something I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is buried in this question of at what stage should you launch a product or service, which is recognizing that in either case. But more so with digital products, you need an attention engine. Like, a lot of people sit down and they go, I want to create a course. But there's no point in you going and spending 10, 50, 100 hours creating a course if you have no attention engine to drive people to it. So that's why, like, one of the things we talk a lot about, Dickie, is how do you start by writing on Twitter or LinkedIn. Creating this attention engine, you're. You're learning as you do that you're gathering all of these important data points. But that engine is what's going to power the course or the ebook or the community or whatever it is that you want to create. And I find a lot of times when I talk with people, everyone's got an idea for a course. But then you're like, well, are you writing on social platforms? Do you have an attention engine? And they go, no. And a lot of them say, no, and I don't want to. So it's like, well, then why are you spending all this time building an asset? Because you're either going to drive it from social organically or you're going to run paid ads. Like, those are your two options, so which one do you want to do? And so I find that most people get lost in the sauce there, where they focus on the end result, the course or the ebook. But you got to focus on the attention engine.

It's almost that the course purchase becomes a byproduct of the trust that you've built up with all the free value you've provided. Right. With ship 30, almost all of our frameworks are out there for free. If you wanted to spend 100 hours trying to gather them all, you could. But you're going to come across two or three very valuable free ones and say, wow, this was great. I bet if that in a structured format where all they're doing is delivering this type of value and it's live, clearly people are going to pay for that. So if you think you're going to launch a course and someone's going to buy that course without going to your social profile and building a trust relationship with you, you're kind of out of luck because that's much, much harder. And especially with the way advertising costs break, like, that's far more of a nightmare to have to deal with.

This is an awesome segue into the next question Luke asked. What are the best ways to drive email list subscribers? What's really interesting is digital businesses are actually extremely simple. You have your attention engine, so call it writing on Twitter or LinkedIn or it could be another platform. You write on medium, you write on Quora, you make Instagram Reels, TikTok videos, you know, whatever it is, you have some sort of attention engine. You drive that attention to some sort of list. So it can be a email list, an evergreen newsletter, it can be an opt in, a download. I'm giving away a free ultimate guide, whatever it is. And, and then as people join that list over time, you pitch them on whatever the product is. So for us, our flow, those three pieces are very simple. We write on Twitter and LinkedIn. We drive people to. We have two options. Either our evergreen newsletter, which is the digital writing compass, or our free ultimate guide to start writing online@startwritingonline.com and then over time, as people join that list, we remind them, hey, by the way, if you found all the stuff on Twitter and LinkedIn for free valuable. And oh, by the way, if you found our evergreen newsletter, slash our StartwritingOnline ultimate guide valuable, you are really gonna find ship 30 valuable and that's it. And you just repeat that all day long. The problem and where most people go wrong though is they think, well, if I just post nothing burgers on Twitter and LinkedIn and then I drive them to a newsletter that just is another nothing burger and then I ask them all to buy my course, then I'm just gonna make millions of dollars. It's like, no, your Twitter and LinkedIn content should be so valuable that you could charge for it. And then your evergreen newsletter and your free opt in should be so valuable that you could have charged for it. And so the whole, the whole game is how do you give away so much for free that by the time you ask someone to spend money with you, they go, well, you've already given me what I feel like is hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars worth of value. So now when you ask me to buy it seems cheap relative to what you've already given me. That's the hardest thing for creators to learn. Like that mindset of give the actual valuable stuff away for free. How would you answer Luke's question, Dickie? What are the best ways to drive email subs?

So Hormozi has. Alex, Hormozy has a great quote on this is the best way to stand out with your organic content is to make Your free shit more valuable than everyone else's paid shit, right? So if you're giving away a ton of value for free, just like you said, the ask of, hey, if you found this extremely valuable thing for free, valuable, you might also like this other free valuable thing, which is my newsletter. It's very easy to convert, right? Very few people get to the bottom of one of our Twitter threads that show them something hyper actionable. And when we ask, hey, if you like this, you might also like this free guide, of course they're going to just opt into that, right? It's not an ask. You're not really driving traffic. You're just giving them more stuff for free. So if you don't think about how do I capture emails, right? It's almost like zero sum or like you're taking, how do I just show people that, hey, if they want more value for free, here it is. After delivering them something valuable in the first place.

This is, this is such a rabbit hole that we can go down Espresso's firing at all in all cylinders right now. So here's the other important point. And you see multi billion dollar companies make this mistake. They go, hey, subscribe to my newsletter. And the person's like, no. Because the whole ask is literally the company going, give me your email. The person goes, no, right? How you get subscribers is not by saying, subscribe to my newsletter, because nobody cares about your newsletter. Nobody wakes up in the morning and actually wants to give you their email. Instead, you have to think in reverse. You have to think, what problem is this person facing and how can I solve it? And oh, by the way, I'm just delivering the solution via email. That's it. You're like, hey, you have a problem. I can solve that problem, but I need a vehicle through which to solve it. So just give me your email and I'll send you the email with the answer, right? But instead, most companies, and then you see creators do this too. But like big companies are so guilty of this, where their, their whole box is just subscribe to my newsletter. Nobody cares about your newsletter, Oracle.

The way to think about this is no one cares what you do. They care what you can do for them. So instead of saying, subscribe to my newsletter, say, I'm going to deliver this value to you in exchange for your email, right? Go from a place of ego to a place of empathy. Deliver value first. All right, last question. Idasoft asks, when you start to write, do you follow any specific formulas or do you start from scratch? Every single Time. And if you do use a system to keep your writing in order, how do you use it? Cole, what do you use for that?

So, two answers. One is very rarely do I start writing in a day before doing any sort of journaling. Journaling has always been my way of just clearing out the pipes. It's really. It's kind of like going to the gym. You know, you go to the gym and you start stretching and you can kind of tell what sort of workout you're about to have. You know, am I a little stiff today? Am I feeling really strong from yesterday? And I know I'm going to lift some serious weight today. Whenever I sit down to journal in the morning, I can usually tell where I'm at and how active my brain is and whether I'm going to need to warm up for a while or if I'm just ready to go and I can jump right into it. The second, though, is, and it's the reason why I'm such a big believer in templates and why we use templates in ship 30 is I use templates all the time. And even if I don't use an actual template, I have templates in my brain where I know, okay, if I'm writing an email, this is the general template I should use. If I'm writing a landing page, this is the general template I should use. If I'm writing a chapter of a book, this is the general template I should use. And once you have those, it becomes so much easier because now you're not staring at a blank page going, I don't know where to start. Yes, you do. Okay, if you're writing this sort of thing, these are what the main points are going to be. This is how the subheads are going to look. This is how the sections are going to look. This is how long each section is going to be. You kind of already have the infrastructure for it. Now you just need to color inside the lines.

All right, so my writing routine is pretty similar, but mine starts always the night before, where I pick an idea that I know I'm going to write about the next day and I brain dump as many bullets as I can about that idea. Then I shut my journal and I go to bed. That kicks off my subconscious. And this sounds a little bit woo woo, but Gary Halbert does it, and I learned it from him. Of, you let that idea kind of marinate overnight. And I always wake up with more clarity on exactly what it is I'm going to say. Then I'll grab my phone and go for a walk. And as I'm doing that, I'm outlining the idea. So I'd say 80 to 90% of my writing actually happens on a walk. The last 20 to 10% happens when I sit down at the computer. But at that point, I know exactly what I'm going to say. I just kind of have to organize it from there to get a little bit more clarity. I put these six questions at the top of everything I write, which is, what problem am I solving, Whose problem am I solving, what benefits am I unlocking, what promise am I making, what emotion am I generating, and what's the next action my reader should take? So from there, I have those six questions at the top and I have the outline for my walk. And there I'm just trying to get all the raw material out of my head. I'm answering those questions. I'm just trying to stay typing for 10 to 15 minutes. All that's going to do is get every piece of junk out of my head and onto the page. And then from there I actually start the quote unquote writing process, which to me is just editing, right? I'm just trying to remove, I'm trying to organize, I'm trying to distill. And I have so much on the page already that I'm never starting with a blank page. So I brain dump the idea before I go to bed, I wake up, I walk and outline it, or throughout the day, if I'm thinking about an idea and I'm on a walk, I'll just start to jot down bullet points. So I'm again never staring at a blank page. And then I get clarity asking those six questions. And once I kind of have the draft where it could get published, I'll wait 24 hours, come back to it the next morning, read it aloud one time, edit it a little bit, and then hit publish. So it never, ever feels ready before I hit publish on something. And that's how I know I'm staying ahead of the curve and not falling victim to perfectionism. Because if you wait till something feels ready, it's never going to be ready. I love the quote of no books are ever finished. They are merely abandoned. Any successful book, any successful Twitter thread, any successful piece of writing came from an author who didn't think it was ready. But hit publish anyway.

I think one of the most underrated writing tips is doing that Prep the page exercise and then going to bed or waiting until the next day. If you leave a page blank and then go try and Think about it, all you feel is overwhelmed because you haven't. You haven't started yet, you haven't taken that first step. But if you prep the page and you kind of create some sections, you. You put in some headers, you jot down some notes, and then you step away. Now your brain has started to assemble it, and then when you come back to it, you probably are going to come back going, oh, I thought about it for a bit. I know how to assemble this differently. But if you just leave it as a blank page and think about it, you just feel this mounting pressure of, I have no idea how to approach it. So, yeah, I love optimizing for. Just put something down so that when you step away, your brain's thinking through it.

All right, that does it for the first edition of the Double Espresso Hour. I think we're coming in right around 20 minutes. So clearly the espresso was firing on this one. If you have questions you want answered in next week's show, you can leave a comment on this YouTube channel or you can reach out to us on Twitter, where we're going to post the Q and A on Monday morning. Reply to that tweet with any of your questions, and we'll make sure to get them answered. See you in the next one.