Watch Us Build A $1,000,000 Education Product In 30 Minutes - Espresso Hour E6

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour where the running joke is this is going to be much shorter than an hour because again, we are cranked up on caffeine. Cole, what's going on, man? What are we going to talk about today?

I think we're going to use a different format today because we are currently thinking through and building what appears to be our next education product. We've been wanting to do a ghostwriting product for a while. A lot of people have showed interest in that. And we want to use this episode to share in real time some of the questions that we're thinking through as we build a whole new vertical and a whole new education product from day one so that you can see what sort of questions we're asking ourselves and just share and document the process of what it's like building something from zero all the way to, you know, we think this has multi seven figure potential. So what goes into that?

Yeah, so definitely leave comments, questions you have, if you like this format, if you think if we should do this more than asking questions as we kind of build out some new products, new offers, and try to take things to the next level. So, Cole, where do you want to start on the ghostwriting coaching program or product or book or all the different ways we thought about the process of ghostwriting?

So one, I think, okay, so just as context for everyone listening and then you and I, we can jam on this. But so the context here is we've been wanting to do a ghostwriting project for a long time. My first business, my first startup was a ghostwriting agency. I ran that for about three years. We scaled it up to, I think at our height, we had 22 or 23 full time employees. It was something like 8 or 10 full time writers, 8 or 10 full time editors, and then like 3,4ish full time salespeople. Everyone was full time. Probably the biggest mistake I made in that business. But we learned and at our height, we probably had like 80 to 100 concurrent clients all at the same time. And it was mad. I mean, we were producing like thousands and thousands of articles and all said, I don't know, we probably racked up a billion views of all the things that we wrote. Dickie, you and I both realized, like, I have a tremendous amount of domain expertise there. I think there are like few people that would be able to create a ghostwriting course with the level of insight that I have from building a company like that. And so we see that as a huge opportunity. The problem or the thing that we've been working through is that like every topic and like every niche, ghost writing is broad. Like it seems really niche until you start to realize that, well, you can ghostwrite lots of different things. Are we talking about ghostwriting articles or books or Twitter posts or speeches or, you know, like, you know, the term ghostwriting is broad until you define it. And so what we've learned building ship 30 and what we're learning studying other education businesses is that if we want something to scale and if we want to be the most helpful we can to people in the most compressed amount of time, we need to niche down in one very specific way. And I took some time to think about it and was like, what's the easiest thing to teach but the most valuable thing to teach, most valuable skill in ghostwriting? And where I landed was it came down to two. It was either it was either helping people ghostwrite for other people on Twitter and LinkedIn, which is very hot right now and a lot of people are in that world, or it's teaching ghostwriters how to ghostwrite email courses, which is really specific and in my mind, very underrated. And so I guess as a starting point, like, what do you think of that?

I spent the night thinking about this. And what I think is so unique about this is we're teaching someone how to create a valuable asset for someone who doesn't have it already. And that it sounds a little bit like duh. But if you think about what is one problem, it's that most people who have a organic following do not have a high quality email course. And we have expertise in this area where our business accelerated when we launched the start writing online 7 day email course because for a while we didn't have any emails. And instead of starting a newsletter, we said, how can we immediately give someone trust or provide enough content that someone trusts us very quickly? And the easiest way to do that is with a seven day email course, right? So for anyone who's ever looked on startwritingonline.com, we have a 13,000 word free ultimate guide, which I think is another thing you could ghostwrite. But the more valuable part of that is instead of just downloading it and then no one ending up going through it, which, I mean, anyone who's downloaded any kind of ultimate guy, they, they buy it or they download it and they never look at it again. So we have a seven day email course that walks them through step by step and that accelerated our business. So we are now going to look at okay what is a problem that ideally we could solve for all these people? It would be help them create an email course. So that's one problem we could solve. Or we could say, that's a problem. How can we go train a bunch of other people to solve that problem?

Right.

So it's, it's an interesting thought on levels of leverage where we could, like, we could solve this problem for the creators by creating a asynchronous course on how to create your own email course, but that would require them to do it. So what we're going to do is say, what would the ideal email course look like? And then train as many people as we could to say, I'm going to go create that for a bunch of other people. So I've just been thinking about the fascinating different, like, levels of leverage that go into something like that, where the counter example of, like, email course versus Twitter threads.

Right.

Which one is more valuable for the creator? Well, an email course that brings them a bridge to their paid courses is much more valuable. And so it's easier for the ghostwriter to then position themselves.

Right.

So there's like three different problems we're solving at the same time there that I think we're the only ones who have the expertise in email courses and ghostwriting to actually go and teach that.

Yep. Yeah. So there's. There's a bunch of things here. So one is part of what made building a ghostwriting agency so challenging is that the nature of ghostwriting is. Is how subjective it is. So when you work with someone as a ghostwriter, you're typically working with an individual. You know, all my clients were CEOs or they were founders. Like, I'm working with the founder. And when you write for a person, there's a high level of subjectivity where that person goes, I want it to sound a certain way, I want it to come off a certain way. And there's an art in being a ghostwriter of understanding how to create the things that the client wants. And that's not scalable. It's not scalable. I had 100 clients at the same time. It's not scalable. And so as I was thinking about, like, how do you teach people to start making money as a ghostwriter, ghostwriting Someone's Twitter or LinkedIn? The subjectivity is way high, especially because that's where the person is most visible.

Right.

So that's where they are building an audience. That's where they're putting themselves out there. That is where they are the most subjected to outside Feedback, criticism, engagement, whatever. And so what likely happens is when you write for those people, they're going to have more edits, they're going to have more input, they're going to have more opinions on how they want you to write. And it takes a long time to know how to do that. Versus an email course is more private, less public, less subjective, more objective asset. It's like, what do you do? What problems do you solve? What can you offer your readers? It's a lot easier to create something like that versus I'm going to write for you in real time on Twitter or LinkedIn. And when you compare the subjectivity of those two things, it's really clear which one is way easier to teach. Even though on the surface it seems like, oh, everyone wants Twitter ghostwriters or LinkedIn ghostwriters, like that's fine. But do you know the easiest way to get someone to go, I want you to ghostwrite for me on Twitter or LinkedIn, write an amazing email course for them and go, oh, you can write now I want to give you other ghostwriting gigs too.

It's funny how this framework that we've clicked on from Cole Gordon of specific problems, specific person, specific way, and it's interesting to see that permeate through this whole idea. So what do I mean by that? We are helping ghostwriters write email courses for Twitter creators or for whatever we end up saying. We're going to also teach that lesson to the ghostwriters for when they are pitching their services. I do this for this type of person in this way, right? They're going to say I write email courses for, you know, health and fitness, Twitter influence, whatever it is. Also they're going to go to those creators that they're writing for when they write the email course and say, I'm going to write you an email course that solves one specific problem for one specific person in one specific way. And if you think you have multiple of those people, I can write you 10 email courses on specific problem in a different way in these 10 ways. And now you have 10 different opt ins for your landing page. Think about all like, it's so interesting to see the like the trickle down effect of this framework, right? And that's what's so helpful I think and why this works is because it's the same line of thinking apply to all parts of, of the program.

Which by the way, how we know that this is valuable is like this has been on our list for a year is we need 10 different email courses going into ship 30. Because we need start writing on medium. Start, start writing on Quora. Start writing on Twitter, start writing on LinkedIn. Right? Each one of those should be its own email course funneling people into ship 30. Do we have the time to write all those? No, it's been on our list for a year. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna build a course to train people on how to do it and then probably hire 10 of those ghostwriters to go write those email courses. And when you're solving your own problem, like in the WhatsApp group with all these other course creators on Twitter, right. All of them have this need. All of them. If you see someone writing on Twitter that is building an audience, but then you go to their website and they have no email capture. What's the sell? The sell is a layup. It's like, why are you spending all this time building a rented audience when you have no mechanism to move that rented audience over to an owned audience? Layup.

I mean, I get, I get more confident talking about this as we go, dude.

And my favorite, my favorite part of this is when this clicked for me, when I was like outlining this, I got so happy. Is the beauty of building email courses and then teaching people how to ghostwrite email courses is we're going to build an email course for this, right? Because we're going to build. Start ghostwriting online.com, right? And then every person who goes through that going to be really obvious. We're going to be like, hey, you are in an email course right now. You are reading this right now, which means you see the value of it from the other side. So now we're going to show you how to do that. And that's going to be a layup to sell to anyone. Because it's like, oh, you read my email course. Okay, so it worked. You're saying to me, it worked right now it's valuable. Yes. It's such an easy offer.

So let's dig into that because this is a great idea. There's thousands of different ways that we could deliver this. And so we've jammed on this a little bit of just putting it out there, right? You could write an ebook that says how to do this, or you could put together an async video course, or you could have a cohort based course, or you could have a group coaching program, or you could have an evergreen community, right? What is it about how we've kind of settled on this eight week intensive group coaching program that kind of resonated with you.

So I've been going through a bunch of these, like, Cole Gordon resources, which are great for anyone who's at seven figures and looking to scale. Amazing if don't bother getting into it before you're at seven figures. But he said something really interesting that, like, I've always known, but now doing it this way is so much more conscious, which is create the most compelling offer you can and then build the product that fulfills that offer. And I realized that in the past, whenever I thought about doing a ghostwriting product, I was doing it the opposite way. I was like, here's all the things that I want to talk about with ghostwriting. And now let me just like, put a bow on it. Let me, like, what's. What am I offering from that? But you should do it in the reverse, like, what's the most compelling offer? And then work backwards. And. And that's where we landed on the email courses specifically. But what I also notice is that people have lots of tangential questions. So I think you have the core curriculum, which is like, what's the one? How are. How are we defining success? What's the one thing that we need to do to make each student successful? And then all the tangential information is like, bonus. It's like gravy on top of. And through that lens, you know, what to. What to prioritize and what not to. And so the way that I've been thinking about this is, I think from a build order perspective. One, we just need to do like one or two or three cohorts and learn what questions are people asking? Improve the course itself. The barbell then is, I'd like to treat the book version as the. Here's all the stuff that you need to know, like, what are the mistakes ghostwriters make? What are the reasons why ghostwriting is so compelling? What are the different things you can ghost? Right. Like, it's just the interesting information that's surrounding it. And then the book is the. It can be the funnel to the high ticket thing. But I think you start with the high ticket, you learn, and then you distill it down into the low ticket and then that's it.

Yeah, because you want their maximum attention at the beginning.

Right.

We want to, as we build this, rather than start with something where we don't have as much of an impact on the result, we'd rather start with a smaller group who we know are going to take it seriously and are early adopters of it. Give them a discount to join because of that. And then we have more resources to get like tangible, tangible. What is this problem? There is another way we could do it of if we started a free ghostwriting community and had a bunch of people join and say, what. What questions do you have?

Right.

So there is another way of gathering information. I think the pro like, okay, what problem are we trying to solve with that is what are the most compelling and important problems to solve for someone who wants to start doing this?

Yeah, I was gonna say I think that's the right decision if we didn't have the domain expertise. Right. Like if I was doing this five years ago, that's what I would do because I would want to learn like what problems do people have. But I'm so intimately aware of what those problems are that it's like I can kind of skip that whole phase and be like, if you're a ghostwriter, I know this is what you want. I know this is where you're stuck. And I know how to get you to $5,000 clients as quickly as possible.

Yeah. And I also think the free group is a way to generate leads. And we don't have a lead. You put one tweet out that said, who'd be interested in this? And it has 150 replies. We have a 70,000 person email list where if we sent an email that said, hey, we're launching a ghostwriting program, click here. And just on the tactical side, for anyone listening to this who's potentially thinking about launching a product, when we do that, we will have an opt in survey that says leave your email and we'll ask what is the number one problem or question you have that we could solve for you? And that's going to generate a giant list of questions and problems that become the outline for the course, which we already have. But I bet there's things that we'll see that we don't. We're not thinking about like little things like how do I take payments or how do I set up a entity, how do I make like those tiny little things that we might be overlooking? And that's going to get us data. So if you're listening to this and thinking about launching something to your email list, spin up a survey that makes people opt in to tell you they're interested. That way you have a segmented list and ask them to outline the product for you. What's the biggest problem you have and why are you interested in this? If you ask two questions, you're going to get benefits and problems and that writes your landing page right you're going to knock those 10 problems down and you're going to hype up those 10 benefits.

Yep. And so there's a big decision I think we need to make this, this is like what I'm wrestling with now, which is basically how long it should be and how to stagger it with ship 30. And I, and I want to preface this for, for listeners too, because I think one of the biggest problems that, that entrepreneurs of all levels make is they go, here's a great idea, and then they spend all day on the idea. But they don't take into account the context of how much time do you have, how many resources do you have, what priority is this? Where does this fit into the bigger picture? You know, and so for us, what I've been thinking about is like, basically what do we want to choose to optimize for? Because what we've learned with ship 30 is that when we have like back to, back to back to back cohorts, it is very mentally taxing, which prevents us from being able to invest in building new things. It's a lot of like you're fulfilling on the existing thing versus being able to build new things. And so part of me is wondering because we kind of use the eight week intensive structure as the arbitrary thing, but the reality is we could double up and we could do the whole thing in a month. You know, it could be four weeks, but two calls a week, just like it is with ship 30. And what I've been debating is the pro con of layering it on top of a ship 30 cohort. So we have calls on Tuesdays and, and Fridays, and those are just our stacked call days. And we have two cohorts, ship 30 and ghostwriting, going at the same time once a quarter or staggering them and going ship 30 cohort, ghostwriting cohort month break, ship 30 cohort, ghost trading cohort month break. You know, and I see pros and cons for both. I'm curious what you think.

Whoa, okay, let's, let's think about what doubles when we do that.

Right.

So say we ran it very similarly of two communities going on at the same time, two live calls going on at the same time. That would mean things that need to double would be community support. We would need more labor to provide that versus using the same team to fulfill ship 30 at the same time as ghostwriting.

Right.

We would need more administrative support for uploading the replays because that would double up on each of those days slightly more time. Around that time we would need More. It requires double our time during those days.

Right.

So that is meant. Or physically and mentally more challenging. It means overlapping marketing. But the pro is we do both of those cohorts at the same time. We do that because it's more challenging. It's going to force us to hire the talent and resources necessary to let us do that. And then gives us two months if we wanted to iterate on both of them.

That's so funny. I literally didn't even think about the doubling resources versus sharing resources, because through that lens, I feel like a much easier first decision would be staggering them. And then over time we can always double them up if and when we grow into that and want to do that. But yeah, you're right, it does. It actually makes a lot more sense to start with the same team just staggering them.

And I think we'd be able to. The additional help would just be more community support. We.

I mean, I think the first. Yeah. So I've been thinking about this and I think we should make the first cohort, like maybe even smaller. Like maybe like 25 people. Like make it intentionally small, knowing that we probably could have made it bigger. But really using that as the forcing function of creating the processes, creating all the resources that we need, going through the motion, like knowing that it's really easy to take something clean at 25 to 100 people, rather than like starting with 100 people and having it be really messy, you know, so here's where.

This gets fun is what are all the ways we could deliver the curriculum? So we could have live calls, we could have text based, we could have videos.

Right.

So when you think about constructing this, I think the best way if we were to redo ship 30, it would be from the beginning, have some kind of curriculum that you consume. And then we talk about on the live session as if you've already done that, rather than using the live sessions to teach. You know, So I. But the con of that is you have to build the curriculum beforehand and then if you need to change it, you have to go change that. Whereas it's much easier to just to change a live session.

Yeah, but you know, what we learned doing ship 30 is, I mean, think about how many times we redid those slides. You redo them anyway, you know, and so I think, I think you're totally right. And especially when we're doing something more high ticket, where we're probably going to have more questions to answer and more examples, like it probably is better to deliver it asynchronously and Then use the live calls as workshops.

And this will be a big template and swipe file and that kind of delivery.

Right.

Where it's like, we make a lot of these decisions for you on how do I write that cold dm? Well, you literally just copy the script, and then we can continue to improve that based on that initial cohort. Hey, let's test a few of these different dms. We. Which ones are working, which ones aren't. Right. So that'll be the advantage for anyone listening who wants to get involved in this initial cohort is that we're going to probably offer it for not quite as much as we do for the eventual full course, just because we're going to be iterating. It's going to be a much smaller group. So you're going to get more attention, and we're going to learn a lot of what works during that.

Yeah. And it'll be. It'll be interesting to see how. What the response is and. And how we stagger it with ship 30 and. Yeah. But I'm really excited about it. I feel like. I feel like this niche and getting so specific on the email course side is so interesting because I pay a lot of attention to, you know, like, what happens in the world of digital writing and ghostwriting, and I. I don't see anyone niching down on that. And that's where I'm like, oh, there's. There's something great, great here.

And what a lot of people would do with not film this podcast episode, because it's like, I don't want to put that idea out there.

Right.

But we're the ones that can execute it.

Right.

It sounds. It sounds like a great idea. Let's go build the thing.

And I also know, I mean, at the risk of sounding immodest, like, I just. I know that there's very few people that know as much about ghostwriting as I do. I just know that. And so part of me, too, is like, I want to give as much away for free because, A, it's an amazing career path for writers. I believe every writer should dip their toe into ghostwriting. You learn so much. And B, is like, there's a abundance of opportunity, abundance. Like, even if we niche down and build something and a bunch of other people copy it, it's like, we have 10 more products that we can build. It's this. We don't have a shortage of ideas.

Yeah. And so just two things on that. One, I think, yes, you know more about ghostwriting, but I think that there's no one that knows the importance of email courses and. And ghostwriting as much as you do.

Right.

Which is an interesting additional bit of specificity.

Right.

There's probably other people who know how to write ebooks or whatever, but very few people have run a business that tripled because of an email course and know about ghostwriting. And then second, where we are going with this idea is ghostwriting email courses is the specific way. But we want to create an infrastructure where over the next couple years we can launch multiple of these. And so our product at the ship 30 level is how do we create a high ticket group coaching writing based program to help people start careers in writing doing specific things a specific way. Because if we can nail that as a product, then we could launch 10 of them at the same time with teams of people running them.

Right.

So our, you know, back and forth on staggering them so the same team can run it. That's how we'll start. But the eventual goal would be to have 10 of them running concurrently.

Right.

And so I have this tweet sitting in my drafts is like naval literally laid out the entire game plan of levels of leverage and how to think about them. And you should just reread that every couple months because this is it, right? There's just to think about the levels of leverage here. You could ghostwrite for someone for hours, right? And so you sell time for money. You could ghostwrite assets for people. Higher level of leverage, you could run a ghostwriting agency that has a bunch of ghostwriters.

Right?

Higher level of leverage, you could run a ghostwriting coaching program that helps people start ghostwriting businesses. Higher level of leverage, you can run an education company that designs group coaching programs for different ghostwriting niches. Higher level of higher level of leverage, you could run a private equity company that helps people create high ticket coaching programs for different niches and that's a higher level of leverage where the ghostwriting or shift 30 would be within that. Or you could invest in private equity companies that manage group like this is where my head is at, right. As, as you think about all of those take the same number of hours. The person selling their time writing tweets and the person investing in private equity education businesses have the same number of 24 hours and almost they have much different skill sets but they have the same fundamental knowledge and they've leveled up skills along the way. And so as I think about you and I, right. Where can we continue to amass leverage? It's we started with ghostwriting. We both were ghostwriting for people, right? And we learned these skills and what's so cool to think about are what are the new skills that, that you have to learn as you ascend these new levels.

Right?

So right away when we go to a group coaching program, we have to better understand high ticket sales. We need to better understand group coaching fulfillment, which I think is different than course fulfillment. We have to better understand hiring for that fulfillment.

Right.

We have to better understand marketing a product of that nature. Tons of different things like there's. You don't have a full 100% money back guarantee like we do with ship 30. We have an outcome or action based guarantee.

Right.

Which probably requires a contract. Like this is just where my head's at. And I think it's just interesting for listeners who think, who are interested in the process, like we want to build a seven figure education business in like three months with this. That's the goal. So we're going to document and maybe we'll do more series on this if people find this interesting. Leave it, leave a comment, leave a comment. You know, shoot us a Twitter DM if you want us to talk more about this. But that's where my head's been like the last few days is the levels of leverage, the new skills we're going to have to learn to do this, the different delivery mechanisms. It's all just, it's fascinating to think about.

It is fascinating. I love how you articulated that and I hope someone listening takes that whole ladder and like visualizes it or something because that is such a great way of thinking about it. And honestly my biggest takeaway in all this, you know, now that ship 30 is like two years old. We've learned a lot doing that. And I feel like a new offer is kind of our way of re examining all the skills that we've learned, plus the new things that we're learning and going, okay, like what would we do differently? You know, it's another lap around the track. And the biggest takeaway for me is like it's all the stuff we teach at ship 30, which is get more specific. Like you think you have it figured out. You don't, you think that your offers like too broad or, or it's, you're gonna rule people out. No, like you have to get so specific that you yourself sit there and go, what? Really? And I think this is gonna be a great forcing function for a lot of that learning for us is it's gonna, it's gonna be really fun to see people's response and how it plays out and, and, and, and put like the new skills that we're learning to the test, you know.

Yeah.

And I think end on this is a framework I use for learning.

Right.

Is anytime I start a new project like this, I think how can I pick something that no matter what, I build new skills in the process. Right. So in the process of learning this, we're gonna learn all the skills we just talked about and maybe it works and it's amazing or we find out it doesn't work. But I got to learn all those skills along the way. So it's pure upside for us. We're excited to build it and I think we should do more episodes like this as we launch it, as we, you know, just get this thing up and running.

I think so too.

I would.

Oh my gosh.

I.

This is exactly what I would be consuming two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, and, and I wish more people did it. Like I really, I love getting to see any inside how people are thinking about building new things.

Yeah.

So maybe we'll make this into a series. Let us know. Leave a comment Leave a review Send us a Twitter DM if you'd be interested in joining this. If you'd love for us to talk more about this. And I think we could go watch us build this seven figure education business in a few months. And we just documented on, on YouTube weekly jam session as we kind of get this up and running.

So love it. That'd be awesome now. No, I think that's it. Yeah. And I, and I also encourage anyone, if you have questions along the way, drop them in the comments. We want to keep answering questions as we build this, but yeah, I mean this is, this is where all the fun is. If it works. I don't know if it does. I don't know. We're going to learn either way.

All right, that's it for this week's espresso hour. Right on that 30, 35 minute mark, the double espresso kicked in nicely. I'm excited for this. I'm excited to keep building. So thanks for watching. Leave a comment if you're on YouTube. If you're listening to this, please, please pull up your podcast listener. Leave a five star review. Leave a comment and forward this episode to a friend. That's the way we grow. And if you think someone would be interested in either this program or just following along on the journey, we'd love to have them. So please share this, like subscribe, smash all the buttons, whatever it is, and we will see you on the next episode. Have a good one, y'.

All.