What I Learned Building A 7-Figure Digital Writing Course

In just 12 months, ship 30 for.

30, our beginner writing program, grew from a small free slack channel into a seven figure business. And it grew into a multi million dollar business and the largest writing program on the Internet the year after that. Today, over 10,000 people have gone through Ship 30 for 30, and many call.

It the gold standard for what an online course should be.

The way we structure onboarding, how we blend education with daily assignments, how Ship 30 connects to our software platform, Typeshare, to give writer templates and their own social blog, and how we gamified building a daily writing habit. I am extremely proud of what we've built ship 30 into, but I am, to be honest, even more proud of how Ship 30 has this unique ability to just attract really smart, really interesting people from all over the world and.

Now has formed this global community of digital writers.

So today I wanted to answer some.

Questions about how we built ship 30.

From the ground up and some of the hard lessons that we learned along the way.

Stone asks, did you ever consider an even longer program, so 60 days, 90.

Days a year, even of writing every single day, more for accountability purposes? So questions like this, the short answer is, did we consider it? Yes. But questions like this, and whenever we ask ourselves these types of decision making questions, it's important to come back to, well, what is the real bottleneck? And the reality is that I'd say 50% of people who join Ship 30 don't publish every single day. I mean, it's probably more than 50%, a very, very small percentage actually write and publish something every single day. And that's because it's difficult. And at the same time, you know, a lot of the benefit that comes from ship 30, it might not actually be you writing and publishing every single day. A lot of people join ship 30 and realize, hey, this is cool, but this isn't actually what I want to do. Turns out my ROI positive takeaway from taking ship 30 is that I don't want to write on the Internet. Okay, well, great. Good thing you Learned that in 30 days or less rather than thinking about it for the next 20 years.

Right?

Another group of people start writing and.

Then see some sort of outcome in.

The first 10 days, and then they.

Have to prioritize elsewhere.

So, for example, we would see people join ship 30, start writing about a topic and then immediately either their boss would see it and go, oh my gosh, I had no idea you were thinking about these things. By the way, we have this new position, can I promote you and can you take it Over. And can you keep writing about these things? Insanely positive ROI from ship 30 and building a daily writing habit. Right. But you unlocked that outcome in 10 days or 15 days or 20 days. So maybe you don't need to keep writing every single day, because now that's the new priority. That's fine. Other people start writing, and then they land two clients. They start ghost writing for someone. Okay, great. Well, maybe that's the new priority. So there are all sorts of different outcomes that someone can get from ship 30, but we find that the vast.

Majority of them unlock some sort of.

Outcome in those first 30 days, and then it's their decision where they want to double down and what they want to do next. And so the bottleneck isn't really, you know, do people need accountability for a year straight? Maybe they do, but that's not really what the program was intended to solve. And so when we were thinking about, you know, what do we need in order to make sure that the most amount of people are happy when they take ship 30, a lot of it was just figuring out how to compress things down to deliver that in the first 30 days. You know, it goes back to copywriting 101 stuff.

It's like, do you want to be.

A painkiller or a vitamin? Well, if I can solve something for you in a very short amount of time, I am more of a painkiller. But if I go, hey, you'll unlock.

These positive outcomes 365 days from now. I'm more of a vitamin.

And we would rather be a painkiller than a vitamin.

Which is why ship 30 is structured.

As 30 days and not 365 days.

All right, Katie asks, and Katie is.

One of our all star team members. So thanks, Katie, for throwing this question out there.

If someone were to create something similar.

Starting live, Ship 30 started as a live cohort and then converting into an async course, meaning people can join it at any time. It's evergreen. It's more of a text and video course.

What milestones should they look for when.

Making the decision to go async?

The real answer, and it's actually.

It's almost like there's a different question that needs to be answered here. The real answer is that both the cohort model and selling an asynchronous text.

And video course, they both work.

Both models work. And I have seen plenty of creators.

Not start with a cohort model or not start by working with people individually.

And just go straight to, I'm selling an asynchronous online course. And that's fine. The real question, and this is true for any digital product business, is do you have a traffic engine? Because unlike services, for example, if you're selling a service, you don't actually need a traffic engine. You need to learn how to monetize your network. Which is why in pga, our premium ghost trading academy, we say over and over again, in the beginning, your niche is your network. You probably know 10 or 20 people right now who need your help or know someone who needs, who needs your help and. Or you just need to get good at cold outreach because that is the.

Easiest way to generate new business for yourself when you're selling a service.

Digital products are not that way.

Right?

If you're selling $100 or $200 or $300 digital product, you can't really make 10 grand a month going, well, I'm just going to do cold outreach and try and sell people individually on my $200 course.

Right?

That is very challenging. And so the way that digital product.

Businesses and course businesses typically work is.

That they are on the back of some sort of traffic engine.

Which fundamentally means if you want to.

Sell digital products at a high volume.

The real name of the game isn't really the course.

It's not really, should it be cohort based or could it be asynchronous? The real question is, do you have a traffic engine? And there's really only two types of traffic engines. There's paid and ads, or there's organic. And then, you know, people argue, oh, and you have affiliates, okay, but that's like way over there, it's really paid or organic. And if you're selling digital products, paid is very challenging. And it also has a very high.

Upfront cost because you have to spend money in order to learn.

And so one of our big takeaways is you would way rather build organic.

First and then pour paid on top of it rather than try and sell.

Cold using paid and getting digital products into people's hands that way. Okay, so a lot of the decision actually isn't in how is the course deployed. It's do you have a traffic engine? And that is the real problem to solve.

And until you crack the traffic engine side, it's really not worth spending time.

Building a digital product if you haven't.

Cracked the traffic engine side.

You are much better off a providing a service. Starting with cold outreach, right? You're going to make way more money faster that way.

And if you do want to sell.

Some sort of education, start with One on one coaching, you basically want to do the most direct and the most.

Manual version of what your education will eventually be.

Because a, you'll get paid more per hour or perhaps group of sessions or per month.

When you're doing coaching in the short.

Term, you won't make as much as.

In the long term, but you'll make.

More in the short term. And the coaching is what will teach you, well, what are those people's problems and can you actually solve them? And how do you need to break.

Things down in order to help the person understand how to do the thing.

That you're telling them to do? And I find oftentimes that people will skip step one of building the traffic engine and they'll go straight to I'm going to create a course and or they will skip step number two, which is, well, I don't have the traffic engine and I want to jump to the course, but I haven't actually helped anyone individually before. And I think that is such a mistake because I promise if you don't know how to help one person coaching them individually, there's no way you're going to be able to help a thousand people all coaching them through text and video. It just can't happen because you're trying to scale something that you actually haven't done successfully. So the course, whether it's asynchronous or.

Cohort based, it really doesn't matter. The digital product in the course is.

Always a reflection of your ability to help one person do that thing.

Part of the reason why ship 30 grew so quickly for us was because.

Every single thing I was explaining, I had already explained and taught 100 plus people how to do manually, individually. I did it first for myself. Then I showed all my friends, literally, I showed all of my friends, including myself, significant other, how to start writing on Quora, how to start writing for major publications, how to monetize their writing through ghostwriting.

I showed all of my friends how.

To do it and they all did it.

They all started writing on Quora.

They all got republished in major publications. This was back in like 2014, 2015. And then after that I trained, I can't tell you how many writers and.

Editors building my agency.

And then after that, when I was just taking some time off, I would do one on one coaching sessions with people just being like, hey, by the way, here's how to improve your writing. Pay me per hour, pay me consulting, or I'll help your company. I'll advise you on how to do this.

I did the manual version of ship 30 for years.

So then by the time we created the product, I was like, I already know everything that I would tell someone.

I already know all of the questions.

That they would ask me because I did it manually.

So that's really the priority.

You have to not skip that learning phase and just go straight to, oh, I want to put out a course and I make money. No, you need a traffic engine and you need to be able to help people individually, one on one, so that you can scale those processes and those answers and those examples to lots of people. All right, Dean asks, Ship 30 was your first product that was top of funnel. Then we had captain's table, which was an upsell on the back end of ship 30. And then various one off products. Like we did a, like a paid webinar when ChatGPT first came out, showing people how to use ChatGPT. And we've, we've, that's been some different revenue streams for us is doing these random little one off products. We do different things for Black Friday every year, for example. But now pga, our premium ghostwriting academy, is the primary focus.

So what considerations did you make or.

Review when prioritizing ship 30 versus PGA? Now, it really came down to one thing. The big decision was us realizing that ship 30 as a cohort based program moved very slowly and had very slow feedback loops. So when we would run a cohort, every time we would run a cohort, everything from the marketing going into it to the actual execution of the cohort, we would learn things. We would learn, oh, those emails performed.

Better than our last batch of emails. They converted more customers.

Okay, we should change that moving forward.

Right?

Or people would go through ship 30 and we'd go, oh, we fixed onboarding last time, but now they're all struggling with the first week of publishing. Okay, we need to fix that. But even if we knew the thing.

To fix, we wouldn't see the result.

Of fixing it for three months until the next cohort.

And so as a result, our feedback.

Loop was basically 90 days. Like every 90 days is when we.

Would see the next change.

And if you've been following my content or Dickie's content and just sort of.

Us and what we've been building over.

The past couple of years, you know, we like to move very quickly. So the concept of pinpointing a bottleneck, fixing it, and then having to wait 90 days to see the improvement was agonizing for us. It was horrible. It was so annoying. But ship 30 was a great business and so we sort of tolerated it because at the time it was still growing and there was so much good coming from it that that was an annoying piece. But we didn't really know what to do from there. It wasn't until two years later and after running 20 cohorts of ship 30 that we started to look around and educate ourselves on other business models. And the business model that, that really grabbed our attention was this group coaching model where it's a significantly higher ticket product, but you are helping people build skills that are directly related to increasing their earning potential. You know, they are career skills. And that's why we picked ghostwriting, because that is exactly what I did on my path and I built a whole business around it. So we have the experience doing it, we have the credibility doing it, but that's a very different type of business to build.

So the decision really came down to.

Do we, do we think that we.

Could keep scaling this cohort based business?

The answer was yes, but it meant having to wait 90 days for each iteration cycle. With a group coaching program, people can join every single day. And the sales process is very different. You're not pitching cohorts, you're, you could have a call with someone, they could decide to join, and then they're onboarded two hours later. And so that means your feedback loop is every hour, every minute. And Dickie and I liked the idea of that a lot more because we felt like it allowed us to use our superpowers, which is to move very quickly. And so we liked the idea of a model where we didn't have to wait 90 days to see if something worked. And I think fundamentally that is why PGA has grown so much faster than ship 30 because our feedback loop is 10 times. I mean, it's so much faster than the previous business, which allows us to.

Learn more, which allows us to iterate faster, which allows the business to grow faster.

And now looking back, it's not that ship 30 was the wrong decision.

It was absolutely the right decision for.

Those first 2ish years. But, but knowing what we know now, we would never launch another cohort based business. Now, whenever I explain this, a lot of people hear, oh, so that means I shouldn't start a cohort based business. That's not what I just said.

Cohort based businesses are still amazing and they're still great and they taught us a lot.

It's a different business model. And I think for someone who is first starting out, it is a very compelling business model because you have FOMO baked in every time we would run a cohort. You have the urgency baked in.

Hey, this cohort's starting now.

This cohort's starting next week, and we're.

Not going to run another one for three or four months, Right?

So the FOMO is baked in. So it actually is a really great model for beginners and people who are brand new to building digital product businesses. It's just as you grow and as you scale and as you acquire more.

Skills and as you unlock other business.

Models, it doesn't make as much sense.

To stick with that.

Right?

What got you here won't get you there. And said, conversely, PGA as a business.

Is infinitely more complicated than ship 30. The funnels are more complicated, the sales.

Process is more complicated, the fulfillment is more complicated. How you scale that program is more complicated. It requires more people. We've had to hire more people. We've had to train more people.

So it's not just like which business model is better.

It's actually that the business model of PGA is more advanced, and it required.

Us to spend two or three years building and acquiring all of these skills.

In order to build this next business. We couldn't have skipped the ship 30 phase. So I always like slowing down and pointing that out for people, because you can't just. I mean, some people do, right? But they're. They're very high agency people. But usually you don't just skip straight to the advanced business model. And I really encourage you to start again. Goes back to what I was just saying. Start with one person, help one person on a coaching call. Then go help 10 people each on individual coaching calls. Then consider maybe doing 10 or 20.

People at once in a cohort, right? Then do 50 people in a cohort. Then do a hundred people in a cohort. Build and acquire all of these skills.

And then you will continue leveling up and leveling up.

Will asks, what was the most surprising challenge you faced?

I mean, I could talk about this for eight straight hours, but I would say, number one biggest challenge is that all of these products and programs have required so much more repetition and effort.

Than I originally thought.

When we first started ship 30, I was under the hilarious impression that we would build the curriculum once, and then that's just how courses worked.

And you would build it once, and.

Then you would make money from it forever. And that is not what happened. We built it once, and then a bunch of people went through it, and then we realized all the ways that it could be better, so we redid it, and then more people went through it. And we realized all the ways it could be better. And then we redid it again. And then more people went through it and they pointed out all of the.

Things that we weren't covering, like other.

Things they wanted to learn.

So we went back and we redid it again.

And if I look back on the number of times that I have iterated.

And rewritten the SHIP 30 curriculum, all.

Of the captain's table stuff that we ended up giving people thereafter, all of the different sequences that we ended up building, email sequences, reminder sequences, upsell sequences, downsell sequences, abandoned cart sequences, Millions of words, millions of words. And for the vast majority of it, it was not just writing something new. It was actually rewriting something that I had already written. And I can't tell you how many times I rewrote that ship 30 curriculum. And every time I would sit down to redo it, I would just have to, like, take a moment and go, cole, this is not going to be the most enjoyable thing you've ever done.

You.

You aren't really learning how to do anything new. Like everything that you need to rewrite, you already know how to write, which just fundamentally means that it's a little boring because you're not really learning while you're doing it. It's just pure hours and effort. And as you rewrite this, you are going to feel like you're repeating yourself.

For the hundredth time.

I've written about all these things on social. I've written about all these things in my book. I've written about all of these things in the previous 10 iterations of the curriculum. But you have to do it, because upgrading this another 10% will have massive implications for how this scales. And so you got to do it again. You got to do it again. You got to do it again. And that is by far the biggest challenge and the most surprising challenge, because I like everybody else, I just thought.

Oh, digital products are easy. You build it once, you make money forever. Tim Ferriss Four hour work week.

When do I get to fly to Bali? And it couldn't be further from the truth. And so you have to really internalize that, building great products and especially maintaining your edge. We updated the Ship 30 curriculum over and over and over again, depending on what was happening on certain platforms or new skills people wanted to learn. Or when Instagram added threads, we were like, okay, we gotta add that into the curriculum, right? So it takes a significant amount of repetition, and you just have to get comfortable with that.

And the reframe that we used is.

Realizing that the boring work is the moat. Every time we would sit down and do boring work, we reminded ourselves we.

Are doing all of the things that.

Our competition is not willing to do.

And that is why ship 30 and.

Especially PGA now doesn't really have competition. PGA, the most PGA literally has zero competition. And even anyone who wants to enter.

That world and go, oh, I'll also.

Create a ghostwriting training program.

The number of hours and repetitions that.

We have put in and that we continue to put in, the moat is so big. You are years behind at this point. And so I keep reminding myself, like, that is the real competitive advantage is.

Getting comfortable with the boring work and.

Realizing every time you do the boring work, think of that as a wall.

That you're building around your business because the next person isn't willing to do that boring work.

Another wall, another wall, another wall, another wall. And you just have to be relentless about it. All right, GJ asks, what is the.

Most important thing in your funnel now.

Compared to the funnel when you started? Two things come to mind, actually. So first is, I tell the story all the time when we added an.

Educational email course to the front end of our funnel.

So we would drive people to startwritingonline.com and then we would have them opt in for an educational email course that walked them through a lot of the.

Fundamental ideas that we teach in ship 30. Before this, we would basically just send.

Traffic to the landing page of ship 30. And overnight, when we moved from sending traffic to the landing page to sending traffic to an educational email course where.

We could give away free value and.

Then nurture them via email, collect their email, eventually put them into a pitch sequence, the business, like, tripled. Because when you send traffic to just a landing page, a most people don't buy the first time they get exposed to something, right? Second is they need to know whether.

Or not they can trust you. They need to hear you talk about these things.

And then third, when you send people to just a product landing page, you're not collecting their email. And when we changed over to pushing traffic to an educational email course, all of those things changed. Right now we were collecting their email. Now we could demonstrate our thinking and show them how we think about these things, which drastically increased the likelihood that they would convert and join chip 30.

Right?

And so immediately you saw list was getting built, conversions went up, more and.

More people were buying the product.

And that's why in PGA now, we train people on how to create these educational email courses, because every single business would benefit from one and it had.

Such a massive impact on our business.

And then we started having other creators ask us, well, how did you build that? Oh, okay, so let's go train the ghostwriters that we can then introduce you.

To so they can build it for you.

Right.

The second upgrade, this was smaller, but it's a cool thing. And I just want to mention it, the second upgrade was realizing that really the funnel that we ended up building is we would push traffic to startwritingonline.com they would go into the educational email course.

When they were finished with the eec.

We would put them into our newsletter sequence. So they would get a weekly newsletter. And for a year, year and a half, when we would move someone from.

The EEC list into the newsletter list.

They would just get the next newsletter that we wrote, which was fine. But a recent upgrade that we made was actually changing the newsletter segment to.

Like a pre filled evergreen sequence.

So what would happen is every single person who finishes the EEC all gets.

Started at the same first email in our newsletter sequence.

So it's sort of a newsletter, but it's actually not. It's like a pre written sequence that is disguised as a newsletter. And the reason that we did that is because, well, if someone joins our.

List, why would we want them to read the next newsletter when they could.

Start by reading our 10 best newsletters, right? And because you always want to front load the value. So what we did is after writing a newsletter for a year, year and a half, we went back through all of the emails, looked for our 10 highest performing ones, which ones had the.

Highest open rates, which ones had the.

Highest click through rates, et cetera, and we moved those 10 to the very.

Beginning of this sequence. So each new person who enters startwritingonline.com.

They go through the EEC. They all go through our 10 best emails first.

Then we took it a step further.

And when I started really investing into YouTube as a channel for each email, I then went and created a YouTube video about that topic.

So then we went back and embedded.

YouTube videos into each of those emails. And even if it wasn't like exactly the same, right, it was just a video about that topic. What happens is that creates a nice little flywheel where all of this traffic goes to startwritingonline.com all of those people.

Go through our EEC.

All of those people start by going through our 10. Their first 10 weeks are the 10 best newsletters that we have.

And each newsletter links to a YouTube.

Video, which drives more organic traffic to my YouTube channel.

And that little flywheel has been so powerful for our businesses.

And whenever people talk about marketing funnels, they think it's something super complicated, and it's really not. Marketing funnels just come down to, who are you trying to help and can you help them? And just front load the value?

And then there's all these little tiny.

Advanced things that you can do later on, but none of it is really worth digging into. In the very beginning, it's like, give away a free educational email course or a free download or something that demonstrates value. Nurture those people, front load the value, remind them you have something for sale. Funnels 101. All right. And Darshit asks, what's the process of.

Structuring and outlining the entire paid course?

And, you know, how have we built and updated ship 30 over the past three years? So there is no one right answer. However, as an overarching framework, I think where most creators and digital product builders go wrong is they think of their course as like, what is a place that I could dump as much knowledge as possible about a topic? And they really view it through this lens of, I'm going to help this person learn. And the problem with that lens is that most people don't actually want to learn. Learning is a vehicle and a means to an end.

It's not the learning that we enjoy.

It'S the result of the learning.

Right?

I want to learn so I can do something.

And the problem that a lot of creators run into is that they dump.

So much learning and so much information.

Into their course or into their digital product or into their community, their school group, whatever it is. And then they wonder why people aren't succeeding or people don't enjoy it.

They're like, I'm giving them so much information.

And that's because you think that the.

Customer is evaluating the value of your product based on how much information you're giving them. And that is not actually what they care about. They would prefer if you gave them less information. What they really want is to accomplish something specific.

They want to unlock a specific outcome. And so your product, it shouldn't start from a place of, here's all of the things that I could teach you. Here's all the things that are really interesting. The product needs to start from a.

Place of where is the person starting.

And where do they want to end up?

And what are the most necessary things they need to not learn, they need.

To do in order to end up where they want to end up? And so you don't want to think of modules or chapters or however you're structuring it. You don't want to think of it as different topics, you want to think of it as different action steps. Where are they today? Where do they want to end up?

10 modules.

What are the 10 steps they need to take? What are the 10 action items they need to do? Not what are the 10 topics they want to learn about? Okay, because that's where people go in. They're like, you're just telling me lots of interesting things. I don't know what to do with this.

Right?

And fundamentally, this is where digital product creators go wrong, because they think in terms of learning and not doing so. When you're outlining some sort of course or paid product, you want to get hyper specific about the outcome that the person wants.

It could be a skill, it could.

Be a destination, it could be a state, a way of being. What do they care about and what.

Are the most necessary action steps that.

They need to take?

What are the things they literally need.

To do in order to get there? And I find that most often when people try and sit down and create this, they go, I don't know. And they get frustrated. And that is the signal that you haven't yet built the skill of understanding how to do the thing that you're trying to explain to someone else how to do. Which is why all of this goes back to start smaller, start manual, start by coaching one person.

Find one person in your life that you can help.

I have told this story in different places, but when I started writing on Quora, long before I created a digital product or course explaining how to do this, I ended up actually, one of.

My early digital products was I created.

A course on Teachable, right when Teachable came out, showing people how to become a top writer on Quora. But before I did that, I taught three of my closest friends how to start writing on Quora. And they all started writing on Quora and they all started generating millions of views and they all got republished by major publications. And then I went, okay, so it's not just me. I know how to do it. I know how to explain it. Now I can put it in a digital product and over and over and over again. No matter how much I give that advice, people skip that step and they try and go straight to let me outline a paid product, not realizing that.

They haven't built the skill yet of being able to articulate and explain. Here are the things you need to.

Do in order to unlock that outcome. And I promise it's not as hard as you think it is. You will figure out how to help that person. If you spend time with that person, if you get on the phone with them, if you spend time on them with Zoom, if you walk them through things and you see where are you stuck?

Where are you?

Where do you have questions?

Right?

But you have to go through that learning before you create the digital product version.