How to Make $10k/Month as a Writer - Nicolas Cole

There are so many people who are now realizing that they all need to build things on the internet. We used to live in an analog world; now we live in a digital world. What you're about to hear is a conversation between me and my friend Nicholas Cole. This is Cole's second time on the podcast. The first time around, we talked about five paths to make a million dollars as an online writer, or rather as a writer, and that episode did super, super well. Today, we're talking about the fastest path to $10,000 a month as

a writer. Your fastest path as a writer to $5,000 as a side hustle, or to $10,000, $20,000—replacing your full-time income and then some—is to just go find one person and say, "I can help you solve problems in your business." We talk about how to craft the perfect email, the sort of energy it takes to sell, and how sales is really the same thing as education. We also discuss a bunch of mistakes that we see people make when pitching us their various services. It seems like the longer road is to say, "I have to go educate

and talk to people." Well, yeah, in the beginning, that is the longer road, instead of just trying to automate the whole process and defer to technology. But if you skip that step, you think you're taking the shortcut, and then guess what? That shortcut ends up being the longer road because you skipped the whole learning process. Cole, welcome back to the podcast! How's it going? Great, man! I'm always happy to be in London. This is going to be fun. In part one that we did, which people absolutely loved, we went through your entire backstory and kind

of a surface-level overview of how to make money online as a writer. In this episode, I was hoping we could go a little bit deeper into this because you teach people how to make money as ghostwriters, and we want to teach people what their fastest path to actually making money as a writer is. A lot of people still kind of think that writing is a thing that they can't really make money from. I've just published a book through traditional publishing; people are like, "Oh, do I find an agent? Do I get a book deal?" What

do people get wrong about making money online as a writer? Okay, most fun question on Planet Earth for me! So, let's start with the mistakes. The mistake that writers make, I think, is thinking that you need to have a ton of attention in order to start monetizing. Everyone thinks, "Step one: I need a million followers." So already, that's wrong because if I told you tomorrow that you had to give a speech in front of a million people, you would have an anxiety attack. You don't need a million followers. Then they go, "Okay, well maybe I

don't need a million followers. I just need 100,000," or "I need 10,000." Okay, reduce the number—still wrong! The reason is, there are all these different paths you can take to monetize your craft. Any craft will use writing as the example, but the fastest path, though, is not selling a product; it is selling a service. If you think about it, everyone in the creator world talks about selling digital products—right? Sell an ebook, sell a course, sell a cohort-based experience, whatever it is. But that's not actually the fastest path, because most of those products, if not all

of them, are priced at a couple of hundred bucks or less. Or, if you're selling an ebook, it's like $10 or $20. The lower the price point, the more volume you need. So it sounds really easy to say, "Okay, well I can make five or ten grand selling a $200 course," for example, but you have to play that out and go, "Okay, well how many of those do I need to sell every month in order to sustain $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 a month?" Right? You need volume. Yeah, I mean, especially with a physical book. My book

sold a lot of copies—well, you know, I sold like 200,000 copies—but I still haven't paid off the advance, and our royalty percentage is, I think I'm allowed to share this, about 15%. Oh, we got 15%! We got a good deal. We got a decent deal; we got 15%. But it's like I make maybe $150 every time I sell a book. Yeah, it's horrible! So I need to sell a lot of books to make a living as a professional writer if the thing that I was making money from was selling books. And by the way, I'm

happy to jam on this because I love the whole traditional versus self-publishing debate. We can all get in on that, too. The reason why there's the whole cliché "nobody makes a living as a writer" is because, of course, it's going to be hard to make a living as a writer when the thing that you're selling is priced at $20. There's no recurring revenue; most people buy a book once, they don't buy it again, and then your deal in that is you get 10% of the revenue. So you're not even getting all $20, right? You're getting

$2. And so then that leads to the cliché, "Well, nobody makes a living as a writer." Right? And that's wrong. So your fastest path, if you're sitting there and— I think so... Often, people have this conversation where they go, "I want to make money; every option is available to me." Well, no, every option isn't available to you. There's usually one thing you're trying to optimize for in your life, and if you're working a full-time job and you're like, "I want to get out of my full-time job," your number one concern is how do I replace

my full-time income, right? So your fastest path to replacing your full income is not selling products because products take longer; you need to build an audience in order to sell them, and you need to sell them in volume. It's much easier to go find one client that is willing to pay you three grand, four grand, or five grand to do something for them. So it's actually monetizing through a service. Your fastest path as a writer to 5K as a side hustle—10K, 20K—replacing your full-time income and then some is to just go find one person and

say, "I can help you solve problems in your business." Okay, it's not to go be some viral creator. You can do that; just do that later, fine. Okay, so how do we do that? Let's say I am—let's rewind—we'll do a bit of a role play. Let's say I'm 26 years old; I've been working two years as a doctor—hi, young Ali in the UK's National Health Service—and I'm like, "You know, I quite enjoy this medicine thing, but you know, if I project out 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, will I continue to enjoy it? I'd love

to have 5K a month coming in; I'd be able to quit my job, take my gap year, travel around the world, and then I can always come back to medicine later if I feel like it." But I sort of feel like, "But like, I don't know. I just went through med school; I don't really have any skills other than the stuff around being a doctor." Okay, so this—I mean, I wrote a lot of essays in medical school, but... yeah, this will be awesome. Okay, so step one is you have to identify your information advantage. Most

people—this is where they start—they go, "I'm not happy; I've decided I want to do something different," and then they just let their imagination run wild and they look at you today, like, "You know, Ali, this world—we now have 5 million plus YouTube subscribers, productivity expert," and they're like, "I want to be that." Okay, first of all, you didn't start there, right? That— that is where you're ending up now; that's not where you started. So your goal is not to just imagine and think, "What is the most legendary version of myself and how do I go

be that tomorrow?" because that's not how the game works. It is so much easier to start by asking yourself the question: where do I already have an information advantage? What do you mean by information advantage? So, information advantage is you've been working as a doctor for three years, right? You graduated medical school; whatever you inherently know more about that subject than someone who hasn't had those experiences, right? It's inherent. The problem is we all take the knowledge that we have for granted. Yeah, because everyone I know is also a doctor, so it's like, "Big whoop,

being a doctor; it's not a big deal." Yeah, so to the classmate sitting next to you, you're like, "I don't know anything," or "I don't know anything different," right? But remove yourself from that classroom, and you actually know a lot relative to the entire population. So, right, Step One is recognizing in yourself: what information do you take for granted? Because that information is what allows you to go help someone. So thinking of it in the reverse: if I run a biotech company, for example, do I want to hire someone who speaks and understands medicine and

the health and wellness industry, or am I just going to go hire some random person that has no idea what any of those terms mean? So, the misunderstanding—and why I say that ghostwriting is the fastest path to monetization—is because anywhere you have an information advantage, you're already fluent in that industry. Okay, so at this point, a lot of people—many medics I know, and this was me back in the day—would have said, "Okay, I have an information advantage in that I got into med school, so why don't I just do tutoring for people to help them

get into med school?" Yeah, okay. So now think about who you're selling to. So, who are you selling to? Well, you're mostly selling to brights students, people in med school, right? Or their parents, if they're applying to med school, and the parents are rich, for example. Yeah, but tutoring is already price-anchored to a certain thing, right? Like, most people say, "How much are you willing to pay hourly for tutoring?" Most tutoring runs about... So the second thing is you have to go, "Okay, I have an information advantage. Now who is the most—like, what's the right

word?—the most affluent customer?" Right? Well, it's a biotech startup that just raised $30 million, right? Or it's an executive for a pharma company, or it's—right? All of those businesses, to them, five grand is nothing; ten grand is nothing. But if you go pitch, you know, a parent of a kid who needs help via tutoring, ten... "Grand is a lot of money, right? So, the second thing is going okay. I have an information advantage now. Who are all the customers that would be willing to pay a premium to help them solve something in their business? Yeah,

this is already, I think, a massive, sort of mind-blowing thing for people to realize: different people value money at different levels, significantly differently. And especially, businesses value money in a completely different way than individuals do. Yeah, how did you first appreciate this sort of disparity in how people think about money? Well, I mean, the honest answer is I just undercharged for a long time until it became so painfully obvious to me that I was undercharging. You know, like when I was first starting out, I remember charging $25 or $50 an article and thinking, you know,

the jump from 25 to 50 was a lot. I was like, "Oh, I'm charging a lot." And then the jump from 50 to 100 was a lot. There's a story that I tell sort of often in our programs: there was a moment where I was pitching a ghostwriting client. I was probably 27, and we met in this restaurant in LA. He was hiring me to ghostwrite this white paper for a crypto startup they were trying to launch. I remember going into the meeting being like, "Okay, how much should I charge? I'm going to throw an

outrageous number in the air." I mustered up the courage and was like, "I'm going to charge 10 grand to write this white paper." We were sitting in the meeting, and it all goes great, and then he goes, "All right, so what's the damage? How much is this going to cost me?" I said, "It's going to..." and at the last minute, I almost backed out. But I was like, "It's going to cost 10 grand." I waited, and he looked at me and said, "I just want you to know that I was prepared to pay three times

that, but you already said the number, so 10 grand it is." I walked away from that meeting thinking, "I have no idea how to value my value." Yeah, and I think that's something where it doesn't matter—I see it in our Ghostwriting Academy all the time, too. We train ghostwriters to build and write these educational email courses for people. We say, "You can sell this for five grand, no problem." No matter how many times we tell them that, there's a large percentage of people who, the first time they pitch it, can't even get the words "five

grand" out of their mouth because they can't conceive of someone being willing to pay that. It's usually only until you experience it a couple of times where you're like, "Wow, everyone's saying yes to $1,000. Maybe I should charge more." Right, nice. Okay, so the quickest path to making money, I guess, sort of zooming out from writing in general, is finding a small number of people to pay you a lot of money rather than finding a very large number of people to pay you a small amount of money, correct? And I think, you know, one of

the issues that people often think is: if you're a young person and you don't have much money, chances are the people you know are also young people who don't have much money. And so you're really anchored towards thinking, "My goodness, I can't believe people are paying $97 for a course. Wow, man, these American scammers are so good at taking money from people. $97 for… why would anyone pay that?" Yet they've just paid tens of thousands in college fees and all that kind of stuff at the same time. There are so many different ways to approach

this conversation, but like, for example, 10 years ago I probably bought my first online course. I remember spending $100 or $200 and thinking, "I can't believe I just spent that amount of money on this." Last year, we joined a mastermind for $668,000. So, you have to sort of build the skill. This is something I want to write more about, which is that spending money and investing in yourself is a skill. You can see it with people who make a lot of money, but they still have spending habits as if they were broke. You know, they

constrain themselves. A lot of entrepreneurs or founders almost take pride in, "I don't drive a car; I drive a Prius," or "I didn't get the nice apartment; I still have my little cramped one-bedroom." That's fine; I'm not advocating for lavish spending, but also you have to realize that, in some way, you’re also holding yourself back because you're not building the skill of going, "I trust myself to spend $68,000 because I know I'm going to get an ROI from that." Yeah, it reminds me of a moment a year or two ago, where I was talking to

Tinon, my YouTube producer. We’d hired this guy to do graphic designs or something, and I thought it was going to come out to $1,200 or something like that. Cool, whatever; the guy's really good. $1,200 is a bargain. Then we got the invoice, and he charged $5,000. I was like, "Oh," because we arranged it over Twitter DMs." ...you, and I get that perspective. However, the reality is that when you're starting out, your focus should be on building skills and gaining experience rather than immediate financial gain. This is a crucial step in your journey. You didn't quite

realize he was charging per asset rather than per platform, and then I said to Dan, the finance guy, "Yeah, five grand—cool, whatever, you know, just pay the invoice." Tinon remembers that moment vividly, thinking, "Wow, to Ali Abdaal, there is no difference between $1,200 and $5,000." That was a mind-blowing moment for him, like, "Holy crap! An entrepreneur with a multi-million-dollar business really values money spent on business stuff." It's a completely different rate. If I were spending my personal money, I would value it very differently, but if I'm spending business money, it's like, "Because it's kind of

open season." I understand why that's hard to wrap your head around because, honestly, that's something you really only understand as you build things that generate more resources, as you hire more resources, and as you employ more resources. Right? Like, we both were gamers growing up. I saw that note in your book, by the way, where you were like, "I was working at it," and I read that, and I was like, "Oh, I love this!" It made me such a fan. But that is really the whole point of video games. A video game is just the

deployment of resources to an end. I remember being 25 years old, living in Chicago in a dumpy studio apartment. I had no resources; I had like $100 in my checking account, right? So, you can't fathom or understand how other people are deploying resources when you don't have resources. That's why it is actually so important to listen to conversations like this or surround yourself with other people, or even do free work for people that have thriving businesses. Just you being in their presence, and your team member saw you make that decision that changed how they thought

about it. When you do free work for someone else and you see them make that decision, you're getting paid in pattern recognition; you're getting paid in experience. Yeah, I remember, as we were talking about World of Warcraft, you know, there's the area Ghostlands in The Burning Crusade. I started playing during The Burning Crusade and I had like a level 14 Warlock. There was this quest to kill one of the Silver Elites that would yield 14 silver, and I was like, "14 silver? Oh my God! I can buy that ostrich! And that ostrich! And that ostrich!"—the

three different colors. Oh my God! Then you go to level 80, and you go to a main city, and you right-click inspect people who've got level 80 gear, and you're like, "Whoa." And then, as I got to level 80 and started doing stuff and finding a way to use Auctioneer, prospecting, and jewel crafting and all that to make money, I ended up spending 18,000 gold on one of the motorbike mounts, the Mechano-Chopper or whatever it was. I still vividly remember how amazing it felt to be making that 14 silver and thinking, "Oh my God, this

is incredible!" Then fast forward like two years later, I'm spending 18,000 gold on this new motorbike thing. I think that speaks to this idea of, yeah, over time you learn to deploy the resource more effectively. It's almost like, have you read the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson? No? Well, you know, I just got turned on to his library, and I'm starting to go down the library—Final Empire, Brandon Sanderson. In all these stories, you've got the hero who starts off as a little kid in the village, like Anakin Skywalker or whatever. He's not very powerful, but

over time, as they learn, they eventually gain dominion over the galaxy. Now they're teleporting from one planet to another, whereas when they were a kid, they were just sort of stuck in this little village on one planet. It’s just this power curve, which really is also a thing in entrepreneurship—100%. That’s what I find so fascinating about speaking to people who have bigger businesses. They’re just thinking on a completely different level. Sticking with the metaphor, right, it’s like in WoW when you get to level 60, 70, 80, and you complete a quest at that level, you

get paid way more gold. You complete a level 80 quest, and they’re like, “Oh, congratulations for bringing us the 10 boar skins! We give you nine gold and 87 silver." But when you complete a quest at level 14, you’re getting paid 10 silver or 14 silver, right? So, the second thing in this whole “what is your fastest path to 10K a month,” I actually advocate for the step before that, which is: you shouldn't even try to charge for the first thing that you do; you’re level one. Right? Having 10 copper or zero copper at level

one makes no difference; you can’t buy anything with 10 copper anyway. A lot of people, whenever I talk about the ROI of free work, everyone comes back saying, "No, you should get paid what your worth is, and your value, and you should never do free work and don't let people take advantage of you." You and I'm like, you're thinking about it completely wrong. In the beginning, free work is basically a marketing cost. It is a way to remove all friction and get yourself paid in experience, credibility, and pattern recognition. Right? So all of a sudden,

you don't have the constraint where you go, "All right, I'm going to charge three grand for this," and someone goes, "No." Okay, want to know how you remove that barrier? You don't charge three grand; you just say, "I'll do it for you for free." Everyone thinks, "No, that's short-term loss." But if I told you you're going to go pitch that service for three grand, and it's going to take you nine months to get someone to say yes, or you could pitch it to someone for free today, do a project, and then the next month have

something to point to that you can ladder up to a client month two, which one would you take? It's only in hindsight or once you explain that, that person goes, "Oh, I would do the second path." But that's not what most people do. Yeah, yeah, we talked about this in our last part as well, and after that, I've had so many people reach out to me with it. So it's kind of good that we're sort of putting it on the map a little bit to be like, "Guys, the ROI on free is astronomical!" Yeah, and

we might say no, or we might not open the DM or the email, but if they go do that for 50 people, someone's going to say yes. You know, and you have to realize that in the beginning, getting paid in cash is actually not the most valuable thing for you. You want to get paid in confidence, "I can do this." You want to get paid in building a network: "Oh, now I know someone who can introduce me to other clients." There are a lot of things more valuable than getting paid 100 bucks or a few

bucks. Yeah, but when you're at that stage, it sort of feels like when you're at level 14, the 14 silver feels like, "Oh my God, it's so much money." You have to fight that, and I think that's why so many people, if you have built something successful, like something I think about all the time is if every social platform went to zero tomorrow, if my business went to zero tomorrow, if everything went to zero, would I be able to do this again? And yeah, of course, I think I could. And I think you could too,

because once you have the skill, you realize that all of those things aren't the thing that made you you. But when you're first starting out, you can't wrap your head around that, so you think the title is important, you think the amount of money is important. Those things aren't what are important. What's important is whether or not you build the skill. What's the fastest path to building the skill? Do it for free. Nice. Okay, so I'm 26, I'm a doctor. I have an informational advantage in the medical area. Cool. And I know that, and I'm

like, "Okay, maybe I shouldn't do tutoring because tutoring is anchored to..." Like, I don't know, I was giving a talk at Cambridge a few weeks ago, and some guy came up to me afterward. He was like, "You know, I’ve got a side hustle as a tutor." And I'm like, "Okay, how much do you charge?" And he was like, "Oh, it's quite a lot of money." I was like, "Oh, how much is a lot of money?" And he felt really cagey about saying it 'cause his friends were right there. He was like, "I charge 45 per

hour." Yeah, I was like, "Yeah, oh, okay, £45 per hour." It very much as I'm could to a lot of money. It's like the Wolf of Wall Street series, we got to bump those numbers up; those are rookie numbers in this racket. Okay? Like, yeah. And again, you only know that when you increase pattern recognition, hanging around other people building things bigger than you. No different than you and I are constantly looking for, "Well, who's built something bigger than we've built?" Yeah, right? So, yeah, this is why when I saw your video about the Cole

Gordon Mastermind, I was like, "Damn, maybe I should pay $68,000 for this freaking Mastermind." And you guys, like, "Yeah, we kind of got the value from it from day one," and then all the rest of it was a bit of a waste 'cause we knew what we had to execute on. And I was like, "Interesting." But if you think about it again, it's like, does it matter if we got the value over the course of a year or one day? No, it doesn't matter. And, you know, in some ways, one day is even better because

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off to people who don't have much money. How do I think about it, then? I mean, okay, first, recognize that there is an unfathomable amount of opportunity on planet Earth that most people just can't wrap their heads around. So what usually happens is someone goes, "Alright, I've decided I want to provide this skill." They go talk to one person, that person says no, and then they'll come back and they'll go, "I guess it just doesn't work for my niche; it's just too saturated. There's no opportunity." Okay, first of all, you haven't deployed enough volume to

know whether there's enough opportunity. Second, there are so many people that are now realizing that they all need to build things on the internet. We used to live in an analog world; now we live in a digital world. I don't think that there's a business owner on Earth who doesn't understand that their life would be better, easier, and probably more profitable if they had a growing audience, if they had an email list, if they had a way of educating customers on autopilot. We all know that! And every single day that goes by, more and more

founders, more entrepreneurs, more business owners, more creators, more podcasters, YouTubers—every single person goes, "I should probably build myself more on the internet." Okay, so that mega trend is increasing. All you have to do is go, "I'm going to help the category of person who, every single day that goes by, is growing." business owners, creators, or anyone that is closely related to your information advantage. In my opinion, another mistake that gets made is when people go, "Well, so what are all the most popular writing gigs?" For a long time, the most popular ones have been SEO

articles, blog posts, basic content marketing stuff like that. Right, so part of the game is always asking, "Well, where is the growing audience?" In this case, that would be the growing customer base. What is the increasingly popular skill that they all want, even if it's not popular yet? For every business owner or creator, there are three things they all want: they all want help putting out more content, especially on LinkedIn. Just to get more specific, they all want help creating text-based content, usually first, and then it becomes video or audio. They all need help moving

that audience to an owned platform, a.k.a. email. The best way to move them to an email list is not to say, "Come join my newsletter." The best way to move them is to offer some sort of free value where they exchange their email address for something. The best vehicle we’ve found is educational email courses. Once they're on your email list, you don't just want them to go through the educational email course and then be done, never to hear from you again. Right? They need a weekly newsletter because that weekly newsletter nurtures them for a prolonged

period of time, and then they inevitably buy your product or service. Every single person needs those three things, which means all you have to do is pick one of them. You can say, "I'm this person with an information advantage in this industry or niche, and I specialize in one of those three services." You need one person, and they will pay you three, four, or five grand per project, per month. Congratulations! You either just replaced or, at least, hit like 50% of your full-time income. Okay, so I'm a doctor. I have an informational advantage in medicine.

I know I like writing; I used to write essays in med school, and I had a personal blog back in the day, and blah blah blah—you know all that kind of stuff. So I'm thinking, "Okay, who could possibly want to pay me five grand a month to help grow their LinkedIn presence?" It would probably be a big pharma executive, maybe the CEO, or someone in the C-suite, or maybe someone at the VP or director level, or whatever. Let’s go simpler than that: a family friend of yours who's a doctor and who has a small business,

a private practice, and they want to create content on LinkedIn to help promote the fact that they're a shoulder or a spine surgeon, or whatever, or a dermatologist. My dad's a spine surgeon. Okay, so how does my dad get more people to know that he's a great spine surgeon? You either put your name up on Google and hope—yeah, that's one strategy, which is what most of them do—or you say, "I'm going to take this into my own hands. I'm going to start educating people." Right? What are the reasons people have back pain? What are the

ways to get rid of back pain without surgery? If you have surgery, how do you recover faster? What foods should you eat? What exercises should you do? Right? It doesn't take very long. You start thinking through it and you're like, "Okay, well, that's pretty easy," and I bet your information advantage would allow you to do that. And how many doctors are there in the world? A lot, right? So you don’t need all the doctors; you need one doctor. Okay, and so what am I pitching then? Let’s say I come up with a list of three

family friends who are all in private practice: one’s a spinal surgeon, one’s a radiologist, and one’s a dermatologist. I’m like, you know, sweating and thinking of sending these emails. What am I saying? Okay, so this is awesome. I’ll resist the urge to offer a script; we'll just do it word for word. So, I’m going to stick with the spine example because I’m familiar with it. Okay, so the first thing is you have to do your homework and understand, "What does this person do? What do they specialize in? What’s their problem?" Another big mistake is that

most people will go apply for a job on Upwork or Fiverr. When you do that, what you’re effectively doing is raising your hand and saying, "I have no control. I have no pricing power. I have no leverage. I am applying for the job. You tell me what you need and I will do whatever it is that you ask." As a result, that is why you have no pricing power, because the power dynamic is wrong. They are the boss. You, as the employee, have the disadvantage. They have a problem that they know they have—they just haven't

gotten around to fixing it yet. Right? So you go to the doctor and say, "You want higher quality customers. You have a private practice, and you want more people who are interested in a specific type of back surgery." So, for example, my dad specializes in minimally invasive spine surgery. Okay, so that's the kind of person you want to attract. The problem, though, is that you don’t know how to find... them? They don't know whether they can trust you or not, etc. Right? The reason that problem is happening is because you have a website that isn't

optimized for anything, and it would be really easy to find those people on LinkedIn. You just need to start creating content, right? The ultimate negative consequence of that problem is that until you start educating people, your business strategy is just going to sit there, and you're going to hope that customers walk through the door. Okay, so if you start with that little mini problem script, it's impossible for the other person to sit there and go, "I'm not listening." Right? Of course they're listening because you just educated them on the whole problem of their business, which

is not hard. Okay, then once you've educated them on the problem—because they can't care about the solution until they care about the problem—you first anchor them in the problem. Then you go, "The solution to this would be if we started educating people on minimally invasive spine surgery on LinkedIn. Be really easy. Here's some sample topics." Right? The benefits of doing this are that we would be able to start reaching people who would either be interested in this or who might know someone who's interested in this. Then ultimately, we could move that social audience over to

our email list, and we could even run localized ads if we wanted to against that email list. We could do retargeting, and the ultimate positive outcome of that is if we do that, you will have significantly more control over lead flow for your business. Problem script, solution script, and then they go, "Okay, that all makes sense. So how much?" So you have to go through all of that before you say, "Oh, no problem! We can create social content for you every month. It's three grand a month. I take care of the ideas and the writing;

all I need is about 30 minutes of your time once a month." Even we could do a quick recap call, go through all the content that we've created, and look at the analytics. You've already written a book, so I can pull a lot of the content from that book, and that's it! Happy to help. And is this all in a single email? Like, what is the process of sending this out look like? So, that would be the call to get them on the call. Right? We have a phrase we talk about all the time, which

is: "In the beginning, your niche is your network." You have an information advantage. Your niche is the fact that you have a family friend who's a doctor. Great! That's the first person you should go pitch because they are most likely to answer your text, your email, or your call. So, the first thing is you open with a problem: "Hey, I know it's been a long time since we chatted, Uncle [whoever]. Quick question: I was thinking about your business. How do you typically get customers? Is that something that you've been thinking about? Are you struggling to

get leads in your area? Tell me about what's been going on." Okay, that could be a text message, that could be an email, and then Uncle Johnny might reply to that saying, "Oh yeah, it's actually been kind of hard. We advertise on Google, but nothing happens." Exactly. And then you go, "Cool! I've got a couple of interesting ideas. Why don't we hop on a call together, and I'll walk you through how this works? I found something that I think would be really beneficial for your business." Uncle Johnny goes, "Alright, cool! I got 30 minutes on

Thursday," and then you go through problem script, solution: "Here's what I would do for you." So, that is significantly easier than going, "How do I build an audience of 100,000 people and sell 200 courses a month, every month, forever?" Right? What if Uncle Johnny doesn't reply to my text? Then you just chalk it up, give up, and think there's no hope for you, and you should just never try. That's it! Your niche? There's no opportunity? Right? Obviously, that's not the takeaway. The takeaway is to go talk to more people. How many more people? Well, what's

your sense of how many emails—assuming I was going to go cold, like reaching out to local doctors in my area where I only have a tangential connection to the fact that they live in my area—how many emails does it take to get a response to get someone on a call? Do you have a sense of what the thumb is? I would say, even still, I would not recommend even opening the door to cold leads until you have fully exhausted warm leads. The way I think about leads in general is that I put them into two

different categories: I call them leaks and faucets. A leak is someone who goes, "My sink is leaking! Help me!" So, a leak is someone who has the problem that you can help with. A faucet is someone who goes, "My faucet's running fine. I don't need your help, but I know lots of other people who do," so they become a conduit to other people. One of the biggest missed opportunities is that people go, "Well, I'm going to pitch all these cold leads." No! You should start with all the people that you know and then go to

each of them and say, "Do you have..." A problem? If yes, I can help you. Or, hey, I'm trying to grow my ghostwriting business. Do you know anyone who needs help creating content on LinkedIn, or anyone who is creating on LinkedIn but needs help moving that audience over to an email list? Right? That's interesting. Like, I remember coming across that line somewhere; it might have been in one of your books. Often, messaging someone or emailing them saying, “Hey, do you know someone who's looking for this sort of thing?” is the easiest thing. Either they know

someone, or they’ll be like, “Oh, actually, I could kind of use some help with that myself.” Yes, but it feels like a more gentle pitch than saying, “Can I help you grow your content on LinkedIn?” or whatever. Yes, it's like, “Do you know anyone who might be looking for this?” I had a mentor in Chicago who used to say, “You are never selling anything to anyone; you are giving them an opportunity.” So, when you think about outreach, whether it's to your network or cold leads, you don't want to approach it through this lens of pitching

because everyone knows when they're getting pitched. Right? The whole methodology that I'm a firm believer in is you want it to all sound like free consulting. Everything that you do—every text message, every email, every phone call, every Zoom call—it should all feel like, “Hey, I see what you're doing. I can't help myself; you're making a mistake. I just wanted to point it out and help you do with it what you will. I just wanted you to know.” Right? And when you do that, the other person can't help but go, “Well, ah, you just educated me

on a problem, and now I know I have this problem.” Inevitably, they go to you and say, “So, is that what you do?” Then you go, “Oh, yeah. No, that is what I do; I specialize in that.” And then they go, “Can you help me?” You go, “Sure! I'd be happy to help.” Right? So, you're almost not pitching them and saying, “Buy from me.” You're educating and guiding them until they're forced to say, “I need someone to help me; is this what you do?” Nice! That sort of takes the fear out of selling because even

in the way I'm describing it, I'm using the word “pitching,” which even subconsciously has a certain energy about it that feels like I'm trying to sell something. Yes, if I had an agency that provided some service right now, and I was trying to get you as a client—even here on this podcast—I wouldn't pitch you. I would just drill into, “Yeah, Ali, like before this, I took an hour, I thought about it. I went through your whole funnel; you know, I just wanted to point out to you—right?—like there's these ten things you should do.” Inevitably, we're

going to get off the pod, and you're going to go, “Okay, that sounds like a lot of work. Any chance I could just hire you and your team to do that?” Right? And that piece, that skill—if you understand the power of that and you build that skill where you don't talk in sales, you talk in education—you will make money forever. Because that is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is not someone going, “Do I want to buy from you? Yes or no?” The bottleneck is that the person doesn’t usually know the problem that they have. There's a

friend of mine who does some really high-end consulting for these big fashion brands and stuff, and I was asking him about how he lands these deals. He was like, “Oh, yeah, I just go, and I teach them about what's wrong with their supply chain and how AI can potentially help,” and then I leave it at that. On the way out, one of the executives will sort of walk me to the lift or to the elevator or whatever, offer me a coffee, and say, “Hey, so can we engage you?” or something. He's like, “Those are the

magic words that I'm looking out for,” but I never get any impression that that's what I'm going for. I mean, just—it’s a lot like dating, right? What's the fastest way to get someone else to deny you or say no? You go up to them, and you're like, “Do you want to go out on a date with me?” Right? No, that's not usually how you get someone's attention. Right? How you get their attention is you're in a busy place, and you lean over, and you see someone attractive, and you're like, “I want to talk to them.”

You don't open by pitching; you open by going, “Hey, you know the brick chicken here is actually really good.” And then they're like, “Oh.” And you're like, “But don’t get the fries, though; they do this weird thing where they put this aged Parmesan on it, and you think it's going to taste good, but it's not going to taste good.” All you're doing is educating them. You're just like, “Hey, I saw that you're having this experience; I just want to make it better for you.” Inevitably, they go, “Interesting.” Now they're hooked; now they start talking to

you. The same is true in business. The goal is never to sell; the goal is to educate. There are people who do this well, and then there are people who do it less well. Like, I've started increasingly getting emails and DMs; um, like every other Instagram DM I get is someone giving me some sort of neg about how they've been through my funnel, and "Uh-oh, Ali, did you know you're leaving $4,000 a day on the table?" and this sort of stuff. I'm just like, "Ugh," like, are they all taking the same course? They're all running

the same kind of script. Yeah, so there are ways to not do it well. But to be honest, a lot of it comes down to tone. You could say the same thing, but the way that you write it—or, like something we talk about in PGA all the time—is actually sending Looms to personalize it more. Yeah, and the tone that you use; if you start the Loom and it's like, "Hey, I've got this exciting idea for your business," and like pitch, pitch, pitch, right, the other person can feel that, and within 30 seconds, they're like, "I'm

out of here." Right? But if you open the Loom, this is like—this was such a huge lesson for me building my agency—you basically talk to every single person as if you've already been friends for 10 years, and that is an energy, right? It's not like a trick, it's just an energy. You just hit them up and you're like, "Hey, John, um, really love what you're up to! I was just going through your site—big fan of your industry and what you're about. By the way, like, I've been really interested in spine surgery for a long time.

My dad's a spine surgeon, fun fact, so I have this kind of knowledge about it. But I was just going through your funnel and I noticed a couple of things. Just wanted to point them out for you—I hope this is helpful." Like, that tone comes off very differently, right? And so many of these things, they're not hard; it just is—you just need someone to point it out to you and then you go, "Oh, that makes a lot of sense" why me pitching is like turning people off in the DM, because people don't want to be

pitched; they want to be educated. Nice, that's good! As you're saying that, I'm thinking of... you know, there's a bunch of YouTubers. A lot of people are going to YouTube as a source of organic lead generation, and the ones who I gravitate towards are the ones who have a 27-minute long video Loom walkthrough explaining how all their systems work. And it's a, "Oh, and oh, by the way, we do this for clients if you're interested. There's a link down below." And I'm like, "Nice, yes!" Like, it just makes perfect sense. And there's almost this sort

of very casual, you know, "I've got the cookies; I don't need you to buy the cookies. I I—I don't need you to buy the cookies, but like, I know you want them." And it's this weird kind of push-pull, yeah, where it's like, "Hey, I'm just being very casual about this, being very friendly about it. I'm not trying to sell you anything at all," sort of vibe. It's very reverse psychology, but it can also be summarized, I think, really simply in abundance mindset or scarcity mindset. When someone is overly pitching you, right, you pick up on

this scarcity that they have, right? Because they're like, "I need this client," which inevitably makes the other person feel like, "Well, why do you need clients? Because no one wants to work with you," right? And then you, like, get turned off from it. But in an abundance mindset, it's like, "Hey, I'm good on clients; I'm actually full! Yeah, I just wanted to point out to you, CU, I think it would be helpful." And that abundance makes the other person feel like, "Well, if a lot of people want to work with them, and if they're so

abundant with what they have, it must be really great! I do want to work with them." So it doesn't actually matter whether you're full or not; it doesn't matter if you have 10 clients or not. It's the energy of: are you operating from scarcity or abundance? Nice, yeah! This is reminding me, so there's a team member of ours that we hired recently, Kayin, and she's our community manager for Productivity Lab. I did like a sort of very casual pod with her the other day, because we were waiting for Cal Newport to show up. So she

and I just kind of did a bonus episode of the pod, and she was explaining how when she moved to London like three years ago, she joined our YouTuber Academy, knowing she wanted to be in the sort of "Alal" orbits, because she's a YouTuber as well and stuff. She came to one of our meetups, and I remember this conversation where she came up to me. We had a very pleasant conversation for like 2 minutes; she mentioned a video that I had seen of hers, and then she left it at that. I didn't hear from her

for like two whole years until she applied for one of our jobs, and I remember that interaction being like, "Oh yeah, I remember her. She came to one of our meetups; she seemed cool." In contrast, there's this other guy who's been coming to every single meetup for the last like two years, who seems clamoring to get a... Job with the Aliv team? Yeah, and the energy around that is so radically different where I'm like, I'm already so turned off by this guy because he's claiming for a job, whereas with her it was just like, "Oh,

it's just chill." Like, yeah, she's normal. She's applied for a job, and she's made the shortlist. Great, let's interview her. That kind of thing. Yep, yeah. Again, a lot of it is energy. It's not that you shouldn't follow up a million times; I'm a huge advocate of keep following up. But it's the way that you do it. It's the energy of it, right? Are you coming at it from a place of, "I swear I can help you," or are you coming at it from a place of, "Hey, I'm just reminding you I'm here anytime you

want to chat"? You know, more than happy to help. Those just come off so radically different. And, look, you said it. An amazing growth hack for finding clients and finding opportunities is—if someone wanted to be in your orbit, there's actually a really easy way to be in your orbit; it's called "be a customer." Right? So, if someone wanted to pitch me to offer a service, and I knew that they had purchased Ship 30, my likelihood of reading and responding to that email and genuinely considering it is ten times higher than someone who hasn't. Right? So,

amazing growth hack: just go find all the people who run communities and have courses and all of the opportunities. Go pay $97 or $150 or whatever the cost is for one of their products. Be a customer, and the likelihood that they will listen to you is exponentially higher. Yeah, yeah. Whenever someone opens an email or anything with a, "Hey, I was part of YouTuber Academy cohort 3," or something like that, I'm going to read it. There's no world in which I wouldn't read that. Like, yeah. I think similarly when you're emailing people who have written

books, if you've actually read the book and are sort of leading with, "Hey, I read your book two years ago, and I loved A, B, C, and D," you know, they're way more likely to read that than a random email. Yeah, I mean, all of this stuff. It's like we all know this. It seems so basic in a lot of ways. Wouldn't it make sense to do your homework before you talk to someone? Yes. You know, are they more likely to respond to you if you clearly understand their business or their industry? Yes. So, that's

why starting with an information advantage is really easy. You know, and with all of this stuff, by far the biggest problem is people just don't do enough volume to see results. They talk to four people, and those four people say no, and then they give up. Yeah, yeah. So, I was asking about this: what's a good amount of volume? What we tell people in PGA is if you're starting warm with your network, you should begin by making a list of 50 people. "Leak, yeah, 5 Z leaks and fesses." I was thinking five. Yeah, no. Five

is like you took, you know, one step into the starting zone, killed two boars, and then are like, "Why don't I have all the epic gear?" Right? So, starting warm, you should make a list of 50 people that you know that either might need your help or might know someone who needs your help. If you're going cold, minimum, you need to reach out to 100 people. And I don't mean get some software tool where you scrape emails and then just copy-paste spam 100 emails or 100 DMs. I mean, identify 100 quality people, do your homework

on each one, send them a message. If they respond, create a Loom problem script outcome solution script, pitch them, right? Like, you should go through that entire process for each of them, and only then should you go, "Okay, I genuinely did my homework and genuinely educated 100 people and zero said yes." Even at that point, it doesn't mean that it doesn't work. It means you have a problem; you have a bottleneck somewhere in there, and your job is to identify that bottleneck, remove it, and do it again. Do it again. What are your thoughts on

using ChatGPT to automate some of this outreach and stuff? I think the big misunderstanding with AI is everyone wants to automate things they've never done before. You can't automate something that you haven't done. And even if someone tells you how, you don't understand it, so you're not getting the full value out of it. So this is one of those just like first principle beliefs that I have. The metaphor I like using is, if you were to run a marathon, you would train with ankle weights so that by the time you ran the marathon, you would

take the ankle weights off and it would be easier. Right? So, whenever I'm doing something, I always ask myself, "What are the ankle weights?" So, in the beginning, it seems like the longer road to go, "I have to go educate and talk to 100 people." Well, yeah, in the beginning that is the longer road instead of just, you know, trying to automate the whole process and defer to technology. But after you do that, you are significantly more educated about the process, how to do it well, what drives the outcome, and what are the mistakes that

then allows you to leverage. Tech, but if you skip that step, you think you're taking the shortcut, and then guess what? The shortcut ends up being the longer road because you skipped the whole learning. Yeah, you know, yeah, I started getting a bunch of these sort of clearly ChatGPT-generated emails, and it's almost like—I'm sure you've gotten this as well—where you can kind of just tell when someone is purely copy-pasting something. The tone is a bit off, the start is off, and it's just an immediate, you know, archive-from-the-inbox kind of response. Yeah, but as you say,

someone who's learned the skill of doing it and is showing that they have done the work, because most—well, at least some—people kind of know what a ChatGPT-generated paragraph sort of looks like, sort of sounds like. There's something about doing the work that really helps you stand out, which itself then sort of becomes the shortcut. The shortcut is actually just doing the work. Yeah, shocker! You know, my default is the coffee shop test. If you sat down in front of that person at a coffee shop—you both decided to meet up, we're grabbing coffee at 3 p.m.,

okay cool—and you said what was in that email out loud, what would happen? Like, that's the question every person should ask themselves. And if, just like you started laughing and you're like, "Oh, I couldn't imagine saying that email out loud," right? That's a problem. And so if you're sitting there and you can't even with a straight face go, "I wouldn't say this email out loud," that means you're not doing the work. The goal is for someone to open that email and go, like, "I read—I get cold-pitched via DM and email every day, probably 20 to

50 times a day, and I read every single one of them because I try and keep my DMs clean and I try and keep my email clean, and the reason I don't respond to 99% isn't because I don't know who the person is. It's not because it's cold; it's because their message is not helpful. They are not educating me; they didn't do the work," right? So I love it when people say, "Facebook ads are dead, email is dead, cold outreach is dead." No, none of those mediums are dead, period, and they all work for people

who do the work. Nice. Okay, what else do people need to know on this road to making 5 to 10K a month as a writer? I think the last thing I'll say is, and we can talk about the creator economy, digital products, and sort of what it's like being a creator in today's world, but I think that one of the mega trends is more and more people are realizing the power of being what I'll call hybrid creators or building hybrid agencies. So the first business that I built was a ghostwriting agency. I grew that from

zero to about 180,000 a month in 18 months or so, and in hindsight, one of the biggest mistakes I made was there was a certain point in that business when we were doing like 60 to 80K a month. We had five full-time team members, we had about 152 clients, and my co-founder and I were completely out of the business. We were both making 20 grand a month, working like an hour or two a day, just making sure that the team was running. We didn't know how good we had it at that time, but that was

the sweet spot. What we should have done at that point is not continue scaling with services, because services are, by nature, right? Like you generate more revenue because you land more clients. To service those clients, you need to hire more people, and people are a static cost; you're paying salaries usually. So we didn't know that. We just thought, "Okay, well, we're just going to grow forever." That's not what happened. If I could go back, what I would have realized is that that was the sweet spot where it didn't take that much effort to keep replenishing

clients when they would churn, you know? So you could maintain profitability and the health of the business. But then, because I'd reclaimed all my time and was only working in the service part for an hour or two, that's when I would have started building digital products. Because every digital product thereafter has no marginal cost, so it's pure profit, right? So, if you think of the difference between, you know, a service company—a ghostwriting agency doing 100K a month purely in services—versus one that does 60K a month and then the other 40K is coming from digital products,

the second one is wildly more profitable. And then there's a flywheel that happens. The flywheel is that, yes, a lot of people will buy the digital product and go, "Well, I don't need your agency because you just told me how to do it." That's fine. But a good percentage of your customers are going to get educated and go, "Oh, this is actually harder than I thought it was. Can I just hire you to do it for me?" So you just monetized the sale, which creates the flywheel. Your digital products are profitable, which educates customers to

become service clients, right? And it just keeps going and going. So I think that this mega trend of hybrid companies, or hybrid creators, hybrid agencies—I don't see very many people doing it or talking about it yet, but I... I think these two worlds are going to intersect. Okay, this is good because the next thing I wanted to talk to you about was to riff on a business idea that we've been having over the last week. Okay, let's do it. So, um, what do you think about—okay, so we want to start an agency that is done

fully Done-For-You video for businesses, where the business does not even need to provide the talent; we can do that. So essentially, what we want to do is create talking head educational YouTube videos, LinkedIn videos, videos for their documentation, or videos for their ads, or whatever, using the AL YouTube formula, which is you get someone who sits in front of a camera and says stuff, with the occasional happening on screen and like nice edits and nice background music and stuff—basic talking head educational stuff, but for businesses like software companies who want to do documentation or ads

or LinkedIn. Probably not LinkedIn, because I would need to be under the founder's personal brand. Potentially, what do you think of this? Okay, so, um, I actually think that's a cool idea because you've found a solution to the number one problem, which is most often people at those companies don't have the time, don't have the skill, don't want to build the skill—all of that, right? Yeah, we found that with Hey Friends, which is the agency that we started in partnership with Hunter Hammond and Blom. We were targeting individuals and also like executives and stuff, but

we found that people really suck at talking to a camera. Yeah, people not making the time for it; people have all sorts of emotional issues dealing with speaking to a freaking camera, even though they're the executive of a freaking multi-million dollar company. It's like, why is it so hard to talk to the camera, man? Yeah, but apparently, it's really hard. So, you found a great solution. So, two things that immediately come to mind, though: one is I think if you hire one person, one talk head, you run a couple of risks. So, one of the

risks is, I think of it like the podcast deals that Spotify did with, um, what's her name—one of them was Alex Earl and the other one was Daddy Caller. Yeah, who's the host? Okay, but yeah, right? Like where the talking head, the person, outgrows the situation and then they want to leave; they want to negotiate, right? That is a risk. Another risk is when you rely so heavily on one person, it makes it then hard to deal with that situation if you need to transition. So what I would do is actually frame the channel not

around a person, but around a category of ideas. So, if it's like a fintech startup, it would be like fintech advice, or whatever, and then I would hire as contractors like three different people. That way, from the beginning, you've set the precedent; it's not one brand channel, it's not a personal YouTube channel—there are multiple personalities. People are not that wedded to the individual; they care about the advice. Yes, and then from there, I think, you know, if you're taking care of the scripting, you're taking care of the editing and everything, the only thing I just—I

know because I ran into it with ghostwriting—the only thing that you're navigating is then the type of team you're dealing with. Like for us with our ghostwriting agency, what would happen is we'd get ten cooks in the kitchen; like the executive would want to weigh in on the writing or the script, right? And then the head of marketing and then the marketing intern. So, the solution I have found to this is you have to basically walk in and say not just we’re going to create these videos, but we are going to create these types of

videos, like very specific. Like, one video a week is going to be a pure tutorial walkthrough; you know, another video a week is going to be trend-watching. And you basically give them the rules for the formula upfront and you're like, each of these videos has this set of rules, which reduces the amount of subjective decision-making for each of them. So that way, when their head of marketing comes in and is like, “You know, I don't think we should do that. I don't like that intro,” right? Well, I don't really care if you like that intro

or not; there's a method, you know? And so you have to educate them on that method so that way—which reduces the amount of edits, which sort of just defers more and more of that trust to you in the beginning. Nice! What do you think a reasonable price point for this would be? How much volume did I—um, that's a good question, though. Yeah, how quickly do you think you could grow a channel, and how much volume would you need to do to grow a channel reasonably well? Uh, the goal wouldn't be to grow a channel; the

goal would be to produce the videos that could go on their website or on its like—the channel growth would be a happy bonus rather than something that we would lean on, that we would sell because it's just impossible to—it's too hard to guarantee. Okay, I'm going to give you one of the things that we learned too, which is then I would anchor it all around long-tail searching. Basically, what you're selling them—again, this is like pricing hierarchy, right? You're not selling them volume of... Videos? You're selling them a specific library of content. Yes, so you're like,

"You want to rank for these terms and phrases. You want to build dominance in this industry, in this niche." One of the months, you go and do an audit. You're like, "These are all, you know, these are the top 30 long-tail things that people are searching for that are related to your business." At the end of six months, or at the end of one year, together we are going to have built this niche library. Because they're buying an asset and an outcome, which is divorced from time and effort, right? That is what allows them to

go, "Okay, so how much is that?" Now you can throw a number in the air, because how do you value that library of content? Well, now it's completely subjective, so you could charge 50 grand for that, or 100 grand, right? It depends on who you're pitching. Then, at the end of the six months, what do you do? You go, "Hey, our team took some time. We identified another niche that you could build dominance in. It's tangentially related. We went ahead and did some free work for you. These are the next 30 videos that you could

make. I think this would allow you to scale your dominance. Do you want to do another six months?" It's anchored to time, but it's not really time that they're buying; they're buying the library. Nice, that's good! Yeah, because what we don't want it to feel like is that we are going to grow their YouTube channel, because now you've removed that part of the conversation. You're like, "Followers don't matter. We are going to rank for these, and these are going to show up in YouTube search. They're going to show up in Google search. They can be

embedded into your website, which improves the SEO of your page because Google owns YouTube." Exactly! So even just notice this conversation, right? The more that we talk about the education component, it's like, "Hey, did you know that embedding these videos on your website is going to increase the searchability and performance of those?" Most people are going to go, "No, I didn't know that." Yeah, we noticed that your brand is already doing posts on LinkedIn, didn't we? We can also repost the same content on LinkedIn, and now you've built a content library on LinkedIn. Did you

know LinkedIn videos are growing by 58 zillion every year, kind of thing? So, because like the framing is everything. And because you've anchored it to an asset and an outcome library, well now you can go to a startup that just raised 30 million bucks and say, "It's 100 grand, and it'll take us six months to build. Do you want this?" That's a pretty good offer! Yeah, this is like an Enterprise agency offering. You know, like, yeah, you could do it for smaller companies, and maybe you have a pared-down offer. But if I were you, where

people go wrong with pricing is they pick two packages that are really close to each other. So they're like, "Package one is five grand a month, package two is seven grand a month." Well, for a business owner, there's actually no pricing threshold between those two. I don't care if it's five grand or seven grand; that, to me, is the same number. Right? So what you want to do is, if you were to create two different packages, you want to widen the gap. You're like, "The five grand a month is for small businesses or creators; the

50 grand a month is for Enterprise tech companies." Well, now there's a pricing decision. Nice! Yeah, that's interesting. So we could even reach out to companies that really should have video content. A company like Salesforce really should have a ton of tutorials on their own YouTube channel that are actually good. A company like HubSpot should really... You know, HubSpot are a bit more modern, so they are sort of doing it. But we could literally go through, well, okay, what comes to mind is we just go through the Fortune 500, look at all the YouTube channels

and see, or, or the NASDAQ, which is like for tech companies, look at all the YouTube channels, see which are the ones that we could make a compelling pitch to, see if we can get a warm intro to that person. Or alternatively, we start with our existing network. We reach out to, for example, Penguin or Macmillan or like any company that's ever sponsored our stuff. So how would you go about—well, this, so now, like what we're talking about is the conversation we've been having. Just on this, this is the level 80 version, you know? We

were talking about the level 14 version: this gets a 100K contract. Yeah? And so where do you start? You start, your niche is your network. You start with the people you know first, yeah? And then you exhaust that list, even if they might not be the right people for the 50K offer or whatever. Yeah, leaks and facets know, yeah? Of course, they'll know people. Yeah, and they'll be far more likely to hop on a call with us to be like, "Yeah, of course I’ll talk to you." Yeah, or their CMO, kind of thing. I can

tell you because at my agency, we had some of the biggest tech companies in the world, and as soon as you start getting up to like Fortune 500 or multi-billion dollar companies, yeah, those are very different deals. Oh, effing like you can do it, but there's more red tape, the sales process takes longer. Like, in my opinion, the sweet spot is... You actually like—do you know the site Crunchbase? Yeah? Okay, so Crunchbase publishes, you know, companies that just raised any amount of money. If I were you, I would target companies in the $10 to $100

million range; it could be valuation, money raised, or revenue—whatever, because that range is where you're not so big that you have 10,000 employees, you know? But you're not small where you're like penny-pinching. That general range—a lot of those companies are like, "We know we want to do video; we're still small enough to move quickly. Let's just write the check. Let's just do it." Yeah, so what sort of, um, what sort of size checks were you charging in the agency back in the day? Oh, I mean our highest offering was like five grand a month. Like,

that was one of my biggest mistakes—going, we literally had companies get on the phone and go, "We love your pitch! Do you have anything more expensive?" And I was like 26 years old; I didn't know. I was like, "No, I thought five grand was a lot." We landed one of the biggest enterprise tech companies in the world; they have as many employees as like small countries. And they literally said, "We don’t work with vendors for five grand a month. Our smallest vendor is like a hundred grand." So they prepaid for a year, a whole year

up front, just because they liked that—it was the only way to get the deal across. Wow! And like that experience taught me so much about just—I mean, you're talking to a company that does $30 billion in revenue, you know? It's crazy. If I were you, I would have two offers. I would have one that caters to the smaller creator but is still sort of premium—like five grand a month, or $7,500 a month; you know, smaller-sized business. Maybe even like a company doing $10 million would say yes to that. But then I would also have a

super high-end version that's like, you know, $20, $30, $40, $50K a month. Yeah? And then you go pitch that to $100 million companies. If you guys didn't have your own long-form YouTube video strategy, what is the sort of thing that—if hypothetically me or someone from my team were to say, "Hey guys, you know, we'll do long-form video for you," what are the sorts of things you and Dicki would be thinking about? Um, like all the things that we're talking about— the first thing is, I would 100% do it for a start-up writing online channel. Like

all of that beginner stuff: I've written a gazillion times; I have all the content. I've already done all the thinking. Like, me creating those videos is actually sort of low leverage, you know? And so creating a branded, but if you will, channel that just does all of that education on autopilot—that's really interesting to me. Yeah. How much would that be to you in theory? Um, I'd say, I mean if it was like three grand a month, I would pull the trigger—like no questions asked. I'd be like, "Let's just try it!" You know, that to me

is just a "Yeah, let's see what happens." I think our pricing cap would probably be around ten grand a month, okayish, before you would start thinking, "Okay, I might as well just do it myself" kind of thing—or "Yeah, is that already worth doing?" Yeah. It would— from there, it probably wouldn't be a money decision; it would be a priority decision. It would be like, "If we're going to spend $20 grand a month, what's the ROI of that doing this relative to something else—oh, something else we could spend $20 grand on? Yeah, fine!" Or "Should we

just hire two people internally to do it?" Right. Because then I can start weighing full-time salaries and—yeah, okay, nice. But you have to—one of the benefits of pitching larger companies is that the larger a company grows, the more taxing it becomes to bring something internally because, you know, you have to train them, and you have processes, and your head of HR needs the process. Like, so it actually is easier to sell to those larger companies because they're not really like— they can't do the rationalization of, "Well, we could just hire five people." It takes too

much bandwidth for them. Whereas for us, we have a small team. Like, I could hire two people and train them relatively easily. Yeah, okay, well that's interesting. Nice. So $10 to $100 million—start off with the network until we have exhausted that—and going back to everything we've talked about, if I were you, I would consider just doing the first one. You could do it for free or just like do it for five grand. Yeah, do super cheap for like Penguin or something; they'd probably be down. Exactly! And like learn—figure out where your inefficiencies are, figure out

what it's worth to the client. You can power-level all of the learning by doing it for one person. Nice, that's a good idea. I'm thinking if we did reach out to the publisher and they're like, "You know, you guys should really have your own YouTube channels where you do—" Yeah, of course they should! Intros to all of the books that you're publishing. Have you seen their YouTube channels? No, I haven't actually. No shade, but they're pretty bad—like publisher YouTube. Yeah, it looks like a writer's house from like... The ’90s, you know, the sound is horrible.

Like, everybody needs help with video, so it is a great service. It's just I would really—not connect it to audience growth; I would anchor it to library. You're buying an asset, and I would pitch companies that have the means. Nice, easy enough. Um, one thing I was going to ask you about—so I’ve been an avid listener of the Espresso Hour, which is a great podcast. I think half my team listens to it on the regular, and we're always like, “Oh, you know, these guys talked about this thing last week,” because it feels so relevant to

where we are. I think your business and ours are at least in a similar order of magnitude. So the sort of stuff that you guys are thinking about is ridiculously relevant to what we're thinking about, and there are so few business podcasts that are talking about how do you go from seven to eight figures, and the actual process of doing that. Um, one thing I'm curious about is: why do you care? You know, you're getting married—or you're married now. Make money; you can chill. Why do you care about growing the business? A lot of—I mean,

I think it's true for anything in life—but I just want to know that I can. You know, I’ve built multiple seven-figure companies now, and I won't lie. I really want the eight figures; I want to just know that I could do that. That feeling might change after we hit, you know, 10 million. By the way, this drives me nuts! I hate when people say, “I built a X million dollar business,” but they're doing it on lifetime revenue versus annual revenue. People say that all the time, and it drives me nuts! They're like, “I built a

$5 million company.” It's like, “No, you built a million-dollar company, and you've been in business for five years.” Oh, I did that with a video that I made five years ago! I was like, “How I built a million-dollar business in Mexico.” I was like, “If you add up all of the revenue for, like, freaking years, you get to just about a million.” Okay, I’ll excuse it because it was a beginner mistake. But I see people who know what they’re doing doing that, and I’m like, “Why?” What’s frustrating to me is because you're educating aspiring entrepreneurs

on the wrong thing; you're setting an unreasonable expectation. You know, our goal—we've already done 10 million in lifetime revenue. I want to build a 10 million a year business, and I'm hoping that we will do that by the end of this year. So, yeah, I just want to know that I'm capable and that I can do that. It’s kind of like a video game. Yeah, why not? Honestly, it’s the video game thing. It's like, you know, I'm playing Horizon Forbidden West on PS5 at the moment, and I'm playing on very hard difficulty. Ultra hard is

a bit too grindy and a bit too hard, but very hard is, you know, I'm like trying to kill the Thunderjaw for like three freaking hours on a Saturday. But when I kill it, it feels satisfying. And I'm like, “Hm, is this what they said about— is this what people meant when they said you should relax more and not work and stuff?” It’s like, but it's just kind of nice. It's like playing at level 80 rather than level 50. Yeah, you know, maybe I'm not interpreting what you're saying correctly, but it's like I don't need

to build a billion-dollar company. If that happens, cool! But to be honest, when I think about that, that feels like way more responsibility than, truthfully, I want to deal with. I’m too creative; I don’t think I want to live my life managing that. Not that I could—I love when people say that: “It’d be so easy; I’m choosing not to build.” I don't want to go to the gym because I don't want to get too big. Okay, so I understand the irony of what I just said, but yeah, I think once you build a seven-figure company,

you're like, “Okay, what does it look like to build a multi-figure company? Cool, did that.” And then it’s like, “Okay, what does it look like to build an eight-figure company?” From there, I’ll reassess. Do we want to continue? Yeah, but I learned that lesson really painfully with my ghostwriting agency, which was sometimes growing too quickly is a huge problem. Something Dicky and I talk about all the time is: what's the tipping point? When does the business—you’re growing or you might reach, you know, 20 million in revenue or 30 million in revenue, but you will probably

cross these tipping points where now you have, you know, 20 people to manage, 30 people, 50 people, 100 people. Maybe that size of business a might not even be as profitable, right? And B, it might not be as fun. So you sort of have to decide, like, how big of a business do you want to build, and is the size of that also giving you the other things you want in your life? Is it fun? Does it make you happy? Is it still profitable? You know, yeah, and how much do you care about building to

sell? I don’t want to sell. I’m... I much prefer the idea of building cash-generating machines, you know, rather than a big sort of like 5x revenue exit or something. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, okay, I sell my company for 20 million bucks, okay? You know, 50% goes to Uncle Sam, so I got 10 million. You know, and then I put that in what, like a 5% account? And then I make, like, you know, what is that, 400k a year or something? That's actually a lot less than I make. So yeah, I have

10 million bucks, but my lifestyle is actually less than what I have now. Yeah, so why would I want to sell? Same argument, by the way, I make for book deals: like, why take the advance when you know the publishers are going to make—or they're going to try to make—10 times that on your book? Maybe a different path is just self-publishing the book, and you don’t get a lump sum up front, but you might generate more in royalties over a longer time horizon. What do you think I should do for my next book? I'm so

glad you asked this! I've been wanting to talk to you about this. So, first of all, I'm like halfway through your book. I want to pay you a compliment, and I feel like this is going to come off as a backhanded compliment, but I don't mean it that way. It is way better written than I thought it was going to be. Not that I thought you were a bad writer or anything, but very often I will read self-help books, and it's just like, really? It's like very mindless, you know? I am not finding your book

to be mindless at all. It's really cool, and I like the combination of research and personal story. I also think the categorical difference of grinding productivity versus feel-good productivity—like how you set that up in the beginning—is very smart. Thanks! One of my questions was actually, what was your book deal? Was it a one-book deal or a multiple-book deal? Yeah, it was a one-book deal with Penguin having the right of first refusal on future deals for life. Do you know for how long? But it just means that if I do go try to publish, I have

to give them the option to buy it first. How long is that clause in effect for, do you know? Like, if you do that once and they take it, do you have to give them first right of refusal for all the books after that? I'm not sure. I should look at the contract; that's an important piece to know. But I think I can choose to self-publish the next one if I wanted to. You can? Yeah, okay. I just have to give them the option of buying it, but I don't have to accept their offer. Oh,

okay. Well, then that's fine. It just means that if Penguin versus, I don't know, Simon & Schuster were bidding, they would have the right to dibs on it. Got it. Okay, so before I give you my perspective, what do you think you should do, and how are you thinking about this? Yeah, so this is going to be very inside baseball, so if anyone feels like leaving the podcast at this point, by all means, please do. I am not sure, so thinking out loud—by the way, I feel like this is what I wanted to talk to

you about. Great, perfect, yeah, that's fine. I'm not sure. So obviously, there's value in traditional publishing. In my case, the goal was to have an asset that would be seen as a legit guy rather than, quote, "just youber" and all of that stuff. I think you accomplished that big time! Yeah, so the prestige, the New York Times list, the Sunday Times list, the fact that it's orally published with Penguin, blah blah blah—congrats on New York Times, by the way. I haven't said that. Oh, yeah, we... but congrats! Thank you very much! So all of that

stuff is done, and now for future books, I know I want to write future books. I also quite like the fact that I had an editor who was nice; I had like the in-house Penguin designer make the front cover. I hired an external designer to make 50 variations, and we couldn't find anything better than the cover. It turns out to be really nice. It's a great cover! Thanks! Penguin gave us, like, 36 different language translation deals. It's in bookstores; people are sending me pictures from, like, freaking Taiwan, from like a random bookstore in Austin, you

know? All over the world, people are sending pictures of this book in different translations. I hear that that sort of stuff doesn't really happen if you're self-published unless you become like a David Goggins or something like that, which just seems unlikely. So there's part of me that's like, I like the freedom that Paul Millard has making like 400 grand already from his book sales of The Pathless Path. I like the idea of doing smaller books. I really want to do a book around—like, I don’t want to say the title because normally I'm not protective of

ideas, but when it comes to book titles, I'm pretty protective of ideas. But I want to do a series of books and have... Like I have more freedom, and that the stakes are lower; but also, I like the idea that, you know, there's a big publisher behind it, who then is doing the publisher machinery to get it into different languages and into different bookstores around the world, which is kind of cool. So just to summarize, what do you feel like the publisher did that you wouldn't be able to do? Specifically, good point: the translation deal.

Translational, I would say, the bulk translation deal. Because, fun fact, by the way, right now I am negotiating the Korean rights for "Art and Business of Online Writing," which is self-published, so you can do translation deals; it's just that they're emailing you; they're not emailing the publisher. A handful of people have emailed us, being like, "Hey, do you have a Slovakian deal?" and I'm like, "Do we have a...?" Yep, turns out we do! Sorry, that kind of thing. So it's possible that you can do that, but, you know, doing a bulk deal like they go

out and sell it in 36 languages—that's something that a publisher does that an individual typically cannot. Okay, so that's one. But, like, what else? What else do you feel like? The translation thing and the bookstores. Okay, so do you know the data of how many copies were bought online versus in-store? Um, yeah, that's a good point. Um, no, but just looking at what we already have, it's like 910 Amazon versus everything else. Okay, so everything else also includes, like, Barnes & Noble. It's unclear as to whether it was brick-and-mortar or online sales, so a big

chunk of those were probably online as well. The mega trend in books is that it's funny, because whenever they talk about book deals, everyone's like, "I want to get into bookstores," but the trend line is that books' spot in stores is going down, and books' spot online is going up. Um, something else that I have found that a lot of people don't know is, you talked about, you know, the designer in-house creating this amazing cover, and you work with an editor—you can hire all those people. Yeah, we did hire an excellent editor; we also hired

an excellent designer. So that's—so even those houses want to freelance on the side, or they used to work in a big five house and now they freelance on the side. So also this argument of like taking a book deal and you get access to these specialized people, it's not true—you can get access to them just by reaching out to them and going, "Do you want to freelance?" Then another thing was, I read the whole analysis that your team did of the marketing, which was fascinating. That was really cool that you did that. Um, do you

care if I share some of those numbers? So one of the things I was shocked by was that you only spent 25 grand on marketing. I know that's not counting labor costs, but that was like the Zoom and some paid newsletters and stuff; it was very minimal marketing. Okay, so like 25 grand to generate the outcome that you did—and that probably isn't really what moved the needle. What moved the needle is your organic audience by far, right? And what did the publisher do? Um, they landed things like, we got Good Morning America because of the

publisher. We got like The Today Show Australia because of the publisher; we got a few like we got the Financial Times piece—that kind of stuff. Yeah, okay—so status symbols. Yeah, you know, but which, by the way, the thing is, I have probably spent 3,000 hours reading about traditional publishing contracts. I've read the nerdiest books on, like, the history of publishing, how it's evolved—like something that I've really wanted as a writer is to be as educated as possible about what is happening in this industry. How do deals get structured? What are the incentive structures? Right? What

are the benefits of taking a traditional publisher versus self-publishing? All these things. And so when you really, like, list them out, the publisher really isn't doing that much. What they're doing is, a: they are giving you the ability to play the New York Times game. Yup, that's it. If I go sell a million copies tomorrow, but I'm not with a publishing house, the New York Times doesn't care. Yeah, right? So it's kind of a Ponzi scheme—they give you access to the game, right? Yeah, okay, in literature you also can't win awards, so you can't really

win the Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize, or anything unless you're with a big five gatekeeper. Okay, so you can't play that game. Um, bookstores—so a lot of people don't know how bookstores work as businesses. But basically what a bookstore is trying to figure out is they have inventory and they're like, "Well, what books should we carry?" Now, just because you accept a book deal, yeah, doesn't mean that they're going to get you in every bookstore. Right? Because how many books does a bookstore hold? Yeah, like small numbers in the grand scheme of things—300. Yeah, whenever I

walk into a bookstore, I'm like, "Is my book there?" And the answer is usually no. Like, I've never seen it in a bookstore. Okay, so there's the IR of—I've seen Instagram stories of people who've seen it in bookstores. Yeah, exactly. So, okay, so they're not going to get you in every bookstore, right? And the bookstores that they get you in—what happens? It's almost like an old-school algorithm. So what they do is they pick these markets and they go, "Okay, we're going to target..." These couple bookstores in this localized area have a rep from their house

that goes to the bookstore and says, "Hey, here's the deal. Ali Abnal, sure, you don't know who this person is, but we just signed this huge book deal with him. He has 5 million YouTube subscribers, so he's going to push the hell out of this thing." Right? And they're basically selling to the bookstore your ability to market, to bring people to the book, and that is how the bookstore decides, "Well, what books should we carry?" Right? So already, if you're an author, you're like, "Okay, how much leverage do I have?" And even if I sign

a book deal, the publisher is not putting me in every bookstore. So how much leverage do I have that the publisher can market to the bookstore saying, "This author is going to drive in-person sales"? Yeah, right? So all of these variables work together. So when you start listing all these things out, if you were to just be really brutally honest, like who got you on the New York Times list? Was it you or was it the publisher? The publisher unlocked the ability to be on the list, but it was really our audience that drove the

sales to get on the list. Yes, okay, so then you start doing the math. So, okay, you got the status symbol, "Once a New York Times bestseller, always a New York Times bestseller," so you don't need to play that game anymore. Right? I don't think there's much value in being a two-time New York Times bestseller. Exactly. So it's like trying to embarrass the thing or whatever. Exactly! So now you start doing the math on a published book, and you go, "Okay, what's the difference between—we'll just use round numbers—what's the difference between a million-dollar advance and

a 10% royalty versus zero advance but 100% royalty?" Right? And if you start, like, "Okay, so how many copies do you sell? 200,000?" Yeah, okay, let's just be super generous and go, "100,000 of those are from in bookstores," which the publisher did for you. Right? So, we'll say you're responsible for driving 100K copies, and you sell your next book for 10 bucks as an eBook, 20 bucks in print. Um, and again, just we'll use round numbers: $10 is the net, and you sell a lot of them through your own website and, yeah, some through Amazon,

where, like, the split is 60-40. Whatever. You've already made your million! Yeah, 100,000 copies at 10 bucks a copy! Yeah, you've already made a million, and that's in the first year. So what happens then? Year two? Year three? Year four? Year five? And like nobody does the napkin math, but it almost doesn't matter how big the advance is when you take into account the higher royalty. And if you're someone who has an audience and continues pushing it, right, you go from marketing the book that you don't really own—you own 10% of it—to marketing your library

that you have majority or all ownership over, and the royalties start outpacing the advance. Yeah, and the advance you have to pay off anyway through the royalties, so it's not even free money. It's just, yeah, yeah. Most authors, even if they get a million-dollar advance, they don't see a royalty from their book. So they just went, "I'm going to take the million up front," and sometimes that's the right decision. But if you just want to write one book, if you were like, "I'm one and done," you made the right decision. You won the status game,

probably got a really nice advance; you're good, right? But if you actually enjoy writing and you want to build a library, well, you should own the majority of your library. I love when people are like, "Nobody buys books." Okay, uh, how do you think all the publishers make billions of dollars? People buy books! It's just that the publishers convince writers that there's no money in books, which is why the writers all go, "Sure, you want to take 90% of my product? No problem!" And then they just slowly accumulate a library over the years and over

the decades. Yeah, and it's like, okay, so it sounds like you think self-publishing is the way to go. I would. So I think from both a content and a digital product perspective, we'll just take a different lens. Yeah, if you ran an experiment, a public experiment, and said, "Here's all the math on my traditional book," and then I do it again. And you put forth the same resources, but you do it all yourself, and then you do a postmortem, here are the differences. First of all, I think from a content perspective, that would crush. Second,

it would teach you a ton. And third of all, you could probably bundle all of that into a digital product that monetizes it again, being like, "I'm going to walk you through my whole publishing process." I also like the fact that if you're self-published, you can give away books. Yeah, you're—you can do a lot. So, um, Dicky and I got offered a book deal like a year ago or something, and the contract was nuts! I was like, "I can't believe you think people sign stuff like this." Like, it was so predatory, and they were like,

"This is standard language; I don't understand what you have a problem with." And I was like, "You want lifetime representation of everything that I write forever?" They were like, "Yeah, most writers have no problem with that." I'm like, "Get out! Get out of here!" And so, um, um, yeah, I just—I think that in the long run, because you have anyone who is building an audience... I would really stress-test the value of taking the money up front versus extending the time horizon. You're a creative person; you're going to want to create things for the next 50

years. So, what does it look like when you own your library for 50 years? Yeah, I wasn't even vaguely thinking of, like, the money. Initially, what I said to the publisher was, "Oh, I don't want an advance; I just want the royalties, because I don't need the cash flow." They were like, "Great, perfect!" Then, I was told, "Actually, that's a bad idea because if there's a big advance on their P&L, then they're going to put more effort into it." So, the money up front was really more of a "at least they've got some skin in

the game" kind of idea. Another flaw of traditional publishing is that it forces them to actually be incentivized. Part of the reason why so many writers vent about their publishing deals is that the publisher goes, "Well, we don't really believe in the book, but hey, you're willing to sell us 90% of it, so we'll give you a $10,000 advance." But when they do that, they have no incentive to actually go and push it. So, the only reason you are taking the big advance is to basically put their nose to the grindstone, being like, "Now you

have to push it." Yeah, interesting. You want to talk? I would love to ask you some questions about writing the book, actually. Yeah, sure! Okay, so, first of all, productivity and self-help is one of those things where it's hard to reinvent because it's like how many times can you talk about the same thing? You know? Which is why I think I liked going into the book— I was sort of like, "We'll see, we'll see." And I was really pleasantly surprised. How did you come up with this lens of feel-good productivity? You reference a lot of

studies in it. Were those studies that you had read and that is what gave you the idea, or did you sort of start with the idea and then you went and found research that supported it? Yeah, okay. So, the backstory is that initially, the book was titled "The Productivity Equation," which was modeled off of a Skillshare class that I did that was about productivity equals meaning multiplied by output multiplied by fun or something like that. I always had this fun construct within whatever I would teach about productivity on YouTube and stuff. Initially, when Publisher A

approached me, they were like, "We'll just give you a book deal sight unseen. You don't even need to propose; just sign the book deal," kind of thing. I took ages to sign the papers, and just before I was signing them, when they were sort of hustling me about it, I spoke to a writer friend who said, "You know, who's your agent?" and I was like, "I don't have an agent." She was like, "You need to! Don't sign this thing. Talk to an agent." I talked to an agent, blah, blah, blah, and then we sort of

renegotiated that deal with Publisher A. Then it came to writing a proper proposal for U.S. publishers, because apparently, U.S. publishers don't like books where they're not at least jointly publishing it at the same time, 'cause if the U.S. publisher is playing second fiddle to the U.K. publisher, then they don't like it or something to that effect. So then we had to write a proper proposal for the U.S. publishers, and I wrote "The Productivity Equation" and sent it to a couple of editors. Basically, the feedback was that this is terrible and it's not going to sell

because no one wants to read a book called "The Productivity Equation." It just sounds boring. Then there was this guy, David Moldow, who was super helpful. He's the guy who also did Clar's proposal and has worked with a bunch of our other friends in that WhatsApp group. He basically said, "Yep, it stinks, but come on, man, if you had to boil it down to one thing, you know you're successful; you're a doctor, you're a YouTuber—what's the one thing?" I was like, "Oh, I just find a way to make everything fun." He was like, "That's the

book! That's a cool concept." He's like, "I don't think anyone's gone into productivity from that angle, so why not just do that?" Initially, it was like, "Okay, well, maybe that's a thing," and then it became "The Productivity Game," and it became all about gamification and stuff. Initially, I made the mistake of outsourcing the research, so I got a research assistant who was kind of reading a bunch of papers and stuff and feeding the insights. I'd sort of come up with this framework around, "Okay, well, what do video game designers do? Why is WoW addictive, and

how do we apply that to productivity?" Blah, blah, blah. Then I started writing and realizing I didn't quite have the material, and I couldn't really make the case that fun was the thing. Then I started reading the papers myself, and I was like, "Oh, okay." The guy I had was an English major; he didn't have a science background, so he's trying to read all these psychology studies. He probably didn't even... Know how to actually access them because of, like, the logins and all that kind of stuff. Ah, yeah, the journals. So when I started getting

into the journals myself, that was when I sort of went on a bit of a rabbit trail to see, like, what is the evidence that—like, is there evidence backing up this sort of fun idea? Because there was "The Happiness Advantage" by Shawn Achor, which is the idea that, you know, success comes from happiness rather than the other way around. It's not that happiness leads to success; it's that success—no, it's not that success leads to happiness; it's that happiness leads to success. So I knew there was some stuff there, so I sort of followed up his

findings and eventually came upon this broaden-and-build theory that I talked about in the introduction—that positive emotions are like the thing that runs this upward spiral of productivity and positivity and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, this is it! Finally, there is, like, a thing that I can hang my hat on to be like, there is evidence that positive emotions drive productivity. Mhm. Which is not quite the same as fun. And so then it became a bit of, like, a balancing act to be like, okay, how much do we lean into the language of

fun, or how much do we lean into the language of positive emotions? Eventually, the positive emotions thing made sense, and then in the shower one day, I was thinking, "Positive emotion productivity, positive productivity." It sounds a bit like "Good Vibes productivity." Well, there's a book called "Good Vibes, Good Life" by Vex King, so I can't do that. What's another word for good vibes? Feel good, feel good, feel good... prod, feel good produc—like, "got good"? Brother, do it! Then I hopped on, made a Loom to send to my agent, editor, and team to be like, "Guys,

I think I've got a title. I think it's 'Feel Good Productivity.' What do you think?" And everyone was like, "Yeah, that's like the first of the 5,000 titles we've tested so far that feels as if it lands." And so it was like that kind of idea—fascinating. Yeah, I remember there was a—um, I forget where in the book it is, like, somewhere early on—where you are referencing, you're making the case for this and then you're referencing all the different studies or different books that you were reading. And each sentence that you had pulled referenced a researcher

talking about play in their work, and every sentence had the word "play" or "playful" in it. And that's where I started to really be like, okay, I understand how this is all being connected together. And it's cool because I think with things like self-help, just broadly, yeah, a lot of the secret to positioning or differentiation is finding that through line in lots of different things and pulling it together. And I feel like this through line was—I keep pointing over here because you have a copy of it on your book, and I keep looking at it—is,

that was a really interesting through line to find. And I feel like it all seems to—it's how it always is, right? It's like it seems to make so much sense now; it doesn't seem like it made a ton of sense in the beginning. Yeah, how much did you discover this either through just writing and reading and exploration, or were you an outliner? Did you, like, have an idea start with an outline, refine the outline? What was that process like? Yeah, you know, I think the first half of the book has a strong through line. The

second half doesn't really because the title, "Feel Good Productivity," only came about like two and a half years into the process. And so it was always going to be play, power, and people; like, those were always the chapters in part one. But initially, because I started with an outline and it was like part one was about energizing, and part two was about procrastination, and part three was around burnout and stuff, I think we managed to make it work with that through line. But if I had my time again and another five years and I knew

the title of the book was going to be "Feel Good Productivity," it would have had a way stronger through line because I'm sure I could have found a lot of really good stuff that really pushed that message. But because the title sort of came towards the end of the process, then it was a case of trying to almost retrofit what we already had, knowing that, like, "Okay, well, all this stuff around burn, there's all this stuff around procrastination and emotions and stuff," and like, I guess we can do a little bit of literary sleight of

hand and say that, like, you know, feeling bad makes you procrastinate, so feeling good makes you productive. It's not quite that simple, but with a bit of hand waving and a little bit of shoehorning in a block quote or something—like a pull quote that really emphasizes the feel-good angle—maybe it can work. Yeah, and so it felt a little unsatisfying once that title—it’s like trying to come up with the title of a YouTube video once you've made the video. It's like, "Y well, it's always way harder than starting with the title." And so, yeah, I don't

know what your original question was. Yeah, okay, so on a—like, that's one of the biggest things that we teach. In all our writing programs, too, it's like if you start with the title—the title is what dictates all of the content. But if you start with the content and try to retrofit the title, it's impossible. What a nightmare! Yeah, so actually, it's interesting that the next book you write, yeah, it's like you should spend a disproportionate amount of time on the title, 100%. That's what I tell every author I know. This now, whenever someone's like, "Yeah,

I'm two years into the process, and we're still thinking about the title," I'm like, "No! I can feel the pain!" And they're all like, "Yep, I know." Yeah, 'cause literally, the title or the subtitle completely changes so many things: the stories you tell, the résumés you pull, the advice you give—everything! I would have had no idea about this had I not been through the process. Because if someone had told me this three years ago—that, oh yeah, you should really think of the title first—I would have listened to the publisher, where they were like, "Oh, you

know, like in 80% of cases, the title comes later," and stuff. I was like, "Okay, okay." So this is another thing I've learned: Publishers, they don't really have a framework for books. They sort of do. I can tell that they all think that the key to self-help is to go as broad as possible. The challenge of going broad is that it becomes less and less tangible and less and less specific. So what happens is you have a lot of these self-help books that come out with nothing to hold on to. They'll be titled like Limitless—whoever's

book is named Limitless, is his name to you, right? So it'll be Limitless, and the subtitle will be like, "Becoming Your Best Self." It's like, I don't know what I'm signing up for! Your book, actually, and I think it often happens on accident, I don't want to take away from what you did, but I think it often happens on accident, where your book title is actually—I've been formulating this framework around like the perfect book title. What is the perfect book title? Your main title is actually a category of productivity. So as much as possible, you

actually want to define a categorical difference, right? So like slow productivity—K-Por defining a category—exactly! He's not trying to be productivity; he's trying to be slow productivity. Exactly! And so, on accident or on purpose, you did that, which is literally 90% of the game. Because people that read the book title then go, "I intuitively understand this isn't about all productivity." And I've already seen there's a book on slow productivity, so it's a different niche or subcategory. What is Feelgood productivity? So you're being specific, but it's also really broad. Everyone wants to be productive, and everyone wants

to feel good. Yeah, so one of the keys that I found to book titles is: how can you make something both specific and broad at the same time? Feelgood productivity accomplishes that. Then the subtitle has to tell you what you're going to get, right? And so the subtitle is like, "How to do more of what matters to you." How to do more of what matters to you, right? Okay, so it actually is accomplishing that. So you see Feelgood productivity, and you go, "Oh, this is a how-to book." So we accomplished that, right? And then it's

like, well, what does the person want to learn how to do? They want to learn how to do what matters to them. Right? If you don't have those two pieces—if you don't have the category differentiator multiplied by what are you actually telling me—there's a reason why those books don't move, you know? And so now your job, when you go do this on your own the next time, is like: how do you take that general framework and go, "Now let me apply it to something different," and then spend like a year just doing nothing but workshopping

the title and the subtitle? I agree! I completely agree. Do you think I should lean into being the productivity guy? I think, I think in snow laap [sic], would you talk about this kind of—the whole, like, you know, Ryan Holiday equals stoicism kind of thing? If you ask people, what's the word that you would associate with Ali Abdaal, that word is productivity! That's a really good word! It's a really high-value word to be associated with my name. So do I want to go, I don't know, feel-good fitness, feel-good relationships, feel-good spirituality, feel-good parenting, or do

I want to go productive relationships, productive parenting? You know, that sort of idea. Okay, so this is an awesome question. This is going to be very advanced, so anyone who's listening, we're just gon' to skip straight to level 80! Okay, alright, so first of all, I think it's funny, this growing trend you see it on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, where everyone's like, "I am the broad category guy!" Yeah, the writing guy, the writing guy, the productivity guy, right? Okay, the thing that everyone needs to internalize is that when you're thinking categorically, the goal you are—not

what's important. Like, the goal is actually not how do I grow the category of "I'm the productivity guy." The goal is how do I grow the category itself, and I am part of it. Fine! Like, Ryan Holiday grew stoicism, right? So he doesn't go, "I'm the stoicism guy." He goes, "I'm going to evangelize stoicism." And because I am doing that more than anyone, you associate me with that category. Right? So... Every person who does the guy thing, I'm like, "You already misunderstood the idea." Right? Second of all, is your book title: "You Stumbled Upon Something,"

which is, it's not all productivity; it's Feelgood Productivity. Right? So if I were you, your mega category is not productivity; you're not the productivity guy; it's Feelgood Productivity. Then the question is, "Okay, so you own that now. You've planted your flag. Now, what are all the subcategories of Feelgood Productivity?" So what are all the other things that can go within that umbrella? Feelgood Productivity for parents, Feelgood Productivity for writers, Feelgood Productivity for students. So you can go, you can go the "for" - the Miracle Morning for... so, for... yeah, for left dogs. Yeah, so you

could go, you could niche down within that category by audience. Yeah, you could niche down by outcome; you could niche down by problem; you could niche down in all sorts of different ways. Okay, what do you mean by "problem" or by...? So I think that the mistake would be... well, I actually think you could go multiple different ways. Typically, it's very hard. So there's an old book called "Positioning." You ever read that book "Positioning"? I've read it ages ago, but I need to. By Al Ries and Jack Trout, and they have this concept called line

extension or brand extension. Right? Which is, you know, Google becomes known for search, and then they go and take the Google brand and they bring it over to social, call it Google Plus, and it doesn't go anywhere. Right? Because typically, you can't just take a brand and then extend it into other categories. Right? So I think the mistake would be you thinking, "Well, I'm Ali Abdaal, and I've been successful in productivity. Now let me just go jump to a different mega category and just think." Right? You can sort of make the argument, though, that it's

not fully line extension if you're extending not the brand Ali Abdaal, but you're extending the category of Feelgood Productivity. And that's where you could go Feelgood relationships, you know, Feelgood fitness, whatever. Sure. But what I would think about first is what are the categories that are most closely related to productivity? Like, relationships isn't the closest next category. So what are some other, I mean, motivation would be... I mean, I guess, like, how do you define category? Time management? Man, like that's a subset of productivity. Productivity is so wide, so you're sort of going like, what

are the largest subcategories within productivity? Sure, yeah, time management would be a big one, procrastination, motivation definitely, increasingly discipline is a lot of... So, like, for example, like Feelgood discipline? Like, that's interesting. That's interesting. And that, that is like a one deviation away, and you're not... yeah, I'm full of them. And so that's not you going, "I'm Ali Abdaal; I can be successful at anything." That's you taking your already successful flag in the ground and going, "I'm just going to extend it to this little territory that's right next to me." Yeah, Feelgood discipline would be

an interesting book to write. And so that's kind of... it almost writes itself. Exactly! That title writes itself. And something that I always look for, especially with book titles, is how do you take two words that shouldn't be in the same room and put them in the same room? And Feelgood and discipline usually are not put together. So inevitably, you just created some magic for the person's like Feelgood in relationships. I mean, that's like so vanilla. Exactly! So you're looking for that dissonance. Oh, that's good. Anything else? Um, yeah, I think just to crystallize it,

though, if I were you, especially because of how successful this book has been, and I sort of seen how you've adjusted some of your branding to like sort of be all cohesive with this book and the book title, everything, website redesign stuff as well, I would, if I were you, I would 100% double down on the mega category of Feelgood Productivity and make everything fall under that. And literally, I honestly think no one has really executed this better from a categorical lens as Ryan Holiday with Stoicism. Yeah, and that's your whole goal. It's just Ali

Abdaal comes second; Feelgood Productivity comes first. How do I build a suite of products and a library of IP and books that falls within that category? So if I did a book called something like, I don't know, "How to Actually Enjoy Your Work" or something like that, "How to Actually Enjoy Your 9 to 5" or something, that's almost like extending the category of Feelgood Productivity. Um, yeah, sort of. Yeah, you could do that. The risk that you run with that is it's very similar to that book, the book that you just wrote. And so, same,

like with our pricing discussion, where people put prices together, most people, if you look at like Mark Manson's actually a good example of this, his second book and his first book are actually very similar. And so when you read the first book, you're sort of like, "I don't know that I need to read the second book because it's so..." you know. And so when you're thinking about the library, your goal is like, how do I create something that is farther away from my first book from a concept perspective? Good point. Yeah, so Feelgood Discipline would

be one of them where people can appreciate that those two are actually different books, but they're close; they're related enough that like, "Okay, yeah, that makes sense." Yeah, you know, or like Feelgood Conflict Resolution, you're like, "Oh, that's interesting." Like conflict resolution usually feels stressful, yeah, you know? So what would that look like? So you have—I mean, it doesn't get much bigger than the irony of Feelgood productivity—is that you've niched down without niching down because it's still so wide. Yeah, so you've found something. The magic is like finding something specific that actually doesn't rule a

lot of people out but immediately forces people to go, "Well, do I want slow productivity or do I want Feelgood productivity?" Yeah, yeah. Part of the reason to have blocks on the book cover was also that, like, I could imagine a world where all of our books had like blocks—colored blocks in different configurations. So I was sort of like mocking up Feelgood Parenting, being like, "The blocks are a bit higgledy-piggledy to look like kind of a totle of blocks." Oh, that's cool! Or like Feelgood Fitness is like, "The blocks are like a barbell," or something

to that effect. It would just be cute if like the whole thing could have—a whole library could have a sort of video animated reconfiguration of the blocks that would result in the things. But, yeah, that's going really like, "No one cares." So something else to think about too is if you wanted to like experiment with that library, you could not deploy a ton of resources, and you could write smaller eBooks or even print books on Amazon within those different verticals, and then look for the one that outperforms the rest. Then go to the publisher and

go, "I'm ready to do round two. I've written five different Feelgood category eBooks; this is the one that's clearly working. Let's do a book deal that's even bigger than the first one," but is basically that book expanded. Yeah, because Atomic Habits is just a blog post expanded; Mark Manson's book was a blog post expanded, right? So they are interested in the expansion of ideas once they're proven successful. And I guess, kind of ringing on that, maybe it would also be useful to just do a video tool called "F-Good Discipline" with, like, how to actually blah

blah whatever the subtitle would be and see how that does. I mean, a book I'm working on right now is based on our first episode together because the title—I forget even the title—but it was like "Five Ways to Make a Million Dollars as a Writer" or something, that kind of thing. And that, because it performed so well, sent me down the rabbit hole of, well, or "Five Paths to Make" something like that. I was like, "Oh, it'd be really interesting to do a book around the different career paths and how each one, pros and cons

of making a million dollars as a writer," like how do you make a million as a literary writer, you know? And so, yeah, you should take all of these ideas and just run them through the lean writing method, create a video on it, create Twitter threads on it. "Feelgood Discipline," that's a good starting to percolate. Yeah, that could be quite a fun book to write. The best part is I only take 10%. Yeah, nice! Um, cool, what about hybrid publishing? I hate it! It's a hedge. I think almost anything in life that is a hedge

means—except hybrid agencies! Except hybrid agencies, exactly. Hybrid agencies, the word is in a different context, but hybrid publishing is like you don't know whether you're playing the New York Times game or the self-publishing game; you've picked a weird middle ground. How many copies has "The Art and Business of Online Writing" sold? I don't know how many, or like how much have you made from it? Uh, yeah, number of copies, I don't know, but I've probably made like a quarter million from it, something like that. Self-published? Yeah, so you just get royalty checks every month, or

every—how does it work? Uh, every month on Amazon. Nice! And I sell like 20% of them through my own website, so I'm getting 100% of that sale. Oh, you just sell through like a Gumroad store or something? Yeah, like that. And what's wild is when I wrote that book in 2020, I had been writing online for a while, didn't have a huge audience. The advance I would have gotten for that book probably would have been about 20 grand. Yeah, maybe I could have talked my way into getting like a 50 grand advance just because of

where I was, but if I had done that, to date, I probably wouldn't have made much more than 50 grand. So it's interesting too to look at that decision in hindsight and go, not only have I completely eclipsed whatever that advance would be, but I'm making way more. And if you sell on Amazon, so like, how much do you personally take home from each sale? Like do you sense what those numbers are? I've read this so many times, and I always forget the exact numbers, but it's something like, depending on eBook or print book, it's

somewhere in the ballpark of—I think print is like—it's one of the two: it's either print is 30% and eBook is 70%, or it's flipped, but it's a percentage of the same. Okay, fine. And have you got an audiobook for it? No, and that was one of the biggest missed opportunities. I've just been so busy, and we've been building our companies, but that's on my to-do list for this year. Nice! If I had done the audiobook with it, I probably would have made another $250. Which is really frustrating to look at in hindsight, but you know,

yeah, okay, golden question: maybe it's a good one to end on. Was writing this book daunting, and how did you overcome the constant inner critic? Did you have an inner critic? What was that like? Oh yeah, all the way through. I thought I'd gotten over imposter syndrome and stuff because I’d been doing YouTube videos for so long and all that, but as soon as it came to writing a book, there was something about that. Why do you think that is? Why is that so daunting for people? I think, for me, a big part of it

was that when you write a book, you’re really putting out a thing into the world, saying that I think what I have to share is sufficiently valuable. Whereas when you put out YouTube videos, like, I mean, everyone and their dog is putting out YouTube videos. It's not like a major— you weren’t sticking your neck out that far when putting out a YouTube video. I mean, still, people think that putting out a YouTube video is sticking their neck out, but putting out a book, where particularly strangers can then review it on Amazon and Goodreads publicly and

can actually share what they think about it—even though people comment ridiculous things on YouTube videos—yeah, but it’s a YouTube video. Like, no one, like, it doesn’t have a rating; YouTube videos don’t have a rating system. I think part of it was the fear of "What if people don’t like this?" and then that will be public acknowledgment that it is, ah, and that is really scary. Which was a big part of, like, second-guessing myself. Also, the books I read—I was sort of comparing my shitty first drafts to, like, Dan Pink's final draft and thinking, "Gosh, it’s

so good! How is it so good?" And yeah, when I got the book deal, I was 26, and I kind of thought, "Who the heck is going to listen to a 26-year-old dude talk about this?" Wow, realized that was four years ago. Wow. And so, yeah, there were a lot of these sorts of things. I've never really done anything interesting. Yeah, I mean, I was a doctor, but, like, big whoop; so was everyone I know, you know? That kind of thing. And, like, yeah, I grew a YouTube channel, but like, you know, it’s not like

a Mr. Beast-level YouTube channel. And yeah, I grew a business, but like, you know, it's only a seven-figure business, you know? That sort of thing—it was all sorts of like, "My credential is only X," and there are five million other people in the world, five million or more, who also have credential X or Y. Interesting—like, who am I to write this book? So then how did you get it over the finish line? Did you hire a coach or anybody to help you? Yeah, so I had a writing coach initially in the early stages, and then

had an external editor outside of the publishing house about halfway through the process. She was great. Rachel—she sort of project-managed the whole thing. A lot of my conversations with Rachel and with Kate, my agent, were emotional-support-type conversations where they were like, "Don't worry; everyone goes through this. Yep, it's fine; you don’t have to read the reviews. Also, the book is genuinely good, so don’t worry about it. We’ll tell you if we thought it was bad. Don’t worry; we’re all professionals; we’ve done this before. The publishers have done this before; we know when a book is

bad. We're not going to let this be bad; don’t worry." A lot of that. So that is a big value. Yeah, you know, I understand then why a lot of people want that hand-holding, you know? But you can hire that out, too; you also can hire that. Yeah, interesting! And then a big part of it was, along the way, I had to remember to take my own advice. Whenever I would really struggle with the book, it’s because I flipped into treating it with too much seriousness, taking it too sincerely. Sorry, just taking it too seriously

and thinking this is a big, heavy thing. It was the times where I really embodied this idea of, like, "What would this actually look like if it were fun? What does the feel-good version of this look like?" Exactly where I would be like, "You know what? This is it; I’m writing about this!" So let me actually, okay, cool. Let me, you know, get a walking pad for my desk. Let me do this, like, dictate this bit while I’m going for a walk around Hyde Park. Let me do this bit in the coffee shop. Let me

have, like, a co-working party with friends. Let’s take the whole team to a team retreat in Wales and get a big Airbnb where the goal is no one’s allowed to do any work, and the team’s all hanging out, and I’m just sitting there grinding on this book, 'cause I have to get a chapter every day. It was things like that that made the process more enjoyable and ultimately helped it get over the finish line. What of those things are you planning on doing this next time? Um, a big part of it is the intense sprints.

I found that the most productive times in the book journey were when I— Had like a whole week or two to just think about the book—the whole stuff around like, well, if you write for three hours a day, then that's as much as anyone can do in any reasonable length of time. And then, if you write a thousand words a day, that extends out, compounds, blah blah blah. I didn't really make much progress because the startup costs of rebooting it back into my RAM and trying to figure out where I was—it’s like, okay, where was

I? Let me bring up all those tabs on freaking Zotero and Scrivener that I have. What was that study again? By that time, it's like, it's time for my coffee and poo, and then it's like I can't be arsed to write anymore. But on the weeks where I just had nothing to do other than write the book, or on the whole days where I had nothing to do other than write the book, yeah, I screw around a bit in the morning, I go to the toilet three times, but I still have another seven hours to

write the book. So that's—I'm actually really glad you said that, because one of the things I beat myself up about most often is, you know, because I'm running a company, you know? There's a lot to do, and I will get very down on myself, being like, “You didn't do your personal writing today!” Yeah, I did eight hours of work writing, you know? But I didn't get my personal writing in. And I actually think, yeah, it’s funny—sometimes you just need to hear it from someone else—but I think you’re totally right: it’d be better to just immerse

yourself for a week rather than try and do 30 minutes a day. Which is so interesting because that's counter to everything we talk about in Ship 30. But I think, especially when you're juggling so many different types of pursuits or projects, immersion is almost always better. Yeah, I think so. Um, what was I going to say? It’s like, um, I’ve also realized this—a big part of what Cal talks about in "Slow Productivity": the more projects you have going on in parallel, the more the administrative overhead costs of each project add up. And so actually just

carving out a whole day to just do one thing means that you don't have to deal with all of the other crap that would otherwise be associated with running a business and building a team and stuff. Yep. So, yeah, I'm very bullish on these short sprints of intensity—to just turn it into a party! I see why writers go to a cabin in the woods for like a week at a time or a month at a time. I'm like, you know what? That would actually be kind of fun! Maybe I'm going to come full circle because

I always trash “The Cabin in the Woods,” the shapo and the chord cod pipe. Maybe I'll come full circle and go, you know what? There is a place for a cabin in the woods after all. Yeah, I think editing is nice to do in like small drips and drops because, with editing, the goal is to see it with fresh eyes, and to like—you know, yeah, that's a good point. But the writing itself, especially the first draft, and then also like the really meaty edits where it's like, okay, I need to immerse myself in this for

a whole week just to see the whole picture and then be able to slot things around. Yeah, you have to hold all that stuff in your head. Yeah, well, congrats again on being a New York Times bestseller! Thank you very much! Enjoying the book, but you also sort of talked me out of reading the second half, so we'll see if I finish it. Although a lot of people have said chapter 9, the final chapter, is their favorite one, so maybe you just get great. And if you watch to the end of this video, we'll give

you a bonus! Um, do you have any bonuses this time around for people who are watching to the end of this episode? You know they know where to find us; we're always giving away free stuff. Not too worried about it. Happy I got to see you here in London! Yeah, thanks for coming by! And if someone’s watching this on YouTube, you can click here for the first episode that we did, which goes into more detail about the backstory and a bit more of the groundwork—good stuff. Awesome! All right, so that's it for this week's episode

of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or share

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