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

There are so many people that are now realizing that they all need to build things on the internet so 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 and today we're talking about the fastest path to $10,000 a month

as a WR so your fastest path as a writer to 5K as a side hustle you know 10K 20K replacing your full-time income and then some is to just go find one person and go I can help you solve problems in your business we talk about how to craft the perfect email and the sort of energy that it takes to sell and how sales is Really the same thing as education and a bunch of mistakes that we see people make when pitching us their various different Services it seems like the longer road to go H

I have to go educate and talk to 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 if you skip that step you think you're taking the shortcut and then guess what Shortcut ends up being the longer road because you skipped the whole learning 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 so 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 you know how to make money online as a writer yep um in this episode I was hoping we could go a Little bit deeper into this because you teach people how to make money as ghost writers and we want to teach people what is their fastest path to actually making money as a writer because a lot of people still kind of think that writing is a thing that can't like you can't really make money from it I've just published a book

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 we'll start with the mistake so the mistake that writers make I think is thinking that you need to have a ton of attention in order to start monetizing so everyone thinks step one I need a million followers so already wrong because if I told you tomorrow you had to go give a speech in front of a million

people you would have an anxiety attack you don't need a million followers second is they go okay Well maybe I don't need a million followers I just need 100,000 or I need 10,000 reduce the number okay still 1,000 FS right yeah okay so still still wrong and the reason you know there's all these different paths you can take to monetizing your craft any craft will use writing as the example the the fastest path though is not selling a product it is selling a service because if you think and everyone in the Creator World talks about

selling digital Products right sell an ebook you sell a course you sell a cohort-based experience whatever it is right but that's not actually the the fastest path because most of those products if not all of them are priced in a couple hundred bucks or less or if you're selling an ebook it's like 10 or $20 right so the lower the price point the more volume you need so it sounds really easy to go okay well I can make you know five or 10 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 10 20K a month right you need volume yeah I mean especially with a physical book like or a physical book is my book sold a lot of cop well you know sold like 200,000 copies but I still I still haven't paid off the advance and our royalty percentage is I think I'm allowed to share this about like 15% oh you got we got 15 we got a Good deal deal we got a decent deal we

got 15% but it's like I make maybe 150 every time I sell a book yeah no it's a horrible so I need to sell a lot of books to make a living as of professional writer if the thing that I was making money from was selling books yeah and by the way so and I'm happy to jam on this cuz I love the whole traditional versus self-publishing we get nut on here as well you know yeah like just do a round table because the Reason why there's the whole cliche 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 cliche well nobody makes a living as a Writer right and that's wrong and so your fastest path if you're sitting there and I 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 because 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 five grand to do something for them so it's actually monetizing through a service so your fastest path as a writer to 5K as a side hustle you know 10K 20K replacing your full-time income and then some is to just go find one person and go 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 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 in the UK's National Health Service and I'm Like you know I quite you know I think I 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 man if I could have 5K a month coming in I'd be able to

quit my job and be able to take my Gap here be able to travel around the world and then I can always come back to Medicine later if I feel like it y but I sort of feel like but like I don't know I just went through med school I 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 dot dot dot yeah this will be awesome okay so step one is you have to identify your information

Advantage so most people this is this is where how 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 5 million Plus YouTube subscribers productivity expert and they're like I want to be that y 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 your goal is not to just imagine and think you know what

what is the 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 3 years right you graduated medical school what 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 to 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 so 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 that and that you know 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 M so the misunderstanding and why I say that ghost writing 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 a lot of a lot of Medics I know and this was

me back in the day um 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 soing who are you sing to well you're mostely to brle students people in med school right or their parents if they're Applying to Mid school and the parents are rich for example yeah but tutoring is already price anchored to a certain thing right like most people like how much are

you willing to pay hourly for tutoring most most tutoring per hour so the second thing is you have to go okay I have an information Advantage Now who is the most um like what's the right word the the mo 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 10 grand is nothing but if you go pitch you know a parent of a kid who needs help via tutoring 10

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 a massive like sort of mind-blowing thing for people to realize that different people value money at different level significantly differently and especially businesses value money at a completely different in a completely different way than individuals do yeah how 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 and there was a story that I tell sort of often in our programs is there was a moment where I was

pitching a ghost riding client I was probably 27 and we met in this restaurant in La And he was hiring me to GH stri this white paper for for a crypto startup they were trying to launch and I remember going into the meeting being like okay how much should I charge I'm I'm going to throw outrageous number in the air and I remember I mustered up the courage I was like I'm going to charge 10 grand to write this white paper and we were sitting in the meeting and he we 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 gonna and at the last minute I almost backed out you know but I was like it's going to cost 10 grand and I like waited and he looks at me and he goes 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 and I walked away from that meeting going 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 ghost Writing Academy all the time too we we train ghost writers to build and write these educational email courses for people we go you can sell this for five grand no problem no matter how many times we tell them you can sell this for five grand there's a large percentage of people who the first time they pitch it they they can't even get the words five grand out of their mouth because they're so they can't conceive of someone being Willing to pay that and

it's usually only until you experience it a couple times where you're like wow everyone's saying yes to $1,000 like maybe I should charge more right nice okay so quickest path to making money I I I guess sort of zooming out from writing in general it's it's find a small number of people to pay you a lot of money rather than find 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 so good at taking money from like $97 for why would anyone pay that Y and they've just paid like had tens of thousands in college fees and all that kind of stuff At at the same time and it's all I mean there's 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 a 100 bucks or 200 bucks going 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 spending money And investing money in yourself is a skill and you can see it with people that make a lot of money but they still have spending habits as if they were broke you know they constrain themselves

and I think a lot of a lot of entrepreneurs or Founders they almost take this pride in you know I don't drive car I drive a Prius you know or I didn't I didn't get the nice apartment I I still have My Little Queen one bedom and that's fine like 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 Grand because I know I'm going to get an Roi from that yeah

yeah it reminds me of a moment it was like a year or two ago um where I was talking to tinon my YouTube producer and we we'd hired this guy to do like graphic designs or something and and you know I thought it was going to come out To $1,200 or something like that cool whatever you know the guy's really good $1,200 as a as a bargain then we got the invoice and he charged 5 grand and I was like oh and it's just like oh because because we arranged it over like Twitter DMs I

didn't quite realize he was charging per asset rather than per platform and and then I said to Dan or Finance guy like yeah five grand cool whatever you know just pay the invoice and tinon remember remembers that moment Vividly thinking wow to Ali abdal there is no difference between $1200 and $5,000 and that being like a mindblowing moment for him to be like holy an entrepreneur with a multi-million dollar business really values money spent on business stuff yeah completely different rate if I was spending my personal money I would value it very differently but if

I spending business money it's like because it's Kind of Open Season yeah and you know 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 resource and as you hire more resource and as you employ more resource right like we both were Gamers growing up I saw that note in your book by the way uh where you were like uh I was I was work at it and I read that and I was like oh I love this it made me

such a fan um but That is really the whole point of video games you know and a video game is just the deployment of resources to an end and I think when you're starting out I remember being 25 years old living in Chicago in a dump studio apartment I had no resource I had like $100 in my checking account right so you can't fathom or understand how other people are deploying resource when you don't have resource which is why it is actually so important to listen to Conversations like this or surround yourself with other people

or even like do free work for people that have thriving businesses because just you being in their presence and you just like 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're Talking about World World of Warcraft um you know there's the area ghostlands in the burning Crusade where I remember when I've uh I I started playing during during burning Crusade

and I had like a level 14 Warlock and there was this there was this quest to kill one of the silver Elites that would that would you that would n you 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 and then you go to level 80 and or like and and then you go to a main city and you right click inspect people who've got like level 80 gear and you're like whoa uhhuh and then as

I got to level 80 and started doing the stuff and started finding a way to use Auctioneer and prospecting and Jewel crafting and all that to make money I ended up spending 18,000 gold on like a one of the motorbike mounty type thingies the mechano chopper or whatever It was and I I still vividly remember remember how amazing it felt to be making that 14 silver and thinking oh my god this is incredible and then fast forward like 2 years later I'm spending 18,000 gold on this on this new motorbike thing and I think that

speaks to this idea of yeah you're just over time you learn to deploy the resource more effectively yep or almost like in a in um have you have you read the mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson no But you know I just I just got turned on to his library and I'm like starting to go down the library final Empire Bron Sanderson okay but it's like in all these um stories it's like you've got the the hero who starts off as like a little kid in the village like you know Anakin Skywalker and tne or whatever

and he's like he's a bit he's not very powerful and then over time as they learn eventually they get dominion over the Galaxy and now they're likeing 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 and it's just sort of this power curve which really is also a thing in entrepreneurship 100% yeah that's what I find so fascinating about speaking to people who are like have bigger businesses it's just they're just thinking on a completely different level and there okay

just 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 right so you complete a level 80 Quest they're like oh congratulations for bringing us the 10 bore skins we give you nine gold and 87 silver right but when you complete a quest at level 14 you're getting paid 10 silver or 14 silver right so the the second thing in this whole you know like what is your fastest path to 10K a month I would

actually and I do I often advocate for The step before that which is you shouldn't even try and charge for the first thing that you do you're level one right like you having 10 copper or zero Copper at level one makes no difference you can't buy anything with 10 copper anyway right so a lot of people whenever I talk about the ROI of free work everyone comes back and like no you should get paid what your worth is and your value and you should never do free work and don't let people will take Advantage of

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 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 and you Just say I'll do it for you for free and 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 9 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 and 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 in

our last part as well and after that I've had so many people reach out to meed with it so it's kind of good it's good that we're sort of putting it on the map a little bit to be like guys the ROI on free is astronomically 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 bucks yeah but when you're at that stage it sort of feels like when you're at level 14 the the 14 silver feels like oh my God I it's so much money and you have to that 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 I you know 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 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 like the medical is area Cool and I know that that I and and I'm like okay maybe I shouldn't do tutoring because tutoring is anchored to like I don't know I was I was giving a talk at Cambridge a few a few weeks ago and some guy

came up to me afterwards he was like you know 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 you know it's uh it's quite a lot of money I was like oh how how how much is a lot of money and he he felt really kg about Saying it cuz his friends were right he was like charge 45s per hour yeah I was like yeah oh okay £5 per hour um it very much very much as I'm could to to

a lot of Mone 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 you won 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 when I saw you a video about the cold 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 cuz we knew what we had to what we had to execute on and I was like H interesting but if you Think about again it's like does it matter if we got the value over the course of a year or one day no doesn't matter and and you know in some ways one day is even better because it saves you time yeah this episode of Deep

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10% off so thank you again to hostinger for sponsoring this episode Okay cool so I've got the informational advantage in like the medically typed bits but I shouldn't go off to people who don't have much money how do I think about it then so I mean okay first is recognizing 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 all right 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 just no there's no opportunity okay first of all you haven't deployed enough volume to know whether there's enough opportunity second is there are so many people that are now Realizing that they all need to build things on the internet so 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 so 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 increasing so all you have to do is go I'm going to go help the category of person who every single day that goes by that is growing so going to any

business owner any Creator anyone any that is tally related to your information advantage and in my opinion another Mistake that gets made is people go well so what are all the most popular writing gigs yeah so 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 going well where is the growing audience in this case that would be the the growing customer base and what is the Inc not popular yet but the increasingly popular skill that they all

want and so for every business owner Or Creator or anyone right there's three things they all want they all want help putting out more content yep well special in LinkedIn it seems okay so just and we'll get more specific they all want help creating text based content usually first and then it becomes video or audio right they all need help moving that audience to an owned platform AKA email right but 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

give some sort of free value where they exchange their email address for something so the best vehicle we found our educational email courses then once they're on your email list well you don't just want them to go through the educational email course and then they're done and you never talk to them again right they need a Weekly Newsletter because that Weekly Newsletter nurtures them for a prolong 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 you could just pick

one of them and you go I'm this person with an information advantage in this industry or this Niche and I specialize in one of those three services and you need one person and they will pay you three four five grand per project per month and congratulations you either just replaced Or at least hit like 50% of your full-time income H okay so I'm a j need doctor I have an informational advantage in medicine I know I like writing I used to write essays in med school and I likeed you know I had a personal blog

back in the day and blah blah blah you know all that all that kind of stuff um and so I'm thinking okay who could possibly want to pay me five grand a month to help grow their LinkedIn presence and yeah it would probably be a Big farmer executive maybe the CEO maybe someone in the CC Suite maybe someone who's the VP level or director level or whatever let's go simpler than that a family friend of yours who's a doctor and they have a small business they have a private practice and they want to create content

on LinkedIn to help promote the fact that they're like a shoulder and blah blah surgeon or whatever Dermatology that kind of thing 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 go I'm going to start taking this into my own hands I'm going to start educating people right what are what are the reasons people have back pain what are the ways

to get rid of back back pain without surgery if you have surgery how do you recover faster what foods should You eat what exercises should you do right so 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 load like 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 doing Private Practice in one's a spinal surgeon one's a radiologist and one's a dermatologist and I'm like you know sweating thinking of sending these emails what am I saying okay so this is awesome so IR resist will offer script we'll just do it like word for word okay so um I'm GNA stick with the the spine example because I because I'm familiar with it okay so first thing is you have to do your homework and understand well what is what does this person do and What do they

specialize in and what's their problem so another big mistake most people will go apply for a job on upor or Fiverr right when you do that what you're effectively doing is raising your hand going 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 okay as a result that is why you have no pricing power because the power Dynamic is wrong right they Are the boss you the employee have the dam

them and have toate a they didn't they or a problem that they know they have they just haven't gotten around to fixing right so you go to the doctor you go problem you want higher quality customers you have a private practice you want more people who uh are interested in back surgery but like a specific type of back surgery so for example my dad specializes in minimally Invasive spine surgery okay so it's like that's the type of person you want to attract right the the 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 and the ultimate negative consequence of That problem is that until you start educating people you are going to be your your business strategy is you're just going to sit there and you're going to hope that customers walk through the door okay so if you start with that like

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 so 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 is that we would be able to start reaching people that would either be interested in this or would uh maybe Know someone who's interested in this and then ultimately we could move that social audience over to our email list and we could even run like 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 go oh no problem so we can create social content for you every month it's three grand a month I take care of the ideas the writing all I need is about 30 minutes of your time uh once a month even we do a quick recap call go through all the content that we've created look at the analytics um you've already written a book so I can pull a lot of the content from that book um and that's it happy to help

and is this all in a single email Like how what what ises the process of sending this out look like so so that would be the call so to get them on the call yeah right is you start we have a phrase we talk about all the time which is in the beginning your Niche is your network so you have an information Advantage your Niche is the fact that you have a family friend who's a doctor y okay great that's the first person you should go pitch because they are most likely to answer your text

or answer Your email or answer your call right so the first thing is you open with problem hey know it's been a long time since we chatted Uncle yeah you know Uncle whoever yeah uh quick question I was thinking about your business you know how do you typically get customers you know is that something that you've been thinking about you know are you struggling to get leads in your area tell tell me about what's been going on okay that could be a text message that Could be an email that's and then Uncle Johnny might reply

to that yeah saying oh yeah it's actually been kind of hard we adverti Google but nothing happens exactly thing and then you go cool I've got a couple interesting ideas why don't we hop on a call together and I'll walk you through uh how this works I I found something that I think would be really beneficial for your business Uncle Johnny goes all right 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 um what if Uncle Johnny doesn't reply to my text then you just chalk it up you give up 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 go talk to more people how how many more people like well what's your sense of how many emails SL like assuming I was going to go cold like I'm reaching out to local doctors in my area who

I only have a tangential connection to I the fact they live in my area how many emails does it take to get a response to get a get someone on a call do you have a sense of what the thumb is up I would say so even still I would not recommend even opening the door of cold Leads until you have fully exhausted warm leads and the way I think about leads in general is I put them into two different categories I call them leaks and faucets so a leak is someone who goes you know

my my sink is leaking help me right so a leak is someone who has the problem that you can help 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 okay And so one of the biggest missed opportunities is people go well I'm going to go pitch you know all these cold leads no you should start with all the people that you know and then go to each of them and go do you have

a problem if yes I can help you or hey I'm trying to grow my ghost writing 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 Emil List right that's interesting like I I remember coming across that line some somewhere it might have been one of in one of your books and often messaging someone or emailing them saying hey do you know someone who's looking for this sort thing nobody doesn't it's the easiest thing either they know someone or

Chan they' be like oh actually I could kind of use some help with that myself yes but it feels like a more gentle pitch than 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 you are yeah I had a a mentor in Chicago who used to say you are never selling anything to anyone you are giving them an opportunity and 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 like like pitching because that's not everyone knows when they're getting pitched right so 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 I can't help myself like you're making a mistake I 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 and then inevitably they go to you and say so is that what you do then you go oh yeah no that that is what I do I specialize in that and then they go can you help me and you go sure i' I'd be happy to help right so you're almost you're not pitching them and going by from me you're educating and like guiding them until they're forced to go I need someone

to help me is this what you Do nice that s sort of takes the fear out of selling because even in the way I'm describing I'm using the word pitching which yeah even subconsciously has a certain energy about it that feels like I'm trying to sell something yes if I if I was if I had an agency that did I don't know provide some service for right now and I was trying to get you as a client even here on this podcast I I wouldn't pitch you I would just drill into yeah Ali like before

this I took an Hour I thought about I went through your whole funnel you know I just want I just wanted to point out to you right like there's like these 10 things you should do and inevitably we're going to get off the Pod and you're going to go okay so that sounds like a lot of work any chance I could just hire you and your team to do that right and that 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 that is the bottleneck the bottleneck is not someone going you know 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 MH there's a friend of mine who does some really high-end Consulting for these sort of big fashion brands and stuff and is I I was asking him about how he lands these deal these deals and he was like oh yeah just go and and I Just teach them about what's wrong with their

supply chain Y and how AI can potentially help and then I leave it at that and 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 and he's like those are the magic words that I'm looking out for but I never I never get any impression that that's what I'm going for I mean just it it's a lot like Dating right like what's the fastest way to get someone else to

deny you or say no to to you 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 know you see someone attractive and you're like I want to talk to them you don't open by pitching you open by going he 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 don't get the fries though they do this weird thing where they put this like like age parmesan on it and you think it's going to taste good but it's not going to taste good and 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 and 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 yeah there's like um I think

there are people that do this well and then there are people that do it less well like I've started increasingly getting emails and DMS um like every other Instagram DM I get is someone like giving me some sort of neg about how they've been through my funnel and uhoh Ali did you know you're leaving $4,000 a Day on the table and this sort of stuff and I'm just like off like they all taking the same course they're all running the same the same kind of script yeah so there there are ways to not do it

well um but to be honest a lot of it comes down to tone a 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 so you're sending a loom 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's that is an energy right it's not like a trick it's just an Energy and 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 um big fan of your industry and what what you're about by the way like I've I've been really interested in spine surgery for

a long time um my dad's a spine surgeon fun fact so I have this kind of like knowledge about it uh but I was just going through your funnel and I like I noticed a couple things just wanted to point them out for you I Hope this is helpful like that tone comes off very differently right and so 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 that are Like a lot of people are going to YouTube as a source of organic lead gen and the ones who I gravitate towards are the ones who are 27 minute long video Loom walk through explaining how all their systems work and it's a oh and oh by 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 have I I I I don't 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 but also it can be summarized I think

really simply in abundance mindset or scarcity mindset when someone is overly pitching you right you 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 do you need clients because no one wants to work with you right and then you like get turned off from it but in abundance mindset is like hey I'm good on CL 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 it actually doesn't 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 um there's a team member of ours that we hired recently kayin and she's our community manager for productivity Lab and

I did like a sort of very casual pod with her the other day cuz we were waiting for Cal Newport to show up and so she she and I just kind of did a kind of bonus episode of the Pod and she 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 and 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 that I had seen of hers and then she left it at that and I didn't hear from her for like two 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 one of our meetups she seemed cool MH 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 I'm already I'm I'm so turned off by this guy because claming for a job whereas with her it was just like oh it's just chill like yeah she normal she and she's applied for a job and she's made the short list 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 and and are you coming at it from a place of like I swear I can help you you know where are you coming at it from like again hey I'm just reminding you I'm here anytime you want to chat you know more than more than happy to help those just come off so radically different and little just cuz you said it like an amazing growth Hack for finding clients and finding opportunities is you just said it's like 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 as a to offer a service right and I knew that they had purchased ship 30 my likelihood of Reading and Responding to that email and like genuinely considering it is 10 times higher than someone who hasn't right so amazing Growth pack just go find all the people who run communities and have courses and know and have all of the opportunity go pay $97 or 150 or what 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 I was part of YouTuber Academy cohort 3 or something like that I'm going to read there's no world in which I wouldn't Read that like yeah I think similarly when when you're when emailing people who have written books if you've actually read the book and sort of leading with hey you know I I I read your book two years ago I loved ABC and D you

know and 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 it seems so basic in a lot of ways is 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 information Advantage is really easy you know and then with all of this stuff by far the biggest problem is people just don't do

enough volume to see they they talk to four people and those four people say no and then they give up yeah yeah so we I was asking about this what's what is a good amount of volume Before throwing 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 fosses I was thinking five yeah no F five is like you took you know one step into the starting zone and like killed two bores 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 need 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 send 100 emails or 100 DMs I mean identify a 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 and 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 um using chat GPT to automate some of this Outreach and stuff I think the

the 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 which is 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 is the what are the ankle weights so in the beginning it seems like the longer road to go H I have to go educate and talk to a 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 what are the mistakes that then allows you to leverage

Tech but if you skip that step you think you're taking the the shortcut and then guess what 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 chat GPT generated emails and it's it's it's it's almost like I'm sure I'm sure You've gotten this as well where you can kind of just tell when someone is purely copy pasting something and it's just like the tone is a bit off the start is off and it's just it it's just an

immediate you know archive from the inbox kind of kind of response yeah but yeah as you say someone who's like learned 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 Chad GPT generated like Paragraph sort of looks like sort of sounds like um there's something about doing the work that really helps you stand out which itself which then sort of becomes the shortcut the shortcut is actually just doing the work yeah shocker you know my my default is the coffee

shop test if 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 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 are not they didn't

do the work right so I love it's like when people are like 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 ro road to making 5 to 10K a month as a writer I think so last thing I'll say is and we can talk about 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 or building hybrid agencies so the first business that I built was a ghost writing 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 me and My co-founder were completely out of the

business and we were both making 20 grand a month working like an hour or two a day just making sure that the team was running that we we didn't it was our first business I didn't know how good we had it at that time but that was The Sweet Spot and 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 so to service those clients you need to hire more people and people are stat at costs

you're paying salaries usually and so we didn't know that we just thought okay well we're just going to grow forever it's not what happened and 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 like the health of the business but then because had reclaimed all my time I 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 it's pure profit right and so if you think of the difference between you know a Service Company a ghost writing 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

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 or LinkedIn videos or

videos for their documentation or videos for their ads or whatever using the AL YouTube formula which is you get someone who sits on in front of a camera and says stuff with the occasional happening on screen and like a nice edit and like nice background music and stuff basic talking head educational stuff m uh but for businesses like software Companies who want to do documentation or ads or LinkedIn uh probably not LinkedIn because I would need to be under the the founders 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 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 um Hunter Hammond and Blom and we were targeting individuals um 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 deam million dollar compan is like why is it so hard to talk To the camera man yeah but apparently it's really hard so you you found a great a great solution so two things that immediately come to mind though um one is I think if you hire one person one talk head you run a couple risks so one of the risks is um 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 uh daddy caller yeah who's who's the host that okay but yeah Right like where the talk 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 uh frame the channel not around a person but around a category of idea so if it's

like a fintech startup it Would be like fintech advice or what whatever and then I would hire as contractors like three different people so that way from the beginning you've set the pr it's not one brand channel it's not a personal YouTube channel there like multiple personalities people are not that wted 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 ghost

riding the only thing that you're navigating is then the type of Team you're dealing with like for us with our ghost raining agency what would happen is we'd get 10 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 and then so the solution that 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 um like pure tutorial walk through you know another video a week is going to be like Trend watching and you basically give them the rules for the formula up front and you're like each of these videos has these 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 that I don't like that intro right well that I don't really care if you

like that intro or not like 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 would this for this would be how much 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 uh the goal would be to produce the videos that could go on their website or on it's like CH Channel growth would be a happy bonus rather than something that we would lean that we would sell because it's just impossible to it's too hard to guarant Okay I'm going to give you one of the things that we learned too which is then I would Anchor It All Around longtail searching B 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 month one you go and do an Audit you're like these are all you know these are the top 30 longtail 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 and 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 we're it's a complete subjective so you could charge 50 grand for that 100 Grand right it depends on who you're pitching and then at the end of the six months what do you do you go hey our team took some time education we identified another Niche that you could build dominance in it's tangent related we

went ahead did some free work for you this is 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 is if like 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 thingy of your thingy page because Google owns YouTube and 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 sit most people are Going to go no I didn't know that yeah we noticed that your brand is already doing posts on

LinkedIn did you we can also repost the same content on LinkedIn and now you've bu a Content Library on LinkedIn did you LinkedIn videos growing by 58 zillion per 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 go 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 this is like an Enterprise agency offering you

know like yeah you could do it for smaller companies and maybe you have like a paired down offer but if I were you like where people go wrong with pricing is they 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 5 grand or seven Grand that to me that's the same number right so what you want to do is if

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 you know Enterprise tech companies well now there's a pricing Decision nice yeah that's interesting so we could even reach out to companies companies that really should have video content company like Salesforce really should have a ton of tutorials on their own YouTube channel that are actually good yeah a company like HubSpot should really you know the HubSpot are a bit more modern so they are

sort of doing it but we could literally go through well okay how well what comes to mind is we just Go through the Fortune 500 look at all the YouTube channels and see or or the nasda 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 McMillan or like any company that's ever sponsored our stuff

how 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 is the level 80 version you know we were talking about the level 14 version this get 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 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 H on the call with us to be like yeah of course I'll talk to you yeah or dra CMO kind of thing I can tell you because at my age see we we had some of like the biggest tech companies in the world and as soon as you start getting up to like Fortune 500 or like multi-billion dollar companies yeah those are very different deals oh F and like you can do it but there's more red tape sales process takes longer like in my opinion The Sweet Spot is

you actually like do you know the site crunch base yeah okay so crunch Bas publishes you know companies that just raised any amount of money if I were you I would Target companies in the 10 to100 million range either in in could be valuation money raised it could be 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 that General range and that's a big Range but 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 was 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 we land we landed one of the biggest Enterprise tech companies in the world like they have as many employees as like small countries and they literally said we don't do we don't work with vendors for five grand a month like our smallest vendor is like a hundred grand so they prepaid for a year a whole year Up front just because they like that 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 like it's crazy and so if I were you I would have two offers and I would have one that caters to the smaller Creator but is still sort of Premium like five grand a month 7500 a month you know smaller size business Maybe even like a company doing like 10 million would say yes to that but then I would also have a super ding-dong version that's like you know 20 30 40 50k a month yeah and then you go pitch that to100 million do companies if you guys

didn't have your own long form YouTube video strategy what is the sort of thing that that if hypothetically me or someone of my team would to say hey guys you know we'll do we'll do long form 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 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 yeah you know and so creating a branded but f 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 with 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 okay you know that that to me is just a yeah let's see what happens I think our pricing

cap would probably be around 10 grand a month okayish before you would start thinking H okay I might as well just do it myself kind of thing Or yeah 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 uh what's the ROI of that doing this relative to something else oh something else we could spend 20 grand 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 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 and 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 start off with a 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 Done exactly and like learn figure out where your inefficiencies are figure

out what it's worth to the client you can 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 you yeah it looks like like a 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 I would 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 wanted to ask you about so i' I've been an aid listener of the espresso hour really which is a great podcast like 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 where we are because I think your business and ours and it is 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 talking about how do you go from seven to eight figures Y and like 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 like why do you care about growing the business um 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 I've built multiple seven figure companies now and I won't lie I really want the uh the eight figure like I want to just know that I could do that um 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 oh all the time I 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 5 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 I'll excuse it because it was a beginner mistake but but I see people I see people who know what they're doing Doing that and I'm like why why it's frustrating to me is because you're educating aspiring entrepreneurs on the wrong thing you're setting an unreasonable expectation you know and our goal like I don't we've already done 10 million in lifetime Revenue I want to build a 10 million a year business and are I'm hoping that we will do that by the end of this year and so yeah I just I want

to know that I'm capable and that I can do that so it's Kind of like a video game yeah why not he playing on very why do you want to honestly it's the it's a video game thing it's like you know I'm playing Horizon forbidden West on PS5 at the moment and I'm play 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 Thunder jaw 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 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 I don't maybe I'm 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 um not that I could I love when people say that like 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 EX okay so I understand the irony of what I just said but um but yeah I think like once you build a seven figure company you're like okay what is it 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 fig company and then from there I'll reassess and you know do we want to continue yeah but I learned that lesson really painfully with my ghost raining agency which was sometimes you growing too quickly is a huge problem and something Dicky and I talk about all the time is what's the Tipping Point like when does the business yeah 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 yeah make you happy Is it still profitable you know yeah and how much do you care about like building to self I don't want to sell I 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 and then I make like you Know what is that 400k a year or something like 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 why take the advance when you know the Publishers 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 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 so I 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 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 and not that I like 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 um it's it's really cool and I I like the combination of research and personal story and um I also think the categorical difference of grinding productivity versus Feelgood productivity like how you set that up in The beginning very smart oh than you very smart um so one of my questions was actually what was your book deal and was it a one book deal was it a multiple book deal yeah it was one book deal with penguin having the right of first refusal on future deals for life do you know

for how long but it it just means that if I do go try to publish it I 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 ref usual 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 I think I 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 and Shuster Were bidding that would have the right to dibs on it got it okay so before I I give you my perspective what do you think you should do and like how are you thinking about this yeah so this is this is going to be very inside baseball so if anyone feels like leaving the podcast at this

point by all means please do um I am not sure so Thinking Out Loud by the way I feel like this this is what I wanted to talk to you about for m so let's just we'll just keep it going Great perfect yeah that's fine um I'm not sure so obviously there's value in traditional publishing um in my in my case the goal was to uh have an asset that would to be seen as like a legit guy rather than quote just youber and all that you know 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 wayen I haven't said that oh yeah we but congrats thank you very much so all of that stuff is done um and now for future books I know I want to write future books and I also quite like the fact quite like to the fact that I had an editor who was nice they had like the in-house penguin designer made the front cover

I hired an external designer to make 50 variations and we couldn't find Anything better than the cover and the cover turns out to be really nice it's a great cover thanks uh they penguin Ved us like 36 different language translation deals it's in bookstores people are sending me pictures from like freaking Taiwan from like random bookstore in Austin you know all all over the world people are sending pictures of this book in different translations and and I I hear that that sort of stuff doesn't really happen if You're self-published unless you become like a David

gogin or something like that which just seem 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 like smaller books um like I really want to do a book around like I don't want to say the title because like normally I'm not protective of ideas but when it comes to book Titles I'm pretty productive of ideas um but I I I want to do a series of books and have feel

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 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 I would say the bulk translation deal cuz fun fun fact by the way right now I am negotiating

the uh the Korean rights for art and business of online writing which is self-published so you can do translation deals it's just they're the they're emailing you they're not emailing the publishing a handful of people have em 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 and 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 something that a publisher does that

individual typically cannot okay so that's one but like what else what else do you feel like they translation thing and the book stores 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 and everything else also like uh bonds & Noble it's unclear as to whether it was uh bricks and morar or online sale so a big chunk of those were probably online as well

the the mega Trend in books is that it's funny because everyone whenever they talk about book deals is 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 a lot of people don't know is you talked about you know the designer inh house creating this amazing cover and you work with an editor you can hire all those people yeah yeah we did hire an Exel editor we also hired an Exel designer so

that's so even those houses want to freance on the side Or they used to work in a big five house and now they freance 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 reaching out to them and going do you want a freelance so and then another thing was I read the whole analysis that your team did of the marketing y um 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 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 by far right and what did the publisher do um they landed a Things like we got Good Morning America because

of the publisher we got like the 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 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 to be as educated as possible about what is happening in this industry how do deals get deals get

structured what what are the in 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 y That's it if I go sell a million copies tomorrow but I'm not with a Publishing House New York times doesn't care yeah right so Ponzi scheme they give you access to the game right yeah okay in literature also you

can't win Awards so you can't really win the Pitzer prize Nobel Prize or anything unless you're with 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 uh 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 schem 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 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 and they have a rep from their house that goes to the bookstore and goes 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 um he has 5 million YouTube subscribers so he's goingon to push the 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 go 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 New York Times 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 being at two times New York exactly so it's times Like to embarass the thing or whatever exactly so now you start doing the math on published book and you go okay what's the difference between

we'll just use round numbers what's the difference between a million advance and a 10% royalty versus zero advance but 100% royalty right and if you start like okay so how many copies you sold 200,000 yeah okay let's just be super generous and go a 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 uh 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 the net uh

and you sell a lot of them through your own website and yeah some through Amazon where like the split is 6040 whatever you've already made your million yeah 100,000 copies 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 doesn't it almost doesn't matter how big the advance is is that 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 most authors even if they get a million dollar advance they don't see a royalty from their book so they they just went I'm going to take the million up front and sometimes that's the right decision but if 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 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 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-publish 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 hear 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 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 in Um Dicky and I got offered um a book deal like a year ago or

something and I was 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 like 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 and going you're 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 was I wasn't even Vaguely thinking of like the money like initially what I said to the publisher was oh I don't want an advance I just about the royalties cuz I don't I don't need the cash flow and they were like great perfect and then

I was told actually that's bad idea because if there's a big Advance on their p&l then they're going to put more effort into kind of thing and so the money upfront was really more of a at least they've got some skin in the game yeah kind of Idea yeah it for so another flaw of traditional publishing right is that forces them to actually be incentivized if they part of the part of the reason why so many writers uh vent about their publishing deals is because 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 grand advance but when they do that they have no incentive to actually go push it so the only reason That you are taking the big Advance is to basically put their nose to the Grind Stone 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 um 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 um which is why I think I like going into The book I was sort of like uh we we'll see we'll see you know and I was really pleasantly surprised um how did you come up with this lens of Feelgood productivity and you reference a lot of studies in it were those studies that you had read and then they 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 um okay so the back story 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 something like that and I I I always had this fun construct within whatever I would teach about productivity on YouTube and stuff and initially when publisher a approached me they were like we'll just give you a book deal site on scene you don't even Need to proposal just like sign sign the

book deal kind of thing uh I took I took ages to sign sign the papers and just before I was signing them when they were sort of um 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 and she was like you need to don't sign this thing talk to an agent I talk to an agent BL blah blah blah blah then we sort of renegotiated that deal with Publisher a and then it Came to writing a proper proposal for

us Publishers because apparently us Publishers don't don't don't like books where they're not at least jointly publishing it at the same time cuz if they F if the US publisher is playing second fiddle to the UK publisher then they don't like it or something to that effect so then we had to write a proposal a proper proposal for the US Publishers and so I wrote the productivity equation and sent it to a Couple of editors and 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 as with the idea and there was this guy David moldow who was super helpful um he's the guy who also did clar's proposal and also has worked with a bunch of our other friends in that WhatsApp group um he basically said yep it stinks uh but come on man like if you Had to boil it down to one thing you know you're successful you're a doctor you're YouTuber like what's the one thing and I was like oh I just find a way to make everything fun

and he was like that's the book that's a cool concept and he's like I don't think anyone's gone into productivity from that angle so like why not just do that and initially it was like okay well maybe that's a thing and then it became the productivity game and they became All about gamification and stuff and as I was initially I made the mistake of Outsourcing the research so I got a research assistant who was kind of reading a bun papers and stuff and feeding the insights and I'd sort of come up with this framework around

like okay well what do video game designers do like why is wow addictive and how do we apply that to productivity blah blah blah and then I started writing and realizing I didn't quite have the Material and I couldn't really make the case that like fun was the thing and then I started reading the papers myself and then I was like oh okay the guy who I HED had an English background he didn't have a science background so he's he's trying to read all these like psychology studies he doesn't probably do 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 is there evidence backing up this sort of fun idea because there was the The Happiness Advantage by Shan Aker like 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 thingies and eventually came came came on this broaden and build theory that I talked about in the introduction that positive emotions are like the thing that like 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 and eventually the positive emotions thing made sense and then in the shower one day I I was thinking positive emotion productivity positive productivity it sounds a bit 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 um 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 was 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 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 uh on your book and I keep looking at it is um that's 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

how much did you discover this either through just writing and reading and exploration or are you 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 it I Think the first half of the book has a strong through line the second half doesn't really because the the title Feelgood productivity only came out 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 S

the chapters in 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 part three was around like burnout and stuff I I think we managed to to make it make it 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 could I'm sure I could have found like 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 are on Burn there's all this stuff around like procrastination and emotions and stuff and like I guess we can do a little bit of literary slide of hand and saying that like you know feeling bad makes you procrastinate so Feeling Good Makes You Productive it's like it's not quite that simple but with a bit

of hand waving and a little bit of like shoehorning in a block quote or something that like a pull quote that really emphasizes Feelgood angle maybe it can work yeah and so it felt a little unsatisfying once that TI it's like try trying to come up with the title of a YouTube video Once once youve 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 is 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 and retrofit the title it's impossible what nightmare yeah so actually so it's interesting that the the next book you write yeah it's like you should spend a Disproportionate amount of time on the title 100% CU 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

I can feel the pain and they're all like yep I know yeah cuz literally the the title or the subtitle completely changes so many the stories you tell the res you pull the advice you give everything I I 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 you know I listened to the publisher where they were like oh you know like in like 80% of cases the title comes

later and stuff I was like okay okay so this another thing I've learned I've learned that Publishers have they don't really have a framework for books they sort of do like I can tell that they all think that the key to self-help is go as broad as possible and the challenge of going broad is that it becomes less and less tangible and less and less specific and so what happens is you have a lot of these self-help books that come out with nothing to hold on to so 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 and It's like I don't know what I'm signing up for um 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 this framework around like the perfect book title what is the perfect book title your main title is actually a category of productivity y so as much

as possible you actually want to define a Categorical difference right so like slow productivity K Port 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 that 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 different Niche or subcategory what is Feelgood productivity so you're being specific but it's also really broad like 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 it's 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 and what are you actually telling me yeah 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 I completely agree um do you think I should lean into being the productivity guy I think I think in snow laap would you talk about this kind of the whole Like you know Ryan holiday equal stoicism kind of thing um and if you ask people what's the word that you would associate with Ali abdal that word is productivity that's a really good word it's a really high value word to be associated with my name and 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 all right so first of all um I I think it's funny this growing Trend you see it on Twitter and linked it in 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 holid 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 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 I 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 feel good productivity for parents feel good

productivity for writers feel good prod for students so you can go the you can go the for who the miracle morning for so for yeah for left dogs yeah so you could go you can 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 um 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

a old book um um called positioning you ever read that book positioning I've read it ages ago but I need to by Al R Al re and Jack trout and they have this this concept called uh 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 abdal 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 abdal but you're extending the category so of Feelgood productivity and that's where you could go feel good 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 product productivity is so wide so you're sort of going like what are the largest subcategories within productivity sure yeah time management would be big one procrastination motivation definitely uh increasingly discipline is a lot of so like for example like Feelgood Discipline like that's interesting that's interesting and 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 Ally abdall 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 feel good discipline would be an interesting book to write and so that's kind it almost Writes itself exactly ex that tile it writes itself and something that I 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 feel good in relationships I mean that's like so vanilla like exactly so you're looking for that Dissonance oh that's good anything else um yeah I think just to like 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 magga category of Feelgood productivity And make everything fall under that and literally I 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 AB doll comes second Feelgood productivity comes first how do I build a suite of products and a library of Ip and books yeah 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 how to actually enjoy your 9 to5 or something that's almost like extending the category of Feelgood productivity um yeah sort of yeah you could do that that the risk that you run with that is um it's very similar to that book the book that you just wrote and so same like with our pricing discussion where people like 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 from a concept perspective good point yeah so feel good 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 uh conflict resolution you're like oh I that's interesting

like conflict resolution usually feels stressful yeah you know so what would that look like so you have I mean you 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 you've Found something that's 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

was also that like I could imagine a world where all of our books had like blocks like colored blocks in different configurations and so I was sort of like Mocking up feel-good 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 or something to that effect it would just be cute if like the whole thing could have like a the whole Library could have a sort of video animated reconfiguration of

the blocks that would result in the things but y 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 resource and you could write smaller uh ebooks or even print books on Amazon with within those different verticals and then look for the one that outperforms the rest and 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 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 ring on that maybe it would be it would also be useful to just do a video tool called f good discipline with of like how to actually how to blah blah whatever whatever the subtitle Would be and see how that does I mean so 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 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 um or five paths to make something like that and 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 doll 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 it through the lean writing method create a video on it create Twitter threads on it feel good discipline that's a good starting to percolate yeah that could be quite quite a fun book to write the 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 I think anything in life 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 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 qu

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 like through like a gumroad store Or something yeah like that yeah and what's Wild is when I wrote 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 how much do you personally take home from each sale like do you sense of what those numbers are I've read this so many times and I always forget the exact numbers but it's something like uh 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 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 it's if I had done the audio book 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 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 like all the way through I thought I'd gotten over imposter syndrome and stuff because i' been doing YouTube videos for so long and and all and all that but as soon as it came to writing a book there was Something about that that why do

you think that is why why is that so daunting for people I think uh 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 like I think what I have to share is sufficiently valuable whereas when you put out YouTube videos like I mean everyone in the dog's putting out YouTube videos like it's not a it's not like a major you you weren't sticking your neck out That far we're putting out a YouTube video I mean still people think that putting

out a YouTube video is sticking the neck out but putting out a book where in particular 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's it it doesn't have a rating YouTube videos don't have a Rating system I think it was part of it was the fear of what if people don't like this and then that will be public acknowledge that it is ah and that is

really scary um 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 was it so good um And yeah when I got the book deal I was 26 and I kind of thought like who the is going to listen to a 26y old dude like talk about prod wow realized it was four years ago wow yeah and so so H yeah there it it was a lot of these sorts

of things and like I I've never really done anything interesting yeah I mean I was a doctor but like big whoops 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 levels of YouTube channel and yeah I grew business but like you know it's 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 5 million other in the world 5 million or

more people in the world 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 um did you like hire a coach or anybody to help You yeah so we had I had a writing coach initially in the early stages and then had a external editor outside of the Publishing House about halfway through the process she was great Rachel she sort of project manag the whole thing and a lot of my conversations with Rachel and with Kate my agent were

like emotional supporty 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 like we tell you if we thought it was like 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 I understand then why a lot of people

want that that handholding you know but you can hire that up ex 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 and whenever I would really struggle with the book it's because I flipped into treating it with too much seriousness just taking it too sincerely sorry to just just taking it too seriously and thinking this is a big heavy thing and it was the times where I really embodied this idea of like what would this actually look like

if it were fun like what does the feel-good version Of this look like exactly where I would be like you know what this is this literally this the the I'm writing about and like let me actually Okay cool so let me you know get a walking pad for my desk let me kind of do this like dictate this bit while I'm going for a walk around hide 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 ass a andb where the Goal is no one's allowed to do any work and so the team's all hanging out and I'm just sitting there grinding on this book cuz I have to get a chapter every day it was things like that that made the process more enjoyable that ultimately helped it get over the Finish Line what 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 where I

had like a Whole week or two to just think about the book the whole stuff around like well if you write for 3 hours a day then that's as much as anyone can do in any raise length of time and then that if you're right a th words a day that extended out compounds blah blah blah I didn't really make much progress because the startup costs of rebooting it back into my Ram and like trying to figure out like where where was I and like okay where was let me bring up all those tabs On

freaking zoto and scrier that I have like 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 a 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 yeah so that's You know

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 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 and I actually think yeah it's funny sometimes just need to hear it from someone else but I think you're Totally right is 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 countered to everything we talk about in ship 30 but I think especially when you're juggling so many different types of Pursuits or projects like immersion is almost always better yeah I think so um what was I going to say it's like um I I I've also realized this this a big part of what Cal talks about in slow productivity Like 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 that would otherwise be associated with running a business and 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 like go to I I I see why Writers go to a cam in the woods 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 gonna come full circle because I always trash The Cabin in the Woods the shapo and the cord 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 editing it's like the goal is to See it with fresh eyes and to like you know yeah that's a good point but the WR especially the first draft the writing itself and then and and

also like the really meaty edits where it's like okay I need to immerse myself in this for a whole like 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 New York Times besteller 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 the 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 yeah um do you have any bonuses this time around for people who are watching 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 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 L A bit more of the ground work 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

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