Nicholas Cole (@Nicolascole77), co-founder of Ship30for30, will teach you why indie hackers should embrace writing as a transformative tool in their arsenal. He sheds light on the common misconception that writing pales compared to coding for developers, but illustrates how writing can be a vehicle for desirable outcomes like zero-cost customer acquisition and recognition within the industry. Listen in as he shares the secret of building a timeless library of content, emphasizing how past writings can continue to serve us without the need to create new material constantly.
Arvid Kahl 0:00
Today, I’m talking to Nicolas Cole, co founder of Ship 30 for 30 and prolific writer. We discuss the importance of writing for indie hackers and how it can change their lives. And we look at different ways of writing and the shelf life of content and then delve into the evolution of writing skills and the journey of writing a book. Do you want to overcome self limiting beliefs about writing? Tune in today. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More on that later. Now, here’s Cole.
Hey, Cole, welcome to the show. You’re the co founder of Ship 30 for 30. And that’s one of the most impactful writing courses that I’ve ever seen, which is awesome. Now, for people of my background, engineers, developers, coders, makers, shipping mostly means deploying software and writing for other people. Well, that’s by far not as important to many indie hackers as writing code. And I think that’s unfortunate. And the more indie founders should write, so what can we do today to convince these busy people that coding away that writing can change their life?
Nicolas Cole 1:00
That’s a good question. I don’t think you can convince anyone to do anything unless they understand what it leads to. Right? So instead of framing it as, how do you get someone excited about writing? I think a more productive or helpful question to ask the person is, what do you want? What’s the outcome that you want? Because nobody wants to go to the gym. But everybody wants the results of going to the gym, right? Nobody wants to eat healthy. Everyone wants the result of eating healthy. And writing is sort of no different. A lot of times, the process of writing isn’t always easy or enjoyable or fun. But the outcomes are worth it. So I think it just starts with what’s the goal? What’s the outcome? And if you’re a developer, if you’re an indie hacker, if you’re a solopreneur, this sort of doesn’t matter what archetype. Every person in every industry wants some version of the same things, which is, I sure would love zero customer acquisition cost on the thing that I’m building, right? You want $0 CAC. Every person wants, when there’s a broader conversation happening in their industry, they want to be seen as someone who has a helpful opinion or, you know, the thought leadership sort of. They want to be seen as that person who can help and foster and participate in whatever that broader narrative is. Everybody wants “passive income.” So how do I build something that’s going to pay me a dividend over time? Which you can do through software, you can do through books, you can do in all sorts of different ways. Everybody wants some sort of either status or money outcome. And I think the thing that we’re really on a mission to help people understand is that writing is probably you could make the case writing is the most effective vehicle for accomplishing any of those things. Because it is infinitely scalable, you know, 50% plus of the whole internet is text. And it has this very, very low barrier to entry. It’s a lot easier to learn how to write than it is to learn how to create short form video or start a podcast or you know, like writing really is the easiest, but most scalable vehicle, if you think about it that way. And I also think there’s a little asterisk on that. I also think a lot of people misunderstand what it means to write. I think people look at creation as forward moving as, if I’m going to start creating on LinkedIn, I have to create on LinkedIn forever. If I’m going to start writing on the internet, I have to write something new every day forever. And in reality, that’s not how I think about writing. I think about writing actually, in the opposite direction. I think about it as if I invest time in building a library, that’s a library I can use over and over and over again. And a really easy example is I’ve started reposting a lot of my old long form content on Twitter/x right now. And just this morning, I saw someone comment and go, how do you have so much time to write so much long form every day? And I’m sitting there going, you have no idea that I’m posting long form essays that I wrote seven years ago and you have no idea. And that’s the point is I’ve built a library that now I can reuse over and over and over again. So long winded way of saying, right? It’s you can’t convince someone of the vehicle unless they understand the outcome.
Arvid Kahl 4:40
That is a wonderful way of phrasing it. And I very much agree with this because like you leave traces, right? You leave traces of things that you’ve thought about and you leave these traces in the public sphere where people can actually find them, comment on them and interact with you, which is again, leading to all these things that you want more customers, more reputation, more engagement with the community at higher status or low income. I really liked this. I liked the rephrasing. It’s not the writing part that matters. It’s understanding that through writing, you get to the schools better and more easily. That’s very interesting. So you just touched on something that I want to dive into because I think when people that come from a technical background, think about writing, they think about instructing, right? They think about, oh, here’s how to write an open source library for that particular framework or here’s how to solve this particular error with this solution. And they think about like the kind of manual style writing, which in the software world often is something more, you know, this is going to be useful for the next few months or six months until there is a completely new way of doing this. Because technology just revolves so quickly, right? Throughout this whole cycle that we’re all in. So what would you just said is that you re use content from seven years ago, kind of evergreen stuff. So do we have to kind of think about writing in different ways that what we create has a different shelf life?
Nicolas Cole 6:04
Yes. Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s something I think a lot of people don’t consider when they sit down to write. So the first thing is, so that instruction manual type of thing. I actually think that that is one of the biggest, like top three biggest opportunities for writers on the internet today. Because if you think about how many things just think about anything that happens in your life. A perfect example, my espresso machine broke this morning. What am I going to do? I’m going to google how to fix my espresso machine, right? And it might be a video, but it also might be a really helpful walkthrough blog post, right? And so informational, highly actionable, even educational, text based content is really, really valuable. And I think it’s often looked at as boring. But in reality, you know, something I’ve learned with Ship 30 because Ship 30 caters to beginners. It caters to I’ve really never written on the internet before, how do I get started? And it has really humbled me and made me realize that making things simple is difficult. If you want to explain it to a beginner, you can’t, you have to have a level of clarity of someone who’s mastered it in order to really explain it in a way that a beginner can understand. And I kind of I didn’t really realize this until very recently, but I put this thought together that I’ve learned that I’m very good. Or maybe I’ve just practiced so much that I’ve acquired the skill, but I’m very good at writing this actionable educational, instructional “content.” And my very first writing job ever, was when I was 15 years old, 16 years old. And my parents told me, I needed to get a summer job. And the first thing that I did because I was a really competitive World of Warcraft player. And the first thing that I did was I went online and I started searching for I literally think I typed in World of Warcraft jobs. How do I get paid to do this video game? And I stumbled across a site that said they were looking to hire writers to write walkthrough guides. And my very first writing job they used to pay me like, I don’t know, 25-50 bucks an article. And I would have to write a walkthrough guide of here’s how to go through this dungeon. Here’s how to explore this zone. And I didn’t really realize that that was my introduction to “writing on the internet” or even monetizing writing like I was paid to write.
Arvid Kahl 8:40
Oh, that’s awesome!
Nicolas Cole 8:40
You know. And so, yeah, a little bit of a tangent, but I just, I think that that sort of content gets glossed over a lot. And in reality, it’s probably one of the biggest opportunities you have as a writer.
Arvid Kahl 8:53
Yeah, let’s stay on this tangent because I used to be a competitive World of Warcraft player as well. And I want to know who you were writing for, like, what site was that?
Nicolas Cole 9:03
Oh, don’t I mean, all of those old sites don’t even exist anymore. I don’t even remember, but it was like, some little indie. Okay, the real question is horder alliance.
Arvid Kahl 9:12
Oh, I was a horde back in the day.
Nicolas Cole 9:13
Okay. That was the right answer. What class did you play?
Arvid Kahl 9:17
I was an undead rogue and I had a great time.
Nicolas Cole 9:23
Yeah, I was an undead mage. There we go. We would have been great friends.
Arvid Kahl 9:27
I think we should still be friends in the future about this and maybe do it. Do you still play? Like that’s a question that I really would like to know.
Nicolas Cole 9:35
Yeah, my honest answer is every once in a while, yeah. This past weekend, I just watched the whole Blizzcon.
Arvid Kahl 9:45
Me, too.
Nicolas Cole 9:46
And then okay, right? And they shared all these announcements and I’m like, I am so busy. I don’t have time for this, but at the same time, I’m like, ah, I could squeeze a weekend then.
Arvid Kahl 9:54
Yep. Yep, yep. Yeah, I feel the same way. And it’s like whenever they announced a new expansion coming in the future, you just like, oh, do I really want to put in these like 10 hours to get from current like to the current max level and prepare for the next one?
Nicolas Cole 10:08
So it’s like 50-100 hours.
Arvid Kahl 10:11
It’s, yeah, it is a lot of work, particularly if you want to play multiple characters. But I digress. The thing is World of Warcraft allowed me something similar. If it wasn’t writing, it was speaking. Like the fact that I can speak English in any fluid capacity is mostly due to bein,g a great leader on World of Warcraft because I had to back in the day, it was vanilla, right? I had to get 40 people to just coordinate their most basic movements to not all die in the fire. Right? That was the idea. So to have a grasp of what people are doing what people should be doing, communicating this clearly, that’s what I learned from the game as well. And if if writing was your avenue or if the World of Warcraft was your avenue into writing, even better, right? It’s a complex ecosystem of things that you need to do, like, particularly those guides that you wrote, I probably read a couple of them back in the day.
Nicolas Cole 10:11
Hey, you never know.
Arvid Kahl 10:11
You never know. And that’s the fun part, like how connections happen now, but retroactively, maybe. But this is really cool. It’s also interesting that you started writing so early, because to me, writing was never on the table. Like, I was always a software engineer. My writing was purely for the machine. I never wrote for people. It was after I built and sold a SaaS business that I noticed writing is catharsis. I can actually take my many problems that I have and just write them out and think in writing about solutions, put that into a folder and maybe publish it one day. I didn’t with this one. But later, after we sold the business, I took my cathartic writing and turned it into something that was actually accessible to other people. So writing is, to me a way of thinking, kind of calcified into something, you can share it with other people. Right? So and you do this spectacularly well, like you’ve published, like, what 10 books at this point. I was gonna say, like you’ve done a lot of work to get to the point where you are in being able to communicate clearly what writing is about because you have written so extensively, that if you look at your books over time, have they gotten simpler?
Nicolas Cole 12:23
Yes, significantly. A lot of these things you don’t. It is really, really hard to understand a lot of this stuff in the beginning. And it’s really hard even if someone explains it to you. It’s very hard for you to get it until you’ve crossed certain milestones of reps. Because there were a lot of things that I look back on that, you know, I studied fiction writing in college. I had a lot of teachers tell me things that went in one ear and out the other. And then it didn’t click for me why they were telling me that till eight years later, you know. And so, yeah, my writing has gotten simpler. My writing process has gotten faster. The way I wrote my first book is completely different than the way I write books now. Everything is different. And I really equate it a lot to, I grew up playing hockey. My first dream was I wanted to play in the NHL and then I got injured and that was never gonna happen. But I’m a really big believer in studying pro athletes. Because I think that there’s a mental discipline. And there’s also a habitual discipline that is really unique to sports. And ever since I was a little kid, I feel like ever. I fractured my spine playing hockey when I was like 14. And then I fractured it again when I was 17. And ever since then and I always knew I wanted to write. I don’t know why. But ever since then, I really made it a point to think I was like, if I’m not going to play hockey, then I’m going to write as if I’m playing hockey, you know and I’ve always treated it that way. And I think that’s something that I don’t, I talked about it a little bit. I don’t know how much it comes across or how much people gather that but I treat my writing like an athlete and I train every single day. And at the end of every year, I’m constantly asking myself the question like okay, my right hand is more dominant than my left hand. What do I have to do to cross train? And I’ll put myself through exercises and learning phases that like make no sense to the average person but to me, I’m like, this is what I need to do to improve this one small aspect of my craft, you know
Arvid Kahl 14:49
Because it looked like
Nicolas Cole 14:50
I’ve done some crazy things. I’ve done like everything from like reading a page or two of the Thesaurus every morning or I’ll read books in genres that I have absolutely no real interest in. But I’ll do it just to learn. I’ll take certain books and highlight. Like, I’ll grab a handful of highlighters and go through and be like, okay, which sentence or even which word in a sentence is communicating the voice, which sentence is moving the plot forward, which sentence is like, just so I can really understand how something’s being built. I’ll get very in the weeds with it. And I think those are all the little things, especially in our world of digital writing. And, you know, I’m sort of in this ecosystem now of solopreneurs and course creators and you know, indie hackers and like, we’re all in this sort of, weirdly like co related space building in public. One part of me really resonates with that because I’ve always been very digital first and digital forward. And the other part of me feels very out of place in that because I think unlike a lot of other people who build followings, especially build followings off of their writing and things like that, like, I don’t spend a lot of time studying other people’s Twitter’s. I spend a lot of time studying Pulitzer Prize winning authors or reading literature or putting myself through these weird writing sprints just so I can improve some part of my craft. Like that’s the part where I don’t really feel I don’t meet very many people that I can really like, dig into that with, you know.
Arvid Kahl 16:38
Yeah, it’s a different kind of writing too, right? Lke, if you have a book that it’s so many thoughts, all in a synthesis with other thoughts communicated very clearly, very extensively. And if you contrast that with like Twitter, where people just blurt out whatever they think, like, obviously, the quality of writing is different. But I guess that’s where it starts, right? Because when I think about writing books, you can’t write a book out of nowhere or at least I don’t believe you can. Like you have to have your thoughts in order to even be able to attempt writing a book. And for many that starts with blog posts or fragments or long tweets, right? So is it more important to you to focus on the ultimate outcome of books of writing books? Or can writing for founders for solopreneurs also happened without necessarily wanting to write a book at the end of I don’t know, the year or their work life? Do people need to write books? That’s kind of the question.
Nicolas Cole 17:40
Yeah, I don’t think people need to write books. And if you’re being really objective about it, books are not the most profitable or efficient or effective vehicle for monetizing your writing. They’re really not like, if you go hour by hour somewhere else. The thing that I struggle with this question and it’s not you asking it. It’s like I struggle with this question in general, because I have put in so many hours, not just practicing, but really studying and thinking deeply about all these different writer career paths. And I’m starting to get to a place where I sort of feel like, I equate it to being like a really high level proficient, chess Grandmaster. I can feel myself starting to get to a point where I have supreme clarity over whatever the goal is, what are the steps to get there and sort of like you’re playing chess, you can see 10, 15, 20 moves down the line. And I find that most of the time, when people ask a question, like, do you think this or this, you know? The challenge with that is they’re looking at it as if it’s one step. They’re like, you know, I’m not writing a book. I make the decision to write a book, you know, and in reality, it’s actually there’s 30 steps between that. And the moment that I start to break it down. And I try and really let go, okay, that’s where you want to go. Here are all the steps to get there. And here’s why each one is important. I tend to notice, I’m not saying you do this, I’m just speaking in general. People’s eyes sort of glaze over. And they’re like, I didn’t want all that. I just wanted you to tell me that if I write a book, then it’s all going to be okay. And you’d be proud of me.
Arvid Kahl 19:33
Right
Nicolas Cole 19:34
Right? And like that’s I can feel like, every day that goes by I feel that challenge increasing because I find fewer and fewer people act. Like most people who say they want to write a book don’t actually want to write a book. They just want to say that they’ve written a book, right? Or most people that want to build a audience on the internet. It’s like they don’t actually want to write short form content five times a day every day for four years in a row. They just want half a million people applauding them.
Arvid Kahl 20:06
Yeah, that’s the gym metaphor, right? Like people people want the body that the regular gym activity gets, not the gym activity itself.
Nicolas Cole 20:14
Completely. And like, I don’t fault anyone for feeling that way. Because I know that there have been many times on my own journey where I misconstrue the process for the outcome. And I probably have said the same thing. But it’s a really hard thing to figure out how to educate people on which is like, the thing that you want is completely doable, but it’s gonna require you to slow down and understand the steps in order to get there. And I love this mantra. I say this all the time, which is the shortcut is the longer road in disguise. You know, so whenever someone’s like, no, no, just tell me like, it’s like learning a musical instrument. They’re like, I don’t want to learn the chords, just tell me how to play Freebird, right? It seems like a shortcut. But really, what you’re doing is you’re doing yourself a disservice. And now you’re on the longer road and you don’t actually understand how to get where you want to go. And so circling back to your question on books, I do not think everyone needs to write books, you know. It certainly is the the most productive vehicle, but I love it. And I think there’s a lot of money to be made in writing books, but I also really, really enjoy the format. And so that’s why I like having this contrast of internet businesses that are very, they’re much more efficient and much more profitable than trying to earn a living writing books. But that allows me the luxury and time and no stress to go do the thing that I really enjoy that also may have upside potential.
Arvid Kahl 21:49
Yeah, I think you’re 100% right. Like a lot of I mean, that’s just the general human nature. We want to have the thing with the cake and eating it too kind of thing, right? We want to do less and get more. And writing the book is still kind of a status symbol for many. And I think it shouldn’t have to be, right? People could easily go through their life and build reputation and credibility without writing books. It’s just that it’s a great vehicle for communicating that with people. I’ve seen what you just explained to me like with the software businesses and that as well. A lot of people who write really good books are people who don’t intend to write books, but aren’t just experts in their field. And then they notice that they have a lot to share. And then they start writing. That is something like Brennan Dunn is an example for this. Like, he’s recently written this as personal. He was on the show, too. And he explained his whole process too. I don’t think he ever set up to write that book, really. He just set out to build a really good marketing tool and understand the whole email marketing space really well. And then it turned out that he now he has something to teach. And I think that that rain reverse is also what keeps many people from writing. They believe they don’t have anything to teach, even though they are experts in their field. That’s also something I want to talk to you about how we can overcome this kind of weird, self limiting belief that even though we’re experts, we shouldn’t write because somebody else also may have written about this topic before. So how can we get people to start just sharing doesn’t have to be a book doesn’t have to be a newsletter, but just generally sharing the knowledge more easily?
Nicolas Cole 23:22
Yeah so this is, it’s a great example of sort of speaking to my brain immediately goes to like, I can give you the super action. I can tell you exactly how this plays out. But the reality is that someone at the very beginning of their journey, not only do they not need all of that explanation, but they also don’t want it.
Arvid Kahl 23:45
Yeah
Nicolas Cole 23:45
You know and they can’t hear it yet. And so what I’ve learned is for someone who really is step one, there’s really only one thing you can do to help them which is encouraged them. They’re not ready for some advanced framework. You got to just go, hey, you should start sharing and it’s kind of up to them to take the first step and go on that journey, you know. Now, the advanced version and the real framework from here is recognizing that okay, so first, let me say. This is what most people would say, as their framework. Well, the key and what makes you different, is you just have to speak from the heart. And you just have to be authentic. And as long as you’re authentic, the world will hear your story. And there is nothing about that that is actionable. Like that doesn’t actually mean anything, right? And that’s what drives me nuts is all of the “best writing advice” is literally just different versions of that you have to be authentic, unlock your creative genius. What does that mean? Right? And so really, tangibly, right? There’s all sorts of frameworks you can use here, like, what are all the different points? So get super in the weeds. What are all the different points of differentiation when it comes to writing? Well, one point of differentiation is simply the way that it’s organized or it’s formatted. Right? So you could take a New Yorker article and you could keep all of the same content, but if you reformatted it to look like a Buzzfeed article with a bunch of bulleted lists and sub heads and all that, it’s completely different. And some people prefer differences on the formatting side, right? Other people prefer differences or you might find a point of differentiation in terms of the voice. Okay, but here’s the thing. How do you define voice, right? And voice is really just a combination of different variables. And those different variables are word choice, right? Sentence structure, pacing and rhythm. Right? That’s why I love when people are like Chat GPT will never be able to write like a human. Yeah, will, if I define the voice and I give it rules, Chat GPT is gonna write like me. So there’s all of you can get really in the weeds with these things. And that’s why I love studying literature. And I bring out all the highlighters and I’m like, I want to go word by word. How did this get constructed? But that’s not what most people need in the beginning, right? What they need is for someone to just go, you got this. I would love to hear from you. Or where I started on Quora was answering a question. I found Quora really helpful because I didn’t have to write. All I had to do was answer a question. And that was way lower barrier to entry for me. And that’s where I always start with people like, I had this joke. Because I used to do ghost from my first business was I had a ghost writing agency. I go through it for all these executives. And over and over again, the executive that I was ghost writing for would go, I don’t know what I want to say about this. And then I would just say to them, well, what do you think you would say about this? And then they would say it. And then I’d be like, great. So we should probably just say that then
Arvid Kahl 26:58
Yeah
Nicolas Cole 26:59
Right? Everyone already knows. You just have to give them the container. You have to ask them the question. And answering a question is way easier than going, here’s a blank page. Now go make art out of it, you know.
Arvid Kahl 27:10
It’s like a permission thing, right? Like people need to give themselves permission to actually state their responses. Like, they don’t want to have the blank page problem where they don’t know where to start, like just a little trigger. That’s all people need. That’s,an interesting thing. And I’ve seen the same like, if you look at the book side, the complexity of a book, let’s just leave that aside and look at like writing for social media, right? On Twitter or just like building a presence, building an audience, whatever that might be. Like, people are deathly afraid of the empty Twitter prompt because they don’t know. First of what do I need to write to meet? Right? That’s even the perception that people have because they need to write. And then is it going to resonate with people? Are people even going to read it? There are so many fears and limitations that people have before they even start writing. It’s not even published, it’s not clicking that button, it’s even putting any sentence up there. And I found personally for myself, in my own journey and for the people that I tried to help with this, that going to where other people are already having a conversation is the best way of dealing with this, like literally participating in a conversation, which then also teaches you to be a conversational writer, which is great, because that’s what people like to read, like as if it was a conversation with you. So gauging with others that already have something to share that have questions that need help, I think that’s a great starting point for writing.
Nicolas Cole 28:36
You could say that an even easier place to start writing on a platform like x or LinkedIn or whatever is not you broadcasting but you just replying the other.
Arvid Kahl 28:48
Exactly, yeah.
Nicolas Cole 28:49
Right? And I yeah, I am a big believer in what is the simplest action. Simplicity is velocity. So how do you do the simplest action? But there’s an underlying layer to all this. And it’s something that I’ve started writing about more, which is, I’m a big believer in therapy. I’m a big believer in personal development. And the reality is, we can talk all day about what makes an effective headline or, you know, how do you format a post really well, so that it’s skimmable? But the reality is, if there’s an underlying issue of you have a really brutal inner critic and every time you sit down to write your, you know, your internal narrative to yourself is really hurtful and toxic. Though it really doesn’t matter how much we talk about headlines because you that’s the root issue, right? And so, something that I try and I guess destigmatize especially in the world of writing, which is dependent on you sharing. You have to recognize that it’s two sides of the same coin. Right? It’s like you have the hard skills which is the writing, but then you also have that underlying, I like thinking of it as soft skills, which is well and what’s the relationship you have with yourself? You know, and every time you sit down to write, do you have your mom and dad sitting on your shoulders being like, nobody cares about you? Why would anyone want to listen to you? Right? Well, then you’re never going to hit publish. And so I think both of those are really important. And you sort of have to ping pong back and forth and figure out at any given time, what’s the real bottleneck? Is it a hard skill bottleneck? Or is it a soft skill bottleneck?
Arvid Kahl 30:33
Do you consider journaling a way to deal with this? Or do you actually have to, like, seek mental health professional to deal with this stuff, if you have this inner critic in your life?
Nicolas Cole 30:44
I mean, I would hardly say that I’m qualified to give a true objective answer, but I’ll just speak for myself. I’ve been journaling for a long time. I try and make it a point to journal almost every single day. I think it’s an incredibly helpful vehicle to a hear yourself outside yourself. And b, I use it often to just, I think of it like getting the gunk out. Like before I write something for real, I like just getting the words moving. And it’s a low pressure environment. But I will say I think that there is a tremendous difference between you processing through within yourself in a journal and you processing through with someone else. And I’ve seen the benefit that that’s had, for me. Some people have the complete opposite perspective. And that’s fine. But I think that there’s something that happens when you get outside yourself. That’s very different than you just sitting in your internal vacuum.
Arvid Kahl 31:50
Yeah, yeah. Generally, I would say writing nowadays with the digital community that we have and just the place in which we write, it’s not a solitude thing anymore, right? Like, you don’t have to write all by yourself. You don’t have to be in the cabin in the woods can the writer anymore. In fact, that actually is hurtful to the quality and the perception of your writing. And I think you posted something recently saying that you should write with your readers. You should write for and with your readers. And I think that’s important to understand because for most people writing coders in particular, the writing code is a very, like solipsistic, very isolated activity. But I don’t think it has to be for writing, like long form prose or even mid form short form, whatever it might be. So how can we approach other people and form communities with them as writers as people who want to write?
Nicolas Cole 32:46
Yeah, something that’s been clicking recently is because I have this conversation with people all the time. I mean, we talked about it in Ship 30, which is hundreds or 1000s of writers, but I also see it with people in my life, friends, you know, I’m always giving feedback or share, like everyone wants to write now. And so I tend to get asked a lot of these questions. And something that has really clicked for me recently, is that a lot of times people think about writing from the perspective of I. So here’s what I want to write about or here’s what I think other people want to read. Right? And it’s very selfish, in a sense. And then most beginners go through this loop, right? Where they’re like, I want to write this and then they put it out into the world. And they’re like, nobody’s paying attention to me and then they get really upset, right? And I think you have to get through that initial, I think of it like the starting zone phase, you know. You got to get out of the starting zone, for you to ultimately realize that it’s a lot more productive to think about it from the perspective of you. Right? So not I but you, the reader. And it goes back to what I was saying, writing with executives. People go, I don’t know what I want to say. And then you just ask them the question. So what do you want to say? And then they say it. And so if you think about your writing not as here’s what I want to say, but you think about it more as what do you need? Oh, I just have to tell you the thing that you need, right? And it’s such a simple thing, but we make it so complicated because it’s so simple. We literally can’t step outside of ourselves and go what is the other person care about? You know? And I see it I mean, it’s really easy to pinpoint if you just watch most conversations most people don’t ask the other person questions. Right? And that is a very clear signal of you’re in your head and you’re like it’s my reality, it’s my thoughts. I’m what matters. I’m the main character. And really, the other person’s the main character and if you want people to read your writing, you have to realize, like, just think about it super objectively. You want an external result, right? So you want something from the other person. Which means the thing that you’re doing has to be in service of them.
Arvid Kahl 35:16
Yes, exactly
Nicolas Cole 35:17
Right? And it’s so simple, but it takes people a long time to like really shift that way of thinking in their head. And then once they do, like, massive growth because all of a sudden, they’re solving someone else’s problem.
Arvid Kahl 35:31
Yeah, that’s it, right? Like I think we’ve been conditioned to think of writing as art, as an expression of self, where we should actually thought of it as like a product of a productized self, like it’s a business thing. You try to find product market fit. That’s the idea, right? You try to figure out what your market needs and you write the thing they need and then they consume it. And that’s what guarantees results, not your artistry.
Nicolas Cole 35:56
Yeah, and I would even clarify that language a little bit, which is, if you think of it as product market fit, that language, I think on a very unconscious level still trains the person to think I have a product and I have to go fit it into someone else’s brain. Right?
Arvid Kahl 36:17
Yeah, it’s a question phrase. Yeah, you’re right.
Nicolas Cole 36:20
But if we have to, you know, use that structure, I would clarify the language and call it more something like reader problem fit. Like, you’re not starting with you. You’re starting with the other person. And you’re not starting with, here’s what I want to say. You’re starting with, well, what’s their problem? What’s their question? And every time I go down this rabbit hole, inevitably, someone then goes, yeah, yeah. Okay, that makes sense for like marketing type writing. But I don’t think that that’s true for storytelling. I don’t think that’s true for fiction. I don’t think, okay, what you don’t realize is that Harry Potter answers a question. And the question is, what is life like for middle schoolers who go to wizardry school?
Arvid Kahl 37:08
Yep.
Nicolas Cole 37:08
And the reason you read that book is because you’re interested in that question and you’re interested in the author’s answer to that question. And so, again, like, everything starts with, it’s not about you, it’s about the reader. And every, like, every once in a while, I’ve recently been going down the rabbit hole of David Foster Wallace, really eccentric writer and interesting in a lot of different ways. But I think what people have missed about even someone like him, who is a very unique literary writer, right? And most people think, oh, he just sat in a room and was just brilliant. And then we’re all obsessed with his voice. And we all applaud them, right? But if you go listen to interviews with him and you hear him talk about his writing, Infinite Jest and all of these things that he dug into, started with here’s what’s going on with my generation. A lot of his writing was speaking to readers who he felt were struggling with growing up in a world that was starting to be dominated by TV and media and you never sat in silence anymore. And it created this strange, you know, discomfort in the human soul. It really had nothing to do with him. It was his observation of what other people were going through and by extension, what he then was going through. And so like, I love bridging that gap, where whenever I talk about these things, it’s so easy for people to just jump to like, well, you’re just a marketer. And that’s, I guess, it’s just marketing writing. And you don’t understand that the marketing or business writing is just the easy way of being able to talk about it. But the reality is, all of these principles also exist in the highest forms of literature. But it’s hard to jump there without losing someone’s, right? Like, it’s hard for them to follow you there.
Arvid Kahl 39:07
It sounds like I mean, mirrored us back at you. It sounds like you’re looking at the writer not as a generator of wisdom, but as a kind of a conduit between a question and an answer.
Nicolas Cole 39:18
Yes
Arvid Kahl 39:19
That’s a wonderful visualization. I really enjoy this because that also makes it so much easier to just do it. Because you know, there’s a question and you know you have answers that you could potentially give to people. Like you don’t have to be super smart. You just need to answer this one question as a writer.
Nicolas Cole 39:35
Yeah. And also to clarify, you as the conduit don’t always have to be the source of
Arvid Kahl 39:40
Yes
Nicolas Cole 39:40
Wisdom or brilliance. One of my favorite examples is Ryan Holiday has now dominated this category of stoicism, right?
Arvid Kahl 39:48
He invented stoicism, right?
Nicolas Cole 39:50
Exactly. That’s the example that I use. And everyone looks at someone like him and goes, well, yeah, but he’s an expert. Okay, like, what was his credibility for writing The Obstacle Is the Way. It was literally, I read Marcus Aurelius Meditations. And so a lot of times when we talk, this is a core principle in Ship 30 we talk about all the time, which is when you sit down to write you as the conduit. Yeah, you could write from personal experience, but you could also write from curated experience. Ryan Holliday, his entire career is not based off of his insights. It’s based off of Marcus Aurelius his insights that he’s a conduit for and he makes it very easy and accessible for other people to access. And there’s value in that. Right? And so, yeah, same thing is if you want to write about a topic you don’t, it’s not like you were born. Another favorite example, Tony Robbins wasn’t born the Tony Robbins you know today. Tony Robbins started out as a sales trainer. And he was the conduit for I went and learned all these things. And now I’m going to make them accessible and share them with other people. And, you know, so yeah, it could be either.
Arvid Kahl 41:01
Yeah. And throughout like Tony Robbins, great example, I think we still have some cassette tapes fromthe like, late 80s somewhere in this household here, right? Like he’s been around for a long while. And what he’s been teaching also shifted over time. Like, it’s not that he had to know everything from the start. But he shared. He had things to say then, and he learned new things. And he shared them again, in later books, like Tony Robbins is one of the reasons that I got into understanding or wanting to understand financial investments or financial lucidity, whatever you might want to call it, just being aware of what investment is. I kind of access that through his writing. And I’m glad he did that. Right? He might not be the world’s foremost expert on it. But he wrote it in a way that was accessible to me. And that’s all I really needed. And he has to give to write in ways like that. But I don’t think everybody loves Tony Robbins either. Right? Some people would rather read like more academic books on this issue. But that doesn’t mean that Tony Robbins’ contribution is not an important part in people’s lives.
Nicolas Cole 42:03
Yeah, I use this. I think this is a helpful way of looking at it. You ever have a friend recommend a book? And they’re like, this was the best book I’ve ever read in my entire life. And then you open it up and you read the first page, you’re like, there’s no way I’m finishing this. There’s no way I’m reading this, right? And a lot of times, people misunderstand what’s happening there. What’s happening, there’s a framework in Ship 30 we talked about called the 4A framework, which is most writing can be reverse engineered back into these four different buckets. It’s either actionable, aspirational, analytical, or anthropological. And what’s happening in that moment is your friend loves aspirational books. And you hate aspirational books. You love actionable books, right? And so it’s not that one person thinks the writer is good and the other person thinks the writer is bad. It’s that you as readers have different expectations. And if you start with that, when you sit down to write as a writer, the real goal over time is for you to have supreme clarity over well, who exactly is my reader? Because if you start like the average person goes, I want to start writing about real estate. Okay, well, you’re gonna attract very different readers if you write about actionable, here’s how to buy your first property. Or if you write analytical, here’s what’s going on in the economy and real estate trends over the next 25 years or aspirational. I was dead broke, my life sucked. And then I got into real estate and everything changed, right? Those are three completely different experiences as a reader. And so as a writer, it’s about you figuring out which one do I enjoy writing about. Some people enjoy aspirational, some people enjoy actionable write and which one attracts which type of reader. And then over time, your efficiency becomes I know how to not only create actionable content, but I know what my actionable readers want from me, which is like a self fulfilling prophecy. It’s that virtuous loop where it keeps spiraling in the right direction.
Arvid Kahl 44:17
Oh, that’s great. And also and let’s maybe pivot a little bit to the actionable part here that can make your money right. At that point, when you have the capacity to write in a style that is really needed and wanted by certain people. You don’t necessarily even need to write for yourself and think you too mentioned ghostwriting earlier as well. I find this a very interesting field because I had very negative opinions about it in the past. Let me be perfectly honest, because yeah, because I didn’t think about as much. I didn’t reflect on it much. But I have since and I feel that if somebody can write and can write in a style that is really conducive to people understanding what they write about, then writing for somebody else who needs that style and to talk about a topic that they care about is a perfectly fine occupation like, why wouldn’t it be? So I think that is also part of like productizing yourself as a writer. You don’t need to necessarily build your own, like literary career, that’s not the only way to write. You can also do other things. So maybe, let’s talk a bit about the ways that you can actually make money from writing.
Nicolas Cole 45:19
Yeah, I mean, the big two are. So using the language productizing yourself. So productizing yourself, I equate more with creating digital products around your writing. So that’s one side of the barbell. You could do that with books, you could do it with courses, you could do it with digital downloads, you could do with paid newsletters, those are all different vehicles for productizing yourself and productizing your knowledge. The other side of the barbell is monetizing your talents as a service. Right? And again, this kind of goes back to the seeing 15 moves on the chessboard, right? Because the thing that people misunderstand with these two paths is productizing yourself as a writer is very difficult in the beginning. So the benefit of productizing yourself with it and creating some sort of digital product is that it is “infinitely scalable.” If I have a paid newsletter, the effort it takes me to write one paid newsletter is identical if I have one subscriber or I have 100,000 subscribers, right? That’s the benefit of it. As a result, your profitability or your financial ceiling is significantly higher. The challenge is that in the beginning, in the short term, it’s much harder to make a dent in your income, right? Because if you’re selling a $20 a month paid newsletter, you need a lot of volume. You need a lot of people subscribing for you to feel that. On the other side, if you’re providing writing as a service, it’s a whole lot easier to find one person who’s going to pay you five grand a month, right? Rather than find 100 people who are going to pay you 20 bucks a month or whatever, whatever it is, right. But as a service, you have a lower ceiling. So you can get to six figures very quickly providing a service but then, you know, especially through ghostwriting or things like that, like it’s gonna be hard for you to get above 30, 40, 50k a month without suddenly hiring other people and building an agency and doing all of those things. And so pro con depends on which one, you want. The thing with ghost writing and I think you’ll appreciate this metaphor as a engineer. Most people think what ghost writing is, is the writer goes to someone and says I will write for you, you’re just going to put your name on it. And in reality, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is the person who would be your client has a lot of knowledge. So they’ve been in their industry for, you know, 10, 20, 30 years, they have a significant amount of knowledge. But they have a bottleneck called I don’t have the time to write. And I often not always, but I often don’t have the skill set to write. And the writer has the complete opposite problem, right? The writer goes, I don’t have 30 years of knowledge. But I have the time. And I have the skill set. And what I realized very early on is that there’s a magical combination when you pair those two types of people together, because the writer is really just doing the manual labor, that the thinker the client doesn’t have the time to do can’t rationalize doing and often doesn’t have the skill set to do. And in a metaphor, it’s sort of like you being a CTO and you being like, I have to write every line of code in my startup, otherwise, it’s unethical. Right? And that’s not what we do and the CTO is, like, I’m gonna give you the ideas. I’m gonna give you the frame. And then all you developers are going to do the manual labor of writing the code. And that is identical to what’s happening with a client and a ghostwriter. The client gives the thinking. The ghostwriter goes great, I’m going to take this transcript. I’m gonna format it. I’m going to simplify it. They’re doing the manual labor.
Arvid Kahl 49:11
This is such a nice explanation. Thank you so much for making this so obviously, clear, would have beneficial, like almost symbiotic relationship that can be, right? In the best sense of the word.
Nicolas Cole 49:22
It should be.
Arvid Kahl 49:23
Yes
Nicolas Cole 49:23
It should be symbiotic because you, as the writer, get to accelerate your knowledge because you’re tapping into someone who has pattern recognition of multiple decades that you don’t have. And you as the smart person, go, yeah, you know, I’m the founder of $100 million startup. There’s no way I could rationalize sitting here writing all this stuff. My time is too valuable, but that doesn’t mean that your knowledge isn’t valuable and that it wouldn’t be appreciated by other people. Right? So it really is a magical combination. And I mean, I started the first ghostwriting agency for founders and executives back in 2016. Like I’ve been on a mission trying to educate people on this because I think it’s so sad that you have all these smart people who have these incredible careers and then they retire and their knowledge just evaporates. No one knows what’s in their brain. And I see that as a detriment to the compounding of knowledge in our society.
Arvid Kahl 50:18
Yes, it is a big problem, particularly as like the artisanal skills are being lost. Right? That’s a big problem too. As things shift to the digital, there’s a lot of lack of the actual artisanal insights. And I even noticed this in my personal life, like in the family, there are a lot of stories that aren’t written down. Like or even just the things that hold us together, the narratives that we have in the family, if they’re not written down, they don’t often last for generations too. I kind of forced in the best sense of the word, my grandmother to dictate, like books worth of stories into like Dragon natural speaking like that weird window software that we could install in our old laptop. And she was sitting there for weeks and months, just dictating a whole book into that thing. And she has passed away since but I still have the stories. The family still has the stories like there’s power in retaining these kinds of stories. And that’s just in the family, a very small unit of people that care about these things. It is so much more important to do this on a ocial level, right? On the level of a society where people pass away without passing on everything they’ve learned in a lifetime. I really liked this. And if ghost writing is a way of doing this, of extracting this information and putting it into a shape where other people can consume it. If I had known that that was a writing career a couple years ago, I probably would have tried it out maybe in my native language, maybe in German, maybe in English because you know, writing is just thinking and translating. Well, you can fix that with professionals, you know, but it’s such a wonderful thing, man. And I’m really happy. You’re bringing this into the focus of what you’re working on and how you share it, what you talk about on Twitter and all these other platforms. And I follow you for this, you bring this out, you explain it so well. I really really enjoy it. If people want to find out more about these things, about you in particular, about ghostwriting, the thing that you offer, I think there is something out there where you help people with this. Where do people go to learn more about this?
Nicolas Cole 52:23
Yeah, I think my most active platform is Twitter slash x at this point. I don’t know what we’re calling it
Arvid Kahl 52:29
What were you calling this again?
Nicolas Cole 52:31
It’ll take us a year for it to crystallize. But yeah, like six months ago, we launched our Premium Ghostwriting Academy, which trains people on how to become ghost writers. It’s all the same things that I was doing for years as a ghostwriter. And I built my agency off of this. That’s sort of if you want to go the route of monetizing with a service and the fastest route to monetizing your writing is providing a service like you will get to 10 or 20k a month by providing a service significantly faster than you will creating a digital product. And so the framework and the model that I try and educate people on is I think it’s worth doing the service first. You know, get yourself to a point where you’re comfortable and you’re getting paid to practice like that’s a huge benefit of ghostwriting. You’re learning, you’re learning about the industry, you’re learning what works. And then once you get to 10-20k a month as a ghostwriter, you can start to experiment with the other side, which is creating digital products that are more infinitely scalable. And then it becomes a virtuous loop. Right? Is the people consumer digital products and then go oh, you know a lot, I would love to hire you as a client. And then your clients give you the money to reinvest in your digital products. And then it just goes round and round.
Arvid Kahl 53:52
That’s quite the flywheel there. That sounds like a really good career path. It reminds me a lot of the stair stepping approach that Rob Walling has about software businesses, right? Where you start with a couple service oriented things, you build plugins, you try to go to a more productized thing, but you try to stabilize your income path first. And then you go for the big SaaS, right? The big automated thing that makes money forever. And it’s kind of also this loop. I see a lot of similarities there.
Nicolas Cole 54:17
Yeah
Arvid Kahl 54:19
Go ahead
Nicolas Cole 54:19
No, same thing. You know, it’s everyone wants to start by going I’m gonna build the next Uber. And in reality, you should probably figure out how to make a widget for Chrome first.
Arvid Kahl 54:31
That’s right. Yeah, and that also scales in different ways, right? Maybe not as much, but it also and you set this and allows you to train your skills, like you need these coding skills along the way. You need these writing skills along the way. You do smaller projects. You graduate into bigger projects and more sustainable things. Man, thank you so much for going through the world of writing, the world of making a living of writing, which is also a very important thing to me as a writer and to the people that are listening and maybe just intrigued what that is. Thank you so much for explaining all of this today. That was a wonderful insight into all of these themes.
Nicolas Cole 55:09
Yeah, these are great questions, a lot of things I haven’t gotten to fully jam on. So
Arvid Kahl 55:13
Well, I’m looking forward to articles and books around those topics, then in the future.
Nicolas Cole 55:16
Yeah, coming soon.
Arvid Kahl 55:18
And thank you so much for being on the show. That was wonderful. Thanks for having me. See you in World of Warcraft.
Nicolas Cole 55:23
Yeah, see you in Expansion.
Arvid Kahl 55:26
Bye, bye.
And that’s it for today. I will know briefly thank my sponsor, acquire.com. Imagine this, you’re a founder who’s built a really solid SaaS product, you acquired all those customers, and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue. That’s the dream of every SaaS founder, right? Problem is you’re not growing for whatever reason, maybe it’s lack of skill or lack of focus or play in lack of interest, you don’t know. You just feel stuck in your business with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire, and you started working on the business, not just in the business and all those things you did like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach, they really helped you to go down this road, six months down the road, making all that money. You tripled your revenue and you have this hyper successful business. That is the dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this. And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who’s facing this crossroad. This problem is common, but it looks different every time. But what doesn’t look different every time it’s the story that here just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation. Because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don’t do anything. So if you find yourself here, already at this point or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option and that is selling your business on acquire.com. Because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It’s certainly better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list. They’ve helped hundreds of founders already, just go check it out at try.acquire.com/arvid, it’s me and see for yourself if this is the right option for you, your business at this time. You might just want to wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It’s always good to be in the know.
Thank you for listening to the Bootstrapped Founder today. I really appreciate that. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. And you’ll find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you want to support me and this show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let me know. It’d be interesting to see and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). It really makes a big difference if you show up there because then this podcast shows up in other people’s feeds. And that’s, I think, where we all would like it to be just helping other people learn and see and understand new things. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.
