The Startup Ideas Podcast - Why a Gamer Mindset Can Change Your Life and Business with Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Today Greg is joined by the founders of Ship 30 for 30. In this episode, you'll hear how to stop worrying about being 'cringe' on Twitter and start developing a writing habit that pays off in your business and in your life. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team: https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comhttps://startwritingonline.com/https://www.ship30for30.com/Dickie Bush: https://twitter.com/dickiebushNicolas Cole: https://twitter.com/Nicolascole77SHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro0:55 - How esports (and obsessive attention) helps in business11:30 - Playing the Twitter game right25:00 - How to start writing27:00 - Pseudonymity 34:50 - Case Study: Ryan Holiday41:45 - You're not special. The niche is special45:48 - How to avoid doing too much

This is it. Legends. Dickie Bush, former Black Rock employee, turned writer, aficionado, ship 30 for 30, co-founder. Nicholas Cole, one of the best World of Warcraft players in the world, in North America, at least. Now he's an author and also co-founder of Ship 30-for-30. welcome to the show.

So good to have you. What's going on, bro? It's like to be here. That's my claim to fame, apparently. Well, it was just interesting to me, because I had always known you as the ship 30 for 30 guy. And then when I saw that you played Warcraft and you were competitive,

I thought that was really interesting. I'm curious. Let's just start with that. How has being a professional, or competitive e-sports gamer helped you, you know, in your career. Dickie, you probably have a similar answer. I feel like all of it can get boiled down to one thing, which is video games increased my threshold for pain. I think my ability to endure boring tasks on the pursuit to achieve something is like

world class. I think that is a very difficult skill for a lot of people. to just sit in front of your computer and do the boring thing because you want one item upgrade and it's going to cost you 78 painful hours to get there. Like that was my whole childhood. So now you just see that play out and everything. Like entrepreneurship is literally that all the time. And it's funny because Cole and I, when we first met, didn't know that we had such

similar backgrounds, but I played professional Call-Duty 4. And before that, I played more hours of runescape and my entire childhood was based on video games. I picked up sports, luckily, in high school. And we were cool, we were like three or four years too early because Twitch was not a thing. You could not record your screen. And cell phones didn't really have high quality video cameras. So you couldn't like, I remember the idea of having a capture card where you could record your screen to play it back. But if, if I was like three years younger, I never would have played sports. I never would have, I would have just become a Twitch streamer

because that's all I wanted to do is play video games. We're a little bit before our time. But I mean, my answer is pretty much the same. I to this day learned more playing Roomscape about business, economies, working with the team, monotonous work than I learned in college or really anything. And I think running an online business is pretty much like playing a video game, except you don't stack, you know, digital gold. You can stack real gold and do cool things with it in the real world.

So it's like at the end of the day, one, both things, you're kind of just clicking buttons for a lot of it. But one of them, the rewards are a little bit better. I mean, you're still seeing a number on a screen go up. You know, whether you're logging into StarCraft or you're logging into Chase, you know, instead of gold, it's USDA. It's still kind of the same. And I think it's Haki McCormick, who calls it the great online game, how we're all playing this online game.

And I think there's something to be said about people who are obsessed with games and people who are really good at the internet. Would you agree? Yeah. I mean, I think one of the most surprising things for me is how many times when I share that little tidbit, you know, I was a really competitive. it. You know, I was a really competitive World Warcraft player as a teenager. A lot of people respond with, oh, so was I in XYZ situation. I'll never forget, I moved to L.A. in 2017, and I found myself at this big fancy dinner up in the hills and all these really accomplished people there, Lady Gaga's designers there, like all these random, really successful people. And we're having this

dinner and we all were going around introducing ourselves and the guy who hosted the dinner shared that tidbit about me. And the guy opposite me who had built a massive ad agency turns to me and goes, oh, no way. I was the guild leader of one of the biggest guilds in World Warcraft of all time. And like that happens constantly in the entrepreneurship world. It's like the background in gaming clearly primes your brain for certain skills, for certain ways of thinking for a certain threshold of pain, for strategy, for learning rules, then bending rules. You know, it's like video games prime all of that.

I think you could almost go like a level above that and say it's not even video games, but it's just obsessive personalities. And for young kids, there's not very many ways to direct that obsessive personality other than video games and maybe music, right? Because you don't have enough autonomy. And so I think it's more rather than video games have just been a vehicle to apply that obsessive personality. And then you get into the real world, it's like, oh, I can take this and apply it to solving problems as an entrepreneur. Like, of course I'm going to choose that path. And growing up, I always thought my obsessive personality was kind of a bug rather than a feature, because I'm going to

I think school, other parents, society in general, discourages that kind of like obsession or intensity where I'd pick up a new thing and I'd only do that for months and get as good as it as I could quickly. And I always say my parents let me do whatever I wanted. Like if I wanted to play 15 hours of video games, I could as long as I was doing well in school where a lot of other parents wouldn't let their kids obsess over anything, right? Instead, they would just let them, they wanted them so well-rounded where they didn't end up building any kind of real, you know, obsessive skill. And so they get in the real world. And that is rewarded by working for just a company or a regular corporate job, I think. So you both now

obsess about building audiences and writing on the, internet. Why, why obsessed over that? Dickie, I'll let you field that one first. Mine was a way of exploring opportunities. And so my background working on Wall Street, I started in 2018, when I graduated college, and realized like a year in that that wasn't the path that I was going to take forever. I looked around and saw guys in their early 30s in one specific example, ask his boss to go to his son's little league game and his boss said no. And that was about a year in. And I knew that I wasn't going to stick. I was not going to be able to work for someone else for a long time. But rather than just quit, I said, what's an easy way to explore

opportunities? And it was just putting myself out there and becoming easy to find. Right. So for me, I started doing that with just a newsletter in the time at Cole, a time at you, at time at 95, percent of the people that I talk to on a weekly basis now. And so the goal of ship 30 is to help as many people experience that as possible, right? Or maybe there, I love this idea of the internet democratizing access to friendship where if you grew up and you were, this goes back to what we were saying of being obsessed with certain things and you didn't have a way of meeting other people that were obsessed in the same thing as you thought you were the odd one out. But the internet has made it where I would have loved to have had a,

blog or something writing on Twitter wherever as a younger person because I would have found so many more like-minded people along the way. And so that's why I'm writing to this day is I'm still continuing to meet cool people and all that compounds over time. So if I can help as many people as possible unlock their creative writing ability, which then goes to unlock new opportunities, like that sounds like an awesome mission to kind of build around. And that's our goal. Our, our mission to help a million people start doing it because we know if we help a million people start writing, the number of new connections and opportunities and education that will come from that is, is huge. So the nuance I think that is worth pointing out because there's there's so much talk around

how do you build an audience benefits of building an audience. We all understand it. But I think what gets lost is it really is not about the size of the audience. It's not about the number. And a perfect example is Dickie and My's relationship. When we got connected, now I've been doing this for a long time. I've been writing on the internet for a really long time. And I've gone through multiple platforms and multiple cycles and multiple, you see people rise and then they get burned out and new classes of creators and new, like, I've been doing this for over a decade. Like, it's just the same patterns over and over again. And when Dicky and I got connected,

I remember what's the first thing I did? I clicked on his Twitter profile because I was like, who's this guy I just got connected to? We got connected in a cold email through a mutual friend. I clicked on his Twitter profile. Dickie probably had, I don't remember, 800 followers, right?

But when I started to look, what I saw beyond just how big is your audience, what I saw were good habits. I saw someone who was actively writing on the internet. I saw someone who was trying to share things that were interesting to them and valuable to other readers. And because I've been doing this for so long, I could see that data point projected out into the future and go,

Dickie has 800 followers today. He's going to lap everybody because I just know. I have that pattern recognition. And so the thing for me is it's not actually about building an audience. What it is is it's about understanding. It's what you said about Paki and the great online game. We are all playing the game, whether we realize it or not. Consciously, unconsciously, when you meet someone, what's the first thing you do?

You look them up on the internet. And what you find dictates how you perceive that person. We're all playing it. But everyone's focus is on the follower count. And really, that's like one small data point in the whole game. It's really about, is this person playing? Are they playing consciously or unconsciously? Are they putting things out there that are valuable?

A thousand followers or 100,000 followers? When you click on their stuff, are you interested? There's a lot of people I know with half a million followers where I'm like, you write really not interesting things. There's a lot of people with a thousand followers I click on and I go, wow, this is brilliant. I want to sink my teeth into it. Right. So it's like going beyond the benefit of building an audience and more of the, are you playing

the game consciously such that it unlocks new opportunities for your life? I'm a audience maximalist, like building an audience maximalist, and I think everyone should do it. You know, I hear often from people who don't write on the internet or who don't have a conscious effort of creating an audience. I ask them like, hey, why are you not writing on Twitter? And they say, I don't want to be cringe. I feel like there's this growing cringiness vibe that's going around. that's holding people back from participating. If someone thinks that,

they're thinking they're far more important and that people are paying way more attention to them than they actually are. And so it's, I don't want to be cringe behind that has this assumption that when I put something out, everyone that I know is going to read it. They're going to study every word of it.

They're going to judge me. But the truth is most people are way, way, way to caught up in themselves. And so the only reason someone would be quote unquote scared to be cringe if that is if they're sitting on the other side not writing and just judging everyone that they see right so it's i'm worried i'm going to look cringe because i'm sitting here reading all these people and i'm like oh that's cringe that's cringe but at the end of the day they're putting themselves out there they're unlocking opportunities and you're the one paying with your attention by reading it right so rather than have this fear of like oh i don't

want people to think i'm cringe it's why don't you just try putting yourself out there and recognize where it tips is they're so scared to look cringe and then suddenly they're upset that no one's reading any of their stuff when they get started. And so it's the opposite side of the coin, right? They don't look cringe. They just don't look like anything because the truth is no one reads any of the things you put out in the beginning. So you just kind of have to get started. Yeah, I totally agree with all that. And Greg, I would say I'm an audience maximal. too. It was the first thing I realized as a 17 year old on the internet. I was like, if you have an audience, you get more stuff, period. I thought you were going to say, you're cringe. That's what I thought.

I thought you were going to come out and be like, I'm really cringe, guys. I'm really cringe and I'm putting it out there. No, I mean, look, I don't think anyone disagrees with the statement. If you have an audience, you get more opportunities. Period. Right. Yes. But, But the nuance, what gets missed is it's the same as waking up every day and going, I want to be rich. There isn't anyone on earth that if you gave them the option to be rich tomorrow would say no. Right. But if all you did was walk around and say, I just want to be rich, you'd be cringe. Just like if you say, I just want to build an audience, it's a little cringe.

But the reason it's cringe is because what you're talking about is I want the outcome without caring about the process. That's what you're saying. And so the issue is when people go, all this focus on audience, audience, audience, audience. Audience is an outcome. It's an outcome of what? Of learning. Of helping people. Of sharing things that are valuable.

So the cringe part is someone going, I just care about the number. not I care about helping someone because the moment someone goes, I really care about educating these people or I really care about solving these problems or I really care about no one's going to look at them and be like, that's stupid. Right?

So it's all, it's this over rotation on, I want the outcome without caring and being connected to the process. Yeah, where this is coming from is I have a friend, his name's Daniel Singer, and I saw his Twitter bio recently. And his Twitter bio is, is imagine taking Twitter seriously.

And I feel like there's this growing class of people who are like him where they don't want to look, like they don't want to do threads, for example, because threads are cringe, even though we know threads work. All right. When I used to play World Warcraft, I was very good at the game,

very, very good at the game. And I would duel other players, or we would compete against their arena team or we would play them in battlegrounds and just crush them. Do you know what they would say back afterwards? Imagine taking this game seriously. That's what you say

when you don't know how to play the game. So when someone sits there and goes, I'm upset that I'm not winning, what they do is they point and they criticize everybody and go, you're a cringe, imagine taking that seriously. Look at you. And it's like, all you're doing is just admitting that you don't know how to play the game.

That's all you're doing. So even the fact that we're talking about this, it's like we're basically debating why the people who don't know how to play the game don't want to play the game are like saying that it's a bad game. Dickie and I are too busy trying to help other people play the game. You know? Yeah. Why give it attention?

I mean, I don't want to put it. words in Daniel's mouth, but people like him, they might look at, you know, playing the game as like, oh, I don't need to play the game. I don't need to play the game because I'm already a founder of a company that's doing really well. And I'm, I need to, you know, spend all my time focusing on, you know, solutions to problems, building my team, raising venture capital. But that's a different game. That's a different game. And what ghostwriting taught me, is there is a drastic difference between doing something and being really good at explaining how to do it. And so a lot of times when I would go straight for a founder, they'd be accomplished.

But then when I asked them, can you explain how you solve these problems? They can't articulate it. Right. So they got good at doing it, but they didn't build the skill of being able to articulate it. And so a lot of times, right, what does that person do? They go, oh, the people over over there articulating it, super cringe. No, you're probably just mad that that's a game that you're not winning. That's a game that you're not playing, right? Just like, think of the other side. There's all the people that go, imagine taking your startup seriously. It's just the other side, criticizing the other game, right? It's everybody in their own vacuum criticizing the other vacuum. And it's like, these are all just niche games. Just play the game that you want to play and let other

people play their games. Is there any truth to cringiness Twitter? Of course. I just want you to say it. I want you to say it. Like, tell me, you know, tell me how you feel about that. And do you think the people that are writing, you know, the, you know, Twitter is a top university, you know, the top, you know, these threads that we always see that are basically

repurposed time and time again, when you see. When you see those threads, like, what do you think, you know, as professionals, do you, are you like, wow, they're just playing the game? Or are you like, I think they should be playing another game? I think it's a way of playing the game. Is that the optimal way? Depends what game you're playing. If their goal is to play the dopamine slot machine that we've all played and we all do with Twitter and write a thread that gets 50,000 likes, but every person who reads it, has no interest in following you along as a reader? Sure, right? If you only write threads about Google Docs and, you know, Chrome extensions, you're not building any kind of personal relationship, but it's okay.

If you choose to play that game, you can do it successfully. You're going to get a lot of followers. Now, if the goal of the game is maximum number of followers, sure, but I don't think that's a very smart goal to have for the game, right? because if you have 200,000 followers and you've never sold anything, what is that going to do? And none of them, they all followed you one time for one thing. And then the next thing you write, they're like, I've known why did I follow this person again? They don't remember anything you wrote from a personal perspective versus when you're telling your stories or providing educational content, right?

Look, I've written threads on Google Docs and on TED Talks and on YouTube videos. And they've worked. But it's all about you don't build your entire life around that. But again, I don't think it's not worth spending time, like, judging the people playing that game, right? Instead, you should just play your own game and say they are playing theirs. I'm going to play mine. And rather than give them the mental headspace of like, oh, my gosh, I can't imagine riding a thread like that. It's like, why don't you just focus a little bit more on what you're doing rather than kind of what other people are doing?

My take on it is I respect games in general. as a game player I respect games putting it out there you know do I think the the best way to get your name out there is to essentially copy formats like copy a thread that's worked for example this you know the one that we've all seen around you know Twitter is better than 99.9% of universities

and just kind of like copy and pasting I don't think it's a great approach that being said like someone like Blake Birch, who authentically writes threads on Excel and Google Sheets and creates new content, you know, in the game format, like in threads. You know, not only is he able to like build an audience of 400,000 people in like two years, which is wild. He's also able to like, you know, he quit his job.

He's like living on like a farming community, like his dream with like 1500 other people. he's selling like Google sheets and other digital assets and making a great living from it. Like when you hear stories like that, it just like gives you the warm and fuzzy feeling. Yeah, Blake was got his start in Chip 30. He's one of Ship 30's biggest success story. So the first course he took was Ship 30. And the number of pieces that he's written to get to where he is, he's talked about a ton of different things. And then he said, wow, people like.

when I write about Excel. And there's just no world where someone who's living an awesome life now because of writing on the internet looks around and it's like, you know what? I'm really worried that like this group of VCs thinks I'm cringe. Like that does not go through his head one time. He's like, I'm making a living,

living my dream life. I got to quit my corporate job like all these things because I wrote about something that I had experience in. That sounds like an absolute dream to me. So it's all perspective, right? And most people just think they're too smart or too cool. And it's all a place of ego. If you look around other people doing things on Twitter, like, oh, and you're just judging

them. So I'm always kind of of the perspective from Jim Detmer that's if you spot it, you got it, which means the way you kind of think about other people and how you project on them is always projecting from the way you feel about yourself or whatever it is, you're doing. So I don't know. I don't spend any time judging other people and how they're living their life. Like you look at some of these people on Twitter who have their entire thing on Twitter has become making fun of people writing on Twitter. But all they're doing now is trying to get likes on Twitter the same way the other person is doing. They're just appealing to a

different group of people. Right. So it's like you're playing the same game. You just don't recognize it. some reason think you're more important or smarter or whatever of just being a professional shit poster. And it's negative. Yeah. Why would you want to live your life like that? Like waking up like, you know what? I'm going to go generate internet clicks today by being me. Imagine waking up with that like predisposition. It just sounds like a horrible life. So I always, I look at those people from a extreme place of empathy. Like, man, I'm very glad that that is not how I wake up and choose to live. A lot of people ask me, Greg, how do you build products that foster community?

Well, I've got good news. That's exactly what Late Checkout does, my company. We partner with the largest brands in the world and fast-paced startups to design products that resonate with your community. We add a couple interesting clients every single year. So if you're interested, and that sounds like you, email. front desk at laycheckout. Studio with what you're working on, what you need help with, and don't forget to mention the Where It Happens Pod. Thank you. So if you're listening to this and you want to double down on writing, you know,

what do you recommend the first steps are? So for example, I didn't know that Blake basically wrote about a bunch of things and then narrowed in on Excel and Google Sheets. To me, he was just always the Excel guy. So this happens with anything, right? Writing is just, it's a vehicle, but this is true for wanting to improve or get better at anything in life.

And when you first start trying to learn how to do anything, you are operating from a lot of assumptions. you're operating from the assumption that you'll enjoy it. You're operating from the assumption that you know what you want to do with it. You're operating from the assumption that you have the patience to get through the first three steps, you know. And so a big focus of ship 30 and why we've constructed it as a writing challenge is because the goal is to accelerate essentially two years, three years, five. years of learning into 30 days. And so, for example, one of the biggest assumptions that someone makes at the beginning of deciding, I want to start writing, is they assume they know what they

want to write about. So you walk into the whole thing and you go, I want to write about productivity. And then you write about it for three days and you realize that's not actually what I want to write about. And part of the learning process is accelerating through those moments so that you can figure out, is this what you actually want to write about or no? And then the other side is, is this what people find valuable? Right. So you write about productivity for five days in a row, 10 days in a row, and like very lukewarm. And then you go and tell the story of how you explored Machu Picchu and what it taught you about living a fulfilling life. And it goes viral. Right. And all of a sudden you go, oh, now I have a data point. Oh, something about that topic is

really resonating. The thing I thought people wanted isn't actually the thing that people want. And so a huge part of the process, this is why we have this saying, you can't steer a stationary ship. What a lot of people do is they sit in their room, they sit at their desk, they draw out this huge map, they go, before I take one single step, here's my path to a giant successful career on the internet, where no one will judge me and everything I do is perfect and I will build a giant audience, right? And then they take one step and they have to confront all these assumptions. And instead, a much better approach is to just begin, write about a lot of different things, see how you feel about it, see how it feels for the reader.

Is it something they're enjoying? Is it something you're enjoying? And you navigate as you go along. That's the whole idea. What do you think about, you know, writing as Greg Eisenberg versus writing as at the community guy? There's this growing trend around people picking, uh, not a, anonymous accounts. You know, I follow this guy name at the car dealership guy.

He tweets about like cars and stuff like that and where the prices are going. And yeah, I'm just curious how you think about that. There's definitely an interesting trend on person or anonymous. But I think there's two really important things to point out here. One is either way, it's a person. the community guy, the community gal, the community whatever, right, which is very different than at Avis rental car, right? It's very, there's a difference between a entity and a person, whether the person is their name or anonymous point A. And I think we always want to listen to

people more than we want to listen to entities. The second, though, which I find really ironic, is this idea of I'm the community guy, I'm the product gal, I'm the whatever, right? And it's important to understand what are they doing? They are literally naming their niche, right? Which is the whole thing. The whole thing is not for you. It's not for Dickie to be famous.

It's not for me to be famous. It's not for Greg to be famous. It's for each one of us to become known for a niche that we own. it's to be known for a category of thing. So whenever someone goes, oh, I'm the community person or I'm the product designer person, what they're trying to do is they're trying to signal their niche so that it's easy to understand why do you pay attention to me. That's the whole point.

So it sounds like if you want to double down on writing, step one is picking a topic. step two is picking a niche is step three pick a personality step three is right every day for a year and then pick your head up and see if it worked like see who you are basically because you're going to learn it so much about what you like to write about what people like to read

and so where most people will go is okay this sounds great sounds like I can pick a niche and then I'm going to go spend the next six months creating the perfect website, the perfect blog, the perfect content plan. I'm going to have it all mapped out rather than just hitting publish on something tomorrow. And so that's why we say this idea of shipping daily. You have to be putting ideas out for a year. And if you commit to writing about one thing for an entire year, you're going to get really good at that thing. And you're going to build distribution around it where right now I'm not talking about writing quite as much as I did in 2020 and 2021. Now I'm talking about things that I'm more well, not well-rounded,

but a more diverse list of topics. But the only reason people are paying attention to that is because I talked about a singular thing pretty much every single day for a year and a half. And Jack Butcher has a great quote. It's build distribution and then build whatever you want. And so if I had only written about what I'm writing about now, people would have come to me and they wouldn't have built any kind of relationship with me because it was harder to latch on versus when you say, hey, I'm going to help you solve this one specific problem. It's much easier to start with a niche and then expand than to think, oh, but I have so many interests.

You just need to pick one and extend the time horizon and say, I'm going to write on the internet for 20 years. I don't have to figure it all out right now. I can pick one thing and write about it for three and then pick another thing and write about it for three. I think too many people and myself included when I was getting started felt like, I had to have it all figured out right away rather than recognizing this was going to be a long-term game. And that the only thing I needed to do is get started.

And the rest kind of takes care of itself when you're putting out enough data, getting feedback, all that. I've been seeing you tweet more lifestyle content, really. You know, I saw you tweet, there's simply no better way to prepare for the week ahead than steak, eggs, potatoes, and spinach. and then you took a picture of your steak and eggs and potatoes and spinach. And first of all, it looked amazing. Like, I don't know what you put in your eggs, but sign me up. And second of all, I feel like if you can post about steak and eggs, you've made it. In the sense of like as a writer or as a content creator, when you're able to create lifestyle content where you're basically, for me as a content creator,

I think about like, how do I build audience first and then build affinity second. So affinity is another word for trust. I want to increase that amount of trust. And I feel like lifestyle content a lot of the time makes people feel more connected to the creator. Is that something that you're consciously doing? Well, the mistake I made when I just started out was thinking I could only talk about lifestyle content and I was going to grow. because the truth was no one, they come for some specific problem you're solving for them

and then they build a relationship with you based on the tangential things you talk about, not the reverse, right? If I'd only tweeted out pictures of my steak and eggs, I'd have 100 followers and that was it. But instead, I've helped so many people solve problems in their life through my writing that now I can tweet about just things I'm generally interested in and they've come to trust me as a person.

So it's the dream, of course, is where you just live your life on a day-to-day basis and your writing is a byproduct of exploring your unique interests. And then all the readers are reading anything you put out just because they're interested in you. But I'm still not at that point and still focus most of my writing on solving problems. But like, I think the long-term sustainable way to write

has to be things that you're extremely interested in learning and continuing to grow rather than only talking about one thing forever. But I do think you have to start there because otherwise you're not going to generate any kind of, it's like the cold start problem. You can't talk about things that interest everyone in the beginning because someone would come to your profile and say, I don't know what I'm here for. But now it's like you build up enough of a general readership, then you can kind of talk about anything. I essentially agree. The thing with this topic is it is such a nuanced thing, right? I think

it's so easy to just go, you get famous and then you can do whatever. But everything sits inside a context, right? The context is the niche that you are creating within. So why is Dickie's posting steak and eggs interesting? Well, let's follow the logic line. The logic line is, I, I, reader, follow Dickie because I want to start writing online. Next point, Dickie treats writing online like an athlete. Writes about that. Next logic line, Dickie must structure his life in a very disciplined way

in order to treat writing online like an athlete such that I can learn how to write online. Right. Fourth logic point, Dickie posts steak and eggs for breakfast. That's kind of interesting. Maybe I should start eating steak and eggs for breakfast so that I can treat my writing like a sport so that I can get better at writing. That's literally what's going through the reader's head. And so I think there's a huge logical fallacy where you look at all these big creators. I've watched a dozen cycles.

This is exactly what happens. Writer starts, creator starts, experiments, gains traction, doubles down on a niche. becomes known for a niche they own, thinks that everyone's following them for them, not the niche, abandons the niche, and then loses engagement over time. Every over and over, it's just the same loop.

And it's our human nature to think we are special. The reader cares about me, Cole. The reader cares about Dickie. The reader cares about you, Greg. And in actuality, what the reader cares about is you, in the context of the niche that solves a problem for them. And the moment you step out of that niche completely, and you start thinking it's just about you and how special you are

and how famous you are and how big your audience is, the great dissension begins. And just it happens over and over and over again. If Ryan Holiday tomorrow publishes a book in his niche stoicism, it's a number one bestseller. Well, if Ryan Holiday tomorrow publishes a book outside that niche, very, very different result. I mean, Ryan Holiday didn't start off as like some well-known stoic.

Like, I've known Ryan. No, he built it. I met Ryan when he was the director of marketing at American Apparel. I'm super familiar with this whole story. Right. But what happened? Starts, marketing, little bit attraction, doubles down. Second book, does okay.

Ghost experiments with a different data point. obstacle is the way, very successful, doubles down, doubles down, doubles down, now category king, stoicism. If tomorrow Ryan starts only making YouTube videos about his life, his breakfasts, and his farm animals, whole thing goes like this. The crazy thing about the rise of Ryan Holiday

is that Ryan Holiday is more famous than Marcus Aurelius and Seneca to most people today. Because he's the one who's delivering the message about stoicism in a way that people can understand nowadays via TikTok, via Twitter, via Instagram, via his books. I think what's really courageous that Ryan did was he had a really good thing going with marketing and PR. And he said to himself and his editors or whatever, like, I'm going to go. And he picked stoicism when stoicism was like not a real category, basically.

A hundred percent, because the mistake would have been him going into Tim Ferriss's category and going, I'm going to compete with Tim Ferriss, losers game. Right? Most people, I've studied the shit out of his story. because I think it's fascinating. And most people don't realize that his mentor is Robert Green. What did Robert Green do? He went and did the same thing with all the Machiavellian stuff and mastery and war and all of that, right?

So Ryan Holiday takes the blueprint, does it with a new category and evangelizes it. But the point is Ryan Holiday is famous because of how he's built stoicism. Ryan Holiday is not famous because he posts lifestyle content. And so lifestyle can be woven in, sure. It's cool to see what someone that you learn and study from and enjoy following. It's cool to see what they're doing. But you are not what matters to the reader. Unless you're Kim Kardashian, right, you are not what matters.

What matters is the category. Are they interested in the niche? Does your niche solve a problem for them? If so, your value sits in that niche. And the moment that that context changes, the way that the reader, the listener, the viewer changes the way they see you. Does the chase ever end? Like, should Ryan Holiday be thinking about what's next in a new category, or is this it for him?

His choice, right? I mean, but anyone who starts to experience it, Dickie and I are experiencing it right now. You've experienced it with community. The moment you start unlocking rewards in a niche, the moment you realize, oh, like Dickie and I aren't the category kings of all writing. It's just one very specific subcategory. Start writing. That's it.

You want to go learn how to write a Pulitzer Prize winning novel? You go somewhere else. If you want to learn how to start writing on the internet, this period. Done. We win right here. And once you start unlocking rewards in a niche, you realize that the switching cost goes up. right so the more that you dominate a niche at this point if Ryan Holliday went to his publisher and went I'm doing a hard pivoting out of stoicism that's like a code read publisher calls in 12 people being like we've got a

serious problem on our hands right because there's a huge switching cost and so can you do it yes do people do it all the time but does it take time and do you have to go through then a whole reorienting of who's interested and who's not, 100%. Because you're not what's special. The niche is what's special. The earth-shattering moment of what you said was you're not focused on writing. You're focused on the sub-niche of start writing, which sounds so small. It sounds like start writing.

That's like other people are going to do it, you know, other people are going to own that. And it's so small. Like, why, you can't build a business around that. Why would you, why would you think so small? That's what, you know, goes through people's brains. But you guys are making millions of dollars on the start writing piece. And I also think that what enough people don't talk about is you could move adjacent

to adjacent categories once you, own the category, you lead the category. Yeah, what's the next logical step? Start copywriting, right? Start email writing. Put the word start in front of anything. I remember, Dickie and I had a whole conversation. I remember it was a year and a half ago.

And it was like a light bulb moment. It was like, this is all we have to do. All we have to do is educate people on start. That's it. And most creators would be smart to do the same thing for their business, right? It's not just the topic. It's where in the journey are you?

And what's the biggest funnel? Where do you create the most demand? It's all the people who haven't started yet beginning. Right? So take any niche, any category, anything. Web 3, get more specific. Start Web 3. Community, get more specific.

Start a community. And if all you did, as Dicky and I are learning, if all you did was drill into that for three years, you would realize that you have more work to do, not less. Because the more specific you get, the more problems you uncover, the more people you realize you can help, the larger the demand creation opportunity, right? It's a great, like, golden rule is whenever someone thinks something is too specific,

that's usually the signal that that's where the gold mine is. it's funny because start writing sounds small until you realize that the total addressable market is everyone who has not started writing which is anyone who's not writing and there's not that many people writing so it sounds small but you go oh wow the the layer zero is everyone on the other side of that and so in whatever niche it is most potential customers will be in getting started. You don't have to choose that way. Like there's a lot of B to B businesses

who only help people who are at $5 million a year to get to 20 or something like that, right? Or you have to have this number of followers. Or choosing where to help people based on their level of experience is totally up to you. But we went with beginners. And why did we go with beginners? In the very beginning,

I was such a beginner that I had no ability to write very well. But what I was really good at was building a writing habit. like ship 30 before cole and i even got together wasn't even like start writing online it was like build a writing habit because i had no ex-colle has been writing since 2014 and so when we partnered it was like okay this is how you get the ideas that were in cole's book into the whole world right but before start writing online it was just build a daily writing habit because i had no experience or ability to teach anything like that so it was even more niche to start like you don't even have to put your ideas out It's just how do you start writing every day?

So I think the more specific you can get on level of experience, all it does is make people, it forces people to make a choice, whether or not they want to start or not, whether or not they're at that level of experience where they qualify for. One of the most interesting things that you guys do is not only you're running an education business, you're running a SaaS technology company called TypeShare. I just went to the website. Obviously, the first thing I see is everything you need to, and this is like, you know, in red versus everything in black, everything you need to start writing online. And they're emphasizing start.

Shocker. Why did you decide to start a SaaS business and what are your hopes for it? Well, I think it's worth recognizing that Dicky and I didn't start TypeShare. TypeShare's original founder is Sam Shore. He built basically the first version of it on his own. Maybe after like two or three cohorts of Ship 30, it was very early. And we saw him do this on Twitter and we're like, wow, this is really cool. And reached out and basically said, hey, if you're going to build this, you know, as an indie developer, why don't we partner up?

We'll bring all the customers. and you continue to build the platform will obviously help build the platform because we know how we can turn our education into SaaS and let's just create a separate company. So we did. We created a separate company and me, Dickie and Sam are co-founders in that company. And it basically plugs into Ship 30. And so the idea is, right, you take Ship 30 and then everyone in Ship 30 is basically getting educated on how to use the SaaS platform thereafter. And I remember, Greg, first time I explained that to you, your brain just exploded. You were like, that is genius.

And yeah, I mean, I think an honest answer is we'll see where it goes. You know, I mean, Dickie and I, neither of us have done SaaS companies before. There's a huge learning curve. It's very, very different than education. Ship 30 and TypeShare is a really, they complement each other well. And I think the key is if you're going to build things, if you're going to build multiple things, they have to work together, right? Because if they don't work together, then there's no compounding. It's just you're signing yourself up for more work elsewhere. But because

ship 30 is basically the lead gen for TypeShare, you can rationalize spending time on both because both benefit each other. TypeShare benefits Ship 30 retention and Ship30 benefits TypeShare customer acquisition, right? So you almost think of it just like two different departments in the same company almost. And both are extremely lean teams where Cole and I have been patient in hiring. So we have one or really a handful of employees, but one core and an assistant with Ship 30. And then Sam is the lead developer. And we have a contractor developer working on it with him.

We don't have these big teams. We haven't raised any money. And this all goes back to which game we want to play. Could we go raise a big round for TypeShare and hire a bunch of engineers and accelerate that process probably but that sounds like signing up for a little bit of a job again which i'm not sure we want to do and could we scale ship 30 to triple what it is now if we went and hired a bunch of people right away maybe but it's also a lot of fun to operate with a very small team and probably at the expense of growth and pursuing different opportunities and so we're

extending the time horizon and saying yeah we'll get to that And we'll get to that and we'll get to that. And it's very freeing to run a business that way where it's, yes, this is working now, despite not doing this, not doing that, not starting that thing, not starting that thing. And so rather than look at it as like, oh, we could be doing way more. It's like we will do way more. We just extend the time horizon with which we do all those. And we're going to be able to grow forever because of it.

There's this trend right now about solopreneurship. So many people want to be Solopreneurs, businesses of one. In the previous cycle, I want to raise as much money as possible. I want a business of a million. I saw a term recently called micro entrepreneurs, which I found interesting,

which is sort of in between, I want to swing for the fences, and I want to live in the forest by myself and not have contact with anyone, but also have a business type thing. And microentrepreneurs is like, you know, the 5, 10, 15, 20 person business that's profitable, that is highly leveraged, that relies on audiences. And I think we're going to see a huge surge in micro entrepreneurship. And that's a great example of like, who is owning that category?

Like, why doesn't someone go and, like, put a stake there? Like, if Justin Welsh is the solo entrepreneurship guy and is making seven figures a year and has an incredible audience, you know, someone could easily be that, Justin Welsh, but for micro entrepreneurs. I think Michael Conjra Capra, I can't pronounce his last name, but he tweeted it, solopreneurs are one-person teams, micropreneurs are like 10-person teams. I sent that tweet to him via DM. Like, I love this language. And this was a couple days ago. Because I think that is where people are headed because in entrepreneurship, you quickly realize, like, you basically have a glorified job

for a lot of it because you're doing everything. So why wouldn't you potentially want to zoom out and have a little bit of a team where you're able to not? The thing about solopreneurship is you can't stop doing all the things you're doing without your livelihood being completely at risk. not that we would ever stop doing anything, but I think it's worth recognizing whether you have a glorified job or a business. And so entrepreneurship, to me, is you just are working for yourself versus running a business. And it's interesting to think about all the different ways we could educate

on how we do things as a team call on that front. But that to me sounds way more fun to have a 10-person team, a lot of autonomy. You really know the people you're working with. You enjoy. working with them. I totally agree. And I raised a small round for my first company. And we were thinking of doing the whole VC route and I took all these meetings and, you know, kind of projected it all forward. And I think I and a lot of entrepreneurs have woken up and are waking up to the realization that every time you raise more money, your success, chances go down, not up. that's that's the big aha is that every time you you move the goal post you're the chances of you actually having a meaningful outcome go from you know 20% to 10% to 5% to 1% to 1% to

and when you start to net it out you realize it is significantly easier to make a million a year than it is to have an exit that pays you one to $10 million. And then when you have that exit, well, now your cash machine is gone. So now you have to go do it again. Right. And so I think it's different games for different people. I know some entrepreneurs who play the VC game exceedingly well and they've made fortunes doing it. But I think it's very easy to look at it.

and go, that's easy. And it's not. And you have way higher chances creating financial abundance for yourself, putting yourself in positions of power and leverage and opportunity by building a one to three to five million dollar business or being a solopreneur making half a million or a million bucks a year. You have so many more freedoms, so many, a lot of which aren't financial, right, the freedom to just wake up when you want to wake up, to go for walks with your significance.

other. I think the post-COVID world revealed to a lot of people like, hey, I'd rather trade my $600K salary for a $300K salary if it means I have my sanity. There's a lot to be said for that. The biggest takeaway I have from this conversation is it's not the great online game we're playing. It's the great online games that we're playing. And it's about how do you think about which games do I want to play in life and in work and being creating systems to basically go after those games.

That's like that's my takeaway. Jents, always a pleasure. If people want to learn more about Chip 30 and you guys, where can they do it? I think the easiest place to go is start writing online.com. You can download our free 13,000 word ultimate guide to start writing like we talked about. It's got everything you need to write on any platform.

It's all our best frameworks. Just give it away. So start writing online.com and then ship 30 for 30.com if you want to check out the course, next cohort's in April. And if you're listening to this later, I have cohorts running all the time. And if you're looking to get started like we talked about, no better place. And I'm at Dickie Bush on Twitter, LinkedIn, spend way too much time on both those. So that's where you can find me.

epic thanks so much guys for coming on you're going to have to come back on again and by the way i'm drinking a non-alcoholic beer if you're watching this on youtube i saw that dicky was coming on to this and dicky doesn't drink and uh i opened the fridge and i was inspired by dicky and i was like you know i'm going to have a non-alcoholic drink so cheers