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

Nicolas Cole 0:00 There are so many people that are now realizing that they all need to build things on the internet. So we used to live in an analog world, now we live in a digital world.

Ali Abdaal 0:11 What you're about to hear is a conversation between me and my friend Nicolas Cole. This is Cole's second time on the podcast. The first time around, we talked about five paths to make a million dollars as an online writer, or rather as a writer, and that episode did super, super well. And today, we're talking about the fastest path to $10,000 a month as a writer.

Nicolas Cole 0:30 So your fastest path as a writer to 5K as a side hustle, you know, 10K, 20K, replacing your full-time income and then some, is to just go find one person and go, "I can help you solve problems in your business."

Ali Abdaal 0:42 We talk about how to craft the perfect email and the sort of energy that it takes to sell, and how sales is really the same thing as education, and a bunch of mistakes that we see people make when pitching us their various different services.

Nicolas Cole 0:54 It seems like the longer road to go, "Uh, I have to go educate and talk to 100 people?" Well, yeah. In the beginning, that is the longer road instead of just, you know, trying to automate the whole process and defer to technology. But if you skip that step, you think you're taking the shortcut, and then guess what? Shortcut ends up being the longer road because you skipped the whole learning.

Ali Abdaal 1:17 Cole, welcome back to the podcast. How's it going?

Nicolas Cole 1:19 Great, man. I'm always happy to be in London.

Ali Abdaal 1:21 This is gonna be fun. So in part one that we did, which people absolutely loved, we went through your entire backstory and a kind of a surface level overview of how to make ... you know, how to make money online as a writer.

Nicolas Cole 1:32 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:33 Um, in this episode, I was hoping we could go a little bit deeper into this, because you teach people how to make money as ghostwriters. And-

Nicolas Cole 1:41 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:42 ... we wanna teach people what is their fastest path to actually making money as a writer, because a lot of people still kind of think that writing is a thing that can't ... like, you can't really make money from it. I've just published a book, traditional publishing. People are like, "Oh, do I find an agent? Do I get a book deal?" What do people get wrong about making money online as a writer?

Nicolas Cole 1:58 Okay. Most fun question on planet Earth for me. So let's ... we'll start with the mistake. So the mistake that writers make, I think, is thinking that you need to have a ton of attention in order to start monetizing. So everyone thinks, step one, I need a million followers. So already wrong, 'cause if I told you tomorrow you had to go give a speech in front of a million people, you would have an anxiety attack. Like, you don't need a million followers. Second is they go, "Okay. Well, maybe I don't need a million followers. I just need 100,000, or I need 10,000." Reduce the number. Okay. Still, still wrong.

Ali Abdaal 2:32 Yeah. I need my 1,000 true fans, right?

Nicolas Cole 2:34 Yeah. Okay, so still, still wrong. And the reason ... You know, there's all these different paths you can take to monetizing your craft, any craft. We'll, we'll use writing as the example. The f- the fastest path though is not selling a product. It is selling a service. Because if you think, and everyone in the creator world talks about selling digital products, right? You sell an e-book, you sell a course, you sell a cohort-based experience, whatever it is, right? But that's not actually the fastest path, because most of those products, if not all of them, are priced in a couple hundred bucks or less. Or if you're selling an e-book, it's like 10 or $20, right? So the lower the price point, the more volume you need. So it sounds really easy to go, "Okay. Well, I can make, you know, 5 or 10 grand selling a $200 course," for example. But you have to play that out and go, "Okay. Well, how many of those do I need to sell every month in order to sustain 5, 10, 20K a month?"

Ali Abdaal 3:27 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 3:27 Right? You need volume.

Ali Abdaal 3:28 Yeah. I mean, especially with a physical book. Like-

Nicolas Cole 3:30 Or a physical book isn't gonna work

Ali Abdaal 3:31 ... my book has sold a lot of copy- well, you know, it sold like 200,000 copies, but I still haven't-

Nicolas Cole 3:35 Has it been that many?

Ali Abdaal 3:35 I still haven't paid off the advance. And our royalty percentage is, I think I'm allowed to share this, about like 10, 15%.

Nicolas Cole 3:41 Oh, you got 15?

Ali Abdaal 3:42 Yeah. Oh, yeah, we got 15. We got a good deal.

Nicolas Cole 3:43 You got a decent deal [laughs] .

Ali Abdaal 3:44 We got a decent deal. We got 15%. But it's like I make maybe £1.50

Ali Abdaal 3:48 every time I sell a book. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 3:49 Yeah. No. It's horrible.

Ali Abdaal 3:50 So, so I need to sell a lot of books to make a living as a professional writer if the thing that I was making money from was selling books.

Nicolas Cole 3:56 Yeah. And by the way, so ... and I'm happy to jam on this, 'cause I, I love the whole traditional versus self-publishing debate.

Ali Abdaal 4:02 Yeah, we could get nut on here as well. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 4:03 You know? Yeah. Like we just do a round table, because the reason why there's the whole cliche nobody makes a living as a writer is because of course it's gonna be hard to make a living as a writer when the thing that you're selling is priced at $20. There's no recurring revenue. Most people buy a book once. They don't buy it again. And then your deal in that is you get 10% of the revenue. So you're not even getting all $20, right? You're getting $2. And so then that leads to the cliche, well, nobody makes a living as a writer, right? And that's wrong. And so your fastest path, if you're sitting there ... And I, I think so often people have this conversation where they go, "I wanna make money. Every option is available to me." Well, no, every option isn't available to you.

Ali Abdaal 4:45 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 4:46 There's usually one thing you're trying to optimize for in your life. And if you're working a full-time job and you're like, "I wanna get out of my full-time job," your number one concern is how do I replace my full-time income, right? So your fastest path to replacing your full-time income is not selling products, because products take longer 'cause you need to build an audience in order to sell them, and you need to sell them in volume. It's much easier to go find one client that is willing to pay you 3 grand, 4 grand, 5 grand to do something for them. So it's actually monetizing through a service. So your fastest path as a writer to 5K as a side hustle, you know, 10K, 20K, replacing your full-time income and then some, is to just go find one person and go, "I can help you solve problems in your business."

Ali Abdaal 5:30 Hmm. Okay.

Nicolas Cole 5:31 It's not to go be some viral creator.

Ali Abdaal 5:33 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 5:33 You can do that. Just do that later.

Ali Abdaal 5:35 Fine. Okay, so how do we do that? Let's say I am ... Let's rewind. We'll, we'll, we'll do a bit of role play. Let's say I'm 26 years old. I've been working two years as a doctor-

Nicolas Cole 5:43 Hi, young Ali

Ali Abdaal 5:44 ... in the, in the UK's National Health Service, and I'm like, "You know, I quite ... You know, I think I enjoy this medicine thing, but, you know, if I project out 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, will I continue to enjoy it? I'd love to have ... Man, if I could have 5K a month coming in, I'd be able to quit my job and be able to take my gap year or be able to travel around the world, and then I can always come back to medicine later if I feel like it."

Nicolas Cole 6:03 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 6:03 But I sort of feel like, but like, I don't know, I just went through med school. I, I don't really have any skills other than the stuff around being a doctor.

Nicolas Cole 6:09 Okay, so this will be-

Ali Abdaal 6:10 I mean, I wrote a lot of essays in medical school, but dot, dot, dot. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 6:12 Yeah, this will be awesome. Okay.

Ali Abdaal 6:13 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 6:14 So step one is you have to identify your information advantage. So most people, this is, this is where, how they start. They go, "I'm not happy. I've decided I wanna do something different," and then they just let their imagination run wild. And they look at you today, like, you know, Ali, this world renowned 5 million-plus YouTube subscribers productivity expert, and they're like, "I wanna be that."

Ali Abdaal 6:35 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 6:36 Okay, first of all, you didn't start there, right? That, that is where you're ending up now. That's not where you started. So your, your goal is not to just imagine and think, you know, "What i- what is the [laughs] the most legendary version of myself, and how do I go be that tomorrow?" 'Cause that's not how the game works. It is so much easier to start by asking yourself the question, "Where do I already have an information advantage?" So-

Ali Abdaal 7:01 What do you mean by information advantage?

Nicolas Cole 7:02 So information advantage is you've been working as a doctor for three years, right?

Ali Abdaal 7:06 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 7:06 You graduated medical school, what- whatever. You inherently know more about that subject than someone who hasn't had those experiences.

Ali Abdaal 7:13 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 7:13 Right? It's inherent. The problem is we all take the knowledge that we have for granted.

Ali Abdaal 7:17 Yeah, 'cause everyone I know is also a doctor, so it's like, big whoop, being a doctor.

Nicolas Cole 7:20 Right.

Ali Abdaal 7:21 You know, it's not a big deal.

Nicolas Cole 7:22 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 7:22 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 7:22 So to, to the, to the classmate sitting next to you, you're like, "I don't know anything," or, "I don't know anything different," right?

Ali Abdaal 7:27 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 7:27 But remove yourself from that classroom, and you actually know a lot relative to the entire population.

Ali Abdaal 7:32 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 7:32 Right? So step one is recognizing in yourself what information do you take for granted? Because that information is what allows you to go help someone. So thinking of it in the reverse, if I run a biotech company, for example, do I wanna hire someone who speaks and understands medicine and that, and that, you know, health and wellness industry, or am I just gonna go hire some random person that has no idea what any of those terms mean?

Ali Abdaal 7:59 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 8:00 So the misunderstanding, and why I say that ghostwriting is the fastest path to monetization, is because anywhere you have an information advantage, you're already fluent in that industry.

Ali Abdaal 8:11 Okay. So at this point, a lot of people, a, a lot of m- a lot of medics I know, and this was me back in the day, um, would've said, "Okay, I have an information advantage in that I got into med school, so why don't I just do tutoring for people to help them get into med school?" Dot, dot, dot. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 8:26 Yeah. Okay, so now think about who you're selling to.

Ali Abdaal 8:29 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 8:30 So tutoring, who are you selling to? Well, you're most likely selling to broke college students-

Ali Abdaal 8:35 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 8:35 ... or people in med school, right?

Ali Abdaal 8:36 Yeah, or their parents if they're applying to med school and the parents are rich, for example.

Nicolas Cole 8:38 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 8:39 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 8:39 But tutoring is already price anchored to a certain thing, right? Like, most people, like, how much are you willing to pay f- hourly for tutoring? Most, most tutoring is priced hourly.

Ali Abdaal 8:48 Yeah, in the tens of dollars per hour.

Nicolas Cole 8:49 Right.

Ali Abdaal 8:50 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 8:50 So the second thing is you have to go, "Okay, I have an information advantage. Now, who is the most, um..." Like, what's the right word? The, the mo- [laughs] the most affluent customer, right? Well, it's a biotech startup that just raised $30 million, right? Or it's an executive for a pharma company, or it's... Right? All of those businesses, to them, five grand is nothing. 10 grand is nothing. But if you go pitch, you know, a parent of a kid who needs help via tutoring, 10 grand is a lot of money, right? So the second thing is going, "Okay, I have an information advantage. Now, who are all the customers that would be willing to pay me a premium to help them solve something in their business?"

Ali Abdaal 9:32 Hmm. Yeah, this is already, I think, a, um, a massive, like, sort of mind-blowing thing for people to realize, that different people value money at different levels.

Nicolas Cole 9:40 Significantly differently.

Ali Abdaal 9:41 And especially businesses value money at a completely different, in a completely different way than individuals do.

Nicolas Cole 9:45 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 9:45 How, how did you first appreciate this sort of disparity in how people think about money?

Nicolas Cole 9:50 Well, I mean, the honest answer is I just undercharged for a long time until it became so painfully obvious to me that I was undercharging.

Ali Abdaal 9:58 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 9:58 You know? Like when I was first starting out, I remember charging $25 or $50 an article and thinking, you know, the jump from 25 to 50 was a lot. I was like, "Oh, I'm charging a lot." And then the jump from 50 to 100 was a lot. And there was... The, a story that I tell sort of often in our programs is there was a moment where I was pitching a ghostwriting client. I was probably 27, and we met in this restaurant in LA, and he was hiring me to ghostwrite this white paper for a, for a crypto startup they were trying to launch. And I remember going into the meeting being like, "Okay, how much should I charge? I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw a outrageous number in the air." And I remember I mustered up the courage and I was like, "I'm gonna charge 10 grand to write this white paper." And we were sitting in the meeting, and he, we... It all goes great, and then he goes, "All right, so what's the damage? How much is this gonna cost me?" And I said, "It's gonna..." And at the last minute I almost backed out, you know? But I was like, "It's gonna cost 10 grand," and I, like, waited. And he looks at me and he goes, "I just want you to know that I was prepared to pay three times that, but you already said the number, so 10 grand it is."

Ali Abdaal 11:00 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 11:00 And I walked away from that meeting going-

Ali Abdaal 11:02 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 11:03 ... "I have no idea how to value my value."

Ali Abdaal 11:06 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 11:06 And I think that's something where it doesn't matter. I see it in our ghostwriting academy all the time too. We, we train ghostwriters to build and write these educational email courses for people. We go, "You can sell this for five grand, no problem." No matter how many times we tell them, "You can sell this for five grand," there's a large percentage of people who the first time they pitch it, they, they can't even get the words five grand out of their mouth. 'Cause they're so... They can't conceive of someone being willing to pay that.

Ali Abdaal 11:33 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 11:33 And it's usually only until you experience it a couple times where you're like, "Wow, everyone's saying yes to $1,000. Like, maybe I should charge more." Right?

Ali Abdaal 11:41 Nice. Okay. So quickest path to making money. I, I, I guess sort of zooming out from writing, in general, it's, it's find a small number of people to pay you a lot of money-

Nicolas Cole 11:49 Yes

Ali Abdaal 11:49 ... rather than find a very large number of people to pay you a small amount of money.

Nicolas Cole 11:53 Correct.

Ali Abdaal 11:53 And I think, you know, one of the issues that people often think is if you're a young person and you don't have much money, chances are the people you know are also young people who don't have much money.

Nicolas Cole 12:02 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 12:02 And so you're really anchored towards thinking, "My goodness, I can't believe people are paying $97 for a course. Wow Man, these American scammers are so, so good at taking money-

Nicolas Cole 12:11 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 12:11 ... for like $97 for it. Why would anyone pay that?

Nicolas Cole 12:14 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 12:14 And they've just paid, like, well, had tens of thousands in college fees and all that kind of stuff at the same [laughs] -

Nicolas Cole 12:18 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 12:18 ... at the same time.

Nicolas Cole 12:19 And it's all ... I mean, there's so many different ways to approach this conversation, but, like, for example, 10 years ago, I probably bought my first online course. I remember spending 100 bucks or 200 bucks going, "I can't believe I just spent that amount of money on this." Last year, we joined a mastermind for $68,000. So you have to sort of build the skill. This is something I, I wanna write more about, which is-

Ali Abdaal 12:41 Mm

Nicolas Cole 12:41 ... spending money and investing money in yourself is a skill, and you can see it with people that make a lot of money, but they still have spending habits as if they were broke. You know? They constrain themselves. And I think a lot of, a lot of entrepreneurs or founders, they almost take this pride in, you know, "I don't drive a nice car. I drive a Prius," you know, or, "I didn't, I didn't get the nice apartment. I, I still have my little quaint one-bedroom." And that's fine. Like, I'm not advocating for lavish spending, but also you have to realize that in some way you're also holding yourself back 'cause you're not building the skill of going, "I trust myself to spend-"

Ali Abdaal 13:15 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 13:15 ... $68,000 'cause I know I'm gonna get an ROI from that."

Ali Abdaal 13:18 Yeah. Yeah. It re- uh, reminds me of a moment. It w- it was, like, a year or two ago, um, where I was talking to Tintin, my YouTube producer, and we'd, we'd hired this guy to do, like, graphic designs or something, and, you know, I thought it was gonna come out to, like, $1,200 or something like that. Cool. What- whatevs. You know, the guy was really good. $1,200 is a, is a bargain. Then we got the invoice, and he charged five grand, and I was like, "Oh," and it's just like, oh, because, because we arranged it over, like, Twitter DMs, I didn't quite realize he was charging per asset rather than per platform.

Nicolas Cole 13:45 Uh-huh.

Ali Abdaal 13:46 And I, and then I said to Dan, our finance guy, like, "Yeah, five grand. Cool. Whatevs," you know? "Just pay the invoice."

Nicolas Cole 13:50 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 13:50 And Tintin remember, re- re- remembers that moment vividly, thinking, "Wow, to Ali Abdaal, there is no difference between $1,200 and $5,000."

Nicolas Cole 13:59 Uh-huh.

Ali Abdaal 13:59 And that being, like, a fucking mind-blowing moment for him to be like, "Holy shit, an entrepreneur with a multimillion-dollar business really values money spent on business stuff" [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 14:08 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 14:08 ... at a completely different rate. If I was spending my personal money, [laughs] I, I would value it very differently. [laughs] But if I was spending business money, it's like, 'cause it's kind of open season.

Nicolas Cole 14:15 Yeah. And, you know, I understand why that's hard to wrap your head around because honestly, that's something you really only understand as you build things that generate more resource and as you hire more resource and as you deploy more resource, right?

Ali Abdaal 14:30 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 14:30 Like, we both w- were gamers growing up. I saw that note in your book, by the way, uh, where you were like, uh, "I was a, at confession-

Ali Abdaal 14:39 Oh, yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 14:39 ... I was a rule workout addict."

Ali Abdaal 14:40 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 14:40 And I read that and I was like, "Oh, I love this."

Ali Abdaal 14:42 Thanks. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 14:42 I mean, such a fan. Um, but that is really the whole point of video games, you know? And a video game is just the deployment of resources to an end, and I think when you're starting out, I remember being 25 years old, living in Chicago in a dumpy studio apartment. I had no resource.

Ali Abdaal 15:00 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 15:00 I had, like, $100 in my checking account.

Ali Abdaal 15:02 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 15:02 Right? So you can't fathom or understand how other people are deploying resource when you don't have resource.

Ali Abdaal 15:08 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 15:08 Which is why it is actually so important to listen to conversations like this or surround yourself with other people or even, like, do free work for people that have thriving businesses because just you being in their presence and you ... Just like your team member saw you make that decision, that changed how they thought about it. When you do free work for someone else and you see them make that decision, you're getting paid in pattern recognition.

Ali Abdaal 15:33 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 15:33 You're getting paid in experience.

Ali Abdaal 15:36 Yeah. Uh, it re- I, I remember vividly as, as we were talking about World of, uh, World of Warcraft, um, you know, there's the area Ghostlands in The Burning Crusade where I remember when I've ... Uh, I, I started playing during, during Burning Crusade, and I had, like, a level 14 warlock, and there was this g- there was this quest to kill one of the silver elites that would net-

Nicolas Cole 15:53 Oh, yeah. They were hard

Ali Abdaal 15:53 ... that would net you, that would net you 14 silver. And I was like, "14 silver. Oh my God."

Nicolas Cole 15:58 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 15:58 "I can buy that ostrich and that ostrich and that ostrich, the three different colors. Oh my fucking God."

Nicolas Cole 16:04 Uh-huh.

Ali Abdaal 16:04 And you get to level 80 and, and ... Or, or, like ... And, and then you go into a main city and you right click inspect people who've got, like, level 80 gear, and you're like, "Whoa."

Nicolas Cole 16:11 Uh-huh.

Ali Abdaal 16:11 And then as I got to level 80 and started doing the stuff and started finding a way to use Auctioneer and prospecting and jewel crafting and all that shit to make money, I ended up spending 18,000 gold on, like, a, one of the motorbike-y mount-y type thingies.

Nicolas Cole 16:24 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 16:25 Uh, the mechano chopper or whatever it was. And I, I still vividly remember how amazing it felt to be making that 14 silver and thinking, "Oh, my fucking God, this is incredible." And then fast-forward, like, two years later, I'm spending 18,000 gold o- on this, on this new motorbike thing, and I think that speaks to this idea of, yeah, you're just ... Over time you learn to deploy the resource more effectively.

Nicolas Cole 16:46 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 16:46 Or almost like in a, in um ... Have you, have you read the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson?

Nicolas Cole 16:51 No, but, you know, I just-

Ali Abdaal 16:52 It's fucking sick. Yeah

Nicolas Cole 16:52 ... I just got turned on to his library, and I'm, like, starting to go down the library.

Ali Abdaal 16:55 Oh, dude, mate. Final Empire, Brandon Sanderson.

Nicolas Cole 16:57 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 16:58 But it's like in all of these, um, stories, it's like you've got the, the hero who starts off as, like, a little kid in the village, like, you know, Anakin Skywalker in Tatooine or whatever.

Nicolas Cole 17:06 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 17:07 And he's like, he's a bit shit. He's not very powerful. And then over time, as they learn, eventually they get dominion over the galaxy and now they're, like, fucking teleporting from one planet to another, whereas when they were a kid, they were just sort of stuck in this little village on one planet. And it's just sort of this power curve, which really is also a thing in entrepreneurship. Um-

Nicolas Cole 17:24 100%. It's like-

Ali Abdaal 17:25 Yeah, that's what I find so fascinating about speaking to people who are, like, have bigger businesses. It's just they're just thinking on a completely different level.

Nicolas Cole 17:30 And they're ... Okay, just sticking with the metaphor, right? It's like in WoW when you get to level 60, 70, 80 and you complete a quest at that level, you get paid way more gold.

Ali Abdaal 17:41 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 17:41 Right? So you complete a level 80 quest. They, they're like, "Oh, congratulations for bringing us the 10 boar skins."

Ali Abdaal 17:46 [laughs] Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 17:46 "We, we give you nine gold and 87 silver," right?

Ali Abdaal 17:49 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 17:49 But when you complete a quest at level 14-

Ali Abdaal 17:51 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 17:51 ... you're getting paid 10 silver or 14 silver, right?

Ali Abdaal 17:54 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 17:54 So the, the second thing in this whole, you know, like, what is your fastest path to 10K a month, I would actually, and I do, I often advocate for the step before that, which is you shouldn't even try and charge for the first thing that you do.

Ali Abdaal 18:08 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 18:08 You're level one. Right? Like, you having [laughs] 10 copper or zero copper at level one makes no difference

Ali Abdaal 18:15 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 18:15 You can't buy anything with 10 copper anyway.

Ali Abdaal 18:17 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 18:17 Right? So a lot of people, uh, whenever I talk about the ROI of free work, everyone comes back and they're like, "No, you should get paid what your worth is and your value, and you should never do free work, and don't let people take advantage of you." And I'm like, "You're thinking about it completely wrong."

Ali Abdaal 18:31 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 18:32 In the beginning, free work is basically a marketing cost. It is a way to remove all friction and get yourself paid in experience, credibility, pattern recognition, right? So all of a sudden you don't have the constraint where you go, "All right. I, I'm gonna charge three grand for this," and someone goes, "No."

Ali Abdaal 18:50 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 18:51 Okay, wanna know how you remove that barrier? You don't charge three grand, and you just say, "I'll do it for you for free." And everyone thinks, "No, that's a short-term loss." But if I told you you're gonna go pitch that service for three grand, and it's gonna take you nine months to get someone to say yes, or

Nicolas Cole 19:08 you could pitch it to someone for free today, do a project, and then the next month have something to point to that you can ladder up to a client month two, which one would you take?

Ali Abdaal 19:17 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 19:18 And it's only in hindsight or once you explain that, that person goes, "Oh, I would do the second path." But that's not what most people do.

Ali Abdaal 19:24 Yeah. Yeah, we talked about this in our, in our last pod as well, and after that I've had so many people reach out to me-

Nicolas Cole 19:29 Oh, I'm sure

Ali Abdaal 19:29 ... offering free work. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 19:30 I've even been dotted with it. But like-

Ali Abdaal 19:32 So it's kind of good. It's good that we're sort of putting it on the map a little bit to be like, "Guys, the ROI on free is astronomically high."

Nicolas Cole 19:38 Yeah. And you-

Ali Abdaal 19:38 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 19:38 ... we might say no-

Ali Abdaal 19:39 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 19:40 ... or we might not open the DM or the email, but if they go do that for 50 people, someone's gonna say yes, you know? And you have to realize that in the beginning, getting paid in cash is actually not the most valuable thing for you. You wanna get paid in confidence, "I can do this." You wanna get paid in building a network, "Oh, now I know someone who can introduce me to other clients." There are a lot of things more valuable than getting paid 100 bucks or 1,000 bucks.

Ali Abdaal 20:03 Mm. Yeah, but when you're at that stage it s- sort of feels like when you're at level 14, the, the 14 silver feels like, "Oh my God-

Nicolas Cole 20:09 I know

Ali Abdaal 20:09 ... it's so much money."

Nicolas Cole 20:10 And you have to, that, you have to fight that.

Ali Abdaal 20:11 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 20:11 And I think that's why so many people, if you have built something successful... Like, something I think about all the time is if I, you know, if every social platform went to zero tomorrow, if my business went to zero tomorrow, if everything went to zero-

Ali Abdaal 20:24 Mm

Nicolas Cole 20:24 ... would I be able to do this again? And yeah, of course, I think I could, and I think you could too.

Ali Abdaal 20:30 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 20:30 Because once you have the skill, you sh- you realize that all of those things aren't the thing that made you, you. But when you're first starting out, you can't wrap your head around that, so you think the title is important. You think the amount of money is important. Those things aren't what are, are important.

Ali Abdaal 20:45 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 20:45 What's important is whether or not you build the skill.

Ali Abdaal 20:47 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 20:47 What's the fastest path to building the skill? Do it for free.

Ali Abdaal 20:50 Nice. Okay, so I'm 26, I'm a doctor, I have an informational advantage in, like, the medical-ish area.

Nicolas Cole 20:57 Cool.

Ali Abdaal 20:58 And I know that I pr- and, and now I'm like, okay, maybe I shouldn't do tutoring because tutoring is anchored to, like, I don't know. I was, I was giving a talk at Cambridge a few, a few weeks ago, and some guy came up to me afterwards. He was like, "You know, you know, I've got a side hustle as a tutor." And I'm like, "Okay, how much do you charge?" And he was like, "Oh, it's, you know, it's, uh, it's quite a lot of money." I was like, "Oh-

Nicolas Cole 21:15 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 21:15 ... how, how, how much is a lot of money?" And he w- he felt really cagey about saying it, 'cause his friends were around. He was like, "I charge £45 per hour."

Nicolas Cole 21:22 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 21:22 And I was like [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 21:24 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 21:24 "Oh, okay. [laughs] £45 per hour." Um-

Nicolas Cole 21:28 You know-

Ali Abdaal 21:29 But it, it is very much, very much is anchored to, to a lot of money

Nicolas Cole 21:31 It's like The Wolf of Wall Street series. Like, we gotta bump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.

Ali Abdaal 21:35 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 21:36 Okay? Like, yeah. And you won't... And again, you only know that-

Ali Abdaal 21:40 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 21:40 ... when you increase pattern recognition, hanging around other people building things bigger than you.

Ali Abdaal 21:45 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 21:45 No different than you and I are constantly looking for, well, who's built something bigger than we've built.

Ali Abdaal 21:49 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 21:50 Right? So-

Ali Abdaal 21:51 Yeah, this is why when, when I saw your video about the Cole Gordon Mastermind, I was like, "Damn, maybe I should pay $68,000 [laughs] for this frigging Mastermind." And you guys were like, "Yeah, we kinda got the value from it from day one, and then all the rest of it was a bit of a waste-

Nicolas Cole 22:01 Uh

Ali Abdaal 22:01 ... 'cause we knew what we had to, what, what we had to execute on." And I was like, "Mm, interesting."

Nicolas Cole 22:05 But if you think about, again, it's like-

Ali Abdaal 22:07 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 22:07 ... does it matter if we got the value over the course of a year or one day? No, doesn't matter.

Ali Abdaal 22:11 Yeah. And, and even in some ways, one day is even better, 'cause it saves you time.

Nicolas Cole 22:14 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 22:14 This episode of Deep Dive is brought to you by Brilliant. Brilliant is an amazing learning resource that allows you to level up your skills and your knowledge and understanding in maths and data science and computer science. Now, what I like most about Brilliant is that it's a super fun and engaging way to learn. It's not based on dry lectures and dry theory. Instead, what it's based on is engaging in interactive quizzes and games and problems to solve. And so you try and solve a problem, and then they give you the information you need, and through the process of getting that information, you then learn enough to be able to solve the problem. And so it's a really engaging and dynamic way to learn that's actually really fun. Now, some of my favorite courses on Brilliant are the computer science ones. When I was applying to medical school back in the day, I was torn between medicine and computer science. And even though I went for med school, there was always a part of me that really wanted to learn more about computer science. And so thanks to the courses on Brilliant, I've been able to satisfy that curiosity, and I've been able to learn the fundamentals of computer science, like algorithms and programming with Python. And actually recently, they've added a bunch of AI-themed things, including a course on how large language models are built, which helps you understand a little bit more about how things like ChatGPT work, which is pretty cool. They've also got a really good course called Thinking in Code, which is like a sort of computer scientist's way of looking at the world, and it shows how you can apply thinking in code or, like, code-like thinking or programmer thinking to problems in real life. So even if you don't intend to become a computer scientist, there are things that you can take away from that course that can just help you level up in life. And with data skills getting more and more in demand, the data analysis courses are really good as well. So for example, Data Analysis Fundamentals teaches you to draw fascinating conclusions from the data that you're given and could actually transform the way that you think. Whatever your interest or skill level, Brilliant is for you. It matches you up with the courses that best suit your ability. So whether you're a complete beginner or you're a pro when it comes to computers, for example, they'll definitely have something for you. If you're interested, then head over to brilliant.org/deepdive, and that will let you sign up to a completely free 30-day trial. And if you're one of the first 200 people to use that link, you'll also get 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this episode. This episode of Deep Dive is very kindly being sponsored by Hostinger. Now, if you're looking to start a business or develop your personal brand in 2024, then you're gonna need a website. But the question of where to start is a question that I get asked all the time. So if you've ever wanted to set up a website, but you've had a question of where to begin because there's all these different options out there, then Hostinger has literally everything you'll need. Hostinger is a top global website hosting service with servers all around the world. It's fast and reliable, and with over two million users, it's becoming one of the fastest growing web hosting services out there. We've recently moved our website over to Hostinger to host my personal website, and not only was the transition completely seamless, but the tools are actually really simple to use as well. And I really wish something like this had been available when I was first starting my business, like, 12 years ago. If you're new to web design, then they've got everything you need to make a professional looking website. One of their really interesting features is their AI website builder, which can help you make a custom website in literally seconds, and a whole suite of other really useful AI tools, including a logo creator, an image generator, and a heat map tool as well. It's super easy to use with a drag and drop editor for simple customization, and you don't need any coding or technical knowledge at all. Hostinger comes out to less than $3 a month, which includes a free domain name, so it's super affordable. And if you use the link in the video description or in the show notes, which is hostinger.com/aliabdaal, and if you use the code ALIABDAAL in all caps, uh, at checkout, then you will also get 10% off. So thank you again to Hostinger for sponsoring this episode.

Ali Abdaal 25:26 Okay, cool. So I've got the informational advantage in, like, the medically type bits, but I shouldn't go after people who don't have much money. How do I think about it then?

Nicolas Cole 25:33 So, I mean, okay, first is recognizing that there is an unfathomable amount of opportunity on planet Earth that most people just can't wrap their heads around. So it... The... What usually happens is someone goes, "All right. I've decided I wanna provide this skill." They go talk to one person.

Ali Abdaal 25:49 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 25:49 That person says no, and then they'll come back, and they'll go, "I guess it just doesn't work for my niche. It's just too saturated. There's just no... There's no opportunity." Okay. First of all, you haven't deployed enough volume to know whether there's, there's enough opportunity. Second is there are so many people that are now realizing that they all need to build things on the internet. So we used to live in an analog world. Now, we live in a digital world. I don't think that there's a business owner on Earth who doesn't understand that their life would be better, easier, and probably more profitable if they had a growing audience, if they had an email list, if they had a way of educating customers on autopilot. So we all know that. And every single day that goes by, more and more founders, more entrepreneurs, m- more business owners, more creators, more podcasters, YouTubers, every single person goes, "I should probably build myself more on the internet." Okay. So that mega trend, increasing. So all you have to do

Nicolas Cole 26:47 is go, "I'm gonna go help the category of person who every single day that goes by, that is growing." So going to any business owner, any creator, anyone, anything that is tangentially related to your information advantage.

Ali Abdaal 27:01 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 27:02 And in my opinion, another mistake that gets made is people go, "Well, so what are all the most popular writing gigs?"

Ali Abdaal 27:10 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 27:11 So l- for a long time, the most popular ones have been SEO articles, blog posts, basic content marketing, stuff like that, right? So part of the game is always going, well, where is the growing audience? In this case, that would be the, the growing customer base. And what is the inc- not popular yet, but the increasingly popular skill that they all want? And so for every business owner or creator or anyone, right, there's three things they all want. They all want help putting out more content.

Ali Abdaal 27:44 Yep. Well, [laughs] especially on LinkedIn, it seems. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 27:48 Okay. So ju- and we'll get more specific.

Ali Abdaal 27:50 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 27:50 They all want help creating text-based content-

Ali Abdaal 27:52 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 27:52 ... usually first, and then it becomes video or audio.

Ali Abdaal 27:54 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 27:55 Right? They all need help moving that rented audience to an owned platform, AKA email.

Ali Abdaal 28:01 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 28:01 Right? But the best way to move them to an email list is not to say, "Come join my newsletter."

Ali Abdaal 28:06 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 28:06 The best way to move them is to give some sort of free value where they exchange their email address for something.

Ali Abdaal 28:11 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 28:12 So the best vehicle we've found are educational email courses. Then once they're on your email list, well, you don't just want them to go through the educational email course, and then they're done, and you never talk to them again, right? They need a weekly newsletter-

Ali Abdaal 28:24 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 28:24 ... 'cause that weekly newsletter nurtures them for a prolonged period of time, and then they inevitably buy your product or service. Every single person needs those three things, which means all you have to do, you could just pick one of them, and you go, "I'm this person with an information advantage in this industry or this niche, and I specialize in one of those three services." And you need-

Ali Abdaal 28:45 Mm

Nicolas Cole 28:45 ... one person, and they will pay you three, four, five grand per project per month, and congratulations, you either just replaced or at least hit, like, 50% of your full-time income.

Ali Abdaal 28:56 Hmm. Okay. So I'm a junior doctor. I have an informational advantage in medicine. I know I like writing. I used to write essays in med school, and I liked... You know, I had a personal blog back in the day and blah, blah, blah.

Nicolas Cole 29:04 Didn't we all?

Ali Abdaal 29:04 You know, all, all that kind of stuff. Um, and so I'm thinking, "Okay. Who could possibly wanna pay me five grand a month to help grow their LinkedIn presence?" And yeah, it would probably be a big pharma executive, maybe the CEO, maybe someone in the CC suite, maybe someone who's the VP level or director level or whatever.

Nicolas Cole 29:25 Uh, let's go simpler than that.

Ali Abdaal 29:28 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 29:28 The family friend of yours who's a doctor.

Ali Abdaal 29:32 Ah, yeah.

Nicolas Cole 29:32 And they have a small business.

Ali Abdaal 29:33 They have a private practice.

Nicolas Cole 29:34 They have a private practice.

Ali Abdaal 29:35 And they wanna create content on LinkedIn to help promote the fact that they're, like, a shoulder and blah, blah, blah surgeon or whatever, dermatology-

Nicolas Cole 29:41 Exactly

Ali Abdaal 29:41 ... and that kind of thing.

Nicolas Cole 29:42 My dad's a spine surgeon.

Ali Abdaal 29:44 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 29:44 Okay? So how does my dad get more people to know that he's a great spine surgeon? [laughs] You either put your name up on Google and hope.

Ali Abdaal 29:54 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 29:54 That's one strategy, which is what most of them do.

Ali Abdaal 29:56 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 29:56 Or you go, "I'm gonna start taking this into my own hands. I'm gonna start educating people." Right? What are the, what are the reasons people have back pain? What are the ways to get rid of back c- back pain without surgery? If you have surgery, how do you recover faster? What foods should you eat? What exercises should you do?

Ali Abdaal 30:12 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 30:13 Right? So it doesn't take very long. You start thinking through it, and you're like, "Okay. Well, that's pretty easy."

Ali Abdaal 30:17 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 30:17 And I bet your information advantage would allow you to do that.

Ali Abdaal 30:20 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 30:20 And how many doctors are there in the world?

Ali Abdaal 30:23 Lots. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 30:23 Like, a lot.

Ali Abdaal 30:24 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 30:24 Right?

Ali Abdaal 30:25 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 30:25 So you don't need all the doctors. You need one doctor.

Ali Abdaal 30:28 Okay. And so what am I pitching then? Let's say I've come up with a list of three family friends who are all doing private practice in, one's a spinal surgeon, one's a radiologist, and one's a dermatologist, and I'm like, you know, sweating [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 30:40 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 30:41 ... thinking of sending these emails. Wh- what am I saying?

Nicolas Cole 30:44 Okay, so this is awesome. So irresistible offer script. We'll just do it like word for word. Okay, so, um, I'm gonna stick with the, the spine example 'cause I, 'cause I'm familiar with it. Okay, so first thing is you have to do your homework and understand, well, what is, what does this person do and what do they specialize in, and what's their problem? So another big mistake, most people will go apply for a job on Upwork or Fiverr, right? When you do that, what you're effectively doing is raising your hand going, "I have no control. I have no pricing power. I have no leverage. I am applying for the job. You tell me what you need, and I will do whatever it is that you ask." Okay? As a result, that is why you have no pricing power, because the power dynamic is wrong, right? They are the boss, you are the employee.

Ali Abdaal 31:28 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 31:28 In order to charge more, you have to flip the power dynamic. You have to go to them, and you have to educate them on a problem they didn't know they had.

Ali Abdaal 31:35 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 31:36 Or a problem that they know they have, they just haven't gotten around to fixing.

Ali Abdaal 31:39 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 31:39 Right? So you go to the doctor, you go, "Problem: You want higher quality customers. You have a private practice. You want more people who, uh, are interested in back surgery, but like a specific type of back surgery." So for example, my dad specializes in minimally invasive spine surgery. Okay, so it's like, that's the type of person you want to attract, right? The, the, the problem, though, is that you don't know how to find them. They don't know whether they can trust you or not, et cetera, right? The reason that problem is happening is because you have a website that isn't optimized for anything, and it would be really easy to find those people on LinkedIn. You just need to start creating content, right? And the ultimate negative consequence of that problem is that until you start educating people, you are going to be ... Your, your business strategy is you're just gonna sit there, and you're gonna hope that customers walk through the door. Okay? So if you start with that, like, little mini problem script, it's impossible for the other person to sit there and go, "I'm not listening."

Ali Abdaal 32:39 Mm. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 32:40 Right? Of course they're listening-

Ali Abdaal 32:41 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 32:41 ... 'cause you just educated them on the whole problem of their business.

Ali Abdaal 32:44 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 32:45 Which is not hard. Okay, then once you've educated them on the problem, 'cause they can't care about the solution until they care about the problem, so you first anchor them in the problem. Then you go, "The solution to this would be if we started educating people on minimally invasive spine surgery on LinkedIn." It'd be really easy. Here's some sample topics, right? The benefits of doing this is that we would be able to start reaching people that would either be interested in this or would, uh, maybe know someone who's interested in this, and then ultimately we could move that social audience over to our email list, and we could even run like localized ads if we wanted to against that email list. We could do retargeting. And the ultimate positive outcome of that is if we do that, you will have significantly more control over lead flow for your business.

Ali Abdaal 33:29 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 33:31 Problem script, solution script, and then they go, "Okay, that all makes sense, so how much?" So you have to go through all of that before you go, "Oh, no problem. So we can create social content for you every month. It's three grand a month. I take care of the ideas, the writing. All I need is about 30 minutes of your time. Uh, once a month even, we can do a quick recap call, go through all the content that we've created, look at the analytics. Um, you've already written a book, so I can pull a lot of the content from that book. Um, and that's it. Happy to help."

Ali Abdaal 34:01 And is this all in a single email? Like how ... What, what is the process of sending this out look like?

Nicolas Cole 34:05 So, so that would be the call.

Ali Abdaal 34:07 Oh, okay.

Nicolas Cole 34:07 So to get them on the call-

Ali Abdaal 34:09 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 34:09 ... right, is you start, we have a, a phrase we talk about all the time, which is, "In the beginning, your niche is your network." So you have an information advantage. Your niche is the fact that you have a family friend who's a doctor.

Ali Abdaal 34:21 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 34:21 Okay, great. That's the first person you should go pitch.

Ali Abdaal 34:23 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 34:23 'Cause they are most likely to answer your text or answer your email or answer your call.

Ali Abdaal 34:27 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 34:27 Right? So the first thing is you open with problem. "Hey, I know it's been a long time since we chatted, Uncle..." [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 34:34 Yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 34:35 You know, Uncle whoever.

Ali Abdaal 34:36 Yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 34:37 Uh, "Quick question. I was thinking about your business. You know, how do you typically get customers? You know, is that something that you've been thinking about? You know, are you struggling to get leads in your area? Tell, tell me about what's been going on."

Ali Abdaal 34:49 Okay.

Nicolas Cole 34:49 That could be a text message. That could be an email.

Ali Abdaal 34:51 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 34:52 That's it.

Ali Abdaal 34:52 And then Uncle Johnny might reply to that-

Nicolas Cole 34:54 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 34:55 ... saying, "Oh, yeah, it's actually been kind of hard. We advertise on Google, but nothing happens."

Nicolas Cole 34:58 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 34:59 That sort of thing.

Nicolas Cole 34:59 And then you go, "Cool, I've got a couple interesting ideas. Why don't we hop on a call together, and I'll walk you through, uh, how this works. I- I found something that I think would be really beneficial for your business."

Ali Abdaal 35:08 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 35:08 Uncle Johnny goes, "All right, cool. I got 30 minutes on Thursday." And then you go through problem script, solution. "Here's what I would do for you." So that is significantly easier than going, how do I build an audience of 100,000 people and sell 200-

Ali Abdaal 35:23 [laughs] Yeah

Nicolas Cole 35:23 ... courses a month, every month forever, right?

Ali Abdaal 35:27 Mm. Um, what if Uncle Johnny doesn't reply to my text?

Nicolas Cole 35:30 Then you just chalk it up, you give up, there's no hope for you, and you should just never try it.

Ali Abdaal 35:34 Nice. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 35:35 That's it. Your niche, there's no opportunity, right? But obviously that's not the takeaway. The takeaway is go talk to more people.

Ali Abdaal 35:42 How, how many more people? Like what, what, what's your sense of how many emails, sl- like assuming I was gonna go cold, like I'm reaching out to local doctors in my area who I only have a tangential connection to, i.e. the fact they live in my area. How many emails does it take to get a response to get a, get someone on a call? Do you have a sense of what these numbers are?

Nicolas Cole 36:00 I would say, so even still, I would not recommend even opening the door of cold leads until you have fully exhausted warm leads. And the way I think about leads in general is I put them into two different categories. I call them leaks and faucets. So a leak is someone who goes, you know, "My, [laughs] my sink is leaking. Help me." Right? So a leak is someone who has the problem that you can help. A faucet is someone who goes, "My faucet's running fine. I don't need your help, but I know lots of other people who do." So they become a conduit to other people.

Ali Abdaal 36:35 Okay.

Nicolas Cole 36:35 And so one of the biggest missed opportunities is people go, "Well, I'm gonna go pitch, you know, all these cold leads." No, you should start with all the people that you know, and then go to each of them and go, "Do you have a problem? If yes, I can help you," or, "Hey, I'm trying to grow my ghostwriting business. Do you know anyone who needs help creating content on LinkedIn, or anyone who is creating on LinkedIn but needs help moving that audience over to an email list?"

Ali Abdaal 36:58 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 36:58 Right?

Ali Abdaal 36:59 That's interesting. Like, I, I remember coming across that line some- somewhere. It might've been one of, in one of your books. And often messaging someone or emailing them and saying, "Hey, do you know someone who's looking for this sort of thing?"

Nicolas Cole 37:08 Yeah, nobody does it.

Ali Abdaal 37:10 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 37:10 It's the easiest thing in the world to do.

Ali Abdaal 37:10 Either they know someone, or chances are they'll be like, "Oh, actually, I could kinda use some help with that myself."

Nicolas Cole 37:14 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 37:15 But it feels like a more gentle pitch than, "Can I help you grow your content on LinkedIn?" Or whatever.

Nicolas Cole 37:20 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 37:20 It's like, "Do you know anyone who might be looking for this?" [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 37:22 You are ... Yeah, I had a, a mentor in Chicago who used to say, "You are never selling anything to anyone. You are giving them an opportunity."

Ali Abdaal 37:29 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 37:29 And so when you think about outreach, whether it's to your network or cold leads, you don't wanna approach it through this lens of, like, like pitching.

Ali Abdaal 37:38 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 37:38 'Cause that's not ... Everyone knows when they're getting pitched, right?

Ali Abdaal 37:42 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 37:42 So the whole methodology that I'm a firm believer in is you want it to all sound like free consulting. Everything that you do, every text message, every email, every phone call, every Zoom call, it should all feel like, "Hey, I see what you're doing. I just, I can't help myself. Like, you're making a mistake. I, I just wanted to point it out and help you. Do with it what you will. I just wanted you to know." Right? And when you do that-

Ali Abdaal 38:07 Nice. Yeah

Nicolas Cole 38:08 ... the other person can't help but go, "Well, ah, you just educated me on a problem, and now I know I have this problem."

Ali Abdaal 38:15 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 38:15 And then inevitably they go to you and say, "So is that what you do?" Then you go, "Oh, yeah. No, that, that is what I do. I specialize in that." And then they go, "Can you help me?"

Ali Abdaal 38:25 [laughs] Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 38:25 And you go, "Sure, I'd, I'd be happy to help." Right? So you're almost ... You're not pitching them and going, "Buy from me."

Ali Abdaal 38:31 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 38:31 You're educating and, like, guiding them until they're forced to go, "I need someone to help me. Is this what you do?"

Ali Abdaal 38:39 Hmm. Nice. That sort of takes the fear out of selling, because even in the way I'm describing it, I'm using the word pitching, which-

Nicolas Cole 38:46 Yeah, no

Ali Abdaal 38:46 ... even subconsciously has a certain energy about it that feels like I'm trying to sell something.

Nicolas Cole 38:51 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 38:52 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 38:52 If I, if I was, if I had an agency that did, I don't know, provide some service right now, and I was trying to get you as a client-

Ali Abdaal 38:59 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 39:00 ... even here on this podcast-

Ali Abdaal 39:01 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 39:01 ... I, I wouldn't pitch you.

Ali Abdaal 39:03 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 39:03 I would just drill into, "Yeah, Ali, like before this, I took an hour. I thought about, I went through your whole funnel."

Ali Abdaal 39:09 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 39:10 You know? "I just want, I just wanted to point out to you-"

Ali Abdaal 39:12 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 39:12 "... right, like, there's, like, these 10 things you should do." And inevitably-

Ali Abdaal 39:16 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 39:16 ... we're gonna get off the pod, and you're gonna go, "Okay, so that sounds like a lot of work."

Ali Abdaal 39:20 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 39:20 "Any chance I could just hire you and your team to do that," right?

Ali Abdaal 39:23 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 39:23 And that, that piece, that skill, if you understand the power of that and you build that skill where you don't talk in sales, you talk in education, you will make money forever.

Ali Abdaal 39:35 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 39:36 Because that, that is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is not someone going, you know, "Do I wanna buy from you? Yes or no?" The bottleneck is that the person doesn't usually know the problem that they have.

Ali Abdaal 39:47 Hmm. There's a friend of mine who does some really high-end consulting for these sort of big fashion brands and stuff, and is ... I w- I was asking him about how he lands these deal, uh, th- these deals, and he was like, "Oh, yeah, I just go in, and, and I just teach them about what's wrong with their supply chain-

Nicolas Cole 40:00 Yep

Ali Abdaal 40:01 ... and how AI can potentially help. And then I leave it at that. And on the way out, one of the executives will sort of walk me to the lift or to the elevator or whatever, offer me a coffee, and say, 'Hey, so can we engage you?' Or something, and he's like, 'Those are the magic words that I'm looking out for, but I never, I never get-

Nicolas Cole 40:16 Yeah, no

Ali Abdaal 40:17 ... any impression that that's what I'm going for.'"

Nicolas Cole 40:18 I mean, just-

Ali Abdaal 40:19 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 40:19 ... it, it's a lot like dating, right? Like, what's the fastest way to get someone else to s- deny you or say no to you? You go up to them and you're like, "Do you wanna go out on a date with me?" Right? No, that's not usually how you get someone's attention, right?

Ali Abdaal 40:34 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 40:34 How you get their attention is you're in a busy place, and you lean over, and, you know, you see someone attractive, and you're like, "I wanna talk to them." You don't open by pitching. You open by going, "Hey, you know, the brick chicken

Nicolas Cole 40:46 here is actually really good."

Ali Abdaal 40:47 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 40:48 And then they're like, "Oh."

Ali Abdaal 40:49 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 40:49 And then you're like, "But don't get the, don't get the fries, though. They do this weird thing where they put this, like, like aged Parmesan on it-

Ali Abdaal 40:55 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 40:55 ... and you think it's gonna taste good, but it's, it's not gonna taste good." And all you're doing is educating them.

Ali Abdaal 41:00 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 41:00 You're just like, "Hey, I saw that you're having this experience. I just wanna make it better for you."

Ali Abdaal 41:03 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 41:03 And inevitably they go, "Interesting." Now they're hooked. Now they start talking to you. The same is true in business. Y- The goal is never to sell. The goal is to educate.

Ali Abdaal 41:14 Yeah. And there's like, um, I think there are people that do this well, and then there are people that do it less well. Like, I've started increasingly getting emails and DMs, um-

Nicolas Cole 41:22 Hmm

Ali Abdaal 41:22 ... like every other Instagram DM I get is someone, like, giving me some sort of neg about how they've been through my funnel, and, "Uh-oh, Ali, did you know you're leaving $4,000 a day on the table?" And this sort of stuff. And I'm just like, "Fuck off." Like, they've all taken the same course.

Nicolas Cole 41:36 Yeah. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 41:36 They're all, they're all running the same, they're, they're the same kind of script.

Nicolas Cole 41:39 Yeah. So there, there are ways to not do it well.

Ali Abdaal 41:42 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 41:43 Um, but to be honest, a lot of it comes down to tone. A l- you could say the same thing, but the way that you write it, or like something we talk about in PGA all the time, is actually sending looms.

Ali Abdaal 41:54 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 41:54 So you're sending a loom to personalize it more.

Ali Abdaal 41:56 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 41:57 And the tone that you use, if you start the loom and it's like, "Hey, I've got this exciting idea for your business," and like pitch, pitch, pitch, right? The other person can feel that-

Ali Abdaal 42:07 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 42:07 ... and within 30 seconds, they're like, "I'm out of here," right? But if you open the loom, this is like, this was such a huge lesson for me building my agency. You basically talk to every single person as if you've already been friends for 10 years.

Ali Abdaal 42:19 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 42:20 And that's, that is an energy, right?

Ali Abdaal 42:22 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 42:22 It's not like a trick. It's just an energy. And you just hit them up, and you're like, "Hey, John. Um, really love what you're up to. I was just going through your site. Um, a big fan of your industry and what, what you're about, by the way. Like, I've, I've been really interested in spine surgery for a long time. Um, my dad's a spine surgeon, fun fact, so I have this kinda, like, knowledge about it. Uh, but I was just going through your funnel, and I, like I noticed a couple things. Just wanted to point them out for you. I hope this is helpful." Like, that tone comes off very differently. Right? And so, so many of these things, they're not hard, it just is ... You just need someone to point it out to you, and then you go, "Oh, that makes a lot of sense why me pitching is, like, turning people off in the DM." 'Cause people don't wanna be pitched, they wanna be educated.

Ali Abdaal 43:06 Hmm. Nice. That's good. As you're saying that, I'm thinking of, you know, there's a bunch of YouTubers that are ... Well, like, a lot of people are going to YouTube as a source of organic lead gen.

Nicolas Cole 43:18 Huge.

Ali Abdaal 43:18 And the ones who I gravitate towards are the ones who are 27-minute long video Loom walkthrough explaining how all their systems work, and it's a, "Oh, and oh, by the way, we do this for clients. If you're interested, there's a link down below." And I'm like, "Nice."

Nicolas Cole 43:31 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 43:31 Like, it just makes perfect sense. And there's almost this sort of very casual, you know, I've got the cookies, I don't need you to have ... I, I, I don't, I don't need you to buy the cookies. Uh, but, like, I know you want them. And it's, it, it's this weird kind of push-pull-

Nicolas Cole 43:46 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 43:46 ... where it's like, "Hey, I'm just being very casual about this, being very friendly about it. I'm not trying to sell you anything at all," sort of vibe.

Nicolas Cole 43:52 It's very reverse psychology, but, but also it can be summarized, I think, really simply in abundance mindset or scarcity mindset.

Ali Abdaal 44:01 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 44:01 When someone is overly pitching you, right? You, you pick up on this scarcity that they have, right? 'Cause they're like, "I need this client," which inevitably makes the other person feel like, "Well, why do you ... Do you need clients because no one wants to work with you?" Right? And then you, like, get turned off from it. But an abundance-

Ali Abdaal 44:21 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 44:21 ... mindset is like, "Hey, it, I, I'm good on cl- I'm, I'm actually full."

Ali Abdaal 44:25 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 44:25 "I just wanted to point this out to you 'cause I think it would be helpful." And that abundance makes the other person feel like, "Well, if a lot of people wanna work with them, and if they're so abundant with what they have, it must be really great."

Ali Abdaal 44:39 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 44:40 "I do wanna work with them." So it doesn't ... It actually doesn't matter whether you're full or not. It doesn't matter if you have 10 clients or not. It's the energy of are you operating from scarcity or abundance?

Ali Abdaal 44:51 Nice. Yeah, this is reminding me, so there's, um, there's a team member of ours that we hired recently, Kaylin. She's our community manager for Productivity Lab. And I did, like, a sort of very casual pod with her the other day 'cause we were waiting for Cal Newport to show up. [laughs] And so she, she and I just kind of did a, a kind of bonus episode of the pod, and she w- she was explaining how when she moved to London, like, three years ago, she joined our YouTuber academy knowing she wanted to be in the sort of Ali Abdaal orbit because she's a YouTuber as well and stuff. And she came to one of our meetups, and I remember this conversation where she came up to me. We, we, we had a very pleasant conversation for, like, two minutes. She mentioned a video that I, that I had seen of hers, and then she left it at that.

Nicolas Cole 45:29 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 45:29 And I didn't hear from her for, like, two, two whole years until she applied for one of our jobs. And I remember that interaction being like, "Oh, yeah, I remember her. She came to one of our, uh, one of our meetups. She seemed cool."

Nicolas Cole 45:37 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 45:38 In contrast, there's this other guy who's been coming to every single meetup for the last, like, two years who seems clamoring to get a job with the Ali Abdaal team.

Nicolas Cole 45:45 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 45:46 And the energy around that is so radically different, where I'm like I'm, I'm already ... I'm, I'm so turned off by this guy because-

Nicolas Cole 45:52 Sometimes it's too much

Ali Abdaal 45:53 ... he's clamoring for a job.

Nicolas Cole 45:54 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 45:54 Whereas with her, it was just like, oh, it's just chill. Like, yeah, she seemed normal. She- and she's applied for a job, and she's made the shortlist. Great, let's interview her. That kind of thing.

Nicolas Cole 46:01 Yep. Yeah. A- again, a lot of it is energy. It's not that you shouldn't follow up a million times. I'm a huge advocate of keep following up, but it's the way that you do it.

Ali Abdaal 46:11 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 46:11 It's the energy of it, right? And, and are you coming at it from a place of like, "I swear I can help you" [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 46:16 Yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 46:17 Or are you coming at it from like, "Again, hey, I'm just reminding you I'm here anytime you wanna chat. You know, more than, more than happy to help."

Ali Abdaal 46:23 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 46:23 Those just come off so radically different.

Ali Abdaal 46:25 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 46:25 And little ... Just 'cause you said it, like, an amazing growth hack for finding clients and finding opportunities is you just said. It's like if someone wanted to be in your orbit, there's actually a really easy way to be in your orbit. It's called be a customer.

Ali Abdaal 46:42 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 46:43 Right? So if someone wanted to pitch me as a, to offer a service, right? And I knew that they had purchased Ship 30, my likelihood of reading and responding to that email and, like, genuinely considering it is 10 times higher-

Ali Abdaal 46:59 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 46:59 ... than someone who hasn't.

Ali Abdaal 47:00 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 47:00 Right? So amazing growth hack.

Ali Abdaal 47:03 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 47:04 Just go find all the people who run communities, and have courses, and know l- and have all of the opportunity. Go pay $97, or $150, or what- whatever the cost is for one of their products. Be a customer, and the likelihood that they will listen to you is exponentially higher.

Ali Abdaal 47:19 Yeah. Yeah, whenever someone opens an email or anything with a, "Hey, I, I was part of YouTuber Academy Cohort 3," or something like that-

Nicolas Cole 47:26 Of course you're gonna read it

Ali Abdaal 47:26 ... I'm like, "Of course I'm gonna read it." Yeah, there's no world in which I wouldn't read that. [laughs] Like-

Nicolas Cole 47:29 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 47:29 ... I think similarly, when, when you're, when emailing people who have written books, if you've actually read the book [laughs] and just sort of leading with, "Hey, you know, st- uh, I, I, I read your book two years ago. I loved A, B, C, and D," you know? Then they're way more likely to read that than a random email.

Nicolas Cole 47:43 Yeah. I mean, all of this stuff, it's like we all know this.

Ali Abdaal 47:47 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 47:47 It, it seems so basic in a lot of ways, is wouldn't it make sense to do your homework before you talk to someone? Yes. You know, are they more likely to respond to you if you clearly understand their business or their industry? Yes. So that's why starting with information advantage-

Ali Abdaal 48:03 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 48:03 ... is really easy. You know? And then with all of this stuff, by far the biggest problem is people just don't do enough volume to see.

Ali Abdaal 48:11 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 48:11 They, they talk to four people, and those four people say no, and then they give up.

Ali Abdaal 48:15 Yeah. Yeah, so we, we ... I w- I was asking about this. What's, what is a good amount of volume before, uh, [laughs] throwing in the towel?

Nicolas Cole 48:21 So what we tell people in PGA is if you're starting warm with your network, you should begin by making a list of 50 people. Leaks-

Ali Abdaal 48:29 50? Five zero?

Nicolas Cole 48:30 Yeah, five zero.

Ali Abdaal 48:30 Oh.

Nicolas Cole 48:31 Leaks and faucets.

Ali Abdaal 48:31 I was thinking five.

Nicolas Cole 48:32 Yeah, no. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 48:33 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 48:34 Fi- five is like you took, you know, one step into the starting zone and, like, killed two boars, and then are like, "Why don't I have all the epic gear?" Right?

Ali Abdaal 48:42 Right.

Nicolas Cole 48:42 So starting warm, you should make a list of 50 people that you know that either might need your help or might know someone who need your help. If you're going cold, minimum you need to reach out to 100 people. And I don't mean go get some software tool where you scrape emails and then just copy, paste, spam, send 100 emails or 100 DMs. I mean identify 100 quality people, do your homework on each one, send them a message. If they respond, create a Loom, problem script, outcome solution script.

Ali Abdaal 49:15 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 49:16 Pitch them, right? Like, you should go through that entire process for each of them, and only then should you go, "Okay, I genuinely did my homework and genuinely educated 100 people, and zero said yes." And even at that point, it doesn't mean that it doesn't work. It means you have a problem. You have a bottleneck somewhere in there, and your job is to identify that bottleneck, remove it, and do it again. Do it again.

Ali Abdaal 49:42 What are your thoughts on, um, using ChatGPT to automate some of this outreach and stuff?

Nicolas Cole 49:48 [sighs] I think the, the, the big misunderstanding with AI is everyone wants to automate things they've never done before. You can't automate something that you haven't done. And even if someone tells you how, you don't understand it.

Ali Abdaal 50:05 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 50:06 So you're not getting the full value out of it. So this is one of those just, like, first principle beliefs that I have, which is... The metaphor I like using is if you were to run a marathon, you would train with ankle weights so that by the time you ran the marathon, you would take the ankle weights off and it would be easier.

Ali Abdaal 50:22 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 50:22 Right? So whenever I'm doing something, I always ask myself, "What is the an- what are the ankle weights?" So in the beginning, it seems like the longer road to go, "Oh, I have to go educate and talk to 100 people?" Well, yeah, in the beginning that is the longer road instead of just, you know, trying to automate the whole process and defer to technology. But after you do that, you are significantly more educated about the process, how to do it well, what drives the outcome, what are the mistakes, that then allows you to leverage tech.

Ali Abdaal 50:54 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 50:54 But if you skip that step, you think you're taking the shortcut, and then guess what? Shortcut ends up being the longer road because you skipped the whole learning.

Ali Abdaal 51:02 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 51:03 You know?

Ali Abdaal 51:04 Yeah. I've started getting a bunch of these sort of clearly ChatGPT-generated emails, and so it's, it's, it's almost like, I'm sure, I'm sure you've gotten this as well, where you can kind of just tell when someone is purely copy-pasting something and it's just like the tone is a bit off, the style is off, and it's just, it w- it's just an immediate, you know, archive from the inbox kind of, kind of response.

Nicolas Cole 51:23 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 51:24 But yeah, as you say, someone who's, like, learned the skill of doing it and is showing that they have done the work. Because most, well, at least some people kind of know what a ChatGPT-generated, like, paragraph-

Nicolas Cole 51:36 Mm-hmm

Ali Abdaal 51:36 ... sort of looks like, sort of sounds like. Um, there's something about doing the work that really helps you stand out, which itself, which then sort of becomes the shortcut. The shortcut-

Nicolas Cole 51:47 That is the shortcut

Ali Abdaal 51:47 ... is actually just doing the work.

Nicolas Cole 51:48 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 51:49 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 51:49 Shocker.

Ali Abdaal 51:49 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 51:50 You know? My, my default is the coffee shop test. If, if you sat down in front of that person at a coffee shop, you both decided to meet up, we're grabbing coffee at 3:00 PM, okay, cool, and you said what was in that email out loud, what would happen?

Ali Abdaal 52:05 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 52:07 Like, that's the question every person should ask themselves. And if, and if, just like you started laughing-

Ali Abdaal 52:11 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 52:11 ... and you're like, "Oh, I couldn't imagine saying that email out loud"-

Ali Abdaal 52:15 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 52:15 ... right? That's a problem. And so if you're sitting there and you can't even with a straight face go, "I wouldn't say this email out loud," that means you're not doing the work. The goal is for someone to open that email and go... Like, I read, I get cold pitched via DM and email every day, probably 20 to 50 times a day, and I read every single one of them 'cause I try and keep my DMs clean and I try and keep my email clean. And the reason I don't respond to 99% isn't because I don't know who the person is. It's not 'cause it's cold. It's because their message is not helpful.

Ali Abdaal 52:49 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 52:50 They are not educating me. They are not... They didn't do the work, right? So I love, it's like when people are like, "Facebook ads are dead. Email is dead. Cold outreach is dead." No, none of those mediums are dead, period, and they all work for people who do the work.

Ali Abdaal 53:08 Nice. Okay. What else do people need to know on this roa- road to making 5 to 10K a month as a writer?

Nicolas Cole 53:14 I think, so last thing I'll say is, and we can talk about creator economy, digital products, and sort of what it's like being a creator in today's world, but I think that one of the mega trends is more and more people are realizing the power of being what I'll call hybrid creators or, or building hybrid agencies. So the first business that I built was a ghostwriting agency. I grew that from zero to about 180,000 a month in 18 months or so. And in hindsight, one of the biggest mistakes I made was there was a certain point in that business when we were doing, like, 60 to 80K a month. We had five full-time team members. We had about 15, 20 clients. Me and my co-founder were completely out of the business, and we were both making 20 grand a month working, like, an hour or two a day just making sure that the team was running. That, we, we didn't... It was our first business. I didn't know how good we had it at that time, but that was the sweet spot. And what we should have done at that point is not continue scaling with services, because services are linear by nature, right? Like, you generate more revenue because you land more clients, so to service those clients you need to hire more people, and people are static costs. You're paying salaries usually. And so we didn't know that. We just thought, "Okay, well, we're just gonna grow forever." It's not what happened. And if I could go back, what I would have realized is that that was the sweet spot where it didn't take that much effort to keep replenishing clients when they would churn, you know? So you could maintain profitability and, like, the health of the business. But then, because I had reclaimed all my time, I was only working in the service part for an hour or two, that's when I would've started building digital products.

Ali Abdaal 55:03 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 55:03 Because every digital product thereafter has no marginal cost.

Ali Abdaal 55:07 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 55:08 So it's, it's pure profit.

Ali Abdaal 55:09 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 55:10 Right? And so if you think of the difference between, you know, a service company, a ghost writing agency doing 100K a month purely in services, versus one that does 60K a month, and then the other 40K is coming from digital products, the second one is wildly more profitable.

Ali Abdaal 55:25 Nice.

Nicolas Cole 55:26 And then there's a flywheel that happens. The flywheel is that, yes, a lot of people will buy the digital product and go, "Well, I don't need your agency 'cause you just told me how to do it." That's fine, but a good percentage of your customers are going to get educated and go, "Oh, this is actually harder than I thought it was."

Ali Abdaal 55:44 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 55:44 "Can I just hire you to do it for me?"

Ali Abdaal 55:47 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 55:47 So you just monetized the sale.

Ali Abdaal 55:49 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 55:50 Which creates the flywheel. Your digital products are profitable, which educates customers to become-

Ali Abdaal 55:55 Yes

Nicolas Cole 55:55 ... service clients, right? And it just keeps going and going. So I think that this mega trend of hybrid companies or hybrid creators, hybrid agencies, I don't see very many people doing it or talking about it yet, but I think these two worlds are going to intersect.

Ali Abdaal 56:13 Okay, this is good, because the next thing I wanted to talk to you about was to riff on a business idea that we've been having over the last week.

Nicolas Cole 56:18 Okay, let's do it.

Ali Abdaal 56:19 So, um, what do you think about... Okay, so we wanna start an agency that is done, fully done for you video for businesses, where the business does not even need to provide the talent. We can do that. So essentially, what we wanna do is create talking head educational YouTube videos or LinkedIn videos or videos for their documentation or videos for their ads or whatever, using the Ali Abdaal YouTube formula, which is you get someone who sits on a, in front of a camera and says stuff with the occasional shit happening on screen, and like a nice edit, and like nice background music and stuff. Basic talking head educational stuff.

Nicolas Cole 56:55 Mm.

Ali Abdaal 56:56 Uh, but for businesses, like software companies who wanna do documentation or ads or LinkedIn. Uh, probably not LinkedIn, because that would need to be under the f- the f- founder's personal brand potentially.

Nicolas Cole 57:06 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 57:08 What do you think of this?

Nicolas Cole 57:08 Okay. So, um, I actually think that's a cool idea-

Ali Abdaal 57:11 Mm

Nicolas Cole 57:11 ... 'cause you've found a solution to the number one problem, which is m- most often people at those companies don't have time.

Ali Abdaal 57:18 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 57:19 Don't have the skill.

Ali Abdaal 57:19 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 57:20 Don't wanna build the skill, all of that, right?

Ali Abdaal 57:21 Yeah, we found that with Hey Friends, which is the agency that we started in partnership with, um, Hunter Hammond and Saito Bloom.

Nicolas Cole 57:27 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 57:28 And we were targeting individuals, um, and also like executives and stuff, but we found that people really suck at talking

Ali Abdaal 57:35 to a camera.

Nicolas Cole 57:35 Yeah, it's a, it's a

Ali Abdaal 57:36 People not making the time for it. People have all sorts of emotional issues dealing with speaking to a freaking camera, even though they're the executive of a freaking multi-deca-million-dollar company. It's like, why is it so hard to talk to the camera, man?

Nicolas Cole 57:45 Yeah. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 57:46 But apparently it's really hard. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 57:47 So you, you found-

Ali Abdaal 57:48 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 57:48 ... a great, a great solution. So two things that immediately come to mind though. Um, one is I think if you hire one person, one talking head, you run a couple risks.

Ali Abdaal 57:58 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 57:59 So one of the risks is, um... I think of it like the podcast deals that Spotify did with, um, what's her name? One of them was Alex Earl and the other one was, uh-

Ali Abdaal 58:11 Call Her Daddy.

Nicolas Cole 58:12 Call Her... Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 58:13 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 58:13 Who's, who's the host of that?

Ali Abdaal 58:14 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 58:14 Okay. But yeah, right?

Ali Abdaal 58:15 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 58:15 Where, where the ta- the talking head, the person outgrows the situation.

Ali Abdaal 58:20 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 58:20 And then they wanna leave, they wanna negotiate.

Ali Abdaal 58:22 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 58:22 Right? That is a risk.

Ali Abdaal 58:23 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 58:24 Another risk is when you rely so heavily on one person, it makes it then hard to deal with that situation if you need to transition.

Ali Abdaal 58:33 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 58:34 So what I would do-

Ali Abdaal 58:34 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 58:34 ... is actually, uh, frame the channel not around a person, but around a category of idea.

Ali Abdaal 58:41 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 58:41 So if it's like a fintech startup, it would be like fintech advice or what- whatever.

Ali Abdaal 58:45 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 58:45 And then I would hire as contractors like three different-

Ali Abdaal 58:49 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 58:49 ... people. So that way from the beginning you've set the precedent.

Ali Abdaal 58:51 Yeah, exactly.

Nicolas Cole 58:52 It's not one.

Ali Abdaal 58:52 It's a brand channel. It's not a personal YouTube channel.

Nicolas Cole 58:54 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 58:55 There's like multiple personalities. People are not that wedded to the individual. They care about the advice.

Nicolas Cole 58:58 Yes. And then from there, I think, you know, if you're taking care of the scripting-

Ali Abdaal 59:02 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 59:02 ... you're taking care of the editing and everything, the only thing I just, I know 'cause I ran into it with ghost writing, the only thing that you're navigating is then the type of team you're dealing with. Like for us with our ghost writing agency, what would happen is we'd get 10 cooks in the kitchen. Like the executive would wanna weigh in on the writing or the script, right?

Ali Abdaal 59:20 Oh, okay.

Nicolas Cole 59:20 And then the head of marketing, and then the marketing intern, and then-

Ali Abdaal 59:23 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 59:24 So the solution that I f- have found to this is you have to basically walk in and say, not just we're gonna create these videos, but we are going to create these types of videos. Like very specific. Like one video a week is going to be, um, like pure tutorial walkthrough.

Ali Abdaal 59:44 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 59:45 You know, another video a week is going to be like trend watching. And you basically give them the rules for the formula upfront, and you're like, "Each of these videos has these set of rules," which reduces the amount of subjective decision-making for each of them. So that way when their head of marketing comes in and is like, you know, [laughs] "I don't think we should... That, I don't like that intro," right? Well, that... I don't really care if you like that intro or not. Like there's a method, you know?

Ali Abdaal 1:00:13 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:00:13 And so you have to educate them on that method so that way, it, which reduces the amount of edits-

Ali Abdaal 1:00:17 Yep

Nicolas Cole 1:00:18 ... which sort of just defers more and more of that trust to you in the beginning.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:22 Nice. What do you think a reasonable price point would this, for this would be? Like-

Nicolas Cole 1:00:25 How much, how much volume?

Ali Abdaal 1:00:27 Don't know. [laughs] Um, that's a good question though. Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:00:30 How quickly do you think you could grow a channel, and how much volume would you need to do to grow a channel reasonably well?

Ali Abdaal 1:00:37 Uh, the goal wouldn't be to grow a channel. Uh, the goal would be to produce the videos that could go on their website or on Y- uh, it's like ch- cha- channel growth would be a happy bonus rather than something that we would lean, uh, that we would sell because-

Nicolas Cole 1:00:53 Okay

Ali Abdaal 1:00:53 ... we, it's just impossible to guarantee.

Nicolas Cole 1:00:54 It's too hard.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:54 It's too hard to guarantee.

Nicolas Cole 1:00:55 Okay, I'm gonna give you one of the things-

Ali Abdaal 1:00:57 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:00:57 ... that we learned too, which is then I would anchor it all around long tail searching. And bas- basically what you're selling them, again, this is like pricing hierarchy, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:01:06 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:01:06 You're not selling them volume of videos.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:09 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:01:09 You're selling them a specific library of content.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:12 Yes.

Nicolas Cole 1:01:12 So you're like, you want to rank for these terms and phrases. You wanna build dominance in this industry, in this niche.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:19 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:01:20 One of the ... Month one, you go and do an audit. You're like, these are all, you know, these are the top 30 long tail things that people are searching for that are related to your business.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:29 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:01:30 At the end of six months or at the end of one year together, we are going to have built this niche library, and because they're buying an asset and an outcome, which is divorced from time and effort-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:41 Nice

Nicolas Cole 1:01:41 ... right, that is what allows them to go, "Okay, so how much is that?" Now you can throw a number in the air, 'cause how do you value that library of content? Well, now we're ha- it's a s- completely subjective. So you could charge 50 grand for that, 100 grand, right? It depends on who you're pitching. And then at the end of the six months, what do you do? You go, "Hey, our team took some time, education. We identified another niche that you could build dominance in. It's tangentially related. We went ahead, did some free work for you. This is, these are the next 30 videos that you could make. I think this would allow you to scale your dominance. Do you wanna do another six months?" It's anchored to time, but it's not really time that they're buying. They're buying the library.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:22 Nice. That's good. Yeah, because-

Nicolas Cole 1:02:24 Does that make sense?

Ali Abdaal 1:02:24 ... what we don't want it to feel as if like we are going to grow their YouTube channels.

Nicolas Cole 1:02:27 Yeah, no.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:28 That's not kind of the idea.

Nicolas Cole 1:02:29 'Cause, 'cause now you've removed that part of the conversation.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:31 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:02:31 You're like, followers don't matter. We are going to rank for these, and these are gonna show up in YouTube search.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:35 Yes.

Nicolas Cole 1:02:35 They're gonna show up in Google search.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:37 Yeah. They can be embedded into your website, which improves the SEO thingy of your thingy page because Google owns YouTube and vice versa. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:02:42 Exactly. So even just notice this conversation, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:02:45 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:02:45 The more that we talk about the education component-

Ali Abdaal 1:02:48 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:02:49 ... it's like, "Hey, did you know that embedding these videos on your website is going to increase-"

Ali Abdaal 1:02:53 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:02:53 ... "the searchability and performance of those site?"

Ali Abdaal 1:02:55 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:02:56 Most people are gonna go, "No, I didn't know that."

Ali Abdaal 1:02:58 Yeah. We noticed that your brand is already doing posts on LinkedIn. Did you ... We can also repost the same content on LinkedIn, and now you've built a content library on LinkedIn.

Nicolas Cole 1:03:04 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:04 Did you know LinkedIn video is growing by 58 zillion percent every year-

Nicolas Cole 1:03:07 Exactly

Ali Abdaal 1:03:07 ... kind of thing? [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:03:09 So because, uh, like the framing is everything.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:11 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:03:11 And because you've anchored it to an asset and an outcome library, well, now you can go to a startup that just raised 30 million bucks and go, "It's 100 grand, and it'll take us six months to build. Do you want this?"

Ali Abdaal 1:03:23 Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. That's a pretty good offer.

Nicolas Cole 1:03:25 [laughs] Yeah. This, this is like an enterprise agency offering.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:30 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:03:30 You know? Like, yeah, you could do it for smaller companies, and maybe you have like a paired down offer.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:34 Mm-hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:03:35 But if I were you, like where people go wrong with pricing is they, they pick two packages that are really close to each other. So they're like, package one is five grand a month. Package two is seven grand a month.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:45 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:03:45 Well, for a business owner, there's actually no pricing threshold between those two.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:50 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:03:50 I don't care if it's five grand or seven grand.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:52 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:03:52 That to me, that's the same number.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:53 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:03:53 Right? So what you wanna do is if you were to create two different packages-

Ali Abdaal 1:03:57 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:03:57 ... you want to widen the gap. You're like, the five grand a month is for small businesses or creators.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:01 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:04:02 The 50 grand a month is for, you know, enterprise tech companies.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:06 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:04:06 Well, now there's a pricing decision.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:08 Nice. Yeah. That's interesting.

Nicolas Cole 1:04:12 I-

Ali Abdaal 1:04:12 So we could even reach out to companies, uh, companies that really should have video content. A company like Salesforce really should-

Nicolas Cole 1:04:18 Yes

Ali Abdaal 1:04:18 ... have a shit ton of tutorials on their own YouTube channel that are actually good.

Nicolas Cole 1:04:21 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:21 A company like HubSpot should really ... You know, the HubSpot are a bit more modern, so they are sort of doing it, but we could literally go through ... Well, okay, how ... Well, what comes to mind is we just go through the [laughs] Fortune 500, look at all the YouTube channels and see ... [laughs] Or, or the NASDAQ, which is like for tech companies. [laughs] Look at all the YouTube channels, see which are the ones that we could make a compelling pitch to. See if we can get a warm intro to that person, or alternatively, we start with our existing network. We reach out to, for example, Penguin or Macmillan or, like, any company that's ever sponsored our stuff. How, how would you go about this?

Nicolas Cole 1:04:54 Well-

Ali Abdaal 1:04:54 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:04:55 ... so now, like what we're talking about is the conversation we've been having just on this is the level 80 version.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:00 Yeah. This is ... [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:05:01 You know? And we were talking about the level 14 version.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:02 This is, yeah, this is, I wanna get the 100K contract. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:05:04 Yeah. And so where do you start?

Ali Abdaal 1:05:06 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:05:06 You start, your niche is your network.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:07 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:05:07 You start with the people you know first.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:09 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:05:09 And then you exhaust that list.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:11 Even if they might not be the right, right people for the 50K offer or whatever.

Nicolas Cole 1:05:14 Yeah. Leaks and faucets.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:15 Yeah. Yeah, 'cause they'll know-

Nicolas Cole 1:05:15 Do you know anyone?

Ali Abdaal 1:05:16 Yeah, of course they'll know people. Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:05:17 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:17 And they'll be far more likely to hop on a call with us, be like, "Yeah, of course I'll talk to you."

Nicolas Cole 1:05:20 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:21 Or intro-

Nicolas Cole 1:05:21 But I, I can-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:21 Intro you to a CMO kind of thing

Nicolas Cole 1:05:23 ... I can tell you because at my agency, we, we had some of like the biggest tech companies in the world.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:28 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:05:29 And as soon as you start getting up to like Fortune 500 or like multi-billion dollar companies-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:33 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:05:34 ... those are very different deals.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:36 Oh, okay.

Nicolas Cole 1:05:36 And like, you can do it, but there's more red tape, sales process takes longer. Like-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:42 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:05:42 ... in my opinion, the sweet spot is you actually ... Like, do you know the site Crunchbase?

Ali Abdaal 1:05:46 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:05:47 Okay. So Crunchbase publishes, you know, companies that just raised any amount of money. If I were you, I would target companies in the 10 to $100 million range, either in value-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:59 Uh, per year in revenue. Oh, yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:05:59 ... could be valuation, money raised, it could be revenue, whatever.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:02 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:06:02 Because that range is where you're not so big that you have 10,000 employees.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:08 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:06:08 You know? But you're not small where you're like penny pinching.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:12 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:06:12 That, that general range, and that's a big range, but that general range, a lot of those companies are like, "We know we wanna do video. We're still small enough to move quickly. Let's just write the check. Let's just do it."

Ali Abdaal 1:06:23 Yeah. So what sort of, um, uh, what sort of size checks were you charging in the agency back in the day?

Nicolas Cole 1:06:29 Oh, I mean, our highest offering was like five grand a month.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:32 Right.

Nicolas Cole 1:06:32 Like, that was one of my biggest mistakes, was going ... W- we literally had companies get on the phone and go, "We love your pitch. Do you have anything more expensive?"

Ali Abdaal 1:06:39 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:06:41 And I was like 26 years old. I didn't know.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:42 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:06:42 I was like, "No."

Ali Abdaal 1:06:44 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:06:45 I thought five grand was a lot. We, we la- we landed one of the biggest enterprise tech companies in the world.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:51 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:06:51 Like, they have as many employees as like small countries.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:54 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:06:54 And they literally said, "We don't do, we don't work with vendors for five grand a month. Like, our smallest vendor is like 100 grand." So they prepaid for a year. A whole year up front just because they like, that was the only way to get the deal across.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:11 Wow.

Nicolas Cole 1:07:12 And like that experience taught me so much about just... I mean, you're talking to a company that does 30 billion in revenue.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:19 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:07:19 You know, it's like it's crazy. And so i- if I were you, I would have two offers, and I would have one that caters to the smaller creator but is still sort of premium.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:31 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:07:31 Like five grand a month.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:32 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:07:32 7,500 a month, you know? S- a smaller sized business, maybe even like a company doing like 10 million would say yes to that.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:39 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:07:39 But then I would also have a super ding-dong version.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:42 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:07:42 That's like, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50K a month.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:45 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:07:45 And then you go pitch that to $100 million companies.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:49 If you guys didn't have your own long form YouTube video strategy, what is the sort of thing that, that if hypothetically me or someone on my team were to say, "Hey, guys, you know, we'll do, we'll do long form y- long form video for you"

Nicolas Cole 1:08:02 Mm-hmm

Ali Abdaal 1:08:02 ... what are the sorts of things you and Dickie would be thinking about?

Nicolas Cole 1:08:05 Um, like all the things that we're talking about, the first thing is I would 100% do it for a Start Writing Online channel. Like all of that beginner stuff I've written a gazillion times.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:15 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:08:15 I have all the content. I've already done all the thinking.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:17 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:08:18 Like me creating those videos is actually sort of low leverage.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:21 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:08:21 You know? And so creating a branded but faceless, if you will, channel-

Ali Abdaal 1:08:27 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:08:27 ... that just does all of that education on autopilot, that's really interesting to me.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:32 Yeah. How much would that be worth to you [laughs] in theory?

Nicolas Cole 1:08:35 Um, I'd say, I mean, if it was like three grand a month, I would pull the trigger, like no questions asked. I'd be like, "Let's just try it."

Ali Abdaal 1:08:43 Okay.

Nicolas Cole 1:08:43 You know? That, that to me is just a-

Ali Abdaal 1:08:45 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:08:45 ... let's see what happens. I think our pricing cap would probably be around 10 grand a month-

Ali Abdaal 1:08:51 Okay

Nicolas Cole 1:08:52 ... ish.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:52 Before you would start thinking, "Ah, okay, might as well just do it myself" kind of thing or-

Nicolas Cole 1:08:56 Yeah, that, that's-

Ali Abdaal 1:08:56 ... it's already worth doing or?

Nicolas Cole 1:08:57 Yeah. It would ... From there, it probably wouldn't be a money decision, it would be a priority decision.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:01 Right.

Nicolas Cole 1:09:01 It would be like if we're gonna spend 20 grand a month-

Ali Abdaal 1:09:05 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:09:05 ... uh, what's the ROI of that doing this relative to something else? It, it would-

Ali Abdaal 1:09:10 Oh, something else we could spend 20 grand a month.

Nicolas Cole 1:09:11 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:12 Fine. Okay.

Nicolas Cole 1:09:12 Or should we just hire two people internally to do it, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:09:15 Okay. That's when it starts to-

Nicolas Cole 1:09:15 'Cause then I can start paying full-time salaries and, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:17 Okay. Nice. That's a good point.

Nicolas Cole 1:09:19 But, but you have to-

Ali Abdaal 1:09:19 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:09:19 ... one of the benefits of pitching larger companies is that the larger a company grows, the m- the more

Nicolas Cole 1:09:26 taxing it becomes to bring something internally.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:28 Oh, yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:09:28 Because, you know, you have to train them, and you have processes, and your head of HR needs the process and like... So it actually is easier to sell to those larger companies-

Ali Abdaal 1:09:37 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:09:37 ... because they're not real... Like, they can't do the rationalization of, "Well, we could just hire five people."

Ali Abdaal 1:09:44 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:09:44 Takes too much bandwidth for them.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:45 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:09:45 Whereas for us, we have a small team. Like I could hire two people and train them-

Ali Abdaal 1:09:48 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:09:48 ... relatively easily.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:50 Yeah. Okay. Well, that's interesting. Nice. So 10 to 100 million, start off with the, start off with the network until we have exhausted that.

Nicolas Cole 1:09:59 And going back to everything we've talked about-

Ali Abdaal 1:10:01 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:10:01 ... if I were you, I would consider just doing the first one. You could do it for free or just like do it for five grand and go-

Ali Abdaal 1:10:08 Yeah. Do it super cheap for like PayPal or something. They'd probably be down.

Nicolas Cole 1:10:10 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:10 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:10:10 And like learn.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:11 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:10:11 Figure out where your inefficiencies are.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:13 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:10:13 Figure out what it's worth to the client. You can, you can power level all of the learning by doing it for one person.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:20 Hmm. Nice. That's a good idea. I'm thinking if we did reach out to the publisher and they were like, "You know, you, you guys should really have your own YouTube channels where you do-

Nicolas Cole 1:10:27 Yeah, of course they should

Ali Abdaal 1:10:28 ... in- intros to all of the books that you're publishing"

Nicolas Cole 1:10:31 Have you seen their YouTube channels?

Ali Abdaal 1:10:32 No, I haven't actually. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:10:33 No shade, but they're pretty bad.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:34 Oh. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:10:34 Like publisher us- Yeah, it looks like, like a, like a writer's house from like the '90s, you know?

Ali Abdaal 1:10:39 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:10:39 The sound is horrible. Like everybody needs help with video, so it is a great service.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:44 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:10:44 It's just, I would really ... I would not connect it to audience growth.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:51 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 1:10:51 I would anchor it to library.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:53 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 1:10:53 You're buying an asset.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:54 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:10:54 And I would pitch larger companies that have the means.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:57 Hmm. Nice. Easy enough. Um, one thing I was gonna ... I wanted to ask you about, so I've, I've been a, an avid listener of The Espresso Hour.

Nicolas Cole 1:11:04 Really?

Ali Abdaal 1:11:05 Which is a great podcast. Like, uh, I think like-

Nicolas Cole 1:11:06 Oh, thanks

Ali Abdaal 1:11:07 ... half, half my team listens to it on the regular, and we're always like, "Oh, you know, these guys talked about this thing last week." 'Cause it feels so relevant to where we are because I think your business and ours and it is at least in a similar order of magnitude.

Nicolas Cole 1:11:16 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:16 So the sort of stuff that you guys are thinking about is ridiculously relevant to what we're thinking about.

Nicolas Cole 1:11:20 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:21 And there are so few business podcasts that are talking about, talking about how do you go from seven to eight figures.

Nicolas Cole 1:11:25 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:25 And like the actual process of doing that. Um, but one thing I'm curious about is why do you care? You know, you're getting married or you're married now.

Nicolas Cole 1:11:34 Just got married, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:34 You've made the money. You can chill. Like, why do you care about growing the business?

Nicolas Cole 1:11:38 Um, a lot of ... I mean, I think it's true for anything in life, but I just wanna know that I can.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:45 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:11:45 You know? I, I, I've built multiple seven-figure companies now, and I won't lie, I really want the, uh, the eight figure. Like, I wanna just know that I could do that.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:56 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:11:56 Um, that feeling might change after we hit, you know, 10 million. By the way, this drives me nuts. I hate when people say, "I built a X million dollar business," but they're doing it on lifetime revenue-

Ali Abdaal 1:12:08 Oh

Nicolas Cole 1:12:08 ... versus annual revenue.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:10 People say that?

Nicolas Cole 1:12:10 Oh, all the time.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:11 Oh.

Nicolas Cole 1:12:11 I s- it drives me nuts.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:12 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:12:12 They're like, "I built a $5 million company." It's like, no, you built a million-dollar company and you've been in business for five years.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:17 Oh, I did that with a video that I made five years ago.

Nicolas Cole 1:12:20 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:12:20 I was like, "H- h- how I built a billion-dollar business in med school." I was like, if you add up all of the revenue for like seven freaking years, you get to just about a million, so. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:12:27 It's okay. I'll, I'll excuse it 'cause it was a beginner mistake.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:30 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:12:30 But, but I see people, I see people who know-

Ali Abdaal 1:12:33 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:12:33 ... what they're doing doing that, and I'm like ... Why, why it's frustrating to me is because you're educating aspiring entrepreneurs on the wrong th-

Ali Abdaal 1:12:40 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:12:40 ... you're setting an unreasonable expectation.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:42 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:12:42 You know? And our goal ... Like, I don't ... We've already done 10 million in lifetime revenue. I wanna build a 10 million a year business.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:50 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:12:51 And our ... I'm hoping that we will do that by the end of this year.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:53 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:12:54 And so, yeah, I just, I wanna know that I'm capable and that I can do that.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:59 So it's kinda like a video game.

Nicolas Cole 1:13:00 Yeah. Why not?

Ali Abdaal 1:13:01 Yeah. Just playing on very hard difficulty.

Nicolas Cole 1:13:02 Why do you, why do you want to?

Ali Abdaal 1:13:03 Honestly, it's the, it's a video game thing. It's like, you know, I'm playing Horizon Forbidden West on PS5 at the moment, and I'm playing on very hard difficulty.

Nicolas Cole 1:13:09 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:13:10 Ultra hard is a bit too grindy and a bit too hard, but very hard is, you know, I'm like trying to kill the Thunderjaw for like three freaking hours on a Saturday, but when I kill it, it feels satisfying, and I'm like, "Hmm- Is this what they said about ... But is, is this what people meant when they said you should relax more and not work and stuff?

Nicolas Cole 1:13:24 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:13:24 It's like ... But it's just kinda nice. It's like playing at level 80 rather than level 50 or something.

Nicolas Cole 1:13:28 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:28 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:13:29 You know, I don't ... May- maybe I'm interpreting-

Ali Abdaal 1:13:31 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:13:31 ... what you're saying correctly, but it's like I don't need to build a billion-dollar company.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:34 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:13:36 If that happens, cool, but to be honest, when I think about that, that feels like way more responsibility than truthfully I wanna deal with.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:43 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:13:43 I'm too creative. I don't think I wanna live my life managing that. Um, not that I could. I love when people say that.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:50 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:13:50 Like, "It'd be so easy. I'm choosing not to build a billion-dollar company."

Ali Abdaal 1:13:52 Yeah, I don't wanna go to the gym because I don't wanna get too big. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:13:54 Yeah, exactly. Okay, so I understand the irony in what I just said. But, um, but yeah, I think, like, once you build a seven-figure company, you're like, "Okay, what does it, what does it look like to build a multi-seven-figure company?"

Ali Abdaal 1:14:05 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:14:06 Cool. Did that. And then it's like, okay, what does it look like to build an eight-figure company?

Ali Abdaal 1:14:09 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:14:09 And then from there I'll reassess and, you know, do we wanna continue?

Ali Abdaal 1:14:13 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:14:13 But I learned that lesson really painfully with my ghostwriting agency, which was sometimes you growing too quickly is a huge problem.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:22 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:14:22 And something Dickie and I talk about all the time is what's the tipping point? Like, when does the business ... Yeah, you're growing or you might reach, you know, 20 million in revenue or 30 million in revenue, but you will probably cross these tipping points where now you have, you know, 20 people to manage, 30 people, 50 people, 100 people. Maybe that size of business, A, might not even be as profitable-

Ali Abdaal 1:14:45 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:14:45 ... right? And B, it might not be as fun. So you sort of have to decide, like, how big of a business do you wanna build, and is the size of that also giving you the other things you want in your life? Is it fun-

Ali Abdaal 1:14:57 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:14:57 ... to make you happy? Is it still profitable, you know?

Ali Abdaal 1:15:00 Yeah. And how much do you care about, like, building to sell?

Nicolas Cole 1:15:03 I don't wanna sell. I, I'm, I much prefer the idea of building cash-generating machines-

Ali Abdaal 1:15:10 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:15:10 ... you know?

Ali Abdaal 1:15:11 Rather than a big sort of, like, 5X revenue exit or something like that.

Nicolas Cole 1:15:14 Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, okay, I sell my company for 20 million bucks, okay? Te- you know, 50% goes to Uncle Sam, so I got 10 million.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:21 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:15:21 You know? And then I put that in what? Like, a 5%-

Ali Abdaal 1:15:23 Yeah, discount or something

Nicolas Cole 1:15:24 ... account. And then I, and then I make, like, you know, what is that? 400K a year or something.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:29 Yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:15:29 Like, that's actually a lot less than I make.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:32 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:15:32 So yeah, I have 10 million bucks, but, no, my lifestyle is actually less than what I have now.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:38 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:15:38 So why would I wanna sell?

Ali Abdaal 1:15:40 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:15:41 That's the same argument, by the way, I make for book deals. Like, why, why take the advance when you know the publisher's gonna make or they're gonna try to make 10 times that on your book?

Ali Abdaal 1:15:54 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:15:54 Maybe a different path is just self-publishing the book.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:58 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:15:58 And you, you don't get a lump sum upfront, but you might generate more in royalties over a longer time horizon.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:05 What do you think I should do for my next book?

Nicolas Cole 1:16:07 I'm so glad you asked this. So I, I've been wanting to talk to you about this.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:09 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:16:10 So first of all, I'm, like, halfway through your book. I wanna pay you a compliment, and I, I feel like this is gonna come off as a backhanded compliment, but I don't mean it that way. It is way better written than I thought it was gonna be.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:22 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:16:23 And not that I, like, thought you were a bad writer or anything, but very often I will read self-help books-

Ali Abdaal 1:16:28 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:16:28 ... and it's just, like, really ... It's, like, very mindless, you know? I am not finding your book to be mindless at all.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:37 Oh, thank you.

Nicolas Cole 1:16:37 Um, it's, it's really cool, and I, I like the combination of research and personal story.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:43 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:16:43 And, um, I also think the categorical difference of grinding productivity versus feel-good productivity, like, how you set that up in the beginning-

Ali Abdaal 1:16:54 Mm-hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:16:54 ... very smart.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:55 Oh, thank you.

Nicolas Cole 1:16:55 Very smart. Um, so one of my questions was actually what was your book deal, and was it a one-book deal? Was it a multiple-book deal?

Ali Abdaal 1:17:04 Yeah, it was one book deal with Penguin having the right of first refusal on future deals.

Nicolas Cole 1:17:09 For life?

Ali Abdaal 1:17:10 I think so.

Nicolas Cole 1:17:10 Do you know for how long?

Ali Abdaal 1:17:12 But it, it just means that if I do go trad publisher, I, I have to give them the option to buy it first.

Nicolas Cole 1:17:17 How long is that clause in effect for? Do you know? Like, if you do that once and they take it, do you have to give them first right of refusal for all the books after that?

Ali Abdaal 1:17:26 I'm not sure. I should look at the contract.

Nicolas Cole 1:17:28 That's an important piece to know.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:29 But I, I think I, I can choose to self-publish the next one if I wanted to.

Nicolas Cole 1:17:33 You can?

Ali Abdaal 1:17:33 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:17:34 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:34 I just have to give them the option of buying it, but I don't have to accept their offer.

Nicolas Cole 1:17:37 Oh, okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:38 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:17:38 Well, then that's fine.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:39 It just means that if Penguin versus, I don't know, Simon & Schuster were bidding, that Penguin-

Nicolas Cole 1:17:43 Oh, then they get

Ali Abdaal 1:17:44 ... would have the right to dibs on it, essentially.

Nicolas Cole 1:17:46 Oh, got it.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:47 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:17:47 Okay. So before I, I give you my perspective-

Ali Abdaal 1:17:49 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:17:49 ... what do you think you should do? And, like, how are you thinking about this?

Ali Abdaal 1:17:53 Yeah. So this is, this is gonna be very inside baseball, so if anyone feels like leaving the podcast at this point, by all means [laughs] please do. Um, I am not sure. So thinking out loud-

Nicolas Cole 1:18:03 By the way-

Ali Abdaal 1:18:04 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:18:04 ... I feel like this, this is what I wanted to talk to you about-

Ali Abdaal 1:18:07 Yeah, that's [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:18:07 ... for mine, so let's just, we'll just keep it going.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:09 Great. Perfect. Yeah, that's fine. Um, I'm not sure. So obviously there's value in traditional publishing. Um, in my, in my case, the goal was to, uh, have an asset that w- to be seen as, like, a legit guy rather than q- just a YouTuber and all that, you know, all of that stuff.

Nicolas Cole 1:18:26 I think you accomplished that big time.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:27 Yeah, so the prestige, the New York Times list, the Sunday Times list, the fact that it's traditionally published with Penguin, blah, blah, blah.

Nicolas Cole 1:18:32 Congrats on New York Times, by the way.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:33 Thank you. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:18:34 I haven't, I haven't said that-

Ali Abdaal 1:18:35 Oh, yeah, we've not seen each other

Nicolas Cole 1:18:36 ... here, but, uh, but congrats.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:37 Thank you very much. So all of that stuff is done. Um, and now for future books, I know I wanna write future books, and I also quite like the fact, quite like to the fact that I had an editor who was nice. They had, like, the in-house Penguin designer made the front cover. I hired an external designer to make 50 variations, and we couldn't find anything better than the cover, and the cover turned out to be really nice. Um-

Nicolas Cole 1:19:02 It's a great cover.

Ali Abdaal 1:19:03 Thanks. Uh, they, Penguin have landed us, like, I think 36 different language translation deals. It's in bookstores. People are sending me pictures from, like, freaking Taiwan, from, like, random bookstore in Austin. You know, all, all over the world people are sending pictures of this book in different translations and, and I f- I hear that that sort of stuff doesn't really happen if you're self-published unless you become, like, a David Goggins or something like that, which just seem- seems unlikely. So there's part of me that's like, I like the freedom that Paul Millerd has making like 400 grand already from his book sales of The Pathless Path. I like the idea of doing like smaller books. Um, like I really wanna do a book around like... I don't wanna say the title because like [laughs] normally I'm not protective of ideas, but when it comes to book titles, I'm pretty protective of ideas. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:19:50 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:19:50 Um, but I, I, I wanna do a series of books and have, feel like I have more freedom and that the stakes are lower. But also I like the idea that, you know, there's a big publisher behind it who then is doing the publisher machinery to get it into different languages and into different bookstores around the world, which is just kinda cool.

Nicolas Cole 1:20:09 So just to summarize, what, what do you feel like the publisher did that you wouldn't be able to do?

Ali Abdaal 1:20:15 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:20:15 Specifically.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:17 Good point.

Nicolas Cole 1:20:18 The translation deal-

Ali Abdaal 1:20:19 Translation deals

Nicolas Cole 1:20:19 ... I would say, I would say the bulk translation deal. 'Cause fun, fun fact, by the way, r- right now I am negotiating the, uh, the Korean rights for Art and Business of Online Writing-

Ali Abdaal 1:20:32 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:20:32 ... which is self-published.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:33 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:20:33 So you can do translation deals.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:35 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:20:35 It's just they're the, they're emailing you, they're not emailing the publishing house.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:39 Actually, a handful of people have emailed us being like, "Hey, do you have a Slovakian deal?" And I'm like, "Do we have a Slovakian?" Yeah. Yep, turns out we do. Sorry. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:20:45 Right.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:45 That kind of thing.

Nicolas Cole 1:20:46 So it's possible-

Ali Abdaal 1:20:48 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:20:49 ... and, and that you can do that, but, you know, doing a bulk deal, like they go out and sell it in 36 languages, that's something that a publisher does that a individual typically cannot. Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:57 Mm-hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:20:57 So that's one.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:58 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:20:58 But like what else, what else do you feel like they do?

Ali Abdaal 1:21:00 The translation thing and the bookstores.

Nicolas Cole 1:21:02 Okay. So do you know the data of how many copies were bought online versus in-store?

Ali Abdaal 1:21:09 Um, [laughs] yeah, that's a good point. Um, no, but just looking at what we already have, it's like 90/10 Amazon versus everything else.

Nicolas Cole 1:21:18 Okay. So-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:19 And everything else also like, uh, Barnes & Noble, it's unclear as to whether it was, uh, bricks and mortar or online sale.

Nicolas Cole 1:21:25 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:26 So a big chunk of those were probably online as well.

Nicolas Cole 1:21:27 The, the mega trend in books is that, [laughs] it's funny 'cause everyone whenever they talk about book deals is like, "I wanna get into bookstores" but the trend line is that-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:35 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:21:35 ... book spot in stores is going down and-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:37 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:21:37 ... book spot online is going up.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:38 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 1:21:39 Um, something else that I've, have found a lot of people don't know is you talked about, you know, the designer in-house creating this amazing cover-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:47 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:21:47 ... and you worked with an editor. You can hire all those people.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:50 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:21:50 So-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:50 Yeah, we did hire an external editor and we also hired an external designer.

Nicolas Cole 1:21:53 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:53 So that's-

Nicolas Cole 1:21:53 So even the people-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:54 ... probably easy enough

Nicolas Cole 1:21:55 ... in those houses want to freelance on the side-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:57 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:21:57 ... or they used to work in a big five house and now they freelance on the side. So also this argument of like taking a book deal and you get access to these specialized people, it's not true. You can get access to them just reaching out to them and going, "Do you wanna freelance?"

Ali Abdaal 1:22:12 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:22:13 So, and then another thing was I read the whole analysis that your team did-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:18 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:22:18 ... of the marketing-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:20 Yep

Nicolas Cole 1:22:20 ... um, which was fascinating. That was really cool that you did that. Um, do you care if I share some of those numbers?

Ali Abdaal 1:22:26 No, by all means. Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:22:27 So one of the things I was shocked that you only spent like 25 grand on marketing. I know that's not counting labor costs, but that-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:33 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:22:33 ... was like the Zoom and some paid newsletters-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:35 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:22:35 ... and stuff.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:36 It was a very minimal marketing spend.

Nicolas Cole 1:22:37 Okay. So like 25 grand to generate the outcome that you did, and that probably isn't really what moved the needle. What moved the needle is your organic-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:47 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:22:47 ... audience by, by far.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:49 By a mile.

Nicolas Cole 1:22:49 Right?

Ali Abdaal 1:22:49 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:22:49 And what did the publisher do?

Ali Abdaal 1:22:52 Um, they landed a few things like we got Good Morning America because of the publisher, we got like the, the Today Show Australia 'cause of the publisher.

Nicolas Cole 1:23:00 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:00 We got a few, like we got the Financial Times piece. That kind of stuff.

Nicolas Cole 1:23:03 Yeah. Okay. So status symbols.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:05 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:23:05 Yeah. [laughs] You know? But which, which by the way, the thing is, I have probably spent 3,000 hours reading about traditional publishing. Contracts, I've read the nerdiest books on like the history of publishing-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:20 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:23:20 ... how it's evolved. Like something that I've really wanted as a writer is to be as educated as possible about what is happening in this industry.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:28 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:23:29 How do deals get, deals get structured? What, what are the inve- incentive structures?

Ali Abdaal 1:23:32 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:23:32 Right? What are the benefits of taking a traditional publisher-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:35 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:23:35 ... versus self-publishing? All these things. And so when you really like list them out, the publisher really isn't doing that much.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:44 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:23:44 What they're doing is, A, they are giving you the ability to play the New York Times game.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:49 Hmm. Yep.

Nicolas Cole 1:23:50 That's it. If I go sell a million copies tomorrow, but I'm not with a publishing house-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:53 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:23:54 ... New York Times doesn't care.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:55 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 1:23:55 Right? So Ponzi scheme [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:23:57 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:23:57 Like they, they give you access to the game, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:24:00 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:24:00 Okay. In literature also you can't win awards, so you can't really win the Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize or anything unless you're with a big five-

Ali Abdaal 1:24:09 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:24:09 ... a gatekeeper.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:10 Mm-hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:24:10 Okay? So you can't play that game. Um, bookstores, so a lot of people don't know how bookstores work as businesses, but basically what a bookstore is trying to figure out is they have inventory and they're like, "Well, what books should we carry?"

Ali Abdaal 1:24:26 Mm-hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:24:27 Now, just because you, uh, accept a book deal-

Ali Abdaal 1:24:31 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:24:31 ... doesn't mean that they're gonna get you in every bookstore, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:24:35 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:24:35 'Cause how many books does a bookstore hold?

Ali Abdaal 1:24:37 Yeah, like small numbers-

Nicolas Cole 1:24:38 Like-

Ali Abdaal 1:24:38 ... in the grand scheme of things

Nicolas Cole 1:24:39 ... 300?

Ali Abdaal 1:24:40 Yeah. Whenever I walk into a bookstore I'm like, "Is my book there?" And the answer is usually no. Like, I've never seen it in a bookstore.

Nicolas Cole 1:24:44 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:44 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:24:44 So there's the irony of that.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:45 But I've seen Instagram stories of people who've seen it in bookstores. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:24:48 Yeah, exactly.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:49 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:24:49 So okay, so they're not gonna get you in every bookstore, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:24:52 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:24:52 And the bookstores that they get you in, what happens, it's almost like, like an old school algorithm. So what they do is they pick these markets-

Ali Abdaal 1:25:00 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:25:00 ... and they go, "Okay, we're gonna target these couple bookstores in this localized area" and they have a rep from their house that goes to the bookstore and goes, "Hey, here's the deal. Ali Abdaal, I'm sure you don't know who this person is, but we just signed this huge book deal with him. Um, he has 5 million YouTube subscribers, so he's gonna push the shit out of this thing," right? And they're basically selling to the bookstore your ability to market to bring people to the bookstore.

Ali Abdaal 1:25:27 Oh, okay. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:25:28 And that is how the bookstore decides-

Ali Abdaal 1:25:30 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:25:30 ... "Well, what books should we carry?"

Ali Abdaal 1:25:31 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:25:31 Right? So already [laughs] if you're an author, you're like, "Okay, how much leverage do I have? And even if I sign a book deal- The publisher's not putting me in every bookstore.

Ali Abdaal 1:25:41 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:25:41 So how much leverage do I have that the publisher can go market to the bookstore-

Ali Abdaal 1:25:45 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:25:45 ... saying, "This author is going to drive in-person sales"?

Ali Abdaal 1:25:49 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:25:49 Right? So all of these variables work together. So when you start listing all these things out, if you were to just be really brutally honest, like who got you New York Times? Was it you or was it the publisher?

Ali Abdaal 1:26:01 The publisher unlocked the ability to be on the list, but it was really our audience that drove the sales to get on the list.

Nicolas Cole 1:26:07 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:07 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:26:07 Okay. So then you start doing the math. So, okay, you got the status symbol. Once a New York Times bestseller, always a New York Times bestseller.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:14 Yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:26:14 So you don't need to play that game anymore.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:15 Yeah, true.

Nicolas Cole 1:26:15 Right? So-

Ali Abdaal 1:26:16 I don't think there's much value in being a two times New York Times best-

Nicolas Cole 1:26:18 Yeah, exactly. So it's like, who cares?

Ali Abdaal 1:26:19 Or five times or like Tim Ferriss thing or whatever. Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:26:21 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:21 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:26:21 So now you start doing the math on a self-published book.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:25 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:26:25 And you go, okay, what's the difference between, we'll just use round numbers.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:27 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:26:27 What's the difference between a million dollar advance and a 10% royalty-

Ali Abdaal 1:26:31 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:26:31 ... versus $0 advance but 100% royalty?

Ali Abdaal 1:26:36 Yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:26:36 Right? And if you start like, okay, so how many copies? You, you sold 200,000.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:42 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:26:42 Okay, let's just be super generous-

Ali Abdaal 1:26:43 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:26:44 ... and go, 100,000 of those are from in bookstores, which the publisher did for you, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:26:49 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:26:49 So w- we'll say you're responsible for driving 100K-

Ali Abdaal 1:26:52 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:26:52 ... uh, copies, and you sell your next book for 10 bucks as an e-book, 20 bucks in print. Um, and again, just we'll use round numbers, $10 is the-

Ali Abdaal 1:27:02 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:27:02 ... the net. Uh, and you sell a lot of them through your own website.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:05 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:27:05 And yeah, some through Amazon where like the split is 60/40, whatever. You've already made your million.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:12 Hmm. Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:27:13 100,000 copies, 10 bucks a copy.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:16 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:27:16 You've already made a million, and that's in the first year. So what happens then year two, year three, year four, year five? And like nobody does the napkin math, but it doesn't... It almost doesn't matter how big the advance is, is that when you take into account the higher royalty and if you're someone who has an audience and continues pushing it-

Ali Abdaal 1:27:34 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:27:34 ... right, you go from marketing the book that you don't really own, you own 10% of it, to marketing your library that you have majority or all ownership over.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:43 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:27:43 And the royalties start outpacing the advance.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:46 Yeah. And the advance you have to pay off anyway through the royalties, so it's not even free money. It's just, yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:27:51 Yeah. Most, most authors, even if they get a million dollar advance, they don't ever see a royalty from their book.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:55 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:27:55 So they, they, they just went, "I'm gonna take the million upfront."

Ali Abdaal 1:27:58 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:27:58 And sometimes that's the right decision. But if y- if you just wanna write one book, if you were like, "I'm one and done"-

Ali Abdaal 1:28:04 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:28:04 ... you made the right decision. You won the status game, probably got a really nice advance. You're, you're good, right? But if you actually enjoy writing and you wanna build a library, well, you should own the majority of your library.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:16 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:28:17 I love when people are like, "Nobody buys books." Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:19 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:28:20 Uh, how do you think all the publishers make billions of dollars?

Ali Abdaal 1:28:23 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:28:24 People buy books, it's just the publishers convince writers that there's no money in books, which is why the writers all go, "Sure, you wanna take 90% of my product? No problem." And then they just-

Ali Abdaal 1:28:34 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:28:34 ... slowly accumulate a library over the years and over the decades.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:38 Yeah. And it's like, okay, so it sounds like you think self-publish is the way to go.

Nicolas Cole 1:28:42 I would... So I think from both a content and a digital product perspective, we'll just take a different lens.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:50 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:28:51 If you ran an experiment-

Ali Abdaal 1:28:53 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:28:53 ... a public experiment and said-

Ali Abdaal 1:28:55 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:28:55 ... "Here's all the math on my traditional book."

Ali Abdaal 1:28:57 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:28:57 "And then I do it again," and you put forth the same resources-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:00 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:29:00 ... but you do it all yourself.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:01 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:29:02 And then you do a postmortem.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:03 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:29:03 Here are the differences. First of all, I think from a content perspective, that would crush.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:08 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:29:08 Second, it would teach you a ton.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:10 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:29:10 And third of all, you could probably bundle all of that into a digital product-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:14 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:29:14 ... that monetizes it again-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:16 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:29:16 ... being like, "I'm gonna walk you through my whole publishing process."

Ali Abdaal 1:29:19 Hmm. I a- I also like the fact that if you're self-published, you can give away books.

Nicolas Cole 1:29:23 Yeah. You're, you can do a lot. So in-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:25 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:29:25 ... um, Dickie and I got offered, um, a book deal like a year ago or something, and I was... The contract was nuts. I was like, "I can't believe you think people sign stuff like this." Like, it was so predatory.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:40 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:29:40 And they were like, "This is standard language. Like, I don't understand what you have a problem with." And I was like, "You want lifetime representation of everything that I write forever?" They were like, "Yeah, most writers have no problem with that." I'm like-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:50 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:29:51 ... "Get out, get out of here."

Ali Abdaal 1:29:52 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:29:53 And so, um, yeah, I just, I think that in the long run, because you have anyone who is building an audience, I would really stress test the value of taking the money upfront-

Ali Abdaal 1:30:06 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:30:06 ... versus extending the time horizon and going, "You're, you're a creative person. You're gonna wanna create things for the next 50 years."

Ali Abdaal 1:30:15 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:30:15 So what does it look like when you own-

Ali Abdaal 1:30:16 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:30:16 ... your library for 50 years?

Ali Abdaal 1:30:18 Yeah. I wa- I wasn't even vaguely thinking of, like, the money up. Like, in, in, initially, what I said to the publisher was, "Oh, I don't want an advance. I just care about the royalties 'cause I don't, I don't need the cash flow."

Nicolas Cole 1:30:26 Uh-huh.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:26 And they were like, "Great. Perfect." And then I was told, "Actually, that's a bad idea because if there's a big advance on their P&L, then they're gonna put more effort into marketing-"

Nicolas Cole 1:30:33 Exactly

Ali Abdaal 1:30:33 ... the kind of thing. And so the money upfront was really more of a, at least they've got some skin in the game-

Nicolas Cole 1:30:38 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:30:39 ... kind of idea.

Nicolas Cole 1:30:39 Yeah. And for... So another flaw of traditional publishing, right, is that forces them to actually be incentivized. If they-

Ali Abdaal 1:30:47 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:30:47 ... part of the, part of the reason why so many writers, uh, vent about their publishing deals is because the publisher goes, "Well, we don't really believe in the book, but, hey, you're willing to sell us 90% of it, so we'll give you a 10 grand advance."

Ali Abdaal 1:31:00 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:31:00 But when they do that, they have no incentive to actually go push it.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:03 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:31:03 So the only reason that you are taking the big advance is to basically put their nose to the grindstone-

Ali Abdaal 1:31:09 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:31:09 ... being like, "Now you have to push it."

Ali Abdaal 1:31:11 Yeah. Interesting.

Nicolas Cole 1:31:14 You wanna talk... I would love to ask you some questions about writing the book, actually.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:16 Yeah, sure.

Nicolas Cole 1:31:18 Okay. So, um, first of all, productivity and self-help is one of those things where it's hard to reinvent-

Ali Abdaal 1:31:25 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:31:25 ... because it's like how many times can you talk about the same thing?

Ali Abdaal 1:31:29 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:31:29 You know? Um, which is why I think I, like, going into the book, I was sort of like, "Uh, we'll, we'll see."

Ali Abdaal 1:31:35 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:31:35 "We'll see," you know? And I was really pleasantly surprised.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:37 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:31:40 How did you come up with this lens of feel-good productivity? And you reference a lot of studies in it.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:47 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:31:48 Were those studies that you had read and then they, that is what gave you the idea? Or did you sort of start with the idea and then you went and found research that supported it?

Ali Abdaal 1:31:57 Yeah. Um, okay, so the backstory is that initially the book was titled The Productivity Equation, which was modeled off of a Skillshare class that I did that was about productivity equals meaning multiplied by output multiplied by fun or some- something like that.

Nicolas Cole 1:32:11 Mm.

Ali Abdaal 1:32:11 And I, I always had this fun construct within whatever I would teach about productivity on YouTube and stuff. And initially, when Publisher A approached me, they were like, "We'll just give you a book deal sight unseen. You don't even need a proposal, just like sign, sign the book deal," kind of thing. Uh, I took, I took ages to sign, sign the papers, and just before I was signing them when they were sort of, um, hassling me about it, I spoke to a writer friend who said, you know, "Who's your agent?" And I was like, "I don't have an agent." And she was like, "You need to... Don't sign this thing. Talk to an agent." I talked to an agent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then we sort of renegotiated that deal with Publisher A, and then it came to writing a proper proposal for US publishers, 'cause apparently US publishers don't bl- don't like books where they're not at least jointly publishing it at the same time, 'cause if they feel... If the US publisher is playing second fiddle to the UK publisher, then they don't like it.

Nicolas Cole 1:33:02 Ah.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:03 Or something to that effect. So then we had to write a proposal, a proper proposal for the US publishers, and so I wrote the productivity equation and sent it to a couple of editors. And basically, the feedback was that this is terrible, and it's not gonna sell because no one wants to read a book called The Productivity Equation. It just sounds boring as fuck.

Nicolas Cole 1:33:18 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:33:19 What's the idea? And there was this guy, David Moldauer, who was super helpful. Um, he's the guy who also did James Clear's proposal-

Nicolas Cole 1:33:24 Hmm

Ali Abdaal 1:33:25 ... and also has worked with a bunch of other, uh, our other friends in that WhatsApp group. Um, he basically said, "Yep, it stinks. Uh, but come on, man. Like, if you had to boil it down to one thing, you know, you're successful. You're a doctor, you're a YouTuber. Like, what's the one thing?" And I was like, "Oh, I just find a way to make everything fun." And he was like, "That's the book. That's a cool concept."

Nicolas Cole 1:33:42 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:43 And he's like, "I don't think anyone's gone into productivity from that angle, so, like, why not just do that?" And initially, it was like, okay, well, maybe that's a thing, and then it became the productivity game, and they became all about gamification and stuff. And as I was... In- initially, I made the mistake of outsourcing the research, so I got a research assistant who was kind of reading a bunch of papers and stuff and feeding me insights, and I'd sort of come up with this framework around, like, okay, well, w- what do video game designers do? Like, why is WoW addictive, and how do we apply that to productivity? Blah, blah, blah. And then I started writing and realizing I didn't quite have the material, and I couldn't really make the case that, like, fun was the thing.

Nicolas Cole 1:34:18 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:18 And then I started reading the papers myself, and then I was like, oh, okay. The guy who I hired had an English background. He didn't have a science background. He... So he's, he's trying to read all these, like, psychology studies. He doesn't, probably doesn't, in- he probably do- didn't even know how to actually access them because of, like, the logins and all that kind of stuff.

Nicolas Cole 1:34:34 Ah, yeah, the journals.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:35 And then... So when I started getting into the journals myself, that was when I sort of went on a bit of a rabbit trail to see, like, what is the evidence that, like... Is, is there evidence backing up this sort of fun idea? 'Cause there was the, the Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor, like, which is the idea that, you know, uh, success comes from happiness rather than the other way around.

Nicolas Cole 1:34:51 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:51 It's not that happiness leads to success. It's that success... No, it's not that success leads to happiness. It's that happiness leads to success.

Nicolas Cole 1:34:57 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:57 So I knew there was some stuff there, so I sort of followed up his thingies, and eventually came, came, uh, came out on this broaden and build theory that I talked about in the intro- introduction.

Nicolas Cole 1:35:05 Yeah, I remember.

Ali Abdaal 1:35:05 That positive emotions are, like, the thing that, like, runs this upward spiral of productivity and positivity and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, this is it. Finally, there is, like, a thing that I can hang my hat on to be like, th- there is evidence that positive emotions drive productivity.

Nicolas Cole 1:35:20 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:35:21 Which is not quite the same as fun, and so then it became a bit of, like, a balancing act to be like, okay, how much do we lean into the language of fun, or how much do we lean into the language of positive emotions? And eventually, the positive emotions thing made sense. And then in the shower one day, I w- I was thinking, "Positive emotion productivity, positive productivity, it sounds a bit shit. Good vibes productivity." Well, there's a book called Good Vibes, Good Life by Vex King, so I can't do that. What's another word for good vibes? Well, feel good. Feel good. Feel-good product. Feel-

Nicolas Cole 1:35:46 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:35:46 Feel-good productivity. Oh, shit. Like, oh [laughs] .

Nicolas Cole 1:35:49 It's got a vibe to it.

Ali Abdaal 1:35:50 Feel-good productivity. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:35:51 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:35:51 That I hopped on, made a Loom to send to my agent and editor and team to be like, "Guys, I think I've got a title. I think it's Feel-Good Productivity. What do you think?" And everyone was like, "Yeah, that's like the first of the 5,000 titles we've tested so far-"

Nicolas Cole 1:36:01 Uh-huh. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:36:02 "... that feels as if it lands." And so it was, like, that kind of idea.

Nicolas Cole 1:36:05 Fascinating. Yeah, I remember there was a, um... I forget where in the book it is. It's, like, somewhere early on where you are reference... You're making the case for this, and then you're referencing all the different, um, different studies or different books that you were reading, and each sentence that you had pulled referenced a researcher talking about play in their work.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:24 Yep, yep.

Nicolas Cole 1:36:24 And every sentence was, had the word play or playful in it.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:28 Yeah, yep.

Nicolas Cole 1:36:28 And that's where I started to really be like, oh, okay, I understand how this is all being connected together. And it's cool because I think with things like self-help just broadly-

Ali Abdaal 1:36:38 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:36:39 ... a lot of the, the secret to positioning or differentiation is finding that through line in lots of different things-

Ali Abdaal 1:36:47 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:36:47 ... and pulling it together.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:48 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:36:48 And I feel like this through line was... I keep pointing over here 'cause you have a copy of it, uh, on your bookshelf, and I keep looking at it, is, um... That's a, that was a really interesting through line to find.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:59 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:36:59 And I feel like it all seems to... Uh, it's how it always is, right? It's like it's, it seems to make so much sense now. It doesn't seem like it made a ton of sense in the beginning.

Ali Abdaal 1:37:11 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:37:12 How much, how much did you discover this either through just writing and reading and exploration, or are you, were you an outliner? Did you, like, have an idea, start with an outline, refine the outline? What was that process like?

Ali Abdaal 1:37:24 Yeah. You know, it... I think the first half of the book has a strong through line. The second half doesn't really because the, the title Feel-Good Productivity only came out, only came about, like, two and a half years into the process.

Nicolas Cole 1:37:35 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:37:35 And so it was always gonna be play, power, and people. Like, those were always the sort, the chapters in, in part one. But i- initially because I started with an outline, and it was like part one was about energizing and part two was about procrastination, part three was around, like, burnout and stuff. I th- I think we managed to, to make it, m- make it with that through line. But if I had my time again and another five years [laughs] and I knew the title of the book was gonna be Feel-Good Productivity, it would've had a way stronger through line.

Nicolas Cole 1:38:08 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:08 Just because I co- I'm, I'm sure I could've found, like, a lot of really good stuff that really pushed that message. But because the title sort of came towards the end of the process, then it was a case of trying to almost retrofit what we already had.

Nicolas Cole 1:38:21 Ah.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:21 Knowing that, like, okay, well, there's all this stuff around burnout, there's all this stuff around, like, procrastination and emotions and stuff. And, like, I guess we can do a little bit of literary sleight of hand in saying that, like, you know, feeling bad makes you procrastinate, so feeling good makes you productive. And it's like-

Nicolas Cole 1:38:34 Uh-huh

Ali Abdaal 1:38:34 ... it's not quite that simple. But with a bit of hand-waving-

Nicolas Cole 1:38:38 Uh-huh

Ali Abdaal 1:38:38 ... and a little bit of, like, shoehorning in a block quote or something that, like, a pull quote that really emphasizes the feel-good angle, maybe it can work.

Nicolas Cole 1:38:46 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:46 And so it felt a little unsatisfying once that title... It's, it's like try- trying to come up with the title of a YouTube video once you've made the video. It's like-

Nicolas Cole 1:38:54 Yep

Ali Abdaal 1:38:55 ... oh, it's always way harder than starting with a title. And so, yeah, I don't know what your original question was about that. Yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:39:01 So, okay, so on A, like, that's one of the biggest things that we teach in all our, our writing programs too, is like, if you start with the title, the title is what dictates all of the content.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:10 Yes.

Nicolas Cole 1:39:10 But if you start with the content and try and retrofit the title, it's impossible.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:13 What a fucking nightmare, yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:39:14 So actually, so it's interesting that the, the next book you write-

Ali Abdaal 1:39:19 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:39:19 ... it's like you should spend a disproportionate amount of time on the title.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:24 100%.

Nicolas Cole 1:39:25 'Cause that's what fixes the whole book.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:26 I tell, I tell every author I know this now. Whenever someone's like, "Yeah, I'm two years into the process and we're still thinking about the title," I'm like-

Nicolas Cole 1:39:32 No.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:32 [laughs] I can feel the pain, and they're all like, "Yep, I know." [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:39:35 Yeah. 'Cause literally, the, the title or the subtitle-

Ali Abdaal 1:39:38 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:39:38 ... completely changes so many, the stories you tell-

Ali Abdaal 1:39:42 Yeah, if you're researching it

Nicolas Cole 1:39:42 ... the research you pull, the advice you give, everything.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:45 And I, I, I, I would've had no idea about this had I not been through the process.

Nicolas Cole 1:39:48 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:48 'Cause if someone had told me this three years ago that, yeah, oh yeah, you should really think of the title first, I, you know, I listen to the publisher where they're all like, "Oh, you know, in, like, in, like, 80% of cases, the title comes later," and stuff. I was like, okay, yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:39:59 Okay, so that's another thing. I've learned, I've learned that publishers have... They don't really have a framework for books.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:07 Mm-hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:40:08 They sort of do. Like, I can tell that they all think that the key to self-help is go as broad as possible. And the challenge of going broad is that it becomes less and less tangible-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:20 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:40:20 ... and less and less specific.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:22 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:40:22 And so what happens is you have a lot of these self-help books that come out with nothing to hold onto.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:26 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 1:40:26 So they'll be titled, like, Limitless.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:29 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:40:29 Whoever's book is named Limitless-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:30 It's... Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:40:31 ... it's named Limitless, right? So it'll be Limitless, and the subtitle will be, like, Becoming Your Best Self.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:35 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:40:35 And it's like, I don't know what I'm signing up for.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:37 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:40:38 Um, your book actually, and I think it often happens on accident-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:42 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:40:43 ... I don't wanna take away from what you did, but I think it often happens on accident, where your book title is actually... I've been formulating this, this framework around, like, the perfect book title.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:53 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:40:53 Like, what is the perfect book title?

Ali Abdaal 1:40:54 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:40:56 Your main title is actually a category of productivity.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:00 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:00 So as much as possible, you actually want to define a categorical difference.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:05 Yes.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:05 Right? If-

Ali Abdaal 1:41:06 Sure, like Slow Productivity, Cal Newport.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:07 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:07 He's defining a category.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:08 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:09 He's not trying to be productivity. He's trying to be slow productivity.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:11 E- exactly.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:12 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:12 And so on accident or on purpose, th- you did that-

Ali Abdaal 1:41:16 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:41:16 ... which is literally 90% of the game because people that read the book title then go, "I intuitively understand this isn't about all productivity, and I've already seen there's a book on slow productivity."

Ali Abdaal 1:41:26 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:27 So different niche or subcategory, what is feel-good productivity?

Ali Abdaal 1:41:30 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:31 So you're being specific, but it's also really broad.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:34 Mm-hmm. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:41:34 Like, everyone wants to be productive, and everyone wants to feel good.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:37 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:37 So one of the keys that I've found to book titles is how can you make something both specific and broad at the same time?

Ali Abdaal 1:41:44 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:44 Feel-Good Productivity accomplishes that.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:46 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:46 Then the subtitle has to tell you what you're going to get.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:50 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:50 Right? And so the subtitle, it's, like, how to do-

Ali Abdaal 1:41:53 More Of What Matters To You

Nicolas Cole 1:41:54 ... How To Do More Of What Matters To You, right? Okay, so it actually is accomplishing that.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:59 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:41:59 So you see pr- Feel-Good Productivity, and you go, "Oh, this is a how-to book."

Ali Abdaal 1:42:02 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:42:02 So we accomplish that, right? And then it's like, well, what does the person want to learn how to do? They want to learn how to do what matters to them.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:09 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:42:09 Right? If you don't have those two pieces, if you don't have the category differentiator-

Ali Abdaal 1:42:15 Yes

Nicolas Cole 1:42:15 ... multiplied by and what are you actually telling me-

Ali Abdaal 1:42:19 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:42:19 ... there's a reason why those books don't move.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:22 Mm.

Nicolas Cole 1:42:23 You know? And so now your job, when you go do this on your own the next time, is, like, how do you take that general framework and go, "Now let me apply it to something different"?

Ali Abdaal 1:42:32 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:42:32 And then spend, like, a year just doing nothing but workshopping the title and the subtitle.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:37 I agree. I, I completely agree. Um, do you think I should lean into being the productivity guy? I think, I, I think in Snow Leopard you talk about this kind of-

Nicolas Cole 1:42:47 Mm-hmm

Ali Abdaal 1:42:47 ... the whole, like, you know, Ryan Holiday equals stoicism kind of thing. Um, and if you ask people what's the word that you would associate with Ali Abdaal, that word is productivity. That's a really good word. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:42:59 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:59 It's a really high-value word to be associated with my name. And so do I wanna go, m- I don't know, feel-good fitness, feel-good relationships, feel-good spirituality, feel-good parenting, or do I wanna go productive relationships, productive parenting, or, you know, that sort of idea?

Nicolas Cole 1:43:13 Okay, so this is an awesome question. This is gonna be very advanced. So anyone who's listening, we're just gonna skip straight to level 80.

Ali Abdaal 1:43:20 Sure. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:43:20 Okay? All right. So first of all, um, I, I think it's funny, this g- growing trend. You see it on Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube, where everyone's like, "I am the broad category guy."

Ali Abdaal 1:43:33 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:43:33 Right?

Ali Abdaal 1:43:33 The writing guy or-

Nicolas Cole 1:43:34 The writing guy, the productivity guy, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:43:36 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:43:36 Okay. The thing that everyone needs to internalize is that when you're thinking categorically, the goal... You are not what's important. Like, uh, the goal is actually not- How do I grow the category of I'm the productivity guy? The goal is how do I grow the category itself, and I am part of it.

Ali Abdaal 1:43:54 Fine. Like Ryan Holiday grew stoicism.

Nicolas Cole 1:43:56 Right. So he doesn't go, "I'm the stoicism guy." He goes, "I'm going to evangelize stoicism, and because I am doing that more than anyone, you associate me with that category."

Ali Abdaal 1:44:04 Ah. Okay. Fine. Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:44:04 Right? So every person who does the guy thing, I'm like-

Ali Abdaal 1:44:07 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:44:07 ... you, you already misunderstood the idea.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:09 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:44:09 Right? Second of all is your book title, you stumbled upon something which is it's not all productivity, it's feel-good productivity.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:18 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:44:18 Right? So if I were you, I- your mega category is not productivity. You're not the productivity guy.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:25 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:44:25 It's feel-good productivity.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:26 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:44:27 Then the question is, okay, so you own that now.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:29 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:44:30 You've planted your flag. Now what are all the subcategories of feel-good productivity? So what are all the other things that can go within that umbrella?

Ali Abdaal 1:44:39 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:44:39 Right?

Ali Abdaal 1:44:39 Feel-good productivity for parents, feel-good productivity for writers, feel-good productivity for students.

Nicolas Cole 1:44:43 So you can go the-

Ali Abdaal 1:44:44 You can go-

Nicolas Cole 1:44:45 The for who

Ali Abdaal 1:44:46 ... the, the Miracle Morning for dot, dot, dot.

Nicolas Cole 1:44:48 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:48 Yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:44:48 So for, yeah, for left-handed dogs.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:50 For real estate. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:44:51 [laughs] Yeah. So you could go... You can niche down within that category by audience.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:57 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:44:57 You could niche down by outcome. You could niche down by problem. You could niche down in all sorts of different ways. Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:45:05 Yeah. What do you mean by problem or by...

Nicolas Cole 1:45:07 So I think that the mistake would be... Well, I actually think you could go multiple different ways. Typically, it's very hard. So there's an old book, um, called Positioning.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:25 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:45:25 You ever read that book, Positioning?

Ali Abdaal 1:45:26 I've read it ages ago, but I need to reread it.

Nicolas Cole 1:45:27 Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:45:28 By Al Ries.

Nicolas Cole 1:45:28 Al Ries and Jack Trout.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:29 Yes.

Nicolas Cole 1:45:30 And they have this, this concept called, uh, line extension-

Ali Abdaal 1:45:34 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:45:34 ... or brand extension, right? Which is, you know, Google becomes known for search.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:39 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:45:40 And then they go and take the Google brand, and they bring it over to social.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:44 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:45:44 Call it Google Plus, and it doesn't go anywhere, right? Because typically you can't just take a brand and then extend it into other categories.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:51 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 1:45:51 Right? So I think the mistake would be you thinking, "Well, I'm Ali Abdaal, and I've been successful in productivity. Now let me just go jump to a different mega category-"

Ali Abdaal 1:46:02 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:46:03 ... "and just think I'll be-"

Ali Abdaal 1:46:04 Like relationships or something.

Nicolas Cole 1:46:04 Uh.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:04 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:46:05 Right. You can sort of make the argument though that it's not fully line extension if you're extending, not the brand Ali Abdaal, but you're extending the category-

Ali Abdaal 1:46:17 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:46:18 ... so of feel-good productivity.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:19 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 1:46:19 And that's where you could go feel-good relationships, you know?

Ali Abdaal 1:46:24 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:46:24 Feel-good fitness, whatever.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:26 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 1:46:28 But what I would think about first is what are the categories that are most closely related to productivity? Like relationships isn't the closest next category.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:40 No.

Nicolas Cole 1:46:40 So what are some other-

Ali Abdaal 1:46:41 I mean, motivation would be o- I mean, I guess, like, how do you define category?

Nicolas Cole 1:46:45 Time management.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:46 Time management. Yeah. That's-

Nicolas Cole 1:46:46 Like that's a subset of product-

Ali Abdaal 1:46:48 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 1:46:48 Productivity's so wide-

Ali Abdaal 1:46:49 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:46:49 ... so you're sort of going, like, what are the largest subcategories within productivity?

Ali Abdaal 1:46:53 Sure. Yeah. Time management would be a big

Ali Abdaal 1:46:55 one. Procrastination, motivation definitely. Uh, increasingly discipline is a lot of-

Nicolas Cole 1:47:00 So like-

Ali Abdaal 1:47:01 ... sort of thing

Nicolas Cole 1:47:01 ... for example, like feel-good discipline.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:03 Hmm. Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:47:04 Like that's interesting.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:05 That's interesting. Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:47:06 And, and that, that is like a one deviation away, and you're not-

Ali Abdaal 1:47:10 That's a good idea. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:47:11 Yeah. [laughs] I'm full of them. And so that's not you going, "I'm Ali Abdaal, I can be successful at anything."

Ali Abdaal 1:47:17 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:47:17 That's you taking your already successful flag in the ground and going, "I'm just gonna extend it to this little territory that's right next to me."

Ali Abdaal 1:47:26 Yeah. Feel-good discipline would be a f- an interesting book to write.

Nicolas Cole 1:47:29 And so that speaks-

Ali Abdaal 1:47:29 It kind... It, it almost writes itself.

Nicolas Cole 1:47:31 Exactly. Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:31 It just based on that title.

Nicolas Cole 1:47:32 It writes itself. And something that I, I always look for, especially with book titles, is how do you take two words that shouldn't be in the same room-

Ali Abdaal 1:47:40 Yes

Nicolas Cole 1:47:40 ... and put them in the same room?

Ali Abdaal 1:47:41 Yes.

Nicolas Cole 1:47:41 And feel good and discipline-

Ali Abdaal 1:47:43 Yep

Nicolas Cole 1:47:44 ... usually are not put together.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:45 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 1:47:46 So inevitably, you just created some magic-

Ali Abdaal 1:47:48 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:47:48 ... where the person's like-

Ali Abdaal 1:47:49 Feel good in relationships is, I mean-

Nicolas Cole 1:47:50 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:47:50 ... that's like so vanilla. Like-

Nicolas Cole 1:47:51 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:52 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:47:52 So you're looking for that dissonance.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:55 Oh, that's good. Anything else? [laughs] Feel-good discipline.

Nicolas Cole 1:47:59 Um, yeah. I think just to like crystallize it though, if I were you, especially because of how successful this book has been, and I sort of seen how you've adjusted some of your branding to like sort of be all cohesive-

Ali Abdaal 1:48:10 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:48:10 ... with this book and the book title and everything.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:12 Yeah. I mean, the website redesign stuff as well, and...

Nicolas Cole 1:48:13 I would... If I were you, I would 100% double down on the mega category of feel-good productivity-

Ali Abdaal 1:48:19 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:48:19 ... and make everything fall under that.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:21 Yep.

Nicolas Cole 1:48:21 And literally, I, I honestly think no one has really executed this better from a categorical lens as Ryan Holiday with stoicism.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:29 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:48:30 And that's your whole goal is just Ali Abdaal comes second. Feel-good productivity comes first. How do I build a suite of products and a library of IP and books-

Ali Abdaal 1:48:39 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:48:40 ... that falls within that category?

Ali Abdaal 1:48:41 So if I did a book s- called something like, I don't know, How To Actually Enjoy Your Work or something like that, How To, How To Actually Enjoy Your 9 To 5 or something, that's almost like extending the category of feel-good productivity.

Nicolas Cole 1:48:53 Um, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:54 Sort of.

Nicolas Cole 1:48:54 Yeah, you can do that. The, the risk that you run with that is, um, it's very similar to that book.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:02 Oh. Yeah. Right.

Nicolas Cole 1:49:02 The book that you just wrote. And so same like with our pricing discussion where people-

Ali Abdaal 1:49:06 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:49:06 ... like put prices together.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:08 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:49:08 Most people, if you look at, like Mark Manson's actually a good example of this. His second book-

Ali Abdaal 1:49:13 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:49:13 ... and his first book are actually very similar.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:15 Yes.

Nicolas Cole 1:49:16 And so when you read the first book, you're sorta like, "I don't know that I need to read the second book 'cause it's so sim-" You know?

Ali Abdaal 1:49:20 Sure.

Nicolas Cole 1:49:21 And so when you're thinking about the library-

Ali Abdaal 1:49:23 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:49:23 ... your goal is like, "How do I create something that is farther away from my first book?"

Ali Abdaal 1:49:28 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:49:28 From, from a concept perspective.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:30 Yeah. Good point. Yeah. So feel-good discipline would be one of them where people can appreciate that those two are actually different books.

Nicolas Cole 1:49:37 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:37 But they're clo- they're related enough that like, okay, yeah, that makes sense.

Nicolas Cole 1:49:40 Yeah. You know? Or like feel-good, uh, conflict resolution. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:49:45 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:49:45 You're like, "Oh, I... That's interesting."

Ali Abdaal 1:49:48 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:49:48 Like, conflict resolution usually feels stressful.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:51 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:49:52 You know? So what would that look like? So- You have, I mean, you ... It doesn't get much bigger than ... The irony of Feel-Good Productivity is that you've niched down without niching down, 'cause it's still so wide.

Ali Abdaal 1:50:06 Mm. Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:50:07 So you've cr- you've found something. That's the magic, is like-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:10 Mm-hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:50:10 ... finding something specific that actually t- doesn't rule a lot of people out, but immediately-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:15 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:50:15 ... forces people to go, "Well, do I want slow productivity or do I want feel-good productivity?"

Ali Abdaal 1:50:18 Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, part of the reason to have blocks on the book cover was, was also that, like, I could imagine a world where all of our books had, like, blocks. Like, colored blocks in different configurations. And so I was sort of, like, mocking up Feel-Good Parenting being like the b- blocks are a bit higgledy-piggledy to look like kind of a toddler's blocks.

Nicolas Cole 1:50:36 Oh, that's cool.

Ali Abdaal 1:50:37 Or like Feel-Good Fitness is like the blocks are like a barbell or something, or something to that effect.

Nicolas Cole 1:50:41 Oh, that's-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:41 I was just ... It, it would just be cute if, like, the whole thing could have, like, a [laughs] the whole library could have a sort of video animated reconfiguration of the blocks that would result in the things, but-

Nicolas Cole 1:50:51 Yep

Ali Abdaal 1:50:52 ... that's going really [laughs] like nowhere.

Nicolas Cole 1:50:54 So, so something else to think about, too-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:56 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:50:56 ... is if you wanted to, like, experiment with that library, you could not deploy a ton of resource, and you could write smaller, uh, e-books or even print books on Amazon with- within those different verticals, and then look for the one that-

Ali Abdaal 1:51:14 Mm

Nicolas Cole 1:51:14 ... outperforms the rest, and then go to the publisher and go, "I'm ready to do round two. I've written five different feel-good category e-books."

Ali Abdaal 1:51:24 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:51:24 "This is the one that's clearly working. Let's do a book deal that's even bigger than the first one-

Ali Abdaal 1:51:30 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:51:30 ... but is basically that book expanded."

Ali Abdaal 1:51:32 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:51:32 'Cause Atomic Habits is just blog posts expanded. Mark Manson's-

Ali Abdaal 1:51:36 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:51:36 ... book was a blog post expanded, right? So they are interested in-

Ali Abdaal 1:51:40 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:51:40 ... the expansion of ideas-

Ali Abdaal 1:51:42 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:51:42 ... once they're proven successful.

Ali Abdaal 1:51:44 And I guess kind of riffing on that, maybe it would be, it would also be useful to just do a video talk called Feel-Good Discipline with-

Nicolas Cole 1:51:51 Exactly

Ali Abdaal 1:51:52 ... like, the subtitle of, like, how to actually im- how to blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever the subtitle would be, and see how that does.

Nicolas Cole 1:51:57 I mean, so a book I'm working on right now is based on our first episode together.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:03 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:52:03 Because the title ... I forget even the title, but it was like-

Ali Abdaal 1:52:07 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:52:07 ... Five, Five Ways To Make a Million Dollars as a Writer or something.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:10 Yeah, that kind of thing.

Nicolas Cole 1:52:11 And that, because it performed so well, sent me down the rabbit hole of, well, um ... or Five Paths to Making-

Ali Abdaal 1:52:17 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:52:17 ... something like that. And I was like, oh, it'd be really interesting to do a book around the different career paths-

Ali Abdaal 1:52:22 Mm-hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:52:23 ... and how each one, pros and cons of making a million dollars as a writer.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:27 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:52:27 Like, how do you make a million as a literary writer?

Ali Abdaal 1:52:29 Yeah, that's cool.

Nicolas Cole 1:52:29 You know? And so yeah, you should take all of these ideas and just run it through the lean writing method.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:35 Mm-hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:52:35 Create a video on it, create Twitter threads on it.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:38 Hmm. Feel-Good Discipline. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:52:41 [laughs] That's a good start to percolate.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:43 Yeah. Like, that could be quite, quite a fun book to write.

Nicolas Cole 1:52:45 The, the best part is I only take 10%.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:47 Yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:52:49 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:52:50 Nice. Um, cool. What about hybrid publishing?

Nicolas Cole 1:52:56 Ah, I hate it. It's a hedge. I think, I think-

Ali Abdaal 1:52:58 Okay

Nicolas Cole 1:52:58 ... anything in life, almost anything in life that is a hedge-

Ali Abdaal 1:53:01 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:53:01 ... means-

Ali Abdaal 1:53:02 Except hybrid agencies. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:53:03 Except hybrid agencies.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:04 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:53:04 Exactly. Hybrid agencies, the word is in a different context.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:07 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:53:07 But hybrid publishing is like you don't know whether you're playing the New York Times game-

Ali Abdaal 1:53:12 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:53:12 ... or the self-publishing game.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:14 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:53:14 You've picked a weird middle ground.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:15 How many copies has Art and Business of Online Writing sold?

Nicolas Cole 1:53:19 I don't know how many.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:20 Or, like, how much have you made from it?

Nicolas Cole 1:53:22 Uh, yeah. Number of copies I don't know, but I've probably made, like, a quarter million from it.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:28 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:53:29 Something like that.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:29 Self-published.

Nicolas Cole 1:53:30 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:30 So you just get royalty checks every month or every quarter or-

Nicolas Cole 1:53:32 And-

Ali Abdaal 1:53:33 ... how does it work?

Nicolas Cole 1:53:33 Uh, every month on Amazon.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:35 Nice.

Nicolas Cole 1:53:35 And I sell, like, 20% of them through my own website, so I'm getting 100% of that sale of the book.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:41 Oh, you, you just, like, through, like, a Gumroad store or something-

Nicolas Cole 1:53:43 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:53:44 ... like that?

Nicolas Cole 1:53:44 Yeah. And what's wild is when I wro- I wrote that book in 2020.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:48 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:53:48 I had been writing online for a while, didn't have a huge audience. The advance I would've gotten for that book-

Ali Abdaal 1:53:53 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:53:53 ... probably would've been about 20 grand.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:57 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:53:57 Maybe I could have talked my way into getting, like, a 50 grand advance-

Ali Abdaal 1:54:01 Sure

Nicolas Cole 1:54:01 ... just 'cause of where I was. But if I had done that, to date I probably wouldn't have made much more than 50 grand.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:08 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:54:09 So it's interesting, too, to look at that decision in hindsight and go, "Not only have I completely eclipsed whatever that advance would be-

Ali Abdaal 1:54:16 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:54:16 ... but I'm making way more."

Ali Abdaal 1:54:17 And if you sell on Amazon, so, like, how, how much do you personally take home from each sale? Like, do you have a sense of what those numbers are?

Nicolas Cole 1:54:23 I've read this so many times and I always forget the exact numbers, but it's something like, uh, depending on e-book or print book.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:30 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:54:30 It's somewhere in the ballpark of ... I think print is, like ... It's one of the two. It's either print is 30% and e-book is 70%, or it's flipped.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:40 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:54:40 But it's a, it's a percentage of the sale.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:43 Okay, fine. And have you got an audiobook for it?

Nicolas Cole 1:54:46 No, and that was one of the biggest missed opportunities.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:48 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:54:49 I've just been so busy and we've been-

Ali Abdaal 1:54:50 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 1:54:50 ... building our companies, but that's on my to-do list-

Ali Abdaal 1:54:52 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:54:52 ... for this year.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:53 Nice.

Nicolas Cole 1:54:54 It's ... If I had done the audiobook with it, it, I probably would've made another 250.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:58 Hmm.

Nicolas Cole 1:54:58 Which is really frustrating to look at in hindsight, but-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:01 Hmm

Nicolas Cole 1:55:01 ... you know.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:02 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:55:03 Okay. Golden question. Maybe this is a good one to, to end on. Was writing this book daunting, and how did you overcome the constant inner critic? Did you have an inner critic? What was that like?

Ali Abdaal 1:55:17 Oh, yeah. All the t- like, all, all the way through. I thought I'd gotten over imposter syndrome and stuff because I'd been doing YouTube videos for so long and s- and all, and all that. But as soon as it came to writing a book, there was something about that that felt really scary.

Nicolas Cole 1:55:30 Why do you think that is? Why, why is that so daunting for people?

Ali Abdaal 1:55:33 I think, uh, f- for me a big part of it was that when you write a book, you're really putting out a thing into the world saying that, like, "I think what I have to share is sufficiently valuable."

Nicolas Cole 1:55:44 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:44 Whereas when you put out YouTube videos, like, I mean, everyone and their dog's putting out YouTube videos. Like, it's not a, it's not, like, a major ... You're, you aren't sticking your neck out that far by putting out a YouTube video. I mean, still people think that putting out a YouTube video is sticking their neck out. But putting out a book where in particular strangers can then review it on Amazon and Goodreads publicly- ... and can actually share what they think about it

Nicolas Cole 1:56:04 Even though people comment ridiculous things on YouTube videos?

Ali Abdaal 1:56:07 Yeah, but it's a YouTube video. Like, no one-

Nicolas Cole 1:56:09 Mm.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:09 Like, it's, it, it, it doesn't have a rating. YouTube videos don't have a rating system.

Nicolas Cole 1:56:12 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:13 I think it was, part of it was the fear of what if people don't like this, and then that will be public knowledge that it is shit.

Nicolas Cole 1:56:24 Ah.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:24 And that is really scary. Um, which was a big part of, like, second-guessing myself. Also, the books I read, uh, I was sort of comparing my shitty first drafts to, like, Dan Pink's final draft and thinking, "Gosh, it's so good. How is it so good?" [laughs] Um, and yeah, the, uh, well, when I got the book deal, I was 26, and I kind of thought, like, "Who the fuck is gonna listen to a 26-year-old dude, like, talk about productivity?"

Nicolas Cole 1:56:49 Oh, wow.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:49 Like-

Nicolas Cole 1:56:49 I didn't realize that was four years ago. Wow.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:51 Yeah. And so, uh, yeah, there wa- it was, it was a lot of these sorts of things and, like, I'd, I've, I've never really done anything interesting. Yeah, I mean, I was a doctor, but, like, big whoop, so was everyone I know.

Nicolas Cole 1:57:01 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:01 You know, that kind of thing. And, like, yeah, I grew a YouTube channel, but, like, you know, it's not like I'm MrBeast levels of YouTube channel. And, yeah, I grew a business, but, like, you know, it's, it's, it's only a seven-figure business, you know, that sort of thing. It was all sorts of like, "My credential is only X."

Nicolas Cole 1:57:15 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:16 And there are 5 million other, in the world, 5 million or more people in the world who also have cred- uh, credential X, so why is it interesting? Like, who am I to write this book?

Nicolas Cole 1:57:24 So then how'd you get it over the finish line?

Ali Abdaal 1:57:26 Um-

Nicolas Cole 1:57:26 Did you, like, hire a coach or anybody to help you?

Ali Abdaal 1:57:29 Yeah, so we had, I had a writing coach initially in the early stages and then had a external editor outside of the publishing house about halfway through the process.

Nicolas Cole 1:57:36 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:37 She was great, Rachel. She sort of project managed the whole thing. And a lot of my conversations with Rachel

Ali Abdaal 1:57:41 and with Kate, my agent, were, like, emotional support-y type conversations, where they were like, "Don't worry, everyone goes through this. Yep, it's fine. [laughs] You don't have to read the reviews. Also, the book is genuinely good, so don't worry about it. Like, we'd tell you if we thought it was shit. Like, don't worry."

Nicolas Cole 1:57:53 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:53 "We're all professionals. We've done this before. The publishers have done this before. We, we know when a book is bad. We're not gonna let this be bad. Don't worry." A lot of that sort of hand-holding.

Nicolas Cole 1:57:59 So that is a big value.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:01 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:58:01 You know? I, I understand then why a lot of people want that, that hand-holding.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:06 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:58:06 You know?

Ali Abdaal 1:58:06 But, but you can hire that out externally.

Nicolas Cole 1:58:07 You also can hire that.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:09 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 1:58:09 Yeah. Interesting.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:11 And then a big part of it was, along the way, I had to remember to take my own advice, and whenever I would really struggle with the book, it's 'cause I'd flipped into treating it with too much seriousness.

Nicolas Cole 1:58:20 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:20 Just taking it too sincerely. Or, sorry, to, just to, just taking it too seriously and thinking, "This is a big, heavy thing." And it was the times where I really embodied this idea of, like, what would this actually look like if it were fun? Like, what does the feel-good version of this look like? Where-

Nicolas Cole 1:58:33 Drink by the pool, like-

Ali Abdaal 1:58:34 Exactly, where I would be like, "You know what? This is just literally the, the, the shit I'm writing about." And like, "Okay, let me actually... Okay, cool. So let me, you know, get a walking pad for my desk. Let me kind of do this, like, dictate this bit while I'm going for a walk around Hyde Park. Let me do this bit in the coffee shop. Let me have, like, a co-working party with friends. Let's take the whole team to a team retreat in Wales and get a big-ass Airbnb where the goal is no one's allowed to do any work."

Nicolas Cole 1:58:55 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:55 "And so the team's all hanging out, and I'm just sitting there grinding on this book 'cause I have to get a chapter out every day." It was things like that that made the process more enjoyable-

Nicolas Cole 1:59:02 Hmm

Ali Abdaal 1:59:02 ... that ultimately helped to get over the finish line.

Nicolas Cole 1:59:04 What, what of those things w- are you planning on doing this next time?

Ali Abdaal 1:59:08 Um, a big part of it is the intense sprints. I found that the most productive times in the book journey were where I had, like, a whole week or two to just think about the book.

Nicolas Cole 1:59:17 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:59:18 The whole stuff around, like, well, if you write for three hours a day, then that's as much as anyone can do in any reasonable length of time. And then that, if you write 1,000 words a day, that extended out, compounds, blah, blah, blah. I didn't really make much progress because the startup costs of rebooting it back into my RAM and, like, trying to-

Nicolas Cole 1:59:33 That's a great point

Ali Abdaal 1:59:34 ... figure out, like, where, where was I and, like, okay, where was... Let me bring up all those tabs on frickin' Zotero and Scrivener that I have.

Nicolas Cole 1:59:40 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:59:40 It's like, well, what was that study again? By that time, it's like, "It's time for my coffee and poo," and then it's like, "I can't be arsed to write anymore." [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:59:46 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:59:46 But on the weeks where I just had nothing to do other than write the book or on the whole days where I had nothing to do other than write the book, yeah, I screw around a bit in the morning. I go to the toilet three times, but I still have another seven hours to write the book. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 1:59:56 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:59:57 So.

Nicolas Cole 1:59:57 That's... You know, I'm actually really glad you said that because one of the things I beat myself up about most often is, you know, 'cause I'm, I'm running a company, you know? There's a lot to do. And I will get very down on myself being like, "You didn't do your personal writing today."

Ali Abdaal 2:00:14 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 2:00:14 I did eight hours of work writing, you know? But I didn't get my personal writing. And I actually think, yeah, it's funny. Sometimes you just need to hear it from someone else. But I think you're totally right, is it'd be better to just immerse yourself for a week rather than try and do 30 minutes a day.

Ali Abdaal 2:00:29 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 2:00:29 Which is so interesting 'cause that's counter to everything we talk about in Ship 30.

Ali Abdaal 2:00:33 Mm-hmm.

Nicolas Cole 2:00:33 But I think especially when you're juggling so many different types of pursuits or projects-

Ali Abdaal 2:00:38 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 2:00:38 ... like, immersion is almost always better.

Ali Abdaal 2:00:41 Yeah, I think so. Um, what was I gonna say? It's like, um, I've a- I, I've also realized this. This, this is a big part of what Cal talks about in Slow Productivity. Like, the more projects you have going on in parallel, the more the administrative overhead costs of each project add up.

Nicolas Cole 2:00:56 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 2:00:56 And so actually just carving out a whole day to just do one thing means that you don't have to deal with all of the other bullshit that would otherwise be associated with running a business and, and building a team and stuff.

Nicolas Cole 2:01:06 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 2:01:07 So yeah, I'm very bullish on these short sprints of intensity to just turn it into a party, like, go to a... I, I, I see why writers go to a cabin in the woods, in the woods for, like, a week at a time or a month at a time. I'm like, "You know what? That would actually be kind of fun."

Nicolas Cole 2:01:22 Maybe I'm gonna come full circle 'cause I always trash the cabin in the woods-

Ali Abdaal 2:01:25 Yeah. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 2:01:25 ... the chapeau, and the corncob pipe. Maybe I'll come full circle and go, "You know what?"

Ali Abdaal 2:01:29 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 2:01:29 "There is a place for a cabin in the woods after all."

Ali Abdaal 2:01:31 Yeah. I think editing is nice to do in, like, small drips and drabs because editing, it's like the goal is to see it with fresh eyes and to, like-

Nicolas Cole 2:01:38 Hmm

Ali Abdaal 2:01:38 ... you know.

Nicolas Cole 2:01:40 Yeah, that's a good point.

Ali Abdaal 2:01:40 But the writ- especially the first draft, the writing itself. And then, and, and also, like, the really meaty edits where it's like, okay, I need to immerse myself in this for a whole, like, week just to-

Nicolas Cole 2:01:48 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 2:01:48 ... see the whole picture and then be able to slot things around.

Nicolas Cole 2:01:51 Yeah, you have to hold all that stuff in your head.

Ali Abdaal 2:01:53 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 2:01:54 Well, congrats again on New York Times bestseller.

Ali Abdaal 2:01:57 Thank you. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 2:01:57 Very much enjoying the book.

Ali Abdaal 2:01:59 Thanks, man.

Nicolas Cole 2:01:59 But you also sort of talked me out of reading the second half.

Ali Abdaal 2:02:01 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 2:02:01 So [laughs] we'll see if I finish it.

Ali Abdaal 2:02:03 Well, a lot of people have said the chapter nine, the final chapter, is their favorite one.

Nicolas Cole 2:02:06 Really?

Ali Abdaal 2:02:06 So maybe you'll-

Nicolas Cole 2:02:06 Okay

Ali Abdaal 2:02:07 ... just skip ahead. [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 2:02:07 That's great. And if you watch to the end of this video-

Ali Abdaal 2:02:09 [laughs]

Nicolas Cole 2:02:10 ... we'll give you a bonus.

Ali Abdaal 2:02:11 Yeah. Um, do you have any bonuses this time around [laughs] for people-

Nicolas Cole 2:02:14 Mm

Ali Abdaal 2:02:15 ... who are watching to the end of this episode?

Nicolas Cole 2:02:16 Uh, you know, they know where to find us.

Ali Abdaal 2:02:19 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 2:02:19 We're always giving away free stuff.

Ali Abdaal 2:02:20 Yeah.

Nicolas Cole 2:02:20 Not too worried about it.

Ali Abdaal 2:02:21 And if someone-

Nicolas Cole 2:02:22 I'm just happy-

Ali Abdaal 2:02:22 Yeah

Nicolas Cole 2:02:22 ... happy I got to see you here in London.

Ali Abdaal 2:02:24 Yeah, thanks for coming by. And if someone's watching this on YouTube, you can click here for the first episode that we did, which goes into more detail about the backstory and lays a bit more of the groundwork. Good stuff.

Nicolas Cole 2:02:34 Awesome. [keyboard clacking]

Ali Abdaal 2:02:35 All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Uh, do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already.