Why a Gamer Mindset Can Change Your Life and Business with Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush

0:00this is this is it Legends uh Dickie Bush former BlackRock employee turned writer Aficionado shipped 30 for 30 co-founder Nicholas Cole uh one of the best World of Warcraft players in the world in North America at least now he's uh an author and also co-founder of 30 for 30. uh welcome to the show so so good to have you what's going on I'd like to be here that's my claim to fame apparently well it was just interesting to me because I I had always known you as the ship 30 for 30 guy and then when I saw that you played Warcraft and you were competitive I thought that was really interesting

0:52um I'm curious let's let's just start with that how has being uh professional or competitive esportsgamer helped you you know in your career Dickie probably you probably have a similar answer I feel like all of it can get boiled down to to one thing which is video games increased my threshold for pain I think I think my ability to endure boring tasks on the pursuit to achieve something is like world class I think that is a very difficult skill for a lot of people to just sit in front of your computer and do the boring thing because you want one item upgrade and it's gonna cost you

1:3578 painful hours to get there like that was my whole childhood so now and now you just see that play out and everything like entrepreneurship is literally that all the time and it's funny because Cole and I when we first met didn't know that we had such similar backgrounds but I played professional Call of Duty 4 and before that I played more hours of RuneScape and po like my entire childhood was based on video games I picked up Sports luckily in in high school and we were cool we were like three or four years too early because twitch was not a thing you could not record your screen and cell phones

2:12didn't really have high quality video cameras so you couldn't like I remember the idea of having a capture card where you could record your screen to play it back but if if I was like three years younger I never would have played Sports I never would have I would have just become a twitch streamer because that's all I wanted to do was play video games but we're a little bit before our time but I mean my answer is pretty much the same I to this day learned more playing RuneScape about business economies working with the team monotonous work than I learned in college or really anything and I think running an online

2:50business is pretty much like playing a video game except you don't stack you know digital gold you can stack real gold and do cool things with it in the real world so it's like at the end of the day one both things you're kind of just clicking buttons for a lot of it but one of them the rewards are a little bit better I mean you're still seeing a number on a screen go up you know whether you're logging into Starcraft or you're logging into chase you know instead of gold it's USD it's it's still kind of the same and I think it's Packy McCormick who

3:26calls it the great online game how we're all playing this online game and I think there's something to be said about people who are obsessed with games and people who are really good at the internet would you agree yeah I mean I think one of the most surprising things for me is how many times when I share that little tidbit you know I was a really competitive World of Warcraft player as a teenager a lot of people respond with oh so was I in XYZ situation I'll never forget I moved to LA in 20 17 and I found myself at this big fancy dinner up in the hills and all these

4:12really accomplished people there Lady Gaga's designers there like just all these random really successful people and we're having this dinner and we all were going around introducing ourselves and the guy who hosted the dinner shared that tidbit about me and the guy opposite me who had built a massive Ad Agency turns to me and goes oh no way I was the guild leader of one of the biggest guilds in World of Warcraft of all time and like that happens constantly in the entrepreneurship world it's like the background in gaming clearly primes your brain for certain skills for certain ways of thinking for a certain threshold of pain for strategy for learning rules

4:53then bending rules you know it's like video games Prime all of that I think you could almost go like a level above that and say it's not even video games but it's just obsessive personalities and for young kids there's not very many ways to direct that obsessive personality other than video games and maybe music right because you don't have enough autonomy and so I think it's more rather than video games have just been a vehicle to apply that obsessive personality and then you get into the real world it's like oh I can take this and apply it to solving problems as an entrepreneur like of course I'm going to

5:36choose that path and growing up I always thought my obsessive personality was kind of a bug rather than a feature because I think school other parents Society in general discourages that kind of like Obsession or intensity where I'd pick up a new thing and I'd only do that for months and get as good as it as I could quickly and I I always say my parents will let me do whatever I wanted like if I wanted to play 15 hours of video games I could as long as I was doing well in school where a lot of other parents wouldn't let their kids obsess over anything

6:16right instead they would just let them they they wanted them so well-rounded where they didn't end up building any kind of real you know obsessive skill and so they get in the real world and that is rewarded by working for just a company or a regular corporate job I think so you both now obsess about building audiences and writing on the internet why why obsess over that Dickey I'll let you field that one first mine was a way of exploring opportunities and so my background of working on Wall Street I started in 2018 right when I graduated college and realized like a year in that that

7:03wasn't the path that I was going to take forever I looked around and saw guys in their early 30s in one specific example uh asked his boss to go to his son's Little League game and his boss said no and that was about a year in and I knew that I wasn't going to stick I was not going to be able to work for someone else for a long time but rather than just quit I said how what's an easy way to explore opportunities and it was just putting myself out there and becoming easy to find right so for me I started doing that with just a

7:36newsletter and that's how I met col all the time that you at time at 95 of the people that I talked to on a weekly basis now and so the goal of ship 30 is to help as many people experience that as possible right or maybe they're I love this idea of the internet democratizing access to Friendship where if you grew up and you were this goes back to what we were saying of being obsessed with certain things and you didn't have a way of meeting other people that were obsessed in the same thing as you thought you were the odd one out but the internet

8:07has made it where I I would have loved to have had a blog or something writing on Twitter wherever as a younger person because I would have found so many more like-minded people along the way and so that's why I'm writing to this day is I'm still continuing to meet cool people and all that compounds over time so if I can help as many people as possible unlock their creative writing ability which then goes to unlock new opportunities like that sounds like an awesome mission to kind of build around and that's our goal our mission to help a million people start doing it because we know if we help a million people

8:44start writing the number of new connections and opportunities and education that will come from that is is huge so the Nuance I think that is worth pointing out because there's there's so much talk around how do you build an audience benefits of building an audience we all understand it but I think what gets lost is it really is not about the size of the audience it's not about the number and and a perfect example is Dicky and Maya's relationship when we got connected you know I've been doing this for a long time I've been writing on the internet for a really long time and I've gone through multiple

9:23platforms and multiple cycles and multiple you see people rise and then they get burned out and new classes of creators and new like I've been doing this for over a decade like it's just same patterns over and over again and when Dicky and I got connected I remember what's the first thing I did I clicked on his Twitter profile because I was like who's this guy I just got connected to we got connected in a cold email through a mutual friend I clicked on his Twitter profile dick he probably had I don't remember 800 followers right but when I started to look what I saw Beyond just how big is your

9:58audience what I saw were good habits I saw someone who was actively writing on the internet I saw someone who was trying to share things that were interesting to them and valuable to other readers and because I've been doing this for so long I could see that data point projected out into the future and go Dicky has 800 followers today he's gonna lap everybody because I just know I have that pattern recognition and so the the thing for me is it's not actually about building an audience what it is is it's about understanding it's what you said about and the great online game we are all playing the game

10:36whether we realize it or not consciously unconsciously when you meet someone what's the first thing you do you look them up on the internet and what you find dictates how you perceive that person we're all playing it but everyone's focus is on the follower count and really that's like one small data point in the whole game it's really about is this person playing are they playing consciously or unconsciously are they putting things out there that are valuable a thousand followers or a hundred thousand followers when you click on their stuff are you interested there's a lot of people I know with half a million followers where I'm like you write

11:10really not interesting things there's a lot of people with a thousand followers I click on and I go wow this is brilliant I want to sink my teeth into it right so it's like going beyond the benefit of building an audience and more of the are you playing the game consciously such that it unlocks new opportunities for your life I'm a audience maximalist like building an audience maximalist and I think everyone should do it you know I hear often from people who don't write on the Internet or who don't who don't have a conscious effort of creating an audience I ask them like hey why are you not writing on Twitter and

11:50they they say I don't want to be cringe I feel like there's just growing cringiness Vibe that's going around that's holding people back from participating if someone thinks that they're thinking they're far more important and that people are paying way more attention to them than they actually are and so it's I don't want to be cringe behind that has this assumption that when I put something out everyone that I know is going to read it they're going to study every word of it they're going to judge me but the truth is most people are way way way too caught up in themselves and so the only

12:29reason someone would be quote unquote scared to be cringe if that is if they're sitting on the other side not writing and just judging everyone that they see right so it's I'm worried I'm going to look cringe because I'm sitting here reading all these people and I'm like oh that's cringe that's cringe but at the end of the day they're putting themselves out there they're unlocking opportunities and you're the one paying with your attention by reading it right so rather than have this fear of like oh I don't want people to think I'm cringe it's why don't you just try putting yourself out there and recognize

13:00where it uh where it tips is they're so scared to look cringe and then suddenly they're upset that no one's reading in any of their stuff when they get started and so it's the opposite side of the coin right they don't look cringe they they just don't look like anything because the truth is no one reads any of the things you put out in the beginning so you just kind of have to get started yeah I totally agree with all that and Greg I would say I'm an audience maximalist too it was the first thing I realized as a 17 year old on the internet I was like if you have an

13:34audience you get more stuff period I thought you were gonna say your cringe that's what I thought you I thought you were gonna come out and be like I'm really cringe guys I'm really cringe and I'm I'm putting it out there look I don't think anyone disagrees with the statement if you have an audience you get more opportunities period right yes but but the Nuance what gets missed is it's the same as waking up every day and going I want to be rich there isn't anyone on Earth that if you gave them the option to be rich tomorrow would say no right but if all you did was walk around

14:17and say I just want to be rich you'd be cringe just like if you say I just want to build an audience it's a little cringe but the reason it's cringe is because what you're talking about is I want the outcome without caring about the process that's what you're saying and so the issue is when people go all this focus on audience audience audience audience is an outcome it's an outcome of what of learning of helping people of sharing things that are valuable so the cringe part is someone going I just care about the number not I care about helping someone because the moment someone goes I really care

14:59about educating these people I really care about solving these problems or I really care about no one's going to look at them and be like that's stupid right so it's all it's this over rotation on I want the outcome without carrying and being connected to the process yeah where the where this is coming from is I have a friend uh his name is Daniel singer and I saw his Twitter bio recently and his Twitter bio is Imagine taking Twitter seriously and I feel like there's this growing class of people who are like him where they they don't want to look like they don't want to do threads for example because

15:41threads are cringe even though we know threads work all right when I used to play World of Warcraft I was very good at the game very very good at the game and I would dual other players or we would complete against their arena team or we would play them in Battlegrounds and just crush them do you know what they would say back afterwards imagine taking this game seriously um that's that's what you say when you don't know how to play the game so when someone sits there and goes I'm upset that I'm not winning what they do is they point and they criticize everybody and go you're cringe imagine

16:23taking that seriously lucky and it's like all you're doing is just admitting that you don't know how to play the game that's all you're doing so whenever so even the fact that we're talking about this it's like we're basically debating why the people who don't know how to play the game don't want to play the game are like saying that it's a bad game I Dicky and I are too busy trying to help other people play the game you know yeah why give it attention I mean I don't want to put words in Daniel's mouth but people like him they might look at you know playing the game

16:59as like oh I don't need to play the game I don't need to play the game because I'm already a founder of a company that's doing really well and I'm I need a you know spend all my time focusing on you know solutions to problems building my team raising Venture Capital but that's a different game that's a different game and and what ghostwriting taught me is there is a drastic difference between doing something and being really good at explaining how to do it and so a lot of times when I would go straight for a Founder they'd be accomplished but then when I asked them can you explain how you solve these

17:41problems they can't articulate it right so they got good at doing it but they didn't build the skill of being able to articulate it and so what a lot of times right what does that person do they go oh the people over there articulating it super cringe no you're probably just mad that that's a game that you're not winning that's a game that you're not playing right just like think of the other side there's all the people that go imagine taking your startup seriously it's just the other side criticizing the other game right it's everybody in their own vacuum criticizing the other vacuum and it's like these are all just Niche

18:17games just play the game that you want to play and let other people play their games is there any truth to cringiness Twitter of course I just want you to say it I want you to say it like tell me you know tell me how you feel about that and do you think the people that are writing you know the you know Twitter is a top university you know the top you know these threads that we always see that are basically repurposed time and time again when you see those threads like what do you think you know as professionals do you are you like wow they're just playing the game

18:56or are you like I think they should be playing another game I think it's a way of playing the game is that the optimal way depends what game you're playing if their goal is to play the dopamine slot machine that we've all played and we all do with Twitter and write a thread that gets 50 000 likes but every person who reads it has no interest in following you along as a reader sure right if you only write threads about Google Docs and you know Chrome extensions you you're not building any kind of personal relationship but it's okay if you choose to play that game you

19:37can do it successfully you're going to get a lot of followers now if the goal of the game is maximum number of followers sure but I don't think that's a very smart goal to have for the game right because if you have 200 000 followers and you've never sold anything what is that going to do and none of them they all followed you one time for one thing and then the next thing you write they're like I've known why did I follow this person again they don't remember anything you wrote from a personal perspective versus when you're telling your stories or providing educational content right look I've written threads on Google Docs

20:10and on TED talks and on YouTube videos and they've worked but it's all about you don't build your entire life around that but again I I don't think it's it's not worth spending time like judging the people playing that game right instead you should just play your own game and say they are playing theirs I'm gonna play mine and rather than give them the mental headspace of like oh my gosh I I can't imagine riding a thread like that it's like why don't you just focus a little bit more on on what you're doing rather than kind of what other people are doing my take on it is

20:43I respect games in general as a game player I respect games putting it out there you know do I think the the best way to get your name out there is to essentially copy formats like copy a thread that's worked for example this you know the one that we've all seen around you know Twitter is better than 99.9 of universities and just kind of like copy and pasting I don't think it's a great approach that being said like someone like Blake Burge who authentically writes threads on Excel and Google Sheets and creates new new content you know in the game format like in Threads you know not only is he able

21:30to like build an audience of 400 000 people in like two years which is wild he's also able to like you know he quit his job he's like living on like a farming Community like his dream with like 1500 other people he's selling like Google Sheets and other digital assets and making me a great living from it like when you hear stories like that it just like gives you the warm and fuzzy feeling yeah Blake was uh got his start in Chip 30. he's won a ship 30's biggest success story so the first course he took was ship 30. and oh the number of pieces that he's written to get to where he is

22:10he's talked about a ton of different things and then he said wow people like when I write about Excel and there's just no world where someone who's living an awesome life now because of riding on the internet looks around and is like you know what I'm really worried that like this group of VCS thinks I'm cringe like that does not go through his head one time he's like I'm making a living living my dream life I got to quit my corporate job like all these things because I wrote about something that I had experience in that sounds like an absolute dream to me so it's all

22:48perspective right and most people just think they're too smart or too cool and it's all a place of ego if you look around at other people doing things on Twitter like oh and you're just judging them so I'm always kind of of the perspective from Jim Detmer that's if you spot it you got it which means the way you kind of think about other people and how you project on them is always projecting from the way you feel about yourself or whatever it is you're doing so I don't know I I don't spend any time judging other people and how they're living their life like you look at some

23:23of these people on Twitter who have their entire thing on Twitter has become making fun of people writing on Twitter but all they're doing now is trying to get likes on Twitter the same way the other person is doing they're just appealing to a different group of people right so it's like you're you're playing the same game you just don't recognize it and for some reason think you're more important or smarter or whatever just being a professional poster and and it's negative yeah why would you want to live your life like that like waking up like you know what I'm gonna go generate internet clicks today by being mean

23:58imagine waking up with that like predisposition it just sounds like a horrible life so I always I look at those people from a extreme place of empathy like man I'm very glad that that is not how I wake up and choose to to live a lot of people ask me Greg how do you build products that Foster Community well I've got good news that's exactly what late checkout does my company we partner with the largest brands in the world and fast-paced startups to design products that resonate with your community we add a couple interesting clients every single year so if you're interested and that sounds like you

24:43email front desk at latecheckout.studio with what you're working on what you need help with and don't forget to mention the where it happens pod thank you [Music] so if you're listening to this and you wanna double down on on writing you know what do you recommend the first steps are so for example I didn't know that Blake basically wrote about a bunch of things and then narrowed in on Excel and Google Sheets like to me he was just always the Excel guy so this happens with anything right writing is just it's a vehicle but this is true for wanting to improve or get better at anything in life

25:38when you first start trying to learn how to do anything you are operating from a lot of assumptions you're operating from the assumption that you'll enjoy it you're operating from the assumption that you know what you want to do with it you're operating from the assumption that you have the patience to get through the first three steps you know and so a big focus of ship 30 and why we've constructed it as a writing challenge is because the goal is to accelerate essentially two years three years five years of learning into 30 days and so for example one of the biggest assumptions that someone makes at the

26:20beginning of deciding I want to start writing is they assume they know what they want to write about so you walk into the whole thing and you go I want to write about productivity and then you write about it for three days and you realize that's not actually what I want to write about and part of the learning process is accelerating through those moments so that you can figure out is this what you actually want to write about or no and then the other side is is this what people find valuable right so you write about productivity for five days in a row 10 days in a row and like very

26:54lukewarm and then you go and tell the story of how you explored Machu Picchu and what it taught you about living a fulfilling life and it goes viral right and all of a sudden you go oh now I have a data point oh something about that topic is really resonating the thing I thought people wanted isn't actually the thing that people want and so a huge part of the process this is why we have this saying you can't steer a stationary ship what a lot of people do is they sit in their room they sit at their desk they draw out this huge map they go before I take one

27:25single step here's my path to a giant successful career on the internet where no one will judge me and everything I do is perfect and I will build a giant audience right and then they take one step and they have to confront all these assumptions and instead a much better approach is to just begin write about a lot of different things see how you feel about it see how it feels for the reader is it something they're enjoying is it something you're enjoying and you navigate as you go along that's the whole idea what do you think about you know writing as Greg Eisenberg versus writing as at

28:02the community guy there's this growing Trend around people picking Anonymous unanimous accounts um you know I follow this guy named at the car dealership guy tweets about like cars and stuff like that and where the prices are going and yeah I'm just curious how how you think about that there's definitely an interesting trend on person or anonymous but I think there's two really important things to point out here one is either way it's a person the community guy the community gal the community whatever right which is very different than at Avis Rental Car right it's very there's a difference between a entity and a person whether the person is their

28:56name or Anonymous point point a and I think we always want to listen to people more than we want to listen to entities the second though which I find really ironic is this idea of I'm the community guy I'm the product gal I'm the whatever right and it's important to understand what are they doing they are literally naming their niche right which is the whole thing the whole thing is not for you it's not it's not for Dicky to be famous it's not for me to be famous it's not for Greg to be famous it's for each one of us to become known for a niche that we own

29:35it's it's to be known for a category of thing so whenever someone goes oh I'm the community person or I'm the product designer person what they're trying to do is they're trying to Signal their Niche so that it's uh it's easy to understand why do you pay attention to me that's the whole point so it sounds like if you want to double down on writing step one is picking a topic step two is picking a niche is step three pick a personality step three is right every day for a year and then pick your head up and see if it worked like see who you are but

30:17seriously because you're gonna learn it so much about what you like to write about what people like to read and so where most people will go is okay this sounds great sounds like I can pick a niche and then I'm gonna go spend the next six months creating the perfect website the perfect Blog the perfect content plan I'm gonna have it all mapped out rather than just hitting publish on something tomorrow and so that's why we say this idea of shipping daily you have to be putting ideas out for a year and if you commit to writing about one thing for an entire year you're gonna get really good at that

30:49thing and you're going to build distribution around it where right now I'm not talking about writing quite as much as I did in 2020 and 2021 now I'm talking about things that I'm more well not well-rounded but a more diverse list of topics but the only reason people are paying attention to that is because I talked about a singular thing pretty much every single day for a year and a half and Jack butcher has a great quote it's Bill distribution and then build whatever you want and so if I had only written about what I'm writing about now people would have come to me and they

31:28wouldn't have built any kind of relationship with me because it was harder to latch on versus when you say hey I'm going to help you solve this one specific problem it's much easier to start with a niche and then expand than to think oh but I have so many interests you just need to pick one and extend the time Horizon and say I'm gonna write on the internet for 20 years I don't have to figure it all out right now I can pick one thing and write about it for three and then pick another thing right about it first I think too many people and myself included when I was

31:56getting started felt like I had to have it all figured out right away rather than recognizing this was going to be a long-term game and that the only thing I needed to do is get started and the rest kind of takes care of itself when you're putting out enough data getting feedback all that I I've been seeing you tweet more lifestyle content really you know I saw you tweet there is simply no better way to prepare for the week ahead than steak eggs potatoes and spinach and then you took a a picture of your steak and eggs and potatoes and spinach and first of all it looked amazing like

32:36I don't know what you put in your eggs but sign me up and second of all I feel like if you can post about steak and eggs you've made it in in the sense of like as a writer or as a content creator when you're able to create lifestyle content where you're basically for me as a content creator I think about like how do I build audience first and then build Affinity second so Affinity is another word for trust I want to increase that amount of trust and I feel like lifestyle content a lot of the time makes people feel more connected to the Creator is that something that you're

33:15consciously doing well the mistake I made when I just started out was thinking I could only talk about lifestyle content and I was going to grow because the truth was no one they they come for some specific problem you're solving for them and then they build a relationship with you based on the tangential things you talk about not the reverse right if I had only tweeted out pictures of my steak and eggs I'd have a hundred followers and that was it right but instead I've helped so many people solve problems in their life through my writing that now I can tweet about just things I'm generally

33:49interested in and they've come to trust me as a person so it's the dream of course is where you just live your life on a day-to-day basis and your writing is a byproduct of exploring your unique interests and then all the readers are reading anything you put out just because they're interested in you but that I'm still not at that point and still Focus most of my writing on solving problems but like I think the long-term sustainable way to write has to be things that you're extremely interested in learning and continuing to grow rather than only talking about one thing forever but I do think you have to

34:27start there because otherwise you're not going to generate any kind of it's like the cold start problem you can't talk about things that interest everyone in the beginning because someone would come to your profile and say I don't know what I'm here for but now it's like you build up enough of a general readership then you can kind of talk about anything I I essentially agree the the thing with this topic is it is such a nuanced thing right I think it's so easy to just go you get famous and then you can do whatever but everything sits inside a context right the context is the niche that you are

35:08creating Within so why is Dickies posting steak and eggs interesting well let's follow the logic line the logic line is I reader follow Dicky because I want to start writing online next Point Dicky treats writing online like an athlete writes about that next logic line Dicky must structure his life in a very disciplined way in order to treat writing online like an athlete such that I can learn how to write online right fourth logic Point Dickie posts steak and eggs for breakfast that's kind of interesting maybe I should start eating steak and eggs for breakfast so that I can treat my writing like a sport so that I can get better at

35:53writing right that's literally what's going through the reader's head and so I think there's a huge logical fallacy where you you look at all these big creators I've watched a dozen Cycles this is exactly what happens writer starts Creator starts experiments gains traction doubles down on a niche becomes known for a niche they own thinks that everyone's following them for them not the niche abandons the niche and then loses engagement over time every over and over it's just the same Loop and it's our human nature to think we are special the reader cares about me Cole the reader cares about Dickie the reader cares about you Greg and in actuality

36:43what the reader cares about is you in the context of the niche that solves a problem for them and the moment you step out of that niche completely and you start thinking it's just about you and how special you are and how famous you are and how big your audience is the great dissension begins and just it happens over and over and over again if Ryan holiday tomorrow publishes a book in his Niche stoicism it's a it's a number one bestseller well if Ryan holiday tomorrow publishes a book outside that Niche very very different result I mean Ryan holiday didn't start off as like some well-known

37:22stoic like I've known Ryan no he built it I met Ryan when he was the director of marketing at American Apparel I'm super familiar with this whole story right but what happened starts marketing a little bit of traction doubles down second book does okay ghost experiments with a different data point obstacle is the way very successful doubles down doubles down doubles down now category King stoicism if tomorrow Ryan starts only making YouTube videos about his life his breakfasts and his farm animals whole thing goes like this the crazy the crazy thing about the rise of Ryan holiday is that Ryan holiday is more famous than Marcus Aurelius and

38:14Seneca to most people today because yeah he's the one who's delivering the mess the message about stoicism in a way that people can understand nowadays uh via Tick Tock via Twitter via Instagram via his books I think what's really courageous that Ryan did was he had a really good thing going with marketing and PR and he said to himself and his editors or whatever like I'm going to go and he picked stoicism when stoicism was like not a real category basically a hundred percent because the mistake would have been him going into Tim ferriss's category and going I'm going to compete with Tim Ferriss losers game

39:08right most people I I've studied the out of his story because I think it's fascinating and most people don't realize that his mentor is Robert Greene what did Robert Greene do right he went and did the same thing with all the Machiavellian stuff and Mastery and War and all that right so Ryan holiday takes the blueprint does it with a new category and evangelizes it but the point the point is Ryan holiday is famous because of how he's built stoicism Ryan holiday is not famous because he posts lifestyle content and so lifestyle can be woven in sure it's cool to see what someone that you learn and study from and enjoy follow

39:50it's cool to see what they're doing but you are not what matters to the reader unless you're Kim Kardashian right you are not what matters what matters is the the category are they interested in the niche does your Niche solve a problem for them if so your value sits in that niche and the moment that that context changes the way that the reader The Listener the viewer changes the way they see you does the chase ever end like should should Ryan holiday be thinking about what's next in a new category or is this it for him his choice right I mean but anyone who starts to experience it Dicky and I are

40:32experiencing it right now you've you've experienced it with Community the moment you start unlocking rewards in a niche the moment you realize oh like dick and I aren't the category Kings of all writing it's just one very specific subcategory start writing that's it you want to go learn how to write a Pulitzer Prize winning novel you go somewhere else if you want to learn how to start writing on the internet this period done we win right here and once you start unlocking rewards in a niche you realize that the switching cost goes up right so the more that you dominate a niche at this point if Ryan holiday went

41:16to his publisher and went I'm doing a hard pivot pivoting out of stoicism that's like a code red publisher calls in 12 people being like we've got a serious problem on our hands right because there's a huge switching cost and so can you do it yes do people do it all the time but does it take time and do you have to go through then a whole reorienting of who's interested and who's not a hundred percent because you're not what's special the niche is what's special the earth-shattering moment of what you said was you're not focused on writing you're focused on the sub niche of start

41:54writing which Yes sounds so small it sounds like yep start writing that's like other people are gonna do it you know other people are going to own that and it's so small like why you can't build a business around that why would you why would you think so small that's what you know goes through people's brains but you guys are making millions of dollars on the start writing piece and I also think that what enough people don't talk about is you could move adjacent to adjacent categories once you own the category you lead the category yeah what's what's the next logical step start copywriting right start email

42:45writing put the word start in front of anything I remember Dickie and I had a whole conversation I remember it was a year and a half ago and it was like a light bulb moment it was like this is all we have to do all we have to do is educate people on start that's it and most creators would be smart to do the same thing for their business right is is it's not just the topic it's where in the journey are you and what's the biggest funnel where do you create the most demand it's all the people who haven't started yet beginning right so take any Niche any category

43:25anything web3 get more specific Start web3 Community get more specifics start a community and if all you did as Dicky and I are learning if all you did was drill into that for three years you would realize that you have more work to do not less because the more specific you get the more problems you uncover the more people you realize you can help the larger the demand creation opportunity right it's a great it's a great like Golden Rule is whenever someone thinks something is too specific that's usually the signal that that's where the gold mine is it's funny because start writing sounds small Until you realize that the total

44:08addressable Market is everyone who has not started writing which is anyone who's not writing and there's not that many people writing so it sounds small but you go oh wow the the layer zero is everyone on the other side of that and so in whatever Niche it is most potential customers will be in getting started you don't have to choose that way like there's a lot of B2B businesses who only help people who are at five million dollars a year to get to 20. or something like that right or you have to have this number of followers or that like it choosing where to help people based on their level of

44:49experience is totally up to you but we went with beginners and why did we go with beginners in the very beginning I was such a beginner that I had no ability to write very well but what I was really good at was building a writing habit like ship 30 before Cole and I even got together wasn't even like start writing online it was like build a writing habit because I had no ex Cole has been writing since 2014 and so when we partnered it was like okay this is how you get the ideas that were in Cole's book into the whole world right but before start writing online it was

45:22just build a daily writing habit because I had no experience or ability to teach anything like that so it was even more Niche to start like you don't even have to put your ideas out there it's just how do you start writing every day so I think the more specific you can get on level of experience all it does is make people it forces people to make a choice whether or not they want to start or not whether or not they're at that level of experience where they qualify for it one of the most interesting things that you guys do is not only running an education business

45:55you're running a SAS technology company called typeshare I just went to the website obviously that the the first thing I see is everything you need to and this is like you know in red versus everything in Black everything you need to start writing online and they're emphasizing start uh shocker um why did you decide to start a SAS business and what are your hopes for it well I think it's worth recognizing that uh Dicky and I didn't start typeshare um typeshare's original founder is Sam Shore um he built basically the first version of it on his own uh maybe after like two or three cohorts of ship 30 was very early and we

46:46saw him do this on Twitter and were like wow this is really cool and reached out and basically said hey if you're gonna build this you know as an indie developer why don't we partner up we'll bring all the customers and you continue to build the platform will will obviously help build the platform because we know how we can turn our education into SAS um and let's just create a separate company so we did we created a separate company and me Dicky and Sam are co-founders in that company and it basically plugs into ship 30. and so the idea is right you take ship 30 and then

47:21everyone in ship 30 is basically getting educated on how to use the SAS platform thereafter and I remember Greg the first time I explained that to you your brain just exploded you were like that is genius um and yeah I mean I think an honest answer is we'll see where it goes you know I mean Dicky and I neither of us have done SAS companies before there's a huge learning curve it's very very different than education um ship 30 and typeshare is a really they complement each other well and I think the key is if you're gonna build things if you're gonna build multiple things they have to work together

47:58right because if they don't work together then there's no compounding it's just you're signing yourself up for more work elsewhere but because ship 30 is basically the lead gen for typeshare you can rationalize spending time on both because both benefit each other typeshare benefits ship 30 retention and ship 30 benefits typeshare customer acquisition right so you almost think of it just like two different departments in the same company almost and both are extremely lean teams where Cole and I have been patient in hiring so we have one or really a handful of employees but one core and an assistant would ship 30 and then Sam is the lead

48:38developer and we have a contractor developer on working on it with him we don't have these big teams we haven't raised any money and this all goes back to which game do we want to play could we go raise a big round for typeshare and hire a bunch of Engineers and accelerate that process probably but that sounds like signing up for a little bit of a job again which I'm not sure we want to do and could we scale ship 30 to Triple what it is now if we went and hired a bunch of people right away maybe but it's also a lot of fun to operate with a very small team

49:12and probably at the expense of growth and pursuing different opportunities and so we're extending the time Horizon and saying yeah we'll get to that and we'll get to that and we'll get to that and it's very freeing to run a business that way where it's yes this is working now despite not doing this not doing that not starting that thing not starting that thing and so rather than look at it as like oh we could be doing way more it's like we will do way more we just expand extend the time Horizon with which we do all those and we're going to be able to grow forever because of it

49:45there's this trend right now about so solopreneurship ever you know so many people want to be solopreneurs businesses of one you know preview and the previous cycle it was I want to raise as much money as possible I want a business of a million um I saw a term recently called micro entrepreneurs which I which I found interesting which is hmm sort of in between I want to swing for the fences and I wanna live in the forest by myself uh not have contact with anyone but also have a business type thing and micro entrepreneurs is like you know the 5 10 15 20 person business that's profitable

50:34that is highly leveraged that relies on audiences and I think we're gonna see a huge surge in micro entrepreneurship and that's a great example of like who is owning that category like why doesn't someone go and like put a stake there like if Justin Welsh is the solopreneurship guy and is making seven figures a year and has an incredible audience you know someone could easily be that uh Justin Welsh but for micro entrepreneurs I think Michael Kondra Capra I can't pronounce his last name but he tweeted it solopreneurs are one person teams micropreneurs are like 10 person teams I sent that tweet to him via DM I was like

51:21I love this language and this was a couple days ago because I think that is where people are headed because in solopreneurship you quickly realize like you basically have a glorified job for a lot of it because you're doing everything so why wouldn't you potentially want to zoom out and have a little bit of a team where you're able to not the thing about solopreneurship is you can't stop doing all the things you're doing without your livelihood being completely at risk not that we would ever stop doing anything but I think it's worth recognizing whether you have a glorified job or a business and solopreneurship to

51:59me is you just are working for yourself versus running a business and it's interesting the thing about all the different ways we could educate on how we do things as a team call on that front but that to me sounds way more fun to to have a 10 person team a lot of autonomy you really know the people you're working with you enjoy working with them I I totally agree and I raised a small round for my first company and we were thinking of doing the whole VC route and I took all these meetings and you know kind of projected it all forward and I think I and a lot of entrepreneurs

52:39have woken up and are waking up to the realization that every time you raise more money your success chances go down not up that's that's the big aha is that every time you you move the goal post your the chances of you actually having a meaningful outcome go from you know twenty percent to ten percent to five percent to one percent to half of one percent to and when you start to net it out you realize it is significantly easier to make a million dollars a year than it is to have an exit that pays you one to ten million dollars and then when you have that exit

53:26well now your cash machine is gone so now you have to go do it again right and so I think it's different games for different people I know some entrepreneurs who play this play the VC game exceedingly well and they've made fortunes doing it but I think it's very easy to look at it and go that's easy and it's not and you have way higher chances creating Financial abundance for yourself putting yourself in positions of power and leverage and an opportunity by building a one to three to five million dollar business or being a solopreneur making half a million or a million bucks a year you have so many

54:09more freedoms so many a lot of which aren't Financial right the freedom to just wake up when you want to wake up to go for walks with your significant other you know I think the post covid World revealed to a lot of people like hey I'd rather trade my 600k salary for a 300K salary if it means I have my sanity right there's a lot to be said for that the biggest takeaway I have from this conversation is it's not the great online game we're playing it's the great online games that we're playing and it's about how do you think about which games do I want to play in life

54:46and then work and being creating systems to basically go after those games that's like that's my takeaway gents always a pleasure if people want to learn more about chip 30 and and you guys where can they do it I think the easiest place to go is start writingonline.com you can download our free 13 000 word Ultimate Guide to start writing like we talked about it's got everything you need to write on any platform it's all our best Frameworks just give it away so start writingonline.com and then ship3430.com if you want to check out the course uh next cohorts in April and if you're listening to this later I have co-works

55:31running all the time and if you're looking to get started like we talked about no better place and I'm at Dickie Bush on Twitter LinkedIn spend way too much time on both those so that's where you can find me epic thanks so much guys for coming on you're gonna have to come back on again and by the way I'm drinking a non-alcoholic beer if you're watching this on YouTube I saw that Dickie was coming on to this and Dickie doesn't drink and uh I open the fridge and I was inspired by Dicky and I was like you know I'm gonna have a non-alcoholic drink so cheers

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