Alex Hormozi recently launched a book that sold more than three million copies in three days, smashing the record for fastest-selling non-fiction book, and raking in over $100M in sales. It was wild. It gets even crazier too, because his pre-launch marketing was cash-flow positive – meaning for every dollar he put into hyping the […]
A friend of mine was at a party here in Austin recently, chatting with a data scientist from Medium about AI-generated content. “Technology can’t really detect it yet,” was the basic gist, “but humans seem to be able to.” Fascinating. What this person meant, I gather, is that any individual human has barely a coin-flip’s chance of […]
I’m not sure what it was. It’s not like I’m not busy enough already. But I just signed up to run the Lean Horse Ultra Marathon with my friend, Sam – 50 miles through South Dakota hill country – four months from now. This is by far the longest race I’ve run. The last ultra […]
I got this really nice compliment on my Austin newsletter from Jason Scharf this week 👇 This was a big deal for me for two reasons: This was a really nice indication that the process is working, so this week, I thought I’d write about what that process looks like at a high level each […]
Most of the time, when a writer starts to feel bored, it’s because they’re writing what they think they should write, rather than what they’re actually interested in. Led by obligation, rather than curiosity. We got some experience with this at Trends. People paid $300 per year for the newsletter, and we felt pressure to deliver the same […]
Yesterday, I sent the ninth issue of my local newsletter – the one I plan to grow into a 6-figure business – and as of right now, that list is sitting at 96 subscribers. Sound low? It probably is a little bit, but based on what I’m seeing so far, I’m optimistic this is going […]
On May 6th, 1835, from a cellar in downtown New York, James Gordon Bennett Sr. published the first-ever stock report based on information he’d gathered on Wall Street. His brand new one-page paper was called The New York Herald, and it would change the content we consume forever. When you think of old-time paperboys yelling, “Extra! […]
The first person who ever really explained newsletter monetization to me was James Altucher, and if you’ve seen the Newsletter Engine business model we published at Trends, it was strongly influenced by him. If you haven’t, here’s the short version – there are three ways newsletters make money: “Free sells the frontend, frontend sells the back,” James told […]
Here’s something that no one’s going to tell you when you first get started writing or creating things on the internet… Someday, a new generation of creators will come up behind you, and they’re going to be better than you in a lot of ways. Sometimes, their work will be better than yours. Other times, […]
Geoff Sharpe is the co-founder of Lookout Media up in Canada. They have a string of three local newsletters, spread between Ottawa and Vancouver, and have grown to over 65k subscribers and six-figures in revenue. Last week, he jumped on Zoom with me to share a bunch of what they’ve learned, including: He gave me permission to […]