How Tommy Made $60k With His Superniche Ebook

Over sixty thousand dollars in ebook sales in just three months. That's exactly what Tommy Gioka was able to pull off just shortly after completing Ship 30 for 30, our community-powered writing course that helps beginners start writing online. And in this video, we interviewed Tommy to hear about his journey, his lessons, his mistakes, and we help him chart his path forward to one million dollars in revenue over the next 12 months. So sit back, relax, grab a pen, take some notes, and enjoy this interview filled with takeaways you can immediately apply to your digital business. All right, let's go for it, because we got a lot to get through. We got Tommy with us.

Tommy, for anyone who's unfamiliar, has been a Captain Stable member for about a year, something like that. And I want to frame this conversation and take us back to August. And Tommy, we'll kick this off—was it August or…? Here, let's unmute, and I want to ask you just a quick rundown of what we're going to cover today. You've made what? Seventy plus grand from your ebook launch?

Yeah, I'm just about to cross 60 right now. Uh, just crossed a thousand sales a few days ago, which was—I mean, that was my goal for the year. And so where I want to start to frame this conversation is watching the video from what was it? April. So Cole, if you screen share, because we gave Tommy some tough love on a hot seat on one of these Captain Stable calls, and I'm sure you'll share some of this in your story, but is it cool to start with this part of the video? You think that would make good sense?

Yeah, and I mean, I'm happy to talk a little bit to it as well, but I'm glad you guys have that because I was trying to find it in the last minute and I couldn't.

Cool. Okay, so let's play this back. Tell me, is it just right here at the beginning, Daniel? Where is it?

Yeah, it's clipped.

Okay, cool. Tommy, you put a really great question in the chat, and we've been chatting a little bit in DM. Um, we can explore some of that, but you want to come up and jam on this for a few minutes?

Cool. Here, uh, let's unmute, because this is a really good question: How do you allocate time between maintenance content and revenue content—the stuff that makes money? And right away, there's no difference; there's no difference between maintenance content and revenue content. And what I mean by that is, if you want it—I think the number one belief to break is like, I'm gonna put out things for free, and then that's going to be okay, but once you pay me, you're going to get all the good stuff, right? It would be like us putting our Start Writing Online guide behind a big fat paywall and said, "This is a hundred bucks." Would that negatively or positively impact Ship 30? In a massively negative way, because that guide has been downloaded now 45,000 times, right? That number would be one percent of that, maybe 0.1 percent. And the network effects of putting out unbelievable free content magnify, right? How many times have someone forwarded that Ultimate Guide that we could easily charge for? And to be honest, is what we charge for when you join Ship 30—it's a lot of that, just deeper and actually explain with better examples, right? So the difference between your free and your paid content is really the depth, right? It's the same thing; you might just go a little bit deeper. Um, that's my initial take. Does it make sense?

To watch this whole thing, Tommy? It's about 10 to 15 minutes long, and and I I had a thought of cutting it up at one point, but here was the takeaway I can tell you guys, and it was it was seriously impactful. I got off that call, and I like sent that clip to a few friends. And let me just kind of like TL;DR for you: I was sitting there, and I was saying, "Hey, I had this post; it went mini-viral. Um, there were a couple of other things that I was like, I don't know what to do; I was kind of in my own head about it. Um, and pressing go was just something that that I was not able to unlock yet." And you guys were like, "Dude, you have more signal than you absolutely need; what are you waiting for?" And Nicholas, it was you who said, "Tommy, I'm going to check in with you in 30 days, and I swear to God if this thing isn't launched, like you have no reason—you have the whole thing written in that mini-viral post—like, what is going on, dude? Like, just go." And I think there was even a point where I kind of made an excuse, and I can't remember what it was where I had said something to the degree of, um, yeah, I don't remember; I I was giving myself a reason not to go forward, and you guys were like, "Dude, like a little bit of an attitude adjustment—like you got this—like you're finding excuses where there needs to be, you know, none need to exist." It took me four months from that moment to really act on this. I made a lot of mistakes, and when I finally got this thing launched, it was like, "I'm such an idiot; like, what was I doing?" And because immediately it was just—it was very clear as soon as that thing launched, you guys were right. And thanks to some of the stuff I had learned earlier on um from from Ship 30 and from everything else, like I was able to push through it, and it's it's truly has has changed my entire trajectory for 2023. Um, so I really want to talk a little bit about that and some of the other things that have worked out. So first of all, amazing. You know, it took four months, but at least it didn't take four years, so there's that. Second, um, real quick, just just so everyone knows, can you just share the the topic of the ebook again and what it was about?

Yeah, so I'm a product designer; I design software, right? And this entire thing is about designing software and and using kind of finding your niche. What I talk about is how to design software at warp speed is kind of the languaging I use for this, and it's counter to the idea that you need really deep meaningful mind-sweeping research all the time to be successful in the market, um, because the shape of work I've worked in for 13 years has actually been opposite of that, and I've seen companies go to a billion dollars on intuition or on really scrappy research. And there's a lot of people in my industry—it's like, "Find your—and enemy who were beating a drum about how you're supposed to do this," and I'm saying, "Well, guys, actually there's a lot of companies doing really well not doing it that way, and I think we're guiding a lot of people kind of in the wrong direction for the sake of advocacy." So that's the topic.

Awesome. So here, here Cole, just one sec before that, because I think I was trying to remember the most impactful part of the call. If you go to 11:20 on that, because I think people watching us talk about the data is screaming at you would be super helpful to hear. And then Tommy, I know you have a bunch of uh a presentation to kind of go through, so cool. Daniel said it's like 11:20. And at this point, Tommy just broken down how many likes did that LinkedIn post get? We're looking at it, so let's just play it.

Yeah, here, let's see it. It's so simple; it's complicated. It's like—it's staring you right in the face. And this is this is why such a big part of Ship 30 is taking that pause and reading through the analytics, because every single person on this call has a version of this happening—like the data is screaming at you, being like, "If you create this, the internet will pay you," but so often we're just—we overlook it. And you you probably saw this; it went mini-viral, and you were like, "Cool," and then like that's the end of it, and now I can't talk about it again, right? Like, because I already…

Yeah, yeah, there is that. It's like, okay, I talked about that; that's the ammunition; there's gone, right? The opposite—it's the first time you can write about it. Dick, you scroll up to the top; I just want to make this like soup; I want to drill this point home. Okay, number one: Practice a UI tool like Sketch. Okay, that's its own piece of content. First point: Recreate Gusto's workbench components. That's its own piece of content. Read Atomic Design by Brad Frost; great breakdown that book; that's its own piece of content, right? Then take one, two, three; that's its own piece of content. Then take two, four, and six; that's its own piece of content. Then each one of these—when one of these pops off, then do a deep dive into Gestalt psychology as it relates to institutional knowledge; great; that's another 10 pieces of content. Like, this is the beginning; this is not the end. And so if you think, going back to your question, right, you turn this into a digital product, and then you reverse engineer, and you make each one of these—and every one of these subpoints—its own piece of content, and they all point to the same exact thing—that'll keep you busy for two years. And and that—and here's here's the beauty—is all of your funnel content, which is all of this put into a PDF, is your revenue content. See how it's no different? And then when you write like the most underutilized law in product design, Jacob's Law, here's a breakdown of how it works; you write it; it goes viral; oh my God, it's amazing; how can I get more bang? This is one part of one chapter of my eight-chapter ebook; here it is.

Yeah, right. I mean, you have literally a whole two or three years of content here.

Yeah, and all that content leading to a pillar piece, right, that you can monetize along the way. So I think if you if you look at this and you go into the zero-to-one dollar and take the Launch Your Digital Product in Eight Day Challenge—I think is the number—it'll show you exactly which one of these you should pick to monetize, how to build it, and you'll be on your way. So this fires me up because like—I wish—it's funny when you look at this; I'm like, "Oh, you you just wake up and pick one." It's like, yeah, my 10—my 10 biggest takeaways from Atomic Design by Brad Frost is a great thread right there; cross-post it to LinkedIn, you know, just like that. My—I would highly, highly, highly encourage you to set an arbitrary compressed deadline for yourself; you launch it; pre-launch the book, yeah, and say, "Launching in 21 days!" Yes, and you can do pre-sales on Gumroad, though, right?

Can you? I think you can. I have other questions around pre-sales; I don't want to take up all the time, but…

Yeah, that's okay. Well, either way, it's possible. Time, I actually—I wanna—I wanna double-click on this point, because it's a little bit of a mindset thing. We just said all fired up, all excited, "Oh, go do this, this," and the very first thing is like, "Oh, I can't do that on camera," right?

Right. Yeah. So so let's instead flip the mindset of like, you can go do this, right? If you can't do it on Gumroad, you'll find a better solution, right? But the number one foundational thing here is like, you can go do this, yeah? Not—there's a—"Oh, this sounds great, but like can't do it on Gumroad," so uh—and I'm on to the next thing, right? A little bit of tough love, but I think that it's important to address because right away it's—"Let me go—let me go make this happen," not—"Let me find another obstacle," right?

Yes, guys, I appreciate it; truly, thank you so much. There it is; there it is, dude. That fires me up just listening to that again. And you know what I want to do? I want to do a quick little uh brutal honesty moment here in the chat: How many people re-watching that or listening to what you just said—you know, you're like, "Oh, I'm a product designer; software design," you know, how many people hear your first inclination was, "Oh, well, of course this happened because you're in a—you're in an easy niche—oh, software—oh, that's an easy niche—oh, of course, of course you made 50 grand—an easy niche," right? First of all, even if there was such a thing as an easy niche, it still took you four months to—to go, okay, you know what? I believe it, fine. And second of all, the biggest joke is, you know, now when—when I explain to people, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I—I write about, you know, digital writing things like that," do you know how many people go, "Oh, that's easy—oh, great—that's—that's an easy niche?" Really? Because for 10 years, people have told me that I basically have like the most worthless skill on planet Earth. So every single—every single niche has this potential; it's just a question of whether or not you look at it as, "Oh, that—well, my niche is hard; I can't do that." Yes, you can; yes, you can. Amazed. I—I just wanted to frame that because it's so cool to look back on, but Tommy, I'll let you—you take it from here, man. What has been happening since that call?

Yeah, I mean, it's—it's blown up; I'm getting a lot of great feedback. So that post—and someone asked what the analytics were; I think it was like three or four thousand uh likes, so like mini-viral, right? We've seen like the ten, hundred thousand, whatever those are, but it was my best-performing post; the comments were incredible; there was clear engagement and kind of validation around it. In my head, though: One—oh, you can't—you can't launch a pre-sale on Gumroad. Yes, you can; I figured it out. Um, and two, it was the other thing was I wasn't sold that—that was my point of view, right? Like, "Claim your category"—I didn't feel like that was interesting enough. Um, I didn't lean into that post entirely, but what I did do is I looked at the mechanics of what made that post successful: It was a listicle; it was a breakdown; it was like a retro of what would I do differently, and I kind of built that around my actual point of view about moving fast in software as a designer. So I did the same thing, and I literally repurposed that entire post uh with the different type of bullet points for my point of view; it went mini-viral, excuse me, and and I was able to take that, and then that was my outline; I used that as my book outline. Uh, here's how you go, by the way, for anyone who's like, "You can't pre-selling Gumroad"—create a PDF and say, "Hey, like this is coming in x amount of weeks, days, whatever"—that's the download, and you just message correctly on the landing page, like, "Hey, this is a pre-sell"—there you go, done, you know? And it was like—and it's funny for me because—um, and I'll kind of get into this—and I have a Notion page with topics that I'll run through…

Yeah, I was gonna say maybe we share that. Um, but you know, I'm really interested in this being more of a conversation, so I'll walk through this, pause, and we can talk about some of this stuff. But you know, I—I'm not new to coming to market with things like software; I'm a startup founder; I've done this before. I mean, a million dollars is the really, really hard way, and with a lot of sacrifice; I never want to do that again. But for some reason, sitting in this seat, writing, doing all of these things—is it felt different, and I suddenly went, "I like—I like regressed back to, you know, that shy—I'm not sure what to do—how do I go to market with writing—how do I validate ideas"—somehow this is different; it's not different. And and so this—this—this ebook is like the start of a lot of things that—watching you guys build Ship 30 and turn it into what it was—which fun fact—uh, I joined Ship 30 back when you guys still had a Slack; I joined Ship 33 times before I actually went through with it, and uh the procrastination—it's like the toxic productivity—it's the—the idea that progress or motion is progress, which isn't true, and I got so sucked into that for a long time. Um, so I—the one thing I'm gonna walk through some of the things that have really helped me so far, uh specifically with what you guys have helped me with, but the one thing I really want people to get out of this—I hope you do—is that like it's so much closer than you realize, um, and a lot of times if you're like me, we get in our own way, uh and and everything you guys—like if you just go through the motions and you just do it consistently, it does start to pay off, and then it even starts to compound, right? Um, I don't know if I want to do like, "Who am I?" and all these things, but what I want to do—talk about is—is like making a million dollars the smarter way. And so the nutshell is that I'm a Marine, turn designer, turn entrepreneur twice over; that's it, right? Um, so I've been through this stuff.

Now you're about to turn 27, dude. Congratulations! What a freaking fantastic place to be at 27. This picture is me at 27, and this is the first product I ever created; we were at the very first TwitchCon. So if you've ever watched a live stream and you're like, "Why are people donating money to these live streamers?" and like interactions pop up, we took that to market. And this picture of me at the first TwitchCon—I am—I'm exhausted; I am broke; I uh my marriage was in shambles, and and I'm sitting here like hoping this thing works out, right? And I had spent all this time—like you can't tell—but I'm so tired, and I did everything—I did everything the wrong way; I—I didn't validate—date this—the right way. I mean, we were very fortunate; really, we were lucky; we just—we rode the wave as soon as live streaming blew up, right? My goal now is to do this the smarter way, where I'm not sacrificing my relationships, where I'm not going broke, where—where a lot of these things are smarter, and it's like you guys give the—the blueprint for this—for going to market in this like new social media era where distribution is free—distribution is free—like if the internet was the—the great equalizer for everyone across the world who had access to it, this inflection point in social media is—is the greatest follow-up for it, and we just have to leverage that, right? And I really think writing is—is that right now. Um, but I haven't made it, and I want to be clear—like I'm not sitting here on some pedestal saying I've made it; my goals are all accomplished, but I've had a breakthrough that's really exciting to me, so that's what I want to talk about.

This is your—your Slack back in the day. You guys stopped doing Slack, though. You didn't like it, huh?

Yeah, it's just too big; too many people to have in Slack.

The big thing with me, too—I want people to know—um, is you know, here's—here's some stats, right? Like, I—I'm cross-posting a lot, and writing has helped so much—not just short-form writing, but even in video; I do a lot of video. Um, I do video on TikTok; I do video on Instagram; I haven't—I haven't hit YouTube yet, and I—and I took kind of your guys's philosophy about that, which is, "We could, but I haven't really tapped the ceiling on the places that are working right now," so I kind of stopped that. Um, but—but it's working across like Instagram; it's working across uh LinkedIn and TikTok. Um, Twitter—it's funny; I—when I joined Ship 30, I actually took all the lessons you taught in Ship 30, and I went to LinkedIn with it; I didn't do Twitter. And so I actually today just passed 2,000 on Twitter, and I'm celebrating that; it's small, but—but I'm super happy about it, right?

Um, and then you have all the content to blow up on Twitter when you want to.

Exactly. And it's like that. So that's why it's like, "Should I go to YouTube?" No, let me just repurpose for Twitter; it's—it's a really easy, you know, leverage. I did a little podcast thing; didn't go very far; did like eight episodes; I'll do a season two, maybe; we'll see. Um, but that's like an easy way to populate YouTube for now. Uh, I have about 4,000 um newsletter subscribers; I write that on Saturday; I totally bit the title from Justin um when I said it's the Saturday uh design decision, right? He does the Saturday Solopreneur. Um, and then yeah, so sales—as of last night, you know, a thousand—59,000 dollars; pretty cool. Now I'm just trying to figure out how to optimize the channels I have to turn more sales, and I'm going to talk a little bit about what's working around channel optimization. So one—one quick thing I want to point out is because that's—that's actually really cool; I didn't—I didn't know that—that you had these larger audiences on—on other platforms. And the path that everyone knows and is used to is, "Oh, I need a huge audience"—like they just chase the audience of—"Oh, I have 300,000 followers on Instagram," or whatever it is. And imagine you having that big of an audience and zero digital product. Now, like, in hindsight, you're like, "That's the dumbest thing I could have possibly done," right? But what so many people do is they just chase the audience number, and then for whatever reason, the acceptable path is like, "Well, then—and maybe I'll do like brand-sponsored posts; maybe I'll shill a protein powder; that sounds like a good idea," right? And it's like, "Why?" And—and what I've—what I've concluded is that the reason people wait so long to do their first digital product is because they think it's a marriage decision; they think whatever first digital product I put out, the entire world is going to recognize; the entire world is going to associate me with, and I'm never going to be able to do anything else. My first digital product was called Skinny to Shred It; it was a bodybuilding ebook; nobody today even knows that; nobody cares, you know? And I just—I want to point that out—of it is not a marriage decision, and the—the act of building an audience for the sake of building an audience with no digital product, in hindsight, is the stupidest thing you could possibly do, because what's the point of having all that attention just for the sake of attention? And—and I want to—so that's a great—I'm gonna call out two points on this list because that's such a great point. You know, me coming from software, it's been drilled into our startup heads that, "Hey, take an MVP to market; just be scrappy," and it's like, "Why—why aren't we taking the same approach to content?" Every piece of content is just a little product I'm shipping to market; I'm testing it out, and you're testing two things, right? You test idea, when you test execution, and you just do that. And—and the thing is—is for example, I—I blew up on TikTok really early; no one on TikTok was talking about designer software; that wasn't cool; I was—I was like scripted design content on TikTok when it was like mostly trends and the—the memes of dancing and the whole thing, right?

Yeah.

And—and here's—here's the truth: It's like—I love this kind of idiom, which is early early critics or late adopters. And so if you see these platforms or you're like, "No one's talking about my topic in this platform; I'm not gonna go over there"—like, get over there—like, get over there and uh and test—like treat all of your content—take everything to market; just put—put some stuff out there, and it might not perform, but you're gonna—you're gonna sit there and start learning little piece of info—pieces of information about each piece of content you put out, and it's a great way to kind of build your point of view in real time, because you get those feedback mechanisms; you're like, "Hey, is this point of view resonate?" Uh, and then sometimes I'll put something out; I'm like, "Do I—do I really believe in that?" And I think about it, or someone might challenge the idea, and I'm like, "You know what? That person challenged that idea, and I actually agree with what they said," and that's a scary thing to do—like it's a scary thing to build your—your point of view in real time, but it's—it's so worth it in my opinion.

Yep. Um, I kind of talked about—I wanted to see—and—and by the way, it's funny for those of you—I—being on the LinkedIn side, the B2B kind of content side, and then being on like this TikTok side, it's a very funny like macro view I get because everyone on TikTok's like, "Oh, man, LinkedIn; they're so cringe—like they just talk about business, and they're so self-served"—like, what? And then everyone on LinkedIn is like, "TikTok—like you can't make sales on TikTok, guys." I make like 400 an hour every time I go live on TikTok from sales, which is not something I thought would happen, to be honest. Even with my follow-up, I did not think I had the same kind of reservations—at TikTok audience are—are you know, junior—not gonna translate, and my book is not for junior people—like I didn't—and that's why I didn't lean into the first post because I felt like the first post was kind of junior-level content, and I wanted to speak more to people working in the field. As it turns out, there's a lot of them on TikTok, and so I'm sitting here like a traffic controller—like, "No, hey, if you got a thing, go to LinkedIn; hey, if you got a thing, go to TikTok"—I swear to God, you have no idea what you're talking about, you know? And some people listen, and others don't, but as we see, like TikTok's getting—it's—it's starting to get all its flowers, and LinkedIn is the same. And in my opinion, if we were to try to like place bets on what's going to be the next worthwhile platform, I think it's Substack; Substack's doing like a killer job on discoverability. And so anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there for anyone interested.

Hmm. So a couple—I want to dig into where you're going to go from here, but if you want—I'm selfishly interested in the most impactful lessons from us—like I'm curious to see what resonated based on—on that toggle.

Absolutely. You know, I mean, it was like this: I—I guess I'm privileged to say these are the simple things now because they seem so simple in hindsight, um, but it really was learning like that entire five-pillar concept of digital writing, right? Like, how to actually write copy, how to generate ideas, um, how to build your point of view, how to write really compelling hooks. Guess what? I—I like—I said, I write video content, and so at the time I wasn't writing anywhere, but that was so impactful for my scripts on my—like it helped me create my most viral hook on TikTok, which has become a series and really kind of what I've known for, and it's like really simple. And—and yeah, I have to kind of tailor it a little different on video; you've got like two to three seconds for someone to catch someone's attention, but the idea of hooks and the idea of how to think about a hook—almost every piece of content I write, whether it's video or uh, you know, a short-form written or newsletter—that hook is—is truly like—I don't worry about, "Oh, what's the best time to post?" and what are all the little like tweaks and hacks; it's like—how to hook is the most important thing that you could possibly craft, and you guys—that—that's probably the most beneficial thing. The way you guys generate ideas—Twimix was—was like gold when you introduced that to me; that was so good. Uh, and—and the thing that it allowed me to do was to think about like my first scrappy process, which was, "Okay, Twimix is awesome; I use Notion to capture my ideas; is there a Notion plug-in maybe out there that I can quickly—if I run into a really well-written Medium article or Substack article"—and there was—there was like a Web Clipper for Notion. And so anytime I came across a really cool LinkedIn post or anything, I just clip it, right? And you guys got me thinking in that way of like, how did—how to generate those ideas and how to do it fast, because you know, ideas like strike us, and there was a long time where I'd have like a really good idea in the shower or something, and I'm like, "I'll get to that later," and I would forget it, and then later I'd be like, "Oh, crap, what was that idea?" And it's like those little processes that—that I started to build on became like the foundation of how—now like I open up my—I think over to—I'll show you—like, you know, I open up my library now, and—and I have an endless amount of like, "What do I feel like writing about today?" And it's thanks to the—to the idea generation that you guys introduced—it—like I just—I feel I've just got like a gold mine worth of ideas that I can talk about at any given time; I just have to like sit down and during my writing block and, you know, bang it out. Um, so go ahead. Are you already—do you already—sorry if I'm jumping ahead—but do you already have in mind what your next digital product would be?

So I'm taking lessons from you guys, and this is—this is—I—I just languaged it; I call it the Permanent Beta. So for example—

Good job!

Yeah. And—and it's—so it's basically like this is my workbook, and—and here's the thing: When I was creating this ebook, I was stressing out—

Why? Damn it, that's—that's good, Tommy! Damn it! I'm—I'm—I'm having—I'm getting that feeling where I'm like, "Damn it, I missed that one!"

I mean, use it! You nailed it! Good job! Good job!

And—and the idea is really—and I'm sorry, give me a second here—hit Command-P, and you can search—what was the name of my—it was like speed—something—designing—something—products—like a…

Yeah, there you go! I didn't know about that shortcut; thank you for that.

Um, the Permanent Beta, right? And—and so to answer your question, like, what am I thinking of next? So this is a page in my workbook, and it's like, "Welcome to the Permanent Beta; here's what you're getting; here's what to expect," and I even roadmap it out, right? I'm like, "Listen, the book's not even done yet; the book's not even done yet; it's on sale; it's like permanent sale—59; eventually it's going to be 199 or whatever I say," right? And I just let them know, "Hey, every single time there's like a new meaningful section that gets added, this price is going up," so I—I can kind of create that urgency regularly, and I'm also—and it's true—I'm like, "Hey, guys, like you're supporting me to create this, and—and as a reward you're getting future updates uh because you're supporting it now." Now, eventually, I will have to try to find ways to monetize—like, you know, I want to extend lifetime uh value of these customers, but for now, it's like this is helping me, you know, put food on the table without feeling like I need to create all of this—all at once. And it's really allowing me to do it the same way I would build software—just like MVP—what's working—all right, I'm gonna ditch that; I'm gonna go harder into this. And so there's a couple of sections that are coming up. Um, maybe there's a community built in; maybe there's a video course in the summertime that I'm going to turn this into, and it's just going to allow me—it's gonna allow me two things: One, it's going to allow me to increase the price of this as we continue forward, and two, it's actually going to allow me to give tiered offerings to people who—"I don't want the video course; I just want the Notion template," or "I don't want the Notion template; I just want the workbook." And—and it's just—it's all just one—this entire year is dedicated to my workbook—or the concept—which is making design decisions, and it's going to just be in higher suite of offerings around that concept. So two—two quick things—um, I want to point out—crystallize for other people—and then Tommy—ideas for you. So one is—biggest mistake people make—bar none—in pricing when it comes to digital products—doesn't matter if it's an ebook or a course or a community—they spend all this time building it; they launch it; day one—and day one they discount it by 50 percent.

To not be perfect, like to not be perfect, which is again like an attitude thing that we saw that earlier. Yeah, that's the point of view of that language term. Okay.

I have a couple of questions, and I want to frame how we can spend this, this next 20 minutes. So right now, first off, can we distribute this document in the replay so people can learn from like the things we don't get to? Absolutely. Okay. Because I, as much as I want to talk about like what got you here, I want to get you to a million dollars by the end of the year, so I want to talk about that as well. So because I think that'll be kind of interesting.

So what do you have for sale right now? It's this 59, is the ebook. Now 59, or I was a little confused on the workbook versus the the book. The only product I have for sale is the book, and it is 59. Gotcha. Okay, cool, amazing.

Now you've made 59 grand. The prices continue to go up for that. My gut take right when I saw your audience numbers is that you were dramatically under-monetized because too much of that audience is rented, and there's no bridge from, "Hey, I saw this viral thing from you," to, "Hey, you've educated me in some way that is going to make me trust you more than just your social profile." So I look at what you're doing on the email side, and I would, as much as the newsletter, I think you should continue doing, I think you need bridge email courses from your audience on rented platforms to the ebook. So I'm not even going to look inside your ebook, but if I had to guess, there would be like pillars of one pillar, two pillars, three, like individual topics within this. Now within each of those, I bet you create a ton of content around those topics specifically, like those are almost your content buckets in some kind of way, right? Yep.

Now this is what I wish Ship 30 had had done, and this is our plan going forward. Right? If you look at all the buckets we talk about with writing, there's like, get started writing; there's build a daily writing habit; there's come up with ideas; there's overcome like the mindset things; those are kind of like the four. Now where we're going to do right now, we have our start writing online email course. Our next steps are going to be creating email courses that teach those specific topics, and when someone comes to our landing page, we're going to ask them what their biggest problem is and funnel them into that trust-based email course. Right? So we're immediately creating a better bridge. One, when we create social content around those topics, we're going to send them, "Hey, don't just go to this broad thing, but like here's a five-day email course talking exactly what you just read, but like but." Okay. So I think for you, the very first thing would be some kind of five-day preview of your ebook that gives away a lot of that information for free, and then people pay for the packaging. That was my first gut take when I looked at all your different audiences. And then if I were you, and looking back at that once I created that first email course, I would literally just make four more right there, like right when I was at that stage. When we look back at Start Writing Online, I wish Cole that we had done four different email courses and had those churning all the time. Right now, yeah. And just sorry, real quick. So, so to make this super actionable, uh, email courses, just so everyone is aware, it's all that we have as startwritingonline.com. It's over the next five days; I'm gonna send you five emails; they're gonna educate you on something. The easiest ways to come up with ideas for for email courses that are creating that bridge is: for beginners, so your first time doing anything. So in this case, you're brand new to Figma, or you're brand new to launching a product, or you're brand new to whatever, just beginner mode. Second is biggest mistake, like you've been doing this thing, but you're stuck. Where are you stuck? Okay, this email course gets you unstuck in that thing you know. And then the third is like, well, you've been doing this for a while, but you haven't achieved some sort of outcome. What's the outcome that you desire? Over the next five days, I am going to show you the things that you need to do to achieve that outcome. And if you just go down the list, products, archetypes, problems, outcomes, like you should have 50 email course ideas. Pick one, pick three, pick five, build them out. You're gonna get data. Right. Oh, lots of people are buying from this email course, not as many people are buying from this email course. I should expand that email course, like, you know, each of these are just more data points.

So is the thinking for you guys to take some of like to just completely repackage parts of the like your main product into like a five-day course? Do you give it any additional treatment or gloss or, you know, anything at all, or is it just like literally plug and play? I mean, we'll we'll change the format to make it fit, but like the five-day endless ID generator is going to come pretty much from the text-based curriculum, and we'll just make it actionable. Right? And so you have all the content. Yeah, you're gonna have to change it a little bit, but like pick the outcome, pick the specific problem, make a specific promise. Right? So this is how for our Endless Idea Generator, it'll be, "Create 100 ideas to write about in five days." That will be like the promise of the email course. Your email course should solve a specific problem. So coming up with writing ideas in a specific way with the endless ID generator for a specific person, someone's struggling to come up with ideas. Right? A beginner writer, that's our POV on that. And if you can define that, someone comes to that landing page, you use that same language, and it's, if you were a beginner writer struggling to come up with ideas, you will generate 100 of them in five days. Put your email here. Imagine the person who doesn't do that. Right? Yeah. I want to, just because I see some of these questions in the chat, I want to drive home a point. An email course literally is five blog posts distributed each day. Right? So don't overthink it. It's just five pieces of content distributed each day, but there's such a massive difference in the framing of either going, "Hey, go read this stuff on my blog," or "Going, enter my email course, and over the next five days, I'm going to teach you." It's a it's literally the the difference between you having a dirty car and someone going, "Hey, if you bring your car over to my house, I've got a garden hose and I'll wash it," and you're like, "That's weird." And then the same person goes, "If you drive your car down the street to my car wash where I use a garden hose to clean your car," you go, "Well, that sounds like a great idea. Of course, I'm going to take my car to the car wash." It's the same thing, right? But when you frame it differently, people value it differently. So calling something an email course immediately feels valuable, and you walk the reader through, you give them the information, it becomes the bridge, and then you can plug your digital digital product at the end as a bridge.

How do you think about pricing in terms of like the email course? Should be three? Would you like price it cheaper just because it's a bridge or the same? It's free. Oh, free. Oh, for, okay. Got it, got it, got it. Yeah, your whole goal here is how do you get more people on your email list? How do you build more trust? How do you get them in your ecosystem? You need to be able to sell your ebook via. And so here's cool, I just dropped this in the chat. I put up a tweet of so people can see how we use this. Right? I wrote a long thread uh about a year ago of how I would start over if I was a beginner writer. Right? And so it's an exact step-by-step playbook. So if you scroll up on the thread, right, it's it's an entire playbook of how to get started writing online as a beginner, like everything that I would do now. At the bottom, you can see that the CTA, anyone who gets there, it's, "I hope this was helpful. For a deeper dive into everything you just read, here's a free 13,000-word ultimate guide and email course." And if you click that link, just so everyone can see this is all it does, there's one thing. Right? And download this guide, and our opt-in rate for this page, what Dick is 60 something percent, 65.70, like absurd. So just I wanted because it to clear up how we use this. Right? Drop in the chat who joined Ship 30 because of this email course. Right? More than likely a good number of you, because that was right exactly. And so you built up trust with this from something that started trust, and then you took this, and then you got pitched on joining, and if you didn't join, we waited until the next cohort, and then we pitched you again. Right? So that that's just our full breakdown of how it works, but everyone should have something like this that bridges your social profile and social content to an email list. Right? Because right away when you said I only had 2,000 subscribers, but I have like a zillion people on all these other platforms, I think the most powerful one would be Instagram having a link, "Hey, go check out this email course," optimize the page for mobile and start printing emails um and and getting that way. Yeah. So prioritize that bridge over the hard sale. Oh yeah, you should never pitch the book. That's a thing. Like very rarely do we pitch Ship 30 under a tweet. It's always, "Here's something free to build more trust." That's good. Oh yeah, you guys are speaking to like my immediate problem right now. Yeah, so I wanna I wanna reinforce this hierarchy because I also see the question in the chat of like what's the difference between an email course and a newsletter. Okay, so a newsletter is, I'm going to send you something every week; it's ongoing. Right? An email course is very short, "Hey, over the next five days, you're gonna learn this. Over the next five days, you are going to accomplish this." Right? And so think about the hierarchy here. Okay? If you post something on social, and Tommy, this is directly to you, okay, you post something on social and the you have the person's attention for seven seconds, and the first ask is, "Hey, go buy my 59 product," how many people are gonna do that? Some, but not as many people as the people if you go, "Hey, subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It's free. You'll learn." Right? And how many people subscribe to that? More, but how many people will type in their email to a five-day email course? Even more than that, right? Because the ask is lower. Asking someone for money is harder than asking someone to read your emails every week forever is harder than, "Hey, just read the next five emails, and I'm gonna solve your problem." This is this is where the whole stack is like, attention is not like, you saw my thing and now you love me forever and you buy everything from me. Right? Attention is, I got your attention, now here's just a couple more days, here's a couple more days, here's a couple more days. Right? It's just you want to that's why it's a stack. Should we make a Captain Stable Challenge on making your own email course? Would you all be interested in that? Yeah, a lot of nods. Awesome. There you go. Good signal. Yeah, permanent beta as we say. And by the way, email courses are nothing new. I remember being an intern at my first job reading about email courses 15 years ago, you know, and it's just it's a technique that not very many people use, and they really misunderstand the difference between, "Subscribe to my newsletter," versus, "Over the next five days, I'm gonna solve your problem." Like the first one gets maybe a one percent opt-in rate, this page 70 opt-in rate. Right? Because people don't want to just sign up for, "Hey, send me an email every week forever." People are like, "I have a problem. You say you're going to solve that problem over three or five days. I'm typing in my email so you helped me solve that problem over five days." That's that's it.

Well, I know what I'm doing this weekend. So what's the email course going to be on for me? Um, how to one of one of my buckets in that book and that I talk about is like how do you weigh information to take action on in the absence of clarity? So it's like, well, user research is the top most important thing you could have. The next most important thing you could have is is another thing like familiarity, like do you know what your customers are familiar with? So if you don't have like contextual research, then do you at least know what they're familiar with? If you don't know that, well, then what does institutional knowledge say? Like psychology and all the principles that we know that exists in the wild and and just how to just how to make like just how to quickly run through that scale every single time. Okay, we don't know this, we don't have time for it. Do we know this? No, we don't. Okay, then we know this, so let's do this then. Okay, so let's just skip skip to the end, and here's the answer. Right? So what's the what's the problem and the outcome that the person wants? They want design clarity. Right? Okay, so the name of the email course is, "Here's Your Five-Day Design Clarity Master Class." Right? The subtitle is, "The reason you're not designing and shipping your MVP is because you don't have clarity. Over the next five days, I'm going to walk you through my five-step framework for achieving clarity, confidence, and whatever else you need." Right? What's the likelihood that someone with that problem types in their email? Like 98 percent. Right? And then now the purpose of your email course is helping them achieve clarity. You go one, two, three, four, five, and then at the end of the email course, you go, "Great, so glad I could help you solve that problem. I solve these other nine problems that I'm aware of that you have in my 59 ebook; you should probably grab that too." And because you just solved their first problem over five days, the likelihood that they buy your ebook goes way way up, and that's the game.

It's so annoying how after I hear it from you guys almost everything I'm like, "That's so obvious. Like what the hell was I thinking?" It's okay. It bugs the crap out of me, but but you're not alone in that in the fact that like we feel the same way when people say it to us. They're like, "Oh, you you guys don't do that." I'm like, "Ah, yes." Right as I was just talking about having these different email courses, I'm like, "Damn it, we should have been having that for 10 years." Yeah, right. So you're not alone. It does take sometimes hearing it from someone else now to actually make that actionable. You can you have a thousand people who have bought your book. If I would, I would add something to your book purchase sequence: start asking them the number one reason they bought. So send a post-purchase survey that says, "What's the number one reason you bought? Was there anything that had you on the fence from buying? And what's the next biggest thing that you could that I could help you solve next?" So if you ask those three questions, number one reason you bought, anything that had you on the fence, and what can I solve for you next, you're going to get future product ideas, you're going to learn how to improve your current offer, and you're going to find out the biggest pain point why someone bought this product. That's a great, I just came up with that, that's pretty good. So nice. There you go. Yeah, you can see how so much of this is literally just asking, "What's the problem?" And then the person goes, "Here's the problem," and then you go, "I have a product that solves this problem," and then they go, "Here's my money," and then that's it, over and over and over again. It's no different in software; it's no different here, and and I'm I I hate it because I've got the ADHD brain that wants to look at everything or as soon as I like zoom in on a detail, I get stuck, and I'm like, "Where am I? I don't know what to do next," and it's like, "Hold on, just step back. It's not complicated." And uh, anyway, that's been one of the biggest values outside of like the very actionable ways to write, just like the the constant like realignment with like, "Hey, this is this is this is hard, but it's not complicated," and and that has been something that you guys really helped me with and continue to do so.

Well, Tommy, you are I I mean, we are so excited for you. You are in an amazing position. This is step one, and now the hardest part is over. The hardest part is having zero data to work with. You now have an abundance of data, which means, literally, as Dicky likes to say, it's one of my favorite phrases, "It's all execution risk." Literally, the only risk here now is just you putting one foot in front of the other. That's it, because all the answers are screaming at you. So this is a very exciting place to be.

Yeah, I'm stoked. Thank you so much, guys. I'm I'm also thank you for just having me up here. This is cool, and I hope everybody else has an opportunity to to get some of these milestones in and share them together. Yeah, I love this format. It's really I'm liking this, and how we can start to do this. I think is this all started because you had a lot of consistent writing, you had a breakout post, and when that comes to our attention, Cole and I know that that's the start, not the end. So we've seen this hundreds of times. Right? So for anyone watching, it's like, how can I how can I start doing this? Put out a ton of things, template like here's here's how to make this super actionable, that post template that you had. Right? Can you add that to the top of this Notion doc, and like anyone who is watching this when you watch the replay will put the link to Tommy's Notion in there. You can go right that same post that Tommy wrote, will it get is it guaranteed to go viral? No, but it's guaranteed to generate a foundation of content ideas. Right? Um, and yeah, just go through those because I wanted to make time like to go through mistakes, things could have gone better, and all that, but like I was more excited to help you go make a million in the next 12 months. I'm all for it. Yeah, twist your arm.

Well, this was amazing. Thanks for being willing to do the hot seat, Tommy, and I hope everyone here you've walked away with at least one good takeaway. And please, I feel like the overarching lesson, and and Tommy, I know you would agree, is if you could go back, you would have done this four minutes after that call, not four months. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Every person here, if the inclination is like, "Oh, I kind of get it, but like maybe I'll do it a couple of months from now," no, because your future self is going to look back and be like, "Why did I wait?" Just put it out there, just see what happens. Um, I'm fired up, and we will play this exact clip in like six months when you're coming back up to celebrate your seven-figure milestones. You hit those milestones, and you suddenly feel like a lot is possible, and I'm so excited for this year. I really uh yeah, just thank you. Amazing. Oh yeah. All right. I hope I hope that's good Friday motivation for everyone to keep writing, keep building, keep the long view, just keep putting things out there, data points into the world. I'm glad this was helpful. Love seeing all the the reactions in the chat, the the jaws on the floor at some of these. It's good. It's really good stuff. So we'll distribute all this, and uh that's it for today. Hope this was helpful for y'all. Tommy, thanks again for putting this presentation together, man. Really appreciate it, dude. Thanks, guys.