How Dan Koe Built A Successful One-Person Business From Scratch Writing Online

All right, let's kick it off, folks. Welcome. We've got Danko of Modern Mastery. He's got his hands in a ton of different things. We're going to dig into basically his entire one-person business model: the way he thinks about generating traffic, building relationships with that traffic, kind of nurturing things, his offer stack, where he sees things coming.

If you haven't heard of Dan and his background, I encourage you to just subscribe to his podcast and go listen to some of his prior episodes. We're going to save that because I think he's talked about it a ton, and I'm—I've heard it enough where I want to go in and hear what you're doing now, what you're up to now, and how you're thinking about things. So Dan, thanks for joining us. Uh, this is going to be a good one. I'm excited, man.

Thanks for having me, too.

All right, so let's dig into it. Let's start with traffic. I think the way we want to structure this conversation is traffic, nurture, offers. You've done a lot on Twitter, obviously. I think you've done some cool stuff on Instagram. You've recently started to write on LinkedIn as well. Talk us through the evolution of your traffic strategy and then what it is right now, today.

Okay, so starting out, I didn't have any strategy. It was just like I saw other people posting things that I knew that I could post about because I'd been reading and talking about it for a long time, building my freelancing business, whatever it may be. And so I just started posting, right? And then that's when I started actually learning about Twitter as a whole and learning how to drive traffic and other things like that. But it—there was zero strategy to it at the beginning. I wrote threads here and there, just when I felt like it. And aside from that, it was just tweets and then plugging under the tweet—nothing crazy at all.

And then after that, it—it started to turn into more scheduled and dedicated and targeted threads to lead to either my lead magnet, which at the time was the Power Planner. So that one was easy to structure targeted threads around because it—the—the planner itself holds so much depth to it where it's like I could talk about structuring your vision for the future or dissect like learning how to set goals and other things like that. And I also had my web design product at the time, so I would also write threads around that. So my traffic strategy at that time pretty much revolved around breaking down the big ideas or the pillars of the products that I had available and just writing about those and sending them to a system related to pretty much the theory that I was writing.

So that's when I started to develop kind of a whole—talk about your theories or your philosophies or the big ideas behind things and then either sell or give away a structured system or process for doing that. So I started to think of content creation in general as like the scientific process where I'm kind of observing things in real life, noting them down, forming my own hypothesis, which in this case would be like my own perspective on that given subject, and then I would write about it, start to understand it a bit more, and test certain processes in my life. So for the planner, the process in that case is creating a vision for your future, breaking it down into goals, setting priority tasks. And that's what really helped me uh become more productive. And at that time, the—the planner holds a lot of value, so then I can talk about all of my theories and big ideas that I had been developing throughout that entire time and lead them into the process or the system that would help them implement that. So it's like Alex Hormozy says, where it's like, give away information, sell implementation.

And so that started on Twitter. I started to get more into long-form writing, and then the newsletter came into play a bit late. I had always been—um, I always had a newsletter; I was always getting like emails, but I rarely ever sent emails, which wasn't the best move because it just led to a lot of inactive subscribers; they weren't getting the emails. And then over time, I started to write those more consistently, and at the bottom of my threads, so that I was already writing or my tweets, I would plug the newsletter and get more people in there. And that started to form or make connections of like, okay, how can I streamline this a bit more? Because now I'm writing threads and an email and tweets and all this other stuff, and none of them are leading into one another. It's more so I'm generating ideas; I'm writing an email on one business topic this week and then writing a thread on a self-improvement topic the next week, and it just didn't work. It—it's like there's a problem here; I need to solve it; I need to create a process around this in order to make it better. And so over time, it's—it's became very cohesive.

Do you have any questions before like I can start diving into the entire content ecosystem and like how I structure things now?

Yeah, here, let's do that. I think it's just worth putting two pins on two of the things you said that listeners, watchers can immediately take away. And the first is you've got your start and your initial traction simply experimenting in your own life and distilling your learnings for the people behind you. And I think that a lot of people on their creative journeys would look at where you were at the time and potentially think, "I'm not an expert in any of these things; I can't go write about productivity or health or whatever it is because I haven't done anything," whereas you took the very simple thing we talked about in Ship 30, which is write about your right to yourself two years ago, right? So you learned about how to focus, how to, you know, get your body in shape, how to set goals, how to set a mission, right? All these things that you are solving as a personal problem on your own exploration and then sharing that with the people behind you. And lo and behold, the scale of the internet guarantees there are a ton of people who want to learn about those things that are in the exact same spot as you.

100%. That sounds kind of like cohesive of what you've done.

Yes. So I'm sure you have like your own names that you've coined for it. I call it the experience model, and it's pretty much—I'm very—so—so—so big on getting a first iteration out immediately. It doesn't—you don't have to sell it; you don't have to do anything. If it's like a first iteration in the form of a newsletter and just writing things out and getting something out there, getting your thoughts right now out there, and then you can iterate on top of that. But um, what you said makes me—it makes me think of like angles, right? Because it—I feel like a lot of people, they'll think, "Oh, I'm not an expert on a subject; like I can't write a thread on like I made 50 million dollars this month; here's the seven things I learned." That's just one angle. Talking about the same concept, it's like the what, how, why. The—the what is the actual topic you're talking about, but the how is—is all the same; it's going to be the same whether it's positioned as like the hook is positioned as, "I made 50 million dollars this month; here's how," you can say, "I studied—I—I spent 156 hours studying productivity; here's the seven big ideas that I learned," and that could be the same exact how. And then when you come back in the future with results, then your hook just gets stronger and stronger, and your authority gets stronger and stronger. So as a beginner, you can talk about anything you want; it just depends on how you actually position what you're saying. We—the way we describe this is if you are thinking you aren't an expert in something, you're just lacking specificity, right? Because you are an expert in whatever it is you have done and developed. Yes, maybe you haven't made 50 million dollars, but I'm an expert right now on living in Miami for two weeks. I've been living in Miami for two weeks, which means I could write a ton about things to do in your first two weeks in Miami, things not to do, where to go, where to live, what I expected versus what actually happened, right? Could I go and write the ultimate guide to living in Miami? No. And I wouldn't go out and try that. And a lot of people will think, "I can't write anything until I could write the ultimate guide to living in Miami." No. You are an expert in a ton of different things, and that's what we try to help unlock with—look back over the last two years; what problems have you solved, hobbies have you created? Uh, we call it the two-year test, but exactly everyone's kind of got their own framework. So that's one thing I just wanted to kind of put a pin on and dig into a little bit more.

The second one, which is you had your product, the Power Planner, and the way you were driving more traffic to it was simply breaking down different parts of it and giving it away for free, right? Now I think the Power Planner you eventually made free, but it was a paid product at the time, right? A physical product. And I—I think a lot of people go, "I have this thing; how do I get people to—to come to it?" And it's like, just slice and dice all the different parts of it, give it away for free. People are paying for you bringing it all together for them, right? There's paying because you save them time versus any new information. All the information is out there for pretty much every course, every way of learning something. What they're paying for is the convenience. And when you realize that, it's like, "Hey, if you enjoy this, you'll really like the PowerPoint where I talk about dozens of these things."

Yeah. And that brings up another important thing because I'm writing a book right now, and it's—it's like a big goal or dream of mine to do that, and I never thought I would be able to actually do that until I started outlining it, right? Just outlining it, not even writing it, and then that gave me ideas for like what to write in it, and I began writing it out or at least developing the ideas in my newsletter or in threads, right? So if in terms of like a lead magnet or even a product, if you just outline it, that will spark ideas to start building. So you can start building authority in that space, start developing your own ideas, iterating on them. And if you wanted to, you could quite literally write out sections of the ebook in the newsletter, eventually piece it together into like a free ebook, let's say, and then when you continue writing on those, now you have space to create on top of those ideas, write better threads and drive massive traffic to that lead magnet.

Cool. We talked about that. You want to expand on that a little bit—the lean writing method of—you think every single book is just a collection of atomic essays at this point?

Yeah, the—I mean, I love telling people that it took me four years to write my first book, in four months to write my second. Because the first time you go through that process—it sounds like Dan, you—you've kind of got it figured out because you've spent so much time creating content, but most people think of books or even courses as like this giant project that you have to do linearly. So you're like, "I write the first chapter, and then I write the second chapter, and then I write the third chapter," and—and it feels like you're pushing a boulder up a hill. In reality, what you want is you want to—you want to work in the opposite direction. You want to start with, "What are all the things that I want in this book? Just what are all the things that I want to say?" And then you go down the list, "All right, well, I want to say this. Now what are all the little points that I want to include inside there? Then the next main point, what are all the little points I want to include inside there?" And so you don't actually even start writing until you get all the ideas out, and then you start going, "Okay, now where do I want these to go? And what do I—how do I want to arrange it?" But—and then the lean writing thing is you can mitigate so much of your risk. Dan, I'm sure consciously or subconsciously you're doing this: you tweet a hundred things, you know three of them perform really well; those three should probably be chapters, or those three should be main points, right? Because you already have data that says that's what the person's looking for, you know? And we have tons of examples of, you know, most people don't know that Malcolm Gladwell's book, uh—"The Tipping Point"—started as an article, you know, or that Mark Manson's "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a [ __ ]" started as a blog post, you know? There's all of these examples where you start small and then you just build and expand over time. I'm curious, Dan, have you been doing that consciously?

Consciously? Yeah, yeah. It's always like testing because that—that's part of the ecosystem as well, because my tweets—I mean, my Instagram posts are just tweets like copy-pasted over, and they're usually the best ones. So my Instagram is pretty much like just iterate on these ideas, only talk about these all the time, then good to go. Yeah, and—yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say from here, I'd love to just dig into that cohesive content strategy that you've kind of circled around, right? So having the newsletter, you do such a good job squeezing out all the juice while also creating like this cohesive, you know—I—the pillar newsletter, I have a thread about it, I made a YouTube video, I have tweets that talk about the little things. So why don't you just walk people through uh that system?

Yes, so it all starts with an outline again, and specifically for the newsletter, and I—it took me a long, long time to realize this, but like the importance of a newsletter—it's extremely important because those are some of your dedicated fans; that's how you nurture the people that want that deeper information. Like they subscribe for a reason; they downloaded your product for a reason; you should give them a lot of attention. And so that's where it all starts for me. At the very beginning of the week, I will choose a topic, so whether it be from a tweet that did well or just an idea that sparked when I was consuming other information, like a YouTube video or a Medium article, something like that—an idea that I know will do well and that I can write about—and I'll take that, and I have an outline in Notion, right? So at the top, it's like a quick capture area, and then another section where it talks about it—pretty much dissects everything I would need to write the newsletter: the topic itself, the big idea, the problems surrounding that idea, the benefits of overcoming those problems, um, objections to overcoming those problems, so kind of like the outline of what would be a persuasive writing framework. And then I'll outline the key points, so the sections that I think would help explain that article the best or that topic the best. And I do that at the start of the week because then throughout the week, I've realized that I can really consume anything relating to my interests, and it will give me an idea that allows me to attack that topic from a very unique angle and start to piece together a story or a new perspective that, in my eyes, makes my newsletter stand out from others. While I can—mine's very long-form; some people uh enjoy like the short, punchy bullet list types. And so that's how I do mine. And throughout this entire time, throughout the entire week of like piecing together and writing this newsletter, which I usually do like an hour or two in the morning, I dedicate only to writing and fleshing out the newsletter, I keep in mind potential tweets, threads, or other pieces of content that can stem from that. So as I'm writing something, if like a tweet idea comes to mind, I'll pretty much write out the tweet in the newsletter itself because it's short, punchy, and just a good way of writing, and then I'll copy-paste that somewhere else so I can refine it later and actually schedule it as a tweet. And then it's a—it's a long process, but a week-long process. But then from the newsletter, I take that and I post it to my blog. Now Substack or Revue or some other areas allow you to—it backlogs the newsletters for you, but this is a crucial step—then we'll discuss this soon—is I upload it to my blog, structure it, send the newsletter out, and then the next week I have that—that becomes a YouTube script. So that's another thing I keep in mind when I'm actually writing it is like, okay, how—at the very intro, how can I make this so it like hooks people in and makes them want to watch and continue watching? How am I going to guide them through the video? Maybe note some areas where good B-roll would go in, and then I'll record the video. And this just happens throughout the week—usually on Tuesdays, I'll block off an hour. And since it's there in my hand, I just quite literally look over the first section of the newsletter, look at the camera, and then pretty much say it how I would say it, and it takes about an hour to record a decent YouTube video that way. And now from that, I also record a podcast, but the podcast is kind of different, differentiated in where I'm just going over those topics and talking about what comes to mind, right? So now I have content on most long-form platforms: a podcast, YouTube, newsletter, and blog that are all slightly different and all kind of dissecting that topic and giving a very uh like fleshed-out perspective to help people understand it more, right? So there's just subtle nuances that makes it feel—it makes me feel better because I'm not just copy-pasting like everywhere and just reading off of it. And so now I can either use all of that for short-form content inspiration and just writing tweets or whatever it may be. But one other thing I missed because it's—it's a lot, but inside the newsletter as well, you're—you're linking relevant offers or resources that would help them, right? So that's—that's also a crucial step. And then in the newsletter, I give an exclusive like, "Join Modern Mastery for five dollars" to them only, right? So that's on the newsletter and in the blog. And now as I—every single day when my tweets are going out, I'll come in at a specific time, and I will plug a relevant newsletter under it. So I'm not really asking people to subscribe to the newsletter; I'm more so saying, "You can read more about this topic here," and there's a newsletter opt-in at the very top with a strong call to action. And that's been bringing me like two to four hundred subscribers a day just from plugging the articles themselves. And that's how I make sales as well; I don't necessarily have to promote on the timeline. If I'm just plugging a relevant article under my tweets every single day, the—the sales just come in without me trying to sell. And then from—so that's like the main trickle-down approach to getting ideas for like breaking it all down. And then in terms of everything else, I'm—I've become—tweet writing has become second nature where I'm just writing them all the time on my walks; like it—it just happens, right? And so from that, I'll take my best tweets and post them onto Instagram. I use Tweetpic, but you can just screenshot them, make them look nice, and pop them over there. [Music] And from there, I can also take the tweets and expand on them on LinkedIn. And then throughout that entire time, so whether it be on LinkedIn and in a comment there, I'm doing the same thing; I'm leading them to my newsletter. Or on Instagram, I'll have like a caption, and then at the bottom I'll be like, "Go find the"—since Instagram is kind of weird with links—"Go find this newsletter; here's exactly where you find it." I'm very specific with that, or it's—"I just posted a story about this; you can find the link there," and so on. All platforms, I'm just driving traffic to deeper articles that nurture, sell, and get newsletter subscribers in one. And now I missed a few things there since this is a long process—is that one thing that has changed the game for me in terms of actually writing the newsletter and fleshing out the idea is visualizing it. So that's a big step when I'm actually outlining things—is I take just a notebook and I'll start drawing out like certain concepts that—like I'll just draw things out at first. It's like if I—um, like I wrote my story—my—my last article two articles ago was like my story; I came back and rewrote it, and I took like a lesson from there and created a visual out of it, kind of like Jack Butcher's, where it's like, "Nothing happens, and then everything happens," because it kind of describes the entire journey. And then that adds a bit of flair to the newsletter as well because I can include that visual in there. And then that also helps me diversify or like—it makes it so my Instagram feed isn't just all tweets, right? There's some cool visuals here and there, and it just looks a lot nicer. And the visuals are much more attention-grabbing than let's say just a basic Unsplash picture as like a featured image. So when I'm plugging the newsletter, people are liking and retweeting it just because the visual looks cool, I'm assuming, and more people click through because it's just a cool visual, right? And then eventually those could probably be taken and turned into a thread on like, "10 visuals that'll change your life" or something, and they have a lot of depth behind them, right? And I can link the relevant newsletters and go crazy with that. So the—the newsletter process is pretty much hitting and dissecting the topic in every single way I can, whether it be written form, visual form, spoken form and podcast, uh, storytelling form and YouTube videos, right? I'm trying to knock out every single thing in one newsletter, and that gives me so much more firepower throughout this entire like content ecosystem.

Yeah, there's—there's something I want to double-click on here that I think is really important—is it's the no-sell sell. Yeah. So—so—so often people think, "In order to get people to subscribe to my newsletter, I need to literally tweet, 'Subscribe to my newsletter'," right? Or, "In order to sell my product, I need to send some fancy marketing email that says, 'Here's why you should buy my product.'" In reality, 99% of the time you're doing the no-sell sell, which is, "Hey, I wrote this thing, and also if you want to go down the rabbit hole, well, you know, I did a whole topic over here; it's—it's here if you want it," right? "Oh, do you want all of these in your inbox? Well, it's here if you want it," you know? "Were you thinking of buying a course that was going to help you with this? Well, here—it's—it's here if you want it," right? And—and that's the right way of approaching it—is you write the thing, and then you just subtly direct people to like—and this other thing is here if you want it. And so it sounds like Dan, so much of what you're doing is just—"I know what I'm giving people that's valuable, and oh, by the way, if you want to go down the rabbit hole, it's here if you want it," right? And that's why I stress like in—in my system here, because this may not apply to other people that are doing it a bit differently—I stress like I—the newsletter has to be absolutely amazing. Like I have to make it extremely high quality because that's where most of my conversions, whether it be email subscribers or sales, come from, and then I don't have to worry about like pushing a hard sell.

Yeah, my—I have a couple takeaways. The first is what you just said of—"Everything starts with, 'I'm going to write a damn good newsletter every week,' and things are going to take care of themselves from there." The entire system being based around—"I'm going to put something out there that I know every reader is going to find valuable; everything else takes care of itself." What I—

Also, like, is this newsletter, podcast, video, form, blog post? What you said that stuck out was, “I am making the relevant changes to each one that make it more native to that form.” So, video, I’m thinking about how to guide the reader more through a video format. Podcast, I’m, you know, potentially riffing different directions, like you’re intentional about the way the reader or the listener, the consumer, is going to interact with it.

My question on this is, this is a somewhat complex system. So first, I think we have a lot of beginners listening to this. You’ve been doing this for a long time; you know how to think in this structured way. I think a lot of people might have heard what you just said and said, “Oh my gosh, I can’t even think that I could do that.” So if you were to simplify it, I would say it’s: you have a newsletter that’s really high quality; you extract some short-form content from that. And if you only did that, where it’s, “Hey, I write a high-quality newsletter every week; I turn that into a Twitter thread that expands on maybe one of the ideas in that,” and then I have some tweets such that there’s a cohesive… if I tweet that out, I can then say, “Hey, if you want a deeper dive, check out my newsletter.” And if you only have those two things, on just those two platforms, and you did that every single week for a year, you are going to have success. So I just want to drive that home because I, I know there’s people like, “There’s no way I could do all that,” and you shouldn’t, you should not do all that in the beginning, right? You’re more advanced; you have the ability to do that. So I just wanted to kind of drive that point home.

So before we get into the offers, I want to just ask, do you think you’re going to be able to stick to this process for a year? Because I hear it and I go, “That’s a lot of work,” right? That’s a lot to do every single week, a lot of platforms, there’s management, and not that you would spread yourself too thin, but the way I am trying to engineer our systems, which 30 right now, is, “Can we do this every week for a year?” 100. And so I think that there’s a lot of times with a system where you might do it for 12 weeks and then say, “You know what, the most exhausting part about this is the podcast; turns out that actually has the lowest readership or the lowest listenership,” I’m gonna axe that, and that’s okay, right? I think most or a lot of people will make a mistake; is they build up a complex system first, which is sometimes a mistake, but I actually think it’s okay to throw a lot out there from the beginning, knowing you’re gonna trim the fat. But I think where people go wrong is they create a complex system, they can’t stick to it, and then they stop the whole thing, right? Versus iterating and say, “Hey, I took a lot on with this; turns out the video and podcast aren’t doing too much; I’m going to go back to just the newsletter, turn that into a blog post, and write threads on it,” right? So how do you think about potentially iterating on this process, or what, what’s your take, you know, five, six weeks into it?

Yeah, uh, you’re speaking my language because I’m, the podcast is… it’s not overwhelming, right? It’s gotten to the point where I could probably get all of this done in two hours in my morning, right? I could probably knock out the newsletter as a whole in three days, two hours at a time, and that’s like, that’s a lot of time, right? If I’m deeply focused and I have inspiration to pull from, and I’m consistently consuming things on my walks—that’s another very big pillar that goes unnoticed in a sense—as walks and idea generation, and quite literally outlining and writing the newsletter as I’m walking and adding ideas in there. But in terms of the podcast, it’s, it’s just… it’s something that I don’t really enjoy doing. It’s mostly enjoyment-based to me; if I really enjoy something, then I could probably spend five, six hours a day doing it with no problem at all. But the podcast itself, I’ve cons… I’ve changed it so many times where like, first it was guests, and then it was solo, and just uh, answering questions from the Discord, and then it was straight from uh, the newsletter and going off of the ideas there. And now, rather than axing it, I want to fit it in. And so my thought process now is pulling inspiration from like Naval’s podcast, where it’s just two minutes, right? So I could go over the big main ideas of the newsletter very quick in a podcast episode and just see how that does. And then if that ends up not doing very well, then consider axing it and just focusing in on the things that are really moving levers. But as a whole, it’s fairly sustainable right now, mainly because I have been like systemizing every aspect of it over these three years of doing this. So that’s kind of the… I have a major advantage there where it’s like, I’ve been practicing this for so long that now it’s like that entire process is kind of intuitive; like I can go into Figma and whip up a graphic in 20 minutes just because I have the idea in mind and know exactly how to do it. And it’s the same with the newsletter; like I’ve been consuming and kind of storing and taking notes and building that second brain of information where all of the topics in the newsletter are pretty much the same ideas just under a different perspective; like I talk about uh, survival, spirituality, philosophical concept, and start to like paint a picture around a specific topic where when I’m talking about uh… I called it “How to create a better life for yourself,” and it was pretty much, “Craft a vision for your future, break it down into goals,” etc., etc., and that could… that alone is used in like so many different sections of the newsletters where now I have these philosophies and big ideas that I can piece together in the newsletter and like create and just hammer those ideas into people’s heads. And then those ideas are what I’m known for, and I’ve like found people starting to talk about them and tagged me in them on Twitter. So that’s another big thing is like developing these… when I said originally at the very start how I kind of treat it as the scientific process of having like a theory or a hypothesis or a philosophy on whatever it is, the big idea that you have, and processes to go along with that. Once you develop kind of a database of those things, you just piece them together based on any topic. I could talk about vision, goals, whatever, for uh, building a personal brand, right? It’s branding in a sense where you have a vision; like brands have a vision, brands have a mission, brands have goals, and I could talk about it from so many different angles. And so it’s kind of intuitive at this point where it’s like, okay, this theory or this process works perfectly in explaining this topic, and I just piece those together.

So what I love about this is you are… you’re generating traffic on your different sources; you are nurturing a strong relationship where… I mean, I listen to your podcast; I feel like I grow closer to you as a friend when I listen to it because we just… it’s like you’re having a conversation, right? I watch your YouTube; I, I feel like you do a great job where someone learns about Dan Coe and then they’re immediately friends with them because they hear him, they get to see him, they get the visuals, all that. Let’s move into offers where you have this traffic, you have people who are building a relationship with you, what can they buy from you right now? How do you think about what value that delivers to them and the way you’re thinking about growing um, your one-person business right now?

Yes, so this has been like a huge process of iteration; like I’ve probably built out five, five to eight products and just like continued like bundling them and like building on top of them. And so from like an original bundle of three courses, that’s how Modern Mastery was born. It’s like all of these make sense, but I don’t really like having to like either create an email funnel and sequence to continue like sales of a static price product. And so that’s why I eventually move towards the cohort model and like the community model is because it’s evergreen in a sense where Modern Mastery, it’s a subscription-based thing, so I don’t have to worry if I forget to promote for a week or something. And then for a cohort, it’s the same as a course in a sense, but it’s… it’s like every two, three months you have the potential of what would be like a product launch. Because if it’s a static product, you’re just like… the majority of your income is going to be made in the product launch if it’s done right, and then you have to create systems to continuously sell that product. And so you wanted to know what was the second part of the question; just went off… I just wanted to overview. So we have Modern Mastery; I’d love to know kind of the breakdown of how many people are in it monthly, um, average cost, like how you think about people within that potentially joining the cohort. And then I know you’ve recently kind of built this out, so it’s, it’s in its earlier stages, but just walk through the way someone can kind of ascend up your value ladder right now.

Okay, so first it starts with the newsletter and the lead magnets. The, the lead magnet, uh, “Seven Days to the Creative Process” lead magnet is like crucial um, in kind of educating people to the point of joining Modern Mastery or Digital Economics. And can you explain what the seven days of creative genius is and like where that leads people at the end, how much it costs, just if anyone’s unfamiliar, because I think it will add context to the way you’re thinking about creating your personal… 100. So uh, it is pretty much the idea generation aspect of the content ecosystem that we talked about. So it’s kind of like a simplified and dumbed-down “build a second brain in Notion” type deal. So it’s like, “Here’s how you consume information, here’s how you take notes in this specific place and Notion, here’s a template for kind of dissecting that idea and making it your own,” and it’s not targeted at content creators, it’s targeted at creatives and people that just want to either be more creative or get into this stuff and understand the process that goes behind it. And so in that lead magnet, while it’s pretty much a full course like walking people through that, and then at the end it’s like, “Here’s what you can use this for,” like a bonus section where it’s like, “You can use this to write an article, you can use this to write content, here’s some tips on how you would do that, here’s like some ways to monetize,” right? Giving them ideas and then including… so I lied originally about the discount being only available to the newsletter; there is the five-dollar join Modern Mastery in at the end of the lead magnet itself. And so once people kind of believe like, “Oh, I can do something with this,” then they’re much more likely to understand uh, and join Modern Mastery. So that’s kind of the first step, and I… and when I talk about creativity in the newsletters, that’s when I plug the lead magnet. So like the traditional way of doing it would be to plug the lead magnet under your tweets or in your threads, which I do sometimes, but a lot of the time it’s just in the newsletters to give people another level deeper into all of that stuff and then go into Modern Mastery. And so you have questions about that; I can go into Modern Mastery.

No, that that makes perfect sense. So I think from there it makes sense to explain what Modern Mastery does, how it helps people, um, because that will give further context to your higher-ticket offer, which is Digital Economics.

Yes, so Modern Mastery is… and this is kind of the way I’ve been going about products is something that not only helps me now but would have been what I wanted at like two years ago, right? As you guys said, like something that would get me to this level now. And so uh, in this case, it’s everything. Now a lot of people don’t recommend like doing this, but Modern Mastery is like, “Okay, I just want to do this; this is a passion project at this point, and I’m going to include everything,” whether it be health and fitness, philosophy and spirituality, business, social media growth, everything that I’ve done pretty much and can start documenting and having a consistent way of like having a scheduled way to pull in an income in a sense. And so when people join Modern Mastery, it’s a community; they get access to both the Circle platform, which is kind of like a paid blog in a sense, but it’s very actionable, very straightforward, something you would pay for. And they also get access to the Discord community, so they can ask questions, interact with others; there’s some cool stuff in there; we have challenges, um, and like a daily check-in for like getting one percent better every day and like listing out what you did to get one percent better every day. And the… when… when they join, they go through the onboarding process because it’s a lot; it is a… it’s just grown like to be a behemoth now; there’s way too much information that if I were to just put people in there, they’d have no idea what to do and they just quit. So there is the onboarding letter which tells them exactly how to use it and exactly like where to go when they need to do specific things. And then they’re also entered into a buyer’s journey email sequence where they get the welcome message and then a few days later it’s like, “Hey, these would be the first things you should go through,” and those are uh, courses for like the fundamentals of social media, uh, fundamentals of like freelancing or like landing clients in this case and understanding that more. And then there’s Joey also has a course in there about productivity. So we have like beginner-level courses on most of the pillars that we talk about in Modern Mastery. And then from that they also get emails on like the… my favorite articles that have been posted there, uh, reminders to either check in for the challenge in Discord or just ask a question and really guiding them through it and like easing them into the community until they understand every facet of it. So it’s like… it’s indoctrination to an extent where that’s how you use the community and it kind of… it starts to become a part of their lives, right? Because I structured it… I structured a lot of the Discord based off of the Power Planner because as I said like this isn’t… Modern Mastery is an iteration of everything before it, so it’s like, “How can I bake this in?” And so every month there’s an automated reminder to set your goals for that month and write them down and start talking with other people about the goals; there’s uh, as I said, like the daily check-in of like, “What did you do to get one percent better every day?” And those are usually like the priority tasks that stem from the goals, um, and other things like that. So there’s a lot… does that answer the question?

No, I mean, it’s spot on. I’m so… I’m a Modern Master member; I think the Circle’s great; I think the Discord… Discord kind of uh, intimidates me, so I don’t go… not not your Discord in particular, but like I’m a boomer and like I get a Discord and I kind of just freak out a little bit and I gotta shut the app because there’s just so much going on.

You can spread your focus.

Yeah, yeah. So it’s… it’s a… there’s… there’s pros and cons. I think Circle’s doing a good job now rolling out new features with live chats and things because I think in the long run it’s better to have all those kind of in one… in one platform. So how many people are in Modern Mastery? Uh, we’ve been hovering around a thousand for a while because the… the thing with uh… one… I’m… I just haven’t gotten around to like paying attention to numbers very much; like I just don’t care at this point. And so I don’t know churn rate, but one thing I do know is that those special offers that people run where it’s like, oh, uh, when I had like an anniversary sale, right, ton of new members inside, but that’s just pushing a lot of people like with scarcity tactics into it, and then a lot of them just… sure… cancel, and yeah, they churn right away. And so we’ve been hovering around a thousand, but since I’ve implemented like the content ecosystem and gotten into the flow of that, it’s been growing like very sustainably, so I’m just doubling down on that now.

Awesome. And so of course within that community there’s going to be a group of people who want more access to you, more direct learning from you, and this is Bond Digital Economics, which I think is a tremendous name; we talk about digital writing, digital business, all that; I think it’s a… it’s an awesome name. I think you own digital.economics, right?

No, I tried to find that one; it’s digitaleconomics.school; that’s what it is. Because right when I saw that, I looked up digitalwriting.school and it’s taken, um, because I… I wanna… I want that domain. So uh, if anyone’s squatting on that because they think we’re gonna buy it, hit us up, but… talk to us… all right, talk to us about Digital Economics. Every time I say that word, I… I’m like, “Damn, that is a cool name.” So great, talk us through, you know, what does it do, how does it help people, what is the… the overarching goal? You said it’s a live cohort-based course; have you had any cohorts yet? Where you at on that process?

Yes, so the… another reason behind creating Modern Mastery is like… I’ve… I’ve always had the big goal of like… get… I’ve always gravitated towards master classes as opposed to like a very uh, niche product that solves one problem, and they… that has very much place in uh, like those sell well, those are amazing products, but for some reason like I’m just stubborn, and it’s like, I want to give away everything that it takes in one single product. And so Modern Mastery was kind of my way of doing that where it’s like, I can start to write all of these things out in the articles and just build this database where it’s the go-to place for everything self-improvement and business, life and business pretty much. And then Digital Economics, from that, is the systems I’ve developed, the specific processes for every single aspect of business. So the… there’s two tiers; there’s the Bachelor’s degree because I’m treating it as like a modern school, so there’s a Bachelor’s degree and then there’s the Master’s degree. And the Bachelor’s degree is all about um, branding and content, right? So growing an audience in a sense in a very streamlined way that gives people a lot of clarity and gives people things to focus on, and that’s all built around like Notion systems. So they have a way… like the Notion system itself is pretty much their entire dashboard as a creator to be productive and consistently put out content, generate ideas, uh, go through that creative process where they’re writing down their notes, like ideas that come to mind, building their second brain in there, and then eventually turning it into articles and breaking it all down into stuff. And so that’s what helps me um, like manage this stuff and make it as sustainable as I possibly can. And so the Bachelor’s degree is walking people through that because I’ve grown to learn… originally I was very heavy on like, “People just want to make money, so I’m going to teach them how to make money,” and go that angle, right? But that was not the case at all after like two years of doing that, and I was neglecting a very, very big part of my audience where they just wanted to learn the skills related to that, right? I always thought like, “There has to be a monetary value tied to this product in order for it to sell; I have to promise something quantifiable and all of this other stuff,” which there’s merit in that and you should get as close to that as you can, but that’s what made me start Digital Economics is like, “I need to introduce people to this process and show them that it is possible and have them actually like start building something” to lead into the Master’s degree, which is like all monetization; it’s pretty much like starting a service business, uh, learning how to DM people, offering free help to them or even slightly paid help; there’s a lot of nuance to it, but getting results that way, starting to develop your processes and your systems, eventually charging more, uh, possibly going the route of productizing and then like building out buyer’s journey sequences and all of these other things, like diving deep into promotions and how to promote correctly and all of that other stuff. So that’s pretty much it; it’s like zero to 100, the skill set you need to build a digital business, which is the foundation of learning business in the real world is to understand economics. And so the foundation of building a business in the digital world is to understand the digital economics, which makes a lot of sense. And maybe you can add that to your landing page because that’s the way I’ve internalized it, right? It’s like there’s a core set of skills that you need if you’re gonna build this business out. I think a lot of people get caught in… what I hope is the angle of your course is like, “We’re gonna learn this by… by the end you’re going to have some kind of digital business,” right? Versus, “I’m gonna go read all these books and think I’m making progress,” versus, “Hey, the goal here is to start a digital business by the end of this, and we’re going to teach you the skills such that you are your own bottleneck,” right? You can’t launch this until you understand how to write a landing page, so instead of going and reading a bunch of stuff on how to write a landing page, we’re like, “You have to build this landing page out, so now we have to learn it,” right? So this action-oriented learning, we call it “just in time” versus “just in case,” right? It’s learning only when you have skin in the game on a project that you’re working on. So that makes a lot of sense to me.

Cool. You have any questions, thoughts? I just… I want to emphasize that last point; I think that’s really fascinating where… so much of the world of like digital entrepreneurship, um, inherently the conversation always comes back to, “How do you make money?” And that… that is important, and obviously that is a huge part of it, but I… to me that’s the most interesting thing that you’ve shared here, Dan, is like, there is a large number of people who are paying to learn skills that they measure the value differently, you know? Yeah, they might make money from them, but they also might help them connect with more people, or they might help them get promoted at work, or they might help them, you know, like secure a speaking opportunity, and that means more to them than making more money. And there’s this conversation… just to really put it into context, like what we’re doing here is the next generation of education; like this conversation, it is the same exact thing as sitting in a college class; it’s the same exact thing; it’s just instead of us going and getting degrees in education and learning how to, you know, teach people, we just took it upon ourselves and gave ourselves the permission, right? So I think it is really interesting to think about if we’re all learning from each other on the internet; yes, some people’s ambitions is to use that through an entrepreneurial lens, but a lot of people just go, “I can’t afford college; college didn’t work for me; I don’t have the college that I want to in my area,” right? There’s just a lot of value in learning in and of itself. So I just… I love that you shared that; I think that’s awesome. That’s… that’s exactly… like that was the… I guess breakthrough that I needed to actually start building it out; like once I made that connection of like, “Oh yeah, like this is pretty much like the new college,” and that’s somewhat included in the landing page; that’s like somewhat of the angle is like, “Four-year degrees are out; this is in,” and uh, that’s what made it click; I’m like, “That’s perfect,” and so just built it out.

Launched it, yeah, pretty quick. It's awesome. There's definitely some, some really cool takeaways here for everyone. And again, I hope the, the biggest takeaway is you just start, start on the journey, start experimenting, start sharing things, double down on what works.

You know, Dan, how long have you been at this? I assume you're not an overnight success story.

No, uh, Twitter or like social media in general, uh, three years, closing in on three years. And then freelancing and other stuff before that, total journey is like five years.

Yeah, so hey everyone, take it to heart. You know, it doesn't, that Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will your whole entire, you know, digital business, digital presence, additional thought leadership, all of that. So thanks for joining us, Dan.

Yeah, this was, this was great. And exactly what I want to do more of is have people like you on, and just talk through traffic, nurture, offers. How are you thinking about generating attention, capturing attention, keeping attention, monetizing attention, delivering value? And there's a ton here I think people can immediately apply. I know I've got a bunch of good notes. So throw some love in the chat for Dan, uh, say thanks, Dan. Where can the people find you, go learn more about MMHQ, your newsletter, Twitter? Where do you want to send the folks?

Yes, first off, thanks for having me, guys. This is, this is cool. I really like diving into this. I, I love answering questions because it just reveals so many blind spots. Like I have a lot of ideas I'm going to write down right after this. But, uh, the Danko on really anything, YouTube, whatever, it Dan co can probably be searched anywhere. Um, but yeah, Modern Masteries, the community, Digital Economics is the cohort I would recommend starting with, the seven days to genius ideas lead magnet that I have. And now you know all of my secrets, so I'm gonna try and sell you on something in there, but it's very useful. I put a lot of effort into like that free information.

It's seven days to genius ideas, right?

Oh, nice. And you use the headline a little rewrite, world jamming there you go, 10x your creative output. Awesome.

All right, Dan, this has been great. Uh, I think we will put a pin in this one, to have a recap in a year or so from now, or recap all the growth and cool stuff that's going on. So appreciate you taking the time. I appreciate you listeners, watchers, anyone for diving into this one, and we'll see you on the next episode.