I've been writing online for more than 10 years. Here's why I think the entire content creation ecosystem is just getting started 🧵👇
One of the most common questions aspiring content creators ask is, "Am I too late?"
No, and here's why:
Every year, new "classes" of content creators are born, both on new platforms (TikTok), but also on "legacy" platforms (Twitter, YouTube, etc.).
The reason is two-fold:
1. Content creation is HARD. And every year, older "classes" of creators either reach their goals and/or burn out.
2. Content creation is easy (low barrier to entry), and every year, new "classes" of creators try their hand at the game.
This creates a constant cycle of old-creators-out, new-creators-in.
Very few daily creators keep creating daily after 3, 4, 5 years in a row. Most reach a certain goal (status/$$$) and then change games.
They stop grinding out content and start a company, investing, etc.
This leaves an "attention window" open for a lot of audience members.
Their favorite creator has stopped, or taken a break, which means they need to look elsewhere for the "next" creator to pay attention to.
Second, new classes of creators almost always end up creating new categories of content.
Ex: it's very hard (if not impossible) to start a podcast with the goal of building a bigger/better podcast than, say, @TimFerrissShow
So new podcasters create & target dif niches.
When these new niches are created, this opens up even MORE opportunity for new creators to try to niche down further and create new subcategories.
Ex: TikTok dances. The category of "TikTok dancer" didn't exist 5 years ago.
Today? Hundreds of thousands of creators.
The question, "Am I too late?" is the wrong question to ask.
A better question is, "What new category can I create?"
If you set out to compete against a legacy creator who has already created, dominated, and defended his/her category of content, then yes, you're too late.
But if you set out to create a NEW and DIFFERENT content category for yourself, then no, you're never too late.
If your preferred method of content creation is writing, check out my newsletter, Daily Writing Habits.
🚢 Atomic Essay #18: “Nobody Makes A Living As A Writer”
My very last week of college, all my teachers ran through the same speech:
“Writing is thankless work. It’s hard. It doesn’t pay very well. When you do the math on the hours you spend writing and what you end up earning in the end, you’re making pennies on the dollar. Nobody makes a living as a writer.”
My name is Nicolas Cole, and I'm a writer, ghostwriter, and entrepreneur.
Want the full story? Start here 👇
I started writing online early on.
At 17 years old, I was one of the highest-ranked World of Warcraft players in North America, and one of the first e-famous gaming bloggers on the internet.
I wrote a book about it, called Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. amzn.to/3p7ffYc
After HS, I spent a year at University of Missouri studying journalism. Wasn't my thing.
My sophomore year, I transferred to @ColumbiaChi and studied Poetry, then Music Production, then Piano Performance, before finally settling in Fiction Writing.
- How to create new categories and redesign existing categories.
- Why "Product-Market Fit" is flawed & dangerous thinking, and what you should be focused on instead.
- Why category creators generate outsized returns for investors.
Through our research, we found that 21% of the 600ish companies on the Fortune 100 list are category creators. For 79% of fast-growing companies, $1.00 of revenue growth = $1.77 in market cap growth.
For the 21% category creators, $1.00 of revenue growth = $4.82—nearly 3x more
When I was 26 years old, I started my first company with one of my closest friends.
18 months later, we had 20 full-time employees & several million in revenue.
❌💸Here are the mistakes we made that cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars ❌💸👇👇👇
Mistake #1: Scaling the wrong product.
Our V1 offering was 12 ghostwritten articles per month for 1 executive/founder client. That level of output was absurd, but at the time I was used to writing 1 new article per DAY for myself.
Clients signed up, but many fell behind.
Every time a client fell behind, they would "pause" and then we'd be stuck with the balance of overdue articles, which ate into our profit margin heavily over time.
We scaled with that broken V1 product for months without even considering bringing the workload down.