10 pieces of advice to the 254 members of the Feb cohort of @dickiebush's Ship 30 for 30, from an alumni member.

This advice also applies to any creator 🧵👇 Your only goal is to hit publish. Don't worry about likes, followers, or subscribers. If all you do is write 30 atomic essays, you've done what 99% of the world never has, and proven something to yourself that you probably thought impossible. You've won. Anything else is a bonus.

5 MVPs of now BILLION dollar companies:

Dropbox, Zappos, Airbnb, Groupon, and Twitter 🧵👇 The Dropbox MVP was a video that showed how the product WOULD work (they hadn't built it yet). Drew Houston posted it to Hacker News (yes, comments were skeptical) and captured 70k+ emails overnight.

Today's market cap: $9.80B
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

In 2020 on Teachable:

2 creators made over $10,000,000

56 creators made over $1,000,000
823 creators made over $100,000

What do the top course creators have in common? 🧵👇 🗣 They share what they know for free.

They spend countless hours creating free content and demonstrating value to establish domain authority, credibility, and earn trust.

Common sentiment is that "audience-first" is the correct approach:
Create content, gain attention, build something for your new audience, sell it, and celebrate your new found success.

But if you're starting from scratch today, is that your only path? 🧵👇 Audience-first: Build an audience before building a product.

Product-first: Build a product before building an audience.

At @teachable, we help creators measure completion rates.

But completion rates are a proxy metric at best. Track them if you want, but don't let them trick you into thinking students are getting value 🧵👇 Hypothetical 1:

As a student, would you rather consume 100% of a course, or complete 30% of it but find an idea that helps you achieve your goal faster?

If you’re building products for creators, you’ll eventually need to generate revenue. VC money or not.

Get familiar with the most common monetization models 🧵👇 🤝 Share of earnings

∙ Aligns incentives between creator & platform.
∙ Harder to monetize creators with low sales.
∙ Creates a graduation problem (successful creators are incentivized to leave).
∙ Platforms negotiate special contracts for top earners to solve this.

In 2020, Building a Second Brain and Write Of Passage had thousands of combined students & $1M+ in revenue.

Not many cohort-based courses are operating at this scale.

Luckily, @fortelabs @david_perell and @will_mannon shared their hard-earned learnings, summarized 🧵👇 On curriculums & live classes:

- "Running a live course is like organizing a music tour, but having to develop the music before every single new show."

- Curriculums aren't set in stone. The advantage of live classes is you can adjust the curriculum to cater to students needs.

"I really want to start a side hustle / become a creator / earn income online... But first I need to learn more about [topic]... Then I need to research the best tools... And I'm really busy right now, so I'll start later when things calm down."

Sound familiar? 🧵👇 There's a good chance this is you. And if so, you've probably been telling yourself this same story on repeat for years.

The only thing you're creating is excuses.

With a good pre-sale you can validate audience/idea fit with real money in the bank... Before you even create the product.

The secret to a good pre-sale? Treat it like a Kickstarter.
4 examples in the thread 🧵👇 🎯 Set a goal

How many customers / much revenue will you need to continue working on your product? How long will you give it to hit that target? 1-2 weeks at most. Don’t drag it out.

Each week:

@APompliano publishes 5 podcasts, 5 newsletters to 35k paid subs, 5 YT vids, while running an investment firm. @anthilemoon publishes 2 articles, a newsletter to 25k subs, while running a paid community with 1500 subs.

What separates top creators from the rest? 🧵👇 They're prolific.

Content platform algorithms reward publishing good content frequently over great content sporadically. B-grade content with A-grade consistency beats A-grade content with B-grade consistency.

∙ Yesterday by The Beatles
∙ Single Ladies by Beyonce
∙ Your Song by Elton John
∙ Skyfall by Adele
∙ Royals by Lorde

What do they have in common? 👇🧵 They were all conceived and written in less than 1 hour.

Is this the result of creative genius that's only accessible to superstars? Unlikely. It's more probable that they were tapping into a level of creativity that only exists when striking while the iron's hot.

In 2020:

∙ 56 Teachable creators made over $1M.
∙ 10 Patreon creators made over $1M (est).
∙ 10 Substack writers collectively made over $10M.
∙ 8 Gumroad creators made over $1M.
∙ 8 Twitch streamers made over $1M (est).

What's their secret? 🧵👇 At this level, almost no one is doing it alone. They’re supported by YouTube editors & writers, podcast producers, online course coaches, agents that find and negotiate brand sponsorship deals, and assistants.

These are the people behind the growth of many successful creators.

In the last 10 days I've grown my email list from 0 to a few hundred, gained thousands of followers, had writers I admire reach out to me, been invited onto podcasts, into communities, made new friends, and been offered some great career opportunities.

How? 🧵👇 10 days ago I had a stale Twitter account, a fear of writing, and a bigger fear of publishing. Since then I've written & published 10 short essays online, & my ideas have now been seen over a million times.

In effect, online writing changed the trajectory of my life in 10 days.

10 years ago, pre-recorded video and asynchronous leaning was the pinnacle of online learning.

But in 2021 and beyond, is this really the best we can do? 🧵👇 The typical online course is single-player:

Load up a series of pre-recorded videos, press play, and progress through them at your own speed. Billions of dollars are spent on these courses each year. They do just fine.

The idea of recurring revenue sounds great, but don't be fooled—memberships are not the passive income you're looking for.

It's income, but there's nothing passive about it. 🧵👇 Creators have many monetization options, but the wrong choice in the wrong situation can lead to less money and more work.

Beware of these concepts before starting a membership:

Doing a 3 part mini-series on monetization.

Part 1: Simple funnel modeling.
Part 2: Psychology and strategy.
Part 3: One-time sales vs subscription.

P.s. free product pricing calculator in 🧵👇 Creating a digital product, and don't know how to price? Start with this exercise.

Let's use a goal of $10,000, and look at 3 ways to hit it:

1. $5 product
2. $50 product
3. $500 product

The most common question I'm asked is: "how did we grow Teachable?"

In 7 years we've helped over 100k creators sell more than $1B in courses & coaching.

Here's the story of how we did it.

Revenue, metrics, and monthly investor updates in 🧵 In 2013, Ankur Nagpal was a Udemy instructor selling app marketing courses.

He wanted to sell more products to his students, but because Udemy owned the students, he couldn't access any of them. What's worse, Udemy would cross-sell his students to other people's classes.

The Compounding Creator

How one creator made $1,332,400 across 6 revenue streams in 2020:

🎬 $135k - Ads
🔥 $177k - Affiliates
💰 $182k - Sponsorships
📚 $470k - Self-paced courses
🚀 $295k - Cohort-based course
⭕️ $71k - Community

Breakdown 👇 In 2017, @AliAbdaal created a YouTube channel.

He started with 0 views, 0 subs, but he posted 2 videos every single week for 6 months.

His revenue from this work? $0.

***This is when 95% of creators quit.***

But 52 vids and 6 months later he hit his first 1,000 subs.

📈 Trend:

• @Shopify Shop
• @gumroad Discover
• @SubstackInc Reader
• @Patreon search
• @teachable Discover

Why are creator-first companies exploring marketplaces?

Storytime in 🧵 In 2009, Udemy created a course marketplace.

They built a successful business by attracting students to sell instructors courses—taking a fee of sales revenue in the process.

📖 Creator economy reading list

As we kick off 2021, here's a roundup of my favorite Creator Economy / Passion Economy reads from 2020, covering:

• State of the market
• State of creators
• Trends and insights
• Platform strategy

👇 How many creators are there? Who are the key players? What are the key trends? If you're looking for an overview of the creator economy, this is a great place to start.

signalfire.com/blog/creator-e… by @YuanlingY, @JoshConstine

Thinking of starting a Substack?

Read this first 👇 As someone working in the creator economy space, I love the movement that Substack started.

They mainstreamed paying for independent writing, and changed the lives of thousands of writers in the process.

But they're building for a specific type of creator.