They either use it to do their work for them, or they barely use it at all.

AI is one of the most revolutionary technologies (if not the most) humanity has ever seen.

Yet, over half the American population has never used an AI chatbot. And the other half either make it too complicated for their own good, or they’re missing out on most of the potential.

And it’s not really their fault.

This is a brand new technology. No one had AI literacy classes in high school.

But that’s exactly where AI’s best use case is hiding.

While most people are applying AI to “increase productivity,” there’s a handful using it to increase autonomy instead.

The easiest way to get the most out of AI as possible is to swap roles.

It’s surprisingly simple, and by the end of this newsletter, you will have completely changed how you think about using AI in your life.

The Path of Most Resistance

49% of US Adults use AI Chatbots, 24% use them daily, 12% several times per day, 4% almost constantly. 51% don’t use AI chatbots at all.

The most common use case for AI is the AI overview at the top of a Google search. Almost everyone who has access to the internet is exposed to this.

And there’s nothing wrong with the AI overview. It’s just a faster (or slower) version of what you’ve already been doing for the last 20 years.

But there is real potential for AI to positively impact your life that the search engine overview doesn’t even come close to.

Even the daily power users often miss this angle.

Most of them use AI for the things they are already an expert at, and then get frustrated when the output doesn’t meet their standard.

In doing so, you either:

• bring in a second expert who competes with your expertise, creating a “too many cooks” situation;

• or you bring in an absolute beginner that you have to teach from the ground up before it does anything genuinely useful.

Either way, it’s a lot of friction.

You’re using the most capable tool for the thing you need the least amount of help with, and then you’re grading its homework. You wanted a faster version of yourself, and you ended up with a slower version that argues back.

This creates a fight for control over something you already know how to do, causing that complexity and friction.

So what’s the real advantage AI provides?

The Advantage

When my Dad was a kid, if he wanted to learn something, he had to find a ride to the library, and stay there for hours, hunting for the right books and parsing through them to find the information he was looking for.

Many points of failure here.

Sometimes you don’t know what information you’re missing.
Sometimes you do know, but you don’t know which books hold that information.
Or you do know which books you need, but the library doesn’t have them.
And sometimes you can’t even get to the library at all.

If I wanted to learn something when I was a kid, I could just go on the internet, which reduced a lot of the friction.

I didn’t need a ride or permission to look something up. I didn’t need to know which sources had the information I needed. The internet could tell me that.

But self-education only takes you so far.

The highest leverage education resource in existence is individual mentorship.

A one-on-one teacher understands your specific situation, answers your specific questions, and adapts to you instead of a syllabus.

This is why private coaching is exclusive.
This is why private tutors cost what they cost.
This is why every master you’ve ever admired had a master of their own.

This is where self-education dies.

It’s you alone with a book and no one to say “here’s specifically what you’re doing wrong.”

So you stall. You assume you’re not smart enough, or the material is too advanced, or the whole thing is a scam.

Really you just needed a teacher, and teachers cost money.

For the entirety of human history, the private mentor has been a scarce luxury.

Now you can summon them on command.
Infinite versions for infinite situations.
On demand.
Free.

Think about that.

The single biggest advantage for individual mastery in any domain at your fingertips.

If you’ve ever watched a great YouTube video and thought, “Damn, I wish I could sit down with that person for three hours and work through my project with them...”

Now you can.

The Path of Least Resistance

The easiest way to get the most out of AI as possible is to swap roles.

Take off the expert hat and put on the student hat.

Otherwise, your effort goes into defending what you already know, comparing every output to your standards, and racking up reasons to distrust the AI.

You’re not learning anything because you already knew it, and you’re not getting anything, because you could have done it better or faster yourself.

When you’re the student, things become simpler. You spend less time correcting, debating, and pushing back and more time actually learning from the AI.

This is a teacher who never gets tired, never judges your questions, and will explain it a fifth, sixth, nth way until you fully understand the concept.

The result is a dramatic improvement in autonomy.

Every skill you never learned because the barrier was too high is now 10-100x more accessible.

Knowledge is power. Wielding it is what actually makes you powerful.

Note: AI is an incredible learning tool, but do not outsource your thinking entirely. It should be used to uncover new information and progress toward a goal, not plant beliefs, values, or opinions.

Stop defending what you already know and start learning what you don’t

Why are you so desperate to outsource the skills you already excel at? Instead, use AI to outsource the high value, low supply resources - personalized mentors for literally whatever the hell you want.

The best way to obtain this teacher is with what I call an AI Buddy: a dedicated chat for learning an ongoing topic or completing a long-term goal in an area where you’re lacking knowledge, skills, or experience.

No expensive tools or complex integrations. Just a regular AI chatbot.

It takes your “why” into account to give you the “expert how” for your specific situation and goals.

An AI Buddy can take one of 4 forms:

Consultant: Best for short-term learning/consumption
Collaborator: Best for short-term doing/executing
Companion: Best for long-term learning/consumption
Coach: Best for long-term doing/orchestrating/executing

You’ll typically know which one you need based on what you want to accomplish.

But goals evolve as you progress towards them, and the beauty of AI is that your mentor evolves with you.

You may start off with a consultant learning about gardening, and it may evolve into a collaborator, doing research on your behalf for the best plants, soils, fertilizers, etc. for your garden specifically.

And that collaborator might evolve into a coach, helping you keep your garden healthy year-round and overcome any unexpected challenges that may arise along the way.

The typical evolution is from short-term to long-term and/or from learning to doing. Doing is, after all, a more evolved version of learning.

So how do you actually build your first AI Buddy?

Context Is King

Whether you’re learning or doing, you always need to provide context.

AI knows everything in the world, but it knows nothing about you unless you tell it.

For example, the first AI Buddy I ever built for someone else was an HR Buddy. My sister Molly was having a rough time at her job with a huge workload and management that gaslit her every chance they got.

“It wasn’t one singular incident,” she said, “but the culmination of lots of little things, and I needed a way to document what was happening objectively without constantly revisiting an already difficult situation.”

As her brother, I wanted to give her the validation she needed in order to do something about it, but I knew I only had the parts of the story that she could distill into our weekly phone calls. I also knew that, as a writer, she was hesitant to use AI, so the solution had to preserve the human element.

So I built the HR Buddy, designed to

• capture every questionable moment at work,

• evaluate it through the lens of a standard Human Resources perspective,

• provide non-sycophantic validation when appropriate,

• challenge or push back when appropriate,

• and formulate an action plan to do something about it.

Ultimately it helped Molly submit a clear and accurate record of events to HR.

“What could have been an incredibly time-consuming and emotionally exhausting process became something I could manage in real time, and when I ultimately decided to escalate the situation, I wasn’t starting from scratch.”

The only reason something like this was actually effective was because she was able to provide the context from her personal situation on an ongoing basis.

Whenever her boss did something that made her question “wait am I overreacting?” she would drop it into the chat, adding to the overall context of the situation and getting an immediate read on the interaction based on the entire history of the situation.

I knew this would be more effective for her than trying to collect her thoughts for a 20-minute meeting with the HR department. How could she articulate all the microaggressions that don’t sound so bad on the surface, but have piled up with crushing weight?

Because the HR Buddy had all the context, it was able to help her articulate the issue to HR in a much more effective way than it would have been off the cuff. (I know my sister.)

I’m happy to report that Molly is now free from the chains of the corporate overlords and is cultivating her own personal autonomy, right here on substack.

Turn Anything Into A Course

The best thing about AI is that it knows everything in the world.
The worst thing about AI is that it knows everything in the world.

But context is only half the equation.

The expertise is the other half.

You have to do more than tell it what you want. You also have to tell it why you want it, how you want to do it, and why you want to do it that way.

Sometimes general expertise is sufficient, typically for things that are done in a standard way.

But most times you want to do something a specific way, and that’s where specialized expertise comes in. Without a specific expert or resource to draw from, the AI draws from everyone and everything, and that’s how you produce slop.

So if you want to implement a certain process or strategy, you have to tell the chat explicitly.

This is how you can turn any YT video, podcast, newsletter, book, or any other form of media into your own course.

It’s very simple.

All you have to do is give your AI Buddy the article, transcript, pdf, or whatever resource you want to use from whatever expert you want to emulate. Tell it what you want to use the resource for, and why you want to use this particular resource or expert.

When Molly was “onboarding” her HR Buddy, the chat asked her to upload her company’s employee handbook for organizational context.

Side note: if you don’t know which expert to draw from, you can ask your AI Buddy for suggestions based on your context. Then go watch videos, listen to podcasts, and read articles/books by those experts to see who you resonate with the most. Then come back with your favorite piece from that expert.

If you like learning and taking courses, this is your coupon for free unlimited courses for life.

I’ve done my best to make this as easy as possible for you.

I wrote up a free AI Buddy metaprompt for your convenience.

Copy and paste that into your preferred chat bot. Answer the questions about your problem or goal. Upload an article or video transcript, and explain why you want to use that resource in particular.

Then the chat will output a prompt for your AI Buddy. Copy that prompt and paste it into a new chat. Start providing the context for your situation and appreciate the beauty of infinite private mentorship.

This is my favorite way to use AI (maybe you can tell)

I have used this for so many different things that not only made me more productive but also relieved stress, improved effectiveness, and ultimately became enjoyable learning pathways.

Some examples:

• Coding & App Development Coach - Building my personal command center with no developer experience. I didn’t even know what a “commit” was, and now I have a polished web app for my specific use case.

• Fantasy Football Collaborator - Haven’t really watched the NFL in years, so I created a consultant to help me prepare for the draft. Now it runs weekly injury reports and researches potential pickups and trades for me.

• Health Insurance Consultant - With general context of my medical history (no sensitive data was harmed in the making of this AI buddy) this consultant made selecting a health insurance plan surprisingly painless.

• Content Analysis Collaborators/Coaches - If I find an article or tweet I like and want to use the same structure for one of my own ideas, a consultant will break down why it works. It will evolve into a collaborator, helping me map my idea to the structure. And into a coach so I can use the same structure again in the future.

• The Mentalist Companion - I wanted to keep track of the 6-season thruline without spoiling anything for myself. This was super helpful for confirming the things I wasn’t sure if i remembered correctly, and keeping track of my own theories.

• Board of Directors - This is like a combination of the 4 C’s. I chose 3 public figures to be on the board, and fed my favorite content to the AI Chat. Now whenever I have a question for the board, I put it in that chat. It gives me the perspective of each of them, then synthesizes what they agree/disagree on, then I make my own decision, taking that advice into account. It’s hard to choose a favorite, but this one might be it. Complete game changer.

To reiterate: AI Buddies are incredible learning tools, but do not outsource your thinking entirely. They should be used to uncover new information and progress toward a goal, not plant beliefs, values, or opinions.

Building Your Buddy

Now it’s your turn.

Pick a project you’ve been putting off, a problem that’s been nagging you, or something you’ve always been curious about but never bothered learning.

Determine if there is an expert or resource you want to guide you on your learning path, then build your AI Buddy following these steps:

1. Copy/Paste the AI Buddy metaprompt into your chat bot of choice

2. Tell it about the topic you want to learn, goal you want to accomplish, or problem you want to solve.

3. Tell it why you want to solve that problem, learn that thing, etc.

4. Upload a resource or ask it to suggest an expert

5. Copy/paste the specialized buddy prompt into a new AI Chat

6. Provide as much situational context as possible

7. Learn from your new mentor

8. Share the metaprompt with someone who could use it

That’s really it.

These prompts have produced some of my longest-running chats, and I’m always eager to return to them and pick up where I left off.

It’s removed all the frustration and friction of two experts butting heads, and reignited the flame of curiosity and drive for self-education.

Even before AI, this was the best way to learn any topic or skill.

Now it’s orders of magnitude more accessible.

Please take advantage.

Thanks for reading. If you found this article helpful, consider subscribing.

If you like the metaprompt and you’re looking for more resources to cultivate personal autonomy, join the Future of Freedom VIP Community.

I’m building this community specifically for people who value independence, who are tired of conforming to the traditional path and who are ready to live life on their own terms. It’s completely free to join.

Come join hundreds of VIPs and start building your future of freedom today.

See you inside,
Tim

Even if it solves the problem better than any other product out there, if it’s not framed properly, it’s doomed to fail.

It’s the same with content.

Each piece of content is like a little mini product. The problem it solves is helping your audience shift their worldview on one particular point.

But if it’s framed poorly, it will get no engagement, no matter how good the actual content is.

No engagement. No leads. No sales. No income.

I previously wrote an essay titled Picking a Problem Worth Solving about how to select a focus problem to build a business around.

But the truth is that there’s more to it than just picking a problem.

No matter which problem you choose, that’s only the first half of the game.

The hard part is actually getting your audience to feel the pain the problem causes, and the urgency that pushes them to solve that problem.

Without feeling that pain and urgency, the audience has no reason to act and no reason to buy. If this is truly a problem worth solving you have to make them feel the need to solve it.

It all comes back to serving your audience. If you sell a solution to a problem, it’s your responsibility to get it into the hands of the people with the problem.

Of course, if and only if it’s in their best interests.

This essay is about the second half of the game.

The “Niche” Problem

In that Essay, I gave a very simple framework for choosing a problem. It’s either a Problem, Pain, Prevention, or Pleasure.

Pretty much any business idea worth pursuing can be put into one of those four buckets, or multiple, no matter the niche.

That’s important because a lot of the time people pick the problem based on the niche instead of picking the niche based on the problem.

So this essay will cover what to do once you’ve picked a problem.

Choosing your “niche” and making your audience feel the pain and urgency of the problem, so that they come to you to solve it.

Niche really isn’t the best word for this use case. Here I mean niche in a more broad sense, rather than the ultra narrow sense typically used by creators.

In 2026 the niche has been pretty played out.

People are no longer scrolling social media for someone with hyper-specialized and ultra-focused content. They’re scrolling social media for relatable people who have solved relatable problems.

The best niche you can choose in 2026 and beyond is your own niche.

A niche of one. You are the niche.

Everyone has their own unique set of influences and perspectives, which leads to inherent uniqueness in creators’ worldviews and content.

I won’t go into too much detail here, if you want more on becoming the niche, you can check out the brand canon essay.

The “niche” we’re talking about today is more of a foundational direction toward that ultimate one-person niche.

It will point you in the right direction of your own niche without stifling most of your good ideas.

The Big 4

There are 4 main niche areas: health, wealth, relationships, and happiness.

People are significantly more willing to purchase a product or service if it’s a solution that will solve a problem in one of these areas.

Wealth

People are usually willing to pay for something that has the potential to make or save more money than it costs.

As I talked about in Become Dangerously Autonomous, money is a resource used to participate in society.

Growing or protecting wealth increases financial autonomy and therefore personal agency.

And it unlocks solutions in the other 3 categories as well.

Health

Health will always be a high priority for people with purchasing power.

Regardless of the benefits of money, you can’t take it with you when you leave this world.

So it’s better to put that money to use extending your time in it.

Relationships

Arguably more important than the length of your life is the people you fill it with.

Our relationships (platonic, romantic, familial, professional, etc.) are the sources of some of the most beautiful and the most painful experiences of our lives.

Helping your customers solve problems in this area can greatly improve the quality of their lives, and yours, making relationships another high priority area.

Happiness

And of course if you’ve solved all your problems in those 3 areas, there’s not much left but to focus on your own happiness and experiences.

This area is arguably slightly lower priority than the others, but most people will spend some amount of money on some level of happiness no matter where they are on the financial autonomy scale.

The Frame

Every solution fits into one of the Big 4, and is one of the 4 P’s.

Depending on the problem, your solution may pertain to one or more of these areas.

No matter what it is, you can find a way to frame the product as a solution through one of these 4 lenses.

When you’re evaluating your options, you’re really looking at this 4x4 grid. Your problem fits into one of those 16 cells.

But figuring out which cell it’s in is just the first step.

Now your job is to illustrate to your audience why it’s important to solve the problem.

What problem do you solve?

Why is it important for your audience to understand it?

Why is it important to solve it?

The cell your solution fits into has coordinates, and those coordinates give you a cheat sheet for how to frame your product.

For example, acetaminophen is just a jumble of letters until it’s framed as pain relief for physical injuries.

You don’t sell what’s in the bottle, you sell what it does.

Here are a few more examples to illustrate the point.

As you can see some solutions can actually fit into multiple cells. This gives you multiple angles to work with.

Feel The Pain

“If you can articulate someone’s pain better than they can, they will believe you have the ability to solve it.” —Alex Hormozi

Once you’ve selected your problem and determined which lens to frame your solution through, you have a much better idea of how to make your audience feel the pain.

And not just in the pitch.

In all your copy and content as well.

In your emails and your ads, in your webinars and VSLs.

Anywhere and everywhere you communicate with your audience, you must illustrate the pain.

There are a number of ways to do that, and we’ll go through examples of these tactics shortly.

But you need to understand the underlying principles in order to use them strategically.

Making the pain be felt is a 4 part process. We’ll call it the APII framework

1- Get their Attention

2- Communicate the Problem

3- Communicate why it’s Important

4- Illustrate the pain with an example or analogy

APII is the blueprint for framing the problem. Use the tools below to actually build it.

Getting Attention

Pattern interrupts are one of the best ways to get people to pay attention to you.

A social media post, or subject line, or sales copy, that goes against what they are conditioned to expect from that content is much more likely to grab attention and stop them from scrolling.

Using specific numbers in your headings, titles or posts is a great way of doing that.

Numbers jump out from the page and push the audience to actually read the sentence the numbers are in. You can use them in many forms from metrics and statistics to dollar amounts and timeframes.

The perfect example is the listicle with headlines like “This 6 step morning routine…” or “20 pieces of advice for people who…” or “Top 15 must see destinations in…”

Negativity Bias is an excellent tool for capturing attention.

It plays on our brain’s natural tendency to react more strongly to negative stimuli (experience, emotion, information) than positive stimuli of equal magnitude.

“Everyone wants to be successful” vs “Nobody wants to be a degenerate”

Communicating The Problem

You can also call out the problem outright, which takes care of step 1 and 2 simultaneously.

Most problems are experienced by many people. If you can communicate the problem to them well you have their attention.

A more direct way of getting their attention is to call out the target audience directly, rather than the problem. For example:

“If you’re a creator writing short form posts for X and Substack, the target callout is your best friend.”

Communicating The Importance

Rather than calling out the problem or the target audience, you can lead with a benefit instead.

What is the payoff?
How soon can they see results?
What type of results can they expect?
What obstacle will they be able to avoid?
(“Without” is a good word to use for that.)

Be sure it’s actually a benefit and not a feature. People want what the product does, not the product itself.

Warn your audience what happens if they don’t solve this problem?

What are the consequences of leaving the problem unresolved?

Illustrating The Point

Social proof is the most direct way to illustrate the problem and your product’s ability to solve it.

Reviews and testimonials relieve uncertainty in the customers eyes. If you can show it worked for people before, they become more confident in your solution.

Stories, examples, and demonstrations are a good alternative if you don’t have reviews or testimonials.

Tell the story of how you discovered the solution. Or the story of someone who really needed the solution, and how it improved their life.

Show them how the product can be used in different use cases. Show them how the product works so they can see how it can solve their own problem.

And you don’t have to physically show. Sometimes you can’t. But you can always show it with words. Illustrate.

Metaphors and Analogies are excellent tools for this.

Not only do they help the audience see the point from a new perspective, but they also help you see it more clearly as well.

I find metaphors and especially analogies open up new pathways of thought about an idea or topic.

Best Practices

No matter where you apply these principles (and you should apply them everywhere you communicate with your audience) your communications should be easily consumable.

Your social posts, emails, ad copy, all of it should be formatted for readability. It should be easy on the eyes and aesthetically pleasing to a certain degree.

Your communication is most effective when you do it with confidence and conviction in what you’re talking about or writing about.

If you don’t have confidence in your product’s ability to solve the problem, you’re selling the wrong product.

Sell only what you trust to solve the problem.

Make It A Habit

If you don’t get attention, you’re speaking into the void.
If you don’t communicate the problem, your audience has no reason to care.
If you don’t communicate the importance, they have no reason to take action.
If you don’t illustrate the point, they won’t feel the need to solve the problem.

Your content will flop. Your products will flop.

You’ll just keep spinning your wheels with nothing to show for it.

But now you know how to frame your offers and content to make them feel the pain.

Use the grid. Use the 4 step process. Everywhere you communicate.

Take whatever offer you’re selling or thinking about selling, and see where it fits best on the grid.

If you aren’t selling an offer yet, you can use the grid to evaluate which areas resonate with you.

The more you resonate with the problem/solution frame, the less you will have to “sell” and the more you will just naturally serve.

And any time you have an idea for a product, a business, a piece of content, whatever, check the grid to see which frame fits best.

After a while this will become second nature and you wont need the grid anymore because it will be burned into your brain.

A good exercise to get there is to sit down with an empty grid and fill it up. with your ideas, with other ideas you’ve seen, with new ideas that pop into your head.

The more you stimulate this part of your brain, the more innate the “business idea” skill becomes, and the more intuitively you’ll be able to frame your offers and content.

If you’re looking for help or feedback on your ideas, come ask your questions in the Future of Freedom VIP Community. It’s for anyone looking to build independent income online and it’s free to join.

See you inside,
Tim

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And it’s not your fault.

Almost everyone in the online business space has experienced this to some degree.

You tire of your current monotonous existence as a corporate drone, so you do some research on generating income independently.

After digging, you come across an idea that seems like it could actually work.

You hem and haw, but the math checks out and it seems like this is not only your best option, but your only option.

So you bite the bullet and invest. You start on the first module and it’s even better than expected.

You move on to the second module, and the third after that, continuing to soak up all the information available until…

That’s it. It’s over.

You’ve finished the course material and now you can see it clearly.

The actual mountain you have to climb before you can reach the summit that was originally promised.

And that mountain is much bigger than anticipated.

You start to second guess if this strategy is all it’s cracked up to be.

Now that you can see all the hurdles and challenges and obstacles that are a part of this journey, you question if all the answers are just hiding behind the upsell’s paywall.

Rather than continuing to shell out for the information that was promised to you from the beginning, you wonder if there isn’t some other method out there.

A better, more efficient and effortless method that would deliver you from your current reality much faster.

So you do some research, and wouldn’t you know it, you come across an idea that seems like it could actually work.

And the cycle repeats.

There’s an underlying pattern that perpetuates this cycle.

A pattern most people are completely unaware of.

It’s the root cause of not only the frustration that comes from attempting a new strategy, but also the self doubt and the opportunity-hopping pressure (what I call “hopportunism”).

Once you actually acknowledge this pattern, breaking it becomes much more trivial.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, you first have to understand the cycle and where it shows up.

The Valley of Despair

The Valley of Despair is not a new concept. It’s been around for decades as a component of other frameworks, most notably the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger Effect describes a cognitive bias where people with limited experience in a given skill or subject matter overestimate their knowledge or ability to perform that skill. They don’t yet have enough exposure to know how much more there is to learn.

This results in an early peak in confidence relating to that skill or subject, that gradually declines over time. The more time you spend on it, the more you realize the true depth of the subject. The peak in confidence is referred to as “Mount Stupid” and this low point is the Valley of Despair.

Even though you’re more proficient than you were at peak confidence, what’s peaking now is your self-doubt. But keep pushing through the valley of despair, and you’ll find yourself on the Slope of Enlightenment. It’s an uphill battle, but with each small win you regain some of that confidence, until you finally achieve your initial goal, and your confidence levels out on the Plateau of Stability.

The Learning Curve

We can see a similar pattern in the 4 stages of learning. It begins with unconscious incompetence, when you don’t know how to do the skill, and you don’t know that you don’t know how. This parallels mount stupid from the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

This is followed by Conscious Incompetence, which is when you realize you don’t know how to do the skill. This is when the graph begins to dip into the valley of despair. The uphill battle is Conscious Competence, where you can perform the skill but you have to think about every single step.

The final stage is Unconscious Competence, when the skill becomes natural. You can enter flow state and perform the skill without even thinking. This is the plateau of stability.

5 Stages of Entrepreneurship

You can start to see how this pattern applies in the case of shiny object syndrome when you look at Alex Hormozi’s 5 stages of entrepreneurship:

He names the stages Uninformed Optimism (familiarity with the pro’s but not the con’s), Informed Pessimism (learning about the con’s), Crisis of Meaning (aka Valley of Despair, when you see the size of the mountain you have to climb), Informed Optimism (you know what it will take and you’re willing to do the work), and Achievement.

5 Stages of Grief

The same pattern can also be found elsewhere, such as the 5 Stages of grief, traditional American names for the grades in high school and college, and arguably, even in the hero’s journey, though it is a bit of a stretch.

In the 5 stages of grief, denial aligns closely with uninformed optimism. “I can just tell myself everything is fine, and everything will be fine.” Anger lives at the peak of mount stupid and bargaining begins the steady decline into the valley of despair. Depression is the uphill battle, and acceptance is that plateau of stability.

High School & College

In America, the 4 levels of high school and undergraduate college are Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior. Freshman is intuitive, with fresh in the name, and junior and senior are also relatively intuitive hierarchically. The junior year was always my most challenging year and I often hear the same from others, so it fits nicely in the valley of despair (much to the chagrin of my 16 year-old self).

But the real reason I include this example is for Sophomore, the only not-obviously-intuitive one of the four. It’s a Greek word coming from Sophos, meaning “wise” and Moros, meaning “foolish.” So the word sophomore literally translates to “wise moron” and was named such because most students in their second year are somewhere near the peak of Mount Stupid.

Hero’s Journey

The hero’s journey begins with a call to adventure and mentorship, which align closely with uninformed optimism. Upon departure, the hero begins encountering challenges, some of which make them question their ability to complete the quest. This is the downward slope.

The crisis or ordeal sits in the valley of despair. This is the true test. If it were a normal person in the hero’s shoes, they would give up, quit, or fail. At a certain point, even the hero doubts their own ability to overcome this test. But they push through, achieving the victory and beginning the journey home. The return chapter lines up with the slope of enlightenment, and the final chapter, Transformation, fits right into the plateau of stability.

So clearly, we’re working with a pattern here, and the simple reduction is 5 stages of Optimism, Frustration, Despair, Determination, and Success. The trap that most people fall into is the valley of despair. Simply knowing it’s a part of the process and not necessarily the end of the road makes it much easier to continue pushing through.

But the valley of despair is not without its symptoms, and there’s one in particular that’s the single biggest road block keeping people from the slope of enlightenment and achieving success.

Imposter Syndrome

More often than not, you are your own biggest obstacle.

The valley of despair is a bout of low confidence that comes as a result of more accurately assessing the horizon of mastery. This is when you finally understand what it’s going to take to reach your desired level of success, and that it’s more involved than the shiny-object marketing made it out to be.

In the valley, you think you are less of an expert than you are. Experience is higher than confidence, so you have something to offer but you think it’s worthless. If you’ve ever been on a hike with a false summit you can relate on a physical level.

You’ve been hiking for hours and you finally see the top, a peak with nothing but sky beyond. Until you actually get there, and realize the real summit was hiding behind it. You’re just a sophomore standing on mount stupid. You had your hopes up and now you see there is still more work to do.

Most people are quick to throw in the towel at the first semblance of imposter syndrome. And logically it makes sense. “There’s so much I don’t know. What business do I have helping, teaching, or selling people the solution if I haven’t mastered it yet?”

This is when people gaslight themselves out of their own ambition. But this can actually be a good thing. As long as you’re aware of it and don’t let it stop you from persisting toward your goal, imposter syndrome can be a positive indicator.

For one thing, it means you’re not a delusional asshole. Half the reason people are afraid to share their expertise, limited as it may be, is because they see other people spewing their opinions without a shred of established trust or authority. It’s gross, and they don’t want to be gross like that.

The fact that you’re aware enough to notice that, puts you ahead of those greaseballs. But if it stops you from pushing forward, it’s not doing you any good. You have to remember that just because you are not the most knowledgeable on a certain subject, doesn’t mean you can’t share the knowledge that you do have with those who lack it.

This “greaseball-aversion” also keeps you focused on serving your audience, rather than straight selling. The more you focus on selling, the more you lose sight of the purpose, and the more slimy you come off as. Focus on serving and you come off as someone who truly cares. This is when sales happen naturally.

Imposter syndrome is also an indicator of your progression through the learning process. The fact that you’ve learned enough for your confidence to plummet means you’re actually making progress.

When you’re aware of imposter syndrome it can be a positive indicator. What was once a reason to give up is now a reason to keep going.

But unaware, it can lead to a much more serious problem.

Shiny Objects

Shiny object syndrome isn’t lack of competence or discipline, it’s lack of awareness of the shifting horizon of the mastery of the subject.

When you’re not aware of this process, you’re much more susceptible to shiny object syndrome, especially in the valley of despair and imposter syndrome stage. Some people never get out of the valley of despair, and shiny object syndrome makes it worse.

You find a new shiny object (opportunity) and it sells itself. “Seems easy enough” or “Makes sense to me”. Think buying a course. After going through the first few modules, confidence rises. “Shit, this is actually going to work!”

And then the course starts getting into the nitty gritty. The day-to-day. The actual work. And you realize that it might have been more of a challenge than what was sold to you. This is the beginning of the valley of despair.

“I didn’t sign up for this”

“Maybe I’m not cut out for this”

“Maybe there is something better/easier/faster/etc.”

This is when you’re most prone to shiny object syndrome. All of a sudden a goal that once excited you now seems impossibly daunting. If you are to simultaneously come across something that seems marginally easier, you’d be tempted to jump ship to the new opportunity because your confidence is higher in that new shiny object than the thing you’re currently working on.

But mount stupid and the valley of despair permeate nearly every opportunity, skill, or subject matter. It’s not a question of if you’ll hit the same roadblock, but when. You haven’t had enough exposure to the new opportunity to learn about the challenges that will pull you down into the valley of despair.

This is uninformed optimism/unconscious incompetence, and it’s what enables you to logic your way into opportunity-hopping.

But you are comparing Stage 3 confidence of one to Stage 1 confidence of the other. They’re not equal and Stage 3 is always lower than Stage 1, so the shiny object is always going to win, even with logic.

This is why it’s so important to be aware of this cycle. When you’re aware of this process and how you behave throughout the process, you’re more likely to catch yourself before jumping ship.

And when you do catch yourself, you have the opportunity to make an honest assessment.

Choose Your Own Ending

In the depths of the valley of despair, there is a fork in the road.

Imposter syndrome and the valley create the right conditions, and it’s triggered by a shiny object. This is your opportunity for assessment.

You now have two paths in front of you. Jump ship and focus on the new shiny object, or dismiss it and remain focused on your current plan, persisting through the uphill battle.

And this is not about “being a man and toughening up” to push through. It’s about actually assessing your options. Sometimes your current plan is inferior and it’s worth considering another option. But whichever way you make your decision, don’t make it blindly or based only on short term factors.

Imposter syndrome, the valley of despair, and shiny object syndrome are inextricably linked in a vicious cycle, one feeding into the next. The only way out is fighting the uphill battle to achievement. The question is just which opportunity is worth the uphill battle.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to make that call. I’ve written a few essays with the goal of pointing you in the right direction to make it as easy as possible. (Check out these essays if you’re interested: 3 Keys to Maximize Financial Autonomy; The Holy Trinity of Solo Online Business)

But “as easy as possible” does not mean “easy.” If a caveman could do it, everyone would be doing it. But it’s not, so they don’t. The goal is to find an opportunity that makes it easy to say no to the shiny objects, especially in the valley of despair.

There are a few things you can do to accomplish this, and we’ve already taken care of one of them.

1- Be aware of the cycle.

This is the most important one because, as we talked about before, if you are not aware of the cycle, you are likely to mistake the valley of despair for reasons to quit and doom yourself to repeating the cycle.

Part of being aware is having the ability to step back and realize when you are in the valley. In the depths of frustration it can be easy to lose sight of the process, even if you’ve been made aware of it in the past.

Take a breath and remember you’re halfway through the race. You can keep going, or you can give up and go back to the start line to keep repeating the worst parts of the race. This is why I’m so adamant about building a long-term business instead of chasing trends and hacks that will be obsolete in months.

2- Be consistent and persistent

Pretty much the only way up the slope of enlightenment or informed optimism is to just show up every day and move the needle forward. Eliminate as many detractors as possible and be strict about what you allow to interrupt your focus.

The simplest mechanism for consistent persistence is the one-day-off rule, which says that when you need a day off, take a day off. But don’t take 2 days off in a row. This keeps consistency high, while giving you time to recover, thereby reducing the risk of burnout.

This can require serious discipline, so it’s important to give yourself every advantage possible.

3- Seek obsession

Chris Williamson, host of the Modern Wisdom podcast, wrote a short essay about this. The essence is this: Discipline is a great tool for maintaining consistency. But an even better tool is motivation.

If you are externally motivated to do something, there is less resistance than if you have to discipline yourself to do the thing.

And even better than being motivated is being obsessed, which is an internal drive. When there is literally nothing you would rather be doing than this, you stay consistent and persistent just by default.

To really make this work like magic, you have to apply this in two places.

First, the end goal. What is the desired outcome that you are absolutely obsessed with, you cannot get it out of your head. If you feel any level of apathy toward the final goal, odds are good you’ll struggle to maintain consistency.

The same thing applies to the individual steps to achieve that end goal. You might really want a castle, but if you hate laying bricks, the process is not going to be enjoyable and you’re likely to quit before it’s finished.

If you love laying bricks, then you just enjoy the process and the castle is completed as a byproduct. Ideally, you find a project where you’re obsessed with the “castle”, and “laying the bricks.”

4- Seek like minded people

One of the most effective ways to maintain consistency is to surround yourself with people who have goals and ambitions similar to yours. The people who are in the same part of the journey as you become your allies. They can validate your struggles and remind you it’s part of the process, keeping you motivated.

The people who are ahead of you have a lot of valuable experience to share with you. They can help you avoid painful mistakes before you even encounter them, and provide clarity on new challenges.

Even the people who aren’t as far along in the process can be beneficial to you. These people give you opportunities to employ the Feynman Technique. By sharing your knowledge with the people who lack it, you uncover hidden gaps in your own knowledge and deepen your understanding of the subject.

The best way to do this is to join a community about your topic of obsession. Connect with people behind you and those who are further along. Ask questions when you get stuck and share your findings to help others keep moving forward as well. Form alliances with peers, collaborate, and share audiences where it makes sense. This is the best way to get from zero to one.

If you want to see it in action you can join the Future of Freedom VIP Community completely free. This community was built specifically for entrepreneurs and people looking to generate independent income online.

My goal is to help you develop the mindset, skillset, and toolset to succeed in digital business and cultivate financial autonomy.

And like I said before, “as easy as possible” doesn’t mean easy. But you know the saying: “Nothing that’s easy is worth doing, and nothing worth doing is easy.”

The VIP community is here to help you keep pushing through the uphill battle and join us in stage 5, success.

Consider this an open invitation. Join whenever it makes sense for you.

See you inside,
Tim

Thanks for reading. Subscribe for more.

Money is a resource that is required in order to participate in society.

Financial autonomy is having the financial means to do the things you want to do without being tied to the things you don’t want to do.

Financial autonomy is not a number, it’s a scale with 3 levels: survival, participation, and freedom.

Level 1 financial autonomy is required in order to survive, so it is therefore a fundamental human right.

Level 2 financial autonomy enables economic and social participation beyond basic survival.

Level 3 autonomy enables you to solve large meaningful problems, so it’s in humanity’s best interest to get as many people to level 3 as possible.

Financial autonomy can be increased by reducing expenses, increasing income, or finding work more to your liking.

There are a number of ways to increase income, but fundamentally they are all the same. The only way to make money is to sell something.

To make a lot of money you have to sell something at scale. The best mechanism for scaling sales is business.

The primary purpose of a business is to solve a problem. The secondary purpose of a business is to turn a profit.

The primary purpose of the profit is to enable the business to solve the problem more effectively and efficiently at scale. (Paying the owner and employees well is part of this)

A business solves a problem. More specifically it solves one of 4 types of problems: Problem, Pain, Prevention, Pleasure. Everyone has at least one idea in at least one bucket.

Money is a certificate of appreciation. Money exchanges hands because the customer appreciates having the solution to their problem.

The business has a solution to a problem. The primary purpose of a sale is to deliver the solution to the customer.

Thus the primary purpose of selling is serving. Serve your people, and sales will come naturally.

You can serve customers in the physical world, digital world, or both. Make things easy on yourself and start with a digital business.

Digital business increases earning potential and decreases overhead, friction, risk, and effort.

Financial autonomy can be increased further by maximizing earning potential and minimizing investment. Digital business is the best way to do that.

There are lots of digital business strategies, but only 3 are worth your time

Digital products reduce cost by eliminating materials, manufacturing, inventory, and fulfillment costs. Thus, profit margins are inherently higher on digital products.

Digital products exist virtually, so you create once, sell infinitely. That means your margins approach 100% with every sale you make.

Affiliate marketing reduces cost and effort by eliminating product development, fulfillment, and customer service. Your only responsibility as an affiliate is promotion.

You can promote multiple affiliate offers in the same niche to the same audience, effectively multiplying your sales.

Digital products earn larger affiliate commissions because they have higher margins.

Community is the best capture mechanism for your true fans: repeat buyers, raving reviewers and serial referrers. These fans contribute to the longevity and sustainability of your business

Kevin Kelly posited in 2008 that a creator only needs 1000 true fans to make a decent living.

This depends on your income goal and annual customer lifetime value. The higher your goal, the more members you need. The higher your CLTV, the fewer members you need.

If you can earn $100 per year per customer, 1000 customers is $100,000 per year.

But to make it happen, you need a direct relationship with your true fans. You can do this with a hub-centric business.

The hub-centric business model is the pinnacle form of digital business because it creates one centralized home for all your business assets on a platform you own and control.

Host your website, blog, podcast, funnels, live events, CRM, email marketing, and community all from the same place.

This model allows you to leverage digital products, affiliate marketing, and community on a platform you own and control, giving you a direct relationship with your true fans.

Now these fans can serve their purpose. Repeat customers buy your offers without ever leaving the community.

Raving reviewers are vocal about your ability to solve the problem, both inside the community and outside. They help you make the community valuable.

Serial referrers actively send new members to your community. Those new members grow into one or more of these 3 R’s (Repeat customers, raving reviewers, and serial referrers.)

Build a system that facilitates this behavior. Make it as easy as possible to buy your stuff from the community. Integrated checkout, native hosting, subscription models (ethically) etc.

Incentivize community engagement with gamification and digital rewards. You can also incentivize referrals with a similar system. This creates a new member flywheel.

You can take it a step farther by implementing an affiliate program. Now your serial referrers can earn way more from recommending your offers, and you’re making free sales.

Before you can create an affiliate program, you have to build an offer. I recommend building a digital product for all the reasons mentioned above.

Digital products come in all shapes and forms: PDF guides, ebooks, tools, templates, checklists, blueprints, courses, newsletters, memberships, swipe files, and other resources.

If you’re worried about becoming the “bUy mY cOuRse” guy, make sure your product is designed not just to be sold, but to solve a problem.

What used to be marketing is now education and what used to be selling is now serving.

If you already have an audience, poll them to decide which problem to focus on.

If you already have expertise, pick the problem you can solve the best.

If you don’t have either, ask introspective questions. Dig deep.

There is no problem too small to build a product around. Start by creating the minimum viable product (MVP). Run it by someone who has the problem it solves. Get their feedback.

If you still can’t figure out what problem to focus on, start with writing. Whether you publish it or not, writing gives you clarity of thought, beliefs and values.

Once you know what’s important to you, you’ll know what’s worth building. You’ll know what problem it solves, and who needs the solution most.

Long-form writing is your moat. It acts as a reference library for your ideas, arguments, and frameworks. Plant your forest one tree at a time.

This is how you start to build your brand canon. It can’t be copied by a competitor or replicated by AI. It’s what protects your unique perspective.

Thank you for reading. Again, if you’re not convinced and you’re looking for a more robust argument to back up these claims, you can check out any of the essays linked above. If you are convinced and you don’t need any more evidence that the best way to level up your financial autonomy is with a hub-centric digital business, then come join the FOF VIP Community where we’re helping people do just that. It’s free to join.

See you there,
Tim

If you want to make it easy for your business to generate revenue and grow your customer base, you have to stop spending time catering to your worst fans and customers.

It’s unfortunately a common misconception that the only way to earn more revenue is to get more customers. And that is one way to scale, but it’s a very linear scaling function. And the more customers you have, the more the fulfillment and customer service burdens weigh on you.

But there are more efficient ways to scale your customer base and income than just finding new people to buy your offer.

Certain types of fans and customers are more valuable than others, and if you’re trying to streamline your business to make it as profitable as possible, there are only three that are really worth your time and attention.

These people simultaneously contribute to audience growth and revenue growth. By focusing your efforts on cultivating these three customers, you are extending the longevity, sustainability, and compounding growth of the business.

I call these The 3 R’s of Community, because community is by far the number one capture mechanism that allows these three to contribute to their full potential.

In this article, I’ll break down why each of the three is important and how to build your community properly to cultivate these members naturally, with minimal effort.

First, let’s start with the customers that have the most direct impact on your bottom line.

And, I should say that there are other ways to increase your revenue, such as making larger offers available and/or more of them. This article is focused specifically on the types of customers that contribute to business growth and longevity.

Part 1 - The 3 R’s of Community

“Your fans don’t treat you equally, and you shouldn’t treat them equally either”

The First R

Likely the most obvious of the three are the Repeat Customers. If the desired outcome is to generate more revenue, these customers are generally the number one contributor.

These people bought a product or service from you and decided it was so effective at solving the problem, they either bought it again, or trusted you enough to purchase another solution to a different problem from you.

This is good because the more of your offers these customers have purchased, the more likely they are to purchase the next one, which is not only great from a revenue perspective, but also from a product validation standpoint. These customers let you know your product is effective, and there is demand for it.

Most of the value of repeat buyers comes from recurring revenue, and this can be simplified with a subscription model. The caveat here is that you have to use it ethically.

If you’re selling a digital product like a PDF guide, don’t charge a monthly fee for the customer to maintain access to the guide, just make it a one-time purchase. If there’s anything people hate, it’s a recurring fee for a one time product.

Generally, subscription models work best for things like premium memberships, ongoing coaching, software products that require continual or recurring usage, and any other services regularly provided by the business.

Please, for the love of god, if your product is a tangible thing that is exchanged once, do not use a subscription model. There, I said it.

If you can use a subscription model ethically, it’s a great way to increase customer lifetime value. Even just a $9/mo subscription makes that member worth over $100 per year. If you’ve read my other essay, You Don’t Need Millions of Followers, you know the significance of that number.

While the impact of repeat buyers mainly manifests in the form of customer lifetime value, the next set of members is valuable to your business in a much different way.

The Second R

This group of members has a tremendous impact on your business, specifically your reputability. When you start catering your community to the raving reviewers, they have the potential to improve reputation, brand awareness, social proof, and even community value.

Most of these members have purchased a product so they’re already contributing to your business in the form of revenue. But that’s not the only contribution.

Raving reviewers also review your products, and rave in those reviews (thanks Capt. Obvious). These people really appreciate finally having found the solution they’ve been looking for (or finally realizing there was a solution), so they’re adamant about your ability to help them solve the problem, or your solution’s ability to solve the problem.

A nice byproduct of this is that they tend to be quite vocal inside the community. These are people who have had enough success to want to help others implement your solution.

That means they post in the community, provide value, and help members, which adds to the value of the community, giving your members even more reasons to join and stay. These people create a positive community environment and relieve some of the hosting pressure from you.

And while providing quality products and direct assistance to your members is the best and most important way to cultivate raving reviewers, you can also implement an engagement incentive system to accelerate this type of behavior even further.

We’ll go more in depth on that in the final section. But first, let’s cover the final, and arguably most impactful, group of the 3 R’s.

The Third R

Think of Serial Referrers as raving reviewers on steroids.

They also appreciate having their problem solved, and are just as adamant, if not more, that people seeking the solution should come to you. While the role reviewers play is incredibly valuable, the main difference between these two groups is that reviewers talk the talk and referrers walk the walk.

Referrers are actually sending people to your community actively. They’re just as passionate about helping people solve the problem as you, which is huge.

If you’ve read the Selling is Serving essay, you know the main purpose of a business is to solve a problem. The secondary purpose of the business is to generate profit. The profit helps the business solve the problem more effectively and efficiently at scale.

So it’s best to build a business around a problem you are passionate about solving for people. When you do that, you stop worrying so much about the money and focus more on helping your people implement the solution.

These serial referrers share that passion for the problem. They experienced the pain or frustration of the problem without having the solution. Now that they’ve found you and implemented your solution, they can’t imagine life without it.

So much so that when they encounter other people dealing with the same problem (especially people close to them) they can’t help but suggest the solution that worked for them.

These referrers tell them, not only that there is a solution, but the exact solution that solved the problem for them. Yours. They know it’s in this person’s best interest to implement your solution and eliminate the problem, so they’ll do the educating and convincing for you.

The best serial referrers even go as far as sending the person in need a link to your offer or community. This makes it as easy as possible for the new member to join and see the solution for themselves. It also makes your life much easier, because now you are getting new members with zero additional effort.

It’s essentially free marketing.

And just like with engagement within the community, you can also create an incentive structure to reward referrals and catalyze community growth even further still.

So now that you understand the customers you should be catering to and why they’re important to your business, let’s talk about the structure that facilitates the cultivation of all three with very little ongoing effort on your part.

Part 2 - Build It Right

“Effortless doesn’t come from laziness or luck, it comes from investing in the right systems”

When you’re setting up your community platform, there are 2 major things you need to do in order to increase the possibility each of your members becomes one (or more) of the 3 Rs.

Whether you’re building from scratch or upgrading your existing community, incorporating these two changes into your build makes life much easier for you going forward.

You no longer have to burn your energy spinning your wheels to create content that only 10% of your followers will see. You no longer have to rely on ad revenue or creator funds because your true fans have plenty of opportunity to purchase your solution(s). And you don’t have to spend every waking moment tracking down leads on social because your referrers are sending new members to your community regularly.

When a community is built properly, it does two things: (1) it makes it as easy as possible for your members to buy your stuff, and (2) it has effective incentive structures in place. There are multiple strategies that you can leverage for both, and you don’t need to use all of them. But as always, when they’re all stacked, they maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of the system.

Make It Easy To Buy Your Shit

This is the lowest hanging fruit for a lot of communities.

The simplest way to start reducing purchase friction is to leverage recurring payments like a subscription model, as mentioned before. This makes it easier for customers to pay you because it happens automatically every month or year, without them having to get their wallet out every time. Like I said before, use subscription models ethically, and only where it makes sense.

The next best thing to automatic payments is integrating checkout right into the hub. That way when a member purchases an offer, they never even have to leave the community.

And you can take this a step further by hosting your products directly inside your community. This is a pretty standard feature for community platforms now, and works especially well for digital products like courses, templates, guides, events, etc.

Now, whenever your members want to access their purchases, they’re not taken to some other platform that owns the relationship. Instead they stay right here, learning from the product you created in the environment you created, for this specific purpose.

But what if you haven’t created a digital product? What if you don’t have any native offers at all? Even if you’re only promoting affiliate offers, you can still make this happen to a degree. The best community platforms offer a sponsors/resources center which keeps all your affiliate offers in one place where your members can easily find them.

But that’s still not ideal, because your members are clicking links and going away from the community. Ideally, you want your members to be able to find, purchase, and access the offer all in one place. Luckily, cutting edge technology and the newest affiliate networks are enabling this to be a reality for affiliate marketers.

This is huge, even if you’re mainly focused on selling your own products. There is almost always at least one affiliate product you can integrate into your offers to earn some extra revenue with virtually no additional effort. That’s why I encourage everyone to at least consider incorporating affiliate marketing into their monetization strategy.

Now that you’ve made it easy for your members to purchase your offers right from your community, you want to focus on fostering a positive community environment. That’s where the first incentive structure comes in.

Build Effective Incentive Structures

Engagement Gamification not only makes community activity more exciting, it also makes it more valuable. Members earn points when they post or comment, and earn even more points when other members like the post or comment. This naturally rewards valuable content and the members that post it.

When a member’s accumulated points reach a certain threshold, they level up. Each level unlocks rewards automatically, including things like access to specific digital products, live events, private channels, exclusive groups, courses, coaching calls, etc. It’s best if access can be granted automatically as soon as the member levels up. These engagement rewards incentivize members to give to the community just as much value as they’re receiving.

The other great thing about this is that a lot of the people who are really gung-ho about getting points to earn these rewards, are usually not repeat customers. They operate more on the “free-to-play” mindset rather than the “pay-to-win” mindset. This gives your business a healthy balance of recurring revenue and community value.

Now that you’ve made it easy to buy your stuff, and incentivized quality engagement, it’s time to focus on bringing in new members to the community. To start, your best bet is using traditional methods like social media marketing or paid ads. If you already have an existing audience you can invite them to join using a lead magnet of some kind.

Once your community has a solid foundation of membership and value, you can implement the second incentive system - referral rewards. Just like members can earn points and rewards for posting valuable content, you can incentivize referrals the same way.

Each member gets a unique referral link, and any time someone joins your community from their link, that member gets credit. Just like with engagement gamification you can create multiple levels or milestones for members to achieve, unlocking increasingly more valuable rewards at every tier.

If you want, you can even give rewards in the form of cash or coupons. This does entail a slightly more involved set-up, but it’s incredibly powerful because this essentially acts as a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model. Your referrers bring in new members, you pay your referrers a fixed rate per new member, and you never have to worry about losing money on marketing.

If you’re going to go the CPA route, I recommend making it the final milestone of your referral reward system. Give your members the opportunity to unlock other rewards like digital products first. This allows them to prove themselves as effective referrers, so you aren’t paying them until they’ve reached the final tier by referring a specific number of new members. From here on out they can continue referring and earn small rewards for each new member.

If you’re worried about people gaming this system or the engagement gamification system, just make sure you’re building your community on a platform with double opt-in enabled. That means when a new member signs up, they’ll be asked to confirm their email. This ensures only real people with real emails are joining, no fake accounts.

There is one more incentive structure you can implement, and it’s a natural progression from the referral incentive, especially if you’re using a CPA-type system. It’s totally optional and not for everyone, but if it makes sense for your business, it can be a complete game-changer.

The one downside of the CPA model is that if your community is free, your referral rewards have to be relatively low, since you aren’t technically making any money with each new referral. This isn’t really a problem if your customer lifetime value is high, but if you’re like me you want to make the rewards worth it for the people bringing you new members.

So the next step after a referral program is introducing an affiliate program. Now the serial referrers who have already been sending you new members, can start sending you new customers, and earning even more. Because when someone makes a purchase, now you are making money.

And because the sale happened as a result of a referral, it’s a sale you otherwise wouldn’t have made. So it’s a no-brainer to pay a healthy commission to your affiliate who made the sale for you (especially for digital products). Now you can afford to pay your affiliates commissions that make promoting your business worth their time even more.

Just to concretize the power of these incentive systems: Engagement gamification alleviates some of the community hosting and value delivery burden on you as the community owner, because your members are helping you make the community a valuable place to be.

Referral incentives and affiliate programs are essentially free marketing. These people are sending new members and customers to your community without you having to even lift a finger. All you need to do is give them a small cut, so as long as you know your margins, you’re still making profit.

Obviously, one thing at a time. Start by building a community around a problem. Add some digital products and/or affiliate offers that help solve that problem. Integrate payment processing to make some of them paid products. Add engagement gamification and use your digital products as rewards for leveling up. Add more levels as your product library expands. Then you can implement a referral system and affiliate program to spin the flywheel even faster.

But how do you actually build it?

The Right Infrastructure

In an ideal world, you’d be able to incorporate all the components covered in the last two sections into your community with a single platform.

Now there are a lot of community platforms out there, each with varying degrees of capability in the context of this article. As far as I know, there is only one that has the ability to implement each and every component of this system on a single platform. (If you know of another, let me know in the comments)

The technology I’m familiar with (and use for my business) is called ESTAGE, and its different from all the other community platforms in one big way. It’s not a platform, it’s infrastructure. It allows YOU to build YOUR platform, instead of requiring you to rent your platform. That means the members in your community are YOUR members. Not Instagram’s, not Substack’s, not Skool’s. Yours.

ESTAGE gives you the ability to build a community platform right into your front-end website or blog. Make the community public, private, or paid; host products and affiliate offers natively; integrate checkout, including subscriptions and coupons; create as many engagement levels as you want, customize the rewards and rules to your heart’s content; do the same for the referral rewards; create affiliate programs baked right into your hub; and so much more.

If you’re ready to set up this insane customer flywheel for your business, I can’t recommend ESTAGE enough. It’s what I use, and I recommend it because I wouldn’t want to use anything else. You can learn more about ESTAGE here.

I’m sure there is a way to get this set up with other platforms, but it’s going to require multiple subscriptions (5-10 depending on the functionality you want) and lots of duct-tape integrations to make it functional. If you’re able to get a system like this to work, let me know, I’d love to see it.

However you decide to build, now you know what to spend your time on and which members propel your business forward.

Stop wasting time on the passive scrollers, social media haters, and dead weight email subscribers.

Focus your efforts on cultivating repeat customers, raving reviewers, and serial referrers.

Build infrastructure and incentive systems that automate that cultivation.

Then focus on your favorite part of the business.

Thanks for reading. Subscribe for more.

Subscribe now

If you have any questions, come into the (free) VIP community and ask me there.

Talk soon,
Tim

So you wait around for the perfect idea to smack you in the noggin.

You’ve had ideas, thats not the problem. The problem is none of those ideas seem significant enough to justify building a brand around.

It might make for one interesting youtube video, but you have no idea how you would monetize it and turn one video into a business.

If you’re like most people, you have tons and tons of seemingly insignificant ideas swimming around in your brain competing for your attention, and very few big ideas, if any at all.

But odds are, at least one of those “insignificant ideas” has even more potential than the perfect idea you’re waiting for.

I often say how, fundamentally, business is about solving problems. And it’s true, that’s what people pay for.

But I use that language pretty generally, and oftentimes people misinterpret that, thinking they need to solve an “Elon level problem” in order to enter the game.

But you don’t need to cure cancer to start a business. In fact, you don’t even need to “cure” anything. You just have to make the “problem” marginally easier to solve.

When I talk about “Problem and Solution,” those terms are relatively open for interpretation. So this article is a deep-dive breaking down exactly what qualifies as a problem and what the solutions might look like.

There are 4 categories of problems a good business can solve.

I’m convinced you have some “insignificant ideas” in all 4 buckets, and at least one has enough business potential for you to commit to.

So lets get into each of these buckets, starting first, with the most obvious one.

Disclaimer: I call these 4 buckets the 4 P’s of serving. This is a completely different framework than the “Marketing Mix” which is also 4 P’s (Product, Price, Placement, Promotion). The Marketing Mix is useful, but not the subject of this article.

The First P - Pain

The first of the four P’s is the most tangible, and it’s a good place to start since this type of problem is usually top priority for people to solve. These are the “painful problems.”

Pain comes in all kinds of flavors, and some are more painful or prevalent than others. There’s of course the obvious physical pain caused by injury or illness. This often manifests as chronic discomfort which contributes to the building pressure to relieve the pain.

And the pain relief solutions come in all shapes and forms as well. Think about products like painkillers (obvious one, it’s literally in the name) and ice packs. Those provide direct relief, but other solutions contribute to pain indirectly, like physical therapy or ergonomic chairs. They may not have the same instant relief as an ice pack or painkiller, but they contribute more to pain relief in the long-term.

But physical pain isn’t the only kind of pain people experience. There’s also emotional pain like grief, loneliness, anxiety, heartbreak, depression, etc. And again, the solutions come in different forms than just the obvious therapy sessions. Emotional pain relief products also include things like meditation apps, group counseling, self-help books, spiritual retreats, and guided experiences.

In modern society, emotional distress often comes as a result of financial pain. Whether it be credit card debt, a cash-flow crunch, or an unforeseen tank in your portfolio, finances are the biggest source of stress for American adults. Somewhere between 60-90% of Americans reported feeling some degree of financial anxiety, with over 30% feeling that anxiety 5 or more days per week.

Not only is that a huge problem, it’s also a huge market with many potential solutions including bookkeeping services, debt consolidation, budgeting software, and portfolio management, among many others.

The worst thing about financial pain is it often leads to emotional pain or relational pain. Most often this happens between spouses, but is also common among business partners, family members, roommates, friends and colleagues. This could take the form of basic miscommunication, a full on conflict, or somewhere in between.

Unlike the other types of pain, relational pain brings someone else into the picture. Generally, pain is an individual problem, but with relational pain the solution needs to be catered to both parties experiencing the conflict. So the best solutions here tend to be things like couples therapy, communication coaching, or mediation service.

Similarly, the dynamic is also different for solutions to social pain. Anyone experiencing embarrassment, exclusion, or loss of status is now feeling that social pain and the solutions need to cater to the individual as well as the audience. This is where things like PR, reputation management, and image consultants come in.

Finally, a type of pain I’m sure we’ve all experienced many times is frustration. Whether it’s a broken process or wasted time or an insufficient tool, you find yourself saying “it shouldn’t be this difficult.”

When I find myself in these situations I always hear my dad’s voice, passing on a piece of advice from his own father: “Always use the right tool for the job.” If there’s a better tool for the task at hand, that usually relieves some of the frustration. Sometimes there isn’t a better tool, and my mind wanders through the design process of the perfect new tool for the job. Every one of those moments has the potential to birth a new business.

A quick note on morality: obviously there are moral implications involved when you capitalize on someone else’s pain or discomfort. It’s been done countless times and will likely continue for a long time. The aim is not to encourage you to capitalize on the pain of others. The goal is to help you identify solutions that already exist in your life. If you were able to solve your pain, you can help pass on the solution to others with the same pain. You aren’t taking advantage of their pain to make the sale, you’re making a sale because you’re helping relieve the pain. I felt obligated to make this explicitly clear due to the inclusion of painkillers in this section.

Pain relief is the most fundamental type of problem humans can help each other solve. Its top priority because it creates discomfort and stress that reduces the overall quality of life for that person. If you can help relieve that pain, you’re in business.

But what if you could take it one step further? What if you could prevent the pain from happening before it even shows up?

The Second P - Prevention

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” —Ben Franklin

Relieving pain is excellent, but most people would agree it would be ideal to not have experienced the pain at all. That’s where the second P comes in. These are the “preventable problems.”

Prevention is key not only with pain-related problems, but with any recurring, looming, or fear-inducing problems. People are really affected by FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). If you can relieve the problem before it arises, you can give them significant piece of mind, and they’ll value that more than you realize.

Preventing a problem is as good or better than solving one. And just like with pain, the problem-solution combinations can take many forms. In the context of pain, there are health related prevention solutions like regular checkups and health insurance, as well as things like gym memberships, diet cookbooks, and air purifiers. But physical pain isn’t the only thing worth preventing.

As mentioned in the previous section, finances are the biggest source of stress for people today so there is lots of FUD in this space too. There are plenty of products that aim to prevent financial problems, like home or life insurance, warrantees, and estate planning. People care about their money and they’ll pay a lot to protect it.

There are a lot of FUD reduction opportunities in the safety and security worlds as well. In the physical world these show up as things like seatbelts, helmets, and smoke detectors. In the digital realm we have antivirus software, cloud backups, VPNs, and 2 factor authentication apps. More and more of our lives are spent online, and again, people want to protect their digital property.

And of course one of the biggest areas of prevention is the operational and legal side, which ties in directly to the social and reputational pain mentioned in the last section. This is where things like contracts, NDAs, and background checks come into play as well as compliance policies and audits, quality control efforts, and cybersecurity services.

Pain and prevention are very closely related and often the solutions are two sides of the same coin. One solves the problem after it already exists, and one solves it before it becomes an issue.

The third P is a different approach entirely.

The Third P - Pleasure

The third P is probably where most of your slept-on high-potential ideas live. These are the “pleasure problems.”

Most of the time, people don’t even consider the ideas in this category as viable businesses. And there are some far-fetched concepts here, but more often than not, what stops people from pursuing these ideas is that they are personal passions, hobbies or interests.

Most people assume that no one cares about their interests, especially if the people around them don’t share their same passion for the topic. This often results in a “who cares, what’s the point” attitude, and a lot of these ideas are left on the table.

Because the pleasure ideas hardly ever seem like solutions to a problem.

But really, the businesses in the pleasure category are just solving the problem of the lack of that thing. And before you get all up in arms about “pleasure businesses,” that’s not what I’m talking about. (Although an examination of the world’s oldest profession is honestly a decent illustration of this point).

What I’m really talking about is types of pleasure like experiences, aesthetics, status, social belonging, convenience, and yes, sensory stimuli (taste, scent, touch, sound). Things like specialty coffees, perfumes, and massages, which leads right into experiential pleasure.

This caters to desires more-so than fears or pain. The desire for travel, adventure, or entertainment. Solutions here include travel packages, concert tickets, and theme parks. Movies, books, and podcasts also fit in this category as entertainment solutions. Really any type of captivating content can leverage experiential pleasure.

And the best pleasure solutions have some overlap. For instance a live music show provides sensory and experiential pleasure. It also provides a sense of social belonging, connection and fun. This is much more intangible than a pain or prevention, but still has plenty of solutions like event planning, group experiences, clubs and classes.

As much as some people love to be a part of a bigger group, others love to stand out, and that’s where luxury products and status symbols come in. These products provide a sense of recognition to the customer and oftentimes boast a luxury experience. In the words of Coco Chanel, “Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury” which is why so many status products also provide aesthetic pleasure.

But aesthetic pleasure isn’t limited to watches and handbags. It also manifests most obviously as fine art, beauty and design. Architecture, fashion and interior design services all cater to the aesthetic pleasure.

The point is that even the products that aren’t an absolute necessity can grow into successful businesses, as long as they can be framed as the solution to some kind of problem. You just have to think a little deeper about what a problem actually is.

The Fourth P - Problem

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
—Theodore Levitt

The fourth P is for “problematic problems.”

Yes, I know, all problems are problematic, that’s what makes them problems. This one is really like a catch-all for all the problems that don’t fit into the first three.

Things like functional problems, when something is broken or no longer working. Problems like this can be solved by repair services, bug fixes, or replacement services.

Efficiency problems also fall into this category. When an operation takes too long, needs streamlining, or requires ongoing oversight, solutions like automation tools and project management software can improve the situation.

You can also consider products that solve access problems or create connections, like marketplaces, recruiters, logistics companies, and matchmaking services. Or decision making problems that can be solved by advisors, curators, personal stylists, or even a listicle review site.

And let’s not forget about the informational problems and solutions, most commonly addressed by digital products like guides, courses, and how-to content. Check out my previous article on how to sell digital products without becoming the “bUy mY cOuRsE” guy.

But like I said, all problems are problematic, and everything I’ve covered in this essay, whether it’s a pain prevention or pleasure, is also a problem. We’ve just categorized 4 types of problems: pain-problems, preventable-problems, pleasure-problems, and problematic-problems.

Everything is a problem. This is good news.

The point of this article is not to convince you to go manufacture a designer handbag. It’s simply to illustrate that you don’t have to solve some huge problem in order to justify building a business.

The point is to show you that everything is a problem. Problems can take on many, many forms, and the solutions to each problem can take on even more forms. Everything you pay for solves a problem in one of these 4 capacities, or a combination of multiple. Break the walls of the box that confines the definition of “problem” in your head.

When you get creative about what is considered a problem, you begin to see that possibilities are endless. And not only that, but you start to have more ideas that you’re confident in. Plus you’ll realize ideas you’ve dismissed in the past actually have more potential than you initially thought.

This article is meant to be more than just a list of problems and solutions. It’s meant to stimulate your thoughts and get your mind churning on the problems you’ve solved for yourself and could solve for others.

Picking a Direction

Hopefully now, your mind is racing with potential ideas. Grab one and follow it all the way from problem to solution. Ask yourself:

1. Validate the problem - Is this a real problem that real people are dealing with? If it fits in one of the 4Ps, its a real problem. Next step is to find the people with the problem.

2. Research your people - How prevalent is the problem? How do the people with the problem talk about it? Where do these people spend time online? Youtube? Reddit? Facebook? Old forums?

3. Research your problem - How long has the problem existed? Has anyone tried to solve it before? Were they successful? How would your solution work differently?

4. Commit - If the problem is prevalent, and there is demand for a solution, commit to this direction. Start getting clear about the problem. Why it’s a problem. Why people should care about solving that problem. How people should go about solving the problem. How YOU can help them solve the problem.
   For more guidance on this check out my recent essay on brand canon.

Stop waiting for the perfect idea.
Odds are you’ve already had plenty of them.
All that’s left is to validate, research, and commit.

Use step number four to begin formulating a manifesto as to why your problem is worth solving. I encourage you to write this whether you intend to publish it or not.

If you do publish it, drop it in the comments. I want to read your stuff.

Looking forward to supporting and connecting with you

Thanks for reading. Subscribe for more.

Talk soon,
Tim

It’s so universally cringe that it became a meme. Yet, it seems like everyone and their mother has a course to sell, which begs the question: if it’s so cringe, why did it become so popular?

It all started in the early 2020s when selling courses became the crocs of online business. No, not the crux. The Crocs. Let me explain.

Everyone claims to hate Crocs (or at least they used to 10 years ago) yet the company has been doing over a billion in revenue every year since 2011. So either some people were lying about hating Crocs, or the company has been falsely reporting its numbers for 15 years.

Just like everyone claims to hate crocs, everyone also claims to hate the “course hawkers.” And yet, there are so many of them, there must be a good reason for it. And there is. Selling courses and digital products is easily one of the most profitable ways to earn money online. That’s why half of these online courses supposedly teach you how to sell courses.

But if it actually works, why is it so gross?

The problem with a highly efficient profit mechanism like digital products, is it attracts shallow people just looking to make a quick buck. Those aren’t the only type of people selling courses, but they’re the loudest, and they’re the biggest reason why the whole thing became annoying enough to be memed.

They’re also the biggest reason why the problem needs to be addressed. We don’t need fewer courses, or fewer people selling them. We need better courses.

And there is one key difference between these course hawkers and the people actually making significant money with digital products. It’s something you can implement into your strategy today, to make plenty of money without becoming the “bUy mY cOuRse” guy.

Why It Feels Gross

Most courses and digital products feel ultra-cringe when they’re pitched for one simple reason.

They were created to make money, not to solve a problem.

Don’t get me wrong, products are supposed to make money. Businesses are supposed to make money. It keeps them alive, and selling products is how they do that. And digital products do this incredibly efficiently, increasing your earning potential, and decreasing costs and friction, which we talked about in my previous essay 3 Keys to Maximize Your Financial Autonomy.

The issue is that making money is not the primary reason the product exists, but a byproduct of it. The real purpose of a product is to solve a problem.

The purpose of a business is to solve a problem at scale. The product helps the business provide the solution to the customer, and create profit for the business. The profit enables the business to continue solving the problem more effectively and efficiently.

The problem with the course hawkers is they want to jump straight to the profit without solving any problems. So they built a product designed to create a one-time customer. It’s optimized for conversion, not for success or ease of use. And every piece of content they produce is designed to be more of an ad than an actually helpful post.

That’s why every pitch is so cringey. They’re asking you to exchange your hard earned coin for empty promises at best. And being bold enough to do it without having established any trust or rapport.

Compare that to a genuine solution. A creator focused on solving a problem will create a product that actually helps the customer implement the solution and/or learn how it works. And every piece of content they create is hyper-focused advice pertaining to a specific aspect of the focus problem or solution.

For example, consider someone in the AI education space. You watch their videos and read their posts because every time you do, you get something out of it. Whether it be a new prompt to try, a new project to tackle, or just a new way of approaching the subject, this creator’s content is valuable to you. You can see where they are now, and know that you want to be in a similar position in the near future, so you value their advice on this topic.

When they drop a course designed to help people integrate agentic workflows into their day to day, you’d probably be stoked to take that course. Why? Because you know it’s coming from someone who already is where you want to be, and they’ve given quality advice in the past. If the course is priced right, it would be a no brainer for you.

Compare that to the guy pumping out AI slop content, posting 15 low quality posts on every platform every day, and pitching his new AI “course” in every video. No, I don’t want to pay $200 for 6 prompts you generated on your lunch break.

This creator (if you can call him that) hasn’t given you any reason to trust him. He hasn’t shown you that he cares about solving your problem. All he’s shown you is some AI slop and a bunch of shaky pitches. By staying attached to the outcome (making the sale) he’s completely lost sight of the point (solving a problem) and as a result, the product has virtually no substance and customers have no reason to pay for it.

If he channelled all his energy into solving the problem, the sales and the money would come naturally as a byproduct. Instead he feels like he’s grinding. Waking up every day to generate and post content, hoping one day he’ll make the sales he needs to make ends meet.

So there’s nothing inherently wrong with selling a course or any kind of digital product. The downfall is losing sight of the problem and solution, and only focusing on making the sale. If you want to make the sale, you have to solve the problem.

But how do you know which problem to focus on?

Find Your Starting Point

If you’re like most people considering digital products, you probably fall into one of three buckets: either you have a skill, an audience, or don’t have either yet. Regardless of which category applies to you, I promise there is something you can sell.

You already have an audience: If you already have some kind of following you’re one step ahead of the game. Whether it’s a client list, a social media following, or a list of newsletter readers, there is already a group of people that cares about what you have to say on a certain topic.

Use this to your advantage. Poll your audience to see which aspect of your advice or content is most valuable to them. What are the recurring problems they are dealing with that you could potentially help them with? Find your most popular content and consider if it could be productized to help your audience implement the solution.

Once you know which problem you want to solve, build the smallest product that solves it (we’ll talk about that next) and then iterate and improve from there. You can always build a bigger product that solves the same problem, but the most important thing is getting the solution into the hands of your customers.

You already have expertise: If you already have extensive experience or skillsets, you likely already know what problem(s) you’re best equipped to help people solve. The same problems you have used your expertise to solve for yourself and others. Use your digital product to pass your expertise through the product to the customer as best as possible.

Again, build the smallest product that delivers the solution. (This is called the Minimum Viable Product or MVP.) Once the MVP is built, find 3-5 people who desperately need the solution and give it to them for free. Collect feedback and testimonials and use them to improve and promote the product.

Even though these first few customers aren’t paying you money, they are the most valuable customers you’ll ever have because they’ll help you validate the product and build something people will actually pay for.

You don’t have either (yet): But if you don’t have an audience to poll, and you don’t have expertise to productize, how do you figure out which problem to focus on? This is where I recommend some thoughtful introspection. Ask yourself some probing questions to excavate your true beliefs and passions.

What experience or experiences do you have that others don’t? What do you actually care about? What beliefs, habits, or practices are you adamant about other people adopting? What gets you up on your soapbox? What gets you fired up? What’s something you just can’t sit around and let be?

If you read all those questions and still haven’t thought of anything, you need to go deeper. Stop mindless content consumption and start consuming content mindfully. Pay attention to what kind of content captures your attention, why it interests you, what new questions do you have after consuming it, whether you agree or disagree, and how that information impacts your life.

Spend enough time on this and you will begin to notice patterns that help you answer the questions above. And remember, at the end of the day what you are looking for is a way to serve people. And there is no problem too small to solve.

Think about simple products like the paperclip, or tissues, or rubber spatulas. All those products solve very minuscule problems. And yet every one of us has all 3 of them at home. Because even though those problems are small, having that particular solution makes life better, easier, less frustrating, etc.

No matter which bucket you fall into, there is a digital product out there for you to sell, and someone out there who needs it. But now that you know which problem you’re going to focus on, the question becomes “how do I deliver the solution?”

What Counts as a Digital Product?

Digital products are not only some of the most profitable and efficient products to sell, but they’re also incredibly versatile. They come in all shapes and sizes, and the best one for your product depends on the nature of the problem and the solution.

Guides and ebooks: A basic PDF guide is generally the simplest form to start with. It allows you to synthesize your expertise into a digestible format for someone who needs your solution.

Most guides can also be expanded into an ebook as well. The key is to treat your PDF guide like an implementation manual, and your ebook more like a manifesto. If you have more arguing to do to support your stance, an ebook might be a better option than a simple guide.

Checklists and frameworks: The next step up from a guide or ebook. Even though these documents tend to be shorter than a PDF guide, perceived value can actually be higher. This is because the customer is getting a concrete framework or blueprint that will help them achieve their goal or solve their problem.

A framework like this gives the customer more than just a few pages of information. It gives them the clarity they need to start moving toward the solution. That clarity may exist in an ebook, but the customer has to parse through hundreds of pages to get that direction. You can help them out by synthesizing the clarity into a single document for them.

Tools and templates: If your focus problem can be solved virtually, you could consider developing a tool that implements the solution for the customer.

Consider a software like Calendly (not sponsored) which allows you to manage all your booking requests in one place, without having to worry about double bookings, or last minute meetings, or rescheduling chaos. These problems are the bane of existence for anyone doing online bookings, and calendly created a software product that delivers the solution.

But developing a software tool can take serious time, effort, money, and commitment. A better option for most people, especially if this is your first digital product, is to build a template instead. This can be done on platforms like Google Sheets or Notion or many others.

If you’ve built a spreadsheet or dashboard or calculator or scheduler or anything of a similar nature for yourself, there are definitely other people who would benefit from it and even pay for it.

Text or Video Courses: This is probably the format that is most familiar to people. It’s a good natural progression from a framework or PDF guide. It allows you to expand on each part of the process in as much detail as is necessary to facilitate the learning of the solution.

If you’re considering going the online course route, I recommend starting with a guide or framework. Then you can create a course module for each component included in the framework. Start with a text course, and optionally add videos where they are most effective.

Swipe files and resource packs: You’ve already done the hard work, and now you’re giving back to your audience by letting them copy your homework. This is perfect for things like email swipes, social post templates, targeted AI prompts, and more.

Paid newsletter or membership: And of course one of the things I talk about the most when it comes to running a profitable digital business is incorporating community.

The customers that will end up supporting your business the most throw money at you because they love you. You helped them solve a problem in their life or scratch a metaphorical itch of some kind, and as a result they are eager to listen to what you have to say and consume more of your content.

Community gives them that opportunity, and it gives you the opportunity to monetize it. You can either build your very own members area and social feed, or you can send out regular email newsletters to share your inner musings with your members. Substack is a great tool for this because it gives you a free subscription and the option to open up a paid subscription.

Honorable Mention: One final honorable mention for those who are so inclined. Live events are becoming more and more prevalent, and pretty much any digital business can take advantage of that. If you’ve developed one of the digital products above, you could easily turn it into an event. And vice versa, the recording of any live event can be repurposed as a digital product.

You can take your guide, ebook, framework, or course and convert it into a webinar. Invite your audience to the webinar for some free value (because you are basically going to deliver the product through the presentation) and then at the end of the webinar, give them the option to purchase the product to implement the solution for themselves. For tools, templates, and other resources the presentation could take the form of a demo.

If you’re running a community or paid membership, you can use the event as an incentive to join or upgrade. And the best part about live events is that once it’s over, it’s still not over yet. After the event, you can turn the recordings into their own digital products. This creates long term value from a one-time event which is incredibly powerful.

So now that you know what problem you’re going to solve and how you’re going to deliver the solution, it’s finally time to build your first digital product.

Create Your First Digital Product

No matter which of the buckets you fall into, you can follow this 8 step process to create your first digital product.

1. Identify the problem - List 5 things that people ask for your help or advice on. Pick one.

2. Pick the format - Choose the smallest viable format. The best product is the one you actually complete.

3. Validate the concepts - Before building, describe it to a few people that may benefit from your solution. Gauge reactions and collect feedback. If the idea doesn’t excite them, probe to figure out what they would pay for.

4. Build the MVP - Complete the minimum viable product in 2-3 days. You can improve from there.

5. Price it - Don’t sell yourself short. You spent 3 days on it, don’t put it up for less than what 1hr of your time is worth.

6. List it - Sell it from the window of your own shop, not sitting on a shelf in someone else’s store. Sell your products on your hub.

7. Promote it - Share the solution with the people that need it. In person, on social media, even ads if it makes sense for you. The best channel for promotion depends on the product, industry, and audience.

8. Iterate and improve - Collect feedback continuously. Regularly update the product to keep it top quality and as effective as possible for solving your customers’ problems.

9. Optionally - Experiment with different formats. If your PDF guide did well, consider expanding it into a course. If the course does well, consider creating video modules for it. This allows you to charge more for a higher quality product, and makes it as easy as possible for people to implement your solution.

Ignore This

“My idea already exists”
“I’m not an expert in my field”
“Who even cares about this thing?”

Screw it. Build it anyway.

The reality is that every product already exists. Even if it’s been done before, it hasn’t been done by you, for the people who trust you. People buy based on voice, format, and trust, not pure novelty. Your version serves someone theirs doesn’t.

Remember our examples from before: paperclip, tissues, rubber spatula. Those products solve tiny problems. And for all three, a viable solution already existed. What makes those products successful is not that they were the first products to try to solve the problem, but that they solved the problem effectively and efficiently. Novelty has nothing to do with it.

If you’re still lacking the conviction to create your first digital product, I recommend checking out my latest essay “Building Your Brand Canon” which goes even deeper on finding personal clarity and picking a direction to take your business. I also wrote an AI prompt to help you facilitate this process which you can access here for free.

And if you still feel like you don’t have the experience or authority to sell your own solution, stay tuned for a future essay that will teach you how to multiply your revenue in half the time by selling other people’s digital products — the right way.

Thanks for reading. Subscribe for more.

Pick one. You can’t use both excuses.

I get it. Earning income online can be tough. There are so many methods and tactics out there it’s hard to know what to focus on. And once you pick one, you still have to compete for attention with your competitors, AI slop, and the general noise of social media.

But there’s one solution that most people are overlooking (or even abandoning) that enables you to rise above the noise and competition. And it actually becomes your most valuable intellectual property without having to slave for algorithms and trends.

It’s not some new software or a magical AI prompt. It’s a clear, unique perspective you own. And the best way to get a clear, unique, owned perspective is through long form writing.

I know, I know, this isn’t what you wanted to hear. You thought you were done with writing in high school.

But trust me, long form writing is one of the highest value skillsets you can develop in an era of AI noise. And I say this as someone who hated writing with a passion for my entire life, and somehow, ended up making it my career.

There was one key realization that transformed me from someone who avoided writing at all costs into the person who can turn a few thousand words into a few thousand dollars.

But before I share that with you, we have to first address the real problem. Not the tactics and strategies that have let you down in the past, but the lack of perspective, vision, and direction.

And it all stems from a contradictory belief that most people hold without even realizing it.

The Paradox of Paralysis

If you’ve tried any of those tactics, you know that “shiny object” feeling.

You roll your eyes at yet another Youtube ad, your cursor hovering in the bottom right corner of the screen just waiting for the skip button to pop up.

But by the time it does, the talking head has your attention, and you find yourself wondering if this is the solution you’ve been missing.

You know this feeling. You’ve felt it before.
But this time, you tell yourself, it’s different.
You listen. You bite. You buy.

And 6 weeks later, the project is half finished, the course is stale, and you find your mouse hovering over the skip button once again, feeling the same feeling. Again, thinking this time is different.

I get it. I’m no stranger to this feeling myself, and I’ve beat myself up countless times for succumbing to Shiny Object Syndrome.

But it’s okay. It’s not actually your fault.

Even though it might feel like it, shiny object syndrome is not actually a discipline problem. It’s really more of a direction problem. When you’re not committed to a long-term goal, every new tool or tactic looks like the answer.

Those shiny objects usually do work, they’re not selling snake oil. But they didn’t work for you because they’re only a piece of the puzzle. Most visions require multiple tools and tactics, but if you don’t have a clear vision, you don’t know how those tools and tactics fit in to support that vision and bring it to fruition.

Of course, the direction problem is an invisible problem. In the moment, it just looks like the strategy that the stupid course is teaching isn’t working for you, and you don’t know why. So you start to put the blame on the teacher, or the platform, or AI.

And this makes sense. But these are just symptoms of the real underlying problem, and jumping from shiny object to shiny object is just a subconscious effort to avoid it. The only way to solve the problem is to face it head on and ask yourself what you really believe and who you’re here to serve.

Long form writing is not only the best way to articulate that, and also one of the best ways to excavate it. I call this your “Brand Canon” because it acts as a source of truth for your core values and perspective. What stops most people from going down that road is a pair of contradictory beliefs that create the paradox of paralysis.

1. My interests are too niche, I’ll never be able to grow an audience.

2. Even if people did share the same interests, why would they listen to me?

If that resonates with you prepare yourself, because you have to swallow these truths before you can go any further:

1. You are not special. Your interests are not unique. There are 1000s out there like you.

2. Your experience is special. Your perspective is unique. Something no one else can offer.

The reason these 2 core beliefs are paradoxical is because you simultaneously think you’re so special no one can relate to you, and you also think you’re so boring no one will listen to you. Both of these ideas make logical sense on their own, but when examined together it seems insane.

The point is, no matter what, you have something to offer. You could be teaching finger style guitar. You could be teaching sewing. You could be teaching ancient history. You could be teaching dog tricks. You could be teaching cooking. You could be teaching dieting. You could be teaching cooking on a diet. You could be teaching a language. You could be teaching physics. You could be teaching underwater basket weaving.

It doesn’t matter.

There is a 100% chance that you have a unique perspective on something.
There is a 100% chance that there are plenty of people who are interested in that thing.
There is a 100% chance that there are enough people who want to listen to your perspective.

But there’s a 0% chance that you ever make any money from it if you don’t take the time to figure out what it is. Everyone has a unique perspective to offer, and I’m about to show you how to determine yours even if you’ve never had a single original idea in your entire life.

No Such Thing

I personally never considered myself to be a writer.

I would consistently rank writing as my least favorite school activity from first grade all the way through college.

Like dead last. Every year.

It wasn’t until years after college I realized that I’m not “not a writer.” What I am is a deep thinker. When I realized that writing is simply the mechanism to articulating my own thoughts, not only was I able to write more, but I actually began enjoying it.

So if you can think, you can write. The problem is most people find themselves waiting around for an original idea to magically appear before they start writing.

But I’ll let you in on a secret. There’s no such thing as an original idea.

This is good news and bad news. The bad news is that if you’re waiting for an original idea, you’ll be publishing your first piece from the grave. The good news is that you don’t have to wait for originality. You are already just as original as all your favorite creators.

Most of the ideas we come up with, we come up with because we were influenced by people who had the same or similar ideas. Whether consciously or subconsciously, you pick up little influences from everywhere in your life, and they all contribute to who you are. This is what gives birth to your unique perspective and why people should (and will) listen to you instead of someone else. Because no one has that combination of influences, even though most of what makes up your perspective isn’t really original ideas.

I’ll prove this to you in a very simple way.

That paragraph above is not a new idea. It’s almost plagiarism. That paragraph was influenced by the Dan Koe, who says, “There is no such thing as original thought, only original articulation.” So while the idea of long form writing as a mechanism of articulating thoughts and preserving your unique perspective is not an original idea, my articulation of the idea as “brand canon” is uniquely mine. And if “brand canon” helps you understand the concept better, you’ll probably associate the idea with me, even though it’s not my idea originally, AND even though I TOLD YOU it’s not my idea.

And to be fair, it’s not Dan’s idea either. When talking about this topic of articulation and original thought, he often quotes a tweet from JK Molina which says “Twitter is about saying one thing in a thousand different ways.” As you can see, this concept has been around long enough to exist back when Twitter was still Twitter and people actually shared profound insights on the platform.

This should be encouraging. Remember, no one is really an original thinker at all. You are as original as your favorite creators, you just don’t think so because you haven’t tried to articulate the beliefs you pull from them in your own words. The difference between you and them is simply that they decided to articulate their perspective publicly, and you haven’t.

Yet.

Your Brand Canon

So if the problem is a lack of perspective and direction, and the solution is original articulation, the mechanism is long form writing.

In the age of AI slop, long form content is one of the only ways to articulate and share deep, meaningful, thought-provoking ideas.

By building your library of long-form content, you are building a moat around your brand and intellect, protecting you from the competition and swarms of AI-slop-creators jumping on the bandwagon of every trending topic or popular take. This is your Brand Canon at work.

Your long-form writing establishes your unique perspective and thought process. It simultaneously gives your audience content to binge while also allowing them to understand you on a deeper level. The more long form writing you publish, the more you protect your unique perspective and insulate yourself from competition. Others may promote the same or similar products or make some of the same points, but no one will ever reproduce every single essay you ever publish because no one has your unique thought process and exact collection of influences.

Your brand canon is more than just bingeable content. It becomes a reference library you can point to when backing up your convictions. Any time you find yourself saying “I’ve made this argument before,” you can reference the relevant piece. And if it doesn’t exist yet, you have something new to write about.

It’s most useful through the selling-by-serving lens. You know your beliefs and values best. You know which problems you can help people solve, and who needs the solution.

Sometimes these people need convincing, so if someone is on the fence about your offer, you don’t have to pitch them, you just point to the article that addresses their hesitation directly. You’ve already clearly articulated the argument which will get them over that hurdle and one step closer to solving their problem.

For instance, this article is for all the people that say “I want to earn income online, but I don’t know what I care enough about to build a business around.” This If that’s you, this piece should encourage you that you do actually have something worth writing about and turning into a business.

Think about it like this. Each piece you write is like planting a tree, and you are planting a forest. The more trees you plant, the bigger the forest gets. And over time, the trees themselves also get bigger as your ideas develop. The branches grow upward and outward and eventually start overlapping, connecting concepts you may have initially thought of as completely separate. Eventually, you no longer see a bunch of trees, but a forest of your knowledge.

Planting a forest may seem daunting, but writing is actually one of the best places to start in that case. Many people are intimidated by writing and publishing long form content because they don’t know what to write about. It may seem counter-intuitive, but writing is one of the best tools for figuring out which direction you want to go.

Everyone has their own thought processes and their own unique set of influences. Even if two people consumed the same content from the same creators, they still have a different perspective on a wide range of topics because the internal processes are different.

I promise you DO have something to write about. You DO have a perspective worth sharing.

So how do you figure out what that is?

Where To Start

The core of most people’s beliefs comes from either external influences, internal introspection, or a combination of both. The flow chart below will point you in the right direction to start defining your beliefs and architecting your brand canon. I’ve also written an AI prompt that will interview you to excavate your core values and convictions, determine your most notable influences, and create your personalized brand canon blueprint.

The Deep Thinker Diagnostic:

• START: Do you consider yourself a deep thinker about anything in particular? Do you find yourself contemplating certain topics throughout the day? Do you find yourself in debates (hypothetical or real) about the right/best way to do something? Do you have a strong set of values or moral principles you adhere to?

  • If ANY YES: Do these beliefs mainly come from your own introspection or mainly from external influences (authors, podcasters, etc.) or a combination of the two?

    • If Introspection: Focus on writing and articulating your ideas clearly, and make them digestible for people to understand. Get clear on why it’s important for people to understand these ideas and which kind of people it’s important for (a lot of the time it’s not everyone). As you spend time contemplating your ideas, frameworks will emerge that make it easier to teach and consume these ideas.

    • If Influences: Focus on synthesizing the high impact insights from your favorite thought leaders. Get clear on how those insights impact you, and how the creator is able to deliver the insights in an impactful way. Determine which beliefs you actually hold and which you adopted without really thinking about it. Then focus on writing and articulating your ideas clearly, and make them digestible for people to understand.

    • If Both: Articulate your personal beliefs and examine your influences to determine which beliefs came from which influence. Get clear on why it’s important for people to understand these ideas and which kind of people it’s important for. As you contemplate your ideas, frameworks will emerge that make it easier to teach and learn these ideas.

• If NO: Stop mindless content consumption. Start consuming content mindfully. That means paying attention to what kind of content captures your attention, why it’s interesting to you, what additional questions arise after having consumed that piece of content, whether you agree or disagree, and how that information impacts your life. Spend some time on this (a few days, a few weeks, no more than a month) and once you start noticing patterns, come back to this flow chart and start again. Eventually, conscious consumption will be engrained in you and it will be very easy to notice which ideas resonate with you, why, and how you can put your own spin on it that will benefit your audience.

Set aside a few minutes for the flow chart and follow the process to really lay out your beliefs and establish your brand canon. If you get stuck or need some stimulus to get the ball rolling try out the AI prompt I wrote specifically for this purpose. I’ve made it available for free here.

And if you’re looking for some additional support, share your writing with me. I’m always looking for new writers I resonate with on any topic, to learn from and collaborate with. The best way to do that right now is to post your writing on Substack and connect with me there. If you really want to be an over-achiever, join the Future of Freedom VIP Community and message me there. That’s the fastest way to get me to read your writing.

Whether you publish your essays or not, I encourage you to develop a writing habit. Even if you never share your writing with another human, a regular writing practice will benefit you in many other ways.

Primarily, like we talked about, it allows you to articulate your thoughts more clearly. This not only makes writing easier, but also speaking to people about that topic, and even thinking about that topic you can go deeper, having concretized your perspective.

And you DO have a unique perspective.

Stop making contradictory excuses.
Stop waiting for original ideas.
Just write.

Talk soon,
Tim

“A man is what he thinks about all day long” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

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If you want an online business that pays you reliably and independently, you don’t need more tools and platforms, you need fewer.

So many creators have spent years growing their audience only to realize their business is leaking money. They’re losing customers to platform hopping, checkout friction, and the sea of noise on social media.

If you’ve been juggling a bunch of tools tied together with api keys and shaky integrations, you know what I’m talking about. A website here, a course hosted there, a link-in-bio page somewhere else, and a separate community platform all completely disconnected from your social media audiences. It’s not ideal.

If you’re just starting out, but haven’t started building yet, all that can sound intimidating. But the good news is you’re here before you’ve started, so you can set out in the right direction without having to restructure a disconnected business.

When it’s built right, a centralized business with an audience of 1,000 can earn 10x more than a disconnected business with an audience of 100,000. In this article, I’ll give you a blueprint that tells you exactly how to build it right.

In a previous article, I covered three key mechanisms you can leverage to maximize your earning potential, minimize cost and friction, and ultimately create a self-sustaining business. (You can read that article here)

In that article, I gave you a framework to decide which of the three makes the most sense for you to focus on first. In this article, I’ll show you how all three pieces can fit together to become greater than the sum of their parts. And it starts with your home on the internet.

Your Home Online

Before you can integrate all three components together, you have to give them a place to live. This is done by building a hub for your digital business.

Your hub is your home on the internet. It’s where all your business assets live: funnels, offers, community, CRM, courses, live streams, blog posts, lead magnets, podcast episodes, etc. All on one domain, built on one platform.

This does a few things for you. First, it makes your life easier to be able to manage and operate everything from one place, and eliminate multiple software subscriptions. Second, it makes your customers’ lives easier because they don’t have to jump from platform to platform to find what they’re looking for. And third, it plugs the leaks that come from platform hopping and logistical friction that cause you to lose both sales and customers.

By building a hub for your business, you are essentially creating a digital ecosystem. All the products and services you have to offer are made available in one place. If people want to purchase your products, they have to come into your ecosystem. Once they’re in, they’re more likely to make another purchase.

Companies like Apple and Tesla have been doing this for decades. It’s literally a trillion dollar business model. And you can take advantage of that same model (even starting from zero) to create a self-sustaining ecosystem by integrating these 3 mechanisms into one hub.

The three high-leverage mechanisms of digital business are digital products, affiliate marketing, and online community. If you read the newsletter on maximizing mechanisms, you might remember the decision framework gives you a few options to consider, but no matter what, community is an option no matter where the flow chart takes you.

Your community is a key component of your hub. It’s the end goal for most digital businesses because it’s currently the best way to cultivate repeat buyers, raving reviewers, and serial referrers all at once. These top fans are the most valuable members of your community and contribute to a majority of your revenue. (If you’re not convinced, you can read this essay)

Integrating a community into your hub gives you a capture mechanism for these most valuable members, and multiple monetization pathways they can follow to purchase your offers and fund your business.

A good community platform enables at least 6 of these monetization pathways, including (but not limited to) paid memberships, exclusive content, course hosting, private live events, live and automated webinars, affiliate offer integration, and many more possibilities.

The more monetization pathways you leverage, the more options you give your members and the less you have to sell and pitch to them. And the possibilities are only multiplied when you start incorporating the other two levers.

Multiplier 1 - Membership Growth

Digital products are high-leverage because they maximize profit and minimize cost. Because these products are created and delivered virtually, it eliminates a whole host of expenses that come with physical products like materials, manufacturing, and fulfillment. This not only reduces cost, but eliminates much of the logistical friction as well.

But the real power of digital products is their scalability. You create it once and then you can sell it infinitely. That means the value compounds over time, increasing the profit margins until they approach 100%. But you don’t have to put all your digital products up for sale.

There are many ways these products can increase the value of your hub without being a paid product. Digital products like PDF guides, templates, and checklists make for great community lead magnets. You can give them to your new members at no cost as an incentive to join your community.

And they can be used to incentivize members to do more than just join the community. You can use them to gamify engagement within your community feed. Popular posts and comments earn points, and when a member earns enough points, they level up. Digital products make the perfect reward/incentive for engagement, because they can be delivered instantaneously as soon as the member reaches a new level.

An even more powerful use case for digital products is for referral rewards. This gamification incentive structure is very similar to engagement gamification. You decide how many new members someone has to refer before they earn that particular reward. Again, instantaneous delivery makes this reward system almost entirely automated.

Yet another purpose for digital products is as premium membership perks. If you decide to create a paid membership in addition to a free private community, you can include access to select digital products at no additional cost. You could do this by making certain paid products free for premium members, or by gating access exclusively to premium members. The community hub infrastructure not only makes this possible, but also very automatic, and one less thing for you to worry about.

Digital products are excellent for maximizing profit margins and reducing operational complexity and friction. And when combined with community, they can actually catalyze the cultivation of premium members, raving reviewers, and serial referrers. These are your community’s most valuable members.

This is the power of combining just 2 of these high-leverage mechanisms. Imagine what happens when you add in the third.

Multiplier 2 - Revenue Growth

Affiliate marketing is the revenue multiplying lever.

When you become an affiliate for a company, you recommend their product or service to new customers, and when they buy, the company pays you a cut of the profit, aka a commission.

Not only does this give you the opportunity to sell a validated product without having to create it yourself, it also allows you to promote multiple offers to the same audience. This means you’re simultaneously giving your members multiple solutions to multiple problems, as well as more opportunities to become repeat customers. This multiplies customer lifetime value which in turn multiplies revenue.

In the previous article, I recommended starting with affiliate marketing if you haven’t productized a solution of your own. And it’s true, this is one of the best places to start in that case, because it allows you to earn while you learn. You can find a product that solves your problem, and recommend it to the people who have that problem. When they buy, you earn a commission.

And like we talked about in last week’s newsletter, selling is all about serving, and serving is just education and problem solving. Tell them about the problem, show them the solution and say, “if you want the solution I personally recommend, it’s this.”

But affiliate marketing is also a great addition even if you do have your own products for sale. Your products are focused on solving a specific problem, but there may be other problems adjacent to the one your business focuses on. By finding adjacent problem-solution combos, you can help more of your members solve more problems, and earn more money at the same time.

When possible, I recommend affiliating with and promoting digital products due to their innately higher profit margins. Physical product profit margins are often as low as 20-40% which means any commission you earn from the sale of that product is going to be less than that. Meanwhile, digital products have profit margins that often exceed 90%. With so much profit left over, your partner is much more likely to pay you a higher commission.

Does this mean you absolutely shouldn’t affiliate with physical products? No. Sometimes that makes sense based on the industry and the solution. But when given the choice, earning 50% commissions on a digital product is usually preferable to earning 5% commissions on a cheap physical product.

For the most profitable affiliate offers on digital products, I personally recommend checking out Vault Alliance. They have lots of offers to choose from in varying price tiers, and the best part is, you can embed these assets into your digital business hub and sell them right from your community. This means your members get access to valuable products without ever having to leave the community, making it that much more of a destination.

Sell Without Selling

Community allows you to integrate your affiliate offers and digital products by embedding them into your ecosystem. Your community becomes primarily an education vehicle with embedded monetization pathways. It takes your members through the 5 stages of awareness naturally, so you hardly have to pitch your offers, just mention them as the natural recommendation for the solution to whatever problem they solve.

This is often referred to as “selling without selling” or “inception marketing,” and it’s what I refer to when I talk about selling by serving.

For instance, in the Future of Freedom VIP community, I give all the information away for free and only charge for help with implementation. I create free products and newsletters that educate the audience on the problem and how to solve the problem. Then just casually mention the offers that might help them get there easier. No need to do a whole mid-roll ad break, just drop it and leave it.

(If you want to see for yourself, you can join the VIP community for free)

And believe it or not, the opportunities to sell by serving don’t stop there. Cutting edge community technology takes this even further by opening up even more customer pathways for your hub, like exclusive content. Similar to digital products, your exclusive content library makes your community a destination members come back to. Your content can act as à la carte digital products, premium membership perks, or just free community value.

And speaking of premium memberships, I recommend building your hub on a platform that allows you to create multiple channels within your community. This opens up tons of possibilities like having a free private membership and an exclusive paid membership. You could also use an additional channel for private cohorts or group coaching. Or you could use it to manage your team of affiliates or even to manage your production team as a Slack alternative. There are lots of ways for additional channels like these to create value for your members and your business.

The best community platforms also enable live streaming directly from your hub. No need to send your members to an external platform like Youtube or Twitch, and no need for third party meeting apps like Zoom or Google Meet. You’re able to host private live events, right in your community, exclusive to your members only. Or host public events and webinars to grow your community.

This is one of the most underrated benefits of hosting a community online and I’m betting private events, public webinars, and livestreams are about to explode in popularity. In the age of AI noise, live events are one of the most foolproof ways to prove you are a genuine human being.

On top of that, it’s one of the best ways to create compounding value inside your community. Host an event once, and it’s valuable for all the attendees, once. Post a replay in your community and now it’s valuable for all your members, forever. That’s why the best hub-building platforms enable instant replays and automated webinars directly from your hub. A one time event creates long-term value. It essentially becomes a stand-alone digital product you can use however you want.

These are just some of the many ways the hub-centric business model can be leveraged to create an ecosystem of your own. An environment where sales happen naturally, without selling.

The three main mechanisms are not only powerful on their own, but they’re even more powerful when integrated together in the same hub. And you can take it even further by leveraging exclusive content, premium memberships, and live events to really increase that customer lifetime value and create a sustainable independent income source.

So how do you actually create your own ecosystem?

Building Your Home

1. Pick a lane. Figure out what your business is about. What problem are you going to focus on solving? Do you have experience or expertise that can help your members solve the problem?

2. Build your hub. This is your home on the internet. Consider building on a platform that doesn’t require you to duct-tape your assets together. I personally recommend ESTAGE.

3. Find your offer(s). Turn your solution into a digital product, and/or find affiliate offer(s) that are relevant to your community.

4. Integrate your offers. Integrate your offers into your hub and your community to open up monetization pathways for your members.

5. Deliver value. Build value inside your community. Post regularly, host events, run giveaways, create exclusive content, premium memberships, and engagement rewards. Make your hub the place to be.

6. Expand your reach. Cross post your content outside your community on other social platforms.

7. Invite your members. Social media is a great way to grow your audience, and your community gives them a home.

So now hopefully you can see how the three high-leverage mechanisms come together to be greater than the sum of their parts. These three components create capabilities that none of them possess individually. This is the hub-centric business model at work and I’m more bullish on this being the future of digital business over the next decade than I am about anything else.

If you’re looking for more direct guidance, come join us for an entire workshop dedicated to building your digital business hub and growing your community to 1000 members and beyond. The workshop is designed specifically with the hub-centric business model in mind, and it’s completely free to join. Grab your free seat here

If you’re ready to build a hub of your own and turn it into sustainable income, this event is for you.

See you there,
Tim

I’m serious. Every method of making money involves a sale of some kind.

Even your day job is selling. You probably don’t think about it like that, but it’s true. First, you had to sell yourself in the interview just in order to get the job. And every day you clock in, you’re selling your time to your employer.

Everything is sales.

Most people (especially people with morals) have an aversion to sales. Whether you’re the seller or you’re being sold to, sales can have a slimy, manipulative feeling. And there’s a reason for that.

Unfortunately, sales has a bad reputation because bad sales people exist. They make you feel like a target. Like they’re sizing you up, figuring out how to extract money from you, rather than helping you.

That feeling is real. It’s the reason so many people want nothing to do with sales, from either side.

Most of the time, this comes from a combination of bad sales experiences and an underlying assumption. There is a subconscious belief that sales is a zero-sum game. That, in order for someone to win, someone else has to lose.

If you’re a person with moral values, neither role feels acceptable, so you opt out.

Except you can’t opt out. Because everything is sales.

The truth is that the zero-sum belief is just flat out wrong. Ethical selling (the only kind worth doing) leaves both the buyer and the seller better off after the sale than before.

And once you understand how that works, selling stops feeling like manipulation and starts to just happen naturally.

The Unavoidable Truth

You might not realize it, but you’re already selling.

Every monetary transaction is some kind of sale. There is no version of making money that doesn’t involve a sale. That means it’s impossible to avoid selling, even if you work a non-sales position at your day job.

Everyone who collects a paycheck is engaging in sales. Even before you start your job, you have to get the job. That involves going into an interview and presenting an argument as to why you would be a valuable asset to the company. In essence you are selling yourself as a product to the company. If you’re successful, the company buys the employee (you) from you with an offer for employment. (Aka the hiring process)

So landing a job is a successful sale, but that’s not where the selling ends in this example. Because you get paid for every hour you show up to work. That’s a monetary transaction, so where is the sale? When you accepted the job offer, you agreed with your employer on how much your time is worth to the company. Every time you clock in, you are selling your time back to your employer for that previously agreed upon rate.

Most people don’t realize they can get more value for their time because they think the safety of a paycheck is the best possible deal they can make. The only way to top it is to increase the fixed rate. But the fixed rate, time-for-money sale is actually one of the worst deals available. You simultaneously eliminate any opportunity to sell that time at a higher value, and lock yourself into a fixed rate for the foreseeable future where the buyer (your employer) controls the terms.

Time is your most valuable asset because you only have a limited amount of hours per day. Selling most of them for a flat rate is one of the least profitable sales you can make. You invest 40+ hours per week and your employer takes what you produce, packages it, and sells it at a significant markup. Not much freedom in that scenario.

So in reality, you haven’t been avoiding sales, you’ve just been selling poorly. (Don’t worry, it took me a long time to figure this out too. Most never figure it out, so you’re ahead of the game.)

The truth is that selling is unavoidable. It’s literally the only way to make money. Sales is what keeps the economy functioning. It’s a necessary component of society.

But if it’s so fundamental, why does it feel so wrong?

Win or Lose

Most people have an aversion to sales for a few reasons. It’s possible you had a bad sales experience in the past that has left the pitch forever tainted in your mind. Or maybe you have a subconscious aversion to money in general, which is just as common, if not more. And if you’re already money-averse, sales (or pursuing money in general) is just as bad or worse.

These beliefs are planted in our minds at a young age before we even know what to do with them, so it’s no wonder we hold onto them throughout life, despite their contradictory nature. Whether you had a bad sales experience, or you find the pursuit of wealth to be immoral (or both) most people who avoid sales hold a common belief. The belief that sales is a zero-sum game. That is to say that for someone to win, someone else has to lose.

This zero-sum belief is supported by the aversion to money, and reinforced by negative sales experiences. The people who hold this belief see rich people and think “they must have screwed over so many people to get that wealth,” and in some cases they have. But many times that’s not the case, and really, it takes more than screwing people over to have success in sales. Real sales, ethical sales, doesn’t have a winner and a loser.

An ethical sale creates a mutually beneficial arrangement. Both parties, the buyer and the seller, are better off after having made the sale, than either of them were before. The buyer is better off because now they have a solution to a problem. A better solution than they could have come up with on their own. Better, faster, cheaper, or more convenient. The seller is better off because they collected on the sale.

So really once you understand ethical selling, there is no reason to avoid sales. Which is good, because we’ve already established that sales is unavoidable. The good news is that you’ve already been selling for your entire professional career. The real question is, are you getting a fair price for what you’re selling?

Right now, for most people, the honest answer is no.

But that’s not because you’re lazy, or “bad at sales”, or because selling is wrong. It’s because you didn’t even know you were selling in the first place. Once you realize every exchange of money involves selling, you can make it happen naturally, ethically, and effortlessly.

And it starts with understanding what money actually is.

What Money Really Is

Somewhere along the way, money got a bad reputation.

Maybe it was the phrase “money is the root of all evil,” misquoted so many times it became cultural gospel.
Maybe it was watching wealthy people behave badly and assuming the money made them that way.
Maybe it was just the general cultural discomfort with openly wanting more than you have.

Whatever the source, most people carry a quiet belief that money is morally complicated. That wanting it makes you greedy. That pursuing it at all makes you a bad person.

But the truth is that money is morally neutral. It’s not good or evil. It’s not corrupting or purifying. It’s simply a tool. A unit of measurement for an exchange of value between two people who both walk away better off than they started.

My mentor put it this way: “Money is nothing more than a certificate of appreciation.”

When someone pays you, they’re not surrendering something precious. They’re acknowledging that what you gave them was worth the exchange. They’re saying thank you in the most universal language humans have ever invented.

Think about the last time you bought a coffee. When you were served, you were better off than before, because now you had your morning caffeine. The coffee shop is better off than before because now they have more money than the resources for the cup of coffee cost them, so they can keep serving coffee to the community.

Yes, you could make the coffee yourself and keep your money. But you value the convenience of having the barista make it for you. You value the superior quality of the coffee that the shop has to offer. Maybe you’re far from home and making the coffee yourself isn’t an option.

How much is it worth to you to have it made immediately? If it’s worth less than the price of the coffee then don’t buy the coffee, just make it yourself. But the reason you probably don’t think about this as a sales transaction is because it’s worth significantly more than the price of the drink. So you give the business your certificate of appreciation to say “thank you for making the coffee so I don’t have to.”

The coffee shop solves that problem for you and may even offer an elevated experience that’s worth the five dollar price tag. And it’s the same in reverse. When a customer pays you for your product or service, they’re not being taken advantage of, they’re telling you your solution to the problem was worth it. Just like paying five bucks for a cup of coffee is worth it because it saves you a 15 minute drive home, making the coffee, and a 15 minute drive back to the office, or wherever you are.

You don’t feel manipulated when you swipe your card at the coffee shop. So why should any other sales transaction be any different?

Don’t Overcomplicate It

Money, or revenue, is the life blood of a business. A business stays alive when it engages in activities that bring in more money than they cost. That is to say that the survival of a business is determined by the frequency and magnitude of the monetary transactions in which it engages.

Now we already know that every monetary transaction is a sales transaction, so it follows that sales is the primary mechanism of business. Another way to look at it is that business is the best way to scale sales transactions.

When it comes down to it, business is just problem solving. The fundamental purpose of every business is to solve a problem. The business devises a solution in one or more of many forms (product, service, software, information, coaching, etc.) and delivers it to the customer. The customer now either knows how to solve the problem, or has already solved the problem. Thus they are happy to exchange a certificate of appreciation for having their problem solved.

Once you accept that money is just appreciation for value delivered, the entire concept of “business” becomes a lot less intimidating. It’s not about being a shark. It’s not about manipulation, or hustle, or grinding yourself into the ground. It’s about solving problems.

This is key to understand if you want to make significant money. We know the only way to make money is with sales transactions, and the best way to scale sales transactions is with business. So it’s imperative you understand that fundamentally, a business is a problem solving mechanism that leverages sales at scale to serve its customers and maintain profitability. Profitability further enables the business to continue serving its customers as best as possible.

Problem. Solution. Exchange.

That’s all business is. And the better your solution solves the problem, the more money people are willing to pay for it.

So the next natural question is “what problems can I help people solve?” But it doesn’t stop there.

Selling Anything Ethically & Effortlessly

First, determine your area of focus. What problems have you solved for yourself or others? How does your experience or expertise help other people solve the problem? Once you identify a problem you can solve (a real problem that causes real pain for real people) your relationship with selling has to change.

The key is to not approach the solution as an income generating mechanism, but to instead see the solution as the primary goal and the money as a byproduct. Now, when you find yourself in a sales situation as the seller, you can pause and say “how can I use my solution, expertise, or knowledge to help this person best?”

This often includes a question like “would my solution actually help this person solve the problem?” or “is purchasing the solution in this person’s best interest?” If the answer is no, give the best advice you can in order to steer them in the right direction, but don’t sell to them, even if the prospect wants to buy.

Now you know that when you are the seller, you aren’t going to end up with an unethical outcome. This takes a lot of the pressure off.

But, ethical selling is about more than just not pushing products on people who don’t need them. It’s just as much about educating the people that do need them.

Most people aren’t vocal about their solution because they don’t want to be that guy. The loud, pushy pitcher always turning everything into a sales opportunity. Totally fair.

Instead, they’d rather wait for people to come to them for the solution. This is when their “integrity” starts to get in their own way. They’ve spent so much time avoiding the archetypal salesperson that they’ve swung too far in the other direction. They’ve become invisible.

But think about it from the perspective of the person with the problem. If you have the solution to someone’s pain and you stay quiet out of fear of being “that guy,” you aren’t being humble. You’re being selfish.

You’re prioritizing your own comfort over their solution.

Remember, the sale isn’t just an opportunity to make money, it’s a responsibility to help someone solve a problem. Some people don’t even know it’s a problem, or that there is a solution. You have to point out the problem and meet them where they are to show them that a better way exists.

What used to be marketing simply becomes education.

You inform them of the problem, educate them on the solution, and then can very casually say, “you can get this solution from me personally” without pitching very much at all. The people who really understand the problem understand the value of the solution, so they’re happy to give a certificate of appreciation.

And when you’ve identified a problem and/or solution that you’re passionate about, the whole process becomes effortless. You actually care about educating the people with this problem so they can end their suffering, and as a result your “selling” automatically becomes much more authentic.

This is why I personally chose to focus on helping people solve the problem of independent income. I’ve watched too many people (myself included) follow a downward spiral of pain and frustration that comes from working a job that they hate.

It’s more than just sitting in traffic for an hour a day.
It’s more than just putting up with an annoying coworker.
It’s more than just trading 40+ hours a week for a paycheck.

It consumes all your time and energy, all the best hours of your day and best years of your life, and all it gives you in return is instability. One shaky leg to stand on: A paycheck that could disappear at any time, regardless of your work ethic or performance, forcing you to get scrappy to pay the bills.

I’ve witnessed these situations absolutely destroy people of all ages financially, emotionally, and physically. And because I have access to what I genuinely believe is the best solution to this problem, I feel morally obligated to at least inform people that there is a way out of this hell.

I struggled for a while with the whole “buy my course and quit your job” pitch. But once I started looking through the lens of education, the “selling” feeling disappeared entirely.

Once they know about the problem and your solution, it’s up to them to make a purchase decision. If they want to keep experiencing the pain that’s on them. But you have to at least inform them there’s a better way.

Start With What You Know

You came into this thinking sales was something that happened to you. Now you know it’s something you actually do (and have always done).

The only thing left is to do it intentionally.

Here’s a simple 3 step process to follow if you want to put this into action:

1. Brainstorm a list of problems you have solved for yourself or someone else.

2. Pick one.

3. Get clear on your experience and perspective.

That’s your starting point.

If you want to make money you have to sell something.
If you want to make lots of money, you have to scale your sales.
If you want to scale your sales, your best bet is to to run a business.
If you want to run a business, you have to solve a problem for your customers.
If you want to solve a problem for your customers, you have to serve your customers.

When you practice serving, selling comes naturally.

If you want to see it in action, join us for the free Mission 1000 live event. This live workshop is all about creating independent income online and selling to serve. Like I said, I genuinely believe this is the best solution to the financial autonomy problem. Grab your seat here.

See you there,
Tim

Social is great for getting attention, but it’s terrible at capturing that attention and even worse at monetizing it.

You work hard creating content, posting every day, and engaging in the comments, and the creator program might pay you a couple hundred bucks for the month, if that. Or you have to sell out and sign brand deals to promote irrelevant products to an audience that doesn’t care about them.

Either way, the solution seems to be: get millions of followers and gain influencer status, or go viral and get stuck slaving for the algorithm.

The truth is you don’t need to sell your soul for proper monetization.

There’s an even simpler method for audience monetization that’s way more effective than either of these strategies. It’s simultaneously the pinnacle of digital business in 2026 and one of the best places to start.

You don’t need to go viral.

You don’t need millions of followers.

You don’t need to become someone you’re not.

Because the actual solution has nothing to do with followers or virality.

Followers Aren’t Enough

Growing an audience and growing a business are not the same thing.

Social media has convinced an entire generation that the path to financial freedom is accumulating as many followers as possible. Get more followers, get more views, get more engagement, make more money.

Sounds reasonable. The problem is that followers aren’t customers.

Someone can follow your account for years without ever buying anything from you. They might enjoy your content, agree with your ideas, and watch every video you post. But if they never make a purchase, they don’t actually contribute to the sustainability of your business.

This is why so many creators find themselves stuck on the content treadmill. They spend years chasing bigger numbers, only to discover that a large audience doesn’t automatically translate into meaningful income.

A creator with 100,000 followers can struggle to pay their bills, while others with much smaller audiences can build thriving businesses without slaving to the algorithm.

Why?

Because follower count is a vanity metric. It tells you how many people raised their hand and said, “this is interesting.” It doesn’t tell you how many people trust you. It doesn’t tell you how many people you’ve helped. And it certainly doesn’t tell you how many people are willing to pay for a solution to a problem.

It gets even worse when you remember that social media platforms don’t actually work for you. Their goal is not to help you build a business. Their goal is to keep users on the platform for as long as possible (to build their business).

Your content, your audience, and your hard work all exist inside a system designed to serve the platform first and the creator second. That means even if someone follows you, there’s no guarantee they’ll consistently see your content.

You can spend years building an audience only to find yourself competing with algorithms, trends, advertisements, and millions of other creators vying for attention from people who already chose to follow you. That’s the fundamental problem.

Social media is excellent at attracting attention. But it’s terrible at capturing it.

So if you want to build a sustainable business, simply attracting attention isn’t enough. You also have to capture the attention and monetize it.

So what’s the best way to do that?

The Cream Of The Crop

Email, the king of audience capture, has finally been dethroned.

A new mechanism emerged in the early 2010s, and evolved in the 2020s, to become even more effective at audience capture. And now in 2026, the technology behind this mechanism enables much more effective monetization than email marketing as well.

The key mechanism is community. Done right, an online community will become a perpetual revenue engine. If you want to supercharge your business revenue, this is the one thing to focus on for 2026.

Online community gives your most loyal and dedicated fans a place to congregate online, allowing you to cultivate your best customers. So many people are concerned with increasing their numbers (follower count, listeners, impressions, etc.) but the real high-leverage move is to focus on quality over quantity. Community does exactly that by allowing the cream of the crop to rise to the top. These are your repeat buyers, raving reviewers, and serial referrers. Spending your time and energy catering to these people will increase your bottom line and decrease your effort and frustration.

Online community also gives you a ton of ways to monetize, making it easier to increase customer lifetime value (LTV) without doing a bunch of direct selling and pitching. The more monetization pathways you leverage, the more opportunity there is for your members to pay you for something they want or need. It’s now incredibly simple to monetize things like paid memberships, courses, 1-1 calls, PDF guides, affiliate offers, live events, and much more.

It’s nearly impossible for a digital business to be unable to leverage at least one of these pathways, and most are able to make multiple work. In traditional systems, these require complex integrations and automations, external tools, and platform hopping for the customer. But now it can all be done seamlessly from one platform.

The combination of these two principles, audience capture and community monetization, allows you to cultivate your biggest fans, or cream of the crop. Your repeat customers (or future repeat customers) join your community to access their purchases and continue buying your stuff. You solved their problem once and now they’re hooked. Some will even buy everything you sell, just because you’ve made it available.

Community also cultivates your raving reviewers. The people you’ve actually helped will be vocal about it inside the community and outside. They can’t stop gushing about you. They’ll leave official reviews, submit testimonials, post in the community feed about their transformation, and adamantly recommend you to other members, coworkers, friends, and family.

This brings us to the serial referrers. Think of them as raving reviewers on steroids. They’re so adamant about your ability to help solve the problem that they actively send new members to your community directly. They want other people to experience the same transformation they did. These members can begin to alleviate some of the marketing burden on you, and you can even gamify the system to incentivize referrals, turning them into an automated marketing engine for your community.

When just one of these groups starts to grow, revenue begins to increase fast. And when all three begin to grow, you can see how the results compound to create a self-sustaining ecosystem.

So how many “cream of the crop” customers does it take to reach a point of sustenance?

The Magic Number

“A creator needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living. I believe the 1,000 True Fans concept will be useful to anyone making things, or making things happen.” –Kevin Kelly

In 2008, Wired Magazine editor Kevin Kelly published an essay titled “1,000 True Fans.” He argued that creatives (who typically have trouble earning a livable income, hence the term “starving artist”) don’t need millions of followers or customers. They only need 1,000 true fans in order to make a healthy living.

According to the article, you must meet 2 criteria to make this work. First, you have to be able to earn an average of $100 per true fan. Second, you must have a direct relationship with your fans. This means cutting out the middleman wherever possible. Instead of working with a publisher, you self-publish your books. Instead of working with a music label, you produce your music independently. Instead of hiring an agent to manage your bookings, you manage them internally.

The more middlemen you can eliminate, the more you will earn from each sale, making it easier to earn $100 per true fan. If you can earn $100 (on average) for each fan, then it only takes one thousand fans to reach $100,000.

But, the number 1,000 is not set in stone. Kelly himself says “The number 1,000 is not absolute. Its significance is in its rough order of magnitude — three orders less than a million. The actual number has to be adjusted for each person.”

It all depends on 2 things: your income goals, and how much you can earn per fan. If your goal is to earn $250,000 per year and you only earn $50 per fan, you’ll need 5,000 fans. If you can earn $500 per fan you only need 500.

It’s a very simple formula. Take your income goal and divide it by 1000. That’s how much your customers need to spend each year in order for you to meet your goal with 1000 members. If the annual lifetime value seems too high, increase your member goal. Or if the member goal seems high, see how you can increase your customers’ annual LTV. The simplest way to do that is to add more monetization pathways.

This logic is pretty sound, and the essay made it clear that in 2008 (and later in 2016, when the essay was updated to be included in Tim Ferris’s book Tools of Titans) 1,000 true fans was the baseline for a six-figure business.

Now however, times have changed, technology has improved, economic landscapes have shifted, and a whole host of other variables have evolved alongside. Community has emerged as the most effective mechanism for capturing and cultivating true fans, and based on the last section, it’s clear why. These communities (and the hub technology they run on) have made it much easier to increase annual LTV.

Think of your community as the people, your hub as the home they gather in, and your ecosystem as everything that happens inside it. Together, they make it easier to cultivate loyal members, increase spending per customer, and generate referrals. I’d argue that now, 1000 members is no longer the baseline of a six-figure business, but the target benchmark for a self-sustaining ecosystem.

These things make each member’s impact on your business much larger. They aren’t just buying an ebook or a subscription. They’re buying related affiliate offers, attending events, and even sending new members to the community. Less marketing required for you.

But there are tons of creators and influencers out there that have way more than 1,000 followers, but don’t have a self-sustaining business. What’s up with that?

Followers vs Members

Not all fans are equal.

Kevin Kelly gives 2 definitions for a true fan. First, “a fan that will buy anything you produce.” And while that sounds ideal, not everyone will purchase everything you create. But that’s not where the 1,000 number comes from.

It comes from an income goal (albeit arbitrary) of $100,000 per year. So he also defines it as the ability to earn “on average, $100 profit from each true fan.” But we’ve also been talking about followers on social media, subscribers, customers, and community members. So let’s clear these up as well.

Social media followers and subscribers are not the same as true fans. Gaining 1000 instagram followers will not result in a self sustaining ecosystem or even a six figure income. Not necessarily anyway. These people see one of your posts in their feed, find it interesting, and click subscribe. They aren’t true fans yet because they aren’t even customers yet. But you can turn them into true fans by leveraging community.

A customer is simply someone who buys something from you. Not quite a true fan or ‘super fan’ because they might only buy from you once, and it might total less than $100 (or whatever your annual LTV goal is). But they’re more than just a follower or subscriber.

Community members are social followers and customers that have joined your community. Not all your followers will take this step, and that’s okay. It’s actually good. The ones that do are the most valuable to you and your business.

You only want the cream of the crop in your community—your repeat customers, raving reviewers, and serial referrers. These are the customers that matter most. Spend your time and effort on these ones, not collecting a bunch of people who buy once and forget.

The difference between followers and fans comes down to this: followers are passive, fans and members are active. The follower relationship is much more surface level, while the member relationship goes much deeper. And the platform you operate on has a lot to do with this.

Platform Matters

Social media followers are less engaged primarily due to the nature of the platform.

It’s not that they don’t enjoy your content, they just don’t see as much of it in the sea of noise that is the modern social media landscape. The algorithms are incentivized to show users content that keeps them on the platform, whether they follow that account or not.

The actual ratio can vary, but by most accounts, only 30-50% of the content in a user’s instagram feed is content from accounts they follow. This results in a very low percentage of your followers seeing your posts (roughly 3-6% according to some studies).

That’s abysmal.

No wonder 1000 followers is not the same as 1000 fans. If you post when you have 1000 followers, less than 100 will likely see that post. Some people who don’t follow you may see the post, and some may actually follow you because of the post. But the chances they see your content again are slim, and the chances they see all your posts is almost non-existent.

And engagement is only part of the problem. The picture only gets gloomier when you consider monetization. TikTok changed the game when they introduced their creator fund program, which pays creators based on organic engagement (as opposed to ad views). Regular every day people could now post videos to TikTok, something they were already doing, and earn money for high performing posts.

This was great for regular people trying to make some spending money. But digital businesses quickly learned that this was not a real revenue stream. You work hard creating content, posting every day, engaging in the comments, and the creator program pays you a couple hundred dollars for the month (maybe a couple thousand if you manage to go viral) because they decided that’s how much you are worth to the platform.

But everyone knows the real money doesn’t come from the creator funds, it comes from brand deals. Get your content in front of enough eyes and you might just have brands waiving thousands of dollars in your face to make a video about their product.

This can be very lucrative (thousands of dollars for a 60 second video) and when it makes sense, creators should jump on these deals. But more often than not, the product has nothing to do with that creator’s content. So if they want to take the deal it feels like selling out, especially when most of their audience doesn’t care about that product.

Recall one of Kevin Kelly’s requirements for the 1000 true fans concept to work: “you must have a direct relationship with your fans.” Social media platforms are the middle man of the creator economy. You work hard honing your craft so the platform can profit and pay you peanuts. Eliminating the middleman might be the biggest reason to start a community.

Save your audience before it’s swallowed by the platform.

How To Start

The social platforms do have their purpose though. Mainly that purpose is to attract attention. They’re good for growth, but not for sustainability. You don’t just need to attract attention, but capture it as well. For true sustainability you really need your own platform.

This used to require a boatload of money to hire a big team of developers and designers, and months, if not years, of development. But luckily with today’s cutting edge technology, building a platform like this is the cheapest and easiest it has ever been. Here are the eight steps to follow.

Determine Your Interest and Perspective

1. Choose an area of expertise or a topic of interest. If you’ve already been building an audience you probably know what this is for you. If you’ve been throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, now is the time to pick a direction.

2. Define your perspective. Why are you interested in this? Why is it important? Who is it important for? Is there a proper or best way to execute? Is there a framework you can offer that makes the concept easier to understand or implement?

3. Refine your perspective. Writing is one of the best ways to determine your perspective and continue to shape and define it. You don’t even have to post or publish anything, just use it as a tool to make your thoughts on the topic more tangible. 30-60 minutes a day is usually the sweet spot.

Start Simple to Build Trust

4. Solve specific problems in your topic space. Problems you encounter or problems you hear others having trouble with. Open your ears on the internet. Listen for problems and pay attention to solutions. Use your writing habit to articulate both the problem and the solution.

5. Connect with people ahead of or behind you. Pick a social media platform (for attention growth) and follow people in your niche. Comment on their posts. Ask questions. Give suggestions (respectfully, no one likes a know-it-all). This is another opportunity for problem identification and solution connection. The more problem-solution pairs you can identify in your space, the easier monetization will be.

Build Your Hub

6. Give your business a home on the internet. One place for your website, community, blog, store, livestreams, etc. Your hub is your platform. The more your business is spread out across multiple domains and platforms, the more disoriented and confused your audience becomes and the less likely they are to convert. Then invite your audience to join your community. This is how you capture your biggest fans and cut out the middle man.

Monetize

7. Leverage one or more of the monetization pathways available for your digital business hub. Having everything in one place gives you the flexibility to take advantage of multiple monetization mechanisms. Here are some of the pathways you can leverage in your hub:

• Paid membership

• Paid newsletter

• Live events

• Courses

• Sponsorships

• Exclusive content

• Automated webinars

• Additional channels

• 1-1 coaching calls

• Private cohorts

• Affiliate offers

• Giveaways

• and more

You don’t need all of them, just pick and choose what makes sense for your scenario.

Join The Mission 1000 Live Event

8. If you’re not sure which pathways would be best for you, or you just want some general assistance with building your home on the internet, I got you covered. We’re hosting a live workshop designed specifically to help you build your hub and grow your community to 1000 members and beyond. And it’s completely free to attend.
   
   The entire philosophy behind Mission 1000 is built on the fact that you don’t need millions of followers. You need a system capable of attracting, serving, and retaining 1000 engaged members. Mission 1000 is for people who want to build a system like that. If that’s you, register for the event here.

Don’t be so concerned with your follower count. Yes, social media is good for getting attention. It’s actually one of the best tools for that in the history of humankind. But that’s not where the money comes from. The money comes when you’re able to capture and monetize that attention.

In 2026 the best mechanism to do that is community, and you don’t need millions of fans to reach your income goals.

It only takes 1000.

If you don’t believe me, come join us for the Mission 1000 Live event. Grab your seat here.

See you there,
Tim

Almost everyone has experienced shiny object syndrome at some point, especially in the beginning stages of pursuing a new goal like creating an independent source of income online. Maybe you tried dropshipping, or affiliate marketing, or freelancing, or creating content on social media. But after a few months of an online course and your own trial and error, you have little to show for your efforts, another shiny object catches your eye, and the cycle repeats.

We’re going to stop that cycle today and give you the clarity you need to create the right path for you to maximize your income without burning out.

Last week’s newsletter was all about financial autonomy (having the financial means to do the things you want to do without being tied to the things you don’t want to do) and why it’s in our best interest, individually and collectively, to maximize this autonomy.

Today we’re doing a deep dive on three high-leverage mechanisms you can implement to increase your financial autonomy. Each of these components increases earning potential and decreases cost and friction in their own way. You don’t necessarily need all three, but stacked together they become greater than the sum of their parts.

But before we can get into these mechanisms, we have to touch on the one skill that lays the foundation for everything.

The Truth About Making Money

Nobody likes to be sold to. No one likes telemarketing calls, no one likes ads, no one likes being stopped in the street to be pitched.

There’s a reason for that.

Most of us have had some negative sales experience of some kind that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. This taints your perception of sales and salespeople, seeding a bias against being sold to.

These bad experiences come from the bad actors in the sales space, and unfortunately they discourage people from going into sales because they give it a bad name.

Unfortunately, selling is unavoidable. There is actually no way to make money that does not involve a sales transaction of some kind. Money is just a certificate of appreciation given in exchange for something of value. This is important to understand because a lot of people have an aversion to selling. They may try to avoid it for fear of discomfort or acting unethically, but the reality is that if you’re making money in any way, you are engaging in a sales transaction.

Even a regular day job is a sales transaction. First you have to sell yourself in the interviews to get the position. And every day you clock in, you’re selling your time to your employer at a fixed rate.

The point is you have to be somewhat comfortable with sales if you want to make money because everything is sales. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be unethical. This is a common misconception, again usually seeded by negative past experiences. Often it manifests as “Rich people only get rich by screwing over the rest of us, and if I want to get rich I have to do the screwing over.” But it doesn’t have to be this way.

When it’s done right, selling is serving. Both parties are better off after the transaction than before. Serving comes down to education, problem solving, and value delivery. Educating is important (and often overlooked) because a lot of the time potential customers aren’t even aware that they’re dealing with a problem. And if they are, they may not be aware that a solution exists.

The main purpose of a business is to solve a specific problem. The mechanism is the value delivery. The business could solve the problem for the customer and the value delivery would take the form of a service. Or they could sell a product, which enables the customer to solve the problem themself, still using the business’s solution. Or they could sell the information the customer needs to create the solution independently, the mechanism being education.

It all boils down to this: making money is selling, and selling is serving. Learn to serve well and making money will be much easier.

Maximize Profit, Minimize Cost

One of the best ways to start practicing selling and serving is with digital products. Not only do they make a good entry point, but also go a long way in reducing investment costs and increasing earning potential.

A digital product is a product that’s delivered virtually (i.e. not a physical product) like eBooks, online courses, tools, templates, live events, digital subscriptions, PDF guides, etc. Digital products typically have a much lower barrier to entry because there are no raw materials costs, no manufacturing costs, no inventory cost, no shipping cost, etc. Because the product only ever exists in the digital space, it eliminates a whole host of hurdles businesses have to deal with when selling physical products.

Beyond the cost savings, digital products dramatically reduce operational friction. There are no suppliers to manage, no manufacturing delays, and no shipping logistics for you or your customers.

But there’s an even bigger benefit to digital products that has the power to increase earning potential exponentially, and that’s scalability. Because the product is created digitally, this gives you the ability to create once and sell infinitely.

I’ll say that again: Create once, sell infinitely.

Profit margins on physical products are limited by how much the materials and labor cost to make the product, because every unit needs to be created from scratch. With digital products, you only need to make it once. This means the more units you sell, the closer your profit margins approach 100% which is pretty much impossible with physical products.

The low cost, low friction, and scalable nature of digital products make them one of the fastest ways to start gaining experience selling and serving. Unless you’re already committed to a specific physical product, start with a digital one. You’ll get valuable sales experience much faster because you can begin serving customers immediately instead of spending months or years developing inventory and supply chains.

Remember, use it as an opportunity to serve. People who buy your product should feel like they got something out of it. They should feel like it helped them move from the problem closer to the solution. Spend a weekend making a PDF guide on a topic you’re relatively knowledgeable about and you have an asset you can keep selling forever.

Minimize Effort, Multiply Income

But what if you’re not an expert at anything? What if you don’t have a solution to a problem or enough knowledge in a certain area to create and sell a digital product?

Well you don’t have to be an expert to create a digital product or even to sell it. You just have to be more knowledgeable than a beginner. If you can help a beginner, there’s nothing stopping you from selling a basic info product except for yourself.

But if you aren’t confident enough to create your own product just yet, don’t worry. You can still practice selling and serving by promoting products that have already been created and are already solving the problem for customers.

This concept is called affiliate marketing and it allows you to partner with brands and companies that are already selling successful products. As an affiliate, you recommend the product to new customers, and when someone purchases, you get a cut of the sale.

This creates a win-win-win scenario. First, the customer wins because now they have a solution to a problem they were not previously aware of. The business wins because they made a free sale, thanks to you. This was a sale they would not have otherwise made, so they’re happy to share the profits with you by paying you a commission. And you win because you get paid for helping someone solve a problem.

Affiliate marketing is another good place to start because it eliminates even more responsibilities than digital products. As an affiliate, your sole responsibility is promotion. No need to worry about inventory, fulfillment, or customer service or even developing the product in the first place. The company takes care of all that, which means you can come in and start selling from day one. This is a great way to start getting the reps in.

There’s another more subtle benefit that comes from this. Yes, the company has already developed the product which eliminates one of the most challenging aspects of business. But they’ve also validated the product, which means they’ve done enough trial and error to know that the product they’re selling does 2 things. First, it actually solves a problem that people have; and second, people are actually buying the product.

It doesn’t matter how good an idea is, there has to be demand for the product, and market validation is one of the most painful processes of business. If you’ve spent a lot of time and money on developing a prototype, you can get attached to it. And if the market wants something different, you essentially have to part with your baby. Affiliate marketing eliminates this entirely.

This brings us to the ultimate benefit of affiliate marketing: multiple income streams.

Because you’re only focused on marketing (not research, development, procurement, manufacturing, distribution, fulfillment or customer service) you have more bandwidth and you’re able to promote multiple products. This gives you multiple sources of income which creates some redundancy. If something happens with one product (it’s discontinued, becomes controversial, etc.) you don’t lose all your income because you’re simultaneously selling other products.

And you can take this a step further by promoting a handful of offers in the same niche or topic. That way, you can promote multiple products to the same audience, essentially multiplying your commissions with very little additional effort.

You can affiliate with all kinds of businesses and products, including physical products. If the problem you’re focused on solving requires a physical product, I recommend affiliating with an existing solution if possible before trying to create your own prototype. This bypasses all the serious logistical friction and operation costs mentioned in the last section, and reduces threat of competition.

But ideally, I recommend affiliating with digital products. Why? It’s a matter of margins.

If a company only makes 20-40% profit on the sale of a physical product, they have to pay a commission smaller than that, otherwise they lose money on you as an affiliate. Meanwhile, with 80-90% margins on digital products, they’re much more likely to pay a higher commission because there is still plenty of profit left over. Many companies pay 50-75% commissions on digital products and I’ve even seen some offer 90% or even 100% commissions. Compared to the 5-20% that’s standard for physical products, you can easily see a 3-4x improvement.

No matter what you end up promoting as an affiliate, make sure it’s a genuine recommendation. Don’t promote a product just because it has a high commission. Promote products that you actually use. A good test is to ask yourself “would I promote this even if I didn’t get paid?” if the answer is a definitive no, promote something else.

You may even want to start out recommending products that you aren’t affiliated with. You won’t earn any direct commissions, but you’ll be building trust with your audience and it’s possible that brand deals or affiliations could come from quality reviews/recommendations in the future.

Perpetual Revenue Engine

Digital products increase margins. Affiliate marketing reduces workload.
Community amplifies both by cultivating your best customers.

An online community gives your true fans a place to gather and contribute to your business. This comes in the way of making purchases directly from the community, posting content that helps other members (so you don’t have to), or bringing new members into the community. And they’re happy to do it because you were the one to help them solve whatever problem you specialize in solving. Plus it gives you a number of ways to monetize, depending on the platform you build on.

The importance of community was popularized by WIRED editor Kevin Kelly in his 2008 essay 1000 True Fans. His argument was simple: creators don’t need millions of followers. They need a relatively small group of highly engaged supporters willing to buy their products, attend their events, and share their work. Kelly showed that 1,000 true fans spending on average $100 per year could create a six-figure business. Today, with digital products, memberships, and online communities, it’s often possible to reach that level with even fewer people.

The latest technology available gives you a ton of ways to monetize your fanbase. For instance, you could offer digital products for sale right in the community, or promote affiliate offers, or both. You could also create a paid newsletter subscription or a paid membership for an exclusive group within your community. Or you could host live events, contests, or giveaways, charging a small fee for registration. And of course you can combine multiple strategies to increase engagement and efficiency.

This is the endgame for most avenues of digital business. Every successful business has a mission, usually related to solving the focus problem, and they need revenue (the lifeblood of a business) in order to drive forward in that direction.

Online community is the pinnacle solution for both. It helps with problem education and solution integration while simultaneously relieving a portion of that burden from you. And it cultivates the cream of the crop customers who not only purchase your products/services but bring more customers to your community and your business. These are your repeat buyers, raving reviewers, and serial referrers.

The fact that a thriving community is a common end goal and has a low barrier to entry makes it a great place to start. You don’t need a product to build a community. You don’t need sponsors or partnerships. You don’t need millions of followers or book deals or well known podcast guests. You just need to pick a problem and dedicate your efforts to solving that problem for yourself and your members.

If you know what problem you want to focus on and you have a solution, you can use the community as a mechanism to help with implementation. Position it as a way for members to get more direct guidance from you on exactly how to solve the problem step by step, ask questions pertaining to their specific scenario, etc. Then you can sell your own digital products or affiliate offers right from the community as natural solutions without selling or pitching.

If you don’t have the solution to the problem yet, this is still a good place to start. Learn in public. Share the insights and lessons from your attempts and mistakes. When you arrive at the solution you will have documented the whole process, have experience to back up your authority, and built trust with people that understand you actually care about solving the problem, not just making a quick buck.

Again, the followers and members you gain in the beginning will end up being your most loyal customers, reviewers and referrers. They basically become your marketing engine and alleviate some of the marketing burden on you. Hopefully by now it’s clear that this is one of the most powerful mechanisms you can leverage to increase earning potential and decrease cost, effort, and friction.

Putting It All Together

So now you’re probably wondering “What the heck? I thought we were going to break the shiny-object-syndrome-cycle, but now I have 3 new shiny objects to consider. This doesn’t make my life any easier.”

That’s fair.

The goal isn’t to learn all three mechanisms at once. It’s to identify which one makes the most sense for your current situation and focus on it long enough to see results. Use the framework below to determine where to start.

Is there an obvious problem or an area of interest you want to focus on?

• If YES: Have you already solved that problem for yourself or someone else?

  • If YES: Did you devise the solution or did you find someone else who had the solution?

    • If YES: Productize your solution in a way that makes sense in the context of your problem space. (Digital Products, Community)

    • If NO: Recommend the solution that worked for you to others with the same problem. Affiliate with that product if possible. (Affiliate Marketing, Community)

  • If NO: Start learning in public. Build a community around your journey toward solving the problem. Share what you’re learning, what’s working, what’s not, and the lessons from your mistakes. This builds trust, attracts like-minded people, and gives you a place to test ideas while developing your eventual solution. (Community)

• If NO: Practice conscious consumption. That means paying attention to what kind of content captures your attention, why it’s interesting to you, what additional questions arise after having consumed that piece of content, whether you agree or disagree, and how that information impacts your life. Spend some time identifying real interests. Then join a community focused on topics that genuinely interest you. Pay attention to recurring problems, questions, and ideas that capture your attention. Once you notice a pattern, come back to this process.

Remember, none of these mechanisms work just because they’re trendy. They work because they increase earning potential while reducing cost, effort, or friction. Follow the flow chart and choose one of the mechanisms listed under where you end up. Don’t think too hard about this, just ask yourself which makes more sense for your situation.

If you already know how your solution would best be delivered, start with a digital product. If you’ve already found an existing product that solves the problem, see if you can affiliate. Even if you can’t, practice recommending the solution to people with that problem (community is great for that). If you know where your expertise lies but not quite sure how to productize, start with community. Pay attention to the questions people ask and build (or affiliate with) products that reduce or eliminate those issues.

If you still don’t know which one to start with, start with community. You’ll notice it’s listed under each possible outcome because remember, community is the ultimate end goal of most digital businesses. And the barrier to entry is relatively low which means it’s also a good place to start, especially because you will probably want to go down the community path eventually anyway.

If you want to learn more about building and growing an online community from zero to 1000 members, come join us for the Mission 1000 live event, designed specifically to show you the most efficient way to create an independent source of online income. The workshop is completely free to join so there is nothing to lose and everything to gain. Register for your seat here.

So now you understand three of the most efficient mechanisms you can leverage to increase your financial autonomy (Check out last week’s newsletter for a deep dive on financial autonomy). The ultimate goal is to create maximum earning potential with the minimum amount of cost and friction to create a sustainable independent income system.

You also now have a framework to determine which of these three mechanisms are worth your time, which one to start with, and where to go from there. Keep this plan top of mind, focus on it, and tune out the distractions. Only take on a side-quest when it supports your ultimate goal. This will go a long way in breaking both the shiny-object-syndrome cycle and analysis paralysis.

Thanks for reading. Subscribe for more.

Talk soon,
Tim

Everyone knows this, and yet by default most people trade their entire life for a paycheck, while simultaneously complaining about the cost of living in today’s society.

And it’s totally valid.

We’ve been told since we popped out of the womb that a successful life means going to school, getting a job, and retiring with a few measly years left.

But now, most people on this path are stuck in survival mode. 37% of Americans aren’t able to handle a $400 emergency expense without taking on additional debt. This is bigger than a personal savings problem. This is a financial autonomy problem on a societal scale.

I define financial autonomy as having the financial means to do the things you want to do without being tied to things you don’t want to do. It’s not a specific number, but rather a scale with 3 levels: survival, participation, and freedom. Because survival mechanisms cost money (rent, food, water, etc.) a certain level of income is required just in order to exist.

I believe basic financial autonomy is a fundamental human right because it’s tied to survival. Not only is it a basic human right, but I also argue that it’s in the best interest of humanity to increase it as much as possible, for as many people as possible.

When you maximize your financial autonomy, you don’t have to stress about survival expenses, you don’t have to stress about emergencies, and you don’t have to spend 40+ hours a week at a job you hate. You have more time, energy, and money to make your life even better still, and improve the lives of other people as a byproduct. At a societal scale, this would massively improve life for all of humanity.

So it’s in humanity’s best interest to increase financial autonomy for each individual. This makes it the individual’s responsibility to increase their own financial autonomy. But if you try to do it by following the default path (birth, school, work, death) you’re going to have a bad time.

The world is much different 130 years later, and so are the paths to cultivating financial autonomy. I’m going to share a new framework for thinking about financial autonomy with the goal of illuminating a more positive path forward than the default. And it all starts with understanding what money really is, and how it enables life on 3 levels.

What Is Money Really?

Money is a resource required in order to participate in society.

At the most practical level, money is a societal participation resource that enables life on 3 levels. This is important to understand because many people have a twisted conception of money that says accumulating wealth is immoral and all rich people are evil. Or maybe the opposite. For some, money has been glorified beyond measure, making it the be-all and the end-all.

The truth is that money is neither good nor bad, it is neutral. It’s a resource that allows the players of the game of life (us) to do things in the game. Yes you can do bad things with money. You can do good things too. That doesn’t make money good or bad, only the person wielding it, and the decisions they make.

It follows from this that money, or wealth, is a determining factor of personal agency, and the more money you have access to, generally, the more personal agency you have. Of course that’s not the only factor, but it’s a big one, and I refer to this specifically as financial autonomy.

This isn’t a number. It’s not synonymous with financial freedom or financial independence or ‘FU money’. Financial autonomy is a scale, or spectrum, and financial freedom is a point on that scale. Its location on the scale is different for everyone.

In fact, everyone’s scale is slightly different depending on where you live, how you live, and who you live with. The scale is going to look different for someone with 3 kids living in Los Angeles versus a single person living in Vietnam. Additionally, everyone also has a different starting point on their scale. However, as we’ll see, that does not provide as many advantages (or disadvantages) as we might think.

But first, let’s talk about the levels of the scale.

The financial autonomy scale is essentially a measure of “what kind of life does my income allow me to live.” The more income you have, generally the higher you are on the scale. As you move up the scale, you unlock new levels of personal agency in your life.

The scale has 3 main levels: Survival, Participation, and Freedom. Remember, money is a resource, and the biggest thing that that resource is useful for is survival. For the most part, all our food, clothing, water and shelter come into our possession in exchange for money. When you have just enough to cover the bare essentials (let alone less than that) you don’t have enough “financial bandwidth” to even consider a luxury purchase. At this level, just one emergency expense is enough to cause checking account chaos.

Once you start to build a bit of a surplus, whether by increasing your income or reducing your expenses or both, you’re able to absorb those emergencies better. And, you can start to make non-essential purchases for your own personal enjoyment. This is the participation level where you can actually breathe, and not every dollar needs to go toward survival. Now you have some disposable income left over to feed hobbies, outings or even some minor travel.

Beyond this is Level 3: Freedom. At this level, your survival expenses make up a small percentage of your income, any and all emergencies become non-issues, and you have lots of disposable income for leisure, investing, or entrepreneurial ventures. People with level 3 financial autonomy have the means to solve meaningful problems and improve society, so I’ll also make the case that it’s in the best interest of humanity to get as many people to level 3 as possible.

If you’re conflicted about the morality of wealth creation, this is your sign to delete the “money is bad” or “rich people are evil” beliefs. Because financial autonomy is directly tied to survival, it is not only in your best interest to move up the scale, it’s your fundamental human right.

Level 1 - Survival

It’s hard to demonize money once you realize it’s required for survival

Once you recognize money is a resource, everything makes a little more sense. Before money and society, the one thing that everyone was focused on was surviving. And survival is still the number one priority today because without survival everything else is meaningless.

But survival is more of an invisible priority in the modern world, because technology and global society has made survival relatively easy... but not free. You still need some level of income to afford basic human needs like food, water, shelter, etc. Maybe someday we’ll have a society that can just give the basics to everyone for free, but that’s a thought experiment for another day.

Because money is required for societal participation, and even more-so because it’s required for basic survival, I am of the opinion that this makes Financial Autonomy a fundamental human right. I’m of the opinion that it’s inhumane to make a person choose between the right prescription medication and a week of groceries. Or to choose between a second job and the kids’ soccer game. Or between paying for a medical emergency and paying rent to keep a roof over your family. Once you understand this you become much less willing to forfeit that right and stay in survival mode.

The survival level is like treading water. You have just enough income to keep your head above water, but barely. And if you stop working, you go under. All you can think about is oxygen and getting more and more so you can continue to breathe. You’re so focused on moving your hands and feet that you couldn’t possibly comprehend a yawn, something that you need a lot of oxygen for. But that’s exactly what Level 2 will do.

Level 2 - Participation

Level 2 is where your ambition goes to die.

This might seem counterintuitive, but let me explain. When your net income is greater than all your expenses, you progress to level 2 of the scale. Now you have some surplus resource (disposable income) you can use to participate in society beyond just basic survival.

This unlocks things like going out to eat and supporting a local business, investing in a hobby or interest, or planning a trip to visit family. This is a crucial level for a number of reasons.

First and foremost is it enables participation, which is why Level 2 is called Participation. The distinction is “participation beyond basic survival” which is important because now the person actually has some agency. Before they HAD to decide based on survival, now they have more opportunities to decide based on preference.

Unfortunately, a lot of people bring the survival mentality with them to level 2. They continue making survival decisions because they’re afraid of falling back into the survival scenario, which is totally valid. But without exercising your agency, that is, without making personal decisions not based on survival, you’re cutting yourself off from the third level. But this isn’t what kills ambition.

Most people have the opposite problem. They worked their butt off to level up from survival to participation, and now things are comparatively much better. They don’t have to worry so much about making ends meet because they have plenty of income to cover it. They don’t have to worry so much about emergency expenses because their savings are growing. And it’s not a monotonous existence because they can use money for the things they actually want to do.

This is where Level 2 can be dangerous. Level 2 creates stability and comfort, which is the perfect recipe for complacency. Especially when combined with the physical and/or mental exhaustion of whatever work you do to earn that income, willpower tends to tank. And along with it go the motivation and ambition to progress to level 3.

In our water treading analogy, (oxygen=money) level 2 is equivalent to a life raft. You can climb up out of the water and give yourself a rest. You can breathe all the air you could ever want, you can lie on your back and close your eyes and yawn—a use of oxygen that is baffling to people on the survival level, just like spending lots of money on something like a car makes a lot more sense at level 2 than at level 1.

So this is where a lot of people get stuck. They get into the wakeup-commute-work-commute-eat-sleep-repeat routine and before they know it they’ve blinked away decades of their life. Or they suddenly lose the job, and now have to figure out how to make ends meet until a new job comes around (scarce these days).

And even if the job is enjoyable and stable, and you make enough to participate, you still don’t have nearly as much financial autonomy as you could. Your job could very easily be replaced (by AI, humans, or a combination) or even be eliminated, often with no warning. So even if you love your job, I encourage you to pursue some avenue of independent income so you don’t have all your eggs in one basket. This is your choice to become automated or autonomous.

Level 3 - Freedom

Level 3 of the scale is when life really starts to feel like a video game.

At this point, less than half of your income is going to survival expenses. A lot is going to participation, which is important for personal fulfillment and a healthy economy. But most importantly, you can dedicate a significant portion of your income to investment or entrepreneurial ventures.

Level 3 is important because you now have the means to solve large, meaningful problems. This is why it’s in humanity’s best interest to get as many people to level 3 as possible. The more problems we’re able to solve collectively, the more life as a whole will improve.

At its core, that’s all business and entrepreneurship is—solving problems. And solving problems is almost always a good thing. You don’t have to wait until you get to level 3 to start solving problems (in fact, solving problems is usually the best way to get to level 3 in the first place) but at this level of financial autonomy, you are better equipped to take on larger challenges.

Problem solving is one of the best and most fundamental ways of contributing to society. This might sound daunting but you don’t have to solve a big problem like curing cancer. You can solve problems on a personal/individual level, on a local/community level, or on a cultural/societal/civilizational level.

Whichever bucket you choose from, you’re starting a positive feedback loop. When you solve a problem for yourself you improve your life. And subsequently, the lives of the people around you improve, and the ripple effect spreads and improves society as a whole. And when life improves on the societal level, your life improves on the individual level and the cycle continues. So whether you’re building space stations or space-saving tupperware, you are contributing to human progress.

The beautiful thing about life is that we all have an opportunity to participate in this cycle, creating a civilizational flywheel that just keeps accelerating. This is why it’s so important to get as many people as possible to level 3. Increasing the quantity of contributors and the magnitude of their contribution can only improve life for humanity.

Now I’m sure the thought has crossed your mind: “Do I really need to contribute once I’ve reached level 3? Now that I have ultimate freedom, isn’t the whole point to stop working?” And it’s a valid question.

We typically refer to this concept as “Margarita Island,” the hypothetical forever-vacation that requires nothing from you aside from sitting on the beach sipping frozen cocktails. And at level 3 autonomy you have the means to make it happen.

The problem is that usually, for almost everyone, Margarita Island is nice for a few weeks and then becomes incredibly boring and unfulfilling. Humans were made to work, to make progress, to solve problems. So typically, what’s more enjoyable than week 4 on margarita island is picking a problem, no matter how small, and solving that problem.

There’s a degree of satisfaction that comes from solving a problem, even just for yourself. Most of us have experienced the phenomenon of home-baked goods. For some reason, a cookie that you put your time and effort into making tastes way better than a cookie bought at a store. This is similar.

And when someone else can benefit as a result of the effort you gave to solve a problem, that adds to the fulfillment. This becomes the driving force behind your business ventures. Now that money is not an object, this is all the motivation you need.

One final note on contribution and working in level 3. “Problem solving” doesn’t necessarily mean work. Your contribution could be leveraging your financial autonomy to invest in companies that are already solving the problems you care about. Direct investment and contribution to these organizations is much more meaningful than a forever-vacation, even if you’re still not doing any actual work.

Calculating Your Scale

Before I get into the actual scale and the mechanisms you can leverage to level-up your financial autonomy, I want to make an important note. As mentioned earlier, everyone’s scale is slightly different depending on their living and income situation. The survival threshold may be lower for some, so participation or freedom may be more attainable.

Additionally, not everyone starts off in the same spot. When we “spawn into the game” (are born) we usually get to jump in wherever our parents are. Most people start off on level 1 or 2, and some people do get to start on level 3. But they’re not as lucky as you might think.

No matter where you start, most people who end up on level 3 had to experience all 3 levels at some point in their life, even if they started on level 3. That’s not to say there’s never been anyone to start and stay on level 3 forever, just that it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Finally, the numbers question. The reason I haven’t included any numbers with these levels is because everyone’s scale is different. For the purpose of giving you a reference point I will use the example of an average American (single, no dependents). But I really encourage you to calculate your own scale.

For the average American, the survival window is ~$40K-80K per year. Anything under $40k and you are likely getting some kind of assistance (unemployment, social security, student housing, etc.). The participation window is roughly $80K-150K. The boundary between level 2 and 3 is a bit fuzzier, but I generally draw the line when your survival expenses account for 50% or less of your income. Level 3 is anything above ~$150K per year.

The tragedy is that the median American income (per person) in 2025 was just $49,000. Most people in this country are living in survival mode. This means the population collectively does not have much agency, and it’s in our best interest to increase that by moving as many people up to level 3 as possible. And it starts with knowing your scale.

Calculating your scale doesn’t have to be complicated, and understanding your current position on the scale is the first step to leveling up. Follow the steps below to see where you’re starting from.

1. The Bare Minimum (X) - Calculate all your expenses. Only the ones that are absolutely essential to your survival. Food, rent, medicine, insurance, school, etc. Your Netflix subscription does not count here. Tally your monthly expenses and multiply by 12. Then add any annual expenses not included in your monthly calculation. This is your minimum survival threshold. If you earned less than that per year, you’d likely need some kind of assistance.

2. The Comfort Minimum (Y) - This is the number that begins to allow you the creature comforts. You could ask “How much do I need to make per month/year to feel comfortable spending money on <basic comfort>?” This <basic comfort> could be a Netflix subscription. It could be a weekend trip to Toledo to visit Grandma. It could be moving your family out of an overcrowded apartment to a small house in the suburbs. Remember this scale is specific to you and your unique situation.

3. The Autonomy Minimum (Z) - This is essentially the comfort minimum times 2. The level at which you no longer need to ask your bank account for permission for anything (within reason). Anything above this number compounds your autonomy, giving you the freedom to do the things you want to do without being tied to things you don’t want to do.

So your scale looks like this - Survival: X-Y; Participation: Y-Z; Freedom: Z+

Now the question is, how do you level up?

Moving Up The Scale

There are a few ways to move up the scale. You can increase your income, decrease your survival expenses, or find work more to your liking. Remember financial autonomy is having the financial means to do the things you want to do without being tied to things you don’t want to do. Someone making 60K at a job they enjoy has more financial autonomy than someone making 100K at a job they despise.

To keep it simple, we’ll focus on increasing income. You can only reduce your survival expenses so much before hitting a limit, and I don’t know you personally, so I don’t know what kind of work would make you happier than your current job. Either way, both are limited. But you can always increase your income, and I’ll give you a few mechanisms that will help you do that while prioritizing work that you specifically enjoy.

Typically, the simplest mechanism you can use to level up is a steady job. But, as we already mentioned, that puts all your eggs in one basket. Plus there is usually a limit to how much you can earn by climbing the corporate ladder. The more you want to earn, the more time you have to give the company, and often when you reach your desired income level you’re at the beck and call of the employer. This takes away from your financial autonomy.

A more efficient mechanism is building a business. But while this can take less time and have a higher earning potential than a salary, it often requires a large investment of both money and risk, as well as time. Historically, entrepreneurs needed tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in venture capital, big teams of employees, and expensive office spaces, not to mention material costs, manufacturing costs, shipping and distribution costs, plus the costs for refunds and returns.

Luckily, none of this is necessary to build a business in 2026. Building a business is still the best way to increase your autonomy, but now you can get all the earning potential with only a tiny fraction of the costs.

The key mechanism to focus on is acquiring high value skills. This could be web design, or video editing, or copywriting, or sales, or content creation, or anything else. Once you have some surplus income you can start investing in attaining one or more of these skills. (Because this directly impacts your financial autonomy, you can consider this a survival expense.)

There are so many skills to consider learning, but in my opinion, these four are the highest leverage skills you can learn in 2026: digital products, affiliate marketing, writing, and online community. I’ll go into each of these in more depth in the next newsletter, and go over exactly how to combine them for maximum efficiency. For now, if you’re interested in building a community, come join us for a free community building workshop.

Register for the Mission 1000 live event for free here.

Action Steps

1. Pick a Problem - Like I said, all business is problem solving. Pick a problem you’re passionate about, whether you’ve already solved it or you’re still dying to find a solution.

2. Pick a Skill - Choose a high value skill to focus on learning. Look at your current strengths and weaknesses and learn something adjacent to your current skills. Don’t pick a skill just because it has high earning potential. Pick something that excites you.

3. Learn & Solve - Learn your skill and solve your problem in tandem. Use your skill to share the solution to the problem. One of the best ways to do this is to build in public.

4. Monetize - Once you have a solution, it’s time to productize so you can actually earn money. This will look different depending on your solution. It may be a product that solves the problem for the customer; it might be a software that solves the problem; it might be a course or info product that teaches the customer how to solve the problem; or maybe you are doing the solving directly, and what you’re selling is a service. It’s up to you.

5. Purge - Get rid of everything you don’t want. The crappy job, the crappy apartment, the crappy habits, the crappy body, the crappy people. All of it. Use your agency to fill your life with things you want, and get rid of things you don’t want.

Don’t overthink this. Be intentional but don’t be paralyzed. The most important thing is to pick something you care about making progress on, and then learn a high value skill to monetize. I already mentioned the 4 highest leverage skills I recommend, but if you’re still not sure which one to start with, I suggest starting with community. Community is the future of value-delivery and authenticity, and it can be combined with the other skills I mentioned to grow your revenue exponentially and sustainably.

I’ll talk more about combining community with other high leverage skills in the next newsletter, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, start formulating a plan: Calculate your scale, pick a problem, pick a skill, and start solving the problem and learning the skill in tandem. If you want to learn how to turn an online community into a future-proof independent online income source, you can jumpstart your journey by attending the Mission 1000 live event. Register for the free event here: register

See you there,

Tim