At the end of 2025, I ran the first Frictionless Growth Challenge. A month later, I ran it again, dropping it to five days, and used that to make a new automation sequence for Hapitalist.

While I think it was probably way too wordy and intense, I really love this sequence. I think it gives the best overview of what I want to teach and why, even if a…

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Every month, I get an avalanche of emails about cross-promotion. There’s not a week that goes by when someone from LetterGrowth or a similar outreach platform hits me up with the same message:

“We should cross-promote!”

I get why they are reaching out. I have around 40,000 newsletter subscribers so it makes sense that a lot of people want to promo with me, even if there’s no earthly reason why they should.

I’m not trying to be mean, but I’ll look at their newsletter, see they have 800 subscribers, and a completely different niche, and just... sigh.

I respect the ambition and the hustle, but the disconnect is unreal. You want to punch out of your weight class, awesome. Game recognize game and hustle respect hustle, but you’re going about it all wrong.

Most pitches I get fail for the same three reasons. If you’re sending cold outreach to someone with a bigger platform than yours, there’s a good chance you’re doing at least one of these wrong.

❌ Problem #1: You're Asking Without Offering Anything

If I have 50x your audience, you're not offering me a fair trade. What you’re really doing is asking for a favor, especially if you offer a straight 1:1 swap. It’s fine to ask for favors. I do lots of favors for people, but if you’re going to ask for a favor, you’d better make it easy to say yes.

Bad pitch example:

“I’ve got 1,200 subs. Let’s swap promos.”

That’s not so much a swap as a leverage imbalance. It’s like offering a paperclip in exchange for a used car, and that’s a hard no.

So if you’re asking for a cross-promo, you need to offer more. Way more.

This might mean:

• Writing the copy yourself

• Sending multiple emails to your list

• Promoting on socials

• Offering design assets

• Giving something exclusive to my audience

When I reach out to someone bigger than me, I don’t say, “Let’s swap.” I say, “Let me do all the work. Here’s what I’ll give your readers. Here’s how I’ll support it.”

❌ Problem #2: You're Not Genre-Aligned (or Audience-Aligned)

Even if you have a comparable list size, if your content is completely unrelated to what I send to my audience, it’s still probably not going to happen.

Your content might be valuable, but it also has to be valuable for my people. I’m not going to promote something that doesn’t serve them, even if you have a million subscribers.

Want to work outside your niche? You have to tell me why it makes sense. Connect the dots. I’m not going to do that work for you.

• Why does this help my audience?

• How does this tie into what I already talk about?

• What’s the angle that makes this work?

Because if you don’t tell me, I’m not going to make that leap for you.

❌ Problem #3: You Haven’t Even Looked at How I Promo

I don’t usually run ads in my newsletter, especially not for other people’s stuff. I don’t often do solo recommendations unless we are really aligned. I rarely plug someone else’s work.

But I do run guest posts all the time. I promote other people by giving them a platform to write something valuable for my readers. If you want to pitch me, and your entire ask is built around a format I never use, then it’s clear you didn’t read anything I send out.

If you don’t know my format, my rhythm, or my boundaries, why would I trust you with my audience?

So How Do You Punch Out of Your Weight Class The Right Way?

You can absolutely work with people who are ahead of you in their journey. I’ve done it. I still do it, but I do it strategically. When I reach out, I come with something strong.

If you want to pitch someone with a bigger platform than yours, here’s how to actually stand a chance.

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I semi-retired more than two years ago at this point, and fully retired from shows last year. The word semi- is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but it’s essential for maintaining the mindset that makes my lifestyle possible.

It gives shape to the career I want, which is one where I’ll always write, show up for readers, hop on podcasts or stages, but I don’t need to do any of it to keep the lights on or pay the bills.

I will always do those things because I like praise and crave the attention. Plus, I genuinely love writing. It regulates my brain and filters my anxiety. So, I’m always going to do that work. I just don’t want to be trapped by it.

When I consult with creative humans, they tell me things like “I just want to write” or “If I could just make things forever, I’d be…” which is great in theory, but I always push back and ask:

“You might want to write for the rest of your life, but do you want to be forced to write for the rest of your life?”

Because that is the difference between a working writer and a semi-retired one.

Since I’ll always rely on my back catalog for some amount of passive income, and I’ll always need an audience to sustain that catalog, it means I’ll never be 100% retired.

At best I’ll ever be 80% retired, which means instead of needing to work 40 hours a week, I only need to work 8.

Once I figured that out, it didn’t take long to realize I was already only working 30 hours a week. That’s 25% retired, which was a good start. Since then I built systems and used them to shift the shape of my weeks.

You might say “That’s not really semi-retired, Russell” to which I would ask “How much retired do you need to qualify as semi-retired?”

It’s the same question I ask when somebody says “How can you say ‘I love you’ so freely?” I tell them “How much love do I have to have before I love somebody? What qualifies as enough?”

I would say that any amount of love counts as love, which is why I can say with no hint of irony that I love each and every one of you reading this now. In the same way, I say that any amount of retired counts as semi-retired.

These days I hover around 60% retired. I still need to work about 16 hours a week, though not every week is the same. Those hours include meetings, writing, and anything I’m doing “for the money” instead of purely “because I want to.”

Even then, I’ve worked to make the have-tos feel like want-tos. A recent weekly “had to do” list included:

• Co-hosting a webinar about writing.

• Be interviewed on a podcast by dear friends.

• Hosting a breakthrough session for 🦄Unicorn members.

• Joining a meeting with a partner I chose to work with.

Last year, I “had” to be at Author Nation, which meant seeing friends all day, watching The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere, seeing O at Bellagio, eating at the Netflix Bites restaurant, and hosting partner dinners hanging out with old friends.

Another week, I had a livestream with a friend, a Zoom about a potential partnership, a planning meeting with a partner, a coaching call with a client I adore, an interview for our podcast with people I love dearly, host a 🦄Unicorn breakthrough session for my amazing members, and co-hosting Craft Con, where I interviewed 12 of my favorite successful authors about how they think and how they break blocks.

I also try to stay 5-6 months ahead on my writing schedule. I still write 1–2 articles a week, but the pressure is gone.

All that took a long time to build, but it started with recognizing I have agency. I may not be fully where I want to be, but I’m some percentage of the way there, and that percentage moves in the right direction when I design for it.

How to define semi-retirement

Most creative careers don’t have a clean on/off switch. We don’t stop making, but we can stop needing to make in order to survive.

Instead, we define semi-retirement with two numbers:

• Your full-time hours baseline. For many people that’s 40 hours. If yours is different, pick the number that represents “I’m working full-time.”

• Your required hours. The minimum number of hours per week you must work for money to maintain your life and business.

Your retirement percentage is the reduction of hours from your baseline over time. If you need 8 hours instead of 40, you’re 80% retired. If you need 20, you’re 50% retired.

This math reframes progress. Now, you don’t have to wait for an arbitrary financial finish line. You can move from 10% to 25% to 40% retired by shaving down the hours you must be present each week.

If you need help defining what that retirement even looks like, then I recommend this article on defining your win condition.

Once you have that win condition, and your retirement percentage, here’s how this looks for fiction vs. nonfiction authors.

• Fiction authors: Build read-through. Align back matter to lead into the next book. Offer box sets. Use audio strategically. Plan release cadences that feed the catalog without burning you out. School visits, festivals, book clubs, Patreon, and limited signed runs can be both joyful and lucrative.

• Nonfiction authors: Anchor your ecosystem around a core transformation. Make sure your books point to a talk, workshop, course, or consulting offer. Each format should be evergreen enough to sell without a constant live presence. Create two or three signature talks so every gig reuses the same spine.

Here are some levers you can use to increase that percentage and move closer to your win condition over time.

• Build an income-generating backlist. For fiction, that’s series with strong read-through, omnibuses, audiobooks, translations, library distribution, large print, and smart pricing. For nonfiction, that’s evergreen titles, updated editions, audio, workbook companions, and rights sales. Your backlist is your retirement account.

• Go wide on rights and formats. Exploit print, digital, audio, foreign, film/TV, special editions, direct sales, bundles, library rights, and speaking. Rights are levers. Each lever is a small annuity.

• Treat your email list like compounding interest. A healthy email list and consistent communication keep your backlist alive. One thoughtful note a week can outperform a dozen frantic launches.

• Productize your expertise. If you teach, coach, or consult, package it: cohorts, workshops, video courses, templates, memberships. Productize once, deliver many times.

• Design a “one have-to per day” calendar. I try not to schedule more than one mandatory thing a day. It protects creative energy and stops obligation creep. If I stack two, I feel it. Three is a bad day.

• Pull the joy forward. Choose podcasts, events, and partnerships you’d happily do for free. If you must sell hours, sell them in rooms that feed you back.

• Front-load the creative bit. Being five months ahead evaporates pressure. Batch first drafts, schedule editing windows, and automate publication. Futures you will send present you a thank-you card.

• Install low-friction systems. Templates for outreach, launch checklists, canned responses, a weekly finance block, and “done for future me” folders reduce decision fatigue and reclaim hours you can reclassify from “must” to “want.”

Here’s what a sample 16-hour “must” week might looks like.

• Two 90-minute creation blocks to keep the pipeline moving.

• One 90-minute admin and finance block.

• One 60-minute partner meeting.

• One 60-minute reader-facing session (live, webinar, or Q&A).

• One 60-minute coaching or client call.

• One 60-minute marketing block (newsletter, promo, backlist tune-ups).

• Buffer: 3–4 hours for the unpredictable.

Everything else like reading, thinking, walking, journaling, and noodling on ideasdoesn’t count as “must”, which means that’s part of already living your retirement.

A note on “passive” investments

We’ve talked a lot about how to make your catalog and business work for you, instead of you working for it, but perhaps the best, and some would argue only true, form of passive income comes from investing in the markets, or in ways that allow your money to grow without you doing anything except watching.

There’s a robust cross-section of literature that talks about pulling money from your business and investing it in index funds. If you can do that, then you’ll never “need” your books to make money at all, and your business can truly be about play.

That’s not a reality most writers live in, but a long time ago I committed to maxing out my IRA every year even when I couldn’t afford it. It didn’t look like much for a while, but over time we have watched it compound (especially once we found a good financial advisor).

Now, every time we get extra money, we put as much as we can into investment accounts, and have for decades now. Success with creative things is always very volatile, which is why successful creators are always investing in car washes, wineries, and phone companies that are considerably more stable.

We can’t do it all right now, but even opening a little space in your life is a big deal. Even moving 1% toward a thing every week or month can create massive, seismic shifts over a long enough time horizon.

In 2015, when I started Wannabe Press, I was 0%, or even negative retired since I was working over 40 hours, but over 10 often painful years, I was able to shift that to 60% retired, with even the “worst” weeks being filed with friends and loved ones collaborating with me.

My wife and I both work from home, eat lunch together almost every day, and spend a lot of time together on the weekends. We are able to do just about anything we want, and take at least one big trip a year, plus going home for the holidays and small trips to conferences multiple times to speak on panels and teach workshops.

Maybe it can’t be your life now, but if you can find your win condition and pull it forward, then it could be your life eventually, little by little. We think this kind of thing happens all at once or not at all, but this is slow work, like water carving a canyon in stone, and it starts with a mindset shift.

30–60–90 day plan to increase your retirement percentage

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I did a livestream with Mal Cooper this week, and we got to talking about open rates. I told her how I had been pruning my list and she said “Oh, I never do that.”

Why? To paraphrase:

“Because the people who open your emails probably aren’t getting tracked, and the ones who do are probably bots.”

Did you know:

• If you open on Apple? Platforms don’t track that.

• If you forward your emails to another address? Platforms don’t track that well.

• If you have images turned off? Platforms can’t track who opens.

• If you have spyware? Then it usually comes across as opened even if the recipient never sees it.

Back in my Action Fantasy Book Club days, Andy Peloquin and I had a Sendfox account that only let us send to “optimized people” who were engaging.

Sounds great in theory, right?

…except there were people we couldn’t send to who were definitely buyers (and recent) while there were people we could send to who we knew were 100% bots.

Sendfox didn’t care. Think about that for a second. They didn’t care their platform was siphoning off real humans. Do you know how bonkers that is for an email platform?

We eventually ended up moving to a different platform at significantly higher costs.

It was the first time I ran into that specific problem, but it it tracks an experiment I’ve been running for a while now. Over the past year, I’ve identified and culled 21,000+ people from my list who didn’t open.

That’s a lot of people to cull, but I didn’t delete them outright. I’ve been running tests for several months to try and reengage them on different platforms to find out if they actually do exist.

From those tests, I’ve been able to pull several thousand subscribers back onto my main list.

You can see from this graph that the last year has been a rollercoaster. We’ve gone from 55,000 subscribers down to 42,000 up to 46,000 down to 31,000 and then up to 34,000 as I’ve culled, added, culled, added, culled over the last year.

By this point in the story, there are 12,000-ish emails remaining that:

• Kit doesn’t show as opening

• Multiple Substack accounts don’t show as opening

• Mailblast didn’t show as opening

Over the last month, I’ve brought those remaining 12,000 emails onto a “secret” Substack account to see if any of these would show up as opened if I just moved servers on the same platform.

I expected that since multiple Substacks didn’t show any of them as opened, this one would play the same tune. And yet…roughly 5% of people on this list now show up as opening every week.

Just look at this:

Now, you might say “Obviously, Substack is showing the same 5% as opening…”

…except that after each email I pulled the people who opened back onto my main list and deleted them from this account.

What remained after each email were people Substack showed didn’t open anything from me ever.

Over the past month, I’ve added 2,000 people back to my list who showed up as opened in my secret account…and when I do they still don’t show up as opened over on Hapitalist.

Do you know what that means? It means the internal system at Substack isn’t even accurate across publications.

To add to the weirdness, I got two replies to an email I sent yesterday with vastly different metrics. In one, even though the person clearly opened the email because they replied to it, the system showed they didn’t.

The other shows they opened 12 times!

Neither of them are true indications of what happened with these subscribers, which vexes me. I sent the last one to the person who emailed me and they responded with:

I admit that I’ve been doing this so long that I’m stuck in the “old way” of thinking about opens from back in 2019 when only 5% of opens were attributed to bots, and the universe made some type of sense.

Now, with the changes to how platforms count emails, and given that something like 50% of opens are now attributed to bots, it’s just a different world than I’m honestly comfortable playing in much of the time.

On one hand, if you don’t cull your list then you’ll be opening yourself to spam traps and deliverability issues. On the other, if you do cull your list, then you’re obviously dropping people who actually open your emails.

Worse, you’re likely dropping real people who open your emails, and keeping bot accounts just because they accurately give off signals to platform bots that indicate opens.

I’ve generally been pretty pro-technology in my life, and even hosted two events called The Future of Publishing, but the deeper I fall into this issue, and the more I track things like OpenClaw, the more I believe we are so far past the event horizon where technology does more harm than good that we can’t even see the line anymore.

Yes, agentic AI is cool, but now that both OpenAI and Claude have cut off unlimited access to them, and you have to pay for most usage, will it be cheaper than hiring an assistant? Will it take less time? Will it improve your life?

I vibecoded an app in Claude a couple weeks ago.

I got about 10 hours into the project before I realized:

• I had to host it myself.

• I had to update it myself.

• I had to do customer service.

I realized there was probably a place that could build me an interface, found one, and then realized I had no interest in an interface and neither did anyone in my community.

It was a fine experience for me, and I was impressed at how quickly I could do it, but once I dug into the nitty-gritty of it, I had no interest or need for it.

This summarizes how I feel about most new technology. Cool, but does anyone really need it?

We used to make genuinely useful technology. Now, we often end up breaking useful technology and then creating new technology to fix what we broke (at significantly higher costs to the consumer).

The current creator economy flywheel looks more like a Rube Goldberg machine than a functional mechanism for growth. It used to be you put something in somebody’s hand or sent an offer into their inbox and they bought it or didn’t.

Now, you have to make a Zap with 50 steps in order to even find that person. This complexity is great for Zapier, who gets to charge for every step in that process, but kind of terrible for every other human.

Then, you have to spend a fortune on ads, that go right into the pockets of billionaires, to make sure they don’t forget about you before the next time you launch something.

I see benefits for AI, including generative AI, and know there are accessibility issues that these technology address which are revolutionary to many people, myself included.

It is genuinely cool than my friend’s 10-year-old can vibe code a video game, but does a 10-year-old need to make a video game? Does everything need to be available to every human on this planet every second of the day?

The AI doc makes the point that the good and bad of every technology are intrinsically linked and can’t be separated. We have to take both or neither, and we have always opted to take both, which has made us prosperous in ways previous generations couldn’t even fathom.

It also makes us believe technology is the answer without ever asking the answer to what or who even posed the question. It’s also pulled us further from human-centered design and forced us to do more and more to “compete”.

We spend a lot of time demonizing the Coral Harts of the world without ever asking why a writer feels the need to release dozens of books a year in order to compete.

We are told that we’re competing against everything bombarding people’s brains without stopping to ask why that is happening.

Why is that competition our responsibility? Why is it our bane? Why is it that we have to exponentially increase our output in order to keep up with technology when technology is the thing facillitating that exponential expansion?

I’m unconvinced that AI models will become cheap enough to make agentic AI work effectively in the near term future. It only works now because these platforms are massively subsidizing the cost. Ed Zitron wrote an amazing article on this “subprime AI crisis” recently.

Even if it does “work”, I just fundamentally think humans should talk to other humans for most things. I don’t want to send this email to bots, even highly engaged ones.

It is in the brilliant inefficiency of humanity that magic happens you could never predict or expect. If you take that away, we are just robots, which is the exact opposite of magic.

This is especially true when it comes to email. I fundamentally don’t want Gmail summarizing my 10,000+ word email so you can read it in 10 seconds. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work. It literally breaks the experience. If I wanted you to get a summary of the post, I would write a TL;DR at the top of it.

Speaking of the top, let’s come back to the main question I posed. Do we cull or not? It’s 50ph13’s (Sophie’s) choice.

Keeping people who are dead, or have abandoned their email address, can’t possibly be the right answer (and opens you up to spam traps), but there’s literally no way to get those people off your list in any realistic way that doesn’t also boot off people who want to be there.

This is a worse place to be than six years ago. If technology is supposed to progress us, then why are we moving backwards in such a fundamental way?

Maybe ESPs don’t care because more subs means more money for their bottom line, even if their customers have a markedly worse experience.

It’s enshittification at its core. There is no value in keeping us happy as the users, so their loyalty is no longer to us. It is to the shareholders, who only care that we keep giving them money…not that we’re actually happy.

Most of us don’t even know this is happening enough to know we’re not happy. We just see open rates dropping and think it’s our fault. We see engagement slowing and think we’re the problem.

But what if we’re not the problem? Recently, I contacted Substack support because in the past two months I’ve gone from 100-200 recommendations a week down to 100 or so a month. I thought that maybe it was because I changed my subdomain.

This is the response I got from them.

I don’t know the reason for the “slowdown” but many have posited that it’s because Substack is prioritizing followers and Notes for growth instead of the recommendations feature, which makes it markedly worse for everyone involved, at least on the publication side.

We’ll never know if that’s true, but the fact it could be true, and that it feels at least somewhat true, supports the idea that these platforms are a black box we don’t understand, and have too much control of our lives.

You might think: “Why are you complaining about this, Russell? I would kill for 100 recommendations a month.”

And yes, that’s the point. Because I used to get a lot more, I had the scale to see the massive slowdown. Most people wouldn’t even notice going from 10 recommentations a month down to 5, but I saw it.

You’ll see this graph is Substack subscriber growth from the organic network and recommendations over the past year.

Compared to March last year, I have a 90% drop in subscriber growth. This might be because I changed categories from fiction to business, but I recently changed it back for a week, and saw no change in subscriber growth.

It might be because SEO dropped like a rock. You can see this is March 2026.

This is January 2026.

That’s a marked difference, but that’s not enough to really warrant the discrepency. It could cause part of it, but I still have 649 recommendations from other publications.

The only way to really explain it is if the whole of the network slowed down at once, which is something that really only happens systemically.

• Are people leaving the network?

• Are people just over Substack?

• Have they stopped trying?

I don’t know, but it certainly sucks. I pay Substack 10% of my revenue, roughly $3,600/yr, and yet it works worse for me now than it did when I paid them nothing, which is a problem.

All of this is a problem. This whole email situation is a problem. I didn’t expect to pull so many threads into this one post, but as I kept writing more and more of this started to make sense to me.

Really, there is an enshittification of email happening at a systemic level, and I don’t know what to do, except be really pissed about it. There are no good choices, just slightly worse and slightly better ones, with us in the middle, getting screwed.

Thanks, I hate it. So, what do you think? Am I just complaining, or is there a there there? Let us know in the comments.

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Mal Cooper — sci-fi author (M.D. Cooper), Facebook ads expert, and co-founder of The Writing Wives — joins Russell to talk about what it actually takes to run ads, why indie authors keep handing money to corporations, and what the web got right the first time around.

Here are some favorite insights from this episode.

1. Facebook Ads Have No Silver Bullet — And Never Will

Every course promises a system. The answer is always the same: make good creative, test a lot of options, and see what sticks. That’s not a cop-out — it’s the reality of a platform with hundreds of variables per ad, most of them unknowable. You’re simultaneously trying to satisfy Facebook’s AI, get it in front of the right humans, and then convert on your product page. The person running the ads is also a variable. Two different ad managers can run campaigns on the same book and get completely different results — not because one has the secret formula, but because creativity is personal and Facebook is a black box even to Facebook.

2. Do the Creative Work First, the Admin Work Second

Don’t follow Facebook’s flow, which buries creative at the end of a long form-filling process. By the time you get there, you’re burned out and you’ll post anything just to be done. Do your images, copy, and headlines on one day. Build the actual campaign structure on another. Splitting those two modes — creative and administrative — is the difference between launching something you’re proud of and rage-quitting the ads manager.

3. Authorring Is the Webring, Rebuilt for Direct Sales

The core problem with every indie author running their own store: discoverability disappears. Buying direct from an author right now is like having to find every author’s house to buy their book. Authorring (authorring.net, two R’s) solves this with a genre-based discovery network — a widget that sits on author websites and lets readers hop between stores the way early internet users hopped between webrings. Authors apply, get manually approved into the right genre rings, and pay a dollar a month. It’s not another middleman. It’s collective discoverability without ceding control to a retailer.

4. Your Email Open Rates Are Lying to You

Half of all email opens are now bots — up from about 5% in 2019. The people your platform says aren’t opening are often your real readers (iPhone users, privacy-conscious subscribers who block tracking pixels). The people flagged as active openers are frequently bots that fire every tracking code without hesitation. The counterintuitive takeaway: don’t prune your list based on open rate data. Mal’s been saying this for six or seven years. Russell proved it himself — he moved 10,000 “inactive” subscribers to a separate Substack, started sending old content, and 30% of them opened within a month.

5. AI Didn’t Replace the Open Source Foundation — It Depends on It

The tools that let authors build things like Authorring exist because of 20 years of developers releasing free code into the world. Claude can’t write a secure connection from scratch — it’s standing on OpenSSL and thousands of other libraries built by people who just put their work out there. That’s also, Mal points out, probably why developers didn’t anticipate authors being upset about training data: in their world, sharing your work freely is the default. The cultural disconnect between open source and intellectual property isn’t hypocrisy — it’s two completely different relationships with creative output colliding in real time.

What Is Authorring?

The problem with every indie author running their own direct store: you’ve traded Amazon’s 30% cut for complete invisibility. At least Amazon had traffic. Your store has you — and whatever you can afford to spend on Facebook ads to drag people there one by one.

Mal’s framing is blunt: buying direct from an author right now is like having to find every author’s house to buy their book. Nobody’s doing that. Readers go where the books are, and right now that’s still Amazon, because Amazon solved discovery even while extracting a premium for it.

Authorring (authorring.net) is the answer that doesn’t require building another Amazon. It’s a genre-based discovery network — a widget that lives at the top of author websites and lets readers hop between direct stores the way early internet users hopped between sites on a webring. Click “next author” in the romantic fantasy ring and you land on another romantic fantasy author’s store. Keep clicking. Keep buying. No algorithm deciding what you see. No retailer taking a cut.

• Direct stores without discoverability are just expensive islands. Running your own store is only half the job. If readers can’t find you without an ad budget, you’ve traded one problem for another.

• Collective infrastructure beats going it alone. You don’t need Amazon’s traffic if authors are sending each other readers. Authorring is a bet that a rising tide can be built by the people in the water.

• A dollar a month to not feed the algorithm machine. The math isn’t complicated. Get approved, embed the widget, and let readers wander their way to you.

Authors apply, get manually approved into the right genre rings (the approval exists specifically to avoid the Amazon categories problem — no thriller authors sneaking into romance), and pay a dollar a month. They can be in multiple rings as long as their store actually has books in those categories. The goal is to train readers that the bar at the top of these sites is worth clicking — that there’s a whole world of direct-selling authors worth exploring, if you just know where to look.

Mal built it because she kept lamenting the same problem on podcasts: she wanted to help authors, but not by becoming a publisher or creating another middleman. The real power of direct sales is owning the reader relationship — email addresses, upsell opportunities, the ability to tell someone about your next book. Authorring gives you discoverability without surrendering that.

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I’ll be honest, getting 1,000 preorders for a book is one of those goals that sounds impressive but can feel downright ridiculous, especially when you’re just starting out. I’ve only ever hit 1,000 preorders once myself, and frankly, I think it’s a bad idea to make that your target early in your career.

Still, people keep asking me how to do it, so I’m finally going to break it down.

In fact, in 2024 we spent $50,000 on audience growth and the #1 best performing ads used some combination of “Get 1,000 preorders.”

So, here we go.

This isn’t going to be easy, and it probably won’t happen the first time you try, but this is about creating the structures in your business that allow you to keep going back to this well and strengthening it with each release.

Let’s get one thing straight off the top.

Preorders are harder to get than regular sales. Readers don’t get instant gratification, so you’re asking for more than just their money. You’re asking for their patience and trust. Meanwhile, they have access to every book that’s ever been released at their fingerprints.

Then, when you add in that if you’re reading this you’ve probably not released many books yet, and now you’re asking people to trust and unproven commodity. Even once you release a book it’s very hard to get somebody to give you a chance. It’s dang near impossible to do so before a book is even released.

If you’re starting with a small email list or limited social media reach, the math can feel brutal. On average:

• Email lists: Only about 1-2% of subscribers might preorder your book, even with strong engagement. Honestly, if you had this kind of conversion rate on a fully released book it would be pretty good. So, you’ll likely get even lower than this on preorders.

• Social media: Only about 1-3% of your followers will even see your promotion on social media, and only 1-3% of those will take action.

• Touchpoints: Readers typically need 7-12 interactions before they’ll take action. That means your message needs to land over and over again.

That’s a lot of math that has to math in order for the math to math in your favor. This isn’t meant to discourage you. It’s meant to prepare you. If you’re a new author, hitting 1,000 preorders isn’t just about the end goal. It’s about using the process to learn, grow your audience, and lay the foundation for future success.

The only reason I think this exercise has any merit is because with every push you are building your audience, and in order to get 1,000 preorders you’re going to have to make a sustained marketing push that will force you to get comfortable with a lot of things that authors tend to shy away from for years.

Preorders require relentless repetition. People don’t make decisions the first time they hear about something. They don’t even make decisions the seventh time. The average reader needs 7-12 interactions with your book before they even consider clicking "Buy."

That’s not because they don’t like you or your book. It’s because they’re busy, distracted, and inundated with options. Your job is to make sure they can’t forget about you.

This is the paradox of promotion. What feels like shouting into the void to you is often the faintest whisper to your readers. When you feel like you’ve said enough, you’re only about 5% of the way there. That means you still have 95% of your work ahead of you.

I promote my books hard and I have never had a launch end without somebody commenting that they didn’t even know I was launching something. By the end I’m exhausted and sick of talking about my book while my audience has barely tuned in to hear about it.

That means showing up consistently, crafting emails that intrigue them, writing posts that make them stop scrolling, and offering them reasons to care.

The more ambitious your preorder goal, the more touchpoints you’ll need, and the more platforms you’ll have to leverage. If you’re aiming for 1,000 preorders, you can’t just rely on one channel. Your email list, social media, ads, partnerships all have to work together to create the kind of buzz that makes people pay attention.

The mental toll wears on you over the course of a preorder campaign, but it’s nothing compared to the emotional toll. You’ll send emails that no one opens, post on social media and watch the algorithm bury your hard work, and spend hours perfecting an ad only to see it barely convert. It’s frustrating, and honestly, it can make you feel like you’re shouting into the void.

To some extent that’s exactly what you are doing, except sometimes the void screams back, and that’s what we’re all hoping will happen a lot when we launch something.

Finding your strategy

Whether you’re traditionally published or indie, your book comes in a specific format like a graphic novel or audiobook, your path to success depends on adapting your strategy to your unique situation.

If you’re a traditional author, you’ll likely have some support from your publisher, but it’s often not enough on its own. Yes, you can use their network to secure retailer placement and influencer support, but it doesn’t stop there. You’ll have to supplement their efforts by engaging with your personal audience, whether that’s through your email list, social media, or local events.

You do have a support network when you are traditionally published though, and you should use it. Make your own list of marketing actions and ask for their help. Publishers love when you schedule a book tour or go to conventions after a book releases. They’ll often even send books with you at their cost if you go to a conference so your name gets out there. Before a launch, your editor and publicist can work with you to make the most of your network and amplify it with theirs, so make sure to stay in conversation with them.

Most authors sit passively by and wait for the publisher to do things, but if you take your fate into your own hands, your publisher will often match your effort.

For indie authors, you’re in full control of your campaign, which is both a challenge and an opportunity. You’ll need to take ownership of every aspect, from audience building to outreach. The good news is that you’re free to experiment. Try a mix of direct sales, email campaigns, and grassroots efforts to see what works best for your audience.

Your book’s format also plays a role in how you approach preorders. If you’re writing a children’s book, your audience isn’t the kids. It’s their parents, teachers, and librarians. Focus on connecting with these gatekeepers through school outreach, local bookstores, and child-friendly events. If your book is a graphic novel or comic, lean into visual-heavy platforms like Instagram or TikTok, where eye-catching art can grab attention. For audiobooks, podcast appearances and collaborations with popular narrators can make all the difference.

The key is to meet your readers where they are, with strategies that make sense for your specific publishing path and format.

Frankly, if you even get 100 preorders you should do a happy dance. Getting to 1,000 is mental. So, why do it? Why put yourself through this?

Because every time you send an email or post about your book, you’re not just marketing for this launch. You’re also planting seeds for the next one. You’re building an audience that will remember you, even if they don’t buy this time. You’re creating a foundation that will make your future launches easier, faster, and more successful.

You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be persistent. Preorders aren’t about doing everything flawlessly. They’re about showing up again and again, until people can’t help but notice. Preorders require more than most people think they can give, but they also give experience, growth, and the beginnings of a loyal readership, which is worth a lot.

Why preorders are hard

Preorders are a different beast from regular sales, which are hard enough as it is to get right. When you’re asking someone to preorder, you’re not just selling a book. You’re selling the promise of a book. Readers don’t get instant gratification, and for many, that’s a hurdle. They might think, Why not just wait until it’s available? or What if I don’t like it? These challenges are amplified if you’re a newer author or working with a small audience. Convincing readers to trust you and your story before they’ve even read a page is no small task.

But preorders aren’t just about getting sales early. They’re about building momentum, creating excitement, and showing your audience why your book is worth their attention. If you can overcome the natural hesitation that comes with preorders, you can turn a skeptical reader into a lifelong fan.

Readers hesitate to preorder for a few reasons, and it’s not because they don’t like you or your book. It’s because preordering is inherently a leap of faith. They’re giving you their money now and waiting weeks, or even months, for something in return. They’re busy, distracted, and often unfamiliar with how preorders work or why they matter. Many readers simply don’t understand that their preorder could be the thing that helps a book they love find a bigger audience.

When you approach preorders, think of it as an opportunity to start a conversation with your readers. Instead of focusing on the transaction, focus on what the preorder represents. Preorders are about trust, exclusivity, and being part of the story before anyone else. They’re not just buying a book. They’re joining your journey.

Talk to your readers about why preorders matter. Let them know how preorders influence bookstore orders, retailer visibility, and even how algorithms decide which books to recommend. Let them know that every preorder is a vote of confidence that helps your book reach more readers. Be transparent, honest, and authentic. When your audience understands the stakes, they’ll be more inclined to take that leap.

The waiting period is the main thing that makes preorders harder than regular sales, but it’s also what makes them special. When readers preorder, they’re choosing to believe in your book before it’s even in their hands. Reward that trust by giving them something that makes the wait exciting.

Maybe you share a sneak peek at the first chapter or send exclusive updates about your writing process. Perhaps you offer preorder bonuses like digital wallpapers, short stories, or behind-the-scenes videos. These extras aren’t just perks. They’re ways to keep readers engaged and excited while they wait.

For example, imagine telling your audience: “When you preorder, you’ll get a free bonus scene that takes place after the story ends. It’s my thank-you for believing in this book before anyone else.” Suddenly, preordering isn’t just about getting a book. It’s about being part of something unique.

This is part of the secret sauce to how Kickstarter works to sell books. It’s not just about getting the book. It’s about getting it early, in a special way, with unique bonuses only available during the campaign. There’s no reason you can’t bring some of that to your preorder campaign, even if you choose not to run a crowdfunding campaign.

If you’re excited about your book, that energy will come through in your messaging. Talk about why this story matters to you, what inspired it, and what makes it special. When readers see your passion, they’ll want to share it.

It’s also important to address the wait directly. Acknowledge that preorders require patience, but frame it as part of the fun. “Preordering isn’t just about buying a book. It’s about being part of the journey. By preordering, you’re supporting this story and helping it reach readers around the world.” Give them a reason to feel good about their choice.

Build the case for your book

A preorder campaign isn’t about shouting “buy my book”. It’s about show readers why your book is worth their attention. Everything you share is another chance to explain what makes your story special. Every day of your campaign is another opportunity to highlight something new and meaningful about your book, gradually building a case that resonates with your audience.

When you first announce your preorder, the case is simple: The book is live, and you can be one of the first to get it. That’s your starting point. But as the days go on, you have to keep building on that message. It’s exhausting, but it’s also supposed to be fun. If it’s not fun for you, then it won’t be fun for them.

One day you might talk about what inspired the story. Another, you could share an early review or a behind-the-scenes look at the writing process. Maybe you dive into a character’s backstory or offer a sneak peek of the first chapter. Each piece adds depth, helping readers connect with your book in a new way.

The middle of a preorder campaign is often where things slow down, and that’s where your creativity matters most. Think about what excites you about the book and share that with your readers. If you’re writing a series, remind them why they love this world and what makes this installment special. If it’s a standalone, lean into the unique themes or emotional core of the story.

Over time, you build a language with your readers by giving them reasons to love your book. No single interaction will likely push them over the edge, but creating a campaign allows you to find the story that will connect with them.

Your readers aren’t all the same. Some will preorder the moment you announce, while others will need a little more time and nudging. Maybe they’re on the fence and need to see a glowing review. Maybe they just need to be reminded a few times because life is busy, and your book hasn’t made it to the top of their to-do list. That’s why variety matters. Each day of your campaign gives you a chance to catch someone’s attention in a new way.

Preorders are about more than just selling a book. They’re about sharing your enthusiasm, creating anticipation, and showing readers why this story matters, not just to you, but to them. When you approach each day with a fresh perspective and a new piece of your book’s heart, you’re creating an experience that readers will remember.

As a newer author, it’s easy to feel like you’ll never get anywhere and that you’ll always be overshadowed by superstar authors with massive followings, endless resources, and access to the biggest promotional platforms, but you have something they don’t. You can show up for your readers in a way they can’t.

When a superstar author releases a book, their reach might be enormous, but their connection with individual readers is often diluted. They can’t respond to every comment, answer every email, or personally thank every reader who supports them.

But you can. Your ability to connect directly with your fans, to make each one feel seen and valued, is a secret weapon that superstar authors can’t replicate.

This doesn’t just make a difference in your preorder campaign. It builds a foundation for lasting loyalty. Readers don’t just want to buy books. They want to feel connected to the authors who create them. By showing up authentically and consistently, you create relationships that turn casual readers into passionate advocates.

Here’s how to use your presence to its fullest potential:

• Respond to comments and emails with genuine enthusiasm. A quick thank-you or thoughtful reply can make a reader’s day.

• Engage directly with your audience through live streams, Q&A sessions, or private community spaces. Let them see the person behind the book.

• Share personal insights, behind-the-scenes moments, or even the struggles of the creative process. These glimpses of authenticity resonate deeply with readers.

Your availability and willingness to connect are what make you stand out. Readers might admire superstar authors, but they’ll champion you because they feel like they know you. Lean into that, and you’ll create a reader base that grows not just in numbers but in loyalty and passion.

Build a foundation that works for you

Your path to 1,000 preorders has to align with your strengths, your audience, and your book. This is where many authors go wrong. They think they have to do all the things, but that’s a surefire way to burn out. Instead, focus on building a foundation that fits you and your book.

Start by asking yourself where your audience is most likely to be. If you’re writing a children’s book, you might find your readers through parent groups, teachers, or librarians.

If you’re writing a comic, your audience is probably hanging out in visual-heavy spaces like Instagram, TikTok, or even niche communities on Discord or Reddit. The key is meeting your readers where they already are, instead of shouting into the void and hoping they find you.

It’s not just about being in the right place. It’s about creating a consistent message. Readers need to understand why your book matters to them. This is where a lot of authors falter. They think, “I’ll just tell people I wrote a book and they’ll buy it.” But readers don’t care that you wrote a book. They care about what your book will do for them. Will it make them laugh? Teach them something? Transport them to a world they’ve never seen before? Your job is to answer those questions before they even ask.

You also need to think about the tools and tactics that work best for you. Maybe you love email and feel confident crafting newsletters that people actually want to open. Or maybe you’re better at connecting through video and can build an audience by posting short, engaging clips on TikTok. Lean into your strengths. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, so don’t force yourself into a strategy that doesn’t feel natural.

The hardest part is staying consistent. Building a foundation takes time. It might mean spending weeks building a blog in the same vein as your book to attract the right audience. Or it might mean slowly growing your email list by offering free resources that connect with your book’s theme. Whatever it is, it won’t happen overnight. But the work you put in now will pay off when it’s time to launch.

This is what separates authors who succeed from those who give up. It’s not about having the biggest budget or the fanciest tools. It’s about showing up every day and doing the work. Not because you’ll see results right away, but because you know the results are coming.

Building a foundation that works for you isn’t about doing it all. It’s about doing what works, consistently, with patience and persistence. Because when you find the right combination of strategies, your audience will notice. And when they do, they’ll start to trust you. That’s when the preorders start rolling in.

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Find the right readers by listening and testing

The hardest part of any preorder campaign isn’t about finding readers. Readers are everywhere. There are literally billions of them around the world.

The trick lies in finding the right readers. The ones who will not only preorder your book but connect with it so deeply that they tell their friends about it, leave reviews, and come back for your next launch. So, how do you figure out who those readers are and what they want? It starts with listening and testing.

If you’ve launched a book before, even if it was a small launch, you already have some data to work with to give you insights. Who bought it? Who shared it? What did they say in reviews or comments?

If you don’t have a previous book, think about other ways readers have interacted with you. What content gets the most engagement on your social media? Which email newsletters do people reply to?

If you don’t even have this level of data, then it’s time to start testing. You don’t need a massive audience to start learning what resonates.

If you’re active on social media, post about different aspects of your book, like an intriguing character, a unique world, or a compelling theme. See what gets the most attention. If you send emails, try including a question or sharing a snippet from your book. Watch for replies, clicks, and engagement. These small experiments will help you refine your messaging and understand what your readers care about most.

If you don’t have much of an audience yet, look at similar authors in your genre. What are their readers excited about? Read their reviews, check their social media, and pay attention to the conversations happening in their spaces. You’re not copying them; you’re learning what resonates with the people you’re trying to reach.

Your readers are out there, talking about books like yours. The trick is finding where those conversations are happening. If you’re writing a cozy mystery, check out book clubs and Facebook groups where mystery lovers gather. Writing fantasy? Dive into Reddit threads, Discord servers, or TikTok hashtags where readers share their favorite tropes and authors. Don’t just observe, Join the conversations, not as a salesperson, but as someone who genuinely loves what they love.

This will teach you the language of your reader that you can deploy when you’re ready to launch your own book. Not only will you know the stakeholders, but you’ll be able to speak with them in a language they understand.

Your job is to find the overlap between what readers are looking for and what your book offers. Maybe your fantasy novel gives them the immersive escape they crave after a stressful day. Maybe your nonfiction book solves a problem they’ve been struggling with. It’s not about selling them a book. It’s about connecting your story to their lives.

One of the most direct ways to find out what your readers want is to ask them. If you already have an audience, send out a short survey or ask questions in your newsletter or on social media. What are they looking for in a book? What frustrates them about the genre? What themes, characters, or settings make them pick up a story? If you’re just starting out, these questions can still be valuable in genre-specific groups or forums. The key is not to pitch, but to listen.

One of my favorite strategies is to reach out personally to my best readers and ask to meet with them for 30 minutes. Surveys are fine, but interviewing ten of your best readers will tell you more than getting 1,000 surveys never could.

Finding the right readers and understanding what they want isn’t a one-time task. It’s an ongoing process of listening, testing, and refining. The more you pay attention to your audience, the better you’ll get at recognizing what works, and the closer you’ll get to building a loyal readership that keeps coming back.

The best time to start this work is way before you need it. So, even if you’re years away from launching a book, this kind of work can help you build the resources to use when you do need them.

Craft messaging that connects

Talking about your book isn’t just about telling people what it’s about. It’s about showing them why it matters to them. Readers don’t buy books because they exist. They buy books because they see something in the story that resonates with their lives, their emotions, or their imaginations. Crafting messaging that connects is about building that bridge between your story and their world.

The first step is speaking their language. Every audience has a way of thinking and talking about the books they love. If your readers rave about “emotional roller coasters” or “unforgettable heroes” in their favorite stories, use those words when you describe your book. If they love specific tropes like “grumpy/sunshine romance” or “chosen one adventures,” lean into those familiar hooks.

Readers also want to know what’s in it for them. They don’t just want to hear about a magical quest or a strong female lead. They want to know how your book will make them feel. Will it leave them breathless with suspense? Will it inspire them to believe in their own strength? Will it make them laugh when they need it most? Your messaging needs to focus on the experience your book delivers, not just its features.

For example, instead of saying:

• This book has a strong female lead, you might say

• Meet a heroine who overcomes impossible odds and inspires you to do the same.

Or, instead of saying:

• This guide is packed with tips for entrepreneurs, try,

• Discover strategies to grow your business without burning out.

The shift is about centering the reader and their journey.

Connection also happens through authenticity. Readers don’t just want to know about your book. They want to know about you. What inspired you to write this story? What personal experiences shaped its characters or themes? These little glimpses into your journey create trust and make your campaign feel real.

At the same time, your messaging should spark curiosity. Don’t give everything away in one breath. Share an intriguing quote, pose a question the book answers, or tease a moment of high tension. Let readers wonder about the world you’ve created, the mysteries within, or the characters they’ll meet. Curiosity keeps them engaged and draws them closer to clicking that preorder button.

One of the hardest parts of crafting messaging is keeping it fresh throughout a campaign. You’ll need to repeat the core message, but find new ways to say it. One day you might focus on the emotional heart of the story, another day on an enthusiastic early review, and the next on a fun preorder perk. The trick is to keep the energy alive while always driving home why this book deserves their attention.

No matter how creative your messaging gets, it should always end with a clear call to action: preorder now. Readers need simple, direct instructions on what to do next. Include a link, make the ask clear, and give them a reason to act today instead of waiting until later.

Crafting messaging that connects takes effort, but it’s what transforms a potential reader into a preorder. It’s not just about selling a book. It’s about creating a connection.

When your words reflect their hopes, dreams, or desires, readers will feel seen. And when they feel seen, they’re far more likely to preorder your story and make it part of their world. Moreso, it’s about becoming an avatar for your reader’s transformation, even if you’re writing fiction, and then proving that your book will help them achieve that transformation, even if that’s just to live in another world for a while and forget their problems.

Make every interaction count

A preorder campaign isn’t just about big moments like launch day or final reminders. It’s about the smaller interactions in between that add up over time. Every email you send, every social post you share, and every conversation you have is an opportunity to build excitement for your book. The key is making each one meaningful.

Think about how often you see ads or promotions and scroll past without a second thought. Your readers are no different.

They’re busy, distracted, and bombarded with noise. That’s why you can’t just announce your book and expect people to rush to preorder. Instead, you need to create moments that stop them in their tracks and make them think, This is something I don’t want to miss.One way to make interactions count is by showing readers something they didn’t know they needed. Maybe it’s a sneak peek at a compelling scene or a glimpse into your creative process. Maybe it’s a behind-the-scenes photo of your workspace or a heartfelt post about why this story means so much to you.

Another way to stand out is by keeping things personal. A generic, one-size-fits-all message won’t cut it. Your readers want to feel like you’re talking directly to them. If you’re emailing your list, start with a personal anecdote or a note of gratitude for their support. On social media, engage in the comments or respond to DMs. These small gestures make people feel seen, and when people feel seen, they’re more likely to invest in your book.

But let’s be real, keeping up with every platform, email, and interaction can be exhausting. That’s why it’s important to work smarter, not harder. Focus on the channels where your audience is most active and double down on what’s working. If you’re getting great engagement on Instagram, lean into that. If your email click rates are climbing, test different formats to see what resonates most. You don’t have to do everything. You just have to do the right things well.

Ideally, if it’s going well, you can hire people to fill in the gaps where you aren’t strong, like a virtual assistant, PR person, or even an ads expert. The right team can amplify your exposure while reducing your anxiety.

It’s also worth remembering that not every interaction will result in an immediate preorder, and that’s okay. Marketing is a cumulative effort. One post might plant a seed, another might nurture curiosity, and yet another might finally push someone to click “preorder.” Together, these moments build the momentum that makes your campaign successful.

Finally, don’t forget to have fun with it. If you’re excited about sharing your book, that energy will come through in every interaction. Readers want to feel your enthusiasm. They want to believe in the story you’re telling, Not just in the book, either, but in your campaign as a whole. So, let them see your passion. Let them feel why this matters.

Every interaction is a chance to connect, to share, and to invite readers into the world of your book. Make those moments count, and over time, you’ll see the results add up.

Turn curiosity into commitment

Curiosity gets readers interested, but commitment gets them to preorder. The gap between Oh, that looks interesting and I need to have this book right now is where many campaigns falter. Turning curiosity into commitment means giving readers the final push they need to click “preorder.”

The first step is understanding that curiosity is just the beginning. When a reader stumbles across your book for the first time, they might be intrigued by the cover or a brief description. But curiosity fades quickly if you don’t follow up with something more substantial. That’s where your messaging comes in. You need to build on their initial interest by showing them why your book isn’t just intriguing. It’s unmissable.

One of the most effective ways to deepen curiosity is to give readers a taste of what’s inside. Share the opening chapter, a character profile, or a key scene. If your book is nonfiction, offer a small excerpt that solves a specific problem or shares a powerful insight. Think of this as a “try before you buy” moment. It’s your chance to prove that the story or content lives up to their expectations.

Another strategy is to use social proof. Readers are more likely to commit when they see that other people are already excited about your book. Share early reviews, testimonials, or even comments from readers who’ve preordered. If you’re engaging with your audience on social media, highlight their enthusiasm. “I just preordered and can’t wait to read!” is the kind of validation that can tip a hesitant reader into action.

Scarcity and urgency are also powerful motivators. Give readers a reason to act now rather than later. Maybe it’s a limited-time bonus, like a free short story or a behind-the-scenes video for early preorders. Maybe it’s a countdown to the end of a special deal or perk. Urgency creates focus, and focus drives decisions.

The most important factor in turning curiosity into commitment is clarity. Readers need to know exactly what they’re getting and how to get it. Make your call to action clear and easy to follow. Use direct language like, Preorder now and get instant access to [specific bonus]. Include a direct link to the preorder page, and make sure your messaging is consistent across every platform.

Curiosity opens the door, but commitment is what gets readers through it. By combining intrigue, social proof, urgency, and clarity, you can turn casual interest into excitement, and excitement into action.

Build complementary content and community through collaborations

When you’re launching a preorder campaign, you can’t do it alone. Collaborations are one of the most effective ways to expand your reach, tap into new audiences, and create excitement around your book. But it’s not just about teaming up with anyone. The best collaborations feel authentic, serve both parties, and provide something valuable for readers.

So how do you find the right opportunities, and what steps can you take to make these partnerships successful?

Collaborations don’t have to begin with strangers. Start with the people you already know, like fellow authors, bloggers, podcasters, or creators in your genre. If you’ve been part of an author group, attended events, or even had casual interactions on social media, reach out and start a conversation. The key is to ask yourself, What value can we create together?

For example:

• If you’re writing nonfiction, partner with another expert in your field for a co-hosted webinar.

• A romance author could team up with another writer to create a “sneak peek” bundle featuring the first chapters of both books.

• For comics or graphic novels, connect with an artist for an exclusive piece of artwork to share with both of your audiences.

Your pitch doesn’t need to be complicated. Something as simple as, “I love your work, and I think we share a similar audience. Would you be interested in collaborating to help promote our books?” can open the door to possibilities.

If your current network feels limited, it’s time to branch out. Start by asking, Where do my ideal readers spend their time online? and look for creators who are already engaging with those audiences. This might include:

• Authors in your genre: Check Amazon bestsellers, Goodreads lists, or review sites to find authors writing for the same audience.

• Podcasters and YouTubers: Search for shows that cater to your book’s themes or niche. If you’ve written a thriller, look for true crime podcasts. If it’s a children’s book, parenting channels might be a perfect fit.

• Influencers and bloggers: Follow hashtags, TikTok trends, or genre-specific blogs to find creators who are actively engaging with your readers.

Once you’ve identified potential collaborators, spend some time engaging with their content. Comment on posts, share their work, or leave a thoughtful review. When you eventually reach out, they’ll recognize your name, an you’ll already have established a positive connection.

Once you’ve identified potential collaborators, the next step is reaching out with a clear and compelling pitch. Keep it simple and focus on how the partnership benefits both sides. For example:

• “I’m launching a fantasy novel, and I’d love to collaborate with you on a joint giveaway. I could offer a free copy of my book, and we could cross-promote to our audiences.”

• “I see you run a great podcast about parenting. I’m launching a children’s book and would love to come on your show to talk about storytelling for kids.”

• “I’m putting together a newsletter swap for indie romance authors. Would you be interested in sharing my book in your newsletter? I’d be happy to do the same for yours.”

Be respectful of their time and make it as easy as possible for them to participate. Provide prewritten content, clear instructions, and a timeline to make collaboration effortless.

Honestly, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in finding collaborators is to organize things, instead of just joining them. People naturally gravitate toward being part of something bigger, but few want to take on the effort of leading. If you’re willing to be the organizer, you’ll find others lining up to join you.

Start by thinking about what would excite your ideal readers and collaborators. A multi-author giveaway, a themed blog series, or a shared social media event can bring attention not just to your book but to everyone involved. For example:

• A romance author might organize a Valentine’s Day “Books We Love” giveaway with exclusive content from multiple authors.

• A fantasy writer could host a “Worldbuilding Week,” featuring interviews, live Q&As, or blog posts from other authors in the genre.

• A children’s book creator might arrange a “Family Reading Challenge” with printables and activities shared by collaborators.

These events don’t have to be complicated. Even a small, well-planned initiative can generate excitement and create buzz. The magic is in bringing people together around a shared theme, idea, or goal.

But how do you find the right people to collaborate with? Start by looking at your existing network. Fellow authors, bloggers, or illustrators you’ve worked with before are great places to begin. If you’re unsure, explore spaces where your ideal readers and creators gather. Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and Discord servers tied to your genre or niche are gold mines for discovering potential partners.

Engage authentically in these communities, not as someone pushing your book, but as a fellow enthusiast.

When you’re ready to reach out, your pitch doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to focus on what’s in it for them. People are busy, and your collaborators will want to know that your idea is worth their time. Say something like:

• “I’m putting together a joint giveaway for fantasy authors, and I think your book would be a perfect fit. Here’s how it would work…”

• “I loved your recent blog post on [topic]. I’m organizing a series of guest posts on the theme of resilience in fiction—would you be interested in contributing?”

Be clear about the value they’ll get, whether that’s exposure to a new audience, exclusive perks for their readers, or the chance to connect with other creators. Make it easy for them to say yes by providing clear details, prewritten content, or specific timelines.

When you’re the one creating opportunities, you become someone others want to align with. And even if you’re starting small, these partnerships will grow with time.

Collaboration isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a cornerstone of building a successful preorder campaign. By finding the right partners, creating value together, and engaging authentically, you can turn your book launch into a shared celebration that reaches far beyond your existing audience.

Mobilize your ambassadors

The most powerful advocates for your book aren’t strangers. They’re the readers who already love what you do. We call these superfans your street team, and the people on it your ambassadors, the people who are excited to spread the word about your book because they genuinely believe in it. When you mobilize them effectively, they can amplify your campaign far beyond what you could do alone.

Your ambassadors are the readers who consistently show up for you. They comment on your posts, reply to your emails, and share your updates with their friends. You don’t need a massive following to mobilize ambassadors. A small, engaged group or even 5-10 enthusiastic people can have a huge impact.

Start by reaching out to your existing audience:

• Ask your email list or social media followers if they’d like to join a special preorder team.

• Look for readers who’ve left glowing reviews or sent you enthusiastic messages. These are the people who already care about your work and are likely to help.

Keep it personal. A direct message or email saying, “I’m putting together a small team to help spread the word about my new book. Would you like to be part of it?” can go a long way.

Once you’ve recruited your ambassadors, make it easy for them to promote your book. Provide prewritten content, eye-catching graphics, and clear instructions for sharing. For example:

• Social media posts: Share-ready captions and images they can post on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

• Email templates: A short, friendly email they can send to friends or book clubs, recommending your book.

• Exclusive content: Offer ambassadors sneak peeks, bonus chapters, or behind-the-scenes updates to share with their networks.

The goal is to remove as much friction as possible. If they don’t have to create content from scratch, they’re more likely to follow through. However, it’s also a good idea to encourage your most enthusiastic, savvy fans to remix their own promotional efforts so social media platforms think that there’s a bunch of people talking about your book at once and help amplify you.

While many superfans are happy to help for free, offering small rewards can boost participation and enthusiasm. Think of incentives that align with their interests:

• Exclusive perks: Early access to your book, signed copies, or personalized thank-you notes.

• Recognition: A shoutout in your book’s acknowledgments or a spotlight in your newsletter.

• Contests: Offer prizes for ambassadors who refer the most preorders or drive the most social media engagement.

The key is to make them feel valued and appreciated. When your ambassadors see that their efforts matter, they’ll be even more motivated to help. Make sure to give regular updates keep them engaged and excited. Send a weekly email or set up a private group (like a Facebook group or Discord server) where you can share campaign milestones, answer questions, and celebrate wins together.

For example:

• Share progress: “We’re halfway to our preorder goal—thank you for your amazing support!”

• Highlight individual contributions: “Shoutout to Sarah for sharing our book on Instagram and bringing in 10 preorders!”

• Provide ongoing resources: New graphics, updated social media captions, or fresh ideas for promotion.

By keeping your ambassadors in the loop, you’ll maintain their momentum throughout the campaign.

Mobilizing ambassadors isn’t just about this preorder campaign. It’s about building a community that will support you for years to come. Stay connected with your superfans after the campaign ends. Send them thank-you messages, give them a sneak peek at your next project, or invite them to be part of future launches.

Mobilizing your ambassadors is one of the most rewarding parts of running a preorder campaign. It’s not just about selling books. It’s about creating a team of passionate supporters who believe in your work as much as you do. Together, you can turn excitement into action, transforming your book into something readers can’t wait to talk about.

Leverage promo stacking to dominate attention

Authors often suffer from a severe lack of funds, especially when it comes to their early launches. Plus, they hate doing promotion, even if they simultaneously wrote a book and put their name on the cover.

If you really want to be invisible:

• Why is your name on the cover, though?

• Why is your picture and bio inside the book?

• Why even release a book of your words when you could have left it on your hard drive, or deleted it?

It’s okay to want to be beloved by lots of people, but you have to get over yourself.

If an author can get over themselves, they will only book a few promos spaced out from each other that end up getting lost in the din of everything else. One way to combat that is to focus all your promotion around a short period of time, and concentrate all your efforts, both organic and paid, around it so that all your promotional efforts amplify each other.

We call this promo stacking, and it’s amazing for authors on a budget who want to maximize every dollar.

Promo stacking works because it capitalizes on repetition, and is predicated on the premise that if a reader is on one email list, they are probably on several others about the same topic. Since the human brain suffers from recency bias, it’s easy to short-circuit it into believing you’re a much bigger deal than you are if you can flood the market with your work on a bunch of channels at once.

Basically, the more closely packed people see your book, the more they will remember it. The more they remember it, the more likely they are to take action and preorder it.

The idea is to flood the channels your readers use with your book for a short, intense period. When readers see your campaign across multiple touchpoints, they can’t help but notice, trust, and get curious.

Start by centering your promotional efforts around one big event, like a BookBub Featured Deal, and layer additional promotions to amplify its impact. The goal? Create a short-term, high-intensity campaign where your book shows up everywhere your target readers look.

Here’s how a stacked promo strategy works:

1. Anchor your campaign with a big event: Schedule a high-impact promotion, like a BookBub Featured Deal, a Chirp audiobook promo, or an influencer partnership, as the centerpiece of your campaign. This becomes the focal point that everything else revolves around.

2. Layer in supporting promotions: Surround the big event with additional efforts. like newsletter swaps, smaller promo sites like Bargain Booksy or Fussy Librarian, and social media ads. These amplify the visibility created by your anchor event.

3. Extend the impact: Use countdowns and follow-ups to maximize the momentum created by your stacked efforts, keeping readers engaged even after the peak.

4. Coordinate your messaging: Every piece of your campaign should tie back to the anchor event. Use consistent branding and repeat your core message across all channels.

Promo stacking creates a snowball effect. Smaller promotions prime your audience, the anchor event delivers a massive spike in visibility, and post-event efforts sustain momentum to make it feel like your book is the thing everyone’s talking about, creating urgency and trust.

This approach works because it respects how people make decisions. Remember, readers often need 7–12 touchpoints before they buy, and promo stacking ensures those touchpoints happen in quick succession. By combining strategic timing with focused intensity, you can maximize your preorder campaign’s impact and drive real results.

Track your progress and refine your approach

Running a preorder campaign is like climbing a mountain. You don’t reach the summit in one leap. Instead, you break it into smaller milestones and celebrate each step along the way. Every 100 preorders is a mini-goal that helps you gauge your progress, refine your strategy, and stay motivated. By tracking your campaign in real time and focusing on actionable metrics, you’ll not only make the journey less overwhelming but also more effective.

Hitting 1,000 preorders might seem daunting, but breaking it into smaller goals makes it manageable. Each milestone represents a chance to test, learn, and optimize your approach. Here’s a roadmap:

1. Preorders 1–100: Warm leads and low-hanging fruit

   • Focus: Your inner circle. This includes friends, family, superfans, and your email list. These are the people who already know and love your work.

   • Metrics: Track email open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and conversions from your direct audience.

   • Strategy:

     • Send a personal email to your most engaged readers.

     • Offer an exclusive early bird bonus for the first 50-100 preorders to create urgency.

     • Use direct outreach like DMs, personal notes, or in-person asks to engage your core supporters.

2. Preorders 101–300: Expanding reach

   • Focus: Engaging your social media followers and reaching casual fans.

   • Metrics: Look at engagement rates on social media posts (likes, shares, comments) and ad click-thru rates.

   • Strategy:

     • Use teaser content like sneak peeks, behind-the-scenes videos, or excerpts to build excitement.

     • Start layering in paid ads with low budgets to test messaging and audiences.

     • Begin newsletter swaps with authors who write for a similar audience.

3. Preorders 301–600: Building momentum

   • Focus: Expanding into new audiences and leveraging partnerships.

   • Metrics: Measure referral traffic from newsletter swaps, social shares, and collaborations.

   • Strategy:

     • Partner with other authors for joint promotions, like group giveaways or bundles.

     • Ramp up your ad spend with refined targeting based on earlier results.

     • Pitch guest blog posts or podcast appearances to reach readers outside your immediate audience.

4. Preorders 601–900: Attention domination

   • Focus: Making your campaign inescapable.

   • Metrics: Track impressions, ad frequency, and total traffic to your preorder page.

   • Strategy:

     • Execute a promostacking strategy by concentrating ads, social posts, and newsletter updates into a single, high-intensity week.

     • Use urgency-driven messaging, such as “Only 3 days left to claim preorder bonuses!”

     • Highlight social proof, share testimonials, reviews, or quotes from early readers.

5. Preorders 901–1,000: The final push

   • Focus: Creating urgency and exclusivity.

   • Metrics: Track daily conversions and bounce rates to identify what’s working.

   • Strategy:

     • Offer a last-minute bonus or limited-time perk for preorders in the final stretch.

     • Use countdowns and reminders on all platforms: “Just 48 hours left to preorder!”

     • Engage ambassadors and superfans to amplify your message, asking them to share and promote one last time.

Not all numbers tell the same story. In the middle of a preorder campaign, it’s easy to get lost in surface-level metrics like how many people liked your post or how many followers you gained last week, but those numbers don’t necessarily translate to results. What really matters is understanding what drives preorders, and focusing on those metrics can make the difference between a successful campaign and one that falls flat.

The first number you should pay attention to is your conversion rate. This is the clearest indicator of how effectively your messaging is working. If readers are clicking through your emails, ads, or social media posts but not completing the preorder, it’s a sign something needs to change. Maybe your preorder page isn’t convincing enough, or your call to action isn’t clear. On the other hand, a strong conversion rate tells you that your audience is not just interested, they’re invested.

Next, look at your traffic sources. Where are your preorders coming from? Are readers finding you through your email list, social media ads, or collaborations with other authors? Tools like Google Analytics or email tracking can help you pinpoint which channels are driving results. If you notice that one source is outperforming the others, you can double down on what’s working and allocate your resources more effectively.

Finally, pay close attention to engagement. Are people opening your emails, clicking your links, and interacting with your posts? High engagement is a sign that your messaging is resonating, even if it hasn’t yet translated into preorders.

On the flip side, low engagement might mean it’s time to rethink your approach. Are your subject lines intriguing enough? Are your social media posts grabbing attention within the first few seconds? Engagement is the bridge between awareness and action, and it’s a metric you can’t afford to ignore.

Tracking these numbers isn’t just about gathering data. It’s about making informed decisions. When you know what’s working and what isn’t, you can pivot in real time, refining your strategy to maximize impact. Every click, preorder, and interaction tells a story. Your job is to listen to what those numbers are saying and use them to create a campaign that resonates with your audience and drives results.

Keep the momentum alive after your launch

A successful preorder campaign doesn’t end when your book is released. The work you’ve put into generating excitement, building relationships, and engaging your audience can carry over into the next phase of your book’s life. Post-launch momentum is about turning the energy of your preorder campaign into long-term connections, ongoing sales, and a foundation for your future projects.

When your campaign ends, don’t quietly move on, celebrate! Whether you hit your goal or came close, take a moment to recognize the achievement and share it with your audience. A public thank-you not only shows gratitude but also reinforces the community you’ve built. Share your results in an email or social media post:

• “Thank you to everyone who preordered! We hit [goal], and I couldn’t have done it without you.”

• Include a behind-the-scenes look at what the preorder campaign meant to you, or share stories about how readers’ support made a difference.

This isn’t just about closure. It’s about showing readers that their involvement mattered, building goodwill for future campaigns.

These are the people who believed in your book before they could even hold it in their hands. Now that it’s out in the world, this is your chance to deepen that connection and turn casual fans into lifelong advocates.

Start by reaching out personally, if you can. A simple thank-you email or message can go a long way. Let them know how much their support meant to you, and make it clear that they’re part of something special. Whether it’s a heartfelt note or a short video, that personal touch makes readers feel valued and appreciated.

Next, invite them into your world. A private Facebook group, Discord server, or other community space can give your readers a place to connect, not just with you, but with each other. This transforms your audience into a community, a space where they can share their enthusiasm for your work, swap recommendations, and celebrate your book together. When readers feel like insiders, they’re more likely to stick around for your next project.

But don’t stop there. Give them something extra. Exclusive bonuses, like deleted scenes, additional chapters, or behind-the-scenes content, keep the excitement alive. Maybe you share a map of your fantasy world, a playlist you listened to while writing, or a video tour of your writing space. These extras don’t just reward your preorder buyers. They reinforce their decision to support you and remind them why they were excited in the first place.

Your preorder campaign isn’t just about sales. It’s about proving that your book has an audience. Those preorder numbers are a tool you can use to create new opportunities. Retailers and libraries pay attention to strong preorder campaigns. Use your stats to pitch better placement or convince a bookstore to stock more copies of your book.

You can also leverage your success to attract influencers, reviewers, or promotional partners. If you can say, “My book hit 500 preorders before launch,” that’s a compelling story that makes others want to be part of your success. Early reviews from preorder buyers can also become powerful testimonials, helping you build credibility as you promote your book to new readers.

Post-launch promotions help you maintain visibility and attract new readers who may have missed your preorder campaign.

Keep the energy going by scheduling ads or features on platforms like BookBub, Bargain Booksy, or similar promo sites. These can give your book a second wind and bring in readers who are still discovering it. Continue engaging with your audience through email and social media. Share reviews, milestones, or personal reflections about what the launch means to you. Show your readers that the story doesn’t end with the preorder. It’s still unfolding every day.

Collaborate with other authors in your genre to cross-promote your books. Whether it’s a joint giveaway, a shared blog post, or a bundle deal, these partnerships keep your book in front of fresh audiences while building relationships with fellow creators.

The excitement you created during your preorder campaign doesn’t have to fade. When readers see you showing up consistently, sharing your passion, celebrating milestones, and continuing to connect, they’ll remember why they preordered in the first place. And when your next book comes out, they’ll be ready to join you again.

By valuing your readers, leveraging your campaign’s success, and keeping the momentum alive, you can turn your preorder campaign into a launchpad for your career.

After your campaign, take time to reflect. What worked? What didn’t? What surprised you? Document your process, including the strategies that delivered the best results and the ones that fell flat. This isn’t just about learning for the future. It’s about giving yourself credit for what you accomplished. Every campaign, successful or not, is a step forward in understanding your audience and growing as an author.

A preorder campaign is more than a sales strategy. It’s a way to connect with readers, build excitement, and set the stage for your long-term success. When you keep the momentum alive after launch, you’re not just selling a book. You’re building a career. And that’s a story worth telling again and again.What do you think?

• How many times can you post about your book before it gets annoying? The article says people need 7-12 reminders - what's your tolerance level?

• What actually makes you hit that preorder button months before a book comes out? What's that magic thing that gets you to commit?

• Who would be in your dream book hype squad? You can pick 5 people - go!

Let us know in the comments.

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If you’re like most indies, the idea of selling your work in person might feel somewhere between daunting and ridiculous. Why spend hundreds of dollars on a table, stock, gas, travel, and maybe even a hotel room just to stand behind a plastic table in a loud convention hall hoping someone buys you stuff?

It’s easy to think, "There’s no way this adds …

Read more

Russell sits down with Chelle Honiker — publisher, vibe coder, and what Russell calls “the queen of vibe coding in the author industry” — fresh off a three-week international event sprint through Savannah, London, and Ireland. What starts as a state-of-the-industry conversation pivots into a live tech problem-solving session, a breakdown of how Chelle built a full author operating system from scratch with no traditional programming background, and a broader argument for why right now is the best time in history to be an independent creative.

What Chelle Saw at Three Events

The industry is splitting. On one side: authors paralyzed by AI anxiety, frustrated by discoverability problems, convinced the gold rush is over. On the other: authors using AI to do translations they never had bandwidth for, launch new pen names, and run lean solo operations that outperform teams of ten. At the Ireland Publishing Show, one author demonstrated a new pen name launched in January — no email list, no existing audience — that cleared €7,000. He wrote the book with AI, edited it himself, and wasn’t shy about it.

Russell’s take: the gold rush has always been “behind us.” That story is as old as the industry. The real variable isn’t the market. It’s the story you’re telling yourself about what’s possible.

The Mindset Argument

Both Russell and Chelle spent time on this, and it’s core Hapitalist territory: the brain is not that smart. It processes whatever you feed it and starts looking for evidence to confirm it. Tell it the gold rush is over and it will find proof everywhere. Tell it there’s opportunity and it starts finding that instead.

The practical upshot: refusing to engage with AI entirely doesn’t just cost you one tool — it costs you the curiosity that leads to the next unexpected thing. Chelle’s frame: “Let the bots do the boring so you can do the brilliance.”

On AI ethics — both acknowledged the minefield is real. But Russell pushed on the double standard: if AI is your hard line, are you also auditing your payment processor? Your book retailer? Barnes & Noble wiped out indie bookstores. Amazon was once the scrappy underdog. No company stays the good guy forever. The move is to make clear-eyed business decisions for yourself, not to pick a villain and stop thinking.

What Is Storyteller OS?

Chelle vibe-coded a full author business platform in roughly four months of intensive work — somewhere around 600 hours of development, built with Claude Code, with an assist from one other programmer on bug reports. The result is an all-in-one system that replaces the scattered tool stack most authors live with:

• Writing studio — write, edit, export, push directly to BookFunnel or Lulu

• Social media — create posts, manage a content calendar, connect up to 13 platforms

• Email — replaces MailerLite and similar tools; authors control their own sending through Amazon SES keys, which cuts costs significantly

• Direct sales — built-in storefront, or it manages existing WooCommerce/Shopify setups

• Business intelligence — review tracking, reader database, analytics

The original vision was a central command center that integrated with existing tools. Reality from beta users pushed it further: at the price point she’s charging, it needs to replace those tools, not just organize them. She pivoted. That’s the advantage of building your own software — you can.

Her big audacious goal: 1,000 indie authors running million-dollar businesses from one platform. find it at: https://storytelleros.com/

The Live Problem-Solving Session

This is where the episode got genuinely useful. Russell mentioned he’s been trying to connect Substack (where paid subscribers live) to a separate community hub — and has been told repeatedly by developers that it’s impossible because of how Stripe handles financial data.

Chelle’s answer: it’s not impossible. It’s a webhook.

When someone subscribes through Stripe, Stripe fires a webhook. You build your hub to catch that webhook, create an account, and trigger whatever automation you want. No Zapier. No Make.com. No N8N. No additional payment processor. The Stripe transaction has everything you need to power the rest of it.

Russell’s reaction was essentially a live “I hate everything” moment — because he’d just been about to pay for a platform to solve the exact problem that a webhook solves. Chelle’s note: with agentic AI, the era of no-code automation tools being the answer is largely over. She spent two years evangelizing Make.com workflows. Three months ago she stopped using them entirely.

The Closing Argument

The episode ends where it started: unlimited choice is the new constraint. For most of publishing history, your options were basically hamburger, hot dog, or sausage — work within the platform or don’t work at all. That’s gone. The problem now isn’t that there aren’t enough options. It’s that people don’t know what they want, and that uncertainty reads to their brain as impossibility.

Russell’s wife’s line closes it out neatly: almost everything always works out for almost everyone, almost all the time. Stop optimizing for the five worst minutes of your day. The creative person who decided to make things independently already did the hardest part. The rest is figuring out what you actually want and building toward it — which is a much better problem to have.

3 Takeaways

1. The gold rush was never behind you. It’s a story your brain tells when it’s scared. 7 billion people, unlimited money, renewable resource. Feed your brain differently.

2. Vibe coding changed the math. Non-technical founders can now build their own tools, own their own stack, and pivot in real time based on what actual users need. That’s an asymmetric advantage over anyone still waiting for the right platform to exist.

3. The webhook is the answer. If you’ve been told you can’t connect two platforms because of payment data — you probably can. Ask about webhooks before you pay for another integration tool.

Find Chelle and everything she does at chellehoniker.com. AI Summit: April 21–22.

Having lived in an upstate New York small town briefly as a teenager, I’d pretty much do anything to avoid returning. One of the few upsides of reality is that we can sometimes avoid things we don’t want to do. Fictional characters aren’t so lucky!

So, let’s look at how FX’s 2010 series Justified uses the return-to-small-town trope. To do that, I’m using an example from the recently released The Trope Thesaurus Mystery and Thriller, co-written by Sara Rosett and me. It’s available now from D2D and Amazon.

Justified, a character-driven show with elements of mystery and thriller, has become a fan favorite. If you haven’t watched it, it’s available on streaming services, and trust me, this is an enjoyable assignment!

In Justified, disgraced U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens is sent back to his Kentucky small town to apprehend his former friend, turned criminal, Boyd Crowder. The series was based on an Elmore Leonard short story, which I also recommend.

First, read my summary of Justified, with the identified tropes below. Notice how well tropes play with others-- it’s the trope superpower.

Justified, Season One (American, 2010)

Raylan Givens is a US Marshal (loner, profession, protector) based in Miami who is sent back to his home state of Kentucky (return to a small town) after embarrassing his bosses.

Unhappily, he returns to the Lexington, KY office, where he learns the Chief, Art Mullen, was his former instructor (boss). Givens grew up in Harlan County, KY, which is home to a local criminal the US Marshall Service seeks—Boyd Crowder (antagonist, suspect). Years earlier, Crowder and Givens worked together as miners for one summer before Harlan went to college and Boyd joined the army (forced proximity). When questioned by his boss about whether the two men are friends, Raylan says ‘We dug coal together” (found family).

The Season One arc involves the US Marshals trying to get evidence that Boyd (suspect) is targeting other drug traffickers to eliminate the drug-selling competition. Raylan is assigned to protect Ava (ticking time bomb), the widow of Boyd’s brother. She killed her husband after years of abuse (victim). Raylan and Ava have an affair even though Raylan still cares for his ex-wife, Winona, who is now married to a scheming local real estate agent (love triangle, politics, secrets). Boyd, who has long been in love with his brother’s wife, stalks Ava (violence).

Boyd’s criminal father has a grudge against Raylan’s shifty father, Arlo, for a previous deal gone bad (antagonists). These two men actively undermine their sons (suspects, politics). Arlo and Raylan have a poor relationship based on Raylan’s childhood and abuse from Arlo. After Raylan’s mother’s death, Arlo married her sister. She and Raylan are close; she paid for his college, providing him an escape from Harlan County (protector).

The first season is all about the shifting alliances Raylan struggles to navigate. He has help from his two Marshall colleagues, Tim and Rachel (found family, profession), as he tries to neutralize the Crowder clan.

• Tropes that work well with Return to Small Town: Found Family, Ticking Time Bomb, Quest, Secrets, and Scars.

• Other examples of stories with Return to Small Town: In the Woods, Hell or Highwater, Winter’s Bone, Burn Notice, and Grosse Pointe Blank.

  ---

Jennifer talks a lot more about this in her new book with mystery legend Sara Rosett, out now.

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3 Reasons Why I Love the Return To Small Town Trope

1. It provides motivation. Marshall Raylan Givens is the Justified protagonist who only goes back to his hometown, Harlan County, KY, to keep his job. His return is a demotion from his Miami office. What I love about this setup is that, right away, Givens is focused on getting back to Miami. We know his motivation, and the series provides plenty of obstacles to his return.

   When using this trope, think about why your protagonist wants to be there? What are the factors at play, and how can you make it even more difficult for your character? How can you increase the story tension by making it impossible for them to leave? If your character doesn’t want to leave (often the case in a romance as the relationship progresses), what obstacles can you introduce to them?

2. It provides a built-in backstory. Raylan’s habit of shooting bad guys, telling his boss he pulled first, is why he is sent back to Kentucky. We learn that this isn’t the first time Raylan has killed a criminal with his deadly accurate aim. His bosses, who want the accused alive, are not happy with him. Raylan’s boss, Art Mullins, expresses concern at his new hire’s hotshot reputation explaining, “It’s a small office, I get nervous when we change the coffee filters.”

   The return to the small town has a backstory built in, which is why it’s such a popular trope. There’s no need to dump info when the character will be forced to relive it in that environment! It’s the forced proximity trope built into the character’s past.

   When using this trope, think about what scars and secrets you can gradually reveal about your character. This is not a fresh start but a return, which means the character returning carries all misunderstandings and disappointments (given or received) back with them.

3. It provides forced proximity. There’s no way to outrun a small town! Raylan returns to Harlan County to find his ex-wife working at the courthouse and his estranged father skulking around. His work requires him to interact with both of them, causing all kinds of buried feelings to resurface.

   That’s the magic of the forced proximity in that characters have to keep bouncing off each other, generating conflict. Think about how, in using the small town trope, you can create more tension by limiting resources and time. Characters make decisions when they are not at their best and face the consequences, creating story conflict.

Next time you are working on a story involving the return to a small town trope, think about if you have mined all the possibilities for your story. There’s a lot of conflict in this unassuming concept.

Calling All Sleuths, Spies, and Serial Killers! Love red herrings, hidden identities, and secrets? Want to indulge your armchair detective instincts?

Check out The Trope Thesaurus: Mystery & Thriller by USA Today Bestselling authors Jennifer Hilt and Sara Rosett.

Join us as we unlock the storytelling DNA behind forty-plus tropes that power the most gripping tales of suspense.

From domestic thrillers to serial killer hunts, femme fatales to police procedurals, and spy sagas to cozy whodunits, we reveal how each subgenre uses familiar frameworks to keep readers guessing—and gasping.

Packed with examples from books, series, and movies, this guide goes beyond surface patterns to explore how goal, motivation, and conflict intersect with tropes and genre expectations.

Discover how secrets, scars, and hidden identities drive character relationships and create emotional stakes that turn simple puzzles into heart-pounding revelations.

Whether you’re crafting your next twisty thriller, historical mystery, or private detective tale, The Trope Thesaurus: Mystery & Thriller will help you transform tropes into tools—showing relationships in action, heightening suspense, and keeping your readers up long past midnight.

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Honestly, you’ll probably want to just skip to about minute 27 or so of this one when it goes straight into a coaching call and you see in real time how Russell’s brain works, and how it all clicks into place in 30 minutes.

In this one, Russell sits down with Jermaine, a serial founder whose current passion project, Heirlight, an AI-powered estate planning app, grew out of a deeply personal place: trying to understand his mother before she passed. What starts as a conversation about death, legacy, and memory transforms in the second half into a candid coaching session where Russell holds up a mirror to Jermaine’s product, messaging, and the gap between what he says he’s building and what his website actually says.

Jermaine built the first version of Heirlight as a Mandarin-language chatbot so his mom — who was anxious about retirement and unclear on her own finances — could tell her life story in her own language. Four months of conversations later, he realized he had the raw material to build her an estate plan. She passed away three months after he started building the app.

The conversation opens into something broader: both Russell and Jermaine have lost parents, and both had the experience of either trying — and failing — to capture those stories before it was too late, or just barely succeeding. The throughline is that understanding someone’s past unlocks empathy for who they became. Russell connects this to his own father, his stepmother, his grandmother with dementia at 92. Jermaine connects it to a recording he made of his grandmother in 2017 that reshaped his understanding of his entire family.

The emotional core of Heirlight, as Jermaine describes it in the first half, isn’t estate planning at all — it’s connection and remembrance.

At around the midpoint, Jermaine invites Russell to just look at his website and give it to him straight. What follows is one of the more honest product critiques you’ll hear on a podcast.

🔍 What Russell Saw on the Site

Russell pulled up Heirlight.com live and flagged the disconnect immediately:

• The hero headline: “Make your will in 27 minutes”

• Supporting copy: state-specific, bank-level encryption, unlimited updates, free lawyer referral

His reaction: “27 minutes is a long time. Bank-level encryption — I don’t care about this at all. Free lawyer referral confuses me because I thought you were making my will.”

More pointedly: “We’ve talked for roughly an hour across two calls, and you never once talked about making a will or the fact that it’s quick.”

💡 The Core Tension

Jermaine’s product is mission-driven. His messaging is pain-point-driven. Those are two different apps, and right now the website is selling the wrong one.

Russell’s framework: every product is really about the transformation it delivers. “Make a will in 27 minutes” is a task completion. That’s not a powerful transformation. The real transformation Jermaine kept describing — feeling grounded, feeling like a responsible adult, preserving stories your grandchildren will hear after you’re gone — that’s nowhere on the page.

“The thing you said for the first 25 minutes of this talk is not this site.”

🧭 Key Coaching Insights

1. Your referral users aren’t your ideal customer. Most of Heirlight’s growth comes from word-of-mouth, and those users come because it’s “easy.” But Russell pushed back: it’s not easy because it’s fast — it’s easy because it’s natural language. People are telling stories. That’s the thing. And yet the app currently buries the conversational part behind the rigid will-building flow.

2. You’re playing a game you can’t win. Competing on speed and task-completion puts Heirlight in the same lane as every other will-maker. Russell was blunt: “You are going to lose that game because they are already winning it.” But shifting the axis — making Heirlight the app that helps you tell the story behind the will — puts it in a category of one.

3. There’s almost no risk to going all in on the thing when you have good cashflow. Because Jermaine has a profitable freight forwarding business funding his life, he has rare runway to take asymmetric creative risk. Russell’s challenge: “You are constraining yourself from taking the actual risks you want to take because your brain says businesses do business things.”

4. The order of operations matters. Currently: rigid legal questions first → natural language/storytelling after. Russell’s suggestion: flip it. Let people tell stories first, then surface the will questions gradually — one per day over four weeks if needed. Let the will be the thing that emerges from the conversation rather than the thing that gates it.

5. Make it shareable and collaborative. Wills are hard partly because people don’t have all the answers alone. What if you could “phone a friend” — loop in a sibling to help answer two questions? What if a story got cleaned up by AI and you could share it with family? What if your niece could comment and say “that’s not what happened”? That’s a product people talk about.

6. The face problem. Jermaine revealed he’s been reluctant to put his own story front and center because two teammates quit their jobs to build this with him — and it feels narcissistic to make it about himself. Russell reframed it: “They didn’t follow you because this was the best idea ever. They followed you because of you.” The story doesn’t have to be Jermaine’s exclusively — but someone’s story has to be there. If not his, find a customer whose story can stand in.

🎯 Russell’s Parting Challenge

“What I would love to see next time is what you talked about in the first half of this call to be on this page.”

The episode ends with Russell going full pitch mode — framing wills not as legal documents but as storytelling apparatuses. Every item in a will has a story behind it. 70% of Americans don’t have a will not because they’re lazy, but because wills feel cold, impersonal, and bureaucratic. Heirlight’s bet — if it leans into what Jermaine actually built — is that wills can be the most personal thing you ever make.

“Wills are about how we take bits of our identity and give them to other people and hope they can carry little pieces of us around with them forever.”

3 Takeaways for Founders

1. Your messaging should sound like you on your best day — not like a product spec sheet. If you’d never describe your company the way your homepage does, something’s off.

2. The transformation > the feature. “Make a will in 27 minutes” is a feature. “Feel grounded enough to stop avoiding the hardest conversation” is a transformation. Sell the second thing.

3. Asymmetric risk requires asymmetric positioning. If you’re not going to win by playing it safe, you might as well play it weird and true.

Heirlight is currently live in California. You can try a draft for free at https://heirlight.com/en/podcast/hapitalist

I've spent years watching the indie publishing industry obsess over book launches. We pour endless energy into those first few weeks, treating them as the ultimate measure of success. After managing over 75 books throughout my career, I'm pretty confident in saying that we're thinking about this all wrong.

That’s not to say launches aren’t important.…

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I was a guest on a livestream by my friends at this week, and I said a lot of words. Here are some of my best takeaways. I was pretty animated in this one, and I’m still on fire even now typing this bit to you.

Everyone Has the Same Four Problems

Doesn’t matter if you’re publishing novels, drawing comics, running a tech company, or selling tarot decks — the problems are the same. The HAPI Compass breaks them down:

• H — Project blocks. Things intrinsic to the work itself that you and your team can fix without anyone else’s help. Bad cover. Weak blurb. A third-chapter structure problem. Before you do anything else, fix the thing.

• A — Audience blocks. You’ve got the right product but you’re talking to the wrong people, on the wrong platforms, or your list was built for a completely different version of what you do.

• P — Prioritization blocks. Doing too many things, doing the wrong things, doing things in the wrong order. This one’s everyone’s problem, always.

• I — Income blocks. Your conversion is broken. Not your audience size — your actual sales mechanism.

The reason most people stay stuck is that they misidentify which block they have. And the solutions are often opposite. If you have an audience block, you need to lower the barrier to entry and get more visible. If you have an income block, you need to raise prices and get more exclusive. Apply the wrong solution and you make things worse.

You’re Playing on Someone Else’s Axis

Every platform gives you a set of rules. Substack has one. Amazon has one. TikTok has one. Those rules exist because they maximize the platform’s revenue, not yours.

The problem isn’t that platforms define their own axis. They should. The problem is that most of us just believe it — and play entirely within a game designed for someone else to win.

Your job is to define your own axis. What does winning actually look like for you? What activities give you the best return on energy? Once you know that, you can use a platform without being owned by it.

You Have to Learn the Rules Before You Can Break Them

There’s a version of “going your own way” that’s actually just not knowing what you’re doing. Real creative freedom, like absurdism and surrealism is harder than playing it straight, not easier. It requires that you understand exactly what you’re departing from and why, and that you can bridge the gap for your reader or audience.

Frank Gehry said 85% of what he does is the same as every other architect — gravity, logistics, construction. The 15% is where he has freedom. That’s true in writing, marketing, and building an author business.

You pick your medium, you work within its constraints, and you find your 15%.

Authenticity Has a Practical Definition

Authenticity isn’t a vibe. Here’s how I think about it: Can I sell this for the next ten years without hating my life?

Your books are something you have to talk about for a decade. Your brand is something you have to live with every day. Most early-career authors have no concept of how long ten years actually is.

For me, something is authentic when:

1. I like it

2. I get a positive feedback loop from doing it

3. It flows out of me without a lot of effort to contain

If you have to think about whether something is authentic, it probably isn’t. Your authenticity is you being “back on your bullshit” — the thing your friends recognize immediately as you doing your thing again. The work is figuring out how to make that broadly palatable and position it as a sail, not an anchor.

Chaos Needs a Container

Some people are naturally chaos-oriented. They want to make music and fashion and photography and woodwork all at once. The default advice is “pick a lane.” That advice is often wrong for that person.

The better question is: what container is big enough to hold all of it?

If your chaos spills beyond your monetization structure, that’s a problem. But if you can build a container — a brand, a publication, a body of work — that’s broad enough to be unmistakably you, then the chaos becomes your competitive moat. Nobody else can replicate the specific combination of things you are.

The goal is to plant your flag so clearly that when you pivot or shift or get weird, your audience comes along because there’s nowhere else to get what you offer.

Anyone Can Do It, Even if Not Everyone Can.

Can you make a living as a writer? Yes. Will it look the way you currently imagine it? Probably not.

The math is simple: $100K is 100 people at $1,000, or 300 people at $300, or 4 companies at $25K. The hard part isn’t finding those people once — it’s building a mechanism that keeps finding new ones, because even your biggest fans don’t follow you as closely as you think. (When’s the last time you bought a book from the author who meant the most to you in childhood?)

The goal isn’t to be locked into “books forever.” The goal is to build enough time affluence that you can do what you want, when you want — and then reinvest that into the work that matters most to you right now.

Know What Era You’re In

Growth era or monetization era? These are different modes with different strategies, and you can’t run them both at full throttle simultaneously.

In a growth era: maximize visibility, lower barriers, build the audience. In a monetization era: increase exclusivity, refine conversion, deepen the relationship with the people already there.

The most important thing is honesty with yourself about which one you’re actually in — and what you actually want. Not what sounds good, not what the platform is incentivizing. What do you want right now, and what’s the most energy-efficient path to that specific thing?

One Brilliant Arc is a story coaching and editing service. If you’re working on a story that matters and need help getting it out of your head and into the world, check them out.

If you want to go deeper on any of this framework, everything I covered lives inside Frictionless Growth — which you get free just for subscribing to Hapitalist. We do live sessions twice a month if you want to bring your specific situation.

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It’s 2026, which means it’s time for another yearly wrapup.

You can find all our previous yearly and quarterly income reports here.

At the end of my 2024 wrap-up report I said:

“As for 2025, I’m sick of worrying about it. Somehow, it will all work out. Maybe it will be a disaster, who knows. I’ve been planning for a disaster for a long time, and yet…”

Well, good news…it did work out, and it was a disaster, and I did survive, and it was okay.

I went into how I burnt it all down in a recent post so I won’t litigate it again, but I will say that if you’re following along with these income reports, I really messed up my categorizations throughout the year.

Even though the total is roughly the same, how I categorized each transaction in this report has changed drastically, which changes the overall tenor of the year.

For instance, my “course” earnings increased 30%, and my publishing income decreased by roughly the same amount. This is because I really don’t take a ton of time to make sure everything is right every quarter before running the report.

However, since this all goes to my accountant after I finish the year, I’m much more diligent about making sure things line up. They didn’t this year. When I started this process, there was a $40k discrepency between my quarterly reports and my final numbers.

It took me several days and multiple attempts to correct all my previous assumptions, but I think it’s finally right in the report below. I can’t tell you how annoying it was, or how tedious, but for now let’s just get to the “good” stuff.

Crowdfunding - 13.6%

Even though the percentage was only down 6%, since total income was down significantly this year, I’m actually in a worse position than it shows right here. If you’re a paid member, I recommend just going down below and seeing how the actual numbers stack up. If you’re not, this is a great time to upgrade.

In total, this year was kind of a crowdfunding nightmare. In 2024, I posted my highest total Kickstarter revenue ever, as I partnered with Claire Venus, Melissa Storm, Laurie Foster, and my ex-business partner on projects throughout the year that put up big numbers.

2025, by comparison, was my lowest total crowdfunding revenue since 2019, when I only ran one project. Last year saw me consistently underperform expectations, which is something that never happened before. I put up 2017 numbers, when I only had two campaigns, even though I ran six of them. That means almost triple the effort for the same results. At this point in my business, that’s brutal.

Courses - 43.5%

If you haven’t been following along, then a couple years ago this category basically became a “repayment fund” to capture the money Writer MBA paid me for monies outlaid.

Think about that for a minute. Almost half my income last year came from Writer MBA repaying monies I outlaid. That is not good.

The biggest single category in my income report saw me mainly using one account to pay another, resulting in a circle jerk for most of my year. Because of the structure of my business, I have to log every debit and credit, even if it evens out, so basically my actual income is about half the total you can see below if you are a paid member.

Consulting - 6.7%

This was easily the biggest shock in 2025, and I include the dissolution of Writer MBA in that mix. In January, my biggest client of the past few years cancelled their contract. This was the contract I relied on to live, and contributed about 80% of the profit in my total business. I was able to make ridiculous investments and try bonkers things because I always had this money to fall back on. In 2025, I basically had to rebuild it from scratch. I got another client in September, but at 1/4th of my old rate.

Publishing - 28%

Before I recallibrated everything, my income reports showed that I made almost 40% more through publishing, and I was stoked. It felt like, for the first time in a while, my publishing business worked.

However, when combing through the numbers before giving them to my accountant, I realized that a ton of money I originally attributed here should have been attributed to Writer MBA repayments, meaning I did…not so great.

Still, between consulting and publishing, combined with not having as many projects in development and running no ads, I was able to have a little fund of profit in my otherwise revenue intensive business. I’m hoping in 2026 to get my profit up significantly from previous years, and do things that are mainly profit heavy, now that I’ve written like 80 books.

Tax Return - 6.9 %

My tax return doubled this year from previous years, which is kind of brutal when you realize how much money I must have spent in 2024 to make that happen. My 2025 taxes showed a loss of over $130k, which meant I effectively paid zero taxes, and received the biggest return of my whole life. While that was a nice boost given the lackluster start to 2026, I would rather not go through last year again to relive it.

Retailers - 1%

Retailer sales almost quadrupled this year, which is great, but I also launched like 30 books on retailers. When you 10x your retailer products and only 4x your revenue, that’s not great. Still, if I can somehow 10x this number, then it would be a nice amount I’m pulling in from this stream. IDK how I’ll do this without ad spend. Right now it’s just nice bonus money.

Royalties - .3%

I generally put a lot of stuff in this category that probably shouldn’t be considered royalties, like affiliate sales, just so this wouldn’t be a fat zero. Two years ago I thought we had entered my royalty age, but instead I ended contracts with many of my partners and publishers, while having several other projects delayed. Eventually, I chose to enter a second coming of the choosing myself era.

Now, we’re going to get to the meat of it. If you’re not a paid member, this post might be worth the price of admission by itself, because you see every dollar I made, and every expense. I don’t break out expenses in my quarterly reports, but I do below.

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I have a sizable audience now, but it wasn’t always that way. For years, I launched products to crickets again and again. My first two crowdfunding launches on Indiegogo didn’t even make 20% of their goal…combined!

Over time, I found strategies to help me turn it around, and they turned me from launching a project to crickets into an entrepreneur with…

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In this webinar, I walked through how to use the HAPI Compass as a diagnostic tool to identify your actual constraint right now.

Most people aren’t failing because they lack information.They’re failing because they’re misdiagnosing the problem.

The core of the session focused on the four HAPI coordinates — Heart, Audience, Prioritization, and Income —…

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It’s easy to say you don’t care about winning a gold medal after you’ve already won it. But watching how easily and effortlessly Alysa Liu moves through competition, and life, makes me believe she really means it.

When you’re looking for somebody who exemplifies what I call the “Hapitalist” way, look no further than her entire vibe. While Liu claims she doesn’t consciously know the strategies she uses to achieve this kind of outcome independence, if you listen to enough of her interviews, you’ll see a clear pattern emerging—one that entrepreneurs can learn from and apply to their own business careers.

So, what does Alysa Liu do differently?

1. She focuses on the inputs and enjoys the journey

I heard her talk about this in an interview after her gold medal win, and it’s so true.

The key to “thinking quantum” as an entrepreneur is letting go of the outcomes. We’ve been taught to think Newtonian for our whole life. Newtonian thinking at its core claims success is linear, predictable, and comforting. That “if I check all the boxes, success should arrive right on schedule.”

Success doesn’t happen like that, though, for almost anyone. The more success you get, the less control you have over the outcome. You can control what you do and put out into the world (to a point), but not how it’s received or whether it will be enough to “win”.

When you’re competing for a gold medal, literally every move you make could send you from the medal stand into the nethers of the rankings. In situations like that, we have two choices; beat ourselves up over every microscopic flaw, or realize that even getting there is a gift and enjoy the journey.

As entrepreneurs, we face this daily. You can control the work you put out into the world and how you move through your creative process, but you cannot control what customers think about it. You cannot control whether your product becomes a bestseller or languishes in obscurity, only how much effort you put out and where. You cannot control whether that investor says yes or that reviewer is kind.

You can only control the work itself, and your relationship to it. You can make it the best you can given the limitations given you, and trust that the right people will resonate with it.

2. She practices radical acceptance

In another interview, I heard her say that the key to her mindset was radical acceptance, which is something I talk about all the time. People get this concept wrong all the time. They say things like, “How can I accept injustice in the world?” or “How can I accept that my product failed?”

That’s totally missing the forest for the trees. The point is not to approve of what’s happening. It’s that you accept the things that are happening are actually happening. You accept reality as it is as you work to change it.

There are three kinds of radical acceptance, and you need a combination of all three to get into Liu’s headspace.

• Self: Accept who you are right now, not who you’ll be in five years, not who you wish you were, but who you actually are today.

• Other: Accepts that judges, competitors, and audiences are going to think what they think, regardless of your intentions or desires.

• Life: Accepts that conditions, the circumstances, the judging panel, and countless other factors beyond your control will impact your score in ways you cannot predict or prevent.

This doesn’t mean Liu becomes passive. It means she stops arguing with reality long enough to work effectively within it.

3. She has the “Courage to Be Disliked”

I’ve heard her in enough interviews blow off people who dislike her with comments like “I can’t stop them from thinking that” or some form to know the courage to be disliked has to be somewhere in that operating system somewhere.

People will think a certain way about Liu whether she wants them to or not. The courage to be disliked is about letting them think what they think.

This concept was famously captured by Cassie Phillips in her 2022 poem “Let Them,” before being popularized by Mel Robbins. My favorite exploration of it, though, comes from The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga.

For entrepreneurs, this is essential. Someone will hate your product. Someone will leave a one-star review. Someone will say you’re a hack, a fraud, not a “real” entrepreneur. Someone will think your success is undeserved, or that your failure proves you never had what it takes.

Let them. Their thoughts about you are not your concern. Your concern is the work, and your relationship to it.

4. She embodies outcome independence

Captain Jean-Luc Picard famously said, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”

Even Liu’s best performances are never guaranteed to win. The difficult technical elements she cares most about are sometimes overshadowed by skaters with more theatrical programs that are more palatable to certain judges.

She can skate the most profound, beautiful, technically perfect program of her career and watch someone else win while her routine gets scored lower.

Alysa Liu won gold with 150.2 points. Meanwhile, H.I. Lee scored 140.49 points and placed 8th.

On another day, with different judges, different ice conditions, different atmospheric pressure in the arena, Lee might have won. That is not failure. That is life.

On February 19th, 2026, in this version of reality, 150.2 points won the gold, but the next time will be different as different elements collide to form a new reality.

The same is true in entrepreneurship. Your product launches on a specific day, in a specific market, competing with specific other products, being discovered by a specific subset of customers who are in a specific mood when they encounter it.

Change any of those variables, and you get a different outcome. You can build the same product, do the same marketing, put in the same effort, and get wildly different results based on factors entirely outside your control.

What Liu’s approach actually means in practice

None of this means that we don’t get upset when things go sideways. None of this means we never fall into old patterns of anxiety, control-seeking, or outcome-obsession.

It means that we understand and accept that we don’t have control over most of the things that happen to her, and that’s okay. When we gets into bad patterns, it means we can get ourselves out of them, and fall into them less often over time.

The practice is in getting slightly better at returning to what we can control: the work, and our relationship to it.

The Hapitalist path forward

This mindset and the entire approach that Liu embodies, is the crux of what I teach in the Hapitalist methodology. It’s about optimizing for joy and making money doing it. Not one or the other, but both.

It’s about understanding that you can have a successful entrepreneurial venture without sacrificing your mental health, your relationships, or your basic sense of human dignity.

It’s about learning from athletes like Alysa Liu, who somehow manage to perform at the highest levels while maintaining that ineffable quality of lightness, of not being crushed under the weight of expectations and outcomes.

You can put this into practice in your own entrepreneurial venture. You can cultivate outcome independence while still working toward your goals. You can care deeply about your work without being destroyed when it doesn’t perform as you hoped.

That’s not just possible, but essential because this career is long, and if you can’t find a way to be happy and successful at the same time, you won’t make it to the end with your soul intact.

Let Alysa Liu’s vibe be your reminder: the work is the point. The journey is the point. And everything else? That’s just points on a scoreboard that will be different tomorrow anyway.

What do you think of her vibe? Let us know in the comments.

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I’ve been trying to understand tarot for years, but every time I tried to learn it, nothing stuck.

It’s hard for me to see the framework until I break it down and rebuilt it for my weird brain. So, that’s what I did. I broke it down to first principles and rebuilt it in a language I already understood.

This episode is all about the process I used to build this deck, the underlying methodology, and pulled it all together in less than a month (after working on it for 2+ years).

This is the first time I’ve demoed the methodology live. You can download the whole system, and the digital deck, at: https://www.hapitalist.com/p/tarot

If you’d like to see more, you can also book a free 15-minute tarot reading on our consulting page here: https://tidycal.com/noheltyr

Book a business tarot reading

Takeaways

1. If you don’t understand a system, reverse-engineer it. Sometimes the problem isn’t that a framework is wrong. It’s that you’re trying to memorize outcomes instead of understanding mechanics. When you rebuild something in a language you already understand, you stop borrowing authority and start developing your own.

2. Most business problems can be reduced to their major constraint. If you can identify which one is actually blocked, you stop throwing effort at the wrong layer.

3. Friction is not failure. Don’t panic just because something feels heavy. You determine whether it’s early, misaligned, or complete. Those are very different states.

4. You cannot integrate what you refuse to release. This is the one most entrepreneurs resist. We will optimize, repackage, and rebuild endlessly to avoid admitting that something has expired. Sometimes the block isn’t effort. It’s attachment.

5. Interruption is underrated. The value of something like tarot isn’t mysticism. It’s disruption. It interrupts your favorite coping mechanism long enough for you to see what you’re avoiding.

You pour your soul into the work. You sacrifice time, sleep, and sanity. You finish an impossible thing. Then it comes out, and the world shrugs. That’s what breaks people. Not the work or the rejection, but the gap between what you thought would happen and what actually did.

And the gap is almost always about expectations. Even if we don’t say it ou…

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We covered:

• Continuity (…

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Publishing loves binaries. You’re either “trad” or “indie,” “new” or “established,” “serious” or “just starting out.” Unfortunately, that’s not how any of this actually works, and it’s definitely not helpful when you’re knee-deep in it, trying to figure out what to do next.

You don’t wake up one day and suddenly “have a career.” You don’t go from zero…

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Text version:

A Hapitalist is somebody who’s building a business, but doesn’t resonate with the “hustle all the time” or “make all the money” culture. They want to succeed, but not at the expense of their happiness or their ethics.

To them, money isn’t worth hating yourself.

To other people, that often looks like sabotaging themselves, but Hapitalists know success can’t come without joy. Even if it could, they wouldn’t want it.

They love what they do enough to sacrifice for it (to a point), and other people love it, too. Just maybe not enough people, or maybe not as many as used to. They’re frustrated it is so hard to get traction on something they love so much.

They don’t want it to be easy. Otherwise, they would just do something else.

They want it to be easeful. Easy is a measure of difficulty while ease is a measure of friction.

Easeful things can be hard, but they lack unnecessary resistance.

Hapitalists know that if you expend effort on the right actions they lead to amazing results.

Sound like you?

If so, take our quiz and find your own frictionless growth path.

Take our quiz

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If you’re still on the fence about joining us behind the paywall, here is what others are saying about us.

• “Thank you for creating this space where those of us who never quite fit the mold can find resources for bringing together our love of creating and desire to serve a purpose larger than ourselves. Can’t wait to dive in! “ -Annie Slade

• “Thanks for the transparency. It’s what I’ve been searching for--someone I could compare facts and figures with.” -K.P. Davis

• “You seem to have the path to success on Substack and you make it look fun. That’s what I want. “ -Rob M. Thompson

• “I support your work because you are already doing all the things I wish I knew how to do. I am looking forward to learning how to write and publish the right way! LOL!” -Debbie McMannis

• “You’ve helped me so much. Thank you, Russell!” -Tiffany Chu

• “I really appreciate the realistic advice and content of substance. “ -Edwin Earl

• “Russell is a fount of knowledge, a bit edgy with a sense of humor to go with it. I want to run amuck with my highlighter when I receive his articles. So much great stuff, some controversial thinking (which is always good for me) and genuine caring…Happy to support him supporting us.” -Crasser

• “Stumbled upon your post about ai narrated books. Such useful information that is really difficult to find on google searches apparently…Absolute love it and looking for ways to leverage that to publish audiobooks. I just tried the google play auto narration and i dont think its as good. Anyway, love your posts. Thanks. “ -S Pathak

• “Discovering I was a ‘Forest’…[it] might be the most important thing I’ve learned as a professional creative. I’m excited to learn more about different ways to publish and succeed. Thanks, Russell, for making this info accessible!” -Kel E Fox

• “You are providing solid, actionable guidance…Thank you for both the guidance and the inspiration on multiple levels!” -Donn King

• “There is no better place to learn comprehensive real world marketing. Learn from his experience instead of trying to do these tests on your own. Saves years.” -Robert C. Worstell

• I just went on a walk with your last comment, and I think my brain just cracked open. Maybe I should say, “A lock was opened.” But it feels more explosive than that. I need to mull this over, but I think shyte might be about to get real here. ~Cracked Brain. Thanks, Russell. You are so good at helping with clarity. -Julia Ashley

• Frictionless growth is my new mantra. -Sydney J. Baily

• “Russell has years of unparalleled experience writing and selling his work…and the value of his insights and knowledge are incredible “ -Kaj

• “There are so many things I don’t know, and the way you approach business resonates with me in a way that I need. Thank you for that. “ -Mary E Thompson

• “I support your work because you are an honest hard working writer I admire and I believe I can learn a lot from. I love your transparency, your courage to test new things, to fail forward fast, and your effervescent creativity.” -Sylvia Becker-Hill

• “…so many amazing and entertaining resources! You have made me a better and more business-savvy writer. Thank you!” -Rey Katz

• I went and noted all the ones that fit best for me (Spotlighter). It feels wonderful to have a strategy for next year instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall! -Amanda Aaron

• “After reading the tutorial ‘How to Get Over Your Sales Phobia,’ my mindset has completely changed. There’s one particular section that convinced me to upgrade to the paid version: ‘If you’ve been at this for a while with very little success, then there’s a good chance you think that nobody is interested in what you sell.’ This resonated deeply with me. I hope my work will be that good one day🙏😊” -Jana

• “I have taken advice from Russell since following him on FB years before I actually began publishing my work. He was encouraging. I’ve watched him be successful and use no-nonsense methods along the way. So, I’m very curious to learn more. “ -Rachel D. Adams

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I’ll be honest, Q4 went by in a blur. What I do remember of it was that I planned to close out projects toward the end of 2025, and instead I ended up writing two new books that packed into my release calendar for 2026.

I also ended up, instead of slowing my schedule, starting a new publication (Frictionless Growth), with 100+ posts and a 5-day challenge, hosting a virtual conference, and running out of my mind busy for six weeks between November and mid-December.

The good news is that I set up a lot of things at the end of 2025 that should make 2026 easier. Those things are now launched and out into the world. For 2026, my plan is not commit to anything that doesn’t already exist. So, launching books I already wrote, writing for publications that exist, and working with existing clients, plus taking consulting clients, along with strengthening existing brands.

Basically, if it’s a brand I was working on in 2025 after I burned most of my life to the ground, I can keep doing it. Otherwise, I need to carefully consider my next moves. I’ve spent so long gathering the pieces, but now I have time, and need to think about how to deploy them effectively.

Before I dig into last quarter’s revenue, I wanted to remind you that since 2017, I’ve kept a pretty detailed income report of my expenses. It’s an almost unbroken chain reaching back to when I started making real money at Wannabe Press. You can find them all here.

See my income reports

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Consulting - 17.6%

This is my biggest consulting quarter in a while, mainly because I took on a new client in September and spent the quarter onboarding them. I ran a virtual conference for them, and went to Author Nation to promote their brand. This should be something that consistently gives me a decent consulting boost, and I’m looking for a couple new clients, too. Otherwise, I had a few consulting calls, but no more than usual.

Crowdfunding - 29.5%

This is from the Publishing is Broken Kickstarter campaign I ran in September. It paid out through Q4 as the payment plans from a few pledges coming due. This campaign was smaller than I would have liked, but it did make fulfillment easier than I expected. So, that’s something right? I only have two campaigns I’m slated to run in 2026, and both for non-fiction properties. I have several I’m going to support, but I’m trying really hard to ONLY talk about Hapitalist stuff this year and see if I can build up a head of steam with it.

Publishing - 53.9%

Substack again brought in the majority of this bucket, and mainly from Hapitalist subscriptions which are $300/yr instead of the $20/yr average I have without it. I spent many years discounting my paid membership, but I stopped doing that in September.

It’s weird that both my subscriber base and my paid subs are shrinking and yet I’m growing my revenue. This was always the plan, to build a wide base of support and then focus on upgrading people, but it’s so weird to see it working. I need it to work about 10x faster in 2026 than it did in 2025, and that’s my main focus for the rest of the year. I’m not looking for scale until I can get this upgrade process working properly.

Thoughts

Q4 was about closing out projects so they didn’t follow me into 2026. I know it’s weird to think writing to books fits in that process, or starting a new publication, but my overall goal in the new year is to find as many inroads into Hapitalist as possible, while shimming down things that focus attention away from it. So, I think the 6FAE podcast is a great feeder into Hapitalist. I think Frictionless Growth is a great leadin. I think my new happiness book is a great leadin.

Meanwhile, The Author Stack wasn’t a great lead-in. A significant portion of people came expecting craft advice, not business strategy, so it wasn’t really aligned, which is why I converted the site into Hapitalist. Additionally, I heard A LOT is people confused about how to join Hapitalist, how to sign into their Hapitalist account, and a lot of people wondering how this kind of content has anything to do with writing a book, which is why I changed it.

I don’t like confusion, so I am trying to fix that confusion, and giving people better alignment.

Okay, now let’s get to the good stuff. If you’re not a paid member, you can sign up below.

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In this masterclass, you’ll learn why that experience is normal—and why it’s often a si…

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The first time I saw a post by I reached out to see if I could interview him. He said no because his focus is on writing, and not speaking. “A funny thing happens when you become successful doing something.” He said. “The world tends to conspire to pay you lots of money to do everything but that thing.”

I laughed. He continued. “I don’t want to be a speaker. I want to be a writer.”

He told me that he was about to release a book with HarperCollins called Unhinged Habits and that he built a Substack called as a way to both hold him accountable and attract other writers and authors into his orbit.

Then he sent me the book, and I loved it.

Check out the book

It’s fascinating to watch Jonathan, who has made over $40 million selling products and services online as an entrepreneur, deploy the same methods into launching a book.

Since I’m very interested in this kind of thing, I asked if he’d write for us. He said yes, and asked if he could share the animal school story from his book, which is officially out this week.

Here’s Jon:

Animal School

A rabbit, a fish, a bird, a squirrel, and a bunch ofother animals start a school.

Arguments began when they sat down to write the curriculum. Rabbit wanted running to be included; fish wanted swimming; bird wanted flying; and the squirrel insisted there be a class on advanced tree-climbing techniques.

To appease the group, a well-intentioned mediator added each animal’s specialty into the programming. Then they made the mistake of insisting that all animals take all classes.

The rabbit cruised through the running lessons, but the instructors said it was good intellectual and emotional discipline for it to also take flying lessons. So the rabbit did what it was told, climbed up onto a ledge, and jumped off, flapping its arms just as it was taught.

The poor thing fell and broke a leg. It could never fly, but now it can’t run well either. Instead of getting an A+ in running, it got a C.

The fish had a similar experience. It did well in the swimming class. But then it was time for vertical tree climbing... and, well, you can guess how that went. The teachers gave the fish a D in climbing (because the fish asserted itself), but it had become dehydrated in the process and lost all motivation to swim, receiving a C-.

At the end of the year, the valedictorian of the class was an intellectually disabled salamander.

English came naturally to me in high school. All A’s. Math, on the other hand, was a struggle. Solid C’s. In order for me to get accepted into a good university, my average needed to improve. My parents got me a math tutor.

What happened next was a real-life version of animal school. Math, a subject I showed no natural aptitude for, became the focus. English got ignored because I was already good at it. The strategy worked. I got into a good university.

But does any of this make sense?

I don’t think so.

I should have had an English tutor, perhaps a writing coach.

You may be a genius. You may be a great writer. But you can’t get into a university unless you can also figure out the cos angle of a triangle. That makes no sense.

Growing up, external validations in the way of grades—averaged out across a wide array of opposing aptitudes—are what you’re judged on. But then you get into the real world, and it doesn’t matter if a rabbit can fly, because the rabbit’s fast. And fish don’t need to climb trees; they swim.

You have a thing. A thing that comes natural to you. A thing that you just seem to get. Where you wonder why, even if it’s hard, you have boundless energy for it. A thing that makes sense to you in a way that disables you from having conversations with people you know about it because it’s so clear to you, and foreign to them.

How do you know what your thing is? Here’s a three-part test:

1. What seems easy to you, yet hard for others?

2. What do you have boundless energy for?

3. What can you consume an unlimited amount of content about?

Once you find your thing, obsess over it. Accept the tradeoff that nothing you could work on matters as much as it does.

I write every morning for two hours before my family wakes up. I don’t like to wake up early. But early morning is when my brain works best. So I wake up early.

Waking up early is a constraint (like packing a small backpack for a trip) that has downstream effects on the rest of my life.

Because I wake up early, I go to bed early. I don’t drink alcohol because it wrecks my sleep. I rarely accept invites to social events at night or attend concerts because they end late.

I’d love to see more live music. But I’m not willing to sacrifice my writing for it. I’ve also turned down advisory board invitations. In order to maximize, you must minimize. Identify the tradeoffs. Accept them gladly.

I don’t read a lot of books on writing, but I do read a lot. And everything I read, I read with the goal of improving my writing. I wish I could read for pure pleasure. I’m simply unable.

Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, I’m studying. The title of the introduction of my previous book The Obvious Choice is “Business Was Great, Once.” The first line of Elantris by Brandon Sanderson is “Elantris was beautiful, once.”

I’ll steal like an artist, stealing that phrase from Austin Kleon. For example, “He’s the type of guy who wears a bike helmet while grocery shopping.” I didn’t come up with that. I don’t quite know what it means. But it’s great. I’ll use a version of it somewhere at some point, probably.

The primary goal of my social media is to test passages and use the feedback I get there to improve them.

Everybody’s got a thing. Most never pursue it fully and therefore never thrive. “Bring up your average,” you’re told. Fly, if you’re a fast runner. Climb, if you’re a good swimmer.

Being average isn’t fun. If you follow that path, your energy will ebb and flow: feeling motivated for brief periods before burning out again.

Burning out isn’t the result of working too hard for too long. It happens when you work on the wrong things, or too many things.

You’ve got your thing. You know what it is. The more you design everything else you do to maximize it, the better. The less of everything else, the better.

There’s nuance to this conversation though. A but.

The corollary to the animal school parable is that mastery over one thing is great and fun and absolutely something to go after. But if you want to be conventionally successful with it, your thing needs to be supported by a mediocre-to-just-okay level in what I call “Leapfrog Skills.”

Leapfrog Skills are transferable. They can be combined with any industry expertise to make you more valuable. With them, you’ll have an advantage in any entrepreneurial venture or become indispensable to your employer, allowing you to command a higher salary. If you change industries, you’ll take them with you.

The five biggest Leapfrog Skills are:

1. Business writing: Get to the point. Hook the reader. Tell a story. Write simply. Offer an actionable takeaway.

2. Behavioral psychology: Recognize, navigate, and take ethical advantage of the major cognitive biases.

3. Conversation: Ask the types of questions that encourage others to talk about themselves.

4. Sales: You get what you want by helping others get what they want.

5. Wealth management: Make money with money. With patience, even a little bit of money is enough money to make meaningful money.

The following is a good guideline for how the most successful people in their fields focus their professional development over time:

• Year 1: 75% industry skills / 25% Leapfrog Skills

• Year 2: 50% industry skills / 50% Leapfrog Skills

• Year 3 onward: 25% industry skills / 75% Leapfrog Skills

Industries have different baseline levels of knowledge required for results. Your ratio might be different, but even if it is, it’s probably not by much.

Focus is the key to skill acquisition in a world determined to distract us. Nothing’s new about that advice. You hear it all the time. “The art of focus.” “The secret to success is to be more focused,” they say. Well, how do you decide on your focus? Then, how do you stay focused?

Leapfrog Learning has two parts:

1. Sixty-day focused sprints

2. Teach

The best way to stack skills is to choose one at a time and focus for sixty days of dedicated effort.

Why sixty days?

It’s long enough to develop a mediocre level of skill yet short enough to feel doable.

Once you learn a skill, having it becomes your new normal. Like building muscles or riding a bike, if you don’t use it for a while it’ll get rusty but come back quickly.

Now onto the second part of Leapfrog Learning: teaching it.

A lot of work these days includes listening and reading. That’s where most people stop.

Teaching helps you retain more than 90% of what you’re learning as opposed to listening and reading, which generally sits around 20% knowledge retention rates. These numbers aren’t scientific. Whether they’re technically accurate or not isn’t as important as the pattern: Teaching is the best way to learn and retain what you learn.

Here’s three examples of Leapfrog Learning:

• Get better at social media by choosing one platform to master, listening to podcasts, reading blog posts, and studying the top accounts. After sixty days, build a slide deck, invite three friends over, feed them pizza (without pineapple—pineapple on pizza is gross), and present what you’ve learned.

• Build your personal wealth management philosophy by studying topics like greed and envy, interviewing financial advisors, reading books about investing, and listening to case studies where knowledgeable people share honestly what they do with their own money. After sixty days, teach a loved one about your philosophy or record a podcast episode about it.

• Figure out what to do about artificial intelligence by reading books and listening to experts speak about how it’s going to redefine job roles in the future. Once done, compile a report for your industry and send it to five colleagues.

What’s useful about focus is that a little bit goes a long way. Every time you do a leapfrog period, you’ll find yourself not just a little bit ahead of where you were previously, but a lot.

Look at the unspoken assumptions in your field. The “must-dos” that everyone accepts as gospel.

Most aren’t universal or mandatory.

Find the true top performers. They’re not doing everything. They’ve identified the vital few things that matter and become exceptional at those while merely appearing competent at the rest.

Basic arithmetic undoubtedly matters. But beyond a certain point, if a person isn’t going to go into a career that requires complex mathematics, its importance falls off a cliff.

Specialization isn’t limitation. It’s leverage. The more focused your energy, the more impact you create.

Yes, this is unhinged. However, I tend to think that’s a good word.

-Jon

--

Jonathan Goodman is the author of the newly released Unhinged Habits: A Counterintuitive Guide for Humans to Have More by Doing Less. It’s full of helpful frameworks to break bad habits and build your rich life by mastering the art of strategic subtraction.

If you liked Atomic Habits or Essentialism, you’ll love this book. Same lane, but a contrarian spin with more focus on the deeper values of relationships, health, and purpose.

Check out the book

Unhinged Habits is a practical and philosophical examination of why modern success feels so exhausting—and how to step out of the middle. Rather than promoting discipline, optimization, or hustle, Jonathan Goodman argues that lasting change comes from designing habits, environments, and expectations that reflect how people actually live.

Written for those who are busy, capable, and quietly dissatisfied, the book offers a framework for doing less, choosing deliberately, and designing a life you don’t need to escape from.

These are the core ideas explored in Unhinged Habits and Jonathan Goodman’s work:

• Strategic Subtraction: Why doing less—intentionally—is often the fastest path to clarity, momentum, and sustainability.

• Getting Out of the Middle: The hidden cost of indecision, half-commitment, and chasing conflicting definitions of success.

• Building for Humans, Not Algorithms: How trust, specificity, and consistency outperform visibility and optimization over time.

• Redefining Success: Designing personal metrics that reflect values rather than social comparison.

Habits as Alignment, Not Discipline: Why consistency emerges naturally when habits fit real life.

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Hi,

In my long and (relatively) storied career, I’ve written over 40 novels, 16 non-fiction books, and a bajillion articles. I’ve signed over 50 publishing contracts, written for a ton of magazines, and edited several anthologies.

I’ve also worked with hundreds, maybe thousands, of writers. The newer amo…

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My name is The LA Grind. (rip 2011)

My name is The Business of Art. (rip 2017)

My name is The Complete Creative. (rip 2020)

My name is The Author Ecosystem. (rip 2023)

My name is The Author Stack. (rip 2025)

My name is Hapitalist.

I’ve been doing this a long time, and been through a few dozen pivots in my life. I left my first job out of college in June …

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How many days a year do you really need to “win” to be successful? Is it 100? 50? Maybe 20?

What if I told you it’s just 1–2?

And by “win,” I don’t mean having a good day or crossing tasks off your list. I mean those days; the ones where everything aligns. The launch that shoots into the stratosphere. The post that spreads like wildfire. The moment whe…

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Every week, somebody asks me some version of the same question:

“Russell, how do I know what to focus on when there’s so much coming at me all the time?”

It’s hard, especially with a billion things flying at you every second of the day. You’ve got a dozen strategies floating in your head. Your inbox is full of newsletters saying you need to be on TikT…

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This episode is part of the January Joy(ful) Growth Club with Russell and Claire program I’m running with Claire Venus ✨. Join and get access to special challenge and interviews all month.

Join by clicking here.

In this episode, we’re joined by education entrepreneur and writer Michael Simmons to explore a radically different way of thinking about work, learning, and growth.

We start with a deceptively simple question: What if making a living didn’t have to feel miserable? From there, the conversation opens into practical and philosophical territory. We talk about how many people you actually need to support a sustainable life, why fractional work and contracting are often safer than they look, and how entrepreneurship can offer more freedom than traditional employment if you approach it creatively.

Michael shares his own journey through ambition, burnout, and reinvention, including building a seven-figure education company in his twenties, and burning out because he didn’t enjoy the day-to-day work required to sustain it. That experience led to a major shift: choosing curiosity and energy as filters for what he works on, rather than goals alone. When he began writing only what he was genuinely excited about, everything changed—traction, resonance, and sustainability followed.

From there, we dig into deeper ideas about learning and expertise. We talk about why it’s no longer possible, or desirable, to know everything, and why the future belongs to people who understand distributed responsibility: recognizing both the keys you hold and the locks you don’t. Rather than idolizing lone experts or pretending everyone has all the answers, real progress happens when people bring their specific knowledge together.

The conversation moves fluidly between AI, intuition, education, and systems thinking, touching on why the things that feel like “cheating” are often your greatest strengths, how we add by subtraction as we mature, and why so many people are over-armored for battles they’re no longer fighting.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by how much there is to know, pressured to optimize yourself into exhaustion, or stuck believing work has to be hard to be valuable, this episode offers a generous reframe: you don’t need all the answers—you just need to know which ones are yours.

Here are 5 grounded, actionable takeaways from the conversation with Michael Simmons, written to land clearly at the end of the episode:

1. Design your income around fewer people, not more. You don’t need thousands of customers to build a sustainable life. Explore models like fractional work, contracting, or high-trust relationships where a small number of people pay for deep value.

2. Let curiosity be a filter, not a reward. If you consistently dread the daily actions required by your goals, something is misaligned. Prioritize work you’re genuinely curious about and energized by—momentum follows engagement.

3. Trust the things that feel like “cheating.” The actions that feel easiest to you are often your highest leverage skills. If they work, double down instead of abandoning them for something harder.

4. Stop trying to know everything and build relational intelligence instead. Expertise now lives in networks, not individuals. Focus on knowing what you know, knowing what you don’t, and knowing who to turn to when you need the missing pieces.

5. Add by subtraction as you mature. Regularly audit the armor you’re still carrying from earlier seasons of your life or business. Keep what protects you now and consciously shed what no longer serves you.

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Entrepreneurs often talk around how their market is oversaturated.

And, yes it’s at least partially true. If we stopped making things today, humanity would still have enough non-food stuffs to last a while.

By all logical accounts, this should mean you don’t stand a chance but, contrary to popular opinion, competition isn’t what’s killing your career. What kills your career is believing you’re trapped in the same game as anyone else, and that you’re already losing.

Success is a blue ocean, and we need to start thinking like it. Blue Ocean Strategy is all about refusing to drown, or get eaten, in the bloody red waters of competition.

In a red ocean, everybody’s fighting over the same customers, slashing prices, and clawing for attention, and it’s miserable. In a blue ocean, you carve out your own lane, create something so different that you’re not competing at all.

You win by shifting the rules of the game, by offering unique value that feels obvious once people see it, but invisible to everyone else still stuck brawling in the red ocean.

Amazon specifically is the definition of a red ocean, where everyone is fighting over the same customers, slashing prices, and bleeding each other dry.

You win by changing the axis to one you can win and refusing to let anyone else define you by theirs.

An axis could be:

• The format you create in.

• The platform you choose to build on.

• The community you build.

• The style only you can deliver.

And there are an infinite number of these axes. Every time you pivot to a new axis, you create a blue ocean where nobody else is competing because you’ve redefined the game.

When people struggle, they are almost always relying on another company’s positioning to define their own. You might thing they define the market, but they don’t.

They only define their market. And they define it so well that anyone who buys into their definition will obviously buy from them, not you. By framing yourself in their terms, you’re essentially selling their product for them.

Why would you do that? Why would you hand them your customers?

That kind of positioning only works when the arbitrage (the gap between supply and demand) in the market is wide enough that you can skim off opportunity. Once a market is saturated, that arbitrage disappears.

Then, the only reliable way to find arbitrage is to make your own, which means you have to stop playing on axes where you can’t win.

Stop trying to compete on the same stage as mega corporations and redefine your edge.

• Define your own stage.

• Build your own axis.

• Create a game where you are the obvious, inevitable choice because you’re the only one playing it.

There is always a game you can win. The market leader often defines the opportunity, like Amazon, and gives people the language to talk about it, but they also create legions of people dissatisfied with that experience and want something else…and that’s the crack in the dam.

For every customer that adores a business, there are others who can’t stand them. For every person who happily one-clicks on Amazon, there are plenty who are sick of the algorithm, the ads, and the endless sea of sameness.

That’s where you come in.

The real opportunity is in identifying the people who aren’t being served fully in the existing market, and then offering them something that resonates with their frequency instead.

That’s soul resonance selling, where you’re not fighting over scraps, but building work that vibrates with on the right weird frequency so deeply that customers who’ve been hungry for what you offer can easily find you.

The general tenor of my marketing method is that I am gonna find as many potential customers as possible and say stuff so bonkers (but also true) that nobody else would even think about saying it because nobody would even fathom connecting those dots in that way.

Yeah, most people will say “no thanks”, but those who resonate with it have no choice but to hang out with me because I am the only person talking about this stuff in this way. At the end of the day, if you like the Russell thing, I have that, and if you don’t, well I still have the same Russell thing either way.

My focus then becomes having you make up your mind as to whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

That is a much different value proposition than whether you buy my stuff or not. I don’t care about that even a little bit, because I know that if enough people make up their mind then the rest will work itself out.

Right now, too many businesses are selling their work like a charity drive, making customers feel like the only reason they should give you their money is out of pity, obligation, or some vague moral duty.

Guilt might work once, but it doesn’t build a career.

Customers don’t owe you a living. If the entire backbone of your sales funnel is “support me because I’m small and scrappy,” then you’ve already lost.

Customers don’t wake up in the morning thinking, “Man, I really hope I can support some random small business today.” They wake up thinking about what will serve them, fulfill them, and make their lives better.

This is another version of the same trap. You’re playing someone else’s game.

Amazon has already defined the buying experience as easy, cheap, and fast. If your entire pitch is “buy direct to support me,” you’ve basically admitted you can’t compete on their axis and, instead of creating your own, you’ve tried to make customers feel bad for choosing the option that actually serves them better.

That’s backwards.

Sales only works (unless you’re already a market leader) when you offer something others can’t and define yourself by the rules of your game. Kickstarter’s real revelation, for those that do it right, is that it helps you define your game. It shows what you care about and why your business matter.

People don’t back a campaign because they feel sorry for the creator. They back it because they want to be part of something exciting they can’t get anywhere else. That’s an axis Amazon can’t touch.

If you need help finding your axis, then here’s something akin to ikigai, the Japanese concept of purpose at the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for.

Draw three overlapping circles:

1. Joys: What lights you up instead of draining you? (This is the work you’ll actually sustain.) Examples: “I love bantering with customers in person,” “I get obsessed with making the most complex apple pie,” “I live for designing simple products.”

2. Jolts: What makes your customers lean in. (This is the resonance piece.) Examples: “People tell me my cookies are super gooey,” “Fans beg for more behind-the-scenes peeks at my art,” “People say they feel ‘seen’ in my products.”

3. Gaps: You have to love the standards in your niche, but some of them are overdone, cliché, or just plain disconnected from reality. And customers feel it, too. They roll their eyes, sigh, and mutter, “Not this again.”

The overlap of Joys + Jolts + Gaps is your unique axis. It’s the place where you’re most alive, your customers are most lit up, and the market has left a hole big enough for you to stomp through. (By the way, you can have more than one. You can have unlimited.)

Once you realize there are infinite axes, you stop seeing other businesses as competition at all. You’re not playing their game. You’re building your own.

That’s why competition isn’t real. There are only axes you can’t win and ones where you still can. The moment you step onto an axis where you can win, you’ve already left the red ocean behind.

And the funny thing? Once you do that, you realize the supposed giants aren’t your enemies or your competition. They’re the ones creating the opportunity. Every customer they fail to satisfy is a customer who might find a home with you.

So stop measuring yourself against their scoreboard. Stop playing their game. Define your axis and play your own game because the second you do, all that bloody competition vanishes.

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This episode is part of the January Joy(ful) Growth Club with Russell and Claire program I’m running with Claire Venus ✨. Join and get access to special challenge and interviews all month.

Join by clicking here.

In this conversation, we’re joined by artist and writer from to talk about intuition, energy, and what it really takes to build a joyful creative life over the long term.

Elin shares what it looks like to stay in business as an artist for more than a decade, across countries, life seasons, motherhood, burnout, and reinvention, without forcing herself into rigid systems that slowly drain the joy out of the work. At the center of the conversation is the idea that if you want to keep creating, you have to become ruthless about what works for you and what doesn’t.

We talk about why creators often cling to strategies that are hard but ineffective, while abandoning the things that feel easy and work. We unpack return on energy investment, how to balance “guaranteed” work with space for delusional experiments, and why knowing when something isn’t likely to work is just as important as optimism.

The conversation also explores shame around slowing down, pivoting, disappearing, or changing direction, and how external expectations can quietly push artists into building golden cages of their own design. Elin reflects on learning to trust her intuition again after burnout, recognizing when misalignment shows up as over-explaining, and why creating, privately or publicly, is often the fastest way back to clarity.

We dive into ecosystems, creative operating systems, and why some paths look chaotic from the outside but make perfect sense internally. We talk about building your own arbitrage instead of chasing trends, why originality isn’t something you find but something that emerges over time, and how everything you make eventually connects, even if it only makes sense in hindsight.

If you’re an artist or creator wrestling with consistency, visibility, pivots, or the fear that stepping off the hamster wheel will make everything collapse, this episode is a powerful reminder that alignment isn’t indulgent, it’s how you stay in the game.

Here are 5 clear, grounded, actionable takeaways that match the tone and substance of the conversation with Elin Petronella:

1. Get ruthless about return on energy, not just money. Regularly name which activities drain you and which ones give energy back, even if they aren’t immediately profitable. Long-term sustainability depends on keeping energy-generating work in the mix.

2. Balance guaranteed work with delusional experiments. Make sure part of your workload reliably pays the bills, then intentionally reserve space to try things that might not work. Creativity dies when either side crowds out the other.

3. Treat over-explaining as a misalignment signal. If you find yourself constantly justifying a pivot or decision, pause. That urge often means you’re acting from conditioning instead of intuition.

4. Stop forcing consistency across seasons. You’re allowed to disappear, slow down, or change mediums as your life changes. What looks chaotic from the outside often creates coherence over time.

5. Keep creating, even when it’s private. Creation is how you stay connected to your intuition. If you stop making things altogether, clarity gets harder, not easier, to find.

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Now, let’s get down to it.

At this point you should have a pretty good idea about your path of least friction, which will help identify, pinpoint, and overcome the vast majority of your business challenges without expending unnecessary effort.

Now, it’s time to talk about how we build a thriving business using this new taxonomy. The key to creating lasting success revolves around constructing an integrated sales ecosystem that:

• Works as a unified whole instead of a pile of disconnected tactics.

• Uses your time, energy, and resources efficiently.

• Grows steadily without demanding constant handholding.

• Generates predictable, sustainable revenue.

• Lets you focus on the work only you can do, instead of living in perpetual marketing mode.

An integrated sales ecosystem maintains two principles above everything else: leverage and sustainability.

1. Leverage is about doing something once and letting it create value over and over again. In business terms, it’s the difference between trading hours for dollars and building assets that keep producing results long after the initial effort.

2. Sustainability means building a business infrastructure you can actually maintain without going feral. Your systems should be repeatable, automated where possible, and supportive of the time and energy you realistically have, not the fantasy version of you who wakes up at 5 a.m. journaling about KPIs. If your ecosystem can’t scale as you grow and stay manageable when life gets messy, it’s not sustainable.

This integrated system is built in six parts across the modalities of subscriptions, crowdfunding, retailers, website sales, and live events. You can deep dive on the elements of this system here.

Your path of least friction will lead you to prioritize certain elements first using the 4 P’s of prioritization, which you can read about here.

Depending on what you prioritize, certain high leverage growth activities that will amplify your growth without unnecessary additional effort. Learn more about those strategies here.

This is where Hapitalist can really help, because it has a deep well of resources, small group breakthrough sessions, and a digital brain trained on it all that can help individualize everything to your situation. Learn more about the resources.

We’ll talk about that below, but before then, you’ve been doing the heavy lifting this week. Now, it’s time to connect the dots.

Today’s task: Write your frictionless growth statement:

• My natural growth path is [X]

• I’m currently in Stage [Y], so my next step is [Z]

• My base Ecosystem is [W]

• I’m in a [growth/monetization] era

• My biggest friction point is [H/A/P/I], and I’m addressing it by____________.

That’s your map. Now, post it in today’s challenge post. Then, post it on your social media #fgchallenge

​Challenge post link​

Keep coming back to this process at least once every quarter to see how it changes over time, or come join us in Hapitalist, where we can help keep you on track and support you when you drift.

It’s close to impossible to see misalignment in ourselves, and even harder to keep ourselves on track. That’s why you need a community, preferably one trained on the same methodology as you and run by somebody who knows what they are doing on a deep, structural level.

This is the work we do inside Hapitalist, and how we help actively keep you aligned.

Hapitalist is designed around three pillars:

• Bi-monthly breakthrough sessions to make sure you’re on track and to course correct.

• A digital brain trained on over 2 million of my teaching modalities to give you feedback between sessions and show you what to do next in real time.

• A collection of world-class resources to help you make the most of the path you choose to achieve the most frictionless growth possible.

This is just the first step in a vast journey. Let us help guide you on your quest.

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It took me years of tinkering, hundreds of tiny adjustments, countless failed experiments, and more than a few existential crises, to develop the HAPI Compass, and it’s become foundational to everything else I teach.

At its core, the HAPI Compass is a four-point system designed to help you find alignment and direction in your business. It’s about learning how to triangulate yourself and solve the right problem with the right solution.

Author business challenges usually show up in four buckets, which are mapped to the four cardinal directions of our HAPI Compass.

• (H)eart challenges come from the ideas, projects, and creative work that light you up and resonate deeply with who you are. These are challenges intrinsic to the work itself.

• (A)udience challenges come from the people ready to champion, amplify, and ultimately buy your work. These are challenges revolving around growing a fandom that resonates with your work.

• (P)rioritization challenges form around choosing (or failing to choose) one high-leverage move at a time, letting wins compound, and buying yourself runway for the next right thing.

• (I)ncome challenges revolve around the revenue that funds your life and fuels your creative work. These are challenges around people buying your work.

Your biggest challenge will almost certainly form around one of those areas, but we’re horrible at recognizing which one is really blocking us. What makes it harder is that there is significant overlap between them.

• Is the reason somebody doesn’t respond to your work because there is a flaw in the design (Heart) or because you built the wrong audience (Audience)?

• Is the reason people aren’t buying because you need a better landing page (Income) or because you have to change who you’re attracting (Audience)?

• Is the reason you’re burned out because you hate what you’re working on (Heart) or because you’re doing too much (Prioritization)?

(Side note: This is one reason Hapitalist is so great, because you have a bunch of people experienced in the same methodology that can help you triangulate).

Yesterday, we talked about how Audience (or growth) blocks and Income (or monetization) blocks have wildly different and diametrically opposed solutions.

Solving monetization blocks is about raising the price and becoming more exclusive. Meanwhile, solving growth blocks is about dropping the price and becoming less exclusive.

And yet, we constantly try to solve Audience blocks with Income solutions, and vice versa. Worse, we often go about trying to solve both blocks at once, leading to us stall or even go backward.

You can dive deep on this idea here, where you can learn more about how to recognize your biggest block right now.

If you want to solve your biggest challenges, you need to use the right solutions, which means you need to know what your biggest challenge is right now, and almost nobody does, especially about themselves.

Today’s task:

• Pick the HAPI Compass direction where your friction is the highest.

• Write one sentence about why you think that problem fits into that compass point

• Brainstorm one thing you could try to ease it.

Now, post it in today’s challenge post. Then, post it on your social media #fgchallenge

Tomorrow, we’ll sew it all together.

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SCALE paths have a lot of overlap with Ecosystems, and lots of people confuse the two. However, they actually serve two very different functions.

• SCALE paths are how you grow.

• Ecosystems are how you operate.

If you don’t already know about Ecosystems, you can learn more by clicking here.

Think of Ecosystems like the operating system of your computer. You might use Windows, Mac, Linux, Ubuntu, etc. Whichever you choose goes far to determine how you interface with your computer, including what programs you can run, and how they run.

It doesn’t really influence what you create, though, how you share it, or who you meet through it. That’s where SCALE paths come into the picture.

The main point I want to make is that Ecosystems have nothing to do with growth.

They are all about how you build your business on a deep, foundational, and structural level. Your Ecosystem isn’t how you want to be. It’s how you actually function.

They show you how to structure your work so it doesn’t drain you. Yes, each Ecosystem is echoed in a SCALE path.

• Spotlighter = Grassland

• Collaborator = Aquatic

• Arbiter = Desert

• Launcher = Tundra

• Evangelist = Forest

And yes, most entrepreneurs will align both tightly together, but that’s not necessarily the case. Each base Ecosystem could work equally effectively with multiple SCALE paths.

• Grasslands are steady, strategic and methodical. They grow slow, deep, and sustainably, which aligns well with the Spotlighter path. However, they could also build a legion of ambassadors, like Evangelists, that spread their message all over the internet, or partner with brands on new products like Collaborators.

• Aquatic are expansive, layered worldbuilders who create systems that span universes, which pairs well with the Collaborator, as they both rely on outside validation from partners to normalize their work, but an Aquatic could also choose to get out front and center of their brand like a Spotlighter, or build ambassadors like an Evangelist, depending on their path of least friction.

• Deserts are fast, tactical, and opportunistic. They move quickly and build lean, which matches well with the Arbiter who is always looking for the next trend to hop on. However, it’s equally possible for them to take advantage of a Launcher path since they can both spin up new projects quickly and almost at will.

• Tundras are cyclical, burst-driven, and seasonal sprinters who sprint hard, then recover hard. This is a natural fit for the Launcher path, but since they work fast it’s possible for them to build quickly like an Arbiter, or rely on partnerships to help build during their recovery like a Collaborator.

• Forests are relational, connective, and built for emotional resonance, which makes them ideal for the Evangelist SCALE path. However, it’s just as possible for them to broadcast their message like a Spotlighter, or launch their programs repeatedly like a Launcher.

As you can see, there’s a natural fit for most brands to align their SCALE path and Ecosystem together, but it’s possible to have success many different ways. However, we must know both your SCALE path and base Ecosystem if we want you to find success.

If you are having trouble figuring out your Ecosystem, you can take our quiz here.

So, did you find a perfect fit above? If you don’t, that’s okay. Many people see themselves in multiple ecosystems, and we have a modality for blended ecosystems.

Today’s task: Read those five descriptions again. Which one feels like home? Does it align with your SCALE path? Is it compatible with how you’ve been trying to grow?

Write: “I’m a _________ because __________. This [aligns/doesn’t align] with my SCALE path because _____________________________.”

Now be brave and share it in today’s challenge post.

Then post it on social media with #fgchallenge

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Here they are again:

1. (S)potlighter (Thought Leadership): You make essays, newsletters, podcasts, and ideas that ripple through your industry. You’re a lighthouse.

2. (C)ollaborator (Partnerships): You grow by building with others. You co-create products, join collectives, align with complementary brands, and tap into shared audiences. Your strength lies in working inside ecosystems instead of going it alone. You’re a builder of collectives.

3. (A)rbiter (Virality & Data Trends): You scale by seeing opportunities others miss. You spot rising trends early, leverage platform gaps, follow the data, and build predictable systems around attention. You turn analysis into action, and timing into profit. You’re a tactician.

4. (L)auncher (Big Spectacle Moments): You thrive on momentum and big moves. You build campaigns, run summits, host events, and orchestrate high-energy moments that capture the market’s attention. People watch because you make noise intentionally and strategically. You’re a firestarter.

5. (E)vangelist (Community & Advocacy): You grow through people who believe in you. You rally superfans, brand advocates, influencers, customers, and ambassadors who spread your message faster than ads ever could. Your community is your engine — and your differentiator. You’re a connector.

Each of those paths has five stages

1. Stage 1 - You’re too overwhelmed/paralyzed with fear to do anything.

2. Stage 2 - You are doing things, but none of them work particularly well.

3. Stage 3 - You’ve found one thing that works really well, but you’re weighed down with a bunch of stuff that doesn’t work.

4. Stage 4 - You’re honed in on what works, but capped out on how much you can grow.

5. Stage 5 - You’re expanding and thriving.

The next step differs depending on where you are on your journey,

If you’re in Stage 1, then your goal is to do anything. If you’re in Stage 2, then your goal is testing all the thing to find something that works. If you’re in Stage 3, then your goal is to shed things that don’t work. If you’re in Stage 4, then your goal is to start expanding into new paths. If you’re in Stage 5, then your goal is to build your team.

Trying to scale when you’re still in chaos is a recipe for a beautifully branded nervous breakdown. If you’re still on the fence, you can find more info about the evolution track here.

Today’s task: Identify your current stage. Be honest. Write:

I’m in Stage ___ because __________. My next step is _____________________.

Do you have it? Now post it below. Then, post it on your social media #fgchallenge

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Easeful growth comes from increasing meaningful progress while eliminating unnecessary effort. Imagine yourself as a Jenga tower. Frictionless growth is when you find that block that slides out with barely a touch.

There are five major frictionless growth paths. We call them SCALE paths.

Here they are:

1. (S)potlighter (Thought Leadership): You make essays, newsletters, podcasts, and ideas that ripple through your industry. You’re a lighthouse.

2. (C)ollaborator (Partnerships): You grow by building with others. You co-create products, join collectives, align with complementary brands, and tap into shared audiences. Your strength lies in working inside ecosystems instead of going it alone. You’re a builder of collectives.

3. (A)rbiter (Virality & Data Trends): You scale by seeing opportunities others miss. You spot rising trends early, leverage platform gaps, follow the data, and build predictable systems around attention. You turn analysis into action, and timing into profit. You’re a tactician.

4. (L)auncher (Big Spectacle Moments): You thrive on momentum and big moves. You build campaigns, run summits, host events, and orchestrate high-energy moments that capture the market’s attention. People watch because you make noise intentionally and strategically. You’re a firestarter.

5. (E)vangelist (Community & Advocacy): You grow through people who believe in you. You rally superfans, brand advocates, influencers, customers, and ambassadors who spread your message faster than ads ever could. Your community is your engine — and your differentiator. You’re a connector.

At least one of those paths will very likely give you frictionless growth. You can succeed with any of these, but spending 100% of your time in your most frictionless path will lead to the most growth in the least time.

You might get growth from several strategies, but one will give you the most growth, which is where you should focus most of the time.

If you need specific examples or want to dig deeper on this idea, I wrote a whole post about it here.

It’s not that you can do anything, but that there’s something inside that you already love, which can lead to frictionless growth, and we just have to find it. Think of it a bit like Anton Ego’s famous line from Ratatouille “Not everything inside you can lead to frictionless growth, but frictionless growth could come from anywhere.”

Today’s task: Read that list again. Gut reaction: which one feels like a relief to focus on?

That’s the path we’ll be working with as a base for the next couple of days. Now, be brave and share your path and why you think it’s right for you in today’s challenge post. Then, post it on your social media #fgchallenge

If you’re having trouble figuring out which feels right, or are torn between multiple, you can find a deeper overview of them here.

That’s your path. Now, post it below. Then, post it on your social media #fgchallenge

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First and foremost, my love language is gift gifting, so please accept a copy of Frictionless Growth as my gift to you.

• Download ebook

• Download audiobook

What can you expect from here on out? Well, we’re going to (hopefully) find your path of least friction in the next few days by going through our legendary Frictionnless Growth Challenge.

The Frictionless Growth Challenge is a 5-day event designed to help you narrow down on your most joyous, easeful growth, and align yourself to break through your biggest blocks in just a few minutes a day with the help of a group of amazing humans on the same journey as you.

This isn’t supposed to be “homework”. It’s supposed to be joywork. We want you to dig deep on the most joyful parts of your practice, because if you enjoy something then it’s probably working for you.

Yet, because we are taught that “work should be hard”, we’re focusing on the things we don’t like…

…and those are the things that you don’t like because they aren’t working for you. After all, if they were working, it would be working.

Good news, There is something inside yourself that will allow you to grow effortlessly and joyously. Bad news, I have no idea what that is, and this is the first step on our journey to figure it out.

So, tomorrow we start the challenge. Before then, write down a time when your business felt fun and effortless. It’s okay if it’s been a while, but it should be a vivid time when you thought to yourself “OMG, this is so fun. I could do it forever.”

Today’s task: Think back to one time when working on your business felt easeful.

While you can picture anything here, try to focus on one that you grew with ease.

It might have been speaking on a podcast that led to a bunch of new subscribers, setting up a table at a local farmer’s market that led to a bunch of sales, partnering with another business on a promotion that led to exposure, optimizing an ad that scaled perfectly, or anything else you can imagine.

Make it feel real in your mind.

• What were you doing?

• What kind of work was it?

• Who were you doing it with or for?

If you’ve never really done anything before, think about a time in your life that your met people and it felt like you were gliding through it.

Got it? Now, be brave and share it in today’s challenge post. Then, post it on your social media #fgchallenge

Challenge post link

Otherwise, I’ll pop into your inbox tomorrow with the first day of the challenge and we’ll start naming your path.

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What do we actually sell to people who enter our ecosystem? That’s where a value ladder becomes an essential component of your environment.

The value ladder is a way to structure your business so that people can build a deeper relationship with you and obtain ever more impactful help with their problem for increasingly higher and higher price points.

…

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I’ve been studying creative businesses for 15+ years, and this is everything I’ve learned about building a successful creative career, condensed into one digestible system.

You’re pouring energy into building an audience when your real bottleneck is clarity.

Hapitalist is how we break that cycle.

1. What we really mean when we say “why is this so hard?” isn’t “why can’t this be easy?” Easy is a measure of difficulty, and if we wanted something easy, we wouldn’t become entrepreneurs. What we actually mean is “why is there so much friction?” Easy measures difficulty, but ease measures friction.

2. Easeful work removes unnecessary struggle, aligns with your natural strengths, and makes your effort matter. It’s still work, but it’s the right work, moving you forward instead of spinning your wheels in place. Most “this is hard” moments are actually “why am I stuck?” moments. The difficulty isn’t the problem. The friction is. When you’re stuck, more effort just digs the rut deeper.

3. Getting unstuck means finding the path of least friction that increases meaningful progress without eliminating effort entirely. Imagine yourself as a Jenga tower. Frictionless growth is when you find that block that slides out with barely a touch.

4. There are five SCALE paths we’ve watched entrepreneurs repeatedly use to achieve frictionless, easeful growth. We call them the S.C.A.L.E. paths. (S)potlight (blogs/podcasts/speaking), (C)ollaboration (shared worlds, anthologies, publishing deals), (A)rbitrage (ads/social media), (L)aunches (Kickstarter/virtual summits), and (E)vangelists (ARC teams, Influncer marketing, referrals). Learn more about them here.

5. At least one of those paths will very likely give you frictionless growth. You can succeed with any of these, but spending 100% of your time in the most frictionless path will lead to the most growth in the least time. We call this your Return on Energy Investment (ROE). You might get growth from several strategies, but one will give you the most growth, which is where you should focus. Learn more about ROE here.

6. This is almost certainly the one that’s also the most fun for you and the one you enjoy most, because you’ll be getting a positive feedback loop, possibly for the first time in your entire career. Once you have one flowing beautifully, the other paths amplify and augment your growth.

7. It’s not that you can do anything, but that there’s something inside that you already love, which can lead to frictionless growth, and we just have to find it. Think of it a bit like Anton Ego’s famous line from Ratatouille “Not everything inside you can lead to frictionless growth; but frictionless growth could come from anywhere.”

8. Each of those paths has five stages, which we call your Evolution Track. In Stage 1, you’re too overwhelmed/paralyzed with fear to do anything. In Stage 2, you are doing things, but none of them work particularly well. In Stage 3, you’ve found one thing that works really well, but you’re weighed down with a bunch of stuff that doesn’t work. In Stage 4, you’re honed in on what works, but capped out on how much you can grow. In Stage 5, you’re expanding and thriving. You can learn more about your Evolution Track here.

9. If you’re in Stage 1, then your goal is to do anything. If you’re in Stage 2, then your goal is testing all the thing to find something that works. If you’re in Stage 3, then your goal is to shed things that don’t work. If you’re in Stage 4, then your goal is to start expanding into new paths. If you’re in Stage 5, then your goal is to build your team.

10. While SCALE paths show you how to grow, your base Ecosystem reveals how you operate. Think of Ecosystems like the operating system for your computer. It determines what programs you run and how you interact with them, not what you do or create. Learn more about Ecosystems here.

11. There are five ecosystems. Deserts are tactical. Grasslands are sustainable. Tundras are cyclical. Forests are relational. Aquatics are expansive. While SCALE paths evolve, Ecosystems are stable and can be blended together.

12. Blended ecosystems combine two Ecosystems together, amplifying their strengths and weaknesses. Popular combinations are Savannah (Desert/Grassland), Bramble (Grassland/Forest), Glacier (Tundra/Grassland), Tiaga (Tundra/Forest), Arctic (Tundra/Aquatic), Swamp (Forest/Aquatic), and Estuary (Grassland/Aquatic). Learn more about Blended Ecosystems here.

13. Each Ecosystem is echoed in a SCALE path. Spotlighter = Grassland, Collaborator = Aquatic, Arbiter = Desert, Launcher = Tundra, and Evangelist = Forest. There is often alignment between them, but not always.

14. It is nearly impossible to grow your audience and monetize your work at the same time. The growth side means investing to reach more people and lower friction. The monetization side means maximizing revenue now through paywalls, premium pricing, and exclusive access, which inherently raises friction and limits reach. Both are valid, but they directly contradict each other. To grow, you need to reduce friction. To monetize, you need to increase friction. Pinpoint where you are on this spectrum, choose your path, and do it completely. Are you in a growth era or a monetization era? Learn more about the Growth-to-Monetization Parallel here.

15. Business challenges usually show up in four buckets, which we call the HAPI Compass. (H)eart challenges come from the ideas, projects, and creative work that light you up and resonate deeply with who you are. (A)udience challenges come from the people ready to champion, amplify, and ultimately buy your work. (P)rioritization challenges form around choosing (or failing to choose) one high-leverage move at a time, letting wins compound, and buying yourself runway for the next right thing. (I)ncome challenges revolve around the revenue that funds your life and fuels your creative work. Learn more about the HAPI Compass here.

16. Your biggest challenge will almost certainly form around one of those buckets, but we’re horrible at recognizing which one is really blocking us. We constantly misdiagnose them in ourselves. Misdiagnosis leads to solutions that make things worse. You double down on marketing when you need to clarify your message. If you have a challenge growing your audience, you can’t fix it with solutions designed to make you more money. They’re at odds with each other.

17. You can only solve challenges by using solutions designed to fix them. (A)udience solutions won’t fix (H)eart challenges, (I)ncome solutions won’t fix (P)rioritization challenges, etc. If you want to solve your biggest challenges, you need to use the right solutions, which means you need to know what your biggest challenge is right now, and almost nobody does, especially about themselves.

18. The key to creating lasting success revolves around constructing an integrated sales ecosystem that works as a unified whole instead of a pile of disconnected tactics, uses your time, energy, and resources efficiently, grows steadily without demanding constant handholding, generates predictable, sustainable revenue, and lets you focus on the work only you can do, instead of living in perpetual marketing mode. Learn about the elements of this system here.

19. An integrated sales ecosystem maintains two principles above everything else: leverage and sustainability.

20. Leverage is about doing something once and letting it create value over and over again. In business terms, it’s the difference between trading hours for dollars and building assets that keep producing results long after the initial effort. Learn more about leverage here.

21. Sustainability means building a business infrastructure you can actually maintain without going feral. Your systems should be repeatable, automated where possible, and supportive of the time and energy you realistically have, not the fantasy version of you who wakes up at 5 a.m. journaling about KPIs. If your ecosystem can’t scale as you grow and stay manageable when life gets messy, it’s not sustainable. Learn more about sustainability here.

22. Your path of least friction will lead you toward certain high leverage strategies that amplify your back naturally without unnecessary additional effort. Learn about these high leverage strategies here.

The Hapitalist approach helps you pinpoint the most easeful path forward, narrow your place on the growth-monetization spectrum, identify your true bottleneck, and match the right solution to the right problem.

Do this well, and you solve the vast majority of business challenges without expending any additional effort. In fact, you’ll probably save effort by cutting back on things that don’t work for you.

Yet it’s impossible to see this in ourselves, and to keep ourselves on track, which is why you need a community, preferably one trained on the same methodology as you and run by somebody who knows what they are doing.

• Hence, why Hapitalist offers the bi-monthly breakthrough sessions to make sure you’re on track and to course correct.

• Hence the digital brain to give you feedback between sessions and show you what to do next in real time.

• Hence the collection of world-class resources to help you make the most of the path you choose to achieve the most frictionless growth possible.

Learn more about Hapitalist

Every entrepreneur joins us with something holding them back, whether that’s a mindset block, a marketing problem, a confidence issue, or a missing skill.

That’s your lock. But everyone also shows up with keys from things they’ve already solved, overcome, or mastered.

You might not have the key for your own lock, but you absolutely have one that can open someone else’s. And in doing so, you often find the clarity to open your own. The real magic happens when we use our keys and start unlocking each other’s locks.

Why is community strategically important, instead of just feel good vibes? Because if you’re in stages 1-3, then you’re lock will probably be opened by somebody in the same success path but further along on their journey. If you’re in stages 4-5, then your lock will probably be opened by somebody in a different ecosystem doing something completely different than you.

You are one human, going through one lived experience, consuming one person’s media, with one person’s brain. You’re gonna miss things, discount important things you don’t understand, and have questions that make perfect sense to somebody else.

Sure, you could study things and maybe figure it out, or you could ask a group of people trained on the same methodologies as you, who know what to look for, and they can give you the right answer in a few minutes.

You’re not stuck because this business is “hard.” You’re stuck because you’re solving the wrong problem, or solving the right problem with the wrong strategy, or solving the right problem at the wrong time.

The path forward isn’t about working harder. It’s about working in alignment with your strengths, your season, your actual bottleneck, and the ecosystem where your particular gifts thrive.

That’s what easeful means.

And yes, it still takes effort, but it’s effort that compounds into momentum instead of friction that grinds you down.

So, what do you think? Does that make sense? I know it’s a lot to synthesize, but I really think there’s something here.

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The internet is overflowing with marketing tactics, funnels, hacks, frameworks, and “proven systems.” If information alone created growth, you’d be drowning in customers by now.

But you’re not, which make you think you’re the problem…but you’re not. The real problem is that you’re trying to grow in ways that don’t match how you’re built.

• You’re forcing yourself to do strategies that drain you.

• You’re mimicking people whose strengths you don’t share.

• You’re following playbooks written for someone with a completely different brain, temperament, energy cycle, or appetite for chaos.

And then, when those strategies don’t work for you, you assume something’s wrong with you.

But it’s (mostly) not you. It’s (usually) misalignment.

Every entrepreneur has natural growth instincts that feel obvious, energizing, and almost embarrassingly easy once you let yourself follow them. Similarly, every entrepreneur has strategies that feel like moving bricks with your teeth.

The secret isn’t learning more tactics. The secret is knowing which ones move the needle for you.

Once you stop trying to force the wrong strategies and start doubling down on the ones that match your wiring, everything gets lighter.

• Your output increases.

• Your audience grows.

• Your marketing feels less like a performance and more like an extension of who you already are.

Below are 14 core strategies entrepreneurs use to grow, and which SCALE paths they actually work for. Some will feel like a relief. Some will feel like permission. Some will feel like a hard no.

If you don’t already know your SCALE path, then you can take our quiz here, and/or read an overview about them here.

Quickly, there are five core growth paths that founders, creatives, and entrepreneurial builders follow. Each one based on how you operate, how you show up, and how you scale momentum.

• (S)potlighters go deep, compound slowly, and build legacy work.

• (C)ollaborators grow by building aligned ventures with equally powerful brands.

• (A)rbiters are fast, tactical, and ruthless with execution.

• (L)aunchers thrive on sprints, public stakes, and launch-based calendars.

• (E)vangelists lead with resonance, story, and community trust.

Remember as you go through them that your job isn’t to become great at everything. It’s pick the strategies that feel like oxygen instead of obligation.

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At their heart, successful brands create deep connections through layers of meaning and emotional resonance. Just as a garden grows through careful cultivation rather than mechanical planting, brands flourish when each element is thoughtfully developed to engage customers on multiple levels.

When you move beyond surface-level to create psychological …

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Most successful people I know are masters of chaos magic. I don’t mean they are chaos; I mean they understand how to live in chaos, harness chaos, and use chaos in a restful way.

When I started on my path to success, I thought I’d eventually become like President Business from The LEGO Movie: structured, orderly, in control of everything. I pictured a…

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At the beginning of my career, when nobody paid attention to what I said, it was helpful to talk a lot to get people used to the cadence of my work, to know I had something to say, and frankly to make them pay attention.

Eventually, something switched, though, since I started working with Monica, and Lee, and Melissa, and Laurie, and Travis, and Andy,…

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Entrepreneurs don’t need more hacks. We need fewer friction points, better questions, and rooms where our effort compounds. Hapitalist is a way of building that room.

It’s a philosophy for entrepreneurs who want to move from solo struggle to collective momentum without losing the bravery and idiosyncrasy that good work requires.

Here are the principles and how they translate to an entrepreneurial life.

🔐 Everyone comes with locks. Everyone comes with keys.

Everyone joins with something holding them back, whether that’s a mindset block, a marketing problem, a confidence issue, or a missing skill. That’s your lock. But everyone also shows up with keys from things they’ve already solved, overcome, or mastered.

You might not have the key for your own lock, but you absolutely have one that can open someone else’s. And in doing so, you often find the clarity to open your own. The real magic happens when we use our keys and start unlocking each other’s locks.

Try this:

• Make two lists: Locks (three specific challenges) and Keys (three specific skills, systems, or experiences you can share).

• Swap keys. In your mastermind group or Slack channel, run a 30-minute “unlock session.” One person presents a lock and the group offers keys in the form of a concrete story, template, or tactic. Rotate weekly.

🤝 Transformation is a shared responsibility

We don’t believe we have all the answers, so we work on a concept called distributed responsibility, wherein everyone has a little bit of responsibility to open the locks of everyone else when they find it.

No waiting around for somebody else to fix it. If you have a key, then it’s on you to step up.

When you mover the burden from individual to distributed responsibility, the energy in the room changes. We create momentum together.

In Hapitalist, you’ll get the tools, guidance, and culture that empower everyone to help one another move faster and farther because when responsibility is shared, transformation scales.

In yoour community that looks like:

• Clear norms: Ask, offer, act. When you ask for help, define the smallest next decision. When you offer, keep it specific and short. When you act, report back results so the room learns.

• Tiny commitments: “I’ll share my checklist by Friday.” “I can intro you to somebody.” “Here’s the email subject line that doubled my open rate. Use it and tell me what happens.”

When responsibility is shared, momentum becomes a team sport, not a private burden.

⚙️ Easeful doesn’t mean easy

“Why can’t this be easy?” is something we hear a lot, but we’re not actually after easy, or we would do something else. E

asy means “without difficulty”. What we are after is easeful, which means “without friction”.

Easeful is the kind of flow that happens when you remove unnecessary struggle, align with your strengths, and stop trying to brute-force your way through everything. Most people say “this is so hard” when what they really mean is “this feels stuck.” We help you get unstuck not by eliminating effort, but by making your effort matter more.

Easeful might look like:

• Aligning to strengths. If you think on paper, outline by hand. If you think aloud, draft by dictation. If you freeze at blank screens, start with the ending first.

• Friction audits. Identify what repeatedly grinds: tool sprawl, context switching, late-night drafting, zero-buffer deadlines. Remove one piece of grit per week.

• Effort that matters. Trade “work every day or fail” for “work with intention four days a week and protect two days for reading, admin, and rest.”

Most people who say “this is so hard” mean “this is stuck.” We reduce stuckness; we don’t eliminate effort.

🧶 The magic is in the messy intersections

Few things worth doing fit neatly into a single framework. Growth rarely follows a clean, linear path. It lives in the sticky, overlapping spaces between mindset and marketing, craft and commerce, systems and soul.

That’s why we embrace intersectional and integrative knowledge, the kind that honors complexity and blends what actually works across disciplines, backgrounds, and lived experience. The real breakthroughs happen in the gray areas, not the checklists.

How to work the intersections:

• Cross-train your brain. Pair a workshop with a positioning session. After revising your prototype, write the product description. Let each inform the other.

• Blend disciplines. Borrow a UX tactic to redesign your newsletter onboarding. Use action beats to structure your sales page. Apply investigative research habits to your surveys.

• Honor lived experience. Your background contains keys. Bring them to the table.

🎲 Planned serendipity is our operating system

Hapitalist is built on planned serendipity, the idea that if you set strong intentions and stay open, the right people, conversations, and opportunities will emerge at just the right time.

Like at a great convention, the most meaningful breakthroughs rarely happen on the schedule. They happen in the hallway, over lunch, during an unexpected moment of connection. Here, we design the container for those collisions to happen more often.

Our goal is to create permission for that serendipity to bear fruit. We embrace chaos, but we don’t leave it up to chance.

For entrepreneurs, that can look like:

• Hallway time on purpose. Build 15 minutes of unstructured talk into every critique meeting. The offhand comment becomes the breakthrough.

• Coffee roulette. Once a month, pair members for a 20-minute chat. One question only: “What are you wrestling with this week?” Keys will surface.

• Event strategy. Attend a conference with two intentions and one generous offer. Leave your schedule 30 percent open. The best conversations rarely happen on the agenda.

🌀Nurture two selves: audacity and empathy

Being an entrepreneur means living in tension. You need the audacity of someone who has never been hurt before and the empathy of someone who’s been hurt too much.

Most people lean into one and suppress the other, but to create anything meaningful, you have to hold both: boldness without arrogance and compassion without collapse.

Inside Hapitalist, we honor both parts of you. We help you nurture the self that dares to be seen, and the self that sees others just as clearly.

Practices to cultivate both:

• Dual check-in before you share work. Audacious self asks: What am I making that could change me? Empathic self asks: How does this land for the customer I care about most?

• Two-pass revisions. First pass: bold cuts, fearless choices. Second pass: tenderness to protect the vulnerable truths and clarify the care you hold for your customer.

• Boundary rituals. Build in private; launch in public. Let the gentle one lead the draft and the brave one guide the release.

🛡️ Building our margin of safety gives us freedom

Risk is essential. Recklessness is not. You make braver art when you have slack—time, cash, and emotional bandwidth. Too many entrepeneurs swing for the fences on having no safety net.

At Hapitalist we believe risk is essential, but only when it’s planted in a bed of slack: extra time, extra cash, extra emotional bandwidth. A margin of safety isn’t a luxury; it’s a creative nutrient. When your rent is paid three months ahead, when your launch calendar includes white space, when your energy reserves aren’t scraping the barrel, you make braver art, give more generously, and recover faster when experiments flop (because some always do).

Build your margin intentionally.

• Time slack. Create buffers everywhere: two weeks of newsletter drafts queued, a one-week pause between “final” revisions and shipping, white space on your launch calendar.

• Money slack. Aim for three months of baseline expenses, or build a project reserve that covers your editor, designer, and ads before you announce a date.

• Energy slack. Cap your weekly commitments at 80 percent. Protect a recovery day after big pushes. Budget creative hours, not just calendar hours.

When experiments flop, and some always do, you’ll recover faster and try again sooner.

Learn more about Hapitalist

If you want to feel this in your bones, try the following for a month:

• Make your keychain. List three locks and three keys. Share them with a trusted circle.

• Host one unlock session. Keep it to 30 minutes. One lock, many keys, one action chosen.

• Remove one friction. Change a tool, a time, or a rule that keeps stealing momentum.

• Add one unit of slack. Two queued newsletter issues, a week of cushion before a deadline, or a simple cash reserve target.

The point isn’t perfection. It’s compounding momentum. You bring your keys. I bring mine. Together we open doors faster than any of us could alone.

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Lining up the right problems with the right solutions is something that everyone deals with all the time. Since this is where I live the vast majority of my existence, I thought I would share with you the three questions I ask all the time, and have been the most helpful reframes inside my community.

What am I missing here?

This is my favorite single q…

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I’ve spent most of my career trying to brute-force the universe. I thought that if I did the work, and not just any work, but the right work, then I’d get what I wanted.

And what I wanted wasn’t outrageous. At least not to me.

• I wanted to write the books of my heart.

• I wanted to reach a loyal audience.

• I wanted to build a thriving business.

• I wanted to be respected, paid, and lauded.

I thought that was the depth of it, but my needs really went deeper…because I also wanted it my way.

• I wanted it on my weird horror comedy comics, even though there wasn’t a big audience for them.

• With massive comic book store distribution, even though only a couple hundred stores in the world back in 2011 stocked indie comics.

• And I wanted it immediately.

• Without having to do that thing over there that felt gross or stupid or beneath me.

If it wasn’t the exact result I pictured when I closed my eyes, then it wasn’t a success. When things didn’t unfold like that, I didn’t feel disappointed. I felt betrayed.

After all, I had followed the rules, played the game, sacrificed, built redundant systems, and shown up for years.

So where was my reward? Where was the neatly wrapped success story all the books and courses and mastermind groups promised me?

Well, it was right there staring me in the face. I just refused to see it.

All the way back in 2015, I got labeled “the Kickstarter guy”. People started to find me, even a decade ago, and ask for help with their campaigns. I bristled, and ran away. I didn’t want that kind of success. I wanted to be known for my work, not a platform. I wanted to be an author, not a speaker. I wanted—

Ugh, even writing it now makes me want to smack myself. Like, didn’t I start this saying I wanted to be successful? And weren’t people paying me to do work I was good at and enjoyed success? Why was I so obtuse when I was younger?!

It’s so frustrating, and it wasn’t until 2021, when my ex-business partner told me they were going to use my work as a guide to co-write a Kickstarter book with me, that I finally had no choice but to become “The Kickstarter guy”…

…and guess what? It’s great to be that guy.

I constantly get to talk, strategize, and hang out with some of the most successful people in the world, get paid for my knowledge, and receive emails from giddy people that turned their careers around thanks to what I taught them.

I never got that with my fiction, even though that’s where I made most of my money for over a decade.

That is success, isn’t it? So, what was my problem all those years? So, so many things, but it boiled down to the fact that I was way too worried about influencing how things happened, instead of focusing on what I got out of the deal.

What I wanted was to wake up, do things I liked with people I liked, and have frictionless ease bringing new projects into the world. It would have been nice if it was in comics, or novels, but what I really wanted was the space and freedom to do whatever caught my fancy.

And I, largely, got that, despite the fact that it didn’t happen how I thought it “should”.

When I stopped focusing on the “how” and focused instead on the “what”, a whole host of new possibilities opened up to me.

The should held me back. It stuffed me into a very narrow lane filled with other people when there were open lanes to success everywhere else.

What nobody tells you (or maybe they do but you don’t actually believe it until it happens to you) is that you usually don’t get to dictate the path. You don’t get to choose how you become successful. You only get to choose what you’re willing to fight for.

You get to name:

• The kind of life you want.

• The kind of work you want to do.

• The kind of people you want to reach.

• The kind of impact you want to have.

But you don’t get to script the moment it happens. You don’t get to choreograph who notices, or how they find you, or which version of your work becomes the one that sticks.

Even if you somehow get all the things you ever wanted, and the book of your heart becomes a household name, there will be all sorts of chaos associated with it that you don’t expect. You’ll be saddled with things you don’t want, have to do things you don’t like, and have expectations foisted on you that you couldn’t imagine.

I realized way too late that the actions associated with my fiction, like actually talking about my books, were things I hated. I liked people reading my work, and I loved writing it, but all the marketing actions I liked revolved around my non-fiction.

Shocking that was what took off, right?

If you hold the path too tightly, if you cling to the idea that it must happen in this one specific way or else it doesn’t count, you will miss everything good that’s trying to find you.

You’ll say no to the thing that wants to work because it doesn’t look like the thing you thought would work. You’ll sabotage yourself in the name of purity. You’ll burn your career down in defense of a version of the dream that maybe never really served you in the first place.

And I get it because I’ve done it. I’ve thrown tons of great opportunities in the trash because they didn’t arrive wearing the right costume.

Eventually, I had to learn to stop making deals with the universe. I had to stop saying “I’ll do this if you give me what I asked for exactly the way I want it.”

It’s about getting out of your own way.

Because the truth is, the universe is a terrible negotiator. It doesn’t barter. It doesn’t owe you clarity. It doesn’t care about your timeline, but it does reward momentum, iteration, and stubborn clarity of want.

Not how. Just what.

So, I stopped fighting for the how. In 2022, after my first Kickstarter book blew up, I turned into the skid. We built a very popular Kickstarter course and I started getting booked to speak about Kickstarter everywhere. I made connections with everyone. I suddenly went from decently networked to amazingly networked, and people were talking about me.

I stopped needing it to look a certain way, sound a certain way, or arrive through a specific door.

And the moment I did? Weird things started working. I could take that momentum and turn it into things I cared about more than just Kickstarter. I was able to thread it into direct sales, and capitalism, and taking control of your career, and even my weird fiction books.

Not just in a general sense, either. For years, I’ve been trying to build a successful membership. I developed an app, hosted a Circle community, tried a Patreon, and more. Each time, I was trying to force a community to grow somewhere it didn’t have any interest in growing.

It wasn’t until I found Substack that I started having success. I don’t think I had 100 paid members across all my previous communities combined, but here I got that many with my first launch. I’ve grown it to over 1,000 members, and almost $35k in annual revenue.

It wasn’t exactly how I wanted it to happen, but once I let go of that and focused on what I wanted to happen, success started to unfold.

Even back in the day, the anthology that broke my career open, Monsters and Other Scary Shit, only happened because instead of writing my esoteric novels I asked people what they wanted (which was monster comics) and gave it to them. I didn’t really have any special love for monster comics, but I loved my audience, and I loved the creators, and my life has never been the same because of it.

Success isn’t a straight line. It’s a labyrinth. You don’t need to know how you’re going to get there. You just need to be ruthlessly clear about what you want, and willing to meet it wherever it shows up.

It’s likely going to be ugly. It’s probably going to look nothing like you planned. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t count or that it isn’t working. It just means you’re finally starting to understand the rules of this game.

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A man’s son gets kicked off a horse and breaks his leg. People tell him that’s terrible. He says, “Maybe. We’ll see.”

Later, a war breaks out. All the young men are drafted except his son. People tell him that’s great. He says, “Maybe. We’ll see.”

It continues like that, each iteration bringing what looks like ruin or salvation, but the farmer refuses to do the thing most of us do automatically, which is decide what something means the moment it happens.

Entrepreneurs get into trouble with this all the time.

Something goes wrong and we immediately treat it like a verdict. A launch doesn’t land. Revenue dips. A platform changes something with no warning. Before we’ve even had time to look at the numbers, our brain has already decided the story: this is bad, this is dangerous, this is the beginning of the end.

Sometimes the opposite happens. Something works. A post pops. A campaign overperforms. Suddenly it’s good. Finally. Proof that we’re doing the right thing.

Both reactions do the same damage when they push us to react before the situation has finished unfolding.

Entrepreneurship doesn’t move in clean arcs. What happens today often doesn’t make sense until much later, and sometimes it never makes sense at all.

When you decide too early, you don’t just get it wrong emotionally. You get it wrong operationally.

You make changes you didn’t need to make. You abandon things that would have worked if you’d given them more time. You double down on things that looked good in the moment and turned out to be fragile. You speed up when you should slow down and panic when nothing is actually broken.

The problem isn’t that bad things happen. It’s treating every event like it’s the conclusion instead of just another data point in a system that’s still moving.

Neutral thinking starts with letting things exist without immediately grading them. Something happened. That’s it. No gold stars. No red flags. Just information.

Things fail for reasons that have nothing to do with effort or intelligence. You can do the right thing and still get wrecked. You can do the wrong thing and get rewarded for a while.

Positivity doesn’t handle that well.

When you’re trained to expect things to get better, every setback feels like a violation. When improvement doesn’t arrive on schedule, it destabilizes your foundation. You start scanning for what you did wrong. You look for hidden flaws. You assume you missed something obvious when it’s just one data point.

Neutral thinking doesn’t promise things will improve. It doesn’t warn that they’ll get worse. It refuses to pretend you know the ending before enough time has passed to see it.

Something happens in your business. You notice it. You don’t decorate it. You don’t interrogate it. You don’t turn it into a story about who you are or where this is going.

You say: that happened.

• Sales dropped this month.

• An email underperformed.

• A platform throttled reach.

• A reader unsubscribed.

That happened. It’s not amazing and terrible. It simply exists as a data point. This is where neutral thinking is a powerful it. It forces you to stop there, at least for a moment.

Most people skip that pause and jump straight to interpretation. They decide it’s a sign, a warning, or proof they’re falling behind. By the time they sit down to analyze, they’re already trying to confirm a story their nervous system wrote for them.

Neutral thinking keeps the order intact.

• First: acknowledge the event.

• Second: stabilize.

• Third: decide what, if anything, needs to change.

Not everything that happens requires a response. Not everything that feels urgent actually needs attention. Some things resolve on their own. Some things repeat and become patterns. Some things look dramatic and turn out to be noise.

You can’t tell which is which if you react to all of them the same way.

Neutral thinking lets you separate “this is uncomfortable” from “this is dangerous.”

That distinction matters.

Entrepreneurship creates constant low-grade discomfort. If you respond to discomfort as if it’s a threat, you’ll exhaust yourself chasing phantom emergencies. If you ignore real threats because you’re numb, you’ll miss the moment to intervene.

Neutral thinking sits in the middle.

It doesn’t deny what’s happening, but it doesn’t rush to fix it either. It gives you enough space to decide whether this is something to observe, something to mitigate, or something to change.

If you decide something is a failure too soon, you abandon it before it has time to work. If you decide something is a breakthrough too soon, you build your future on a shaky foundation.

“Maybe” isn’t indecision. It’s refusing to pretend the story has finished when it hasn’t.

If you’re on the edge, every event feels existential. You don’t get to say “maybe” when the answer determines whether you eat next month. You react because you have to.

That’s why runway matters.

Runway is the amount of time and tolerance you have before a single problem forces a bad decision. Runway is what turns emergencies into problems. Problems can be worked. Emergencies force bad decisions.

Most people think of runway as money, but money is only one part of it.

• There’s financial runway.

• There’s operational runway.

• There’s emotional and physical runway.

The shortest one dictates how reactive you are.

• If you’re exhausted, everything feels louder.

• If you’re overleveraged, every dip feels fatal.

• If your systems are brittle, small shocks do real damage.

Money matters, obviously, but it’s rarely the first thing that runs out. You can have cash in the bank and still be operating on zero runway if your systems are fragile or your health is shot. You can be broke and still have runway if your costs are low, your expectations are sane, and your business can survive small hits without collapsing.

This is the same lens I use to think about growth, platforms, launches, and sustainability: reduce fragility first, then decide what anything means.

Most entrepreneurs are running businesses that are too brittle. When that one thing wobbles, the whole system shakes. Of course it feels catastrophic…

…because it is.

You need enough runway to wait, enough restraint to not decide too early, and enough redundancy that no single event gets to define you.

Most things don’t mean what you think they mean yet. Success can destabilize you just as easily as failure can save you. You don’t know which is which until enough time has passed and you’ve collected enough data.

In a chaotic system, “Maybe. We’ll see.” isn’t always avoidance. It’s often how you stay upright long enough to make the next decision without panicking.

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Before you read this, it’s would be very helpful to learn about your SCALE path and your base Ecosystem.

In nature, ecosystems often blend at their edges, creating rich environments where two biomes coexist. For businesses, these blended ecosystems represent a mix of creative tendencies and strategies that combine the strengths of two archetypes. However, blending ecosystems also brings challenges.

Entrepreneurs must learn to harness both sides without becoming overwhelmed by competing tendencies. Below, we’ll explore some common blended ecosystems in detail and how brands can thrive in each.

Savanna: The Focused Trend Rider (Desert/Grassland)

The Savannah ecosystem is a blend of quick trend adaptation and deep-rooted focus. Entrepreneurs in this ecosystem are great at identifying emerging opportunities like a Desert while also grounding themselves in the thought leadership and long-term planning of a Grassland. They chase relevant trends, quickly producing content that hits the market at the right time, but they also have the discipline to build a strong, long-term brand.

Strengths

• Quick responsiveness to trends: Savannahs are excellent at spotting emerging trends and acting on them swiftly, giving them an edge in content that feels fresh, relevant, and timely.

• Grounded in a core niche: Unlike brands who spread themselves too thin by chasing every trend, Savannahs maintain a strong focus on a central topic or niche (Grassland), which gives them credibility and expertise.

• Balance of speed and substance: This combination allows entrepreneurs to gain visibility in the short-term through trending topics, while ensuring their content has lasting value due to its depth.

Challenges

• Risk of trend-chasing without depth: The Desert’s tendency to jump on trends quickly might make it difficult to maintain depth. Businesses in the Savannah ecosystem must guard against sacrificing quality for speed.

• Burnout from trying to stay relevant: Constantly monitoring trends while also nurturing a long-term niche can be exhausting. If not managed properly, the drive to stay on top of everything could lead to creative fatigue.

• Perception of being a trend-hopper: There’s a risk that audiences might see Savannahs as overly opportunistic if they’re not careful to balance trend-driven content with genuine expertise.

Actionable Steps

• Set clear boundaries for trend adoption: Don’t chase every trend. Focus on those that align with your long-term goals and complement your niche expertise.

• Create evergreen content: While staying on top of trends is important, balance it with content that remains valuable even after the trend fades.

• Use timeboxing: Allocate specific periods to focus on trend-driven content and others to focus on deep, evergreen material, ensuring you don’t get burned out or distracted by too many short-term goals.

Bramble: The Deep Diver with Personal Flair (Grassland/Forest)

The Bramble ecosystem blends the focused, grounded work of Grasslands with the personal, emotional engagement of Forest businesses. These entrepreneurs are experts in their field, delivering high-quality content on a specific niche while also sharing their personality and personal experiences. The result is deep, thoughtful content infused with relatable, human touches that resonate strongly with customerss.

Strengths

• Master of a niche with personal engagement: Brambles are not only experts in their field, but they also bring a personal voice that makes their content feel relatable and engaging. Their depth of knowledge (Grassland) combined with personal storytelling (Forest) fosters loyalty among customers.

• Stronger customer connections: The Forest aspect allows Brambles to build an emotional bond with their audience. Customers don’t just come for the information. They return for the creator’s unique perspective and personality.

• Authenticity: Brambles often come across as more genuine because their work blends expertise with personal insight, making their content feel more like a conversation than a lecture.

Challenges

• Struggle to maintain consistency: Balancing the desire to share personal stories and maintaining authority in a niche can be difficult. Brambles might veer too far into personal territory, losing their focus on delivering valuable information.

• Vulnerability fatigue: Constantly drawing from personal experience can be emotionally draining. Forests often put their heart and soul into their work, which can lead to burnout if they don’t set boundaries.

• Niche vs. breadth tension: Brambles may feel torn between staying focused on their niche (Grassland) and expanding into more personal, diverse topics (Forest), which can create internal conflict over their content strategy.

Actionable Steps

• Set content boundaries: Be clear on where personal stories add value and where they distract. Use personal anecdotes to enhance, not overshadow, your expertise.

• Establish a personal-niche ratio: Aim to have a balance in your content that blends 80% expertise and 20% personal narrative, or another ratio that suits your goals and audience.

• Plan breaks: Personal sharing can be exhausting. Schedule regular time off to avoid vulnerability fatigue and protect your emotional energy.

Glacier: The Launch Expert with Staying Power (Tundra/Grassland)

Glaciers embody the high-energy, exciting launches of the Tundra, combined with the Grassland’s steady, long-term content production. They know how to create buzz around new projects, and they have the discipline to sustain that momentum over time with focused, detailed work. While some excel at either the excitement of launches or the grind of long-term success, Glaciers master both.

Strengths

• Great at building anticipation: Glaciers excel at using high-energy, launch-focused strategies to generate excitement and build an initial audience.

• Long-term commitment: Once the launch excitement fades, they’re able to maintain and grow their audience with sustained, in-depth work, giving them an edge over others who fade post-launch.

• Master of launch cycles: Glaciers understand how to create momentum, using launches as strategic touchpoints throughout the year, and capitalizing on the energy of each one to further deepen their content.

Challenges

• Difficulty maintaining the energy: Tundra energy is intense, and Glaciers may struggle to keep up that level of excitement throughout the year, especially if they are also trying to nurture long-term projects.

• Launch burnout: Constantly creating and managing launches can be overwhelming. Glaciers must be careful to pace themselves or risk burning out from the pressure of frequent promotional cycles.

• Balancing excitement with content depth: The focus on high-energy launches can sometimes overshadow the need for depth, especially if the creator feels pressured to move on quickly to the next project without fully developing the current one.

Actionable Steps

• Strategically space out launches: Don’t feel pressured to launch too often. Space out high-energy moments to allow for downtime and deeper work in between.

• Use momentum wisely: Capitalize on the energy of a launch to build deeper, more evergreen content that your audience can return to after the buzz dies down.

• Plan post-launch recovery time: Always schedule time to rest after a major launch. This will help you avoid burnout and allow you to refocus on the more in-depth aspects of your work.

Tiaga: The Passionate Builder with a Personal Touch (Tundra/Forest)

The Tiaga ecosystem blends the Tundra’s love of high-energy launches with the Forest’s nurturing, personal engagement. They build strong initial excitement for their work but also focus on fostering long-term, personal connections with their audience. Tiagas excel at blending big, bold ideas with heartfelt, emotionally-driven content, ensuring that their customers stay invested long after the launch buzz fades.

Strengths

• Incredible audience engagement: Tiagas are great at making their audience feel like part of the journey, building deep, emotional connections through personal stories and engagement.

• High visibility with authenticity: The combination of energetic launches and personal content creates a winning formula attracting customers are drawn to the excitement but stay for the authentic connection.

• Fan loyalty: Because Tiagas engage deeply with their audience on a personal level, their customers often become loyal fans, eager to support their future work.

Challenges

• Difficulty balancing launch energy and personal connections: The high-energy demands of launching new projects can make it difficult to maintain the personal, nurturing relationships required to keep fans engaged.

• Risk of emotional exhaustion: Constantly pouring personal stories and energy into your audience can lead to burnout, especially if you’re also managing the intensity of Tundra-style launches.

• Over-reliance on personal engagement: While personal stories build loyalty, they may distract from delivering consistent, high-quality content. Tiagas must balance their personal touch with strong, valuable content.

Actionable Steps

• Automate audience engagement where possible: Use tools to manage your community and handle routine interactions, giving you more time to focus on content creation and personal touchpoints that matter.

• Build in downtime after launches: Tiagas should schedule dedicated rest periods after major launches to recharge emotionally and creatively.

• Create content that speaks for itself: Make sure that your content is strong enough to stand on its own, without relying entirely on personal connections to keep your audience engaged.

Arctic: The Immersive Experience Creator (Tundra/Aquatic)

The Arctic ecosystem is where the Tundra‘s fast-paced launch strategies meet the Aquatic ecosystem’s expansive, immersive content experience. Arctics are great at pulling their audience into a rich, multi-faceted world that spans various formats, from books to podcasts to merchandise. Their work is both fast-paced and deeply immersive, keeping customers engaged with a world they can explore long after the initial launch excitement fades.

Strengths

• Master of multi-platform content: Arctics know how to create immersive experiences that pull customers in through multiple formats, giving them a wide reach and deep engagement.

• Ability to generate buzz and sustain it: They can capitalize on the Tundra’s launch energy to build excitement, but they keep the momentum going by offering more than just one format of content, keeping customers engaged long-term.

• Cross-platform loyalty: Their audience often follows them across different media, creating a strong, loyal fanbase that engages with their work on multiple levels (e.g., reading, listening, and watching).

Challenges

• Managing complexity: The Arctic ecosystem involves juggling multiple formats (audio, visual, written), which can be overwhelming for somebody who is also trying to launch and promote.

• Content overload: With so many moving parts, Arctics risk creating an overwhelming amount of content that’s hard for their audience to keep up with, or that dilutes the overall brand.

• Time management: The fast pace of Tundra launches combined with the deep immersion of Aquatic ecosystems can lead to burnout for somebody that doesn’t carefully manage their time.

Actionable Steps

• Use delegation or automation: Consider hiring a team or using automation tools to handle some of the multi-platform logistics, allowing you to focus on creativity and content.

• Plan staggered content: Release different formats of content in phases to avoid overwhelming your audience and give yourself time to focus on quality over quantity.

• Leverage cross-promotion: Use the buzz from each new launch to drive attention to your other formats, ensuring that each piece of content builds off the last.

Swamp: The Multi-Passionate Connector (Forest/Aquatic)

The Swamp ecosystem combines the Forest’s deep, personal engagement with the Aquatic‘s multi-format, immersive experience. They excel at making their audience feel emotionally connected to their work, while offering a wide range of content across various platforms, whether it’s through writing, podcasts, merchandise, or events. The Swamp ecosystem allows for rich creative exploration across multiple avenues, providing a deeply interconnected experience for customers.

Strengths

• Strong personal connections: Swamps excel at building close-knit communities, making their audience feel personally invested in their work and career.

• Diverse content ecosystem: They are able to provide a range of content across different formats, allowing for multiple entry points to engage with their audience.

• Holistic brand experience: Swamps often build a cohesive, well-rounded brand that resonates with fans, making them more likely to support the brand across various platforms and media.

Challenges

• Overextension: Managing multiple formats while maintaining deep emotional connections can spread Swamps too thin, potentially leading to burnout or loss of quality.

• Difficulty maintaining focus: With so many creative projects happening across various platforms, it can be easy to lose focus or let certain elements fall by the wayside, leading to inconsistencies in content or brand messaging.

• Audience segmentation: When offering so many different formats, there’s a risk of fragmenting your audience as some may prefer podcasts, others written work, making it harder to keep a unified fanbase.

Actionable Steps

• Set clear priorities: Focus on one or two main platforms at a time, ensuring each format gets the attention it deserves before expanding to other areas.

• Cross-pollinate content: Ensure that each piece of content across formats ties into your overall brand and message, making it easier for your audience to follow you between platforms.

• Create community hubs: Use platforms like social media groups or newsletters to bring your audience together in one place, helping them feel connected to you and each other, regardless of which format they engage with.

Estuary: The Immersive Authority Builder (Grassland/Aquatic)

Estuary creators are experts who build trust through consistent value while inviting their audience into rich, emotional, multi-format experiences. They combine a Grassland’s deep niche content and rhythm with an Aquatic’s immersive, story-rich resonance.

Where Grasslands are reliable and well-organized, Aquatics are lush and emotionally layered. Estuary creators use both: structured systems to scale and immersive depth to connect. They don’t just build a library of evergreen content. They build a world people want to live in.

Strengths

• Deep, evergreen authority: Estuaries excel at building long-term trust. They deliver consistent, high-value content in a clearly defined niche (Grassland) while infusing it with immersive, human depth (Aquatic).

• Multi-format creativity: They’re comfortable expressing their ideas in various formats, including but not limited to long-form writing, audio, video, and behind-the-scenes storytelling, creating a layered, multi-sensory experience.

• Audience intimacy: Estuary creators are masters at building “slow” relationships. Their audience sticks around because they feel both nourished and seen.

Challenges

• Energy management: Aquatic creators can lose themselves in the richness of their work, while Grasslands thrive on cadence. Estuaries must balance immersion with sustainability.

• Scope creep: Too many formats, too many ideas, and too much storytelling without a clear system (or pruning strategy), Estuaries risk creative overload.

• Conversion friction: Deep content ecosystems can make it harder for new customers to orient themselves. Without clear entry points, it may be hard to “get” what the creator is offering quickly.

Actionable Steps

• Build with a spine: Use the Grassland structure as your base to deliver a regular publishing cadence, a clear point of view, and a flagship product or path. Then, let Aquatic systems reinforce and strengthen that spine.

• Use immersion intentionally: Don’t add layers for the sake of it. Use video, voice, or emotional storytelling when it enhances the point, not just when it feels cathartic.

• Create welcome paths: Use start-here posts, pinned podcast intros, or customer journeys to make your layered ecosystem accessible to newcomers.

Blended ecosystems offer unique opportunities for brands to harness the best of two worlds, but they also present challenges. Balancing these ecosystems takes careful planning and self-awareness, but when done right, it allows entrepreneurs to reach new heights both creatively and financially.

Whether you’re combining the trend-savvy nature of the Savannah with the deep focus of the Bramble, or mixing the high-energy Glacier with the immersive Arctic, finding your unique blend can help you build a sustainable and rewarding career.

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Welcome to the SCALE paths, designed to help you find frictionless growth and build a successful, sustainable, thriving business.

Most people don’t fail because they’re untalented, undisciplined, or unmotivated. They fail because they’re building the wrong way for who they are. They force strategies that weren’t built for their instincts, their energy cycles, or their strengths, and then they blame themselves when everything feels harder than it should.

The SCALE path is a system designed to make things easier.

No, that’s not right.

Easy is a measure of difficulty, and we’re not running from difficulty. What we’re trying to do is reduce the friction, which is a measure of ease.

Your path of least friction sits at the intersection of how you grow, how you operate, how you evolve, and where you get blocked. Once those layers line up, the same amount of work produces ten times the output, momentum becomes predictable, burnout drops, and the path forward finally makes sense.

There are four parts to this system.

We start by identifying your SCALE path, which will show your natural route to exponential growth. Our goal here is to help you maximize your return on energy investment, wherein you get the most growth for the least effort.

Maybe your quickest path to success is to build an army of evangelists, or maybe you come alive in collaboration. Maybe you’re wired for rapid-fire execution, explosive launches, or deep emotional resonance. Wherever you fall, that path is your first clue. It shows you the rhythm your business should have been following this whole time.

Then we move into your Evolution Track, because it’s not enough to know how to navigate the path, you also need to triangulate where you are right now on it.

Every business passes through stages of expansion, consolidation, stagnation, reinvention. When you finally understand your stage, you stop beating yourself up for not being in a chapter you aren’t in anymore and can chart your next steps.

Next, we identify your base Ecosystem, the internal landscape you operate from that foster your natural tendencies. Your ecosystem determines the environment in which you can actually thrive and how to build for growth.

Then, we’ll calibrate your HAPI Compass to reveal your real blocks so you can match them with them with the right solutions to overcome them.

Piece by piece, we build the internal map you’ve been missing.

Only when we’ve uncovered who you are, how you grow, where you are in your journey, what environment sustains you, and what’s been holding you back, do we introduce the strategies that work to build your business.

Strategies for growth need to match your path because there is no “best strategy.”
There is only the best strategy for you.

You’re not here to fit someone else’s mold. You’re here to find your own path of least friction, and finally walk it without apology.

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Before you read this, it’s would be very helpful to learn about your SCALE path and your base Ecosystem.

They are similar, interrelated concepts with lots of overlap, but they are distinct. Since this topic deals more with how you operate your business than how you grow your business, it falls more into the Ecosystems methodology.

Most entrepreneurs …

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