Allow me to re-introduce myself...

New year. New name. Who dis?

Hi,

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 2005 to start my first business (rip RPN Photography, 2008), and have been kind of obsessed with the intersection of craft and commerce since those early days trying to make my business work (it didn’t, neither did my next 3).

Originally, that interest showed up in film, but you don’t have nearly enough control of your own destiny in the movie industry. You have a little more control in photography, but not much if you like fashion or portrait photography, which was my specialty.

So, even though I made several short films, a couple web series, helped build one of the first internet tv companies, directed a tv show and a movie, moved to LA to become a screenwriter, and flew around the world to make movies…

…in 2010 I changed my focus to comics, where I had more locus of control (though still not nearly enough for my taste). With that transition, I closed down my first blog, The LA Grind (which you can still find in my archives).

I had a couple small projects-focused blogs until 2015, when I started The Business of Art, the podcast affectionately (I hope) known at The Business O’ Fart, since that’s how it looked when you wrote out the URL (businessofart.us).

In 2017, that podcast morphed into The Complete Creative (both a podcast and a blog). In 2023, that blog became The Author Stack, and now Hapitalist.

With it, the names changed, but my interests didn’t really waver, nor did my writing style. While I’ve been obsessed with a bunch of different industries in my career, the overarching target of my focused attention has always remained at the intersection of craft and commerce.

How do we keep true to our vision while making enough money to live the kind of life we want?

I was told for 20+ years that every industry faces different challenges. The things that worry tech companies aren’t of interest to comic book publishers, and vice versa. For a while, I believed it, but at this point I’ve been doing this work long enough to know definitively that’s a bowl of corn-fed hogwash.

Over the years, I’ve worked with companies in every industry across the business spectrum. I’ve studied cryptocurrency day traders, master novelists, phone salesmen, muralists, coaches, venture capitalists, musicians, and hundreds more.

I’ve watched people who sit on both sides of the money divide, either obsessed with line going up or obsessed with tanking their ability to make money.

In every case, the problems they dealt with were the same, but how they deal with and talked about them was unique to their industry. Comics creators found Kickstarter to help them overcome the astronomical cost of production, while novelists learned how to rapid release. Tech companies solved that same problem with subscriptions, while newspapers did it with advertising, and coaches focused on live events.

They all rode their solutions hard until they stopped working. Then, their businesses plateaued, and their industries started to crater. Instead of innovating, they chose instead to cannibalize their own businesses and hollow out everything people loved about it.

It occured to me some years ago that they each had a different 5% of the solution, but they were all working on the same problems.

How do you find customers who love your work and spend enough on your services to thrive?

Each industry provides a perfect case study in how to make their strategy work. If they just started talking to each other and pulling what worked into their own business using those case studies as a guide, they could 10-100x their revenue without a ton of extra effort.

This has become the great mission of my life.

I tried it with Kickstarter, bringing comic book strategies to indie authors…and it worked even better than I hoped. I dare say we revolutionized that industry in the past couple of years.

Since then, my brain has been focused on how to make this work on a bigger, more systemic level…

How do we create a “super-stack” that melds all of these amazing strategies together into one business model that works better for everyone?

…one that leads to more happiness, more revenue, and more thriving…

…without becoming exploitative to the very industry they need to thrive. I’ve started to roll it out here with our path of least friction methodology.

With that new focus, The Author Stack doesn’t make sense as a name. I’ve been drifting from a publishing-centric concentration for a while now, and I think Hapitalist evokes what I’ve always been obsessed with at the core of my being.

Publishing gave me a career, and I will always be indebted to it, but I’m returning to the thing I’ve really been focused on since 2005, which is how to make our businesses work without forcing us to sell our souls in the process.

Most of you haven’t been around long enough to see it evolve from its nascent days, but I have the receipts going back decades to prove my cred in this particular arena.

I’ll still be talking about publishing strategies, too, and making books, since that’s what I know best, but I’ll also be talking about a wider array of things, and using a wider array of examples.

I’m about to launch two books in my Author Stack book series, building it up to 11 books, which is longer than almost any non-fiction series in any vertical. If that’s all you wanted here, then those books are pretty much everything I know about publishing.

If you liked what I’ve been posting the past few weeks (even if you thought I posted too much) then you’ll like the new direction. Good news? I’ll be returning to a more weekly cadence after this email.

If you didn’t like those emails, no worries, man. You can unsubscribe below or at www.hapitalist.com/account.

(btw, you can upgrade there if you want to go deeper, too)

If you’re still in, though, then I’m a very good person to have on your team. I’ve seen so much, and built so many things. In fact, my best pitch for Hapitalist is usually “You want me in your corner”.

When I stopped The Complete Creative, there were about 3,500 of you. When I started The Author Stack, there were 16,000. Now, there are 45,000 of you, and I’m so excited to see where we can go from here.

I can’t wait to continue this journey with you.