You can always make more money

(Yes, really) Don't look at me like that.

Hi,

My wife thinks I’m nuts when I say this, but I truly believe you can always make more money.

And I don’t mean “work more hours” or “grind harder” or “manifest abundance” with a vision board and a mug of turmeric tea. I mean you can literally pull money out of thin air.

I do this all the time. Launch a course? Boom, money. Drop a Kickstarter? Boom, more money. Offer a consulting call, publish a book, run a Substack promo…every single one is a container for money.

The better your container, the more money it holds.

A container is anything people can buy from you.

Books, courses, consulting, subscriptions, merch, paid webinars, live events, even a signed postcard with a doodle counts if someone values it.

The moment someone gives you money, you’ve pulled that cash from the ether using your container.

• The better the container fits your audience, the more easily it fills.

• The better container you make, the more money fills that bucket.

• The more aligned that container is to your audience, the more money fills that bucket.

• The more often you launch, the more money (usually) fills those buckets.

• The bigger your audience, the more money fills those buckets.

If you’re not making the money you want, then you need better containers. Let’s say you release something, and it flops.

That’s not the end of the world.

It just means:

• Your container was suboptimal, and/or

• Your audience wasn’t big enough to fill it, and/or

• You offered some combination of the wrong thing to the wrong people at the wrong time.

No big deal. Change the offer. Build a better container. Find a different audience. Rinse and repeat. The reason I succeed as an entrepreneur isn’t because I’m smarter or better than anyone else. It’s because I don’t stop building containers.

I just keep throwing buckets into the ocean until one comes up full. If a launch doesn’t go well, I build a different container to make up the difference.

The product is the container.

The platform is the spigot.

The launch plan is the method by which you turn off and on the spigot.

Over my career, I’ve build a collection of spigots and methods that I know reliable make me money when I need (or want) it.

• Launch a book on Kickstarter? That’s a reliable container and spigot.

• Do a convention? That’s a reliable spigot to sell my containers.

• Offer a discount? That’s a reliable spigot.

• Launch a course? That’s a reliable container.

Really we’re all building containers, spigots, and methods that align with our audience in order to pull money from thin air.

Some containers take longer to build than others. My Hapitalist membership is something that is currently a great container without a very good spigot or method.

My hope is that my talking about it often and then running periodic launch events, I can grow it like I grew my membership, 25-50 people at a time. If I can maintain the 70% retention rate, then after 1-2 years I’ll be making the money I want from it.

Meanwhile, while a launch like Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold was a good spigot, container, and method for a one time event, building beyond that is opaque to me, as neither book fits into a series.

Having a one time event is not a bad thing, per se, but you shouldn’t judge a long term plan on a short-term event, or vice versa.

That’s all this whole thing is about, really. Everything you ship is something you want somebody to buy, and thus it becomes a container for money. Where you launch it (KU, wide, direct to customer) is the spigot by which people find and give you money. How and where you talk about that launch is the method by which you turn on and off the spigot.

Most creators fail because either they don’t have these reliably tested and available or they are building terrible containers that will never support them.

If you make a book that costs $10, and you want to make $10,000, you need 1,000 people to buy. Since most decent offers convert around 1-3% of your audience, that means you likely need a 30,000-100,000 people in your audience to make that offer work.

But if you create something that costs $1,000, then suddenly you only need 10 buyers. And you probably already have 10 super-fans who would buy, if only you gave them the opportunity.

The only limitation on the amount of containers you can build is the number of people in your audience willing to buy that thing, and how often they are willing to buy from you.

If you have a 10,000 person email list, you can reliably do 4-5 launches a year. If you find other people’s audience, you can do more. You can sustain between those launches (and/or support them) with ads.

Want to make more offers? Build a bigger audience. It will take about 1-2 years for the bigger audience to stabilize, then you can make more offers to them.

Want to make more money? Build a bunch of containers.

• Want a bigger audience? Build a free container to capture new people.

• Want more people to buy? Build a $10 container to give people a taste at a low entry point.

• Want to make your career sustainable? Build a $100 container. Build a $1,000 container. Build a $10,000 container. Build a recurring revenue container.

And build an ecosystem of people who want to fill them.

Is this crass? Yes, but it’s also not magic. I’m not saying you shouldn’t take care in what you build. Far from it. You should love all your containers, and you should treasure anyone who buys them.

But under the surface, it helps to also understand the mechanisms powering your career. If you are failing, you aren’t a failure. You just need better containers, better spigots, and/or better methods.

If you want to survive and thrive as a creator, you better believe this with your whole chest:

You can always make more money.

Always.

Always.

ALWAYS.

And if you don’t believe that, you’ll always be afraid to take risks. You’ll freeze when it’s time to launch. You’ll panic when something fails. You’ll convince yourself you’re not cut out for this.

The people who make it? They trust they can always create another offer. Another opportunity. Another container.

Because entrepreneurship is the act of gambling time and money now for future gain, and you can only play the game well if you believe you can earn it back.

So, go build a container.

Doesn’t have to be big. Doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to exist.

Money isn’t just out there waiting to be found. It’s waiting to be created.

Not someday. Not when you’re “ready.”

Now.