“No one makes a living as a writer.”
Well, not true. One of Nicolas Cole’s college professors lectured that line once and he took it as a challenge. This is a story about writing online as the foundation for a multi-million-dollar business portfolio.
In this issue:
💼 Building a business portfolio brining in over $600k/month
🧱 How creators become entrepreneurs (it’s about adding complexity)
💰 How to create and grow a digital product that sells
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
Full disclosure: We advertised Cole’s Ship 30 for 30 and Premium Ghostwriting Academy products six times in 2024 the past, through beehiiv’s ad network. We have not advertised either product since. However, we’re experimenting with affiliate links for Ship 30 for 30 today.
00:00 Introducing Nicolas Cole
05:23 Scaling to $600k+/month
12:00 Growing an educational product
17:15 The demand for ghostwriting in 2025
28:04 The hardest part of scaling a business
35:05 How to never run out of content
40:05 Rejecting the ‘artist vs entrepreneur’ dichotomy
50:00 How to earn more as a creator
55:27 Education with accountability
57:15 New rules for writing online in 2026
🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on Apple, Spotify, and all the rest.
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Artist, businessperson
For over a decade, Nicolas Cole has written every day. Most days, he’s published something to the internet.
At 17, as a top World of Warcraft player, he was a prolific poster on forums focused on the game. Then came bodybuilding communities. Then, in college, he began writing fiction.
Cole’s career is a campaign against something one of his favorite professors once told his class: “No one makes a living as a writer.”
After graduating in 2013, he took a low-wage copywriter job at an ad agency. In 2014, he challenged himself to write one Quora answer per day for a year. By the end of the year, he was the most-read writer on the then 200 million-user platform — setting the record for most Quora answers republished by major publications, including Forbes, CNBC, Inc. Magazine, and Harvard Business Review.
In fact, Inc. republished so many of his answers that they offered him a column with a deal: if he wrote more than four columns per month, they would pay him a penny per page view.
Cole upped the ante — he was desperate for more ways to monetize his writing — and offered to write one column per day. For two and a half years, he executed. He wrote hundreds of columns, drove millions of page views for the publication, and ultimately replaced his full-time income by writing viral articles on their website.
This momentum led him into ghostwriting. By 2016, founders and CEOs wanted to replicate the clarity, velocity, and voice Cole had built for himself. Within three months of taking on his first clients, he was making $20,000 a month working four hours a day, sharpening his craft and absorbing the thinking of high-level operators.
It was the most lucrative writing apprenticeship he could imagine; he was making a living as a writer, just not the sort his college literature professor probably had in mind.
In 2017, Cole launched with a friend Digital Press, an agency built specifically to ghostwrite for founders and executives. The company scaled quickly — 23 employees, 80+ clients, $2 million in annual revenue — but Cole never learned to pay himself. By the time he shut it down in 2021, he had grown a successful business that left him with $10,000 in the bank and a painful understanding of what it actually takes to lead people, not just write for clients.
"I wasn't as good yet at training other writers. I wasn't as good yet at managing my own stress and emotions. I wasn't a good enough leader yet. I was 27 years old. I didn't even know what I wanted out of my life. How was I supposed to give other people career paths?"
Those years of learning — building systems, managing people, and navigating the operational complexity of a real company — didn't pay off immediately, but they laid the foundation for everything that came next.
How Cole makes money today
Cole has built an education-product empire out of teaching people how to write online. His portfolio spans several businesses, with monthly revenue ranging between $600K and $700K — occasionally hitting $1M.
Ship 30 for 30* (a self-paced digital writing course with over 10,000 alumni)
Premium Ghostwriting Academy* (now the largest training program for ghostwriters on the internet)
TypeShare* (a writing and publishing tool)
Write With AI* (the #2 paid education newsletter on Substack)
Different Publishing (his own audiobook publishing house)
*Co-founded with Dickie Bush.
Creators vs. entrepreneurs
In our conversation, Cole drew a sharp line between the two. Creators, he said, are “full-stack solopreneurs” — they've built high-leverage lifestyle businesses, but they still have a job. They show up, do the work, and that's what pays the bills.
"There's nothing wrong with that. But it is a different path than if you were to go the entrepreneur route and actually go: How do I build a team? How do I build systems? How do I build this thing that can function without me?"
Cole couldn't run his company, Premium Ghostwriting Academy, as a solopreneur — it would be impossible. The business requires a sales team, a marketing team, a success team, and coaches. He has a co-founder. Most people aren't willing to spend what it takes to build and manage all of that, which is exactly why, he says, there is no other ghostwriting program at this scale.
The operational complexity keeps competitors out.
“There's a reason why [creators] tend to be limited to a couple of business models. Because, in order to build more advanced things, you literally can't do it all yourself.”
Connect with Cole on LinkedIn.
How to build a digital product people truly want
Cole and his team have trained nearly 2,000 people through the Premium Ghostwriting Academy — a high-ticket product. Some join as complete beginners and are running their own ghostwriting agencies only a year later, bringing in $50k–$90k per month.
Online courses have a reputation for being scammy. Just a couple weeks ago, a new subscriber responded to one of the questions we ask in our welcome email asking how to “weed out the BS classes and find a genuine creator.”
Whether you’re a consumer looking for a reliable course or a creator looking to create education products that consumers will trust, there are clear lessons in what Cole and his team have built.
Do the work before you teach it
Ship 30 for 30 would not work if Cole had not already spent a decade writing online every day. Thousands of Quora answers. Thousands of Inc. columns. A decade of generating the results everyone else wanted.
Same with Premium Ghostwriting Academy: 5,000+ hours of ghostwriting for founders and executives, and dozens of writers trained on his frameworks.
Cole's rule: Informational products must come after doing the work and providing it as a service. You can't teach frameworks you haven't built.
Climb the ladder
Cole describes a clear progression for anyone building a knowledge product:
Do the thing yourself — provide it as a service, generate real results
Teach it informally to friends or colleagues
Run one-on-one coaching calls
Run small group calls with five or 10 people
Build a cohort-based course
Grow the cohorts and refine the material
Only then: productize it further (evergreen, high-ticket, etc.)
Each rung teaches you something. One-on-one calls show you where people get stuck. Small groups reveal which frameworks land and which need reworking. Cohorts let you refine the pacing and structure. By the time you’re ready to launch your product, each piece of it has been pressure-tested.
What separates courses that sell from courses that sit
Cole's framework points to what makes an education product actually work and keep selling:
Build from documented experience. If you can point to years of doing the work publicly — articles, client results, case studies — your product sells itself. The proof is already out there.
Include accountability by design. Integrating community, coaching, and deadlines retains participation
Keep doing the work you're teaching. Your credibility compounds when students see you actively practicing what you preach — and it gives you fresh material to fold back into the product.
Solve for action, not information. Information is everywhere. The value is in getting people to actually do something with it. Structure your product around outputs and milestones. Cohorts help with this — it’s easier to be accountable to other people than yourself, alone with your laptop.
