thinking out loud about the economics of making money doing what feels alive and meaningful coaching, running events, app dev, books, music, research grants re myself as a case study and also others
Economics of making money doing what feels alive
30 tweets · December 2023 · 158 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
I've been making most of my money the last few years from: - subscription revenue for the intend.do app (~$50k/y) - ticket sales & PWYW payments for the online GCI etc workshops (~$15k/y) and a few thousand dollars a year from a couple 1-on-1 coaching clients
for the last few years I've been trying to get myself motivated to work a bunch more on growing intend.do, despite various forms of resistance, that I've worked through recently I've been grappling with fear that I just don't wanna
this would be scary because it would mean not having as much money as I'd like (esp to raise kids in the coming years) or finding a different solution to making more money which feels like starting over, stepping into big unknown
"making more money" continues to simultaneously motivate me and repel me as a lens
sometimes I have really impactful conversations with people, which I really enjoy. in some fraction of cases, those convos are facilitated by them paying me money to focus on what's alive for them so I made these buttons:
and I broadly have the sense that most of the people I interact with have some skills/perspectives that would make it worth it for some people to pay them to talk this is in part a matching problem
but as I wrote in this thread, until/unless we're growing our own food and building our own furniture & computers, our smol economy of weirdos needs to export into the wider economy
to some extent this happens because the people who pay for coaching, workshops, substacks, etc... ...have their own jobs, or are themselves running a business.
anyway, as often happens when I think out loud, I am becoming aware of some anxiety I'm dancing around the edge of kinda like this
here it's........ ahh it's the part of me that doesn't want to be like Ramit Sethi ah man that's a whole story I don't trust salespeople, and I don't trust myself to sell. I don't trust salespeople not to pull the wool over people's eyes.
okay, so there's this loop here I guess I don't trust people not to have the wool pulled over their own eyes if I try to sell them stuff, and to then resent me for it in part because of my own experience of being the guy in the other role
can I forgive Ramit? graghtgh apparently not quite yet. like I don't want to.
can I forgive myself, for buying his stupid courses? hmmm... it's kinda the same part of me that optimistically thought I could finish cleaning my room in 10minutes yesterday even though it took 1.5h some sort of wishful thinking, "this will TOTALLY pay for itself"
which gets back to some of the thinking I've been doing around coaching, and whether coaching pays for itself in some cases obviously yes, like a salary negotiation coach or a sales coach in other cases even if it's a huge win, it doesn't pay back in dollars for a long time
one of the types of marketing/selling I've been wary of doing is promising anybody anything like I've done little bits of it here and there, but I'm wary of being like "if you buy my/our thing, then you'll get this outcome X" like man I don't fucking know what outcome you'll get
then there's like, focusing on your thing, not the outcome, but still as The Answer a friend of mine recently started making posts on facebook that begin with some hook, tell a captivating story, then end with stuff like this and I'm just like 🤮 it's so hooky
here's the trap: people have magic. each soul has magic, and each person has a soul, and that magic can heal and transform each other when their attention is brought to bear on a relevant situation and the magic dies when made into a modality or sold as a solution
because the magic is made out of the way that the person relates to the unknown, not to the known
this is not to say that packaged dead magic can't be fucking useful—it absolutely can my mind has been blown by more books and tweets than I can count. designed objects are a kind of packaged magic.
I know some people who are inspired by Perri Chase's work, and she talks about Magic Led Business and my gloss of the whole premise is that you put a taste of your magic out there and then see who bites, and all you promise them is more contact with your magic
which sounds great, but either I'm confused or there's some hypocrisy going on (maybe both) because this google search result is definitely promising something quite specific: "create six figures"
I'm thinking about that quote about long/fat tails and about how if you're not offering the world a way for someone to spend $1k or $10k on an appropriately-sized offering, you're leaving money on the table my current interfaces are pretty small-scale.
there's a kind of whiny energy that's like "but I don't wanna making a larger-scale offering" okay. well, I don't have to. I'm free to leave money on the table. (or maybe it's glued down anyway! maybe not, but maybe)
some sort of following yesses thing here to do
but I think part of what's confusing me so much is that there are a bunch of adjacent things to what I want to do that would be SO YES but: a) there's a bunch of other little stuff I'd have to do to make it possible b) I don't know if, having done that work, I'd see results
this is true both in relation to a bunch of coaching-ish stuff I would be excited to do but am maybe not sure if I want to set up more affordances for people to schedule than the buttons on this page: malcolmocean.com/coaching-advic…
and also in relation to eg growing Intend it's been hard for me to let go of the idea of growing it because it feels like there's gotta be a lil thing I could do that would 1.5x or 2x it but @bjtoomey pointed out to me that "finding what the lil thing is" IS the work
anyway, if there's a limit to how much the answer is "slow down more and listen to yourself more" I haven't found it and it seems that for me I'm going to go through it to the other side one way or another so I might as well not dilly-dally
so imma go listen if you want some of my magic (/ relationship to the unknown) to be pointed at your life situation, I am currently selling tickets to workshops where that can happen click & have a look and see what you think, sign up if it resonates intend.do/event/bgi?tw=m…