Nicolas Cole

The marketing channel that has taught me the most about budget allocation has to be YouTube.

Everyone loves to believe (myself included) that the secret to YouTube is:

- High production quality
- Pro-grade at-home setup
- Teleprompter, fancy camera
- Script writer, thumbnail designer
- Etc.

The reality, though, is none of these things matter if a) the content isn’t helpful (or entertaining, depending on your niche) and b) you’re awkward on camera.

I have now published over 1,400 videos on my YouTube channel.

And I can tell you that many of my highest-performing videos have the lowest production quality.

For example, earlier this year we doubled our entire video production team and started investing heavily into YouTube.

- We had a Head of Video Content
- We had a Lead Editor
- We had a Thumbnail Designer
- We had multiple Shorts Editors

And once a month, we’d spend $5,000+ renting a huge Airbnb property for a day to film a month’s worth of content—8 hours straight.

All together, our monthly video production team costs were in the ballpark of $50,000/mo.

And the videos looked great. We captured a lot of epic-looking content.

But then I recorded a Loom video one afternoon and published it to my YouTube channel myself. And that Loom video outperformed almost every high-production video we had filmed, edited, and published over the prior 3 months.

Which suddenly raises the question, “What am I spending $50,000 a month for?”

Now, obviously there is an intangible cost to building a brand. And we could make the argument that high production quality content builds a stronger relationship with customers and up-levels the perceived value of the brand, blah blah. But the point is still the same.

So whenever someone asks me how they can get started on YouTube, or which camera they should buy, etc., **the first thing I tell them is to not buy anything and just record 100 Loom videos of you talking over a Google or Notion doc.**

Because, in the beginning, you need to build a few skills:

- You need to “do it” consistently—and prove (to yourself) YouTube is a priority.

- You need to clarify your thinking for video—and that can be done with a Google doc.

- And you need to practice speaking on camera—which does not require “a professional camera.”

There is, quite literally, zero point in increasing your video production costs when you haven’t built the most basic skills or seen any traction from your efforts yet.

Because if you can’t do it with the “budget” version, trust me, you’re still not going to be able to do it with the “premium” version.

13 hours ago | [YT] | 34

Nicolas Cole

One of the things we got “accidentally right” building Ship 30 for 30 is we created a stack of offers that all compounded on each other.

I want to be clear: we did not do this intentionally. We didn’t really understand what we were doing at the time. This was done intuitively, and just happened to be the right answer. I can only see the framework now in hindsight.

- Ship 30 for 30 was a cohort-based writing challenge. This was the “info” component. (Yes, we were also selling accountability, writing with other people, etc., but people were mostly buying “how to write online” education paired with this accountability.)

- Typeshare was the SaaS platform we built (with Sam Shore) to pair with it. Inside Ship 30 for 30, we taught people how to write Atomic Essays online. And then we built the software to help them write and design their own Atomic Essays. (So the info fed the software.)

- On the back of Ship 30 for 30, we launched a back-end upsell called Captain’s Table. This was like a lightweight community/mastermind for Ship 30 graduates who wanted access to “more education” and “more live sessions with us.”

All of these things together created a pretty amazing flywheel:

Ship 30 for 30 was a profitable business in itself.

But Ship 30 also meant we profitably acquired Typeshare customers.

Typeshare customers became a secondary source of recurring revenue.

And Ship 30/Typeshare customers both became the people most likely to join Captain’s Table.

Whenever I’m building info products/programs now, I think about how to replicate this stack of offers.

A few years later, we did this within our Premium Ghostwriting Academy too.

- PGA was a high-ticket group coaching program. This was the “info” component.

- Inside PGA, we educated students on how to use AI to help them land clients and fulfill on client work using Ghostbase. This was the “software” component.

- And then we would upsell PGA students & Ghostbase users to our back-end program, Liftoff. This was the “continued coaching” component.

In an age where you can vibe-code custom software, you should think of software as a highly congruent & niched-down product you can include in your offer stack.

The “info” component educates people on how to use the software.

The software retains your power-users.

And your power-users are the ones you upsell to coaching.

18 hours ago | [YT] | 18

Nicolas Cole

In 2025, we decided we wanted to try to scale PGA with paid ads and live webinars.

• The first webinar was just a forcing function for us to get a rep in. The measure for success was, quite literally, to just “do it once.”

• The second webinar was a container to fix everything that broke during the first webinar.

• And the third webinar was the first rep where we knew enough that we could begin to iterate and improve.

But it took upwards of 20 weekly webinars to get it right.

Each webinar was 2+ hours. The same slides. Sharing the same stories and insights. Answering the same questions. Giving the same pitch. And still, it took 20+ iterations before we felt like we had gotten it to a point where we could rely on it to perform at a certain level.

I share that because if you’re thinking about scaling with paid ads and/or webinars, I want to level-set your expectations.

Before we held that first webinar, I thought, “Great, we’ll do this once or twice and then it’ll just be on repeat.” **That is not what happened.** And I feel stupid for ever thinking that’s what was going to happen.

We changed the positioning of the webinar a dozen times.

I rewrote and rebuilt the slides of the webinar a dozen times.

We held so many webinars, week after week, that I started to lose my voice!

(That said, if you’re willing to put in the work, webinars can perform very well. And now, we view them as one of the highest-ROI vehicles for acquiring new customers into our ecosystem of writing programs.)

21 hours ago | [YT] | 17

Nicolas Cole

There are so many different “playbooks” that work right now to drive traffic.

- You could build an entire business off YouTube Organic
- You could build an entire business just on Instagram Ads
- You could build an entire business using LinkedIn Cold Outreach
- You could build an entire business as a TikTok Shop Affiliate
- You could build an entire business running Live Webinars

The list is literally endless.

But something we come back to, over and over again inside our own business, is committing to play the game, and running the playbook, that we know works for us.

Because there is no one-right-answer. And I promise, the grass is always greener. It’s very easy to see someone else succeeding online running a completely different “marketing playbook” as you and thinking, “I should do that! I bet their model is so much better! I bet they don’t have any of the problems I have.” But that’s not true.

As a mentor used to say to me all the time: “Cole, you’re going to have a bag of problems either way. You just get to pick the bag.”

There is no marketing playbook that is devoid of risk, volatility, or some level of “this is annoying.”

Which means the game isn’t to bounce around and try every new playbook-of-the-month.

Just commit to a platform and/or style of marketing, and use it to build a great business for yourself.

You don’t need to do “everything.”

1 day ago | [YT] | 33

Nicolas Cole

Every step-function change in business profit and/or personal income changes the way you see the world.

- When I was making $10k per month in personal income, I thought $20k/mo was life-changing money.

- When I was making $20k per month, I thought $40k/mo was life-changing money.

- When I was making $40k per month, I thought $80k/mo was life-changing money.

- When I was making $80k per month, I thought $160k/mo was life-changing money.

The goal post never stops moving.

The problem is, if you anchor yourself to your business’s “highest-performing month,” then you will begin to make decisions in your life assuming that peak won’t go away.

And if I’ve learned anything in business, it’s that what goes up… usually comes back down. And what comes down… usually goes back up.

I made a whole YouTube video about this idea, which I like to call the Genius-Idiot Rollercoaster.

So, don’t make forward-leaning decisions based on your “peak month.”

Instead, make decisions based on a rolling 12-month average.

This goes for hiring decisions inside your business, and this goes for personal finance decisions based on your personal income.

You never want to make forward-leaning decisions based on an outlier month or quarter.

1 day ago | [YT] | 12

Nicolas Cole

The amount of things you can sell your audience is dependent upon whether the traffic you generate is concentrated or decentralized.

• Concentrated traffic means: one personal brand building one email list.

• Decentralized traffic means: multiple personal brands building multiple different email lists.

For example, in early 2026 we thought we could scale the business even further horizontally by promoting a few people within our company to lead programs of their own. “More offers = more money,” we thought.

The problem is, these team members didn’t have audiences of their own.

Traffic was not decentralized. It was concentrated. Which meant their offers were dependent upon our audiences—which ended up competing with our own offers.

We learned (the hard way) that if traffic is concentrated to a single personal brand (or in my & Dickie’s case, two personal brands) and one email list, then scaling horizontally doesn’t work. You don’t actually gain more. All that happens is you present your customers with more choices, cannibalizing your core business.

This is different than what a company like Agora Financial has been able to achieve. Their education business and the traffic they generate is not concentrated to one personal brand. Their traffic is decentralized, each personal brand and “thought leader” having their own audience, and their own credibility, which they can monetize with their own stack of offers.

If we were to try to scale horizontally again, what I would do is look to partner with tangentially-related creators who have built their own audiences in “similar but different” niches—and then help them on the back-end with operations, offer construction, and LTV extension.

1 day ago | [YT] | 9

Nicolas Cole

When you have sufficiently maxed out “More” of something, the next step is to do it “Better.”

The problem with “Better” is that it’s incremental improvement. Doing something “Better” is not usually some giant action, decision, or change. “Better” is more likely to be 1,000 tiny upgrades, made one at a time, none of which in the moment lead to an exponential outcome, but all of them added together over a prolonged period of time do. (As Hormozi puts it: “1,000 golden BBs, not 1 silver bullet.”)

Which means “Better” requires a lot of patience and consistency—two things humans are historically very bad at.

As a result, as soon as you begin down the “Better” path, you are quickly confronted by a handful of painful realities:

- “This is boring!”
- “This is tedious!”
- “This is monotonous!”
- “This is going to take forever!”

Which is what causes so many people (myself included) to come to the faulty conclusion that they should do something *else*.

They should start something “New!”

Which is almost always the mistake.

The reason I say it’s a mistake (and I continue to learn this hard lesson myself) is because people stop pursuing the “Better” path for two reasons:

- They get bored, frustrated, or lose interest
- Or they don’t know how to do “Better” any more

But when this happens, and you decide the right decision is to start something “New,” you actually create two different problems for yourself at the same time.

First, you start over. You’re solving for “boredom” with novelty—which feels great in the short-term, but very quickly loops you back to where you already were before.

Second, you deprive yourself of learning the “Even Better” way to do what you were doing before. The higher you climb, the “Better” you get at something, the more nuanced the next improvement. And sometimes, you need to spend 2-3 months consuming lots of different information to learn how to do what you’re already doing, “Better.”

The problem, though, is once you start something “New,” now you have a new commitment.

So, a few months later, when you finally realize how to do the thing you were doing before, “Better,” you can’t do it. You don’t have the time or the bandwidth—because you’ve already started prioritizing something else, something “New.”

Which is why I’ve set a new little rule for myself.

Anytime I reach a “Better” plateau, I will not start something “New” unless I have given myself at least 3 months of trying as hard as I possibly can to expose myself to whatever the next level of “Better” might look like in my current chosen domain.

99% of the time, when you give yourself this time to discover how to raise your own standard, the answer becomes very clear. And the “Better” you get at something, the more you actually learn how many more levels of “Better” are above you.

Very rarely (1% of the time) is the right answer to give up, start over, and choose something completely “New” and different.

2 days ago | [YT] | 19

Nicolas Cole

“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”- Mozart

2 days ago | [YT] | 36

Nicolas Cole

A painful lesson I continue to learn is that as long as you are the CEO and/or primary operator, you cannot grow multiple things at the same time.

You can’t grow multiple businesses at the same time.

You can’t grow multiple departments at the same time.

You can’t grow multiple marketing channels at the same time.

The only way you can grow multiple “different” things at the same time is if you have separate, self-sufficient, and properly incentivized operators in charge of each one. And even then, the person has to have “Founder Potential.” It’s not about how hard they work or how much they care. It’s about whether or not they can successfully grow something on their own with minimal to zero involvement from you. If that’s the case, and you have the resources to make that bet on someone else, then yes, it’s possible to grow something in parallel. But the vast majority of the time, people rush this decision, and don’t realize they are still the primary operator.

Which means, in any given season of life & business, you have to decide the priority.

And there cannot be multiple priorities.

Priority means “one.” The most important.

The good news is, whatever you decide to be “the most important” will grow. Anything that gets the majority of your attention will grow. It just will. Most things in life are simply the result of effort, and effort is the result of attention. So more attention = more effort = more growth.

The bad news is, deciding one thing is “the most important” also means deciding a handful of other things are “less important.” And anything that gets less of your attention will either tread water and maintain is current level or, more likely, begin to atrophy.

I have seen this happen over and over again inside our business.

- Whenever we pick a new marketing channel to focus on and prioritize, our other marketing channels’ performance stays about the same but starts to slowly decline.

- Whenever we pick a new product or offer to focus on and prioritize, our other offers begin to go down in revenue.

- Whenever we pick a new department to focus on and prioritize, our other departments’ standard begins to dip, more things slip through the cracks, and performance begins to go down.

There is no avoiding this problem.

Which is why business is a game of choosing which trade is “worth it” at any given time.

Because anytime you prioritize or gain one thing, you will sacrifice and begin to lose another.

2 days ago | [YT] | 37

Nicolas Cole

Anytime someone says to me, “I want to scale my business,” the first thing I try to identify is what about their business is currently subjective.

Oftentimes, subjectivity hides in plain sight.

An example would be: you run an agency, and you have one Account Manager who interfaces with clients. And they’re great. They work hard. Clients are happy. And you think, “It’s time to scale!”

The problem is, a lot about that Account Manager’s role hasn’t yet been defined.

• They “do what they do” intuitively —not based on a prescriptive checklist or set of processes. And if you don’t have these clearly defined processes, then you can’t scale this person’s role.

• They keep clients happy because of “bundled traits” —they’re *personable*, or they’re *reliable*. But these traits are bundled terms, meaning unless you can unbundle them into actions that can be replicated, you can’t scale this person’s personality.

• And they solve problems based on their own level of personal motivation—maybe they are proactive because that’s a quality they value about themselves. But if this person’s role is not “gamified” properly, with clear incentives that reward the right behaviors and disincentivize the wrong behaviors, then you can’t scale this person’s level of motivation.

On the surface, a great hire masks a lot of these problems.

And it’s not until you start unbundling their role, their motivations & reward system, and even their personality that you begin to realize the level of specificity you need to achieve in order to successfully scale someone’s role within a company.

Subjectivity doesn’t scale.

2 days ago | [YT] | 16