“You’ve got a problem”

“It’s a scam many fall for”

“Most people just need to focus on making money”

Punchy.

Straight to the point.

And frankly not unexpected.

Indeed, enrolling in a coaching program with Mark Moss has been a wonderful learning experience, shout out to him for all the time and effort he has put in this last few months; I really value his advice.

What were we discussing?

I was being asked for an update on how many sales I’d made.

The simple answer was zero.

However I’d decided to answer, alongside my pitiful admittance of “zero sales”, with what has become my general feeling in relation to the course I enrolled in.

Over the New Year break I’ve had a chance to really reconsider what it is I want to do with my time, my attention is my most valuable resource after-all, and the upshot is that I want to find something that “makes my heart sing”.

Mark has been coaching me through how to use organic content to drive revenue.

Get people’s attention.

Then steer it towards products you can make money from.

I’d made progress.

I’d managed to run an oversubscribed free coaching program, for 30 days, assisting people with their Bitcoin inheritance protocol.

I’d also found that something was holding me back.

For some reason I wasn’t hungry to collect their testimonials, to refine the program, to iterate and improve.

I was listening to him coaching other students on the call through their problems.

Why did I have this slightly apprehensive feeling?

Ironically the concept of “sunk cost fallacy” came up.

It resonated.

People stick with a product or service longer when they’ve paid for it.

Quite rightly, Mark was emphasising how important it was for us all to start getting people to pay us.

But “that’s me right now” I thought.

I don’t really feel like pumping out content via IG or YT to then hustle products.

Fuck it.

My turn came to speak.

I decided to confess…

“Zero sales”

“Want something to make my heart sing”

“Feel like I am in the same boat as the sunk cost fallacy customers”

I was worried to admit the truth.

Then something really fascinating happened.

Quite rightly I was on the receiving end of the advice I mentioned on opening this story, that hunting for a purpose is essentially a fools errand, and I just needed to focus on making some money.

Punchy.

His view.

Likely not wrong in most cases…

But as part of my explanation as to where I thought my attention was going had been Nostr.

I’d admitted I couldn’t help but feel on legacy social media platforms, as a content creator, I didn’t want to give them my attention, energy, life-force, as I had this sense I was just building on quicksand.

This had resonated with Mark.

He stated: “my biggest fear is having my YT account taken away”.

In fact, he went on to admit that after 5 months of being locked out of his Twitter account that got hacked, he had found himself questioning “why bother” fire it up again…

I felt my heart surge.

My body literally came alive.

THIS FELT GOOD.

As entrepreneurs, we need to solve problems.

The best problems are those that people find most acute.

In this case, a successful content creator with a large audience, was admitting that platform risk was “his biggest fear”.

We went on to discuss the ludicrous situation in which the SEC incorrectly tweeted about the latest Bitcoin ETF approval, the questionable ethics of a Government using a private technology company to communicate from, and his investment in Zion that is build on DID.

“If you want to build technology, we should have another call at a different time, as I have some ideas”

I could feel a shift.

I was excited.

I think my heart might be singing…

Mark’s biggest fear, resonates strongly with me, and my hunch is that the majority of content creators out there are the same.

So what next?

Well I need to take action.

Which is precisely what Mark coaches “action leads to clarity”.

I will begin a customer discovery process, curating insights from the many other content creators that I know, whilst I will also have a look into what is already built on Nostr.

My initial idea is to re-create a service like Anchor, which Spotfiy acquired, to host one’s content and broadcast to RSS feeds.

So rather than sharing URL’s on Nostr to places with platform risk, I would like a creator to know that their content can literally never be cancelled, by the company or technology that hosts the data.

I would pay for that…

I bet Mark would pay for that…

I bet thousands of content creators globally would pay for that…

Everything starts as an idea!

Best, Jake

Ps - this is my first post on Habla. I am intrigued to understand the benefits of using different Nostr clients for different mediums, and I love that this re-creates the feel of Medium long-form articles, a crucial part of a content creators toolbox. Perhaps this will totally obliterate the need for newsletter platforms such as Substack?..

#morningwriting