Dickie Bush
Ahoy! I started writing online in January of 2020 - and doing so is by far the best decision I've ever made.
But for the first 9 months, I was spinning my wheels. I followed all of the conventional advice: "write a weekly blog post on your website so you can own your platform, write about only things you want to write about" and all of that other common advice.
The problem? There was no feedback loop. The weekly cadence was too slow to work through all of the ideas in my head. And since barely anyone was reading them, I had no clue what I could improve or what my readers were looking for.
So I needed to try something radically different. If I was going to keep writing, I needed to tighten my feedback loops.
This meant going from publishing 1000-word weekly blog posts to posting short, 250-word posts.
And instead of publishing into the void of my own blog, I would post them on Twitter, where I knew there was aggregated attention.
And so off I went. I challenged myself to write and publish something daily, every day for 30 days. 28 days in, the results were pretty good.
My perfectionism? Squashed. My writing speed? 10x faster. My feedback loops? And damn it felt good to work through the backlog of ideas in my head.
And during my personal 30 day challenge, I grew my audience by over 500%. I made my first dollar on the internet. And I woke up every morning excited to write, publish, and improve.
Turns out there was something to this writing and publishing every day idea. I knew there had to be thousands of others out there who were facing the same creative friction as me, and this idea could help them burst through it.
So I sent a tweet to my nascent following of 500 people.
Six days after that tweet, we had 50 people in a Slack channel and we were off and running. Every person committing to writing and publishing every day for 30 days. Learning, iterating, building friendships, and having a damn good time doing it.
Nine months and 1,800 students later, Ship 30 for 30 has evolved from a Slack channel to an immersive, cohort-based writing course and community.
Cole and I have packed everything we know about building habits and writing online into over 20 hours of curriculum.
We've built templates and guides to help anyone, no matter their level of experience, start writing online. And we've built a rich, diverse community of like-minded writers and thinkers.
I can attribute every good thing in the last 18 months of my life to writing every day. I've gotten to meet and connect with people I used to idolize. And best of all, I've helped over 1,800 people experience the benefits that come with writing online.
And the best part of this whole thing? Ship 30 for 30 is just getting started.
And we'd love to have you on board.
Nicolas Cole
Ahoy! As a teenager, I had one of the first e-famous gaming blogs on the Internet.
I went on to study creative writing, fiction writing, and literature in college. But when I graduated, I had no idea how I was going to turn this passion of mine for writing into a career.
I took a job as an entry-level copywriter at a local advertising agency in downtown Chicago, but that's not what I really wanted to do.
I wanted to write books. I wanted to share my own thoughts and ideas with the world (not write social media copy for pizza chains and coconut water brands).
So, in an attempt to build myself as a writer in the digital age, I gave myself a goal.
I challenged myself to write every single day, on a website called Quora, for a year straight.
Best-case scenario, I would experience some sort of life-changing result and my writing would take off.
Worst-case scenario, I'd spend a year doing something I already loved and enjoyed, which was writing.
Well, writing every single day on Quora changed the entire trajectory of my life.
I ended up accumulating millions of views on my writing. In fact, one of my Quora answers ended up on the front page of Reddit, accumulating over 1,000,000 views in 48 hours.
By 2015, I was the #1 most-read writer on all of Quora (out of 200 million users).
And by 2016, I was invited to have my own column with Inc Magazine—where I wrote 400+ columns for the publication exclusively and became one of their Top 10 most-read contributing writers.
By the end of 2016, 3 short years after writing every single day on Quora, I successfully quit my job as a copywriter and began freelance writing for founders, CEOs, and venture capitalists.
By 2017, I had built a multimillion-dollar ghostwriting agency employing a dozen writers and editors, ghostwriting on behalf of hundreds of industry leaders.
And by 2020, I had turned everything I'd learned about writing online into a book, called The Art and Business of Online Writing.This brings us back to the beginning of the story.
By the time Dickie and I met, and I gave Ship 30 for 30 a try, I knew the importance of building a daily writing habit.
Why?
Because building daily writing habit was how I got my start as a writer. Challenging myself to write and publish something, anything, on Quora, every single day for a year, changed my life.
And I knew what Dickie was building had the potential to change other people's lives too.
And the rest is history.
Combined with Dickie's incredible idea for a cohort-based learning experience for writers, I brought in 10+ years of online writing insight to create a curriculum for anyone looking to get STARTED.
It had taken me years to learn many of these lessons on my own. But in Ship 30 for 30, we believed we will shorten your growth curve down to just 30 days.
