I never imagined in my wildest dreams how life-changing 2021 would be.
It was December 2020 and I decided for the hundredth time that I was going to start a blog. I'd been a wannabe creator for the past 10 years always starting new projects only to watch them fizzle out.
I told myself I'd write one blog post a week. By February I'd written a total of 3. It's not that I didn't want to write, but when you know nobody is reading them there is very little accountability to keep up with your schedule.
In February I joined a group of friends in a 28-day blogging challenge which I failed miserably at. I got 14 days in and realized the only people reading these blogs were my few friends in the group.
But something else interesting happened in February. I started to see these image essays in my Twitter feed. And like the good algorithm that it is, once I liked one of them I started seeing more until eventually, my feed felt like it was flooded with these tiny thoughtful essays.
I'm still not sure how long it took me, but I signed up. Figuring that if I put my money where my mouth was I just might follow through this time.
That was about 10 months ago now and I've been writing online ever since.
The First 30 Days
I'd finished a big multi-day event at work and pretty much missed the whole of the onboarding week. I didn't take any of the new shipper advice onboard. I had no writing buckets, no sacred time planned. I sat in an airport bar and cracked out my first 250 words about flight checklists and hit publish.
The first 30 days were about unlearning so many things I had assumed about writing online. First I had to learn how to cut down my initial brain dumps from 600+ to 250. That required a lot of ‘kill my darling’ moments. And I'm 100% better because I can write with brevity these days, rather than padding out long articles for the sake of word counts.
Trust The Process
Those first 30 days taught me I could stick at something, even when it got hard. And around day 17 it got really hard. I was experiencing something we now affectionately call 'the dip.' I drafted an essay that day about why shipping daily was unrealistic and why I wouldn't keep doing it.
I never published that essay.
Instead, I trusted the process. And that might be one of the most magical things about ship30. The evidence is all around. So many other people have done this, it hasn't killed them (not that I know of anyway!). In fact, the success stories are endless. And that's something you don't get to see when you are writing alone in a dark room on your new blog.
Came For The Writing, Stayed For The Community
I am not exaggerating when I say I have never met so many supportive people in my life! The amount of people who are literally cheering for you and wanting to help in so many ways is quite unbelievable until you experience it for yourself.
I'm still trying to figure out if it is intentionally built or a lucky fluke.
And as someone who is in a totally opposite timezone, I worried that I might miss out on some of the live magic of the course. There was nothing to worry about at all. 90% of the connection happened on Twitter and it became totally normal to connect in DM's and jump on zoom calls with people from all around the world.
I remember one afternoon sitting on my balcony in Sydney chatting to a friend who was sitting at the bottom of the Swiss Alps. That’s when I really thought, the internet is wild.
I thought I was coming to write, I didn’t realize I would find so many BFF’s! It’s wild that you can meet deep and lifelong friends who you speak to every day this way.
Follow The Signals
My only expectation coming into ship30 was to walk away with 30 essays and a writing habit. But one of the things I learned early on was to follow the signals. That's the beauty of writing on Twitter, you get pretty much instant feedback on what you write.
Beyond that, I learned to listen to what people were asking me. The more I wrote, the more people asked me about my processes. How did I come up with so many ideas? How did I stay so consistent? And so with less than 1000 followers, I launched my first digital product - Consumer 2 Creator Lab. A notion template + workshop that I built to help organize and take notes from content I consumed and turn that into the content I created.
I figured if I could just get 10 people to buy it I'd be pretty happy. By the time it came out of pre-launch I had 50 sales and had made my first dollars online as a creator. A mere 45 days after I'd started shipping
I was hooked.
Since then, I've launched 4 other digital products, a course, a journal, a newsletter & a podcast. Plus I've continued to ship most days while holding down a full-time job. People started calling me prolific before I even believed it myself.
I’ve been invited into countless Twitter Spaces, and onto podcasts. I was even featured on Gumroad’s new re-branded website with a handful of other creators! People I looked up to started sliding into my DM’s and asking me for advice on all sorts of things from consistency, to the tools I use, to writing and more. I’ve build a library of content & a library of products.
Ship 30 made all that possible. I can 100% say I wouldn't be where I am today if I had just kept slogging away at that blog. Whether you just want to build a consistent writing habit, or you want to become a prolific creator, you have a choice. You can either keep reading all the success stories, or you can become the success story yourself.
It's your choice. I hope you decide to come and join us.
If Ev's story resonated with you, click here to hop aboard the next Ship 30 cohort.