Make Money Online

Episode 116: Business Puberty

Nick and Kai walk through the growth stages of a solo practice, framing the freelancer-to-consultant shift as ‘business puberty.’ They cover the recurring blind spots at each stage: erratic deal flow, administrative debt, and the jump from implementation work to strategy work with executives.

Episode 115: Market Research: How do you identify a company's expensive problem(s)?

Nick and Kai work through how consultants diagnose expensive problems in a client engagement, from pre-call research to on-call questioning. The conversation covers why stated client needs are often a symptom rather than the root problem, and how repeated conversations with clients build into pattern recognition at the industry level. Kai closes with a clean framework: clients know their current situation and desired outcome; consultants own the gap between them, the actual problem and the solution.

Episode 114: General Counseling

Nick and Kai answer a listener question about finding and working with a therapist. Both share personal experiences with the search process, bad fits, and why starting therapy before a crisis hits is worth doing. The episode argues that for knowledge workers whose income depends on their brain, therapy is routine maintenance, not a sign of failure.

Episode 113: I Will Solve Your Problem, and You Will Pay Me

Nick and Kai walk through the anatomy of a consulting proposal, from diagnosing what a client actually needs before writing anything to what should go on the page. Both share their full proposal structures, and both argue that padding with credentials and awards is a contractor habit that loses deals.

Episode 112: How to Optimize Products

Nick and Kai work through when to optimize an existing product versus build a new one, with funnel metrics and customer feedback as the deciding signals. They cover how to spot what inside a product needs work, and the tradeoffs between revising the main material, adding bonuses, or launching a related lower-priced product.

Episode 111: Audio Recording Tips

Nick and Kai walk through the gear, room treatment, technique, and video setup needed to record clean podcast audio. There’s a running disagreement: Kai thinks content beats audio quality and encourages shipping early with whatever you have; Nick thinks podcasts live or die on sound quality in a way that a text mailing list simply does not. They land on a practical middle ground around a $300–$500 rig that gets you most of the way there.

Episode 110: Why You Shouldn't Be On Call 24/7

Nick and Kai push back on Alan Weiss’s advice that consultants should take client calls at any hour. They cover how after-hours requests compound once you answer the first one, how to handle a genuine emergency when it lands, and why setting availability expectations before an engagement starts is cheaper than resetting them mid-project.

Episode 109: Productized Consulting for Drinking in Meatspace

Nick and Kai walk through how to run a local meetup, using Design Football, Nick’s monthly Chicago designer bar meetup, as the main case study. They cover the minimum viable meetup setup, how communities grow beyond what the founder planned, and how to hand one off when you’re done.

Episode 108: The Importance of Sleep

Nick and Kai spend this episode on sleep hygiene: how they structure evenings, manage technology use, and eat to get consistent rest. Both traced most of their sleep problems back to screens and the mental residue of being online, and arrived at similar conclusions through different paths.

Episode 107: Project Scheduling, a How To

Nick and Kai work through project scheduling as a boundary problem, with Nick detailing how his contracts make late payment automatically void the statement of work. The episode covers why payment must clear before work gets calendared, and how losing a difficult client can feel like relief when the red flags were there from the start.

Episode 106: Writing Time is Sacred Time

Nick and Kai argue that the real goal for freelancers is publishing consistently, not just writing consistently, and that building a writing habit is only useful insofar as it gets you there. They walk through their individual routines, Nick’s editorial calendar approach and Kai’s switch to daily letters, and make the case that writers routinely misjudge which of their pieces will land. The episode ends on unsubscribes: why inviting people to leave is a feature, not a risk.

Episode 105: How to Take a Sabbatical

Nick and Kai walk through how to take a real sabbatical as a freelancer, using Nick’s upcoming month in Japan as the working case. Nick booked the trip accidentally in March after finding enough airline miles for a round-trip business class ticket to Narita, and spent the following nine months managing client expectations. The episode covers the mechanics: how far in advance to tell clients, how to sequence billing before handing over the sabbatical work plan, and how a 15-hour time zone gap changes what “available” actually means.

Episode 104: How to Say "No" to Clients

The episode is about how to push back on client requests, from egregious contract terms to gradual scope creep. Nick and Kai open with a roleplay of a ridiculous contract clause to show the mechanics of a professional no. They then move into how consulting relationships drift out of scope over time and what to do when they do.

Episode 103: How to Have a Good Phone Call

Nick and Kai walk through what makes a business phone call work, covering prep, structure, and follow-through. The central argument is that calls exchange information faster than email or Slack, and the discipline to run them well is a learnable skill, not a natural one.

Episode 102: Reading, Writing, Doing

Nick and Kai answer a reader question about balancing educational consumption with doing. They compare their reading systems (Nick’s LIFO book stack versus Kai’s problem-focused sprint reading lists) and cover how they extract value from books through annotation and indexing. Both treat reading and implementation as a loop: what you build tells you what to read next.

Episode 101: Speaking at Local Meetups

Speaking at local meetups is a practical outreach tool for freelancers and consultants: low-stakes audience, direct access to potential clients, and a path to building a speaking portfolio. Nick and Kai cover starting a meetup from scratch when none exists in your niche, recording every talk cheaply with consumer gear, and small logistical moves that build standing with organizers. Both treat the recording as non-negotiable, since conference organizers and clients routinely ask for speaking samples.

Episode 100: Finally, a Legitimate Podcast

Episode 100 opens with banter about checks, payment apps, and food before turning to business. Nick and Kai work through what they miss about having a day job (clear career progression, guilt-free time off, paycheck stability), then trace how Draft Revise evolved from A/B testing contractor work to C-level design consulting. The episode closes on a Thanksgiving note and a year-end review practice Kai uses: two lists, one for wins and one for what to change, with the second list feeding systems rather than resolutions.

Episode 99: The Actual Doing of the Thing

This episode tackles the mindset gap between planning and executing in a solo or consulting business. Nick and Kai work through why overthinkers stay stuck and what it actually takes to ship consistently. Along the way they cover concrete tactics: impact/effort scoring, calendar blocking, and batching small tasks.

Episode 98: Books We've Read Recently

Nick and Kai trade book picks across business, fiction, design, food, and comics, covering roughly a dozen titles between them. Along the way they get into how each actually reads nonfiction and why most business books are padded past their natural length.

Episode 97: Positioning: How Specialized Should You Be?

Nick and Kai define positioning as choosing a target market and deciding how you want to be known within it, separate from your specialization (discipline) and the expensive problem you solve. They work through how narrow is too narrow, why outcome-framed positioning beats input-framed, and why changing your positioning should feel like running a marketing experiment rather than making a defining business commitment.

Episode 96: Shipping Physical Goods

Nick and Kai compare notes on running physical-product businesses: Nick shipping his book Cadence and Slang since 2009, Kai from his eBay days selling Magic cards and iPhones. They cover Media Mail rates, the address validation gap for international orders, and the policy decisions forced by returned packages. The episode closes on why physical goods still belong in a consulting practice even when digital delivery is cleaner.

Episode 95: 💰⚓ How To Use Price Anchoring As A Consultant

Nick and Kai spend the episode talking about food, mostly the weird end of it. They go from edible insects to Icelandic fermented shark to pho scarcity in Chicago to the cult of Harold’s Chicken Shack, with no business content in this stretch of the show.

Episode 94: How to follow up with clients after a project

Nick and Kai walk through how to keep client relationships alive after a project ends. Nick emails every past client every three months with no pitch and no agenda, and treats referrals as the main thing worth looking for. The episode covers tools, cadence, and why a written system is what makes the process actually stick.

Episode 93: Webinar Quickstart Guide

Nick and Kai walk through using webinars as a broadcasting tool for consultants: when to start, how to structure them, and how to turn attendees into one-on-one sales conversations. They cover tool choice (Crowdcast), CTA strategy, wiring attendance data back to your email provider, and what to do when attendance starts dropping.

Episode 92: Referrals From Past Clients and Teams

Nick introduces the ‘dandelion client’ concept: when a project fails and the team gets fired, they scatter to different companies, leaving you with contacts at seven or eight places instead of one. The episode covers how to maintain relationships with everyone on a project team, how to handle returning clients without skipping your intake process, and the practical CRM habits that turn past project contacts into future work.

Episode 91: Welcome Packet Overview

Nick Disabato and Kai Davis walk through the welcome packet, a PDF sent to qualified prospects before any sales call. They cover when to build one, what goes in it, and how it functions as a gatekeeper that surfaces bad-fit leads before they waste anyone’s time. The conversation runs from the basic structure through specific lessons both have learned running the format for years.

Episode 90: A Single Shot of Bourbon

Nick and Kai walk through what they each do after a proposal gets turned down. Kai’s process runs from recording prospect calls to logging rejection reasons in a CRM and reviewing them in aggregate; Nick’s is lighter on follow-up sequences and heavier on staying visible in person and updating his process after each loss.

Episode 89: Closed Doors

Nick is switching the A/B Testing Manual from always-on to closed enrollment, opening for roughly one week at a time, a few times a year. The episode covers his reasoning for the change, how he plans to capture leads during closed periods, and the persistent problem that customers keep treating the course as a book when the real product is a 5.5-hour video course.

Episode 88: Speaking from the Right Dictionary

Nick and Kai work through what it takes to reposition a consulting business toward a single industry, with Nick’s own move from SaaS CRO to e-commerce CRO as the running example. They cover when to make the switch, how to treat old content, and the fastest ways to learn a new market’s language. Nick also says publicly he’s tracking around $250k/year and wants to reach $500k without adding headcount.

Episode 87: Please Don't Buy a Prada Shirt

Nick and Kai work through price anchoring using luxury retail as the model. Nick shows how publicized low-priced goods, a $300 Prada t-shirt or a $10 Apple cable, make premium offerings feel proportionate, then maps that logic onto his consulting product ladder. Kai adds a practical warning: underprice your entry product and clients will use it as the anchor for everything else you sell.

Episode 86: When Should You Offer a Money-Back Guarantee?

Nick and Kai work through money-back guarantees for both consulting services and info products, arguing that the real goal is risk reversal and a refund is just one tactic for it. They cover contract language, how to handle refund requests when they arrive, and conditional guarantee structures for courses. The episode runs from pre-sales objection handling all the way to what actually belongs in a master services agreement.

Episode 85: The Dreaded Price Hike

Nick and Kai walk through the signals that tell you it’s time to raise your rates: closing 100% of your deals, colleagues saying you’re undercharging, major client wins, a growing mailing list. Nick makes the case for pricing at the high end of the market and explains the psychology behind why higher prices make clients assume higher returns. The episode also covers how to handle existing retainer clients when your prices go up, and a tactic for raising your effective hourly rate without changing what you advertise.

Episode 84: Educational Products: Creating Your First

Nick and Kai walk through what a first info product should look like for a freelancer or consultant: small, fast to produce, and priced between $25 and $50. They cover the two main formats Nick recommends (a focused 40-50 page mini book or a contrarian industry critique), why more content does not mean more value, and how pricing gaps in a product ladder affect whether buyers move up to higher-priced offers. The episode closes on medium choice: pick text, audio, or video based on where you already have a skill advantage.

Episode 83: Podcast Equipment: The Travel Rig

Nick walks through his ~$1,000 travel podcast rig piece by piece: two Shure Beta 87A supercardioid mics, a Zoom H6 recorder, cables, adapters, and a Klein Tools bag to hold it all. The episode also covers Kai’s tactic of using podcast interviews to attract clients, and ends on why spending real money on gear up front tends to be cheaper per year than buying cheap and replacing.

Episode 82: Why Aren't We Making More Money?

Nick Disabato and Kai Davis answer listener Max McCow’s question about why they aren’t making more money. They each diagnose concrete weaknesses in their own businesses, from Nick’s sparse launch calendar and missing entry-level product to Kai’s fear of scaling and habit of undercharging, and they work through why the growth path past $250K in solo consulting has no obvious map.

Episode 81: Should You Offer a Free Call?

Nick and Kai both argue against free ‘pick your brain’ calls: without a fee, prospects don’t prepare, ghost appointments, and ignore the advice. The episode covers their own intake processes, including paid call pricing, pre-call questionnaires, and the rule that preparation time should match call length.

Episode 80: Self-Care

Nick and Kai answer a listener question about maintaining a balanced lifestyle while running solo businesses. They cover calendar discipline, non-standard work schedules, a dedicated savings buffer for burnout, physical self-care, time tracking, and the risk of accidentally turning hobbies into work.

Episode 79: Recurring Revenue

Nick and Kai work through how independent consultants can build recurring revenue, using Draft Revise and Kai’s podcast outreach service as live examples. The core of the episode is a four-criteria framework Kai proposes for evaluating recurring offerings, followed by a detour into selling fixed-scope weekly sprints as a cash-flow-adjacent alternative.

Episode 78: Whale Clients

Nick and Kai cover whale clients, consultants who end up with one client consuming the majority of their time and income. They work through the dependency trap, the boiling frog problem of slow over-reliance, and the practical steps to stay solvent and visible if that client walks.

Episode 77: One Single Fact About Olive Oil That Will Absolutely Shock You

Nick and Kai use Zingerman’s deli in Ann Arbor as a case study for why consultants and freelancers should sell educational products rather than give everything away free. The conversation covers how a paid guide signals authority, creates a product ladder entry point, and moves buyers from unaware of a problem to ready to purchase a solution. They work through five concrete reasons info products belong in a service business, including a gap Kai admits in his own Podcast Outreach book.

Episode 76: Kai Buys a Single-Estate Gesha Microlot

Nick and Kai spend the entire episode on tangents before their stated topic (info products). The conversation moves from document-scanning workflow and an IRS delivery trick through Italian espresso culture and a full breakdown of first/second/third wave coffee, then lands on the state of tea retail in the US and why Nick thinks American tea culture is largely a mess.

Episode 75: Writing, Publishing, and Daily Emails

Nick and Kai compare their newsletter publishing frequencies: Nick publishes weekly across Draft Letters and Revised Weekly, while Kai switched to a daily newsletter roughly three months ago. Kai walks through what changed after the switch, including list churn, content sourcing, and reader engagement. They end up making the case that daily publishing, done consistently, signals expertise in a way weekly cannot.

Episode 74: De-Risking the Cthulhu

A listener asks whether Nick and Kai have moved from consulting to SaaS. They treat it as a de-risking question and spend most of the episode on why SaaS growth is much slower than expected, why passive income is a myth, and why personal happiness is a better target than revenue growth.

Episode 73: Best Buyers

Nick and Kai work through Chet Holmes’ best-buyer concept from The Ultimate Sales Machine: within any large market, a much smaller subset of buyers are worth focusing on, and tuning your marketing to that group makes it far easier for the right people to self-identify. The episode covers how product ladders create a natural path to spotting those buyers, how to segment them in email software, and why a handful of repeat, high-value customers can account for most of a business’s revenue.

Episode 72: Skip Steps 1 & 3

Recorded May 11, 2017, this Q2 planning episode has Nick and Kai laying out their 90-day goals, then diverging sharply on whether five-year plans have any value, before landing on habit formation and measurement as the practical ground beneath any goal. Nick is writing a book, Kai is rebuilding WR Audience as a live case study and writing a book on freelancer email. The back half is effectively a practical discussion about willpower, environmental design, and tracking the one metric that precedes the outcome you want.

Episode 71: How do you write more as a freelancer or consultant?

Nick and Kai walk through how they each structure their writing time, what makes professional writing readable, and why publishing frequently beats holding drafts until they feel ready. Nick guards his mornings for writing only and notices a cognitive shift after lunch that makes client calls easier but writing almost impossible. The core argument is that building a publishing practice, not just a writing practice, is what makes a consultant visible and authoritative.

Episode 70: What do you do if a prospect stops responding after you send a proposal?

The episode is mostly about what to do when a prospect goes quiet after receiving a proposal or payment link. Nick and Kai both treat proposal writing as a last resort, preferring productized consulting that routes prospects straight to a payment decision. They walk through follow-up sequences, paid discovery sessions as an earlier qualification gate, and the ‘choice of yeses’ framing from Alan Weiss.

Episode 69: Dear Savvy Entrepreneur

Episode 69 is a loose, largely unscripted milestone episode where Nick and Kai goof off more than they advise. Embedded in the rambling are a few concrete observations: Nick’s framework for naming procrastination tasks, his approach to getting contractors to commit, and Kai’s customer service logging system.

Episode 68: The First Thing Bought

Nick and Kai debate where to start a consultant’s product ladder: Kai makes the case for $19-$49 entry products that get clients comfortable buying before they hit higher price points, while Nick starts at $50 and refuses to run discounts, arguing that cheap prices and sales signal contractor rather than consultant. Both agree the first product should be built from existing material, stay coherent with service offerings, and treat the checkout form as a habit worth training.

Episode 67: Making Retainers Work

Nick and Kai discuss retainer engagements for freelancers and consultants: what makes them work, what makes them go sideways, and when to skip them entirely. The episode covers scope creep, whale client risk, how to structure high-touch retainers, and a simpler alternative where consistent follow-up with past clients generates repeat project work without the complications of an ongoing retainer.

Episode 66: Travel Time is Sacred Time

Nick opens furious at the Chase Sapphire Reserve’s 100,000-mile signup bonus, which has flooded United partner award seats and may force him to pay cash for long-haul flights. The bulk of the episode is travel craft: what to pack, how to protect vacation time from mundane errands, Nick’s pre-trip research ritual, and who is actually worth traveling with.

Episode 65: How to Fill Your Client Pipeline (and What to Focus on This Month)

Nick and Kai answer the question of how to fill a client pipeline in one day starting from zero clients. Nick walks through what he actually did after losing two clients: building a product flowchart to find gaps, launching a new $250 service, and doing outreach. Kai adds the case for tight positioning, reactivating past relationships, and generating ‘referable moments’ to get deal flow moving.

Episode 64: How Do You Work with Large Internal Teams?

Nick and Kai answer a reader question about working with large internal teams as a consultant. Both make the case for a single point of contact and approval authority, negotiated before the engagement starts and written into the contract. The episode covers communication boundaries, team politics, and the self-confidence required to hold those terms when clients push back.

Episode 63: How Do You Move from 90% Client Work to 100% Products?

The episode takes a listener question about moving from 90% client work to 100% products and mostly deflates the premise. Nick and Kai argue that product businesses still demand emotional labor, customer support, and high-touch work. The practical portion covers how client work feeds product content, how to carve out 10 hours a week for writing, and how to calculate a revenue target that lets you drop clients.

Episode 62: Pruning a Very Old Bonsai Tree

Nick and Kai work through a listener question about when to kill off profitable but misaligned service offerings in a solo consultancy. They cover how to read signals, numeric and otherwise, to decide which lines of business to cut, and close on whether a solo practice should optimize for revenue or quality of life.

Episode 61: Why It Is the Way It Is

Nick runs through his UX reading list, from Kim Goodwin’s thousand-page Designing for the Digital Age down to Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, then the conversation shifts to proving the economic impact of design work. Nick and Kai use the IDEO shopping cart story as a frame for how questioning baseline assumptions produces better consulting outcomes.

Episode 60: Copy Everything Kai Does

Nick and Kai work through how to filter business advice, what to take seriously, and why deliberate refusals give a small business character. They sort advice into categories, rank them by usefulness, and use Hot Doug’s and Aesop as examples of businesses that ignored obvious best practices to their advantage.

Episode 59: Pig 5 Syndrome

Nick and Kai open with a joke about ‘make money online’ drowning in Google results, then use it to work through why a crowded market is a good sign and what to look for when sizing one up. The second half is about refining a product after launch: what questions to ask customers, how to avoid chasing problems that don’t exist, and how to win back churned subscribers by fixing what they actually complained about.

Episode 58: Parting Ways With Clients

The episode is about ending client relationships from both sides: getting fired, doing the firing, and the gray zone where both parties just stop feeling it. Nick and Kai work through how to read the warning signs, how to handle the exit cleanly, and why letting one client grow into a whale puts you at the mercy of their decisions.

Episode 57: Intro to Productized Consulting

Nick and Kai walk through productized consulting: what it actually is (fixed price, scope, and delivery), why it matters, and how to build your first offering. The episode covers Nick’s own DraftRevise setup, Kai’s iterative path from SEO audits to podcast outreach, and concrete steps for consultants who want to stop writing proposals.

Episode 56: Make Money Online Mailbag: This Is Your Fault

A mailbag episode where Nick and Kai work through listener questions on qualifying clients, premium pricing, speaking engagements, affiliate marketing, and client gifts. Several concrete frameworks surface across the answers: a two-step intake process, price anchoring with a high-end offering, and a 4-to-1 content-to-pitch ratio.

Episode 55: Customer Service as a Consultant

Nick and Kai frame consulting as customer service, starting from Paul Ford’s essay arguing the web’s core question is ‘why wasn’t I consulted?’ They work through what that means practically: handling complaints, staying professional on bad days, managing unreasonable requests, and knowing when to fire a client.

Episode 54: Nü-Positioning

Nick and Kai walk through how they’ve each repositioned their businesses, always toward a narrower focus, and why that narrowing consistently produces more income and more client respect. The second half tackles a listener question about what to do when your work feels qualitative or hard to tie to dollars, and both argue there’s always a business reason behind a hire, you just have to find it.

Episode 53: Conversion Rate Optimizing the Conversion Rate Optimizer

Nick and Kai spend the episode working through Nick’s 2017 plan to grow the A/B Testing Manual by tightening every stage of his funnel, from traffic acquisition down to the pitch sequence. Kai applies a four-question framework (attract, subscribe, buy, repeat-buy) to Nick’s specific setup and produces a stack of concrete fixes. The episode ends with Kai pointing out that Nick’s 3,700 Cadence and Slang buyers have never been emailed about the A/B Testing Manual or Revised Weekly.

Episode 52: One Year of Making At Least, Like, Twelve Bucks Online

Nick and Kai review 2016 and set goals for 2017, mixing business targets with personal ambitions. Kai walks through the whitelist system he uses to filter opportunities against a fixed annual goal list, and both assess where the podcast stands after its first year. The conversation ranges across sous vide turkey, sausage technique, a maggot-induced garbage can fire, and Nick’s shaving situation.

Episode 51: How Do You Develop a Voice

Nick and Kai work through what it actually means to develop a distinctive voice as a writer or independent worker. The conversation moves from the standard advice (read Strunk and White, be a good communicator) to the harder truth: voice comes from vulnerability, accumulated life experience, and a willingness to publish things that feel risky. They use the ‘Most Wanted Song / Most Unwanted Song’ experiment and a story about Nick’s book getting someone berated in a bar to make the case that a polarizing voice beats a palatable one.

Episode 50: Dirk's Friday Fresh Fish Flash

Nick and Kai use Dirk’s Fish and Seafood Shop in Chicago as a case study in email marketing that actually works. Most newsletters are indistinguishably bland, and the fix isn’t better design: it’s a confident, unself-conscious point of view. Dirk Fusik’s Weekly Fresh Fish Flash is Nick’s only remaining email subscription because Dirk writes like nobody’s watching.

Episode 49: How You Track down Your Number 1 Skill to Start off Your Consultant Business

A listener asks how to identify a number one skill before starting a consulting business. Nick and Kai both push back on the framing: the real question is what expensive problem your target market needs solved, not which skill you already have. They cover how-to guides as market validation signals, copying and combining services as a path to building offerings, and why a polarizing voice matters more than any specific technical ability.

Episode 48: Getting Unstuck When You Feel Stuck

Nick and Kai work through what to do on days when nothing gets done: why you stall, how to get out of it, and the guilt spiral that hits when deadlines slip. The episode starts with Nick’s advice to step away from all screens and Kai’s reframe of procrastination as forgetting who you are. It ends with a case for staying small: not having an audience that expects things of you is what keeps the job fun.

Episode 47: How To Deal With Constraints When Consulting

Nick and Kai work through constraints as a concept in consulting, covering the external limits clients impose (time, budget, tools, human resources, knowledge) and constraints deliberately applied to open up new approaches. They discuss how to surface constraints through client onboarding, why roadmapping sessions matter before an engagement starts, and how clients are reliable at naming a problem but poor at picking the right solution.

Episode 46: It's The Economy, Stupid

Nick and Kai walk through how independent consultants can keep their businesses intact when the economy turns bad. They cover financial basics, why specialists survive downturns better than generalists, and why the craft of business, finding wallet-out customers, understanding client problems, is more durable than any specific skill you practice.

Episode 45: Kai Buys a Tent

Kai recaps his first Burning Man, starting with a last-minute tent purchase at a Fred Meyer’s two hours from the gate after his group changed plans without telling him. The conversation covers how the burn strips status signals, forces adaptation to shared conditions, and left Kai with loneliness as a named problem to address back home. Nick and Kai use it to ask why genuine adult community is so hard to build once college-era spontaneous friendship is gone.

Episode 44: Risky Business

Nick and Kai work through what risk means in a consulting engagement, from the buyer’s side and the seller’s side. Nick frames risk as spending money when the return is unclear or distant, with examples ranging from a $12,000 Mac Pro to a $450 plugin he bought without hesitation because $20k was already in hand. Both argue that case studies, outcome-focused positioning, and asking ‘how does your business make money?’ before any engagement are what move a consultant from risky bet to trusted advisor.

Episode 43: nickd Buys a Dog

Nick adopted Basil, a McNab dog (border collie-black lab mix), after five years of wanting a dog and being blocked by his old apartment’s no-pet policy. The episode covers his shelter-first criteria, the foster-to-adopt trial that sealed the deal in six days, Basil arriving overweight and non-food-responsive, and how Nick restructured his calendar and travel schedule around owning a dog.

Episode 42: The Problem, She Is Forever Expensive

Nick and Kai work through what makes a business problem ‘expensive’: the client knows it exists, can roughly quantify what it’s costing, and hasn’t fixed it anyway, usually from fear of knock-on effects or lack of the right internal resources. The episode maps the consultant’s role in that gap: clients identify the pain, consultants propose and execute solutions once they understand the shape of it. The second half is practical advice on how to find expensive problems worth building a practice around.

Episode 41: This Episode Will Be Delivered in March 2017

Nick and Kai cover the mechanics and pitfalls of pre-orders for info products, using Nick’s A-B Testing Manual launch and Kai’s traffic manual as live case studies. They walk through a full launch sequence, why scope discipline matters before you take a single dollar, and how a dead pre-order can tell you not to build something at all.

Episode 40: Don't Be the Bottom

Nick and Kai explain why they refuse to work through recruitment services, white labelers, and third-party agencies. Every intermediary between a consultant and client adds communication friction and reliably produces lower-quality engagements. They close with the alternative: strong positioning, articulating the expensive problems you solve, and building an audience through guest blogs and podcasts.

Episode 39: Thoughts on Products

Nick and Kai make the case that books and info products are authority tools for consultants, not income replacements, and that SaaS is a trap most consultants walk into too early. The right sequence is consulting first (clients pay you for market validation), small products second, and SaaS only after deep, earned understanding of the expensive problem your market actually has.

Episode 38: Pricing Your Services

Nick and Kai walk through how they set, raise, and defend prices for both consulting services and information products. Nick traces DraftRevise from $650/month to $9,000/quarter; Kai explains how switching target markets let him double his retainer rate overnight. The running argument is that the first price is almost always too low, that price signals quality to buyers who have no other information, and that discounting rate rather than scope costs both money and credibility.

Episode 37: The A/B Testing Manual

Nick walks Kai through the A/B Testing Manual, his third book and first PDF-only product, built from lessons he’s been serializing in his Revised Weekly newsletter. The episode covers why he’s structuring it as a three-tier product, how it replaces Revise Express as a standalone offering, and what he’s actually scared about shipping.

Episode 36: How You Signify To People What You Do

Nick and Kai walk through how they describe their work to different audiences, and why the same job title needs different words depending on who’s asking. The conversation moves from social code-switching to the specific language that signals consultant status over contractor status, and ends on the relationship-game logic behind getting out of the house.

Episode 35: Kai's non-planning v. Nickd's overplanning

Nick and Kai compare their planning styles: Nick’s rigorous, minute-by-minute structure against Kai’s ‘simmer’ method, where inputs accumulate quietly over months before a sudden burst of action. They use Copenhagen travel and Kai’s Hawaii move as concrete examples of how the same outcome (getting things done) can come from very different visible behaviors. Both land on the same conclusion: understand your own process, own it, and stay open to what people around you do differently.

Episode 34: Impostor Syndrome

This episode is about imposter syndrome and the habit of talking yourself out of opportunities before anyone else gets a chance to say no. Nick and Kai work through their own histories of self-disqualification, from passing up speaking gigs and school programs to three consecutive Burning Man no-shows. The fix they land on: show up anyway, skip waiting for an invitation, and see what happens.

Episode 33: Setting Healthy Boundaries

Nick and Kai role-play two client boundary scenarios (weekend work demands, a 4am site-down call) then dissect what makes those conversations go well or badly. The episode is a practical guide to setting communication expectations at the start of an engagement, holding them under pressure, and ending relationships that can’t be renegotiated.

Episode 32: Three Rotting Rutabagas

Nick and Kai use Chicago restaurant stories as a lens for consulting business lessons, moving from a beloved bar’s sudden closure to constraint-heavy kitchens that punch above their weight. The core thread is how to handle failure without freaking out publicly, with a side debate on where useful vulnerability ends and client-repelling distress begins.

Episode 31: What Nick Does

Nick Disabato runs DraftRevise, a retainer A/B testing service under his consultancy Draft, and explains how his process shifted from solo heuristic reviews to research-driven work combining heat maps, Google Analytics, and jobs-to-be-done customer interviews before any test runs. He covers how he qualifies clients, why he refuses to use tests to settle internal design debates, and what it means to treat A/B testing as a design process rather than a marketing tactic.

Episode 30: What Kai Does

Kai Davis walks through what his digital outreach consulting practice actually looks like day-to-day: a research-heavy setup phase, a pile of ancillary work clients don’t anticipate (positioning, post-placement funnels, mock podcast run-throughs), and the persistent difficulty of proving ROI on placements that may not convert for months. Nick and Kai dig into why doing less, faster beats thoroughness for its own sake when you’re a two-person shop.

Episode 29: How To Prep Your Clients For Your Travel

Nick and Kai walk through the practical realities of maintaining client work while traveling: how to set expectations before you leave, what work actually survives the trip, and why the fear of everything falling apart is mostly unfounded. The episode covers communication cadence, time zone negotiation, inbox delegation, and the hard lesson that productivity drops more than you expect.

Episode 28: How To Travel Practically Anywhere As A Consultant

Nick and Kai cover their end-to-end system for air travel: picking carriers and airports, packing light enough to always carry on, and moving through foreign cities without a cab. The episode draws on Nick’s frequent long-haul travel and Kai’s recent first trip to Europe, which opened with Kai landing in Barcelona when his friends lived in Madrid.

Episode 27: The Pepsi Gravitational Field: Make Money Offline

Recorded live at Brennan Dunn’s conference in Sweden, Nick and Kai bring Shopify expert Kurt Elster on stage to walk through marketing automation for independent consultants. The conversation moves from basic drip campaigns to full intake systems that qualify leads before they ever reach the phone, with practical tool stacks and real conversion numbers throughout.

Episode 26: Marketing and Sales Pages: Artisanal, Hand Crafted, Locally Sourced, Farm to Browser

Nick and Kai break down how to write marketing and sales pages that actually close, from opening thesis to objection killing to price. They cover page anatomy, where writers chronically underinvest (almost always objections), and why the whole thing starts with copying the customer’s own words back at them.

Episode 25: Freebie Offerings: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Nick and Kai work through what makes a freebie offering convert for consultants: it should be short, solve one small problem, and align tightly with your positioning. They trace the product ladder from freebie to first paid offer to higher-ticket work, and close with Toby Maloney’s cocktail recipe thread on LTH Forum as a case study in the kind of generosity that builds long-term trust.

Episode 24: Passive Income: Fallacies and Truths

Nick and Kai record together from Nick’s Chicago office and spend most of the episode pulling apart the idea that passive income is low-effort. What actually sits underneath a selling product: market research, audience building, a drip email sequence, and ongoing iteration on the sales funnel, none of which stops once the product is live. Just Fucking Ship by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman is the episode’s sponsor, and both hosts recommend it as the practical fix for stalling on a product idea.

Episode 23: Incorporation! Taxes! Insurance! These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.

This episode covers the mandatory infrastructure of running an independent consultancy: hiring an accountant, lawyer, and bookkeeper; choosing a business structure; separating business and personal finances; and getting the right insurance. Nick and Kai share their own setups as personal anecdotes and remind listeners throughout to find qualified professionals in their own jurisdiction rather than treat the episode as legal or tax advice.

Episode 22: Masterminds: A book club for the eldritch horrors of running a business

Nick and Kai walk through what a mastermind actually is, how their group formed after each of them found themselves without a professional community, and what they’ve built over two years. They cover tools, group size, member selection, governance, and how to start one from scratch.

Episode 21: nickd Buys A House

Nick just bought a three-story house in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood after eight months of searching, and the episode opens with 20-plus minutes of move-in disasters before pivoting to concrete steps independent consultants need to qualify for a mortgage. The closing third is Nick explaining why he bought at all: to lock into a community he has spent years building, not to flip a property.

Episode 20: Periodically Yelling for Profit

Nick and Kai walk through paid newsletters as a product consultants can add below their main service offering. Nick’s A/B testing newsletter Revise Weekly is the central case study: seven subscribers at $50/month, $350 MRR at launch. They cover when to start one, how to think about per-issue value, and how subscriber questions become future content.

Episode 19: Grist for the Mill

Nick and Kai argue that using any piece of content only once is wasted efficiency; the same material can be transcribed, chunked, repackaged, and resold across many formats. The episode covers the full stack: rev.com transcriptions at roughly $1/minute, copy editors for cleanup, splitting larger works into modular assets, and bundling curated collections for sale. The Grateful Dead’s discography, 200-plus albums built mostly from live recordings and curation rather than new studio work, is the closing frame for what this looks like at scale.

Episode 18: What's Your Favorite Positioning?

Nick and Kai break down what positioning is: who you work for, what problem you solve, and what discipline you bring. They cover why consultants resist niching down, the common mistake of describing yourself by tools rather than client outcomes, and how positioning filters out bad clients and distracting ideas alike. The episode draws on their own experience cutting service offerings and on students from Brennan Dunn’s W Freelancing Clients cohort.

Episode 17: Swimming Up the Entropy Chute

Nick and Kai use a thought experiment, what would your job look like the day before ENIAC, to trace how completely their consulting work depends on computers and specific platforms. The conversation turns practical: what happens when any tool, channel, or market position disappears overnight, and what assets actually survive that kind of disruption.

Episode 16: Choose Your Own (Negotiation) Adventure

Nick and Kai walk through negotiation as it applies to freelance contracts and salary conversations, covering what clauses to defend, how to structure your thinking around money, and how to project authority even when your position is weak. Nick handles the contract and process side; Kai adds a three-number model, explains BATNA, and argues for asking questions rather than answering them.

Episode 15: Working With Experts

Nick and Kai answer a listener who wonders whether two coaches ever consult experts themselves. The answer is yes, but mostly through peer masterminds, domain specialists for specific projects, and qualified professionals rather than formal business coaches. They work through what separates an expert from a contractor, why every independent business demands trial and error, and use a $1,000/hour thought experiment to sharpen when delegation makes sense.

Episode 14: MMO Mailbag 1: Kai on Podcast Outreach

Kai explains podcast tours as a structured campaign of guest appearances across multiple shows to reach a defined target market, similar to a book tour. He covers how to cold-pitch hosts, how to build authority through volume, and how to convert listeners into email subscribers using dedicated landing pages tied to each appearance.

Episode 14: MMO Mailbag 2: Establishing Prerequisites

Nick and Kai walk through the specific criteria each has developed for client intake, from traffic minimums for A/B testing to asking about product margin before taking on e-commerce outreach clients. They cover rejection ratios in practice, what to offer people you turn away, and why being explicit about who you work with turns rejected prospects into referral sources.

Episode 14: MMO Mailbag 3: Nick on Out-Pricing the Competition

Nick records this episode into Kai’s voicemail after Kai misses their scheduled session. Between automated system interruptions, Nick works through a mailbag question about competing with cheap designers on 99designs, arguing that his actual differentiation is mandatory research and strategy, not better-looking pictures.

Episode 13: Your Incremental Steaming Abomination

Nick and Kai work through product ladders: a set of interrelated offerings at different price points, all aimed at the same client and the same expensive problem. Nick’s own business is the running case study, his DraftRevise service starts at $9,000 with nothing below it, and the conversation traces what a proper ladder from freebie to retainer looks like and why writing ability is the foundation every rung rests on.

Episode 12: Hiring and Working with an Assistant

Nick and Kai walk through what it actually looks like to hire and work with a personal assistant, from the initial fear of pulling the trigger to the 2-3 month onboarding grind before the time savings kick in. They cover building SOPs, vetting candidates on Craigslist, local vs. virtual assistants, and why hiring a friend is a bad idea.

Episode 11: “Go Back ‘Draft Evidence’ On Kickstarter Right Now”

Nick is about a week from launching a Kickstarter for “Draft Evidence,” a compiled book of his essays on running an independent bootstrap design business, with a $20,000 breakeven goal for printing and shipping. The episode pulls from Nick’s experience running his first Kickstarter in 2009 to cover what separates a successful campaign from a disaster, including reward structure, video, budgeting, and the emotional arc of a month-long campaign.

Episode 10: “The Importance of Research”

Nick and Kai walk through how research anchors their respective practices, UX design and outreach/PR, and why they both treat it as a non-negotiable condition of any engagement. The conversation covers practical methodology (passive interview recruitment, competitor backlink analysis, survey design) and broadens into a critique of Silicon Valley’s move-fast culture, with both arguing that small, deliberate businesses outperform VC-funded sprints for most people.

Episode 9: “A Week in the Job”

Nick and Kai walk through their actual daily routines and explain how they use Calendly to batch meetings and protect focused work time. The conversation shifts into a broader argument that there are no shortcuts in consulting: you show up, do the work, and raise your prices incrementally when clients tell you the value exceeds what they paid.

Episode 8: “Getting the Heck Out of Dodge”

Nick and Kai talk through the logistics and fear of taking vacations as solo consultants. Nick is days from a three-week trip to Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, his longest ever, structured across all three of his vacation types back to back. Both admit the fear of client fallout during time off is mostly self-imposed, with no actual client behavior to back it up.

Episode 7: “Are You Pineapple-Worthy?”

Nick and Kai walk through their client onboarding processes, from first contact through project kickoff, including the deliberate friction points each uses to filter out bad fits before money changes hands. The conversation extends to offboarding, gift-giving as relationship maintenance, and what it actually takes to run a full practice with a waiting list.

Episode 6: “On Writing a Book: Why Write a Book?”

Nick and Kai discuss writing the Independent Consulting Manual, a 270-page book produced by their 13-person mastermind group that earned about $37,000 in its first six weeks. Using Nick’s self-published Cadence and Slang as a reference point, they argue self-publishing beats traditional publishing on money and creative control. For consultants, they say, a book’s real payoff is authority and positioning, not just sales.

Episode 5: “Non-Horrible Business Right-Sizing”

Nick and Kai are both overbooked with no slack time, and use that as a starting point to question whether growing a business has to mean more clients, more revenue, or more staff. The conversation covers how to decide if growth is the right move at all, why pruning often has to come first, and how your social circle narrows as your business problems get more specific.

Episode 4: “Kai Buys a Pen”

The episode starts as a conversation about which pen to buy, takes a long detour through luxury goods (a $25,000 Swiss watch built to exact Apple Watch dimensions, a Patek Philippe pocket watch with a star-map complication estimated at $15 million at Sotheby’s), and lands on what premium brands teach consultants about questioning clients, building authority, and growing a practice.

Episode 3: “How We Got Started”

Nick and Kai trace their paths to independent consulting: Kai started flipping Magic cards on eBay in high school and later ran an iPhone resale business doing $40,000 a month before exiting after iOS 6 cratered the secondary market overnight; Nick bounced through agencies and full-time gigs before launching DraftRevise in 2013 after getting fired on New Year’s Eve 2009. The conversation settles on what they’d change, which books would have altered their trajectories, and why treating yourself as a business owner rather than a freelancer changes how clients treat you.

Episode 2: “Make Money Online”

Nick and Kai examine why ‘Make Money Online’ carries such negative baggage, tracing it to practitioners who prioritize fast cash extraction over genuine education. They draw a clear line between that extractive approach and what they and colleagues like Brennan Dunn do: give away substantive free material first, then offer paid products as an extension of that teaching. The episode closes with a longer conversation about defining success on your own terms rather than chasing a Lamborghini scorecard, including why people with $10 million in the bank are often miserable.

Episode 1: “Click Here to Download Your Free Chapter”

The first episode of Make Money Online. Nick Disabato (interaction designer, Draft) and Kai Davis (outreach consultant) introduce themselves and lay out the show’s premise: the slow, unglamorous work of running a solo consulting business. The conversation covers why neither of them wants to build an agency, the myth of overnight success, and how to evaluate a launch without shame-spiraling after a flop.

Episode 0: The Podcasting Experience

Nick Disabato and Kai Davis talk through podcast guesting as a client-acquisition channel for independent consultants. Nick covers how to find shows, pitch hosts, give a good interview, and improve over time. The throughline is that consistent practice on small niche podcasts beats chasing big audiences or waiting until you feel ready.

Sort of the proto first episode: Kai interviews Nick about being a podcast guest, recorded before the show existed.