Episode 1:“Click Here to Download Your Free Chapter”
Who are we? What is this? What gives us the right to run a podcast? This is horrifying.
Summary
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.
Highlights
- Both stayed solo by choice. When Draft Revise blew up, Nick fielded dozens of questions about when he’d hire a team to run A/B tests and become an agency. His answer was no.
- Kai’s friend assumed a growing business meant hiring a team and getting an office. Kai’s rebuttal: that’s one of many paths, not the definition of success.
- Nick says his job is 95% psychological. Most of it is convincing himself daily that he’s capable of being a good business owner, not just a good designer.
- Nick’s mailing list launched to 21 subscribers and is now three orders of magnitude larger.
- Kai evaluates launches with a plus/delta frame: what went right (plus), what to change next time (delta). He dropped ‘what went wrong’ entirely in favor of ‘what would I change.’
- Darius Kazimi has released several hundred projects and is famous for maybe four or five of them. Nick uses him as the example of someone who focuses on process rather than framing himself by his failures.
- Nick references Dennis DeSantis’s music production book, which has a chapter arguing you should accept that you’ll hate your work most of the time and will hate it slightly less once you ship it.
Read the transcript
I love making you laugh. It’s one of life’s pure joys. I hope we can keep laughter to a comparative minimum. It’s okay if laughter occurs. I will be laughing. You are laughing, right? I think we’re recording an episode right now. I think that’s what’s happening.
I’ve got a pair of thumb clippers or nail clippers next to me, and I’m just going to jab them into my palm whenever I feel like laughing. So we’ll have sobbing.
Don’t hurt yourself. That’s. That means you’re penalizing me for being funny. How dare you? How dare I be funny? Stab, stab, stab, stab. So, make money online. I think we’re actually recording the episode right now. I’m Nick DeSabato. You’re listening to Kai Davis. I’m the baritone. He’s the tenor. That’s how you can figure it out. I think that’s fair. I think that’s fair. I run an interaction design consultancy called Draft. I live in Chicago. I’m a designer and writer. I am most known for making product-based services for all of my consulting offerings and running the world’s most terrible mailing list. And I think that’s that’s all I need. You could go to draft. nu, but that’s on the show notes. It’s fine. We’ll just put we’ll put everything in the show notes The entire episode is in the show notes. We’re just going to transcribe the shit of the episode and put it in the show notes.
I’m Kai Davis. I’m the tenor. I write at waudience. com. I work as an outreach consultant. I help people get on podcasts, build relationships, and do awesome things online. And gosh, what am I best known for? Probably most recently, helping publish the Independent Consultant Manual and being the author of the Traffic Manual, both wonderful books that will help you do wonderful things online. Lots of manual. No transmissions. No automatics.
You have to do everything the long, hard, stupid way. And I feel like we’re going to talk about doing a lot of things the long, hard, stupid way on this podcast. It’s. Do you know what you’re doing with your business most of the time?
I frequently say to clients, I have no clue what I’m doing with my business.
People think that I know what I’m doing with my business. And I think that as consultants, we We’re literally paid to look like we sound authoritative, even though we don’t actually sound authoritative. I might even be sounding authoritative about how I’m not authoritative right now. And I want to assure you that I’m undermining myself. By doing that, I literally have no idea what I’m doing on a daily basis.
I think there’s an interesting duality there where, as consultants or experts, authorities, whatever word we want to throw at it, like we both do not know what we’re doing with our businesses. Like we don’t know what tomorrow holds. We don’t necessarily know what the product road map or what’s going to come down the pipeline is. But we also do have a knowledge of our field. So it’s not as if a client comes to us and is like, can you do this thing? And we’re like, I don’t know how to do that thing. It’s more like, well, I understand the technical proficiency and how to practice this and how to do it. But when it comes to growing our own business, We’re as in the dark as anyone else.
I have a very good sense of design. I know what constitutes good design. I know what constitutes kind of shades of gray design, which is the most interesting. Bad design is less interesting, although it’s funny. And I don’t have to sweat that problem. But what I do have to worry about is getting people in the door so that I can practice design. And do a good job of it. And so in the past couple of years, I’ve spent a lot of my time and effort geeking out on the business of running a consultancy. And treating myself well and treating my business in a way that that allows me to have good clients and live the life I really want. I think that’s a significant amount of difficulty and frankly almost dark magic that I have to deal with on a daily basis. I know that my business works, but I don’t really know how. There’s a lot of like human psychology stuff that you can kind of drill into. Like there’s the I don’t know if you saw that one. Like, it’s a New Yorker or a fireside cartoon or something like that, where there’s two scientists discussing this enormously complicated biological process. And right in the middle of it, all of these equations and stuff, it says, and then a miracle occurs, and dot, dot, dot. And you can drill into everything that we’re doing with our businesses. And then at some point, a miracle occurs and somebody decides to pay you. Or you actually deliver the kind of value that you Earned for the project, or you get a refer from somebody. Somebody could be referring me right now, and it could be the biggest project of my life, and I would have no idea about it. And that to me is magic. I don’t really know, there’s a lot out of my purview that doesn’t make clear sense to me. So I think a lot of this is going to be like attempting to explore that ground and figure out what that means for both of us, really.
Yeah, it’s the same perspective for me in my business. Like, if we think of, I’m trying to craft a metaphor on the fly here, but. If we think of the area we could see of our business, a lot of it is shrouded in a fog of war because, as you pointed out, referrals, clients showing up and deciding to hire us spontaneously, having that miracle insight. You can’t necessarily predict when and how those things are going to happen, but they’re happening out there. There’s just a small sphere that we directly can influence. How are we positioning ourselves? How are we presenting ourselves? How are we building a business that lets us lead the life we want to live? And beyond that, well, you could try to explore beyond it. You should definitely educate yourself on what strategies are out there, what systems are out there. In my mind, I just have it stuck as this: like the larger my purview, the larger area I could see of how my business operates, the more I learn is out there that I don’t truly understand.
Yeah, there’s a certain I’m going to be very very intellectually lazy for a moment. There’s a certain limitation that I encounter with Design where I know enough about typography and enough about color and enough about margins and enough about the way that people think when they’re looking at interfaces to perform my job sufficiently and deliver the kind of value that I need. But when it comes to business, I think you’re exactly right, Kai. Every time I fix, address a certain set of issues in my business, another set of issues presents itself. And so you get this ever-expanding frontier where it’s like, okay, well I address this with my business. Now, how do I now I’ve overbooked myself because my business worked too well. What do I do with that? How do I make myself more efficient? Okay, I did that. Now, how do I delegate more efficiently? How do I grow my rate while keeping my discretionary time constant or increasing, right? So that I can actually have free time to do either business development or additional writing. Thought leadership, as you will, and actually do something that’s meaningful to my job and make more of the job that I want. How do I make the career that Nick D wants more? It’s entirely selfish because I am a solo business. I have every right to be selfish. But yeah, I think there’s a lot there that can possibly be explored.
One of the most interesting encounters I had with a close personal friend about a year ago, I was telling him about how my business had grown and like how I was so excited. And he said something to me like That’s great. It’ll be so exciting once you hire a team and turn into a real business and have an office. And I’m like, wait, hold on, no. That doesn’t define what success is as a business owner or success for a business. That’s one of many possible paths. And you and I have both very intentionally chosen the path of We’re doing the solo. We’ve hired an assistant who works part-time. And beyond that, we want to keep it us. And the idea of like large-scale agency or have the office with the employees, just isn’t as attractive. And I think it’s a benefit to this approach where we’re able to say, well, what’s the business we want to craft? What’s the business that is the highest purpose of Nick or of Kai?
I actually got the exact same thing. When draft revise blew up two years ago, I got like multiple dozens of people asking me, so when are you going to hire people to run the A-B test for you? You can have an agency. And I like. The first time it happened, I was unable to actually restrain myself. And I was like, no, absolutely not. And I found a way to head off that question in a way that’s frankly much more polite in hindsight. But like, yeah, no, we’re both lone wolves. We’re both here to do solo businesses. And what it means to run a solo business is something that like We need to explore a lot for ourselves, I feel. Like it’s a personal decision, but there’s also kind of a set of paths that have been laid forward for you. I read a lot of other independent consultants, and I see a lot of my colleagues like, running solo businesses. And I’m like, okay, well, what are they doing? What’s good there? What can I take? And it’s almost like it’s like a buffet. You take like five things and ignore the other twenty-five things. And knowing which ones work for your values is tremendously challenging for me, at least.
And like there’s a process of experimentation there where you are able to pick up, try and then put down ideas. Concepts, theories, just as easily as you’re able to pick up a piece of clothing and try it on in a dressing room. Like, I’ve definitely adopted ideas into my business and then said, this doesn’t feel right. This isn’t how I want to run my business. And set it down. And so it’s this iterative growing process to figure out: well, what makes sense now? And what did I choose to adopt as a habit or a hobby or a practice that no longer makes sense?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Very much just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And I know that’s a very cliched thing to say, but I fail probably about 15 times for every time I succeed in something in business. And success may be arbitrary and subjective, but for me, I launched something two days ago and nobody bought it. And I haven’t gotten any bites back from it. I’m looking at this like Okay, well, is it just a high-touch thing that needs to take some time? Is it an actual failure? Did I not sell it effectively? Do I need to go back to the drawing board and relaunch it later? You do something and then you measure it, and then you figure out what to do next. And that process is iterative and accretive and very, very slow. And it’s much slower than what many of you, dear listeners, probably think of when you think of starting a business. You probably think that like you you get a bunch of venture capital and scale effectively and hire a bunch of people. And that’s what The success of in business. But, like, that is somebody else’s narrative that they have fed you. And it’s arbitrary. What the success in business is, is what makes you feel happy about what your job is and what you’re doing. You could measure it by impact. Okay, well, then impact makes you happy. You could measure it by revenue. Well, then, revenue makes you happy. You could measure it by the impact on your lifestyle, like Kai and I probably do. That’s what makes us happy. I consider an enormous like goal of my business to be checked off when I traveled to Japan last year. And I had the ability to do that, to just like take two weeks off and not have my clients fire me. It’s not necessarily a business goal, but the business fulfilled the goal, right? If I didn’t have draft, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.
Right, right. It gives you a platform for exploring and building Exactly what you want and exactly what you want to find in the future. And I think, like, there’s multiple narratives of how business is supposed to be done. You touched on one with you get a bunch of venture capital and then, ah, you’re IPO and you’re a billionaire. And another one is the overnight success. Like, maybe it’s a solo consultant or a Lone Wolf who shows up and is just suddenly successful. And what often is glossed over is The months or years that that person spent toiling in obscurity, toiling in their garage, shipping things that nobody bought or nobody expressed interest in. To get to the point where suddenly there was the thing that people really, really liked.
There’s an amazing talk by a guy named Darius Kazimi. I know you’ve heard it, Kai, but for the edification of the audience, and it’s. The first half of it is a talk called How I Won the Lottery. And he parodies every successful creative person’s talk. He started a lottery blog. He played the lottery every day. He built a community. And then he won the lottery. And isn’t that great? Here are the numbers that he used to win the lottery, and they’re completely useless to you, but you know, it took him a long time to get there. And Darius is in an interesting position because he’s released some several hundred projects to the Internet and is famous for maybe four or five of them. You know, if he framed himself in terms of his failure, then he would be balled up in the corner listening to Joy Division in the dark all day and be abjectly miserable. But he focuses on Both the successes and I feel the process. The process is what really marks it. You’re not running sprints, you’re running marathons when you’re doing this, and it’s not going to bear fruit for a long period of time. which discourages many, many people. Or frankly, all of us would probably be running businesses and having our own tiny publishing empires. And that’s never the case, you know. I keep coming.
I always use the metaphor of either diet or bodybuilding when it comes to building a business. That you don’t show up at the gym, lift weights once, and suddenly you’re ripped. You show up at the gym, you lift weights. You constantly fail at lifting weights and lifting heavier weights. Until one day you realize, oh, you’ve managed to put on some muscle. And you look back over the past three years and realize, oh, it was showing up every day and trying and failing and iterating and improving that got you to this point. People want the glory without wanting to acknowledge the work or without wanting to accept the hard work and failure that goes into it. Like, if we framed Darius, for example, as like 99. 9% of his projects have been failures and nobody cared about them, well, gee, that sounds terrible and scary. But the truth is, like. For every great blog post you write or every great product that you ship and people buy, there’s going to be a dozen in the archives that people didn’t care about and that you thought were the greatest thing on earth. Well, people just didn’t like it as much as you liked it, and that’s okay, and that’s sort of the natural process. It Again, to echo back to like the overnight success idea, there’s no such thing as a true overnight success. It’s showing up, it’s putting in the work, it’s learning, it’s iterating, it’s figuring out what your goals are as a business owner. And then just trying things and seeing, well, does this one work? Okay, it didn’t. What can I learn from this? I’m a huge fan of breaking down the success or failure of a project by looking at pluses and deltas. What went right, even if nobody bought the thing? And delta, the plus is what went right. The delta is okay, so what should we change next time we do this? So, throwing out the idea of saying what went wrong, instead saying, what do we want to change and what do we want to keep the same? And I think Just reframing something like a launch or a blog post in terms of what went good about this launch and what would I change next time I do this launch gives a person a much better perspective on it instead of, oh, nobody bought it, it sucked. Well, There obviously were some things that went well. What were those? Capture those. Remember those. And there are some things that could be improved on. Make note of those just like you’d make note of when you’re dieting or when you’re working out. What do I need to work on? What muscle is weak? What do I need to improve?
Yeah, I think that’s that’s all insanely valuable advice. A lot of it just, to be very clear, to put yourself in that mindset, you have to be able to detach yourself from your work and like let go of your ego about it. Because it’s not. your fault that something didn’t succeed. It’s frankly often the market’s fault. It’s frankly often like circumstance’s fault. It may be that you didn’t assess your market effectively enough, and we’ll probably get into this in future episodes about how to make something that people actually want. A lot of it is like just personal ego stroking that ends up getting put out there, and it doesn’t actually generous to an audience. It doesn’t create value effectively. But even if you do everything right in doing the research to assess something well and you put together this beautiful, well crafted launch, well, you’re stacking the deck in your favor, but that’s still no guarantee it’s actually going to succeed. And it’s not your fault that it didn’t succeed, but it is your fault if you take that and like pack up and go home. That is absolutely your fault. And nobody else is going to allow you to get into your job and demand a seat at the table but you. I tell everybody that my job is 95% psychological at this point. It’s telling myself that I am actually worthy enough to To do this on a daily basis and capable of not just being a good designer, but being a good business owner and a good consultant, and sometimes it’s very, very hard to do that. It’s a long, difficult path. You know, we could launch this podcast and nobody would listen to it. We’d probably have to retool it and relaunch it at some point.
But even if we launched and nobody listens, well, there’s so many valuable takeaways just from creating a thing and putting it out there. even if people don’t enjoy it, even if nobody listens to it. Like the process, the SOPs, the act of creating something makes it easier to create something the next time.
Yeah, exactly. Like you build this engine, and maybe, you know, this podcast or something else that I do, it won’t really pick up until. Several installments in, right? Like my mailing list, my first installment in my mailing list was garbage and it went out to 21 people. And now I have three orders of magnitude more people than that on my mailing list. And I’m very, very grateful for that. And you know, even just having the chance to bat these ideas back and forth, like that’s even though it happened theoretically in a vacuum in a Skype call that nobody’s going to listen to for a couple of weeks yet, like that I’m grateful for that. I’ll come out of my day saying, you know, I got to talk to Kai for an hour today, and that’s great. You know, like, I like talking to Kai. And even if no one cares and thinks it’s the world’s most garbage episode of all time, you have that and you can hold it close.
For some reason, I’m always stuck in talking in metaphors. And I think of it like cooking a dish. Like the first time you grab that the recipe book and try to make something, like a I Kocovin. And it might suck. It might be terrible. Like, you’re going to fuck it up. And that’s okay because Like the first time you do anything, it’s going to be hard. The first time you try to launch a business, launch a service, talk to a new client, cook something, practice a new hobby, play piano. You’re going to suck at it super hard, but that means the second time you do it, you’re going to suck at it a tiny bit less. And the third time, you’re going to kind of be okay at it. And the fourth, and the fifth, and the tenth, and the twentieth time, you’re going to be amazing at it. It’s focusing, I think, on that iterative improvement and building something that’s better piece by piece, day by day. That’s where people really succeed instead of getting caught in a shame spiral, a disappointment spiral of like, I did this thing, nobody liked it, I should give up. Well, you did a thing, nobody liked it. It doesn’t care that nobody liked it, you did a thing. Congratulations on doing a thing. Celebrate doing the thing, now do a second thing, now do a third thing, and get better at the act of doing a thing. It doesn’t really matter if people buy it, if people download it, if people pay you money for it. What matters is you’re getting into the habit of shipping the thing, writing the blog post, writing the article, sending out the email newsletter, and sending out the podcast episode. And over time, that leads to the better thing.
You’re just asymptotically sucking less. I mean, even Elon Musk says this, where he’s, you know, he comes into the day, the beginning of the day wrong, and he ends the day less wrong. And that’s how he frames it. And this is like one of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet, right? So I just feel courage is in short supply, right? In order to accept that you’re wrong in your heart of hearts, that’s that’s a Hard pill to swallow for a lot of people, for myself, or and knowing that you’re probably just going to come in and fuck up constantly. Like that’s it’s hard. It’s very very difficult.
Yeah, it could be anxiety inducing, it could be depression inducing and We’ll get into those topics in future episodes. But it definitely I mean, it’s hard. Building a business is hard. There’s no overnight successes. There’s no magic wands. There’s no miracles. What there are are systems and strategies you could follow and best practices you could adopt, pick up, try and put down and see if it’s a best practice for you and see in a year, well, are you better or not? Yeah.
Yeah. There’s an electronic music producer named Dennis DeSantis who wrote a book about music production that I’m reading right now. And one of the chapters is just like. You should accept that you’re just going to be miserable all the time because you’re going to hate your art, you’re going to hate your work, and you’re just going to hate it a little bit less when you ship it. And that’s it. And if you want to be. Happy all the time, don’t get into music making. And or don’t get into it as a profession. And I’m looking at that like, damn, dude. This is like not, but that’s real talk. Like, and that applies across the board. Yeah. I mean, you could just replace music making with owning a business. That’s it. You’re going to be miserable a lot of the time. And on that lovely note, I hope you are not so thoroughly discouraged that you do not listen to more episodes of Make Money Online because we’re going to explore all of that fun stuff, all the good stuff. There is good stuff within it. I love my job. I love it so fucking much. You have no idea. And I think Kai likes his job too. Do you like your job?
Oh my God. I say that I love my job and I’m going to keep on doing it until the day I don’t love it anymore. And then I’m going to go do something else I love. Let’s do that with this podcast. Yeah. We’re launching a new one tomorrow. Well, thank you, dear listener, for tuning in for episode one of Make Money Online.
Hooray, thank you. All right, we did it. Boom.
Notes
- “Then a miracle occurs.”
- “How I Won the Lottery” by Darius Kazemi.
- Elon Musk on being less wrong.
- Dennis DeSantis’s book that contains the quote about being miserable as a music producer.