“productizing yourself as a writer is very difficult in the beginning so the benefit of productizing yourself with with in creating some sort of digital product is that it is quote unquote infinitely scalable... if you're providing writing as a service it's a whole lot easier to find one person who's going to pay you 5 grand a month right rather than find a 100 people who are going to pay you 20 bucks a month”

Service first to $10-20K MRR, then productize — the barbell writing career

Two career paths in writing have opposite shapes. Service (ghost-writing, retainer copy) lets you hit $10-20K MRR fast with a handful of clients but caps near $30-50K before you need an agency. Productized (paid newsletter, books, courses) starts slow because you need volume, but ceiling is unbounded. The fastest stable career: service first to financial security, then reinvest into digital products. Once productized starts working, clients buying the product become new high-ticket service leads — the flywheel goes both ways.