I Am Worth Dollars
I engaged with Francis Pedraza in conversation yesterday and, as usual, it should have been recorded for the content was invaluable. Fortunately, God has gifted humans with something called memory.
I love writing. It can be stories, poems, essays, and so on. The problem is that it is extremely difficult to get a job writing now a days. The stereotype is that English Majors or writers tend to become teachers and sometimes journalists who write what others want them to write, not what they want to write. But Francis and I had this idea. What if I could convince one thousand people to pay me five dollars every month as a subscription in order to read my content. I would have a steady income of five thousand dollars a month. That is epic! Five thousand dollars to do what I love, to just write.
Now the first response people will say is that it is impossible. No, you’re wrong. Stephen King convinced people to pay him for his stories when he was a kid. A kid. And he did not even write original stories. He only wrote the stories he watched on television. And his friends payed him! Are you kidding? This idea can work. No, this idea will work. Effort over time: that is the formula. So, for those of you who do not believe in me pursuing this, I will talk to you in five years when I am living the dream and you are all living in mansions in Corona Del Mar with poor hearts and troubled minds.
So how do I do this? There are a few regular steps to take. The first is to dedicate five to ten minutes a day following people on Medium who write or follow similar content to my own. The second step is to write every day a story, poem, or essay. In other words, I need a network and I need content. That is it. That is really it. The rest will come.
Let us get into the business model. The most basic model is that I write exclusive content to people who pay me five dollars a month. This is my business. But, a little brainstorming will never hurt.
The first idea is to add a new, premium membership which is ten dollars a month. The catch for this membership: members may submit their own story ideas and I will write a story based off their very own ideas.
The second idea is to add a supreme membership which is fifteen dollars a month. With this, members can submit me their own writings and I will personally review, edit, and critique their work. Fifteen dollars for good critique. That is thousands of dollars cheaper than a college professor’s critque and they rarely provide good feedback. I will provide good feedback.
The third idea is to run the business through Slack. With Slack I can invite only those who have paid for the content. Then, I can divide the content into channels like #stories, #poems, #essays, #communityideas, #chat.
The fourth idea is to run the business through email. I like this one because it is so natural. Everybody already checks their email. There are no costs. You do not have to make a new account or download a new app. There will be minimum friction. If the member experience is frictionless then readers will interact with the content more often and thus feel like they are getting their money’s worth.
The fifth idea: run the business right here, through Medium. I am not sure if this is possible yet. I need to research and experiment more with creating private content on Medium. But, the other idea here is to add a “tips” component to my public pages so until I finalize my business plan I can at least get tips from readers who enjoy my content. Medium complicates the basic business idea though because Medium requires contacts outside of Medium to create new accounts and develop a new habit of checking Medium.
Maybe harnessing pieces of each idea solves all my problems. Anyways, these are my beginning thoughts to making myself worth dollars. And let me tell you, I know I am worth dollars. If you do not believe me, just watch. One day I will prove it.
