Mastering the Art of Online Writing: Tips from Dickie Bush

Dickie: You use ChatGPT to iterate on already completed thinking. Rather than letting it think for you, you have to think for it, and give it precise clear instructions on what you want. Most people don't know what they want. And so, they use ChatGPT. They're like, "This sucks. My intern. It didn't work." And so, instead, when you look at an intern, it's, "My intern didn't have proper instructions, because I didn't provide it proper instructions." That has been very freeing for me. It's like ChatGPT will give back to you only as well as you've communicated to it.

(intro)

Welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast with Bryan Collins. Here, you’ll find practical advice and interviews for all kinds of writers.

Bryan: What are the skills you need to write successfully online today? What strategies and tactics should you apply? Hi there. My name is Bryan Collins. Welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast. In this week's episode, I caught up with Dickie Bush. Now, you may already know Dickie Bush because he has nearly 330,000 followers on Twitter. He's also the co-founder of Typeshare, which is a fantastic tool for writing online. He runs Ship 30 for 30, which is a writing online course — that I actually took myself just over a year ago. He's a business partner with Nicolas Cole, who I interviewed for the Become a Writer Today Podcast. I was really excited to catch up with Dickie because he's an expert in writing online, specifically on Twitter.

One of my key takeaways from talking to Dickie is how he looks at the creative process. That is topics he likes to write about on which his audience are interested in, and how he marries that with information and data. That is his analytics and what content is performing well. In fact, it's looking at both sides of the writing process which has helped him build a hugely successful product in the form of Typeshare.

Now, at the time we're recording this interview, Dickie was getting ready to launch a new cohort of Ship 30 for 30. So, if you're listening to this, I'll put the link in the show notes that you can use to sign up for the cohort that's just about to launch. It really is an excellent course. And if you haven't written much online today, if perhaps you're lacking a little bit of confidence about publishing your work on Twitter or other platforms, or you just want to see how an expert does it and learn more about their tactics and strategies, then I would encourage you to take this particular course.

In this week's podcast interview, Dickie also goes into how he transitioned from working as — wait for it — a trader at BlackRock, to somebody who's a well-known writer today. He also describes how he met Nicolas Cole and how they formed Ship 30 for 30 and Typeshare. It was a fascinating interview. So, if you do enjoy it, please consider leaving a short review on the iTunes store. Or you could also share the show with somebody else who wants to write online. Basically, your reviews will help more people find the Become a Writer Today Podcast on iTunes. And of course, if you share the show, that does help the podcast grow as well.

As I've mentioned previously, it does cost a bit of time and money to research, record, and edit a podcast episode like this. I don't currently rely on paid advertising. On the podcast, I simply want to put information out there which can help writers. One of the ways to do that is if you could share it or leave a review. I really do appreciate it. Now let's go over to my interview with Dickie Bush.

(interview)

Bryan: My guest today is Dickie Bush. He has grown his Twitter following from zero to just under 330,000 followers in just 30 months, which is some amazing organic growth. He also runs Ship 30 for 30. That's a course that I took a few months ago. That's also run by Nicolas Cole. He is currently building Typeshare. Welcome to the show, Dickie.

Dickie: Bryan, what's going on? Thanks for having me. Very, very excited for this.

Bryan: It's great to talk to you. I've been following your work on Twitter for some time now. I'm fascinated with Ship 30 for 30 and how it's helping people express themselves online. While I was reading up in your background, you have an unusual story versus some of the other writers that I've met. You didn't start in a career that had anything to do with writing.

Dickie: Yeah, I guess the way to frame it is, I graduated from college. I studied math and computer science at Princeton, because I absolutely hated writing. My freshman English class made me never want to touch writing again. The more I talked to other writers in this space, the more I realized that's pretty common. That college just didn't do it for them. Whatever it was — the way they taught, the way they communicated — it just didn't click. And so, I entered the real world after, basically, four years in college avoiding writing at all costs.

Then I started working at BlackRock. I was a hedge fund trader. Really, within my first two or three months, I was getting these emails from the more influential people at the firm. They were these crafted, well-formatted, engaging, educational emails talking about what was going on in the market. It clicked to me right away that writing in the real world is completely different than in school and academia and all that. And so, I realized that this was a skill that I dramatically overlooked and basically had to start learning how to do.

I was actually writing internally for BlackRock for about two years, trying to just improve writing a morning newsletter, sending things around. It wasn't until I started to poke around the internet that I realized, "Hey, I'm doing this internally. But that means there's only a handful, a thousand people who could potentially read this. There are millions of people on the Internet." That was the origin of starting to put my ideas out there.

Bryan: When I studied writing in — I studied at a university. I did a journalism degree. At the time, I thought that there are two types of thinkers. You have numbers and figures on the one side. Then on the other side, you have people who have orientated around words, concepts and ideas. Is that fair to say? Or do you believe that people can think about figures and words?

Dickie: I don't know. I think you can tend to one or the other. As I think about it now, I definitely still tend towards math and analytical thinking. But I think you don't want to limit yourself, and say, "Oh, I'm an analytical thinker. That means I shouldn't write." Because the analytical thinkers who can write are the ones with the most power, or just language-based thinkers who can also do math at a pretty high level and thinking that way. I think when you put those two together, you become much more valuable to the market. So, I'd be wary of boxing myself into a single way of thinking and then shedding, not doing anything on the other side because you're just limiting what you can do

Bryan: When I took your course Ship 30 for 30 and also read some of your work and Nicolas' work — I will ask you about it in a moment — one of the key ideas you talk about is niche or niche selection, or how to find your category, so to speak. Did it to take you long to develop your category over the course of 30 plus months?

Dickie: Well, in the beginning, I had no clue what I wanted to write about. That's what most people struggle with. Because in the beginning, they have a lot of interests. So, I explored tons of different things. I read about productivity. I read about health and fitness. I read about writing. I read about personal growth. I was just putting ideas out there. My first 100 tweets, 200 tweets, nobody saw. That was perfect, because I got to explore tons of different topics. That's why I advise to any beginner, it's like, publish five tweets a day for three months. You're going to learn exactly what you like to write about. No one is going to read them, so you don't have to worry about failure. You're just getting those reps in. And so, that's what I did in the beginning.

Then I realized that people were resonating with the ideas I was sharing around writing. Because I think I had a unique approach to it based on my first nine months, making every mistake. In the book, following the classic playbook that you see a lot of people say. It's like write up on a blog that you own. That way, you are not vulnerable to platform risk, all that kind of stuff. I did that for nine months. I published a weekly blog post. I would wake up every Sunday and hack away the keyboard, slaving over every single word, only to hit publish in here, the internet's crickets of indifference.

When I started to write on social platforms, people were resonating with that because I had that story of, "Hey, I've made all these mistakes. Here's what I'm doing now. And this is working much better. I'm happier. I know I'm going to be able to stick with this." So, I found my category niche in, "Hey, I'm no writing expert. But I started this thing nine months ago when I followed the playbook that a lot of you are probably about to follow. I don't want you to end up nine months later like I did."

And so, I started to talk about the idea of putting far more ideas out there on a weekly basis, but instead, publishing daily how to build a writing habit, that kind of thing. Then really bootstrapped, becoming more prolific and more, I guess, authoritative in the writing space from that very beginning point of like, "Hey, I have no clue what it means to write well, but I know how to build a writing habit that I can stick to, and just continue to teach the people right behind me."

Bryan: How do you think about the writing habit, publishing consistently on Twitter versus engaging with your audience and with other people who perhaps have bigger accounts than you did when you were starting out?

Dickie: Yeah, I think it's all part of the process. In the very beginning, you should publish a ton of tweets, but you should also be giving thoughtful replies, an emphasis on thoughtful replies. I think a lot of people hear that advice, they're like, "Oh, I just you need to go engage with big accounts, and I'll grow." You end up with just taking the tweet and rewriting it underneath. That doesn't add any value. The most valuable, insightful comments that I get, I always respond to. But people who just repackage whatever I said or just say, "Great idea," or something like that, you're really just ticking a box rather than thinking, "How can I add value with maybe a more thoughtful reply"?

Bryan: Did you or do you carve out a portion of your day for writing your drafts and so on in a different portion for managing engagements with different accounts and your audience?

Dickie: Yeah, definitely. I tried to stay off of actually engaging on Twitter until I've gotten a hand, like a chunk of three hours, four hours of deep work done. That's when I do my writing, or my thinking, or my learning. Then I have a set time of the day where, at this point, the size and number of comments, I can't respond to everything. I wish I could, but I'd spend all day doing it. But in the beginning, I was answering every single comment, every single reply, having tons of damn conversations. That was how I was able to build relationships with my followers and other people in this space as well.

I made sure — I was actually writing a tweet this morning of what I would do if I was starting all over. It would be: write five tweets a day for three or four months, knowing that no one's going to see them. Engage with other people who can add value to 5 to 10 people per day. Then make time — one time per week — to meet someone new. I think that's where a lot of people overlook. It's that the whole point of being in the beginner stages is to find other people who are at similar points on that journey. The easiest way to do that is figuring out how to DM them, connect with them, say, "Hey, we're talking about similar things." Because otherwise, why are we on social media anyway? It's to surround ourselves with like-minded people. And so, that was always something I made time for and still do today.

Bryan: Your currently building Ship 30 for 30, which is a course or a guided program that teaches people how to build an audience by writing one post every day and publishing it. And also, Typeshare with Nicholas Cole. How did you guys meet?

Dickie: It's funny. There's a legendary cold email introduction from Craig Clemens, who was a mentor to both of us. The subject is "Connecting Dickie and Cole." His real name is Cole. He goes by Cole. The title or the copy was, "I'm not sure why, but I think you two should know each other. I'll let you take it from here." This was late 2020. I just started writing. Ship 30 was in its very, very inklings. It was really nothing more than an accountability Slack channel. Then I met Cole. He had written The Art and Business of Online Writing, which I picked up and was like, "This is amazing. I wish I would have had this a long time ago." So, we just started talking and connecting. It was like the perfect match of, "Hey, Ship 30 if kind of in its initial stages. It's helping people build a writing habit. But that's it. You're an expert. You've been doing this for a long, long time. How can we work together, where people start with the writing habit part but then learn the fundamentals that you're so familiar with?" We partnered up right away in 2021. We've been working together ever since.

Bryan: And your work has since evolved into Typeshare. Would you be able to describe what Typeshare does and how it helps writers?

Dickie: Yeah, Typeshare is a platform to help people start writing online. So, it's got everything they need — templates, analytics, one-click republishing to different platforms. You can write tweets. You can write threads. You can write LinkedIn posts, medium articles, everything, atomic essays. The whole idea is, from that nine-month journey, where I was writing and publishing on a blog that no one knew existed, I wasted so much time setting up a blog, worrying about all the hosting and how it looked and all that. None of it mattered.

And so, Typeshare is a way for, in two or three clicks, you've got everything you need to put ideas out on the Internet. We're trying to eliminate all of that friction that keeps so many people from writing in the first place, and instead make it, hey, all you need is a couple of ideas. We're going to show you exactly how to get started published on all these platforms. Just come with one or two ideas. Plug them into some of our templates, and you'll be off and running.

Bryan: The templates are fantastic. I got dozens of different ideas for articles, not just Twitter posts or threads to write up. Did it take a long time to research, gather them and create them, present them in a format that are ideal for your audience?

Dickie: Yeah, but at the same time, a lot of those templates are just my most successful tweets. I've been writing so many of them in my most successful threads, et cetera, that it's like, "Oh, that worked. How can we reverse engineer that so other people could use it and apply it to their niche?"

The beautiful part about templates is, the way you communicate an idea is independent of the idea itself. So, when you have something that works, you can totally apply it to a different niche. I love that there are so many people right now in the health and fitness space applying our techniques for writing engaging things but through the lens of improving your health. That, I think, is the key part of people who are using templates well. They're not just taking things that we've written and trying to repackage them. They're taking the structure in which we wrote them, and then applying it to their topic and seeing that success.

Bryan: What you've described is marrying data with your creative work act of writing. So, you actually got to look at your engagement and what Twitter drives are getting the most reach. You're combining both. What you're describing is marrying data with creative work. So, you're looking at what tweets are getting the most engagement, and also what topics are most interesting to you and your audience.

Dickie: Exactly. I think that that's the whole lean writing method that we talked about. It's, you're going to put out a ton of ideas. You're not sure which ones are going to work — both with what the audience thinks and with what you think. I think one of the beautiful parts about Ship 30 is how many people come in. They're like, "I'm going to write about productivity." Five days in, they've written everything they could possibly ever want to say about productivity. They're like, "I actually really want to write about biotech." And they go explore that niche.

And so, the analytics, it's both external. When you put ideas out there, what's the engagement? What are the questions? What are the replies? How are people thinking about it? But it's also the internal analytics of, how did I feel about writing all these ideas? That's why we condense what takes most writers a year to publish 30 things down into a single month. And if you can do that for a month, you're going to have 30 data points both internally and externally, that then you can double down on. As you follow that double-down path, you know you're going to be exploring things that you like and the audience likes. Once you hit that, your flywheel just starts to spin.

Bryan: Yeah, certainly, having the flywheel is a great metaphor. Because it gets easier and easier the more contents that you're writing and publishing, because you get more information that you can use to iterate and improve your content. Speaking of improving content or platforms, Twitter is going through some problematic changes over the past few weeks and months. Do you still believe it's the, I suppose, the number one or best platform for writers who want to work online today?

Dickie: 100% still. Obviously, there'll be some volatility in the algorithm and things like that. But for no other reason, then if you write 100 tweets, you're going to become a much better writer. Worst case, you write 100 tweets and Twitter disappears at the end of that. Then you figure out where else to go. But you don't lose the skill. I think Twitter itself is the most important platform to start writing, far more than the potential to build an audience. But just the skill set that comes with writing engaging tweets, you have to learn how to write concisely, clearly, no fluff, format things well, catch your attention right. You get all those fundamentals just in writing on Twitter. I think Twitter itself, sure, there's more risk than there was two years ago. But at the same time, I still highly recommend it for anyone starting to write there, because you're just going to learn how to write well.

Bryan: Yeah, good point. Several writers I've talked to lately have recommended Substack. They've had more success with Substack now versus maybe a year ago. For example, they're getting harder finding readers organically within the Substack platform, which wasn't really possible maybe 12 months ago. Are you and Nicolas using Substack at the moment apart from Typeshare or Ship 30 for 30?

Dickie: No, we're not using Substack. I think it's a great platform. I started my initial newsletter on Substack in January 2020. So, I've been a long-time user. I haven't tapped into any of its distribution. I think that they're doing a good job, but I don't have a strong view. I would be wary on — I keep hearing a lot of this. So, we're getting a bunch of new readers from the recommendations. But it's also very easy to just one click subscribe to that newsletter. And so, where my head goes is, how many of those readers who just one click subscribe to 20 things are actually reading what you're saying?

I think a lot of people are seeing their numbers go up, but not necessarily their open rate. That could be trending down at the same time. No strong view there. I think that whether you write on Substack, BeeHive, ConvertKit, whatever it is, as long as you're writing and putting things out there, you're getting 95% of the upside.

Bryan: Writing for you online started as, I guess, a side hustle. Because I presume you were still working in BlackRock. When I was looking at your account today, you are driving the importance of side hustles. Whereas now you're working on 30 for 30 and Typeshare full time. What does a typical day look like? How are you balancing writing and the deep work that you described with, well, I presume it's with conversations like this where you have to talk to your team members and people who are helping you build TypeShare?

Dickie: Yeah, if anyone has good advice on this, please let me know because it's the constant struggle. One year ago this week, I left my full-time job at BlackRock. Only one year into this game and I'm still figuring out how to structure my day and things like that. But for the most part, I'm an early riser. I'm up at 5 AM. I get some quick cardio in, and then I try to work from 6 to 10 on a deep work, whatever it is I laid out the night before. Tuesdays, I'll break that rule. Because Tuesdays I just go full meetings. So, I got no meetings Monday, Wednesday, Thursday. No meetings, no calls, anything like that. Those are really my days. But Tuesday just works well, because we have some Ship 30 calls. I can stack a bunch of meetings. Like, we're doing this on a Tuesday. And so, that's how I've segmented it — of no calls any other days — so I could really do deep work Monday, Wednesday, Thursday the entire day if I wanted to. But I normally will start talking to the team around noon, one o'clock. Sometimes even later. We've done a good job creating an asynchronous communication flow. And that's kind of it. I always do deep work in the morning. So, if by the time I've opened up Slack, or email, or Twitter, or Instagram, whatever, my brain operates about 10% lower. And so, I try to get that big thinking time done early.

Bryan: Yeah, I'm the same. I prefer writing in the morning. And if it's something like editing or briefing another writer for one of the sites that I run, it would probably be in the afternoon. The deeper work I find is better for the morning.

Another tweet that was interesting that you put up recently was how you sometimes use a notebook. It was a photograph of you looking out over a balcony. It looked like quite a nice sunrise. Do you use analog tools much, or do you gravitate towards digital tools? What does your balance look like?

Dickie: When I'm doing personal reflection or deep thinking, I have to be in a journal — handwritten, MUJI notebook, MUJI pen, an hour of free creative writing to get those ideas out. Because no matter how many blockers of the Internet I will put on, there's no Twitter or Instagram app or website in my journal. And so, I tried to just get away from the computer for a little bit, get that free clear thinking. Yeah, that picture was a beautiful sunrise looking over Miami balcony. Some espresso, some Mountain Valley water. When I have those three or four things, the ideas really start to flow.

Bryan: What about the digital side? Apart from Typeshare, what are the tools and apps that will be critical to your writing process?

Dickie: I capture all my ideas in Drafts. Drafts is a quick-capture app for iOS. Perfect. It syncs across everything. I have tons of stuff in there. When I start to organize my ideas, I'll throw them into Notion. Clean them up a little bit, group things together. That's how I think about my publishing calendar as well. I use Typeshare for writing my tweets and threads. Then I use Brain.fm for deep work music. That's a really nice tool that I've been using to lock into a flow state for 90 minutes. I can easily drop into it. My brain recognizes the binaural beat pattern. And boom. I'm just off and running. So, that's my tech stack at the moment.

Bryan: Yeah, I've experimented with Drafts. I haven't used it much in a few years. I struggled with Notion because of the blocks. It didn't really fit with how I like to write and organize information to block out. I know a lot of writers use it. I use Obsidian notes quite a bit. I interviewed the founders of Brain.fm a few months ago. Fantastic service. With a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and a laptop, it's really conducive to get into a flow state. I was also struck that you mentioned you're publishing calendar. I'm wondering how far out are you scheduled with your content?

Dickie: No more than a week.

Bryan: A week? Oh, really?

Dickie: You would have thought more?

Bryan: Yeah.

Dickie: No. No way. I can't think that far ahead. I'm always maximum a week. Sunday is usually my deep writing day, where if I want to get as much done for the week ahead, I'll just block six hours and just churn. And so, sometimes I'll get more than a week on that. But right now, I think the last thing I have scheduled is Friday. And so, I'll be picking that back up.

Yeah, I could probably be better about that. But I have too many fresh ideas, where I want to write about them and get feedback on them right away. I don't want to wait three weeks to get that idea out in the world. So, I try to keep it no more than a week.

Bryan: When you're planning for the week and you're thinking about works on Twitter, what's working quite well today on Twitter? What are the specific types of formats or templates that work quite well?

Dickie: I don't think there's anything different than the normal, high-value stuff. I think threads, I think I'm writing 365 atomic essays this year because I love that format. I love that structure, and I think it's different than what a lot of people are doing. Tweets, of course. Always just whatever's working is always changing. I really don't pay attention to what's working, because I just know what works based on what I've done. And rather than try to stay on the cutting edge of this tactic or this whatever, I just let those washed by. Because it's not something I want to build my writing system around of always finding what the next hot thing is. This just doesn't interest me.

Bryan: To jump to Ship 30 for 30, when I took the course, the cohort was monthly. Is it still monthly?

Dickie: No, we do a quarterly now. So, every quarter. That gives us a little bit more time to build and improve the product and launch other things at the same time. Or not at the same time, but in those two months in between.

Bryan: To somebody's listening and they're wondering, what's in the cohort, what exactly will Ship 30 for 30 do, what would you be able to tell them?

Dickie: Yeah, the highest levels that helps beginners start running online by writing and publishing something every day for 30 days. I think a lot of writing courses out there, they teach, teach, teach. Then you get to the end, it's like, "I didn't write anything." And so, we teach a live cohort-based model over four weeks, where every single day you publish something. We have eight live sessions. We teach over eight live sessions — headlines, formatting, idea generation, analytics, everything you need. It's kind of a 30-day crash course for writing on the Internet.

By the end, you not only have that foundation of understanding, but you have 30 pieces of published content where you put those learnings into practice the entire time. Rather than just learn, learn, learn, it's learn, do. Learn, do. Learn, do. Learn, do. And by the end, people are like, "I can't believe that I wasted years thinking that writing was this big thing. And now I have 30 pieces of content and a totally new understanding of what's possible online."

Bryan: That's a great course. Are there any success stories that you could talk about or that yo could elaborate on from past students that come to mind?

Dickie: It's like picking children. I think we did the math the other day. We have 20 or so, maybe 25, who have over 100,000 followers on Twitter now, which is awesome. But what's really fun is, less than the big success stories, it's actually the people who we thought disappeared from the course in day five. So, we track assignment completion with our bad tracking infrastructure. It's always a little bit of like, "Oh, man. These people fell off. What could we have done to help them?"

The best success stories to me are the people who joined Ship 30 in four days in. They go, "Hey, I got everything I needed. I found this new idea. I went and sprinted on it right away. I stopped the daily 30 days. Here I am a year later, and I found this business partner. We launched the software product, and boom." Far more than just the writing success, I think it's the career clarity that gives a lot of people of like, "Wow, I've waited so long to start writing but maybe, one, it wasn't for me, and that we think of a job well done as a success story of people who would have gone 10 more years. Like, is this for me? I tried it. Great. It's not. Then the people who have gone on to build huge followings and the people who disappeared but went on to do something else. There's just tons of success across the board. I think our testimonial board will show plenty of that, of people just calling it one of the best 30-day experiences they've ever had.

Bryan: Writing can be a great way of clarifying thinking about a specific topic or a specific concept, whether it's journaling or writing online. You and Nicolas have also done some work around AI and how it's going to impact people writing online. So, is it going to take all the spark and fun out of it? Is it going to turn us all into—

Dickie: No, not at all. I see AI making the best writers even better, and replacing anyone who thinks AI will replace them. I look at ChatGPT as my intern. So, what would you have an intern do? That's the exact lens I use it. I use it for a lot of rewriting, where I'll write something and then say, "Hey, I want a fresh perspective. Can you rewrite this as a different author, or with a different goal, or a different tone, or for a different demographic?" All it's doing is, it's able to refresh my perspective faster than I could. And so, that's exactly how I use it. It's like, "Hey, I think that I'm being too formal here. Can you make this a little bit more lighthearted?" Boom. I see a new sentence. I'd take that in, rewrite it a little bit. It just speeds up my workflow.

So, I'm improving as a writer because now I see different ways of writing. That's the most valuable thing. I think to rely on it to create your content for you is a recipe for disaster. I would highly recommend against that. But I think using it as an amplifier and back and forth intern is the way I use it and I'd recommend others do the same.

Bryan: Yeah, it's quite good for iterating headline ideas. I know you're a huge fan of self-help. It's a host of sites. But some of the technical parts of running a site, for example, in SEO, in meta description, it's a boring aspect to running those sites. But it can generate all that content for you if you put the keywords into the tool. It's not 100% accurate for critical content fresh. So, I would never take anything it's produced and polish it verbatim. I would always rewrite it and fact check it. So, I'm putting my own spin and telling the voice on it. Is ChatGPT the main AI tool you're using? Have you experimented with some of the other ones? Because there's quite a few.

Dickie: Only ChatGPT. I actually haven't used Jasper or any of those other tools that I know are more specific for it. But ChatGPT is like the Excel of the AI world. You can do anything in it. So, you might as well just learn that one rather than people who are building on top of it. But I'm sure more cool things will pop up that I'll use.

Bryan: Yeah, I feel like a lot of those are built on the ChatGPT model. Also, for copywriters, it's probably an excellent tool for copywriters. It can turn features into benefits. Have you looked at it from a copywriting angle?

Dickie: Not yet, just only because we haven't been writing much copy or new products or anything like that. But yeah, I think that, again, you use ChatGPT to iterate on already completed thinking. Rather than letting it think for you, you have to think for it and give it precise clear instructions on what you want. Most people don't know what they want, and so they use ChatGPT. They're like, "This sucks. My intern, it didn't work." And so, instead, when you look at an intern, it's, "My intern didn't have proper instructions because I didn't provide it proper instructions." That has been very freeing for me. It's like ChatGPT will give back to you only as well as you've communicated to it.

Bryan: What are you and Nicolas focusing on for the next few months or for 2023? What's the big project?

Dickie: We're launching our freemium ghostwriting academy, which helps turn commodity freelancers into premium ghostwriters creating high-value assets rather than things like blog posts, or tweets, or threads. So, we're going to help them create educational email courses and other things that business owners and solopreneurs are looking for, that would actually drive revenue rather than just increasing followers and writing Twitter threads about Google Chrome extensions.

We're launching that in the next month. We're very excited about that. We're currently running our beta cohort. That is working extremely well. We're seeing huge results from people in there. So excited to scale that and get that up and running alongside Ship 30 through the rest of the year.

Bryan: Fantastic. Yeah, I remember Nicolas was advocating the benefits of ghostwriting when he spoke to me a year ago. So, Dickie, for people who want to keep up with you, your work or what you guys are working on next, where should they go?

Dickie: They can go to Twitter. I'm @dickiebush. I'm on LinkedIn at Dickie Bush. On Instagram, Dickie Bush. Very easy. I think if you're looking for a nice place to start writing if you're a complete beginner, you can go to startwritingonline.com. Download our 13,000-word ultimate guide. That's got everything you need to put ideas out there, start building your audience, and start hitting publish. So, you can go there and download that guide. It's also got a seven-day email course that'll go alongside to coach you through it.

Bryan: I'll be sure to put the links in the show notes. Thank you, Dickie.

Dickie: Awesome, Bryan. Thanks for having me.

(outro)

Bryan: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. If you did, please consider leaving a short review on the iTunes Store or sharing the show on Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you’re listening. More reviews, more ratings, and more shares will help more people find the Become a Writer Today Podcast. And did you know, for just a couple of dollars a month, you could become a Patreon for the show? Visit patreon.com/becomeawritertoday or look for the Support button in the show notes. Your support will help me record, produce, and publish more episodes each month. And if you become a Patreon, I’ll give you my writing books, discounts on writing software and on my writing courses.