Nicolas Cole
Co-Founder, Ship 30 for 30. On 1 show, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authorfounderoperator@Nicolascole77 ↗LinkedIn ↗nicolascole.com ↗
Nicolas Cole is an author and entrepreneur who co-founded Ship 30 for 30 and Premium Ghostwriting Academy. He has written books including The Art & Business of Online Writing and previously founded the agency Digital Press.
1shows
5appearances
59statements
5resolved
3supported
0contradicted
60%fully supported
13said about them ↓ Everything Nicolas Cole said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Cole: Writers who do not learn AI orchestration will lose jobs
“Either you get on board with that and you become an orchestrator and editor in chief, or you don't have a job anymore.”
Cole: Raising more venture capital reduces founders' chances of a meaningful outcome
“Every time you raise more money, your success chances go down, not up. That's the big aha, is that every time you move the goalpost, You're the chances of you actually having a meaningful outcome go from, you know, 20% to 10% to five percent to one percent to …”
Cole: Group coaching models scale fastest and can reach $10M
“Of all the businesses that we've built in the past three years, we've learned that the group coaching model is the fastest to scale, probably most profitable, like probably doing another group coaching program would be low hanging fruit. Cause you can get a gr…”
Cole: The next major publisher will be a single AI-trained author
“So one of mine is I think that the next Simon and Schuster or Penguin Random House or whatever is going to be one individual that builds, I mean, one author, but has like a whole team. So the, an author is being treated like a venture backed startup and the te…”
Cole: Abandoning your core niche inevitably degrades audience engagement
“In actuality, what the reader cares about is you in the context of the niche that solves a problem for them. And the moment you step out of that niche, Completely. And you start thinking it's just about you and how special you are and how famous you are and ho…”
Cole: AI writing platforms will turn everyone into a writer
“And ChatGPT and Claude and all these AI writing platforms are going to do the same exact thing. They are going to make everyone a writer because it's reducing the barrier to entry.”
Cole: AI will multiply output and income for knowledge workers
“So if you add AI into the equation, it's not that AI removes people's jobs. AI becomes the stress test of, do you know how to use this to double, triple, quadruple your output? If yes, you will make even more money than you were making before because you are m…”
Cole: Drafting in a blank document without planning leads to failure
“The thing that most writers and most people who want to write don't realize is that many of the decisions get made before you start writing. So if you start, if you come up with an idea, and your first thought is I should open a Google Doc and I should start w…”
Cole: Writing intuition is just subconscious pattern matching
“Every time you sit down to write, your brain is cycling through previous quote unquote templates that you have seen work. Either something you've read and were inspired by, or something that you've done already and you received a positive response from.”
Cole: Base ChatGPT and Claude make custom GPTs unnecessary
“The ChatGPT and Claude are so powerful that you do not need much more than this for a long time.”
Cole: 99% of nonfiction writing maps to 10 tangible formats
“You could reverse engineer 99% of all nonfiction writing back into these 10 ways.”
Cole: Publish novel genres widely, niche books on Kindle Unlimited
“If you're creating something new, you publish it wide, but if you're creating something really niche, ah, you should look at the existing categories in Kindle Unlimited, and then basically, like, try and stay in that category, and then you're just playing the …”
Cole: Top Lit RPG books generate $250,000 per month
“There are lit RPG books right now doing like a quarter million a month.”
Nicolas Cole: Talented writers rarely analyze market data before writing
“I think it's not writers that do that. I think it's entrepreneurial people who do that. And then they are just like, and I'm just going to write to fulfill on the demand. But I think the people who are actually talented at writing almost never think about this”
Nicolas Cole: Real Publishing Value Lies in Training Niche-Specific AI
“Because I think the real value is you build a niche library, and then you train AI on how to write that specific subject.”
Cole: Founders claiming massive revenue on one-hour workdays are lying
“You know, the, okay, the other one that gets me is the person who goes, I made all this revenue only working one hour a day. And I'm like, nobody does that.”
Raising venture capital reduces a founder's chances of success
“Every time you raise money, your chances of success don't go up. They go down. You just kicked the goalpost way further, right?”
Founders earning $2M in cash flow lose the desire to build unicorns
“Most founders, if you were cash flowing two million dollars a year, you would re your desire to go build a billion dollar business would not go up. It would go down.”
Accepting massive capital offers inevitably destroys founder autonomy and freedom
“You know, cause you know, when someone offers you two million dollars or someone offers you a hundred million dollars, like they're not just giving you that, that there's a lot of strings that come with that. And all of a sudden you have a boss and all of a su…”
Temptation from massive capital offers is driven by status, not money
“Something I recognize is it's really not about the money. It's actually more about the status. It's more about the, like you feeling chosen. You know, like you feel special that it was offered to you.”
Bootstrapping offers less status than being a broke, failing VC-backed founder
“There is very little status in the world that we're in, whereas you, if you're a founder of a VC-backed company, you could be paying yourself a salary of 80 K a year, be losing millions a year, and be on a trajectory to, like, work 80 hours a week for five yea…”
Failing to monetize massive attention reveals skill deficiencies or psychological blocks
“If you're generating all that attention and you're not monetizing it, something else is going on. Because it's not that you can't. Like, the opportunity is there. It's just either you have a skill deficiency, like you haven't really learned or taken the time t…”
Building viral attention before having a targeted product fails to convert
“It's not, you build attention and then you build a business because if you build a ton of attention, posting memes, and then you try and go launch a business, like it's it, people aren't brain dead. It's not like just because they followed you, they're just go…”
Traditional publishing functions like VC, requiring massive hits to avoid failure
“I think, you know, he, cause I'm assuming he got a like a publishing deal. Totally different. It's like venture backed versus bootstrap. Totally different set of expectations, right? He, his book needs to sell a million copies or it's a failure, right? Like VC…”
The other half of the tape: Nicolas Cole's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 12 times in 8 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Greg Isenberg 11Case Kenny 1
Statements about Nicolas Cole, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Startup Ideas Podcast 12
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2024 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2023 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Nicolas's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Co-Founder, Ship 30 for 30 | 5 | 59 | 60% 3/5 | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |