The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 59 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
Cole: Dismissing social media as cringe signals inability to play the game
“So when someone sits there and goes, I'm upset that I'm not winning. What they do is they point and they criticize everybody and go, you're cringe. Imagine taking that seriously. Look at you. And it's like, all you're doing is just admitting that you don't kno…”
Cole: AI cannot automate tasks users do not already understand
“People expect AI to automate and do things that they don't understand how to do themselves. And so it is worth recognizing that, you know, AI is not a silver bullet. On some level, you do have to have a baseline understanding of how the thing is supposed to wo…”
Cole: Struggling writers lack process, not talent
“The majority of people don't have a talent problem. They have a thing called, I don't want to practice and execute the basics, and I would rather, no offense, drink a bunch of coffee, close my eyes, and hope that something smart comes out when I hit the keyboa…”
Cole: AI elevates writers to taste-driven editors-in-chief
“Instead of me passing this along to my junior columnist, I'm going to feed this to ChatGPT, which means we just got to elevate ourselves up to editor in chief, where our primary value is taste.”
Cole: 90% of an article's value is the headline and main points
“And this is something that took me a really long time to understand, is that 90% of the value of a piece is the headline and the quality of the three main points.”
Cole: Writers should ideate first before refining with AI
“I think that you should always try yourself first and then weigh it against what ChatGPT comes up with and then improve the quality together. That is why I don't defer the writing to AI. I write with AI”
Cole: Sentence-style subheadings retain readers better than clever titles
“I've always found that the best main points and subheads are actually more like sentences.”
Cole: Lit RPG on Amazon has far more readers than writers
“What's so interesting about this subcategory on Amazon is that there's way more readers than there are creators. There's a lot more people who want to read lit RPGs than there are people writing it.”
Nicolas Cole: Dominating Amazon Niches Requires Catalog Density Over One-Offs
“The mistake that I see is one is the person sees that opportunity and then goes, okay, I'm just going to go write one book for that keyword or that subcategory, and then I'm going to do it again in a different subcategory And then do it again. And then do it a…”
Nicolas Cole: The gender split in gaming is now roughly fifty-fifty
“One of the growing trends in gaming is that more and more women are coming into the category. So it used to be, or at least the perception was, like, eighty-twenty, you know... And but now it's like fifty-fifty.”
Nicolas Cole: Kindle Unlimited subscribers read 8 to 12+ books monthly
“Kindle Unlimited subscribers... Read something like eight to 12 plus books a month”
Nicolas Cole: Top Fiction Authors Make 10x More Than Top Nonfiction Authors
“If you look at the best-selling nonfiction authors, James Clear, Mark Manson, whatever, they are a 10th of the best-selling fiction writers. The IP value is astronomically different, you know.”
Nicolas Cole: Romance is ten times bigger than any other book genre
“Romance is the biggest literature category. It literally is 10 times bigger than the next biggest category.”
Cole: A paid newsletter must function as a never-ending book
“A paid newsletter, the way to think about it is it's a book that never ends. So it has to be a topic That you want to repeat infinitely, the reader wants to consume infinitely, and every issue has to feel like a tangible object.”
Cole: Substack writers miss massive upside by only selling subscriptions
“The missed opportunity is realizing that the recurring revenue is the beginning, not the end. So what you, what happens is you have all these creators that go, I started a paid newsletter, and then they reach success. You have paid newsletters on Substack doin…”
Cole: AI tools will spawn hyper-niche 'Copilots' by solo developers
“Especially with all the new, like, no code tools, AI tools, I think you're going to get a lot of smart, driven individual people just sitting at their laptop being like, I built the Copilot for pet owners of Border Collies.”
Cole: Touting multi-year cumulative revenue as annual size is misleading
“There's a lot of context stuff, like people taking lifetime revenue and calling that the revenue of their business. So they'll be like, I've done, you know, five million bucks over the past five years. And then you'll see them go on podcasts being like how I b…”
Cole: Commodity products sell at scale when branded around consumer intent
“You go into the tea aisle, and it's just white label green tea, but one of them says calm, and one of them says energy, and one of them says focus. You're gonna buy the one that says the word of the thing that you Associate with. So you could easily do that fo…”
Category leaders benefit most from growing the entire overall market
“When you're the leader in a category, the best thing that you can do is grow the category. The more that the category grows, the more that you benefit”
Making money writing requires solving clear audience problems over pure art
“If you want to make money as a writer, it's significantly easier to start with the end in mind, start with a problem, and then use writing as a vehicle to solve it.”
Creators should optimize for 'cash per like' over raw reach
“I want the cash per like to be as high as possible.”
Ship 30 for 30 hit seven figures using a simple four-step funnel
“ShipThirty hit seven figures as a business with, like, four steps. It was write on Twitter, drive people to a free educational email course, send them a weekly newsletter sharing, here's more of what we know. Every couple newsletters, join the next cohort of S…”
Self-publishing 'The Art and Business of Online Writing' out-earned traditional deals
“Even if it's self published, art and business of online writing, self published. It's made me way more money than if I would have gotten a publishing deal for it. And everyone in the online writing world references it.”
Cole: Gaming background primes entrepreneurs for pain tolerance and strategy
“It's like the background in gaming clearly primes your brain for certain skills, for certain ways of thinking, for a certain threshold of pain, for strategy, for learning rules, then bending rules. You know, it's like video games prime all of that.”