Welcome to The Looking Glass, my weekly newsletter – A journey of personal growth into mindset, self-mastery, meaning in work for creators and solopreneurs.

#43 – 24 Feb 2023

💡 Start building your personal monopoly

I’ve always felt conflicted over the idea of a “niche”.

They are constantly touted as the key to success online or in any business.

But I always felt it was too constricting.

You might be wondering, “a what?”

A niche is a specific segment of the market for a product or service.

In the creator economy, people go a step further and typically use “niche” to imply a very narrow, highly-specific customer segment.

Why would you want a niche?

The theory is that you have to serve some target customer – so the more specifically you can define them, the easier it will be to find and speak to those customers.

The more specific they are, the better you’ll able to communicate with them by using the exact language they need to hear in order to trust you and make a buying decision.

Jay Clouse

People are more than a “niche”.

As creators building a personal brand, we don’t want to be limited to a specific niche for the rest of our lives.

For example, I have skills in accounting and have worked in finance for many years. The niche I developed over time was optimising financial systems and improving financial reports.

Do I want to do that for the rest of my life?

Hell no.

But no one would consider me if I tried to get another job in finance outside of that role.

They would say I “don’t have the relevant experience”.

I wouldn’t even get a look in.

I’m sure you’ve been there before; you see the perfect job ad and know it would suit you perfectly. You would grow right into it.

But no one else could see it.

I felt like that with creative work.

I always did creative things at home – writing, photo editing, or making electronic music.

But the outside world never knew that.

So whenever I considered a more creative role outside of finance, I had no chance.

It was devastating to believe that I was trapped in the prison of a career that didn’t fulfil me. I thought I would be living out my days crunching numbers until I received my golden watch at age 65.

I was ready to relinquish my dream of more creative and fulfilling work.

After all, there were too many barriers:

• Bought a house
• Got married
• Had a baby

I now had responsibilities.

I couldn’t be gambling everything on a career change this late in my life, now in my thirties. 

Or could I?

It all changed once I started curating my social media feeds. I removed the junk – entertainment gossip and news. But I added inspirational and educational content aligned with my interests.

I started following some incredible people online who were creating exciting things I never even realised I was so “into”:

• James Clear – improved my habits
• Tim Ferriss – optimised my work life
• Shane Parrish – helped my mental models
• Tara Brach – calmed the rat race in my mind
• Seth Godin – encouraged me to think bigger
• Jay Clouse – warmed me to the creator economy
• David Whyte – exposed me to the power of poetry
• David Perell – showed me I could be an online writer
• Mark Manson – made me reconsider my relationships
• Anne-Laure Le Cunff – taught me mindful productivity
• Jordan Peterson – helped me take responsibility for the direction of my life
• Rich Roll – got me excited about embracing struggles and deep conversation

These “mentor creators” had a massive influence on my life.

They were heavily impacting my progress and potential. 

And the weird thing is didn’t know I had “interests” or “problems” in those areas until I discovered their content.

When you build a Personal Monopoly, you are creating demand for an idea people didn’t know they were interested in.

The most successful creators tend to define their own subculture instead of moulding themselves into existing ones. 

David Perell

Eventually, I came to a realisation:

This was the future!

This opening was the opportunity of a lifetime:

Creating online.

It’s still the “early days” of the internet.

Some compare it to the Wild West.

The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers.

Most people haven’t figured this out yet.

Naval Ravikant

A light bulb when off in my head.

I could do this.

I have the social proof of so many others doing it.

The final missing piece for me was:

“Ok, well, all this creating sounds great, but what about an income?”

Enter Dan Koe and Justin Welsh.

These guys are masters in the fields of content creation and solopreneurship. 

I have got more value from these guys’ free content on starting an online business that I would now quite happily buy anything they ever put out.

Now I started to see where the real value is here in creating.

Making it actionable.

So that your audience can take away from your story and start doing their own thing.

And by creating all that free value, people are more than happy to buy from you.

But here’s the catch, you can’t see that when beginning.

As you haven’t yet taken bold action, learned the hard lessons, made the mindset leaps, and built the world-class network to pull you along.

So it’s easy to cross your arms and go, “this is all a big scam”.

But that’s a fixed mindset view. One that I used to have before I realised the successes others like the abovenamed creators found. They were making a massive impact and doing business ethically. 

I could now see a way forward that aligned with my values.

You have to start and have faith that things will fall into place.

That’s what I am doing here and taking my plunge into the unknown.

Remember the Steve Jobs quote I have mentioned in previous letters:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Steve Jobs

On creating work you love

Dan Koe’s content has inspired me so much over the last year through his development of the one-person business concept and becoming a Value Creator:

A value creator earns with his mind, not his time. Meaning, his greatest asset is information, ideas, and knowledge that gets you excited to wake up and share the discoveries that came from your research.

If you follow my notion of the one-person business model (monetising yourself), the person you can help the most is you.

Your niche is you.

Your brand, content, and offer are all based on your goals, interests, and personal experience.

This is a holistic approach to doing what you love for a living. You are opening up the potential to be paid for becoming a high-value individual by becoming an expert in a select domain of the interests you are obsessed over. Why would you want to create a business out of anything else? Business was, should, and return to being an extension of the self.

The niche is YOU.

How cool is that?

Just because you worked in finance for 15 years doesn’t mean you have to build a business in finance. And to do online business, you don’t have to learn a money-making skill you couldn’t care less about, like learning Facebook ads and starting a freelancing service.

That misalignment will burn you to the ground.  

No.

You can be you.

For example, when you look at my “resume”, you won’t see all the psychology and philosophy books on my shelves. You won’t see all the creator business and writing courses I have done. You won’t see all the personal development podcasts I have listened to.

Our work resumes neglect all the stuff that is actually interesting about us. 

The stuff which could be the key to our success in this new economy.

The parts which would make us a “value creator”.

Now, by all means, I don’t yet have much of this figured out.

I am learning and growing every day. I write these newsletters to flesh out my ideas and thoughts on this creator journey.

But I am trying to lean into what I am genuinely interested in and what I am personally wrestling with.

And the strange thing is this:

Other people find value in that.

In fact, that is how you stand out in this crowded economy.

That is how you build a personal monopoly.

The personal monopoly 

I read about David Perell’s concept of a “personal monopoly” this week. It resonated with me as it perfectly ties to the value creator idea I mentioned.

The ultimate goal of writing online is to build a Personal Monopoly. 

It’s your unique intersection of skills, interests, and personality traits where you can be known as the best thinker on a topic and open yourself up to the serendipity that makes writing online so special.

The internet uniquely rewards people with Personal Monopolies because it rewards differentiation.

David Perell

We don’t have to be a world-class economist to see the value in a monopoly.

You’ve played the board game. The one with all the power wins. 

Monopoly: (an organisation or group that has) complete control of something, especially an area of business, so that others have no share. 

Cambridge Dictionary

You can charge what you want if you completely control a good or service in the marketplace. 

You are the only option.

That is great for business. 

So how to become a personal monopoly?

In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel asks, “what valuable company is nobody building?”

Now we aren’t massive companies here looking to take over the world.

But this can get us thinking. 

As a creator, you could tweak this to “what valuable product or service is nobody creating?”

Thiel also warns: “Creating value is not enough – you also need to capture some of the value you create.”

For example, you might write an excellent book or have a fantastic coaching service. Still, you won’t be sustainable for long if nobody buys it.

Here we are exploring making a living as a solopreneur creator. It’s not only about creating for the sake of creating. We must examine how we can ethically monetise those creations, so we can continue to create and serve long into the future.

The trouble with this creator space online now is it feels “flooded”.

It seems like every man or woman, and their dog is pushing content and trying to sell their product or service.

It’s overwhelming.

It’s demoralising. 

Where do we even start?

By trying to carve out our personal monopoly. 

The current state 

At first glance, the creator space currently feels like what economists call “perfect competition”:

A situation where the sellers of a product or service are free to compete fairly, and sellers and buyers have complete information.

Cambridge Dictionary

Each creator in the market is undifferentiated and sells similar products. So no creator has the power to sell above what the market determines as the fair price.

If there is money to be made, e.g. online courses, then new creators rush in to sell similar products, which drives prices down. Therefore profit potential is eliminated over time. Some will suffer losses and drop out altogether, leaving a few to fight it out. 

This doesn’t sound attractive to get into, does it?

Thiel describes the opposite of perfect competition, a monopoly:

Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices.

Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximises profits.

Now before you get worried about becoming some illegal, greedy, controlling, bully corporation, he clarifies:

By ‘monopoly’, we mean the kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute.

Google is a good example of a company that went from 0 to 1: it hasn’t competed in search since the early 2000s, when it definitively distanced itself from Microsoft and Yahoo!

You may or may not be old enough to remember that Yahoo used to be the boss in search.

But now they barely register in our memory.

And Google may have some new challenges on its horizon with AI and Chat GPT. Still, you get the idea of the power of controlling that monopoly. 

No substitutes

How many of us can say we are so good at our creations that no one else is even a close substitute?

It sounds pretty hard to nail that down, right?

Well, maybe not.

On closer inspection of the creator economy, you will see creators are actually carving out their own little personal monopolies and doing very well.

Let’s test this:

Who do you think of when I say “habits”?

I bet most of you thought of the one and only:

James Clear.

Exactly.

There is no close substitute there.

James Clear has a personal monopoly over habits.

And equal arguments could be made for the other creators mentioned above who are masters of their domain.

So how can we tap into this opportunity as amateur or professional creators?

By leaning into something we have spoken of before here.

Our superpower!

Remember that unique mix of interests, goals, skills, personality, strengths and abilities. 

And whatever else we can jam in that makes you one of a kind!

With the power of the internet, you have permission to be your whole self in all its glory and build a tribe of like-minds.

The internet enables eight billion monopolies.

Naval Ravikant

Follow your curiosity. 

The most exciting creators don’t just create things:

They give us new ways of living, thinking and doing business.

Many times they’re solving a problem we didn’t know we had or didn’t pay attention to because we never thought there was another better way.

Play Bigger

It’s exciting because they are giving us something different.

This is why Dan Koe has delivered so much value for me. 

He has pushed me to new thinking about what content creation can be as a vehicle for personal growth while also building a fulfilling business and lifestyle.

He is a refreshing voice amongst online scammers and sales types.

You have problems that only you are aware of and could solve uniquely.

Those problems could be the key to designing a niche category and building your own personal monopoly. 

Category Design is a discipline of creating and monetizing new markets in a noisy world.

The journey starts with understanding the problem that you desire to solve.

The problem is the proxy for the category and is the strategic element you see missing in the world.

That unsolved problem is what keeps you up at night, and drives you to build a product, company and category to solve it.

Play Bigger

Our struggles give us clues to how we can serve the world.

That is why I am writing this – the challenge of creating a niche and monetising online content keeps me up at night!

I better wrap this one up, as it’s getting long! Apologies, as I know, I said I would reel in the newsletter length. But I get excited about these topics and love writing long-form. I know many would run away in fear from having to write 3,000 words in a day, so maybe this is one of my superpowers to be nurtured 🙂

Here are some steps I uncovered from David Perell on getting started in online business and writing:

1. Pick a small but growing market.
2. Learn everything you can about it.
3. Share the best of what you learn online.
4. Over time you will become a “big fish in a small, fast-growing pond.”

I’m cheering for you!

❔ Reflection

What is your superpower? That intersection of interests, personality, skills, and experience.

What area can you see yourself becoming so good at that competition is irrelevant? What could be your personal monopoly?

What is that unsolved problem that keeps you up at night? The thing that drives you. That you have a burning desire to solve.

Who are your “mentor creators”, and where are they leading you? Is it aligned? If not, where could you seek out some new mentor creators?

💬 A quote to ponder

This is what a one-person creator business is built from.

Your brand (how your business is displayed) is created from your vision in goals. What are you building? What are you leading people towards?

Your content (how you attract people to your brand) is created from the interests and skills you are refining to actualize your vision and goals. Your purpose is to educate, entertain, and inspire along your self-development journey. Leaders attract followers.

Your product (how you get paid through value) is created from your map of reality. That is, a process, system, or tool that people can use to solve their problems faster. The ones that you were stubborn about solving that led to having a unique perspective and solution.

The most profitable niche is you.

As a divine creator, your job is to make forward progress, expose yourself to new ideas, and use those ideas to further the progress of humanity.

Dan Koe

📣 What happened this week 

Offers

I’ve been reflecting on how I have been creating without having a formal “offer” out there.

I just have the generic discovery call CTA, but I think it’s time to narrow in on a real offer.

We all struggle with this when we get into a new entrepreneurial field.

We have trouble defining what we actually do in a way that is appealing to the marketplace.

And we lack the confidence to promote and sell our work.

Everyone has recommended Alex Hormozi’s book $100M Offers as the blueprint for creating fantastic offers. The idea is to make the offer so good that people feel silly saying no. 

Lol, let’s see how I go there!

But a powerful mindset shift to move past the procrastination is seeing this first offer as a necessary first failure on the path to greatness.

It reminds me of a post Jose Rosado shared this week:

While you were planning the next 5 years of your life…

Getting a logo ready to start a business…

And waiting for the “right time” to take the plunge…

A 20-yo kid decided to force himself to just put in the work on Instagram and now runs a $50k/mo business.

Let that sink in.

💭 Final thoughts 

Today’s writing background playlist was the “Fragments” album by Bonobo.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with a friend, and if you haven’t already, sign up here or below.

It would be great to have you on board!

Cheers!

Matt K. Head