“Two Paths to Monetizing Writing” is a practical strategy Raymond Hou has repeatedly used in The Super Individual’s Way of Working and several articles. It answers the downstream question, “Once you can write, how do you turn it into income?” It complements the belief-level idea Writing Is the Best Investment for Ordinary People (Writing Is the Best Investment for Ordinary People): the latter explains why to write; this strategy explains how writing can be exchanged for money and opportunities. Raymond’s version mainly adapts a framework by American writer Nicolas Cole to his own decade of running a company of one.
Two Paths: Services and Products
Raymond organizes Nicolas Cole’s observations into two ways to earn from writing. The first is the service model, or selling time: freelance writing, ghostwriting, and consulting. It has a low barrier to entry and makes it easy to earn the first payment, but income has a clear ceiling because there are only 24 hours in a day, and another hour of work brings diminishing efficiency and energy. The second is the product model, or selling knowledge: books, online courses, paid memberships, and digital products. It has no fixed income ceiling, and the marginal effort to sell one copy is similar to selling many, but getting started is extremely difficult because it first requires substantial trust and an audience. 1
Raymond emphasizes that these paths are not mutually exclusive; they have an order. When most people want to earn through writing, their first thought is to publish a book, start a column, or make a course. But if nobody knows them, nobody will buy. The right sequence is to survive through the service model while accumulating expertise and proven cases, then package that experience into scalable products. He condenses this into “services first, products later”: services establish a solid base, while products break through the ceiling.
Fish Where There Is Already Traffic
The second core move answers a common beginner question: Should I set up a blog first? Raymond cites Cole’s answer: a personal website should be the last thing to consider, because a new blog has no built-in traffic and is like an unknown island in the Pacific.
Instead, “fish in traffic pools first, then bring the fish back to your own pond.” The process has two steps. First, write extensively on established platforms with large user bases—Quora, Medium, LinkedIn, X, Threads, and Facebook—to get discovered. Then use incentives such as free resources to bring readers back to a newsletter, YouTube channel, or personal website. Raymond positions a personal website as a “digital business card” and “online storefront” for showing work and selling products; social platforms are the open sea for fishing. The underlying idea is leverage: borrow large existing pools of traffic to build a reputation, then convert loyal readers into digital assets one controls.
Raymond’s Adaptation: Three Stages of a Company of One
Raymond connects this monetization logic to his three-stage path for a company of one. Stage one is the labor-intensive period (zero to 1,000 paying users). The priority is not making money, but building work samples and trust. Practices include showing the process instead of waiting to unveil a major project, validating demand with templates and consulting before making a course, and focusing on only one or two platforms. Stage two is the stable period (1,000 to 10,000), when the focus shifts to marketing and operations, and to repurposing proven content in multiple forms rather than creating something new for every platform. Stage three is the systems period (more than 10,000), when administrative processes can begin to be handed to AI and automation. Raymond particularly opposes using AI to generate a course outline and selling it before one has real experience during the labor-intensive stage; courses should grow out of real user feedback.
On the service side, Raymond proposes “strategic unpaid work” as an accelerator. This does not mean being exploited; it means proactively taking on work with a clear objective and time limit, exchanging it for valuable intangible resources one does not yet have: portfolio pieces, connections and endorsements, or learning opportunities. The creator should proactively offer unpaid work in exchange for specific resources, rather than passively accept someone else’s demand for free labor, and should start charging once the goal is met.
Evidence and Limits
Raymond’s own timeline offers examples of the strategy. In 2015, he shared scattered learning notes on Facebook and proactively helped people revise presentations, gaining opportunities for paid presentation workshops inside and outside his university. That was the beginning of the service model. From 2017, long-form writing on Medium brought him work with international companies and TEDx speaking invitations. Only later did he gradually launch online courses, paid memberships, and other products, completing the shift from services to products. He applied the same logic to brand operations: he says the key test for a platform is whether one can access users’ email addresses and process data through an API. He therefore brought courses from third-party platforms back to his own site, preferring fewer users if that meant controlling the list.
The strategy serves long-term accumulation, not a quick win. Raymond advises people in the labor-intensive stage to set realistic income expectations, avoid buying traffic, and not compare their pace with others. Product quality can only drive growth so far; marketing, operations, and a brand flywheel eventually need to fill the gap. He also marks a limit: “services first” is a means. If someone keeps accepting labor-intensive jobs without stepping back to design products, they will be stuck trading time for money and may lose the possibility of moving to the product model.
Related
This is the execution layer for “monetizing expertise” in Raymond’s Super Individual (Super Individual) work system. It builds on the belief in Writing Is the Best Investment for Ordinary People, and connects to the Business Thinking and Writing topic pages. The framework comes from Nicolas Cole; its development through Raymond’s career is described in The Self-Employed Era (2020–). The idea of turning accumulated content into reusable assets also reinforces Second Brain.
Source
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “Who Is Nicolas Cole? From Warcraft Player to Online Writer Earning Millions a Year: An Analysis of His Writing Monetization Strategy,” WordPress, 2025-08-26. View original ↩