Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush spent years teaching people how to write online.
Cole, successful in his own right, had built a ghostwriting agency to $2 million a year.
Bush had left a $180,000 position as a trader at BlackRock to teach the craft of copywriting.
Together they created a writing program that would go on to hit $1 million in its first year and eventually put 10,000 students through the door.
But somewhere in the process of promoting it, they would stumble on to something that would turn the business on its head and generate more revenue than the program itself.
Today their business does $8 million a year, and the writing program is the smallest piece of it.
A Gaming Blog, a BlackRock Salary, and a Cold Email
Cole discovered writing the way most teenagers discover trouble. By accident, and online.
He was sick through most of high school. Undiagnosed Celiac disease, two fractured spines, and years spent mostly at home playing World of Warcraft and writing about it on a gaming blog.
Ten thousand people read it.
He would later describe high school as four years spent “alone, at home,” with his main social world existing on a computer screen.
But the blog taught him something that would take a decade to fully pay off. Strangers would consistently read his writing if he published it where they could find it.
He took that lesson to Quora after college and published hundreds of essays. Traction came slowly, then all at once.
He landed a column at Inc. Magazine.
He wrote a book, The Art and Business of Online Writing.
He built Digital Press, a ghostwriting agency that grew to $2 million a year in revenue with 24 employees and a client list that included Silicon Valley founders and Fortune 500 executives.
Cole had spent a decade proving that writing online could be a serious business.
Dickie Bush came at it from a completely different direction.
He’d studied math, gone into finance, and landed at BlackRock as a trader earning $180,000 a year. Good job, clear trajectory, and absolutely no reason to leave.
He started writing Twitter threads on the side, applying copywriting principles to social media posts that were short, structured, and built to hold attention.
He made $10,000 ghostwriting and realized the leverage of online writing was real.
In January 2020, he made a bet with himself. Write one short piece every day for 30 days and publish it publicly.
He called it Ship 30 for 30.
It started as a personal challenge, but other people wanted in. The 30-day constraint made it work because writers didn’t have to figure out a content strategy or build a brand.
They just had to write something short and hit publish every day for a month.
Bush had stumbled into something that solved the hardest problem in creative education: getting people to actually do the work.
But he knew it couldn’t stay an accountability group forever.
If Ship 30 was going to become a real product, he needed someone who could build the curriculum and turn a writing challenge into a writing business.
A mutual contact sent a short email. “You two should know each other.”
Cole saw it immediately. The 30-day challenge was the perfect delivery vehicle for everything he’d learned about online writing over the previous decade.
Bush had the container. Cole had the content.
They formalized the partnership in January 2021.
The model was simple. Write on Twitter and LinkedIn, drive readers to a free newsletter, and pitch Ship 30 from there.
In Year 1, they went from zero to a little over $1 million in revenue.
Twenty cohorts followed, and over 10,000 students would eventually go through Ship 30 for 30, paying between $350 and $799 to learn the craft of writing online.
The business Cole had spent a decade preparing for was working.
What neither of them expected was what would happen when they tried to make it work faster.
The $2 Million Asset Nobody Was Supposed To See
Ship 30 was growing, but it had a ceiling Cole and Bush could feel.
Every cohort required a launch. Every launch required new energy.
After running more than twenty cohorts, they were still selling seats one cycle at a time, and the only way to sell more was to do it all again.
So they built a free email course to do some of the heavy lifting.
It was called “Start Writing Online.” Five days, fully automated, designed to take a reader from curious to convinced before they ever saw a sales page.
Each email taught one of Cole and Bush’s core frameworks for writing online.
Over five days, the reader’s thinking about digital writing shifted. By the time the sequence ended, the pitch for Ship 30 didn’t feel like a sales email.
It felt like the obvious next step.
Readers who didn’t buy weren’t forgotten. They entered a 20-email nurture sequence that continued educating and pitching Ship 30 on a loop.
Once it was built, they barely had to touch it again.
What happened next was something they never planned for.
Over 100,000 people went through it.
What had started as a promotional tool to fill cohort seats had suddenly become the engine underneath the entire business.
Cole would later describe the sequence as a strategy that had “generated millions of dollars,” all from something they originally built just to automate the sales process.
Ship 30 was still the product. But the five-day sequence was doing all of the selling.
Up to this point, Ship 30 had been the whole business. Cole and Bush were teaching writers to write.
But graduates kept coming back with the same question: how do I make money from this?
The answer had been sitting in front of them the whole time.
The email sequence generating millions for their own business was exactly the type of asset their students could learn to build and sell.
Premium Ghostwriting Academy launched at $6,800 per student. It taught people how to build the exact type of automated email sequence that had powered Cole and Bush’s own revenue, and sell it to clients at $5,000 to $10,000 per project.
Over 1,400 students enrolled.
Once the pivot was clear, the rest of the business filled in around it.
Write With AI, a paid Substack newsletter at $20 a month, launched in 2023 and grew to $620,000 in annual revenue. Bush ran it in under four hours a week.
Products like Low-Ticket Launchpad and Category Newsletter Creator, both in the $350 range, taught writers how to package their expertise and sell it.
Together the low-ticket line brought in $700,000 in 2025.
Substack Starter Sprint, a live two-week bootcamp at $800, launched in 2026 to teach creators how to build a revenue-generating newsletter from scratch.
Ship 30 itself fell 40% in 2025 to $500,000 when they tried reactivating live cohorts. The product that built the business had now become its smallest revenue line.
The total for 2025: $8 million. An eight-person core team. Roughly $8,500 a month in software costs.
The writing program still existed, and it still fed the pipeline.
But the money came from what happened after the writing.
The 40% Revenue Drop That Didn’t Matter
From the outside, Cole and Bush run a writing education company.
Ship 30 for 30. Ten thousand students. Learn to write online, build an audience, publish consistently.
That’s the story most people see.
The backend tells a different story.
The writing program is the smallest revenue line in the portfolio.
The products generating the most income are the ones that teach people how to make money from writing.
That split didn’t happen by design.
It emerged from watching what the market was actually willing to pay for.
The email sequence outperformed the course.
Graduates kept asking the same question, and the answer kept pointing in the same direction.
Cole and Bush could have ignored it.
They had a working business. They could have kept running cohorts and optimizing Ship 30.
Instead, they followed the revenue.
Cole walked away from Category Pirates in 2023 and took a 50% personal income hit to consolidate around what the numbers were telling him.
They doubled ad spend to $1.1 million in 2025, betting that the commercial side of the business could scale independently.
Revenue grew 18%. Net profit dropped 14% as costs compressed margins.
They weren’t optimizing the writing business. They were building a different one behind it.
The writing still matters. Ship 30 still teaches the foundational skill that makes everything else possible. Without it, there’s nothing to commercialize.
But the engine of this business is the commercial application of the craft.
And the only reason Cole and Bush found it was because they paid attention to what their own numbers were saying, even when it contradicted what they thought they’d built.
The Revenue Line You Haven’t Built Yet
Cole and Bush spent years building a writing education business.
The market told them it wanted something else.
100,000 people raised their hand for a free email course they’d built as a marketing tool.
The volume of that response, and the rate at which those readers converted into paying customers, was a signal they couldn’t ignore.
The email course was pulling harder than the writing program.
People paid more for the products that showed them how to make money from writing.
And when they restructured the business around what the market was responding to, revenue climbed to $8 million.
Most creators never look at their own business that way.
They decide what the product is, build it, and optimize it.
The welcome sequence, the lead magnet, the free workshop, those stay filed under “marketing.”
The course stays filed under “business.” The roles feel permanent.
Cole and Bush’s story suggests those roles are worth questioning.
Whatever is converting best in your business right now, look at it with fresh eyes.
It could be a potential product in its own right.
Ask yourself, could you teach someone else to build it?
Could they charge a client for it?
If the answer is yes, you might be looking at a revenue line you haven’t built yet.
The second principle is about how they priced what they built.
Each product in their stack was priced according to how close it brought the buyer to making money.
At $350, you learn to package a small digital product.
At $800, you learn to build recurring newsletter revenue.
At $6,800, you learn to build something you could sell for five figures.
The price tracks with commercial return.
Buyers can see the math, and the exchange makes sense at every level.
If you teach a skill, ask what your buyers do with that skill to earn income.
That downstream application is almost always worth more than the skill itself, and you can price it accordingly.
The third principle is the simplest, and probably the hardest.
Pay attention to what the market is actually responding to.
The signals are already in your business.
Open rates, conversion rates, the things people share, the offers they complete, the free resources that pull harder than they should.
Cole and Bush discovered their most valuable product by watching how 100,000 people interacted with something they gave away for free.
They didn’t chase that insight on day one. It emerged over years of testing, launching, watching what worked, and having the willingness to restructure when the evidence was clear.
The question worth asking is whether the thing making your business successful is what you think it is.