Tiago Forte has spent more than a decade teaching one method.
It’s called Building a Second Brain, it made him one of the best-known names in productivity, and the complete version costs $28 at any bookstore.
His newest course teaches something he only started figuring out last year.
It costs $3,000, and the first fifty seats sold out in minutes.
Forte has been pricing his knowledge this way for years, and it traces back to a habit that started in a bathtub, long before there was anything he had to sell.
The Boy Who Sorted Toys In The Bathtub
Tiago Forte grew up in a house that ran on patterns.
His father was an artist, his mother a musician, and he remembers a childhood of church stages and large canvases of biblical scenes.
The family still tells the story of him as a small boy in the bathtub, sorting his toys by one system, then another, then another.
“I was always captivated by the patterns that seemed to underlie the world around me,” he said later.
The habit turned serious when his body forced it to.
A chronic illness in his twenties pushed him to track everything about his own condition, and the notes became the first system he ever built to survive something.
In 2012 he landed as a junior analyst at a consulting firm, drowning in information, staring down a path he described as “depressingly clear.”
So he did what he’d always done. He built a system to cope.
He bought Getting Things Done, started a lunch-hour book club with coworkers, and turned the book club into a workshop.
In 2013 he packaged the workshop into a small online course.
Within a few months, thousands of people had taken it.
Forte Labs was born, and its founder had a company before he understood what it actually sold.
A $1,500 Course, a Chronic Illness, And The Best Year He Ever Had
Every product Forte has released since began as a system he built for himself, sold years after he first used it.
In January 2017, he ran the first version as a live course called Building a Second Brain, teaching 25 to 30 people the note-taking system he’d built to manage his illness a decade earlier.
The model was simple: teach it live over five weeks, a few times a year, at around $1,500 a seat.
His blog fed readers onto an email list, and each enrollment window opened to a list that had been reading his thinking for months.
Within a year the business crossed $100,000 annually.
By 2021 the newsletter had grown to 40,000 subscribers and was selling more than $1 million of the course a year, with single cohorts reaching as many as 1,000 students.
It was the best year the business has ever had.
In 2022 the method became a book, which has sold 400,000 copies and still moves around 115,000 a year on word of mouth.
The same year, he made Forte Labs a YouTube-first company. The channel now drives half his audience growth and a third of customer discovery.
Between them, the book and the channel do the persuading before anyone reaches his email list.
The proof is in his own numbers: the average subscriber buys within three days of joining, and 1 in 36 subscribers converts to a product.
With the selling running on its own, he retired the live cohorts in 2023 after six years and roughly 6,000 students.
In their place he built a ladder of products that all teach Building a Second Brain at different depths.
The book explains the method in full, and it’s the cheapest thing Forte sells.
A $65 template installs his filing system in the buyer’s own workspace.
A self-paced course walks them through the complete build, and a $799-a-year membership keeps graduates practicing.
But books, templates, and memberships sell steadily rather than in surges, and he’d just removed the offer behind his million-dollar years.
By 2024, a business that had earned $10 million across its lifetime was losing $230,000 a year.
In 2025 he launched an AI program teaching businesses the workflows he was testing on his own company.
It brought in $1.5 million, most of it from a handful of YouTube videos, and carried the year to $2.15 million in revenue and $650,000 in profit. His second-best year ever.
That winter, 600 people paid $199 each for his Annual Review program, a guided version of a reflection ritual he’d practiced privately since 2008 but hadn’t released yet.
The package included early access to Life in Perspective, the book he’s writing about that ritual, due out in November 2026.
More than 500 participants read the unfinished draft and left 3,200 comments, and Forte fed their feedback straight back into his revisions.
Before the book has even shipped, its first 600 buyers have already paid.
The Pricing Rule He Borrowed From The Movie Business
A movie doesn’t earn its money once.
It opens in theaters at full price, then moves to streaming, then to television, and finally to anywhere it can be watched for almost nothing.
The industry calls these windows, and the rule that governs them is simple: the newer the film, the higher the cost to access it.
Nobody pays $20 to see a film that hits streaming next week. They’re willing to pay a premium to see it now.
Forte runs his business through the same model.
Whatever he’s figuring out right now sells live, in limited seats, at the highest price he charges. That’s the “theater” model.
Once a system has settled, it moves down a tier, into a self-paced course or a membership, where it earns steadily at a middle price.
Fully matured, it becomes a $28 paperback, the “streaming” tier, reaching hundreds of thousands of people at a more accessible price point.
Seen through those filters, the decisions to shut down parts of his business operations start to become clearer.
Retiring the cohorts in 2023 was a window closing on schedule: the Second Brain method was more than a decade old for him, so it belonged in books and courses, priced for volume.
The AI program was like a theater opening, and so was the Annual Review: material so fresh he was still testing it, priced for the people who wanted it now.
And Forte’s premium buyers are willing to pay for early access.
They get his newest thinking while he’s still working it out, instead of reading the book about it two years later.
His whole product suite is one asset, released slowly to extract the maximum amount of revenue out of it over time.
Selling Before It’s Finished
Forte had a decade of systems banked before he sold the first one, but the logic behind his product suite works at any scale, and it points at three moves.
1. Build from your own problems, not from market research.
Nothing in Forte’s catalog came from brainstorming what might sell.
The note-taking system existed because he was sick.
The filing method existed because his own files were a mess.
The annual review existed because 2008 was a bad year and he needed to make sense of it.
He knows every problem he sells a solution to, because he’s had every problem he sells a solution to.
The same pattern runs through the creators in this newsletter.
CJ Gustafson wrote the notes he needed as a first-time CFO.
Sarah Renae Clark solved the coloring problem she watched her own buyers hit.
Your next product could be sitting in the same place theirs was: whatever you built to get yourself unstuck.
Write down the last three problems you solved for yourself with a system, a template, or a process.
Each one is a product candidate, and you’re already the proof it works.
2. Charge a premium for the frontier
Forte doesn’t charge a premium for polish.
His $28 book is the polished thing, but that’s released well after he’s released his first versions of the teaching material.
The initial premium price is for access to the newest version of what the work can be, sold with full knowledge that it’s incomplete.
Most creators would baulk at that.
Bringing a partial product to market feels like a reputation risk, so they wait, refine, and sell the finished version cheap into a market that’s moved on.
Forte prices the cutting-edge discovery element as the feature and accepts incompleteness as part of that.
Buyers of the AI program knew he was still testing the workflows on his own company, but they were willing to pay for access to what was being discovered right now.
If you sell your most recent thoughts and discoveries, name them plainly: this is the frontier. It will change, but it’s also the latest version, so that’s why it costs more.
The honesty does the positioning for you.
3. Use early buyers to finish the product.
Forte’s 600 Annual Review participants left 3,200 comments on his unfinished manuscript, and he revised the book from their feedback.
You don’t need to sell the shaping itself. Deliver a real program, and let the feedback be the byproduct.
Their questions show you what’s missing.
Their language becomes your sales page.
Their results become your proof.
By the time the finished version ships, it’s been tested by the exact people it was built for.
Forte’s catalog took twenty years to fill.
Yours could start with the problem you just solved.