Tim Grahl could put almost anyone’s book at the top of the New York Times list.
Dan Pink hired him for it. So did Ramit Sethi and Dan Ariely. For ten years, authors paid Tim to sell what they had written, and he was very good at it.
The one thing he couldn’t do was write a book of his own.
He had wanted to his whole life, and nothing he tried worked.
So he spent the next ten years learning how, in public, one page at a time.
Two novels later, Tim runs a company that was on track to clear $2 million last year, selling the same method he learned.
The method belonged to a man who first came to Tim as a paying customer.
A #1 Bestseller That Felt Like Failure And The Sale Of a $250,000 Business
In 2005, Tim quit his day job with a skill he had taught himself at night: building websites.
He took any client who would pay.
His first was a blogger named Ramit Sethi, who had posted asking for help, and Tim worked for free until Ramit started paying him, right around the time Ramit signed his first book deal.
Every client wanted a different kind of site for a different kind of business, and building something new each time meant, in Tim’s words, “you never get good at anything.”
So his business coach pushed him to pick one kind of client and build the same thing for all of them.
He picked authors, the one kind of client whose work he actually yearned to do for himself.
He landed Dan Pink by going to Pink’s website, finding three things wrong with it, and emailing him the fixes.
By 2012 his agency, Out:think, was making about $250,000 a year with two full-time staff, and Pink’s new book was about to launch.
It debuted at number one, but the only thing Tim felt was the pressure to do it again.
The next launch came in at number two, and the author was thrilled, but Tim had missed the top spot by one place and felt like he had failed.
A goal that gives you nothing when you hit it and leaves you a failure when you miss by one is not your goal, and Tim would say later that he had been chasing the wrong dream.
In 2013 he wrote down everything he had learned about selling books and published it himself as Your First 1000 Copies.
It sold 1,006 copies in two weeks, about 400 of them to the 1,869 people on his own email list.
Readers wanted more than the book though, so he turned it into a course, sold 17 spots to his list at $250 to prove people would pay, and then launched it properly.
The first launch made $30,000.
The second made $60,000.
In its first year the course brought in a total of $150,000, with no staff and no phone calls.
One day though, after sitting through nine calls with his agency clients, a blood vessel burst across his forehead, and he knew a life spent on the phone would leave no room for anything creative..
In 2014 he sold Out:think to one of his longest-serving employees on an earn-out, moved to Nashville, and used the revenue from the course sales to pave the way to his real dream – writing novels.
Somewhere on the list of people who had bought his course was a book editor named Shawn Coyne.
Two Hundred Copies and Six Hundred Phone Calls
Shawn Coyne had spent 25 years editing books in New York publishing, and in 2015 he published one of his own, The Story Grid, a method for working out why a story does or doesn’t work.
Tim had an audience of authors and knew how to sell to them.
Shawn knew how to write a story that works, which was the thing Tim had never been able to learn.
So in October 2015 they started a podcast, with Shawn as the editor and Tim as the struggling writer, handing over his pages every week to be taken apart in public.
They kept it up for 292 episodes.
“Nothing worked until I found Shawn,” Tim said later. “Then he taught me how to do it.”
The email list grew past 50,000 along the way, and when Tim finished his first novel, The Threshing, he sent it to them.
Only about 200 people ended up buying it.
Tim had built an email list around book marketing, and a list of people who want to sell books, he found out, doesn’t necessarily buy young adult fiction.
What that list did want was the thing they had been listening to for years: Shawn teaching a writer how to make a story work.
So Tim sold that to them and built a 12-month program called the Guild, live scene-writing workshops, a certification that trained editors in the method, and a small publishing arm.
By 2021 it was bringing in $690,000 a year.
In 2022 it made $695,000, and in 2023 almost exactly the same again.
A business that makes $690,000 three years running is a good business.
But it was also one that had stopped growing, and after the staff, the mentors and the programs were paid for, it was only managing to pay his salary for half the year.
Tim wanted something much bigger, so he stepped back and took a new look at the business.
Everything he had added in those three years, he added because he assumed writers wanted it, and three years of no growth and very little profit said his assumptions had run out.
So in early 2023 he took a marketing consultant’s advice to speak directly to his customers.
Tim ended up making around 600 calls in total.
He had always assumed that what a writer wanted was a bestseller, and that is what the business had been built to promise.
But “not one person talked to me about wanting to write a bestselling book. They want to leave a legacy”, he said.
He went back through his notes and found that nearly every assumption he had built the business on was wrong.
So he cut everything down to two things: the Guild, and a mentorship built on what Shawn had done for him.
Now a writer in the Writer Mentorship Program pays $3,900 for the first three months and $1,100 a month after that.
Each one gets a mentor trained in the method, sends in pages every week, and gets back a recorded video taking them apart, the same way Tim learned when he and Shawn ran the podcast.
The mentors are contractors, paid $300 to $350 per student per month, so a student who never signs up costs the company nothing.
And every writer gets a promise: do the weekly work, and if you’re not significantly better by the end, you get your money back – and you’re the one who decides!
Out of hundreds of writers, only two have taken it.
By September 2024, revenue was up 29 percent and the year closed at $1.1 million.
It was the first real growth he’d had in three years.
Seven Years of Watching Tim Get Edited
From October 2015 to 2023, the podcast gave away one thing every week: Shawn taking a real writer’s pages apart, and that writer slowly getting better.
Through those same years, what Story Grid charged for was the method.
A writer bought a book, a workshop or a certificate, took Shawn’s rules home, and applied them alone.
So the free product and the paid product were two different things.
The podcast gave away the relationship. The product sold the method.
The 2024 rebuild brought it all together.
Copying the format was only half of it.
Shawn had also taken responsibility for whether Tim got better, and Tim built the company on the same promise.
He put it in one question – “What if I run my company where my goal is to get a hundred percent of the people to get what I promised them?”
Everything else about the business followed from that question.
Under the old model, a writer bought a $1,290 workshop, finished it, and left.
Under the new one, a writer who stays twelve months pays about $13,800. The mentor who reads that writer’s pages costs the company about $4,000 over the same year.
That leaves close to $10,000 per writer, and it is what makes the money-back promise affordable.
One refund costs the company a fraction of what the writers who improve bring in, and the promise can be kept because someone trained in the method is reading every writer’s pages every week.
Chris Do, whom we covered in an earlier piece, built the same engine for designers.
Hundreds of hours of free coaching on camera, where a viewer watches someone else’s pricing assumptions get taken apart and recognises their own, and then a paid room where it happens to you.
Then, in 2026, the format changed.
In May, according to three former mentors who have written about it publicly, Story Grid ended every mentor contract and moved the weekly feedback to a rules-based system built on Shawn’s editorial judgment.
Tim has said in writing that AI is not involved, and as of September the homepage still sells one-on-one support.
Whether it is still mentorship at all is a question Story Grid’s own students are now asking in public.
Three Lessons From the Man Who Needed a Teacher
Three things stand out in how Tim got from $690,000 to $1.1 million, and each one is something you can start on this week.
1. Sell the thing that changed you, in the shape it changed you.
It’s easy to stumble on to a great business idea, package it up into a model that carries all the bells and whistles, but lose sight of what brought on the transformation in the first place.
Tim’s transformation took seven years of one editor reading his pages every week.
Then he went on to sell the method as a book, a workshop, a course and a certificate, and the business sat still for three of those years.
Once the product took the shape of the thing that had actually changed him, one editor and one writer’s pages every week, the business doubled.
People don’t want more information. They want a result, and sometimes getting out of your own way and looking at how that result was delivered to you is the whole answer.
Think back to the moment the result you now sell first arrived for you, and write down what caused it.
A person, a deadline, feedback on your own work, a hundred attempts.
Then look at what you sell and ask whether your buyer gets that same cause, or just a description of it.
2. Ask the people who already paid you what they actually wanted.
Tim sold the idea of writing a bestseller for years and never turned around to ask his clients if that was what they wanted.
It turned out they wanted to leave a legacy.
Once you understand what your client believes and wants, your whole communication around that product changes, and what you deliver changes.
That understanding comes from talking to your clients, reading your sales call transcripts, and breaking them down until you are inside their head.
Start with ten calls. Ask each one what they wanted on the day they paid you, then stay quiet.
3. Document the journey.
For seven years, Tim and Shawn recorded the struggle and how they went about solving it, week by week.
Watching someone pull a real problem apart and fix it is worth more to a listener than any course theory, because they can project it onto their own situation.
If you solve a problem for a client this week, the record of how you solved it is a piece of content. Keep it.
Tim is 20 years into this, and the business he runs today sells the thing he wanted for himself.
The podcast came back on 25 September 2026, and he still writes his own novels alongside running the company.
He says he wants to pass $5 million by 2027 and $25 million within ten years.
Whether he gets there or not, he found out something most people never find out about their own work: the thing worth selling was the transformation that he went through himself.