My scifi novella “The Birth of Paradise” is now available!

The best place to order it is on Amazon:

• Kindle

• Paperback

• Hardcover

• Audiobook

While this novella takes place in the same universe as my first novel, Husk, you do not need to have read Husk first. They can be read in either order.

If you have read Husk, TBOP takes place 100 years earlier, and focuses on Felix’s last day on Earth before he transfers his mind into Meru.

The Birth of Paradise is special to me because while Husk followed a more traditional sci-fi adventure thriller style, The Birth of Paradise is more philosophical, emotional, with a much slower burn to the climactic finish.

I feel confident saying it’s the best of the three books I’ve written. And at about 100 pages, it’s a quick read, one you can enjoy in an evening or two.

So please grab a copy, and I can’t wait to hear what you think!

The Birth of Paradise

“Be careful. If Felix finds you reading this, I can only imagine what might happen to you.”

As a mysterious plague threatens to end civilization, disgraced tech mogul Felix Craft claims he’s conquered death itself. He’s invited journalist Rohan Patel to tell the story of the century: the creation of Meru. A digital paradise to serve as humanity’s final hope.

Rohan arrives at Felix’s estate, expecting either groundbreaking science or spectacular failure. What he discovers is far more terrifying.

Now, he’s smuggling out a secret, wrapped in the story of that fateful day. Paradise is not what it seems. Felix is not a savior.

But Rohan knows how to stop him.

Order The Birth of Paradise

As always, thank you so much for reading.

Writing these books has been a real creative joy, and it means so much to hear from those of you diving into them.

My novella “The Birth of Paradise” is now available for preorder, and will be released next week on January 20th, 2026!

The best place to preorder it is on Amazon:

• Kindle

• Paperback

• Hardcover

The audiobook should be released shortly afterwards.

While this novella takes place in the same universe as my first novel, Husk, you do not need to have read Husk first. They can be read in either order.

If you have read Husk, TBOP takes place 100 years earlier, and focuses on Felix’s last day on Earth before he transfers his mind into Meru.

The Birth of Paradise is special to me because while Husk followed a more traditional sci-fi adventure thriller style, The Birth of Paradise is more philosophical, emotional, with a much slower burn to the climactic finish.

I feel confident saying it’s the best of the three books I’ve written. And at about 100 pages, it’s a quick read, one you can enjoy in an evening or two.

So please grab a copy, and I can’t wait to hear what you think next week!

Here’s the blurb to give you more of a taste:

"Be careful. If Felix finds you reading this, I can only imagine what might happen to you."

As a mysterious plague threatens to end civilization, disgraced tech mogul Felix Craft claims he's conquered death itself. He's invited journalist Rohan Patel to tell the story of the century: the creation of Meru. A digital paradise to serve as humanity's final hope.

Rohan arrives at Felix's estate, expecting either groundbreaking science or spectacular failure. What he discovers is far more terrifying.

Now, he's smuggling out a secret, wrapped in the story of that fateful day. Paradise is not what it seems. Felix is not a savior.

But Rohan knows how to stop him.

Pre Order The Birth of Paradise

I can’t help but pick it apart and think about what it’s doing well and not doing well, not so much to judge it but rather to see what it can teach me about my own process.

With two of my daughters fully embracing their Disney princess phase, I’ve seen Frozen a few more times than I might otherwise have chosen to.

And since the marathon started, something has been bothering me about the twist. I know I’m not the first one to call it out, there’s a good bit of debate about whether it’s a good twist or not, but I’ve figured out why it doesn’t work from a storytelling perspective, and it’s an excellent lesson in the difference between surprising and betraying your audience.

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The Twist

In case you haven’t seen Frozen a couple dozen times this year, the big twist comes when the princess in distress (Anna) thinks her prince charming (Hans) can save her from her frozen heart with a true love’s kiss.

Just before kissing her though, Hans reveals he never loved her, he was using her to try to take over the kingdom. He refuses to kiss her, and in the interest of speeding things up puts out the fire keeping her warm and locks her in a room to die.

The twist plays on the resolutions of earlier Disney movies like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White where the prince does save the day by kissing the princess, and it leans on your expectation of Disney to follow that trope.

It also leans on Anna’s breadcrumbed naiveté throughout the earlier parts of the movie, making decisions like marrying a man she met that day, charging off into a blizzard on her own, and repeatedly ignoring her ice witch sister telling her “hey you should really stay away because I can’t control this and you might die.”

The Problem

Point of view is one of the most important aspects of telling a story as it dictates how the story is communicated to the audience and what part of the story they have access to. And it is especially important for a good twist, because the parts of the story you have access to through the point of view dictate what you do and do not know as an audience member, and thus how surprised you can be.

In Fight Club, 100% of the story is told through the narrator’s (unnamed, played by Edward Norton) point of view. The only times you aren’t seeing through his eyes is when he’s retelling stories that other characters have told him. You never see anything from Marla’s for Bob’s POV because it would immediately reveal Tyler doesn’t exist.

The narrator is unreliable, he’s hallucinating this whole other person in his life, but you don’t realize that until later because you don’t immediately have a reason to believe the accuracy of his storytelling is compromised. There are hints that he’s unreliable during the first watch, like the flashes of Tyler during earlier scenes, but most people don’t catch it. Then when you rewatch the movie, his unreliability feels obvious.

Frozen has no narrator and no interiority. The closest you get to seeing someone’s thoughts is when a character is talking to themselves, so you are mostly inferring their thoughts and motivations through their actions.

The narrator in Fight Club repeatedly breaks the fourth wall and talks directly to the audience, which makes his unreliability more believable. You have a direct relationship with him separate from the relationships among the characters in the story. Frozen does not create this kind of separate relationship, just the relationships among the characters.

We know Elsa has secret powers because we see her history and her struggle, she never tells us. So to the extent characters are lying in Frozen, they should only be lying to each other. There’s no reason to believe they could lie to us because we don’t exist as a pseudo-character in the story the way we do in Fight Club.

And so the twist with Hans’s secret plotting could work, because we mostly see him through Anna’s naive eyes. Their moments at the ball, their song, and when Anna charges off after Elsa, they’re all largely from Anna’s doe-eyed perspective and it colors how we see Hans. He seems to share her romanticism, and seems noble when he rides off to save her after her horse trots back to the town without her. Most of the early moments where we see him without Anna, he’s surrounded by other people and seems to be keeping up the act of being a noble savior and protector.

If this was all we had of Hans, I think the twist would work. All of those actions do make sense as part of a conniving plot to take over power from the innocent princess.

But it gets ruined by one tiny detail.

The Mistake

Anna and Hans meet early in the first act, when Hans accidentally hits Anna with his horse, then narrowly saves her from falling into the river. They awkwardly fall on top of each other in a boat, both clearly acting smitten, then Anna runs off to prepare for the coronation.

If the interaction stopped right there it would still work fine for the twist, because on rewatch, we could interpret it as Hans acting, trying to fool Anna into believing he’s as smitten with her as she is with him. And because we’re seeing this largely from Anna’s point of view, we naturally share her naivete and desire for a love story to emerge, especially after that desire being seeded during the previous song “For the First Time in Forever”:

For the first time in forever

I could be noticed by someone

And I know it is totally crazy

To dream I’d find romance

But for the first time in forever

At least I’ve got a chance

But the scene doesn’t end when Anna runs off. It should, since everything has been from her point of view up to this point, but after Hans’s horse “waves” goodbye to Anna, Hans ends up falling in the lake, and then he lifts up the boat to watch Anna leave.

This tiny beat is the whole problem. If you look at Hans’s expression, he’s still clearly making the doe-eyed smitten face he was when he was talking to Anna. But he’s alone now. There’s no one there for him to lie to. The only reason to include a beat like this in a story told in this way is to tell something to the audience about the character.

It’s exactly where they could have given the subtlest clue about the deception. An evil smirk would have been too obvious, but they could have given him a curious expression or something to hint that he has something other than love on his mind.

But that’s not what they did. In this singular moment where you get a private interaction with Hans before the twist, you see him expressing the same feelings towards Anna that she’s imagining.

This is bad writing. They made the twist work not by clever deception which you can laugh at yourself for missing on the rewatch, but by directly lying to you, the audience.

That could be acceptable if Hans had a relationship with you, like the narrator does in Fight Club, but the fourth wall is never broken in Frozen. So there’s no justification for a character lying directly to the audience. Whenever you’re alone with a character in a story told this way you can safely assume you’re getting an authentic view of that character’s feelings and motivations.

It’s a perfect example of how powerful tiny details can be in a story. One sentence can change a whole book, and one beat can change a whole movie.

It Didn’t Need to Be This Way

Riffing on the story more, I’m really not sure why they even went this direction. The Duke of Weaseltown was already a good villain with compelling motivations, and they could have used him as the main antagonist after scrapping Elsa as the villain.

They could have kept the “true love” twist, too. Instead of Hans betraying Anna, they could have kissed and had nothing happen, the twist being that they weren’t in true love because they just met. This would have made sense too since that twist was breadcrumbed by Elsa and Kristoff’s reactions to Anna saying she’s in love with him.

Then Hans could have helped Anna stop the Duke from killing Elsa, and they could have kept the same second twist that it was “an act of true love” (saving her sister) that cured her. It never had to be a kiss in the first place. I think this second twist is great and it’s kinda ruined by how they botched the other one.

So why make him the villain at all? Maybe they were excited by the “evil prince” concept, maybe it was meant to have some sort of political message, I don’t know, but whatever the reason, that one tiny detail really threw a wrench in the whole thing.

Thanks for reading! If you like Sci-fi, be sure to grab a copy of my technothriller Husk. Or if you’re more of a nonfiction reader, check out Crypto Confidential.

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Yet for years, I have been.

With Cosette (my wife) and I being self-employed, we’ve had to figure out our own health insurance since 2021.

And each year I’ve watched the price go up, especially as we’ve had more kids, my frustration with the difference between what we’re paying and what we’re getting steadily rising.

The last straw came this fall. Our pediatrician informed us they would no longer be accepting our health insurance, and on top of that, we had to pay thousands of dollars for some testing that they mis-billed and insurance wasn’t covering.

So I started the search that has left so many people shocked this year, and discovered we’d have to pay around $3,000 a month for a family of five for the same level of coverage we had before.

That might be tolerable if we got $3,000 a month in value for our health insurance, but it’s nowhere close. Hardly anything we already do for our health is covered by it. All three of our births we’ve paid out of pocket. We get blood work on our own. We hire fitness trainers. We don’t have any preexisting conditions or medications. And the one thing we did use insurance for, our pediatrician visits, would cost significantly less than $3,000 a month out of pocket.

The conversation I kept having with people the last few months was basically: “I’ve been doing the math and I don’t think health insurance is worth it anymore.”

Why pay $36,000 a year for a service we’re not really using, and which we might have to fight tooth and nail to get our money in the event we do need to use it?

I floundered in this grey space for a month, pulled back and forth between “this is way too expensive to make sense” and “you’d be an idiot not to have health insurance for your family.”

Then, finally, I found a solution.

A friend posted on X about his own thoughts along my lines, and another mutual replied mentioning CrowdHealth.

I’d heard of them over the years since they launched, and they’d come up as an option during my research, but I hadn’t felt confident it was a good option. It sounded too good to be true. But spurred by his mention and the endorsements of people in the comments, I decided to dig in deeper.

And, well, it was exactly what I was looking for. I scrapped my plans to pick a new health insurance plan, signed up for CrowdHealth, and it honestly feels like a massive weight off my shoulders.

I’ve gotten a ton of questions about it on X, so I thought it would be worth sharing how I ended up making this decision and why I think it’s the right one for my family.

Maybe it’s the right one for yours, too.

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Two Notes Before We Continue

The Referral Network: As I’ve done on this blog for over a decade, I’m writing this post because CrowdHealth is something I discovered that I’m extremely excited about. They also have a referral program, and whenever I link CrowdHealth in this post I’m including my referral code, which gets you a discount on your first few months and gives me a referral bonus.

I would have written about CrowdHealth even if they didn’t have this program though. And if you’d like to sign up without giving me credit for referring you, use this link: No Referral.

CrowdHealth’s CEO: When I asked people what they wanted me to include in this piece on X, the CEO of CrowdHealth reached out to me and offered to take a look at the piece before I published it.

He corrected a couple small details I got wrong, but did not influence the tone, voice, or pros and cons in the piece at all.

I will say I’ve been pretty inspired by how active the CrowdHealth team is on social media. As you can see from the X post, they jumped right in and started answering people’s questions.

Anyway, onward!

Why Insurance Wasn’t Working for Us

I’m probably 10-20 pounds heavier than I should be, I have high cholesterol, but all things considered, I’m in excellent shape by national standards. My VO2 Max is 50, I can lift twice my bodyweight off the ground, I get excellent sleep, we cook most of our meals, I get bloodwork done and make tweaks in accordance with it. Cosette is arguably even healthier.

In the 8 years we’ve been living together, we’ve only been to an ER twice. Once when she dislocated her elbow, and again when our daughter fell and split her forehead open. No annual physicals, no medications, no chronic conditions.

Our biggest health expenses and investments haven’t been covered by insurance. We can’t charge for our food choices or our fitness. All three births we’ve paid for out of pocket since midwives, doulas, and the one birth center we did weren’t covered.

But during those 8 years, we’ve spent somewhere around $100,000 - $150,000 on health insurance. So we’re deeply in the hole on our health insurance spend, losing tens of thousands of dollars a year for effectively nothing.

Now, I know the big obvious caveat here: health insurance is for the things you don’t expect. The car crash, the cancer, the home birth complications. And that caveat was how I kept justifying it for so long.

But as the costs have risen and as our health has continued to improve, the math started making less sense. If something catastrophic happened, we’re fortunate enough that we could cover the costs by dipping into our investments. Investments which we’d have much more money to put towards if we weren’t spending $36,000 a year on health insurance.

And even if we did develop a chronic condition that required ongoing treatment, there would still be the question of whether that cost was less than the cost of insurance, especially once you factor in the savings of not paying insurance for so many years.

So this was the math I started thinking about. Self insurance through an HSA or something was starting to get very appealing. But even so, I was still worried about having some protection in the event of a sudden unpredictable event.

Before I found CrowdHealth I was pretty seriously leaning towards self-insurance. But I think CrowdHealth is the better option for someone in a similar situation to mine.

What is CrowdHealth

CrowdHealth is the happy medium between taking your health risks completely into your own hands, and being stuck in the current health insurance hellhole.

Each month, you pay a flat monthly fee, and then up to a certain amount on top of that towards other member’s healthcare costs. For my family of five, the flat fee is $295, and then we pay up to $400 a month towards others’ costs.

Off the bat we’re talking about a cost reduction from $3,000 a month to $695, which is what set off my “this is too good to be true” alarm bells. But as I dug into how it works, the math started to make sense.

How it Works

When you have a health event, you submit it to the “crowd,” and they reimburse you, with a couple caveats.

Let’s use my wife’s elbow dislocation as an example for how it works. She fell at a bouldering gym and we had to call an ambulance and go to the ER for them to fix it. After everything was done, instead of giving them my insurance information, I would have told them I was a cash payer and asked for the bill.

Then I upload the bill to CrowdHealth. They contact the hospital and handle negotiating it down as much as humanly possible. Then once they have the price down, they spread it out across the members in their network, with us on the hook for $500 of it.

If the bill came out to $20,000, they might break that down into 200 payments of $100 and ask 200 people to contribute. Anyone who contributes to that bill would be paying towards their monthly contribution limit.

CrowdHealth sends the money to our bank account, I pay the hospital, and we’re done. If we end up with any other bills we just submit those the same way.

As a member, you have a “generosity score” that reflects how reliable you are about contributing to other people’s bills. If you have autopay turned on, this will always be 100 and you won’t have any issues. But if you don’t contribute towards other people’s bills, then when you end up submitting a request other members will have the option to not pay your bill at no penalty to them.

So everyone’s incentivized to keep helping each other out because one day you might be the one that needs help.

But that’s basically how normal insurance works too, so how is the cost so low?

How The Cost is So Low

You can’t join CrowdHealth if you’re not reasonably healthy. And by excluding unhealthy people, they’ve created a better, cheaper option for healthy people.

During the intake form, they ask if you were ever a regular tobacco user, or if you weigh over a certain amount (260 for men, 220 for women). If you say yes to either, you can’t join.

By excluding obese people and smokers, they’ve already cut the cost of healthcare significantly, since those are the two most obvious sources of higher healthcare costs.

Maybe you feel a sense of moral duty to pay for medical care for those demographics, but I don’t. I absolutely want to contribute to the care for a kid who needs emergency surgery through no fault of their own. But if someone has made poor lifestyle choices, that’s not my problem.

CrowdHealth also make joining reasonably unattractive to anyone with a preexisting condition. You aren’t excluded from joining if you have one, but you can’t bill anything related to that condition to the network until two years after you join.

So among those three exclusions, they’re naturally creating a pool of people with much higher average health than the American baseline.

The other area of their process where they can save quite a bit is through their handling of the cash price negotiations.

During my diligence, I got on a call with someone from their team and asked about the most expensive procedure they’d covered. He shared an example from last year where someone had a serious cancer diagnosis that resulted in a bill for $1 million. They negotiated it down to $250,000.

That’s still a huge bill, but break it down into $250 payments, and it only has to be paid by 1,000 people, less than 10% of their 15,000 person network.

So the math was starting to make sense at this point, but there was another very obvious way they could be keeping the cost down: denying people coverage.

Which led to my next question: how many of these bills actually get paid?

Do The Bills Actually Get Paid?

When you sign up for CrowdHealth they make it very explicit that this is not health insurance and they cannot guarantee coverage. They technically call it “funding” instead of “covering.”

Now off the bat, it’s worth recognizing that regular health insurance doesn’t cover you in 100% of situations either. I got a bill from our pediatrician last month for a few thousand dollars because United Healthcare told them they wouldn’t pay for one of our kids’ physicals because their tests weren’t done in the VERY SPECIFIC WAY they have to be done to be covered.

And there are plenty of more dramatic stories. Roughly 19% of in-network claims, and 37% of out-of-network claims, end up getting denied by insurance. I only learned that while doing the initial research and was shocked, that’s much higher than I thought. When you pay for insurance you tend to assume that if something bad happens you’ll be covered 100% of the time, not 81%!

So theoretically, if CrowdHealth is funding at least 81% of the requests, they’re doing as well as insurance.

This was what led me to the last piece of the puzzle and gave me the confidence to pull the trigger. CrowdHealth publishes the data on every single healthcare request they receive and whether or not they funded it.

It’s a ridiculous degree of transparency for a healthcare company. Imagine United Healthcare or Aetna publishing something like this. And if you scroll through it you can see their coverage ratio month-by-month, as well as what bills weren’t covered and why they were denied.

Their denial rate for September was 2.67%, and most of those were cases where a member tried to submit something they should have known wouldn’t be covered in the first place.

You can also see everything that was funded. Like this example of a Pneumococcal Meningitis Event where over $10,000 was funded by spreading it out across 121 members.

Now that said, there are some things that aren’t covered that could give you legitimate concern. If you were symptomatic or diagnosed before you joined, that will get denied. As will anything related to preexisting conditions for the first two years, as I mentioned above.

But if you submit something and it gets denied, there’s an appeal process. CrowdHealth has a volunteer panel of five members from the community who review contested decisions. You submit a statement, CrowdHealth submits a statement, and then the panel votes on whether you should be funded or not.

But there’s one last category where your care might get denied that I was the most worried about, which is their “fair pricing” rule.

The Fair Pricing Rule

Let’s say that Cosette ended up needing corrective surgery for her elbow after the initial emergency room visit. CrowdHealth doesn’t lock you into a network and you’re free to go to any doctors or specialists you want, but your costs are only funded if the provider offers a “fair price.”

The fair price is decided by looking at the average cost for a procedure across the hospitals in your region. CrowdHealth calculates an average price, and recommends doctors within that price range, allowing you to go up to 20% above the fair price.

If you wanted to go to the absolute #1 best surgeon in your region, and they charged more than 20% above the market rate, you would not be fully funded. CrowdHealth would fund up to 120% of the fair market amount, but above that you’d be on your own. It’s worth noting too that this is only for very large bills like surgeries. It’s not for normal specialist visits or primary care visits.

I ultimately decided this was fine since it’s how they can manage the cost of the membership. For most trips to a hospital you do not need the #1 best in the world, and in the event my family ever does, I’m fine paying some of it out of pocket for that extra level of care. Especially since I’m saving ~$27,000 a year.

Assuming something truly horrible happens, it’s still a much better situation to be in than I would be if I did self-insurance.

What About Your Kids?

This is the question I’ve gotten the most, and it was my biggest concern going into it. Kids are naturally a big source of healthcare costs and healthcare anxiety. So I’ll break it out into four categories. Ultimately in my case the savings were overwhelming compared to the slight increase in costs for getting care for our kids:

Childbirth

For every medical event you submit bills for to CrowdHealth, you have to pay the first $500. Except for childbirth, where your initial commitment is $3,000.

On the one hand that feels a bit unfair, but plenty of health insurance plans have a higher deductible than $3,000 for everything, and in our case, we can actually use CrowdHealth for midwife and doula care, so we’ll save ~$7000 on any future births. I wish I had signed up four years ago.

If you’re doing a hospital birth, you’ll end up paying more than you would on insurance, unless your deductible is over $3,000 and you have no other healthcare expenses that year. But you still have to weigh that against what you’re saving from the switch.

Kid Wellness

Before CrowdHealth, our in-network co-pay for kids wellness (their normal physicals) was $20 a visit.

On CrowdHealth, we have to pay the first $500 for wellness expenses for our kids from 0-6mo then CrowdHealth pays the rest, and then it resets for 7-36mo with the same deal.

Once they’re 3 they’re normal members with a $300 annual wellness credit.

So we’ll be spending a little more out of pocket for our kids’ pediatric visits, probably ~$800-900 per kid, but we’re saving more than that per month. Plus, the risk of something getting denied is significantly lower.

Kid Emergency

Our oldest daughter fell and split her forehead open when she was about 2. We rushed her to the ER, got in quickly, they stitched her up and sent us home, and sent the bill to insurance.

If I remember correctly, our health insurance at the time had a lower deductible, around $2,000, so that’s probably all we paid. Maybe less.

On CrowdHealth, we would have gotten the cash bill, sent it to CrowdHealth, and then they’d negotiate it down. But whatever they negotiated it down to, our contribution would have been $500, so we’d save money in this example.

Chronic Conditions

Again, we’re fortunate to have very healthy kids with no conditions that require ongoing care. If you do, then CrowdHealth probably isn’t the right choice, since the first two years of their coverage for those conditions won’t be covered.

The math MIGHT still work out assuming you’re going to be on it for 5-10+ years. But you’d have to calculate that out yourself.

So Who Is It Not For?

CrowdHealth definitely doesn’t make sense for you if:

• You’re over the weight limit

• You’re a current or former tobacco user (3+ months of daily use)

CrowdHealth is probably not for you if:

• You have an expensive chronic condition you need coverage for

• You have incredible free health insurance from your employer

CrowdHealth is maybe not for you if:

• You live in a state where there’s a health insurance mandate, and you’ll be fined for not having true health insurance. These states are California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia.

• You’re borderline unhealthy, very worried about the worst case scenario and would be financially ruined if it happened. Basically if you’ll lose sleep from this choice.

• You feel a sense of duty to pay for other people’s healthcare, regardless of their choices

What’s The Worst Case Scenario?

Justin Welsh asked this question on X and I thought it was a good one:

The one risky “gotcha” I can imagine is where you have something like kidney failure and then need to get on dialysis for an unknown period of time.

You’d only be covered for that ongoing treatment for the first year, after that you’d be on your own, which could easily be $100,000+ per year.

You could quit CrowdHealth and get back on normal insurance, but if the legislation changes and health insurance companies no longer have to accept people with preexisting conditions then you might not be able to do that either.

So if you end up in that situation you’re going to have a bad time. The odds are low, but it’s worth knowing that it’s possible.

Other Questions

What About High Cholesterol (or other risk factors)?

This is another topic I was interested in since I have higher cholesterol. Thankfully high cholesterol alone is not considered a preexisting condition, so if you join and then have a cardiac event you’ll be covered.

But if you’ve already had a cardiac event, or been diagnosed with something related, then your related care wouldn’t be covered until two years after you’ve been a member.

Adult Wellness?

Every member gets a $300 credit per year to use towards “wellness” visits. This could be bloodwork you get done yourself, an annual physical, the dentist, whatever. After that you’re on your own.

That might be an issue if you take advantage of your insurance to get tons of preventative stuff done on their dime, but it’s not something we were able to do for almost anything before anyway so this is a nonissue for us, especially once the savings are factored in.

What if CrowdHealth Shuts Down?

Then we’d just join another crowd-sourcing healthcare company, or worse-case, get back on Obamacare.

How Liquid Are They? What If There’s a Really Bad Month?

CrowdHealth doesn’t disclose how much cushion they have on their balance sheet so I’m not sure on the first part. But they’ve never yet had the member bills for a month exceed what they can cover with the crowd, and in the event it ever did happen, they’d roll the excess into the next month as the top priority bills.

This is one legitimate black swan risk, though. If five people in the crowd had $1m bills in a month I don’t think they’d be able to cover it immediately.

What if You Don’t Like it? Can You Cancel?

You’re not locked in, so you can quit and go back to normal insurance anytime.

Which Doctors Can You See?

Any you want. Though if you go to a particularly expensive one, you’ll need to pay the difference between the 120% of market rate (explained above) and what the doctor you see charges.

Do You Need Specialist Referrals?

No!

What About Long-Term Prescriptions?

If you get prescribed a drug from a health event, CrowdHealth covers that no problem.

But if you require medication in perpetuity, they only cover the first year. So if you’re on ADHD meds, SSRIs, Statins, you’re going to pay those out of pocket.

Now that said they give you access to an RX Card that cuts the cost by ~50%, and you might save more than the cost of your medication from the switch, but it’s worth running the numbers on that if it applies to you or you think it might apply to you in the future.

How Long Does It Take to Get Paid?

Based on their data you usually get paid in under 7 days, pretty much always in 14. As Cosette reminded me when I was writing this, we were dealing with hospital bills and insurance from her arm for a year after it happened, so having everything wrapped up in two weeks sounds great.

Are You Constantly Reviewing People’s Funding Requests?

No, you only get 1-2 per month, and assuming you have autopay on then you’ll automatically fund them assuming the member making the request has a high generosity score. It’s pretty much set it and forget it.

Health Insurance Won’t Change On Its Own

The last thing that pushed me over the edge here was a sense of duty to help nudge health care in a better direction.

I’ve been complaining about health insurance for years, but still forking over tens of thousands of dollars a year to support their broken business.

Voting with my dollars is a way to push the industry in a better direction.

Obviously if my feelings on the program change I’ll write an update, but I’m very excited to be part of the crowd.

If you have any follow up questions from reading this piece, drop them in the comments. I suspect someone from CrowdHealth will pop in and answer them.

Thanks for reading! Before you go, grab a copy of Crypto Confidential or my sci-fi thriller Husk.

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An under-appreciated consequence of social media and virality is how they’ve made the Internet less useful.

When I started writing online over a decade ago, there was no concept of going viral like there is today. It was almost impossible to write something contentious and have it amplified by people who disagreed with it, sending a horde to your digital door.

Those events have tamed in the last couple years, but one consequence from that era is more moderately opinionated people being less willing to share advice or insights.

I know it because I feel it. I’ve had the horde at my door, and while it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it once did, it is still a nagging thought at the back of my mind when I begin to work on a piece.

I find myself asking: “Is writing this worth the possible backlash that will come from people who disagree with it?” And I have to admit I have a lot of articles which I think would be useful sitting in my drafts because I don’t want to deal with the naysayers.

I know that’s not a good reason. I know it’s cowardly. But the feeling is there. And I’m sure it’s even stronger for other people who have not been kicked around by the Internet before.

How many people out there have extremely useful insights and perspectives to share, who stay quiet because they don’t want to risk inciting the mob? What pieces haven’t been written? What mainstream ideas are squelched because they risk upsetting a tyrannical minority?

An idea I’m trying to hold tighter is that the only way to be useful here is to risk offending people. And perhaps if you’re not taking any risk offending people then it’s unlikely you’re saying something useful.

I don’t mean that you should try to offend people. Rather that it is so easy to offend people now, you have to accept that risk.

Some take it too far and accrue influence by deliberately presenting themselves as combative.

They know they’re going to get attackers when they talk about health or money or happiness or whatever. So to preempt that reaction, they take on an aggressive hyperbolic stance, inviting people to attack them in part because they know it will help their message spread.

Unfortunately it works. They do attract followers who like that kind of hard-headedness, but they alienate the more moderate people who want that information but feel turned off by the abrasiveness.

There is some truth to the idea that you are unlikely to go viral if you do not adopt some of this combative stance. But calmly presented, useful information, even that risks offending people, can still break through.

I knew when I wrote the post about having kids being better and easier than I expected, there would be people angered by it who tried to tear it down. But I decided the message was important enough that it was worth publishing anyway.

What I’ve seen since then has really confirmed this hypothesis, because while there were certainly people in the comments or on social media who attacked it, there were so many more people who agreed with it and either responded publicly or messaged me privately to thank me for writing it.

One person even said it moved up their timelines for having kids, and I can’t imagine anything else I’ve written has been as impactful as that.

It elucidated how deep this problem goes, too, because people shared how the ideas I wrote about have been whispered in parts of their friend group for years. How they know there are other parents who they can’t talk about it around and so they feel like they have to keep it a secret.

That’s a shame because a message like “having kids might be way better than you expect” should be something that everyone is comfortable saying (if they agree with it). But the fear of offense stifles that idea from getting out there, and would-be parents never hear it.

I even heard from a number of people in their 20s who had never heard someone say it. They’d only heard the people loudly complaining about parenthood!

I’m writing this in part as a reminder to myself. It is worth writing about topics even if they risk bringing the mob to your door.

Offending some people does not mean your efforts were in vain. Agreement is often quiet. It’s the likes, it’s the shares, it’s the nods as people read along at their computers that you never hear about.

So you have to write it.

The topic you’re avoiding out of fear might be the most important thing you ever publish.

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Thanks for reading! Once again, I’ve started a separate newsletter for all my writing on building with AI. You should subscribe to it if you want to learn more about harnessing AI in your work and life. Or if you want a good book to read, grab a copy of Husk or Crypto Confidential.

If you’re in your 20s and have any aspiration to start a business or work for yourself or make a dramatic career change, you should do that as soon as possible. Ideally today.

You don’t appreciate how little time you have to easily go after it and how much harder it’s going to be later.

When I moved to Argentina and lived out of my backpack to try to get my first bit of self-employed income going, it felt very risky. It felt like I was taking a huge leap.

But looking back, I didn’t realize just how unrisky that decision was. I didn’t have any kids. I had hardly any financial responsibilities. There was really nothing bad that would have happened if I spent a year or two doing that and I failed. The absolute worst case scenario was that I would be back where I started with a year or two of entrepreneurial experience.

Today I have three kids and a house and I can’t responsibly take the same kind of risks that I could back then. But as a 22 year old, I was completely blind to how much harder it was going to be to take that kind of risk at 32.

When you’re in your 20s and you just graduated from college, you have this idea that, oh, well, I have plenty of time to do the entrepreneurship thing or to try that new career. You feel like you have all the time in the world. But you don’t.

Even if you wait to have kids until you’re 35, that only gives you about 12 years.

Each year you delay is costing you 10% of the easiest period in your life to take a big risk.

So if you are in college or you’re in your 20s and you think that you might want to start a business, completely change your career, move to a new city, do something radical like that, you should do that as soon as humanly possible.

Ignore the scared voice in your head. The downside is basically non-existent.

Even if it fails, even if it doesn’t work out for you and you have to go back to what you’re doing right now, you’ll still have that experience and that time under your belt so that if you do want to come back to it later in your 30s, your learning ramp is going to be much shorter because you’ve already invested that time.

I wish somebody had told me this when I was 22 because I didn’t realize or appreciate how easy I had it. And I’m extremely grateful I took full advantage of it anyway, because otherwise I would not have the life I have now.

Don’t waste that time while you have it.

Start today.

Thank you for reading. The new Build Your Own Apps launches next week, which is the best resource online for learning how to build your own software using AI. Or if you’re looking for your next book, grab a copy of Crypto Confidential or Husk.

The term “vibe coding” wasn’t coined until February 2025, but I started in January 2024. Cursor had launched a few months earlier, and tipped off by Dan Shipper and a couple other friends I decided to give it a go.

It was slow, clunky, prone to errors, but even then the promise was clear. As I reviewed and implemented suggestions from Cursor’s chat over the following months, I managed to build a mostly-usable “Strava for writing” mobile app, while writing less than 20% of the code myself.

As someone who has dabbled in coding on and off over the last decade, it felt revolutionary. It was the missing piece for anyone like me who never really learned how to build software but could kinda hack things together given enough time and patience. But whereas in the past I’d often hit some gnarly issue I couldn’t resolve by digging through StackOverflow, suddenly I had an infinitely patient tutor and assistant.

Even so, it was slow going. I wrote the first lines of code for the app on January 3rd, but didn’t release it to the public until June. There were weeks where I got stuck in debugging loops that Cursor couldn’t resolve, and often had to throw out entire days of work because the code was a mess.

Despite eventually getting the app live, I ended up abandoning it, partially because vibe coding just wasn’t good enough to really do the heavy lifting needed to keep building a production app and because I wanted to focus on writing Husk.

I suspected at the time, though, that if I was patient, the tools would get good enough to let me do the kind of work they weren’t yet ready for.

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November 2024

About six months later I dived in again. Claude’s Sonnet 3.5 was live, Bolt and Lovable and Replit were blowing up, and Cursor had added “agent mode” that could implement the code changes for you and run autonomously for far longer than before. I started hacking on some tools to help with my book editing process, having already found a lot of value in using AI as a first-round editor, and was shocked by how much easier it was to build software compared to the start of the year.

By January 2025 I was hooked and could feel how much potential there was, which led to creating Build Your Own Apps. I’m still somewhat shocked by how strong the response was to this course, and it was amazing to see people who had never coded before build their own tools and push them live.

But the truth is vibe coding still wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be yet in January. It got stuck. It created spaghetti. Building a production-ready app still required a decent amount of technical knowledge, especially once you got to making it secure and performant.

Even though I had spent so much time mastering vibe coding, I still wasn’t using it to create software for anyone besides myself. The personal tools I could hack together were useful. But I was running into limits in what the tools could do that I didn’t have the bandwidth or patience to push through.

So once again, I stepped back for a few months, more confident than before that the tools would soon get good enough to let me do the kind of work I aspired towards. I published Husk, wrote The Birth of Paradise (publishing ~December), got to work on Husk’s sequel, and went back to waiting.

June 2025

When my third daughter was born in June, I took a couple months off writing to be home with her and Cosette, and used the bit of free time I had during naps to get back up to speed on AI tools and vibe coding.

And as excited as I was in January 2024 and January 2025, this summer is when I really felt “oh yeah this is it.”

Whereas January 2024 was akin to hiring an off-shore $5/hr developer to try to hack something together for you, and January 2025 was like having a decent junior developer, now it feels like you actually have a team of rather capable engineers who can build whatever you want for you. If you know how to work with them.

I started hacking on Covici for myself. I wanted a book writing tool that checked all the boxes I had been looking for but couldn’t find, and the coding tools just… kept working. I didn’t expect it to turn into something I’d actually launch for other people to use, but it reached that quality level after a couple months of hacking and I was having so much fun building it I figured hey why not release it?

But the real “whoa” moment came when I started recording the update to Build Your Own Apps a couple weeks ago. Aspects of the course that took a few hours across multiple videos in January got done in minutes in a single video.

More complicated integrations like billing customers with Stripe, which I had saved for the very end of the course last time, were suddenly painless so I taught them much sooner. What took 10-20 hours of instruction before could be covered in 5, leaving time to go much deeper.

Whereas vibe coding at the start of this year could build you a workable but minimal viable product, now it can actually take you all the way to a production-ready app. I didn’t expect the tech to get this good this fast, but it has. Even OpenAI says that their own tool, Codex, is writing 70% of their code now.

There are still challenges, of course. You cannot one-shot anything workable. You have to learn how to plan, debug, ask good questions, which tools to use, etc. But the dream of having a professional development team available 24/7 for 1/100th the cost is basically here. And it’s only getting better and cheaper.

The Future & What’s Worth Learning

I’m skeptical that we’ll ever have a world of “personal software” where you tell an agent to whip you up a SaaS for your business and it just seamlessly works the way you want it forever.

Not because that won’t be possible, the tools can already probably build you an MVP, but you won’t want to maintain it. Good software requires maintenance and ongoing attention, which is why most people will still prefer to pay to use something someone else is maintaining.

There will be exceptions, of course. I suspect per-seat pricing for a tool like Slack is going to be hard to defend. But most writers will not make their own writing app. Most video editors will not make their own video editing app. Most entrepreneurs will not roll their own tax app.

The question is no longer what do you want to build but rather what are you willing to maintain?

With enough patience and a few thousand dollars of AI credits you can build probably 90% of software you might want right now. But are you willing to fix bugs in the middle of the night? Resolve Stripe disputes?

Sure some of that will be taken over by AI agents but there will always be some degree of maintenance you need to do, simply because your attention and energy are the only counterforce you have against the natural entropy that decays anything manmade.

But along with the question of what you’re willing to maintain, as the barriers to creation drop the value of taste will only increase. It’s always been important, but your ability to differentiate from all of the other AI-generated software will be your ability to bring your unique taste and vision to it.

I’ve started learning design and Figma primarily because I can sense that my ability to design is now a bigger bottleneck than my ability to code. You can get pretty far telling AI what you want a site or app to look like, but you are still bottlenecked by its limited creativity.

If you do have any dreams of creating software, this is an incredible time to dive in. Even if you were frustrated and roadblocked by the vibe coding tools a few months ago, you’ll be surprised by how much easier it is today. Even I was surprised by how much it’s changed, and I’m doing this every day.

It might not feel worth it to learn considering it’s going to keep getting better and better. But the sooner you learn how to use the tools and find their limits and work around them, the more prepared you’ll be for the next improvement. And I think to some extent, agent orchestration is what a lot of digital knowledge work is going to look like in the next five to ten years.

We’re also at an interesting point in time where if you start building something now, by the time you get to a level of complexity where you’re hitting the limits of the tools there will already be new ones out. You won’t have to take six month breaks like I did. I’ve already experienced this by having bugs in Covici from August solved by Codex and Sonnet 4.5 in September.

Obviously Build Your Own Apps is a great way to get started, especially with the new material coming out next week. But even short of that just download Cursor and start trying to build something.

You might be surprised by how far you can get.

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I started writing this article in 2022, three months after our first daughter was born.

A few paragraphs in, I decided I was jumping the gun. Maybe the first months were easy but those naysayers who kept telling me “just you wait!” were going to be correct in the end.

So I put it in the metaphorical drawer and decided to come back to it later.

Then our second daughter was born, and a few months into being parents of two the itch to write this article returned. But I’d only been a parent for two years, and while two kids is above average these days, it’s still not very many “reps” to claim to know something from.

So back in the drawer it went.

Three months ago our third daughter was born. Our oldest is nearly four, our middle daughter is two, and here I am, once again itching to write this piece.

Along the way, I’ve realized I’m not alone in thinking this. Quiet whispers and text messages from friends have trickled in: “Why did everyone tell me this was so hard?” Revealing a kind of guilt over the joyous reality of life on the other side of having kids I and others did not expect.

So I think it’s time. Three kids under four is enough experience to confidently say this is far easier and more wonderful than I could have possibly imagined.

If you’re on the fence about having kids, or have been putting it off, I strongly urge you to ignore the whiners and complainers. Ignore the fear-mongering. It might be better than you’re expecting.

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Known Challenges, Unknowable Joys

A few years ago I wrote “Known Costs, Unknowable Benefits” about how the best parts of life are hidden.

Many of the best changes you can make in life are on the other side of some cost you’re painfully familiar with, but where the payoff is a kind of joy you can’t yet comprehend.

You cannot understand the high of running if you’ve never built a running habit. But you can imagine the pain of straining yourself and the anxiety around fitting something else into your schedule. Before you start running or any kind of exercise, it seems like a bad tradeoff. Then you start doing it and realize how much better you feel and go “ohhh I get it now.”

Nowhere is this more true than having children.

Before you have kids it’s easy to imagine getting woken up repeatedly in the middle of the night. Having to cut back on your social plans. Not being able to travel as easily. Spending more money. The costs are visible and painful to imagine.

But what you can’t imagine is the first time your baby smiles at you. When they say Mama or Dada. When they start crawling and want to chase your dog around the living room. Or the pride of coming back from the gym at 7am and finding your toddler sitting at the counter in the dark with a play knife cutting a peach for themselves.

Even the challenges you can imagine have a secret side to them you can’t anticipate. Bouncing your baby who’s been crying for an hour is exhausting, there’s no denying that. But then you look across the room at your wife and your eyes meet and you both have the “lol what the fuck” expression on and you start laughing and suddenly the tension isn’t gone, but it’s a strangely happy tension, where sure it sucks but you’re not in the suck alone and you know at some point it will stop and you’ll get to collapse in bed together.

As scary as it is, you have to take on faith that it’s going to be amazing, because the kind of joy kids bring is impossible to imagine before you have them.

But that said, there are plenty of vocal people who will loudly shout about how miserable and hard having kids is. Thankfully except for the most extreme situations, this is not a factor of kids as much as the parents’ attitudes.

Attitude

Some subset of people are going to be miserable regardless of whatever situation they’re in.

Because look, the reality is that losing sleep sucks. Getting poop on your clothes sucks. Your toddler screaming at you because they wanted a DIFFERENT blue dress sucks.

But come on. It doesn’t suck that much. You’re not in a ditch breaking rocks. You’re in an air conditioned house with unlimited entertainment and a magic piece of glass that can conjure Thai food.

If your newborn is screaming they’re either hungry, gassy, overtired, or soiled. You keep trying to solve one of those problems until they stop.

If your kid isn’t sleeping and you’re getting woken up in the middle of the night constantly, you drink some coffee and figure out how to help them sleep better.

Unless your kid has serious health issues, there is just nothing that challenging that warrants constant complaining, unless you’re the kind of person who is going to constantly complain about things anyway.

I should mention too that there’s a type of socializing parents do which can sound like complaining from the outside, but is in reality closer to a kind of shared humor.

When I tell a story like how this morning my older girls got up at 6:20 and tried to rush downstairs, then started crying when I told them they had to stay in their room until their light turns on, to someone without kids you only hear the bad parts like getting woken up, the crying, etc.

But the reality is that it wasn’t a bad experience. They were sad because they heard me downstairs and were excited to play with me, which itself was very sweet. And even though they whined as I walked them back to their room, we cuddled in bed for a minute, they calmed down, and then they happily stayed in their room either snoozing or playing until 7:00.

If you adopt the right attitude, most of the challenges of having kids are a sort of “amusing struggle” where they’re psychologically taxing in the moment but also funny, like trying to get a drunk person to drink water before bed.

So even though the challenges are real, most parents will see them as a kind of Type 2 fun and roll with it. Some don’t, and will thirst for attention online whining about their kids, but they should be ignored, just as you’d ignore someone whining about how unfair it is to have to work.

And, yes, all the obvious caveats here. Having a good partner (with the right attitude) helps. More money helps. Having family around helps. But none of the imagined deficiencies in your situation are more limiting than your attitude.

You can either be the kind of person who accepts the challenges and figures it out, or the kind of person who complains. And it’s a lot easier to accept the challenges when the kid train is pulling you through them.

The Kid Train Keeps Moving

Having kids is far from the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m not entirely sure what the hardest thing is, but two possibilities come to mind.

The first is running my marketing agency, Growth Machine, through 2020. When COVID lockdowns started, over half of our clients canceled their contracts, leaving us cash-flow negative and at risk of not making payroll. We survived, barely, but pushing through that period knowing everyone’s salaries and healthcare depended on me was grueling.

The second is when I did a half-ironman two years ago. The moment I jumped in the water for the 1.2 mile swim, the person in front of me kicked me in the face, knocking my goggles off and filling my mouth with the oily water of Galveston. The second half of the 56 mile bike ride was into a brutal headwind. My legs cramped up halfway through the half marathon run, and I had to walk the last six miles, wondering with each step if they would lock up for good and I’d collapse in the street.

The acute and chronic challenges of having kids have never felt close to either of these. And a core part of why it’s felt so much easier is that even in its hardest moments, you are being pulled through the challenges of raising kids. You aren’t having to push.

I could have shut Growth Machine down any time in 2020, but I woke up every day choosing to keep working on it instead. I could have quit the race at any point in the 70.3 miles, but I chose to keep going. I had to push myself to stick with these challenges, knowing full well they were optional.

And thankfully with kids the challenges are never optional. You can’t not feed them. You can’t not soothe them. Maybe you can procrastinate those interventions for a minute, letting them cry as you take a deep breath in the other room to calm your nerves, but there’s no option to quit.

Alex Elliot described this as “The kid train” and it’s the perfect metaphor:

The kid train keeps moving. You’re not pushing the train, and you’d be foolish to try to stop it. All you can do is enjoy the ride.

And thankfully, trains take a long time to get going.

The Ramp

I like to imagine what the younger single people think when Cosette and I show up to the coffee shop with our three kids. She’s often wearing our newborn, while I try to keep the toddlers from running anyone over with their scooters or grabbing too many crayons.

I suspect it looks quite hectic and challenging, a far cry from peacefully sitting alone at a picnic table debating which cutie from the run club to chat up.

But I don’t feel challenged or hectic. It’s quite fun, and whatever challenges do come up are washed away from memory by the joy of seeing them pull up a chair to start coloring, or pretend to be horsies eating from the decorative hay bale.

It would feel extremely challenging though if one day I was sipping coffee alone and the next day I woke up to having three kids. But kids give you a long time to adjust to their demands.

This is part of why I think “getting ready” to have kids is, frankly, ridiculous. Unless you have some seriously challenging health or life conditions that it would be truly irresponsible to not address first, you get a ton of time to get ready for kids once you start trying to have them.

It’s probably going to take a couple months minimum to get pregnant in the first place, and even if the pregnancy is a surprise you still get seven and a half months from when you find out. Almost every kind of “prep” you need to do can be done in a day, and most of it doesn’t even need to be done until after they’re born.

Nursery? You don’t need it until at least a few months after they’re born, the baby is likely going to sleep in a bassinet in your bedroom, and it’s not like you actually need a special table for changing diapers.

Sleep training? Not a concern until they’re four months old and you can learn everything you need in one book.

Child proofing? Not a problem for six to nine months, and you can spot-do it as they start walking.

All you need at first is a place for them to sleep, a car seat, diapers, wipes, and a few pieces of clothes. That’s ten minutes of shopping if you want it to be. And if you realize you’re missing something, you can usually have it in your hand in under an hour, tomorrow morning at the latest.

What about the challenges of having two, or three? Well again, you never get there all at once, you get those seven and a half months again to get ready, and the kid you have now is not the kid you will have when the next one is born. They’ll be older, more self sufficient, and you’ll be nearly a year more experienced at being their parent.

It rarely gets hard all at once. You slide into the new level of challenge without really noticing it.

When I think about my life now with two toddlers and a newborn, I rarely think, “Wow this is so much harder.” Instead I think “I didn’t realize how easy my life was before.” Now that we have three kids, watching just one kid feels like a joke. Like the easiest thing in the world.

But I definitely didn’t feel that way when I only had one.

Just You Wait

Ever since Cosette got pregnant with our first daughter in 2021 and we’ve remarked on any part of pregnancy and parenting being easier than expected, we’ve heard “just you wait.”

Just you wait until the four month sleep regression.

Just you wait until they’re walking.

Just you wait until they start saying no.

Just you wait until there are two of them.

I’ve been waiting a long time, and all I’ve learned is that it keeps getting better. It keeps being easier than I expected.

And having kids has been the greatest decision of our lives.

Thank you to my incredible wife Cosette for contributing to this piece to make sure it wasn’t “just the Dad talking.” And for building this wonderful family with me.

If you’re looking for something else great to read, grab a copy of my sci-fi novel Husk, which Publisher’s Weekly described as “A riveting debut that blends post-apocalyptic adventure with conspiracy-based sci-fi thriller.”

Last, if you enjoyed this piece, consider subscribing to receive the next one.

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Not because of any credentials or special expert insights. But because I was a decent writer and very, very good at search engine optimization.

If you searched topics like “last longer in bed,” my blog was typically in the top 3 spots on Google, if not the top spot, receiving millions of visitors per year just to those pages.

Absurd? A little. But it was a thoroughly entertaining period that taught me enough about SEO to start my marketing agency, which combined led into being able to do the kind of work I do today, like going deep down the crypto rabbithole, writing a sci-fi novel, and building a writing app.

Anyway, readers who stumbled across my blog around that time might remember that I came up with a rather clever way to monetize all that search traffic. I hired someone to build an app specifically for helping men practice kegel exercises, published it on the app store, and then linked to it from all of the blog posts.

I thought it might pay itself off in a year or two then provide a little stream of passive income. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Over the past nine years since Stamena was released, it earned a whopping $380,000.

At its peak it was earning $5,000 to $10,000 a month, and even though it fell off significantly in the last few years, it was still making $600 to $800.

Over the years I’ve tried to find a better home for it. I moved on from this topic area a long time ago and it felt somewhat misplaced in my portfolio of projects. But the conversations kept going nowhere, and it kept depositing money each month, so I figured it would just die out eventually.

Until last week! A buyer reached out over Twitter, and as of last Tuesday, Stamena has a new home.

So I thought it would be fun to reflect a bit on how this app got made, how it sustained itself over the years, and, if you’re so inclined, how you might try to replicate something like this yourself.

Also heads up that the audiobook for Husk is now available! I’m extremely proud of how this came out, so if you’re looking for your next great sci-fi listen, check it out.

Genesis

I did not grow up dreaming of one day launching a kegel app. I wrote and published the first “last longer in bed” article in one drunken go, and was wholly unprepared for what was going to happen when I did.

The article immediately went viral on reddit, and for years it was in the top few spots on the /r/sex and /r/everymanshouldknow subreddits.

As an aside, it’s entertaining to think about what “going viral” meant back then. Twitter was mostly for updates like “eating a sandwich.” Instagram was still for photos. There was no TikTok. Hell people still had Facebook pages. Makes me feel a little old.

That traffic spurred a quick update on Google’s end, and within a month or two I was getting thousands of visitors per day to that article. I quickly followed it up with a few related pieces, and watched as my blog grew from 2,000 to 10,000 to 20,000+ visitors per day.

With the traffic coming in, I started to wonder what I should do with it. Ads felt wrong, affiliate was tempting but boring, and I knew there had to be a better strategy.

Digging through my site activity, one thing stood out. There was already an app for practicing kegels that I was sending hundreds of clicks a day to. The app cost $1.99, so I started doing the math on how much money I might be earning her per day.

If even 10% of the visitors I sent were buying it, which would seem high normally but I suspected was low given how strong the intent was, then the app was earning anywhere from twenty to hundreds of dollars a day.

So could I build my own version, swap out all of the links to go to my app, and make some income off it? It was worth exploring.

Building

If I were doing this today, I would build a V1 myself by vibe-coding it following the process in Build Your Own Apps.

But, alas, this was 2016, AI was a distant fantasy, and I did not know how to code in Swift or React Native.

Thankfully I had a newsletter, and through it got connected to Alex Gross who ran an app development company. We had a couple of calls where I talked through what I was thinking, and he offered to build it for about $4,500.

That was a ton of money to me at the time. I was only a year out of college and had limited savings, but I figured if my math was correct on how much it could earn once plugged into my site then it would pay itself off within a year.

If I was wrong it would be a painful loss, but not the end of the world. Or if I was underestimating, then it might earn back multiples of what I paid to develop it. The opportunity felt like it had asymmetric upside, so I said yes.

Without the newsletter I’m not sure how I would have found someone good. I could have looked on Upwork, but that can be hit or miss. And I could have asked friends for introductions of course, but I didn’t know anyone at the time who had launched a mobile app. It was considerably harder back then, so I got very lucky that Alex happened to be on my newsletter.

From there things were straightforward. Alex and his team built the app, sending me screens and demos for feedback along the way. A few months later it was done and ready to launch.

Launching

In a decade or so of launching stuff online, I’ve done a number of “hard” launches where I try to make as much noise as possible around the launch, and a number of “soft” launches where I just put something out and start slowly mentioning it and sending people its way.

Stamena was very much a soft launch. I published a blog post but didn’t follow it up with any kind of aggressive marketing to send people to download it. And aside from that, all I did was replace every link in the existing blog posts with new links to it.

No product hunt, no influencer outreach, no trying to get on podcasts or get links from affiliates. It was about as light as it could be.

But it worked! In the first month it made nearly $1,000, and in month two it hit $3,500 officially paying off the investment.

Growing

It sounds ridiculous but that’s basically all I did for the app.

Linked to it in all the blog posts, added a few more specifically targeting Kegel keywords, and let it do its thing.

Every year since 2016, I’ve thought something along the lines of “This probably won’t last another year.” But it kept going. It declined with my blog traffic, but the sales kept coming in.

Part of what kept those sales going was the App Store’s SEO and recommendations. It amassed over 2,000 reviews with a 4.7 average rating, which I’m sure helped make it appeal to people naturally searching for something like it in the app store.

I also think not making it a subscription app helped me. Once Stamena started to do well, competitors popped up to try to eat my lunch. But most of them went for a subscription model which I suspect turns off a certain number of users. So being the popular one-time-payment option may have given me some staying power (hah).

To be honest though, I don’t know very much about how people found it or bought it. I stopped thinking about it or putting effort into it around 2017. But it just kept going.

Selling

Since 2018 or so, I’ve entertained finding a buyer for Stamena. Once I moved away from the topic and knew I wasn’t going to put more effort into growing the app, I figured it would be better off in someone else’s hands who could make the most of the attention and customers it had already garnered.

I’ve had probably a dozen conversations with individuals or companies about buying it since then. A few were companies that made other sexual health products, a couple were influencers, but none of them really went anywhere.

One of those was Zach, who reached out to me in 2023. Honestly this was solid outreach and I dropped the ball here, I think I never responded to his email.

But to his credit, he kept reaching out, and two years after his first outreach we made a deal over Twitter in a couple days.

Zach was a total professional with this process. Legal agreement was simple, we only haggled over price briefly, and within a few days the deal was done, the money was in my bank account, and he had the app.

How It Feels Now

I’ll admit to a tiny bit of sadness at seeing Stamena go. Not regret, I’m happy with the deal we struck and I think Zach will do a great job with it. But just a natural sadness with a small chapter of my life ending.

I am very excited to see what he does with it though. The best reason not to make a deal like this would have been if I seriously believed I was going to put energy into juicing it’s growth, but I’d much rather work on Covici and my books.

So long Stamena. It’s been a fun ride.

Thanks for reading! Grab a copy of Husk if you want a great sci-fi read, and look for the prequel novella coming out sometime in November.

Sappier stuff after, but first things first:

Husk is now available in paperback, hardcover, and on Kindle.

If you like:

• Heart-pounding action

• Dystopian worlds

• Questioning the nature of consciousness

Then you’re going to love this book.

If you liked books like:

• Dark Matter

• Ready Player One

• The Silo Series

• Permutation City

• Altered Carbon

Then you’re ALSO going to love this book.

Or if you like movies and TV like:

• The Matrix

• Severance

• Fallout

Thennnn you guessed it! You’re going to love this book.

So take a second to grab a copy if you haven’t already.

Get Husk!

Husk has been my primary focus for the last year, though I started drafting early versions of it nearly two years ago.

I didn’t know that I would love writing scifi so much until I started doing it. But now that I’ve shifted so much of my focus there and gotten better at it, I’m absolutely in love with this work. It feels like I’ve finally found the home all these other forms of writing were taking me towards over the last decade.

I think, too, that science fiction is the best way to explore and share many of the ideas that started as posts on this site. If you’ve been a long time reader, you’ll find echoes of things I’ve written about throughout the book. Almost like easter eggs.

Thank you for coming on this journey with me. Husk is only the first in what will be a substantial amount of fiction I intend to publish over the next few decades. There will be more books in the Husk universe for sure, but I also already have a few other worlds I want to start building.

So please grab a copy and enjoy the ride. It’s the best thing I’ve written and I think you’re going to love it.

Get Husk!

The bundle includes:

• A signed first-edition hardcover of Husk

• The ebook version to easily load on your Kindle, computer, or other reader

• The complete audiobook

You’ll receive the ebook tomorrow, and your hardcover should arrive before the official launch on 5/27.

It’s been a ton of fun sending out hundreds of books the last few days, and it means so much that so many of you are excited to read it. This is by far the best way to support the book.

If you don’t care to get a signed hardcover though, or you just want the ebook or paperback, you can grab those on Amazon as well.

Thank you so much again for all the support. I’m absolutely thrilled to get Husk out in the world.

Preorder Husk!

Preorder Husk

As a reminder, for the price of the hardcover at launch, the bundle includes:

• A signed first-edition hardcover

• A free copy of the digital edition for your Kindle or other e-reader

• A free copy of the audiobook when it launches in roughly six weeks

• My eternal gratitude and appreciation

I’m planning to shut this off on May 20th, but I might shut it off earlier if I sell out.

So if you want the bundle, this is one of your last chances to get it!

Get the Preorder Bundle

I can’t believe it’s only two weeks until Husk comes out now, crazy how fast time flies.

Thank you to everyone who has already preordered the book, I’m really excited to get it to you. I’m very proud of how it has turned out and I know you’re going to love it.

2025 is off to a great start with writing. I finished up my sci-fi novel Husk which you can learn more about here and set that for final production to Scribe at the end of February. Everything should be on track for it to come out at the end of May.

I've also written the first draft of a novella set in the same universe as Husk, as well as started on the sequel to Husk. Blog posts are slowly becoming regular again, and Between Drafts episodes have been a ton of fun.

In this post, I'm going to share some updates on how everything is going both from a book progress and a business standpoint. Here’s the TOC:

1. Husk

2. Crypto Confidential

3. Husk Novella

4. Husk 2

5. Secret Project

6. Newsletters I’m enjoying

Husk Preorders & Sales

A few weeks ago I launched preorders for my sci-fi novel, Husk. Here’s the blurb in case you missed it:

Immortality awaits…but at what cost?

As a Tech, Isaac maintains the servers housing humanity’s collective consciousness. Tomorrow he turns twenty-five—old enough to transfer into the digital paradise of Meru. Virtual immortality will be his in a world free from the death and disease that plague what’s left of civilization.

But when tragedy strikes, Isaac discovers Meru may not be the paradise he thought. Powerful forces are conspiring to destroy it, and the ones he trusts most have turned against him.

Outcast. Abandoned. Exiled. Isaac must uncover the truth about Meru before it’s too late. And before he suffers a fate he thought was confined to the history books:

Death.

Husk: Book 1 of the Meru Initiative is Nathaniel Eliason’s post-apocalyptic, action-fueled sci-fi adventure: a gripping journey and vibrant world that forces you to question what makes you human.

And you can preorder it directly from me here, or the Kindle version on Amazon here.

This was a bit of an experiment with how to do preorders for a book. Normally, when somebody announces pre-orders for their book, that's entirely done through Amazon.

But because I'm self-publishing this, there is a bit of complicated challenge with putting a paperback or hardcover book up for pre-order on Amazon. They don't allow you to easily do it.

Because of that challenge, and because this sounded like a neat experiment to try, I decided to try selling preorders of the book through my own store instead and I've been extremely happy with how it has gone.

In the last three weeks since it launched, I’ve sold 204 copies directly through Shopify, and another 35 through Amazon, for a total of 239 preorders.

That’s $7,727 in total sales on Shopify, and another $122 or so on Amazon.

If this were a traditional pub book with a big advance, 239 pre-orders at this point would not be very good.

But for what I'm doing, I'm really happy with how this is going so far.

Pre-ordering a book on Shopify is not normal. There's a lot of extra complications that come with it that are going to make people less likely to convert and more likely to wait until the book is available on Amazon.

Further, people pre-order fiction books less in general, especially from an unknown author and especially a first book in a series from an unknown author. If you think about when you have pre-ordered fiction in the past, it was probably only for a subsequent book in a series or from a fiction author who you already really loved.

On top of that, no one except for a few people has ever read any fiction from me. So this isn't like selling a nonfiction book on topics that I've written about. This is something where people are mostly taking it on faith that I have figured out how to do this, Instead of waiting until they can hear from other people if this book is any good or not (by the way, it is, it’s very good).

All that to say, thank you so much to everybody who's pre-ordered - it means a ton, and I've been thrilled to see this response so far!

As a reminder, when you pre-order the book, you get:

1. A signed hardcover edition for the price of a normal hardcover

2. The Kindle or digital version and the audiobook thrown in for free.

This bundle won't be available once it actually publishes on May 27th, and I'll likely shut down pre-orders a week or two before that date to make sure I have time to fulfill them.

So if you want one of these first edition signed copies, you should pre-order it now so you don't forget before I turn it off.

Order Husk

You can also preorder just the Kindle version on Amazon here.

Crypto Confidential Sales

These are less great.

Since the last update in January, I’ve sold 453 copies, bringing the total to 3,700.

And per my predictions in the previous updates, the chart basically follows the crypto market. I think I’ve covered my theories on why enough in the previous posts so I won’t repeat them here.

Ultimately I’m very proud of the quality of Crypto Confidential but it hasn’t found a place in the market, or there never was a great place for it to begin with. I’m taking opportunities to promote it as they come up, but also not actively seeking them out as much because I feel at this point that time is better spent on making new books.

The kinda crazy thing is that in March, I only sold 66 copies. So I sold significantly more copies of Husk! Granted it’s an apples to oranges comparison but still, interesting to see.

Husk Novella Progress

My Between Drafts cohost and close friend Nathan Baugh turned me on to the idea of writing a novella.

Husk is the first book in what will likely be a trilogy, and while it’s not terribly long at 102,000 words that’s still almost 400 pages, which can be intimidating to take a gamble on, especially for someone who’s never read anything from me before.

So enter the novella. He learned this tip from Ryan Cahill, author of The Bound and the Broken series, who uses a 100 page novella as the “taste” of his world to get people interested since his first book is 500 pages and the subsequent ones are over 1,000.

Cahill also gives the novella away for free on his website for anyone who joins his email list, which is a great lead magnet and a worthwhile freebie since anyone who reads it might go buy the next four books.

Once Nathan explained the philosophy I fell in love with the idea, and instantly knew what storyline in Husk I wanted to do a novella on. It’s the story of the day transference first succeeds, when one of the main characters in Husk, Felix, finally leaves his body behind and enters the digital world of Meru.

It was extremely fun to write, and I managed to finish a full draft of it in March, clocking in at about 36,000 words, roughly 120 pages.

My plan is to let this sit for a few weeks, finish a second draft towards the end of April, do another draft in May, then send it off for publishing in June.

I was going to take four months on it instead of three, but honestly the first draft came out good. Better than I expected. So I don’t think editing is going to take as long as I anticipated, though I’ll let you know in a few months if I end up eating my words.

Husk 2 Progress

I finished the draft of the novella on March 27th, so on March 28th I started on Husk 2.

I have a very strong idea of how the first two-thirds of the book are going to go, and a foggy idea of how it ends, but I rather like it that way.

The ending of Husk surprised me, I hadn’t planned it when I started writing it, but I absolutely love it. Basically everyone who reads it says the last act is their favorite part. So I’m leaving room to be surprised by where the story takes me again.

My goal is to turn in the final version to Scribe at the end of November. I assume I’ll need four drafts to get it where I want it, and I think four to six weeks is a good amount of time for drafts after the first, so I should aim to finish drafts in around October 16th, September 4th, and July 24th.

Those are only rough dates of course, but using that timeline as a guide, that gives me three and a half months to write the first draft of Husk 2, minus some weeks off to edit the novella. Call it 12 weeks of writing time.

I estimate it will come in closer to 150,000 words, so I need to average 12,500 words per week while working on it. I’ve set my goal at 3,000 words per day (15,000 per week) to be safe, which sounds like a lot, but it’s much lighter than when I wrote 5,000 words per day for the first draft of Husk.

I’m almost 25,000 words in, and I have to say, it is so fun working on a sequel. Having the characters and world already established and getting to dive back in and build them up further, escalate their conflicts, raise the stakes, it’s very different from starting from scratch.

And in a way I’ve grown to really like all these characters, so I’m excited to see what they do next, and whether that’s what I planned for them or they go off in some other direction.

Secret Project

I’m mostly mentioning this here to see if I follow up on it in three to six to twelve months.

While on a ski trip a few weeks ago, I had an idea for another book, possibly a series, that I’m absolutely in love with. I ended up writing about 10,000 words of backstory and did a high level outline for the plot of the book in the evenings.

The problem is I’m not sure how to prioritize it. The smart thing to do is to focus on the Husk books until the trilogy is completed, but I also want to work on this one.

And, well, books take up such a massive amount of time that you have to be quite deliberate in which one you pick. Husk was easy to choose because I didn’t have as many story ideas when I started, and it was such a strong winner that I knew I wanted to do it.

But now the story ideas are starting to multiply and I’ll need to figure out a better system for what to focus on.

Anyway, more on this later. Maybe. We’ll see.

Newsletters I’m Loving

Finally, a few shoutouts for newsletters I've really been enjoying in the book world:

Nathan Baugh’s World Builders. If you’re interested in fiction writing, or telling better stores in your nonfiction, Nathan’s newsletter is a must read. He’s gone deep on the science of storytelling and has used it for everything from writing his fantasy novel (publishing this year) to building a massive LinkedIn audience.

Alex & Books Summaries and Recommendations. For the nonfiction lovers, Alex has a wonderful weekly newsletter where he shares new books he’s enjoying as well as the best takeaways from books he’s read. If you want a guide to picking the best nonfiction books to read, his newsletter is a great place to start.

Paul Millerd’s Pathless Path. Paul has been a trove of information, guidance, and support as I figure out the world of self-publishing, and his posts on how his books are doing were the inspiration for me starting this series. If you’re interested in becoming an author in the strange new publishing environment, definitely check his newsletter out.

See you in the next update, and don’t forget to preorder Husk if you haven’t already.

Preorder Husk!

With Husk done, I’ve shifted my focus to the next two books in the same universe. One is a direct sequel, and the other is a novella where I can go deeper on one of the major events of the universe, the science and philosophy behind it, and a couple of my favorite characters.

One of the big questions that I ran into when I first started trying to write a novel, especially coming from non-fiction writing, was how do I plan and outline this thing?

I tried “discovery writing,” where you start with a couple characters, a world, and a premise, and just go, but that didn’t work very well. I got lost moving in a windy unfocused direction and ultimately scrapped that first attempt, deciding to start over with more of a plan.

But even with that decision made, I still didn't know how to do it. There are tons of options and suggestions out there for how to outline a novel, and I tried basically all of them until I figured out a system I like.

So if you're thinking about trying to write a novel, here's what I’ve learned and the process I’ve developed.

Obviously, I am not an expert at this. But I often find that I learn the most from people who are a few steps ahead of me rather than the people who have been doing something for 20 years.

To give credit where credit is due, it's drawing on lessons from Stephen King, the "The 7-Point Story Structure" by Dan Wells, and “Save the Cat Writes a Novel” by Jessica Brody.

Oh and once again if you haven’t preordered Husk you should go do that!

Preorder Husk

Step 1: Person-Place-Problem

In "On Writing" by Stephen King, he says that the way he does his discovery writing is he thinks of one or two interesting characters and then a situation that they might be in, and then he just starts writing and sees how they react to the setting.

“The situation comes first. The characters—always flat and unfeatured to begin with—come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate.” (On Writing, 164)

Writing and seeing what happens didn't work for me, but I do like the idea of a situation and the characters in it as a starting point. So, the way I think about it is:

1. A person

2. A place

3. A problem

Who is the main character(s)? Where are they? What is the situation that they are in? What is the problem that they are trying to encounter, or the goal that they are chasing after? What is that they want or they need to fix?

For Husk, you get a lot of this from the sales copy for the book:

As a Tech, Isaac maintains the servers housing humanity’s collective consciousness. Tomorrow he turns twenty-five—old enough to transfer into the digital paradise of Meru. Virtual immortality will be his in a world free from the death and disease that plague what’s left of civilization.

But when tragedy strikes, Isaac discovers Meru may not be the paradise he thought. Powerful forces are conspiring to destroy it, and the ones he trusts most have turned against him.

Outcast. Abandoned. Exiled. Isaac must uncover the truth about Meru before it’s too late. And before he suffers a fate he thought was confined to the history books:

Death.

Person: Isaac, a “Tech” whose job it is to keep the servers that preserve digital immortality running.

Place: A post-apocalyptic world where most of humanity has died (in the physical sense at least), and specific to Isaac, one of the locations where these immortality servers are maintained.

Problem: Someone is threatening the digital paradise, and Isaac needs to figure out why and how to stop them.

This is enough to get me started, and then from here I like to start flushing out more of the plot using the “7-Point Plot Structure.”

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Step 2: The 7-Point Plot Structure

Once I have the person, place, and problem roughly figured out, the next step is to create the very highest level overarching plan for the story.

Most people are familiar with the simplest story structure: beginning, middle, and end, also known as the three-act structure.

The problem with a simple three-act structure is that it's not very prescriptive: it doesn't tell you that much about how to actually plan a story. You might come up with a beginning, an end, and a couple of things that happen in the middle, but it's not much of a plan, is it?

On the more complicated end, you have structures like Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. But that one ends up being almost too complicated, and you keep trying to force different things into your story, especially as a first timer.

The other thing I realized is that sometimes, these story structures are as much about explaining stories (or even more about explaining stories) than they are about helping you plan a new one. It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes between whether a structure is more for interpreting something or planning something, and I've found that a lot of story structures don't work that well for the actual planning phase.

After trying a bunch of different strategies, I ended up liking the 7-point plot structure by Dan Wells the best.

The seven points are:

1. Hook: A compelling introduction to the story's world or characters, capturing the reader's attention.

2. Plot Turn 1: An inciting incident that brings the protagonist into the adventure, setting the story in motion.

3. Pinch 1: The stakes are raised with the introduction of the antagonist or major conflict, challenging the protagonist.

4. Midpoint: A turning point where the protagonist shifts from reacting to acting, often gaining new insights or abilities.

5. Pinch 2: The major conflict escalates, making the situation worse for the protagonist and raising tension.

6. Plot Turn 2: The protagonist discovers something crucial that helps them resolve the conflict or defeat the antagonist.

7. Resolution: The climax where the major conflict is resolved, and the story concludes with the protagonist changed by their experiences.

But despite what you might be thinking, this is not the order that you plan them out. It's actually easiest to start at the ends and to work your way back from there.

Normally, what Dan recommends is you start with the resolution, but we technically already have the hook and a bit of plot turn one from the person-place-problem that we already outlined.

With that in mind, we can go ahead and think about the resolution. Given this person-place-and-problem and the kind of story that you're imagining comes from it, how does this whole thing resolve? You can write that down next.

After that, you can think about the midpoint. What is going to be the shift in the plot middle (not necessarily the exact word count middle of the story) where the protagonist goes from reacting to their environment and the antagonist to being proactive and trying to change the situation.

From there, you can think about Turn 1. What is it that spurs the protagonist to action? What is the inciting incident where their world changes and the meat of the story really begins?

And then what is Turn 2? What is the secret they discover or the big unlock that allows them to finally defeat the antagonist and move into the resolution?

Finally, you can think about Pinch One. What is the event that happens after they've already been called to action that raises the stakes, introduces the antagonist, and eventually spurs them to become more proactive?

After that, you can think about Pinch Two. Once they have decided to start taking action or actually trying to take control of their world, what is it that raises the stakes? What is the really bad thing that happens that leads them to the dark night of the soul where it feels like all hope is lost?

If any of that is unclear, this article has a really good breakdown of how you might think of these aspects in The Hunger Games.

The reason I like the seven-point plot structure is that when you try to plan a novel, you'll often find that it's pretty easy to think of a beginning and ending, but flushing out the middle is really challenging. And if all you have to go off is Act II, you don't really know what to put in there.

So having all these other things - Turn I, Pinch I, Turn II, Pinch II, the Midpoint - gives you a lot more meat to flesh out what's going on between the exciting introduction and the climactic finale so that you're not just wandering around waiting for it to end.

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Step 3: World Foundations

This step will probably start to happen while you're in step two, because as you begin flushing out some of the other 7 points of the story, you'll realize that your initial person and place are not really enough to build a whole story around. You're going to need all the other parts of the world that go with it.

Once I have the 7 points, then I like to go back and start flushing out all the other world details that I'm going to need before I plan the story any further.

This is where I'll start making notes on:

Characters: Main, supporting, and tertiary

Settings or set pieces: Areas where significant parts of the story take place.

The technology: Since I'm primarily writing sci-fi, I'm thinking about the tech and how it makes sense and how it can be explained.

The lore or the backstory: Things that aren't going to happen on scene but that are important details to remember to keep consistent.

The sub-plots: Anything separate from the main plot that's going to be important to keep track of. This could be character relationships, it could be minor quests, things that are happening in the background that you want to make sure are tidied up by the end.

Objects, companies, etc: Non-person entities that play some important role in the story.

And anything else that's going to be important or useful to keep track of as I start flushing out the plot.

I like to keep a separate document where I'm listing all this out so that I can stay on top of it. For Husk, this is well over 20,000 words of its own details that aren't in the original book or the novellas (plus a 100,000 word novel, the one I scrapped, providing backstory).

While other people might like to spend tons of time flushing this out first, I have preferred to do it as I'm working through the plot, filling in these details as necessary. That way I'm not just creating unnecessary complexity that I try to justify later by writing tons of world details into the book that don't necessarily need to be there.

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Step 4: Scenes

It's a little unromantic, but I find it very helpful to think of a book very analytically.

Conventions for a sci-fi novel, especially from a lesser-known author, would put it at a length of 90,000 to 120,000 words. Or, if you prefer to think of it as pages, that's 300 to 400 pages.

If you're well-known and established, then you can push longer—180,000 words, like Leviathan Wakes; or, if we're digging into the fantasy world, many Brandon Sanderson books are over 400,000 words. But when you're just getting started, you want something on the shorter or more normal length to not completely scare off readers who are trying a new author. So for now, I'm still targeting my books in that 100,000 to 120,000 word range.

120,000 words sounds daunting, so the easiest way for me to break it down is to think of the book as a collection of scenes.

A scene is a loose definition, but it's usually a continuous piece of time where a character wants something and either gets it or doesn't get it.

Morpheus explains the Matrix to Neo and asks if he wants the red pill or blue pill. Bilbo and Gollum compete for the ring with riddles. Darrow cuts down Eo’s body and secretly buries her.

There's a big range to how long scenes can be. I'm reading Neuromancer right now, and some of the scenes are only 100 or 200 words long, and they completely break this convention. At the other end, John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged comes to mind, which is itself around 30,000 words, and that's basically one scene.

But as a rough estimate, most scenes in genre fiction are going to be 1,000 to 2,000 words. It's enough time for something to happen, but not so long that you risk losing a reader's attention.

So I estimate that my scenes are going to be 1,500 words long. Therefore, if I want a 120,000 word book, then I need to come up with 80 scenes. And I might come up with 90 to 100 to be safe, assuming I’ll cut some.

Now thankfully, you've already come up with at least seven of these already because each point in the seven point plot structure is going to have at least one if not multiple big scenes that correspond to it. There's going to be an opening scene where you meet the main character or some of the characters and the world. There is going to be an event at the midpoint where the character starts taking action and the pinches and the turns also have very clear corresponding scenes to them as well and the resolution might have at least two scenes that correspond to it. The one where the resolution actually happens and then at least one for the world that comes after. So you already have a bit of a start here.

Then you just need to draw the rest of the owl, so to speak, which can be daunting again, and so that's why I kind of like this structure from Save the Cat Writes a Novel.

Translating the 7-point story structure to the Save the Cat structure:

1. Opening image = Hook

2. Catalyst = Turn 1

3. Break into two = Pinch 1

4. Midpoint

5. All is lost = Pinch 2

6. Break into three = Turn 2

7. Final image = Resolution

From this, we start to get a good idea of how many scenes we want to have in each area. And the math gets very simple here if you plan to have 100 scenes in your book:

First, the hook as the first scene or one of the first scenes.

Then Turn 1 happens roughly around the 10th scene.

So you need to figure out 8 scenes to go between your hook and your inciting incident, your Turn 1.

Then Pinch 1, where things start to get worse, will happen after another 10 scenes or so.

Then you have the long “Fun and games” or “friends and allies” section where you’re building the world, developing the story, trying to solve the problems but it's not working, facing setbacks, which will take about 30 scenes.

Then the midpoint event happens around scene 50 where the protagonist is really spurred into action.

They start taking more direct action for another 25 or so scenes until the Antagonist reaches their peak and it seems like all hope is lost.

A little bit later, about 5 scenes later, they're going to find the key that's going to let them fight back against the antagonist.

And then you have about 20 scenes of going from there to the story being resolved, defeating the antagonist, succeeding, and returning to the original world of the story but forever changed in some capacity.

Now, obviously, you probably won't and shouldn't follow this to a tee, but it starts to give you some ideas for the kinds of things that might be going on and how much should be going on in between all these major parts.

This can also be helpful for revising. You might find after your first draft that you're really lacking in one of these areas. In an early draft of Husk, I had almost nothing in the fun and games section which made the world feel a lot lighter and shallower than it could have been, which is why I went back and focused heavily on improving that part of the book for the second draft.

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Step 5: Beats

Now, if you want to get really structured before you actually start writing to completely make sure that you don't run into any degree of writer's block, the last step that you can do once you have your scenes is to actually list out the beats that are going to happen in each scene.

If a scene is a character wanting something, either getting it or not getting it, there are probably going to be a few different things that happen within that scene.

Maybe they go somewhere, they have a conversation with this person, this surprising thing happens, there's some kind of conflict, there's going to be multiple steps within that scene that lead to that scene's resolution.

The benefit of doing this is that if you plan your novel down to this level, then once you actually start writing it, you're basically never going to have to stop. You're never going to get stuck. You're never going to have writer's block. You will know exactly what is happening next every single step of the way.

To be honest, I don't do this step that religiously because I feel like it takes some of the fun out of the actual writing where I like to discover bits as I'm going. But you might find it's very useful if you're worried about getting stuck along the way.

Step 6: Write!

At some point, probably in step 4, you're going to hit a point where you feel like, "This is good enough for me to get started." If that's the case, then I think you just go ahead and get going.

You definitely want to do enough planning that you don't get stuck and that you have a good idea of where you're going, but you also don't want to do so much planning that you never start writing.

I might not even list out all 100 scenes because I like to find some of them as I'm going, and I want to leave some space for that and not spend too much time on the planning process.

And remember, this isn't something where you do it once and then never touch it again. I'll typically keep refining my outline and make tiny tweaks to it every day while I'm writing as I'm figuring out more about what the story is. So, again, you want to be thoughtful in planning, but also not overdo it.

Anyway, this is what’s working for me right now. I hope it helps you too if you decide to try writing a novel, and don’t forget to preorder Husk!

Preorder Husk

I’ve spent 90% of my creative energy here the last year, and I’m very proud of how it turned out.

It will be published on May 27th, so you won’t have to wait long. In fact, if you preorder, you’ll get it up to a week before launch day.

In this post, I'll share:

1. What Husk is about

2. The cool twist I’m taking on pre-orders.

3. What’s next for Husk and the world of Meru

4. How else you can help

Or if you trust I’ve written an extremely fun sci-fi novel you’ll love, you can pre-order the signed hardcover here now.

Preorder Husk!

What is Husk?

If you enjoyed books like Wool (The Silo Series on Apple), Ready Player One, Dark Matter, or movies / shows like The Matrix and Fallout, you’ll find a lot to enjoy in Husk.

Here’s the Amazon description:

As a Tech, Isaac maintains the servers housing humanity’s collective consciousness. Tomorrow he turns twenty-five—old enough to transfer into the digital paradise of Meru. Virtual immortality will be his in a world free from the death and disease that plague what’s left of civilization.

But when tragedy strikes, Isaac discovers Meru may not be the paradise he thought. Powerful forces are conspiring to destroy it, and the ones he trusts most have turned against him.

Outcast. Abandoned. Exiled. Isaac must uncover the truth about Meru before it’s too late. And before he suffers a fate he thought was confined to the history books:

Death.

Husk started with a question: assume we figure out how to transfer our minds into computers to escape the limits and mortality of our fleshy bodies. Someone would probably still need to keep the servers running.

Solar flares or power grid failures or something bad could happen on the outside. And there would need to be some physical humans who stay behind to help out in case of a disaster.

What would the relationship look like between the humans in the digital, immortal paradise and the humans staying behind to maintain the servers?

Some people would also reject this idea entirely, who neither want to transfer into the digital paradise and who don't want to help maintain it. So what are they doing and what does their relationship to the rest of this world look like?

Finally, what would drive most people to transfer into this digital world? What existential threat or extinction-level event might cause this drastic solution to be embraced by many beyond an end-of-life treatment?

All those questions came together to create the world of Meru, the digital paradise in Husk and the name of the series that Husk, its direct sequels, and the novellas and other books I'll write in this world fit within.

What I've loved about Husk and the other books I'm working on in this world is how it lets me bring together themes I've enjoyed exploring on this blog for a long time.

There's a strong philosophical theory of mind undercurrent, questions about our relationship with technology, and discussions of power and trust in science, all wrapped in a fast-paced thriller of a story.

If you've enjoyed the themes on this site in the last few years, then I think you're really going to enjoy this book. Even if you aren't a big fiction reader.

Preorder Husk!

The Cool Twist I’m Taking with Preorders

For Husk, I've decided to do something a little bit different than a generic request for preorders where I send you to Amazon.

If you preorder Husk, you'll get a signed first-edition hardcover, plus the ebook and audiobook for free.

There's no extra cost for this bundle. I'm pricing it the same as what the normal, unsigned hardcover will cost on Amazon. So if you might buy the hardcover at launch, buy it now for a signed copy plus both digital versions.

I’ve also decided to do the preorders on my own store instead of through Amazon. It’s an added layer of complexity for me, but it means if I want to throw in any other goodies I have that option available too.

Now that said, if you know you only want the Kindle version, you can also preorder that on Amazon.

But, again, if you want the super cool signed first-edition hardcover with the ebook and audiobook included, you should preorder it here.

What’s Next with Husk and Meru

Husk is book 1 in the series “The Meru Initiative.” My plan is to release book 2 in one year, late May 2026, and book three one year after that.

Aside from the core trilogy, I’m also working on a series of shorter novellas in the same universe. Husk is about 350 pages, and the first novella will be in the 125-150 range. That one should publish around Thanksgiving this year (2025), and there will likely be subsequent novellas around the same time in 2026 and 2027.

But that’s just the current scope. This has been an exceedingly fun project, I think the world that’s developing within it is fascinating, and I can see myself doing many more books along these themes.

Suffice it to say, if you like big sci-fi worlds, I’m going to have a lot more to bring you.

How Else You Can Help

Preordering the book is the number one thing I’d love for you to do.

But beyond that, I’m planning to do a podcast and social media tour for Husk like I did for Crypto Confidential.

If there are any newsletters, podcasts, or other influencers who you think would be interested in Husk, I’d love any introductions or recommendations you can make. Any little bit helps.

Also, if you are one of those people and you’d like an early copy, let me know! I’d love to send you a pre-release version to check out.

Last Thoughts

As I said, this has been one of the more fun and rewarding creative projects I’ve embarked on.

I wasn’t sure if writing fiction was going to click and be something I stuck with, but I feel very confident now that it is.

So please take a moment and preorder Husk. I think you’re going to love it, and I can’t wait to send it to you.

Preorder Husk!

“Discovery” writers like Stephen King start with an interesting character or two, a situation, and then sees where it leads, letting the story unfold organically.

“Outline” writers like Brandon Sanderson try to map every plot point and character arc before starting, reducing revision time but front-loading much of the work.

These are fundamentally opposite approaches, yet both can yield great books. There’s no way to know which one is going to work for you before you try both of them. And her'e’s the kicker: whichever one doesn’t work for you will most likely REALLY not work for you.

The mistake you can easily make, whether writing a book for the first time or trying to start a business or trying to get out of bed earlier each day, is finding a strategy that’s worked for someone, attempting to apply it to your own life, then getting annoyed when it doesn’t work. It can easily lead to self-loathing and frustration and bashing your head against the wall trying to force it to work when that strategy was never meant for you in the first place.

This isn't just inefficient. It’s harmful. When you fail at someone else's system, you don't question the system; you question yourself.

In elite sports, training programs are intensely personalized. No coach would give identical regimens to different athletes. Yet in work and personal development, we act as if one-size-fits-all is reasonable. Like we can just grab what’s worked for someone off the shelf and it’ll solve all our problems.

I've wrestled with this myself. For years, I berated myself for not maintaining the steady, consistent writing schedule that supposedly marks a "real writer." Three to four hours every morning, like clockwork. I can maintain this for brief stretches, but my best work emerges from manic sprints—like when I drafted Husk in a month.

For a long time, I viewed this as a character flaw. I thought I needed to become more disciplined, more consistent. But I think now my creative metabolism simply runs differently. Explosive bursts rather than steady output.

The revelation wasn't that I needed to change my process to conform to some Platonic ideal. Rather, that I need to embrace what works for me and figure out how to make it work better.

Self-improvement isn't about becoming someone else. It's about becoming a better version of yourself.

Instead of fighting my sprinting nature, I’m trying to optimize for it. Clear my schedule for month-long creative binges. Develop better recovery techniques. Accept that there will be weeks where I’m basically a hermit, unresponsive to the outside world. And then be diligent about cleaning up whatever little messes I’ve created for myself afterwards.

But this raises an obvious question: How do you figure out what works for you in the first place to even decide what to improve on? The simple answer is to “get more reps,” but a few other self-observations might help:

Experiment with extreme variations: Try working at radically different times, in different environments, with different constraints.

When I was writing the first draft of Crypto Confidential, I tracked every single writing session, how it felt, how many words I wrote, where I was, what time it was, etc.

I quickly realized that I actually didn’t do my best work first thing in the morning at 5:00am. It was better to spend that time burning down email etc. and then start writing at 9:00am. And getting out of the house was a 1.5-2x productivity boost.

Look at your “natural” behavior: What do you slide back to when you’re not trying to force yourself to adopt someone else’s process?

There’s a balance here: Your default behavior might not be optimal. But there might also be a nugget of useful insight in it.

My default behavior since I was a kid has been to get hyper-obsessive about things and then cast them aside the minute I’m bored. That manic focus needs to be balanced with some degree of responsibility, but it can also be harnessed.

Examine your outliers: Your best work often happens when conditions accidentally align with your nature. What was going on when you did your best work in the past?

I consistently do my best work when I’m pressed against some uncomfortable deadline. It’s not ideal to always be under the gun, but if it consistently creates better work, then it’s worth lining up these deadlines occasionally to try to force it out of myself.

I often let myself procrastinate on things because I know there’s some part of my brain that feels like the time pressure isn’t strong enough yet. When the pressure gets strong enough, the motivation to work will appear.

Do I recommend that for most people? Definitely not. But if you’re like me, hey, it might click.

Don't contort yourself to fit someone else's (supposedly) perfect system. Architect an environment that amplifies your natural strengths while accounting for your limitations. It's the only form of self-improvement that will stick.

Oh and if you’re curious: I tried King’s discovery writing and it utterly failed for me. I’m much more of an outliner. But I’m glad I gave it a try.

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Other Things

• I’m planning to announce pre-orders for HUSK and do the cover reveal in the next week or two, very excited for this!

• Nathan and I have a great episode out this week on getting and incorporating feedback on your book.

• Our next podcast episode will be Q&A on anything related to writing, editing, outlining, publishing, audience building. Please respond if you have any questions you’d like to hear me / us answer!

A cash business is like an ATM. It spits out money reliably, often immediately, but may have limited long-term value. You might replace your salary quite quickly with a cash business, but it’s often easier to compete with so someone could come eat your lunch, and it might be hard to scale past a certain revenue number.

An equity business is more like planting a tree. It often takes considerably longer to replace your salary, but once you do those earnings are more durable, and the business is often worth quite a bit on its own.

The mistake I’ve made, and that you want to avoid, is expecting cash business payouts from an equity business, and expecting equity business growth from a cash business.

I learned this distinction the hard way with my marketing agency Growth Machine. It was an incredible cash business, I managed to get it to over $1m a year with only five or six employees. But I made the mistake of treating it like an equity play. I tried scaling it aggressively, imagining I might be able to sell it someday. I should have let it be the cash cow it was and used those proceeds to fund something with more long-term potential.

The flip side are businesses that make peanuts initially but compound into something massive. Nathan Barry recently shared that Kit.com barely made $2k per month for their first two years. From a cash flow perspective, that had to be terribly depressing. Nathan could have made multiples of that from a single consulting client. But ten years later and Kit is worth well over $100m, whereas if he had spent that time consulting or freelancing he’d probably still be charging about the same amount.

A cash business can have quick linear growth, whereas an equity business will have slower but exponential growth.

This is part of why the standard advice is to not quit your day job when you start a startup. You need the salary to keep you afloat for the years it will likely take for your equity business to start paying you.

But there’s another option you could also consider. Instead of going all-in on either type, what if you deliberately combined them? Find a cash business that pays the bills (and then some), but only invest enough time to keep it humming. Don’t try to scale it too far past the sustenance level. Then use that cushion to work on an equity business that could really scale, without the pressure of needing immediate returns.

The danger is in misdiagnosing which type of business you're building. I’ve seen this a few times with online courses or “creator businesses” in particular. Someone launches a course that prints money, then tries turning it into a "real business" by hiring a team and scaling up. But they hit a ceiling on what the course can earn despite the increased investment, and they often end up making less than when it was smaller.

I made this mistake again the last few years with my site and writing. I abandoned my cash-generating activities to focus entirely on book writing, not fully respecting how long the runway is before books can replace a decent income. The smarter play would have been maintaining some of that cash flow while building the book business so it didn’t have that immediate pressure to succeed.

I’m trying to rediscover that balance now, and it feels good to flex some of my “business muscles” alongside the writing muscles. I definitely worry about getting too sidetracked by making money (again), but there’s a prudent amount of it will give me the freedom to attack this author career for years where others might have to abandon it.

So maybe this way of thinking can help someone else going after a very long term, low odds business as well. Find a solid cash business first. Get it to a point where it covers your costs plus some cushion. Then be content leaving it at that level while you focus on building something bigger on that 5-10 year timeline.

Otherwise you risk having to abandon your long term ambitions right before they take off.

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Other Things

• Husk, my sci-fi novel, is done! I’ll share the cover and more soon, but I’m targeting a late-May publish date

• Nathan and I released a great episode last week on hiring a developmental editor for your book

• With Husk done I’ll be jumping back into Build Your Own Apps next week, planning to add a few more videos to flush out some of the existing sections.

Thank you to Matt Ragland for riffing on some of this idea with my this afternoon.

But I never planned to make this course, or make any content on this topic. If my friend Harry hadn’t suggested I do it, I might never have made it.

From the outside, the timeline looks quite short. I started tweeting about coding with AI tools in December, and by January people were asking me to make this course, so it has the illusion of an extremely quick success. It appears to have almost literally happened overnight.

But the real timeline is a little different. I poked at the first AI coding tools in 2023, and by the end of the year felt like they might be getting good enough to handle a significant amount of programming for me. So in 2024 I used Cursor to build an iPhone app I wanted: a Strava for writing called “Prolific.”

That project failed. There wasn’t much demand for a Strava for writing. Even I eventually got bored of using it. But it showed me what the tools were starting to be capable of, and gave me the clue that we might have a very different relationship with software and programming in the near future.

So last fall when the agent-based programming tools started to take off, like Bolt and Lovable and the newly improved Cursor, it felt like the moment I’d been waiting for. They were finally good enough for people with less programming experience than me but with the curiosity to learn to start building their own apps using these AI tools.

Build Your Own Apps was the real payoff for building Prolific. I thought exploring and trying something new would pay off one way, and even though the original plan failed, a tangential (better!) plan popped up in its place.e

The more I look for this pattern in my life, the more it appears in strange and unexpected ways.

Way back at the beginning of my blogging journey I was writing about men’s sexual health to dominate the SEO rankings. And while I did take over that search traffic for a while, the real “payoff” was that other people started asking for SEO help so I started Growth Machine.

When I started taking programming seriously in 2021, my plan was to launch some apps and try to make money that way. But then I stumbled down the crypto rabbit hole (the whole Crypto Confidential story) and ended up writing code for crypto projects.

When I had some downtime between Crypto Confidential drafts and started hacking on a short story, my only goal was to get some story telling practice. Now that’s turned into a whole novel, and part of me suspects it’s going to sell better than Crypto Confidential has.

When I stated this blog in 2014 it was only meant to be a resume builder, a way to show companies that I knew how to write a decent blog post so I could get freelance gigs. And now it’s… well it’s turned into a sorts of wonderful things along the way.

The pattern even shows up in weirder ways: like when Cosette and I bought a house to turn into an Airbnb, then some frat stars shat in our bathtub (yes, really) and we said “fuck this” and sold it at the top of the Austin market in 2022.

To get to the point I suspect I’m not alone in this. I know it shows up constantly in business stories: where the company starts off trying to tackle one problem and discovers there’s a better related problem along the way (Slack was originally a video game company IIRC, and Nintendo was a camera company!). Or you discover a sub-problem that’s a no-brainer to tackle, like SpaceX realizing they could sell internet service.

As you explore in a direction, you have to be willing to alter the destination when a better one presents itself. You might think you’re charting a course towards A but if the current suddenly pulls you towards B, then maybe B has a better beach bar anyway.

The challenge of course is not being too willing to abandon the original plan in favor of the new one that’s presented itself. I probably err too far on the side of changing courses, to my occasional detriment, but it has worked out in its own way.

You can explore and try new things with a certain lightness. It doesn’t need to work out right away, or in the way you want it to, and you don’t need to justify the exploration at the start. By exploring you are discovering the ways in which the exploration can justify itself.

So try things, experiment, explore. You never know how the various threads will tie together later.

Other Things

• My novel Husk is coming along nicely. I’ll be turning in the final draft to Scribe next week (more on that here) and am still targeting an end of May release.

• Nathan and I have had some great Between Drafts episodes recently, like how I wrote my first draft in a month, our favorite books from 2024, and how we self-edit.

• I was also on the Every podcast with Dan Shipper to talk about building Build Your Own Apps, working with AI, and my extremely strange entrepreneurial journey (which inspired this post!).

I was putting the finishing touches on Crypto Confidential and starting to explore writing fiction, and he was deep into writing his debut novel.

We both lamented how hard it was to find other people seriously pursuing a career as an author, and decided to start getting together each week to write and share where we were in the journey.

One topic that constantly came up in our conversations was how opaque the publishing world was. If you wanted to publish book, whether it was fiction or nonfiction, self pub or trad, there weren’t a ton of authors out there sharing what they were doing and learning.

You might see some tips from people who had already succeeded, but you saw significantly fewer stories from people actively in the trenches trying to figure it out and publish their breakout book.

So we decided to pull back the curtain, to share what we are doing and learning, and create a podcast all about writing, publishing, book marketing, and making it as an author.

That podcast is called Between Drafts, and you can now listen to the first three episodes anywhere you like getting your podcasts. Here are links to the big three:

• YouTube

• Spotify

• Apple

Each episode is a mix of sharing what’s going on as we write, edit, and try to sell our books, along with some topic people have asked us about during our journey.

Episode 1 is an introduction to us, our books, and our history of writing online.

In episode two, we dive into the whole process I went through getting a book deal for Crypto Confidential, starting from when I decided to write the book to inking a deal with Penguin Random House.

And in episode three, Nathan shares his journey trying to get an agent for his first novel that he wrote five years ago, and what he’s doing differently trying to get an agent this time:

We’ll be releasing new episodes each week, and already have the first seven recorded.

If you’re curious at all about how the writing business works, or want to publish a book of your own someday, I’d love it if you gave the podcast a listen.

Listen Now

Let us know what you think!

If you’ve read this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that I’ve always enjoyed hacking together software to help me with my work or life.

But I’d usually hit a point where I wasn’t skilled enough to build what I wanted to build, and the projects would never be as helpful as I hoped.

That all changed last year. With ChatGPT and Claude getting increasingly competent at helping me work through my programming challenges, I’ve been blown away by how much I can build despite being a hobbyist developer.

I’ve been spending some time in the last month using the latest tools to hack together apps to automate or improve parts of my work, and I’m honestly shocked at how easily I can build things now.

In the last couple weeks, I built:

1. A tool to take podcast episodes and create nice transcripts, show notes, title ideas, and more

2. A tool to provide detailed professional-level editing feedback on aspects of my book

3. An entirely new website for myself, plus one for my new podcast

4. A personal task manager / goal setter

The more I build with these tools, the more I’m realizing we’re entering a golden age of easy, personalized, software development.

Which brings us to 24 hours ago. A friend replied to one of my tweets saying he was really impressed with the software I was hacking together using these AI tools, and wanted to learn how to do it, and asked if I could run a small cohort to teach people.

I asked on X if anyone else was interested, and over 100 people replied saying yes.

I was honestly hesitant to make another course. I’ve been out of that game for four years and didn’t think I was ever going to make one again. But when I saw how much interest there is in this topic I realized it would be both extremely valuable to people and a lot of fun for me.

So I decided what the hell, let’s do it. And now 24 hours later nearly 150 students are enrolled 🤯.

"Build Your Own Life Coach" will teach you how to use AI to create custom software by walking you step-by-step through building your own fully functional AI Life Coach.

Starting from zero programming knowledge, you'll build a personal productivity tool where you can:

1. Manage your tasks

2. Set and track your progress towards bigger goals

3. Reflect on your success and challenges

4. Get tailored feedback and advice from your AI coach

5. Add any additional features you might want for your perfect personal productivity tool

By the end, you’ll have a framework you can follow to build any other kind of software you might want by using AI tools to do most of the programming for you.

You'll also gain access to the community of other AI builders to share projects, get help, and find the best AI tools to use to enhance your workflows.

The course will be self-paced, so you can work through it at your leisure.

Videos will begin releasing the week of January 6th, and I’ll aim to have the whole foundational curriculum done within 3 weeks.

From there, I’ll keep adding bonus units on whatever other topics are interesting.

You can get $100 off until Monday using coupon code "BLOG"

Here’s the link to join: https://build-your-own-life-coach.circle.so/checkout/access

And when you join, be sure to say hi, share any requests, and share any places you’ve gotten stuck trying to do this in the past. I’m heavily tailoring it towards the interests and pain-points of the group.

Join Now

FAQs

Do I need to know anything about coding to take this?

No, I’m going to start with a blank computer and build up the knowledge for you from there, so even if you have no experience you’ll be able to work through the course. I’ll also show you how to get help on your own and how to ask questions as you go so that you can build this knowledge base for yourself.

I’m already a decent coder, is this going to be too basic?

I’ll split up the videos so that if there’s a topic you’re already familiar with (e.g. using GitHub) you can skip it to get to the material you already know.

Do I need to be on Mac? Windows?

The software will work on both!

Will I need to pay for a bunch of AI subscriptions?

Only Cursor.ai for $20 a month.

What if I don’t want to build the life coach app?

That’s fine! I picked this as the project because it lets us cover a variety of important topics for building your own software, and at the very least you might find it useful in your work. If you have something very specific you want to build you can speed through the material, then start hacking on your own app and re-watch videos on any parts where you get stuck.

How long will the course take to complete?

I’m aiming to make the foundational core piece of it 5-10 hours, with another 10-20 hours of additional modules beyond that which you can pick and choose from based on your interests.

Can I pay with crypto?

Yes! You can pay nateliason.base.eth on Base, nateliason.eth for ETH mainnet or any other L2, or J8WdfJYXVc2ceHz8kNiWo6usSm7LKvVHKt7BWuCr9zYq on Solana. Once you’ve paid, DM me on Twitter with your email address and the transaction link.

If I run into issues, will you help me?

Yes assuming you’ve already tried to fix the issue following the advice in the course. One of the first things I’ll teach you is how to debug your problems using these AI tools, but if you run into a wall even after doing that I’ll help you fix it.

Is this just a Custom GPT?

No not at all. This is an app running on your computer that you could deploy to the web for other people to use, or even put on the App Store.

What language will we be programming in?

Predominantly Javascript, using React Native and Expo as the foundation. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry!

Are you going to use Replit? Bolt?

No, I’m going to teach you how to do everything on your computer so you don’t have to rely on a dumbed down web sandbox. You’ll be able to build just as quickly, your code will be cleaner, and it will be much easier to deploy and maintain. Plus you’ll feel cool doing it.

Is this browser based?

No we’ll be doing everything locally on your computer.

I have a question you didn’t answer

Put it on the comments and I’ll answer it there!

$100 off until Monday with code "BLOG"