Hi, and welcome to the August edition of The Dispatch.
Where I live, on the Western Slope of Colorado (actually the Roaring Fork Valley), It’s been a summer of fire vigilance, budget meetings, and staying close to home before travel picks up again in the fall. That means productivity is on the optimal side as I crank on my Q3 goals.
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Something to Ponder
“If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.” Naval Ravikant
From the Field
What I’m building, wrestling with, and learning this month.
It takes a year for me to write a novel. These things are average-length thrillers, beach reading fare, and will never win an Edgar award. Still, it takes a year to design the story, nail the outline so the twist lands, sketch the characters, write the prose, edit the drafts, and work with two editors and a beta reading team to make the final product. Which then sells for $5.99 a piece. They’re good stories, so say my readers. But it’s a hard road to earn a buck.
Someone once said that all returns in life come from compound interest.
I wrote eight novels in 10 years before deciding that it’s not worth it. But that was a flywheel that I had cranked and cranked until I had a good back catalogue and a half-decent email list.
Did I quit too early? Before the flywheel had a chance to really get going?
Thats a different post.
By pivoting away from writing fiction and into my new business, I’m restarting the compounding clock at zero. Re-building from scratch and making investments that will compound over time into a post-retirement business.
Much like regular deposits into an investment account, I know that the real payoff won’t happen for quite a while. Years definitely, maybe even another decade.
The Platform Decision
Recall last time I talked about my “one platform, one product, one niche, one audience” strategy. I’ve picked the product, the niche, and my audience. But narrowing in on the one platform was tough.
But I finally made the platform decision. I’m committed.
I picked YouTube.
It wasn’t an easy choice, and I want to explain why I made it.
Do hard things.
There are lots of books about it, including one by Steve Magness about the physiological benefits, and Ryan Holiday’s excellent The Obstacle is the Way, which is derived from ancient Stoic philosophy. “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” -Marcus Aurelius
I’ve been drawn to difficult things all my life. Took up running to meet a girl. Entered an MBA program as an average student. Ran two marathons (not with the girl). Several half Ironmans and a full Ironman. An executive job. Take multi-million dollar risks at work. Go uphill on skis in the dark cold morning. Cold plunge. Write novels.
Starting a new YouTube channel is daunting. Pick a niche. Come up with compelling video ideas. Learn to speak on camera, write a good script, package the videos with hooks and titles and thumbnails. Get the lighting and the audio and the camera right. Edit the dang thing using complex software and put it out there and hope the algorithm pushes it.
Toil in obscurity for months and maybe years and eventually maybe people will see your stuff. Maybe.
Sounds a lot like writing fiction.
Besides choosing the difficult path on purpose, here are some more reasons I’m picking YouTube over Instagram or TikTok or whatever for my top-of-funnel strategy.
Nine reasons YouTube is the answer
1. Long form YouTube videos are like books; they sit out there waiting to be found, and years later they can add value to someone, somewhere. It’s an evergreen platform. YouTube is a search engine and a recommendation engine combined.
2. YouTube is the most stable platform. It’s been around since 2005, and while the algorithm has changed, and notably the rules for monetization just got harder, the basic philosophy hasn’t. Make videos that people want to watch, that help or entertain. The algorithm does the rest.
3. YouTube pays its creators. Not a ton. You’re not going to quit your day job on AdSense alone, but the monetization scheme shows Google values the source of its content, the creators.
4. The difficulty of starting, sticking with, and growing a YouTube channel creates a moat: the barriers to entry are high. Hard things have less competition at the top.
5. It’s a high-trust media format. A 10-minute long-form video lets people read your face, evaluate your presence, and hear your cadence. It turns cold traffic into warm leads faster than almost any other medium.
6. The skill-stack is attractive. You must learn to be a researcher, a scriptwriter, a public speaker, an editor, a designer, and a data analyst. Storytelling, marketing, and effective communication are not only useful skills across-disciplines, but also hold my interest.
7. Long-form videos are the foundation of a content ecosystem engine (one video that fuels everything else). You can strip the audio for a podcast, edit the best 60 seconds into 3 Shorts/Reels, transcribe the script into a newsletter, and extract key insights into a blog post or social thread.
8. Asymmetric downside, unlimited upside. The cost to publish a video is practically zero (I might have over-bought on equipment, completely unnecessarily). The downside is capped at a video getting 20 views and feeling a bit awkward. The upside is uncapped: global exposure, inbound business opportunities, direct income, and life-changing network access.
9. I have an unfair advantage: I studied storytelling for ten years and wrote 8 novels, I edited my wife’s YouTube videos for a year, and I’ve built public speaking skills over a 25 year executive career.
Of course, YouTube is not perfect
There are unique and structural disadvantages to YouTube compared to other platforms.
A. No direct ownership of your audience. Unlike email newsletters, you don’t own your audience. The trick with YouTube is to convert your audience into something you own. Like a newsletter.
B. High energy output, and burnout. It can take 10 - 20 hours to make a single video, and that’s after you’ve learned all the skills to do so. Thats 500 to 1,000 hours to make 50 videos in a year. To be successful on YouTube requires year over year consistency, and threat of burnout is real.
C. YouTube’s long-form algorithm prioritizes click-through rate (CTR) and average view duration (AVD). New channels with no authority often struggle to get impression traction in crowded niches. Note: I believe this is changing as Google uses AI to help viewers find more relevant content.
D. The wrapper matters. A lot. Thumbnail and title packaging are critical to being found. The first thirty seconds of the video are hyper-critical to being watched. Poorly done, these can prevent a world-class video from being found and watched.
E. Attention spans may be on the decline. I don’t have evidence of this, but anecdotally and in my personal experience, the attention trend is towards short form and away from long videos and long written posts.
A note about YouTube monetization as of August, 2026
YouTube recently changed its monetization rules (what’s called their YouTube Partner Program). The primary change is to double the watch-time requirement from 4,000 qualified public watch hours in the previous 12 months to now 8,000. The subscriber requirement stays the same at 1,000. The change goes into effect February 1, 2027.
As you might expect, there is a lot of opinions flooding social media about this change. Making it too hard for the small creators, poor communication about the change, etc.
As someone with zero videos (and somehow 23 subscribers), this change only motivates me. There will be less competition in the early stage as less resolute beginners choose a different path and later there will be a larger revenue pie to participate in.
I’ll celebrate when I achieve monetization.
The Short List
Curated links to internet finds.
Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday (book, $19.53) His latest, applying Stoic philosophy to leadership and daily decision-making. Pairs naturally with Magness’s Do Hard Things.
Shottr (Mac app, free): Screenshot and annotation tool for builders and creators. More feature rich than Apple’s native screenshot app. Free, but after 30 days they ask you to consider upgrading for $12.
Every (newsletter, freemium): Long form essays for people who think in systems. It’s a media company with six writers publishing 12 columns.
Ulysses (Mac app, $40 annually): premium writing application I use to write these newsletters and my website posts. Simple, distraction free writing that uses markup.
Ice (Mac app, free): Menu bar cleanup. Free if you don’t want to pay for Bartender.
Company of One by Paul Jarvis (book, $12). Stay small, build systems. Be better instead of bigger. Focus on relationships. Refine quality instead of expanding footprint. Right up my alley, it’s downloaded to my Audible app.
What is The Dispatch?
The Dispatch is a newsletter for late-career professionals in the process of transitioning to a solo business. I write about my own journey as I plan for a day-job exit into an entrepreneur hustle, focusing on mindset, productivity, and technology. Always hand-written.