023: Tiago Forte - Building a Second Brain & Lessons From a $1M/yr Newsletter

Tiago Forte is one of the world’s foremost experts on productivity. He runs Forte Labs, an education company that helps knowledge workers use technology to become more productive. 

He earns over $1,000,000 per year by using his 40,000-subscriber newsletter to sell his online masterclass, Build a Second Brain.

In this interview, Tiago shares newsletter essentials, including: 

• How to get your first 10 newsletter subscribers.
• The best time to send your newsletter.
• How many subscribers you need to launch a course.

Tiago addresses fears about sharing too much in your newsletters, explaining how we live in an age where people want to follow real humans with real problems that aren’t afraid to be vulnerable.

Listen in to find out why Tiago, despite having a successful newsletter and online course, is still traditionally publishing a book about building a second brain.

Stick around to the end of the show to hear Tiago talk about how he’s using the revenue he earns online to help his family build businesses offline. 

Links & Resources

• David Perell
• Building a Second Brain
• James Clear
• Teachable: Create and sell online courses and coaching
• Gumroad

Tiago Forte’s Links

• Newsletter: Forte Labs
• Blog: Blog - Forte Labs
• Twitter: @fortelabs

Episode Transcript

Tiago: [00:00:00]
In the short term, picking one theme and just hammering on that theme week after week after week after week, I’m sure is good for the early days.

People know what you’re writing about. They know what to expect, they know what problem you’re going to solve. But I really think that’s short-sighted because in the long term they’re going to not have that problem anymore, or they’re going to develop more sophisticated problems or they’re just going to move their attention to some other part of their lives.

And if you are this one-dimensional caricature of a person, you pretend you’re this person who thinks about SEO 24/7—which none of us are—they’re going to move on from you.

Nathan: [00:00:41]
In this episode, I talked to Tiago Forte about building an online course, growing his newsletter and so much more. There is a lot of great stuff in there. One: he’s earning over a million dollars a year off of his newsletter. He’s got 40,000 subscribers. We get into monetization, book launches, course launches, cohort based courses, so much stuff.

And then actually, if you stick around to the end, we dive into, actually tiny houses and container homes and taking online revenue and bringing it offline, which I think is one of my favorite things. I’ve always seen me talk about that some on Twitter, but I haven’t talked about it a lot on the podcast or anything like that.

So I love the idea of doing that, of getting family involved and really using it to teach business lessons to kids. So it’s a longer episode, but I think you’re going to love it.

Let’s dive in.

Tiago. Welcome to the show.

Tiago: [00:01:32]
Thanks, Nathan, really, really excited to be here.

Nathan: [00:01:34]
So you’ve done a crazy amount of stuff for the email,sover the last few years. And I think a lot of people look to you for successful strategies and all of that.sone thing that you did before we started recording this is you asked on Twitter,syou know, what should we talk about? You know,swhat your audience would like to hear.

And one thing that that would be a fun place to start, w we’ll get into how to grow the audience and, and monetization and so much other stuff. I just love to hear it starting from zero. What are the first three things that you would do to grow your audience? So, you know, you’re giving advice to someone who’s has nothing going.

All they know is I was told I should have an email newsletter and growing at I growing audiences. The thing I want to do this year,

Tiago: [00:02:19]
Yeah. Okay. Let’s see. Three top things. I think first one is manually add people.sin the early days, I don’t know if you want stories behind these, but if I had coffee with someone, last thing I asked, can I add you to my email list?

If I met them on the subway, can I tell you it was one name and email address at a time? Because I knew there wasn’t much traffic to my website. People weren’t going to sign up just because I was really religious about getting people on there.

Nathan: [00:02:50]
but I’m just diving into that one for a second.sit’s so many people don’t ask right where they just say,sI’m doing all of these things. And over here, I’m trying to grow a newsletter and you can really grow an audience just by saying, Hey, will you join the list? And especially when you’re looking at a point where you’re say at the first.

One two or three subscribers a day coming in you’re at that point, you’re going to wait. This is going to turn into 50 subscribers this month. Something, additional send an additional two to three texts, a day, emails, coffee meetings, any of that, like you could increase your growth rate by 50% by adding an extra couple of people.

And so you could cut the time to a hundred subscribers in half just by asking. So I love that point.

Tiago: [00:03:38]
Exactly. I would add something else too, which is, it’s not just, it’s especially not about quantity in the early days, but quality too. Like when you have coffee with someone, you have such a deeper and closer connection to them.

Which means, you know, maybe from a, like a numbers point of view at the time it takes for you to write down their email address, go home, open up the website, put it in, isn’t worth it. But that person is so much more likely to be someone who reads it, opens it and reads it. Who recommends others who engages with you?
 sin the early days, I really think quality matters more than quantity because you just don’t have the quantity.

Nathan: [00:04:12]
Right. Well, and actually we’ve talked to a few people like burn Hobart comes to mind who writes the which diff,swhich is a popular publication on subs deck. He doesn’t have the biggest audience out there, but he’s read by, by brothers Collison brothers Collison so many influential people in tech where they’re like, he’s, he’s just of right at the intersection of the things that they care so deeply about.

And so. He has an incredibly high quality list. I also think about,sJim’s Clara and Ryan holiday, where they are getting replies to their email newsletter. It’s like, Hey man, we come out and talk to my team. What’s your team. You look, and it’s a professional NFL team, you know, and that’s the head coach, you know?

And so you’re like, Oh right. Of course so-and-so is on my newsletter.sand so that point that you’re making about quality over quantity, I think is really good. And when you’re getting those first few subscribers from Twitter from wherever else, yes. You have some control of the quality based on the content you’re putt...