I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Creators playing chess not checkers
Hey Reader,
You might’ve heard the phrase “chess, not checkers”.
In checkers, each piece moves in the exact same way. But chess requires understanding how each unique piece moves and how they fit together into a cohesive strategy.
A lot of creators focus on playing an overly simplified game and miss out in a big way. Specifically in terms of ownership rights.
Something we like to say on our podcast, Billion Dollar Creator, is:
“Pay me in equity.”
The smartest creators understand how important this is.
I remember talking to Josh Kaufman, the author of The Personal MBA (which has sold over a million copies). Josh initially sold the book rights to his publisher in a standard book deal. The publisher then sold off the audio rights to a third party as they didn’t intend to use them.
After the new buyer didn't produce the audio book Josh reached out to the third party and was able to acquire the audio rights for under $10,000. This was in the early 2010s when there was less of a focus on audio books than there is now.
Not only did Josh quickly make back his investment, but he had individual months where he made over $50,000 on Audible just from the audiobook.
Tim Ferriss took it further: rather than just buying the audio rights to a book or two he purchased the rights to half a dozen of his favorite books from authors such as Ryan Holiday. He saw that audio books were selling faster and faster, but publishers were still undervaluing the rights. So in a brilliant chess move he bought as many of the miss priced assets as he could.
Another way to play chess, not checkers is to cut out the middleman. Taylor Swift did this for her new film, The Eras Tour.
When it comes to movies playing in theaters, there are typically three roles:
- The producer
- The distributor
- The theater
Taylor is the producer, but she decided to cut out the distributor and went directly to the theaters. She knows she has enough leverage herself and doesn’t need someone else to distribute the film. So she negotiated all of her own deals with the theaters.
One of my favorite things is when creators say, “Nope, I'm going to take my fair share of the thing I made and bypass whoever is taking all of these little cuts along the way.”
Whenever possible, get paid in equity, maintain ownership rights, and leverage your unique advantage to cut out middlemen.
(By the way, we talked more about this “chess, not checkers” idea in episode 004 of Billion Dollar Creator.)
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PODCAST
Rejection, Creation, and Building a Unicorn Company
Discover what it really takes to build a unicorn company.
Suneera Madhani joins us on the Billion Dollar Creator podcast to talk about how she started Stax Payments from nothing, scaled it to become the fastest-growing fintech company in America, and exited at over $1 billion in revenue and 500 employees.
By the way, we'll be doing a live recording of the podcast at FinCon on October 19th. So if you'll be in New Orleans for the event, we'd love to see you there! Also, you can also use the code BILLIONS10 for 10% off a FinCon pass.
X (formerly Twitter)
“I can’t deny a growing sense that very little of this writing matters.”
Nat Eliason shared a thought-provoking post on X. (Side note: it still feels so wrong to say X instead of Twitter.)
In it, he wonders out loud whether short-form writing is distracting him from his ultimate goals.
The post continues well beyond what is shown in the above screenshot.
Have a great week!
—Nathan
Nathan Barry
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.