I recently published my 2024 Year-In-Review looking back over the events and lessons from last year.

Now it’s time to look forward – to the goals, plans, and intentions my team and I are committing to for 2025.

The theme I’ve chosen for this year is The Year of Profitability, as our financial results were clearly the biggest weakness last year. Among other things, this means we are:

• Making profitability the main filter we use to decide which projects to take on
• Splitting our efforts approximately 50/50 between creating new products and improving our existing ones
• Keeping the team lean and expenses low, with no new hires this year
• Returning to live cohort courses, but in a way that’s more sustainable for me
• Continuing to invest in the Second Brain Membership as our flagship program, and having all roads lead to it from across our ecosystem

I recently sat down with our CFO to identify three numbers that will be our guiding lights this year:

• To break even on a monthly basis, we need to make $67,000 per month
• To reach a 30% net margin, we need to make $105,000 per month
• To limit our labor costs to 40% of our revenue, we need to make $115,000 per month

Rather than waiting until the end of the year to check on these numbers, I’m going to be keeping a close eye on them every month.

With these criteria in mind, here are the main projects we’ve decided to move forward with.

2025 Projects

Launch an official BASB Notion template

After years of requests, we’ve decided to finally create an official Second Brain Notion template! Notion has continued to prove itself as the preeminent knowledge management platform in the world and is the only one to have truly broken out into the mainstream culture.

We are gathering early feedback from our Second Brain members as well as outside Notion experts to come up with a template that is simple and maintains your focus on what matters, which is putting your ideas to use.

Write the Annual Review book

I sold the proposal for my next book in April 2024, and have spent the 9 months since intensively researching every aspect of year-end reviews. I’ve collected and reviewed hundreds of sources, from historical precedents for this practice going back thousands of years, to psychology studies proving the value of self-reflection, to surprising stats indicating that setting New Year’s Resolutions is actually very effective…as long as you do it a certain way.

I officially concluded the “research” portion of the book in early February, and am now working on the manuscript, which needs to be more or less finished by summer 2025, with rounds of editing continuing into the fall. 

If all goes according to plan, I’ll open preorders for my new book next spring, and it will be released around November 2026. From everything I’ve researched and discovered so far, this practice is going to change many lives, and I can’t wait to publish the definitive guide for it.

If you don’t want to wait so long, check out the self-paced edition of my Annual Review program, which includes many of the ideas and techniques that will be featured in the book.   

Produce more implementation-focused YouTube videos

Although our YouTube channel is technically an ongoing “area of responsibility” rather than a one-time project, we are making some changes to how we make videos this year.

Specifically, I’m noticing that the rapid proliferation of AI is starting to commodify many kinds of content. Now that you can hit “auto-summarize” and get a step-by-step summary of a video in seconds, without even having to watch it, the value of the typical “listicle-style” video is declining. We’re going to switch to more implementation-centric, “coaching” style videos, as I think viewers will increasingly want to know the “how,” not just the “what.”

We will also be publishing a range of annual-review-related videos this year to start building interest and momentum for the release of my book in a little less than two years.

Launch our own app and upgrade the Second Brain Membership

It’s been so gratifying to watch the Second Brain Membership flower over the last year since we launched it to the public in spring 2024. Up until then, it had been a private community only for alumni of our cohorts, which meant that it went completely dark for months at a time.

Once we decided to stop offering live cohorts, it made sense to turn that community into an always-on program that runs all year long.

This year I’m excited to share that we are upgrading to Circle Plus, which will enable a range of new features in our community for communication, collaboration, and engagement. The one I’m most excited about is that we are getting our own app! That means instead of asking people to “join our Circle community” (who the heck knows what that means?!) our call to action will be to “Download our app” on Apple’s App Store or the Google Play store.

This move will make the Second Brain community a more prominent and accessible part of our members’ digital lives – a place they can go to whenever they have something to share or something they want to learn.

Debut an official BASB certification

My book Building a Second Brain continues to sell around 10,000 copies each month worldwide, which has produced a constant stream of inquiries and requests for coaching, consulting, or contract work related to Personal Knowledge Management, from individuals to large companies. But as a tiny team, we’re not set up to service those needs.

That’s why we’ve decided this year to pursue creating an official BASB certification, which will qualify graduates of our courses in the knowledge and skills needed to help others build a Second Brain. I’m hoping this will kick off a thriving marketplace of practitioners and service providers as an extension of our products and books.

Create a new AI cohort-based course

Since early 2023 I’ve been contemplating whether and how I could teach a course on AI. The need was overwhelming and clear, but where I had much more doubt was as to my role. 

What knowledge or perspective did I uniquely have to offer in the rapidly evolving AI space? What kinds of skills could I teach people that would remain relevant beyond the next model release? How could I leverage my background, experience, network, and skills into a program that was impactful while also being sustainable?

I’ve wrestled with these kinds of questions a lot over the last couple of years, and although the pace of innovation hasn’t slowed down, I’m finally starting to catch glimpses of some answers.

My point of view on AI is that it is not primarily a technological challenge – it is a historical, cultural, psychological, ontological, epistemological, societal, educational, governmental, intra and interpersonal, economic, and ultimately spiritual revolution that is going to change everything about our world.

I believe that adapting to AI isn’t just a matter of learning some tactics and tools – it will require a deep and fundamental reimagining of who we are, what our purpose is as humans, what it means to live a productive and fulfilling life, and how we conceive of our place in the universe. In other words, it is a holistic, overarching transformation, not a narrow technical one.

Taking on that perspective, I can begin to see how my way of thinking can help people. I can draw on my knowledge of history to surface lessons from past technological revolutions, my facility with moving between cultures to borrow ideas and ways of being, and my propensity to think holistically and in terms of principles to give people firm guidance amidst a roiling sea of change.

I don’t know exactly what this new course will look like, but I do know it will seek to give people fundamental training in the mindset and skills they need to thrive in the AI era. More to come soon!

Host an Annual Review immersive

For the last 7 years, we’ve taught a live virtual program guiding people through completing a year-end review. In 2025, we’re taking that program on the road! Toward the end of the year, we’ll invite a small group of people to our new hometown, Valle de Bravo, Mexico, to participate in a multi-day, immersive experience.

The details are still to be determined, but I intend to make it the most impactful, transformational experience possible, bringing together everything I’ve learned and discovered about how to make this yearly ritual a paradigm-shifting milestone in people’s lives.

We will also of course continue to offer the online program so as many people as possible have a chance to get support in their review process.

If you want to stay updated on any of these projects, subscribe to our newsletter below:

Open questions

Here are the open questions I’m holding for this year:

1. How can I make irreversible decisions to preserve my willpower?

As I wrote in my 2024 year-in-review, I was astounded at how the single decision to move our family to Mexico led to multiple other intentions seemingly naturally falling into place. I can still hardly believe it, and I want to continue looking for other examples where such a principle might also hold.

Instead of having to create a whole project to individually pursue each goal I have, what are other moment-in-time decisions I can make or actions I can take that allow me to feed two (or more) birds with one scone?

2. What experiences do I want to have with Caio and Delia over the next 10–15 years, while they’re small?

One of the most surprising aspects of becoming a parent is that from the moment the kids are born, you are presented with a complete timeline of their lives, and therefore yours.

You know at approximately what age they’ll begin walking, talking, and going to school. You know when they’ll be in each grade, what kinds of travel and experiences they’ll be ready for, and when they’ll start having friends and wanting to hang out with them instead of you. 

You know when they’re likely to leave home, which means suddenly you can predict the window in which you’ll probably spend 90% of all the time you will ever spend with them, which is before the age of 18.

My kids are 2 and 4, which means they’ll finish elementary school in 2031/2033, middle school in 2034/2036, high school in 2038/2040, and college in 2042/2044. I’ll be 46 when Caio finishes elementary school in 2031, 53 when he finishes high school in 2038, and 57 when he graduates from college in 2042. 

I don’t know why, but these dates completely blow my mind! 2042 is only 17 years away – I remember 17 years ago like it was yesterday! I graduated college myself that year, which means I am already halfway between my own college graduation and my son’s. 

Human lifespans keep getting longer, but the window of time we have to spend most intensively with our kids stays the same. Which means that, as a percentage of our lives, our time with our kids is actually shrinking in a way. “Childrearing” is therefore increasingly no longer a lifelong activity, but a discrete stage of life preceded and followed by many other stages.

All of this makes me want to be very intentional about how we spend those childhood years. I know I want to expose them to as many sports, musical instruments, forms of art, cultural experiences, social situations, spiritually transcendent moments, etc., as I possibly can. 

I want to immerse them long-term in at least two cultures – Mexico and Brazil – so they feel deeply rooted and connected to that aspect of their heritage. I know I want to go on many great adventures with them, having precious moments of depth and intimacy, discovering their limits, inventing new things, seeking new frontiers, and tasting everything life has to offer.

I feel far more commitment and determination around these intentions than any business goal, honestly, which leads me to conclude that all my decisions in the business need to be geared to creating the right conditions for what I consider these much more important moments with my family.

3. What does my jealousy of other people tell me is missing in my life?

One of my favorite indicators of what is missing from my life is what makes me jealous of others.

These days I feel an intense jealousy toward highly fit, middle-aged dads. I don’t know how they do it. It’s not primarily the outward markers of abs and a slim figure I’m jealous of, but the internal sense of dignity and self-respect they must feel when they look in the mirror. That is what I’m after, and exercise is going to be the main focus for my personal goals this year.

I’ve already noticed that my attitude toward exercise has to be different living in a rural town versus a dense suburb. It’s not about how many times I can hit the gym, or how many intensive exercise classes I attend. It’s about taking advantage of built-in opportunities to move, from hiking in the mountains we’re surrounded by, to meeting up with other dads in the afternoon for paddleball, to fitting in quick bodyweight workouts whenever I can.

4. What would it look like to pivot BASB toward AI?

When generative AI first exploded into the mainstream a few years ago, I assumed it was the end of the Second Brain methodology I had spent years developing. If anyone could sign up for an AI chatbot that “knew” the entire Internet, why would they spend the time and effort to curate and build their own personal knowledge base?

But as time passes, I’m beginning to think that maybe AI is not a replacement for the Second Brain, but its true fulfillment. 

People still need to read, take notes, learn, and express themselves even with the aid of AI tools. The “context” you bring to any interaction with AI matters more than ever. There are still many reasons it’s worth storing your favorite ideas, stories, insights, and memories in a private place that only you control.

Maybe, just possibly, AI is going to make the process of building a Second Brain much easier and more accessible to more people, which means the demand for my work might go up instead of down. Maybe I was early to the rise of intelligent software, and am now poised to take advantage of my reputation and experience and teach people how to use it.

This line of thinking is sparking a lot of new ideas for me, which I will be exploring in the coming year.

Here are other open questions I don’t even have the beginnings of an answer to, but I notice fill me with a sense of curiosity and wonder:

1. How can I integrate more anger work into my life and work?
2. How could I explore and understand my relationship to food this year?
3. What is the bottleneck in my thinking or behavior that is leading to poor financial results in the business?
4. What is the business that gives me more of the life I want now?
5. How can we bring service into our family life?
6. What is a hobby I can be passionate about, that’s hands-on, that I can do with Caio in Valle?
7. What is the kind of work that our new home and lifestyle are best suited to?
8. How can I balance book-writing with all the new initiatives and projects I want to take on this year
9. How can we have other people generate new ideas using their energy and enthusiasm, instead of continuing to rely on me
10. What role does the blog play now that I’m not writing as much, and our web traffic is declining
11. How do we make our community bottom-up instead of top-down?
12. What would it look like to make Forte Labs a platform for others?
13. How can I be the kind of leader and manager who inspires people to greatness without me needing to be there?

How I want to spend 2025

As the years pass, I’m increasingly finding that it’s more useful to define exactly how I want to spend my days, as a substitute for goals. Goals have the tendency to require a lot of suffering and sacrifice in the short term, which paradoxically means the more ambitious they are, the worse my life becomes!

As I turn 40 in a few months, I’m not interested in sacrificing current pleasure in order to arrive at a far-off destination anymore. I did that in my 20s so that I would have the life I have now! 

Here are the ways I’ve decided I want to spend my time in 2025, to bring me the happiness, peace, and joy I’ve worked so hard for:

1. Visiting various gardens, parks, and museums around Valle with the kids—being outside or exploring new places with Lauren and the kids, combining quality family time with exploration, discovery, learning, and fun in a physical setting.
2. Playing with the kids at home—being physical and wrestling with them, especially in contrast to watching TV.
3. Spending time in person, in deeply immersive and intentional spaces, with fellow entrepreneurs and creators I know and trust and want to get to know better—helping me feel seen and accepted and connecting on a more personal level, rather than only through my work.
4. Meeting and connecting with people who are passionate about the same ideas and possibilities, like at my conference, meetups, or elsewhere—I feel like such people are “on the same wavelength” and resonate with how I see the world.
5. Deep reading and writing for many hours at a time with no other commitments for the day—getting to this level of flow is one of the most deeply gratifying experiences, soothing my soul while also making me proud of the progress I’ve made.
6. Working on long-term, large-scale, highly novel creative projects—these make me feel like I’m not wasting my time with a bunch of trivial, forgettable projects, but something that matters and that expands who I am and what I’m capable of.
7. Immersing myself in unusual, novel, complex environments that fully absorb my senses, pull me into the present, and teach me things about myself and the world. For example, museums, new countries and cities, nature, and even online—these environments make me feel embodied and expansive, versus stuck in rumination in my head.
8. In deep, intimate conversations with people I find interesting, receptive, and self-aware—whether dinners with other couples, coffees with new acquaintances, or spontaneous encounters with strangers in public—these conversations feel profound, curiosity-provoking, moving, like I’m discovering someone else while also discovering aspects of myself at the same time.

If anything I’ve written here resonates with you and you see a way we could work together, don’t hesitate to reach out at hello@fortelabs.com.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

On October 3-4, 2024, we hosted our very first in-person Second Brain Summit in Los Angeles, and honestly, it was a dream come true. 

This event felt like a “bucket list” moment in every way. I’d count it among my top five life milestones, right up there with getting married, witnessing my children’s births, and signing my first book deal.

Looking back, I’m still in awe of the warmth, love, and generosity everyone displayed—from attendees to volunteers to our lineup of speakers.

One of my biggest takeaways from the Summit was personal: I learned the incredible growth that comes from letting go. 

For much of this project, I had to place my trust in others to handle details big and small. For someone who’s used to doing everything himself (or at least attempting to), this was transformative. For the first time, I felt fully carried by a team of talented individuals working right alongside me, taking collective ownership of a vision we all believed in.

A special shoutout goes to Simply Storied, our event organizer. They made it all possible, guiding us through each stage with finesse and care. And of course, none of this would have happened without the energy and dedication of our team and volunteers.

Now that I’ve had a month to process everything that happened, I’m ready to share my reflections with you, including some painful realizations and lessons learned.

Who joined the Second Brain Summit 

We welcomed 212 total attendees from 16 countries! Only 57% came from the U.S., with some traveling from faraway places such as Bali, Taiwan, and Australia to join us. 

59% were male and 41% female. A third of attendees identified as business owners and entrepreneurs, followed by employees and freelancers. 

I loved to see such a wide distribution of different ages at the Summit, as I think it’s super important for different generations to learn from each other:

Only 44% of attendees had ever purchased one of our courses or cohorts. So for many, it was the first time joining one of our experiences. 

I can confidently say that everyone who attended was a 10/10 in interest and passion. Each person followed such a unique and personal path to get there that we can’t identify a “typical” attendee profile. 

The highlights: What attendees loved the most  

Our highlights video will express this better than words ever could:

I was honestly taken aback by the positive things people said about the experience, starting about two hours in. They spoke about it being “life-changing” and “healing”; as the best conference they’d ever been to. 

My favorite quotes I overheard:

• “You created the world you wanted to live in.” (from my dad)
• “This is a conference for high-functioning autistic people.” (this one made me laugh)
• “I finally found my people.” 
• “This was a spiritual experience.” (from a speaker)

Here are the things attendees said they loved most: 

• The incredible lineup of 39 speakers, their diversity along multiple dimensions, and how most stuck around and participated for the full two days of the conference. 
• High-quality, warm and friendly, and interesting fellow attendees, whom many people noted were unlike any group they’d encountered elsewhere.
• The positive energy of the event, noting that people were genuinely excited to be there. 
• The opportunity to meet people in real life whom they had known online for a while and to have informal yet deep conversations in person.  
• The size of the event (~200 people) was ideal for connecting with others and getting to know them beyond superficial “networking.”
• The seamless, frictionless, classy event design and management (kudos to Simply Storied team)
• The sponsors added a lot of value by offering relevant products and education about how to use them. 
• The “Digital Swag Bag” full of courses, memberships, and tools, allowing attendees to go deeper into what they learned. 

Here’s how attendees reported feeling at the end of the summit (“inspiring connection” jumps out as perhaps the overarching theme of the entire summit):

By the end of the event, 98% of attendees said the Summit met or exceeded their expectations. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) hit 80, a rare and impressive outcome that shows how likely they are to recommend it to others.

This shows how hungry people are for such communal experiences in our digital-centric world and that there’s huge potential in this area.

The financial snapshot

In the interest of transparency, I’d like to share what it took financially to bring this event to life.

Ticket sales brought in $120,604, and sponsorships contributed an additional $60,000, for a total of $180,604 in revenue. However, our total expenses came to $349,771, resulting in a net loss of $169,166. This essentially meant we subsidized each attendee by about $798 on top of the ticket price, which ranged from $999 (early-bird) to $1,200.

The primary challenge? We only sold about half as many tickets as I had originally envisioned, leaving us with the cost profile of a much larger event than we actually hosted. Although we made adjustments along the way, I was so committed to delivering a high-quality experience that I chose to eat the additional cost rather than cut essential aspects of the event.

Moving forward, it’s clear we’ll need a more sustainable financial model to make future Summits viable.

What we’d do differently next time

After reviewing the attendee feedback and our own reflections as a team, here are the things we’d change if we were to host the Second Brain Summit again:

• Increase the focus on the B2B and professional aspects of our niche, making it easier for people and their employers to justify the cost and time to attend.
• Prioritize interactive workshops and hands-on practical sessions, which can only be delivered live and in person. 
• Cut non-essentials such as games, a reserved hotel block, and catered food. A smaller venue would also reduce costs for AV, rented furniture, on-site event staff, security, signage, etc.
• Pick a location different from downtown LA, as the surrounding neighborhood was pretty sketchy. 
• Cap the attendance at an even lower number, so we are guaranteed to sell out and can spend more time on the event design rather than marketing/sales. 
• Schedule fewer sessions concurrently. We had as many as 6 sessions happening at the same time, which was too many for people to choose from and created FOMO. 
• Start conversations with sponsors earlier (9-12 months before the event, when budgets are being committed), seeking deeper, more strategic partnerships that would allow for higher sponsor revenue. 
• Offer a recorded or live-streamed version of the Summit sessions, as so much value was on offer it would have been nice to capture it.
• Add a third day with an unstructured agenda, allowing for informal meals, walking around town, and follow-up meetups to process all the new information and deepen new relationships. 
• Sell a “high-ticket program” on the backend of the summit, such as a group coaching program or mastermind, to support the financial side. 

With these changes, I believe we could make future Summits a financially viable and deeply impactful addition to the Second Brain community. I know of no better way to build true community and connection in our increasingly fragmented, distracted, isolated modern world.

I’m deeply grateful to everyone who joined, participated, and made this Summit possible. It’s an experience I’ll never forget, and I owe a huge “thank you” to every single one of you who helped make it real.

A personal note

There was something about this summit that moved me at a very deep level. I felt myself changing, transforming into someone new. 

Diving into the emotions and insights afterward with my coach, I realized that gathering together all these wonderful people in a warm, welcoming environment had touched a nerve inside me: a longstanding feeling I’ve had that I didn’t belong anywhere.

I traced that feeling back to my school years when I attended 5 different schools in 5 years from 5th grade to 9th grade, which made me highly resilient and adaptable but also made me feel isolated and alone like I didn’t have real friends. I traced it further back, to being the child of immigrant parents from two separate countries, a true third culture kid.

That narrative – that I didn’t belong in any group and no one could understand me – simply couldn’t withstand the outpouring of acceptance and love of 200 people, all united together in one common purpose. It was just so obvious that everyone there had felt alone or misunderstood, but that we could, in the words of my father, “Create the world we wanted to live in” anyway.

Many people have asked me whether we plan on hosting another summit in the future. I honestly can’t say, but what I do know is that in the coming years community is going to be one of the last and most meaningful differentiators in a world transformed by AI. It’s one of the only things that can’t be generated algorithmically, no matter what “social” media tells you.

I honestly don’t know how the financial side makes sense, but I do know two things: that every time I’ve doubled down on community it’s always worked out; and that every time I’ve doubled down on what has aliveness and energy it’s worked out, even if I couldn’t envision how in the beginning.

So in one way or another, I’m going to keep seeking ways to build true, meaningful community, to bring people together whether virtually or in person, and to help forge relationships that transcend any particular app, trend, or niche, so that everyone in my community has the chance to feel that sense of shared purpose and belonging that has been so transformative for me.

The best snapshots from the Second Brain Summit

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

17 years ago, at the age of 22, I uploaded my first YouTube video.

My high school friend Derick and I had set up a digital camcorder, faced the camera with our backs to his bedroom wall, hit record, and just started talking about 3D printing, which was to be the first episode in a recurring show about emerging future trends. 

Needless to say, our show never had an episode two, but something was sparked in me that day. I saw that I could share a message with the entire world from my bedroom, without permission from anyone. All I needed was a message worth sharing. It would take me 14 years to find one.

I distinctly remember feeling back then, in 2007, that I was too late. I thought I had already missed the golden era of online video. Little did I know, those were prehistoric times, revealing only the faintest glimmer of what the YouTube empire would eventually become.

This piece is a comprehensive retrospective of my 17 years of experience on YouTube, including my path to 275,000 subscribers and 12 million views. It is a deep dive into the different “eras” I’ve moved through, the team and production process I’ve built, and the detailed finances throughout. 

I’ll summarize for you what I’ve learned so far, analyze my successes and failures alike, and distill practical insights that you can use in your own YouTube efforts. Whether you aspire to create YouTube videos in the future, or are already doing so now, my hope is that these lessons will shorten your learning curve and save you from making the same mistakes I made. 

Even after all these years and some notable successes, we still haven’t figured out a business model for YouTube that is sustainable for the long term, so this piece will also serve as a springboard for the next era of our channel.

The 4 Eras of My YouTube Journey

I’ve gone through four distinct “eras” in my time on YouTube, each one with a central theme:

• The Experiment Era (2007-2012): Performing random experiments and trying things out
• The Portfolio Era (2013-2020): Using YouTube as a professional portfolio
• The Startup Era (2021-2023): Starting to take YouTube seriously
• The Factory Era (2023–2024): Building a full production process

Each era lasted between 1 and 7 years, and they seem to be getting shorter over time as we iterate more quickly. These years encompass my entire adulthood, and reflect the stages of my growth both professionally, creatively, and as a human being.

Let’s dive into each era one at a time.

The Experiment Era (2007-2012)

The first era I think of as a series of crackpot experiments, dating from that first grainy video uploaded from my friend’s bedroom to the start of my professional career.

In that time I uploaded anything and everything I could think of, from photo slideshows showcasing my volunteering work in Rio de Janeiro, to profiles of microentrepreneurs in support of my microfinance work in Colombia, to short clips of my adventures across South America, to highlight reels from my Peace Corps service in Ukraine.

I had no particular goal, vision, or mission for what I wanted to do on YouTube. I thought of it as a social media site, like Myspace or Facebook – a place for me to share updates about my life and travels and to document my experiences for future record.

And yet some of the most basic lessons I learned during this period were essential, forming a foundation for everything that would come later: how to point a camera, frame an interesting shot, make sure the audio was working, and import it all to a computer to make simple edits and add appropriate music.

In this first experimental era I made 19 videos, which drew 7,411 views and 20.8 hours of watch time from a grand total of 3 subscribers, one of whom was my mom!

The Portfolio Era (2013-2020)

In early 2012 I returned from my Peace Corps service in Ukraine, excited to finally begin my professional career in the big city. 

After working in consulting for a couple years, I struck out on my own as a freelancer in June 2013. To mark the occasion, I uploaded my first “professional” video, a 102-minute long recording of a workshop I had delivered at a coworking space in downtown San Francisco. 

That video frankly left a lot to be desired. The video and audio quality were quite poor, there was no lead-in or introduction, no titles or animations, and no link to the slides. I had not yet heard of concepts like virality or retention. 

And yet, this early video already contained within it some promising signs of YouTube’s potential. It demonstrated that I could expand the reach of my ideas via digital video. It showed me that there was a place for educational content amidst the deluge of endless clickbait. And by including a link in the description to my first product, an online course teaching the Getting Things Done methodology in more detail, it proved that I could find customers by sharing content freely on the web.

All these seemed like earthshaking realizations at the time. With a single video, I could already see the outlines of a holistic online education business, from testing and validating ideas, to gathering feedback, to building community, to finding customers, to serving them with valuable products.

Despite all the limitations and flaws in what I had created, the essential quality of the material I was teaching managed to shine through, and it soon gathered thousands of views, which at the time felt like a big deal.

I forged ahead, uploading the first lesson of my course as a preview, and then a short promotional trailer filmed by a friend in an afternoon. I later leveled up the production values, hiring a videographer to film a Design Thinking workshop I was beginning to offer companies.

As sales of my first course dwindled over time, and a subsequent one I launched fizzled, I decided to set aside online courses to focus on where I knew I could make money: talks and workshops for companies. My YouTube channel accompanied me on this pivot, becoming essentially my “speaker’s reel.”

I spoke on emerging trends such as the Quantified Self movement, new theories of innovation, and shared my personal experiments in using network science to analyze my habits. My attitude was that I would speak for free if needed, as long as I could come away with a recording I could add to my YouTube channel – a tangible, publicly visible “proof of work” that I could point to for future gigs.

After a couple years, I was fed up with corporate work and wanted to return to where I began – teaching people directly online. I had started a blog in 2014 and found that writing was a crucial medium to fully work through the details and implications of my ideas. After writing dozens of in-depth essays, I decided to take my most successful piece, on how I used Evernote as a “second brain,” and turn it into a full-fledged course.

YouTube again played a crucial role in this new chapter. I published testimonial videos from my earliest cohort students, recordings of Q&As, interviews with experts, quick demos and case studies of PKM tools and techniques, recordings of talks on the subject I delivered, and a promotional trailer for my course, which I called Building a Second Brain. I also continued experimenting with personal interests and developing my videography skills during this period, such as with the documentary I created on my father’s life and artistic career once I realized that smartphone cameras were up to the task.

Five years after I wrote my first essay on the subject of Personal Knowledge Management, and two years into teaching the Building a Second Brain course as my sole focus, I uploaded a video that encapsulated for the first time my Second Brain methodology. In many ways, it was the culmination of the first six years of my career, incorporating ideas and insights from a dozen subjects I had researched, taught, and coached on in search of my niche.

It was my first “viral” video, reaching hundreds of thousands of views and serving as the default place to send people for an introduction to me and my work.

I had just begun exploring the possibility of publishing a book in early 2019 when this video came out, and it became the first true test of my holistic methodology. Nothing about the video is optimized or particularly strategic. It’s just a bunch of slides with voiceover, a decidedly low-tech style that didn’t even require a camera – just a computer and a mic. 

And yet, it’s difficult to overstate the impact this single video had on my career. It served as an incredibly effective delivery vehicle for introducing a complex topic to a wide variety of new people, including my future book agent and publisher, who in turn would help me spread my message to even more audiences far from my home base.

During this second YouTube era, which lasted seven years, I released 113 videos drawing 885,000 views, 101,000 hours of watch time, and gaining 20,454 subscribers. This small but promising start laid the foundation for the next era, when I would begin to invest in YouTube seriously and make it the focus of my content creation.

The Startup Era (2021-2023)

In July of 2021 I realized that we had only one year left until the release of my book, and I wanted to invest the book advances I’d received from various countries to make the biggest splash possible. This was also a few months after our largest-ever cohort (fueled by the pandemic), meaning I had substantial resources on hand to do so.

After looking at a variety of avenues, I decided making YouTube our primary focus was the most promising path we could take, for several reasons that remain just as or even more valid today:

• YouTube is the world’s most widely used and most influential platform for educational content, reaching millions of people with a highly accessible form of media that anyone can consume and benefit from.
• The algorithmic reach of YouTube is a powerful mechanism for continuously reaching new audiences beyond our original niche.
• Video production is expensive and time-consuming, but my business was finally at a place where we could afford to make those investments.
• Videos can be produced as a collaboration between a team, rather than relying solely on my personal time and energy as with writing.

By this point, I’d been experimenting on my own and uploading all kinds of videos for years, and knew I needed a different approach if I was going to change the trajectory of the channel and make it a long-term driver of book and course sales.

I’d reached 20,000 subscribers through my own personal efforts, but it had taken many years to do so, and I knew I now had less time and energy to dedicate to video creation with a toddler running around the house and a second baby on the way in a few months. I needed to find a way to massively level up both the quantity and quality of our videos, while also delegating most of the necessary work to my team so it didn’t fall on my shoulders.

I started at the most fundamental level of the videos I wanted to create – with a dedicated place where they could be made. My wife and I decided to extensively remodel our two-car garage, including new tile, an attractive brick facade along one wall, new electrical wiring and lighting, high-end cabinets along another wall, and stylishly modern furniture and interior design throughout, tastefully chosen by my wife Lauren according to a “Mexico City cafe” aesthetic.

Between the $50,000 remodel, $30,000 in cameras and other equipment, and $20,000 in consultants, we would eventually spend about $100,000 making the ultimate home studio, as I’ll detail further below. You can see a video recapping the project here. 

The next step was to hire someone to lead our YouTube efforts, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to remain hands-on all the time. After a wide-ranging search, I hired Marc Koenig as our first Creative Director to lead our overall YouTube strategy as well as provide creative direction for our videos from beginning to end.

It took more than 4 months from when Marc joined to the release of our first video in January 2022. This included everything from buying cameras and microphones and lighting, to brainstorming the kinds of videos we wanted to create, to establishing the initial team and the workflow they would use, to experimenting with test shots in the studio. 

We bought specialized furniture, cameras, microphones, lighting, rigging, computers, editing software, hard drives, and various other tools. We recruited a video editor, a production assistant, and several thumbnail designers. Marc flew out from Wisconsin a number of times to help set up our gear, brainstorm ideas, and iterate on everything from the framing of shots to how we would write scripts to my live performance on camera. We mapped out the first year of videos we wanted to create, scheduled a trip to the East coast and Europe to record a series of interviews with leading experts in our field, and built the beginnings of a production workflow to coordinate everyone who would be contributing.

We also hired a studio design consultant, Kevin Shen, who spent a couple weeks helping us improve our production setup and teaching me the basics of how images, sound, and light interact to produce a holistic effect for the viewer. I gave Kevin the mandate to help us make a “classroom that can teach the entire world,” encompassing not only filming videos but also teaching cohorts on Zoom, working and writing day to day, joining meetings with the remote team, recording interviews with guests, and more. It was a small 320-square-foot space that needed to elegantly straddle the physical and digital worlds while projecting a compelling message to the world.

All this was an incredible amount of work, and took much longer than I expected. There were so many twists and turns, for example:

• We had to buy a commercial-grade AC unit to make sure we weren’t sweating on camera, and to minimize the risk of cameras overheating.
• We needed a backup battery to keep everything online even during a power outage, and a second Internet connection in case the primary one went down.
• We found we needed full blackout curtains across every window to be able to keep the lighting constant, and a door with an access code so various people could come in and out at all hours of the day.
• Lights had to be mounted on walls or ceilings and folded away so we could use the space as an office whenever we weren’t filming.

We faced a constant tradeoff between aesthetics and functionality – we didn’t want an ugly space that we wouldn’t want to spend time in, nor a beautiful one that didn’t support our needs. This creative constraint led to a number of innovative solutions, such as using sound blankets that could be put away instead of wall-mounted pads.

Here’s the “before and after” comparison:

We kicked off this new era with an interview with Thomas Frank in January 2022, instantly 10xing our production values from one video to the next, wowing our viewers, and setting the stage for an epic run in the months to come. The video skyrocketed to hundreds of thousands of views and, more importantly, we now had a team and a process that would allow us to produce such videos regularly.

I was totally occupied with the launch and promotion of my book throughout 2022 and 2023, which meant that Marc led virtually all aspects of our video production, from generating ideas and choosing the most promising ones, to outlining and scripting, to coordinating and managing the editors and post-production workflow, to configuring the look and feel of the channel. This was by far the most control I had ever delegated to anyone, and forced me to give up my perfectionism and trust the process we were developing and iterating on, even when a given video fell flat. 

In August 2022, a full year after making YouTube my primary focus and beginning to feel secure in my new identity as a YouTuber, I wrote a blog post on Why I’m Becoming a YouTuber. It laid out my vision for how and why we would become a YouTube-centric company, after a first decade dedicated mostly to text-based content.

Despite all the talented people I had the privilege of working with during this period, I still had an extremely steep learning curve to climb. It felt so much riskier and more vulnerable to open up my creative process to so many other people, compared to the solitude and privacy of writing. My brain had to think about so many more factors than I was used to – technical problems, creative problems, communication problems, and logistical problems all interacting with each other, across multiple timescales and distributed geographically around the world. 

My most important lessons fell into three categories:

1. On-set production

Initially I thought I could create a “push-button” studio, where everything was already set up and automated and all I had to do was sit down in my chair and hit record. This quickly turned out to be a fanciful dream, for a number of reasons.

Conditions change from one day and even one hour to the next: the sun moves, the temperature fluctuates, sources of noise come and go. Every video also has different requirements, from where I’m sitting or standing to what I’m wearing to which devices I’m using.

Despite having the support of an on-set producer, I still needed to learn how light worked, including how the shutter speed, aperture size, and ISO settings influenced each other and how to adjust them dynamically based on what I was trying to accomplish in a given segment. I had to learn how sound worked, such as how far away the mic should be from my mouth, how to adjust the gain so it’s not too high or too low, and what effect my decisions would have down the line when the editors loaded up the files I’d created. 

Likewise, I needed to learn to always work from a checklist (such as the one below, about how to ensure our cameras wouldn’t overheat) rather than relying on memory, because one wrong setting could make hours of footage unusable. Checklists also ensured any given job could easily be handed off to someone else, so no one person became the bottleneck.

2. On-camera performance

I’d spent years creating content for the Internet at this point, but it had been primarily in the form of writing, either on Twitter or my blog. I thus had a rude awakening when I realized that communicating a message on camera required a radically different level of energy.

It wasn’t just that I needed to be more lively and animated for video. It went far beyond that. There is so much more being communicated in video form: my body language and hand gestures and posture; my emotions and vulnerability; my facial expressions and eye movements; my tone of voice, diction, pacing, and volume. Even the words I used and the structure of sentences had to change, from long-winded and technically precise to punchy and emotionally resonant. All this while reading from a teleprompter, and trying to “act natural.”

I still have a lot to learn on this front to be honest, as it isn’t natural for me to be effusively charismatic on command. I’d also like to move away from word-for-word scripts and incorporate more spontaneity and improvisation into my delivery, as that seems to result in more engaging, natural performances.

3. YouTube strategy

One of the most pervasive and damaging misconceptions I held about YouTube, and one that many creators seem to share, is that “All you have to do is create great videos and the audience will come.”

As much as I would love that to be true, this attitude fails to capture a crucial aspect of the platform: that the algorithm is everything. I’ve never paid much attention to algorithms, never optimized my content for SEO, and never tried to pursue “trending topics,” so this pains me to admit, but it’s plainly true.

When you see two of your videos – both of which you’ve invested similar amounts of time and attention into and which you believe offer important and valuable ideas – but one gets picked up by the algorithm and receives hundreds of thousands of views while the other merely thousands, it really forces you to stop and reconsider. YouTube makes it so excruciatingly clear which videos are succeeding and which are not, with so much precise data about every possible metric of success, it forces you to reckon very directly with the “why” behind each video.

If I was creating videos as an art form, or for the pure pleasure of it, it wouldn’t matter whether they were boosted by an algorithm. But the entire point of growing our YouTube channel is to expand the reach of my message, so it absolutely does matter how many people see it. If I believe a video’s message is important, and that by “packaging” it in a certain way I can have 100x the reach and thus 100x the impact, why would I not do everything in my power to make sure it gets seen by as many people as possible? Any other attitude, I believe, is a matter of stubborn pride.

This realization has led me to seriously study the “strategy” of YouTube – that is, the often secret or subtle tactics, techniques, and creative decisions that the algorithm looks for when deciding which videos to send to the stratosphere. For example, how to design a title and thumbnail that attracts a click, how to write an introduction and hook that keeps them watching past the first few seconds, and how to structure a video to maximize retention across different segments. 

Despite countless lessons learned, I have to admit that this is still the area where we need to grow the most. I still don’t really see myself as a YouTuber, am not immersed in the nitty gritty details of the platform every day, and as a result, it’s been a challenge to acquire the rapidly evolving “insider knowledge” that the most successful YouTubers seem to thrive on.

Marc decided to move on from Forte Labs in July 2023, capping off an incredible run of 31 videos that were watched over 5.7 million times, or over 183,000 views on average per video (compared to 7,800 views per video on average during my previous DIY era, a 23x improvement). Astonishingly, our channel attracted 392,000 hours of watch time during this period, or more than half a human lifespan. We added 161,000 subscribers in two years, or 6,700 per month (versus 243 per month on average during the previous era, a 27x acceleration). 

My hypothesis – that by making large investments of time and money we could rapidly level up every metric on our channel – was strongly vindicated.

(Marc now runs his own solo YouTube agency working directly with business owners, authors, and creators to launch their channels using many of the techniques and workflows he developed at Forte Labs – if you’d like to partner with him on your YouTube strategy, go here!)

The Factory Era (2023–2024)

In the summer of 2023 I was faced with a huge challenge: continuing to make high-quality YouTube videos without the creative lead who had driven the whole process forward up until that point.

And even though our creative director left the company on good terms and with a clear handoff, it was at this moment I realized the downside of having a point person who I’d completely delegated creative direction and project management to: key man risk, in which the departure of one person endangers a whole line of business. I realized it was time to create a more structured, predictable, and transparent process for our video creation.

We started by restructuring the team, putting our head of marketing and content Julia Saxena in charge of all YouTube efforts and bringing our two video editors and other contractors into direct contact with the rest of the core team (they had operated independently and outside our normal communication channels up until then). 

I was surprised to find this required a lengthy acculturation process, as they didn’t have a lot of context around the ways we worked, our values and priorities, and what was going on in the rest of the business. That isolation had allowed them to work in a focused, distraction-free way, but I could see they now needed to come into alignment and synchronize their efforts with ours.

We instituted a weekly all-hands meeting every Tuesday morning to talk through all things YouTube: which videos were coming up, the progress of already filmed videos, metrics and feedback on videos we’d recently released, and sharing lessons about titles, thumbnails, editing, and many other aspects of the craft. This ensured that ideas and insights were flowing between the three main parts of the company: marketing/content, operations/product, and YouTube.

Here’s what the team looked like once we integrated YouTube as a core function of the company:

During the prior two years of our “startup” era, the video team had worked in a relatively unstructured way, treating each video as a bespoke project being created more or less from scratch. This resulted in extremely successful videos from a creative and metrics standpoint, but also meant I had little visibility into our production process, such as which videos were planned or underway, which stage of post-production they were at, and most of all, when I could expect the next video to be released, with timelines ranging from two weeks to two months. This meant it was difficult to coordinate promotion across our newsletter and social media to give it the best possible chance of succeeding.

I’ve noticed this principle repeatedly: the factors that make one era successful become the weaknesses and blindspots of the following one. Conversely, the weaknesses of one era become the greatest opportunities and areas of growth for the following one. Like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other, we decided to pivot away from bespoke videos guided by a singular vision toward collaborative videos guided by a predictable process. 

This meant primarily focusing on two things during the subsequent 12 months of the Factory Era: adding predictability and visibility to our process.

To enhance predictability, we decided to stick unwaveringly to a two-week video release schedule going forward – every Thursday morning, 9 am ET. This unlocked several benefits:

• It provided a predictable cadence to synchronize all the moving pieces and contributors at various stages of a video’s lifecycle.
• It gave us a lot of lead time before each video’s release, allowing us to promote them across all our channels and with extra collateral like lead magnets or bonus resources.
• It forced us to lower our standards and ship a video to meet the next deadline, instead of spending an indeterminate period of time polishing it to perfection.
• It made it easier to compare metrics between videos and across time, as well as more accurately calculate the ROI of each video.
• Our publishing schedule was mapped out far in advance, allowing us to schedule around vacations, PTO, holidays and other events, and seasons of the year.

Once each video’s release date was fixed on the calendar, everything else needed to hit that deadline also became predictable. To hit publish on Thursday, we knew when we needed to have an initial A-cut, and then a B-cut, and then a title and thumbnail, and then a final review. This told us when we were behind schedule long before it became a crisis, and allowed us to tweak and tune our schedule to align with weekends and staff availability.

To gain visibility into our pipeline, we worked to thoroughly document every aspect of our production process in ClickUp. Having a “single source of truth” that everyone could see also unlocked a number of benefits:

• We now had dedicated documents for ongoing ideation around titles, thumbnails, video concepts, formats, insights, feedback, and analysis of our metrics, so we always knew where to look for these things.
• People could be assigned to specific videos and specific stages, and receive an email notification the minute a new milestone was reached and a video handed off to them.
• All comments, feedback, and decisions were centralized in comments that anyone could see, ensuring that key information wasn’t siloed away in 1-to-1 communication channels.
• Clickup allowed us to work in a highly iterative, collaborative, and asynchronous way among many people both internal and external, while minimizing meetings.

Looking back over the last year, we’ve seen substantial improvement across a variety of metrics. Comparing only videos released during the Startup versus Factory eras:

• Our subscriber growth rate grew from 6,737/mo to 7,428/mo, a 10% improvement
• Views per month grew from 80,110/mo to 107,923/mo, a 35% improvement (although the average number of views per video 30 days after publication went down, from 62,020 to 51,803)
• Our click-through rate (a measure of what percentage of people click on our thumbnails) grew slightly from 4.2% to 4.5%
• Average View Duration has remained basically unchanged, from 3:50 to 3:52 minutes
• We reduced the number of days needed to produce each video from 28 to 13 days on average, doubling our publishing cadence

And of course, all cumulative metrics have improved as the “back catalog” of our channel grows and compounds over time:

• Watch time grew from 16,355 hours per month to 28,052 hours per month across all videos, a 72% improvement
• AdSense revenue went from $1,326/mo to $2,067/mo, a 56% increase

We’ve found significant savings on the cost side as well:

• Total YouTube costs declined from $14,406/mo to $11,493/mo, a 20% decrease
• Cost per Subscriber (how much we spend to acquire each new subscriber) decreased from $7.63 to $4.71, a 38% drop
• Cost per View (how much we spend per view) decreased from $0.11 to $0.05, a 55% drop
• We cut the average cost per video by more than half, from $11,146 to $5,094

My takeaways from these results are two-fold:

1. The steady cadence of a new video released every two weeks, produced using a highly predictable and transparent workflow, is a powerful forcing function for consistency and keeping our rate of learning high
2. However, seeing as how the most important metrics (click-through rate, average duration viewed, and views per video at 30 days) are all unchanged or with only very slight improvements, this suggests that we’re not improving the essential quality of our videos, as defined by YouTube

In other words, while we successfully made the transition from “startup mode” to “factory mode” in terms of our internal production process, we’re only treading water when it comes to the value we provide our viewers. And since everything on YouTube is designed for rapid growth, merely maintaining our performance is at best a mediocre outcome.

The Underlying Business

Since I began investing heavily in YouTube over the last few years, the question of return-on-investment has become paramount. No matter how successful our channel is, it can’t be justified or sustained unless it contributes to the bottom line of the business.

Starting with the top of our funnel, it’s very clear that YouTube audience growth is in a category all its own, far outpacing all other active platforms including our two primary ones, X and the newsletter:

The overall Forte Labs audience across all platforms has grown from 13,600 in March 2020 to 578,000 in June 2024, a 42x increase. 264,215 of those followers came from YouTube, or 47%, meaning that YouTube alone has accounted for almost half our audience growth since 2020.

In terms of financial results, the channel has made $517,955 in revenue over the last four years, across the following 6 monetization sources (the two tiny slices are book sales made directly through YT Shopping, and YT Premium payments; course referrals are inferred by asking customers where they heard about us):

In terms of costs, we’ve spent $483,651, including $345,734 during the Startup Era to get the new system up and running:

Plus $$11,493 in monthly recurring expenses on average during the subsequent Factory Era, or $137,917 over 12 months:

In other words, over the last 3 years in which we’ve invested seriously into YouTube, we’ve spent $483,651 and made $517,955, for a profit of $34,304.

These numbers represent a paradox for me: on the one hand, they are probably in the top 0.01% of all YouTubers. To make a profit from content creation at all is a rare thing. And yet, from a business perspective, it’s quite unimpressive. For the amount of time and effort we’ve all had to put in, $952 in profit per month is a meager sum.

I continue to do it anyway for a couple main reasons:

• These numbers can’t fully capture the value that YouTube provides to me personally, to our team creatively, and to the wider business in terms of audience growth, goodwill, and expanding the reach of our message
• YouTube is a long-term play, expanding our sphere of possibilities for the future in ways we can’t currently imagine and opening doors we don’t even know exist

I’ve repeatedly found that our YouTube following can be leveraged for other, seemingly unrelated pursuits. For example, when we started outreach for potential sponsors for our first in-person conference, the Second Brain Summit, being able to include a sponsored video in our proposals made them much more attractive. If I ever land a TV show, the track record and viewership of our YouTube channel will be a pivotal part of it.

That said, I continue to find my much more highly involved role in our video production challenging. My natural inclination is to obsess and pour myself into it, but I’m constrained from doing so both for lifestyle reasons and, more importantly, because I don’t want to create a system with myself as the central element. I don’t want to build a successful channel that I can never take a break or walk away from – that cost is too steep, so I’m trying to find another way, with the team at the center.

The Next Era (2024–?)

In August 2024, I moved with my family to Valle de Bravo, a small town outside Mexico City. Our desire is to embrace a slower pace of life, immerse our two kids in the Spanish language, and focus on writing my next book (I announced the move, fittingly, as part of a “life update” YouTube video).

That move also represented the end of one YouTube era and the beginning of a new one, because it means I no longer have easy access to our home studio in LA. I’ll need to find a way to continue planning and recording videos while in a remote location, while also respecting the limits of family time and my desire to focus mostly on writing.

But there’s another, much more important reason it’s time to embark on a new era, which has been very hard for me to accept: it’s time for us to fully embrace, immerse ourselves in, and master the intricate and subtle strategy of YouTube algorithm-driven growth. 

We focused on the internal-facing and operational aspects of our YouTube process over the last year, which yielded strong results on the backend. But from what I’ve learned recently at YouTube-centric events like VidCon, and from talking to and listening to the YouTubers I look up to, our next frontier will be about leveling up the viewer-centric aspects of our videos – the curiosity-provoking, retention-enhancing, and virality-creating aspects that determine whether our videos get watched by a few thousand people, or a few hundred thousand, or even millions.

It’s taken me a long time to internalize the importance of virality on YouTube, mostly because I never paid attention to it on any other platform. For years I tweeted daily, never thinking about what was trending or what people wanted to see. Same thing on the blog: I never looked at the analytics, only writing about what I thought was interesting and important based on my own curiosity.

But YouTube is an altogether different beast. The algorithm is all-powerful, determining which videos will be targeted at likely viewers and aggressively boosted, and which will languish in obscurity, like a temperamental god deciding which of his subjects will perish in obscurity and which will be exalted to the heavens. If the algorithm’s divine judgment resulted in a 10% or 20% difference in viewership it wouldn’t matter so much, but in reality it’s more like a 10-100x difference, or even more. Our least viewed videos only receive a few thousand views, whereas our most successful receive more than 500,000, despite the fact that we’re spending similar amounts of time, money, and effort on them.

The artist in me wants nothing more than to ignore the importance of algorithmic growth. It offends my creative sensibilities, as I hate catering to the crowd and maximizing hype. That attitude works fine when it comes to my writing, because I enjoy doing it for its own sake, because writing is more about evergreen ideas that stand the test of time, and because writing is essentially free to produce.

But videos are different on all three counts: I don’t really love doing them for their own sake, they don’t really stand the test of time, and are quite expensive to produce. It’s hard for me to ignore the distribution element when each video is costing me about $5,000. Each one needs to have a return, to make an impact, otherwise what’s the point of making them at all?

This leads me to conclude that it’s time for the pendulum to swing back the other way. Now that we’ve built a finely tuned machine for spitting out high-quality videos, it’s time to return to the more subjective, subtle, strategic aspects of video making. On YouTube, this specifically means:

• Idea generation, which I’ve learned needs to be a near-constant activity taking place behind the scenes, to ensure that only the top 1% most promising ideas get made.
• Improve and double down on our most successful “formats,” which has become a major trend on the platform recently, as channels become more like TV shows with a highly consistent, repeatable formula that people come to expect and make part of their routines.
• Bigger bets, as video performance tends to be non-linear, meaning a 10% or 20% greater investment of effort might yield a 10-20x greater result; the trick is to know which ideas and videos to put extraordinary investment into, such as by releasing a single video and then only doing follow-ups or a series if it performs well.
• Titles, thumbnails, intros, and hooks, which I’ve learned are an endlessly subtle and rapidly evolving domain whose importance is impossible to overstate.
• Making the filming process enjoyable for me, as that is key to making it sustainable and viewers can always tell whether you’re having fun (this likely means finding someone to record videos in person with me in Mexico, whom I can iterate and improvise with in real time, which I find far more fun).

There’s another constraint I’m facing that adds a challenging wrinkle to this new era: the business is shrinking. 

After peaking around $3 million in revenue in 2021 at the peak of the pandemic, and plateauing at around $2 million the last two years, in 2024 we’re likely to see a 30-40% decline, or about $1.2–1.4 million. We’re experiencing the post-pandemic slump faced by many creator businesses these days, the continued impact of discontinuing our flagship cohort-based course last year, and significant headwind from the rise of Artificial Intelligence both in terms of lower search traffic and a lot of the enthusiasm around PKM shifting to AI.

As a result, I’ve had to let go of several team members, effectively reducing the team to the smallest core group necessary to send out our newsletter, support our courses and membership, and produce YouTube videos, while also giving me the time and space to write books.

Open questions for the next era

These are the five questions I’m currently grappling with, the answers to which will define the next few years of our channel.

How can we optimize for public metrics while keeping personal enjoyment high?

This obviously isn’t a binary choice, and any long-term successful channel requires some of both. But I’m considering where on the spectrum we should lie, between extrinsic motivators like viewership, subscriber count, and revenue, and intrinsic motivators like curiosity, pleasure, and making videos I think are important even if they don’t perform well.

This also affects the kinds of ideas we produce. From a metrics standpoint, we should probably only make videos that are directly Second Brain-related, as that is what I am by far the most known for. But my interests and curiosity lead me in many directions, and I don’t think I can stomach churning out such videos endlessly.

What is my relationship and level of obsession toward YouTube?

Veteran YouTuber Samir recently said in a video, “To do YouTube right requires all of you…your constant obsessive attention.” I see this attitude reflected in all the biggest names on the platform. They live and breathe all things YouTube, and it defines who they spend their time with, how they spend their days, and even their personalities and beliefs.

But this is where my background comes into play: I didn’t start as a YouTuber, especially not the classic profile of an early 20-something obsessing over videos 24/7. I don’t even particularly like consuming content in video form. I’m nearly 40 years old, have two kids, and a wonderful business that already sustains me financially and artistically. I don’t feel the pressure to “make it” on YouTube as a jumping off point for the rest of my career, nor am I interested in any of the negative effects of that level of obsession on my lifestyle, my health, my family, or my other interests.

At the same time, I don’t want to “phone it in” and do subpar work. I’ve always believed that if something is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well. In this paradox I see an experiment: for me to learn what it looks like to produce extraordinary outcomes without my time and effort as the primary input. I know that I have the capability to accomplish anything if I put my mind to it, but what does it look like to reach the same, or even greater, levels of accomplishment by harnessing a team and systems instead?

I think that is the current frontier of my growth as a founder, a CEO, and a leader, which is why I’m purposely holding back from throwing my entire being into YouTube and learning to depend on the team instead.

What are the video formats that work best for us?

We’ve experimented with many different formats over the last few years, and these are the ones that seem to have worked best:

• Case studies of Second Brain setups/workflows: Showcases of real-life applications of a Second Brain and PKM tools
• Techniques: Notetaking and productivity techniques that the viewer can use right away
• App and tool walkthroughs/reviews/reactions: Which apps Tiago uses and how; help viewers decide which app is right for them and get started with their choice
• AI: How Tiago and our team use AI tools, what impact AI will have, the overall mindset to deal with this shift
• Expressing yourself/becoming a creator: About the ultimate purpose of a Second Brain, what different ways of expressing yourself look like, how to become a creator or realize the potential of your creativity

My question is to what extent and how we should continue doubling down on and evolving these proven formats, or branch out into new ones that have more potential in the future. 

How can we engage with our audience to incorporate their feedback into our work? How can we learn what our audience wants?

One thing I’ve noticed from spending time with successful YouTubers is how incredibly close to their audiences they are. They interact frequently through comments and the community feed, among other venues. They often consume the same content and are part of the same online circles. They have a lot of inside jokes and subculture knowledge in common. Most of all, the best YouTubers are extremely sensitive to the slightest desires and shifts in perception among their viewers.

While I don’t necessarily want to be subject to our subscribers’ every whim, I do think this is an area I am weak in because I didn’t “grow up” on YouTube. I don’t have that much interaction with my viewers, and have chosen to cultivate the hermit life of a writer instead. I think there’s significant room for improvement in how we expose ourselves as a team to our audience, but am not sure how to do that without changing how I spend my time, which I don’t want to do.

How can we better measure how YouTube is driving business results? 

The most challenging contradiction of the last year has been watching our channel grow to unprecedented new heights, and receiving so much praise for that success, while at the same time, watching the underlying business decline.

As exciting as it is to watch our “top of funnel” grow so much, it means nothing if it’s not measurably contributing to the underlying business that makes it all possible. If profit is the permission to keep going, we’re not currently gaining that permission from the marketplace. Something needs to shift.

This could mean improving conversion rates to our courses and other products, doubling down on sponsorships, or other avenues, but I would say we haven’t yet found the business model that works for us long term on YouTube.

Our new (old) vision

What is my grandest vision for what our YouTube channel could become?

This isn’t particularly measurable or objective, but my vision is simply to change the culture. Specifically, the culture around notetaking, reading, learning, productivity, and creativity. To make those subjects more accessible and less daunting. To open up many new entry points for different kinds of people to harness them, whether via technology or otherwise. Creating a profitable business is just a stepping stone to carry us toward that vision.

This vision remains unchanged from its first articulation on the blog two years ago: “To build an open-source Library of Alexandria for the PKM world.” I’ve learned so much about what it will actually take to achieve that vision, and I can now see it’s a much longer and harder road than I first naively envisioned. But I’m also more inspired and dedicated to it than ever.

YouTube is the world’s most important media platform, with more than 114 million active YouTube channels publishing 2,500 new videos every minute, all competing to reach 2.6 billion monthly active users in over 100 countries. I continue to believe we should have a horse in that race, and make our best attempt at shifting the perception and behavior around some of the most important facets of a 21st century undergoing rapid, daunting change.

As I write this, we’ve been living in a small town in Mexico for a week. In that time, two people have recognized me. In both cases, it wasn’t for my blog, or my books, or my newsletter, or my X posts. It was from my YouTube channel, where they said they had learned from me how to organize their information and make use of it.

These anecdotes are more meaningful to me than any quantifiable metric. They are signs that I’m escaping the confines of my niche, going beyond the narrow subculture of productivity bros, and having an impact on people who might never otherwise have access to such powerful ideas. 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

This is a proposal I wrote for a television show based on my bestselling book Building a Second Brain.

If it resonates with you and you’re in a position to make a TV show happen, please let me know by emailing hello@fortelabs.com. I’m open to a variety of formats, funding sources, routes to production, and distribution platforms for this project.

Introduction

Have you ever felt drowned in a sea of ideas, struggling to recall that one crucial piece of information when you most needed it? Have you ever spent hours scrolling social media, or consuming content online, only to find yourself unable to remember even one useful takeaway?

Imagine a world where your mind is freed from everything you’re trying to remember and keep track of, while every important detail and inspired thought remains safely tucked away and easily accessible within seconds. Welcome to the possibility of building a Second Brain – a digital extension of your mind that remembers everything, so you can accomplish anything. 

This isn’t just about storing information; it’s about reshaping the way you approach life. You are offloading your thoughts to technology so you can think more clearly and calmly. By organizing the digital realm where you likely spend hours every day you enhance your focus instead of splintering your attention. Aligning your online habits with your values and goals transforms the time you spend consuming content – from merely passing the time to compounding your learning and growth over time.

By creating a Second Brain, you’ll have a dedicated, digital space you can step into anytime you want to focus your energy on what truly matters to you. Rather than relying on your scarce self-discipline or willpower, you’ll have a cognitive exoskeleton designed to propel you forward into taking action on the goals and projects that could transform your life.

Inspired by the revolutionary concepts from my books Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, which have sold over 300,000 copies worldwide, and the transformative experiences of thousands of my students, readers, and followers, I’m excited to bring the power of the Second Brain to television. Let’s dive deep into the world of digital organization, redefining the way we engage with information and using it to unlock the best version of ourselves.

The Show

I propose an intervention/makeover/personal transformation style unscripted show revolving around people’s digital organizational habits and creative projects. 

This genre typically shows an expert or “guru” who comes into a person’s environment, and shines a light on an aspect of their lives that they are ashamed about, in pain from, or that is holding them back in some way. 

For example:

• Marie Kondo and people’s closets
• Ramit Sethi and people’s bank accounts
• Queer Eye and people’s wardrobes
• The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning and people’s possessions
• The Biggest Loser and people’s waistlines
• Dream Home Makeover and people’s homes

These are all domains that are crucial to our well-being and thriving, but that many of us feel disempowered or embarrassed by. 

There have been many such shows, but I’ve never seen one that deals with people’s digital life – their notes and documents, emails and text messages, web favorites and bookmarks, photos and videos, books and reading, YouTube videos and social media posts, etc. In my experience, most people would rather open up their homes or their bank accounts than show you what’s on their smartphones or computers, and that’s why we will find so many touching, hilarious, and ultimately meaningful stories there.

Why now?

Over the past decade we’ve become a digital-centric culture. 10 years ago, as of 2013, Americans spent more time on digital devices than watching TV. We consume digital media over 7 hours per day, with 44% of 18- to 49-year-olds saying that they go online “almost constantly.” Millennials (currently aged 24-41) are now the dominant economic, political, and cultural force in our society, and their experience of life is fundamentally shaped by the digital world. 

The Internet isn’t a thing anymore, it’s a place – the primary place we go to for education, entertainment, community, connection, and so many other needs and wants. Our digital lives are rich, fruitful landscapes where our hopes, dreams, and creative visions can come to life before our very eyes, as long as we have the will (and the tech-savvy skills) to see them through. 

Yet where is the authentic portrayal of that digital realm that has become such an important part of our experiences? At most, we’ll see a character in a TV show briefly sending a text message on a 5-year-old phone. Where is the self-discovery, the stories, the drama, and the life-changing inspiration that we find online every day?

The Stories

A starting point could be my story of struggling with a debilitating neurological condition that plunged me into a world of pain and shut down my ability to speak, ultimately leading to the realization of how crucial self-expression is to life (and inspiring my writing and teaching on this subject). 

Here are some of the other (real) stories we’ve heard from the graduates of our course, viewers of our YouTube videos, and readers of my books:

• The Colorado pastor who interviews the families of the recently deceased in order to write their eulogies found himself overwhelmed by the quantity of information he was collecting and taking weeks to distill it. He began using a voice transcription app to record the interviews and summarize the key points in minutes, freeing up his time to spend with the bereaved. 
• The UK single mom trying to juggle homeschooling and work, whose depression had advanced to the point that showering and brushing her teeth was a struggle. She adopted digital habits that led to her learning to manage her life and even enjoy reading again.
• The Florida education professor who felt frazzled managing her job while taking care of the kids, before she started using digital notes apps to capture ideas and insights on the fly, which made prepping for speeches something she can do in little batches during the small windows of her busy day.
• A college student who realized he was addicted to video games and watching his life pass him by. Upon discovering the power of a Second Brain, he began using it as a way to learn and grow while activating the same parts of his brain that video games once did.
• The Managing Director for an automaker in Mexico, who after treating her depression with medication, found that she also needed to change her routines around managing emails, her schedule, and her to-do list to put her life and career back on track. Now she’s teaching her team the same techniques and seeing it lift the performance of the whole department.
• The oncologist at a world-renowned cancer clinic who uses my techniques to condense his reading about new clinical trials and patient notes so he can quickly reference the information he needs while spending more time listening to and being present with his patients.
• The manager, whose company was being acquired and position made redundant, decided to utilize digital platforms to document and systematize his company’s knowledge. This led to him being named the General Manager of the new combined business, a position with far more responsibility and compensation.

And these are some of the topics and issues we can touch on:

• The tension between personal productivity for succeeding in your career, and creativity as a means to personal fulfillment
• The epidemic of Information Overload and the crushing stress of all the information we consume and have to pay attention to every day
• Social media’s impact on our attention span, mental health, and ability to focus
• The explosion in freelancing, the creator economy, and remote work as powerful possibilities that require fluency in using digital tools to manage our work and lives to take advantage of
• ADHD and other neurodivergent conditions’ effect on how we think, and how to use technology to consume and interact with information in more effective ways
• Content consumption on online platforms as a major influencer of our thinking, while requiring more intentional habits to glean the most helpful ideas and insights from the noise
• Our digital habits and the platforms on which they take place as important avenues for self-expression, self-determination, and creative agency

Potential challenges

Here are some of the main challenges we’d face in creating such a show, which also represent opportunities if we succeed:

• How to represent digital spaces and virtual interactions in a visual, engaging, relatable way
• What to call this subject (common terms include second brains, digital organization/hygiene/fluency, personal knowledge management, tools for thought, and others)
• How to frame the “promise” of watching the show (commiserate with others struggling with information overwhelm, gain inspiration from others overcoming relatable challenges, get new ideas for how to approach the digital world, be moved by the stories of courage and vulnerability as people confront their fears, etc.)
• How to make the stories relatable, grounded, and easy to understand, since this topic can easily become convoluted and abstract

Ideas for portraying Second Brains on TV

Here are my initial ideas and notes on how we could portray digital environments and habits on the small screen:

• Feature digital notes that are more visual rather than purely textual, including graphics, photos, drawings, diagrams, screenshots, etc.
• Project computer environments onto walls or 3D spaces that we can point to, talk about, and walk around in (like Hans Rosling did on the BBC)
• In Ramit Sethi’s show How to Get Rich there are some good examples of using a combination of zooming in, on-screen animations, and over-the-shoulder shots to make the screen feel less two-dimensional
• Go out into the field and interview real people (architects, sex workers, casino owners, professional athletes, musicians, etc.) on how they use digital notes/second brains “in the wild” as part of their professions (a good example of this is the 1997 documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which profiled an animal trainer, topiary gardener, robot scientist, and biologist studying mole rats)
• Borrow ideas from Sherlock on how to film thoughts and subjective experiences
• Use virtual or augmented reality environments to make the digital realm more tangible; for example, using the Apple Vision Pro to provide a new interface for interacting with digital content on our devices
• Create in-scene animated objects that I can interact with and move around (such as Bradley Cooper’s character in Limitless), or immersive, full-screen animations that illustrate concepts and ideas, such as Steven Johnson does in How We Got to Now on PBS
• Create a “studio” or “lab” with tangible materials and tools that are used to “think outside the brain,” like Stanford does in their design school
• Here’s a short video highlighting some interesting recent experiments in depicting digital/online behavior on screen

If this resonates with you and you’re in a position to make a TV show happen, please let me know by emailing hello@fortelabs.com. I’m open to a variety of formats and distribution platforms for this project.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

It’s now been two years since the release of my book Building a Second Brain. It has already reached and surpassed every goal I had for it, with 250,000 worldwide sales and many new countries and languages still to come.

On this occasion, however, I want to answer a longstanding question that is only just starting to come into focus: Has the success of this book grown the underlying business?

This was one of the most important rationales I had for writing a mainstream, traditionally published book in the first place (which I first formulated in March 2019) – to create a “loss leader” and promotional vehicle for the other products our company sells, such as courses.

With two years of hindsight and data, we can start to arrive at some answers. Let’s approach it through a series of questions.

Did the book grow our audience?

My first hypothesis was that the success of my book would significantly grow our audience. Looking at the growth trajectory of our email list over the past five years allows us to compare the period before the book and after it (the vertical line is the book’s publication date):

The graph above shows a clear inflection point right around the time my book was released, strongly suggesting it made a big impact. 

In the two years preceding the book’s release, our email list grew by 42 new subscribers per day on average (from 16,000 to 46,000 subscribers). In the two years since the book’s release, it’s grown by 108 new subscribers per day on average (from 46,000 to 125,000).

That represents a 2.6x acceleration in new subscribers per day on average. In a timeline where the book never existed and the previous growth rate remained constant, we would have ended up with 77,000 subscribers today, instead of 125,000, which means there are 48,000 people on our email list that likely wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the book.

Looking at social media, I compared our following on each platform where we have a presence between March 2020 (when I signed the publishing contract for Building a Second Brain) to March 2024 (when I signed for my next book).

We’ve seen tremendous growth across every platform, including 180x on LinkedIn, 147x on YouTube, 24x on Facebook, 16x on Instagram, and 13x on Twitter/X. Overall, the Forte Labs audience grew 28x over these four years, an incredible result.

In this chart showing the trajectories of each platform over the last two years, you can clearly see that they fall into three distinct groups: the low-effort platforms where we only repurpose content from elsewhere (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn), the high-effort platforms we focus on (Twitter/X and the newsletter), and then YouTube, which stands on its own due to the power of the algorithm in continuously finding new audiences for our videos.

I can definitively say that my book succeeded in massively growing our audience. There were several additional factors, such as the major investments we made into YouTube over the same time period, and pandemic-fueled growth, but I still conclude that most of this wouldn’t have happened in the absence of my book.

Next, I’ll turn my attention to whether all those new followers and subscribers actually led to growth in the underlying business.

What is our audience worth?

Although there are a lot of intangible or difficult-to-measure benefits of writing a bestselling book, the one I’m interested in most is the financial return-on-investment. If the numbers don’t make sense, then everything else is a wash.

If there are 48,000 subscribers on our email list who wouldn’t be there otherwise, I wanted to calculate how much revenue they would theoretically add to the business. I know our Lifetime Customer Value is $720, so assuming we can convert 10% of those subscribers to customers, that suggests $3.4 million dollars in potential revenue.

Now, realizing that potential revenue is an entirely different question. In late 2023, we stopped offering live cohorts, which were our primary revenue source up until then. This made it significantly harder to monetize all those new followers, forcing us to depend on lower-priced products such as self-paced courses.

Looking at the onboarding survey for those courses, the main ways people found out about us are YouTube (this includes other people’s channels as well as our own), and in second place, my books.

Cross-referencing these referral numbers with our course sales over the past couple years indicates that about $486,000 of our revenue came by way of books, which suggests that we’ve only successfully realized 14% of the potential revenue of this new, larger audience.

Did my bestselling book turn out to be a financial failure?

My strategy with the BASB book was to treat it as a “loss leader” in favor of monetizing via courses, and now I have the chance to determine whether that’s panned out.

Looking only at the book itself, we’ve spent $1.13 million dollars ($570,000 on staff costs plus $560,000 on everything else) on its creation and promotion so far. On the revenue side, book advances have added up to $498,000, and if we add another $486,000 in course referrals, that adds up to $984,000 in total book-related revenue. Which means five years after the start of the project and two years since publication, we’ve yet to break even and are still about $146,000 in the red.

Adding YouTube to the picture, we’ve made $840,000 (via Google AdSense, sponsored videos, and course referrals) and spent $576,000, for a profit of $264,000. Our YouTube videos have been both funded by book revenue and inspired by the content of the book, so I doubt this performance would have been possible without the book. Considering the book and YouTube channel together, they’ve made $1.8M and cost $1.7M, slightly more than breaking even.

The great confounding factor in this entire analysis is that we are in the midst of an “online course winter,” as the immense surge of enthusiasm for everything digital that the pandemic unleashed is now giving way to an exodus, as people want to spend their time and money elsewhere. Nearly all course creators I know are struggling, and in a couple of years, we may see all these numbers turn around.

But if I’m being brutally honest with myself, the financial picture of my book has thus far been pretty mediocre. 

Despite its runaway success in terms of copies sold, I made three major mistakes that are making it difficult for us to capitalize on that success:

1. I spent too much money in the leadup and initial launch of the book, putting us deep into a financial hole that is now taking a long time to climb out of (I probably should have been more conservative with my spending and investments from the beginning).
2. We killed our flagship program and main source of revenue just as our following was exploding (it probably would have been better to change and adapt the live cohort-based course to the needs of readers, rather than killing it completely).
3. We didn’t create a clear pathway from reading the book to taking a course that picked up where it left off (our self-paced Foundation course is largely an alternative to the book in video form).

Essentially, I assumed and hoped that the “rising tide” of the book would “lift all boats” in the business, but without a clear pathway to a profitable course, and no funds held in reserve that would have helped us to build that pathway, we’ve been unable to translate much of the flood of interest we’ve received into profitability.

The big open question for the future is whether subsequent books will change this equation. I’ve already noticed that the short follow-up companion The PARA Method, which I released just a year after Building a Second Brain, has been almost pure profit, since it takes advantage of all the infrastructure and the following created by the first book and thus required very little new spending. 

My next book, on the practice of annual life reviews, will come out in the fall of 2026 and represent my first major title since BASB, and thus the first true test of whether my book writing efforts can be profitable long term.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

One of the aspects of writing a book I most looked forward to was releasing it in my family’s country of origin, Brazil.

I’d spent years daydreaming about what that would feel like, returning to my homeland bearing the gift of hard-won knowledge to share with the people who had given me so much. 

Criando Um Segundo Cérebro came out in July 2023, about a year after the US release, and I decided to travel to Brazil the following month for a press tour to promote it.

In this blog post, I’ll recap our strategy for launching the book in Portuguese and Spanish, the results we achieved, what we found to be most effective, and what I learned.

Strategizing the launch in Brazil

Our strategy in Brazil unfolded in three stages, each one building on the one before:

1. Host or participate in a series of media interviews and events (in person and virtually)
2. Funnel all the attention generated into a dedicated Instagram account and WhatsApp community
3. Use those platforms to launch my book and online course BASB Foundation in Portuguese

Preparing for launch

I hired a Project Manager just for the launch of this book since I knew there would be a lot to coordinate and execute. I found someone in my network who was Brazilian and could handle all communication in Portuguese, which I also speak.

The first thing we did was segment our existing email list to find our “true fans” located in Brazil. Based on their IP address, there were 2,145 of them, out of 81,315 subscribers total at that time, which means 2.6% of my audience was based in Brazil.

Next, I created a WhatsApp Community (essentially a group with multiple subgroups within it) and invited all 2,145 subscribers to join. A couple hundred of them did – representing the most dedicated followers of my work there.

The WhatsApp Community became a central place for me to share updates, ask for help promoting content, announce major milestones, and receive feedback on my plans and ideas. I was blown away by the energy and enthusiasm this group of supporters demonstrated. They shared detailed unboxing photos, posted their recommendations and takeaways, boosted our own social media posts, bought extra copies for their friends and colleagues, and gave me tons of helpful advice about how to approach the Brazilian market. I’m incredibly grateful for their contribution to this launch.

The third and final step of preparation was to schedule a 10-day trip to Brazil, at my own expense, which would be used to extensively promote my book’s release in Portuguese.

Stage 1: Generate attention through media interviews and events

The goal of stage 1 was to drum up as much interest and enthusiasm for my book (and the broader idea of Second Brains) as possible.

I participated in 10 events, both online and in person, including:

• An Instagram Live with a major creator interested in PKM
• An academic-focused event with CRIE, a lab at a public university in Rio de Janeiro specializing in network science, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the study of knowledge management
• Two book signings hosted by my Brazilian publisher, Sextante, in each of the major cities of southern Brazil – Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
• Two Second Brain Meetups I hosted myself, in Rio and São Paulo
• A Notion Meetup organized by the local chapter of Notion enthusiasts
• A breakout session at Fire Festival, the largest conference on online education in Latin America, hosted every year by the online education platform Hotmart
• A major podcast, which we filmed in person at a studio in São Paulo
• A virtual Q&A hosted by the Brazilian Society of Knowledge Management.

For all these events, we took lots of pictures and in a couple of cases even hired a videographer to fully document the experience via short-form video, such as in this example:

Through my publisher, we also received exposure through multiple media outlets, including MIT Sloan Review Brasil, Você RH, O Globo (the newspaper of record in Brazil, which I immediately sent to my mom!), Valor Economico, national radio program CBN, Saber Viver (a lifestyle magazine in Portugal), and Fast Company Brasil.

Besides the traditional media above, we had a legion of independent content creators who were kind enough to produce videos and summaries about me, my book, and my work, on a variety of social media platforms.

Stage 2: Capture the excitement in the new Instagram and WhatsApp accounts

As we were building all this anticipation, we asked everyone to follow our brand new Instagram account, with content only in Portuguese. We haven’t been very active on Instagram in the past (it’s our smallest social platform in the U.S.), but I knew it was by far the most dominant platform in Latin America and would be the ideal home base for our efforts in Brazil.

I knew that events (both in-person and virtual) create “spikes” of attention, but we’d need a way to capture that attention and maintain a longer-term relationship with people.

In the 6 months since its creation, our Brazil Instagram grew from zero to almost 3,000 followers. We posted photos and videos from all the events I participated in, creating a central repository documenting the efforts we made in the country for anyone to see in the future.

I also continued asking people I met and collaborated with to join the WhatsApp group, so we always had a single place to easily communicate and coordinate with them. 

Stage 3: Launch the Portuguese online course

The third and final stage was to create and launch our flagship online course, BASB Foundation, for the Brazilian market. The goal was to make this training as widely available as possible there and to recoup some of the investments we made for the book launch.

I decided to use an AI-powered tool called HeyGen to produce the new course, which accomplished three functions: 

• Translate the actual text from one language to another
• Generate the audio of me speaking to that text, matching my tone of voice
• Change my lip movements to match the new words

Although I speak Portuguese, this saved me several days’ worth of filming and gave me a chance to verify the quality of the service in a language I spoke.

Here’s an example of the results:

Although the HeyGen team was highly responsive and did an excellent job supporting our needs, this endeavor ended up being a lot more complex than we expected. The initial translation was impressive but contained some errors and inconsistencies that we had to correct through several iterations. Here are some challenges we faced:

• HeyGen’s AI-generated translation usually sounded too formal
• The tone of the AI-generated audio was hard to adjust
• Questions were a challenge and the emphasis wasn’t always accentuated in longer sentences
• Very long sentences were difficult for the AI to translate while preserving the meaning
• Transitions between sentences weren’t always fluid and often felt weird
• The speed of the spoken words had to vary in order to match the lengths of sentences between languages, sometimes resulting in abrupt speeding up or slowing down

We also realized that launching a course in another language requires a lot more than translating videos. There is an entire infrastructure that needs to be built: from a landing page to onboarding emails to marketing to customer support. 

Assuming your goal is to make it possible for someone who doesn’t speak English at all to access the training, you have to translate 100% of the infrastructure around the course and make sure it works in their country, which is hard to test when you’re not there.

That said, using Hotmart as our course platform (the most popular one in Brazil) made it much more feasible. They provided a variety of tools and features we needed to make the launch possible, all easy to use and designed for the Brazilian market. Their team helped us at several crucial points, and I recommend them for anyone making a foray into Brazil.

The initial launch of the Foundation course in Portuguese was unfortunately quite disappointing, with only 13 sales totaling a few thousand dollars. I’m not sure why even our existing audience wasn’t receptive to it, but I suspect it’s because the $250 price point is still quite high for the Brazilian market, and there is a lot of free content on this topic (both in Portuguese and English) being published continuously that largely satisfies the demand.

For a full recap of how we localized our BASB Foundation course for the Brazilian market, read the recap written by our Director of Marketing here.

Was it worth it?

We sold about 6,000 copies of my book in Brazil in the first 3 months, and 9,500 in the first 6 months. That’s quite a phenomenal outcome! I believe we’ve set the stage for the book to be a perennial bestseller there for years to come.

Looking at the financial picture, we made about $10,000 USD between the book advance and course sales, and have spent $16,000 USD between contractors, SaaS services, and travel costs. I hope over time these two new income sources will match and eventually exceed what we invested to create a presence in Brazil.

Speaking of the less tangible, subjective rewards, it was without a doubt one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. At the book signing in São Paulo, my entire extended family came out to see me, including people who hadn’t seen each other in years. It was like a family reunion!

Seeing the incredible enthusiasm of the many people who came out to support me, and hearing story after story of how my ideas changed their lives, is something I will never forget. Not to mention the feeling that I gave back to my homeland and provided a reason for hope and progress in a country that is so in need of it.

Launching in Mexico and coming full circle

About 7 months later, in March 2024, I had the chance to do it all again – this time for the Spanish release of my book under the title Crea Tu Segundo Cerebro.

Although the book was being released in Spain and throughout Latin America, I decided to do the press tour in Mexico because of my special connection to that country. I had written most of the book proposal while living in Mexico City with my wife Lauren in 2019. It felt like the whole project was coming full circle to where it began.

Here’s a short video with some highlights from this amazing experience:

One major difference this time around was that my Spanish publisher, Reverte, had generously hired a local PR firm to handle all the interviews, media appearances, and events in Mexico City, where I spent a few days dedicated to promotion. I still had to pay for my own travel, but in Brazil, the cost of local staff had been the single biggest expense, and it was helpful to have them cover that cost.

This also meant that almost all the press this time would be from traditional media, via the PR firm’s network. I was fine with this because I had learned from my time in Brazil that I could access digital media outlets easily on my own. What I can’t do is gain the credibility that mainstream media provides, which is more essential in Latin America than in the U.S.

We followed up with much the same playbook as before:

• Segmenting our existing email subscribers (we found there were about 5,498 subscribers located in 20 Spanish-speaking countries, or 4.7% of my audience)
• Inviting them to a Spanish-language WhatsApp Community (a similar number, about a couple hundred, decided to join, and they became an essential sounding board and chorus of supporters for everything we did)
• Creating a new Instagram account to centralize and promote all our Spanish language content and media mentions (this account has less than 100 followers so far, a testament to our focus on traditional media versus digital-native media)
• Participating in as many events as possible to generate interest and create media mentions which could be further shared to boost the book’s credibility

With the PR firm’s help, I took part in 12 interviews, including several newspapers and magazines, digital publications, a popular podcast, and two TV interviews (including the one below live on air in Spanish!).

Another big difference from the Brazil launch was that I kicked off this press tour with a paid speaking gig at a major conference, at La Festival de Las Ideas in Puebla. This not only started things off with a bang but essentially paid for the entire trip so we broke even from day one. 

Overall, we’ve sold 2,675 copies of my book in Spanish for the initial launch. We’ve made $16,000 USD from Spanish-speaking markets and spent about $7,000, for a profit of $9,000. Taking that into account, our holistic efforts across Latin America have already reached breakeven.

We are planning on translating our course into Spanish (and other languages) as well, using all the best practices we discovered the first time, which hopefully will grow the return on our efforts as well as make these ideas more accessible throughout Latin America.

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