Happy Sunday! I can't tell you how happy I am that it's football season. Despite being both an Ohio State Buckeyes and Green Bay Packers fan... oof, what a rough weekend.
Our team is ON FIRE this week. I'm proud of everything we're publishing, and people are noticing! This week's podcast (below) is already one of our most popular of the year. We've been getting incredible feedback from readers on our recent essays, and exciting inbound from potential partners. Thank you!
And what personally excites me is the way members are showing up and sharing in The Lab lately. We reopened the community in September for the first time since June, and the enhancements we've added are paying off.
In October, we'll be hosting a sprint to help members plan for Black Friday/Cyber Monday. We do this every year to help members run more successful campaigns. If you've been on the fence, this is a great month to join the waitlist.
Invites go out to the Waitlist on October 1, and we'll only accept 10 newbies.
On to this week's issue!
Inside this edition:
Free Workshop: Discover your Signature Product
New Essay: The Trust Loop
From The Podcast: The $9/month membership earning more than $500,000/year
FREE WORKSHOP
Discover Your Signature Product: Turn Your Expertise Into a Product People Will Pay For
You know you have something valuable to teach.
The harder question to answer is: What should you actually build and sell?
Creating a successful product isn’t just about packaging up everything you know—there are important choices to be made. The strongest offers sit at the intersection of your expertise, what your audience actually wants, and the transformation you’re uniquely positioned to help them achieve.
I’ve built multiple successful products around my expertise, including my membership, The Lab. The Lab is my signature product, generating nearly $500,000 per year. Beyond that, I’ve sold self-paced courses and cohort-based courses, with our recent live course launch earning $101,666.
On September 29, I’m partnering with Circle to teach a live masterclass breaking down how I think about turning YOUR expertise into signature products people are willing to pay for. That includes how to decide what to build, how to package the transformation, and how to choose the right delivery model.
You’ll explore the different ways your signature product could come to life, from memberships and communities to cohorts, coaching programs, live courses, and hybrid experiences.
Then we’ll move from strategy into execution.
I’ll be joined by Alexis Teichmiller, and we’ll use Circle AI to take a signature product idea and begin building the actual customer experience, showing you how quickly you can move from:
“I think I want to create this” → “I’m actually building it.”
You’ll leave with greater clarity around what to sell, how to deliver it, and how to start turning your expertise into a real product people will pay for.
Best of all, the workshop is totally free (we’re even providing some bonuses).
A couple of years ago, I spoke with a member of The Lab who was struggling to convert viewers into customers. On the surface, our businesses looked similar: We were publishing on the same platforms to similar audience sizes, and we both had a membership. But my membership was thriving while his struggled to gain traction.
He asked me, “What are you doing that I’m not?”
I thought the answer was obvious.
“My audience just really trusts me,” I answered (with a bit of a shrug).
But he pressed on, asking, “Well, how do you do that? How do you earn trust?”
I paused. Blinked. Reached into the deepest halls of my mind…and came up empty.
It’s rare that I can't explain an aspect of my business—but here I was, at a complete loss. I realized I was standing atop what Tim Urban calls "Child's Hill."
The Lab isn't inexpensive, and hundreds of creators pay to be part of it each year. But when asked exactly how I had earned the trust necessary to attract them, I actually couldn’t explain it.
Just throwing the word “trust” around was easy. I learned from a previous mentor that people buy from the businesses and individuals they know, like, and trust—a “fact” I’d repeated many, many times! And while I knew trust was the goal, I never truly considered how to actually earn it. Through trial and error, I’d learned what seemed to “work” to reach more people and turn them into customers…but what was actually happening that earned their trust?
This moment really shook me. It was that uncomfortable feeling of seeing a blind spot for the first time—I was embarrassed and wanted to cover it up as soon as possible! If I couldn’t explain how trust worked, how could I teach it? As an educator, it’s perfectly acceptable to admit you don’t know an answer. But once you do, I believe it’s your responsibility to find it.
So for the past two years, I've become obsessed with understanding who we trust and why. I was surprised to find how little has been written about trust in practical, ethical, and actionable terms. Trust runs deeper than I realized, too. It’s not just some nice-to-have “soft” skill—trust is the foundation of every relationship. It’s the master key in every interaction, in person and online, whether consciously or subconsciously.
What I’d figured out naturally—and what my business had been built upon—was something everyone desperately needed.
The Trust Loop
Trust is tricky to talk about because it’s used as both a noun and a verb. When you earn trust (the noun), it’s like adding to a bank account balance (in fact, you’ll see me using the term trust account). When you trust someone (the verb), you’re making yourself vulnerable to their actions.
A common misconception is that transparency builds trust. But actually, the purpose of transparency is to eliminate the need for trust. Trust only exists when you can’t fully see, verify, or control a situation. Trust is how humans (I’m talking about even the earliest humans) have learned to collaborate without transparency.
So trust only exists when someone is taking a risk. When I hire you, I’m trusting you to do your job. When you take my job, you’re trusting that I’ll compensate you on time. Both parties take risks, which requires trust. Don’t fully trust one another? We can reduce that risk by signing a legal protection like a contract.
But purchases don’t usually come with contracts. When you sell someone a product, they pay and take on all the risk up front—before their life changes in any way.
Risk is…risky. Risk-taking is rare. You will only take a risk if someone has earned enough trust that you feel like the outcome is more likely to be positive than negative. And if I take a risk in trusting you only to be burned as a result, of course I’m going to be more hesitant to take that risk in the future!
We hired a nanny this year to watch our daughter. When she started, we had some trust because she came with positive references and presented herself well. But we didn’t have enough trust to let her take our daughter out of the house without us yet. That had to be earned through small deposits in our “trust account”—spending several weeks with her without incident, taking her outside to play in the yard, etc. After several months, she had earned enough trust (noun) for us to trust her (verb) to take our daughter to a playground.
That’s how I define trust: The expectation that someone else will choose to act in your interests. If you expect someone to choose to act in your interests—even when it may come at some level of conflict or cost to their own—that’s trust.
If that seems like a high bar, it is! Of course, it’s context-dependent; some risks are higher stakes than others. But you can earn trust little by little through a process I call TheTrust Loop:
The Trust Loop has four stages:
Perception — How someone currently sees you
Promise — The promise you make (and the risk they take)
Practice — Your actions and follow-through on your promise
Proof — The results of the risk taken
Notice that two of these belong to them (Perception, Proof) and two belong to you (Promise, Practice).
If people aren't buying (conversion) → that's a Promise failure. Either your promise isn't clear (people don't understand what you're promising), your promise isn't compelling (people don't want what you're promising), or people don't trust you'll deliver (which is actually a Perception problem).
If people purchased once but don't renew or purchase again → that's a Practice failure. Either you failed to meet the customer's expectations, or you failed to show you delivered.
Someone’s perception of your trustworthiness will determine whether they take a risk in trusting you. If they do, you’re making a promise to them. How you show up in practice after making that promise determines the results of that risk. The results of those risks are proof of your trustworthiness (or untrustworthiness), and shape their perception of you.
The balance in your trust account changes with every cycle around the loop—for better or worse. If you’re earning trust, the next decision to trust you gets a little easier.
Easy, right?
The natural next question is, “How do you build a strong enough perception of your trustworthiness to get someone to take a risk on you in the first place?”
To dig into that, read the rest of my email series, How Trust Happens.
#318: The $9/month membership earning more than $500k/year AND buying Smart Passive Income — Pt. 2 featuring Liz Wilcox
My guest this week is Liz Wilcox, the creator behind Email Marketing Membership—a $9/month newsletter template subscription she’s kept at the same price for six years, which now generates close to half a million dollars a year.
Liz built the whole thing as a single parent with no support system and no reliable internet, working from library parking lots and Lowe’s lots during nap times. She launched in February 2021, kept the price at $9, maintained a 5% churn rate, and grew to over 4,400 paying members. She and her sister run the operation—no upsells, no masterminds, no group coaching. Just the membership. Then in April 2026, she quietly closed a deal to buy Smart Passive Income—the 18-year-old creator education brand Pat Flynn built from scratch. She spent five months operating as SPI’s director of community before anyone outside the deal knew it had happened.
Why the $9 price point has worked for six years—and why she’ll never raise it
How she grew a half-million-dollar membership without social media, using podcasts and a 50% affiliate program
What had to be true before she’d pull the trigger on buying SPI
How she’s thinking about merging EMM with the SPI community — and why she doesn’t have the answer yet
By the end of this episode, you will understand how a $9 offer can compound into a half-million-dollar business—and what it actually looks like when someone buys a legacy brand and tries to honor it.
We honor your time and take your trust seriously. This email reflects our current beliefs, but you should do your own research. Read our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Affiliate Disclosure before you make any financial or investment decisions.
Apple pushed him out. His partners left. His investors lost faith. Then everything changed. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ FS | BRAIN FOOD Sept 6th, 2026 - #697 - read online - Free Version Welcome to Brain Food, your weekly signal in a world full of noise. Tiny Thoughts * Whatever pattern is repeating in your life has one common variable: you. ** One of the worst qualities a person can have is the need to show how smart they are by catching others' mistakes. In some areas, this may be useful, but in general life, it's a disaster. *** We tend to think the people who get ahead have more talent, better connections, greater opportunities, or better ...
