2024 is the Year to Productize Yourself

You have probably read Naval Ravikant’s famous tweet storm: How to Get Rich, without getting lucky.

If you have not read it – I suggest you stop reading this, and read that first. It’s a powerful, succinct, and profound guide to wealth-building that Naval himself was able to summarize in two words – productize yourself.

If you look at successful entrepreneurs and content creators you’ll notice that they’re typically productizing themselves.

They figure out something that they do or understand very well and then they build a business around it.

That’s right – you can make a lot of money online by packaging and productizing what you already know and love.

You can make money from sharing your story.

And there has never been a better time to do it.

Below, I will share the macro strategy for turning yourself into a business.

I will then share my plan moving into 2024.

My hope is that you’ll join me on this journey if you haven’t started already, because if you’re reading this – without a doubt your body of work and experiences can be turned into a lucrative and profitable personal brand.

And before we start, remember that you can always directly reply to these emails. I love hearing from you.

How to Turn Yourself into a Business

At a very macro level, to turn yourself into a business, you need to:

• Build a product that solves a problem and serves a purpose

• Tell stories about that purpose

• Build a brand that drives credibility and affinity to your stories

Let’s go in a little deeper, and add some color.

Step 1: Define Your Unique Value Proposition and Niche

WHO you are.

The first step is to define just who you are. Whether you know it or not, you already have a brand.

Jeff Bezos said it best: your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

Who are you? What set of personality traits, skills or life experiences makes you unique? If you had to give a presentation on a subject with no time to prepare, what are you doing it on?

What are your accomplishments? What are you curious about?

Deeply reflect on what story you have to tell, and who that story could benefit.

For some guidance, I wrote an article on how to figure out what kind of content to make.

Step 2: Build a Strong Brand and Content Strategy

WHAT you do and WHY you do it.

Building a brand is as simple as telling your story, educating people on what you do, how you do it, and most importantly – why you do it.

And of course, the best way to do this today is through content. By developing a content strategy that helps to tell your story in an impactful way to the people who need to hear it.

By educating, inspiring or entertaining a growing audience.

In Unsigned, we teach how to create retentive and effective content. You can purchase the entire course for only $150 today as we build it out for completion next month.

Step 3: Develop Your Product or Service

HOW you do it.

Your product or service should be an amalgamation of your why and your how.

It should leverage your unique skills, knowledge, or expertise to address a specific problem or need within your chosen niche or target audience.

We have a video dedicated to this on Unsigned, but Instead of writing about it - let me give you some real-world examples of products and services that I have created in the last few years.

Tone Studio - this is an app that I co-founded with two of Instagram’s biggest creators, Jack Morris and Lauren Bullen.

The app now has tens of thousands of paying monthly subscribers – and it is growing fast.

Their stories revolve around the beauty of self-expression and exploration of one’s identity through travel. They present this message through beautiful and aesthetic visuals.

The product is one that helps you easily achieve a similar aesthetic - in just one tap. No photo editing knowledge required. They are selling the how to create beautiful visuals, and their story revolves around the why it is so important to do so.

DesignLab - this is an app I created back in 2015 and was sold in 2020. It was pulling in over $30,000 per month.

The story I was telling through content on Instagram and elsewhere was why strong visuals are so important to a business or brand. DesignLab was the solution on how to create these visuals.

Eluna - Eluna is one of my more recent ventures. By the way, big update coming soon!

One of my central themes this year through my content has been on what the opportunity is around AI, and why AI has been so instrumental in optimizing the creator workflow. Eluna is being built as a solution on how to harness that opportunity.

You get the idea.

Go out there and build a product or service that provides a solution to a problem.

My Strategy in 2024

For me, 2023 has been an experimental year.

I wanted to develop the skills that I thought would be most important to begin to generate significant wealth as a creator in 2024 – ideating, video editing, storytelling, and personal branding.

This has led to me growing my Instagram, TikTok, and X by over 500,000 cumulative followers since January.

But my content strategy going into 2024 will be quite different. Here’s the plan.

My main content focus will shift from short-form to long-form. Meaning, my priority will be this newsletter and my currently dormant YouTube channel.

I will still continue to create short-form content, but it will be bite-sized versions of that long-form message or idea. My short-form content will serve primarily as a vehicle to funnel attention to the long-form. This is where the relationship with the audience is really cultivated. This is where you can really tell your story in a meaningful way. And this is where the money is made.