Should you pay to go faster?

I’m taking 30x500 by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman & here’s why.

Coaching, Courses, and Content.

I've taken quite a few courses covering topics like tech stuff, content creation, and growing a Twitter audience.

I paid the University of Nebraska thousands of dollars to learn the fundamentals of computer science.

But I haven't taken a single course focused on the topic of creating a profitable business. I can't really put my finger on why.

Maybe it's because I'm generally skeptical of the "Learn how to make $5000 a month in passive income" type courses?

Anyway, 30x500 is the exact opposite of those.

Here's why:

• Amy and Alex have a ton of trust in the bootstrapper community
• You can "try before you buy" (Amy & Alex have tons of smaller courses, free content, emails, etc.)
• The skills you learn are valuable even if you don't make a dime of revenue

I'm loving the course so far and I've already had some valuable insights.

So is coaching worth it?

I'm realizing it is, especially higher quality coaching that allows you to get feedback from experts.

The few insights I've had so far have saved me from building two or three products (three months of dev time, one month marketing) built with my spare time. Billed at $100 per hour, 10 hours per week, we're looking at $16,000 per project. If I skipped building two projects, that's around 32k saved.

This is only looking at it from the billable hours perspective. It's harder to calculate opportunity cost, the value of the knowledge gained, and the value of connections made with like-minded people, but these are at least half of the value.

The IndieHackers podcast I listened to last week seems to agree:

Listen to the whole episode here.

So why pay for coaching? Because you're buying back time, more specifically, free time.

Sahil Lavingia @shl Buy what you’d never sell. April 26th 2021 434 Retweets 3,916 Likes

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As usual, there’s a Sahil tweet for that. I’m going to try to buy back more free time over the next year. Paid coaching sounds like a good step in the right direction.

What's next?

This week I'm going to try to integrate this site (newsletter.drew.tech) into my main personal site. Revue is great (the tool that powers this), but it's blocking me in a few separate areas.

I'll also be continuing the 30x500 course, writing, and deciding what I'll be doing with FitVitals.dev this week — especially since Google's Core Web Vitals are finally here.

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See you on the other side,

Drew

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