PEOPLE KEEP TELLING ME TO CHARGE FOR THIS LETTER. HERE IS WHY I NEVER WILL.

THE ASSET YOU ARE CHARGING FOR BY MISTAKE

People keep telling me to charge for this letter, and I am never going to. Let me show you the math on why, because the same math is sitting somewhere in your business.

The most valuable asset I own is the one I refuse to sell.

The advice is always some version of the same thing. Paywall it. Turn it into a course. Build a mastermind around it. And the pitch is not crazy. It is arithmetic. Take a list of a couple thousand readers, convert three percent at two hundred dollars a year, and that is twelve thousand dollars. Real money for something I am already writing.

Here is what that twelve thousand dollars would cost.

It changes who reads it. A paywall filters for people who already know they want what you have. Free filters for something far more valuable: the operator who has never heard of me and is three weeks away from needing exactly what I know. That person does not pay two hundred dollars to find out whether I am worth listening to. That person reads one issue, forwards it to a partner, and calls me eight months later with a deal. Every paywall I could build would be a wall between me and the readers I most want.

It changes what I write. The moment someone pays, they are owed output. You publish on a schedule instead of publishing on conviction. You start reaching for something to say on the weeks you have nothing to say, and you start holding back your best thinking so it can go in the paid tier. I have watched people I respect get quietly worse at the thing they were great at, one paywall at a time.

It changes what the asset is. This is the part most people miss. A paid newsletter is a product. A free one is a moat.

The Three Moats That Last

I talk a lot about the three moats I think last forever. Autonomy, which is capital, the ability to say no. Local expertise, which is information, knowing my market better than someone flying in. And brand, which is demand, people coming to me instead of me chasing them.

Most operators build the first two by accident and never build the third on purpose at all. This letter is the third one. It is not marketing for the business. It is a business asset that happens to look like writing.

The people I have learned the most from figured this out a long time ago. Buffett has written the shareholder letter for free for decades. Howard Marks has published his memos free since the nineties. Neither of them is in the newsletter business. Both of them understood that giving away your thinking is how the right people find you, and that the right people finding you is worth more than any subscription list you could build.

The Limit of This, Because I Am Not Anti-Charging

I charge for my books. Those are products, finished things with covers on them, edited, packaged, sold. That is a fair trade and I would do it again. This is different. This is not a product. This is how I think, published, and the second I price it I have converted a moat into a modest line item.

That is the version of "all money is not good money" that almost nobody applies. Everyone understands it about bad partners and bad capital. Almost nobody applies it to revenue that looks clean. Twelve thousand dollars is good money in isolation and terrible money in context, because of what you have to give up to collect it.

Go Find Yours

Every business has an asset it is charging a small fee for that would be worth ten times more given away. The market report you sell for forty dollars. The walkthrough you bill an hour for. The analysis, the template, the introduction, the thing your clients quietly value most. You priced it because pricing things is what businesses do. But some assets earn more as demand than they ever will as revenue.

Look at your business and ask: what am I monetizing that I should be weaponizing?

What is the one thing in your business you charge for that you should probably be giving away? Reply with it in a sentence. I read every response.

P.S. I charge for the books because a book is a product. This is not a product and it is not going to become one. If you want the thinking, it is right here, and it always will be.

Newsletter Edition #209