The most lucrative skill has always been capturing attention.
It’s obvious why.
If your goal is making more money, it doesn’t matter how good a software you build. It doesn’t matter if it took you 3 years and endless scrapped drafts to write a book. It doesn’t matter if you work hard and improve yourself to increase your career opportunities.
If nobody knows who you are or what you offer, how in the world are they going to pay you?
Meaning, whatever your work is or whatever business you build, capturing attention and acquiring customers will be the primary thing that determines your success.
This applies to both your own business and others’ businesses.
And other people will pay top dollar for you to do it for them.
As job security goes down, people are met with 3 options:
Complain about how life is unfair and do nothing
Upskill and reeducate to find a better job opportunity
Start building the business you’ve always wanted to build
An absurd amount of people will choose option 3.
As you could guess, and as everyone is screaming about on social media, the way they will build that business is by starting a personal brand.
Why?
Because attention is a finite resource, and it’s only becoming more scarce. People can make more money, but they will never get back the attention they spent.
In this letter, I will show you how to master attention capture on social media. That way, at least for the next few years, you won’t have an issue making money.
With what you learn, you can start your own business using social media to fuel it, or become a “one person creative team” for other companies that will pay top dollar for your skill set.
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I – You will either become a creator, pay a creator, or get paid to work for a creator.
The data is almost too hard to ignore.
Goldman Sachs predicts the creator economy will nearly double, from $250 billion in 2023 to $480 billion by 2027.
In 2025, creators earned about $185 billion in ad revenue, which is the first year they passed traditional media.
US brands spent $13.9 billion on creators in 2021, and the IAB expects that to reach $43.9 billion in 2026, which is about 3x in 5 years.
Absurd.
And as someone who both is a creator, has worked for creators, and pays creators, the prices people charge are crazy. There is an absurd amount of VC money being thrown around, paying thousands of dollars for a single reel or 60-second YouTube time slot (that don’t even bring results 90% of the time).
The point is that social media is where the attention is. Not the radio, TV, or news anymore. When you want to start any kind of business - from lifestyle business talking about your interests to the next unicorn startup, posting content is almost a given at this point for how you attract an audience that pays you.
When companies want to expand, they put millions of dollars into affiliate and partnership campaigns. I keep getting ads from Hormozi saying they pay over a million a month to creators to promote Skool. And that’s aside the fact the Hormozi is a creator, which massively helps grow Skool.
“Founder-led marketing” is now a buzzword in the startup space, which essentially means that the latest and greatest way to grow your startup is... you guessed it, starting a personal brand and posting content (and most of them are horrible at it by the way, and you should probably start using Eden to research, differentiate yourself, and post).
What does this mean for you?
It doesn’t matter if you plan to work for yourself, have a business already, or want to work for another business - the most lucrative skill to learn is capturing attention. When you translate that to the digital landscape, the most lucrative skill is creating content - good content, not infinite slop.
Unfortunately, you can master capturing attention, but that doesn’t mean you’ve actually captured it.
Getting a million views on one tweet or reel is useless if the rest of your posts get a thousand views a pop. That signals that your content is decent, but your brand is non-existent. We need both.
You can try to go viral all the time, which is what most people do (and why most people fail abysmally), or you can build a world of content that people can’t help but explore.
I’ll teach you how to do that.
II – The One-Person Creative Team
There is a massive shift happening in the content space right now.
I’m the founder of Eden, a tool where creators and digital businesses research viral ideas, plan and schedule their content, sell digital products, and run their email list.
That’s not meant to be a pitch. It’s to point out that we have data about this that almost nobody else has. We know what topics, hooks, and content styles work across billions of posts.
Aside that, freelancers and agencies use it to run their clients’ personal brand, from content to email marketing to digital product launches and building funnels.
We talk with these content agencies and media teams, and they are all saying the same things (paraphrasing):
“We’re not firing people yet, but we can take on so much more work without expanding the team because everyone’s output has gone up.”
“The reason creators and founders hire us is because they don’t even have time to think about content. They have a team to manage and a business to run, which requires focus. AI can write content for them, but they still know they need a strategist or creative director who leverages AI better than they would. It still requires creativity and thought.”
“AI still can’t write the best posts, and I don’t think it ever will, but it can research what’s performing, understand the strategy, and draft posts that are almost there. My entire job nowadays is reviewing and rewriting drafts. It takes me 4 hours a day instead of 12 now.”
The most lucrative AI business to start (as one person), in my eyes, is two-fold.
One - you can become your own creative team. Start a personal brand. Build an audience. Create digital products. Build an email list. All that stuff. And that is your sole focus. Trust me when I say it is a full-time job, even with AI. If you are a creator, you probably aren’t going to build software without a team.
Two - you can become someone else’s creative team. Help companies, founders, and even creators who don’t have the creative bandwidth to put out irreplaceable content. Most founders still create “announcement” style content and have no idea what it takes to build influence online.
In other words, you become the creative director of your own brand or someone else’s.
If you can pull this off, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to demand a price that is a fraction of what a full team costs. $10-$75k a month for 1-3 clients isn’t that far out of reach (if you’re good at this and practice - don’t let your mind convince you this is your next opportunity to get rich quick). And business owners who pour millions into marketing won’t bat an eye at that price.
What does this one person creative team look like?
What skills do you need to learn?
Job 1) Brand Strategist
A brand strategist is in charge of positioning and perception.
They are going to be the first to say that you shouldn’t just follow trends and try to go viral with every post. Growth and engagement are important, but not at the expense of trust and authority.
I’m going to show you how to do all of this below, by the way.
2) Content Strategist
Not the same as a brand strategist.
The content strategist is someone who scouts what content is performing in various topics and niches and proposes what the creator’s next posts should be. They deeply study post formats, YouTube thumbnail and title structures, retention, and virality.
They are good at growing accounts, but without accounting for brand strategy, if the creator were to stop posting, nobody would ask where they went.
3) Content Writer / Social Media Manager
The person who drafts the tweets, YouTube or Reels scripts, X articles, and Substack newsletters, plans them, and posts them.
They take the content strategists ideas and brand strategists direction and make sure the content aligns with that.
You can probably tell why most people are failing to build anything lasting with AI. They still treat it as a get rich quick scheme. They think that if they just have Claude pump out scripts without direction or data they’re going to magically build a connection with their audience.
Almost nobody accounts for brand strategy.
Some people account for content strategy.
Most people just turn random ideas into posts and pray that they’ll do well.
This is your competition, and it’s not hard to stand out.
III – If You Were My Client, Here’s Exactly How I’d Build an Irreplaceable Personal Brand
Let’s have some fun with this.
I’m going to act like I’m onboarding you as a client.
That way, if you want to become a creator, you can implement the process yourself. And if you want to start a content business for others (ghostwriting tweets, writing Substack articles for brands, etc), this is how you would bring them on as a client (I’ll give you one of the best strategies for landing your first client later).
Step 1) Onboarding Call To Create Their Intellectual Signature
To make their brand and content unique, you need quite a bit of context from them.
After you land them as a client, schedule a call with them so you can interview them for everything you need. Record the call so you’re able to store the transcript somewhere and reference it with AI.
If you’re doing this for your own brand, I already have a quiz / prompt you can use. It also comes with a 30 day creator sprint course. It builds your strategy for you based off of what’s going viral right now mixed with what makes you unique. Try it here.
This is what you would ask your client, or you can ask yourself. You could also paste this into Claude and have it pull the info out of you and save it as a brand document you can reference with AI at any point.
All of these questions shape your brand.
They can spin off into content topics, and are something you post about over 6-12 months. People see this and ask “How do I get this all across in one post?”
You don’t. This is a long term game, and is why most people fail miserably. Because they want quick attention and authority. Good luck with that.
Since this is long, I put all of this and more into a comprehensive prompt for you, save it or duplicate it to your workspace.
Who you help
Who do you most want to help? Describe one real person.
What does a bad day look like for them right now?
What do they say when they complain to a friend? Use their exact words.
What have they already tried that didn’t work?
Your story
What have you lived through that your audience is living through now?
What was the moment things changed for you (no matter how small)?
What have you built, tried, failed at, or figured out? List them from biggest to smallest, they are all worthy.
What results can you point to, for you or for people you’ve helped?
Who shaped your mind
Whose books, posts, or videos do you never skip? Name real people and titles.
Which idea from them do you keep coming back to, and why?
Who changed how you think, even if you disagree with them now?
Content pillars and unique perspective
What could you talk about for hours? List everything, even things that seem unrelated.
Of those, which 2 or 3 matter most to you?
How do you come at each one differently from others? (For example “through psychology” or “as a former nurse”)
What do people ask you for advice on most?
What do you keep explaining to people over and over?
Mission and beliefs
In one sentence, what do you want to help people do?
What do you believe that most people in your space don’t?
What common advice in your field do you think is wrong?
What you’re against
What way of living is hurting the people you want to help?
What life do you want to help them escape? Answer in your own words.
What myth or habit would you get rid of if you could? (A habit or idea, not a person or company.)
Why it matters right now
What just changed in the world that most people haven’t noticed yet?
Where you’re taking them
What does their day-to-day life look like five years after following you?
What would they proudly call themselves in their own bio?
Who are you in their story? (Their guide, someone documenting the journey, or someone who got out and came back with a map.)
Rules and words
What does your ideal reader believe and do every day? List 5 to 12 rules.
Do you have names for your own ideas, methods, or problems? Write each name with what it means.
Keep all of this information somewhere safe, like a brand board in Eden so you can reference it whenever you are ideating post ideas.
Step 2) Scrape Their Best Content If They Are Posting
I think we can all agree AI can’t replicate someone’s voice.
Even if it gets close, there’s always going to be one little thing that feels off about it.
That’s not our goal with this. AI can handle company voices just fine, but a personal brand is personal for a reason. It needs that hit of uniqueness.
The reason we interview them and pull in their best content isn’t to automate the entire process. Instead, you’re building a knowledge base of everything that is unique or noteworthy about that person. When you use AI to brainstorm, draft, or ideate, it becomes so much easier than starting from scratch.
To pull in their best content on all platforms, connect Eden to Claude or ChatGPT with the MCP so it can pull in their posts or others posts that are going viral, give it their social handles, and use a prompt like this:
Pull the best content from [@handles]. 10-20 posts from each platform they are on. Then, I want you to note down the core ideas that make them unique, the aspects of their voice that have personality, and a guess at what their worldview or philosophy is that could rally other people behind it. In essence, note down everything that led to their growth, and compile it into a document.
It’s also worth just looking at their top posts on all platforms so you can spot patterns that are replicable.
Step 2.5) If You Haven’t Started Posting Content Yet
As a beginner, this is arguably the best thing you can do.
You must understand that your mind has been shaped by those who have impacted you the most. Your best ideas - the ones that will lead to your growth - are how you interpret the ideas you’ve adopted from others.
Similar to “steal like an artist,” except it’s just how the mind works.
It’s a core sign of intelligence to swap the beliefs and ideas running your mind when you are exposed to a new one. It is a sign of stupidity to never let go of beliefs or ideas that do not lead to advantageous outcomes.
My mind is largely composed of ideas that have been mashed together from Naval, Leo Gura, Mihaly C, Steven Kotler, Ken Wilber, and more. The interaction of those ideas in my head, plus my own life experience, is what makes my ideas mine.
So, if you aren’t posting content, create a list of 5-10 people who have impacted you the most.
If they are creators, even better. Put them in a list so you can see all of their content or chat with it.
Then use the same prompt mentioned above, but for their social handles. If they don’t have social media, ask AI to pull their best ideas from across the web and their books. Save it as a document somewhere safe.
Step 3) Create A Research-Backed Content Map
So far we have:
Gotten enough brand context to create something unique
Documented the best ideas that we can reuse, reposition, and replicate
Now, we need to put on our marketing hat.
And it’s not even a marketing hat. It’s an artists hat.
Most “creatives” hate the thought of researching viral posts, or top performing YouTube titles, or basing your content off of what is more likely to perform... but you’re just looking at it from an angle that hides what you’re actually doing.
You’re collecting references.
That’s what artists do. They have inspiration boards and references that help shape their work. They don’t copy it 1-1, but they pull patterns and principles so that their own work is likely to perform better.
Because let’s face it, you want your work to be a success. You just think looking at data feels icky and somehow isn’t a part of the creative process. Snap out of it.
Here’s what you do.
(Disclaimer: I’m mentioning Eden a lot in this letter, because frankly there isn’t anything else that can do the job. Social scrapers can’t see what’s performing across more than one account, and apps like GrokBot are incredible, but only work on X, and you’re better off researching platforms that you’re not posting on to get unique ideas).
It’s as simple as using this prompt, and plugging the 2 documents you’ve made so far into it:
I want you to create a research backed content map: 3-4 unique and broad content pillars that branch into 5-7 topics that are both based on ideas that are working, through my own unique lens based on [@brand document] and [@content document]. Branching off each topic should be 5-10 ideas that are likely to perform well, with 4-5 angles branching off of each of those ideas.
Look over my brand and content docs, pull potential pillars and my lens out of it, then use Eden to research what’s performing across platforms in those topics. We want a unique content map, but we want to merge it with patterns that have been proven to perform over the past 6-12 months.
Put the output in an easy to read document.
Now you have about 6 months of content ideas that you can work with. You can ask Eve or AI to draft them using the previous context we made, and validate the structure of the post based on what’s performing as well.
I think it’s hard to deny that you wouldn’t see results with this process, and that it puts you miles upon miles ahead of those who are not doing this.
As mentioned, here’s a doc/prompt you can duplicate with the entire process in it. It may take a bit to get through, but it is comprehensive.
IV – How to land your first client
A few years ago, my friend JK Molina (the guy who essentially started the trend of becoming a twitter ghostwriter), send me a DM.
It went something like this:
“Dan, I know you don’t want anyone to write for you, but I wrote 10 posts for you anyway. Try posting them, if you like them, then let me write more, or just give me a testimonial.”
Before I was doing social media stuff, I was a freelancer, and cold outreach was pure hell. I hated it.
But when I got this DM, I realized this has to be one of the best strategies anyone could use to land a content client for $2500 to $5000 a month. You could target current busy creators, founders, or people just struggling to grow.
You could do everything we mentioned above in one prompt for them, have it draft 10 posts, polish them up, and send 10 DMs a day.
If you actually did that, I’d find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t land atleast one client in a month.
This is the “Permissionless Apprentice” approach.
You do free work for a dream client, then get it in front of them however you can.
If DMs don’t work, do it in public like this:
In that reel, he hooked them in with “Grant Cardone needs a new creative director and this is my application. It seems like his content is stuck in 2016.”
I think Grant Cardone responding saying “Hit me I’m stuck” and the engagement on this post prove most of what I’ve said in this letter. It is a massive opportunity right now. And you have all the tools to land these clients, onboard them, and create incredible content for them.
Hope this was helpful.
– Dan
Again, workshop on how to write newsletters / articles people can’t help but read happens on November 10. Join here if you want to learn to create long-form content as a skill.
You are always ahead of the curve. It was your human 3.0 article that encouraged me to join Substack. I made my first post this morning. Thanks Dan
Honestly I became so overwhelmed while reading this. Maybe it was the feeling that I'm behind