“Stop swapping your time for money.”
This is what we are told when we run a digital business.

Going from charging clients $45 per hour to selling online courses and access to your genius* feels empowering.

*disclaimer: I am not a genius.

Over the course of just a few years (2020-2024), my “English Writing Coach” business scaled in quantity of clients, quality of offering, and profit. Though I wasn’t getting paid to write, my work intersected with books, languages, and writing plenty of content.

I moved from 1:1 sessions to groups, then ran a paid community with 100+ members.
I was ‘vertically scaling’ my digital business. Sounds wonderful, right?

At times, it was. Helping clients achieve clear-cut wins (and charging handsomely) gives you higher highs than you can ever experience working for a company. Every like, download, purchase, and booking goes directly to YOU, not your dickhead boss. Every morning, I jumped out of bed ready to get to work.

As a business owner, you learn a bunch of skills — marketing, automations, video production, websites, copywriting, course design, digital publishing, community management, podcasting, and more. I still use those skills today.

But scaling is not all emails informing you of money in your Stripe account. There are dangerous consequences that, without careful management and a very particular personality profile, will bring the whole thing crashing down.

• You need to constantly fail and adapt — products, courses, outreach strategy.
• The learning curve is relentless. Halfway through my coaching career, AI reared its head (and I refused to robotize my business).
• Not every client wins — their failures are your failures.
• More overheads (like digital tools or hiring staff) means more risk. You constantly worry about going fast enough vs going broke.
• You get no vacations because your whole business is YOU.
• Your public and private life blends into one, and you become a wanker who turns the small niceties of life into LinkedIn content.

I know hundreds of coaches, and very few of them run sustainable businesses.
They either quit, pivot, or burn out. I did the latter.

For me, burnout took the form of self-sabotage.

• My marketing posts went from comical to furiously sarcastic.
• I tried to sell asynchronous courses and guides I didn’t believe in
• The effort I put into live sessions waned.
• I could not physically bring myself to complete the outreach tasks that would bring in clients and money.

The lows became crushing.
The highs more fleeting.

This kind of business just clicks for some people. They love building automation sequences, and systems with big promises (i.e. dollar signs) and lots of bells and whistles. But I became a marketing machine who taught others to market themselves. It all began to feel less like a writing program and more like a gigantic pyramid scheme.

Ultimately, I wasn’t honest with myself and kept going when something felt very wrong.

When I started writing content and copy for Konsensus, the words burst onto the page. Everything felt simple again.

I’m OK with swapping time for money, even if it means giving up the dream of waking up to all of those digital purchase notifications, then logging into social media to read all the wonderful praise.

Thanks for sharing this journey with me.
Next time, I become a ghost.

Catch up with previous issues of the story of my writing life by visiting my profile or via Substack