Genesis: Verge Publishing

Good morning from Silverado, California…

Spending the day here with a good friend Erin Alejandrino, who’s actually my first publishing client.

Publishing is an interesting business, I guess I can break it down for you real quick…

I don’t really talk all that much about business on here, so why not?

In this whole attention and information economy, you have a lot of different roles…

For the most part, there are influencers/personalities and then the marketers who help them sell their stuff.

Since about 2017, I’ve been working as a copywriter which in my extremely biased opinion is the greatest superpower anyone can have as a marketer.

Copy is salesmanship in the written form, and if you can get good at it, well you’re good at selling shit online…

Which to a degree means infinite scalability.

Publishing is taking someone who doesn’t really have any assets put together to market their stuff, and handling all of that for them.

This is different from normal freelance marketing for a few reasons (there’s more but here are a few)…

1. It’s more involved
2. You’re usually taking equity or a percentage
3. You have more control or say in strategy and vision
4. You’re starting from scratch from them

So, Erin coaches guys on becoming high-value men…

Fitness, relationships, spirituality, mindset, all the good stuff.

So I helped take all the shit going on in Erin’s brain and we turned it into an offer he can sell and then went ahead and got an asset up…

(Check It Out Here)

Every word you see written on that page is stuff I wrote for him.

And I’m really excited to help him keep growing that offer and being his right-hand man in the whole process.

In the past, I’ve pretty much just done contracting freelance jobs.

Meaning I’m paid once, I do the work, and that’s it.

Don’t get me wrong, those are fantastic…

But it’s honestly better to be more involved in the long-term picture if you actually give a shit about the business because…

1. There’s more upside for you in terms of $$$
2. It’s fun and you can put your soul into it

So Erin is the first one who I’ve helped on a percentage basis and plan to be involved with in the long term.

Well, technically he’s the second…

The last one I worked with was a dating company and I grew the living FUCK out of their business with a partner.

We took them from $110k a month to $260k a month in about 3 months’ time.

So we pretty much tripled their run rate for the year which is awesome.

I was making fantastic money from it, but I really did not feel good about the guru, so I left and that’s why I don’t count it.

There’s a lot that went on there, and maybe I’ll dive into it more in the future, but to make a long story short…

I don’t like working with people who I don’t like.

And honestly, that whole journey was the origin of this substack and the whole Man Of Meaning brand.

Again, we’ll discuss that in more depth another day.

Getting out was difficult because I had poured so much work into that business but hey…

It’s better to make a decision for the soul than for your wallet.

So rather than continue to only take on these freelancing projects where I get paid really well, but only get paid once…

I’d like to help publish more people who are in line with the shit I care about so I can help them grow and be involved in things that I know are helping people.

And to me, that’s the best type of business to have.