I wanted to share a lesson I learned the hard way over the last few months:

At first, I thought the lesson was that not every “business” wants to make money.

And the reason why I thought this was because I’ve been lining up some JVs to sell my book, Entrepreneurship Ruined My Life. And the terms I’m offering are quite generous.

But no matter how good the terms are and how good the audience-to-product alignment is, some entrepreneurs are hesitant.

This happens most with creator-focused newsletters and social media accounts.

They are very timid about sales. They don’t like to make offers to their audience—even good offers that can help them. And they feel obligated to provide “max value” in every piece of content they publish.

These concerns have been magnified out of proportion to the point of crippling the creator’s success.

One creator I know downgraded his weekly newsletter to a monthly newsletter because he didn’t have enough "value" to show up weekly.

Which is completely untrue if you ask me. And I told him as much.

But its a bummer because I quite enjoyed his content. And now he is punishing his readers by not sending as much content. All because of a flawed mindset...

Another creator downgraded his daily newsletter to weekly because he didn’t know the purpose of mailing daily. The purpose, of course, is to build a relationship with your audience so they will trust you when you offer to help them.

But what I’ve realized is that this has nothing to do with these creators not wanting to make money.

Rather, they don’t want to make money by selling things to their audience.

They would rather sell their audience to other people.

Said another way: Instead of selling products to their audience, they want to sell advertising spots in their content to other companies.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

But these are two completely different ways of thinking about business.

In my experience, most creators don’t understand the value of selling quality products to their audience. Or they are afraid of backlash from “selling out.”

So it doesn’t make sense for me to try to JV with them.

This goes back to something that I once heard Josh Spector say: It's not the creators or the entrepreneurs who will win. It's the creative entrepreneurs who will.

These are the people who can create interesting and thought-provoking content inside of a business model that is profitable.

And these are the skills that I teach inside my book, Entrepreneurship Ruined My Life.

If you haven’t read the book, you can check it out at the link below.

aryder.me/erml

Enjoy your weekend.

Check,

Andrew Ryder