How I Landed My First Five Thousand Dollar Client

$5,000 hit my bank account. And my brain broke. ## I thought to myself: “This has to be a typo...” So I messaged him. “Hey, did you mean to send $5,000?” His response: > “Yeah, is that enough?” And just like that, ghostwriting completely changed my life trajectory. ## Here's how I landed my first $5,000 client as a ghostwriter: It was October, 13th, 2020. At the time, I was working a full-time job on Wall Street as a hedge fund trader. But deep in my heart, I knew this wasn't the career path I wanted to take forever. • The commuting • The bureaucracy • The 14-hour days • The New York City corporate rat race I struggled to wake up with any sort of excitement. # Hungry for a change, I decided 9 months earlier to start writing on the internet. I didn't have any real goal or any clue what I was getting myself into, but I figured putting ideas out there would lead to new potential opportunities outside of Wall Street. Spoiler alert: I was right. 9 months in, after 30+ blog posts and hundreds of hours slaving over a hot keyboard, I finally started to see a little bit of traction. I had just finished writing 30 Twitter threads in 30 days—mostly curating the insights I was listening to from podcast episodes. ## Looking back, this was sort of like "free Ghostwriting." I would inhale the rough, spoken ideas people would talk about on podcasts. Then, I would still my takeaways into actionable Twitter threads. And the additional time it took me to write these had massive upside and very little downside. • Worst case, I better understood the concepts (because I wrote them down and put them into my own words). • Best case (which is exactly what happened), the creator whose insights I curated would share the thread & reach out to thank me for putting it together. Truly a win-win. After my 30th thread, I got a private message from someone asking if I would be willing to do a curation thread based on their insights. I was floored. And clearly, I was onto something. It just so happened I was listening to a podcast with them as a guest that morning. And that podcast sent me down the rabbit hole of all of their work: • Videos • Interviews • Dozens of articles • Keynote speeches Were all spread across the internet, each of them filled with golden nuggets but without any one place to find all of them. And that's exactly what this person wanted help with. My job was to scour the internet to find all of that content, closely study it, and organize it in a way that could serve as a rough outline for a book. So when they asked if I was interested, of course I said yes! I was planning on doing this work anyway, and now I could get paid for it? Count me in. Now, when I agreed, they asked me how much I would charge them. Uh-oh. # At the time, I had never made a single dollar on the internet. I had no clue what to say, but my gut said something like $250. This amount would have been an absolute home run for me. If I could get 4 clients per month at $250, I would have a $1,000/month side hustle income stream to supplement what I was making at my full-time job. But unlike my W2, this gig was something under my full control: • My time • My skills • My effort • My intensity Its success depended purely on me (a feeling of ownership I desperately craved). ## The lure of those first sweet digital dollars was stronger than the scent of burning incense. But luckily, I did not ask for $250. In fact, I didn't ask for any money. Why? Because I was terrified that if I asked for it, they might say no. So instead, I said: "To be honest, I have no clue what to charge. This would be my first time charging for something like this. So how about I do the project and then at the end, you can pay me however much value it provided to you." They agreed and I immediately got to work. # For the next 7 days, I immersed myself in their worldview. Barely a second went why when I wasn't consuming every article, interview, and keynote I could find, easily 50+ hours of it. And slowly but surely, stories, patterns, and frameworks started to emerge. I bounced back and forth between long walks listening and focused hours at my computer distilling. "Am I really getting paid to do this?" I thought to myself. Yes indeed—and I was hooked on the idea of doing it forever. 7 days later, the project was finished—and it was a masterpiece. • I organized all of their content into a database with distilled insights from each of them • I created a rough outline for a book that would be the perfect mix of storytelling, practical life advice, and actionable career advice • I created a list of 50+ potential pieces of social content they could create with outlines for each (since they were looking to start sharing more on Twitter) • And I shared a personal story about which frameworks were most impactful to me, since I was quite literally the ideal reader for the book they wanted to write I zipped it up into a polished Google Doc and sent it over. Their immediate response: "This is sooooooo good! Super helpful. I've had a bunch of book ideas in the past but this one is really on point. Thanks for doing this. It's going to take me a while to process it all (which is a good thing). Glad we did this! Where can I send the payment?" Success! ## "Does Venmo work? It's the only way I know how to accept money." I replied, again with no mention of how much to send. Since I only expected a few hundred dollars of payment, I figured it could just sit in my Venmo account balance and pay for future beers on the weekend or something like that. But the next morning, I got an email from their assistant saying: "They are unable to send a Venmo with the amount requested—would you accept PayPal or a check?" Woah... I knew my Venmo limit was $1,000. They were going to send me more than that? Wild. I snapped over to my computer, quickly set up a Paypal account, and sent over the info. # A few moments later, there it was: $5,000. Five thousand dollars for work I was going to do for free anyway. And just like that, my brain was completely broken—and my life trajectory forever changed. Since I did a good job on this project, they started to refer me to their friends for similar work. I spent early morning and late evenings writing and (begrudgingly) stared at charts and numbers for my Wall Street job during the day. ## Here I was, a 24-year-old working on Wall Street without any real writing or business experience getting paid $5,000 to write for clients. And this led to a few realizations about the world of Ghostwriting: - Ghostwriting was basically me getting paid to write & learn, something I would have done for free anyway - Ghostwriting allowed me to charge far more than my time was worth because I was providing value to people whose time was worth much more than mine - Ghostwriting was a potential bridge from corporate prison into a fully entrepreneurial life, providing me with the income & time freedom to eventually spin something up on my own These realizations were worth millions to me on their own—without the added kicker of getting paid. But even better? # Ghostwriting unlocked a completely new (and lucrative) network for me. Before I knew it, I was meeting and talking to people I had looked up to for years. I was exposed to new business opportunities, communities, and mentorship. And most importantly, my Ghostwriting led to a connection with Nicolas Cole, which led to Ship 30, which led to me escaping the Wall Street rat race I sought to escape when this whole writing thing started. Today, I'm working on multiple businesses that pull me out of bed with excitement each morning. And I get to do all of this on my own time, with no commute, with a team I love working with, and without ever setting an alarm clock. # I can confidently say I live a life today I dreamed about living 5 years ago. And none of it would have been possible had I not (accidentally) ventured into the world of Ghostwriting. Which is why I firmly believe becoming a Premium Ghostwriter is the best career decision anyone interested in writing or entrepreneurship can possibly make. • If you're looking to get paid to learn • If you're looking for a career with time & location freedom • If you're looking for the most "plug and play" solopreneurship opportunity on the internet Then I highly recommend checking out this free Premium Ghostwriting Blueprint. Inside you'll find a 5-day crash course to help you break into the world of high-ticket Ghostwriting—a guide I would have done anything to have had 3 years ago before I had to figure out this world on my own. Highly recommend giving it a try ✊