What's up everybody? This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com and you're listening to the

EndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.

And on this show, I sit down with these endy hackers to discuss the ideas, the, and the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.

So it's funny, I've been thinking about books a lot recently.

Stripe has like a publishing arm called Stripe Press. And they've been hounding me to write a book for like two years. And every single time they approach me, I'm like, ah, you know, like, it would be cool to like have written a book in the past. Like, that's the thing that I would like to have done, but like I don't want to write a book, you know, and part of it's like, I've got other things to do. I've never been fully convinced that like it's worthwhile to do, at least for me. You know, like, well, how much money can you really make by writing a book? You know, is a reward worth the effort invested? You know, is a really good way to reach people? Like millions of people have been to Andy hackers, tens of thousands of people listen to the podcast, like if write a book, you know, is it going to get anywhere near that amount of sales or will touch people deeply? There's a lot questions, you know, and yeah, around, I see all these people like yourself who are happily writing books all the time. You seem to know something I don't. So what's the reason why you write books? Why write a book? Well, I enjoy the activity itself is a big part of it. A book is too big of a project to go into cynically. If you're doing it as a pure money game or a numbers game

even if you look at it as a reputation enabler if you don't actually like the writing and the

beta reading and the refining and figuring out how to explain something abstract in a way that works for

people for me that's fun it's the same fun that i get from programming or any other product design

and i asked myself

years ago, I was like, what would I do if I was retired? And I was like, well, I'd wake up.

I'd write something I'm interested in. And then I'd learn and then I'd play video games and hang

out for the afternoon. And I was like, okay, there's no reason I can't just start living that

life now. Yeah, just do it now. But it is good. It's better than people think. And it's passive revenue that truly is passive. If you design it right, it grows rather than

fades. It allows you to think deeply about something. He's talking to an entrepreneurship teacher

from Georgetown the other day. And instead of having his students write business models,

business plans, anything like that, he's having them write a book about the topic

of their future business. So kind of spending the year, the school year, basically deeply

diving and thinking about the problem that their business hopes to solve. And at the end of it,

they have this book. He helps them launch it, get it published. And then their startups are also more

successful because they haven't

skipped the deep thinking part. And they're also experts who have a published book under their name.

Exactly. That's cool. It's pretty rare to hear about a course that actually gives you something so

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