I make $7.2M/year in just 4 years at 28yo writing on x.com

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Today, we'll break down:

• How he started

• Motivation & Discipline

• Growth Strategy in detail

• Revenues

• Books and resources

• Lessons learned

Who is Dickie Bush?

Dickie Bush is a 28yo who built a portfolio of four online businesses that generates nearly $8 million a year.

He went from having no followers in January 2020 to over 390k followers in June 2024.

Left his corporate job in 2022 at BlackRock, a global investment management firm to focus entirely on his online businesses.

Now is well known for "Ship 30 for 30," an online writing challenge that encourages participants to write and publish content daily for 30 days.

How he started

Dickie started writing online in January 2020 with a newsletter called "Dickie’s Digest," where he shared insights from his readings and podcasts.

By September 2020, after nine months, he had only about 300 subscribers and half of them signed by himself.

Feeling frustrated and thinking of giving up, he decided to change his approach.

Instead of waiting for readers to find him, he chose to go where the audience was—on Twitter. He committed to writing 30 threads in 30 days.

The tweet which marked the turning point for Dickie, was retweeted by Naval Ravikant, a thread where he summarized the insights he had gathered from listening to 20 hours of Balaji Srinivasan podcasts.

This thread gained a lot of traction and helped him grow overnight​.

From that moment, the rest is history.

Motivation & Discipline

He discovered that writing on Twitter, it never knows on whose feed your thread ends up.

That person can be Elon Musk, Jeff Besos, Paul Gram, or thousands of other legends like them, who can hear about you by simply writing on X.

He thinks of these tweets like free lottery tickets. As many you ship, as greater the luck to passively unlock new opportunities.

Also, there are 0 downsides and just exponential upsides like always improving yourself, working remotely, and making huge sums of money with few or no employees and overwhelming responsibilities.

This excites him enough to not see the efforts as work but as joy and improvement.

1. Micro-Failures Strategy

Dickie Bush doesn't just create content without a plan. He uses a smart strategy to make sure his threads will be successful before he invests time in writing them.

How does he do this? By validating his ideas first.

Instead of diving straight into a full thread, he tests each idea with a single tweet. Each week, he posts about 8-10 single tweets.

Then, he observes which ones get the most engagement. Based on this feedback, he picks the top 2 tweets and expands them into full threads.

This way, he focuses on topics that already resonate with his audience, increasing the chances of his threads being well-received.

Here are some examples of how this approach works.

2. Mastering Threads

Dickie Bush has transformed from a novice to an expert in crafting engaging Twitter threads in a remarkably short time.

He even creates meta-threads—threads about the art of writing threads—that consistently receive high levels of engagement.

Twitter threads have become a powerful tool for growth, especially for his newsletters and communities like Ship 30 For 30. Here's why:

Drive Growth: Threads, alongside referrals, are a primary growth engine. They help expand reach and attract new followers more effectively than single tweets.

Gain Followers: Single tweets often don’t lead to significant follower growth. Threads, however, are known to be one of the best ways to gain followers on Twitter.

Connect with Your Audience: Threads allow for more in-depth communication. They give you the space to showcase your personality and provide valuable content, making it easier to resonate with your audience.

Write Strong Hooks

The hook of a tweet is essential—it’s like a YouTube thumbnail. If it’s not engaging, people won’t continue reading.

To make people stop scrolling and start reading, here are some tactics used by Dickie that you can apply:

Using Big Numbers: Big numbers naturally draw attention and add intrigue.

Example: One of Dickie's most popular threads utilized big numbers effectively. He even recorded the writing process, offering insight into his approach.

By using big numbers and other engaging elements in your hooks, you can capture your audience’s interest and encourage them to read further.

Using Thread Templates

Many top Twitter creators use templates to quickly generate ideas and content. Here are some templates that Dickie uses:

Lessons as a 101: This popular template presents information as a beginner's guide or "101." Creators like Sahil Bloom and Justin Welsh have successfully used this format because it’s effective.

However, it appears that the audience is becoming fatigued with some of these overused templates.

Clarity Over Cleverness

When writing online, it's best to avoid fancy titles or clever phrasing. Focus on being clear to ensure your message is easily understood.

 Finding 1,000 Ways to Ship the Same Message

The most prolific creators aren’t constantly coming up with new ideas. Instead, they find core topics that resonate with their audience and explore those topics deeply, offering fresh perspectives and insights each time.

3. Acting Irrationally

He understands that by consistently producing a high volume of content, he can outpace those who are doing just the bare minimum.

In the beginning, he was putting out five tweets per day, each one serving as a data point to see what resonated with his audience.

Dickie produces content at an impressive rate, rarely spending more than an hour on a piece unless he knows it will work.

He says that every time he publishes content or completes a monotonous but important task, he imagines surpassing someone who quit at that exact moment.

This approach turns business into a game, making it more engaging and motivating.

Dickie knows he’s not the best writer on the planet, but he combines volume, speed, and data analysis to grow faster than those who might be more talented.

4. Generate conversion, not attention

There are creators with hundreds of thousands of followers making just $50k a year because of bad conversion rates. If you have lots of eyeballs but unmonetized you simply leave money on the table.

Dickie came up with an idea to monetize as many visitors as possible after they walk through his X profile.

He makes you visit the websites, and a pop-up window will face you with a FREE 5-day course meant to win your trust that goes up quickly after you check the mini-course, which is really high quality.

Secondly, it will help deliverability because if a mailbox receives a few emails and the person doesn’t open them, the probability of the next ones ending up in spam is very high due to email providers’ policies.

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