Last week it came out that a tech founder, who wishes to remain anonymous, makes about $200K a year ghost writing tweets for VCs… the creator economy at its best!
Ghostwriting tweets for venture capitalists is my side hustle. Last year I made about $200,000. Some VCs will pay you per tweet. I’ve done $100,000 threads to announce a big funding round, and I’ve also done $100 tweets. Other VCs pay you per month. For $5,000 to $10,000, I’ll write 10 original tweets a month. And the rate goes up quickly from there.
A single tweet I write can generate as many as 4 million impressions for my clients. They have accounts that range in size from 2,000 followers to 200,000. Oddly, the smaller the number, the more they’re often willing to pay. Those are the clients who need the distribution more.
Business Insider
While I create a lot of content, I’ve never used a ghostwriter. Whether it’s VC Cafe (where I nerd out on the topics I invest in), my weekly #Firgun newsletter (where I give props to the founders and VCs who made an impact in Israel every Friday) the Remagine Ventures newsletter (where I share portfolio updates and thoughts on the sectors we cover), and of course my twitter feed (where I sometime just joke around), I take pride in writing everything myself and eating my own dog food. ?
It doesn’t mean that I don’t use technology (like Dalle-2 or Stable Diffusion) to make a nice image or visualise content, but I believe that authenticity is super important. I also played with GPT-3 to test if it can help me to publish quicker, but I ended up changing almost every word to sound more like me (maybe a problem they will solve with enough training down the line). I collect the data myself and do it the old fashioned way, staring at the flashing cursor on a blank page.
My tweets may not get 4 million impressions, my blog doesn’t organise fancy conferences and my #Firgun newsletter is a labor of love, but I still get so much out of it. In the Maslow pyramid of needs self-actualisation is the highest step, and find that writing/ publishing/ creating does it for me!
Here are my tips for content creators who want to get started:
- Just start
- Write about stuff you’re passionate about
- Keep doing it
The hardest part is getting started, and the second hard part is to ignore the self-critic within (just look at my posts in draft mode that will probably never see the light of day). But overall, it was never an easier or better time to be a creator and as content becomes more and more synthetic/robotic, we could all use a bit of authenticity.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
