Seven hours, eleven touchpoints, four places
The publishing arithmetic I took from Daniel Priestley, and the part nobody quotes: what running it costs.
The claim is that someone needs roughly seven hours with you, across about eleven touchpoints, in four different places, before they will buy anything that matters. I did not invent it — Daniel Priestley did — and I ignored it for two years because it sounded like a slogan somebody sells a course about.
Then I counted. Every person who has ever paid me for anything had watched a long video, read at least one essay, and hit some short in a feed first. Not one arrived cold and bought. And the number that carries the weight is not seven, it is four: a hundred touches in one feed is still one place, and one place is a platform risk wearing a relationship's clothes.
Which is why this site publishes in three formats and mails a fourth. A short earns thirty seconds. A long video does most of the seven hours by itself. An essay is the thing that gets forwarded with a sentence attached. The list is the only one of the four I own, and that asymmetry is the entire reason it exists. The cost, which nobody quotes: one recording session, one edit pass I no longer do by hand, and about ninety minutes of writing a week. If you are not willing to pay that for a year, do not start — eleven touchpoints that stop at three only teach people that you quit.