Why I Give
So Much Away
Yes, there is a business behind this. No, the free stuff isn't a trick.
Yes, there is a business
behind this.
If you've spent much time around my work, you may have noticed that I give a lot of it away.
Articles. Assessments. Ideas. Frameworks. Tools. Videos. Conversations. Resources that took considerable time, money, experience, and thought to create.
There isn't a hidden funnel where I'm waiting to spring the real pitch on you.
There is a business here. I make my living doing this work. I have a family, bills, technology costs, and all the ordinary expenses involved in creating and maintaining what you find here.
I just don't think that requires me to turn every interaction between us into a sales tactic.
What about the funnel?
I understand the modern marketing playbook — capture emails, manufacture urgency, find the pain point, agitate it, overcome objections, get the conversion. I'm not suggesting everyone who uses those tools is dishonest.
I just don't particularly enjoy the person I become when I start relating to human beings primarily as prospects moving through a funnel.
It would be strange to encourage honesty, generosity, and personal agency in my work while building the business around it on fear, pressure, and psychological tricks.
If you want to understand why I run things this way — the integrity argument, the deeper principle, what I think it means to earn trust rather than manufacture it — that's here.
The economics are
actually pretty simple.
One idea I've appreciated from Daniel Priestley is the observation that, for many businesses built around expertise, a relatively small portion of the larger audience will account for most of the economic opportunity.
I think about that roughly as 10% and 90%.
There will be some percentage of the people who encounter my work who want more than an article, assessment, book, video, or occasional conversation.
They want to participate.
They may want to join a community, take a course, work with me directly, or otherwise invest more substantially in their own development.
Those people make it possible for me to make a living doing this.
But here's the important part:
I don't need everybody else to become one of them.
If roughly 10% of the people my work reaches eventually create most of the economic opportunity, I don't have to spend my life trying to squeeze money out of the other 90%.
I can simply serve them.
That's a much more enjoyable way for me to live.
The 90% aren't
failed customers.
This distinction matters to me.
Someone can read something I've written, use an assessment, encounter an idea that changes something important for them, and never pay me a dollar.
I don't consider that a failed conversion.
Something useful happened.
That's the point.
I would rather create things that are genuinely useful and let them travel than deliberately make them less useful because I'm afraid someone might get value without paying me.
Scarcity says, Don't give them too much.
I'd rather ask, Why not?
The people who want to go further still can.
There's another
practical reason this works.
I don't actually know who the 10% are.
Neither do you.
I could spend enormous amounts of energy trying to identify them, qualify them, track them, persuade them, retarget them, and push them toward a decision.
Or I can keep doing the work.
I can write. Teach. Build useful things. Share what I've learned. Help people get oriented.
And over time, you get to know me.
Not the carefully optimized version of me from a sales page. You get to encounter enough of my thinking to decide whether it resonates with you, challenges you in useful ways, and seems trustworthy.
I get to trust that process too.
Eventually, some people think:
I'd like to do this work with Sven.
Then we talk.
That seems considerably more human to me.
And if you need convincing,
I may not be the right
person yet.
I don't believe people who are genuinely ready for this kind of work need to be cornered into it.
They may have questions. They should.
They may need to think about the money, talk with their spouse, understand what they're getting into, or determine whether I'm actually the right person for them.
All of that is reasonable.
But if someone needs countdown timers, relentless follow-up emails, manufactured scarcity, escalating bonuses, or a carefully engineered sequence of psychological pressure before they'll work with me, I'm probably not the right coach or mentor for where they are in their journey right now.
That's okay.
I'm not trying to persuade everyone.
I'd rather leave you with your agency intact.
The invitation can remain an invitation.
What that looks like
in practice.
This isn't a philosophy I'm describing from a safe distance.
Not group calls. Not Q&A slots. One-on-one, sitting with someone, working through what's actually happening in their life. Some of those men eventually became clients. Many did not. Both outcomes were fine.
That's what the 90% looks like when you stop treating it like a problem to solve.
Free doesn't mean
free to produce.
There is one other side to this worth saying plainly.
This work costs money to create.
Websites cost money. Software costs money. Data infrastructure costs money. Producing books, assessments, courses, videos, tools, and other resources costs money. And the time I spend creating something freely available is time I could have spent doing something that generates income directly.
I'm okay with that.
It's a choice I've made.
Occasionally, though, someone gets value from something I've created and asks:
"Is there some way I can say thanks?"
Yes.
If you'd simply like to help support the continued creation of freely available work, you can support the work directly.
It is never expected.
It is always appreciated.
And whether you contribute $5, work with me for years, or never spend a penny here, I'm glad something I made was useful to you.
Maybe you're one
of the 10%.
There's no quiz for that.
You don't need a coupon code.
And I'm not going to start a countdown clock.
You may simply have reached the point where reading, thinking, and working on this by yourself isn't what you want anymore.
You want participation.
Conversation.
Practice.
Community.
Or direct support from someone who has spent a long time doing this work.
If that's you, we should probably meet.
Work With Me
Tell me a little about where you are and what you're looking for. There's no obligation to work together. We'll find out whether what I offer and what you need belong in the same conversation.
Start a ConversationFor my skeptical fellow entrepreneurs.
Some of you have told me, kindly and not so kindly, that I "have to" do this differently. Manufacture urgency. Tighten the funnel. Make the free stuff worse so the paid stuff looks better by comparison.
I understand where that comes from. It's the water most of us have been swimming in. Helping people question "you have to" thinking wherever it shows up — including in their own business decisions — happens to be part of what my coaching actually addresses.
I don't know exactly what the numbers below say as I write this sentence. They update live, and I haven't checked before publishing this. But whatever they are, I feel good about them — not because a percentage proves anything on its own, but because of who tends to be on the other side of it.
People who found their own way here, decided for themselves, and showed up without being pushed. In my experience, that tends to make for a far better working relationship than someone talked into a decision through pressure and scarcity.
Getting up each day, serving people in a mission I deeply enjoy, and living with alignment is the reward, not the paycheck. The fact that enough people choose to pay for more is what makes it sustainable — but it was never the point.
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