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Today, the personal finance content niche is absolutely ginormous. You can’t open up YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram without encountering an influencer who gives advice on how to make and save money.

Today’s guest Philip Taylor anticipated this content explosion all the way back in 2011. That’s when he launched FinCon, a conference specifically designed for personal finance content creators. That first year he attracted around 250 attendees, but over the next decade it grew into the largest conference in this niche, attracting over 3,000 attendees a year.

In our interview, Philip walked us through how he got into the personal finance space, his strategy for growing the conference, and his ambitions for launching similar conferences in other niche categories.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

I’m sure just about everybody has had the experience of looking at a celebrity memoir and wondering: did they actually write that? In many cases, they didn’t, at least not by themselves. There’s actually an entire shadow economy of ghost writers who do the bulk of the work on these books – not just for celebrities, but all kinds of public figures ranging from big-name CEOs to politicians.

But how does one go about hiring a ghost writer? And what’s it like to work with one? To answer these questions, I turned to Dan Gerstein, the founder of Gotham Ghostwriters, an agency that specializes in connecting clients to professional ghostwriters.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

Ben McCarthy didn’t set out to create a media company focused on Salesforce, he just began blogging about his use of the product as a way to document the various use cases he encountered. As it turned out, there were thousands of other people who were encountering those same use cases, and via Google searches they began landing on Ben’s blog posts.

Fast forward 10 years, and he now runs a 20-person media company that generates over 1 million pageviews per month and is the most authoritative resource for Salesforce customers.

In our interview, we discussed why there’s such a huge audience for Salesforce content, how he monetizes with webinars and white papers, and whether he wants to launch more media outlets centered around other cloud technologies.