Hey Stranger!

I’m back.

Did you miss me?

I missed you.

Life Recently

As you might’ve read in some of my latest thread posts, life has been hectic over the past two months.

To summarise:

1. I was feeling a lot of resistance towards my business, Saints Coaching (SC).

2. I realised my part-time job couldn’t offer consistent ongoing work, which meant it couldn’t offer consistent income (which my business hasn’t been generating…)

3. The owner of the rental I was living in decided to sell the house. I’d been there for five years and absolutely loved it. Great price. Great location. Home gym. Home office. It was very comfortable.

The news about the house was the cherry on top. The housing marketing in Western Australia is a mess atm. I couldn’t find another decent rental without paying at least an extra $100/week.

(They say things come in 3s??)

I was pretty miserable when I was told.

I felt directionless, hopeless, lost… All the good stuff.

But then something cool happened.

The day after I was told I had to move out of the house, I had an epiphany.

One idea that could solve all three problems.

The rationale for the idea is reflected in this quote:

I wasn’t happy with my results. So I figured I needed to start doing different things.

Those different things include:

• Selling most of my belongings and moving into my partner’s family home.

  • Doing this means the cost of rent and bills is essentially halved. I have one year to enjoy the reduced cost of living, actually start making some money, save up and (hopefully) move into my own place with Han — my partner.

• Completely restructuring my business. At least, that’s what I planned to do initially.

  • And I spent much of February implementing that restructure. In 2023, SC offered an online course for a one-time payment of $1,495.

  • Last year I tried to host the course on my own custom-built platform on WordPress. It was a mess.

  • So I decided to move the course contents to skool.com and offer the product as a course + community monthly subscription.

Lessons Learned

But then I realised that restructuring was delaying the inevitable.

The inevitable is: transitioning away from my business and towards the creator economy.

Real talk:

• I spent 3,000 hours creating the course. I’ve done a lot of online courses and I can confidently say I’m yet to see one that matches the quality of mine. It’s fucking good.

  • I’ll be uploading the entire thing to my YouTube channel soon. This way, students can still benefit from all the course materials and I can focus on creating content that helps more people. Win-win!

• But the painful lesson I’ve learned over the past year since I finished the course is this: business is fundamentally two things — product and people.

• I nailed the product and completely neglected the people.

  • Meaning I’ve had a hard time communicating with prospects in my business.

  • I’m 26 years old. The course is designed for 17-18-year-olds. They hate the subject I teach but the Western Australian curriculum requires them to pass it. Moreover, they don’t have buying power.

  • This means I also need to convince parents my course is valuable and better than the traditional model of 1-to-1 face-to-face tutoring. Students love the video format, but parents have a hard time wrapping their heads around it and how it’s superior to the traditional model.

  • Then there are the teachers. I’ve tried ‘working my way in’ (per Russel Brunson’s book, Traffic Secrets) — albeit unsuccessfully.

• Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of resistance and the course does not have a product-market fit.

  • I could continue working my ass off trying to fit a square peg (my course) into the round hole (the target market), but by that point, the curriculum for the subject of the course could change, and then I’d have to recreate a significant portion of the course materials.

• Moreover, the business model of SC is fundamentally flawed.

  • The product is designed specifically for students in their final year of high school in Western Australia.

  • They number approximately 10,000 each year.

    • I.e. the total addressable market (TAM) = 10,000.

  • This means customers can only do business with me for a maximum of 12 months. And that means a low lifetime value (LTV) and high churn.

• That is not a profitable business.

Lennox, why are you telling me all of this?

You — yes, you — and all my thriends helped me learn everything above.

My time on Threads opened my mind to the creator economy. It’s helped me realise:

• I love connecting with and helping creators! People like me who just want to make a living online doing what they love.

  • I suspect these people number in the millions.

    • I.e. the TAM = (at least) 1,000,000

  • From this perspective, the potential profit is much greater than that of my business’.

• I don’t need to fight an uphill battle (persist with my business) when there’s a downhill battle on the other side (pivot into the creator economy).

• The only reason why I’d persist with my business is to maintain the outward appearance that I ‘have my shit together’ as a business owner.

  • i.e. Pivoting into the creator economy is a no-brainer for me. The only reason why I wouldn’t is the fear of what others would think of me. As soon as I gained clarity on that point, the path was obvious.

  • Not taking action to pursue your dreams purely because of the fear of judgement is unacceptable. I refuse to live that way. Life is too short.

Change Is Coming

No, seriously, Lennox, why should I care and what does this have to do with How To Win Thriends?

In addition to all of the changes mentioned above, I’m rebranding How To Win Thriends.

(I’ve been called Lennox All-Or-Nothing Saint more than once…)

Why the rebrand?

I fucking love Threads. I love my thriends. As I said above, I could not have realised all this had it not been for you and my time on Threads so far.

But, I’ve realised there is SO much more I want to talk about than Threads alone.

We are not narrow, singular beings; we are multifaceted. We each have a collection of interests that make us unique.

I don’t want to neglect all of my interests just because I’ve done so in the past by only talking about Threads in this newsletter.

So what will this newsletter look like moving forward?

How To Win Thriends → Lessons | from Lennox Saint

Well, that’s not what I signed up for…

You’re right. And, believe me, I’ve thought about this a lot.

‘Do I start a completely new newsletter with 0 subscribers or rebrand HTWT with the ~170 subs it currently has?’

After 7 weeks of thinking about that question every. single. day…

Here’s my answer:

Please unsubscribe from this newsletter if you only subscribed for How To Win Thriends and have no interest in Lessons.

• I can assure you I had no intention of rebranding this newsletter when you subscribed to it.

  • I understand how valuable an email address is these days, and I understand even more how valuable a decluttered inbox is.

• I completely respect your decision to unsubscribe and there are no hard feelings at all❣️

• My answer is to rebrand HTWT with the ~170 subs it currently has because:

  • I hope at least half of you would still like to get an email from me every now and then.

  • If a majority are interested in Lessons, the path of least resistance (the utilitarian approach) is to rebrand HTWT.

WTF is Lessons?

It represents my life’s work.

And here’s what you’ll get:

21st-century lessons on health, wealth and wisdom you should’ve been taught at school — but weren’t.

The Lessons Story

My mum, Requel, passed away in 2009. She was 36.

Requel believed in the importance of quality education.

I was fortunate enough to get that.

But we’re in the third millennia and it only taught me 20th-century skills.

The times have changed.

They will continue changing.

QUICKLY.

And the traditional education system isn’t catching up.

Over the past few years, I’ve been self-educating, experimenting, testing, failing, breaking shit and — most importantly — learning.

I believe these lessons are valuable, and to honour my mum’s emphasis on quality education, I’ve decided to share them all with you.

To Requel:

The Lessons Philosophy

Health, wealth and wisdom are the 3 keys to a meaningful life. Each one complements the other two. Think of each topic as a level of a tower.

Level 1

Physical health. Mental health. Emotional health. Spiritual health. Each one is a pillar. Resting atop those pillars is the foundation of self-improvement.

In other words, true self-improvement requires a commitment to bettering the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual pillars of health.

You cannot perform at your best if you neglect any of these pillars. And the foundation of self-improvement informs everything else you do in life.

Level 2

Once you’ve built a foundation of self-improvement, you’re primed to add another level atop your Topic Tower (TT) by accumulating wealth.

Not just monetary wealth, but wealth in terms of time, skills, and relationships.

Online business is the best vehicle to attain all of these.

Level 3

On top of the level of wealth, we build the level of wisdom.

Four main categories of study lead to a well-rounded understanding of the world: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and STEM. Each discipline is a pillar supporting this level of your TT.

Mental models are the best way to understand the main concepts of each discipline. With such an understanding, you can make more informed decisions in every aspect of life. You eliminate your blind spots.

Roof

What’s the point of health, wealth and wisdom? One word: happiness. Ultimately, that’s all that matters.

We strive to become healthier, wealthier and wiser humans to become happier.

That’s why happiness represents the roof of your TT. It’s the final level in this game of life. And Lessons will help you reach it.

The Lessons Manifesto

The Lessons Schedule

As I said, Lessons represents my life’s work.

I’ve lived for 26 years and hope to live for another 77.

I’ve got a quarter-century of my lessons to catch you up on.

Each month will follow the same sequence:

• 1st Friday of the month: a lesson about health (self-improvement)

• 2nd Friday of the month: a lesson about wealth (online business)

• 3rd Friday of the month: a lesson about a wisdom (mental models)

Then you’ll get a break from me until the first Friday of the following month, where we’ll restart the cycle with self-improvement.

The cyclical, tri-weekly nature of Lessons reflects the complementarity of health → wealth → wisdom → and ultimately, happiness. As does the Lessons logo:

• Health = Yellow: Warmth, energy, positivity, creativity.

• Wealth = Red: Passion, love, excitement, power.

• Wisdom = Blue: Calmness, trust, professionalism, reliability.

  ⬇️

• Happiness = White: growth, calmness, contentment, peace.

See You Soon

If you’ve read to this point and decided to stay subscribed, I appreciate you more than I can put into words. I can’t wait to start this next chapter with you ❤️‍🔥

That’s it for Lesson 0.

Keep it simple until the next one.

P.S.

I’ve been preparing to write Lesson 1 for 1,211 days as of today (08/03/24). You won’t want to miss it.