The Things That Didn't Work

Khe Hy’s been called the “Oprah for Millennials” by CNN, and his writing is all about transforming your relationship with time, work, money, and, ultimately, yourself. Today we talk about how he runs RadReads, his newsletter for over 25,000 people. It’s an incredible newsletter where Khe gets super tactical about Notion, but also goes deep on living a better life, organization, productivity, etc.

The biggest highlight from this interview? Khe tells us about going from $100/hr work to $10,000/hr work. He’s not joking! Khe’s building a whole course—Supercharge your Productivity—on this very topic.

Khe also shares useful insights for every newsletter author and online businessperson, including:

• Finding the best marketing platform for your business.
 • How to get your content in front of someone else’s audience.
 • How to launch a premium product.

And so much more!

Links & Resources

• Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
• Loom: Video Messaging for Work
• Friday Forward Inspiration & Motivational E-mail - Robert Glazer
• Patrick O’Shaughnessy Invest Like the Best podcast

Khe Hy’s Links

• Newsletter: RadReads
• Twitter: @khemaridh

Episode Transcript

Khe: [00:00:00]
I often push people to ask, what’s this for? Right. So like, you want to switch from MailChimp to ConvertKit, like, what’s this for? Like, do you want to open it? Sorry, YouTube account. What’s this for? So don’t be satisfied with the first answer. Go one level deeper. Go to the second answer, go to the third answer.

And actually ironically like copywriting, you’ll probably land on some deeper human need that you have.

Nathan: [00:00:29]
In this episode, I talked to Khe Hy about how he runs RadReads, his newsletter for over 25,000 people. It’s an incredible newsletter. I love everything that he features, where he’s talking about Notion, living a better life, organization, productivity, all this other stuff. And he takes it into some pretty deep conversations, which I love.

Alright, few highlights that we dive into: One: $10,000 an hour work. Yep. He’s not joking. He actually means that; we dive into what exactly that looks like, what it means. We get into product launches. He shares the numbers from the launch that he’s in the middle of right as we record the episode. there’s a lot of great stuff.

So I’m going to get out of the way and just let you dive in and listen to the episode with Khe.

Khe, welcome to the show.

Khe: [00:01:11]
Nathan. Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Nathan: [00:01:14]
So we were just joking before we, we talked, you and I have exchanged tons of emails, Twitter DMs, you know, Twitter mentions all of that. We have not actually ever talked until this moment.

Khe: [00:01:26]
You have just converted from a Twitter avatar to a real Zoom human and in the past five minutes. So it’s great to meet you. And that’s why we love the internet.

Nathan: [00:01:37]
Yes. Well, it’s fun to, I feel like I know, you know, your work really well and, and, um, now it’s nice to put a full, a full face to it. so I would love to dive in. Maybe if you could tell listeners really quickly about rad reads, give the high level, like why someone might subscribe and then from there, we’ll start to dive in your backstory.

Khe: [00:02:00]
Awesome. So read, read, I guess I would start by saying I’m the accidental entrepreneur and accidental creator. And I would just show my cards immediately that like I’ve rarely had a plan in this whole internet game thing, and it’s all kind of happened. And so. What is RadReads and what can you expect?

If you sign up, when you sign up RadReads is, it’s a newsletter and the blog about that helps people live intentional and Epic lives. And so what does that mean? the informal tagline is come for the productivity. Stay for the existential. And so we will lure you in with a text expanders, financial independence, retire, early notion, and then it would be like, what’s the deep underlying need that that’s really trying to satisfy. And so that is kind of the, the ethos, the vibe it’s playful, it’s inspired by surf culture or hip hop culture. and I write, so I read a ton. And through the writing, quite, quite new, actually almost approaching two years. I’ve, started an, course business related to that, but I’ve dabbled in so many other monetization, harebrained schemes along the way, but mostly now newsletter blog leads to, online courses.

Nathan: [00:03:31]
Yeah, that makes sense. Well, we’ll dive into newsletter, monetization, and so much other stuff, but you did not set out to be a writer. You didn’t set out to, you know, run your own business or any of that. Let’s take us back. What was, what was your career before you drove it to this crazy internet world that we’re all in.

Khe: [00:03:51]
It was, as Charles Dickens said it was the best of times that it was the worst of times. So, I here’s a little detail important fact, in the stories, you know, I grew up as a child of first-generation immigrants and it was all about. School work, put your head down. Don’t take risk. And so I got on the first generation, escalator, I went to Yale, I majored in computer science.

I worked on Wall Street. I was a really good kid. I like buying sat books and all that stuff. and so I just put my head down and did the work, and never really thought about anything else. Just get on the escalator and stay there. I did that, that brought me to wall street, 14 years on Wall Street.

And, I had a really good career and I had, hopefully what’s a third of a life crisis. you know, it’s 30, 35 years old. I was probably a little bit, not exactly a third, but, I was just kind of, I was doing great. I was doing great. I was, yeah, in that, that world, uh, made a made man in the sense that if I just didn’t screw up, I would never have a financial worry for the rest of my life. But I was bored as heck.

Nathan: [00:05:06]
I was going to say, but then you hadn’t go and screw it up.

Khe: [00:05:09]
I know, and I did screw it up and boy, did I screw it up? I was bored as heck and I love the internet. You know, I had been making HTML pages on 28.8 modems. I had an anonymous blogs and cause you can’t do that stuff on walls. And so I was like, there’s this whole world out there.

And I’m just going to be an expert in this thin, thin sliver. I, I basically studied robot trading. So like actually all this Robinhood stuff is like, Like the end of what’s happening right now is what I studied, like the rails of, of wall street. And so I was a little agitated. I was just like, what’s the point?

What’s the point? I had some savings about 18 months of savings, where I could just burn through them and try something new. It took a couple years, but I just quit. I quit without a plan. the only little anchor in this crazy C of uncertainty w...