tl;dr We're writing a self-help book that smuggles EA concepts to people who will never visit 80,000 Hours. We have a full manuscript done (~50,000 words). Publishers have strongly encouraged building platforms. We have a website, a podcast, and a growing newsletter, and the suspicion that we've spent most of our time solving the easy part. What's the most time-efficient way to build a platform from scratch: Substack? YouTube? Something else?
The Problem
There are 20 million college students in the US. A tiny fraction encounter, or even hear, about EA. Most people who could benefit from thinking carefully about impact will simply never encounter EA materials during the years when career intentions are actually formed.
We think there's a gap worth exploiting: the cultural format of self-help reaches millions of ambitious young people already asking questions about meaning and purpose, but books like Atomic Habits teach you how to achieve your goals more efficiently without ever asking whether your goals are worth achieving in the first place.
Meanwhile, EA literature assumes you're already convinced enough to wade through pretty rigorous material. The barrier to entry is high. We're trying to be the book someone would pick up, and then later, when they encounter more serious EA resources, they're primed to actually engage rather than bounce off.
We don't expect everyone to read the book cover-to-cover. That's not how books like this actually work. The goal is for it to become part of the ambient conversation about career decisions (best case scenario), the thing that gets mentioned in career counseling sessions, referenced by parents to their kids as they set off for college. Books in this genre succeed when they become cultural reference points.
More importantly: we're not trying to convert anyone with a single book. The real win is if someone reads this, finds it intellectually compelling, and then becomes the type of person who might actually engage with 80,000 Hours when they encounter them later. We're trying to create an on-ramp, not the entire highway. If the book gets someone to be curious enough to find more rigorous EA resources on their own, we've succeeded.
What We've Done
We're a small group from Harvard, Oxford, and Middlebury who've been testing this concept for the past year:
- Full book draft completed (~50,000 words) examining the social psychology of prestige-seeking, mimetic desire theory, and the cultivation of reflective preference formation
- Podcast launched with condensed versions of chapters (Spotify, also on Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music)
- Campus newspaper op-eds published that sparked conversations academic texts cannot
- Letters of endorsement from professors who see value in the approach
- Website with active waitlist at howtowantbetterthings.org, includes all our content platforms and signup for the full book release
The Central Question
How do we prove to publishers this will actually sell?
Publishers want proof that we can reach non-EA audiences at scale.
Here's what we're currently considering:
1. Email campaign to build newsletter subscribers Focus on growing from hundreds to thousands through viral pieces, cross-promotion, and consistent publishing. This feels most aligned with our strengths (writing) and gives us direct audience data publishers care about. Automation potential.
2. YouTube channel The reach potential is obvious, but we're concerned about incentive misalignment. The content that performs best on YouTube is often the most clickbaity, algorithm-optimized stuff. We could probably get views with "5 Secrets Consulting Recruiters Don't Want You To Know," but that's not the conversation we're trying to have. That said, maybe we're overthinking this and should just start making videos?
3. Influencer outreach campaign (email/Instagram DM) Reach out to EA-adjacent YouTubers and podcasters who might be willing to feature these ideas. Think people in the productivity/philosophy/career advice space who have substantial audiences but aren't explicitly EA. We have no illusions about response rates here. Cold outreach to people with hundreds of thousands of followers is a long shot. But if even one person with a real platform engaged with the ideas, that could be more valuable than months of grinding out newsletter content.
4. Tiktok we really really hope we don't have to.
5. Something we haven't thought of?
We're genuinely uncertain about what's most time-efficient for proving to publishers that there's a real audience for this outside EA circles. We're students with limited hours, no expertise in platform-building, and a suspicion that we're systematically underestimating how hard distribution is.
Reasons we're probably overconfident:
- We've never published books or built meaningful distribution channels
- The book might reach non-EA audiences but fail to actually shift thinking in EA-aligned directions (we'd just add to the self-help pile)
- Our time might be better spent on direct EA organizing or our own career capital
Reasons we might do it anyway:
- We have comparative advantage (writing ability, demographic access, understanding what resonates with peers)
- We want to test whether cultural bridge-building (now that the FTX storm has mostly passed) to non-EA audiences is tractable
- The expected value seems plausibly high even if the probability of success is low
- Nobody else seems to be trying this specific approach
What We Need
Advice from people who've successfully built platforms outside EA circles. Feedback on whether our distribution strategy is systematically wrong. Honest assessment of whether this is well-intentioned but ultimately a distraction from higher-impact work.
If you have distribution expertise, have published books, or have strong opinions about platform-building, we'd genuinely value your input.
Contact form
