Author: Curry, Deep Tide TechFlow
Original Title: 150 Million Views on a Single Post, Dan Koe and His Super Individual Business
What was the hottest article on X last week?
"How to fix your entire life in 1 day". Fix your entire life in one day.
Author Dan Koe, American, creates content about "super individuals", teaching people how to not work a 9-to-5 and support themselves by writing. A week after its release, this article's views had reached 150 million.
What does 150 million mean? X has just over 600 million monthly active users globally, meaning roughly one in four users has seen this article.
Some wonder how much money this can make. Dan Koe shared a screenshot of his earnings: in 14 days, the X platform shared $4,495 with him.
150 million views, $4,495. But Dan Koe actually earned over $4 million last year.
The money clearly doesn't come from platform revenue sharing.
You've definitely seen the term "super individual".
The general idea is, you don't need a job, you don't need a team, just put your ideas and creativity into content posted online to attract a group of people who identify with you, and then sell courses to them. In the US, this is called a One-Person Business.
Dan Koe is a top player in this field. 750k X followers, 1.2 million YouTube subscribers, 170k email subscribers.
His story is also standard. Studied design in college, became a freelancer after graduation, tried e-commerce, lost money. Started writing on Twitter in 2019, no one read it, persisted for two years before gaining traction.
These experiences are part of the content itself. Failure, struggle, persistence, counterattack—you can see this narrative structure on any successful motivational blogger.
Li Xiaolai talked about it, Luo Zhenyu talked about it, Fan Deng talked about it.
Americans package it as Philosophy and Productivity, Chinese package it as "cognitive upgrade", the skeleton is the same.
How does Dan Koe make money?
Open his official website, you can see several types of products: paid newsletter subscriptions, two books ("The Art of Focus" and "Purpose & Profit"), and an AI tool he co-founded called Eden.
He used to sell writing courses and membership communities, which are no longer visible on the official website, maybe taken down, or merged into the paid subscriptions.
I didn't find official pricing data, but the logic of these products is similar:
Free content filters out people willing to pay, low-priced products filter out people willing to pay more.
How much does he earn? In 2023 he posted on Twitter saying his income that year was $2.5 million. In a 2024 interview with the subscription software beehiiv, Dan also revealed earning over $4 million annually.
But推算 from his follower size, it's not离谱. With nearly 200k email subscribers and millions of YouTube fans,假设 5% have bought paid products, that's nearly fifty thousand paying users.
So what is that 150 million views to him?
The traffic entry point at the top of the funnel. The $4,495 platform share on X is pocket change, more importantly it increases his brand awareness and spread, the real money is with those willing to pay later.
You might ask, who is buying these things?
The answer is definitely people who want to become the next Dan Koe.
The goals of students taking these courses are basically "build a personal brand", "monetize self-media", "escape the 9-to-5". What they are paying to learn is the very thing Dan Koe is doing.
For this model to work, there is one prerequisite: there are always new people wanting to enter the field.
Just like gym memberships always surge at the beginning of the year, the "super individual"赛道 always has people who believe they can become the next top player. Dan Koe published that article on January 12th,刚好是外国人新年决心最旺盛的时候.
The title is "Fix your entire life in one day", what do you think people clicking on it are thinking?
At the same time, X is also placing its bets.
On January 16th, a few days after Dan Koe's article went viral, X announced a new policy: the creator revenue pool doubled, increased weight for long-form articles, and an additional $1 million reward for the best performing original articles.
What Musk wants to do is obvious. TikTok has cut everyone's attention into 15-second fragments, X wants to go the opposite way, using long-form content to retain users. Dan Koe wrote a comment大意是短视频刷得太狠了,现在互联网有机会往回摆一摆.
X loves to hear that.
But what can $1 million buy?
Open X and search, there are already a lot of imitators. Various AI skill tutorials and inspirational鸡汤 articles are emerging, like "How to change your life in 2026", "The one skill you need", "Why most people will never succeed"...
The structure is the same, the image style is the same as Dan's viral post, even the "I'm here to tell you the truth" tone is the same.
This style of writing has even become a meme,引得大家争相模仿和尝试.
It's not really strange. Dan Koe himself said he uses AI to assist writing, the method is to have AI interview himself, extract ideas, and then format them into a high-spread content structure.
Anyone can learn this method. ChatGPT can generate a "life-changing" long article in ten minutes, grammatically correct, structurally complete,还能自动加上几个心理学术语显得有深度.
But it's Dan Koe who got popular, not the imitators.
Why?
One explanation is that trust takes time. Dan Koe has written for six years, has real failure experiences, has a traceable growth trajectory. AI can imitate his sentence patterns, but cannot复制 these.
Another explanation is, the super individual赛道 is too crowded.
When everyone is teaching "how to become a super individual", whether talking about AI tools, guide to getting started, life fixes or business tips, attention concentrates towards the top. Those who enter early eat meat, those who come later drink soup, and those even later get neither.
Another explanation is luck. Dan Koe hit the window of X adjusting its algorithm, the New Year emotional cycle, and the policy tailwind of Musk wanting to push long-form content. Three things叠加在一起, the 150 million appeared.
Change the person, change the time, the same quality article, might only get 1.5 million views.
An interesting point is, Dan Koe's article was published a few days too early, so it doesn't qualify for X's $1 million content reward selection.
But this doesn't matter to him. His business model doesn't rely on platform revenue sharing, the 150 million views have completed their mission, letting more people know the name Dan Koe, letting more people pour into the top of the funnel.
So who will X's $1 million eventually go to? According to the rules, it must be original long-form articles, at least 1000 words, calculated based on impressions on paying users' homepages.
Translation: you not only have to write well, but you also need to already have a large number of fans.
So most likely it will still be taken by the top players.
This is the structure of this game. The platform needs top creators to prove "long-form content has a future", top creators need platform traffic to feed their funnel, AI allows everyone to mass-produce "life-changing" content, but only a very few can actually make money from this.
What is the role of most people?
Readers.
After reading an article "Fix your entire life in one day", feel inspired to become a super individual, then share, like, bookmark, and then continue scrolling to the next one.
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