Author: Curry, DeepTide TechFlow
What was the most popular article on X last week?
"How to fix your entire life in 1 day."
Author Dan Koe, an American, creates content about "super individuals," teaching people how to live without working a traditional job and instead support themselves through writing. One week after this article was published, its views had already reached 150 million.
What does 150 million mean? X's global monthly active users are just over 600 million, meaning that one out of every four users has come across this article.
Some people are curious how much money this can make. Dan Koe shared a screenshot of his earnings, showing that the X platform paid him $4,495 in 14 days.
150 million views, $4,495. But Dan Koe actually earned over $4 million last year.
The money clearly does not come from platform commissions.
You've probably come across the term "super individual."
The general idea is that you don't need to work for a company or rely on a team. You just need to write your thoughts and creative ideas into content and post it online. This can attract a group of people who resonate with you, and then you can sell courses to them. In the U.S., this is called a "One-Person Business."
Dan Koe is a top player in this niche. He has 750,000 X followers, 1.2 million YouTube subscribers, and a 170,000-person email subscription list.
His story is also quite typical. He studied design in college, then became a freelancer after graduation. He tried e-commerce but ended up losing money. He started posting on Twitter in 2019, but no one paid attention. He persisted for two years before gaining any significant traction.
These experiences are part of the content themselves. Failure, struggle, perseverance, and comebacks—this narrative structure can be seen on any self-help blogger.
Li Xiaojun has talked about it, Luo Zhenyu has talked about it, and Fan Deng have talked about it.
Americans package it as Philosophy and Productivity, while Chinese package it as "Cognitive Upgrade," but the underlying structure is the same.
How does Dan Koe make money?
By visiting his official website, you can see several product categories: a paid newsletter subscription, two books ("The Art of Focus" and "Purpose & Profit"), and an AI tool called Eden that he co-founded.
He also used to sell writing courses and a membership community, but they are no longer visible on the official website now. They might have been taken down or possibly integrated into the paid subscription service.
I haven't found official data on the specific pricing, but the logic for this type of product is generally similar:
Free content screens out those willing to pay, and low-price products screen out those willing to pay more.
How much money does he make? In 2023, he posted on Twitter, stating that he earned $2.5 million that year. In 2024, Dan also revealed during an interview with the subscription software beehiiv that his annual income exceeded $4 million.
But based on his fan base size, it's not unreasonable. With an email list of nearly 200,000 people and millions of YouTube fans, assuming 5% have purchased paid products, that would result in nearly 50,000 paying users.
So what is 150 million views to him?
The traffic entry at the top of the funnel.The platform commission of $4,495 on X is trivial; what's more important is enhancing your brand presence and visibility. The real money comes from the people who are willing to pay later on.
You might ask, who is buying these things?
Then the answer is certainly the person who wants to become the next Dan Koe.
The primary goals of students in these kinds of courses are usually "building a personal brand," "monetizing their own media," and "escaping the 9-to-5 routine." What they pay to learn is exactly what Dan Koe is doing himself.
This model can work under one premise: there are always new people wanting to join.
Just like gym memberships always surge at the beginning of the year, there are always people in the "super individual" space who believe they can become the next big name. Dan Koe's article was posted on January 12th, right in the peak of foreigners' New Year's resolutions.
The title is "Fix Your Whole Life in One Day," what do you think people who click on it are thinking?
At the same time, X is also placing bets.
On January 16, a few days after Dan Koe's article went viral, X announced a new policy: doubling the creator earnings pool, increasing the weight given to long-form articles, and allocating an additional $10 million in rewards for the best original articles.
What Musk wants to do is obvious. TikTok has fragmented everyone's attention into 15-second snippets, while X (formerly Twitter) wants to do the opposite, using long-form content to retain users. Dan Koe wrote a comment in the comment section, roughly saying that people have been scrolling through short videos too intensely, and now the internet has a chance to swing back a bit.
X likes to hear this.
But what can a million dollars buy you?
Just search on X, and you'll find a flood of imitators. Articles on AI skill tutorials and motivational content are starting to emerge, such as "How to Change Your Life in 2026," "The One Skill You Need," and "Why Most People Will Never Succeed."
The structure is the same, the image style is identical to Dan's viral post, and even that tone of "I'm going to tell you the truth" is the same.
This writing style has even become a meme, prompting many to imitate and try it out.
Actually, it's not surprising. Dan Koe himself said that he uses AI to assist in writing by having the AI interview him, extract ideas, and then format them into a highly shareable content structure.
Anyone can learn this method. ChatGPT can generate a "life-changing" long article in ten minutes that is grammatically correct, well-structured, and even automatically includes a few psychological terms to add depth.
But it's still Dan Koe's fire, not those imitators.
Why?
One explanation is that trust takes time. Dan Koe wrote for six years, experienced real failures, and developed a traceable growth trajectory. An AI can imitate his writing style, but cannot replicate these experiences.
Another explanation is that,The path for super individuals is too crowded.
When everyone is teaching "how to become a super individual," whether it's about AI tools, activation guides, life coaching, or business strategies, attention tends to concentrate at the top. Those who enter early get the main course, latecomers get the broth, and those who come even later get nothing at all.
Another explanation is luck. Dan Koe hit the window of the X algorithm, the New Year sentiment cycle, and Musk's policy momentum for promoting long-form posts. With these three factors overlapping, 150 million came out.
With a different person and a different timing, an article of the same quality might only reach 1.5 million views.
An interesting point is that Dan Koe's article was published a few days early and thus does not qualify for X's 1 million content reward.
But it didn't matter to him. His business model didn't rely on platform revenue sharing. The 150 million views had already fulfilled their purpose: making more people aware of the name Dan Koe and funneling even more people into the top of his marketing funnel.
Who will ultimately receive that $1 million from X? According to the rules, it must be the original long-form article, at least 1,000 words, and calculated based on the number of views on the paid user's homepage.
You not only have to write well, but you also need to already have a large number of fans.
Therefore, it's likely that the top players will still take it.
This is the structure of the game. The platform needs top creators to prove that "long-form content has potential," while top creators rely on the platform's traffic to feed their own funnels. AI enables everyone to mass-produce "life-changing" content, but only a very few can actually make money from it.
What is the role of most people?
Reader.
After reading an article titled "Fix Your Whole Life in One Day," I felt deeply inspired to become a "Super Individual." I then shared it, liked it, saved it, and moved on to scroll to the next post.