Original author: Curry, Deep Tide TechFlow

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.

The author, Dan Koe, is an American who creates content about being a "super individual," teaching people how to avoid traditional jobs and support themselves through writing. A week after its release, the article has already garnered 150 million views.

What does 150 million mean? X has just over 600 million monthly active users, which means one in every four users has seen this article.

Some are curious about how much money this can earn. Dan Koe shared a screenshot of his earnings: in 14 days, X paid him $4,495.

150 million views, $4,495. But Dan Koe actually earned over $4 million last year.

Clearly, the money isn't coming from platform revenue sharing.

You’ve definitely seen the term "super individual."

The gist is that you don’t need a job or a team; you just need to write your thoughts and ideas into content and post it online to attract a group of like-minded people, then sell courses to them. In the U.S., this is called a One-Person Business.

Dan Koe is a leading player in this field. He has 750,000 followers on X, 1.2 million YouTube subscribers, and an email subscription list of 170,000 people.

His story is also quite standard. He studied design in college, became a freelancer after graduation, tried e-commerce, and lost money. He started writing on Twitter in 2019, but no one read it; he persisted for two years before gaining traction.

These experiences are part of the content itself. Failure, struggle, persistence, comeback—this narrative structure can be seen in any successful self-help blogger.

Li Xiaolai has talked about it, Luo Zhenyu has talked about it, Fan Deng has talked about it.

How does Dan Koe make money?

If you visit his official website, you’ll 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 a membership community, but those are no longer visible on his website; they may have been taken down or merged into the paid subscription.

I couldn't find official pricing data, but the logic for these types of products is generally similar:

Free content filters out those willing to pay, and low-priced products filter out those willing to pay more.

How much does he earn? In 2023, he shared on Twitter that his income that year was $2.5 million. In 2024, during an interview with the subscription software beehiiv, Dan also revealed that he earned over $4 million.

But based on his follower count, that doesn’t seem outrageous. With an email list of nearly 200,000 and millions of YouTube subscribers, assuming 5% have purchased paid products, that’s nearly 50,000 paying users.

So what does that 150 million views mean for him?

It’s the traffic entry point at the top of the funnel. The $4,495 platform revenue share from X is just a small fraction; more importantly, it increases his brand recognition and reach, with the real money coming from those willing to pay.

You might ask, who is buying these things?

The answer is definitely people who want to become the next Dan Koe.

The target audience for these courses is generally "building a personal brand," "monetizing social media," and "escaping the 9-to-5." What they are paying to learn is exactly what Dan Koe is doing.

This model can work, but there’s one prerequisite: there are always newcomers wanting to enter the field.

Just like gym memberships always surge at the beginning of the year, there will always be people in the "super individual" space who believe they can become the next top player. Dan Koe's article was published on January 12, right at the peak of New Year’s resolutions.

The title "Fix your entire life in one day" makes you wonder what those who clicked on it were thinking.

At the same time, X is also placing its bets.

On January 16, just a few days after Dan Koe's article went viral, X announced a new policy: the creator revenue pool would double, the weight of long articles would increase, and an additional $1 million would be awarded for the best-performing original articles.

What Elon Musk wants to do is clear. TikTok has fragmented everyone’s attention into 15-second clips, while X wants to do the opposite, keeping users engaged with long content. Dan Koe wrote in the comments that short videos have been overwhelming, and now the internet has a chance to swing back.

X loves to hear that.

But what can $1 million buy?

If you search on X, you’ll already find a plethora of imitators. Various AI skill tutorials and motivational articles 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 similar to Dan's viral article, and even the tone of "Let me tell you the truth" is the same.

This writing style has even become a meme, prompting everyone to imitate and try it out.

It’s not surprising, really. Dan Koe has mentioned that he uses AI-assisted writing, where he lets AI interview him, extract ideas, and then format them into a highly shareable content structure.

This method can be learned by anyone. ChatGPT can generate a long article on "changing your life" in ten minutes, with correct grammar, complete structure, and even automatically add a few psychological terms to seem profound.

But it’s still Dan Koe who is popular, not those imitators.

Why?

One explanation is that trust takes time. Dan Koe has been writing for six years, has real experiences of failure, and has a traceable growth trajectory. AI can mimic his sentence structures, but it can’t replicate those.

Another explanation is that the "super individual" space is too crowded.

When everyone is teaching "how to become a super individual," whether it’s about AI tools, card guides, life fixes, or business tips, attention will concentrate on the top players. The early entrants get the meat, the later ones get the soup, and the ones who come even later get nothing.

Another explanation is luck. Dan Koe hit the window of X's algorithm changes, the New Year’s emotional cycle, and the policy push for long articles from Musk. These three factors combined led to 150 million views.

If it were someone else, at a different time, the same quality article might only get 1.5 million views.

An interesting point is that Dan Koe's article was published a few days too early to participate in X's $1 million content reward selection.

But that doesn’t matter to him. His business model doesn’t rely on platform revenue sharing; the 150 million views have already fulfilled their mission, making more people aware of the name Dan Koe and funneling more people in at the top.

So who will ultimately receive X's $1 million? According to the rules, it must be an original long article, at least 1,000 words, calculated based on the display volume of paying users on the homepage.

To translate: you not only have to write well, but you also need to already have a large following.

So it’s likely that the top players will take it.

This is the structure of this game. The platform needs top creators to prove that "long articles have potential," while top creators need platform traffic to feed their funnels. AI allows 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?

Readers.

After reading an article like "Fix your entire life in one day," they feel inspired to become a super individual, then share, like, save, and continue scrolling to the next post.

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