8 ways to monetize knowledge, you need to re-evaluate when moving to Taiwan
✍️ This article is reposted from “Vista Newsletter” No.138, originally published in iamvista.substack.com (opens in a new tab). If you like this kind of content, welcome to free subscription to “Vista Newsletter” (opens in a new tab) and receive my observations and methods first-hand every week.
Hello everyone! I accidentally read an article (opens in a new tab) last week, written by Dickie Bush (opens in a new tab) (Dickie Bush), an American who has been in the AI writing education industry for six years and has served more than 34,000 customers through 8 different digital monetization methods.
He compiled the same question that he had been asked repeatedly for six years into a complete long article (opens in a new tab). The answer he gave was not to choose one, but to spread out the 8 models (agency service, one-on-one consulting, evergreen coaching program, group experience, digital products, paid e-newsletters, paid communities and software): If each one wants to achieve a scale of US$10,000 per month or US$100,000 per month, how many customers, subscribers or sales are needed for each model? This account can be calculated clearly.
My first reaction after reading it was admiration. The degree of structure of this article is indeed rare. The second reaction is to start carefully estimating each number in your mind.
Well, it’s not that he miscalculated, but that all his algorithms are based on an unstated premise: he is facing the English market.
29 sales of US$350, 500 paid subscribers of US$20 per month, and software subscriptions of 5,000 people. What is assumed behind these numbers is a group of English readers that can be reached. In theory, it exceeds 1.5 billion people. Even if only a very small proportion of them can actually be converted, the base is still large enough to support these algorithms. And I, and you reading this letter, are facing Taiwan, a market of 23 million people with Chinese as the main language. This is not the common self-doubt that Taiwanese people are reluctant to pay, but a more direct arithmetic problem: the denominator has changed from 1.5 billion to 23 million. For any business model that relies on the number of people, the ceiling will drop a lot.
So, what I want to do is to recalculate the eight paths that Dickie Bush took based on the current situation in Taiwan and see which of them can be replicated? Which roads need to be taken in a different way, and which roads are even inappropriate.
Let’s talk about a variable that is easily overlooked: Taiwan’s denominator is smaller than you think.
When many people talk about the Chinese market, they intuitively include the more than one billion people in mainland China. They feel that they are all Chinese speakers anyway, and theoretically the potential audience is huge. However, this intuition makes little practical sense. The people with whom Taiwanese creators can reach, collect money, and build trusting relationships are almost entirely limited to Taiwan, with a small number of Hong Kong, Macao, and overseas Taiwanese. The platforms are different (LINE, Facebook, Instagram vs. WeChat, Xiaohongshu), the cash flow is different, the content logic is different, and even the wording habits are different (simplified Chinese content inherently has a sense of distance in the eyes of Taiwanese readers). This means that Taiwanese creators can actually operate in a market that is much smaller than the apparent Chinese-speaking population, closer to the Taiwanese population of 23 million than any imaginable large pool across the Taiwan Strait.
This understanding is important because it will directly overturn the $100,000-per-month algorithm for most of the methods in Dickie Bush’s article. Those algorithms are almost all based on scale. If you use Taiwan’s denominator to apply it, you will not get a discounted answer, but a completely unworkable answer.
Agency service: This road can almost be moved here directly
The original article said that agency services do not require an audience. As long as 2 to 3 clients pay 3,000 to 6,000 US dollars per person per month, you can achieve 10,000 US dollars per month. This is the least sensitive method to the size of the audience among all methods. Well, the reason is very simple. What you sell is a service, not a large-scale product. The number of customers is already in single digits.
This path is completely established in Taiwan. Taiwan’s market for case acceptance, consulting, ghostwriting or marketing agency operations is already very mature. Of course, the price range must be converted into Taiwan dollars and adjusted downwards (the monthly fee that Taiwanese small and medium-sized enterprises are willing to pay usually falls between NT$30,000 and NT$100,000, not the US dollar price corresponding to the original article), but the business logic is completely the same: unfamiliar development plus free consultation, negotiating a long-term contract, and renewing the contract based on delivery quality. This is the most Taiwanese-friendly of the 8 paths in my opinion because it doesn’t require you to have a group of people before you can start making money.
One-to-one consultation: The logic is similar, but Taiwanese people are inherently less receptive to hourly payment
Selling judgment is also true in Taiwan, but the consultant culture in Taiwan is different from that in the United States. In the U.S. market, it is highly institutionalized to pay experts to help you think things through. It is normal for personal brand consultants, business coaches, and career consultants to charge by the hour. Taiwanese customers are more accustomed to packaging consultation (opens in a new tab) as part of the service rather than purchasing it separately. It is more difficult to sell simply selling time.
In my opinion, this path usually does not become an independent business in Taiwan, but as the original article said, it is more suitable as an add-on item to other methods, such as additional consulting time purchased by agency service customers, or the top-level value-added option in a coaching plan. I have also launched Consulting Service (opens in a new tab). Friends who are interested or have needs are welcome to contact me.
Evergreen Counseling Program: The logic is feasible, but the speed of trust building must be more conservative than the original article
The high unit price, long-term one-to-one plus group tutoring model is not unheard of in Taiwan. Online course platforms and independent coaches are both doing it. However, the original article assumes that two students will be recruited per month and the cost is US$5,000 per person (approximately NT$150,000). If this unit price is to be transacted in Taiwan, the trust cost required is much higher than in the US market.
Taiwanese consumers are more wary of intangible services with high unit prices. They need a longer period of word-of-mouth accumulation and more concrete and verifiable results cases before they are willing to pay this price. This path is feasible in Taiwan, but the goal of a monthly scale of US$100,000 needs to be postponed. First, the number of students in each period should be lowered, and the unit price should be within a range acceptable to the Taiwanese market (usually in the range of NT$30,000 to NT$80,000). Rely on word-of-mouth to increase the number of students one by one, rather than copying the original enrollment rhythm.
Group experience: This path in Taiwan requires passing the audience size first.
The author of the original article said that this method must be able to find 30 buyers at a time, and the scale must support 300 seats each time. In the Taiwan market, 300 people must be willing to pay to join a limited-time course at the same time. The audience base required is much larger than imagined, because the conversion rate will not be higher just because the market is small.
In my opinion, this path is feasible in Taiwan, but it is usually a late-stage move, not an initial move. You must first have stable content exposure and an email list before you can gather enough people in the week of release. Moreover, Taiwan’s peer pressure-driven course completion mechanism is usually more effective when replacing the combination of live streaming and social platforms mentioned in the original article with LINE communities, because the daily communication habits of Taiwanese users are on LINE.
Digital products: The difficulty is most easily underestimated in the Taiwan market
Doing it once and selling for life sounds very attractive, but the author himself admits that this is the slowest way to make the first money, and if it is to be implemented in Taiwan, it may be even slower.
Taiwanese readers’ willingness to pay for purely information-based products (e-books, online courses or template packages) has historically been lower than that of the US market. Platforms such as Hahow and PressPlay prove the existence of the market, but they also prove that conversion is highly dependent on the traffic and trust endorsement of the platform itself. In other words, if an independent creator wants to sell e-books on his or her own website, it will be much more difficult for an independent creator to achieve the 285 sales per month mentioned in the original article than for an American creator of the same scale.
Therefore, this path in Taiwan is more suitable as an extension of existing services or communities, rather than the main source of income, such as additional textbooks purchased by agency service customers, or supplementary resources for students in tutoring programs.
Paid e-newsletter: Taiwanese readers are still developing their paying habits, but the first-mover advantage is still there
I feel particularly touched by this article, because what you are reading now is an electronic newspaper. The original article mentioned that 500 paying subscribers of US$20 per month must be supported by 10 to 20 times the free list. This ratio is also true in Taiwan, but Taiwanese readers’ habit of paying for subscriptions for continuously updated text content is far less mature than the Substack e-newsletter platform in the United States.
The payment model that Taiwanese readers are more familiar with is courses, physical activities, and one-time products, rather than fixed monthly deductions in exchange for an article. There is bad news and good news in this matter. The bad news is that the conversion rate will be more conservative than the algorithm of the original article. The good news is that the paid e-newsletter market in Taiwan is still in its early stages. Those who are willing to continue to produce and accumulate weekly texts as trust assets have relatively few competitors. The first-mover advantage is still there. This is why I continue to operate a personal e-newsletter.
Paid communities: Taiwan’s community habits are inherently free, so we need to change the algorithm for this path.
The original article mentioned that a deserted community with only 20 people is even less valuable than no community at all. This sentence is particularly true in Taiwan, because Taiwan’s LINE groups and Discord groups have long been a free culture. For people to be willing to pay a monthly fee for a community, the threshold is higher than in the US market.
In Taiwan, this path is usually not the first model, but as the original article said, as an extension of the existing audience or customer base, first rely on agency services, coaching programs or electronic reports to cultivate a group of people who trust you, and then gather those who are willing to pay to stay into a paid community. In other words, it is to rely on the connections between people to retain them, rather than relying on the content itself to attract strangers to join.
Software and SaaS: This is the one that requires the most redesign of the business model in Taiwan among the 8 paths in the original article.
If you rely solely on the Taiwan market to build B2C SaaS, the problem of population base is the most direct. The original article mentioned that 10,000 US dollars per month requires about 525 users and a monthly payment of 19 US dollars. In the Taiwan market, it is necessary to rely solely on local users to come up with this number, which is much more difficult than high unit price and low quantity models such as agency services or tutoring programs.
To put it simply, there are two pragmatic ways to take this path in Taiwan: one is to set the target market overseas from the beginning, use Taiwan as a development base, and use English interfaces for global users, which is equivalent to bypassing the denominator restrictions of the Taiwan market; the other is to switch to B2B, where Taiwanese small and medium-sized enterprises are willing to pay for tools that truly solve problems. The unit price can be raised to a level close to the US$999 mentioned in the original article, and a small number of high-unit-price customers are used to replace a large number of low-unit-price users. The low-price, large-user model of simply copying the original text is difficult to establish in Taiwan.
Taiwan version of starting moves
The starting method given by the author of the original article is to write continuously on the social platform for 30 days, and at the same time open an e-newsletter for 6 weeks. After stabilizing, try the agency service and talk to the first few customers. This sequence is also applicable in Taiwan, because it does not depend on the size of the market, but on your personal willingness to continue to produce.
The only adjustment I would make is to put agency services at a higher priority, because in Taiwan, first relying on writing and electronic reporting to build trust, and then converting this trust into agency services or consulting contracts is usually faster and more stable than relying on pure content or pure community to scale directly. By the time you have a growing Content Engine (opens in a new tab) and a paying customer or two, you’re in a good enough position to branch out into a newsletter, a coaching program, or whatever path you’re willing to take the time to solve that set of problems.
The American formula is very complete, and what is worth referring to is the way it breaks down the problem, rather than every number. Before moving to Taiwan, change the denominator to 23 million, recalculate, and you’ll see a completely different version that still works. If you are in different places such as Hong Kong and Malaysia, please convert it first.
This e-newsletter is coming to an end here. If it reminds you of a model you are currently doing or is hesitant to start, please reply directly and tell me. I would like to know the monetization model you like or are good at, and would be more than happy to discuss and study with you.
See you in the next e-newsletter!
📮 This article is reposted from “Vista Newsletter” No.138. The original text can be found at iamvista.substack.com/p/vista-no138-8 (opens in a new tab). If you like content like this, welcome to subscribe for free to the Vista Newsletter (opens in a new tab) and receive a helpful letter every week.
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Vista Cheng speaks and runs workshops on AI workflows, writing and content systems for companies, schools and public agencies.
