When I got accepted into business school for the 2024 intake, I faced a choice: pay a $5,000 deposit to secure my spot, or invest that money in learning on my own. I chose the latter. I gave myself permission to explore, experiment, and fail forward—building skills, not just credentials. Over the past year, I tried courses, tools, and platforms that promised to help me create content, understand marketing, learn tech, and grow online. Here’s a documentation of everything I paid for, why I got it, and how it helped me start building online.
Doing Content Right by Steph Smith
What it is: “Doing Content Right” is a beginner-friendly guide to digital content, marketing, and SEO. Created by Steph Smith, it walks you through building an audience, creating content that matters, and understanding the basics of SEO. It’s approachable for someone just starting out and full of practical advice.
Price: $150 (50% discount available if you read the intro—so $75!)
My thoughts & lessons learned: If you are completely new to the online building world, Steph did a great job explaining the different parts as well as the basic mindsets that can help you start strong. She has this rare ability of simplifying concepts, and you will feel less intimidated. The biggest takeaway I got from this book is to switch from an online consumer mindset to an online builder mindset.
Domain Purchase: michaelshoe.com/
What it is: Buying a domain is the first step to owning your online presence. I purchased my domain from Porkbun. For a non-tech person like me, this small step was a confidence booster—it forced me to get comfortable with the basics of online tools and experimenting with websites.
Price: $10.50/year
My thoughts & lessons learned: When I first landed on the porkbun site, things didn’t really make much sense – I didn’t know what I was doing but just sort of followed my intuition. Basically you are just buying a human-friendly name for your own site, which you can build content on afterwards. Don’t overthink this step, and don’t stress about making sense of it. Treat it like you are buying a piece of art at a reasonable price, a piece that you can later enhance further with your own strokes and touches. Porkbun’s support is great and responsive, so whenever you have questions, just shoot them an email.
Ghost Pro Plan (with Hosting)
What it is: Ghost.org is a content management system (CMS) focused on publishing. Hosting on platforms like Digital Ocean can be challenging, so I went with Ghost’s Pro plan. It’s beginner-friendly and comes with built-in hosting, SEO features, newsletters, and membership options—all in one package.
Price: $108/year
My thoughts & lessons learned: I followed Steph’s suggestions and built my site on Ghost. The UI is very intuitive and straightforward, which certainly helped for a non-techie like me. Ghost is also search engine friendly. However, I later learned how to build on WordPress and I’m contemplating transferring michaelshoe.com/ to WordPress to save some money.
SEO for Solopreneurs by Nat Eliason
What it is: This course teaches SEO strategies specifically for solo founders and small teams. You learn how to do keyword research, optimize content, and drive organic traffic. I followed it after Steph Smith highly recommended Nat Eliason’s approach, though I didn’t fully implement it, so my results were limited.
Price: $99
My thoughts & lessons learned: I probably could have learned everything for free on Youtube but the good thing with Nat’s course is that everything is structured. If you are new to the concept of SEO, it is still worth paying $99 for the course. However, Steph Smith’s book includes a full chapter of SEO so I’d say I might have double paid for the knowledge.
Keywords Everywhere – Silver Plan
What it is: Keywords Everywhere is an SEO research tool. It helps you check keyword competitiveness, search volume, and trends.
Price: $60/year
My thoughts & lessons learned: It’s great for planning content that people are actually searching for, but I admit I didn’t use it enough to get its full value.
Medium Membership
What it is: Medium is a platform where writers can publish articles and get paid through revenue sharing. It’s beginner-friendly for writers who want distribution without building a full website first. I started here but eventually stopped posting.
Price: $50/year
My thoughts & lessons learned: The goal of Medium is to use it as a discovery method for my blog posts. I know people are still reading on Medium, but it didn’t make sense to me after a while.
Mangool SEO Tool Membership
What it is: Mangools is a comprehensive SEO suite. It includes tools for keyword research, backlink analysis, and tracking your rankings. It’s more advanced than basic tools, which makes it useful for planning a content strategy, but I didn’t fully commit to using it.
Price: $358/year
My thoughts & lessons learned: I didn’t fully utilize all the functions in Mangool to be honest. Also I found myself doing more research than I should without committing to any actions. So I stopped using it.
SimpleScraper Membership
What it is: SimpleScraper is a web scraping tool that lets you extract structured data from websites. I initially bought it to research property prices, but it can also be used for competitive analysis, lead generation, or market research. A powerful tool for data-driven projects.
Price: $70/year
My thoughts & lessons learned: This is a great tool but there are also many other similar web scraping tools out there. You may try whichever one you like.
Porkbun Mail Hosting
What it is: This service allows you to send and receive emails from your domain (hi@michaelshoe.com). It gives a professional impression, but as a beginner, it wasn’t necessary—I could have used Gmail instead.
Price: $24/year
My thoughts & lessons learned: You don’t need to complicate it when just starting; and people won’t treat you differently because of it.
Ship30for30 Writing Course
What it is: Ship30for30 is a cohort-based course designed to help new writers start publishing daily content. It’s great for accountability and community support.
Price: $300
My thoughts & lessons learned: I ended up getting a refund because of the price and some repetition in content, but the structure is solid for beginners.
X Basic Membership
What it is: The basic X membership allows posting longer-form content on X (formerly Twitter), which is essential for growing an online presence as a solopreneur or writer.
Price: $32.25
My thoughts & lessons learned: To be honest, paying for a membership especially a basic one doesn’t make sense. You don’t get the blue checkmark anyway and there are no effects on your contents’ impressions. At the end of the day, it’s still about the quality of your content.
Typefully
What it is: Typefully is a productivity tool for writers. You can schedule posts, cross-post to platforms like LinkedIn or Bluesky, and manage your social media workflow efficiently. It’s helpful if you’re serious about building an audience.
Price: $149.99
My thoughts & lessons learned: I was fairly serious and committed in writing online, so typefully made sense for me since I was able to cross post on LinkedIn, X, BlueSky, Threads, etc. The tool is very easy to use and intuitive, with LLM built in helping with your tone and writing etc., saving many hours potentially.
Web Development Bootcamp 2024 (Udemy)
What it is: This Udemy course teaches HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other web development fundamentals. Steph Smith recommended learning before creating content, and coding gives you the flexibility to build your own web projects.
Price: $24.99
My thoughts & lessons learned: I didn’t really finish this course because it is so long… The content is really good and each session is very compact; however, I just don’t think passive learning is going to help me with building (anymore). I probably finished 50% of the course.
Coursera Plus Membership
What it is: Coursera Plus gives access to hundreds of courses. I used it to take Investment and Portfolio Management by Rice University to build knowledge in finance and investing. It’s a great all-in-one subscription for lifelong learning.
Price: $399/year
My thoughts & lessons learned: I definitely learned the building blocks of investment and portfolio management. However, like any courses of passive learning, the results won’t show up automatically and when you take actions, you still need to fill in the gaps on lots of fronts.
X Premium+ Membership
What it is: X Premium+ provides advanced posting tools, analytics, and visibility benefits. After investing in content creation and building my profile online, I decided to double down on this platform, especially with a Black Friday discount.
Price: $100
My thoughts & lessons learned: I mainly did it because of the end-of-the-year sales.
Expenditure Analysis and Ratings
Learnings from the first year of building online
- I invested heavily in knowledge and tools, but inputs alone don’t create results—I need to tie every tool or course to a concrete output to truly benefit.
- I experimented with many overlapping tools and platforms, but depth is more valuable than breadth—focusing on a few key tools and mastering them is more effective than spreading myself too thin.
- I spent time learning before monetizing, but learning must be paired with action—even small experiments that generate revenue are better than perfect knowledge without application.
- I consumed multiple courses and resources, but knowledge is most valuable when applied—by turning lessons into tangible projects, I can accelerate skill development and track real-world outcomes.
- I started small with IP and distribution. However, low-cost experiments are essential—they allow me to test ideas, explore channels, and gain insights without risking significant capital.
- I tracked spending loosely this year, and I learned that tracking ROI is crucial—documenting cost, effort, and outcomes for each investment helps me optimize future spending and avoid wasted money.
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