Single Article with 150 Million Views: Dan Koe and His Super-Individual Business

Original Author: Curry, TechFlow

What was the hottest article on X last week?

"How to fix your entire life in 1 day."

The author, Dan Koe, is an American who creates content about being a "super individual," teaching people how to quit their jobs and support themselves by writing. One week after its publication, the article's view count had already reached 150 million.

What does 150 million views mean? X has just over 600 million monthly active users globally, meaning roughly one in every four users has seen this article.

Some were curious about how much money this could make. Dan Koe shared a screenshot of his earnings: $4,495 from the X platform over 14 days.

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

The money clearly 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 turn your ideas and creativity into content posted online to attract a group of people who resonate with you, and then sell them courses. In the US, this is called a One-Person Business.

Dan Koe is a top player in this niche. 750k X followers, 1.2 million YouTube subscribers, and an email list of 170k people.

His story is also textbook. He studied design in college, became a freelancer after graduation, tried e-commerce, and lost money. He started writing on Twitter in 2019, got no views, and persisted for two years before gaining traction.

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

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

Americans package it as Philosophy and Productivity, Chinese package it as "cognitive upgrading," but the skeleton is the same.

How does Dan Koe make money?

Open his official website, and you can see several types of products: a paid newsletter subscription, 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 his website—maybe they've been taken down or merged into the paid subscription.

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

Free content filters out those willing to pay, and low-priced products filter out those willing to pay even 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 his annual income exceeded $4 million.

But extrapolating from his follower size, this isn't far-fetched. With nearly 200k email subscribers and millions of YouTube followers, assuming 5% have purchased a paid product, that's nearly 50,000 paying users.

So, what is that 150 million views to him?

The top of the funnel, the traffic entry point. The $4,495 platform share from X is pocket change; what's more important is increasing his brand awareness and reach. The real money comes from those willing to pay later.

You might ask, who's buying this stuff?

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

The goals of students in these courses are basically "building a personal brand," "monetizing self-media," and "escaping the 9-to-5 grind." What they pay to learn is the very thing Dan Koe is doing.

For this model to work, there's one prerequisite: there must always be new people wanting to enter the field.

Just like gym memberships always surge at the beginning of the year, the "super individual" niche always has people who believe they can become the next top player. Dan Koe's article was published on January 12th, right when New Year's resolutions are strongest for foreigners.

The title is "How to fix your entire life in 1 day." What do you think people clicking on it are thinking?

Meanwhile, X is also placing its bets.

On January 16th, a few days after Dan Koe's article went viral, X announced a new policy: doubling the creator revenue pool, increasing the weight of long-form articles, and setting aside an additional $1 million to reward the best-performing original articles.

What Musk wants to do is obvious. TikTok has sliced everyone's attention into 15-second fragments; X wants to do the opposite, using long-form content to retain users. Dan Koe wrote a comment roughly saying that short-form video scrolling has gone too far, and now the internet has a chance to swing back.

X loves hearing that.

But what can $1 million buy?

Search on X, and you'll already find a bunch of imitators. Various AI skill tutorials and inspirational 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 writing style has even become a meme, prompting everyone to imitate and try it.

Actually, it's not surprising. Dan Koe himself said he uses AI to assist his writing by having AI interview him, extracting ideas, and then formatting them into a high-virality content structure.

Anyone can learn this method. ChatGPT can generate a "life-changing" long-form article in ten minutes, with correct grammar, complete structure, and even automatically adding a few psychological terms to appear profound.

But it's Dan Koe who went viral, not the imitators.

Why?

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

Another explanation is that the super individual niche is too crowded.

When everyone is teaching "how to become a super individual," whether it's about AI tools, startup guides, life fixes, or business advice, attention concentrates at the top. Early entrants get the meat, later ones get the broth, and those even later get nothing.

Another explanation is luck. Dan Koe hit the window of X's algorithm adjustment, the New Year emotional cycle, and the policy tailwind of Musk wanting to push long-form content. These three things combined produced 150 million views.

Change the person, change the timing, an article of the same quality might only get 1.5 million views.

An interesting point is that Dan Koe's article, because it was posted a few days early, doesn't qualify for X's $1 million content reward.

But he doesn't care. His business model doesn't rely on platform revenue sharing. The 150 million views have already served their purpose: letting more people know the name Dan Koe and funneling more people into the top of the funnel.

So, who will X's $1 million ultimately go to? According to the rules, it must be original long-form content, at least 1000 words, calculated based on homepage impressions for paying users.

Translation: You not only have to write well, but you also need to already have a large number of followers.

So, it will most likely go to top players.

This is the structure of the game. The platform needs top creators to prove "long-form content has a future," top creators need platform traffic to feed their funnel, 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?

Readers.

After reading "How to fix your entire life in 1 day," feeling inspired to become a super individual, then sharing, liking, bookmarking it, and continuing to scroll to the next post.