Ship 30 For 30 vs. Write of Passage
There are many online writing courses, but the two most dominant (in my orbit at least) are Write of Passage and Ship 30 For 30.
Here my comparison of the two. First, an overview of both programs. Second, an outline of what is included in each and what you are required to invest (money, time and publishing platform. Third, my experiences both positives and negatives for each course and finally my recommendation. Enjoy!
What qualifies me to write this article?
I started my online writing journey exactly one year ago. And I started it by enrolling in Write of Passage (Cohort 6). I also took part in WoP 7 and I will be back as a Steward (help with student feedback and editing) for WoP8.
In May 2021 I took part in my first Ship30 cohort and I have done 4 so far as well as Write the Ship (now ‘The Captain’s Table). I was also an Alumni Captain in the Jan ‘22 cohort (again peer support).
My aim is to provide you with an objective overview of the two courses first and then add in my experience. If at any point, you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
What is Write of Passage?
WoP is a cohort-based long-form writing course.
It doesn’t teach you writing as a craft, but seeks to enable you to embrace the possibility of becoming a digital writer. This could be for professional purposes, to showcase your work, a very personal reflective endeavour as well as for people trying to break into a new industry.
Through a 5-week program, you are supported to develop your own digital writing framework. You will meet people who are starting out just like you as well as some seasoned writers. There is no specific topic or niche that WoP caters for. People taking this course come from across the world.
The framework of WoP is that you have weekly assignments to complete (different essay questions) and through that you are building a base to launch your online writing career.
Your assignments are reviewed by your peers as well as WoP staff and volunteers (like me as a Steward), ensuring you get feedback on each piece you put out there. How you answer the essay prompts is completely up to you. Some people use it for professional development, others to explore something very personal to themselves.
If you follow all the assignments, you will end up with a personal website, your first pieces of content for the site as well as a newsletter (digital postcard). WoP is very much a starting point for your journey as an online writer.
What is Ship 30 For 30?
Ship30 is a cohort-based short-form writing course.
Ship30 focuses on teaching you how people consume written content these days and how you need to adapt to this as an author. Ship30 is not looking at writing style as such, more about tools and tricks to grab the digital reader’s attention and gather data points to understand what people want to read from you.
Ship30 is 30 days of one atomic essay (short form ~250 words) per day.
You publish your work on Twitter and the Ship30 cohort (or any other reader) engages with your content (or not!). Point being that you can quickly write your piece and gather data, i.e. feedback in terms of comments, retweets and likes. For example, you could spend 30 minutes writing your piece, shipping it and within the next half hour you have some initial feedback on it.
The atomic essays and where you publish them are a small enough investment that you can try out different formats, topics and formatting styles to ‘test the waters’ and see what people resonate with.
The Ship30 framework enables you to write whatever you want, whether it be for professional use or for personal. With each cohort getting bigger (so far) the diversity in writers grows too and Ship30 is a truly global community.
Investment
Money
Ok, this is the big one that gets associated with WoP. It is a multiple of the upfront cost of Ship30. And it is also the thing I hear most people mention as to why they have not signed up for WoP yet. My argument here is not to look at how much the price is as a cost, but as an investment. Having said that, let’s find out below, if it is ‘worth’ it?
(For current pricing please check the respective websites).
Time
Both courses are around the 5-week mark. Both offer some ‘onboarding’ in terms of videos and onboarding calls (but more about that later).
In terms of time spent whilst doing the course, you can make it as big or as small as you want of course. Obviously, you will get more out of it, the more you put in.
But, in my opinion, WoP requires the bigger time investment.
Ship30 is a daily commitment, which takes most people about 30+mins to write the essay, some 15mins to edit and then you spend as much time as you want engaging with other shippers. The more you engage, the more people will engage with your writing.
Write of Passage has 1-2 assignments per week (mostly one written and one to build your online platform). These are longer form pieces and require you to spend several days of drafting, writing and editing. Also, you should spend time every day reviewing other people’s writing. The more you review others’ work the more they will do it for you.
Publishing Platforms
Writing and editing for your WoP assignments is all done on Google Docs.
However, as part of the assignments, you are encouraged to design your own personal online home (website or blog) as well as a newsletter. There are multiple options to do this for free as well as some services that even combine the two, such as Substack. But you can equally go all out and purchase your personal URL, create your own blog and separate newsletter delivery system. I chose the latter, using Squarespace and Convertkit.
Ship30 uses the free system of Twitter for publishing. Writing your essays is mostly done using Typeshare or Figma. There are Pro versions to upgrade to, but both time and money investments are smaller for this aspect of Ship30 compared to WoP.
Support Material
Looking at the support structure that the courses offer you, both WoP and Ship30 offer similar systems. As of this writing, both cohorts are primarily using Circle for their internal communications and where the cohort interacts with one another.
A sidenote here is that since Ship30 is heavily focused on Twitter, there is some ambiguity as to which platform people use to build relationships and exchange within the cohort. WoP is solely using Circle.
When you sign up for WoP you will be invited to a short onboarding call with one of the key staff members and a small group of your peers. You will also be granted access to some onboarding videos and additional resources (as well as the Circle community of course).
The material that is released before the WoP cohort kicks off officially, is aimed at getting some basic frameworks set up. Such as your website and also one of the most important elements of the WoP philosophy: your note-taking system.
WoP is the partner course to Building a Second Brain (which I have also taken), and it does an excellent job at distilling the main elements of how to take notes to repurpose and reference your writing. However, this is not a separate note-taking course (WoP focuses on Evernote; I am a Notion devotee but the material is still applicable).
In this part of WoP I learned about both Readwise and Otter. If you are not using either one, do yourself a favour and fix that right now (10x productivity and reference hacks!).
Similarly, Ship30 has an onboarding week, with calls and a daily release of additional videos and material to get you prepared for the 30 days of publishing daily.
The videos focus on both practical elements of how to pin a tweet, thread writing as well as hot to use typeshare. But the real gem here is the material on how to shift your thinking to become a digital writer in the age of people reading on their phones and the sheer volume of competition you are trying to break into.
The onboarding week is when the ship30 “buzz” is most tangible. People get really excited about the upcoming challenge and the material does an excellent job at preparing you for what is to come.
My Experience
As I said before, you get out what you put in.
Both WoP and Ship30 can fill your whole day for the duration of the cohort. In particular WoP often feels like you are taking on another full-time job at times, although one that pays in fun-coin (if you can come up with a good logo, we could start another crypto rocket).
Ok, but now for my experiences.
The Positives
Write of Passage
Starting with WoP. The number one thing that makes WoP the superior experience is: mentor groups.
The structure of the course is two live lectures with David for the five weeks as well as some writing gym sessions, called ‘CrossFit for Writing’. Each of these have breakout groups, which are fun. But for me living in Europe, the live sessions are a no-no as they are around 1am.
But, we also have mentor groups. Those are five sessions, one a week, where a WoP alumni takes on a sub-group of ‘students’ and supplements the weekly material with their own unique experience/ outlook on writing online. Some groups are more subject based, others for people who have published consistently online for a while, others might be more about writing craft.
The beauty is you get to go to them all if you want, see which ones fit you best (incl days/time that they run) and then immerse yourself in them.
(For anyone here who is a fan of the movie Kingsman, they are “f*cking spectacular”).
I cannot hype them enough. The mentors are amazing, each session is filled with breakout rooms and over the weeks you get to know your fellow writers that much more.
Next, is actually looking at who signs up for WoP. Now, this is not discriminating anyone or judging, but from my experience, WoP seems to have a higher retention rate. Meaning people who sign up, stay with the program.
Even if some folk do not do the assignment, the community is so strong that you stay around, still help others and just do the next one.
Then there are the lessons, both video recorded and live ones. David Perell is a master at his craft.
I have learned so much about structure and focusing on the ‘shiny dime’ of a piece.
And the last thing I want to mention is the legacy of WoP.
First up, the people I have met. Apart from talking to some really interesting folk who also gave me great feedback and whose writing I enjoyed, the main takeaway is: I have made friends for life in WoP.
I talk to some of them every week still. New opportunities keep arising for us to meet and work together. Case in point: I am now part of a fiction writing group made up of WoP alumnis, how cool is that? And every cohort you meet new people and connect with old ones. Now some of them are mentors in WoP8 and other Stewards alongside me, super exciting!
No matter what others say, I love having a website. I had to push myself really hard to launch it. It felt silly, arrogant and pointless. But I still did it.
Then I was asked to start a newsletter. Even more ridiculous!
But the newsletter has been the single best thing I started in 2021.
It has kept my writing cadence up, it meant I had an accountability group and I had a group that gave me feedback on what I should write about next. I have only missed one week (in 46 weeks) due to a holiday, but I am ok with it.
WoP changed my life and it was worth every penny, dime or gold doubloon.
Ship30
I did not know what to expect, and I was blown away!
First up, the videos that Nicholas Cole makes as part of the teachings for Ship30 are amazing! His insights into how to respond to the digital reader, little tactics that work better and why, formatting, thread writing, rate of revelation. All amazing! (I wrote a thread on this here).
Then there is the community of writers. I have met so many amazing people during Ship30. People from all walks of life, some who just started out writing at age 70 as well as some young College students. People from Australia, Africa and even one guy who lives on a boat (you know who you are Dave!).
The daily writing cadence is also incredibly helpful to get you into this life-changing habit.
Coupled with this is the instant feedback. It can be hard at times, as you love a piece you wrote and you get no feedback, but that is part of listening to the data.
However, most of the time, people learn to listen to the data and what you see is an increase in engagement over time, which fuels your writing. Once the flywheel starts spinning, it is hard to stop again.
One thing I love about the cohorts is also the incredibly vast ranging topics people tackle in Ship30. I have learnt a lot just reading the essays. And often when you leave a comment or ask someone to dive deeper into one, they will do it. It is ‘just’ another atomic essay.
The Negatives
Write of Passage
To be honest, the biggest one for me is the timing of the live sessions.
They are recorded, but I would love to join in with the whole cohort, but 1am as a working father is not on. David, you listening?
Ship30
Over the last four cohorts I have seen the group size grow substantially.
And that is only natural. People come back for another round, more new people sign up, etc. But what happens is that it gets harder and harder to see who is part of it. 1,100 essays per day (at least at the start) just feels too much.
As an alumni captain what I have seen now is also people being disillusioned with what they should expect in terms of engagement. They come in, 20-50 followers on Twitter start shipping in some obscure niche and complain that no is engaging. And they point the finger at the system as it promised results.
It is not that Ship30 is making false promises, but people misunderstand the message and that needs fixing.
As mentioned above: Circle vs Twitter. You are encouraged to engage with others on Twitter, but also check in on Circle? It got confusing and needs streamlining.
Lastly, for someone who has done Ship30 a few times, it gets a bit wearisome to hear the same 5-step self-help process 9 times a day. Not sure how to fix it, but something I have picked up from others also.
My Recommendation
Do both!
They are two very different courses. If you are tight for funds, just go with Ship30. You will learn a ton! Cole and Dickie are fantastic at understanding how to be successful at writing online. The course material is amazing, the community is superb and it is super fun to engage with everybody. I have also made some friends that have lasted longer than a cohort, and I will always be thankful for meeting them.
Having said that, WoP will just hold that special place in my heart. And if I could do only one, it would be WoP.
Why?
For one it is the framework building that has set me up as a digital writer now. Sorry Ship30 guys, but I love my blog. I am not out here out to make money with it just enjoying my personal little library.
But more importantly to me has been that through the mentor groups, I have forged deeper connections with more writers. And those connections have blossomed into real friendships. And when I started out writing online, that was what I was really after.
If you are interested in joining one of the upcoming Ship30 cohorts, you can support my online writing journey by using this link.
