…mic drop emoji…this is what your $1k bought you!…for me (and something i will write and publish about in 2025) i think WOP’s greatest feature was community…it is hard to get strangers to read you, let alone converse, edit and give open feedback to you…that said quality is not guaranteed and as you note the skew towards certain communities representation was a limitation…i think anthropologically it was if nothing else a fascinating study in the type of people David attracts…lots of coaches, entrepreneurs, founders, a.i. enthusiasts…people from 100+ countries…in the end as is the case with most cohorts and classes and online products for online success i have seen the product itself teaches you someone else’s success story with the guise that their’s might work for you (see also Sarah Fay here on substack or the writer/editor you mention)…the hard truth about creating on the internet is that less than 1% of people can make a living doing this but greater than 50% of people try to…based on this math i am starting a cohort sometime next year that teaches people how to fail on the internet…i am calling it Wrong of Passage…i need to land on a price and am leaning towards one million in Fartcoin and/or an italian combo from my local deli whichever has more cultural cache at time of admissions…great read Rose…happy to know you!…
It was absolutely fascinating to see so many different kinds of people all together, I agree. And I did end up finding a little tribe to call my own too :)
You can't learn from someone's success in this age of algorithms it's true, but you sometimes can learn a lot from their failures!
"teaches you someone else’s success story with the guise that their’s might work for you"
This is a whole genre of linkedin post that I hate so much! these people have apparently no appreciation or awareness of how unique and idiosyncratic their individual experiences are... and how much luck was involved.
Damn. I’ve been trying to see it some other way but i agree with all these complaints. Pretty much mirrors my experience except I paid full price! I probably would not have published if I weren’t in the class but I’m still very unsure why I have published and why I’m planning to keep doing so.
I'm happy I'm not alone in that! It feels very strange sometimes to see some people just loved the course without any reservations. I'm sorry you paid so much, but I hope it'll keep you writing and publishing!
I also paid full price and feel jipped. I agree with a lot of Rose's feedback and, while I'm also ultimately glad I did WoP to kickstart my online writing journey, I couldn't recommend it to anyone else as advertised. If it were a more straightforward "Here's a writing club you pay ~$500 bucks to get into" I'd say sign me up and anyone else who wants in up.
I’m always surprised by how much non-native speakers unnecessarily worry about their English when, in fact, their English is near-perfect. Also, I’m sorry to read that WoP wasn’t a great experience; it sounds like your experience was very different from earlier cohorts. Fortunately, you already have skill in presenting ideas and keeping an essay interesting.
Thank you Leo. I guess the frustration comes from the fact that I have to work so hard for that near-perfect English. It takes a lot of thesaurus research, grammar checks and typo hunting before I get to that. Whereas my French is excellent as soon as the words hit the page!
Don’t call me a Karen, I was enraged by the type of comments you got from your editor. Editing was a huge draw of WOP for me, but halfway through I connected with lots of cool people that I forgot why I was there in the first place.
Writing became fun. I stopped questioning why I wrote, I just wanted to continue! But after the cohort reality hit and it’s hard to keep in touch, and I end up connecting with people who join post cohort courses. And that’s how we connected! Isn’t it ironic that we didn’t meet within Circle? Thinking back to Lily’s post… it’ll be nice if they facilitated connections instead of me having to go through messages and convos with people I clearly didn’t resonate with
Anyway I’m glad you wrote this and so happy that you are continuing to publish beyond WOP. ✨
Writing is so fun! I never thought I'd like it this much ahah...
Yes, Lily put it perfectly in her review, I wish they hadn't removed the group thing where they pair you with people, or that it was easier to find friends!
Typically, I don't thin kwe met during the course because we're on such different timezones we couldn't go to the same gyms :/
Thanks for your in depth perspectives. I think we were in a gym once, briefly, but heard about the quality engagement you made. You are living it out despite however many of the expectations not met.
Education is really hard to scale beyond, perhaps, the Dunbar number. Unless you have trained people who can work with lots of different kinds of ppl via the internet and who may never meet irl.
WoP started pre covid and hit the cohort based courses hype in 21-22. Some might argue it closed too soon. Others, too late.
Regardless, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to publish and meet all of you especially those who I still am interacting with like right now
Well said; I felt the same. I started leaving in-line edits, and I was surprised no one suggested people download Grammarly. I also decided to criticize ideas regardless of what we were told because not every idea is good. I paid $2400, and I don't regret it per se because I met many interesting people. WoP served as a self-selection mechanism for me to find intellectually serious people (and I did find several). I learned next to nothing from David and more from Harrison in the two sessions I've taken with him so far.
Thank you Radha! I'm happy to hear you've broken the rules ahah, and i'm a bit sad we didn't get to connect during the course. I love the work they put into making sure all timezones had gyms and sessions, but it's a bit sad we ended up so fragmented.
I'd love a round-up of the lessons you've learnt from Harrison once you're done (or more advanced) with your sessions. I hesitated with going with him but the price (and the lesson *i* just learned) stopped me for now ahah
Doing “full-stack” anything will take away from specialism. This is what I think happened in WoP. Techniques for writing craft are too different to distribution for a 5 week course to cover in depth – not to mention what this means from a brand ethos perspective (inc what the thing stands for and why).
I’d say could have benefitted from a bit of zooming in/shiny dime-ism 😂
As a disclaimer, I’m sure I’d be considered as one of those tech/salesy people so my opinion will be different there.
I’d have enjoyed reading about endo; but as with all of these things, overlap is partly luck.
Thank you Claire! The "full-stack" vs "specialized knowledge" is exactly the point i wanted to make!
I hope you didn't take the "salesy" bit too personally. For what matters i've been in a few group discussions with you and you always had interesting things to say. I haven't read your writing (yet, i'm on my way right after this comment), and i guess that's the other critique of the course: i found you interesting when you talked but was never shown your essays on Circle. It's half my fault for not reaching out specifically, but i still think it's a lost opportunity from the course organizers.
> I’d say could have benefitted from a bit of zooming in/shiny dime-ism 😂
Absolutely 🤣 I whipped this post up in a few hours, re-read it the next day and called it good to go! I wanted to post it because it felt wrong to only see super positive reviews everywhere, but i didn't want to put in the work to make it good ://
Hey Rose! Not at all, didn’t offend in the slightest – I think I just have a higher tolerance for what you were saying (possibly not a great thing). One of the biggest things I heard from a few women was that they got spoken over in breakout rooms. I didn’t have that problem myself (possibly luck, maybe experience at handling those situations) but I can see how that might have been a problem for some. Not linked to this course necessarily but sad all the same.
For the shiny dime point, I meant the overall course (full-stack is the opposite of shiny dime for most) – not your essay!
"mean French woman" strikes again! My favorite category of human. The way I laughed at so many of your phrases like "otherwise I would've died in the draft phase" or "so it was also full of dudes, except they were 20yo and therefore a lot dumber."
This is a super thorough review, and I'm happy(?) to see the other commenters echo what you say. You also bring up tons of extra points I hadn't thought of myself, like not really teaching us how to write online with specific advice on hyperlinks, using images, etc.
I'm glad I met you and so many others through WOP! And I think in a year, if we keep this momentum going, we may find that it was all worth it. At least for the discounted price we paid haha. But since I'm one of those tech bros with disposable income, I probably will find the full price tag worth it in a year as well.
I think i've reached the point where i've lived long enough to become the tech bro myself too ahah. I'm glad to be your favorite category of people :))
It is a bit 'shadenfreude' (if that's how it's written) to see so many other people echo my points. I'm glad because i feel less alone and less like a grumpy idiot, but also it's a bit sad to see so many of us feeling like we didn't get our money's worth.
You're very right to focus on the community we've built on top of it, i'm sure this will be worth it in the end!
Will always love the "it's time to bitch" types :))
Yeah I agree with you. For some reason we both thought we were totally alone in our disgruntled POV but then it turns out quite a lot of people think this way. And probably more so now that David Perell has come out saying 75% of his writing students write worse than AI lol. He indicted his own teaching/the value of his program with that.
spot on, Rose, every word. I really appreciate your taking the time to describe the WoP failings, it strikes me as brave and maybe simply useful to get really clear. Selfishly, I’m glad you went through it because otherwise I might not have found you on Substack.
Ohh thank you Ed! It's not really that brave or useful when the course is shut down, but I felt there needed to be at least one review on the internet that wasn't all glowing. I wish I'd seen this before I went in (and I still would've signed up, just with different expectations!).
I applaud you for the courage to stand up and say that you paid for one of these things, because honestly? A LOT of writers non-fiction and fiction-based do, get scammed, and stay quiet out of shame. That's a disservice to others because it means there is no stop sign for them to see if you don't speak out. For the record: you are a damn good writer, and honestly, I suspect that there is a storyteller in you.
…mic drop emoji…this is what your $1k bought you!…for me (and something i will write and publish about in 2025) i think WOP’s greatest feature was community…it is hard to get strangers to read you, let alone converse, edit and give open feedback to you…that said quality is not guaranteed and as you note the skew towards certain communities representation was a limitation…i think anthropologically it was if nothing else a fascinating study in the type of people David attracts…lots of coaches, entrepreneurs, founders, a.i. enthusiasts…people from 100+ countries…in the end as is the case with most cohorts and classes and online products for online success i have seen the product itself teaches you someone else’s success story with the guise that their’s might work for you (see also Sarah Fay here on substack or the writer/editor you mention)…the hard truth about creating on the internet is that less than 1% of people can make a living doing this but greater than 50% of people try to…based on this math i am starting a cohort sometime next year that teaches people how to fail on the internet…i am calling it Wrong of Passage…i need to land on a price and am leaning towards one million in Fartcoin and/or an italian combo from my local deli whichever has more cultural cache at time of admissions…great read Rose…happy to know you!…
Count me in! Wrong of Passage sounds amazing!!
It was absolutely fascinating to see so many different kinds of people all together, I agree. And I did end up finding a little tribe to call my own too :)
You can't learn from someone's success in this age of algorithms it's true, but you sometimes can learn a lot from their failures!
"teaches you someone else’s success story with the guise that their’s might work for you"
This is a whole genre of linkedin post that I hate so much! these people have apparently no appreciation or awareness of how unique and idiosyncratic their individual experiences are... and how much luck was involved.
The way I cackled at Wrong of Passage omg…please make this CansaFis!
Damn. I’ve been trying to see it some other way but i agree with all these complaints. Pretty much mirrors my experience except I paid full price! I probably would not have published if I weren’t in the class but I’m still very unsure why I have published and why I’m planning to keep doing so.
I'm happy I'm not alone in that! It feels very strange sometimes to see some people just loved the course without any reservations. I'm sorry you paid so much, but I hope it'll keep you writing and publishing!
…publish so i can keep reading you…
I also paid full price and feel jipped. I agree with a lot of Rose's feedback and, while I'm also ultimately glad I did WoP to kickstart my online writing journey, I couldn't recommend it to anyone else as advertised. If it were a more straightforward "Here's a writing club you pay ~$500 bucks to get into" I'd say sign me up and anyone else who wants in up.
Please write more! I like your designs a lot.
Please continue to write
I’m always surprised by how much non-native speakers unnecessarily worry about their English when, in fact, their English is near-perfect. Also, I’m sorry to read that WoP wasn’t a great experience; it sounds like your experience was very different from earlier cohorts. Fortunately, you already have skill in presenting ideas and keeping an essay interesting.
Thank you Leo. I guess the frustration comes from the fact that I have to work so hard for that near-perfect English. It takes a lot of thesaurus research, grammar checks and typo hunting before I get to that. Whereas my French is excellent as soon as the words hit the page!
The hard work you put in today will set you up for fluency tomorrow. I'm afraid there are no shortcuts. Keep up the great work! :)
Don’t call me a Karen, I was enraged by the type of comments you got from your editor. Editing was a huge draw of WOP for me, but halfway through I connected with lots of cool people that I forgot why I was there in the first place.
Writing became fun. I stopped questioning why I wrote, I just wanted to continue! But after the cohort reality hit and it’s hard to keep in touch, and I end up connecting with people who join post cohort courses. And that’s how we connected! Isn’t it ironic that we didn’t meet within Circle? Thinking back to Lily’s post… it’ll be nice if they facilitated connections instead of me having to go through messages and convos with people I clearly didn’t resonate with
Anyway I’m glad you wrote this and so happy that you are continuing to publish beyond WOP. ✨
Writing is so fun! I never thought I'd like it this much ahah...
Yes, Lily put it perfectly in her review, I wish they hadn't removed the group thing where they pair you with people, or that it was easier to find friends!
Typically, I don't thin kwe met during the course because we're on such different timezones we couldn't go to the same gyms :/
Thanks for your in depth perspectives. I think we were in a gym once, briefly, but heard about the quality engagement you made. You are living it out despite however many of the expectations not met.
Education is really hard to scale beyond, perhaps, the Dunbar number. Unless you have trained people who can work with lots of different kinds of ppl via the internet and who may never meet irl.
WoP started pre covid and hit the cohort based courses hype in 21-22. Some might argue it closed too soon. Others, too late.
Regardless, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to publish and meet all of you especially those who I still am interacting with like right now
Thank you Justin, I'm so glad to hear that. I think it's good that they are closing, it's truly hard to make such a course worth it and great for all!
I will be grateful forever that I took it and forced myself to get started too :))
Well said; I felt the same. I started leaving in-line edits, and I was surprised no one suggested people download Grammarly. I also decided to criticize ideas regardless of what we were told because not every idea is good. I paid $2400, and I don't regret it per se because I met many interesting people. WoP served as a self-selection mechanism for me to find intellectually serious people (and I did find several). I learned next to nothing from David and more from Harrison in the two sessions I've taken with him so far.
Thank you Radha! I'm happy to hear you've broken the rules ahah, and i'm a bit sad we didn't get to connect during the course. I love the work they put into making sure all timezones had gyms and sessions, but it's a bit sad we ended up so fragmented.
I'd love a round-up of the lessons you've learnt from Harrison once you're done (or more advanced) with your sessions. I hesitated with going with him but the price (and the lesson *i* just learned) stopped me for now ahah
A really interesting read!
Doing “full-stack” anything will take away from specialism. This is what I think happened in WoP. Techniques for writing craft are too different to distribution for a 5 week course to cover in depth – not to mention what this means from a brand ethos perspective (inc what the thing stands for and why).
I’d say could have benefitted from a bit of zooming in/shiny dime-ism 😂
As a disclaimer, I’m sure I’d be considered as one of those tech/salesy people so my opinion will be different there.
I’d have enjoyed reading about endo; but as with all of these things, overlap is partly luck.
Enjoyed the read!
Thank you Claire! The "full-stack" vs "specialized knowledge" is exactly the point i wanted to make!
I hope you didn't take the "salesy" bit too personally. For what matters i've been in a few group discussions with you and you always had interesting things to say. I haven't read your writing (yet, i'm on my way right after this comment), and i guess that's the other critique of the course: i found you interesting when you talked but was never shown your essays on Circle. It's half my fault for not reaching out specifically, but i still think it's a lost opportunity from the course organizers.
> I’d say could have benefitted from a bit of zooming in/shiny dime-ism 😂
Absolutely 🤣 I whipped this post up in a few hours, re-read it the next day and called it good to go! I wanted to post it because it felt wrong to only see super positive reviews everywhere, but i didn't want to put in the work to make it good ://
If you still want to read about endometriosis, here's the post: https://technofable.substack.com/p/i-hate-my-doctor-parents-for-not
I was going to say "Sorry for the self-promo" but you *are* in sales so i hope you get it :)
Hey Rose! Not at all, didn’t offend in the slightest – I think I just have a higher tolerance for what you were saying (possibly not a great thing). One of the biggest things I heard from a few women was that they got spoken over in breakout rooms. I didn’t have that problem myself (possibly luck, maybe experience at handling those situations) but I can see how that might have been a problem for some. Not linked to this course necessarily but sad all the same.
For the shiny dime point, I meant the overall course (full-stack is the opposite of shiny dime for most) – not your essay!
I’m off to read that endo one now!
"mean French woman" strikes again! My favorite category of human. The way I laughed at so many of your phrases like "otherwise I would've died in the draft phase" or "so it was also full of dudes, except they were 20yo and therefore a lot dumber."
This is a super thorough review, and I'm happy(?) to see the other commenters echo what you say. You also bring up tons of extra points I hadn't thought of myself, like not really teaching us how to write online with specific advice on hyperlinks, using images, etc.
I'm glad I met you and so many others through WOP! And I think in a year, if we keep this momentum going, we may find that it was all worth it. At least for the discounted price we paid haha. But since I'm one of those tech bros with disposable income, I probably will find the full price tag worth it in a year as well.
I think i've reached the point where i've lived long enough to become the tech bro myself too ahah. I'm glad to be your favorite category of people :))
It is a bit 'shadenfreude' (if that's how it's written) to see so many other people echo my points. I'm glad because i feel less alone and less like a grumpy idiot, but also it's a bit sad to see so many of us feeling like we didn't get our money's worth.
You're very right to focus on the community we've built on top of it, i'm sure this will be worth it in the end!
Will always love the "it's time to bitch" types :))
Yeah I agree with you. For some reason we both thought we were totally alone in our disgruntled POV but then it turns out quite a lot of people think this way. And probably more so now that David Perell has come out saying 75% of his writing students write worse than AI lol. He indicted his own teaching/the value of his program with that.
Let's rock 2025!
spot on, Rose, every word. I really appreciate your taking the time to describe the WoP failings, it strikes me as brave and maybe simply useful to get really clear. Selfishly, I’m glad you went through it because otherwise I might not have found you on Substack.
Ohh thank you Ed! It's not really that brave or useful when the course is shut down, but I felt there needed to be at least one review on the internet that wasn't all glowing. I wish I'd seen this before I went in (and I still would've signed up, just with different expectations!).
I applaud you for the courage to stand up and say that you paid for one of these things, because honestly? A LOT of writers non-fiction and fiction-based do, get scammed, and stay quiet out of shame. That's a disservice to others because it means there is no stop sign for them to see if you don't speak out. For the record: you are a damn good writer, and honestly, I suspect that there is a storyteller in you.
Thank you MP! It's so kind of you to say!
Hi Rose, I chuckled at "i listened actively to ideas like “how crypto is a gift from god”" lol There was A LOT of that in every cohort.
The community was always the best part of WOP, so I'm glad you joined Michael's community and that we crossed paths there!
I'm so so happy that Micheal's group has attracted a slightly different group! I don't think I'd go to the feedback gyms otherwise tbh 😅
The community is so awesome 🫶