My 2025 Annual Review

Despite all these positive signals, there were also some negative ones as well:

• Our average clickthrough rate (a measure of how many people see our thumbnails and decide to click on them) was 4.3%, which is low compared to a target benchmark for best-in-class educational channels of around 8%.
• Although we gained a lot of subscribers, the percentage of returning viewers (which I’m learning is far more important than subscribers) was down 27% due to our changed focus on B2B content that wasn’t relevant to most subscribers.
• Average Percentage Viewed, a measure of how long people watch on average, was down slightly from 24% to 20% (this was partly due to our videos becoming quite a bit longer, but is also worrisome as it’s one of the main numbers that the algorithm looks for).

Most of these negative signals can be attributed to a pivot we made mid-year to B2B-centric AI topics, to support the launch of our Second Brain Enterprise program. That sharp shift in focus led to a lot of churn, confusion, and aversion from our typical viewership. More on that below.

In light of all this, we’re doubling down on YouTube yet again and strengthening the foundation for next year by increasing our publishing cadence to weekly as of this past October. In 2024, we released 31 videos, in 2025 it was 37, and in 2026 we’re aiming for around 46-48. It’s taken us several years to slowly build up the team and the capability to move at this speed, but I’m expecting the higher cadence to give us more opportunities to learn, iterate, and double down on what’s working. 

Website, blog, and email list

The picture for our older ecosystem – which I think of as our website, blog, and email list working together – is less positive.

Part of it is that I’m writing much less on the blog, having released only 21 articles in 2025. That’s partly because I have less time overall since becoming a father, and partly because any concentrated writing time I do have goes to writing books now. 

But a major external factor is that the landscape of online attention is rapidly changing. Blogs are all but dying in the face of competition from algorithmic platforms and Substack. And SEO is being undermined by LLMs that stop people from even searching for things in the first place by giving them the straight up answer.

The blog still attracted 952k visits in 2025, though that is 25% less than the year before. The U.S. accounts for 38% of our website visitors, but we saw an 80% increase from China, which I assume is due to my books being released there. LLMs already account for 3.5% of all visitors, despite the fact that we haven’t done anything to optimize or encourage that. I can see in the coming years AI coming to dominate how people find content online.

Lead magnets are also becoming much less effective, I assume because AI now allows you to create something similar in seconds. Every single source of traffic to our website shows a 40-94% decline in subscription rates, regardless of whether traffic went up or down. This means that organic email subscriptions are way down over the last few years: from 237 per day in 2022 to 115 per day in 2025, a 50% drop. We’re becoming more dependent on “events” such as webinars, viral YT videos, and partnerships and having to work harder to convince people to join our newsletter.

Despite those headwinds, 63k people subscribed to our newsletter this year, representing a 4.23% subscription rate. Once they’re there, engagement is strong, with 48.6% open rates and 3.8% click rates.

Incredibly, in 2025 the average time someone was on our email list before purchasing was only 3 days, which reveals that they don’t necessarily need a lot of nurturing first. The smaller number of people who sign up are also more committed. The total conversion rate from our email list to all products was a healthy 2.75% – which means 1 in 36 people who join our email list end up buying something.

Second Brain Enterprise

This was the big one this year. In last year’s goal-setting, I had a vague intention of launching some kind of AI course in 2025, but had no idea at the time what it would look like. I was open to serendipity, and that serendipity arrived when I met a serial entrepreneur named Hayden Miyamoto who happened to live in the same small town in Mexico. We connected over paddle tennis, and the idea was born out of our shared obsession with AI.

We committed to a 6-month experiment: we would teach 3 cohorts of a brand-new program that we’d create from scratch based on our experience, research, and experimentation. It would be designed for business owners and leaders, prioritize implementation and practical results, and be priced at a level that would make it a significant business investment.

I can now say that that experiment was wildly successful, with almost 200 participants from more than 150 companies having completed the program.

It was so successful, in fact, that it created a bit of an identity crisis for me. It made sense to run the first few cohorts through our existing team and infrastructure at Forte Labs, but for it to reach its potential, we realized it needed its own team, its own infrastructure, and actually a whole new company completely centered on this market. So Hayden has started a new company, EMPOWER Labs, to do just that, and I’ll no longer be involved with it.

This was a difficult decision, but there were many valuable lessons I learned through this collaboration:

• Long-term joint ventures don’t suit me. I don’t like coordinating with another co-founder to reach consensus on decisions, even if they are perfectly reasonable and aligned with my values. I originally became self-employed to maximize my autonomy and creative freedom, and that continues to be my main priority today.
• I realized that although B2B implementations of AI interest me, it isn’t where my experience and expertise are rooted. I haven’t started and don’t run multiple profitable businesses, and therefore didn’t see myself as the best leader for a program designed to serve those needs.
• Through creating this new program, I discovered anew how strong my personal brand is, how much trust people place in me, and how valuable BASB is as a brand and ecosystem perfectly positioned as a stepping stone into the world of AI. But all of that trust and reputation wasn’t built on B2B positioning, and I saw that I’d have to largely abandon much of what I’ve built in order to pursue this new direction, and wasn’t willing to do that.
• I saw how effective a sales team can be, and how feasible it was to recruit, onboard, and train facilitators for the cohorts. These are things Hayden does routinely. But I had never seen so many key functions handed off to new people so quickly and effectively. In the first 3 cohorts, we had 5 separate facilitators, an eye-opening example of the power of delegation. I plan on replicating this model in the future to make cohort-based education more sustainable for me.
• I saw clearly the tangible benefits of a high price point. It benefitted us, by making the customer service burden small and profitability high. But I’m certain it also benefitted our customers, as it inspired such a higher level of commitment from them and their teams.

An underlying doubt I’ve had over the last few years is what education and training would look like in the AI era. So many people have declared the “death of content” or the “death of courses” and I think I bought in a little too much into that doomsday perspective. Second Brain Enterprise demonstrated for me that there’s more need than ever for education around how to use AI effectively, and showed how coaching, interaction, community, and implementation can all serve as moats and differentiators in this new era.

Most of all, I saw that in order to fully pursue this new market, I’d have to dramatically change my focus, what I was working on, my goals and incentives, and I wasn’t willing to do that. I value the total freedom and eclectic mix of random projects I currently pursue too much. That was a valuable realization in itself.

However, I still believe in the program and am confident it’s going to be better than ever. It’s essentially Second Brain principles, infused and leveraged by AI, and applied at a company level – capturing, organizing, and leveraging organizational knowledge the same way individuals do with personal knowledge.

Cohort 4 launches on January 26th, 2026. I’m an affiliate and advocate, and encourage you to join!

Pivoting BASB toward AI

Every few months, I revisit and update the numbers related to my book sales, and every time I do, I come to a new appreciation of what an area of strength this is.

Building a Second Brain has now sold 400,000 copies worldwide, an amazing milestone that I can barely wrap my head around. It continues to sell about 115,000 copies per year (9,500 per month, 2,200 per week) like clockwork. As time goes by, this is increasingly an outlier, indicating that it’s becoming a “category of one” driven by word-of-mouth. Such a book is more like a business asset than a piece of content, and will likely reach half a million copies sold sometime in 2026.

I find myself in the incredible position of standing at the edge of the breaking AI wave, with a sizable audience of early adopters, and a brand and ecosystem built around the “second brain,” a name that seems like it was destined for AI like no other. Everything that’s happening with AI seems like the perfect continuation and expansion of what I was trying to accomplish with my book, except now far more leveraged and accessible.

In 2026, I plan on creating another cohort-based program, this time centered on the needs of individuals – professionals, freelancers, creators, entrepreneurs, and executives who are adopting AI deeply into how they think and work. In other words, we’re going to officially pivot BASB to be AI-first, and do our best to create a curriculum that democratizes this technology and way of working, the same way we did for Personal Knowledge Management.

More to come soon!

Life in Perspective book

I’m in the home stretch of this project, which has dominated my time for the last two years and especially 2025.

It’s been a more challenging project than I expected. There are a number of tricky framing and positioning issues, such as the connotation of “annual reviews” as being about performance reviews at work, which most people hate. I’ve had a few crises of faith, where I doubted whether this book was really needed in the world or had something truly unique to offer. 

In contrast to BASB, which was introducing a new methodolgy, annual life reviews are largely about tried-and-true methods that have been around a long time. My contribution is fourfold: 

1. To make it more emotion-centered, embodied, and intuitive, rather than strictly analytical
2. To add technology to the process as an enabling force
3. To center it on an appreciative lens that values what’s good, rather than what’s missing
4. To create a community of practice where people can learn from and with each other, enabled by the Internet

This book also represents a diversification of the topics I’m associated with, including goal setting, visualization, gratitude, presence, intuition, long-term planning, and even spirituality. There are pros and cons to this kind of diversification, I’m learning. On YouTube, for example, mixing so many topics together on one channel may send confusing signals to the algorithm as certain groups are turned off by topics they’re not interested in. 

But ultimately, I believe that annual life reviews are a powerful force for good in the world, I think many more people can and should take advantage of them, and AI is going to make them radically more doable and useful. And the upsell from the book to the live program, which we’ll continue to offer annually, I’m confident will become a pillar of the business. 

For now, the most surprising development has been using a platform called HelpThisBook.com. It allows you to upload a manuscript, and then invite “beta readers” to leave comments and reactions in a simple interface. We invited 600 participants in the current Annual Review 2026 program to share their feedback on it, and so far over 500 of them have done so, leaving over 3,200 reactions and comments across 21,000 reading sessions, which is just remarkable. 

This would be totally overwhelming to review and absorb, except for the fact that most of those are simple emoji reactions (including “I like this,” “This is confusing,” “This part is slow,” and “This is useful”). There are some sentences with 20+ positive reactions, which tells me clearly that the idea is resonating and should be emphasized more or moved earlier in the book. This kind of data is priceless for an author, and will dramatically shape how the book is written and marketed.

2026 Projects

Here is the full range of projects we’re considering taking on in 2026: