The email went out on August 19, 2024. "This has not been an easy decision," David Perell wrote to the Write of Passage community, "but it's necessary." The company was going to shut down at the end of the year. The next cohort running October 7 through November 13 would be the last.
For readers who discovered writing online through Perell's essays or his podcast How I Write, the announcement landed like news of a friend's retirement: unexpected, a little sad, and freighted with the question of what happens next to the people left behind. For the independent publishing world, it was something else a case study in what it costs to build something worth celebrating.
The Origin Story: A Terrible Student and a Course That Changed Everything
Before Write of Passage existed, David Perell described himself as "a terrible student." What changed was a course called Building a Second Brain, taught by Tiago Forte. It transformed how he processed information. Ideas that used to scatter now connected, and writing became the way he made sense of them.
That kind of shift is hard to keep to yourself. Perell started writing online and kept it up for three and a half years with nothing to sell. A weekly newsletter called Monday Musings. Essays that ran into the thousands of words. Someone who had found the thing that changed how he saw the world, and couldn't stop sharing it.
By November 2018, the audience was there. Perell tweeted a goal to help 1,000 people start writing in the coming year, and asked anyone interested to share their email. Within 24 hours, hundreds of people on every continent had responded, according to reporting at Josh Masters' analysis of the course's business model. The course came together quickly after that. Tiago agreed to co-create it. Tyler Cowen funded production through a grant. Perell flew to Mexico City for ten days of filming, and Write of Passage launched in April 2019 at $600 a student. Around 150 people enrolled, generating roughly $90,000. All organic. No paid acquisition of any kind.
The price went up 50% for the next cohort. Enrollment still climbed. Something was working.
What the Course Actually Built
Write of Passage was, at its core, a promise: transform from a passive consumer of information into an active creator who publishes consistently. The course covered the leverage of writing online, a system for capturing ideas so you never face a blank page, practical techniques for beating writer's block, how to write in a way that holds attention, how to build and connect with an audience, and how to use your writing as an introduction to interesting people in your industry.
The course description on Perell's site framed it as a results-focused alternative to how writing is taught in school. "In school we learned an outdated, ineffective method of writing," the materials state. "We were taught to follow an arbitrary set of requirements. Our teachers told us to pad our writing to reach a minimum length, and to use flowery vocabulary completely foreign to our everyday lives." Write of Passage would help students unlearn all that.
Underneath the curriculum was a philosophy that Perell called the "Mediocre Majority" problem the tendency of people to endlessly consume without ever producing. The course was designed to move students out of that category. "The content you produce will become an asset that you own," the description continues. "It will work for you 24/7, and become a magnet for like-minded people, interesting ideas, and career opportunities."
Students who came through the program reported significant shifts. "It got me over my biggest hurdle: fear of publishing," one graduate wrote in a testimonial on the official Write of Passage site. "In week one, I was scared to hit publish. By week five, it felt natural. I would not have gotten there without this program." Another wrote that the course "cured my intellectual loneliness and reminded me that the Internet isn't just bots and trolls and algorithms. There are real humans out there, full of curiosity and warmth and passion."
The Numbers Behind the Community
Over five years, Write of Passage became something Perell described as "the Four Seasons of writing instruction." Five-week cohorts running two or three times a year. Live sessions requiring hours of preparation. Trained editors delivering feedback within 24 hours on nearly half a million words of student writing per cohort.
The scale was remarkable. By the time of the final announcement, more than 2,000 writers from 72 countries had enrolled. Pricing ranged from $4,000 to nearly $9,000 at the top tier. Students came from companies like Google, Intel, and Twitter, according to a course review at Course Summaries.
Perell rejected investor money. He turned down paid advertising. He refused to build a self-paced version of the course. He avoided any form of product diversification that reduced what he called the "purity" of the experience. Each decision came from a genuine conviction about quality and mission. And it showed in the numbers that mattered most to him: the qualitative ones.
After a recent cohort, when students were asked about their experience, the phrase "life-changing" showed up 39 times in open responses. The program achieved a Net Promoter Score of 75 higher than Apple's. Alumni went from publishing their first article in the course to publishing books or growing newsletters to 100,000+ subscribers.
"Many writing programs promise to make you a better writer. Write of passage goes beyond to make you a better human. It didn't just unlock my pen, it changed my heart."
Ayomide Ofulue, Write of Passage graduate
The Gap Between Love and Sustainability
The announcement letter made the paradox explicit. "At the level of our mission, Write of Passage has been an astounding success," Perell wrote. "We've pushed the limits on what an online course can be." But then came the qualifier: "We've built something worth celebrating in every way, except for the economics of the business."
The first three years were roaring. The past two had been grueling. Growth had been particularly difficult, and Perell said he'd been feeling constrained by the bi-annual cohort model itself. "You need more than a great product to make a business work," he wrote, "and the main thing we were missing was a dependable flow of new students."
To keep the level of quality he was after, he had grown the team to 20 full-time employees and dozens of part-time staff. He built a state-of-the-art production studio in Austin. From a business perspective, he was doubling down on expenses and overheads that continued whether he was bringing in income or not.
The decisions that left the business exposed were the same ones that, at the time, made the product worth celebrating. The rejection of investor money meant no outside capital to smooth over lean periods. The refusal to advertise meant relying entirely on organic reach and word-of-mouth. The premium positioning meant a narrower pool of potential students. The cohort model meant the entire revenue engine ran on a seasonal calendar, with months between enrollment windows when no money came in.
Other creators have built multi-million-dollar businesses from the same subject. The market for premium writing education has been proven repeatedly. But Write of Passage had built something that required more to sustain than it could generate and Perell, who had originally started the course to subsidize his creative work, found that running the company had taken him away from that work entirely.
Why This Matters for Independent Publishers
The story of Write of Passage is instructive for anyone building an audience around writing, newsletters, or independent publishing not because it offers a replicable model, but because it reveals tensions that many creator-economists quietly navigate.
The course's value, as reviewers and alumni consistently noted, was in the structure, the accountability, and the cohort experience not in secret information. Much of the underlying philosophy was available free across Perell's essays and his podcast. The insistence that you gather ammunition from life more than staring at a blank screen. The idea that writing improves by publishing, not by perfecting in private first. The concept of a "personal monopoly" the framework for uniquely framing your expertise so it stands out in a crowded internet.
That raises an uncomfortable question for the independent publishing world: if the best content is already free, what justifies paying thousands for a course? The answer, according to everyone who went through Write of Passage, was community and momentum. "Typing alone at your desk can only get you so far," the course site explained. "Eventually, you're plagued with questions like: Is this essay any good? Is this idea even interesting? Or, What am I trying to say here? You won't find the answers by retreating to Walden Pond."
The course was designed to make writing social. Live instruction. A community of smart, ambitious peers. Detailed edits on everything you wrote. A personal editor who made sure you were proud of what you published. These were the things that turned a philosophy into a transformation.
Where It Stands Now
Write of Passage officially closed at the end of 2024. The final cohort ran its course through November. Enrollment had been opened earlier in the year with expanded scholarships and a lowered price for early enrollees a last chance to experience what alumni described as "magic."
Perell has said he is eager to return to his own writing and to How I Write, his podcast where he interviews writers about their creative processes. "I originally started Write of Passage to subsidize my creative work but the demands of running the company took me away from that," he wrote. "There are people who can do high-quality writing while running a company, but I'm not one of them. I think I can have a bigger impact doing something else."
He also hinted at a book though as of mid-2026, no publication date has been announced. The essays continue on his site, where he writes about business, education, and what it means to be a citizen of the internet. His newsletter reaches more than 70,000 subscribers. The Writing Examples collection, which curates examples of great prose from writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jerry Seinfeld, and John F. Kennedy, remains freely available.
The course materials themselves are gone. But the ideas survive in the work of the 2,000-plus writers who went through the program, in the free essays and podcast, and in the broader conversation about what it means to build a writing life online.
What the Legacy Leaves Behind
Write of Passage was not the first online writing course, and it won't be the last. But it established something that many subsequent programs have tried to replicate: a model where the course felt less like a class and more like a writers' retreat conducted over Zoom, with all the camaraderie and pressure that implies.
The course demonstrated that there was genuine demand for premium writing education not just for the techniques, but for the accountability structure and peer community that made those techniques stick. It showed that people would pay thousands of dollars for five weeks of intensive writing support, provided the experience lived up to the promise. And it showed, perhaps inadvertently, that the economics of that model are fragile when they depend on organic growth, seasonal enrollment windows, and a founder who needs to be everywhere at once.
For independent publishers and bloggers researching how to build an audience around their writing, the Write of Passage story offers both inspiration and caution. The inspiration is straightforward: writing online genuinely can change your life, your career, and your sense of intellectual community. The caution is subtler: building something that changes other people's lives doesn't automatically build a sustainable business. Those are separate skills, and they sometimes pull in opposite directions.
Perell chose to prioritize the mission over the business for as long as he could. The result was a program that its graduates still describe in terms usually reserved for religious experiences or coming-of-age moments. "Life-changing" appeared 39 times in a single round of post-cohort surveys. That kind of language doesn't appear around products that fail to deliver. It appears around things that mean something to the people who go through them.
Whether that constitutes success depends on what you think writing education is for. If the measure is revenue, Write of Passage ran out of money. If the measure is impact on individual writers, on their careers, on the broader culture of independent publishing the course may have outlasted its official closing date by a long time.
Where to Read Further
- The original Write of Passage course description, still archived on Perell's site, documents the philosophy and curriculum in his own words
- Perell's final cohort announcement letter, published August 19, 2024, explains the closure in his own voice
- The Course Summaries review offers a balanced assessment of what the course did well and where it fell short
- Josh Masters' business analysis traces the decisions that shaped both the product's strengths and its financial vulnerabilities
- Perell's main site continues to publish essays and maintain the Writing Examples collection