The Library

Field Notes Vol. II · Publishing · 2026 The Library . Why publishing is your next YouTube - and why most business owners are still standing on the sidewalk with a megaphone. ~ 6 min read · For experts, operators &amp; owners A note before we start. I&rsquo;ve been inside Daniel Priestley&rsquo;s KPI accelerator at Dent for a few months now, working through the Key Person of Influence method as I run my own company. One of his frameworks - 7-11-4 - keeps showing up in how I think about content, authority, and what businesses actually own. This article is me applying it out loud. The thinking behind 7-11-4 belongs to Daniel and the Dent team. The application, the mistakes, and the analogies are mine. In 2007, a few teenagers started uploading videos from their bedrooms. Most adults thought they were wasting their time. By 2024, the top of them ran nine-figure businesses, sat down with presidents, and reached more humans on a Tuesday afternoon than CNN reaches in a month. What those creators figured out wasn&rsquo;t that videos were valuable. It was that a library of videos was valuable. They weren&rsquo;t making content. They were stacking assets. The same opening is now wide open for business owners. Most of you will miss it for the same reason most adults missed YouTube in 2010: you&rsquo;ll think it&rsquo;s about marketing. It&rsquo;s not. It&rsquo;s about ownership . The megaphone vs. the library Most business owners spend their lives running megaphones. A campaign goes out. People notice for a week. The campaign ends. You start a new one. You pay for it again. You shout again. The work doesn&rsquo;t accumulate - it evaporates. Publishing is different. Publishing is a library. Each article, each video, each podcast episode is shelved, indexed, searched, found. The piece you publish today is still earning trust five years from now, while you sleep, in a city you&rsquo;ve never been to. Same effort, different shelf. &ldquo;Marketing rents attention. Publishing builds an asset.&rdquo; Why this is the same window YouTube opened For most of business history, building a library was hard. You had to write a book - and most people don&rsquo;t write books. You had to film a documentary. You had to convince a publisher, an editor, a producer, a network. Distribution was guarded. Then YouTube quietly removed the gate. Then podcasting. Then LinkedIn for long-form. Then Substack. Then AI - which collapsed the cost of producing a polished piece from a weekend to an hour . The economics flipped. The cost of building a library went from prohibitive to almost zero. But here&rsquo;s the part most owners miss: Cost going to zero is not the opportunity. It&rsquo;s the warning. It means everyone can do it now. Which means in three years, the businesses without libraries will look uncompetitive - the way businesses without websites looked uncompetitive in 2010. Every YouTuber who made it had this curve. Every business that builds a library does too. YouTube didn&rsquo;t create more talented people. The talented people were already there - they just didn&rsquo;t have a stage. The platform unlocked them. That&rsquo;s exactly what is happening now for business owners. You have spent ten or twenty years collecting expertise that ninety-nine percent of your industry doesn&rsquo;t have. It lives inside your team&rsquo;s training calls. Your sales conversations. Your operations playbooks. Your private frustrations with what other companies get wrong. Right now, none of that knowledge leaves your building. Tomorrow, with the same effort it takes to write an internal memo, it can be on a public shelf - and a stranger eight thousand kilometers away can read it on a Tuesday morning, decide you are the smartest voice in your niche, and call your sales team. This is the opportunity. It is not &ldquo;create content.&rdquo; It is convert your expertise into a library . Most people will never write a thing Daniel says this often in the program, and the number lands harder every time I sit with it: only about one percent of social media users actually post. The other ninety-nine percent are watching. Scrolling. Reacting. Consuming what the one percent makes. That is not just a content statistic. It is a wealth statistic. A reputation statistic. A strategic statistic. The entire economy of attention is built on this asymmetry - a tiny minority producing for a vast majority who never produce a thing in return. Last week in London, I was having coffee with my wife in a small Turkish caf&eacute; near Harrods. I was telling her about a strange trend I had been watching - searches for old iPods are climbing. Not nostalgia. Not retro fashion. A quiet generational shift, especially among teenagers, away from infinite-scroll devices and back toward something that does only one job: play music. Less noise. More signal. Fewer chances to slip from what you actually want into whatever the algorithm decided you should want next. While I was making the point, a Rolls Royce stopped outside the caf&eacute;. A girl about fourteen years old got out, walked in, ordered, and sat a few tables from us. In her hand: an old iPod. Wired headphones. An album playing on a small grey screen. I could not have scripted it. That iPod was a small, deliberate act of producing the conditions for her own attention instead of letting an algorithm produce them for her. Choosing signal. Choosing focus. Choosing not to drown. Writing is the same act for business owners. The other ninety-nine percent will keep scrolling - through your competitors&rsquo; libraries, through their videos, their articles, their podcast clips - and slowly form the opinion that those competitors are the smartest voices in your niche. Meanwhile your expertise stays trapped inside your office walls, unseen. The cost of being in the ninety-nine is not zero. It compounds quietly against you, every week. Writing has been a forgotten craft for a decade. Video took the spotlight. Then short video. Then shorter video. But the people who quietly kept writing built moats nobody else could see - searchable, citable, indexable, durable. The pendulum is swinging back. The tools have caught up. The audience is hungry for signal again. &ldquo;Most people are 99-percenters by default. Choosing to write is choosing to be in the 1%.&rdquo; The starting library: 7 · 11 · 4 Here&rsquo;s a number that feels small until you realize what it produces. Seven hours of content. Eleven touchpoints. Four platforms. Spread across twelve months, that&rsquo;s about thirty-five minutes a week. A board meeting&rsquo;s worth of time. Done seriously, that&rsquo;s a library that works for the next decade. One method at the centre. Eight ways it shows up. A library, not a campaign. Most business owners produce more &ldquo;marketing&rdquo; than this in a single quarter and have nothing on the shelf to show for it. Same effort. Different shelf. Three kinds of publisher. Pick yours. The strategy depends on what you sell. There are three doors here too. Three businesses, three uses for the same shelf. The Expert - library as reputation Consultants. Coaches. Advisors. Specialists. People hire you because they trust you, and trust is built by reading you, watching you, listening to you long before anyone fills out a contact form. The library does the convincing. The sales call becomes a confirmation, not a pitch. The Operator - library as the niche Manufacturers. Retailers. E-commerce. Software. People searching &ldquo;how to choose a [your product category]&rdquo; should land on your guide, your video, your scorecard. Not a competitor&rsquo;s. Not a generic comparison site. Yours. The library converts buyers who don&rsquo;t yet know they should buy from you. The Service - library as the filter Agencies. Professional services. The wrong-fit clients self-disqualify after reading you. The right-fit clients arrive convinced. Your sales team stops persuading and starts confirming. The library does the unpaid work of separating the two. · · · What to do this week Reading this changes nothing. The library only exists once you put a book on the shelf. Pick one question. The single thing your customers ask you most often. Not the most interesting. The most repeated. Answer it in writing. A thousand words. One afternoon. AI handles the typing if speaking is faster than writing for you. Publish it. On a platform you own. Your blog first, then LinkedIn, then anywhere else. Don&rsquo;t wait for it to be perfect. Shelved beats polished. One question. One afternoon. One book on the shelf. Repeat fifty times and you have a library most of your competitors will never build. Three things you&rsquo;re telling yourself right now &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not a writer.&rdquo; Neither are most YouTubers. The medium has been rewritten. If you can talk for ten minutes about your industry, you have a 1,500-word article. AI now does the part that used to scare people. The barrier was never writing - it was thinking clearly. You already do that for a living. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t have time.&rdquo; You&rsquo;re already producing this content. It&rsquo;s in your sales calls, your team trainings, your client emails, your investor decks. You aren&rsquo;t adding work. You&rsquo;re routing existing work to a public shelf instead of letting it die in someone&rsquo;s inbox. &ldquo;My niche is too small.&rdquo; YouTube proved the opposite. Smaller niches are easier to dominate, more loyal once won, and increasingly more valuable as algorithms get better at matching them. &ldquo;Best window-coverings retailer software&rdquo; is a small audience. So is the competition. That&rsquo;s the entire point. One last thing In ten years, every meaningful business in your niche will have a library. The question isn&rsquo;t whether you&rsquo;ll build one. The question is whether you start now - when most of the shelves in your category are empty - or in 2032, when your competitor&rsquo;s name is already on the spine of every relevant book. YouTubers who started in 2010 own what they built. The ones who started in 2020 are still climbing. The ones who start in 2030 are mostly background noise. Same window. Same urgency. Same rules. Pick one question. Answer it. Shelve it. That&rsquo;s the whole game. The library starts with one book. The decade starts with this week. - field notes vol. ii · the library The 7-11-4 method - 7 hours of content, 11 touchpoints, 4 platforms - was developed by Daniel Priestley and is taught inside the Dent KPI accelerator . I&rsquo;m a student of the program, not the source of the framework. If this resonated, the original work goes deeper than any one article can: dent.global .