David Perell

David Perell is an American writer and educator best known as the founder of Write of Passage, a cohort-based online course that teaches people to write online and build an audience. Sometimes called the writing guy, he also hosts the How I Write podcast and YouTube show, where he interviews novelists, essayists and founders about their craft.

Perell studied media studies at Elon University in North Carolina and has said school was a poor fit. In 2016 he moved to New York for a sales job at an advertising agency and was laid off after seven months. In 2017 he started publishing independently full-time with Monday Musings, a weekly email of things he had learned, which grew into essays on media, culture and technology. He also hosted the North Star Podcast, which passed 250,000 downloads by 2023, and popularised the idea of building a personal monopoly online.

In November 2018 he pitched a writing course, and he built it with Tiago Forte, the creator of Building a Second Brain. The first Write of Passage cohort ran in April 2019. The course grew through Twitter and word of mouth: by 2023 more than 1,600 students from 68 countries had taken it, the company employed 21 people and more than 30 editors reviewed student work, with prices from about $4,000 to $10,000. On the Indie Hackers podcast Perell said the course brings in a couple of million dollars in revenue a year.

Today Perell runs Write of Passage from New York and spends much of his time on How I Write, long interviews with authors such as Dean Koontz, Harlan Coben and Pulitzer winner Paul Harding. He has close to half a million followers on X and still sends Monday Musings and Friday Finds by email.

Perell matters to the creator economy because Write of Passage helped define the cohort-based course boom, and a large share of today's online writers and newsletter founders, including Packy McCormick of Not Boring, passed through it.