How I got paid for free guides I wrote about an AI tool
Yes, companies pay for free content. Last month Zo Computer, the company behind the AI computer I use every day, licensed a set of beginner guides I had published for free, to use as direct inspiration for their official tutorials. The guides stay free. My name stays on them. And I got paid enough that I now treat public documentation as a real income source instead of a hobby.
This is the full story, plus the exact steps to do it with whatever tool you use.
What exactly did they pay for?
The collection is Zo Computer 101: the field guide, sixty-six plain-English walkthroughs of Zo Computer: how to set up an account, what the AI agent can actually do, where beginners get stuck, and what breaks along the way. I wrote them because I was using the tool constantly and nobody had written the guide I wished existed when I started.
I published them publicly, under my own name, free to read, no login.
Then someone on the team noticed them. Conversations happened. The deal got done because the work already existed in public with my name on it. No pitch, no application, no cold email.
I’m not going to tell you the number. It was significant enough to change how I treat this kind of writing. That’s all I’ll say about the money.
Why would a company pay for guides anyone can read for free?
Three reasons, and they apply to any software company, not just this one.
Operational detail is scarce. There are a thousand “getting started with AI” articles written by people who barely use the tools. What a company cannot buy anywhere else is detail from somebody who runs their product daily: what breaks, what the docs leave out, what a real workflow looks like after months of use.
Licensing finished work is cheaper than commissioning it. A company that commissions tutorials from scratch pays for drafts, revisions, and misses. My guides were already written, already tested against the live product, and already read by real users. The risk was gone before the deal started.
Public work is pre-vetted. Companies would rather license writing that already has readers than gamble on something cold. Publishing for free felt like working without pay. It was actually the portfolio.
How do you get paid for writing about tools you use?
Here is the repeatable version. You need one tool you genuinely use and a place to publish. No credentials, no audience, no permission.
- Pick the software you already rely on. Daily use is the moat. You cannot fake operational knowledge and you cannot research your way to it.
- Write the guide you needed on day one and couldn’t find. That gap is your proof there’s demand.
- Include the failures. The error messages, the dead ends, the workarounds. They’re the part that proves you actually did the thing, and they’re what people search for.
- Publish under your real name on a site you control. Search engines, AI assistants, and the company itself all need to be able to find it and attribute it to you.
- Repeat until it’s a body of work. One guide is a blog post. Fifty guides is an asset a company can license.
- Be findable. A contact link next to the work is the entire sales infrastructure this required.
The money doesn’t always arrive from where you expect. Sometimes it’s the company itself. Sometimes it’s clients who found you through the guide. Sometimes it never comes, and the writing still taught you the tool better than any course would.
Where does AI fit in this?
I wrote sixty-six guides while working alone, and AI agents are the reason that was possible. They drafted, restructured, and checked the work. Then every claim got verified against the live product before publishing, and every sentence got edited until it sounded like me. The volume came from the machines. The judgment stayed mine.
That second half is the part that made the work worth licensing. If you publish unverified AI output under your name, you’re borrowing credibility you haven’t earned, and one wrong walkthrough burns it. Publish verified work and the same tools make you several times more productive than the writer next to you. Tie your name to your work and let the quality bar be the thing people remember.
FAQ
Do you need a big audience to license your content?
No. I had no email list for these guides and no sponsorship deals. The company found the work itself because it was public, indexed, and useful. Discoverability mattered; follower count didn’t.
How do companies find free guides to license?
The same ways users do: search engines, AI assistants that cite sources, and community spaces where their users ask questions. Publish where those systems can crawl, use the product’s real name in your writing, and answer the questions beginners actually type.
Can you use AI to write guides and still get paid for them?
Yes, if you verify everything before it ships. AI handles drafting and volume; you supply the daily product experience, the fact-checking, and the voice. Companies are paying for accuracy and lived detail, and those come from you.
What did this cost to start?
Zero dollars. A free account, a text editor, and opinions backed by actual use. Everything that came after started there.
Jeff Kazzee writes about AI, careers, and learning to think clearly. Subscribe on Substack for the next essay: https://jeffkazzee.substack.com/subscribe
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