A Tyre Company Printed 35,000 Guides for a Country With 3,000 Cars

August 1900. France.

Two brothers who make bicycle and car tyres print a small red book.

It has maps, instructions for fixing a tyre, lists of mechanics, hotels and places to buy petrol.

They print nearly 35,000 copies and give every one of them away for free.

There are fewer than 3,000 cars on the roads of the entire country.

Twelve guides for every car in France.

(Somewhere, an accountant fainted.)

▋What André and Édouard Michelin actually bought

They weren't selling a book.

They were selling the idea of driving further.

If people drove more, they'd wear out tyres, and there was exactly one thing the Michelin brothers made.

So the guide did three jobs at once.

It made long trips feel possible.

It put the Michelin name in every glovebox.

And it gave the company a direct line to every driver in France, without renting space in anyone else's newspaper.

That last part is the one that matters a hundred and twenty-six years later.

▋The three kinds of traffic

Russell Brunson splits all traffic into three buckets.

Traffic you control.

Ads. You pay, people come, you stop paying, they stop coming.

Traffic you earn.

Press, search rankings, someone sharing your post. Great while it lasts, but somebody else owns the tap.

Traffic you own.

Your email list. Your subscribers. People you can reach tomorrow without asking anyone's permission or paying anyone's invoice.

His whole argument is that the first two exist to feed the third.

You run ads, you earn attention, and every bit of it should end with someone handing you an email address.

Michelin skipped straight to owning it, with a book.

▋Why creators stay stuck in bucket one

Most people who sell courses live entirely on traffic they control.

They boost a post, get a few sales, boost another one.

The month they stop boosting, revenue goes to zero.

That's not a business. That's a subscription to Meta.

The uncomfortable truth is that an ad only pays off twice if it brings you a person you can talk to again.

Which means the real product of your advertising isn't a sale.

It's a name on a list you own.

▋Build your own red book

You don't need a print run. You need three things.

1. Something worth handing over an email for

Michelin gave away maps and repair instructions. Genuinely useful to the people they wanted.

For you: a checklist, a short lesson, a template, a mini-course.

Useful enough that a stranger would trade their inbox for it.

2. A place to collect it

A lead form on your site, on your sales page, at the end of every article.

Not a link to a third-party page. On your own domain, feeding your own list.

3. Something to say afterwards

A newsletter, an email sequence, an occasional update.

A list you never write to is a phone number you never call.

▋The part that compounds

Here's where the guide beats the ad.

Michelin's 1900 book reached 35,000 people once.

Every year after that, the next edition reached them again, plus everyone new.

By Michelin's own account, the guide went paid in 1920 and became a product in its own right.

Content you own does the same thing.

An article ranks for years. A lead magnet keeps collecting. A list keeps growing.

The ad you ran last Tuesday is gone.

▋Where EXP fits

We built the owned-traffic loop into the platform because it's the loop that outlives any ad account.

Lead forms live on your own site and drop straight into your list.

The newsletter and sequences let you talk to that list without a second tool.

And because publishing is the slow part, the AI writer drafts articles in your voice so the red book keeps getting thicker.

Ads can still bring people in. The point is that they land somewhere you own.

▋Our take

We've seen course creators with real ad budgets and no list.

Every month starts from zero, and every month the ad costs a little more.

We've also seen people with modest budgets and a few thousand subscribers they email every week.

Their launches don't depend on what the auction does that day.

The second group isn't smarter. They just built the red book first.

So before you spend the next dollar on traffic you control, ask where it lands.

If the answer is "a sales page with no form", you're printing guides and throwing them in the river.

Twelve guides for every car. The Michelin brothers were early, not wrong.

Here's to your first thousand subscribers.

(We'd give you a free map, but your phone already has one.)

💡 Put a lead form on your site today. Browse the templates or start a free 7-day trial.

Sources: "Michelin Guide", Wikipedia (first edition August 1900, nearly 35,000 free copies, fewer than 3,000 cars in France; paid edition from 1920); oldclassiccar.co.uk, "Guide Michelin 1900"; Russell Brunson, Traffic Secrets (2020) and DotCom Secrets (2015), "the three types of traffic".