Creator Business Show

Today we are joined by Hannah Hutson. She’s a model. She’s a Twitch streaming partner. She makes YouTube videos. She’s also a creator across all platforms.Hannah is in the beginning stages of her creator career. We have a fascinating conversation about what platforms are doing well, what it means to be authentic online, and what it’s like to be a full-time creator.We also talk about how to take care of your mental health, and how to support your peers when they’re dealing with the challenges of being young, creative, and living in a world where our lives are broadcast online.In this episode, you’ll learn: How to get past your self doubt and limiting beliefs Tips for generating revenue on multiple platforms How to be authentic, and how to deal with criticism Why networking is a huge part of being a successful creator Links & Resources (H3) Fanhouse Opportunity: How to Win in Business and Create a Life You Love Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Follow Chikodi on Twitter Follow Hannah on (H3) Twitch YouTube Instagram TikTok Twitter 00:00:00 Hannah:A lot of opportunities that have pushed me forward in my career and have helped me grow a lot, have all come from networking with other creators. Being on screen with them. Participating in their events. Networking is a huge part of being a creator and sharing audiences who enjoy you and have similar interests, and being seen.All of my success has come from taking advantage of the opportunities I’ve gotten from other creators.00:00:37 Chikodi:Hey everybody. This is Chikodi Chima, host of the Creator Business Show. Today we are joined by Hannah Hutson. She was studying computer science at Cal, and has switched her major to political science.She’s a model. She’s a Twitch streaming partner. She makes YouTube videos. And she’s a creator across all platforms. She’s in the beginning stages of her career. It’s fascinating conversation we’re going to have with her today, talking about what platforms are doing well, what does it mean to be really authentic online, and what does it mean to be a full-time creator.We also talk about how you can take care of your mental health, and how to support peers when they’re dealing with the different challenges of being young, creative, and living in a world where our whole lives are broadcasted online.Stick around for the episode. We’re going to have a great conversation, and thank you for joining us on the Creator Business Show.Hannah, why don’t you give us a quick intro of who you are and what you do. 00:01:43 Hannah:My name is Hannah Hutson. I go by HanHuts on my social media platforms. I started streaming on Twitch a year ago last January, and got partnered. I like to talk about mental health issues, I do some political commentary, and get into spirituality, and just exist online as myself, which I think is really cool.Recently I’ve transitioned into doing YouTube videos. I’ve been blogging on there and making videos of my streams. Then I create some content for Instagram and TikTok as well. 00:02:14 Chikodi:Awesome. Awesome. You graduated from Cal during the pandemic, right?00:02:19 Hannah:I actually didn’t graduate. I did two years at Cal. I studied computer science, and then during the pandemic I decided to take the year off just because I’m paying for tuition myself, and being out of state it’s 50K a year. I did not feel like paying 50K for online classes.Then I moved back to Oakland. I was planning on resuming classes this past fall, but I also ended up not doing that because of the 50K. I decided to take another year off. If I do decide to go back, I’ll only have that in-state tuition. 00:02:58 Chikodi:Well, we’ve got our fingers crossed for you.00:03:00 Hannah:Yeah. But I switched to, I was planning on switching to political science instead. 00:03:04 Chikodi:Okay. But computer science is, quite reputable. Computer science, political science are quite reputable at a count,00:03:11 Hannah:Oh yeah. It’s a great school. 00:03:14 Chikodi:Wow. Okay. So we’re talking to you, you’re in Colorado right now. It’s where you’re from. you are. pause to student, shall we say at, 00:03:22 Hannah:Yeah. Yeah. I’ve paused. 00:03:25 Chikodi:So you are, I know you’ve got about 10,000, Instagram followers and, a sizable audience on a TikTok. 00:03:34 Hannah:Well, I’d say TikTok is a two sizeable. I think it’s my, it’s definitely my smallest platform. I think recently it’s been really difficult to grow on TikTok. I remember when I first started like just posting for fun in 2019, my anything I posted would get like a lot more views than I’m posting now. But I think since the pandemic hit, there’s just been so many more new users and people posting content that the platforms become really kind of oversaturated.It’s a little harder to. get discovered, but I’m working on it.00:04:07 Chikodi:Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. Yeah. So, most sizable, audience on Twitch, my, my bed and your Twitch partner. So what does that actually, what does that actually mean? 00:04:19 Hannah:So being a Twitch partner, you basically get just, a better line of communication with Twitch. Like anything you need help with or any questions you have. it’s a little easier to get that. you also get more emotes slots, which is like, one of the reasons people subscribe to you on Twitch.You get that little check mark by your name. I think maybe a little more visibility and then just like partner, perks, surveys, things they do as partners. but unfortunately, as far as revenue goes, Not much. so that’s one of the big things that people are fighting for on Twitch right now is having a higher revenue split at least for partners right now.If your partner, do you still get the same 50, 50 revenue split as affiliates do, but for their big streamers, they have contracts where they get higher numbers, in higher percentages. So it’s a little uneven, it’s not fair between all switch partners right now. It definitely depends on the size of your audience.So 00:05:20 Chikodi:Well, I’m really grateful for you coming on the show today because, you are of college age, right? So you’re, young. so Sarah, you’re a young person and, you are like native to these creative plus. YouTube, I think is from 2006. Right. So you’ve never really like lived in a world with how YouTube00:05:46 Hannah:No. And I mean, it’s funny, like even being native to those platforms and being on them since they came up, it’s crazy still to see how different the YouTube of today is. Then when I was first watching it as a, you know, like in middle school and stuff, it’s just completely different. So it’s been interesting, but it’s nice, at least having the advantage of somewhat growing up with it, you know? 00:06:10 Chikodi:Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, getting to talk today about mental health topics, both as a human, and then also as a creator, I think they really vary. Informative for a lot of people because it’s not easy to be a creator and it’s not, it’s not easy to be a human, but it’s not easy to live your life online and really open yourself up for a judgment and, you know, even more so of like, you know, self criticism, self, self reflection.So I hope we can spend some time talking about that and how that is, both a, a pursuit of passion and also how that’s, you know, generating revenue as a business.00:06:51 Hannah:Yeah, definitely. I have a lot to say about that. It’s basically what I talk about normally on stream and also just a main factor in my life is how to deal with that. And so I’m still not perfect at it yet. There’s definitely a lot of, knowledge that I at least have about it. 00:07:08 Chikodi:Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that’s fascinating to me is that You have a few very different personas. You know, you’re the same person, but very different on Instagram from, YouTube. then, you get to speak at length on your Twitch stream. So, how do you, how do you see yourself as a creator online?How do you describe yourself as a creator? 00:07:34 Hannah:So that has been, a little bit difficult for me because one, when you’re doing what I’m doing and it’s not really, like I have a product I’m marketing or a niche that I’m trying to do, or I’m a gamer or anything, when I’m online, I’m really trying to be myself market myself as a human being and have people like my personality.And so. It’s hard to know who you are as a person when you’re not on the internet, it’s hard to figure out who you are. so doing that while being on the internet has been a little difficult because there are so many parts of myself and all of those are authentic and real, but it’s difficult to figure out how to express all of those online.That’s why with my platforms, I’ve struggled with a bit becoming the full integration and a full brand of myself, just because I’m not sure how to do that yet on every platform. it is a vulnerable thing to do. And so I think that’s why I started Twitch in The first place because I can be live be myself and talk for five hours, it’s, I think that’s definitely where I am my most authentic. And that’s where my community comes from. That’s where my fan base comes from seeing me as I am just talking to people. And that’s really easy. then with YouTube, it’s really nice. because when I vlog you get to see what I do outside of just being on my PC how I interact with my family and my friends and what I do when I’m not on the internet.So that’s really nice too. with Instagram, you know, right now it’s like, I use that platform a bit separately to, show a part of myself, just like taking photos and then possibly working with brands and stuff. what I really want to do is figure out how to bring it all together in a cohesive way.So I can also really authentically express myself on all of my platforms and have them be more tied in, because I think, when you’re talking about being a creator being a brand and marketing yourself, it’s important that it’s cohesive. And you’re not a different person on different things with differ

Today, I’m speaking with Marina Mogilko, from LinguaTrip. She is the first creator ever to receive a direct investment. Marina received an upfront payment of a million and a half dollars in an exchange for 5% of her revenue over the next 30 years.We talk about what her partnership with her investors actually looks like. What’s in the deal, and what isn’t in the deal. Marina also shares details about her journey to having three YouTube channels with over 7 million subscribers, and how she’s looking at business in 2022 and beyond.Marina and I go way back. We’ve known each other for nearly six years. Marina is a very talented creator. This is a wonderful conversation, and I’m so glad that Marina was able to take part.In this episode, you’ll learn: How Marina balances managing three successful YouTube channels Details behind the negotiations for Marina’s seven figure deal How to increase your YouTube growth and revenue What the future looks like for direct investment in creators Links & Resources Mone On Da Beat episode Rebecca Zung episode 500 Global Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Follow Chikodi on Twitter Marina Mogilko’s Links Follow Marina on Twitter LinguaTrip Check out Marina’s YouTube channel Silicon Valley Girl on YouTube Marina’s Russian YouTube channel LinguaTrip on TikTok Marina’s Russian TikTok Marina’s Facebook page Marina’s Instagram LinguaTrip on Instagram Marina’s blog

Mone On Da Beat is a one-of-a-kind music production experience that tantalizes your artistry and pushes your creativity to the limit.Mone is a creator and an entrepreneur. He’s dabbled in film, enjoys fashion, and loves making music. He’s got his hands in a lot of different things, but music is his number one love.In this episode I talk with Mone and his good friend, Skoon, about going viral on TikTok. We talk about what musicians aren’t doing on TikTok that prompted Mone to take things to the next level. We also talk about his daily routine and how many hours he puts in each day, and much more.In this episode, you’ll learn: How TikTok helps musicians promote their music The value of music partnerships in the creator economy Turning feedback and traffic into business growth Going viral on TikTok by accident Links & Resources Gary Vaynerchuk Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Follow Chikodi on Twitter Mone On Da Beat’s Links Mone On Da Beat’s Instagram Mone On Da Beat’s website Mone On Da Beat’s YouTube channel Follow Mone on TikTok

Ishveen Jolly is the CEO & Founder at OpenSponsorship. OpenSponsorship is the largest and smartest marketplace connecting brands and smart marketers to over 5,700 professional athletes.Using analytical insights, AI based matching, and proprietary ROI information tracking, OpenSponsorship leverages technology and data to create meaningful partnerships, revolutionizing the way people search, secure, and track sports sponsorship.I talk with Ishveen about how athletes take a platform approach as influencers. We talk about her history as a sports agent, and some of the emerging opportunities with cryptocurrency. We also discuss web 3.0 in the world of sports and sports sponsorship, and much more.In this episode, you’ll learn: How athletes stand out as content creators What makes a powerful storyteller Unique obstacles athletes face when becoming creators and business owners Links & Resources Todd Gurley Chad Johnson George Kittle Rob Gronkowski Leo Messi Taurean Prince LeBron James David Blitzer Wrapbook Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Follow Chikodi on Twitter Ishveen Jolly’s Links Follow Ishveen on Twitter Open Sponsorship Ishveen’s LinkedIn Send Ishveen an email

Reid DeRamus is the co-founder and CEO of Yem. Yem can help you grow your newsletter by using smart messaging, can help you convert free subscribers to paid, and help you reduce subscriber churn.Before founding Yem, Reid worked for Crunchyroll, Hulu, and HBO Max. His background in data analysis helped these companies grow their streaming services. Reid now uses his experience in data analysis to help independent creators expand their businesses.Reid and I talk about what he’s excited about for creators in 2022, and also what he’s learned from his previous failures. We talk about the challenges of growing and monetizing an audience. Reid also shares how to find your niche as a creator, how to connect with your community, and much more.In this episode, you’ll learn: How to simultaneously develop products and grow your business What creators need to know for 2022 How to grow your audience while staying true to your values Links & Resources Crunchyroll Hulu HBO Max Wait But Why Substack Teachable Patreon The Pomp Letter Mailchimp ConvertKit Ghost Dan Runcie Gregarious Narain Stir Stripe Flowbo Pipe Jack Conte Josh Constine PomplamooseMusic Packy McCormick Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Follow Chikodi on Twitter Reid DeRamus’ Links Follow Reid on Twitter Yem Episode Transcript00:00:00 Reid:It was really fascinating to go from a service that is for everybody, and how special it is when you see these niche communities. I’m super passionate about which way the world is going, because I think there’s an infinite number of niche communities/media companies that can exist.It’s just a matter of building the infrastructure to help them come into existence.00:00:34 Chikodi:Hey, it’s Chikodi, and this is the Creator Business Show.Today we’re talking to Reid DeRamus, who is the co-founder and CEO of Yem. Previously, he was at Crunchyroll. He was at Hulu. He was at HBO Max. So, he has about 10 years of data analysis work in the streaming video world.Yem helps people who have paid newsletters—sometimes they have 20,000 subscribers, up to hundreds of thousands of subscribers—with automated messaging, target who’s going to churn, who could be a better customer, and who could be a free user to a paid newsletter reader.We’re going to talk about some of his failed experiments, and what he’s excited about for creators in 2022. It’s a great conversation, and I’m really excited for you to be here.So, this is the Creator Business Show, let’s get right into it.Reid, do you wanna give us a little background on who you are, and tell us about Yem? Who uses Yem? Why did you start it? And what’s the future of Yem? 00:01:33 Reid:I appreciate you having me on, first of all.So, a bit of background on myself: I have spent the past 10 years in streaming video, going from Hulu, to Crunchyroll, to HBO Max. My role always revolved around analytics, and using data to help us grow. Working really closely with a performance marketing team, life cycle marketing team, and partnerships team. Anything we tried to do to help us grow, we always tried to use data to make smarter decisions.A couple of years ago I stumbled across Patreon, and some of my favorite creators were on there as the top earning creators or small teams. It was a lot of niche-type content, like educational channels on YouTube, or Wait But Why, which I absolutely loved, and a bunch of others. Now all these individual creators or small teams have a lot of the same problems that we do within the streaming video companies. Such as, how do you build an audience, how do you convert that audience into paying subscribers, and how do you retain them? How do you build the audience, and then also build a reliable income around it?So, this idea of trying to take the growth teams, or the growth function from within the streaming companies that I was lucky to be a part of, and rebuilding it for this wave of what’s being called the creator economy—it’s been rattling around for a while.Last year was just this massive year where Substack, Teachable, OnlyFans, and Patreon continued to blow up, and I just felt like now’s a good time to try to make a run at this idea of trying to rebuild a growth engine for individual and small teams that are building media companies. Whether it be a newsletter, or a podcast, or a YouTube channel.So, that’s our goal. We’re trying to help individuals and small teams develop a reliable income on the internet.00:03:34 Chikodi:Okay, obvious question, but why do individuals and small teams need a growth engine?00:03:40 Reid:You know, like I think if you look at like Netflix or Disney and the resources they have. To invest in growth, not even from like just pure marketing budget, but also the people that work there and like come up with these ideas and execute. It’s enormous, you know, it’s a huge investment and they’re able to do like the smallest AB testing and experiments and open up like so many different channels of marketing.And I think it’s really hard to do that. If you’re creating content, you know, it’s really hard to be, creating the actual product itself and simultaneously thinking about how to grow, Rowan as a business. And so, we’re trying to shore up the gap between like what, you know, the New York times is capable of doing or what Disney is capable of doing, in what individuals are capable of doing. 00:04:34 Chikodi:Okay. So you are at HBO, max and Hulu, Crunchyroll. You mentioned give us some insight, what can they do in terms of AB testing in terms of growth experiments? That, a small person can’t. And what kind of impact does that have on growth and their ability to create, you know, at scale.00:04:54 Reid:I mean, we can talk for the next.Yeah. Day about all of the stuff that they do from a marketing perspective and growth perspective. A lot of it boils down to you know, setting up marketing, like running like a growth engine where you have a variety of different initiatives. And each one it’s like a layer cake, almost of growth initiatives in each of those kind of compounded stack on top of each.And over time, you always have to like innovate and figure out new sources of growth and, how to like sustain the existing ones that are still working. And it’s just like a lot of effort from a, from a human, just from people managing this function, as well as like actual capital investing into, you know, whether it be like, performance marketing or brand advertising or like making content, So, there’s just a huge gap between what these teams can do, collectively at the big media companies versus what, you know, like somebody writing a, a newsletter or, or operating a YouTube channel can do. 00:05:57 Chikodi:You described it as a layer cake of growth, experiments, and channels to reach audience. So how was Yem creating a layer cake effect for small-time creators using technology instead of human resource?00:06:11 Reid:So we, when we came into this world, like building a growth engine for creators is a super ambiguous idea.So to start, we reached out to Anthony pomp, Leanna, who I felt was like ahead of the curve in terms of where the creator world was going, because he had like the normal content distribution, you know, with Twitter and YouTube and, a podcast. but he also had a, job board, you know, the rolling fund and, a cohort based class.He had like these new creative products that were helping him, develop more income, while he built his audience. and I think it’s really great to have that mixture of, drive, delivering more value for your audience and being able to capture some of the value that you’re creating and developing, you know, a, a strong business and building it. something that can last into the future. and so we reached out to him and asked to run some growth experiments for them, and we had a laser focus on the pump letter has paid newsletter. because I think it’s obviously really important to focus, have very tight focus early on. And, we did, you know, we just threw like everything that we could against the Poplar from what we learned, I mean, streaming video services.So we did Facebook ads, early on. We did landing page tests. we did different types of email campaigns, which is what eventually became our core initial product. So we can come back to that. We did a bunch of analytics, you know, that’s kinda like where my comfort zone. so we did like user research to develop personas and, talk through different ways to expand the audience or develop products for, you know, the existing audience.We built a forecast model, which, allowed us to. Looking at like customer lifetime value, how much, earnings we could expect to make over a certain period of time from an individual customer, and also build like a reliable, accurate, forecast model for his, subscription business. And both of those really helped with making an investment.In Facebook ads and other performance marketing, items. And then we also did like different cross promotions, strategic partnerships, and it was a pretty intense learning experience. You know, this is a very new world for me. in terms of like, you know, really getting into the minutia of, newsletter.And emails. And so, it was really awesome. And, you know, ultimately we, took those learnings and turn it into a company and kind of scale it up to where we are today. but, yeah, those were kind of some of the tests we were running earlier. 00:08:46 Chikodi:And you’re almost to do all of this within one piece of software.00:08:50 Reid:That was no. So we’ve kind of had these like three phases of product development. The first one was just me running a bunch of growth tests. at the end of that, we incorporated, it turned into a company, raised a tiny bit of money and, then we had it more like an agency. We got up to like 10 customers. and again, kind of hit our max threshold, you know, where we just didn’t have any more hours in the day. But we were running these different growth tests across all of the newsletters, realizing what wo

Dan Runcie is the founder and publisher of Trapital. Trapital is a weekly newsletter and podcast that covers the world of deal-making by musicians, athletes, and others in the entertainment industry.Trapital looks at how Timbaland, Pharrell, Serena Williams, and Rihanna leverage their audiences, their marketing savvy, and their creativity to make incredibly large and lucrative deals.On today’s show, Dan shares the global influence of hip hop as a business force. We talk about digital communities, DAOs, and NFTs. We also talk about how artists and creators are able to own and capitalize on their creations more than ever, and much more.In this episode, you’ll learn: How to find your niche in the market The the day-to-day business of running a newsletter How to endear your community to you and each other Turning your hobby into a successful newsletter business Links & Resources Harvard Business Review case study: Beyoncé Medium Pistil Data Casa Verde Capital Zack O’Malley Greenburg: A-List Angels Westbrook Inc Peter Okoye MrP Pico podcast episode 007: Zamaan Abbass - Overcoming Obstacles as a Creator The Future Beats Show Bored Ape Yacht Club Pat Flynn Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Follow Chikodi on Twitter Dan Runcie’s Links Follow Dan on Twitter Trapital newsletter Essay: How Issa Rae Became the Modern Mogul Trapital podcast Episode Transcript00:00:00 Dan:After seeing how trends were starting to shift within the digital media landscape, I was seeing more writers that were starting publications that were focused on a particular niche. That’s when I said to myself, there’s so much talk about what hip hop artists are doing in business, but there’s no publication that is dedicated solely to that.I’ve done all this writing for all these reputable websites and all these reputable publications. What if I leverage the tools of the internet and did this myself?00:00:34 Chikodi:Hello, and welcome to the Creator Business Show. My name is Chikodi Chima, and I am really excited to be joined today by Dan Runcie.Dan is the founder and publisher of Trapital. Trapital is a newsletter and a podcast where he looks at the world of deal-making by entertainers, musicians, and athletes in the world of hip hop. How people like Timbaland, Pharrell, Serena Williams, and Rihanna are leveraging their audience, their marketing savvy, and their creativity to do deals on an enormous scale.We also talk about NFTs. We talk about digital communities and DAOs, and we talk about the global influence of hip hop and how it’s a business force, and how musicians today are actually getting to capitalize and own more of the value that they’ve been creating for decades. It’s a really fascinating conversation.It’s one that taps into my history. I was actually a producer of live shows in Seattle, and I had two terrestrial radio shows. So, maybe it’s not surprising that I’m doing a podcast in 2021, 2022. But this is a great conversation that I really enjoyed. Very grateful to Dan Runcie, and I think you’re going to learn a lot.So, join us for today’s edition of the Creator Business Show.Dan, welcome to the show. Do you want to give us a quick intro and tell us what you’re excited about, what you’re working on, and what the future holds?00:02:00 Dan:Yeah, Chikodi. First off, thanks for having me. I’m honored to be here. As you mentioned, I’m the founder of Trapital. It’s a media company that I started three years ago, and my mission and purpose is to elevate hip hop. Specifically, the business of hip hop, and really making sure that we can take this culture to the next level, and make sure that the artists that are making business moves in hip hop—the companies that they’re starting—they’re getting the same level of recognition and analysis, and in-depth coverage that you see from companies and finance companies in tech and other sectors.I’ve been a lifelong hip hop fan. I always believed that some of the business moves that hip hop artists have made have been some of the more revolutionary and inspiring ones. But for so long, the coverage on them was just pretty minimal. It didn’t really go in depth the same way that it did with other the other sectors I just mentioned.Starting Trapital was an opportunity to elevate that, and doing it specifically for the people that are working in this industry, people that are working in other industries that are partnering with hip hop, especially just given how influential hip hop is, especially over the past few years. Every month or every few weeks it seems like there’s another hip hop artist that’s making a big-time investment starting a company.This was an opportunity to highlight and elevate that, and the content and what I’ve been able to do and build through that has been great. I think the recognition has been good, too. It’s been well received across the industry. I’ve been fortunate to have been published and receive recognition across many established organizations.I feel like we’re just getting started. It’s still in the early days, and I’m excited that Trapital can grow as hip hop culture continues to influence, not just in the US, but in the world.00:03:47 Chikodi:Thank you. I have so much to say about that, but how did you decide that this is what you wanted to do? Like walk us through the process of actually starting Trapital and then man, I’ve got so much to say about, you know, like you said, these major business moves, so yeah, let’s talk about all about that, but like, let’s talk about you a little bit more and, you know, starting, starting Trapital, like you said there was a gap. Why did you decide I’m the person to fill this gap and, yeah. Just kind of talk us through the genesis. 00:04:14 Dan:Yeah. So the journey actually started a few years before I even had the idea for travel. So if we go back to 2014, I was in my second year of business school. And a lot of time in business school, we spend breaking down case studies on different companies. And most of these companies are your blue chip companies that are in the Dow Jones or your fortune 500 companies that have been there for awhile.But there was this one case study that came out that year, that was on beyoncé’s surprise album drops. She released that Beyonce self-titled album in December, 2013 and the industry and business world overall had made such a big deal about it, because this was one of the most recent times that we had seen an artist.Drop an album without any notice, without any marketing. And in so many ways, the fact that she didn’t do many of the traditional things, gave it even more exposure. And I think it was really a turning point in her career and Harvard business school, Harvard business review specifically had done a case study that broke down what Beyonce had done, no different than how they’ve done case studies on the New York times or Southwest airlines or many other companies that have been around for years.And I saw how big of an impact that case study had made. It got a bunch of earned media from everywhere. People were buzzing about it. It stuck out to be for two reasons. The case study itself was great. I learned a lot from it and I was inspired by it, but second, it made a big deal because we just didn’t see this type of thing.Often you didn’t see publications like Harvard going deep into artists themselves. And it wasn’t just them. It was more broadly because up to that point, there would be lists on how well people were earning or the amount of money they were making, but nothing was really breaking down the strategy. And that sparked the thought for me to say, There’s an opportunity here to go deeper and there’s opportunity to have more regular content and more regular analysis.That’s put out into the world that can give these artists the level of insight and analysis and critiques that they deserve. So I’d started writing on my own at that point, had recently graduated. I was, I’d started a medium page and this is just what BDO might think was starting to buzz a bit. And I said, you know what?I have some thoughts on the intersections of business and culture, business, and music, business, and sports in other areas that interest me. I didn’t really do much writing before that, but with all of the work I’d done to the business world in past case study analysis, I felt like I had a pretty good shot.So I was just doing it purely as a hobby. After a few times of doing that, it got picked up by different freelance publications that were like, Hey, we’ll pay you if you want to put this on our website. So of course I think the thought there was okay while I was putting this out for free. Just sharing it with friends and family on social media, let’s expand this a bit.And that started to grow and snowball to the point where bigger publications and more reputable publications are reaching out, offering more money. And the conversations were getting a bit more interesting. And at this point I was still working full time, but this.Opportunity here was growing. and I said, you know, there’s could be an opportunity to double down on this.After seeing how trends were starting to shift within the digital media landscape. I was seeing more writers that were starting publications that were focused on a particular niche. And that’s when I said to myself, there’s so much talk about what hip hop artists are doing in business, but there’s no publication that is dedicated solely to that.I’ve done all this writing for all these reputable websites and all these reputable publications. What if I leverage the tools of the internet and did this myself, 00:07:49 Chikodi:Well, it seems, it seems obvious now. yeah. You know, Snoop Dogg, Wiz Khalifa Farell, Dr. Dre. Beyonce. I was reading your post about Esra and all of her, you know, she was a real pioneer, not just in the, you know, as a woman, a black woman, media entrepreneur, but as a social media marketing expert, you know, so I was really liking that breakdown. So yeah, it se

Daniel Kang is the co-founder of Flowbo. Flowbo helps busy creators get paid faster so they can focus their time and energy on creating. Creators spend less time chasing down invoice payments and worrying about paying their bills, leaving them with more time to make great products and services.I talk with Daniel about building and pitching the right product for your customers. Daniel shares candid insights on his journey as a founder and entrepreneur, and the mistakes he’s made along the way. We also talk about how his company, Flowbo, came to be, how it’s removing a lot of friction for his creator clients, and much more.Daniel Kang is the Co-Founder of Flowbo, an innovative startup that helps creators get paid quicker, so they can free up headspace, and focus more time and energy on creating. Daniel earned his master’s in public policy from the University of Oxford, and has worked for companies such as Oliver Wyman, NEXT Canada, and SoftBank.In this episode, you’ll learn: Your first step in gaining the attention of prospective clients The right way to make a sales pitch How to implement feedback loops for product innovation The biggest mistake Daniel made on his journey to success Links & Resources SoftBank Y Combinator Sam Lessin Wrapbook ​​Marina Mogilko Book: The Mom Test Launch House Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Follow Chikodi on Twitter Daniel Kang’s Links Follow Daniel on Twitter Daniel’s LinkedIn Flowbo Episode Transcript00:00:00 Daniel:I think “creator” can be a broad definition. Our general thesis is that there’s going to be more and more of these one person or two people companies that are going to form over time. There are going to be more and more freelancers creating, not just content, but creating services, creating software, creating these products that are being sold to everybody.Anyone who does that, I would consider as creators, which in my mind makes it a very, very exciting market. 00:00:34 Chikodi:Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Creative Business Show. My name is Chikodi Chima, and I am super excited to share our conversation today with Daniel Kang, co-founder of Flowbobo. Flowbobo helps creators get paid faster. Those are creators who have brand deals. They may be waiting 30, 60, 90 days to get a big check.So, getting that check sooner frees up Headspace so that they don’t have to be chasing down invoices. They don’t have to be thinking about how they’re going to pay rent, or if they have medical expenses, or any of the things that happen in life. They can focus on creating.Daniel worked at SoftBank, and this is his first startup. He is really excited to talk to us today about his journey figuring out how to ask the right questions to creators so that you’re not building something based on what people say they want, but what people actually do want.It’s a great conversation, so let’s dive in.My guest today is Daniel Kang CEO, and co-founder of Flowbobo.Welcome, Daniel. 00:01:39 Daniel:Great to be here. Thanks for the invite.00:01:41 Chikodi:We’ve had the chance to talk a couple of times now, but one of the problems that you’re solving with Flowbobo is creator liquidity: how creators get paid fast.Do you want to give us a little bit of background about yourself personally, how you became the founder of Flowbobo, and why this is this such an important problem to solve? 00:02:00 Daniel:Yeah, I think this is an important problem personally. I used to be a musician, and I found that liquidity was often an issue. If someone would say they’d pay me, they wouldn’t pay me. I’d have to keep track of who owes me what, and when, and where, and things like that.I ended up taking a more traditional route, working in consulting. Then later on as a FinTech investor at SoftBank, trying to better understand finance in general; how does money Flowbo? When I left that job last year, I found that this is a problem that’s very solvable. I’ve seen a bunch of problems being solved this way from a commercial perspective.I said, “Why can’t I apply this to a lot of the artists, the musicians and the creators that are out there?” So, that’s kind of like how Flowbobo came to be.Trade finance, in general, is a $3 trillion market. By trade finance, I mean money that’s up in the air because people have not opted in to pay it. It’s money that’s owed, but that’s not paid.Obviously, in the creator economy, this is a smaller than a $3 trillion market. It’s a small sub-segment. But, as we see more and more people become creators we think this market is going to be growing. Even today, a lot of brands will take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of months to pay out on the work that’s been done.00:03:18 Chikodi:Wow. How how much of this is technical versus user experience? 00:03:30 Daniel:I think it depends on how you want to solve the problem. The reason the problem occurs is the brands opt to not to pay early. Not because of a liquidity issue, usually because of accounting and legal issues. So, it takes a bit of time for the accounting team to process. It takes a bit of time to validate that the work has been done.And that’s why this takes a little bit of time. The other problem that occurs is there’s often a middle. So it’s not the brands that pay the creators directly. Oftentimes there are agencies or networks that are involved, which means they receive it first, go through another set of accounting Prokofiev, and then you’ll see that leads to delays.So you can solve it by a couple of ways. Traditional way of doing is factoring. So taking a bunch of invoices and then selling those invoices or getting money up front for them. That’s what Flogo is able to do, but there’s a lot of different technical ways to solve this. So smart contracts are a big thing, right?Web three. so if everyone agrees to be paid in a certain way, then we can just bypass all of this accounting and legal problem. And the entire problem of being delayed would, would disappear.00:04:37 Chikodi:Okay. And so for those who are familiar with pipe, you’ve described Flowbo as pipe for creators, but for people who are not familiar with. Describe what Flowboable actually does. 00:04:50 Daniel:What Flowbo does is we do revenue backed financing. What that means is we know that there’s a certain amount of money that’ll be coming in in the future for creators, and we’re able to give them an advance based on that metric. So this revenue can come in a multiple set of flavors. One flavor can be AdSense revenue from Twitter.Or YouTube or Patrion or any subscription-based revenue, another flavor or brand deals where the work has already been done. But the brand is taking a couple of months to pay out, which is not very hard to validate. And then the final pieces may be brand affiliate programs, which takes a bit of time to process the payments.But it’s very easy to see how many fro links have been clicked, from a metrics perspective. So all of those revenues can be taken. and then you can get an advanced based on that.00:05:37 Chikodi:That’s fantastic. And so what does that actually mean to the creator then when they’re getting advanced money that they’re. But, instead of waiting 45 days, 60 days losing track, how does that actually, you know, what, what kind of material impact does that making for the creator? Are they getting paid faster?00:05:58 Daniel:So I think there are two large impacts. The first is liquidity and the second is Headspace. So in terms of liquidity, a lot of our customers get the money so they can work on other projects, whether it’s a physical product or a mobile app that they’re working on, they’re able to reinvest the money faster to grow their content and their audience and monetization.The other piece related to liquidity is obviously, you know, just having money faster. And if you’re a mid-sized creator, especially liquidity matters. so this may mean making your rent, making your medical bills and things like that. Yeah, exactly. The other major pieces, like freeing up head space.So initially when I started, I thought a lot of larger creators would not be interested in this product because I thought it was purely illiquidity issue. And if you have 10 million followers, you have more than enough money. but it turns out that a lot of creators have to keep track of who owes me, what. and it takes a bit of a head space to do this. So if you get a manager, this might be, you know, 10, 15% of the revenue that you make. If you do it yourself, that’s a lot of time that you have to invest in on a weekly basis on followup, emails, invoicing, and things like that. so by getting paid early, you know, you just get rid of that, in its entirety.00:07:09 Chikodi:And how easy is it for creators to use this? Because yeah, if freeing of Headspace is what you’re talking about, then yes, that’s obviously very important, but if it’s then, you know, instead of spending three hours chasing down people, you’re, you’re doing all this in , then that’s still three hours. So is this like radically simpler? 00:07:27 Daniel:Yeah, this is much, much simpler. so initially our initial product was just uploading your contract, and then linking your bank accounts, and then we’d be able to share the revenue or give you the advanced based on that once you confirm. So it was as simple as upload the contract, link your bank accounts and sign our agreement.We’ve recently developed a new set of product from so we can cover a little bit more basis. So now a creator is able to input the deals that they’re working on, and we are automatically sending emails out for them. If they are late, if the payment is late and then help them audit auto-generate invoices.And obviously related to that, if they want to get paid earlier on invoices or from their YouTube revenue, then we’re able to advance that as well. So we’re going deeper into this cycle of, you know, procuring sort of the, the job to the contracting, to doing the job, to, keeping track of everything, to i

Steph Smith is a successful writer and growth marketer. She is the author of Doing Content Right, a guide covering creating, writing, and scaling a successful blog and newsletter. Steph also hosts her podcast, “S*** You Don’t Learn In School,” is the Director of Marketing for HubSpot, and is the Senior Manager and Head of Trends.co.In today’s episode, Steph and I talk about the future of work, the concept of liquid employment, and what it’s like being a digital nomad. Steph shares what she believes are the most important skills to have in the digital economy, and talks about her podcast and book. We also talk about what will happen next after the COVID-induced shift to remote work, and much more.Steph earned her bachelor’s degree in engineering chemistry from Queen’s University. She has worked for companies such as Toptal, The Hustle, and is the founder of Integral Labs.In this episode, you’ll learn: The next stage in the remote work paradigm shift How earning income as an online creator affects your taxes  Why the future of work is fluid and fractional Tradeoffs between remote work and working in an office Links & Resources Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Follow Chikodi on Twitter Trends.co TheHustle.co HubSpot Tiger Global Pieter Levels Rebase.co Deel Nomad List Airbnb Remote Year WiFi Tribe PolyWorks Packy McCormick Steph Smith’s Links Steph’s website: stephsmith.io Follow Steph on Twitter Steph’s podcast Steph’s book, Doing Content Right Episode Transcript00:00:00 Steph:If you want leverage in this economy, you need digital skills. While that was a “nice to have” in the last decade, now it’s essential. I think you can put a stake in the ground for 2020, onward. It is essential for you to have that.If you truly want to cammand leverage, where you are a person who can demand $300,000 more at a company, you need to learn to code. 00:00:34 Chikodi:Hey guys, Chikodi Chima here, and this is the Creator Business Show.Today, we’re joined by the one and only, Steph Smith.Steph is one of the foremost trend researchers, and she’s in charge of Trends.co. Trends, and The Hustle were bought by HubSpot. They’re reaching millions of people each week, either looking at what is new and happening in entrepreneurship, or what trends are on the rise and are going to be disrupting business either now or in the future.We’re going to talk about the future of work, liquid employment—how people are making it as nomads—and what’s new about being a digital nomad, versus what is just becoming part of the public consciousness.Steph has their own podcast, The Shit You Don’t Learn In School. She recently wrote a book, and she is just so brilliant.It’s a really wonderful conversation, and you’re really going to enjoy it.Today. We are honored to be joined by the incomparable Steph Smith. I’m so happy to have this conversation with you today.Welcome to the show, Steph.00:01:38 Steph:Thank you. I’ve never had that kind of intro. Incomparable! That is very kind.00:01:43 Chikodi:You’re too humble, because you are so dynamic, and such a fascinating person. I got to spend some time you in Mexico a few weeks ago, and I got to hear some really interesting pieces of your biography and your background.So, a lot of people probably don’t know who you are. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?00:02:14 Steph:I never know how to introduce myself, because I do a range of things. Right now, I work full-time for a company called HubSpot, because they acquired The Hustle, the company I had worked out for the last couple of years. I specifically lead the Trends product for the last couple of years.That is a product where we share trends as they’re growing, so that people can capitalize on them. On the side, I taught myself to code a couple of years ago. I built products, and then started building my audience. I write online, I wrote a book, and I have a podcast called The Shit You Don’t Learn In School.I was a nomad for a while. So, that’s an overview of some of the stuff that I work on.00:02:53 Chikodi:Pretty much, incomparable. 00:02:56 Steph:Thank you.00:02:57 Chikodi:You weren’t always an internet writer. I imagine you were always a multihyphenate, always doing a lot of things. What I found really fascinating about your life story you were sharing at the founder’s summit we were both at a few weeks ago, is you came from consulting.00:03:18 Steph:I did correct. That was my first job out of university. 00:03:23 Chikodi:What is it about the consulting experience, from then until now, that informs what you do and how you do it? 00:03:33 Steph:It’s a good question. So the particular kind of consulting that I was doing was for retail companies, but it was for a small boutique firm. And so I think when a lot of people imagine management or business consulting, they’re imagining creating a bunch of decks and having lots of meetings. And that was part of the job.But actually 90% of the job was building these huge spreadsheets and these models that we’ve used, of course, to analyze those retail companies data. And I remember just to kind of set the stage for the type of data analysis we were doing. I remember my first week there, they were like, you see that mouse over there, we’re going to teach you not to use it.So basically like we’re going to teach you to navigate these spreadsheets. Because we don’t have time for you to like, be fumbling around with the mouse, right. We need you to just be really competent within the sheet. And of course, at first I was like, what, like not use my mouse. And, and I would look at these spreadsheets.I remember they sent me one, you know, before I even started. And they were like, Hey, can you just like, take a look at this and let us know what you think? And I was like, I have no idea what any of this means, but of course, as, as time went on, I learned to grow into that role.But the reason I’m sharing this is because that level of like data analysis and the focus, the true focus on numbers and not, you know, external storylines or, qualitative aspects of, of what you want to believe, was really, really influential in basically every job I’ve done since, and actually carried from if there was one financial. And from that period of time, it was the importance of using data, understanding data And again, not so much creating narratives around what you want to be true, but instead using data to fundamentally ascertain what, is true. 00:05:14 Chikodi:You can lie with the numbers, numbers don’t lie.00:05:16 Steph:Yes, exactly. 00:05:17 Chikodi:That was a, that was a conversation I was having, recently where, yeah, looking at numbers and, wishing they were different, but, can spend them only so much. Okay. So now you are in charge of trends.00:05:34 Steph:Yes.00:05:34 Chikodi:And trends is what, for the people who don’t know, cause I’m a pro subscriber, most people aren’t, you know, very popular.But also in this world we live in, you can have a niche product with of thousands of subscribers and still it’s just a blip. 00:05:51 Steph:Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And trends is part of The Hustle. And to your point, The Hustle daily email has over a million subscribers and all the time I’ll meet people and they’ll be like, Hey, where do you work? And I’ll mention The Hustle and yeah. Nothing never heard ofRight So 00:06:06 Chikodi:Much me every day, but then, you know, if you’re in community, you’re like, oh yeah, I read The Hustle, you know, I’m in, you know, 00:06:12 Steph:Exactly. So trends is an offshoot of that, where The Hustle was this daily email about business and tech news. Trends is an offshoot in the sense that it’s for the same audience, to people who are interested in business and tech, but what’s the next natural evolution of staying aware of what’s happening in that space.It’s actually participating in that space. It’s building your own companies, it’s investing in companies and that’s what trends tries to achieve or support people with. Meaning that if you’re interested in starting a company, one of the best pieces of information you can have is what’s taking off, right?Like what’s the wave that you can ride to the top. And that’s what we try to uncover. So trends of things that hopefully aren’t just these like flashes in the pan, but what would be true if you sent a friend five years in advance and they could see what that world looked like if they came back. And they said, Hey stuff, this is what you should care about.Those are the things that we’re trying to write about that people can take advantage of either again, by starting their own company. Some people have used this information to start like business lines or products within their existing companies, investing companies or what we actually see. A lot of our subscribers say is that they just like, kind of being ahead of the curve.Like they’re not going to do anything with this information, but they like knowing what’s to come or just, you know, blurting out a fun fact with their friends. 00:07:29 Chikodi:It brings my level of stress down just to know that I’m not behind the eight ball00:07:33 Steph:Right.00:07:34 Chikodi:Yeah. okay. So trends are, the next evolution, as you said of this, larger kind of upstart community where people are seeing, oh, here’s this deal or here’s these guys, gals people that did something and now it’s starting to take off, but then the next evolution is this is actually moving how we do things.This is the future. So was checking out your tweets before the call. You’re really writing a lot about the future of work you are the future of work because you know, we were in Mexico and you’re kind of a digital nomad now, right? 00:08:15 Steph:Yeah, I’ve been nomadic since 2016.00:08:18 Chikodi:Okay. Yeah. So the future of work is more than a trend. What do you, what do you think about when you think about the future of work? 00:08:27 Steph:Yeah. So what I think is so important about where we are today is that for years, people, i

Rebecca Zung has been recognized as the “Best Lawyer in America” by U.S. News & World Report. Her popular YouTube channel shares her secrets for negotiating with high-conflict personalities. Rebecca is an accomplished creator and author. She has grown her creator business into a seven-figure enterprise.In this episode of the Creator Business Show, Rebecca and I talk about how she went from being a college dropout with three young children to a successful career as a premier attorney and successful content creator. We talk about how to deal with the toxic narcissists in your life, growing a YouTube audience, how to help others achieve success, and much more.Rebecca Zung is one of the top 1% of attorneys in the US. Her unlikely journey began as a college dropout with three children by the age of 23. After deciding to finish her college degree, Rebecca graduated law school, and now runs a multi-million dollar law firm and a hugely successful creator business.In this episode, you’ll learn: How Rebecca reached 230k subscribers on YouTube Rebecca’s proven YouTube content strategy Building a YouTube funnel without paying for advertising How to grow your email subscriber list Links & Resources Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Follow Chikodi on Twitter ClickFunnels Russell Brunson Robert Shapiro Zendesk ActiveCampaign Lynsi Snyder In-N-Out Burger Tony Robbins Coinbase Rebecca Zung’s Links Watch Rebecca on YouTube Rebecca’s Instagram Follow Rebecca on Twitter Rebecca’s on Facebook Rebecca’s website Rebecca’s Crush My Negotiation worksheet Episode Transcript00:00:00 Rebecca:Nobody’s going to dig deep into whatever you posted a year ago, but you could put up a video on YouTube, and a year later it’s still very relevant. If somebody puts in, “How to negotiate with a narcissist,” and that video posted a year and a half ago pops up, it could still be something that somebody watches. People like to watch video.00:00:35 Chikodi:Hello, and welcome to the Creator Business Show. My name is Chikodi Chima, and I am so excited about today’s guest. Rebecca Zung is the Narc Slayer. If you’ve ever seen any of her videos on YouTube, you know that she talks about narcissists and narcissism, how it’s an epidemic, and how you can deal with difficult people in your life powerfully.Rebecca was a college dropout in her early twenties with three young children. She became an attorney, and today she’s on the way to becoming a hundred million dollar creator. Right now she has multiple teams helping her put up five videos a week. She has courses. She has an online community. She has members. She’s creating a lot of transformation in people’s lives.Rebecca is an attorney—she’ll give you the whole rundown—but she’s an attorney. She is an unparalleled creator now, and is helping millions of people deal with some of the most difficult and toxic people in their life.This is a fascinating conversation, and I’m so glad you’re joining us today.So, without further ado, welcome to another edition of the Creator Business Show. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us. Why don’t you take it away?00:01:53 Rebecca:Thank you. I don’t know how far back you want me to go, but I graduated second in my class from high school, and then I kind of, I always say sorta got derailed. I’m half Chinese, half German. My dad was a doctor, so I always say I have no fun genes at all. My parents expected a lot from me.My way of pushing back was, ’m going to drop out of college, get married at 19, and have three kids by the time I’m 22. Right. That’ll show them. Then, at 22, I’m like, maybe they were right. This is actually kind of hard. I have no money, I have two years of college, but what am I doing here?So, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. I finished college and I started teaching. I was teaching inner city elementary school in Fort Lauderdale, and then my marriage fell apart, and I’m still in my twenties, but I felt so old at that point. I had lived such a life already at the time.The University of Miami had a night school, a law school, and here I am divorced with three little kids, and started to go to law school. Luckily, I had a good relationship with my ex-husband, so he would take care of the kids at night. I put myself through law school, met my current husband there, and we’ve been married for 21 years now.And I have a 19 year old daughter with my, my current husband. And while I was still in law school, I happened to me. And a woman who was also half Chinese who had been divorced and had three kids. And, you know, we had this crazy, like all these things in common and she happened to be one of the top family law attorneys in a country.And she had this big, massive practice where she was representing all these billionaires and celebrities. And, you know, because in Florida, you know, everybody wants to be a Florida resident. Even if, if. you know, other places, you know, they’re Florida resident have no income tax, right. So, I learned the business of high net worth divorce, which is very different type of practice than regular divorce.You know, you dealing with estates and business valuations and all this. And so that’s how I kind of came up through the ranks as a, a high net worth divorce attorney. in 2013, I wrote my first book and, you know, by then I’d already had my own practice. You know, the partners that I had been working for had long retired and that kind of started to get me some media attention.John Gray, who wrote men are from Mars. Women are from Venus, had, you know, given me a testimonial for my book. I was picked up by his publicist. So I started to do some commentating, Celebrity divorces. I started commentating for, you know, TMZ and extra and things like that. And, I started speaking around the country on negotiation, just straight negotiation, and, you know, kind of came up through the ranks as a speaker on negotiation and even was the keynote speaker for the American bar association on negotiation.And about four years ago, I decided, you know, I think I want to do other things other than just practice loss. So I merged my practice with two other guys and I just decided I want more space. I want to clear the space. I want to spend more time with my daughter. I had a few more years left of high school.My husband had always wanted to come back to California. So we, we decided to spend more time here in California. I’m still a partner at a firm in Florida, but you know, I don’t really practice anymore. I was, you know, I originate cases, but I don’t Florida resident. I’m a Florida resident, of course. And, you know, I was like, okay, what do I want to do?So I found myself in, an entrepreneurial situation with a, another woman who turned out to be a covert narcissist. And I had. No idea anything about narcissist? first of all, in my mind, I thought narcissists were all male and I also thought narcissists were all boisterous, loud, big mouth people who filled the room, told everybody how great they were.I had no idea that there were different kinds of narcissists. this is how little I really knew about narcissist, to be honest with you. Somebody mentioned to me about the word covert narcissist, and at the time we were also my husband and I were also realizing that there was a family member that we were dealing with.That was also a covert narcissist. And so. This was all kind of coming to light at the same time. And both of them also were a female by the way. And so at that, we started diving into all things narcissism. So my husband and I were like, Just filling our heads with every book, every podcast, every piece of everything we just became like narcissist experts as much as we possibly could.And, you know, we’re both lawyers. So research was our thing. I mean, as many books and everything that we could possibly get our hands on. Started learning everything we could about narcissism. And I was just absolutely shocked. And I realized that the 20 years that I had been studying about negotiation, I could totally apply to what I was learning about narcissism.And that was when I realized. Oh, I could actually, you know, talk about this as well. And I was still doing some law practicing at the time, and I started applying it to my law practice and I was starting to see movement in my cases at the same time, you know, because I was taking this sort of sabbatical from my law practice and I was starting to figure out what I was going to do now.I was diving deep into learning about you, to learning about funnels, learning about digital courses and, you know, trying to figure out my next step. So I started to just do some video. And I did videos on how to negotiate, you know, clothing, color, psychology, and negotiation, how to negotiate a pay raise, and, you know, a couple of those.And some of those would get like 20 views, 30 views, which were pretty much, I’m pretty sure, like my mom was watching and you know, maybe some of her. Oh, yeah, my mom would probably watch all 20. and maybe some of her friends at church because she would show, oh, look at this. And my mom, my daughter, you know, and then I did one video on how to negotiate with a narcissist and it got like 600 views.And. Oh, Hmm. Maybe I’m onto something here. So I thought maybe I should do more on that. Maybe other people are dealing with this too. Not just me. And so I thought, I guess I should do a little more content on that. And that was literally, only about a year and a half ago. And now I have. about a million and a half views 00:10:21 Chikodi:And 230,000 subscribers when I checked last.Yeah. 00:10:25 Rebecca:Yeah. 00:10:26 Chikodi:Okay. So from 20 views to a million and a half years a month, obviously a lot happened, but what do you think? I mean, cause, that is really catching lightning in a bottle. What do you think it was about the subject matter, your particular expertise, and also your, your entrepreneurial drive that made this such a prolific, advancement.00:10:53 Rebec

Today on the show, I’m joined by my friend and colleague, Ed Zitron. Ed is the founder and CEO of EZPR, a top-ranked PR firm whose clients include SK Global, Nature Publishing, Altwork, Lily Robotics, Target and Plantronics.Ed is a prolific writer. In addition to his newsletter, he writes for The Atlantic, and Business Insider. Ed is also an award-winning author, known for his willingness to go against conventional opinions.I talk with Ed about the creator economy, and the necessity of creating a community as a creator. We talk about how technology can help create new communities and relationships. We also discuss how to self-promote as a creator, how to keep your audience engaged, and much more.In this episode, you’ll learn: Why creators might want to avoid Patreon Ed’s unconventional method for creating high-quality content How to write error-free content Why NFTs are not a good monetization model for creators Links & Resources Follow Pico on Twitter Pico The Atlantic Business Insider Patreon PayPal Substack Glenn Greenwald Platformer Some More News Clubhouse Grammarly Mike Isaac Matt Weinberger Eric Newcomer Casey Newton The Verge Bloomberg Delia Cai Vanity Fair Jesse Singal Shopify BigCommerce imPRint DeviantArt Etsy drewtoothpaste Ed Zitron’s Links Follow Ed on Twitter EZPR on Twitter Ed’s website Ed’s books: This Is How You Pitch, and Fire Your Publicist Ed’s Substack There Isn't A Labor Shortage, There's An Abundance of Bad Companies Email Ed Episode Transcript00:00:00 Ed:Keep writing. Keep writing as often as you can. Keep writing until you work out what it is that the people like, but also what you like, which you can write regularly. 00:00:23 Chikodi:Thank you for joining us on another edition of the Creator Business Show. My name is Chikodi Chima, and today I’ll be joined by my friend and colleague, Ed Zitron. He is now writing for the Atlantic, and Business Insider.He started with a newsletter, and he’s been a prolific writer about macro trends.He’s very controversial in that he doesn’t follow the conventional opinion. He definitely goes against the conventional opinion.We talk about the creator economy. Are we re-codifying things that have already been done, or are we charting new ground? We also talk about how community is really essential, and how technology is creating new communities and new relationships.It’s a really wonderful conversation, and I’m so glad that you’re with us.Welcome to the Creator Business Show, Ed Zitron. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that we’re friends, but I’d say that we’re deeply respectful colleagues. Yes. We worked together on the launch of The Compound Protocol, I guess it was 2018. So, it’s been a while now.We’ve been in each other’s orbit for quite a while. I think you were pitching me when I was a reporter at The Next Web in 2012. So, we go back.00:01:31 Ed:I’ve been married, divorced, married again, since then. There’s so much crap that...00:01:37 Chikodi:Bought a home. Sold a home.00:01:39 Ed:Bought a home, sold a home several times, moved to Las Vegas.00:01:43 Chikodi:Does that mean it’s all going to start again, now that we’re together in one place. 00:01:48 Ed:Yeah, I’ve got to do it all again next year. I can’t move anymore. I’m dying here. Well, I was. I’m fine now.00:01:58 Chikodi:Good, good. So, Ed Zitron, you are the founder and CEO of EZPR. You are a prolific writer and a publicist, like myself. Why don’t you give your background? What are the relevant aspects of what I mentioned that you care about, and who are you really?00:02:16 Ed:Who am I really not? So, I run a PR firm. I’ve run it for about eight years now. I’ve been in PR for about 13 years. It was a writer before, I’m still a writer now. Now I have a newsletter. I started writing pretty much only to get the demons out, because if I didn’t write, I got kind of depressed.So, I started writing that, and then people actually started reading it. Which is pretty impressive, considering I was not writing it really for anyone, other than to vaguely get attention. Now it’s grown into something where I write for the Atlantic, Business Insider, and basically anywhere else that’ll have me.So, yeah. As far as creators go, I am deeply suspicious of a lot of creator-focused companies. I really do not like Patreon. I feel like Patreon and Jack Conte do not have the best interest of creators in mind. I think their entire cost structure is terrible, but more importantly, my experience of Patreon previously is friends of mine coming to me, begging for help and saying, “Hey, support will not help me!”These are not small creators. These are not creators who are making 30 bucks a month. These are people making in some cases, tens of thousands. Patreon, I compare their support to PayPal. It’s a bizarre black box, where you don’t really have the support. Patreon has upped their game somewhat.There they’re desperate to keep their biggest creators because surprise, surprise. When you’re half-assing your support for years, people tend to move on. People want to move on. I just don’t believe that Patreon and a lot of these creator-economy com great. companies really offer much. I don’t think they offer anything other than a bait a CMS and a payments platform. if anyone finds a way to do that cheaper, they’re probably going to lose because discoverability is not something that Patreon really offers. Anyway. That’s how I feel. I hate Patreon There we are. It’s my entire, just kicking this off, kicking this00:04:16 Chikodi:Yeah. Yeah. And it’s only going to go up from here. So, you know, taking a small step back as far as creators go, you are a prolific writer. If I do say so myself, you have a couple of books, you mentioned that you’re now being published for your opinion, editorials and original material in the Atlantic Business Insider, and you have your own, uh, sub stack publication, whereas your edit and you’re publishing two, three times a week.00:04:45 Ed:Usually three to five, but I’ve actually been quite burned down. I’ll fully admit I was re I few days ago, I just hit. And it doesn’t mean I’m stopping up, probably stopped writing again today. But usually there was a point when I was doing five. I did like, I had like a separate week street where I did five a week.And now I think it’s a combination of just this very long year for everyone. But also with the fact that I had a relatively breakneck pace for months and months and months, and it eventually just got me. And on top of the fact I’ve run a PR agency along with that, but I like sub stack as well. I think subs Tech’s great because they don’t purport to be more than they are. 00:05:26 Chikodi:Well, um, the pace of production of material puts you in an interesting spot because you’re not monetizing off of content, but you’re producing a lot of content. And, you know, after we became acquainted, when I was a staff reporter at, uh, uh, The Next Web, you know, you’re quite prolific on Twitter as well, and maintain quite a number of very public relationships with a lot of authors, um, on these top publications.So, um, your output is puts you in, in unique company, I would say, How do you think of yourself as a creator?00:06:07 Ed:I think create a, can be kind of a nebulous term because create a can of plate it’s it reminds me of like w like seven or eight years ago when you had this whole maker movement. Not sure if you remember that it was this really disingenuous thing where it’s like anyone who built anything was a maker.It’s like, oh, make a magazine. And it was people like sewing clothes and doing art, which is fine. And they’re both valid pursuits and they’re wonderful, but they’re not new. And I hate codifying and re-codifying things. It’s a personal thing. Well, we are seeking more meaning than it is in the world. That being said the whole create economy.I think the, I don’t see myself as a Cray because I’ve considered someone I consider creation creates or something you dedicate yourself to full-time and I just don’t, but perhaps I’m wrong for that. I just don’t see myself in that realm because creators are more creative than I am. Perhaps. It’s more, more of a, a judgment on me than anyone else.00:07:06 Chikodi:You know, one of the things that I really respect about you is your hot takes. So you say you don’t like codifying and re-codifying things. Why don’t we, why don’t we talk about what the dangers or the pitfalls of codifying and re-codifying things are? Cause that’s what you see this moment, as it00:07:22 Ed:So about to codify something. We’ll talk about not like codifying, but I think the. And subtype brain, which I’ll get to in a second. I think that sub stack has created an interesting thing with writing just in general. And I don’t think it is a subset specific problem, but something that sub-state through its ease of use and its ease of monetization.But also the subsequent pressure to keep creating has created a new thing where people just come up with stuff to fill space and they try and codify something special that isn’t special at all. Uh, I’m not attacking the right own question. I’m not even going to name them, but there was someone who recently wrote something that was like, oh, you’re not just feeling bad.It’s full regression00:08:07 Chikodi:Okay. 00:08:08 Ed:Piss off. You just feel bad. Cause the stuff happening too, it’s not full aggression. Oh, and what was the other one? It was like, um, late night progressed the nation, but it was like deliberate, like, um, ventral procrastination or. Because you stay up at night instead of going to bed, reading stuff on your phone.And it’s like, that’s just using the telephone. It’s not special. And what I think that comes from is this demand to always seem profound. Like you’re always come up with something new, but coming up with something new means coming up with like a new thing, like I’ve invented this and that pressure to constantly create is something that has led a lot of people

Lesley Sim is the co-founder of Newsletter Glue. Newsletter Glue makes it easy to publish and deliver your newsletter right from your blog post. It’s a great way to save a lot of time editing and formatting your newsletter.Lesley started creating websites in 2016 for herself and her clients. A desire for a better workflow and publishing experience than was currently available led her to develop Newsletter Glue.Lesley and I talk about how Newsletter Glue came to be. It was actually a feature in another company Lesley and her Newsletter Glue co-founder created. We talk about Ways you can improve your readers’ newsletter experience, how to anchor them to your newsletter, and much more.In this episode, you’ll learn: How to use audience feedback to easily create new content How to save time and effort publishing your newsletter An easy way to be much more consistent with your publishing How to optimize your readers’ newsletter experience Links & Resources Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Mailchimp Substack WordPress Indie Hackers Float ActiveCampaign MailerLite ConvertKit Dense Discovery Tedium Ryan Gilbert Swiss-Miss Tattly Gregarious Narain Dru Riley Trends.vc The Hustle Tiago Forte Building a Second Brain Talking Shrimp Selena Soo Nir Eyal Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products Lesley Sim’s Links Follow Lesley on Twitter Follow Newsletter Glue on Twitter Newsletter Glue Newsletter.tips Episode Transcript00:00:00 Lesley:The biggest mistake would probably just be trying to be too perfect from the start. Over complicating it is a great way to ensure that you hate it.The best thing to do is keep it super simple. If you want to do an editorial-style newsletter, just write a couple of paragraphs, and send it out.If you want to do a curation-style newsletter, put a couple of links in it. Start as small as you possibly can. 00:00:33 Chikodi:Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Creator Business Show. My name is Chikodi Chima, and today I am joined by Lesley Sim. She’s going to join us from Singapore. She is co-founder of Newsletter Glue. Newsletter Glue helps you publish your newsletter from a blog post.You don’t have to take a blog post and put it into your newsletter tool. You do it all from an API feed into your newsletter. It saves a ton of time. You don’t have to mess around with formatting. So, it’s a great way to save hours a day in your publishing process.Newsletter Glue was started from a feature in another company that Lesley created with her co-founder. They shut down the company. It was a membership site, and people weren’t using it. So, the feature that she loved, and other people liked, ended up being a company on its own.We’re going to talk about ways you can improve your newsletter experience for your readers, get feedback, and turn that into content. Also, how you can shape the experience of reading so that people are anchored in your newsletter experience.Newsletter tips is a project that Lesley is working on. So, we’re going to go for a lot of newsletter tips. Get a lot of great information, and I think you’re gonna love it.So, stay tuned for today’s edition of the Creator Business Show.Lesley, thank you so much for joining us. Do you want to give us a quick introduction, and tell us about Newsletter Glue?00:01:59 Lesley:Hi, Chikodi. Super nice to meet you. Thanks for having me on the show. I run a WordPress plugin called Newsletter Glue. What we do is allow people to write newsletters the way that they write blog posts. So, pull up the block editor, type stuff in, throw in a bunch of images, and send that out as a newsletter to all your subscribers.It’s a much easier way of doing things rather than going into MailChimp, and wrestling with the editor over there, which is not optimized for actual writing.00:02:36 Chikodi:How did you get started with Newsletter Glue?00:02:40 Lesley:At the time Substack was getting really popular, and I went to similar functionality, but for my WordPress site. I just prefer WordPress because I’ve been working in it for a long time, and I liked all the options you get. I can choose my own theme, I can edit all the specific features I want.In my case, I wanted the ability to type a post and send it out. I realized there wasn’t a way to do that at the time. I was like, “Okay, let’s build this.” At the time, my co-founder and I were working on a different plugin, a membership plugin, and it we were having trouble getting it off the ground.There wasn’t much traction for it. I think the membership space is pretty mature, and quite crowded. Which I’m sure people at Pico also feel. So, we were having trouble with the, despite the fact that my co-founder has built membership plugins for the past 10 years. He’s built plugins of hundreds of thousands of users, and decided to go out on his own.And we partnered up and we tried to get a new membership, plug enough, the garden was difficult. And at the time we were like, okay, this is not working. What should we do? but we built this like small feature into our membership plugin that allowed us to send posts as, yes, let us, and I wasn’t too sad about the membership plugin shutting down, but I was sad about that, like tiny feature.Cause I use that feature. and you know, I was like, wait a minute, if I’m sad about this feature going away, maybe other people would be sad or care about this feature too, because like it wasn’t, it wasn’t possible. Like, you know, there are a lot of membership plugins, but there weren’t a lot of other plugins doing this specific feature.And so I realized, like there’s an opportunity here to spin up that feature into a whole Fagan and that’s kind of how it all started.00:04:58 Chikodi:Well, thank you for that. And it’s quite interesting what you said too, that MailChimp, a lot of these newsletter platforms, they’re not actually optimized for writing. They’re optimized for sending they’re optimized for automation. You can get whatever information about the readers and the open rate and what have you, but you can’t write.That seems so simple. And yet that’s a really powerful, so talk about how you went from being sad about a feature that you liked and a product you had built to actually testing it in the market and getting the confirmation from, from others that this is something that they would use and, you know, obviously Newsletter Glue, but talk about the kind of research process that went from a feature to actually being, you know, a company.00:05:46 Lesley:We had the luxury of having care to felt product. So all the pain, and mistakes that we made there, I made sure to not make those mistakes again. so with a membership plugin, we, you know, didn’t tell anybody didn’t do any research didn’t, you know, do customer discovery, interviews, any of those things, we were like, okay, we’re, we’re confident that we can build a membership plugin, and then we just built it.So it’s like classic. That I like that approach. and then with Newsletter Glue, having already made all the mistakes the first time round, I knew that we wanted to build in public from day one. so a couple of things I did, I started getting really active on Twitter. joined indie hackers, wrote a bunch of posts there.Talk to people on there, like, Hey, I think, I think my first post was something like, sub-state for WordPress, like question mark. And then I wrote this whole thing on, like, if we built, this plugin that lets you send posts and this newsletters on, on WordPress, would you be interested and like a bunch of like the reasons why we’re doing it.And. I mean, this, this sounds small, but at the time given where we were coming from, it wasn’t small, but we got like, I don’t know, maybe 40 or 50 comments of people that really interested, wanting to find out more. And I use like, kind of like the same wording and, paraphrased it and asked again on a bunch of Facebook groups, like new sets of Facebook groups.And also I think maybe on Twitter. And so we kind of slowly got maybe 90 interested people and then that it down into maybe I want to say 10 customer discovery interviews. and yeah, that kind of gave us the confidence that it was something that people want it. and we try to build something really small to begin with.And I think like within the first week we got maybe like 10 random people signing up and using our free pregnant. which again sounds small, but, it’s different when like you’re coming from zero, like me and my co-founder, we weren’t like, you know, internet celebrities if 10,000 or a hundred thousand Twitter00:08:10 Chikodi:Now, but you weren’t.00:08:12 Lesley:Well, I S I still don’t have, but that’s the thing I feel like, especially on Twitter, you see these people with like, you know, hundred thousand followers and it’s like, they tweet one thing and then, you know, boom, oh, you know, overnight success a million-dollar 00:08:28 Chikodi:Oh yeah. Like Blakey mall from a00:08:31 Lesley:Yeah, exactly. Right. 00:08:32 Chikodi:But it does sound like youDid the hard part, which is. Testing an idea with the market before going and building out the whole thing, which is definitely easier than shutting down a whole company. So this time you did that and you got validation and yeah, like you said, having a random person that just likes what you’ve built, because it solves a problem for them is, you know, like if I’ve made $1 on something from somebody, I don’t know, that’s the best dollar you ever make.So that sounds like you got to that point and who were the people that gave you the, the good feedback that you said, okay. People like this, if there’s one of them, there’s a thousand of them. So describe the profile of your early users and the pain that, that you were solving for them.00:09:22 Lesley:The interesting thing is. originally thought that I’d be able to move a bunch of people from Substack over to WordPress and that’s turned out generally pretty wrong. what turned out to be like a good, user profile fo

Louis Nicholls is Co-Founder of SparkLoop. SparkLoop makes it easy to grow your audience by word of mouth. SparkLoop’s email referral program is easy to set up, and gets amazing results. Sparkloop lets you focus on creating great content for your audience.I talk with Louis about growing your audience and newsletter through referrals. We talk about how the increasing costs of Facebook ads, and competition for people’s attention, are making referrals a cost-effective way to connect with and grow your audience.In this episode, you’ll learn: Why email marketing is still a great way to connect with your audience How to increase your email signups through referrals Why social media marketing costs have exploded The right way to use emails in your marketing strategy Links & Resources Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Manuel Frigerio HubSpot The Hustle Morning Brew MailerLite ConvertKit Campaign Monitor Sailthru The Skimm Front Office Sports Bose Tim Ferriss Eight Sleep Trevor McKendrick Quora Reddit Brian Clark Further The Tilt Discord Packy McCormick Not Boring Substack Louis Nicholls’ Links Follow Louis on Twitter Follow SparkLoop on Twitter SparkLoop Email Louis Episode Transcript00:00:00 Louis:Brands over-index on physical goods, and they don’t think enough about rewards that make people sit up and pay attention. So, there’s stuff that’s based on exclusivity, on urgency, on personality, that’s funny or humorous. In five years, pretty much every brand will have one. It becomes even more important to break out of that Morning Brew style— stickers, mug, t-shirt—kind of phase, and to have something really cool that makes people sit up and take notice.00:00:34 Chikodi:Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Creator Business Show. My name is Chikodi Chima. My guest today is Louis Nicholls, Co-Founder of SparkLoop. SparkLoop helps you, as a publisher, grow your email newsletter subscriber list by referral programs.What we discussed today is that you actually don’t need to necessarily give away schwag stickers, hoodies, coffee mugs, things like that. As great as they are, a lot of times people are incentivized to share just because they get a shout out, they get recognized, or they get preferential access to somebody that they really admire and want to know better. That can grow your newsletter tremendously.In the last couple of years, with the cost of Facebook ads skyrocketing, and the competition for people’s attention, growing your newsletter by referrals is a really cost-effective and sticky way to maintain connection with your audience, grow your audience, and grow your revenue. It’s a really fascinating conversation, and I am excited to share it with you.So, stick around for today’s episode of the Creator Business Show.Well, thank you very much for joining us today. I am joined by Louis Nicholls. He is today in Lisbon, and he is the founder of SparkLoop. Louis, do you want to give a quick introduction about yourself, and tell us about SparkLoop? 00:01:52 Louis:Yeah. Thank you so much for having me here today. I am the Co-Founder of SparkLoop, one of two, along with Manuel Frigerio. We co-founded SparkLoop about a year and a half ago, nearly two years ago now. We make a referral tool for emails and email newsletters, which makes it very easy to grow your audience by word of mouth.We’ve been doing that for about a year and a half now. I think we power, for context, probably seven of the 10 biggest newsletter referral programs out there, and thousands of slightly smaller ones. Our team is still relatively small, but growing quickly, and spread out all across the world. So, from Europe through to the other coast of the US.00:02:47 Chikodi:Just for reference, if you are watching this, we did not plan to both be wearing black t-shirts. That just kind of happened.00:02:55 Louis:Yeah, it was a complete chance. We agreed that we weren’t going to wear pants, right?That was something we did beforehand, but the black t-shirts is a coincidence.00:03:04 Chikodi:That is one of the great things about working from home and shooting from the waist up. So that was, that was an agreement, but the black t-shirt thing completely random. okay. So talk to me about email, I think, and I’m sure you’ll agree that email is still the killer app of the internet. 00:03:24 Louis:Definitely. Yes, absolutely. I think there was debate about whether phone numbers were going to take over and text was going to take over. And I think that still has some application. There are still some interesting avenues to explore with, with SMS and with phone numbers. But if you look at the trends over the last two years, we had a decade slightly more than a decade where.Everybody was being pulled onto third party proprietary platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and everybody was very happy building their own audiences and their own empires on top of those platforms. And then those platforms came and said, well, brilliant. We now have a relationship with your audience.We’re going to start slowly squeezing you and to start slowly charging more and more and making it more difficult to own that relationship with your audience. And you can’t take them anywhere else. They’re locked in. And all of a sudden, everybody started realizing, wow, we need some way to be able to keep up to date with our audience.We need some way to be able to keep in touch with them, to move them to different platforms and to, you know, really own that relationship. And what’s the one thing that everybody has, it’s an email address. So I think less two years has really been a wake-up call. And I don’t see that changing in the next five years, for sure.Really, even in the next 10 years, I think it’s going to be just as important.00:04:51 Chikodi:We just said something interesting about SMS. So we think that SMS is, hierarchically inferior to email, but, that SMS is actually less preferred than email. Is that, is that a vested interest or like, explain that. 00:05:09 Louis:Yeah, no, I mean, for me, doesn’t have a vested interest. I mean, we are an email referral platform. We could do the exact same thing with SMS, right. It would be probably one day’s work to change the entire company to just be maybe focused on SMS. It would not cost, you know, it would not be a difficult thing at all.It’s just, I think people, they don’t like having that relationship with brands and with creators via SMS, right. That’s still very bound to your phone as opposed to, to, you know, to the various devices that you use. and it’s just, it’s not a rich medium with which to get information across. Right. It’s very clunky.It’s it’s, it’s almost too personal people still don’t like being interrupted there. And, yeah, I, I, I just don’t see that changing. I thought there was going to, there was an opportunity maybe for that to become kind of like the defacto, but it seems to be going like swinging back in the, in the other direction, especially with, I think you’re seeing a rise of, you know, people having, most people will have maybe two phone numbers, right.Everyone has a personal phone number and then potentially also work phone number often. It’s the same one, but some people will have a second phone before work. Most of us have a couple of different email addresses for different things. kind of different versions of ourselves, right. Different identities. And I think that’s, one of the main reasons that, you know, that email is just such a, I think it’s just so sticky. I think it’s going to be very hard to get rid of. 00:06:38 Chikodi:You know, as you say it, I definitely can relate to not wanting, like there aren’t really any brand, like maybe my local restaurant or something could text me and get me to take action, but I do actually resonate with your point about how it is too personal to have that relationship with a party that just wants to sell me stuff, on my phone, but I don’t have a problem filtering it through email, so yeah.Point taken for sure. Talk me through the journey of SparkLoop. Email is now 45 or even 50 years, in its life. And SparkLoop is two years in its life. And email newsletter is having quite a moment with, you know, very big startups being grown on the back of email servers, servicing people through email.So what was it, what was it about this moment and your background and your co-founders background that led to the creation of SparkLoop?00:07:44 Louis:Yeah, for sure. So I would say as the background, my co-founder at the time that we started SparkLoop, he’d been running his own referral platform. That was just a generic referral platform. You know, you could, you could connect it to any kind of business to do referrals really. And that’s still today what the bulk of referral platforms.I like that kind of like a, like a Swiss army knife. Right. They, they, they kind of do everything and it, you know, you can kind of plug them in and kind of make them work to do everything. And what we saw, which I just touched on was you had this kind of. Shift of like a couple of different things happening at the same time.Firstly, you had kind of that effect. We talked, we touched on about like the platforms, the third party platforms becoming more restrictive and brands kind of waking up to the fact that, oh, well I need to own the relationship with my audience. I need to have their email addresses, which means all of a sudden, about two years ago, three years ago, people really had this big shift that we need to start collecting email addresses, smaller audience, and we need to start doing it now.So that was kind of like the demand bubbling of that originally. And if you look at how a lot of these big brands started out over the last five years or so, a lot of that was done by a. Marketing. So social media marketing on Facebook, for example, by Google Instagram, in some cases, even Snapchat at a time, probably a bit at the moment, it’s still a bit of tick-tock going on.And that was relatively

Zamaan Abbas, (AKA) DJ Complexion, has been deejaying for nearly 20 years. His SoundCloud podcast, The Future Beats Show, has over 55,000 followers. He's worked with School Boy Q, A$AP Rocky, Jorja Smith, and other notable artists. He also runs Future Wave with Complexion, on BBC Radio.Zamaan started deejaying to impress his high school crush. He enjoys green tea, comic books, video games, and is obsessed with anything related to outer space. His deejaying has taken him around the world as both a tour DJ, and running solo gigs.In this episode, I talk with Zamaan about his journey to monetizing his show on Twitch. We talk about the obstacles he faced as his business has grown, and some unexpected opportunities that have emerged because of the COVID pandemic. It’s a great conversation that I’m sure you’ll enjoy.In this episode, you’ll learn: How to build a loyal fan base Creating a brand that people remember How to monetize your online DJ show Links & Resources Pico Twitch BBC BBC Sounds Ko-fi Coachella Westside Bandcamp Busta Rhymes Dru Riley Robin Eisenberg Jorja Smith Interscope Records Josh Constine TechCrunch Discord Patreon Daniel Richtman Zamaan Abbas' Links Follow Zamaan (DJ Complexion) on Twitter Future Wave with Complexion Complexion’s Instagram Complexion’s show on SoundCloud The Future Beats Show The Future Beats Show episode 250 The Future Beats Show episode 200 The Future Beats Show on Twitter The Future Beats Show on Instagram Episode Transcript00:00:00 Zamaan:The effect the internet has had has been incredible. When I first started doing my radio show, I pitched it to so many different radio stations, all the big radio stations, and every single person said no. So, I was like, cool, I’ll do it independently, and I’ll do it myself. 00:00:23 Chikodi:Thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode of the Creator Business Show. My guest today is my dear friend, Zamaan Abbas, also known as DJ Complexion. He has a show on the BBC, which was just renewed. I first found out about him through his show, The Future Beats Show.He has a global community of listeners, all continents, including Greenland. He is now on episode 296 of his show. He’s a DJ, an A & R, and an amazing creative. He has an incredible aesthetic. If you check out his album art on his SoundCloud podcast, you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. It’s space themed. You see, we’re in the San Francisco space port. So, we talk about his journey to monetizing on Twitch after only doing his show for eight years. Some of his blockers in his business. Some of the opportunities that have presented themselves because of the pandemic. It’s going to really be a great conversation.I’m really grateful for you for being here. So, let’s dive into today’s episode of the Creator Business Show.Welcome to the Creator Business Show. My name is Chikodi Chima. I am honored to be joined by Zamaan Abbas, also known as DJ Complexion. We have a lot of history. He’s been a huge inspiration to me, and I will just let you introduce yourself, and we can go from there.00:01:48 Zamaan:Thank you so much, Chikodi. As you said, we go way back, and it’s my absolute pleasure to now be on the other side of this. Because normally it’s you listening to me. Now I’m a part of something that you’re doing, which is great. Professionally, I’m known as DJ Complexion. I’ve been deejaying for coming up to 20 years.I’ve worked with plenty of artists. I’ve done A & R work, some radio work, some production work, and currently I have a radio show that I’m running myself. I also have a show on BBC Radio 1Xtra, as well.00:02:20 Chikodi:Hey, congratulations. That’s such a career achievement. I know that was something that you really, really, sought to do for a long time. So, the show on the BBC is called the Future Wave, and your SoundCloud show is?00:02:37 Zamaan:Is The Future Beats Show.00:02:38 Chikodi:The Future Beats Show.00:02:39 Zamaan:Yeah, so we play lots of very forward-thinking, downtempo electronic music, but we also explore other avenues of electronic music. The whole idea just came about from myself wanting to listen to music which wasn’t club music. I deejay as a full-time profession, and I’d finished deejaying, had a long drive home, and the only thing that was on the radio was either stuff from the seventies or eighties, or it would be like really hard music. Whether it was Hip Hop and R and B, whether it was House music, and I wanted to have something else, like listen to something that was a bit more calming. A bit meditative, I guess.I started exploring this electronic scene, and lo and behold, nearly eight years later we have a radio show which is listened to worldwide. We have between 25,000 to 50,000 listens a week. We’ve had a successful merch launch. We’ve worked with many brands, artists, and it’s become something which I’m really proud of.It’s something I never thought that would have got to the point that it’s got to.00:03:46 Chikodi:Well, that’s so cool. And, and you know, not only that, but the future beats kind of, you are the king maker, if you will, for the sound. 00:03:58 Zamaan:I mean, people say this and I guess, you know, not only being British, I just don’t like to talk about myself. Like, I’m the, I’m the person who just, you know, made the sound or anything. Why will say I’m a fan of this genre of music. And I push it out to as many people as I can is I guess is the, the way that I can say it.And that makes me cringe just a tiny bit saying it.00:04:23 Chikodi:Yeah, because you’re British. So if you’re unfamiliar, the show is called the future beats. Hosted by GJ Complexion Zamaan and on the BBC, you can listen to the episodes on the BBC sound’s app and there’s the Future Wave. And so, so as he was saying, there is now, or is a whole genre called future beats and they are somewhat synonymous.So it’s pretty amazing. and over the course of the show, you don’t really do artist interviews anymore, but certainly you’ve had the opportunity to connect with, you know, artists across the spectrum. And, you know, you’ve worked with and deejayed with some really notable, musicians who are really hitting their stride today.00:05:14 Zamaan:Yeah, I think that’s something I’m really proud of. and I don’t intentionally do it, but I’ve managed. You know, champion artists that I’ve been a big fan of and they’ve gone on to do amazing things. I mean, there’s artists that I’ve played in the show 5, 6, 7 years ago, and they’re now signed to drinks label, or they’re doing something else really huge or, you know, it just, it just, I mean, I’d call it luck.Some people say I have an ear for this stuff. So, you know, if someone else wants to say that, I’m, I’m fine with that. But yeah, I I’m, I’m really happy being able to do that in terms of the off-season to use, someone who used to work with he had a background in interviewing. So that’s something he brought onto the radio show and it just eventually it got to the point where.To have fun on interviews with artists. I wanted to make that a separate project rather than interrupt the music. Because if you listen to the show, it can vary between an hour and 20 minutes to two hours. And what a lot of my listeners have told me, they like to press play and just get on with the day with it’s working out with it’s working in the office, or doing anything, we’ve even had people can see babies to the show, which I say, if you have a child, while listening to the show, the middle name of the child has to be Complexion.It’s just the rules. I don’t write them, but it’s been interesting just to hear these different kinds of stories, from people. And I think having interviews would sometimes break that apart. So that’s something I’m still working on, where I can fully showcase people that I’m a big fan of. And also people that I think are going to go and do big things. 00:06:43 Chikodi:So, you know, this is the creator business show. As you mentioned, artists you have played have gone on to get record deals, do world tours, many things. How does, how do you monetize? let’s Let’s talk about the ways that you as a DJ having done A&R Artist Repertoire work, et cetera, monetize, and how is this a business for you?00:07:07 Zamaan:This is, what’s really interesting. if you believe, I mean, I’m sure you would, because we’re actually friends and we’ve spoken a few times about this, but for everyone else listening and watching, I didn’t actually monetize the show until the lockdown happened. until COVID hails for the longest.Time Six years maybe. I never made any money from doing the radio show. my radio show went out on a local community radio station and I’d also upload it to SoundCloud where it would be able to, people can listen to it worldwide. we had some merch sales years ago, but we broke even with that. And it was something we, I I should have continued on, but I didn’t.The only the only way I made money was actually from deejaying, doing other events that weren’t on brand, but something I would have to do just to be able to get paid, which enabled me to do radio once lockdown kicked in, in the UK. And I wasn’t able to go to any clubs. like a lot of us, who were stuck at home.So I turned to Instagram and Twitch and I started streaming on these platforms. the great thing with Twitch is is that you can subscribe to someone’s. channel at the time the time it was $5. I know Twitch now adjusted things for different exchange rates around the world, but it was $5. the person who was streaming would make half the money and Amazon would take the other half in return, they would support you and you’d get access to little emotes you could use in the chat room.Also Also you can get access to other things as well. you could have a mailing list where you can send, musical other exclusive things to people in the mailing list that’s how, initially I started making money with on Twitch once we had announced we go into lockdown. people just star

Josh Spector is a consultant, newsletter publisher, and creator. Josh helps other creators identify their audience, and helps them monetize their content. Josh also helps creators develop social media strategies, grow their newsletter, and build businesses around their creative work.Josh publishes a weekly newsletter called For The Interested. It features ideas to help creators produce, promote, and make money from their creations. He also shares his knowledge on Twitter, and runs a second newsletter called This Is How I Do It. It features a behind-the-scenes deep dive into exactly how Josh creates, markets, and sells his content, products, and services.In this episode, Josh and I talk about eliminating distraction as a creator. We talk about not spreading yourself too thin, and making sure you’re connecting with the people that need you the most. We also talk about how you present transformation to your audience, and much more.In this episode, you’ll learn: A simple trick for increasing your conversion rate A savvy mindset shift for staying motivated as a creator Getting the most value and production from your content A clever branding strategy to make your newsletter more appealing Links & Resources Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Ship 30 for 30 Pat Flynn James Clear Blair Enns Josh Spector’s Links Follow Josh on Twitter JoshSpector.com For The Interested newsletter This Is How I Do It Episode Transcript00:00:00 Josh:I’m huge on repurposing content. Most people don’t get nearly the value they should out of the content they create. Every blog post I write is not only going to be a blog post that is evergreen and can be used again. Whatever the underlying idea is, the quote unquote “intellectual property” within that blog post, I’m going to leverage in all sorts of different ways.00:00:34 Chikodi:Hey guys, this is Chikodi, host of The Creator Business Show. Today, I’m talking to Josh Spector, from JoshSpector.com.He’s a consultant who works with creators. He helps them identify their audience, and he helps them monetize.We’re going to talk about how you eliminate distraction. How you eliminate spreading yourself too thin, and make sure that you’re talking to the people who need you. We’re also going to talk about how you present your transformation.A lot of great content. So, I’m really excited to dive in. Thank you for joining us on today’s episode of The Creator Business Show.Josh, do you want to tell us a little bit about who you are, and what you do?00:01:23 Josh:Thanks for having me. I am an audience growth strategist, consultant, and newsletter creator. I run the For The Interested newsletter, which I have done for a little over five years now. It comes out every Sunday, and then I have a one paragraph daily weekday edition, as well.It’s designed to basically help creators produce, promote, and profit from their creations. It’s a combination of usually one original article a week that I write, as well as curated articles, and videos, and podcasts from other people. In addition to that, in terms of, how I generate revenue, there are ads in the newsletter.That’s one revenue stream. Working as a consultant is probably my main revenue stream. I sell some info products, and I have a—I don’t actually call it a paid “newsletter,” I call it paid “resources,” which we can get into. But, people are more likely to pay for resources than a newsletter, which is something interesting I discovered.It’s called, This Is How I Do It, and that has an archive about 60 or so resources in there. And I publish a new one every week, as well.00:02:48 Chikodi:You publish a new resource every week?00:02:50 Josh:Yes. Each of those are deep dives behind the scenes of how I do something to grow my audience and business. So, pretty much everything I do is how creators grow their audience and business in various ways. Whether that’s consulting. Whether that’s showing how I do it. Whether that’s sharing information and you know, in my newsletter, and things like that.00:03:13 Chikodi:That’s a brilliant turn of phrase, resource, not newsletter. How much revenue have you seen grow by calling your product a resource instead of a newsletter? 00:03:26 Josh:Well, I don’t have a, I don’t have a specific number, but I can say so I’ve I launched, this is how I do it probably a little over a year ago. almost a year and a half ago. And I think initially I was calling it a paid newsletter and, you know, like with anything, the messaging is always sort of a work in progress.And I started to notice that as I would experiment it, promoting it in my free newsletter, you know, I was always sort of tweaking the copy and what happens when I do this. And I just, I don’t have specific numbers, but I noticed when I refer to these things as resources. They, it converted better. And I think there was a perception of value that, people believe their quote, unquote resource is more valuable than a newsletter.The other thing is, you know, to be honest, so each of these resources, they’re, they’re evergreen, they’re timeless for the most part. So it actually, in a lot of ways is a more accurate description than a, you know, it’s not, here’s, I’m not sharing news, I’m not sharing here’s what happened. and, and as it, as time went on, certainly as it went on, like when someone joins now and, and I offer, there’s two ways I sell it.You can get an annual subscription. right now that’s $120 a year. or I make select individual issues from my archive available for single purchase for $15. So I don’t, I don’t even offer a monthly subscription anymore. so it’s annual, or if you want to sample it, you can buy one of those individual issues.So again, that too is a very sort of resource dynamic. So when someone’s buying now, they’re not just getting everything I share for the next year. They’re getting the 60 resources that are already in there. And I think that’s very different than the typical paid newsletter, which depending on sort of what they’re covering, like their archive may not be that valuable.Right? Like I I also like the term resource, because I think it’s more, timeless. It suggests that what you’re paying for is sort of this collection of information, as much as you’re paying for the new stuff 00:05:46 Chikodi:And did you get that idea from somebody or did you just, was it like a flash of inspiration? Like, let me experiment with this. 00:05:53 Josh:Yeah. I mean, it just, it’s just sort of, it just sort of came to me as I experimented and, and stuff evolved. you know, the one thing with everything I do my free newsletter as well. Like I’m very focused on creating sort of evergreen, longterm, valuable content in everything that I do. I don’t cover, you know, my newsletters not going to cover here’s the new Twitter feature, you know, Facebook announced desks.Like I don’t cover news. I want everything that I create to have a longer window of value. So that, and again, that’s true in free and paid products. So as a result, you know, this is how I do it, the pay price. Has been way more, you know, it just continues to get more and more valuable because I’m building up this archive and content library, which is really different than I think how a lot of people think about certainly media businesses, where they’re like, what’s in the news today, you know?And they have, if I cover, you know, I saw Twitter today, I think rolling out like tips, functionality, you know, if I do a thing about Twitter, rolling out tips, that’s fine. But that’s valuable for maybe a week, a couple of weeks, a couple months at most. if I do instead do a thing about the underlying principles of how to turn Twitter followers into customers, for example, that’s likely going to be valuable for years.Right. So, you know, and, and I, my background, I’ve been a full-time consultant for over five years now, but before. I’ve worked in a variety of jobs in, you know, marketing and media and entertainment. so I have sort of a Hollywood background and I think what a lot of people, I think not purposefully, but I now have realized that I’ve sort of adapted some of that.Like the real value in Hollywood is in the content libraries. It’s not the new stuff, it’s the intellectual property. And it’s the libraries, right? Think about how much money the office has made after they stopped making episodes of the office. Right? These timeless assets are massive. And if you compare that to, let’s just say hypothetically like a news broadcast, there’s not a lot of value in an episode of the nightly news from a month ago00:08:22 Chikodi:You can’t sell yesterday’s hotel room. 00:08:25 Josh:Right? Exactly. So, so I think that approach of understanding that when you do things that are relatively evergreen or time. The, the return on investment. You know, when I have blog posts that I wrote five years ago to get me new clients today, the value of that time spent creating just compounds over time.And, and it’s, you know, I’m always amazed again, you can’t do it with everything, but I’m amazed that people choose to invest in things that have a very short value span. Doesn’t seem like the best use of time 00:09:02 Chikodi:Yeah. Well, I was just thinking in terms of SEO, you know, it’s like people aren’t searching for yesterday’s news, but they are searching for evergreen resources. So by investing your time on the front end to something, that’s going to have lasting value, you create it once and it can pay dividends in perpetuity.So it’s a very smart strategy. You’re a creator is creator. Talk about your audience for a second. 00:09:28 Josh:So my audience, you know, I use the term, creator sort of very broadly. you know, it’s not, my audience, you know, I tend to focus more on sorted in what I would call sort of independent creators or individual creators. I’m not, and this is true of my consulting as well. Like a lot of what I share may be relevant to big companies or big brands who are trying to figure out social strategies

Ned Berke is VP of Audience Strategy at BlueLena. Founded in 2020 to support community-based alternative news and emerging digital media, BlueLena builds long-term reader revenue models, and enhances audience management by sharing world-class technology and expertise with their customers.BlueLena’s mission is to create a sustainable future for independent local media. They offer professional services to build and support subscription, membership, and donation models for long-term success.In this episode, Ned and I talk about how small organized groups have made history throughout time. We talk about publisher churn, and a surprising but simple way to make more money. We also talk about making connections that might not otherwise seem obvious, but have a big impact on your creator business.In this episode, you’ll learn: An unexpected benefit of having a paywall How local engagement leads to making a national impact Scaling your online publishing business How to connect better with your audience, and why connection so important Links & Resources Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Substack Breaking Media Stripe Katelin Holloway Reddit Alexis Ohanian Discord Circle Luma Nick Chen Jason Bade Ned Berke’s Links Follow Ned on Twitter BlueLena Follow BlueLena on Twitter Ned’s Audience Explorer Episode Transcript00:00:00 Ned:The thing that I love about local news, is, that’s where you realize, “Oh, I do have an impact, and I can impact nationally by impacting my own backyard.” It just takes a minute to get there.So, people who feel like they don’t have an impact in the world should really be reading more local news, because that is a very critical step to being able to change the world around them. 00:00:35 Chikodi:Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Creator Business Show. Today, we’re talking to Ned Burke, who is the VP of audience strategy at BlueLena. We’re going to discuss how small organized groups have been the people who make history throughout time. We’re also going to talk about publisher churn, and how publishers can make more money just by making sure the credit cards of their subscribers are up to date.That was a big surprise to me. And we’re going to talk about a lot of things that aren’t obvious when they are in front of you, but maybe the connection was never there. So, stick around. It’s another great episode of the Creator Business Show.Ned, thank you for joining us. Why don’t you give us a quick introduction of who you are, what BlueLena does, and how are they helping people?00:01:20 Ned:Yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here. I’m the VP of Audience at BlueLena. I work hand in hand with the publishers that we work with, and our partners, our tech partners that are all part of the stack, which I can talk more about.The problem that we’re looking to solve is particularly in local journalism. There’s a lot of knowledge about sustainability. There’s a lot of knowledge about what the best practices are and what you need to do. There’s a lot of technology that helps facilitate it, but there’s still a complete lack of resources and being able to connect the two. A publisher might buy into technology, but not have the time, not know what to do.If they do know what they need to do through some sort of accelerator program, they still don’t have the time to turn all the dials and make it happen. They don’t have the expertise or the experience to be doing the ongoing iteration and experimentation that audience development requires for member growth.00:02:33 Chikodi:Okay. Yeah. You know, I definitely identify with that because I was a reporter before I got into the work that I do now. I actually did help launch a publication for Breaking Media. You may be familiar with them, you know, Above the Law, Deal-Breaker, Fashion East. They’ve got into some other verticals as well, but the benefit that they have of being a publishing house is having a shared CMS.But to get to that scale can be quite costly, and needs to be maintained. So, is that something that you help clients with?00:03:10 Ned:Yeah, we don’t, we don’t we’re CMS agnostic. We don’t actually deal with the CMS, where we are, we’re short sort of a shared resource for, first of all, for poor strategic guidance and, you know, being able to map out an audience development plan and build and execute experiments because it’s not just as easy as saying, well, I’m going to go do this is a matter of measuring it, knowing how to do that.and, there are shared resources in terms of the ESP. So we, we, we have a CRM ESP, and then we use the Pico stack on the, on the front end, in order to kind of connect the dots and make sure that. That, that, we’re gauging users collecting data and giving a monetization gateway, but it’s really the, where we are excelling is sort of at the, the CRM and ESP, or I guess anyone who doesn’t know that’s email service provider.So, it’s, in some cases that would be, you know, the most popular is, is MailChimp. It’s not what we use. but we build a lot of automations and, you know, make sure that we’re getting a lot of data signals into that, technology so that we can trigger messages at the right time. we work with our publishers to craft those messages and, know what they need.00:04:31 Chikodi:Very basic question, but why is this important for publishers?00:04:36 Ned:Yeah, man. it’s incredibly important for, for, for publishers and especially a news publisher, isn’t it, especially, especially local news publishers. So I was a reporter and an editor and a publisher. I had started my own publication, and there’s only so much one person or a small team can do. and certainly not much that they have, there’s always, vacuum of, expertise as well.So we are sort of a back bench that really helps them, first of all, avoid burnout because we’re there to give them guidance. A lot of burden burnout just comes from, from creators and publishers, not knowing what to do next and feeling a little bit lost and they can kind of spiral and the pressure builds from there.But then there’s, you know, just the financial need, right? So a lot of what we do, it’s not purely about driving reader revenue, but that is an obvious KPI. It’s why most people hire us, but we, we find ways to also to turn these engagement tools into tools that power and improve the quality of journalism as well.But staying on the revenue side, it’s incredibly important because there’s never been really a more dire time in local journalism. I mean, w we know it in 2020 was a record year for newsroom layoffs, in and, You know, the, the number of outlets that have been shutting down or trimming independent outlets, it’s much harder than it used to be to actually launch.And that sounds contradictory because we have things like Substack that make it easier than ever, but there’s a huge discoverability issue. and so we need to make sure that they have the guidance and these resources and and at the end of the day, the money to continue to do important democracy building, and, and civic infrastructure building, journalism.And so that’s why it matters.00:06:40 Chikodi:Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, you said a lot of important things there. You talked about burnout and that is, kind of endemic in the journalistic profession because you’re constantly searching for the next story and there’s a constant deadlines, but then there’s also, like you said, discoverability.So, you know, it’s not only a matter of getting the content out there, it’s about connecting with the audience. So do you want to talk about how a BlueLena leverages technology to help publishers and, content, producers and journalists connect with their audience and, and, and also what is the, what is the, what is, what does, what does a deeper connection look like?So I guess that’s a two-part question. What does it mean to. To help publishers connect with an audience. And then how does that actually manifest00:07:33 Ned:How much time do we have.I mean, we, we do, we do a lot on that front. I, I think about it and approach it in a very holistic way, which is first sort of just knowing who your audience is. Right. And learning more about them. And the only way to do that is to engage them in a conversation. So we can no longer afford in media to just say, I have a thing to say, and I’m going to say it, and then I’m going to say it.I’m going to say it. And for some people that really works in resonates, but it’s not, especially in journalism where you need to be hearing from the audience about their information needs. that’s not always the most, I would say it’s usually not a path to success. There are sort of, unicorns or yeah, in that, in that, in that model who can just write whatever the, you know, they want and it resonates.And so, so it’s first just trying to understand them. we might do that through surveys and modeling and in some, sometimes really boring stuff. But other times it’s also just encouraging publishers to go out and have conversations. whether that is on social media, via email, you know, when they get a complaint from a reader, really talk to the reader about the complaint and don’t just be like heard. and you know, if you have the resources to sort of organize community events, so that’s sort of engaging with the readers that you already have in that holistic way. And they more kind of audience development, technology, you know, funnel sense. It’s making sure that once you have these readers aware of you, that you are, giving them a pathway to be in a relationship with you.And then the, you know, The the most obvious and sort of traditional at this point way of doing that is capturing the email address. And we use Pico for that. and we capture that email address. Pico is very good, with its prompts and it has a very effective, implement an easy implementation effect, effective and high, capture rate.We get that. And when they are, when they fill out their email address, instead of just like it being a

Pico is monetization software for the creator economy. Pico provides signup and payment tools that empower online businesses to build upon their communities. Collect emails, sell subscriptions, and manage customer relationships at scale on your own domain. Pico helps creators understand their audience and unlock revenue growth.In this episode, I talk with Jason Bade and Nick Chen, Co-founders of Pico. We talk about starting and scaling a successful creator business. We talk about freeing up time to work on your content, and why your relationship with your audience is crucial to success. We also talk about why Gen Z is primed to enter the creator economy, and much more.Jason Bade is the President and co-founder of Pico. Jason earned his bachelor's degree in public policy from Stanford University. Before co-founding Pico, he worked as a consultant at Change Labs. Besides his duties at Pico, Jason is a lecturer at Stanford Law School.Nick Chen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pico. Nick earned his bachelor’s degree in product design from Stanford University. Nick has worked as a product consultant, UX engineer, and designer.In this episode, you’ll learn: A huge mistake creators make How to get paid more for your content Tasks every creator should outsource How to avoid burnout Links & Resources Follow Pico on Twitter Pico Substack Patreon Cameo WordPress Oxo Casey Newton Dru Riley Jack Marshall Discord Packy McCormick Minecraft Roblox Jason Bade’s Links Follow Jason on Twitter Edible Schoolyard Project Nick Chen’s Links Follow Nick on Twitter The Workshop NYC Episode Transcript00:00:00 Jason:It used to be that websites were the anchor foundation of someone’s business online. That, to us, is a totally obsolete thing. It’s all about the audience relationship, because who knows how you’re actually going to be interacting with members of the audience.It might be through email. It might be through audio. No matter what, I’m going to have a relationship with someone who wants what I’m producing, and that’s the future of a digital business.00:00:34 Chikodi:Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Creator Business Show, brought to you by Pico. Today, I’m talking to Jason and Nick, co-founders of Pico. We’re going to talk about passion, profession, and geography: the central elements of publishing, and reaching a community.We’re also going to talk about how this notion of geography needs to be re-imagined because so much of our activity is happening online. So many of our communities are communities of interest, whether it’s a Discord server, whether it’s the comment section of a YouTuber or somebody that we really like.So, our geographic proximity is no longer based in the physical world, and that creates new opportunities for publishers.Gentlemen, welcome. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how did we get here today?00:01:27 Jason:We’re basically brothers from another mother, which I know a lot of founders say, but in this case, literally fourth grade was when we started hanging out. 00:01:37 Nick:We’ve been working on Pico ever since.00:01:39 Jason:We’ve been working on the business plan in elementary school recess. 00:01:44 Nick:Drove our teacher nuts. Yeah.We had a fourth grade “meet cute,” and the rest is history. I feel like I’ve always been that startup guy, at least among our circles of friends. My internship as a high schooler was at my uncle’s startup. It’s in my blood. I’ve only ever worked at startups in tech.Jason was the perfect compliment to that. Being more on the academia side, he consulted very large businesses in Europe. We approach problems from two very different angles, but both of us are on the same foundation of design thinking, user-centered design thinking.We’ve always enjoyed talking to each other about things that bother us. There are a lot of things that bother us.00:02:53 Jason:Probably more so, that bother me.00:02:55 Nick:Yeah.00:02:56 Jason:Because...00:02:58 Nick:Yeah, you’re more easily disturbed by...Yeah, it’s a common trait among designers, right? I think we’re the most, easily ruffled. 00:03:09 Chikodi:So, you’re the friendly guy, and Jason’s there curmudgeon, starting in fourth grade.00:03:15 Nick:Yeah. Pretty much.00:03:17 Chikodi:Yeah. And so w w why don’t we, why don’t we start there and Jason, you know, maybe taking the Baton, what is the problem that, you know, you came together to solve through Pico.00:03:27 Jason:Oh, my goodness. I mean, I think at the very highest level, like the very highest level was, you know, really great information. to be paid for, and we didn’t see great infrastructure to help people pay for it. I mean, that’s really the simplest distillation at, at like the design, problem level. and then from there, of course, you know, we, it led us down this path of, well, what is infrastructure for those?I going to produce that information and then sell that information look like, and that sort of looks like, what does infrastructure for journalists look like? What does infrastructure for other types of content creators look like? What is infrastructure for, those folks, if they are digital entrepreneurs look like, that’s the problem that Pico salts.00:04:17 Chikodi:Right. Right. And so when we’re talking about information, we’re really talking about published information, regular, you know, scheduled newsletters and, and publications. Correct.00:04:28 Jason:Yes, but I mean, I think the definition of what high quality content high quality information looks like has expanded and expanded kind of faster than I think Nick and I can even keep up sometimes. you know, for some of our customers membership in a. It’s actually one of the key value propositions, you know?What is that for information, of course. Yeah. You learn from, from other folks in the community, but you’re also, you know, as a relationship, it’s like th th the, the definition. What the transaction is, what the product is online for creators today has, has evolved so much in just a year, three years, five years, compared to what it was when we started the company.And we’re thinking literally just about sort of quality text information.00:05:20 Nick:I mean, if you really want to zoom out, it really taps into everyone’s desire to, to feel a sense of belonging. Even, breaking news in a news about your, your city or even the country, you know, that’s why you care about it because it’s, it’s geography. It’s where you are. It’s where you call home.When it comes to trade magazine Content about your industry, you know, you’re, you’re professional in that space. You, you want to, you want to feel like you belong in that tribe and even apply to a. like Jason’s talking about where it’s really just a, primarily the community that’s being sold.When you think about it at that fundamental level of just wanting to belong, gosh, I mean, Content is just one possibility, right? and that’s, we like to think big in that way, but execute very narrowly. 00:06:19 Chikodi:So...00:06:19 Nick:But that just means we’ve got, you know, at least a decade plus of, of opportunities.00:06:25 Chikodi:Just, just the decade. That’s I, you know, I love the, I love to get philosophical and you guys are really great at that. You know, pairing the philosophical with the practical. So content creators, information, generators and spreaders are kind of like community leaders, but then you said there is a problem that, or many design problems that weren’t being addressed.So I really definitely resonate with his idea of creating a community around shared knowledge and that the, the people who are. Generating and sharing this knowledge are quite, quite adept at leading conversations, but then what’s the problem that they’ve been experiencing. And why did Pico come to be.00:07:12 Nick:And simple. How do you make money doing that? Right. And I think, the, the internet of the nineties and the aughts as well, set up a really challenging precedent, which is that everything feels. And so how do you go from a world like that to a world where, expertise is appropriately rewarded?And the truth is, you know, when, when Jason and I started talking about this problem space, we were kind of struck by how honestly, how affordable this kind of content would actually be if someone just asked us to pay for it. and gosh, that sounds like a design. the experience of paying we’re just a whole lot easier.And, and also the experience of setting up the back office to offer such a thing, you know, on the creator side, what if that were also easier? so that’s, that’s how this all got started.00:08:14 Chikodi:And, and, so monetization and people should get paid for sharing information for having a passion for informing. But what were, what were the real problems once you started digging in to the, you know, once you got on this journey and realize, yes, people should be getting paid, don’t have to pay people a lot, if there’s enough people in your audience and your community, but then there’s still, you know, a host of host of challenges.I’m sure.00:08:41 Jason:The, the challenges are, it’s funny, you know, we’ve, we’ve been working in primarily with, with publishers, and you know, local news publishers, all weeklies, monthly publishers, people who publish content, but think of themselves as publishers, not necessarily. that was the first set of customers that really are our biggest set of customers.So we work with, they’re five, 10 years ahead. Of where I think the, the creator is like Geist is today in terms of folks who don’t think of themselves as publishers, but, are now selling Content as creators, you know, sub stack newsletter or Patrion only fans cameo, you know, the whole range of types of creators, that are now starting to monetize directly to their audience and to their fans.A lot of these challenges were encountered. The years ago by publishers who were trying to piece together a solutions on WordPress with plugins, tr

Gregarious “Greg” Narain has been at the forefront of social media and influencer marketing for nearly two decades. Greg helps creator businesses with content management, email and customer relationship systems, and product development. He’s spoken internationally at leading industry events, and is also involved with many non-profit organizations.Greg earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology from New York University. He’s gone on to found numerous startups in the influencer economy. Greg’s latest venture is Zealous, which he co-founded. Zealous is a live streaming platform that connects creators and their fans through interactive experiences.In this episode, I talk with Greg about the importance of growing a community as a creator. We talk about synchronous engagement, and why it’s having such a huge impact in the creator space. We also discuss the fastest growing monetization models in the creator economy, creating deep connections with your audience, and much more.In this episode, you’ll learn: The most effective tools for building a community How current social media platforms are obscuring your audience The difference between audience and community The number one mistake creators make Links & Resources Follow Pico on Twitter Chute Joe Fernandez Binh Tran StreamYard Twitch Patreon Clubhouse Rally AMA coin Gary Vaynerchuk Maven Kajabi Circle Teachable Etsy Gregarious Narain’s Links Follow Gregarious on Twitter Zealous on Twitter Zealous website Email: gregarious@zealous.app The Created Economy on Twitter The Created Economy show Episode Transcript00:00:00 Gregarious:We’re switching from this attention-based universe to an access-based universe. The attention-based universe was predicated on getting a really big following, then you’ll make money. Today, folks are like, “I don’t need a big following. I can just start to make money.” What’s happening now is we’re seeing the ecosystem, the tooling, the VC money, all the things that are working together to increase the opportunities for you to make money with less people than with more.00:00:34 Chikodi:Hello, and welcome back to the Creator Business Show, brought to you by Pico. My name is Chikodi Chima. I’m here in San Francisco, and today my guest is my long-time friend Gregarious Narain. Greg, why don’t you give us a quick background of who you are? What are you doing today? And let’s talk about creative monetization.00:00:53 Gregarious:Well, that’s a quick background. That’s interesting. I’ve been in the creator space for a very long time. I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life, but my last few companies were all in this domain. So, I was the first employee, and ran product at a company called Klout. I left Klout, went to into YC and did a company called Chute, which was a user-generated content platform connecting brands and influencers.Since then I’ve been working with or advising different startups in the creator space, but I’m also right now the co-founder and CEO of a company called Zealous, which is a community live streaming platform that helps creators monetize going live. 00:01:35 Chikodi:That’s so cool. Thank you, and yeah, I’m thinking that we probably met in a warehouse party at the Klout office. 00:01:45 Gregarious:That that may be.00:01:46 Chikodi:Yeah. 10 and a half years ago.00:01:48 Gregarious:Yeah. 00:01:50 Chikodi:There are people coming to this from all over. So, what was Klout? Because I do think it’s actually relevant to this broader conversation about creator monetization. How to leverage the people that engage with you. Because I don’t wanna say audience or community.There are people out there that want to know what you are doing, and Klout was a really interesting take on that.00:02:21 Gregarious:Yeah. So Klout was somewhat ahead of its time. Online influence has been a thing, or influence has been a thing obviously, or a business model for marketers for a long time. Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran, they started Klout, and the idea of Klout was essentially that everyone’s got some kind of observable influence in the world.By interacting online, people can drive some kind of action, and that’s how we define Klout. the way that we probably described it was probably closer to a FICO score for how influential you were, and this as a 50/50 thing. Some people loved it, and then a whole bunch of people hated it.Because if you had a low score, then you’re like, “Well, you guys suck.” And if it was a good score, then people were really happy with it. But the idea of Klout, fundamentally, was that if we could observe your connections, and the actions that happen or ripple out from that, we could approximate your relative influence in the online world.The goal of having that understanding ultimately was that we were one of the first companies to launch what is now today called influencer campaigns, like connecting brands with individuals who had the ability to sway or influence other people online.00:03:37 Chikodi:Great. So fast forward to today, why don’t we talk about what you’re doing today in the creator space? And I have a very philosophical question bouncing back 10 years.00:03:48 Gregarious:Yeah, absolutely. So today, as I mentioned, my new company is called zealous zealous.app. And what we do is we are like a live streaming platform, but a few key differences here. number one, I think the most important thing though, is that we allow creators to stream with their fans. So traditionally, when you live stream, you go out and you’re broadcasting out to your universe of, followers and fans.But you know, maybe you interact with them a little bit through. With zealous, it’s sort of like a hybrid between like a stream yard, a Twitch, a and patriarch kind of all rolled together. So we provide a web based studio for producing your live stream. You can syndicate that out to YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, wherever you want to send it.We provide, an interactive experience like clubhouse, where anyone you see in the audience, you can bring them on stage with video or audio and actually engage with them. And we provide monetization and community tools like Twitch and Patrion, where you can actually charge either for a sort of that opportunity to get on stage with you or for tickets to an event, or for subscriptions to sort of ongoing access or, you know, more privatized access over time.00:04:51 Chikodi:Great. And what was the revelation that led you to realize this needed to exist? Something like Salice. 00:05:03 Gregarious:Yeah, that’s a great, that’s a great question. and when we get often, so at heart, actually I would say. much, I say our sponsor, Pico, the re the revelation I had from working with brands and, lots of other large creators over time was that fundamentally they’re unaware of who’s in their audience.Right. and so we, you know, platforms sort of intentionally hide the actual nature of our audience from us. They, they sort of like provide us with age sex location, you know, like information, which doesn’t give us a lot of deeper insight into who we’re actually talking to, or who we’re reaching.And so at heart, when we started zealous, and in fact, the formal name of the company is Fanbase inc.—we recognized that we needed to solve this, this relationship problem that existed between the creator and their fan. And that needed to be a tighter, more close knit relationship, event, you know, in general.But I think like, especially now, and so what we’re trying to do with Zealous and what we really recognized was that if you’re going to create the best content for your fans, if you’re going to deliver the best kind of experience for your fans That the way to do that today is through more of this sort of synchronous kind of engagement we saw how fast Clubhouse took off because it really personalized and humanized creators and individuals, to each other, as opposed to the sort of arms length publishing model asynchronous model that sort of was previously dominant.And so I think like, you know, with things like COVID, which I don’t think were the driver of this behavior, because this was, where we were moving anyway, but I think it accelerated this recognition that, Hey, if I can be the, closer I can be to a creator who I’m a fan of, the more likely I am to build a stronger relationship, the more likely I am to share more information about myself and ultimately more likely I am to be loyal over time 00:06:52 Chikodi:One of the things that you said in the intro that I found really interesting was, you know, influence is the, is an old business and there’s the, the idea of an influencer is kind of a new word. Probably we’ve been using that word for certainly under 10 years, but influence is the oldest, you know, it is one of the oldest human activities that there is.So how do you think we got to an age where. There is an influencer as a business.00:07:30 Gregarious:So I I believe the way we got here is basically with the sort of slow, but steady decline in attention. Right. And so what we’ve ultimately found is that all marketing has sort of traditionally been optimized to insert a message into the eyes or brains of people, using various ways, right?Some of them were accidental. Some of them were serendipitous. Some of them are intrusive like our original pop-up ads and things like that. And I think the way that we have always preferred as humans to interact or be told about something interesting is word of mouth or through friends or peers, or through trusted relationships.Interestingly enough, at the same time that attention has been declining, more of our relationships moved online, right? And, and it’s in a lot of ways, it’s become harder to make friends, true friends—those word of mouth, individual, peer to peer in person, friends—than ever before. Right. And so when you have this, what happens with the influencers is you can develop a sense of intimacy and a relationship with someone through content, right.That is very difficult to repli

Packy McCormick writes about business strategy, community, tech, and real estate. Packy’s popular newsletter Not Boring is a bi-weekly publication that covers business and business strategy.Before starting Not Boring, Packy was General Manager of NYC at Breather, and later VP of Experience at Breather. Before that, Packy worked in the financial sector for companies such as Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. Packy earned his bachelor’s degree in Economics from Duke University. The Not Boring community currently has over 70,000 members, and is still growing. Packy writes Not Boring from the perspective of making learning about business concepts and trends fun.In this episode, you’ll learn: Why Packy believes $1m per year as a creator is possible The new paradigm shift that’s merging entertainment with education How creators are using NFTs and cryptocurrencies Tips for balancing your creator business and personal life Links & Resources Bank of America Merrill Lynch Breather Write of Passage David Perrell Ben Thompson On Deck On Deck Course Creators Fellowship Li Jin Web Smith Mario Gabriele Acquired podcast Airbnb Pallet Mirror.xyz Martin Shkreli Discord WallStreetBets Art Blocks SuperRare Packy McCormick’s Links Follow Packy on Twitter Not Boring newsletter Solana Summer Episode Transcript00:00:00 Packy:Be more open-minded and less dismissive of new things that are happening, because the crazy thing about exponentials is that they just get faster, and faster, and faster. So, things are going to come up and feel weirder and newer all of the time. And you could either just say like, no, no, no, no. Hopefully it goes back to the way things were, like, this is silly.Or you can at least try to learn and have some fun in the process. Maybe there’s a business there, and maybe there’s some spark of another idea for something that you might be able to do. 00:00:35 Chikodi:Thank you for joining us on today’s episode of The Creative Business Show. My guest today is Packy McCormick from Not Boring. He is famous for saying that he’s going to make a million dollars on his newsletter, Not Boring.We talk about NFTs. We talk about fringe communities. We talk about curiosity, and it’s a really great conversation.So thank you so much for joining us today, and I hope you enjoy it.We’ll Packy. Thank you so much for joining us on The Creative Business Show. I’m really excited to be here with you today. I was actually checking out your deep dive on Solana, that published—was that yesterday?00:01:13 Packy:That was Monday morning,00:01:14 Chikodi:Monday, and today’s Wednesday.Okay. Today’s Wednesday. We are both fathers of young kids. So, it’s a whole job. Yeah. It’s a job in and of itself. So, thank you for making time. We are here to talk about creator monetization. You are a creator’s creator, I would venture to say. So, it’s just really cool to have you here.You know, you’re also a big crypto enthusiast. NFTs are the topic, as you are. So I’d love, after we talk about you a little bit, just to kind of get the background. We can go a lot of different ways, but I think that it’d be really interesting to talk about how creators are using crypto and NFTs today, what could be possible, and what we’d like to see.So, why don’t you just kick us off, kind of give us the background. Who are you? How did you find yourself here today? And, you know, what are you doing?00:02:18 Packy:Thanks for having me. It’s weird to call myself a creator. I’ve only been kind of a creator for about 15 or 16 months. I, you know, grew up outside Philadelphia, went to Duke, studied econ, did finance, worked at Bank of America, Merrill Lynch. So, it was like very much on that traditional finance path. Ended up at a startup after that called Breather. Was there for six years, which is a very long time.I like risk, but I’ve accidentally kind of found myself in these very safe-ish situations, and very comfortable situations. Then I was thinking about starting something after leaving Breather in covenant. And so I had no other real kind of assets or prospects. This was like the very beginning of COVID, except for this little newsletter that I’d been writing on the side for a year that had grown from zero to 400 people over the course of a year or something like that.Very much a side thing. Then just decided to go all in and see if I could grow it and make some sort of living on it or make enough of a living that I could then buy myself time to find the dream job or whatever. And 16 months later I’m now writing this newsletter. We have 70,000 subscribers now and, a small venture fund as well.So, kind of the things that I want to be doing if I retired are, you know, writing and investing, I get to do professionally now. So, I feel very lucky that things have worked out the way they have. 00:03:42 Chikodi:That’s fantastic. Let’s actually take one small step back. You were at a startup for six years: Breather. Now, I’m familiar with Breather. Why don’t you explain what Breather is? Because I think you might have dodged a bullet by leaving when you did, pre-COVID.00:04:00 Packy:Yeah, it was not a COVID-proof business, unfortunately. So, Breather, was a network of on-demand meeting and workspaces. So, it started out, with 150 square foot, tiny little spaces that you could rent for as little as half an hour to just take a nap or go get some work done, or have a coffee meeting.You know, kind of do whatever you would do with a small space anywhere in the city. That’s what attracted me to the idea in the first place. I was in investment banking, I’d have some downtime, and I’d like, literally just go nap in a toilet stall or something. And so I was like, oh man, the idea of having something right next to me that I can just unlock with my phone, get access to and have to myself when nobody else for an hour. That sounds perfect.So, went there, was a New York City General Manager, and you know, I kind of grew that market up became our biggest market, grew a team there, and then was promoted to VP of Experience. So I oversaw all of our real estate operations, that customer care design research, a bunch of other stuff at a 150 person team of amazing people, which is probably what kept me there as long as I stayed, was that I really loved the team that I worked with.We transitioned kind of during that period from just these little meeting spaces. Full workspaces that team could rent 12,000 square feet, a hundred percent team for two years at a time. So, literally in the same app, you could book an hour of space, or you could book two years’ worth of space.So, it was a really cool model. I think we obviously made plenty of mistakes. We would still be around and doing better. But, yeah, then when COVID hit, people were not booking small meetings or short-term office space nearly as much as they have in the past. Yeah. Surprisingly, surprise.Luckily, I’d gotten out in the beginning of 2020, really end of 2019. But I think it was probably time for a business to go somewhere else. And it, it ended up at Industrious, which is a company that actually is in the same kind of general space and did a lot better because of the way they set up their business model. So, they found a good home, at least.00:06:05 Chikodi:Oh, did it exit to industrious? Well, okay. Enough shop talk from us, startup guys. but I’d be curious. Were there any lessons or what lessons, what experience did you take from investment banking to then working in a startup and now to being a creator? You know, even if it’s only been a year and a half or so, like what, what’s the common thread?What did you take from the last experience into this one? 00:06:32 Packy:Yeah. I mean, I think the big thing that it’s kind of gone through each of the different phases of my life, except for school, for whatever reason, but I was like cross country runner in high school. I did investment banking out of college. I did, that was the only employee in New York at Breather for the first year.So I was literally seven days a week going out and cleaning spaces on a Saturday night and you know, all that kind of stuff. And then writing is now a seven day job, right. Kind of big thing that’s gotten through all of them is just no matter what you’re doing, kind of just as work ethic that it takes to do well in any one of these things.And that’s not maybe a super generalizable lesson or something people can take away. But I think like at least from the outside would look at creators and be like, oh, that looks fun and easy. And it’s actually, it might, this might be the hardest job I’ve had yet in terms of like actual hours of actual work that I put in, like in investment making, you need to stay at the office, but maybe you’re not working all the time.This is just like a ton of hours every week of work. and so I think that’s probably the most surprising similarity to me, I guess, across all of them, 00:07:38 Chikodi:Nobody’s buying you dinner if you stay past eight. Right. 00:07:41 Packy:No, all comes out of a, Not Boring.00:07:45 Chikodi:All right. So let’s talk about Not Boring, you know, what was it when you conceived it? What would you describe it as. 00:07:52 Packy:Sure. So there was no real conception of it. So I, because I was in that last year of Breather where I realized that I’d been there maybe a little too long, I needed a new thing to at least wrap my mind around. Took a writing course was called Write of Passage. as part of that, we had to start a newsletter as one of our assignments and get people to sign up for it.And so I think 20 people maybe read the first, the first version of it. And it was like, there are five things that I read on the internet this week. It was called per my last email back then and kept that going kind of weekly over the course of a year. And then when COVID it, the thing that I was actually trying to start, what’s called Not Boring club.So I took the name from that when that died, because it wasn’t gonna work

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »Josh Kaplan is the Cofounder and CEO of Smooth Ops. Smooth Ops is dedicated to helping content creators operate and scale their businesses. Josh is also co-founder of Thinking Is Cool, a media production company.Josh earned his bachelor’s degree from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, at the University of Michigan. He worked as Product Manager of Audio, and was the Strategy & Operations Lead at Morning Brew. After leaving Morning Brew Josh went on to co-found Thinking is Cool, and Smooth Ops.Josh was instrumental in starting Morning Brew’s Business Casual podcast as the show’s strategy and operations lead. Josh was also responsible for creating other new media products, including industry-specific newsletters.In this episode, you’ll learn: How to find and solve your audience’s pain points Why we’re on the verge of a monetization boom in the content economy Why getting your brand equity right is so important Links & Resources Follow us on Twitter: @pico Morning Brew Kinsey Grant The Business Casual podcast The Wall Street Journal The New York times The Skimm The Hustle Popchew Packy McCormick  MrBeast Trends Trends.vc Dru Riley Lew Wasserman RCA Colin and Samir Justin Rhodes Binging With Babish Shelby Church Josh Kaplan’s Links Follow Josh on Twitter Smooth Ops Contact Josh Episode Transcript00:00:00 Josh:You used to only be able to produce a certain number of movies per year. You used to only be able to have a certain number of classes because you only had so many classrooms. Now that ceiling doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no cap on the amount of YouTube videos or the amount of courses.That gatekeeping of how much can we create in a given year doesn’t exist anymore.00:00:34 Chikodi:My name is Chikodi, and I’m here today with Josh Kaplan. Josh, why don’t you give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are, what you’re working on.I know you’ve got some news as well, so why don’t you just lead lead off with that?00:00:48 Josh:I’d love to, nice to meet you Chikodi. Thank you for having me on. Very honored. I love Pico and the rest of the team. So, it’s great to be here.I have somehow found myself into the thick of the creator economy over the past couple of years. I went to school with the two founders of Morning Brew, who are very good friends of mine, and seeing them launch the company.Somehow I found myself there full-time within the founding team of the first seven of us. I never had a stable job. I was doing strategy and operations, product management at a media company. The definition was always a little bit loose. So I was always launching our new products, whether that was the industry newsletter set or getting us into audio and multimedia, moving offices, building strategy, decks, doing back office stuff.I was really lucky to get this 360 degree experience of seeing Morning Brew, the business media company, grow from seven people to 75 people in a massive sale. Not massive, but it was, it was a really good sell for us. It was awesome for us to get to build a business together. and from there I realized that I had been spending a lot of my time working with the writers and the podcasters at the company, and after the company.So, I was looking for the next opportunity to see what the next big wave would be. What’s the next great business that I could try and start myself. Within this whole trend of the creator economy, I started to learn more and realize how much operations support creators. A lot of them are very, very talented, but if they want to fulfill this energy of being independent and owning their business and owning their content and getting to play on their terms, they were still going to need that operational compliment.All the technology in the world is great, as Pico and all these other great companies are. I think that there’s still a lot of the human part that needs to be built. What are the org structures look like? How fast can you move? How far ahead do you plan? Those are the types of problems that I’m really excited to be working with creators on.So, we had been doing it for the course of the year consulting for different creators and in particular Kinsey Grant who I’d worked with at Morning Brew, who was the host of Business Casual. Her and I are very close. We’ve always had a great working relationship. So when she also left the company, we decided to put our heads back together and said, Kinsey, I think that you can go independent. You can do this. Let me help you. Let me be the operations next. So we did just that with our first season of Thinking Is Cool, which is her media brand as an independent journalist, and using that model of creator and operator, We’ve now launched a company called Smooth Operations, which is hoping to do that for more creators. We provide services for creators to grow and scale their businesses. I could go on and on about how we do that, and all the different pipe dreams that I have with that business. But as far as the introduction goes, that’s, that’s been the brief history of Josh Kaplan entering the greater economy.00:03:35 Chikodi:So, is it safe to say you’re a smooth operator? 00:03:38 Josh:I’m trying to be that’s the goal. Yes, we are.00:03:41 Chikodi:Nice. Well, you kind of skipped over what Morning Brew actually is, you know, for the 00:03:47 Josh:Oh yes. 00:03:48 Chikodi:You give a quick synopsis? 00:03:50 Josh:Morning Brew is a business media company that started around 2015. The feeling from the founders was that the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, there’s so much of it. There’s so much jargon. It’s hard to understand. How can we break business down into a more accessible format? One email a day, five minutes; it’s as if your friend is telling you what happened, and then go have a great day to be a great contributing member of the business world.This was around the time when The Skimm and The Hustle were really growing quickly. We were in that cohort after the Vices, and the Buzzfeeds, and a lot of these other new media companies had taken a lot of venture capital to grow and make video on Facebook and do all these crazy things. We were very focused.We said, we really are good at newsletters. Then we got very good at podcasts, but it’s how do we make the business world more accessible? Then where do we go from there? So we had an awesome time. I’ve got incredible memories sitting in that room, doing my business stuff, working with the writers.You’d hear a joke, come out at 2:00 PM and then you’d see it in the newsletter the next morning. That is what Morning Brew is. Since then they’ve continued to grow in spectacular ways, trying to make the business world.00:05:04 Chikodi:And so they actually exited before the hustle. Right. 00:05:07 Josh:Correct. Correct. Morning Brew got sold in October of 2020. the hustle I think was 2021. and, it’s funny, like we all continue to bump into each other online and see what everybody’s up to after these companies have sold and as they’ve grown and other people have grown into different opportunities,00:05:25 Chikodi:And So okay. Let’s, let’s dive in. Cause we really want to be a resource for creators and people who have the skill set and maybe need the additional support. So you were at Morning Brew from the size of seven employees to 75 isn’t and you got to see throughout the company. So what are some of the things that as an, as a media organization with a hierarchy.Editorial responsibility, business responsibility. What are some of the things that every creator needs and what is it that smooth ops is doing to replicate what a larger media organization was able to hire people to do, but a single creator can do, hopefully it’s not too, too complicated question, but you know, what did you, what did you learn that you can take.00:06:15 Josh:I like the question because it’s very much comparing what is the business model and operating model of a traditional media company that was started within the past 10 years. So we’re not talking about legacy media. This is still a very new media company versus what I’m working on now, which are creator businesses.And I think that they differ in very specific ways that are great to call out Morning Brew. We had our rowing channel. We were all very focused. Austin, the CEO of the company now is incredible at keeping people very aligned on what’s important to the business that he goes, we write, we grow and we sell. And so from the writing side, it’s how do we create the best newsletter day in and day out? And that required first having writers and then saying, all right, we got to get copy editors. We have to get fact-checking also what systems are the writers using? So the tech team for the most part was very focused on making the writer experience better, going from Google docs, to going some homegrown systems, to making sure that the emails were being sent properly.There were a lot of customization that growth in engineering help the writers with so that they could get their word out best on that growth side. It was being very much like a D to C company thinking about paid advertising on social platforms, growing the brand on social media, having a really great referral program.So your best fans can help you grow from there. And then on the sales side, it is all right, we’re going to get a couple ads in the newsletter every day. How do we get the best partners to pay the most money? And what will, what can we create as a content team, as a branded content team that our advertisers will find more valuable.So those were the three core buckets within the Morning Brew, and it worked really well. And keeping those three departments in sync was always one of the top priorities on the creator side. I see it very, very differently now because of how these platforms are built. A lot of the best content grows automatically.So your marketing team is your content. You’re the creator. You’re the face of the b