#267: When to use low-ticket offers, refund policies, how much I earned in the last 12 months, and my 5-year vision [Ask CS Pt. 1]

Jay Clouse [00:00:00]:
Foreign hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. I am here in the home studio and I figured we are overdue for an episode of Ask Creator Science where I dive into your questions from different social media platforms that I asked for them on. And we've got a bunch here. We have several dozen questions. I'm going to do my best and cover as many as I can. We've got product questions, we've got content questions, we've got business strategy questions, we've got personal questions. I will cover it all and the time it takes for our baby girl to take a nap.

Jay Clouse [00:00:46]:
And we will start after a quick message from our sponsors. All right, we've got questions From Substack X, LinkedIn, YouTube and threads and I'm going to try to cover as many as I can, starting with Substack. Let's start with Substack. We have a question from Sharif. He says how is the user flow in your business from content to leads and in between? At this point, most new folks coming into my world are either finding me on YouTube or or some sort of recommendation from somebody else. Or I guess maybe LinkedIn is also a source of new people as well. All these sources are what I would bucket under the category of discovery platforms. Where are people discovering me? It is YouTube, probably LinkedIn and recommendations which encapsulates kit recommendations, substack recommendations, word of mouth recommendations, people tagging me on different platforms.

Jay Clouse [00:01:45]:
It's a lot more referrals than it used to be because I'm actually creating less content on discovery platforms, primarily on YouTube these days. So that's where people come in in the first place. Then my goal is to get people to discover the Creator Science newsletter as soon as possible and get into the world of email, which takes them to a very short welcome sequence where really I have just two emails trying to get people to tell me a little bit more information about them using a tool called Write Message based on the responses from Right Message. That will opt you into another email sequence that is tailored for your stage of business and what you're looking for. And then you go into this typical tempo of one to two newsletters per week from me. I hope in receiving those newsletters you get interested in the podcast if you aren't already subscribed to the podcast and then through the course of listening to the podcast or reading those emails, you will run into one of my paid offers, most likely the lab. And hopefully that is where you become a member. If you run into a different paid offer like a course Or Creator hq.

Jay Clouse [00:02:54]:
That's often where people start is one of my self paced, lower priced products like that. And on the backside of any one of those products I will offer you a coupon for your first year in the lab that is equal to the purchase price of that product. Because all of those products are part of the lab and that's pretty much it. Once you're in the lab, if you're in Standard or vip, you've basically reached the end of the rainbow and I have nothing else to sell to you. I will continue to make things and give them to you as part of your membership. If you join the basic tier, then I hope to get you to the point where you are eligible for standard and VIP, which means you have 10,000 followers on one platform or earn $10,000 per month or more. Again, that kind of gets you to the end of the rainbow. So that's the user flow.

Jay Clouse [00:03:36]:
It's really built around email and providing a lot of value in email and also making it known that I have this membership and the lab is really where I think I can help people the most, where you have the best experience and that typically is where people land. Next question on substack was actually a question about the shirt I was wearing in this photo and it's from homage.com but then the last question on substack is when business is going good or bad, what are practices or rhythms you have to help you stay connected to what really matters to you? And to be honest Blake, I don't know that I really have good practices or rhythms here. I have been thinking lately that I need to find ways to spend more time in my body because I spend so much time in my head that I move through my day sometimes and am just not at all present in my body. I'm like having a conversation with myself in my head. So some things that I've noticed help me feel more embodied are going for walks. I really try to get a three mile walk in every day. If I can't go outside, I try to do it on my walking treadmill in the office swimming. We have a pool and it's warm enough now in Ohio that we can swim and that really helps me feel more embodied as well.

Jay Clouse [00:04:52]:
Both those experiences are better by the way, if I don't have my phone or watch notifications on time just passes much slower. I haven't done much meditation in a long time. I used to have this as a pretty daily practice. I even did a 10 day Vipassana meditation course back in 2017. But I haven't really been doing this as much lately. And you know, I don't have a good reason why. I don't think anybody has a good reason why they don't meditate more, but I haven't really done that. Morning pages is something that I try to put time into most days.

Jay Clouse [00:05:25]:
Basically a stream of consciousness journal writing to myself that really helps me stay connected. And it has some prompts in there basically asking, what are you grateful for? What do you really want? What would it look like to do everything in your power to get that thing? More times than not, I kind of circle back to working less is a good thing. But when you work less, one, that's a privilege. Two, there's not really a leading indicator. You're waiting on lagging indicators as to whether working less has a positive or negative impact on the business. And if the business is not performing better than when you were working more, it's very easy to get freaked out and think that you need to be working more. And that's why business is not as good. But I don't think it's usually that simple.

Jay Clouse [00:06:14]:
It's usually not that directly correlated. But it's the trap that I think a lot of ambitious or work oriented people get into is they think the outcome of the business is a direct correlation to how much time you spend working in the business. And that's not necessarily true. So probably need more practices and rhythms, but right now it's walking, swimming and journaling. All right, we are going to hop over to Threads now. Moving from substack to Threads. First question is from Vix Meldrew, a member of the Lab. Hello Vix.

Jay Clouse [00:06:47]:
She says, what made you decide to put the Lab in tiers and how did you decide what tier got what feature? What was your strategy? So I was actually just on a hot seat call with another member of the lab and what I find is it's very difficult to build mindshare around any single idea, let alone multiple ideas. So as tempting as it truly, truly is to build a whole bunch of products that solve very specific issues, it gets very difficult to effectively market all of those offers because you only have so much content that you are publishing that buys you the ability to promote one of your offers. And so if you are constantly promoting one of your offers and all of your content so you can promote all of them, that's not a great experience to the person on the end. And even if you do effectively talk about an offer in all of your content, if you're talking about offer A, that comes at the cost of the ability to talk about Offer B. You know, there's an opportunity cost to how many offers you talk about. So where I've kind of come around to, from a product strategy standpoint, is it's better to talk about a single offer, what I call your signature product, because then you can build a lot of recognizability, referability, brand equity in the name of that product over time. Because you just talk about it and talk about it and talk about it and talk about it and talk about it. It's not to say you can't solve multiple problems with that one offer.

Jay Clouse [00:08:22]:
Oftentimes people create multiple offers to basically serve the same problem, right? The same value proposition. I'll give you an example that I don't think he would mind me sharing. My friend Justin Moore, incredible sponsorship coach, all of his stuff is related to sponsorship. You know, his brand creator, wizard, helps you negotiate and land your dream sponsorship deals. He had multiple offers that were all saying, we're going to help you land negotiate your sponsorships, but they had multiple names. And I said, why don't you just pull these all underneath the brand of Wizards Guild instead of creating a new product, just create multiple tiers inside of Wizard Guild based on where you are in the journey. And then all you need to talk about is the Wizards Guild. And when people hear about it, they go to the sales page where they see there are multiple tiers here for different people at different stages or interest in levels of investment.

Jay Clouse [00:09:24]:
So I really like the single product, multiple tiers approach. Like the Lab has three tiers. I could potentially make three products with that, but they all kind of serve the same value proposition, which is helping you be more successful as a professional creator. But it's for people at different stages. The basic tier is for folks who are not yet eligible for standard VIP. They are not yet earning $10,000 per month. They don't yet have 10,000 followers. And so I was not able to serve them in the lab because we had that qualification requirement.

Jay Clouse [00:09:56]:
So to serve them, I could create an entirely new product and market that. And now every time I create content, I say, hey, sign up for our beginners membership or sign up for the Lab. But now I'm talking about two offers. I'm making two pitches and one piece of content. Whereas now I just have to talk about the fact that the Lab is my signature product. And if you want to be more successful as a creator and be surrounded by other professional creators, this is the best place for that regardless of where you are on the journey, you can go to the lab's sales page, see where you fit and make that purchase. Okay, so then our next question is how do you decide what tier got, what features the design for this I see most of the time working now is three tiers for a membership tier, 1, 2 and 3. And for simplicity we'll say it escalates in terms of price and investment from 1 to 3.

Jay Clouse [00:10:46]:
Tier 1 is often a education tier. It has your courses, your self paced materials, it's the lowest investment, it's mostly self paced. Tier 2 is what I call the community tier, where you have the educational materials and you have the peer to peer experiences that are asynchronous in terms of a forum. They're also synchronous in terms of live sessions and whatever other strategy you want to put in there. That is really where the core of the lab is, is the peer to peer experiences, the live sessions, the masterminds we do, the offline events we're now doing. And then tier three is the coaching tier, which has again the educational materials, it has the peer to peer experience and it has one on one coaching. With me, this courses tier, community tier and coaching tier that works really, really well. The challenge that I found after doing this for about two years, having three tiers, the lowest tier, the educational tier, if that truly is mostly self paced materials, the value of that tier is extracted within the first year of membership and so there's not a big reason to renew.

Jay Clouse [00:11:52]:
So what we did was we added a lot of community, peer to peer components to the basic tier so that while you're working to get to this level of eligibility for standard, meaning that you're working to get to $10,000 per month in revenue or 10,000 followers, you have now other people who are on that journey as well and you can learn from each other, you can support each other. Having a monthly office hours in there has made that experience much more renewable. But the community experience itself is lighter weight than the rest of the standard and vip. Because I can't put as much time into the basic tier as I can Standard and VIP because it's not sustainable at the level of investment that is asked for at that tier. So that's how I thought about it. That was the strategy. Hopefully that helps somebody else. We had another question on threads about memberships that said, I'm starting a membership community and I'm caught between doing a pilot with a few founding members for free and launching it right from the gate with A low price for early adopters.

Jay Clouse [00:12:53]:
What should I be asking myself to help me make this decision? I am not a fan of the freemium model in communities. And even if you think it's going to be a fully paid community, I'm not a fan of bringing people in for free at the beginning. Because the thought which makes logical sense is, well, why would people pay for a community where nobody is. Let me get some people in there so that now there actually is a community. But if people don't value it enough to pay for it, they're certainly not going to value it enough to use it. There's a phrase that Gina Bianchini from Mighty Networks has said, which is we value what we pay for. And every time people bring in community members for free, those members don't use the community because they weren't asking for it, they didn't want to be in there. And even if they were, they're not valuing it because they didn't ascribe literal value to it.

Jay Clouse [00:13:51]:
So what you get is this forum with people in it that's not active and that actually feels worse than having a forum with nobody in it. So I really wouldn't do a pilot of having free founding members. I think you could have a price incentive to join early. And this mirrors what I teach in my membership course, Build a Beloved Membership. I promote a two phase launch strategy called private opening and then public launch. In the private opening, you basically subtly talk about the fact that you're building this membership so that only the people who are paying closest attention, AKA your biggest fans, are going to know that you're doing this. And you offer them a price incentive for joining early before you have a sales page or any of the bells and whistles they get in early. You lead with a ton of value.

Jay Clouse [00:14:38]:
You have live sessions, you really do your best to help those people one to one in those early days, and then you document that experience so that you can have a public launch. And it's no longer theoretical that we're building the space. It's hey, we built the space, people are using it. Look what's happening here already. Would you like to join it? So that's what I would do. Is this private opening, public launch approach. One more question here from Threads and then we'll move on to another platform. We have Julius, also a member of the Lab.

Jay Clouse [00:15:07]:
Hey, Julius, asked building on your email mentioning that you're doing less social how can creators be discovered with social media being more challenging today? What other acquisition channels work? So Julius is speaking to you. I have recently said that I'm taking the position that I am not holding myself to a specific schedule on social media anymore. I'm posting less on social. You can see it. You can go to any social platform and you'll see that I'm posting less there. So he's saying social media seems to be more challenging. And I think that is true for a lot of folks, mostly because the platforms change constantly, the algorithms change, what they're optimizing for changes. And whatever once worked for a creator on a platform is likely going to change if it hasn't changed already.

Jay Clouse [00:15:49]:
And so holding onto that strategy once the climate has changed is not a winning strategy, unfortunately. And I found myself in one of those moments, especially on X. X was a huge platform for me for a long time. I. I have something like 53,000 followers or something on X, and when I post there now, reach is not great. And so it's discouraging. It makes you want to throw up your hands and say, okay, fine, I quit. I don't want to do it.

Jay Clouse [00:16:19]:
And in some ways, that's how I've looked at social media recently, is saying, I don't want to play this game right now. Because all these platforms are a game. You gotta learn the rules, you gotta learn the players, you gotta learn how to compete, and you can win that game. And the game I was playing on social media is no longer the game that's being played. So I could learn the new rules of the game and play it, or I can say, I'm not gonna play that game right now, and right now I'm not playing that game. I am choosing discoverability on YouTube, number one. I'm still putting a fair amount of time into LinkedIn because I'm seeing that as fruitful for new email subscribers in particular. We've talked about this in the lab a few times.

Jay Clouse [00:17:01]:
We just see time after time when you do take the extra time to basically put the signature at the end of a LinkedIn post where you introduce yourself, what you do for people and say, if you want to get started with me right now, subscribe to my newsletter over here. It's a slow build, but it certainly helps and it certainly works. There's no reason not to put that basically on all of your posts is to have a link to your newsletter. So I think that's certainly a way that will work for most people still today. YouTube I think is great if you really want to invest the time, effort and cost into being great at YouTube recommendations and email are also a big thing. If your network also publishes on Kit or Beehive or substack, then recommending each other and is a great way to get more people into your email list. Although I will say I kill it on Kit recommendations, but we recently did an audit of those subscribers and there are very few purchasers out of many, many thousands of new subscribers. I think actually the math was in the last 90 days, I had 4,000 subscribers from recommendations.

Jay Clouse [00:18:14]:
It's just in Kit. And of those 4,000 subscribers, there were five purchases. So at our Lab Offline event, Nathan Barry came and spoke and he said a line that I thought was very, very prescient. He basically said, the creator network, any type of email recommendations, you're not getting a true subscriber. What you're getting is the opportunity to keep a subscriber. Basically, it's like you're getting the opportunity to audition, but that subscriber may not stick around. Or if they do stick around, they certainly might not be engaged. And so I was talking to Jason Resnick, who helps me on the email side lately, and I was saying this seems like a huge opportunity to try to solve for this problem because everybody in Recommendations has this problem of we're getting a bigger list, we're getting more subscribers, but they're not purchasing, they're not engaged, they're not doing anything.

Jay Clouse [00:19:08]:
It feels like a solvable problem, but the cost to solve that problem right now is pretty high. It's a time cost. And I think I would rather solve other problems in the business right now. So while Recommendations seem really attractive because it builds your list, how effective is that? And actually getting the goals you want as a business, which is probably more revenue, probably not that effective. But the thing that I think about all the time, and I recommend you think about as well, is what if we just assumed I couldn't reach anybody new? What would I do with the assets I've already built and the audience at my fingertips now to make that more valuable? How could I create more value, capture more value with the people I'm already consistently reaching? I think that's a better place to start anyway, if you're trying to increase revenue because you're reaching a ton of people. I email 64,000 people every. Every time I send out of kit. I have 55,000 people on LinkedIn, 53,000 people on X, 10,000 people on Instagram now.

Jay Clouse [00:20:10]:
That's plenty of people. You know, we have something like 400 members in the lab. If I'm trying to increase revenue I'm trying to get more people to consider joining the lab. And If I have 400 members out of tens of thousands of subscribers and followers, like, there's still a lot of room there, maybe the answer isn't more followers. Maybe the answer is better meeting people where they are, making them aware of how I can help them and making the products better, you know? And so I think that's actually the opportunity that's in front of us that we should spend more time on week in and week out. After a quick break, we're going to move on to questions from LinkedIn X and YouTube. So don't go anywhere. We will be right back.

Jay Clouse [00:20:56]:
We are back. Let's answer some questions from YouTube, then we'll do Twitter and we'll close things out with LinkedIn. Cam Edward Benton asks, what things should an early creator focus on that a larger creator doesn't need to worry about, and vice versa. I think in the early stages, what you need to think about the most is your premise. What is your legible, compelling, differentiated view on the world? That is the thing that attracts people to you and keeps them with you. It is increasingly competitive out there. You have to be differentiated. And I'm not saying niche down necessarily.

Jay Clouse [00:21:32]:
I'm saying understand. What is it that makes you different from other people offering similar outcomes? Because there's plenty of space for multiple people offering the same outcome in a different way or the different strategy or the different point of view. That's all you really need. So you need to be thinking, what is my differentiated viewpoint on a problem or vision for the future that is still legible, meaning it's easy for other people to understand, and compelling, meaning people care. You really have to nail this thing down. It's difficult to figure out what this is for you. Let's run this example with my business creator science. Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:22:14]:
I said legible, compelling, and differentiated. And I would kind of go in that order. So the legible thing that I do is I help creators grow. I help them earn more money. What makes that compelling? Well, what I'm not focusing on is just how to create more content. I want to help people capture a higher return on the attention they're already getting. And how do we do that in a differentiated way? We focus on experimentation, measurement, analytics, taking a very rigorous approach to this content thing. Okay? It's not about hooks or tactics or these flashy things.

Jay Clouse [00:22:49]:
It is about rigorous experimentation. So figuring out your premise is the highest ROI thing you can do early on. And, you know, I wouldn't say that A larger creator doesn't need to worry about it, but by virtue of being a larger creator, they probably stumbled into this and are doing okay in this regard. What does a larger creator need to do that early stage creators don't need to think about as much? I would say probably collaboration and partnerships. Early stage folks can do this. You just have less leverage and it's harder to do. But the larger you are, the more leverage you have and the more ability to open doors with your following. And I think the fastest way to grow an audience is to get in front of that existing audience that other creators have gathered.

Jay Clouse [00:23:36]:
Now your competitors aren't gonna just give you the stage, but if you find ways to do complimentary work to other creators, then that's a huge doorway for you. What's always interesting to me is creators like Cal Newport, he doesn't have any social media at all, and yet he has a large audience. So how does that work? Well, Cal puts a lot of time into making very high effort, high value, high leverage. Products, artifacts, content in the form of books. And because that investment is so high, the quality is good, it's differentiated. And he goes to other creators who already have an audience and a platform that he is not competing with. It's value add to bring his concepts to their audience and he builds his audience by getting in front of large audiences that have already been gathered. And I think that's awesome.

Jay Clouse [00:24:29]:
Next question from YouTube. How do you know how much to charge for ad spots in videos or sponsored social media posts? Well, I take an experimental approach to this as well. On one hand, I know that there are price points that make it worthwhile for me to do it. You know, doing sponsored ads or promoted posts. There is a certain amount of effort that goes into this and if it's an integration, that's a lower effort than if you're doing dedicated content. Doing dedicated content for a third party is a huge investment of time and effort that takes away from your ability to create content for yourself. So I'm not gonna do that work or take that effort on unless it is financially worthwhile to do so. And so sometimes there is this mismatch between the amount of money that it's worth for you to do the work and the amount of money that creates a positive ROI for the sponsor so that you get a renewal and the earlier on in the journey, it might be more work than it's worth, to be frank.

Jay Clouse [00:25:32]:
Now, depending on your financial situation, it might be worth it to have cash, even if it takes a lot of work. So, you know, I always tell everybody the first thing to start with is what is the floor of what makes this worthwhile to me right now? And once you have your floor, you take that floor, add 40% or whatever percent you want, and put that price out to whoever is inquiring and see how they react. It's always better if you can present this live in person over video is better than over the phone. But all that is better than in writing because when you present the price and you can see their reaction, you get a lot more data around how they felt about that price. Did it feel like a stretch to them? Did it seem like an easy yes? If it felt like an easy yes, then you probably have room to expand the price the next time, you know, so you kind of do this. But what you want to see is that that sponsor comes back and wants a renewal. First of all, you should follow up and ask if they want to renew and the answer is no, then that was not a successful campaign for them, meaning the cost was higher than the return. And that will give you some more data about am I pricing this correctly based on what the market can bring in? Part of this is also sponsorship selection.

Jay Clouse [00:26:44]:
I give the example sometimes of if you have meundies as a sponsor and they're selling $30 underpants that is going to require a higher volume to pay off a $2,000 sponsorship than a law firm that signs a client for $3,000 a year. You know, my first podcast, we worked with law firms, accounting firms, executive placement firms, because the value to them, they just needed one new customer from that campaign and it paid for itself. So it was easy to get an ROI for them and charge a higher rate than if I was using like a smaller or lower priced consumer product. Next question from Kate M. Says, for a community or course, what is your view on refund policies and how can you be confident enough to offer a no questions asked refund policy? Okay, so refund policies. The one product I don't have a refund policy on is Creator hq, because that is a notion template that I cannot revoke access to. So having a refund policy in place sends a signal to bad actors that this product can be abused, basically, especially a product that cannot be revoked. So courses are a little bit similar in that people could take a course and then ask for a refund and say that they didn't take the course.

Jay Clouse [00:28:06]:
But most course platforms will show you people's participation and engagement with the material. So you could put in place a refund policy that basically says if you finish the course and do not get the value, you can request a refund. Basically, top level, having a refund policy is good business because one, it creates trust before the point of purchase. Two, it will sometimes be the thing that gives people the confidence to make the purchase in the first place. And if that is true, if people are making purchases because there is the refund policy, you're almost certainly going to get more sales because the refund policy than refund requests. So having a refund policy in place is good business. When somebody asks me for a refund, I refund them, no questions asked. I don't make it hard, I don't ask for proof of effort.

Jay Clouse [00:28:56]:
You know, it's just, yes, you can have a refund because again, that's an opportunity to build trust. You can be confident enough to offer this. If you have people who have experienced the product and had a great outcome, then you know this works for people if they are the right person. Most of the time refund requests come from a place of misunderstanding or incorrect expectations. So it's an opportunity to revisit your sales copy to make sure that you are setting the correct expectations. But having a refund policy is good business. In the lab, I don't have a written refund policy because again, what I don't really want is tire kickers to come in just to look at stuff and then request a refund. But when somebody has written and asked, I've told them, I'm not gonna hold you hostage.

Jay Clouse [00:29:45]:
Especially because this is an annual only membership. I'm not going to ask somebody to stick around for 12 months if at the end of the first month they're like, this was not for me. But sometimes I don't post a refund policy because I don't want to attract abuse on that product. So I think it's just good business to offer refunds. And in a self paced product where there is no incremental cost to you, I think making a publicly visible refund policy is a good idea as well. In a community, especially a peer to peer community, it's a little tricky because if people come in and they introduce themselves and they build connections and people are excited to see them and that person asks for a refund. Now all those people who had an initially exciting experience with that person are kind of like, what happened? Where'd that person go? I like them. What did they see that we obviously are missing? Should we maybe not be here either? You know, it's tricky, but it's always a Good idea to have a refund policy, I think.

Jay Clouse [00:30:46]:
And it's probably better to offer it and then retract it or revise it if you see that as become a problem than worry about it too much. Gaston asks, how much did you make in the last 12 months? Very direct question. I did the math and it's just, it's just under $800,000. Looks like it's going to be about $794,000 from July 1st of 2024 to June 30th of 2025. Okay, we have two more YouTube questions here about monetization. The first one is I can tell there's interest in my niche topic, but I can't figure out what product I could sell aside from hourly consulting, which I don't feel enough like an expert yet to go there. Meanwhile, I spend hours communicating with viewers and comments on my video. It would be great to have some advice about where to start in terms of selling products or services.

Jay Clouse [00:31:41]:
I truly, truly, truly believe that the more time you spend with your viewers, your readers, your listeners, your audience, the more time you spend with individuals in your audience, the more obvious good product ideas become. If it's not yet obvious what product to create, then you might want to just spend more time with your audience doing these things like communicating in the comments or by email. But my guess, if you've been spending this much time in the comments responding by email, you should have seen some patterns by now. What you're really looking for are patterns in their questions. And maybe not specifically the questions themselves, but maybe you see patterns in the underlying motivation behind a group of questions and you can build a product that addresses that desire or motivation. But patterns are what tell you there's a market here. It's not an individual or one off problem. There's actually a market for this specific thing, product or service.

Jay Clouse [00:32:45]:
Hourly consulting is great. You don't need to feel like you are an expert to sell hourly consulting. People who buy hourly consulting simply need you to be more knowledgeable than them and that's a huge unlock for a lot of people. You don't need to be the foremost expert on a subject for it to be valuable and worthwhile to pay you for your time. If you are more knowledgeable than the person who is paying for that. And hourly consulting is great because one you're monetizing at a slightly higher price point than if you're selling a self paced product of some sort and you're doing great customer research. When you're talking to somebody live, you are getting incredible feedback, both in their words, in their body language. Like you get such incredible feedback when you're doing one on one consulting with people in your audience.

Jay Clouse [00:33:33]:
So I would say start there and between that and your comments and your emails, you're going to see some patterns and you should figure out what are the underlying problems or motivations in these patterns. And let me solve that. The next question is from Charles Broomfield. He says many of the people I can help the most also have low buying power. I help people implement savings habits and systems. Is it a mistake to look for a low price option while I'm still small, less than 10,000 subscribers on my channel? How do you think through low ticket versus high ticket offerings at different stages of audience size? The reality is every market has beginners, intermediates, experts. Every market has the spectrum of how advanced the consumer is. And that's going to be this distribution curve of it's not even a standard distribution curve.

Jay Clouse [00:34:29]:
Like most people are beginners at a thing, a few people are intermediate and an even smaller percentage of people are more advanced. So in any market, serving beginners is going to be the largest segment of that market. But beginners are also most likely to have the lowest buying power. So it's kind of a trade off. Do you want to play more of a volume game by serving a larger number of people at a lower price point or do you want to go more upstream? I have opted for the more upstream approach. You know, we have folks in the lab with million plus followers or subscribers and I wanted to focus on those harder, more contextual, more advanced problems. Because the other thing about the beginner segment of any market is that that has the lowest barrier to entry for new competitors. The beginner segment of any market is always going to have the most competition.

Jay Clouse [00:35:31]:
And so I tend to try to start up market and then move down market over time. Once you built a reputation at the higher end of the market because that also positions you in this place of almost like a luxury good. Like it's more aspirational is what I want to say. It's more aspirational to work with you when you are working at the higher end of the market and then that becomes easier to pull in the lower end over time. The example that a lot of people give, I shouldn't say a lot of people, the example that my friend Jay Aconzo gives is it's easier to start a luxury brand like Tesla and create a lower priced product over time, subsidize the development of lower price product because people who were initially priced out of the Tesla market will want to purchase it when it moves into their pricing range. But the opposite is not true. You know, it's the example of like, would you rather buy a Rolex watch that is at a affordable price point? Would you rather buy something from Temu that is priced like a luxury good? You know, you wouldn't trust this more commodity, lower priced option is worth the higher price if that's where they started. So all this to say I tend to focus on the higher end of the market first because you can have more meaningful revenue more quickly with fewer purchases and then use that to subsidize the development of products and services that serve the beginner market over time.

Jay Clouse [00:37:11]:
That does it. For our questions on YouTube, we still have X in LinkedIn. And you know what? I think LinkedIn might be a part two because there's so many questions on LinkedIn. So after one last quick break, we're going to get into the questions from X and then we'll have a part two episode on LinkedIn. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. All right, we are back and we are with our questions from x.com. i finally started calling it X instead of Twitter.

Jay Clouse [00:37:40]:
It has lost the heart and soul that was Twitter. So it is X. I have been beaten into submission. It is x.com now. First question is from my friend Caitlin Burgoyne. She says, how does your ideation process look? In other words, how do you collect organized priorities and shape all of your content ideas? So this all happens inside of notion. I use Creator HQ, the same Creator HQ template that is available for sale at creatorhq.co. it's a part of any lab membership as well.

Jay Clouse [00:38:10]:
But genuinely, this is where I keep all of my content ideas. We have a content database and I can create a new page inside that database for any platform. And each platform has a template as a starting point. So the podcast template has different sections, like here are sources, here are links I want in the show notes, here's the bio for the guest, here are the questions that I ask, and there's a repurposing area as well. But some of the templates are simpler. You know, if it's a tweet template, it's pretty much like, what's the big idea? I'm trying to get across what emotion do I want to hit on? So I like to think about the different emotions that a piece of content can touch on because emotions are what makes something resonate and more shareable. I'm Certainly not the king of this by any means. But more and more my content, I'm trying to hit on the emotion of like, ah, I feel seen.

Jay Clouse [00:39:04]:
Or yes, this was written just for me. So I'm really trying to shape things in that way. But on some platforms like YouTube, we have 10x100x the number of ideas as we do published content, and it becomes kind of a hunger games for ideas. The game is to create more and more snapshots of an idea and then rank them and pull the ones that you just absolutely can't stop thinking about, as this is where we create it. And there was a second part of Caitlin's question which was, the struggle is choosing which ideas to develop that my audience loves and drive business outcomes. I don't keep this as tight as I probably could, to be honest. Like, if I wanted every piece of content to drive a direct business outcome, then that content probably needs to speak to a core problem that one of my offers gives the solution for so that I can position that offer at the end of the piece as the obvious next step. But I don't think about that as much since the lab is really the core offer.

Jay Clouse [00:40:07]:
I just have this belief, and so far it's played out that you know what I'm about, you know what I'm offering, and if I continue to provide value, you are going to find your way to that offer at some point. I could probably be way more aggressive and on the nose about this, but really I'm looking at which ideas have high performance potential on YouTube specifically. But that's because we've been optimizing for views on YouTube for a long time. It is my main discovery platform, so I do want it to reach new audiences. So I'm often looking through the lens of how big is the potential of this idea in terms of, like, the target market it can reach. And then on YouTube, we are packaging or thinking about the package before we do any scripting or interviewing just to confirm that, yeah, we could see how this would perform well. But the drafting process that happens in notion, moving it along, the process of like, in progress to complete that is a notion. You know, most content is kind of underwhelming, to be honest.

Jay Clouse [00:41:16]:
Like, most growth in terms of audience, in terms of followers, comes from a minority of content that just does very, very well. And most stuff, I think, is more like audience engagement more than audience discovery, if you know what I mean. I'm basically trying to make good with the current audience rather than attract a bunch of new folks, because I'M just not good at the attention game. I'm not good at attracting new folks as much as I am at just continuing to speak to the people I'm already reaching. Parker asks Lessons from having multiple products versus one Membership I think I kind of already addressed this. It's just so much simpler to build up mind share around a single product that has a great name to it. I think a great signature product actually builds top of funnel for you. When you have a signature product that becomes so well known in terms of value proposition, if that value proposition is in alignment with your overall brand, it becomes this great flywheel where people buy the product.

Jay Clouse [00:42:18]:
People have such a great experience, they talk about the product, which brings people to your brand, which brings people to your product, which brings people to your brand. So having one product I've just found to be so soothing in a lot of ways. But you know, the Lab isn't the only product that I sell. It's about 50% of revenue. Creative HQ is a big segment of revenue as well. And what I do on the backside of any of those products, as I said, is if you purchase one of them that's included in the membership, I'm going to encourage you to roll that investment forward into the membership and I just hope that you have a great experience and you stay there. And so far two out of three people do. That's the, that's the retention numbers.

Jay Clouse [00:42:57]:
Working on making that better. All but above 50% is very good. Brian Feroldi asks your thoughts on paid ad strategies like retargeting. I haven't done nearly enough paid experimentation. It falls in this bucket of this is a great idea and I know it could work. In fact, I know that it does work for a lot of people and I could figure that out, but that would take a fair amount of effort and I can't do every viable strategy that is out there. I just want to do a few of these things really, really well. And paid ads, paid retargeting, I haven't tried it.

Jay Clouse [00:43:32]:
I don't think my offers really align to it. I think to do paid ads this is also kind of a volume strategy. And so you want a product that is probably $29 or less. You want to get this paid funnel to be self liquidating in a pretty short payback period. This is all like a fun optimizing game and I know a lot of people who grow their lists basically for free because their $29 product pays for the ad spend. And so they get a customer who hopefully has a Great experience, their list grows, and it's a really smart strategy, but you've got to put a lot of time into learning how to do that, or you've got to hire somebody who knows what they're doing to set it up for you. That's going to eat into the self liquidation cost. You know, it's gonna add costs and make it harder for that funnel to be sustainable.

Jay Clouse [00:44:24]:
But a lot of these groups, you know, you could hire them to set things up initially and then you can kind of run it on your own. We had a woman named Taylor Cooper come into the lab and do a workshop on Facebook ads. That's just like an off the shelf. Here is how to do it. That's available to all members in the lab, regardless of tier. And that's a really good starting point if you want to try paid ads, but you don't want to pay a third party. She really showed how to do it. And if you can get someone to teach you how to do it and do it yourself and look at the numbers, I think it's a really good strategy.

Jay Clouse [00:44:56]:
Demetri asks, what's your personal advice for making the most out of a conference or networking event? I had a friend named Andy Sparks tell me one time that his goal with every event is to leave with one new friend or somebody who could be a lifelong friend. And I think that's such a great goal because the impact is high, the effort is relatively low. It's very achievable, and it doesn't put this pressure on that I think a lot of people have, which is like, I need to get the most out of this. You feel like if you're there and you've dedicated the time, you just have to do the most to get everything out of it that you can. That's a lot of pressure. And so, number one, I love that goal of can I leave this place with one person who I think could be a lifelong friend? The other thing that I really, really recommend is to host a dinner at this event. It is so powerful to be the person who gathers a group of people at one of these events. And it's not that hard.

Jay Clouse [00:45:55]:
The hardest part is actually looking at the schedule and finding the right time block to do it and then finding a location that's walkable from the main venue. But when you host a dinner, you can invite the speakers of that event because even the speakers are feeling this pressure of, I need to get the most out of this. And so if you tell the speakers, hey, I'm hosting A dinner and a bunch of speakers are coming. You can be the person who gathers some of the most influential, in demand people at that event into a room for an event that you have put together. And it's so, so powerful. It's an absolute cheat code to networking at these events. Instead of trying to fight the entire crowd of the event to meet a couple of these high value people, host your own dinner and invite exactly the people you want to meet. Most people are going to say yes.

Jay Clouse [00:46:41]:
Nathan asks, what are you spending money on right now that's increasing your happiness? Especially stuff you wouldn't be able to have if you were in a high cost of living city like New York? So I live in Columbus. It seems like Nathan lives in Columbus as well. Things that increase my happiness. I mean this entire basement project of building our home studio, finishing the basement, this has been a huge return on investment in terms of happiness because we got 50% more house. It's the summer our air conditioner was out for the last three days. Basement stayed cool. The theater room is incredible. I love tv, I love movies.

Jay Clouse [00:47:16]:
So that's a great place to end the day. We have a little library down here, so that's fantastic. I've gotten much more into audiobooks lately, so Audible, even Spotify Premium actually has a ton of audiobooks. I've been reading on the Kindle more. I think my walking treadmill actually was great. That gives me a chance to get steps in on days where it's more difficult to get out of the house or get outside. Yeah, I think that's kind of it. I mean, I love owning a house.

Jay Clouse [00:47:45]:
There's a really good argument to be made about renting versus owning. And believe me, when you get a larger house, you have a lot more to maintain. It's a headache, it's expensive. But working from home to have full control over my domain, it's just awesome. We are constantly investing in making the house better and better. From a design and functionality standpoint, it's really great. So I'm a big fan of owning a place in wherever you are. But you know, in a city like New York, that would be a lot harder than it is in a suburb of Ohio.

Jay Clouse [00:48:18]:
That's been great. Oh, I guess one last thing, I will say my wife and I love tasting menus. So if we can find a good restaurant that has a tasting menu, I'm happy to splurge on that dinner because it's just the best. Next question on X comes from Shushant who asks a diversification of Channels that get you the most revenue. For example, how much YouTube contributes, how much X contributes. This is difficult because on one hand, I could just look at direct attribution of revenue. Like, I know that YouTube pays me somewhere between 12 and $40,000 per year in AdSense alone. And then there's integration.

Jay Clouse [00:48:57]:
So I could talk about sponsorship. Actually, I'll do that. So last year the newsletter did $57,000 in sponsorship, which is almost half of our total sponsorship budget. The podcast did 20,000, YouTube contributed about 60,000. So the newsletter and YouTube are about 50, 50 in terms of direct sponsorship monetization. And if I look at this year, is that trend holding close? Newsletter is higher than YouTube because we haven't had a big video like YouTube. AdSense is driven by views and we haven't had a video be as successful as our Jenny Hoyo's video. We recognize most of that AdSense revenue last year.

Jay Clouse [00:49:42]:
So right now, newsletter is about 50% of sponsorship overall. But when you compare it to memberships, it is so much less. Newsletter sponsorship is 13% what membership revenue is in the business. And in General, sponsorship is 16% of revenue overall and the membership is 62%. So, you know, most of membership sales come from the newsletter or the podcast. And then YouTube. Social media generates very little direct revenue attribution in the business. I basically ruled it out.

Jay Clouse [00:50:26]:
I hope that social media gets people to email, but I do not monetize social very well. I could sell some integrations, but it's just a drop in the bucket compared to focusing on making more of my own content that's valuable and makes people aware of the lab. So the membership is the biggest thing. Sponsorship is a distant second. Yeah, we have twice as much sponsorship revenue as digital product revenue this year. Digital product revenue is actually on par with affiliate revenue this year, which is kind of surprising. But I think a lot of digital product revenue gets eaten by the basic tier of the lab. So really, digital products, affiliates, those are in third place behind sponsorship, which is a distant second to memberships.

Jay Clouse [00:51:17]:
Tobias asks recently you've spoken a couple times about the macro changes you see in social media due to AI's impact. With that in mind, what would wise Future J's advice be on what the 8020 of marketing will look like for the next five years? Where's the best risk reward? Well, if we're talking about discovery networks, again, I'm in a privileged position because I have owned media now, my newsletter, my podcast. These properties have dedicated subscribers who get it and consume it every week and there's not an algorithm in the middle. So my future plans are mostly on those platforms and YouTube, because YouTube is kind of like a scaled version of the podcast. But let me take myself out of that place and assume that somebody is getting started today or in the next year, we'll call it. What would be my advice for the 8020 of marketing for the next five years? I think most importantly is that you pick one medium to get extremely good at. Okay? And by medium, I mean video, audio, writing, or I guess design. You know, if you think about carousels, because these are their own games that you have to get good at, and trying to do all of them really well is very difficult.

Jay Clouse [00:52:40]:
It starts to proliferate where you feel like you need to show up. And if you're getting started, you just need to get really good at one thing, because you don't have any leverage when you're getting started. You have no leverage. So you have to outwork and out qualify, like outclass very good people. And you're only gonna do that as a beginner if you're dedicating just a huge amount of your available time towards the pursuit of getting good at that thing. So it might be that you only get good at Instagram carousels, it might be that you only get good at YouTube, it might be that you get really good at short form vertical video. But pick one of those mediums to say, I am well suited to do writing, I am well suited to do video, I am well suited to do design. Pick one of those three.

Jay Clouse [00:53:29]:
Even if you're well suited to do all three, pick one as a starting point and say, okay, based on this medium, what is the best platform for me based on the audience I'm trying to reach? If you're focusing on writing, which would lend itself well to LinkedIn, but your audience isn't on LinkedIn, don't do LinkedIn. You know, you've got to know what platform are my people on and what platform am I a big consumer of so that I will know when the culture and the trends and the meta changes on this platform and go with that. You know, even if, let's say you want to do short form vertical video, you could take on Reels, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube shorts at the same time. But I really wouldn't recommend it. I would pick one of those platforms because, yes, the same asset cross posted will get results on all of them, but they are different enough that you're going to have to create that asset for one in particular. And so choose that platform, get really good at that platform. Because the only way you're going to build leverage is if you build an audience. And you're only going to build an audience if you out compete really good people.

Jay Clouse [00:54:37]:
And you're only going to out compete really good people if you are learning quickly and getting a lot of practice and really becoming a student of one platform. So if you do that, if you become a student of one platform, you build an audience on that platform, you create leverage and now you have the ability to expand and do other platforms and collaborate with other people. But I really, really, really cannot overstate the importance of focus, restraint and choosing what game you want to play. They're all equally viable, but they have varying degrees of difficulty. And really the difficulty depends on your interest in learning the thing or your existing skills. Like I think YouTube still has a very, very high ceiling, but it also has the most moving parts and things that you have to get good at or hire for to be good at. So YouTube is a team sport in a lot of ways if you want to do it well. Whereas you can find a format that is low production value, that works in short form video and get really good at that quickly.

Jay Clouse [00:55:41]:
I don't want to pick like a winner of a platform. I guess it's kind of telling that I'm personally focused recently on YouTube, LinkedIn, I think substack based on their notes feature is also interesting. But you got to pick one and really, really focus for years. This leads into Mark's question, which is what's your best advice for hiring when building out your content team? We heard this from Caleb Raulston on a recent episode. Don't hire a social media agency. I really, really don't recommend it because the agencies that are good and worth hiring as a social media agency are going to be really expensive getting started. That's more money than you should probably hire for. Most of the time they're just behind on what actually works.

Jay Clouse [00:56:27]:
What you really need is to think of each platform as its own like ecosystem in a way or its own almost mini business. Like I really want to create P&LS for every platform we operate on and put one person in charge of each P and L. So we can see, we can localize the costs and the revenue for each platform to see which is working well and also have like a creative director for that platform. Because again, I truly believe that if you wanna compete on these platforms these days, you've gotta know that so, so well. And it's changing all the time that it's not practical for one person to know all these platforms really well on their own. Like you're going to be giving something up. I think you want a world class person who knows a platform inside and out, leading that platform, which you know, the more platforms you're on then now it's a lot of hiring. One person might be able to do like two platforms and maybe you can have a working knowledge of multiple as I think I do.

Jay Clouse [00:57:27]:
But I'm not killing it on any of these platforms because I can't be world class at all of them. I need to hire for it or I need to scale it back. It's just hard to play all these games and have time to be a human. So hard to have time to be a human when you need to be online all the time to compete in this game. And if you can't be a human, what's the point? What's the point of playing this game in the first place? Last question here from Twitter and we're gonna call that the last question for the episode. We'll do a part two with LinkedIn. But last question is from Matt Barron who says, tell us what you envision your life like five years from now. Five years from now the book that I'm working on right now will be done and I will be extremely proud of it.

Jay Clouse [00:58:11]:
And I think it will be a large part of my life five years from now. I think it will be picking up steam. I really think this is the type of book that's going to be more relevant and more successful over time. So I think five years from now the book will be doing pretty well. I'll be getting some speaking opportunities. I don't know if I'll take those speaking gigs. I'm going to limit the number of speaking gigs I do because I don't like to travel. But I think I will have built a reputation and some mind share around the topic of trust.

Jay Clouse [00:58:44]:
And I think I'm going to be talking a lot about it, not just on my platforms, but other people's platforms. And I will be in the same house enjoying the same finished basement we have made. I hope we have a second, if not third, child five years from now. And I hope I'm working less, I hope I'm writing more, I hope I'm reading more, hope I'm working less and our family is bigger. That's what I hope for my future. And I think that's probably what a lot of people hope for their future. And I am not that different. So that is today's part one of Ask Creator Science.

Jay Clouse [00:59:24]:
We'll record a part two where I answer questions from LinkedIn, because again, I think I had like 30 to 40 questions on LinkedIn, which is the same number of questions I just answered. So we'll do a whole part two coming up with all of my questions from LinkedIn. Thank you for asking these questions. By the way, whatever social media platform you enjoy, please find me over there. So when I ask for questions like this, you can participate and ask them. If you have any thoughts on this episode, I'd love for you to comment on Spotify and let me know. And if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, please consider leaving a rating or review. We're getting closer to 500.

Jay Clouse [00:59:58]:
That is a huge milestone for me. It would mean a lot to get there. In any case, thank you for listening and I'll talk to you next week.