#269: Moments I wanted to quit, AI-proofing, what’s changed on social, and whether I’d ever sell the business [Ask CS Pt. 2)

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. This is part two of our July edition of Ask Creator Science. I asked for your questions about your business or mine on all of our different social platforms, LinkedIn and Instagram x substack, YouTube threads even. And in part one, which I'll link to in the show notes, we answered all the questions that were from all the platforms except LinkedIn. And here in this part two, we're going to answer all of the LinkedIn questions. We had several dozen, so I'm going to get through as many as I possibly can. They are insightful, they're quirky, they're into the nitty gritty, and I'm excited to share all of those answers with you.

Jay Clouse [00:00:54]:
So. So we will get into all of those questions after a quick break for our sponsors. All right, we are here. Our first question from LinkedIn comes from Chica, who is a member of the lab. Hello, Chica, she asks, what is your strategy on LinkedIn? Will you take it more seriously? And we got a plus one from a couple folks on this. So, as you may or may not know, social media has not been a huge part of my strategy for the past several weeks. But I would say the biggest exception on that is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where I tend to get the most bang for my buck right now in terms of sharing and getting a good response from folks.

Jay Clouse [00:01:31]:
So I have been taking LinkedIn fairly seriously. There was some research that was done and Richard Vanderblam reported on this. I'll also link to Richard's episode in the show Notes that suggested that you should publish at least three times per week if you're gonna take LinkedIn seriously. They had some evidence to show that you get a boost in reach if you're publishing at least three times per week. So, you know, historically I was actually trying to post every single day, all seven days of the week, and now I've reeled that back. I still shoot for a minimum of three times per week, which is actually pretty easy for me because I'll typically just take whatever the best performing content I have on other platforms and share that on LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn in a weird way operates, it accepts content that works on like every other platform. You know, like you could do text only, you could do images, you could do carousels.

Jay Clouse [00:02:24]:
If you're winning on any other platform, you're probably going to be able to take that same content in whatever format and win on LinkedIn as well. It just seems that we are still in the moment of having more attention on LinkedIn than there is good content to be consumed. I don't know if that's true for everybody, but I'm certainly having a good outcome there. And the interesting thing is actually as I have been posting less, I am getting more reach on average on those posts. Now, I don't know if that's because I'm posting less or because since I'm posting less, the relative quality, I guess you could say of the posts might be higher because I'm putting more thought and a little bit more effort into it. But all this to say I am just fine with my LinkedIn performance right now. Posting less, but those posts performing a little bit better. A couple more things on LinkedIn though, that I think will be worthwhile.

Jay Clouse [00:03:18]:
We have a member in the lab. His name is Avery. Shout out to Avery. Avery is awesome. And he is constantly experimenting and testing with stuff on LinkedIn. And what he has shared with us a couple of times is polls do extremely well still. Or maybe the word is. Again, if you want to have a low effort, high engagement format on LinkedIn, polls still do extremely well.

Jay Clouse [00:03:42]:
And the thing about polls is, and every post, you can add a link in the body of a post and it doesn't really negatively impact the performance of that post on LinkedIn. What I mean by that is if you look at some of my recent posts on LinkedIn, you'll see that at the bottom of the post I have kind of a signature that says, hi, my name is Jay. I help people become more successful professional creators. And if you want to get started with me, click here to learn from my newsletter. And that seems a little cheesy. It seems like it doesn't add a whole lot, but I'm telling you, it actually does effectively add subscribers to your list. So my strategy on LinkedIn is to publish at least three times a week, hopefully more. I am completely bought into the idea that just about every post should be a non text only post, meaning that images do well, videos do well, polls do well, carousels do well, text, text only posts.

Jay Clouse [00:04:39]:
It's kind of like fighting with one arm behind your back. Because when you have any type of media in the post, you essentially have the opportunity for two hooks. You have the visual hook of whatever the visual is that's part of your post and you have the first three lines of the post, which is also its own hook on LinkedIn. So you want to give yourself the chance of hooking people twice. That works out better. I'm having fun posting video to LinkedIn. I think it's still more effective and underutilized. It's really interesting.

Jay Clouse [00:05:06]:
My most successful posts ever on LinkedIn are either carousels and several years old at this point, or videos. Sometimes videos just really break through and get crazy reach. But when they do get crazy reach, the engagement on those videos isn't all that impressive. So it's a little weird. But I do find that if I have a video that I posted to Instagram, or maybe it was even a story on Instagram, that tends to perform pretty well on LinkedIn. Okay, next question is from Melvin. Melvin says, what's one thing you do differently if you're starting your business today and why? I think I shared this in part one as well. But basically I would choose fewer platforms to get started on.

Jay Clouse [00:05:47]:
I would get really specific about a specific medium that I wanted to double down on. Whether it's writing, video, text or designimagery, I would pick one of those mediums, choose one platform that leverages that medium and just do that one platform really, really well because it's just really hard to build leverage starting from zero. Today you have to out compete professionals on every platform. And the only way you're going to break through, or the fastest way you're gonna break through, I guess, is by really focusing and specializing on a particular platform and building relationships there. You know, this is the story that doesn't get told. A lot of times a lot of your growth on any platform is going to come from collaborating and supporting others and them supporting you as well. You can either mechanize that by trying to put together like an engagement group, or you could just build friends, make friends on the platform. And if you are trying to split your attention on creating across multiple platforms, what you're probably not going to do as well is build those relationships and spend time supporting others on that platform.

Jay Clouse [00:06:52]:
When I talk to people who have grown really big on LinkedIn or wherever they have these groups of people, that said, we are just focusing on this and by just focusing on that platform, you're not only focusing on creating on that platform, but being a good patron of that platform as well. Supporting other people, being more active in your own comment section. You can do a lot more on a platform when you are focusing all of your energy on it. And that's what I would do differently starting today. I guess the other thing I will say if I was starting today is the topic that you create around is probably like 90% of the success you have. Because think about this, a lot of people get into this Space. And they're like, I serve creators, I serve solopreneurs and listen, I serve that audience. And it's a great audience.

Jay Clouse [00:07:39]:
I love helping you. However, it's a small market. It's a small, small, small subset of the population. We're talking about content creators who are a subset of entrepreneurs who are a tiny subset of the overall population. Okay. I know people who have much bigger businesses than mine because their market is much, much larger than mine. When you have a large market and there's less competition, you can be way more successful, earn way more money, have a much bigger business while doing everything relatively worse than I'm doing in my business because it's just a huge market. A tiny fraction of a huge market can be a huge business.

Jay Clouse [00:08:28]:
But in the beginning we don't think about that. And so if I were starting over today, I would be really, really thoughtful about the target market. I'm addressing the ideal customer. I'm trying to serve, to try to serve a much bigger market. Because the bigger the market, the bigger the upside and opportunity in your business. Okay. Allison asks, you probably have this somewhere, but I would love to hear about when you added that second and third revenue stream to your business in the early days. As you know, starting out is often trading time for money.

Jay Clouse [00:08:58]:
But if you want to grow as a creator, these next steps are often uncertain but necessary. Yeah, I mean, I've talked about this many times before and I would still beat this drum. When you're getting started out trading time for money, selling services is going to be the fastest route to meaningful revenue. And I think you should do that because that's also basically getting paid to do incredible customer research. When you're working directly with somebody doing one to one work, you are getting a front row seat to how they think, how they talk, their problems, what's important to them. And then you start to draw patterns across clients to see. I keep seeing this one issue come up over and over again and actually, because I've had to solve that, now I have a pretty unique and effective solution to that problem. And when you see that pattern and you started to find some efficiency in solving a problem for your one to one clients, that's when I would start to say, okay, how can I productize this? And maybe you can't fully productize it into like an off the shelf, self paced thing.

Jay Clouse [00:09:57]:
If you can do it, if you can, you see how that would work, make a solution. But if you feel like you still need some direct involvement and fulfillment, that's totally fine. But this becomes what you call a productized service. Instead of selling a bespoke, custom one to one solutions package to somebody, you basically say, this is a productized service. This is a very specific problem that I solve. I have a way of solving it, which means that I understand the timeline very well, I understand the process very well, I understand the pricing structure very well. That allows you to get a better hourly rate on your time because it's a little bit more scalable in that way. Now, hopefully, as you've been doing this time for money service work, you've also been carving out time for your most important client, which is you.

Jay Clouse [00:10:47]:
And for your most important client, you are the content creator, you are the producer of media. And if you're producing media, hopefully you have started to get some traction. And once you do feel like you have consistent viewership of whatever platform you're on, then sponsorship becomes a meaningful potential revenue stream as well. And I know a lot of people would say, well, I don't have a big enough audience for sponsorship yet. But sponsorship and success with brand deals is in large part about selecting for your sponsors, knowing who your sponsors are. Because if you have a sponsor that has a higher average lifetime value of the customer you're sending them, you don't need a huge audience, you just need to have the right audience for that sponsor. And what's interesting is a lot of other service based companies don't have sponsorship opportunities a lot of times. I remember in the early days our first podcast, our go to sponsor was a law firm.

Jay Clouse [00:11:52]:
We also had executive recruitment, we had accounting, and there weren't podcasts approaching these people asking if they would sponsor. So they looked at it as kind of a fun experiment that they wanted to try. And we only had to get them one, maybe two clients for that sponsorship to be worth it. And a lot of times the clients we sent them were actually the guests we had on the show. We would build relationships with the guests on the show. We would find out they might have a problem that sponsor could solve and we would refer them. And that was well worth it. They weren't just sponsoring our podcast for the listeners, they were sponsoring our podcast for the relationship and association to us.

Jay Clouse [00:12:27]:
And that is an opportunity for anybody creating content. Even if you have a small audience, if that audience is specific and targeted, there's going to be somebody that wants to reach that audience and find who that somebody is, especially if the value to them is relatively high. Blair asks, are we going to get a hair update? This is a joke question, but I will tell you, I am on the edge deciding, what do I do with this receding hairline? Do I shave it? Do I embrace the bald? Do I go the hair plug route in Turkey? Do I go with a toupee? My wife is actually pushing hard for the toupee route because she sees these toupee creators on TikTok and she's like, these are pretty good. This can be great. That's definitely in the third place slot for me. I am leaning towards shaving my head. I'm actually on like a multi month journey right now of growing my hair out. I believe it's called a French crop.

Jay Clouse [00:13:23]:
Is that what I'm doing? Let me Google this. Yes, I'm going for a French crop. The idea that there are lots of parts of my hair that are actually pretty thick and in the immediate term I think I can grow it long and kind of push it forward and be okay. Once we really start getting into comb over territory, I believe that's when I'm just gonna shave it. So we're trying it long first and if I hate it or it just doesn't work, we're going bald. And this is part of the reason why I became a hat guy over the last couple of years. Because you know what, if my brand was known as somebody with a full head of hair, I would be in big trouble going bald. So we will see.

Jay Clouse [00:14:06]:
I'll keep you posted. I've had some compelling arguments for the hair plug treatment in Turkey. I don't think I'm gonna do it. I think we're just gonna shave it. Lots of precedent for bald white men with beards. All right, Tom asks, tell me about the times you wanted to stop. Why didn't you? Ah, let's see. I don't think there was any time where I truly, truly contemplated quitting this direction.

Jay Clouse [00:14:36]:
I really don't. I don't think there was any time where I was like, I'm going to go back and get a job. I think that's a big reason why I have made this work, because not making it work was not an option. That being said, probably every week I'm like, this sucks for one reason or another. There's always something that is suboptimal and feels like, man, I am working way too hard for this. But I've never seriously considered quitting because I can't imagine this any other way. Like, to me, the foregone conclusion is that I am going to be self employed. Now, what does that look like for the next five, 1020, 30 years.

Jay Clouse [00:15:23]:
I think that'll probably change a lot. You know, I could see a world where maybe the work I'm doing now gets me a seat at the table for a non creator business, a software company or a hardware company. I don't know, somebody who's trying to reach the audience that I've already built. If I have the perfect distribution for a tool that serves that audience and I believe in that tool, there's a world where I get a seat at the table and I spend more time building a non content company to serve the audience that I am currently serving. You know, we saw Marques Brownlee get a design role with Ridge and I think we're going to see a lot more of that over the coming years. There's going to be products that don't have a face and faces who don't have a product and that's a perfect combination. So, you know, I think it's a foregone conclusion that I'm going to be self employed for as long as I have the option and the agency to be self employed. Does that look like this business and just creating content forever? I don't know, probably not.

Jay Clouse [00:16:32]:
But this is the life I want. I want full agency and that is ultimately why I haven't seriously considered quitting. We have a lot more questions to get to here. Questions about high ticket offers, product strategy, would I ever sell the business? Lots of juicy ones here that we're going to get into. After a quick break, our next question comes from Matt Gira. Hello, Matt. He says I know you're an advocate of starting with high ticket offers most of when does it make sense in your mind, if ever to start with a low ticket offer as your first way of monetization? Well, you're right. I do typically recommend starting high ticket because the math is just easier, especially if you have financial constraints.

Jay Clouse [00:17:20]:
So that's the big thing. If you don't have financial constraints, then the door is a little bit wider. If you for some reason have a huge audience, then that's another time that would make sense. Starting with a lower ticket offer. If you plan or have access to somebody who is good at Facebook ads. You know, a big hole in my business right now that I'm realizing or a big missed opportunity I guess is I'm more confident than ever that I know the people or I could build the skill to build a low ticket funnel. With Facebook ads. What I don't actually have is a low ticket product to serve that funnel.

Jay Clouse [00:18:02]:
So I think that's kind of a miss. I know a lot of people, that's their entire strategy. They have a low ticket product that they self liquidate through a Facebook ads funnel and that feeds into some higher ticket offer. So again, I don't know if it makes sense to do that before you have the high ticket offer. I think it is more of an entryway thing. But if you have a very large audience, that typically means that you are serving a larger target market. And typically larger target markets, large audiences mean that on average that audience has lower purchases power. So having a lower ticket offer makes sense.

Jay Clouse [00:18:37]:
So if you're targeting an audience that does not have purchasing power, then you're going to be kind of boxed into a corner of having to do a lower ticket offer and you can certainly experiment with it, but most of the time you're going to start and you're going to have a small audience and it's not going to be financially helpful or good enough enough for you to live off of if you start with a low ticket offer. So I think you either need to not have financial pressure and have a broad audience in mind or have already built a broad audience for that to be the most prudent strategy. But ultimately, if you want to build a high ticket or sorry, a low ticket product, go ahead. Don't let me talk you out of it. If you want to do it, fine, but it's just not what I would advise unless you were in one of those two situations. Todd Linder followed up on that and said, is there a point at which you know that it is time to add an additional offering or even pivot away from the high ticket? We're using the word high ticket, but what I want to talk about is your signature product. Okay. I'm a big, big believer still that you need to have a signature product.

Jay Clouse [00:19:52]:
And in fact, even if you have multiple products that that you sell, you will be known more than anything for one of those products and it will become your defacto signature product. So if you have a product that you don't believe is your signature product, meaning it's not the thing that's completely aligned with the brand promise that you've built. It's not the thing that you think is delivering outcomes that make people talk about it so that they refer it to other people, your signature product should be the thing that you become known for. The problem it solves is the problem you become known for solving. And a great signature product starts to drive its own top of funnel because it's so good and you're solving a problem that is so needed. If your current products don't seem to fit the mold for that, where that product can become your signature product that you're known for, that drives a huge percentage of your revenue, then you should probably think about what is that? What is my signature product? And that becomes a thing you build next. So if you don't have a signature product, if your current products you have don't feel like your signature product, that's a good signal that you should identify what your signature product is and start building it now. If you do have products in market and one of them is your signature product, then you have the choice of okay, am I getting enough mind share in my target market for this product? Does it feel like my target market knows this exists? If the answer is no, then you should probably just spend more time building a name in your target market and drive more people to your signature product.

Jay Clouse [00:21:30]:
If it feels like it's pretty well known, but there's a hurdle for people making the purchase for some reason. Maybe it's price, maybe it's timing, then it might make sense to build another product in the offer suite. Either a product that leads into it, maybe a low ticket product that you can do a Facebook ads funnel to, maybe it's a retention product. Do people finish your signature product and then have no way to continue working with you, but they have new problems that need solved? Maybe you create a new product for the customers of your existing product. That's also a good strategy. So I'm typically recommending start with a signature product. Then when that hits some sort of plateau and not because you're just failing to reach your target audience. Like a lot of times your plateau is just I'm not creating enough content, I'm not collaborating, I'm not building enough of a name for myself in this space.

Jay Clouse [00:22:24]:
But if you are well known in the space and you've hit a plateau, then you might want to look at, okay, second product. Does that go before or after the signature product? And I think either path is viable. Doing it before might get some new people into your ecosystem and into that product ultimately that were hung up for some reason. Doing it after, it's easier to sell to people you've already sold to. So if people go through your signature product and had a great experience, they're going to be pretty open to working with you again to solve the next problem they have on the back end of that. Sam Brown asks, It'd be great to hear about the big moments in your creator journey and what you would have done differently if you knew then what you know now. The biggest moment that stands out to me is actually when I rebranded the company to Creator Science. I told the story a bunch of times, so I'll kind of speed through it, but before the brand was Creator Science, it was called Creative Companion.

Jay Clouse [00:23:20]:
And I just saw I was not being thought of around the creator economy. I thought my content was for creators, but people didn't see me that way. The newsletter was called Creative Companion. The podcast was called Creative Elements. So I did the painful thing of rebranding the company to Creator Science, and then I rebranded the podcast as well. So everything was Creator Science. And that made things much smoother. That's the most night and day moment that I've had in the company's history was when I consolidated the brand behind Creator Science.

Jay Clouse [00:23:54]:
So what I would do differently, based on what I know now, I think I knew that Creative Companion wasn't a great brand. I was just kind of making a decision faster than I really needed to. A lot of times I think I hurried through things that didn't need to be hurried through that created basically, like, debt in the business that I had to solve. Not financial debt, but like problems that future me would have to solve. There's that old anecdote of like, if I had 60 minutes to solve a problem, I would spend 45 minutes thinking about it, and then 15 minutes solving it or whatever it is, you know, or if I had an hour to cut down a tree, I would spend 45 minutes sharpening my ax. There's a lot in business that's like that, basically spending more time up front being thoughtful about it, and that makes the execution smoother, cleaner, more effective. When I had more time, I just used that time like a blunt object, you know, just banging my time and capacity against problems. And now I have way less time.

Jay Clouse [00:25:04]:
And I find myself taking the opposite approach of thinking, planning, being a little bit more thoughtful and surgical with my moves. I heard James Clear one time say, bolder moves, fewer strokes. I love that idea as well. Trying to make fewer moves, but stronger. And I think I could have done that earlier on. And like I said earlier, I think I should have focused on a specific platform way sooner. I didn't try to really leverage social media for a long time either. I was just emailing and podcasts.

Jay Clouse [00:25:39]:
The YouTube channel was the last thing that I added. It's been the most effective. Social media gets harder every day, every year. And if I would have started on social media earlier, I probably would have grown a larger audience and maybe gotten them to email, but it's hard to say. You can't really run the counterfactual and you could drive yourself crazy thinking about what could have been if I would have done this. So I would have just focused and I also would have consolidated my products sooner. I have too many products or had too many products and really the lab drives 60% of overall revenue in the business and it's my signature product. I should have more quickly recognized that just making this product as good as possible is going to be better for me long term than developing one off workshops and courses and things and launching those.

Jay Clouse [00:26:33]:
The membership has been the biggest fundamental shift in the business and I started it pretty early when I started this whole thing, but I really should have just known from or I guess I could have focused earlier on just making that the one product that I'm really selling. Dennis asks, I'd love to hear you dive into some of the unexpected twists you've encountered along the way. And I don't, I don't know, nothing is really standing out to me as unexpected twists. I wish there was something here, but I feel like my story is both very boring and hopefully very relatable. There just hasn't been some crazy inflection point or crazy twists. I guess our YouTube video with Jenny Hoyos that really exploded. That was big because I went to VidSummit later that year. I thought I'd be a complete anonymous attendee.

Jay Clouse [00:27:25]:
But like everybody at VidSummit had seen that video. It was crazy. It was crazy how many people came up to me because of that one video. And you know, what I continue to see is 90% of growth. Maybe even 95% of growth is 5 to 10% of posts. It might be as crazy as 99% of your growth is due to 1% of your posts. It's wild, but you know, you just never know which 1% it'll be. So you have to keep getting shots on goal.

Jay Clouse [00:27:55]:
But the overall growth of your audience is typically determined by a tiny, tiny fraction of the content that you make. I wish it wasn't true. And there's certainly a ton of value to being consistent, getting reps in and getting better. But it's a small number of your posts that have such an outsized impact. You just never know when it's gonna be. Dylan asked, how would you go 0 to 5000rrr if you had to start over no audience? I think honestly I might start on substack. I know It's a big 180. But it was surprising to me when I started my substack experiment.

Jay Clouse [00:28:34]:
I went pretty hard into it and I was getting paid subscribers without a ton of effort. The hard thing is, I think if you're going to do the paid newsletter game or the paid substack game broadly, because you don't have to just do more newsletters. If you're going to do that, you are basically now Netflix. You have to continue adding to your content catalog to make it worthwhile for people to continue to subscribe. Recurring revenue comes from recurring value. And if you have revenue recurring on a monthly basis, you need to provide new value on a monthly basis, or at least equal value. But when you create content as the thing that is providing value, that value gets extracted, consumed and extracted very quickly. So if your product is more premium content, you just have to get on the treadmill of making a lot of new content.

Jay Clouse [00:29:29]:
But I think if you have the propensity for writing a lot or creating good community experiences, you could do it on substack and you could do it pretty quickly. I said substack because that's very lightweight and scalable. You probably can't charge the prices that we have for the lab or other more community peer to peer memberships. And substack doesn't really facilitate a peer to peer membership the way the lab exists. But when you have a peer to peer membership, there's also just it's more time and resource intensive than premium content. It's more sticky as well. I think premium content has a higher churn rate. So I would say pick your poison.

Jay Clouse [00:30:11]:
You asked for 0 to 5k mrr. So you said recurring revenue. So to me that is either a subscription, a content subscription or a community membership. And I think you have to ask yourself what you are better suited for, which is really a question of what are you more interested in. And that's where I would go. Alee judge asks name a mistake that you took too long to make. Gosh, that's a really interesting question and I don't really know how to answer it. But I will say every time we publish a YouTube video, I think to myself, this took us too long to make.

Jay Clouse [00:30:47]:
And I'm usually thinking that because as I was saying, most of your growth comes from a very small number of pieces of content you create. So if you invest a ton of time into any one piece of content, it kind of puts a lot of pressure on the performance of that piece of content. And we put more time and effort and resources into any YouTube video than any other format of content. And most of those videos are middling or underperforming. And so anytime we're putting a ton of extra time and effort into a YouTube video, I'm thinking to myself, gosh, if this bombs, this is going to be such a bummer. Not just for me, but for the team. Yeah, I think in general we take too long to make any particular YouTube video, which is a mistake. Carlstabe asks, what's one system you built that gave you the biggest return in time or energy? Easy, easy answer.

Jay Clouse [00:31:40]:
It is absolutely no question about it. Our Notion setup in Creator hq. I mean I was actually talking to someone on my team about this recently. I am marketing Creator HQ incorrectly. Actually, if you listen to the ad that probably played at the beginning of this episode, that gives a window into how I actually think about Creator HQ and how I should be talking about it, which is it's basically a team member. The amount of day to day stress, worry, planning, management of information that that system takes away from me is just incredible. It saves me so much time because I don't have to remember anything. Everything is tracked, everything is in one central place.

Jay Clouse [00:32:20]:
Everything is easy for me to share between my team and collaborate on with my team. It tied together all of my task management, project management, goals, content management. It's just been an absolute dream. I use it all the time, every day. It's no questions asked. Our backbone of the business, our operating system built in Notion is easily our best return on time and investment and that's something you can use today. You can go to creatorhq.co I believe if you use the promo code podcast that will save you quite a bit on it, but man could not recommend that more highly. I know it's a pain if you already use Notion to some degree and you're like, ah, do I want to migrate my system into the system? And we have some tutorials for doing that.

Jay Clouse [00:33:07]:
But if you're at a clean slate and you're not using Notion or using some other hodgepodge of tools, I'm telling you this is going to be a dream for you as long as you are willing to use Notion. And if you're new to Notion, we have a bunch of tutorials built into it to teach you how to use Notion as well. Because it can be an overwhelming tool, it can do anything, but you have to know what you want it to do and know how to set it up. And this just is an out of the box set up for you. Use it and gosh it's just been a dream for us. Uh oh, Ken is on the haircut train as well. Well, sort of. He says, what is your beard trimming routine? It has been getting longer and I shape it with a razor or I guess with an electric razor.

Jay Clouse [00:33:54]:
But yeah, I don't think this is a real question. I have been growing it longer, just like my hair. I'm growing everything out, which is an awkward kind of weird thing to do in the summer. Cause it is noticeably hotter. But we're trying it out and, you know, hair's great because decisions you make with your hair, you can change very quickly. Another James Clear thing that I love is he says decisions are either hats, haircuts, or tattoos. And you can kind of intuit from that. You know, hats you can take on and off right in that moment.

Jay Clouse [00:34:22]:
Haircuts, they are reversible, take a little bit more time. And tattoos are a lot more permanent. And so literal haircuts and experiments. Totally fine. Totally fine. Abel Grunfeld, who is the VP of marketing at Riverside. I actually think Abel is one of the co founders of Riverside as well, which we use for all of our recording of interviews. So thank you, Abel.

Jay Clouse [00:34:44]:
He says. Counterintuitive lessons about growing a podcast audience. I have time and time again come around and realize that I think the assumption when you're podcasting is that people who listen to your podcast listen to all of your podcast episodes. And if you just interrogate your own listening behavior, I bet you would see, oh, I listened to like 1 in 6 of some of my favorite podcast episodes. I bet it's pretty crazy. I'm a big fan of Ryan Holiday's interviews on the Daily Stoic podcast. I don't listen to a single one of his actual Daily Stoic episodes. I only do the interviews.

Jay Clouse [00:35:24]:
So I'm a huge fan, recurring listener. And again, I Probably listen to 1 in 7, maybe even 1 in 14 if I don't like that guest of his episodes. So if people are extremely choosy about the episodes they listen to, I think the important insight here is titles in podcasts actually matter a lot. The title of your episode actually matters a ton. And I can see this in my analytics for our episodes here. When I have a title of an episode that very, very clearly lists the topics discussed in that episode, it gets more listens than a interview that has like one overall theme. And I've been surprised by this. But this episode here, I could have titled Ask Creator Science Part 2 and not given any context as to what was in It.

Jay Clouse [00:36:17]:
But I know that by putting some of the specific questions answered in the title, it's going to get more clicks. Here's why that's important. On the face, it doesn't sound like that's going to grow your audience, but I think podcast audiences are constantly contracting. Because if I don't listen to one of your episodes one week, and then I don't listen to it the next week, and then I don't listen to it to the next week, even putting aside what that podcast player might do based on that behavior, I do think some podcasts algorithmically recommend certain shows and episodes based on your listening behavior. But even assuming that every episode of every show you subscribe to just shows up chronologically in your feed for consideration, habits are a thing. So if my habit becomes I don't listen to your podcast, that's gonna be a hard habit to overcome. So my strategy on the podcast lately has been better episode titles to try to increase week to week listener retention, because a retained listener is somebody who is likely, or at least more likely than anybody else to recommend an episode. I just think we don't think or talk enough about podcast retention because we assume it's really high, and I think it's actually quite low.

Jay Clouse [00:37:38]:
I think you need to really, really, really care about the episodes you make and how you title them to get people to listen to them and then even within the episode. We had Dan Misner on the show many months back and he said based on their data at Bumper, and they have a ton of data, he said for a show to have word of mouth traction, average listeners need to listen to 70 to 80% of the episode. That is a signal that the show is good enough that people are going to talk about it with people in their life. And that's a high bar. Super high bar. This show retention is about 50 to 60% of the episode on average. So I gotta get better. I gotta get better at that.

Jay Clouse [00:38:21]:
And it's hard. It means that you probably have to edit your episodes more, gotta make them shorter, gotta make them tighter, gotta make them more retentive. And you know, the bar is getting higher all the time. It's getting higher all the time. Shiloh asks, what's the genius strategy you swore would 10x your business, but instead 10x'd your stress? Ugh. I think adding on any new content platform has typically been relatively more stress than reward. Because when you announce like, hey, I'm making Instagram a priority now, you feel like you, in order to be consistent with that declaration have to do it even if you're not seeing results. So every time that I've been like, I'm gonna start doing this now and made a public declaration about it, that has been a problem that has not been good.

Jay Clouse [00:39:15]:
I fairly recently started doing this behind the scenes experience in the lab where as I'm building out my next course product, which is about building your signature product meta. As usual, I said I'm going to update this every week. And then I promptly started working on my book proposal and weekly updates became direct conflicts with doing the book reposal. So I have been slow to record some of those updates. And what I told everybody in there was, you're going to be in this space and you're going to see these updates for as long as it takes for me to finish it. So I think people are getting and will get more than they paid for for being in that experience. It's going to be a long term experience which I think is positive. But it's been slow development.

Jay Clouse [00:39:58]:
And so I'm always, I'm always reminding myself experiments don't need to become declarations. And in fact, by not declaring something that you're doing, it allows you more flexibility for the experiment because it doesn't need to be successful. It can fail. And you can talk about it if you choose to. You can not talk about it. You can continue it if you choose to. You cannot continue it. Most of the time it's just like run the experiment without talking about it and then decide after it runs whether you want to continue it and whether you want to talk about it.

Jay Clouse [00:40:34]:
After one last quick break, we'll get to the rest of your questions from LinkedIn. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. Joshua asks, when do you and don't you use AI and how has it changed your creative process? I'm using AI a lot with the book project because it's a great researcher, or at least it's a faster researcher than me doing all the research on Google. The way I can ask for academic research or findings on something or help me correlate this phenomenon with this phenomenon over a period of time it goes out and finds us data and then I demand the sources and then I go and look at the sources just to confirm that it's a credible source and that the data it's giving me is right. But it's been a huge unlock in research and a lot of what I'm doing with this project is research driven. At one point in time I fed Claude a bunch of my writing and asked it to give me a brand voice template. Basically, like, how would you describe what a creator science essay sounds like? And so now, because that exists, I can take essays in progress and ask for feedback on that essay based on my best writing.

Jay Clouse [00:41:53]:
And it will say things like, it seems like you need more structure, add some headings, add some transitions between these sections. And you know, the thing about AI is, well, two things are true. One, it wants to please you. So I constantly have to ask it, like, do you actually believe what you just said? Are you trying to make me happy? Like, assume that I am looking for the truth and not to confirm my assumptions. The second thing is it will find or at least tell you issues with your thing for as long as you ask it, it will never be like, this is great, you're done. As good as it can be, it will just find issues. And sometimes it goes in circles. It'll find issues.

Jay Clouse [00:42:30]:
So you fix it and you ask, what else do you see? And then it will take, like, some of the new stuff you said, and now that's an issue, almost like it's pushing you back in the direction where you came. So you have to be really discerning in what feedback you take, how you actually parse it and move forward with it. But yeah, that's how I use AI. I don't use it for any generation of published content at this point. I'll sometimes give it a transcript of a podcast episode and say, hey, can you help me find 10 of the most impactful standalone quotes from this episode? I'll give it a word limit or a character limit. Sometimes I'll use that as a jumping off point to write a Tuesday email that is inspired by the podcast. But I like writing and I want to be a writer. And I truly, truly believe that the risk of AI is actually atrophy in your ability to think, problem solve, be creative.

Jay Clouse [00:43:29]:
So I'm very conscious about, do I want to ask AI to do this because it feels hard and I don't want to do the work? Well, if that's true, is this a skill that I want to get better or worse? I won't use AI to do something for me that is a skill that I want to get better at. Because if you don't use it, you lose. Just doesn't make sense. So that's currently how I use AI. I haven't done anything with like, voice dubs or a video avatar of me, and maybe I'll do that someday, but I don't use those things until at least I'm interacting with somebody else's AI avatar. I have no interest in doing that. I look at the scarcity of access to me as a feature and not a bug. I don't want to be responsible for what an AI version of me trained on some of my past content, extrapolates and recommends to people that isn't rooted in how I'm currently thinking.

Jay Clouse [00:44:28]:
You know, it just, it seems like more of a liability than an addition. I know it seems novel and cool, but I just don't want to let that genie out of the bottle yet. Maybe I'm going to be behind the curve and this is a problem, but I am in no rush to duplicate or clone myself so that people can chat with me, quote unquote. It's not chatting with me, it's chatting with a language model that is a combination of my words and itself, and I just don't want that to be people's experience of me. Sultan asked how do you tackle the desire for instant gratification as a content marketer? Well, first of all, I don't think of myself as a content marketer. I think of myself as a content creator. I pretty much never use the word marketing anymore because I think marketing is done through great content and it's not a thing that you sprinkle on top of great content. But anyway, how do I tackle instant gratification? I look for signals of progress, but I don't make things with the intent of instant gratification because those things just have a short shelf life.

Jay Clouse [00:45:35]:
I don't know. I'll say this out loud, and then you can help me decide if this is something you believe to be true or not. But I think oftentimes the lifetime impact of something that you make has some correlation to the amount of effort put into it. There are, of course, exceptions. We know there are some albums that were written in a weekend that are classics and continue to be classic. So there are outliers to this. But I think in general, the amount of time you spend working on something is likely to have an impact on the overall shelf life of that thing. You know, if you spend 30 minutes writing a newsletter, chances are a newsletter you spend two weeks working on might stick in people's minds a little bit better.

Jay Clouse [00:46:24]:
So I just, I am trying to make better work. I'm always trying to make better work. And to make better work, you have to push off to gratification, which is a muscle that I've had to build. It's hard. It's not Easy to do, but it's just, it's just a muscle that I've had to build. Rittvik asks, is consistency underrated in the creator economy or is content. I think consistency is probably overrated in the creator economy. It's important to get reps so that you get better because you have to make great content for this to work.

Jay Clouse [00:46:59]:
But I think the advice of just be consistent has people checking a box because they think just the act of publishing is enough. But really the advice is you need to maintain a standard, even increase your standard and publish a lot to get a shot on goal. Consistency is a way to kind of force a certain number of shots on goal in a period of time. But again, that only matters. The shot only matters if it's on goal. A shot that is on goal is one where you put real effort into the thing. Just publishing for publishing sake is probably not a shot on goal. It's probably a shot off goal.

Jay Clouse [00:47:40]:
And I think a lot of people are taking shots off goal in the name of being consistent when they know this isn't good enough. But they think, but I have to publish this week. So I think that as relative quality and quantity increases in the creator economy, the way to compete is by just making better work. You have to make better work and it has to be for a specific audience. And that may mean that you're a little bit more inconsistent or a little less consistent. I think that's a worthy trade. We have no schedule on YouTube. I wish we had a little bit more of a schedule.

Jay Clouse [00:48:20]:
I wish we had like a two videos per month outcome at least. But I would not get into like we're going to upload every week unless you're really trying to build routine in people's week. But it's going to be hard to build a routine into people's week if you're only checking the box. It's got to be good. You gotta start with having a high standard relative to your own abilities, of course. Like you can't do something that is outside of your ability. You have to earn your skill and ability. But you should always be pushing your current level of skill and ability to do the best that you can, even if that slows down your schedule a little bit.

Jay Clouse [00:49:02]:
Richard asks, can you start a community based business without educational content or a guru? Most communities seem to really be support groups structured around courses run by a guru. What are the options for a non guru based community? I take a little bit of umbrage or issue with the word guru because here's the thing. Nobody goes out and says, I'm a guru now I want to be a guru. What happens is people go out and try to be helpful and they attract an audience. And now by virtue of having an audience, people look at that person, call them a guru, and use that in like a derogatory way. It's this hilarious cycle I see of people being like, I am the anti guru. This is what the gurus tell you that's wrong. And that person gets traction and now they're seen as a guru.

Jay Clouse [00:49:48]:
And it's like, wait, what? How? What happened? I didn't mean that. Anyway, I'm just anti word guru because I think it's not accurate or helpful. But point taken. A lot of communities are built as support groups structured around an individual creator's courses. No, I don't think it has to be true. Any membership, let's say, is going to be somewhere on the spectrum between educational content on one end and peer to peer experiences on the other. A lot of communities, or I should say memberships, are structured around the premium content side of things. But you can say, I want to be more on the peer to peer experience side of things.

Jay Clouse [00:50:28]:
So how do you attract a group of peers to have experiences? Typically you're going to serve as some sort of lightning rod or aggregator of those people. Why would people be coming to you to be aggregated? At some point it's because you've built this community that is known in their space as an important community or the community of note. But whether you do that through content or some other means, if you identify a common interest that is underserved, meaning there are people who love this specific thing, but they don't have a way to connect with other people who love that specific thing. That's an opportunity to create a community for that interest group. There was some crazy research. I forget the percentage, but it was like a super high percentage of very young people like Gen Z say that they have a very strong interest that none of their friends share. There are these strong interest groups that people feel like weirdos. Like, I love this thing.

Jay Clouse [00:51:31]:
Nobody seems to get it. I was just Googling today. I was like, man, I missed the video game Medal of Allied Assault. That was a PC game as the first game that I played online. And I was like, do people still play this somehow? And I looked it up and there's an open source group that's been making an open source version of this. They have a forum and it's like, that's a cool thing. That's a cool thing that I just found that I could get into because there's no one else in my life that cares about this. So if you find a specific interest that doesn't have a place that collects those people, that's a really great opportunity to build a community based business and a great thing to start.

Jay Clouse [00:52:07]:
Actually a common interest that is probably around you is your community. We're seeing this in the newsletter space. There are a lot of local newsletters popping up that are building like pretty significant businesses because great word of mouth. People feel very strongly about the place they've chosen to live and invest in. And they want to know, like, what's the cool thing? How should I be spending my time? What are people doing? There's gossip involved. And so whether it's a newsletter or whether it's a membership or whether it's a mix of both, people are spinning up these Instagram pages, doing a local membership product. You know, memberships traditionally didn't have like forums. It was like AARP and aaa.

Jay Clouse [00:52:48]:
And these memberships where you have benefits, you pay every year, you get stuff in the mail for being a member and you have perks. That's still an opportunity. I think that's actually probably the next evolution of memberships is just these things that have core benefits and perks for a specific type of person, but doesn't necessarily have this always on community forum. I think a lot of people put community and membership as this synonymous thing, but it's not. A community is a value proposition of some memberships. It doesn't have to be in every membership. I think that you can have a membership organization that solves a problem, serves a need, benefits a target audience without having a community component. Prasha asks, how do you choose what not to pursue in your business? That's a great question.

Jay Clouse [00:53:34]:
And honestly, the more successful your business is, the more your default answer to anything should be no. Most of the time your answer should be no. If something is working, you should just do more of the thing that is working because it's so rare and so hard to have something that works. So if something is working, you should choose not to pursue virtually everything. I'm not talking about nine out of 10 things, I'm talking 99 out of 100 things. So the bigger question is, how do you choose what to pursue in your business? And to me that answer is it needs to be so low effort and high return. People call this an asymmetric bet. Basically, the cost, the risk is low, the upside is very, very high.

Jay Clouse [00:54:27]:
So how do you find things that are very low risk? Well, maybe they're taking advantage of an asset you've already built. You don't have to spend a bunch of time investing resources into building a new asset or doing some new effort. It relies on something you've already built or a process you've already built and creates a new upside opportunity. The higher the risk, the less likely you should be to say yes. It's really hard to say yes to things that are super time intensive. I'm experiencing this now as I'm pursuing this book project that from a business perspective should be a no because it's so high risk and it's so high expense in terms of my time, the actual money that I'm paying for an editor and things like that. The downside is so high and the upside is so unlikely. So I don't look at the book project as a business project.

Jay Clouse [00:55:23]:
I look at it as a personal project, a personal, you know, dream, if you will. It's something that I've always wanted to do. That's why I'm doing it. But from a business sense, I can't really make a case for it. It's not the smartest use of my time or resources. So if it comes to the business and it's like, how do you choose what to pursue? It needs to be low risk, high reward, something asymmetric Vo Tec asks How to design and run a great online offline community this is a much bigger question that I can answer in this Q and A, but what I will say is I did an interview with Ali abdaal on his YouTube channel and podcast Deep Dive. It's also been on this feed. I'll link to it in the show Notes where I really talk about designing a great online community.

Jay Clouse [00:56:09]:
And then as far as offline goes, we've only done one attempt at this and I had a recent episode on the podcast as well about a full breakdown of the Lab Offline. I'll link to that in the Show Notes so that you can peruse that if you would like. Those things will give you a much deeper sense on how to do this. My course, Build a Beloved Membership, is also a further step beyond what I shared with Ollie. Antiprofit says. Have you found it challenging to convert in your offers due to the fact that you're usually interviewer rather than the interviewee? Do you feel like your conversion metrics would be higher if you were always the one front and center? Yeah, probably. But I felt like in the beginning I didn't have any credibility and I didn't know as much as I know now. A lot of what I've learned now I've learned in public on the podcast.

Jay Clouse [00:56:55]:
So interviews were a way for me to get reps to draw in an initial audience to learn in public. And I am thinking now, like, I think there's more opportunity for me to create solo content and you see it in this episode. You see it on our channel from time to time, you see it on my social media channels. So I do think there's an opportunity for me to share more directly in that those episodes tend to actually do better than the interviews at this point. But I don't think it has an impact on my offers because I don't typically structure my interviews in a way where it's like and now go join the lab. It's not like that. It's typically the people who convert to my offers are people who have been following me for a good amount of time anyway and have already been considering this for some time. So I do think that by doing more solo content I could draw a more direct line to my offers and that would probably result in more sales in total.

Jay Clouse [00:57:52]:
But I don't think it's a conversion issue right now so much as I'm not making as many offers as I probably could if I was doing things just more solo. We're running a little long here, so I'm going to pick and choose a few more of these questions. Thank you everybody for sharing these. I'm sorry if I don't get to your question. Yuma asks, is there a future where you sell creator science? If so, what would have to align for you to pull the trigger? Tough question. I mean, I hadn't built the company with a sale in mind. I do think it's possible because we have a brand and there are things that happen in the business that don't require me. I think the most acquirable part of the company as it stands today is the membership because I could still be active in that membership without owning doesn't fully depend on me to be in it.

Jay Clouse [00:58:46]:
But I'm not interested in that at this time. Is there a future where it happens? I guess. I guess it's possible. When I think about building an event, which I've thought about a few times because I think the bar is actually very low for doing a great large scale conference. When I think about that, I think about that as an asset that can be sold. What would have to be true? I would have to really, really, really Believe in the acquirer, that they're going to treat my audience, my people well. Because ultimately if I sold the business, I would still have a reputation and relationship to that audience. And I want that to be intact and positive and good and maybe even better.

Jay Clouse [00:59:31]:
Ideally, they have a better outcome post acquisition than they did pre acquisition because if they don't, that's going to stick around in their mind as oh, sometimes Jay sells out and that's net bad for us. I feel like I didn't do as good of a job as I could have when I sold my first community to smart passive income. I don't think I made that transition as smooth and as good for people as I could have. That being said, I didn't, I didn't like hurt anybody by any means. I mean, the community that I sold was an alumni community that was no longer being paid for in any means. And I got them a year free of SPI Pro. So I felt like I did good by them. But also I noticed that my relationships to that community did not strengthen after the sale.

Jay Clouse [01:00:23]:
A lot of cases got weaker. And so to me that says that wasn't like an experience that they were stoked about. So moving forward, I'm just very conscious of how do I make sure a post acquisition experience, if that ever happened, was great and strengthened my relationships with my audience, with everybody involved. And so I just want to be a good steward of the relationships I've built through this business. And I would not make a sale if I didn't believe that to truly, truly, truly be true, they would have to be super aligned with this work. I think it would have to be somebody in the creator space. The precedent for this is like a technology company buying a media company. You know, that's what happened with HubSpot and the Hustle.

Jay Clouse [01:01:11]:
So that feels like the most likely thing. We recently saw Gumroad purchase small bets. So that feels like the most likely scenario where it would happen. And then that would mean that it would have to be a tool that I truly, truly use and believe in. But I just, I don't know what that company would be that makes sense. So it seems super unlikely with the current business. I think what would have to be true is I'd have to develop some other valuable asset, maybe one of my own software products, maybe an event, like I was saying something where I am not the face of it while I own it, that would be something that's easier to sell. So I don't know.

Jay Clouse [01:01:52]:
I'm not thinking about that. I don't think it's likely. Even the book project I'm doing now, which I see as like a bigger play that encapsulates the creator science audience, but is large in the creator science audience, it would still be in service to the creator science audience. So, yeah, I don't know, it'd probably have to be years in the future. And it probably means that I'm also looking towards a future where I'm not doing this work. And I don't know when that would be either. Cornelius asks, I would love to hear your perspective on AI proofing your creator business in the next five years. Listen, we have no idea what's going to happen here.

Jay Clouse [01:02:31]:
To me, you know, I said earlier that I have no interest in cloning myself because I look at access to me as a feature and not a bug. Or like I should say the restricted access to me as a feature and not a bug. I actually think one of the ways to AI proof yourself, this is a current viewpoint, this might change, but my current viewpoint, one of the ways to AI proof yourself is to not make an AI version of yourself. Of course, anybody can go and scrape your content and make their own AI version of yourself, but then you're not liable for that. You know, you're not on the hook for what somebody made leveraging your publicly available content that extrapolated beyond you. But when I think about future proofing myself, I'm thinking, okay, what's AI going to replace the quickest? I think it's going to replace core sales pretty quickly. So I'm not really trying to build self paced courses. I'm leaning more into peer to peer community experiences.

Jay Clouse [01:03:25]:
I think people are going to be asking themselves, how do I spend more time with people? How do I know what is real? And when you have other people involved in the value delivery of a product, I think that's good. Having a community that's both online and offline. You know, we had our first offline event recently. That's a big part of it. Doing cohort based courses rather than just self paced courses is a big part of it for me. Ultimately it's also the relationships to the audience. I want people to feel a certain affinity for me and my viewpoint. If I was pure information and we didn't have a relationship beyond information, then that's easily replaced by AI.

Jay Clouse [01:04:09]:
But if you like my viewpoint, looking forward on things, because AI is a great collective knowledge system, but it doesn't look forward as well as it looks back. If you like my viewpoint looking forward, you like My personality. You like the way I teach, you like the way I talk, you like the way that I share things. Then I think that's a little bit of a moat in an AI future. So I'm leaning into relationships in all senses, even parasocial relationships. But I'm looking at human experiences, relationships with my audience, them to me, that's how I'm trying to future proof my business right now. Aaron asks, I would love an update on the workflow of your day as a new dad. We hope to have kids one day and I'd love to know.

Jay Clouse [01:04:52]:
Man, this is tough. And I have an episode coming out with my friend Jay Akunzo where we talk in full about this. So I won't go too deep here, but most mornings I wake up and I have morning shift with a baby. She has turned me into a morning person. I've always wanted to be a morning person, but nothing turns into a morning person like a baby waking you up as your alarm screaming da da da da da da into the monitor. So I wake up with a baby. I have the morning shift. She will usually wake up around six or seven.

Jay Clouse [01:05:22]:
It's been more six lately and she'll take a mid morning nap sometime around 9 to 10. At that point I will typically start my workday. Mal will be working around the house. She'll take the baby shift at that point and I have calls on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. But Mondays and Friday are open creative days. So I'll try to get out of the house a lot of times for a couple hours on Monday or Friday just to get distractions away and get some deep work time. And honestly like that's as good as I get. I will usually clock back in with the baby around 3 or 4 and will have until her bedtime around 6:45, 7 when she goes to bed.

Jay Clouse [01:06:07]:
Then I'll either get back to work or I'll go and exercise or I'll watch TV with Mal. I have way less time than I used to. I feel like I'm working less than ever and not necessarily because I've systematized and built processes that have gotten me out of the business. Like no, there's more fires than there's ever been in the business and I'm just learning to work with less time, which is super, super super hard. We'll round things out with Dave Pacos. He says, what are the biggest differences you've noticed between social media three years ago and today? Social media seems to care way less about connecting the best audiences to every creator on the platform and seems to be much more focused on just maximizing overall view time on the platform. What that looks like is specific niche interests have a harder time reaching a significant audience because these platforms will just find the most broadly applicable and engaging content, which is usually like dumb human stuff or music or you know, just broad interests that interest everybody and just push all of those to more and more people and more people are creating broad based, interesting content. So niche educational content is just so much harder to do on social media because you need to wrap it in a package as something that's broadly accessible to really get the benefits of algorithms.

Jay Clouse [01:07:39]:
Now I will say the exception to this is YouTube. YouTube still does a really good job of gearing that content to the most relevant audience. I hope it stays that way. But every social media platform now has a for you feedback that doesn't seem to be attuned to very specific niche interests very well. It seems to serve just the most engaging stupid human stuff more times than not. LinkedIn's a couple years behind X, Instagram, TikTok, they're leading this trend. LinkedIn will probably get there soon. I hope it doesn't.

Jay Clouse [01:08:20]:
I mean LinkedIn has different incentives than every other platform because it's owned by Microsoft and I think they do want to protect the professionality of the platform a little bit. So I hope it doesn't go in this direction. But most platforms I find are just harder. You really have to play the game at a high level, really understand short form video to do these games well. But even on X, X is text based more than anything else. And gosh, it just seems to reward polarizing hot takes much more than educational threads. You know, it used to be that threads that were long form that taught you something that was super viable, super effective on X. And that does not seem to be the case anymore.

Jay Clouse [01:09:08]:
So we are learning, things are evolving all the time. Just know whatever game you're playing, you've got to learn the rules of the game, the players of the game get good at those games. I'm going to cut it here. That is part two of our July Ask Creator Science if you missed part one that is linked in the show notes, go check it out. I hope you've enjoyed this. If you did enjoy this, leave a comment on Spotify. If you're listening on Spotify or if you're on Apple podcasts, please leave a rating and review. We're trying to get to 500.

Jay Clouse [01:09:32]:
We're getting close. Everyone matters. I truly read all of them. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next week.