#246: Planning for a recession, my approach to email, increasing customers, and finding your partner [Ask Creator Science]

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hello, Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. I'm recording for the first time the first episode in the brand new Creator Science home studio here. Kevin Shinn's team came out and visited the house, put the finishing touches on setting up the studio and it is just absolutely glorious. I'm so excited to have this just steps away every moment of the day to come down here and record. I feel like this is going to be truly life and business changing. So, while we've been preparing for the studio, I've gotten a little bit behind on recorded interviews and I thought this would be a great opportunity to do another listener Q and A episode. I've been asking for questions here this morning on social media and an email, so I've been keeping track of those.

Jay Clouse [00:00:56]:
I'm gonna answer them here in this episode. If you don't already follow me in email or on social media, it's a great time to fix that. I'll have links in the show notes to everywhere that I exist online, but I say we dive right in into some of these questions. So the first question comes from Gareth Davies, and Gareth shared this in the lab. I actually asked folks in the community if they have some questions that they wanted to get answered here on the show. And Gareth asks, I'm curious about your approach to automation in your business. What kind of tasks or processes are you comfortable automating versus those where you prefer to maintain direct human creativity and attention? Where do you draw that line? In what ways has that boundary shifted for you over time? My general way of operating is to say that if I feel the relationship would be negatively impacted by not having a human touch, then I'm going to maintain a human touch. Basically, I optimize for people and my relationship to them.

Jay Clouse [00:01:58]:
So most of the time, I try to automate anything I can, you know, especially if it's something that I do repeatedly. Any type of repeat task is certainly something that I want to try and automate because that will save some time. Things that are repeat tasks that I can't automate, I will often hand off to my assistant who has just been really, really impressing me. She's been just handling things that involve necessary creativity and problem solving, and she's just been crushing it. So between automation and my assistant, I feel like things are a little bit better than before. But I do genuinely try to automate anything that is repeatable. But, basically, the lens is either will this have a direct negative impact on the person that is engaging with it? Will they think less of me or have a worse experience if I do something that's automated or AI driven? And if so, then I look for a different solution because relationships are number one over everything else. Ana says, You talk a lot about the benefits of having one signature product that you are known for.

Jay Clouse [00:02:58]:
What process do you recommend for figuring out the right signature product or offer to build? Well, anytime you build any product, there are a couple of key ingredients. Right? You need to make sure you have high conviction that you understand a problem that your audience is having and most likely a lot of people in your audience are having. So you should have a lot of data or a lot of experience to support this idea that, okay, I know a lot of people in my target audience are facing this problem. Beyond that, you should have, again, high conviction and confidence that you can solve that problem in some way. So how do you do that? How do you get conviction and confidence that you can solve that problem? Well, if you've solved it for yourself, that's a great start. Or if you've solved it for other people in kind of a less scalable one to one productized service or service provider way, that's a great sign that you were right in that you understand the problem and you can solve it. You know, first and foremost, do you know a problem that people value enough that they would pay for a solution? Have you validated that you can provide that solution? And if so, then the question is basically like, what is the form factor that I should deliver this solution in? Because products can take a lot of forms. You know, you've got digital products.

Jay Clouse [00:04:18]:
You've got physical products. Inside of each of those, you have a bunch of different potentials like digital products. You can do a course. You could do a template. You can do some sort of download. You can do a self paced course. Lots of different ways that you can solve this problem and it kind of comes down to what is the most scalable yet successful way you can deliver this solution. Because, ultimately, if you can't deliver a solution or the solution that you're promising, then the product's not gonna work.

Jay Clouse [00:04:48]:
People aren't gonna trust you. They're not gonna recommend you. You need to make sure you're delivering on whatever the promise that you're making is because otherwise it just doesn't work. So ideally you can do this in a way that scales so that all you can focus on is getting in front of more people who need that problem solved. If you have a scalable solution, sometimes it's hard to conceptualize how you can scale this solution. Either it's something that you can't solve forever or you just can't solve for right now. In which case there's no harm or shame in offering a one to one service solution. A done for you solution.

Jay Clouse [00:05:26]:
You know, if you get more reps solving a problem for somebody, you'll start to see what areas of the process can be smoothed out, can be made a little bit more scalable and automated. And then you can start to get some ideas for, Okay. What are some ways that I can deliver this solution at at least a higher level of scale? You know, a lot of times this looks like, Okay. I'm doing one to one services. Now I'm gonna try to do this in like a group fashion where I teach a group and then I can have some one on one interaction and support with them in a group coaching context or a cohort based course. And then, if that goes well and you've proven that you have a methodology, a framework, a linear progression of how to solve it, then maybe you put it into a self paced course. Maybe though, teaching isn't the way you do this at all. There are a lot of people who have built their entire livelihoods doing done for you services as an agency or basically building a human delivery function.

Jay Clouse [00:06:21]:
I think we're in a really interesting time now where AI agents it'll be a new form factor. You know, basically creating the capability in software using AI to solve problems for people. It's still kind of a Wild West. Don't know how reliable it is yet. You certainly don't want to create like a brittle or unpredictable solution for folks, but I do think this is going to be a new form factor we see where you build a specialized AI agent to basically solve problems for people based on the training you are able to do for that AI agent. I think that'll be really interesting. But right now, you know, I would say solve the problem for one person, then start to see what are the things we can automate and solve it for more people at scale without having my direct one to one involvement. Alright.

Jay Clouse [00:07:10]:
Cal asked, your episode with Mark Manson made me think about the tension of building the front end and back end of your business. Both are important and both take time to build. I know you did a great job building your back end funnels first. If you go back, what would you do differently? I do think there's an interesting tension here because if you have an audience that trusts you and that you've earned that trust with them, you have a lot of options for how you can monetize that relationship. And of course, again, first and foremost, should be how do I respect the relationship and respect the trust that I've been given? But if you have lots of ways that you can respectfully deliver on promises that earn money, you have a lot of opportunities. So there's there's a good argument to be made that for a long time you should focus on delivering, over delivering, creating value for free so that you can build trust en masse. When I started, I just I really bought into this idea that social media was rented territory and I thought that meant social media was bad. And so I really focused on email first and foremost.

Jay Clouse [00:08:12]:
Then I moved into podcasting, eventually into YouTube and a little bit more social media now. And that has served me because those platforms are really hard to build. It's really hard to get people to subscribe and stay subscribed to emails. It's really hard to get people to listen to a podcast. It's really hard to get people to watch you for any length of time on YouTube. And if you do that, then you are probably building trust at a high level. In which case, there are lots of ways that you can monetize. A lot of people today, they think winning in the creator game is getting attention and they find ways to get a lot of attention on social media in short form.

Jay Clouse [00:08:53]:
And it feels like winning because you see this number of followers go up. It gets pretty big and you're like, Wow, I'm really doing it. But if that's not having a direct impact on your downstream revenue on your bank account, then is it really winning? I don't know. I think you're probably serving the social media platform more than you're serving your own business and even the audience. So I do think if you just imagine a world where you have a social media post go viral and you have the opportunity to en masse direct people somewhere, where would that be? Do you have an answer to that? Do you have an answer where you can say, And because I have your attention, go check this out with confidence that some number of them will find value in that thing and pay for that thing? If you don't have that type of customer journey set up, I would build that because the best case scenario is you do get a lot of attention all at once. And then where do you direct that? What does that do for the business? Does that make the business safer, more sustainable? Does it grow the business? If the answer is no, then I think you need to spend some time on the back end systems. And to me, that looks like understanding your signature offer. What is the one problem I want to be known for solving and for who? And what is the form factor of that problem? And if I have that signature product dialed in, how do I get more people to me to be aware that I have that signature product? I think that delivery system, that awareness engine should exist exist in email.

Jay Clouse [00:10:20]:
I'm not saying solely in email, but I think you should have a system in email that if people subscribe to you, they get value for free from you on some regular basis, whether that's because you have an ongoing newsletter as I do or whether you have some sort of evergreen sequences running that provide value when somebody signs up. And eventually, you should say, Hey, it seems like you are a pretty good fit for this offer that I have. Here's more information about it. If you have that system set up, then you can really get back to work drawing attention to you, your work, the problems that you you solve to try to get people to email to get them through that system. Eventually, you should be able to dial this in so well that you understand the lifetime value of a subscriber on average and you also understand the cost to acquire a subscriber on average. I'm not quite there yet. I'm not saying you need to snap your fingers and have this at your fingertips just like that. It takes a while to get there.

Jay Clouse [00:11:10]:
But if you do get to this point where you understand the lifetime value of a subscriber on average and you can acquire a subscriber for less than that cost, you basically have this self funding, self growing business that you can just pay to acquire more subscribers through Meta Ads or the Creator Network or any of these new tools for acquiring subscribers. And if you can prove that those people on average are worth more than the cost to acquire them, then you have this great game where you just spend more on ads, bring more people in, anything that comes in organic is a plus. And big businesses are built that way. So I do think spending more time on the back end systems is where I would go. But when people hear that advice, a lot of times they over index on building products and services way too many products and services. And you really just need one signature product that can service the typical customer avatar that you're trying to bring in. Cal had a follow-up question that says, Do you now only use Circle to host your courses, or do you still use Teachable? I'm wondering if I should move my course from Kajabi to Circle in preparation for building a membership in Circle. I get asked this a lot actually because people see that my courses are housed on Teachable, but the lab is on Circle, obviously.

Jay Clouse [00:12:22]:
And they say, why don't you just have the courses in Circle? And that's a very valid question. The real answer is just sequencing. I had my courses. I had some courses on Teachable before Circle existed, before I built the lab. And so, to continue to give access to those courses to the people who have purchased them over the years, moving them into Circle would be its own project on its own. And the sales pages that I have in Teachable are better than the sales pages you can build on Circle right now. I would basically have to recreate sales pages for all of my Teachable courses elsewhere, then migrate people into Circle. And there's a good case for doing that because if you do, if you give people access just to single courses in your membership and then say the membership like the Lab gives you access to all of the courses, then you would have access to the course in Circle And you can design it so that all the other spaces are locked, and you see all the things you're missing out on.

Jay Clouse [00:13:16]:
And it gives you an easy pathway to upgrade and expand the access to educational materials and community spaces inside of Circle. It's not a bad idea. I just haven't prioritized that migration as a project to do in the business because it's kind of a not broke, don't need to fix it thing. I'm more concerned and more interested in letting people who have purchased a course on Teachable know via email that, Hey, you purchased this course. It's worth this amount of money. I'm willing to give you a coupon for that amount of money towards your first year of membership in the lab, whether it's Basic or if you apply for Standard and VIP. That to me is kind of my strategy with digital products right now is to let people know all of my educational products are inside the lab on all levels. And so if you've purchased any of them, I will let you apply that purchase to your first year of membership in the lab at whatever level you join at.

Jay Clouse [00:14:12]:
And I think that's a higher leverage project to take on to set up that system in email in an automated way rather than trying to just move people all over to Circle for the cleanliness of it. I might get there at some point, especially if Circle rolls out a better sales page builder for courses because right now it's just a lock screen and it's not very good. But if they build out a sales page builder, then it's very possible that I consolidate over to Circle. Alright. Got two more questions here in the lab. Next is from Martin. He asks, If it's not too late, what metrics, if any, do you keep an eye on to know if your newsletter is doing well or not? So I look at open rates and where that is trending. I look at click rates.

Jay Clouse [00:14:56]:
I look at unsubscribes on each issue to see if the average number of unsubscribes is increasing. Because basically, if open rate is trending down or unsubscribes are trending up, then what I know is I am losing what I call the regret test. Basically, I have a good sense analytically that people who have been opening my emails are more dissatisfied with it than satisfied because if someone opens an email from you and they're dissatisfied, they're now less likely to open the next one. Right? And you'll see that in open rates or unsubscribes. So that's like the core of what I look at. Anecdotally, I also have kind of a gut sense on how many responses I'm receiving to a broadcast. If I'm not getting a lot of email responses, then that probably means that I'm not creating an emotional reaction because what tends to get a reply if I'm not asking explicitly for a reply but what tends to get a reply is an emotional reaction to something that I've written. And so if I'm not getting replies, then I'm not creating creating an emotional reaction, which means the writing probably isn't that good.

Jay Clouse [00:16:06]:
You can educate people without appealing to their emotions, but I do find that even when you're educating, the more you appeal to their emotions any emotion the better that writing is and the more replies you will get. Alright, last question from the lab. This member says, I'm liking the voice memo episodes of the podcast. How are those performing? What's your thought process on doing those? So if you're listening to this, you've probably listened to one of my voice memos, maybe not. It's a shorter, like usually sub ten minute episode here on the podcast feed. And I usually just record those straight into my phone. I just open the Voice Memos app on my iPhone, talk right into it, and then AirDrop that file to myself, upload it to Megaphone, and it's good to go. I like doing it and really what I try to do is shorten the time between insight or idea and posting.

Jay Clouse [00:16:59]:
There's no editing on those episodes. They're just a one take straight into the mic. And I like it because I think it creates more closeness between me and the listener. I really do want it to feel like you're just getting a voice memo text from me. And they perform really well. I remember I talked to Dan Meisner who's like a podcast analytics nerd. He was on the show a few months ago. It's a good episode.

Jay Clouse [00:17:22]:
You should go check it out if you like podcasting. But he was talking about with his clients. He typically sees that podcast episodes need a completion rate between 7080% as a marker that the show is good enough that on average more people are going to recommend it via word-of-mouth and the show will grow. And for this show, I think the average listen rate is around 60%, but on those voice memo episodes, they're pretty much all above 80%. Some of them close to 90%. So the performance on those is really high and I like doing them. They get great feedback from folks. I want to do more of them and I'm trying to not let myself kind of have scope creep on what I think qualifies as a good episode.

Jay Clouse [00:18:08]:
I'm trying to just let myself have fun and let inspiration strike and do it. My thought process on doing it is I just think any time spent with me is good for the business. If people are enjoying spending time with me in any medium on any platform, that's good for the business. And I experimented with this. I enjoyed it. People enjoy it. It's relatively low lift and so if I can do that more regularly, then that's going to be good for the business. And if I start to see that the analytics do drop in some way, that'll probably reevaluate.

Jay Clouse [00:18:39]:
But so far, it's been very, very positive. Alright. We're gonna take a quick break here for the sponsors. When we come back, I'm gonna answer questions from X, Threads, LinkedIn, and YouTube. So stick around. We'll be right back. Alright. We're back.

Jay Clouse [00:18:52]:
We got some more questions here. We're gonna start on the LinkedIn side of things. Krista asks, I want to know how you collect questions from listeners for episodes like this. This has always stumped me that there isn't an easy tool to collect feedback. Any recommendations? Thank you. So what I typically do is I have an always open form on my website at creatorscience.com/ask. That is built in Tally, and there are some automations built into email or sometimes I'll post this online places and I'll say, Hey, I'm doing an episode of the podcast where I answer listener questions. Fill out this form if you have a question.

Jay Clouse [00:19:30]:
And the questions of that form, you can check it out if you want. It's at creatorscience.com/ask. It says, What is the question? Then there's another one that says, Is there any context I should know? Then I let people submit anonymously or select alert me if you answer my question. And if they say alert me, I ask for their name and email address. When people fill out the tally form with their questions, that actually is integrated with my Notion setup, which is, you know, Creator HQ. If you haven't checked out Creator HQ, it's at creator h q dot co. This is my full operating system for my business that is built in Notion. And so there is a database in Creator HQ called Problems and FAQs and in Tally that's Tally.

Jay Clouse [00:20:14]:
So it's a form tool. They have a free plan. It's super generous. In Tali, when you create a form, you can select an integration with different tools and I have it integrate via Notion with my problems and FAQs database. So when people submit a question, it goes into my Problems and Questions database. And so I can visit that anytime. It can inspire new essays. It can inspire full episodes of this podcast.

Jay Clouse [00:20:38]:
But for stuff like this where I'm just asking for quick questions from the audience, I do find that I get more questions if I don't ask them to fill out a form. And so for this episode, I created a page inside my content database in Creator HQ. And every time I post it on a social platform X, LinkedIn, threads, YouTube, the lab Inside the episode page for this episode, I pasted links to where I asked that question. So now I can just go back and reference each post and go in real time and look at those questions. So either way will work. I do like getting the full form submissions, but, like I said, I do tend to get more questions when I do it a little bit more ad hoc like this. Sarah McDonald asked: Everyone's talking about a looming recession and as a full time creator, this will be my first time navigating one. I'm not sure how it might affect the creator economy, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Jay Clouse [00:21:31]:
Are you making any preparations? I don't know. I feel like we've been talking about a looming recession for like eight years, maybe even longer. This is the longest bull run the market has ever seen here in The US. So there's almost certainly going to be some level of correction at some point, if not a recession. I don't know that I fear like when I think about the things I fear, I don't think about a recession. What I do think about is I worry the impact AI will have on employment. I really do. If I was sending our daughter to college right now, I would have no idea what I recommend she goes to study.

Jay Clouse [00:22:09]:
I just feel like it's gonna have such a huge impact on such a wide swath of jobs. And of course, there will be new jobs created. I just don't know if it will truly create as many jobs as it will destroy. And so that worries me because of course that would have a downstream effect of if unemployment rises, then that's gonna be bad for the economy. It's gonna be bad for people. That's going to probably lead to some level of recession. And that does worry me. And the speed at which this is changing is so crazy, but it's not really the speed that AI gets better that is going to be what dictates rising unemployment.

Jay Clouse [00:22:47]:
I think it's actually the speed at which companies thoughtfully integrate it into their companies, which will be much slower than the timeline of when it is possible. Know, the people that are paying attention right now are way on the edge. Way on the edge. AI will have the capability to take jobs probably a long time before it actually does because people inside those companies have to understand how to use it, how to apply it, and then you know what they're going to do with their workforce. There's going to be a lag behind what is possible with AI and how it actually impacts jobs, but I do think that it's coming. I just think that it's probably several years away, but it could be really bad. So I am personally in a mindset that I'm gonna work as hard as I can over the next several years and I'm going to increase our savings rate. Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:23:44]:
I am so uncertain about the future that for me it's really, can we earn more, save more, have more of a safety net for whatever future comes because I am I am worried about it. So how do you earn more? Well, you have to do two things. You have to create value for people and then you need to drive more people to you that are the type of people you're creating value for. And so it's a two pronged thing. Can you create more value in the solutions you provide? And can you market and spread your message better and faster? And that's, what I'm trying to do. The temptation for a lot of creators like us is to constantly create new products. For me, I'm just focused on making the lab as good as it can possibly be. I want to make it better and better and better.

Jay Clouse [00:24:31]:
Make it really hard for anyone to come in and make a better product than this and stick with it as long as I have and I'm going to. And I think I'm going to really lean into more human in person experiences as well. We're doing our first in person event this year in June, and it's a two day event just for Standard and VIP members of the Lab. We've got about 40 ish people. It seems like they're going to come from the community and hang out for those two days. I'm going to program and facilitate the whole thing and I think it's going to be one of the most impactful couple of days of the year for a lot of people, a lot of creators. And I want to do more stuff like that in the membership. And so instead of trying to create incremental revenue by building and launching new products, everything is about the Lab.

Jay Clouse [00:25:13]:
Even if I make something new, it's so that I can make the lab better first and foremost and if it makes sense to sell it publicly, okay maybe I'll do that too. But I'm really trying to focus on earnings and savings right now just because the future is very uncertain. Andrea asks, How do you handle creator burnout when you start feeling it creep in? The thing that I've realized is I don't get burned out doing things that I enjoy doing. Right? Burnout usually happens because it's this prolonged period of time where I'm doing things that I kind of feel like I have to do and are taking me away from the things that I want to do. So if I'm starting to feel burned out, it means that I'm off balance in where I'm allocating my time, and I need to change that somehow. And I would say this has happened over the last few months for me. It's why, if you have been listening to my Voice Memo episodes, I've been talking a lot more about hiring more because there are some projects that I'm really excited about doing right now, but there are so many weekly deadlines and commitments in the business that I need to deliver on outside of, you know, being a husband and father, I don't get a lot of extra time for new, like net new projects in the business right now. So, I am reallocating my time.

Jay Clouse [00:26:28]:
And you can do that in two ways. You can hire and delegate, and that's what I'm choosing to do. Or you can simply say, You know what? I'm going to cut some things off. I'm going to stop doing a few things. And that's also totally viable to take some of those things off your plate. So, if you're starting to feel burnout, I think you need to listen to it and you need to do some reflection on what's causing this. I'm willing to bet it's a misalignment between how you're spending your time and how you want to be spending your time. And you should try to fix the root cause of that misalignment either by doing less through dropping some things or delegating some things.

Jay Clouse [00:27:04]:
Alright. Angela Hollowell has several good questions here. So I'm going to do a few from Angela here in succession. I'm going to try to answer them kind of quickly. First one is what helped you move the needle from 1,000 subscribers to 5,000 subscribers on your newsletter? I remember I started writing in January of twenty seventeen, and I moved to ConvertKit in August of twenty twenty. And at that time, I had 1,800 subscribers. So I kind of remember this point in time. It took me a long time to get to a thousand subscribers.

Jay Clouse [00:27:35]:
You know, we're talking almost four years to get to 2,000 subscribers and then things have grown a lot since. I think in any relationship platform, so email, podcasting, SMS, private communities, what really moves the needle or has historically is word-of-mouth. And so in growing your newsletter, the best thing you can do is generate word-of-mouth by being the best newsletter in some vertical or for some particular person, which is a big proposition. But it gets easier when you have clear differentiation. What is it about your newsletter that makes it different or better for some specific market? And if you make a newsletter that is an obvious best choice for some specific person trying to get some specific outcome or learn some specific thing, then you start to unlock legend. You know, there's like lore about this newsletter. People are talking about it because they can't help but talk about it. It's one of their favorite things.

Jay Clouse [00:28:34]:
It seems curated just for them or created just for them. And so I really think creators need to spend more time thinking about differentiation and what they're associated with. I could have probably grown a lot faster if I had realized earlier on that I wasn't really being associated with creators. A huge unlock for this business was when I rebranded from what was called Creative Companion at the time and the podcast was called Creative Elements. When I rebranded and consolidated everything to Creator Science, people had a much clearer idea who this was for and then they gave it a chance. And once they gave it a chance, they saw they really liked it. So you have initial adoption that's a challenge and then you have the experience itself. If you have a great experience or what you believe to be a great experience and you're having problem getting adoption, I would solve that problem first.

Jay Clouse [00:29:24]:
Why aren't people taking this more seriously? When people find out about it, why aren't they adopting it by subscribing or listening? They probably don't have a full sense for why should they? People do what they want to do. And if people aren't doing what you want them to do, it's because they don't want to do it. You need to find a way to position this so that it feels like it's in their best interest to do the things. Subscribe to the newsletter. Listen to the podcast, whatever it is. Today, we have more advantages in terms of newsletter growth than we've ever had before with Creator Network, Substack recommendations, Beehive recommendations. Today, if you really want to grow quickly, I would try to build relationships with people who are using those platforms and recommending other newsletters and try to be one of those recommended newsletters. Build kind of a small group or alliance of people who are recommending each other.

Jay Clouse [00:30:13]:
Chanel at Growth in Reverse, she and I have been recommending each other for, I don't know, two plus years. I bet we've driven each other close to 20,000 subscribers apiece at this point, maybe more. And it's because we reached out. We realized there's clear overlap in our audience. We're not doing exactly the same thing. And so, not only would we benefit from getting recommendations from the other, but also our subscribers would benefit because they're going to enjoy it both. So when you find these win win win situations, it's great for recommendations. And I would try to find a way to align with other people that are about your size, maybe a little bit bigger, maybe a little bit smaller.

Jay Clouse [00:30:50]:
Recommend each other. But otherwise, I think dialing in your differentiation will take you a long way. Angela also asked, How important is having a website for your newsletter early on? I think it's really important. Where are people going to sign up otherwise? I think you should have a website. I think when you have like a form that's on the kit website or some subdomain. It just looks a little unprofessional. It looks a little illegitimate. Having a website feels more legitimate as long as the website looks good.

Jay Clouse [00:31:17]:
If it's on its own domain, that looks good. A lot of times these adoption issues come from people perceiving this to be kind of not legit or worth taking seriously. And so you need to take it seriously before other people will and I recommend having your own website. If it's early for you and you don't have the skills to build a website, tools like Substack, Beehive, they do have a really great out of the box tooling for this. People do think Substack newsletters are legitimate. I use Kit, of course. I'm a huge advocate for Kit. I do find that their website capabilities are not to the level of Substack or Beehive And it's a little bit more beginner friendly to use one of those other two platforms.

Jay Clouse [00:31:59]:
That being said, I think as things improve and grow well, you'll realize you want more email marketing capabilities and you'll probably graduate to Kit. For your company rebrand, how did you approach working with a brand designer for your logo suite? I'm considering doing the same for my company and I'm struggling to actually visualize what I would want a branded suite of logos to look like. My rebrand for Creator Science was pretty in-depth, pretty complex, and I don't think I could have done it to this level without having like done a lot of the company activity for a long time. I think if you're trying to build your brand and you're just kind of getting started, you don't actually know really what the brand is yet. You've got to spend some time finding your voice, figuring out your own vibe before you can translate that to a designer. That being said, when you work with a professional I worked with Holly Arnett. You can Google her. She goes by Maker and Moxie.

Jay Clouse [00:32:55]:
Makerandmoxie dot com. I worked with Holly and she has a whole process to kind of pull information out of you, which I really appreciated. Because if it's totally on you to tell the designer what you want, then basically what you're saying is all you don't have is design skills. But really, it should be a collaboration where you talk with a designer. They pull this vision out of you and that's what the relationship with Holly was like. We spent months on this. We went through many, many revisions. She probably gave me three to four times as many revisions as she should have because we really, really whittled this down.

Jay Clouse [00:33:32]:
But I had a really good sense for what I was looking for. And when we looked at the logo suite creating different logos for Creator Science the brand as a whole, The Lab, the Creator Science Syndicate, Creator HQ, even a product called Creator School that does not exist, may never exist. We'll see. All these logos look really cohesive. And this idea came from I mean the direction I gave her was I pulled up the different icons on the stations of Lost. I don't know if you watched Lost, the TV show from like the early 2000s, but there was this group called the Dharma Initiative. They had different base stations and each base station had their own visual identity even though it was kind of within the same construct. And we used that as kind of a starting point.

Jay Clouse [00:34:18]:
All that being said, like this is a collaboration between me understanding the brand really well, me having strong opinions about sources of inspiration that I really liked, And then Holly taking this word salad, these kind of ideas, mix them together and coming up with something really really great. Okay. Carrie asks: I'm ready to get a sponsor for my podcast and newsletter. Where should I start in terms of what I can charge? This question is really a math problem. Put yourself in the shoes of your sponsor. What they want to be able to do is say, I'm gonna put X dollars in and if that campaign goes well, it should be more than X dollars out. So the price that you charge to any sponsor should really be based on what can you deliver. And so where a lot of people get stuck here is they have a smaller audience when they start thinking about sponsors.

Jay Clouse [00:35:09]:
And by smaller, I mean maybe it's a thousand people, maybe it's a few hundred people, maybe it's a couple thousand people. You can monetize that effectively. But if you go to a sponsor who is selling a $20 product and you ask them for a thousand dollars for the sponsorship, that means you're gonna have to deliver 50 conversions 50 sales from that campaign to break even on that sponsorship. So what I recommend people do, depending on the size of your audience and how many conversions you think you might be able to drive for something, maybe choose sponsors that have a higher customer lifetime value for the people in your audience. When I first started doing sponsorship, I was actually doing a different podcast and it was a show about startup companies. We didn't have any listeners. We probably had 300 subscribers total. And so the sponsors we worked with were professional services firms.

Jay Clouse [00:36:02]:
We worked with lawyers, accountants, financial advisory because they really only needed one person to convert per campaign to pay for that campaign and then some. So the more valuable a customer is to that sponsor, the fewer you need to deliver and the higher price you can charge. So it's kind of a math problem. You just need to think, What value can I provide to the sponsor? Because the game isn't just getting somebody to say yes the first time and hand over some money. What you really want is renewals. When you start getting renewals from sponsors, then you know you have really good sponsor audience fit. That begins to be revenue you can really count on. Of course, this is something that is probably a better question for my friend, Justin Moore, than me.

Jay Clouse [00:36:46]:
You can check him out at creatorwizard.com. He has a new book called Sponsor Magnet. It's fantastic. You should order it at sponsormagnet.com. Alright. Let's take one more quick break here. And then when we come back, we're gonna get questions from X, Threads, and Instagram. So stick around.

Jay Clouse [00:37:02]:
We'll be right back. And we're back. Okay. I lied a little bit. There was one more question on LinkedIn that I wanted to answer, and that is from Ghaleb. He says, I'm targeting two different countries and languages via one YouTube channel. English is the crossover between both audiences. Both topics are very similar as well.

Jay Clouse [00:37:20]:
I think it's totally possible to target two different countries via one channel, and I think it's getting increasingly possible as multiple language dubbing is coming to YouTube. I don't know if it's built into the product yet. Well, I think it is built in the product yet, but it's still in beta for different channels. But I would kind of wait until that is a public feature in YouTube the way that AB testing is right now. I think voice dubbing will be coming to YouTube very very soon. In which case, basically all of us can be making content for multiple countries and languages. And at the touch of a button, people can listen to it in their native language and we won't have to do any prep for it. So I think before thinking about different channel strategies or whatever, waiting for multiple language voice dubs coming to YouTube natively is what I would do.

Jay Clouse [00:38:07]:
Alright, we're gonna go to Instagram next because I've been putting more time into Instagram. You can follow me there at jklaus. Let's look at the questions we received here. Starting with Jason Davies. He says, as a creator, what did you look for in a CPA? Did you find an independent CPA or a large company? So I've been working with my CPA. Her name is Christine. She's at avanttaxworks.com. I've been working with Christine for literal years and she's built a team over the years.

Jay Clouse [00:38:40]:
She was a little bit more independent in the beginning. What I look for more than like team size or what I would look for today if I were looking for a different CPA is basically somebody who really understands my business model because the creator thing is not super, super common. Having somebody who's worked with creators before, I think, is really, really key. So I would just ask some other folks that are kind of in your circles who they use and if they recommend that person or not. I used to be really concerned about the pricing on accounting and bookkeeping because it seemed higher than it should be. That's not a mark on Christine. That's just in general. But what I've come to realize is good accounting pays for itself many, many times over, especially at tax time.

Jay Clouse [00:39:20]:
And so I would really just try to find someone that has a glowing reputation for working with people like you and work with that person. Next, we have Gareth who asks, what are some ideas for generating more leads and getting more customers?' That is the the golden question, right? I mean, any piece of content you create should be created with your target audience in mind. So, you know, content is really what brings in leads. Customers is a different question Beyond the attention content, the content that goes out and starts to bring people to you, you really have these two types of content that you create: that attention content and conversion type content. And I think they're separate problems. So I would ask yourself, which problem is the most important problem right now? Is my audience growing, but they're not converting to customers? If so, then I would say we need to focus on the content that converts attention into customers. If your audience isn't growing, but you're okay at converting people to customers, then you need to focus on how do I get more attention to my work? Two separate problems. If it's an attention question, I think you need to become a student of the platforms you're posting on and see, okay, what's working here? And not just for people in your niche, but like outside of it.

Jay Clouse [00:40:38]:
What is working for getting more attention on Instagram or an email or YouTube? What seems to be working? How can I apply that to the content I'm creating? And start to innovate and experiment a little bit more. If your audience isn't growing, it's probably a sign that the format or the way you're delivering your message right now just isn't quite working. And so you need to play with it. You need to experiment, innovate. A lot of that will fail too, but something will eventually hit. So be a student of the platforms you're posting on. Maybe even reduce where you're focusing to a single platform to say, Let's actually just create one really reliable source of new attention here first. And as we master that, we can start to broaden out again.

Jay Clouse [00:41:15]:
If you're struggling to convert people to customers, I think what is usually missing is confidence by the end consumer that what you're promising is for them and will work. So let me break that down. Most people, when they create a sales page, they really focus on highlighting all the stuff you'll get in the product. We really over index on stuff. We think people assign value to stuff and if we just blow you away with the amount of stuff that we're promising, you're certainly going to convert into a customer. But what I find is actually more true is what people need to know from a sales page is you understand their specific problems and desires and that you've delivered the outcome they want to other people like them before. That's really it. If you convince people that you understand their problems and desires and you've delivered the outcome they want to other people like them before, everything else is a bonus.

Jay Clouse [00:42:10]:
People will sign up just based on that information alone. But where people miss is they don't talk enough about the problem. They don't empathize enough with the consumer. So there's no confidence that you understand me as a consumer. I don't feel confident that what you're offering is for me specifically. If you do make me feel confident that what you're offering is for me specifically, then the question is, Well, why should I believe that you can deliver that? And so what you need is social proof, testimonials, case studies, undeniable evidence that what you are promising has been delivered before to people like them. If you can do that, then people are gonna sign up like crazy. But most people will focus on like the stuff, the features rather than the benefits, the course material, the number of calls you're gonna get with this thing.

Jay Clouse [00:42:57]:
But really, you just need to say, I know you. Here's the situation you're in right now, and I can solve that problem for you. I can deliver that outcome for you. Here are five people, 10 people, 20 people that I delivered that outcome for and here's what they have to say. Do that in video where it's like much, much harder to lie. You know? If you're getting a genuine video testimonial from a customer, we feel their truth. We feel that they're telling the truth. And that's just really, really powerful.

Jay Clouse [00:43:30]:
So I would focus on that if you're trying to convert more of your attention into customers. The Art of Speaking Up says, I'm trying to find a sustainable way to grow my podcast. Social media feels super saturated. I hear you on that, and I don't think that social media is really the sustainable way to grow your podcast. Even if you get really good at clipping videos from your podcast and putting it on social media and even if those videos perform well, what what it's going to do is grow that social media account. It's not going to grow your podcast really. Podcast is like near the bottom of the funnel of your content where people are going to find you. They need to really trust you and be interested to sign up to listen to something from you for a long period of time.

Jay Clouse [00:44:12]:
My friend Chris Hutchins gave a great talk at the Newsletter Marketing Summit this past week. He talked about all the experiments he's run-in podcasting and it really comes down to just a few things that work for sustainably growing a podcast. You could do paid acquisition, which will certainly boost downloads. But there's a lot of paid acquisition strategies in podcasting that are illegitimate. They drive downloads, but they're not really driving real listenership. What drives real listenership in audio is guesting on other people's Podcasts, doing cross promotions on other people's podcasts, or doing feed drops on other people's podcasts. Guesting is obvious being a guest on somebody's show. Cross promotions is like an ad where you promote somebody's show, they promote your show.

Jay Clouse [00:44:54]:
Feed drops is dropping an episode of your show into somebody else's RSS feed. When people download it on the other person's RSS feed, that's not gonna be a download for you. But it will give you a great shot at them listening to it and being like, Oh, I like that. I'm gonna go subscribe. He recently tried a tool called Podroll, which I believe is podroll.fm. Yes, podroll.fm. This is a paid acquisition tool that looks really promising. I'm gonna do a campaign here and try it out and I'll let you know how it goes.

Jay Clouse [00:45:24]:
But PodRoll looks really promising. What I think I'm most interested in trying to do this year as a podcast growth strategy is to create joint episodes or two part episodes with other hosts. I think two part episodes is really what's going to work the best. I tried one of these with my friend Dan Andrews, but we did it over Christmas, which was not at all the right time to do it. Basically, if you can find other shows that serve a similar audience that you're trying to reach, but maybe in a different way, then what you can do is set aside like an hour and a half or two hours, you know, create an episode with them, chop it up into two parts, put one part on your feed, one part on their feed, and each of you in the intro and outro of that episode say, If you want more of this conversation between the two of us, go check out their podcast that's at their feed. Coordinate the release of that so they kind of release in the same week. I think it's a really great way to introduce people to each other's shows. I think it's probably the most sustainable way to do it is to be a good cross promoter or guest with other people around you.

Jay Clouse [00:46:28]:
That being said, I still routinely will talk about the podcast in every email that I send because even though it does not convert highly, I am trying to get just a couple people a week, a couple new people who get my emails to say, Oh, Jay has a podcast too. I'm gonna listen to that. Incremental listeners, incremental subscribers add up over time. It's worth trying to do even though it's slow. It's painful. It's hard. It does work. And you may have noticed, or maybe not, but I hope some of you have noticed.

Jay Clouse [00:46:57]:
In the show notes of every episode of this show is a recommended next episode to listen to if you liked this episode. What I'm trying to do there is trying to increase the average number of episodes listened to per viewer just a little bit. Trying to go above one instead of just listening to this one episode. I hope some number of you listen to this episode and the recommended episode in the show notes as well. More time listening to the show is more trust, a deeper relationship, and solving more problems for you, obviously. And so that's that's a little bit of my strategy, but podcasting, especially audio podcasting, is the hardest platform to grow. Omid asks, When should you run paid ads to boost newsletter subscribers? I think you should run paid ads when you feel confident that you can create a funnel that converts. We actually just had this thread in the lab where last summer when I was on paternity leave, one of our members gave a workshop about how she drives new paying customers via Facebook ads and how she then upsells those paying customers to her membership program.

Jay Clouse [00:48:02]:
That's Valerie Figale. She's actually on the show recently. She gave a workshop to our members on how she did that. And then another member recently put the same process in place and he's now doing $10,000 per month or close to $10,000 per month. So that strategy is a paid ads strategy to a paid product. But there are also paid ad strategies to free subscribers. You should just run this process when you have a clear understanding for: If this works, here's how it will turn into money so that it can pay for itself or at least offset the costs. And then you need to have a way of measuring that.

Jay Clouse [00:48:37]:
I think you can do paid acquisition at any time, but you need a way of measuring is this getting a result that makes it worth paying for? And if yes, amazing. Keep dialing it in. Keep doing better. If no, is is it close? Do you think you can get it there? Or is this just like way off when we're just spending money and these subscribers are not really vetted? If they're not qualified, then it's not quite a good fit. For me, I'm getting enough new subscribers through the Creator Network that I'm trying to prove with free recommendations that I can turn new subscribers into customers at a high enough rate that it makes sense to pay for them. But it doesn't make sense to start paying for them until I've proven that since I'm already getting a good inflow of new subscribers for free. So you just need to know if this works, how would it make money, and can I measure whether it is right now or not? Chris asks: I just built a podcast and now I want to grow the video podcast on YouTube. It's not quite a question, so I'm not sure exactly how to answer it.

Jay Clouse [00:49:36]:
But I will say that video podcasts are a completely different experience than audio and you need to think of the video podcast as its own product. You need to create for video first, in my opinion, and then use the audio from that video show as an audio episode. It's not going to work to focus on audio and then just try to put whatever video up on YouTube. You really need to make videos specifically for YouTube for it to perform there. Otherwise, you're gonna upload it. You're not gonna get a lot of views. My producer, Connor, and I figured this out the hard way. We spent a lot of time figuring this out.

Jay Clouse [00:50:09]:
We created a workshop called Podcasts Like a YouTuber. You can find that at creatorscience.com. That is a four hour workshop where we share exactly how we do this process. Jaden asks: How do I know if an idea is worth pursuing or not? That's a great question. I wish more people would ask that question. Basically, what I try to do when I have a new idea before I commit to it, I really try to float the idea by a lot of people that I trust and especially people who I think would be interested in that idea if it were real. And I like to do it live where I can gauge their true honest reaction because people are nice. They don't want to hurt you.

Jay Clouse [00:50:48]:
And if you don't have a way of gauging their honest reaction, you know, if you just send a text message, it'll be hard to decipher from their written feedback how they actually feel about it. So I really try to, in person if possible, or on video or then in audio, float this idea by people that I think would care and see if they actually care. And you'll see it in the way that their face lights up. If they change their physical posture or presence, you'll be able to gauge just using your human intuition whether that idea really resonated with them or not. And if you routinely see people having like a visceral reaction to an idea, then you've got something. If not, then I would try to, you know, shift the way you're talking about it and keep trying it. Like, can I talk about this in a different way to get that really strong reaction? And if ultimately you can't find a way to talk about this so that the people who should care do care, then it's probably not there yet. Alright.

Jay Clouse [00:51:50]:
I'm going to answer a few questions from X now, formerly Twitter. Rest in peace Twitter. I so miss Twitter. Janeal asks, I have an email list of 30,000 subscribers, and I want to sell a low priced digital product, a checklist, a template, etcetera. How should I proceed next? Option one, do an email survey to gauge interest and price point. Option two, beta test the product with superfans and then market to the email list. I'm not a fan of validating with a survey because one, I think it's hard to write a survey in a way that you get honest responses. The best way to validate a paid product is to ask people to pay for it because if people don't pay for it, then they don't actually value it or they don't value the description you've given of it.

Jay Clouse [00:52:34]:
A lot of times, it's our failure and not positioning or messaging or differentiating the product well enough. So, if I had a specific idea I was excited about, I'd kind of go off of what I was just saying from Jaden's question of talking about it to the people who would care about it. See, do they actually have a good reaction? If you get to the point where you find a way to talk about it so that people have a strong reaction, then I would create it. If I had high conviction that this is something that long term I want to be as part of my business and I can see that people have a strong reaction to it, I would take the step of actually building it. It used to be that I would say just presale it. Create a sales page, presale it, see if people will buy it. I think that's still an okay strategy. But the wild card here is how much conviction do you have that this is an asset you want to create? And how much conviction do you have that people truly want this because you talk to it? Because some people, they have high conviction that they want to make this.

Jay Clouse [00:53:27]:
They have high conviction that people will want it, but they have a small audience and they can't quite get anyone to buy it because they're just not getting in front of anybody. And so, if you put up a presale page and nobody buys it, it might be actually an issue of distribution more than anything else. It doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea. So the wild card being, if you have high conviction personally that you want to make it or that more importantly, people would value this solution, then make it and set a date for when it will be released. Set a date like a month or two in the future and talk about it for a month or two. Build anticipation for the release of this thing and then launch it in earnest. That process is gonna make more and more sense the more of an investment the product is. If we are talking about a low priced product, which often I don't really recommend unless you have one of these paid strategies to get people to purchase the product and then that is actually kind of a lead in to a larger product.

Jay Clouse [00:54:27]:
If you're doing a low priced product, you really need volume for it to be meaningful revenue. And a lot of people don't have volume. Now, Jenniele says that they have 30,000 subscribers and that's relatively high volume. So, you know, that could be meaningful depending on the price point. But I would maybe presale like a beta version of it to see, will people trade money for this? Give people an initial version. See what their feedback is. Make a better version. Then do this anticipation type of strategy that I'm talking about.

Jay Clouse [00:54:59]:
Put it out in the future. Talk about it for a couple of months. Build a wait list and then release it on a day. You could presale it as a beta product. You could actually just reach out directly to superfans in this question. Maybe you look at your email list and sort of divide it by engagement score. Find people that are at the highest level of engagement or find previous customers. Say, Hey, I'm working on something.

Jay Clouse [00:55:21]:
Can you look at an early version of it? And then, you know, once you get good feedback on it, launch it, build some anticipation for that launch. That's the way that I would do it. Jacob Edmonds asks, what are your thoughts on x as part of your business, meaning the platform? Is it worth the time spent or do other platforms have a better return in terms of newsletter sign ups, book calls, products purchased, etc. This is very personal to me because Twitter used to be about 50% of where I would get new members of the community. I would talk about the community and I would say one out of every two people who joined the lab came from Twitter. And now I feel like I can attribute basically zero value to X as a platform for my business. I don't want to let it go because I have fairly significant reach there and it was such an important part of my life and business for a long time. And I hope that it comes around and I get more value out of it eventually.

Jay Clouse [00:56:19]:
I feel like if I just kind of leave the platform entirely, it feels like a semi permanent decision where it would be hard to regain any momentum there. So right now, it's very much just a place where I'm having fun. I expect zero out of X, but if I have the urge to write something and share something there, I'm going to do it. The one wild card where I still get a lot of value on X, I guess I should say, is in direct messages. Like most people on X still manage their account. It's not like a social media manager. They are the one looking at their direct messages. So, I've been able to connect with a lot of people personally through direct messages on X.

Jay Clouse [00:56:56]:
And that's really the only place I'm getting value right now. Otherwise, I feel like the experience over there has really, really degraded. It's increasingly rare that I see women using the platform at all. Like, it seems incredibly male dominated. It feels much more political than it used to and they've changed what really gets eyeballs over there away from niche vertical interests over into much more broad based content. And, obviously that's not what any creator educators like us are really doing. So it's just tough to get real traction there, but it's a good place to connect to people personally in direct messages. Obviously, the more effective the larger your profile appears to be.

Jay Clouse [00:57:41]:
But if I'm starting at zero, I don't know that I'm spending any time on X to be completely honest. Elizabeth Gutierrez asks, Do you think the market is too saturated with coaches for online creators or is there still a need? I find that the best coaches for online creators are typically other creators who are kind of in the trenches depending on the type of coach that you are. You know, like if you are a mindset coach, then I don't know that there's like a limit to how many of those can exist. Because a coach, kind of like a doctor or a therapist, you want to have a good personality fit with that person. You need a good vibe. And I think you can build a solid book of business by being distinctly you and connecting with a certain type of person. I think there's plenty of space for that if you are helping people with like their own hang ups and challenges from a mindset or perspective level. When it comes to like teaching creators how to do the creator thing, I guess the same would probably apply.

Jay Clouse [00:58:46]:
I think there's probably still plenty of space for people who have a specific vibe or have built a certain vertical. My friend Roberto Blake would say there is no saturation of quality content. You know, there's saturation of content, there's saturation of people, but not quality. And I would agree with that. I think there's always space for really high quality work and for someone to be distinctly themselves and be a really good fit for certain personality types. So I think there's I think there's still a need. I don't see it's going away. I do think it's probably getting more competitive.

Jay Clouse [00:59:20]:
You need to be you. You need to find your people. Connect with your people. I think there's still plenty of value you can deliver. Alright. We have just a few questions from my YouTube community. I'll answer a few of these and then we'll wrap things up here. Newton Family Clan asks: How is it that I can go from 15 to 20,000 views in one week to maybe 10 views the next? And this is just discovery platforms and how they work.

Jay Clouse [00:59:48]:
YouTube as a platform is maximizing for time spent on YouTube time spent by people watching videos. If you are not driving people to spend more time on YouTube, then your videos will get deprioritized by the algorithm in favor of other videos who are encouraging people to spend more time on YouTube. It's a brutal competitive game, you know. If you want YouTube to send you more traffic, you need to keep more traffic on YouTube. And that comes down to packaging so that when your video is shown on the home page, people want to click it more than other videos around it. And it comes down to the quality of the video in terms of viewer satisfaction and average view duration. If people are not watching very long in your video, then YouTube's gonna find another video that that person is more likely to watch for longer. And that's just the way it goes.

Jay Clouse [01:00:36]:
YouTube is not loyal to you. It is loyal to the needs of Google, which is trying to drive more time on platforms so they can drive more results to advertisers and more advertising revenue. It all comes down to more view time and they're gonna promote the videos that deliver view time. It doesn't matter how many subscribers you have. If those subscribers are not showing good appetite for the video because YouTube will show any new upload to some number of your subscribers right away and they'll see. Does this person's biggest fans like this video? And if not, they're not going to show it to any more of your fans. It's just going to get shut down. You should, at some point of uploading, have a pretty good sense for what your baseline CTR goal is your click through rate.

Jay Clouse [01:01:23]:
In my experience, I can tell within twenty four hours whether a video is going to be a good performer for us or an underperformer based on the click through rate in the first twenty four hours and the average view duration. Sometimes the click through rate is a little bit lower than typical, but the average view duration is higher, in which case I know it's kind of a waiting game. Eventually YouTube will get better at recommending it to the right person because they see the right person watches for a long time. If CTR and ABD are both low, that video is probably dead in the water. If CTR is high, but AVD is low, it will perform really well for a period of time, but then probably plane off because again, YouTube will find a video that holds people's attention longer. If CTR and AVD are both higher than typical, then you've got a high performer on your hands and that's really good. So basically, I look at my videos and say, Can I get our CTR above typical for our videos? Which for our long form interviews, if I can get the CTR above 6%, that's good for us. If I can get the CTR to stick around like 8% to 10% for half of a day, it's gonna get driven like crazy.

Jay Clouse [01:02:29]:
But over time, the more impressions the more views your video gets, AVD will drop over time. Our video with Jenny Hoyos, which has nearly 4,000,000 views at this point, has one of the lowest average view durations of all of our videos because it's just gotten so many impressions that on average it drives the AVD down. And also drives the CTR down. That video had our highest CTR ever. And now it's about average or below average for our channel because YouTube has just pushed the crap out of it to anybody it thinks will be interested because it performed really well. So it's it's just it's the YouTube game. The BK Pat says, I would really appreciate some ways to make a paid community feel really worth it. So to make a paid community feel really worth it, there are two typical levers to pull.

Jay Clouse [01:03:13]:
When you have a paid membership, are you leaning more on premium content or you leaning more on peer to peer connection? Premium content tends to be a little bit easier to sell, but it also tends to be a lower price point. It also tends to have, lower retention because people will consume it and leave or they'll be overwhelmed by the amount of stuff, realize they're never going to consume all of it and leave. Peer to peer connection is harder to sell because people can't really quite conceptualize how valuable connecting with other people is until they've connected with those people and reap the benefits. And you can't really accurately state what those benefits will be because you don't know how these two people will interact and what will come of it. You just know that something will happen. So it's harder to market but tends to be something that's higher value to the subscriber and is more likely for people to stick around. So if you pick one side or the other, of course, most paid memberships will have elements of both, but you'll probably lean one side or the other. If you lean on the Premium Content side of things, you've got to be churning out a lot of content to make that be worth it.

Jay Clouse [01:04:16]:
You know, if Netflix was not creating new shows or getting new movies constantly, you would eventually unsubscribe because you you would run out of things that you're interested in watching. Same thing happens in a premium content membership. You gotta be constantly creating new stuff with the cadence of when people renew or they're gonna feel like, this isn't really that great. And the stuff that you do make needs to be high impact. It needs to have the effect that after somebody consumes that premium content, they think, I'm glad I did that. And they can ascribe some sort of business outcome to that consumption. On the peer to peer connection side, you really need to be making relationships happen between people. Because if you're promising a new network, a new group of people, new connections, that's what people are coming for.

Jay Clouse [01:05:03]:
They're coming to connect with other people. And if they're not making new friendships, then they're going to leave. It's hard to force people to be friends. You can't really do that. Right? But what you can do is say I'm gonna do everything in my power to create serendipity on the part of my members. If you're just doing it online, having live sessions is a great way to do that. But then you got to get people to show up to the live sessions. And to get people to show up to live sessions, you need to have very specific outcomes that they should expect from those live sessions.

Jay Clouse [01:05:30]:
So in the lab right now, I am doing, I'm planning more and more specific workshop type live sessions because I know people have a clear sense of what they're going to get out of that session, which makes them more likely to show up, which makes them more likely to interact with somebody else in the Community and build a relationship. It's It's even easier if you can convince people to show up to a physical location in person at a certain point in time because people will just talk to each other and that becomes really valuable. That's why we're doing in person events more and more in the community. But ultimately, anytime anybody puts any amount of effort into your membership, you want them to think that was worth it. And most memberships are not delivering that experience. Most memberships are a time suck and people can't ascribe any type of value from that activity. I think we'll end on this question from Dalen. He says: Do you have any advice for owning the single season? I'd like to get married in the future and I'm currently building a tech startup with a friend while also writing some poetry books and building a newsletter.

Jay Clouse [01:06:32]:
Your story of how you found your wife is way inspiring to me and I think a similar thing may happen for me. We'll just have to see. Even still, I think I'm at least two years away from that. There's still a lot of work I need to do. At times it feels lonely, but I'm not going to settle for anything less than a committed partner. Of course, it's best to start as friends and then let it move naturally from there. And I genuinely don't feel I'm ready for a full commitment. So basically, I'm working to improve myself and get more financial means and structural stability in my routines, but at times it gets lonely.

Jay Clouse [01:06:58]:
I go to church events and things of that nature and have friends, but I have boundaries. So I keep my golden hours to myself. I know this is only temporary, so I'm working to be able to up my skills so I can better provide in the future. But, yeah, sometimes it gets lonely. We don't talk about partnership in terms of relationship partnership nearly enough in this space. Because you know what? Before I met my wife or before I started dating my wife, I should say, because I met my wife in 2014 or 2015 and we didn't start dating until December of twenty eighteen. In fact, I was trying to get her to go on dates with me, between 2015 and 2018 and she was mostly avoiding me. And then in 2018, she reached out to me to go out on a date and we've been together ever since.

Jay Clouse [01:07:44]:
But during that period of time before 2018, I was also really interested in finding a partner. But you know, I was also a young guy in his 20s and I was doing the dating apps. I was going on a lot of first dates, a few second dates, very few third dates. I was really having a hard time finding my person, but what you don't realize in that stage if you are spending a lot of time dating, it is expensive from a time and financial standpoint. It was really a lot of time. I was dedicating not just to the dating but like the courting beforehand, you know, because if you are doing the apps thing, you're sending messages, you're trying to suss out whether there's a connection, you're trying to represent yourself well, you're trying to learn more about this person, get them interested in meeting up in person, going and spending that time in person. It was a lot of time. It is absolutely no surprise to me that there's a direct correlation between the performance of the business and when I got together with and became committed to my wife.

Jay Clouse [01:08:49]:
It really changed how I was spending my time. So, I was not, you know, doing this very emotionally challenging thing of courting between people and trying to decide, is this person my person? I could just focus on our one relationship. She was extremely supportive of me and it helped a lot. So, it's hard because the business is very demanding. And there were seasons in my single life where I would say, You know what? I'm not dating right now. Like, I'm just gonna focus on the business because this dating thing isn't working. It's taking a lot of time away. But while you do that, now you're also you know, you don't have any lines in the water if you want to use a fishing analogy.

Jay Clouse [01:09:28]:
It's hard to find somebody if you're not attempting. But I think it is kind of telling that, you know, eventually the person that I married, the mother of my child, we had met in person locally in Columbus. She was bartending. I was drinking. We know how that story usually goes and it did usually go that way. You know, she was like, Ah, this guy. Get him out of here. Eventually, we both grew up and we connected and there wasn't like a swiping or a reading of a profile to find her.

Jay Clouse [01:09:57]:
It was interactions we had had in person over the years and eventually when we both gave each other a real shot, real interactions that way too. So, it's really hard to say. You know, I think there's still a lot of magic in meeting somebody through mutual friends or having someone recommended to you rather than trying to do this infinite choice thing of dating apps. There's some interesting data to show that the best and most long lasting partnerships are very complementary rather than similar. And I think people's behavior on dating apps is they're often looking for somebody very similar to them. But that gets complicated because evolutionarily, we are biologically wired to find somebody who is different from us so that we can have a wider number of antibodies and immune responses. Like, we know physically from being around somebody if they have a different biology to us so that we can pass on better genes to offspring. It's kind of crazy.

Jay Clouse [01:10:59]:
There was a study done where people would smell sweat on a t shirt from a different potential partner. And they would rank the attractiveness of somebody based on their perception of the smell of that person's sweat. And what they found is there's a high correlation between genetic variability in that study. I'm probably messing up some of the words here, but I think you get what I'm saying. Anyway, on dating apps, people tend to focus on people that are similar to them. And I think most partnerships are better when there's more complementary aspects of your personality. And I think your friends are the best gauge of that, but it's hard to basically sit back and wait for somebody to make a good recommendation of who you should date. I think you probably do want to be fairly active in searching for somebody, but it also just doesn't feel like a problem you can solve with pure intensity.

Jay Clouse [01:11:51]:
And so I think it's a good idea that in this season you're focusing on yourself, making yourself a better person, focusing on bringing as much to the table and a partnership as you can. I don't think you can totally stop the search, but I do think the better of a potential partner you can make yourself, the better off you'll be when you do find somebody. And you know, single season, no children season, you have a lot more time than you will have when you have children. Take it from me, the new father of a seven month old. Time is very scarce in this season of life, and I wish I would've I mean, I worked really, really hard before we had our daughter. I've worked really hard for a long time, but I wish I would've worked even harder. I'm honest with you. I think I set us up pretty well.

Jay Clouse [01:12:43]:
I think we both set each other up pretty well for this season of life, but I don't think there's any limit to how prepared you can be. And I wish I would have put us in an even better position. And mostly, I wish I would have constructed the business in such a way that more of the ongoing work was outsourced to the team. But everything is fixable. You can overcome anything with hard work and determination. But I think it's a good idea to say, In this season of life where I'm single, I don't have any kids, I'm gonna look for my right partner, but I'm gonna make myself the best version of me I can be. I'm going to build the business and provide as much as I can. I think it's a good place to focus.

Jay Clouse [01:13:21]:
And also, you know, don't let friendships drift away. Spend some more time with friends right now because if they're also in that season of life, you're you're gonna have more time with them right now than you may ever have again without at least having a lot more effort. So, enjoy this time. Work hard. Have some faith. Make yourself as good of a version of yourself as you can be. Alright. I think we'll, I think we'll call it there.

Jay Clouse [01:13:44]:
That was a long enough episode. I appreciate you guys submitting questions. I didn't get to every single one that came through, but I tried to get to as many as I could. If you have more questions for me that you want to see answered on a future episode of the podcast or the YouTube channel, go to creatorscience.com/ask. A link to that is in the show notes. If you enjoyed this, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It goes a really long way. Otherwise, thank you for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.