#227: Are memberships still viable in 2025? Creators vs. AI, creator economy pyramid schemes, and more [Ask Creator Science]

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. A couple days ago, I recorded an upcoming video for the YouTube channel with my producer, Connor. And the idea of that video is answering questions you're afraid to ask. So I very explicitly asked people on my social media, what are the questions you're afraid to ask me? Things that feel a little bit off limits or taboo. And we got a lot a lot of great questions. More than we could answer in that video. So we did record a video answering a ton of them and the actual just recording of that was nearly 2 hours.

Jay Clouse [00:00:50]:
And I would say we answered less than half of the questions I received. So my goal with this audio only episode is to answer a bunch of the other questions that we didn't answer for that episode, that video in particular, but I think are still good questions. So we're back here today with an audience q and a. Let's dig into it. I'm gonna start with the questions I got in my YouTube community tab starting with the Gavin Barry. He says, is there a specific fame threshold where you notice sponsors or major brands taking you more seriously? When pitching, I selectively choose brands that align with my channel, personalize the emails, and still getting ignored or rejected every single time. So I would say yes. I mean, I don't know what the number was because sponsorship has never been the main thrust of my business in terms of revenue.

Jay Clouse [00:01:38]:
And I think that's a good idea for anybody. If there's a way that you can avoid sponsorship as the main revenue driver for your business, I would do it because you are going to build the strongest relationship with your audience first. And that is an opportunity for you to create something of value for your audience and sell it to them directly. If a sponsor is going to sponsor your content, the idea is there is value for them from your audience. And if that is true, there's value for you from your audience as well. So So I don't know what these thresholds are that sponsors look for. You know, as you grow bigger, of course, you get more attractive. I don't know what those numbers exactly are, but it definitely exists.

Jay Clouse [00:02:17]:
Because if you're a sponsor, you're probably getting a ton of inbound all the time, and you're gonna be choosy. You're going to pick the ones that seem like the best opportunity for you because everybody is a little bit self interested. We're looking at what's in it for me. And if I'm a sponsor and I'm thinking about where am I gonna put my budget, I'm gonna put it in the opportunities that feel like they have the best odds of success for returning that budget and making me look good to my boss. There's some risk when sponsoring a creator and if you appear to be more risky than other creators in my inbox, I'm going to pick the other creators. Henry Paka asks, is it still worth it to build a membership community in 2024 or even 2025? Well, I'm a little bit biased because I have membership community. I have a course called Buildable of Membership on building membership communities. So at a base level, of course, I'm going to say yes because memberships can fundamentally change your business.

Jay Clouse [00:03:08]:
A strong business can fundamentally change your life. What I will say as we move into 2025, there are more membership communities than ever. And I've been talking about this for a couple of years and it's happening. There's going to be and there is right now a boom of new membership communities because we have better tools for it. We have more awareness of it and people are going to want recurring revenue if they can create it. Membership community feels very attractive to the creator because it represents the opportunity for recurring revenue. So when we have something that was scarce become abundant, that is a bad swing of the pendulum. It means that there's going to be kind of a reckoning.

Jay Clouse [00:03:49]:
There's going to be a reconciliation. There's going to be a reversion to the Mean. It means that a lot of membership communities are going to struggle and go to 0. So proactively, if you're going to build a membership community, what you need to do is have a very clear purpose for why that community exists and what makes it differentiated from what is in the market. It's not enough to say you like my stuff and here's a place where people who like my stuff can get together. That once was enough, but it's not specific enough and it probably even if attracts people, it's gonna have a hard time retaining them because the number one reason members churn from community is that they don't know how to extract value from it That is more than the value they're putting into it. The cost of being in there. You need to make it very clear how to extract value from the community and ideally, you do it in a way that is not difficult.

Jay Clouse [00:04:40]:
The easier it is for someone to extract value from your membership, the more likely they're going to continue purchasing their membership. So how do you do that? It's easier to teach people how to extract value when it's easy to remember what I'm trying to get out of this place. And if I know what I'm trying to get out of this place and you show me how to get that, I'm more likely to follow through and get that value. When you have a membership that basically says to get the value out of this, you need to put in a lot of effort to ask questions and extract the value from other members. That's a difficult proposition. It requires effort on the part of the member, but it also means you have to hold and create a space where other people are going to be helpful. It's a difficult flywheel to get going. It's something that has been one of the hardest things to get going in the lab.

Jay Clouse [00:05:26]:
So what I recommend to folks today when they're building memberships is be very clear on what you want people to get out of it. And if you can construct a linear journey from the point of joining and show people start here work through all these steps and you're going to get the outcome that you want. That is going to be the easiest membership to sell and retain members. Cyber Invention asks, are new creators better off copying what works or trying to come up with their own unique series? Maybe a bit controversial as I know there's a lot of copycat creators out there because inventing a new series that works is really hard to pull off. I agree. It's hard to pull off. And the distinction I would draw is it depends on where you are in your journey as a creator. If you don't have a lot of practice and you haven't done this creator thing before, then I would recommend modeling.

Jay Clouse [00:06:12]:
I wouldn't say copying. I would say modeling off of what is already working because that's the way we learn things. We learn things through imitation first. We imitate, then we innovate. So if you haven't gotten to the point where you have confidence and style and taste and you really understand how this creative thing works, then you should imitate other creators that you vibe with to get the muscle memory of how this works. As a natural result of doing this for a little bit, you're going to start to feel like, I wouldn't quite do that that way actually. The magic moment when you're learning is the moment where you think to yourself, I think I disagree with this Because that means you have connected enough dots that you're drawing your own conclusions and you have confidence in your own conclusions. When you finally are in the learning journey to a point where you think, I disagree with how they're doing this or I would do this differently.

Jay Clouse [00:07:03]:
That is the point where you can move beyond imitation and towards innovation and that's a magical time. But, you know, before that point, imitation is how you learn things. It's also going to derisk the effort a little bit. And then as soon as you have confidence and conviction in your own taste, doing something more unique is the way to go. Now when I say more unique, people think that means every aspect has to be unique. But usually, the things that are unique and successful are things that took a proven model and changed one key aspect or maybe 2 key aspects but very little actual change just like an important piece of change and that is what made that thing feel unique even though a lot of it is still the same. Gina Real Talk asked, what has been the most rewarding yet challenging aspect of balancing your business at this stage with your journey into fatherhood? Looking back, if you could revisit the timing, when would you have chosen to step into fatherhood and why? What personal or professional markers guided you in creating the conditions to welcome a child into your life? Well, my wife and I have talked about this for a long time and our shared vision was that we didn't want to utilize daycare for our children. It's not anything against daycare or people who use daycare.

Jay Clouse [00:08:21]:
We just wanted to create a life where we could be the ones raising our child at home throughout most of the day. And to do that, you have to be in a relative position of privilege. You know, we needed to not have either one of us working full time out of the house and be able to afford that lifestyle while also affording a child. And thankfully, you know, owning a business is a great way to do that. So last year, last June, when Mal and I were talking about bringing her into the business, part of the impetus of that was we wanted to get pregnant, have a baby, and in that world, she could take as much maternity leave as she wanted, still have a full time role with the company. And, you know, we can kinda have our cake and eat it too. So I feel like we planned this well. We're in our early thirties now for context.

Jay Clouse [00:09:16]:
We would, I think, like to have more children. We haven't fully decided on this. We have a tightening window on that, of course. And so, you know, the later you wait in your career to have a child because you're trying to be more economically successful, obviously, that starts to limit your optionality and availability for having biological children. And I think we've timed this really well. So looking back, if I could revisit the timing, I don't think I would do a thing differently. We bought a new house last July that we knew would be able to house children because our first home was a little bit small and it really felt like our vision followed through the way that we wanted. And, you know, the challenging part now is while Mal really leads on the front of home and childcare and I'm trying to continue to keep the business going and thriving at the level that it is.

Jay Clouse [00:10:09]:
I'm trying to do the same amount of work that I did before having a baby, but now with a baby and wanting to spend as much time with her as possible and be very, very involved in her life. And I think I'm doing a good job of that being very involved, but it's hard to find the time for all the aspects of the business that have come to this point to be expected to run. That's challenging. So if I were to go back and do anything differently, it would probably be getting serious about hiring an operator that's not one of the 2 of us. And that can still happen. But right now, you know, the business is filing as an s corp. If we don't hire a contract operator and we have someone full time that comes with structural changes. That's kind of something we're working through right now.

Jay Clouse [00:10:52]:
Delaydance asks, I'm doing content that relies on a script. While I'm writing, I constantly battle against these voices that say, is this good enough? Am I wasting my time? Is this the quote unquote right approach? Did you have similar thoughts as well in the beginning or is that something you still have to deal with? This still comes up for sure. We put a lot of pressure on the performance of our content. So as we're creating it, we're asking ourselves, am I doing this right? Am I doing is the best? Is this going to get the best outcome? And that's the struggle of being a creator because a creator, which I would differentiate a little bit from the term artist, a creator is making things commercially. We make content because we want there to be a commercial outcome. We want there to be an economic outcome to the content that we make. We're making with the audience in mind. And so when you make something commercially, the bar of success is did this perform commercially? Whereas an artist, I would say make something purely out of self expression and is detached from the outcome and reactions of third parties.

Jay Clouse [00:11:54]:
If you are detached from the outcome, you can't really be upset when the outcome isn't as good as you wanted. It means that literally you were not detached from the outcome. So as a creator, I think we all struggle with this. Am I doing this well? Am I doing it right? Am I wasting my time with this? But I think the right answer is somewhere in the middle. I think you have to cultivate your inner artists while still having a foot in the commercial world because if you depend on this for a living, for an economic outcome, you can't totally detach from the outcomes, but you also can't totally detach from your inner expression because that is usually, I find, a more fulfilling meter or gauge for is this good enough in particular? Ultimately, if you make content that you're proud of, that you're happy with, that is to your standard and says what you wanted to say, then I think you can be satisfied with the effort even if you don't get the commercial outcome with that piece. To some degree, you know, this is a number scheme. And, frankly, even good enough content, there are external factors that may give a false negative on the quality of that content. You may post at the wrong time.

Jay Clouse [00:13:12]:
There may be other stuff happening. Maybe the wrong initial viewers saw it, whereas a different sample set of who could have seen it in the beginning might have given a better signal to the algorithm. So there's a lot of third party factors on what is good quote unquote in the eyes of an algorithm. And so you really just start from a place of am I happy with this? Is this to my standard? Did it say what I wanted to say? And know that there are going to be a lot of flops along the way. Content creation is a hits business. You want everything to be successful, but by and large, your growth will be on the back of a couple outliers. You know, the biggest growth comes from a few outliers and, of course, everything you publish, there should be some incremental growth along the way. But if you were to zoom out and look at a line graph of your growth on any given platform, the spikes would be from outlier style pieces of content.

Jay Clouse [00:14:02]:
And You can't really predict which ones those will be. So the best thing is to be at peace with your effort and have the enthusiasm to show up and do it again tomorrow. You, Me, and Coffee asks, occasionally, the online course building and membership offering that is being recommended and advertised to creators feels like a pyramid scheme of sorts, with each new creator offering their unique insight and success story to help get sign ups to their own course for you to then build your own and on and on and on. How would you advise new YouTubers approach this idea if they're keen to stimulate income outside of the platform, but feel that the waters are a little murky when it comes to this sort of business strategy? I got a lot of questions like this actually. I got a lot of questions along the lines of is the creator economy just creators selling to creators to sell to creators? And there is a lot of that. We answer this in the YouTube version as well. The key thing you need to understand if you are a creator, you are the target audience of creators who create for you. So you end up seeing a lot of content from creators for creators.

Jay Clouse [00:15:00]:
And you think that this is the entirety of the creator economy. But most creators are serving particular interests and outcomes. You know, they're talking about gardening or rollerblading or acoustics or raising a family. Any products, anything in commerce has the opportunity for a creator to build media around that interest, around a product like that. But if you're not interested in that particular area or product, you're not going to see content from those creators. You will see content from creators where you are the target market. And so you see a lot of Creators for Creators because that is who is trying to sell to you. It does not mean that you need to participate in that.

Jay Clouse [00:15:45]:
If someone is selling you a course on building a course or building a membership, you can build a course or membership not for other creators or online business owners. You can build a course or membership for people who are trying to learn how to run marathons or how to lift heavy or how to choose their gym equipment. You know, I'm just naming things off the top of my head that are around me. Most creators are not creating for creators. It's just that is what is being marketed to you because that's who you are. You are the customer of those people. You can choose to serve a different audience. And I really recommend you do.

Jay Clouse [00:16:18]:
The online business space is so competitive, so competitive and overserved and frankly, kind of small. Creators are a subset of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are a small subset of the overall population. So you're going to be better off and be able to build a better business, a bigger business going to a larger target market that is not creators. 5th, Seal Beats asked, how much did you charge for your 1st online course? How long did it take you to make money? Was it a mini course? How long was the course? Well, I actually remember the first two course customers I ever had because at my launch, I only had 2 customers. So I know exactly who those two women are and I am so indebted and appreciative to them because without their trust and support, I might have thought this is not at all going to work for me. So I remember it was 2019. I believe I started creating my courses in, like, February or maybe it was April.

Jay Clouse [00:17:16]:
And I had the bright idea that why don't I just make 3 courses and then I can sell them as a bundle when I launch. So I literally in my head was like, let me just make 3 courses instead of 1 and then try to sell the bundle. So I was trying to sell potentially 4 different units. You know I have course 1, course 2, course 3, and the bundle of all 3. And I made these in a complete vacuum. I spent more than 6 months doing it. I know that the sales happened in mid October because again I have the email in front of me. October 5, 2019 is actually the first purchase.

Jay Clouse [00:17:51]:
And this is so frustrating. There were courses on freelancing. So I made a course called selling for freelancers, a course called marketing for freelancers, and a course called business for freelancers. And then the bundle was the freelancing bundle. I priced each course at 199 and then sold the bundle for 4.95. And so at launch, I gave a 10% discount and the first purchase was for 4.55. That is a lot for somebody who had next to no online audience, very little reputation to come out with 3 courses that I didn't warn people I was making to sell them for 1.99 each and actually try to get people to spend basically $500. That's a high price.

Jay Clouse [00:18:38]:
And those courses were fairly long. I think each course was a couple of hours. I would say somewhere between 1 and 2 hours each course was. So together, there was like 5 or 6 hours of content, I wanna say. And I don't even remember what I was really modeling after. I think I had learned a bit from Brian Harris, who's been on the show twice now. And, yeah, I just wanna move in this world. I remember talking to a friend of mine as I was building this.

Jay Clouse [00:19:02]:
I was like, man, if I could sell one course per month, that would change my life because it was 100 of dollars and my rent at the time was $600 a month. And I just thought if I could sell one course, I could sell I could pay a third of my rent. And it took a long time because, you know, obviously I spent 6 months making this, which included making the slide decks. And then I recorded each lesson in Loom. I didn't know video editing. So to record the courses in Loom and feel happy with it, I would literally do a one take on each course. I did a one take read that I wanted to be the right pace, not have any mess ups. And each of these lessons were like 5 to 15 minutes long.

Jay Clouse [00:19:45]:
So I ended up rerecording a ton of these lessons because I wouldn't edit them. I had to do it in one take. It was a lot of recording. I think there were a total of like 38 or maybe 36 lessons. So I did this for months months months. This is when I was starting to date my now wife. I launch it beginning of October. I remember going to Snap Fitness with her the morning of launch, seeing a purchase, and I was like, my life is forever changed.

Jay Clouse [00:20:12]:
Got a second purchase that morning. This is amazing. My life is forever changed. No more purchases for a long time. Those 2 purchases. But it was enough. It was enough to feel like I can do this. There's something to work from here.

Jay Clouse [00:20:25]:
I can tweak this and my next course I don't think launch for the next year. I I kind of did this freelancing school thing for a while. I retooled the pricing. I retooled how I marketed them. I built this free email course and that got people into my email system. I was emailing them more. I did a free community for a little bit. So it increased over time.

Jay Clouse [00:20:45]:
But really where I landed on for a while I did presales with my courses. I would sell the course before making it and tell people if 10 people buy this, I'll make it. If not, I won't. And that kind of derisk the effort of building because I could also say here's the price. You know, the price is gonna be 199, but if you purchase before it's done, you can get it for $99. And so people would purchase because that's a good deal and it would derisk the effort to build the course and it did a little bit better. Over time, I've come to realize that actually instead of doing a presale while building the course, it's a good way to validate in the beginning. But if you have strong validation, instead of doing a presale, you can build anticipation.

Jay Clouse [00:21:23]:
Just talk about the course and build a wait list for the course and get people excited about it for months before it's available for sale. And that was a better outcome for Creator HQ. I didn't get ahead of podcast like a YouTuber as much as I could have my most recent course, but now I'm doing that with my Black Friday promotion that I'm starting this weekend. I'm trying to build anticipation for things so you're aware that this is coming so that when I say it's here, it's available for sale, it's not a surprise, and you've probably already made a decision on whether you're going to purchase or not. We're gonna take a quick break for our sponsors, and we're gonna come back, and I'm gonna talk about AI, my strategies, regrets that I have, and more. So stick around. We'll be right back. Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:22:07]:
Nikkode of Fishing asks, Has YouTube become your primary focus now that you've seen success from it? And has it passed your audio podcast revenue? I always need video and I've never understood how someone can just listen to a podcast and not watch. This actually kinda drives me nuts. We in a recent video on the channel, we were discussing some of our analytics and we saw that, like, 50% of our views come from mobile and the way our videos are made they're really not super conducive to mobile because there's a lot of text on screen in like our interviews. And so I asked people in the comments let me know how you listen to the show and a lot of people said mobile in my pocket. I don't watch the video and yet these same people tell me they won't listen to the audio only show because they just want to listen on YouTube. I don't quite get it. I don't understand the audio only YouTube listener when there's 2 or 3 times as many audio only episodes here on the feed. But anyway, to Nikkoda's question.

Jay Clouse [00:23:01]:
YouTube has not become my primary focus. We have constraints on throughput of videos. We're not able to publish as many videos as I would like to yet. And you might think, well, the clear answer is to hire more editors. And you're right. We should do that. But that is expensive. And right now, the channel is still actually losing money on a pure cost and revenue basis if the revenue that we're considering is AdSense and brand deals.

Jay Clouse [00:23:28]:
We're right around breakeven. So I've been investing in YouTube for a couple years now because I think it's gonna be big for the business long term and it takes a long time for stuff like this to pay off. So I'm happy to operate at a breakeven or slight profit or slight loss because I see what we're building with the channel here. You know, we now have a 111,000 subscribers on the channel. We get a lot of views of their videos and more and more people are coming to the lab and saying I watch your YouTube videos, which is great. I love that. And so I see a lot of opportunity there because it has become one of our biggest discovery platforms for the business. I'm gonna keep investing there.

Jay Clouse [00:24:08]:
We're finishing our basement right now and building a very legitimate at home studio so that the videos look better. It's more sound controlled and light controlled and I can create like really some scenes in there that work better for YouTube. And at that point, I probably will invest more in YouTube. But in terms of has it passed the audio podcast in terms of revenue barely. I would say not a ton because the podcast contributes more to members of The Lab. People who listen to the show, a lot of them end up applying for The Lab. They're a great fit. They are incredible perfect members.

Jay Clouse [00:24:44]:
And it just seems like the podcast is where the most new members are coming from. So it's more close than you would suspect given the overall size and consumption of the 2 platforms. Oliver Gilpin asks, are creators destined to be competed with by AI that creates its own channels and launches them? Are creators careful to consider this? And is there anything we can do about it with platforms and regulation? Well, I don't think that regulation is ever coming to save us, at least not in the US. We are more concerned about regulating our way back to 1950 than regulating for 2050 in my opinion. So regulation is not going to come and save us in any way. I do think that there will be AI driven channels that create very successful channels and maybe there are creators in that niche that get competed out. But I think the creators who are most at risk are creators doing faceless channels. This is a big thing right now.

Jay Clouse [00:25:39]:
People are like faceless channels. Look how I can automate my income on YouTube. And there's probably a window opportunity for that. But I think there's less of a competitive advantage or a moat around that. I think in a world with AI driven content, we are going to constantly be asking the question, is this real? What is real? And that question is gonna be coming from a place of I want to feel like I'm having a real human experience and I want to relate to other people, both the creator of the content and other people who are watching the content. There's a world where AI creates content on demand that's hyper personalized to the individual and your interests. Imagine watching a TV show that's created on the fly just for you. Seems kind of awesome, but at the same time, now you have this experience that cannot be a shared experience.

Jay Clouse [00:26:30]:
Who do I share that with? No one else watched this. And so I think there are some limits to what AI will eat because humans want to have shared experiences both with the person who made the video or is in the video and other people who consume the video. So for me, on one hand, I am just not at all in any rush to create any type of AI clone of myself. I'm not feeding my content into an AI to create an AI version of me you can talk to. I don't think that's actually net good for me. Now, if I create this AI clone that goes and gives damaging or incorrect advice, I'm kind of liable for that. And I just I don't want that. I'm a human.

Jay Clouse [00:27:13]:
I wanna relate to other humans and no, I'm not completely scalable and I'm okay with that. I don't know that I want to be designed to be scalable. I think some great creators will figure this out and they'll have huge success by making AI versions themselves, but it's just not something I'm personally interested in and I think in the same way I'm not interested in it as a creator, there will be consumers that are not interested in it as well. So the question is, the content that you're making, the audience that you're serving, are they going to want a clear human relationship with you? And is that going to exist in a way that cannot be competed with with ai? And that's what I'm betting my business on. Last question from YouTube. I told you there's a ton of questions here. Neptune Design asked, do you talk so little in interviews because you want to make a good podcast or are you afraid to show your own personality? I feel a little triggered. I'm not afraid to show my own personality.

Jay Clouse [00:28:08]:
When I bring someone on to the podcast, though, I think about our interviews as conversational education. I basically want my guest to present a tactical masterclass without having to prepare material and you're not going to learn from that person. If I'm talking a bunch, I bring on people on the show that I want to learn from. You don't really learn when you're not listening. And so, you know, my style of conversation is that I just want to listen to the guests that brought in here. That being said, I wanna show my own personality more and more and episodes like this or sell episodes in the channel. That's a great way to do that. The essays that I write for the newsletter at creatorscience.com, my social media.

Jay Clouse [00:28:52]:
There's lots of places where I show up and interviews is just not one of them. That's just not my job. If a guest asks or I have something to follow-up on, I'm going to follow-up. But I can tell you as a consumer, nothing frustrates me more than finding a podcast episode where there's a guest that I wanna hear from and the host doesn't let them talk. Let them talk. They're here for a short period of time. If people are here for the guests, they wanna hear the guest. So that's my approach.

Jay Clouse [00:29:19]:
It's not a fear thing. It's just a respect and preferences thing. Alright. Moving on to LinkedIn, starting with my friend Dennis Geelan, who asked what's something you did as a creator that you regret? There's the micro and the macro here. The micro here is anytime that I am baited into engaging with a troll or some sort of hater on social media, I tend to regret engaging in that way. If there's a fire, you just rob it of oxygen. And also, I love the advice that you never punch down when it comes to power. If you are in a position of power or authority and someone's trying to tear you down, don't punch down.

Jay Clouse [00:29:50]:
Are the people trying to tear you down from below? Only punch up in power. So I wish that I engage in that less and I very, very, very rarely do it. In the macro, I feel like I sometimes regret the non specificity of the business. Creator Science, I've now become extremely associated with the term creator, which is great. But the term creator is also very broad and yet a small identity marker. So broad in terms of who it applies to small in terms of how many of those people exist. And I think it can be hard to refer what I do because it's like, is it for podcasters? Is it for YouTubers, bloggers, people doing email, social media? Is it about audience growth? Is it about monetization? And the answer is yes. And so it's difficult to do all of those things to the level of depth that they demand as a team as small as we are.

Jay Clouse [00:30:48]:
So it's hard to get beyond that with the brand name creator science because now I've kind of locked myself into that term. But I do find that its lack of specificity is still fairly limiting where a more specific, more narrow, but larger market business could probably be more successful. Heather Burns asked, how does ethics show up in your business? I love this question. This almost never comes up. I am a high integrity person. Integrity is super, super important to me in this business. And the places where integrity is tested the most is actually sponsorship and brand deals. It's a third party brand saying we want to align with you and piggyback on your trust and authority for the purposes of our brand.

Jay Clouse [00:31:34]:
And that's why most brand deals just don't get done with me. I think I probably accept less than 25% of the inbound of brand deals that come in by less than 10% and a lot of it is I don't use the product so I can't recommend it. What I've come to realize is any recommendation even if it feels implicit or soft as there's a sponsorship, it's actually me making an endorsement of that thing. And I want you as a consumer of my content to know if I'm recommending something, if something is being sponsored by me, it's not just them buying the space. I am willing to endorse this product. By doing that, I think those sponsorship campaigns will be more successful because I'm willing to say you trust me. I trust this brand. You can trust this brand.

Jay Clouse [00:32:20]:
But it takes more effort on my part to try to vet those brands. And usually the easiest thing is just to say, do I use it? If I don't use it, why would I use it? Have I tried it? I certainly don't touch things that are like financial services that I don't use or crypto. I'm very, very careful. And I also just genuinely don't lie. I just won't lie to you because there's nothing more important than my reputation, my relationship with you. And I feel like I have to be an ethical, high integrity person to build the type of trust that I strive to with you. That comes at a cost. There are certainly relationships outside of brands that I could engage with or strategies I could engage with that are less ethical and would probably grow the bottom line of the business.

Jay Clouse [00:33:10]:
But to me, it just feels like building your business on sand. And if you build your business on shaky ethics feels like it could go away pretty quickly. And so I'm willing to take the longer slower road to just feel more alignment with what I do. Valentin Farkas asked tell me about a time this year you almost quit. I don't think there's a time this year that I almost quit. Although I will tell you in the hospital after having our daughter and holding our daughter for the first time it was like a psychedelic experience where at one point I was like business is the silliest thing in the world. How was I ever how did I ever care that much about running a business and will I ever care that much again? Spoiler time passed I get back into the swing of things and it's it's fine. But you know before I had a child I was looking for all meaning and fulfillment from the business and now I have meaning and fulfillment outside of the business.

Jay Clouse [00:34:03]:
And so the business carries less weight with me. What bums me out and when I think about quitting is either someone is so good at doing basically what I do that I think what's the point of me doing it? That gets in my head sometimes when I think they're so much better at this than I am. Why should my content exist when their content exists? That gets in my head sometimes. Other things that get in my head sometimes are I get just genuinely kind of grossed out by the attention economy. I'll say the creator economy. I'll just say, like, the the areas of the creator economy where it's all about, like, hooks, views, get attention. And I don't think it's net good for society and I'm participating in that to a large degree. So sometimes I fantasize about starting a creator style business that is not serving creators and I think that'll probably happen at some point.

Jay Clouse [00:34:59]:
I just don't know what that is and the highest leverage choices in what you do. So I'm not going to leave behind a great thing for something that is not something I'm extremely excited about and have high conviction in. But I could see a world where I I serve a different audience in a larger problem and participate a little bit less in the great attention grab that is the creator economy. But, you know, the thing that bugs me out about that or bums me out about that is I think there's just a lot of beginners who are getting taken advantage of. And I don't serve beginners. I don't serve that audience. I serve you. You're more advanced.

Jay Clouse [00:35:36]:
You're more discerning. That's a relationship I value, and I won't let that go just because there are bad actors in the space. Tyler Reid asked, how much revenue do you actually make from each of your revenue streams, podcast courses, and YouTube? Well, I would say podcast and YouTube are not revenue streams. They are distribution streams, but I can tell you what my revenue streams are. They are digital products, affiliates, memberships, services, royalties, and sponsorship. And I can tell you what each of those have brought in so far this year. Digital products, and this is as of October 2024. Digital products have brought in about $166,000 affiliates, a little less than 20, memberships, $320,000 services, $13,000 royalties, $24,000 sponsorship, $239,000 So as you can see, sponsorship has grown to become a large percentage of my overall revenue.

Jay Clouse [00:36:37]:
And if you're trying to calculate the total in your head, that would give us $665,000 up to this point. So, you know, it's been a good year and sponsorships have become a large part of our revenue as have digital products and memberships. Things that are down quite a bit are services because I simply don't sell my time one on one outside of being in the lab. It's just a higher leverage use of my time serving folks that are in the community and affiliates. I just don't put any strong effort behind because I think most affiliate strategies go to 0 over time and I don't want to build my business on that either. I just kind of want to take advantage of what's there easily. So that's the very explicit metrics. If you're curious to see how that breaks down month to month, this is something I share in the lab in our monthly retros that is available on every tier of the lab including the basic tier.

Jay Clouse [00:37:31]:
So I would recommend joining the lab if you wanna have more behind the scenes of how I run the business. Tyler had a second question I really like which is do you ever feel like you're prioritizing content creation over actually building and innovating the products that you sell? How do you balance these 2? I actually feel like a lot of times I'm doing the inverse where I focus more time on my paid products than I do on content creation in terms of what I should be doing. I think you operate in seasons. Ideally, you have all things in complete balance all the time, but it's just unreasonable. It's unrealistic. What you really wanna have is balance throughout a larger period of time, and I think about that on, like, an annual basis. And I operate in seasons where I'll have a season that's high on content creation. I'll have a season that's high on developing a new product.

Jay Clouse [00:38:21]:
I'll have a season that's high on selling that product. All in all, you kind of want to balance these things out and you start to develop a sense and intuition where you're out of balance. When you pull one lever, another lever kind of gets out of balance and you start to just feel where things are out of balance and you can use that as a nudge to move into a new season. And that's what I try to do. Tyler even had a third question that I really liked, which was what's your biggest fear about the sustainability of being a creator in the long run? I know you've been doing this for 7 years or so now, but that's a short time and what could be another 20 plus years as a creator? Yeah. Sustainability is something I think about a lot and something that I don't think most creators think about because even on my now 7 year journey, most people that I've seen go through this have given up. It's just so rare that someone has been working out as long as I have, let alone longer. So I think about sustainability a lot.

Jay Clouse [00:39:10]:
I think about it in the design of my days. Do my days feel sustainable? Because that's where you feel it first. If your day to day does not feel sustainable, then you know you're a ticking time bomb. And so to me, I'm trying to find a way to either simplify the business and what I'm offering and what's taking time in my day to day or hire myself out of certain aspects of the business. I think there's kind of this chasm that I'm in right now where I have the infrastructure and elements of a large scale business that a team would typically be supporting, but it's a very small team supporting it. So the way forward is to either hire a larger team or remove some of those aspects to become more sustainable. I'm going to have to make a decision on that in the near future because I do feel that my day to day is not super sustainable right now. I think ultimately one of the biggest keys to sustainability is doing something that you have a lot of intrinsic interest and curiosity in and luckily I am still wildly interested and curious about creator businesses and so I can continue talking to people about this.

Jay Clouse [00:40:19]:
I can continue iterating on mine, but I do think that long term I wanna be writing books. I think it's gonna be the most sustainable life for me and I know that there's actually increasing leverage in the longer I wait to write the first book because the audience, the awareness of me and my work grows. So my hope is by the time I write the first book, that becomes a really nice stepping stone to a future of writing more books and simplifying the business as a whole or at least my involvement in it. After one last quick break, I'm gonna move on to the questions from Twitter, including how I get out of my own head and create using post templates versus creating my own post from scratch and more. So stick around. We'll be right back. Our first question from Twitter comes from friend of the show, Andrew Ellis. Andrew asked, do you overthink your own content? What are your strategies for getting out of your own head and creating? For sure.

Jay Clouse [00:41:17]:
Of course, I do this. But I think what has helped me is I think about every piece of content I create, especially long form content, essays, podcast episodes, YouTube videos. I think about it as a larger body of work, and I want to have confidence that the thing I am making is fairly evergreen and slots into my body of work in a place that hasn't quite been covered before. And to do that, it needs to come from a place of being useful. I see a lot of content that is successful quote unquote. It gets a lot of reach on LinkedIn or wherever and I read it and I just think what's the use of this? This doesn't seem useful. And everything I create, I want it to be useful so that there's a chance that I can continue to get use out of it. You know, it may not get as much spread the day that it's published.

Jay Clouse [00:42:06]:
But if days from now, weeks from now, months from now, years from now, I can refer to this and say hey, the question you have, I actually answered it to a level of depth here. If I can feel confident that I'm making something useful, then I do it. But in terms of overthinking, even overthinking useful content happens all the time. At some point, you have to let the schedule drive the work a little bit and give yourself a deadline because otherwise, if you have no deadlines at all, no timelines to worry about, then perfectionism will will get you pretty strong. Andrew went on to say what is your opinion of using post templates versus creating your own posts from scratch? I think it's a personal preference thing and I think it depends a little bit on your audience. You know anything that I put in front of my audience, I ask myself if the person reading this had full knowledge of how it was created, would that have a positive or negative impact on their perception of me? And serving creators, if I were to just use other people's post templates and you knew that you would probably have a lower perception. You'd probably say, well, what's the source material? Instead of listening to you, why don't I go to the source? That may be a story I tell myself and the idea that, well, it matters less than other niches where your audience is not creators. I don't know if that's true or not.

Jay Clouse [00:43:25]:
That's just what I think right now. And I would prefer to be more original because I think being original or trying to be more original leads to more original thought, which I think is long term a better strategy. Eventually, we're gonna have, you know, templates of templates of templates. And I think people will start to see it and get a little burned out by it. I do think that in general, people are a little bit more aware of templatized posts and they will become less effective over time. So if you don't build and strengthen the muscle to create your own style of posts, then when those no longer become useful, is that gonna be a problem for you? I don't know. My friend David Spinks is asking the classic Jerry Colona question, which is how are you complicit in creating the conditions you claim you don't want in your life or business as a creator? I'll repeat that again because it's a powerful question. And if you haven't heard before, it's worth repeating.

Jay Clouse [00:44:21]:
How am I complicit in creating the conditions I claim I don't want in my life and business as a creator? Well, we have to start with the conditions I claim I don't want. I think the conditions I claim I don't want are unsustainable time pressures on the business and on me personally. That's what I would say I don't want. And yet how am I complicit in creating those conditions? Well, the things that create the most time pressure are sponsorship and content deadlines of which I approve the sponsorship. I set the schedule and I set my own deadlines as well. So the things that cause me stress are deadlines from sponsorship and creating content and those deadlines are self imposed. So that is that's the clear answer of how I am complicit. So what do I do about that? I can either slow down the pace or I can increase team capacity that helps facilitate that pace.

Jay Clouse [00:45:16]:
And I have done neither so far, David. So thanks for calling me out. Jeff Neighbors asked, what are things you're doing in your zone of competence or even zone of excellence that are robbing you of spending more time in your zone of genius? This gets to a lot of what I've been talking about this whole episode. I operate at the intersection of a lot of things and where that's really problematic right now is that I'm operating at the intersection of visionary and integrator in this business. Those are terms by Gino Wickman in his book Traction. If you're not familiar, the idea is a visionary is a person that kind of sets the vision, sets the direction of the ship and the integrator is a person who comes in and helps execute on that vision. I am operating in both seats and have been up to this point. I think I'm good at both.

Jay Clouse [00:46:02]:
I don't even know which one of them is truly my zone of genius. I think I'm very good at both. But as I get older, I find that I have less time and energy for the PureExecution side of things and better leverage for the vision side of things. So right now, I am spending a ton of time in the operation side, which historically I've been very good at. I think I still am good at, but it prevents me from running wild with the vision and building the relationships or planning for the future that can make that vision real. And so, it's a it's a pain point. It's a pain point for sure. Something that needs to be solved in the near future.

Jay Clouse [00:46:44]:
And then you follow that existential question with a second of if you died tomorrow in your last breath, what would you regret not having done with your time? Well, I think I would regret spending my last breath on talking about regrets. But I mean, probably just spending time with loved ones. You know, I'm grateful that my parents are still alive. They're within 2 hours of me here in Ohio. And I feel like I've built just a stronger and stronger relationship with them. And now as a father, I look at my parents with a completely different light. And I think, gosh, I can't believe I'm not spending more time with them or calling them, talking to them. So it probably be regretting spending more time with them, regretting spending time, you know, in the business.

Jay Clouse [00:47:26]:
I'm trying to give myself this frame of family first when, you know, I'm working and now wants to go to floor and decor. I want to say, yes, let's go. I'll pause the work. I'll get back to work when time allows. But working the business around life and not working life around the business, I think, is what I'm trying to do. And if I don't do that, that's probably going to be the biggest regret. We're down to our final four questions here before I make my coffee and settle in for NFL Red Zone, my favorite part of the week. My friend Joe Gossabona, who is also a member of the lab, asked, do platitudes, for example, I make 7 figures per month and you can too, or you can stay at your 9 to 5 or make endless amounts of money or to be successful, all you need to do is write.

Jay Clouse [00:48:12]:
Do these platitudes do more harm or good for the creator economy? I don't know that they have a positive or negative impact on the creator economy as a whole. You know, he says these are kind of paraphrases of large creators that are out there. And, you know these are big promises making 7 figures per month making endless amounts of money being as successful as you want by just learning to write. These are big promises that clearly resonate with a large audience, but they're big promises. And there's kind of a YouTubification of everything in the creator economy, meaning that kind of, sensational titles in YouTube world get clicks. Sensational promises, sensational, you know, subtitles to your business. That stuff can get clicks and then you kinda walk it back and show them it's harder to get there. I do think though that a lot of people are susceptible to huge claims.

Jay Clouse [00:49:10]:
We want to believe that we can have huge success for very little effort in short amounts of time. So if you make that promise, there are gonna be people who want to believe you and therefore sign up for your stuff. On the off chance, even if we don't believe that it's true, on the off chance that it is true, we want to judge that for ourselves. So we say, yes, we're in to find out more. I do think, though, that it has a net negative impact on the public trust. I will say that. I think when you make really bold, impossible to fulfill claims with the size of the audience that it's reaching, I I think it has a net negative impact on the public trust, and that's probably a bad thing for people. But, you know, I get bummed out when I see people having what I deem to be more success than I do by making claims that I know can't possibly be true or can't possibly deliver for most of the people that are coming in there.

Jay Clouse [00:50:08]:
And I think this is gross. I don't wanna participate in this at all. But the reality is the creator economy needs measured people who can deliver on the promises that they make. It needs people like me who are more honest to their own detriment. And maybe that's you too. And I think we should keep fighting the good fight. Will asked, what are some red flags you see when you come across an online creator? For me, it's often I look for alignment between what do they say and what do they do. If there's not alignment there, then that's a red flag to me that there's some lying or at least misleading happening here.

Jay Clouse [00:50:48]:
I also tend to look at who is responding to this creator. What's the audience that already exists like? Not in terms of how big is this audience, but who are these individuals and do they remind me of me? Because a lot of times, the people who are responding or this is resonating with, they are a little naive in terms of the Internet world, and they may be susceptible again to like broad promises that are just not true. So I look for does this person have a discerning audience regardless of how large that audience is and is there alignment between what they say and what they do? We'll actually end on this question from Chris 3 d who asked how many people in your community or the creator economy in general actually do something after buying a digital product? The feeling with digital products too often is people buy, but they don't do. They barely watch it. How real is this? I would love to have some real talk behind the scenes, some metrics post purchase, but every creator is trying to talk about this because it undermines their marketing. So I am guilty of not knowing these figures as well as I know most figures in my business. So I went into Teachable and I looked at it and of my courses, the courses that I'm actively selling right now, the completion percentage, the average completion percentage range from 28% to 47%, which is higher than a lot of the benchmarks you hear from like, I think Seth Godin has been quoted as saying either 4 or 6%, which is bad. I don't think that even 27 to 46% is as high as it should be.

Jay Clouse [00:52:20]:
And if I look into the lab, this isn't a perfect example because the courses I have in the lab, you may not be joining the lab to watch Build Up Love and Membership, but I'm looking here and I have dozens and dozens of people who have completed greater than 50%. So I think a key distinction here is what is the emotion that you're pulling on when the purchase is made? Because a lot of times purchases of digital products come from a place of loss aversion. It's like, hey, here's this great offer that you would be crazy to pass up and we purchase with the thought of someday, if I want to go through this, now I have the opportunity because I got it for this good price today. And I just think that's not a sustainable way to sell products because what it creates is a neutral or net negative interaction with you and your products. If I don't actually get the value out of the thing, then I'm not having a positive interaction with your brand and your product. So to me, the ideal is to come from a place of optimism and excitement right now to do the thing. I'm not trying to get you to purchase this course because I'm giving you some manufactured scarcity or urgency around the course, although I am about to run a Black Friday deal. What I'm trying to do is capture you at the point of you want to do this thing.

Jay Clouse [00:53:44]:
I know you do and here is my best product to help you do it. And that way, people move right into the actual execution of the product and get more of it done. So, you know, I would be careful about constant scarcity or urgency as a lever trying to be moved to make you purchase because this is preying on our feelings of FOMO or loss aversion. And look, I've done I've been guilty of it as well because sometimes it does move the needle and in my pursuit of having higher and higher integrity, I find myself doing this less and less and it comes at a real cost. Scarcity and urgency work, but when you have these moments of scarcity and urgency, that's when you see lower completion rates or impact from your products. Alright. Alright. I think I'm gonna leave it there.

Jay Clouse [00:54:42]:
I'm gonna go make my coffee, start my day. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Truly, I say it in every episode because it makes a real difference, and we haven't had a new review in a little bit, so it would mean a lot to help me get to 450 on Apple Podcasts. If you're here on Spotify, you can actually leave a comment, which I would love to see. I love getting comments on Spotify. I respond to all of them, and it just makes my day. If you enjoy these q and a's, go to creatorscience.com/ask to ask some of your questions. It's linked in the show notes as well.

Jay Clouse [00:55:13]:
I'd love to feature your question, and we'll have the video version of this answering questions our audience was afraid to ask coming out very, very soon. Go to our YouTube channel to be subscribed to see that. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.