#203: Mid-Year Review: Goal progress, revenue, audience growth, and changes to my approach

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hello my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Hey, we are halfway through the year. We are in mid July. We have passed the 6 month mark of 2024 and I thought this is a perfect opportunity to reflect on the 1st 6 months of the year both personally and encourage you to do the same. This is something I actually do on a monthly basis inside the lab. I do a 30 minute retro each month and several members do the same, but I don't always look back at longer chunks of time. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to look back at the 1st 6 months of the year and I hope it inspires you to do the same.

Jay Clouse [00:00:49]:
So here today, I'm going to go through my overall progress on my goals as tracked in Creator HQ. I'm going to break down some of my numbers mostly talking about revenue and how that breaks down this year compared to last year. We'll talk about audience growth across the different platforms that I'm publishing on things that are over performing underperforming what I'm optimistic about, what I'm pessimistic about. We'll talk about some of my personal goals and then at the end, I will revisit my goals for the rest of the year and revisit my approach, tell you the things that I'm doing differently. Now as I sit here recording, if you're paying close attention to my world, you may know that we are expecting our daughter any day now. As I recorded this, she is not yet here. But by the time you are listening to this, it will be past our induction date. So should be safe to assume that baby is here and Mallory and I are gonna be taking some parental leave.

Jay Clouse [00:01:43]:
You should still be hearing from me on a weekly basis. I'm gonna be creating content where I find the time, but your patience with me is appreciated. Alright. So I had a few goals this year that we'll check-in on and actually bucketed these into 4 different categories. I had financial goals, health goals, play goals, and Relationship Goals. So I'll go category by category, let you know how I'm doing. In the Financial Goals section, I have the goal of increasing enterprise value inside of Creator Science, the business. Now, this is actually recently revised.

Jay Clouse [00:02:14]:
So spoiler what I talk about at the end. But I had some goals that were things like launch Creator HQ, launch Creator School, launch The Lab version 2. And I actually don't think those were goals so much as projects. And when I think about the why behind those projects, it was for the goal of increasing enterprise value. Now, if you're not familiar with enterprise value, it's basically the idea the value that is inherent in the enterprise, in the business, the business of creator science. If you listen to my recent conversation with Nathan Barry of ConvertKit, we talked about this quite a bit at the end of that episode. It's this idea that does this business hold value for somebody else that's not me? I have no plans to sell creator science, but I think it's a very worthwhile question to ask. How do I create more value in the business so that if I ever wanted to, the opportunity to sell the business was a viable opportunity and a profitable opportunity.

Jay Clouse [00:03:10]:
And so that is a goal for the year is increasing enterprise value in the business, and that's not just about increasing revenue. It's actually about decentralizing systems and processes away from me. So all of that rolls up into that goal. I would not say that goal is completed yet. I do think we've, you know, made good progress in that direction, but that's gonna be a theme for the entire year. Below that, I had the financial goal of maxing out both of our solo 401ks for my wife and I. We have 401k plans within the business. They are solo 401ks offered by Carrie, carrie.com, which disclaimer, I am a small investor in.

Jay Clouse [00:03:48]:
And we're on track for that. We're on track for hitting our investment goals into our solo 401ks, so that is not completed, but it is tracking positively. Behind that, we have the goal of completing 2 or more deals out of the Creator Science Syndicate. Those are investments. The syndicate is basically this community of people that have said, hey, Jay. We trust your ability to find good investment opportunities. If you tell us about those opportunities, we may invest in that deal alongside you. So we've done 2 of those this year.

Jay Clouse [00:04:14]:
We've invested in RightMessage, my friend Brendan Dunn, as well as Cary, which I just mentioned. It's the product that hosts our solo 401ks. It's awesome. We've invested in 3 companies now: Carry, RightMessage and ConvertKit, and it's very, very fun. So if you're curious about that, go to creatorscience.com/syndicate to learn more. We have completed that goal this year. That is good. And the 4th goal under financial is to pay off one of our vehicles.

Jay Clouse [00:04:39]:
And actually, as time passes, I realize that interest rate is so low. It doesn't really make sense to pay it off ahead of time unless I just want the peace of mind that we don't have that loan outstanding. But it's not actually the fiscally most responsible decision to make when I could actually take the same money that would go into paying off the Mitsubishi, put it into the market, and make more on the returns. So, you know, not a financial adviser by any means, but I do have one, and this has been his advice to me. So of those four goals, we have completed 1. We're on track for 2 of the others, and the 4th may not even be a goal for the rest of the year. Okay. Let's move on to health.

Jay Clouse [00:05:17]:
There are 3 goals right at the top here. We have take paternity leave, take maternity leave for Mal, and have a safe and healthy birth. We have started our parental leaves. We are not taking any calls. Mal is gonna have as much time off as she would like. I am not taking any calls of any kind until mid September. I'm gonna create things where I can where there's space, but family is coming first. So I've checked those boxes off.

Jay Clouse [00:05:41]:
We have not, as of this recording, had the birth yet, so I have not checked that goal off. But again, as you're listening to this, that should be checked off. I had a goal of reaching a £185. Personally, I was up to 210 in November of 2023 and I have gotten down to 180. I'm floating around 186 right now, but I did break that goal, so I'll check that off the list. And then finally, I had a goal of taking cooking classes, which has not been done yet, and I still wanna do that, but it's probably gonna be something on YouTube. So we are 3 of 5 there, should be 4 of 5 by the time you listen to this. In the play category, I had the goal of completing a book proposal at least for myself, even if I haven't showed it to an agent yet and finish reading 10 of my own books.

Jay Clouse [00:06:27]:
Yeah. That second one is definitely tracking. Have read more than 5 books this year. Have not made progress on a book proposal, but I'll talk about why here in a little bit. So on track for 1 of 2 of those goals. And then finally the relationships category, start 1,000 conversations, plan 12 date nights, and start the basement remodel. We have a date for the remodel. We have planned more than 6 date nights, and I have not kept as good a track about the conversation started.

Jay Clouse [00:06:55]:
So still a major goal of mine. I am making steps towards it, but probably not on pace for that yet. Moving on, let's talk about numbers. Let's talk about revenue, expenses, and net operating income. So for this, I looked at January through June of 2023 and January through June of 2024 and what I've done here is I've broken down my 6 revenue streams and I have the total of them. I have the percent total for the respective years, and then I have growth percentage from 2023 to 2024. I'm looking at this very nicely formatted chart, so it makes sense for me saying that. Hopefully, you're following what I have to say here, but from January through June of 2023, total income last year for the 1st 6 months was just over $294,000 which was a huge increase over the year before.

Jay Clouse [00:07:53]:
This year, for the 1st 6 months of 2024, we're sitting at $424,000 So that's a 44% revenue increase this year over last year and that's fantastic. I could not be happier about that. That makes me feel very proud of not only the health of the business, but also the direction of it because as I've said, I have 6 revenue streams. They are affiliate revenue, digital products, memberships, royalties, predominantly LinkedIn Learning. Services is number 5, and sponsorship is number 6. Those are my 6 revenue streams, and if we look at the percentage as far as what those revenue streams represent in a given year, last year memberships represented 64% of my revenue from January to June and by memberships, I mean the lab in particular. So that was a huge huge chunk of my overall revenue and this year one of my goals has been to diversify outside of memberships a little bit so that the business is not so dependent on memberships without decreasing the total of memberships in terms of revenue. So last year, as I said, memberships represented 64% of revenue.

Jay Clouse [00:09:12]:
This year, memberships represent 45% of revenue and there's still a 2% total increase in membership revenue. So what that means is we have earned more from memberships this year, but it's a smaller percentage of the overall whole of revenue. That is the ideal outcome. More revenue from that revenue stream, but it's a smaller percentage of the overall whole which is up 44%. So where did that difference come from? The difference came from digital products and sponsorship. Digital products last year was 11% of total revenue at about $33,000 and for the first half of this year, digital products were at a and $10,000 which is about 26 percent of revenue. Mostly, that is due to Creator HQ, a fantastic launch, and also Buildable of a membership, my course around memberships. It has become more and more popular over time.

Jay Clouse [00:10:07]:
It's been getting people a lot of results, and it's been performing really, really well. And the second source of change here in revenue is sponsorship. Last year, the first half of the year, we had $41,000 in sponsorship. This year, we had $82,000 in sponsorship. Literally doubled our sponsorship total last year to this year. And that encapsulates a few things. It encapsulates our strategy, which has changed since talking to my friend, Justin Moore, about this quite a bit. So we are doing bigger campaigns that are more cross platform.

Jay Clouse [00:10:41]:
I am no longer working with third parties to broker those deals, so I'm not giving up a percentage of revenue there. And also, we have gotten more revenue from YouTube the first half of this year than last year as well. So all of that together doubled our sponsorship revenue. It now represents almost 20% of our overall revenue. And, again, total revenue for the year up 44%. So very, very pleased with that. The other streams of income, I don't know how much there is to say. Affiliate revenue is up about 19%, but it's a difference of 13,000 last year to 15,000 this year.

Jay Clouse [00:11:19]:
It's just not a huge focus. And every time I think about, hey, maybe I should put more effort into affiliate revenue because I could probably run a couple dedicated campaigns, talk about how much I love ConvertKit and Circle and Senja. These are some of my biggest affiliate partners and drive more affiliate revenue, but it's not going to be as meaningful as focusing the same marketing effort to my own digital products or the lab, for instance. So Affiliates is what it is. I mean, $15,000 is nothing to sneeze at, but it's extremely hands off. It just happens through whatever means I've plugged it into already. Very, very passive on that front. Royalties is up about 12, 13%.

Jay Clouse [00:12:03]:
I'm not sure what to credit that to, to be honest, because they're remarkably consistent month to month. Again, this is just sales of my LinkedIn Learning courses through LinkedIn. I have no control over that. It was a publishing agreement. They pay in advance. They pay royalties. Again, $15,000 is nothing to sneeze at, but I'm doing next to nothing or literally nothing actually to move the needle there. Services is actually the one line item that is down last year services accounted for 4% of my total income this year it's 2%, and it's down about 15% overall because I've stopped offering any type of services, really.

Jay Clouse [00:12:43]:
I was doing some one off, like, hourly consulting to start the year, but I've actually removed the ability for people to hire me on an hourly basis because I wanted to put all of my extra hours into members of the lab, serving them, serving our VIP members, making the product better. It just wasn't worth it. Again, as 2% of total income, I can make up that again, it's about $95100 of services so far this year. That's a few memberships in the lab to make up that revenue. So it was taken up a disproportionate amount of my calendar and headspace for something that was offering incrementally very little to the business. And then sponsorship, as I said, is up a 100% over last year and now 20% of the overall total. So this puts us on track for about $850,000 of revenue this year, and last year, we were at 5.65. So that's a huge jump.

Jay Clouse [00:13:44]:
Very grateful, very excited about this because our expenses have jumped as well. Our expenses have increased about 37% from last year. Last year, the front half of the year expenses are about a $165,000. This year, they're about $226,000. And the majority of that, vast majority of that is compensation for Mal and I. We're the 2 w two employees. So it has our salaries, you know, all things related to employment. It also includes our team of contractors.

Jay Clouse [00:14:17]:
So that's Connor, Izzy, Adam, Jonathan, folks who work on the team on a contract basis. So the expenses are no joke. They've increased 37%. We've had $226,000 of expenses this year, and I have invested in the business heavily this year also to be fair. Not only our team, but also some special projects that have come through. So in the end, if you're keeping track at home, net income has increased 53% from a $130,000 last year to about a $198,000 this year. And that's net operating income on top of our compensation as employees. So that's a pretty healthy business.

Jay Clouse [00:14:58]:
Now a lot of that money, most of that money has stayed in the business to future proof us, to allow us to invest in special projects, but also to account for down months, you know, as Mal and I look at parental leave now, I don't want to feel the pressure of maintaining the same revenue standard that I've had the last few months while we are working much less for the next 2 months, frankly. The last 3 months, we have averaged over $83,000 in revenue, which puts us on a 7 figure annual run rate, which is awesome. That's like a fun, you know, check off the box on my mind of, like, things to achieve. I don't think we'll hit 7 figures this year unless, you know, some things ramp up drastically to end the year. But to know that when we're at our best or on a 7 figure run rate, that's really great. That's really exciting. It makes me really proud of what we're building here. So we're gonna take a quick break for our sponsors, but after that break, we're gonna talk about audience growth and different platforms.

Jay Clouse [00:15:59]:
What I'm seeing there. We're gonna talk about my personal goals and then later, we'll go into how I'm revisiting these goals, revising them and revising my approach. There's a lot there. So stick around. We'll be right back. And we're back. Okay. Let's talk about audience growth.

Jay Clouse [00:16:15]:
In the monthly retros that I do inside the lab, not only do I cover the numbers in the business, but I also look at growth on all the platforms that we're publishing on. I'm talking every single social media platform, email, podcasting, YouTube, and even website analytics too. All those numbers, by the way, I have created a template in Google Sheets for what I do. It's inside of Creator HQ. So if you have Creator HQ, look in your administrative folder. If If you don't have Creator HQ, it's just another reason to consider. Okay. So let's talk about the over performers in terms of audience growth.

Jay Clouse [00:16:46]:
YouTube has continued to be extremely, extremely promising. There was a time where we were tracking on about a 100,000 subscribers by my birthday which just passed last week and we didn't get there. We're just shy of 92,000 subscribers as I'm recording this. But growth on YouTube has been really great. I'm really optimistic about it. What we have to figure out is how to move people from viewer to subscriber. I'm not even trying to go from viewer to customer just yet. I'm trying to go from viewer to subscriber and the people who do this really well, they integrate these resources that back up what any particular video is about.

Jay Clouse [00:17:24]:
If we think about my friend, April Lynn Alter, she has a video about how to do great thumbnails. She made a resource that backs up what she shows in her video, and she'll say, by the way, you can get this resource here. And as that video succeeds, it gets more views. People hear that call action. They get the resource and that moves them into email. That's so much more compelling than just saying, hey, by the way, I have a newsletter. Go sign up for it, which is what we're doing now. We have dedicated tracking links in these videos.

Jay Clouse [00:17:52]:
I've just started using specific tracking links per video to see how are we doing in getting people over there. And the results so far have been exciting. I mean, we didn't really have tracking before, so it's hard to follow the data. But our recent video is Zach Honnervar. We put in a unique tracking link as soon as we publish that. It's just shy of 20,000 views right now and a 194 people have clicked that link. So if we just make this easy, a 194 divided by 19,400 that's 1% of people. 1% of viewers are clicking that link which isn't great but it's something and it's something we can work off of.

Jay Clouse [00:18:30]:
It's a benchmark we can try to improve and that's nothing to sneeze at. Again, if half of the people who click that link end up subscribing because we are very specific about what that link is, That's a 100 new email subscribers from that video. That is something. These little little wins, these incremental improvements that you do all the time across all your channels and do that for days, weeks, months, years on end, that really, really adds up. So I'm really optimistic about YouTube, not to mention the revenue potential directly from YouTube. People are sponsoring the channel. We're now booked through September, 3 videos for the next 3 months. And that's really exciting too.

Jay Clouse [00:19:10]:
You know? Again, I think the goal of all of our channels is to get people to email, to get people to our products because that is where you build the most enterprise value. That's actually where you have the highest margin. But for the people who aren't buying our products to get them to support sponsors, to share the video, these are all positive indicators that are happening on YouTube. So I'm really really optimistic about YouTube. LinkedIn is also performing pretty well for me right now. I haven't historically been that great at LinkedIn. I have a fair number of followers there, like, 42,000 followers on LinkedIn, which is pretty good. And I'm one of those LinkedIn top voices.

Jay Clouse [00:19:49]:
But I seem to top out a lot of the times between, like, 4,006,000 impressions per post. And I know folks who are far outperforming that on their typical posts. So what I'm trying to do now is I'm trying to mix in more mixed media because I've historically been, like, maybe an image but mostly text. And what really works well on LinkedIn right now are PDF carousels. This has been true for a long time. Polls do really well, making your whatever image that you're using very distinct in the feed. So if you've been following me on LinkedIn, you've seen a couple of infographics that I put together. So that seems to be performing pretty well in terms of overall reach, which gets more followers.

Jay Clouse [00:20:34]:
But again, then the goal is can we get the traffic from these platforms over to email? So I just posted this really in-depth infographic this morning. It was describing my conversation with Richard Vanderblom. And as I'm recording this, this is midday. And the post already has 17,000 impressions, which is, you know, a factor of 3 or 4 higher than typical. So 17,000 impressions, 213 reactions. I also had a link in that post to the full podcast episode. It has gotten 9 clicks. So did not do a very good job of turning viewers of that post into podcast listeners or email subscribers, but has resulted in more followers and that is something.

Jay Clouse [00:21:21]:
So I'm bullish there. I'm optimistic, but I really think you need to be distinct in the feed and I'm going to talk about that a little bit later when I talk about my approach and things I'm optimistic about. Threads right now is actually doing pretty well for me as well. But I think Threads is the furthest away from figuring out how I get engagement to be a customer or subscriber. It does pretty well relative to, like, x. Threads is, you know, a factor of 10 smaller than my x audience, but performs probably 50% or more as well as typical content there. So there's good things happening on threads. And what I've been really optimistic about there is it used to be when a post outperformed on threads, it was getting in front of just random people, it seemed.

Jay Clouse [00:22:09]:
It seemed like they were not good at finding the relevant audience for your content. But as time has passed, it feels like they are getting much better at giving you relevant views to your content. So So I'm optimistic about threads. I'm also optimistic about Instagram. And not really because I think Instagram is doing anything new or exciting. I actually think I probably missed the bigger opportunities on Instagram. But it's such a big platform that when you do make a Reel that does pretty well, the reach is crazy. I still think there is crazy reach potential on Instagram with Reels.

Jay Clouse [00:22:43]:
And I think the audience for creator educators like you and I is better on Instagram than TikTok. I'm just not at all optimistic about TikTok as an audience or I should say business building platform. So those are my over performers right now. Things I'm optimistic about YouTube, LinkedIn, threads, Instagram, x and the podcast are underperforming for me right now, and it's hard to know what is real with the podcast. Early on in the podcast's existence, I purchased some marketing campaigns through an app called Castbox, and that was promising subscribers Castbox subscribers for 50¢ each. And so you could really rack up subscribers and downloads through Castbox quickly on the podcast. But I just don't think those listeners were very high quality or maybe even real. So literally, for the past couple of years, there's just been this slow decay in subscribers on Castbox in particular that offsets the growth I see on other platforms.

Jay Clouse [00:23:48]:
So the net for a long time has been what looks like decay in podcast listenership. But I actually feel like there is more energy and listenership and positive benefit coming from the podcast today than ever. When I look at applications for the lab, for instance, we get many, many applications per week for the lab and just about all of them, should say just about all of them, but the majority of them, the vast majority of them reference the podcasts and starting to be the YouTube channel as well. So these platforms where you have more depth with people so powerful. I am more optimistic about the podcasts than most other things right now, despite it being an underperformer in terms of growth. So that's an interesting data point for you to clock. I'm more optimistic about the podcast than maybe ever, and yet it's still underperforming where I would expect it to be from a reach or growth perspective. I'm also optimistic about YouTube, which I think we covered.

Jay Clouse [00:24:52]:
I'm optimistic about email automation. This is something I'm thinking a lot about right now. I don't think I do a good enough job of saying, okay, once you enter the creator science email ecosystem, we're gonna take you by the hand and show you the options for how I can best serve you and get you up to speed and help you. I'm gonna do that in an automated way. I had this attitude for a long time that I didn't wanna do a long welcome sequence because I find them annoying. And so I have this 2 email welcome sequence that performs really well in terms of people respond to it and say, hey, thank you for not, like, pushing me down a funnel and doing this thing, but it doesn't perform well from a revenue perspective. So I think there's actually a middle ground here where I don't one size fits all put everyone into a welcome sequence. That's not what I'm suggesting.

Jay Clouse [00:25:38]:
What I'm suggesting is mapping out the customer journey of how I can help somebody go from I just found this email list to I'm now making progress towards my goals regardless of where they are. I'm doing a pretty good job of segmenting people already using RightMessage and tags and things in ConvertKit. I should really be able to say based on what you've told me, here is the next obvious best step. Do you wanna take that step? You know, make it opt in. Say, I think the best thing for you is to get this 5 day email course where I teach you the basics of how to actually make a living as a creator. Or more specific than that, I think the best next step for you is to get this free resource that teaches you how to build a community that has high retention and high engagement. Okay, great. All you have to do is click this button and I'll send that to you.

Jay Clouse [00:26:28]:
But I don't necessarily opt them in. I say welcome, glad you're here. I'm not gonna opt you into something, but I do think the next best step for you is this and that should be an intelligent recommendation based on what I know about that subscriber and then give them the option to opt into that at the click of a button. That is what I wanna do. I wanna take what I know about subscribers, position to them not just the best paid offer that I have, but position to them the best pathway that can serve them so I can build trust with them. And if there is a pay offer that makes sense at the end of that journey, great. I'll pitch it then. I feel like that is ultimately what I need to have in place before I go hog wild on just driving more social attention because what is the point of social attention? The point of attention on social media is to people into a system that you know serves their goals and you capture some value on top of that as well.

Jay Clouse [00:27:19]:
Create value, capture value. That's the goal of social media is to get people into your email ecosystem to create value and then capture value. I think a lot of us get trapped in this, like, I wanna get engagement on social media because that's what looks legit and that's what the people that I aspire to be are doing. But we're not thinking about the back end of that system, You know, just as a quick little aside, I've been studying a lot of Ryan Holiday's work and his career, his journey, even his day to day, like kind of breaking down. What does his life actually look like? And he's publishing all over the place all the time. The pure output of this man is nuts. Daily Stoic is daily from an email perspective, from a podcast perspective. He's doing the daily dad outside of that.

Jay Clouse [00:28:03]:
He's got the daily stoic YouTube channel. He's got the Daily Stoic podcast in terms of long form interviews as well. And when you look at that, you think this guy just gotta be creating content all the time. But actually, what he's doing is he's reading all the time, and he is taking great notes and capturing great information on what he calls his note card system. And that note card system can then be handed off to somebody else to create the short form content from it, and that builds awareness of the Daily Stoic brand and funnels towards the long form work that he's really doing, which is writing books. He reads. He writes books. He has a team that supports him in turning the sawdust from that process into short form content.

Jay Clouse [00:28:42]:
He has a videographer that follows him on these vlogs that I see. We look at the output of some of our creative heroes, and we think that that is the bulk of their time and day because it has to be. Right? How do you create all that? Well, you build systems and teams around you. His focus is on the important stuff learning, capturing this knowledge on his note card system and writing long form books and everything else falls out from that. So I am thinking to myself, I get so caught up in, like, short form and creating bite sized content. I'm not doing the long form important stuff as well as I should. I'm not even writing my emails as well as I should. That's what started everything.

Jay Clouse [00:29:20]:
Writing really great newsletters is what started everything. So I need to get back to doing that really well. The long form YouTube videos are important. Long form podcasts like this are important because this can become short form content. And I've started to build processes around this, which I'll talk about towards the end of this episode and revisiting my approach. So to recap, sorry, I'm going off script a little bit there. Things I'm optimistic about, The podcast, YouTube, email automation, Creator HQ. This has proven to be a great addition to the Creator Science business because it serves the average member of the audience.

Jay Clouse [00:29:54]:
I mean, it's literally what I use. Every time I make an improvement in my own creator HQ setup and it's usually something minor I go into the master creator HQ file and I improve it for future purchases of that product as well. So it's really just this wonderful flywheel of I use the product. I make it better. I hear from customers. I make it better, and it serves just about anybody that comes into this ecosystem. If you are running a creator business, Creator HQ will make it better as long as you are willing to use or learn to use Notion. I'm optimistic about membership communities, the lab in particular.

Jay Clouse [00:30:33]:
I still think there's a huge opportunity here if you do it well. And so I'm really focused on making this better and better all the time, and the bar for what it takes to be a member is just raising all the time. The people who are coming in is just blowing my mind. How amazing these people are, what their businesses are, what they're doing. Many of them have bigger businesses than I do at this point. It's just fantastic. So I feel really great about that. I'm also this is a little Easter egg.

Jay Clouse [00:31:01]:
I'm also optimistic about text only links in short form posts. This is a very small specific thing, but what I'm trying to say here is if you are posting on Twitter, threads, LinkedIn, YouTube community, you can share a link in those posts, remove the social share image from that link, and as long as the post itself is a self contained piece of value and the link supports that value, it will drive clicks. Again, it may not be 100 or 1000 of clicks, but this is an incremental game. The point of Shortform is to get people into the email ecosystem and to nurture the long form or resurface the long form. So more and more what I'm thinking about is Shortform comes from long form and then it links back to whatever long form it came from to try and convert a new short form viewer into a long form fan. Okay. Okay. Let me repeat that so you can think about that.

Jay Clouse [00:31:56]:
I'm taking a long form piece of content. Today, for example, I took my podcast interview with Richard Vanderblom and I turned that into a short form piece of content, which was these 10 insights from Richard Vanderblom and at the end of that social post, I had a text only link that said, by the way, if you want to listen to the full conversation, click here. Drives people to the podcast. Not only does drive people to the podcast, it drives people to the website page for the podcast where I have a right message experience that asks people some questions that starts to segment them in email, makes them an offer. So you see how these things start to tie together. I think you have to have these types of systems if you want to do short form. Because again, what's the point of doing short form if you don't have these types of systems? What is the action you want a short form audience to take if you don't have something on the back end. So as I've evolved the business and matured the business and built out a better back end on the business, now I feel like there's more opportunity to invest and doing things in short form to drive people to that back end experience.

Jay Clouse [00:32:59]:
Couple things I'm pessimistic about right now in terms of audience growth. I think that just the basic call to action of subscribe to my newsletter, even if it follows a post that's, like, performing really well, I don't think that's gonna work super well. You know, there was a time, like, a year and a half ago, 2 years ago on Twitter where you'd put up a thread and if it was going viral, you append that thread of the tweet that says, by the way, I write a newsletter every week. Here's where to get it. And it would result in a lot of subscribers from that. But I don't think that's compelling enough. You know, I think things will move in the way of what I see in YouTube videos where it's not, hey, I read a newsletter. It's hey, this thing you just read in this post.

Jay Clouse [00:33:37]:
I have a free resource to give you this experience or back up this value or make this easier for you. Here's where to go get it. It should be very contextually relevant, very high quality, and very specific. That's gonna work. And lastly, I'm pessimistic about SEO. I've pretty much always been fairly pessimistic about SEO, but unfortunately, so many friends and peers and members of the lab who have built businesses on SEO, they're seeing such a negative effect of these Google updates and Google's Gemini AI summary at the tops of page. They've seen such a decrease in site traffic and link clicks and revenue in some cases, so I don't think that's gonna reverse. Maybe SEO will change in some way, but I don't think the things that were working in SEO are gonna keep working.

Jay Clouse [00:34:32]:
Alright. After one last quick break, I'm going to revisit and revise my goals a little bit, tell you where my head is at for the next 6 months as well as how I'm changing my approach to creating content, being a creator, all the things that you and I do day in and day out. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And we're back. Okay. So we just looked at the last 6 months. How is that impacting the next 6 months? Well, with our daughter being born, everything is reorienting around that new reality because I mean, sincerely, for the past 7 plus years, I have known that I want to build a family and I want the business to support our family and set us up for optionality and the ability to exist and experience life the way that we want without worry about finances.

Jay Clouse [00:35:25]:
So thankfully, I think we're there. I think we got there this year hiring now into the business. So now the business supports both of us full time. Cash flow on a month to month basis has improved to a point where it supports us, supports the team. There's a little bit of cushion and it feels reliable. So everything is being reoriented around family, and I don't just even mean Mal and our daughter, which, you know, those are two things that I certainly do mean 1st and foremost. But I mean, I even want to focus on my personal relationships with my family, my parents, my sisters, my friends. When you get so heads down into a business, as I have been for the past 7 years, I have lost touch with a lot of close friends.

Jay Clouse [00:36:10]:
In some ways, as the outer circle of my network has gotten wider and wider, the inner circle has gotten smaller and smaller and I don't like that. I don't think that's an easy thing to fix once you, like, lose it. So I've really already been putting a lot of time into how can I be a better friend to people? And it starts with the things that I consume. I am consuming much different information over the last several weeks months than I was previous to that. You know, I'm listening to older voices. I'm listening to people who seem to have different priorities in terms of relationships over business. I'm listening to and reading just different sources of information. Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:36:58]:
Arthur Brooks is one that I'm really enjoying. And I'm trying to be more proactive in reaching out and going first with family, friends. That's a big deal to me. I'm also really focused on my fitness. This is something that I made rapid improvement with for several months, lost a ton of weight. And you know once you lose the weight and you move into kind of a maintenance phase or a muscle building phase, the gains are less obvious. And so it's it really has to be a practice. It has to be a part of your routine that you appreciate and you do because you enjoy it and that's what makes it sustainable, not just the outcome.

Jay Clouse [00:37:36]:
So on the personal front, I have these 4 f's fitness, family, friends, and fans. And kind of in that order, I don't know if it's selfish to put fitness above family, but I have just noticed if I am not taking care of myself and at my best, I just can't take care of others. So having a minimum level of exercise and movement each day, I think, is really, really, really important for me to be my best, and that allows me to take care of my family, which creates the environment for me to be a better friend. And then the time that I can put into business, I wanna focus on fans of the brand, not of me. I use the word fans, but, like, I don't really think of it as fans. What I'm trying to say is people who actually care about me and the business and are being impacted by the business and not just anybody who I get in front of. You know, I had some negative interaction on x yesterday because somebody didn't like the text I use in, like, the the social share image on a link. He thought it was too marketer y and at first, I was like, I wanna fight this guy, but then I realized I don't care about this guy.

Jay Clouse [00:38:41]:
This isn't a customer. This isn't somebody who has invested in me. Why should I invest any more time in this person? So I really want to invest in the people who have already invested in me. It's so easy to get skewed towards I wanna reach more people. I wanna get in front of new strangers. I want that sweet dopamine hit of all the likes and whatever. And then you forget some of the people who have already raised their hands and said, hey, I want to be a customer, a client. I want to be someone closer to you in the brand.

Jay Clouse [00:39:13]:
I want your help more than other people. That's who you should be focusing on. So that's my 4 f's of my personal priorities, fitness, family, friends, and fans. On the business front, I really wanna keep focusing on this enterprise value goal. And really that's gonna come down to team building and process building. So leading up to paternity leave here, I've invested in a few outside resources to help me with this team building project. First, I hired a woman named Tara, and she has come in. She's a fractional operating partner for businesses, but we actually have capacity on the team.

Jay Clouse [00:39:52]:
I have a great assistant named Izzy, and my wife when she's back to full time, she's gonna be running a lot of the operations in the business. So I hired Tara to come in and say, hey, just kind of pretend you're going to be my operating partner. But then instead of running the operations yourself, like train my assistant because I've been so bad at delegating to people historically. What if I hire you to delegate on my behalf essentially to the team that I've already hired? So my assistant, Izzy, is taking on a bigger role, and she's perfectly well equipped to do it. It's really exciting. My audio engineer Adam is stepping into a producer role, which we haven't completely worked through exactly how that will look, but I'm really optimistic about it. I think having people who are stewards of different channels in the business can be really, really effective. The way Connor has been leading the YouTube channel, it's been just magical because he has a lot of autonomy.

Jay Clouse [00:40:48]:
He has a lot of creative freedom, but also he sees it as something that he can like own and make his canvas and move forward and that adds so much capacity to the business as a whole. I hired a law firm on a retainer. I don't have enough experience there yet to endorse or recommend, so I'll hold off for a future episode. But, you know, check-in with me a month or 2 months from now. So far, it's been a good experience. I also invested in a few short term projects. One of them is illustration. You might see some of the infographic sketchnote style illustrations that I published recently on my different channels.

Jay Clouse [00:41:27]:
That is Emily Mills. She's fantastic. She joined the lab recently, and I loved her work, and I wanted to try something in an illustration style that felt elevated. So she's been helping me there. I just hired a team to help me do some short form video animation. None of that has come out yet, so there's nothing to see. But if you follow me on Instagram, you'll see it. If you don't follow me on Instagram, find me at jklaus.

Jay Clouse [00:41:53]:
And I also hired a designer to extend our brand work. We did this big brand refresh early in the year. He is creating short form templates for Instagram, for LinkedIn. So if you've seen some of my text images there that are in the brand, that was a short term project. And we're also extending the brand into our YouTube graphics right now too. So there's a lot of investment happening right now to extend the brand, to create assets, to create systems that support our publishing, so that things are not so centered around me and ideally that creates some more enterprise value in the business as a whole. Again, no plan to sell this business, but I think it's a great way to build a business to assume that you should have enterprise value and sellability. Something I've been studying a lot here on the show and thinking about a lot is writing a book, and I've had a ton of conversations about this.

Jay Clouse [00:42:48]:
I've had a ton of different concepts, different ideas, and what I've come to believe is true regardless of all those ideas is that I want to have a book, but I don't think I've yet landed on the concept of the book that I want to write. And this is a huge important difference. Having a book and writing a book are 2 very separate things. And I think right now we're in this moment where a lot of folks in the creator space are in the same boat where they want to have a book. And so they sell a book idea and they get a book deal and now they have to write the book. But if you don't enjoy writing the book and you're not really pumped about making the best book that's been written on this thing, you will have a book, but it might not get the outcome that you actually want. I think it's really really important to start from a place of what is the activity that I want to do regardless of the outcome. It sounds so obvious and we hear all the time, but we have to repeat it all the time and remind ourselves.

Jay Clouse [00:43:43]:
What is the activity that I want to do regardless of the outcome? And that's something that I am revisiting in my approach is the question I'm asking myself right now. How does that question apply to Creator Science? Where are the curiosities and the 10% Edge, as Amy Porterfield would call it for what I do uniquely different in this creator space that I wake up and I'm excited about that mission and not about any particular outcome. You know, when you reach certain thresholds, when you reach certain goals, I told you guys earlier that we reach this cash flow level where as a family we're comfortable moving into family leave here and that removes a lot of urgency for oh I gotta do this thing because for a long time, a lot of my activity has been driven by I need to do these things so that I can get the business to a place so that we can have a family and we can live comfortably. And when you kinda get there, you have to ask yourself, well, now what is the thing that's getting me up in the morning? If it's not this urgency around this goal that we have, what is it? And I think it's easy to get stuck in like the day to day routine of creating stuff and it pushes you in this direction of chasing metrics chasing numbers and kind of playing the video game of being a creator. But I don't know if that's enough intrinsic motivation for me. I think I I really need to recenter on what is the impact I wanna have on people's lives. What is the 10% difference that I can bring to the table, And how can I craft that into a mission that I wake up excited to go to? Because, you know, sometimes you look at the task list and the project list, and it's, like, that makes sense. I should do those things, but I don't really want to.

Jay Clouse [00:45:28]:
I don't have energy around it. If you don't have a why behind it, you're just gonna kinda sit there. So for me, I've been thinking about this already. I think my 10% edge is community. It's connecting people. It's always been that way. I've always been good at connecting people and creating a space that people enjoy once they're in it, you know. So the lab is an obvious extension of that, but also potentially doing less of other people's events next year and doing more of my own events.

Jay Clouse [00:45:55]:
I think I could actually put on incredible events, whether it's like a large scale conference or whatever, or a smaller scale meetup just for the lab or something in between. I think I would be very good at putting together in person experiences as an extension of the Creator Science brand. So community is a 10% edge for me. Integrity is a 10 percent edge. There's so much willful lying by omission in the space at least. I am proud of the fact that in this goal of building enterprise value, I'm going to build a team and processes. I'm not going to pretend to be a solopreneur. I think there are a lot of people who pretend to be a solopreneur because they rationalize themselves.

Jay Clouse [00:46:36]:
Well, I don't have any other employees. That doesn't mean they don't have other people supporting them. And I just think it's it's kind of gross. I think it's dishonest. I think we're living in a time where competitive advantage is integrity. So that's important to me, not just because it is an advantage, but because it's naturally important to me, and I wanna lean into that wherever I can. And 3rd is accessibility. I mean that from the standpoint of I get feedback from people that they feel that I am more approachable and relatable than other people in the space, and so I want to maintain that.

Jay Clouse [00:47:14]:
So I think those three things are my edge, community integrity and accessibility, and I want to lean into that more. May even mean creating this second membership of Creator School, but that's gonna be a project for late in the year, maybe next year, depending on how being a parent is going. Okay. So that's one revision to my approach to just recap. Find my curiosity, my intrinsic motivation, focus on my 10% edge, serve those who have already raised their hand and said, I want your help. I mentioned this a little bit earlier, so I won't double down on this too much, but it's this idea that there are already people in your life and business who have identified themselves as more willing to do the hard work to invest in you, and you should just focus on serving those people. You know, sometimes I get so worried about do I have a post scheduled for tomorrow that I invest more time creating that post than making the lab more valuable. You know, there's a world where I do nothing else other than just make the paid products better than they are now.

Jay Clouse [00:48:22]:
And by serving the people who are already investing in you better, that's probably gonna turn into more customers anyway. It might not be as good a vanity metrics. It might not make you look as legit, but it might be a better business and certainly more raving fans. So I wanna really center those people who have already raised their hand and asked for help. I want to ignore competition. Sounds simple. Sounds easy. Sounds obvious, but it's really hard to do.

Jay Clouse [00:48:50]:
It's really hard to ignore what other people in your space are doing and try to reverse engineer it and try to do it. I actually feel like this next season of life, if I just focus on this intrinsic motivation and my 10% edge and do that based on, you know, my own curiosity, that's gonna lead to a much better outcome than seeing, oh, well, people posting notebook images are doing well right now. Maybe I should make a notebook image. That might be true. But is that me? Is that my 10% edge? No. And it's derivative, and it's not where I should be spending my mental time. On that note though, when I did see, okay, notebook images are doing well, or on Twitter these, like, screenshots of just text on a white background are doing well right now. I saw that, and my insight wasn't I should do that.

Jay Clouse [00:49:41]:
It was I should do my version of that. I think that's a good signal to follow when you see something and you say I should do my version of that, but that's only possible if you have your version. So I am so bullish on crafting, curating, protecting a style. You need to have your own style, your own voice. This brand project that we did for the Creator Science brand this year is so exciting because it's so in-depth and so specific. We have a style, we have an aesthetic, and we can play that forward in all of our content. You know, when I hire an illustrator to do these sketchnotes, I can say this is our brand guidelines. These are some things that should be true for this to fit within the Creator Science Universe.

Jay Clouse [00:50:27]:
So when you hire professionals to take brand guidelines of your style and do something and their abilities, you get these magical outcomes that are different from everybody else and yet when people see it, they think, oh, that's something from Jay. That's something from Creator Science because it's cohesive. So I'm so bullish on creating your own style and yes, having a great brand is a good start, but you might even just know some things that are true about you, your your voice, your aesthetic preferences that you should stick to. Don't just try to copy other people's style because you see their content working. You need to hone your own style because it is extensible into any platform that you do. So I'm leaning into my style. I'm focusing on being useful as opposed to just, like, copying formats that work. How do I actually serve my audience of people? How can I make everything I publish useful to the person who reads it? I wrote this essay a couple weeks ago called More Better New.

Jay Clouse [00:51:27]:
I'll link to that in the show notes as well if you wanna read that, but it's really been this great shift for me to focus on doing things that are working more. Just do more of the thing that is working. If you can't do more of the thing that is working, take the thing that is working and make it better. If you can't make anything better that is already working or you can't do more of what is it already working, that's when you make something new. We default to new all the time. New is so far down the road for me right now, more and better. That's what I'm focused on, doing more of what's working, taking what's working, and doing it better. And lastly, this is gonna be surprising to you, something that I've started to play around with.

Jay Clouse [00:52:08]:
I'm playing around chat GPT more. I'm doing it because what it's really good at is things like formatting. For example, earlier in this episode when I was telling you about the revenue streams this year from last year, What I did was I copied the text from my QuickBooks account, put it into this chat gpt, and said, can you make me a table that breaks down my revenue from January of June of last year, my revenue from January June of this year, and compares them side by side. Then it did. I said okay, great. Now can you add percentage of total income for each of these revenue streams? And it did. Okay great now can you add growth percentage last year to this year? It was awesome. I was thinking about putting this into a spreadsheet and doing it myself, but I'm not good at spreadsheets.

Jay Clouse [00:52:51]:
Such a time saver. Did it so well and today's post with Richard Vanderblom took the transcript for my podcast episode, put it into my creator science GPT, and said, hey, can you pull out 10 of the most remarkable compelling quotes from this conversation related to how to use LinkedIn well And it did, and I've kind of honed that a little bit. But the body of that post today was started from ChatGPT, and it's doing very well. So I'm starting to play around with it, playing around with it in a way that doesn't lose my style, my voice, my soul. But when it comes to hey, I made a great piece of long form content and I want to talk about it on like LinkedIn short form, but it feels like a lot of work to do that. Starting to find ways to make it easier is really great because what I could also do now that same output that came for LinkedIn, I could take each of those 10 insights, put them into my Figma template for, you know, a carousel, put it on Instagram or LinkedIn another day. It's just making repurposing of long form easier, and I've avoided it for a long time. But you know what? If it's coming from the long form work that I did, I don't feel bad about it.

Jay Clouse [00:54:06]:
So I'm playing around with it. I'll let you guys know how it progresses. I don't think we want average content, but if I can do the thing that I already want to do a little bit more quickly, I'm gonna do it. And so far, it's working. Okay. That is the end of this episode. Would love to hear what you think about this. If you like this episode, please let me know.

Jay Clouse [00:54:26]:
Tag me on whatever social media platform is most relevant to you. Twitter, threads, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever, I am there at jklaus. Let me know. If you really want to say thank you, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps a lot. Truly. Please take a minute. Thanks for listening.

Jay Clouse [00:54:43]:
I'll talk to you next week.