#259: My numbers from May 2025 [From The Lab]

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. I just finished recording my monthly retro for May. And what that looks like is once per month, at the beginning of the month, I look at all my KPIs for the month before I take notes on what went well, what concerns do I have and what changed am I gonna make moving forward because of these insights. I record this as a 30ish minute video and I put it in the lab. And all members of the lab have access to this basic standard vip. All membership tiers have access to these monthly retros. And it's a very transparent look behind the scenes at my numbers.

Jay Clouse [00:00:50]:
I'm constantly sharing my screen so you see my actual dashboard just to confirm this stuff. And it's really meant to be the type of content I want to get more of myself. I love getting behind the scenes information about how people are running their businesses, what decisions they're making and why. And this has been a really valuable reflection experience for me every month as well. So I've been doing this Since I think November 2022, like a very long time. And if you join the lab, you can get access to all of these going back, if you really want to watch these going back. But more importantly, I think it helps you to see what I'm thinking, what's changing. It's very much in touch with what's going on in the world and landscape and I think it is helpful.

Jay Clouse [00:01:33]:
So what I wanted to do here this week is actually just share the audio from my May Retro so you get a sense for what that is like. And if you enjoy it, you should consider joining us in the lab. Again, these retros are available to anybody, regardless of membership tier. If you want to start in the basic tier, I think that's a great place for you to start. And you'll get these every month. On top of all of my courses, all of my workshops, Creator hq. A bunch of these workshops, by the way, aren't even available publicly. It's workshops that we bring folks into the community community to record.

Jay Clouse [00:02:00]:
So I think it's a screaming bargain. I think you should consider it. You can learn more@creatorscience.com lab there's also a link in the show notes. We would love to have you in there. But now let's get into my May Retro. Hello. It is the beginning of June, which means it's time for my May Retro. I'm recording this about 24 hours before flying to Boise for the lab IRL, our first in person event for the community And I'm really excited.

Jay Clouse [00:02:31]:
Mal and I are battling a little bit of the end of a cold or a virus or something. So we're, we're drinking lots of fluids, we're drinking lots of tea, we're trying to relax. But everything is on its tracks and ready to go. And I think we have one heck of an event planned. But before I take the whole week away in Moise with the group here and also craft and commerce, I wanted to record my retrospect and even share this on the podcast feed this month because I think this gives a good look at what part of the lab experience is like. And I'm trying to do a better job of talking about what we're doing here. So I'm gonna share this on the podcast feed this month. Let's start with my goals for the month here.

Jay Clouse [00:03:09]:
We'll look over here in notion. Pretty good month of goals it was. I pared back my goals last month because I knew most of my energy would be directed towards getting everything ready for the lab IRL and also working towards the book proposal. And so I pared things back, hit my revenue goal of $70,000 or more in top line revenue. I did not think about the newsletter format mostly because I forgot month after month, something that I'm reminded with goals is I need a better system for keeping these goals in front of me throughout the month. So that I remember. Oh yeah, that's a priority, I said. This month I finished prep, I kept up with my proposal homework.

Jay Clouse [00:03:45]:
I averaged more than 8,000 steps per day. Did not get 8 strength workouts. I have been prioritizing just steps above all, but really I should be getting more strength workouts. So not the best month of goals, but pretty good. We'll look over at the KPI dashboard here. Numbers in a lot of ways looked good this month. Revenue was at $72,000, which is our third highest month of the five. Highest month this year was $79,000 followed by $75,000.

Jay Clouse [00:04:13]:
This is 72, but it was up over last month's revenue of 56. Expenses were down just a little bit. Still pretty high. We're investing a lot over here in the team and content. $44,000 in expenses last month down from 45. Net income was up then from 11,000 to 28,000 subscribers. Not a huge uptick. I actually need to clean my subscribers.

Jay Clouse [00:04:36]:
We're sitting at about 64,000 right now, but I think I could probably clean somewhere between 8 to 10,000 of those. If I'm honest. I'M wondering if I do that before or after I share information about my email list and my book proposal. Just to be totally honest, it's like, well, higher number is probably something that a traditional publisher would feel good about. Absent of that book proposal, I would probably remove 8 to 10,000 subscribers from that list for being disengaged. So I'll do that here in the near future. Good month of follower growth, and I'm not sure what to attribute that to, but we'll look into that deeper here. Oh, it's YouTube.

Jay Clouse [00:05:09]:
Good month. On the YouTube front, we published one video. It was our Caleb Raulston video, and it's doing very, very well. I'll show a graph of how that has been actually picking up speed several weeks after release. Podcast consumption hours were up quite a bit this month, and a lot of that is driven by Spotify. Posting video to Spotify is a little bit of a growth hack, it seems if the video does pretty well, we'll dig into that as well and verified listeners up there for as well. Oh, okay. Month of Digital Products Creator HQ is kind of pacing around a thousand dollars a month.

Jay Clouse [00:05:41]:
Courses were up this month, best month, of course, sales this month. And a lot of that I think is due to the work I'm doing with Jason Resnick in my email automation setups, because we're basically trying to make it more obvious more often what the best purchase for a subscriber is and encourage them to take the leap. And so we've been doing some, some fun stuff in terms of dynamic footers and dynamic call outs based on what that subscriber is most well suited for. And that's showing some, showing some promise. So I'm very excited about that. Affiliates was an okay month. $4,000 in affiliate sales kind of on par with most of the rest of the year. Memberships were actually our second lowest month of memberships.

Jay Clouse [00:06:22]:
So we would have had a pretty good month of revenue or like a high month of revenue this month if memberships were a little bit higher. We had a little bit of churn this month, which typically May is an okay month in terms of revenue because, you know, annual membership, a lot of renewals. In May we had a handful of folks choose not to renew. Membership revenue was a little bit down at 39,000 this month and then services at $12,000. I haven't had a month of services at that much since. Gosh, I'm scrolling back now through several years. That's the highest month of services since 2022. No, maybe the highest Month ever.

Jay Clouse [00:06:59]:
And here's the. Here's the kicker. 10,000 of that was one speaking gig. 2,000 of that was a consulting contract. 10,000 was a speaking gig. I'm not really seeking out speaking gigs, but I did have another opportunity come to me this week that might be a $25,000 speaking arrangement in January of next year. So we'll see. I've been pretty proactive in saying no to speaking opportunities because my unpopular opinion is that it's actually an expensive use of your time and a big distraction.

Jay Clouse [00:07:25]:
But if they pay well, then that's a different story. LinkedIn royalties were on par with typical second highest month of sponsorship total, which I can attribute to. We've been pushing the newsletter a little bit more. We've been proactively reaching out to past sponsors of the newsletter and saying we have some availability. Do you want this? And my assistant Izzy has been really helpful in driving the sponsorship bus because it's something I'm not constantly thinking about. Fifteen new members in the community this month. That's the second highest of the year. Ten of those were on the basic Tier 3 standard, and two VIP retention this month was at 97%.

Jay Clouse [00:08:02]:
The annoying thing about Stripe is that they show retention in a monthly figure even though this is an annual membership. So 97% retention means 2.74% churn. And if you make that over the course of the year, that's about 33%, which is on par with what we've seen year over year. Two out of every three members tend to renew. So it's pretty much on par. But following a month of very high retention, it was kind of a bummer to see folks move their way out of the community. We did break $40,000 in estimated MRR this month, and ARR is up to $483,000, we'll call it. So not as high of a month of revenue growth.

Jay Clouse [00:08:46]:
You can see here. The last three months have been over 3% revenue growth. This was just under 2%. And also, interestingly, you can see that if you look at page views for the lab, this is the lowest month of page views to the lab. And as a result, we had our lowest month of applications, even though almost all of them were qualified. So this is something that I've been tracking because every month when I do this, it reminds me if I want more members in the community, I need to talk about it more so that more people visit the sales page so that more people apply and ultimately more folks join the community. So you'll See, in my goals this month, it's time to do a dedicated campaign for the lab and we'll talk about that here in a little bit. Decent month on X.

Jay Clouse [00:09:26]:
Probably the highest month of growth on X I've had in a while because somebody else took our video with Caleb Raulston, who was a strategist behind Gary Vee and Alex Hermosi, made a thread out of it. That thread went viral, tagged me. So I got a good boost from somebody else using my content, which is a good reminder that I should make more short form content around my long form content because obviously that the format of that specifically he took, it was a thread on X and each tweet in the thread had a couple like two to three minute exchanges from the video and then a summary in the body of the text to show what that exchange was about. And yeah, that did really, really well for him, for me, for Caleb, which was great. LinkedIn growth was about the same. 650 new followers Instagram, nothing to write home about. Threads, nothing to write home about. TikTok, nothing to write home about.

Jay Clouse [00:10:15]:
Because this month, you know, I had no expectation or goal for how often I'm posting on social media. I've been talking about this for a couple of weeks. But social media is kind of a boom or bust game right now. And if you want to go boom, then you need to put a lot of effort into making the post boom worthy, otherwise it's probably going to bust. And when I think about the effort that I want to put into things in the business right now, it's not into social media. So it's been kind of a as it comes for me. At the same time, we're putting more effort into YouTube and we had our second best month of new subscribers on YouTube this month. 3200 new subscribers on YouTube, which is about two and a half percent growth.

Jay Clouse [00:10:53]:
And we only published one video. That's a video with Caleb Ralston. It's doing really well and we've been playing around with the packaging a little bit more. You can see here it's actually on kind of a resurgence right now. For folks who are just listening to this, I'm sharing my YouTube studio look. In the first 24 hours of this video being published, we had a 6% click through rate which is actually high for our channel. I would love to get closer to like 8%. That's what our Jenny Hoyos video was doing.

Jay Clouse [00:11:18]:
So we had a 6% CTR in the first 24 hours. That dropped down to 515-444-442-4042. So CTR dropped pretty quickly on that video and it limited its growth even though it has a higher average view duration than most of our videos. We've been doing AB testing with our thumbnails, tried a new variant of our original winning thumbnail, and now our CTR over the last several days has been like 663-6465, 626-16-37469. So our CTR is going up and we are seeing that this video is now catching new wind, which is really exciting because it feels like this video has already been Fairly successful for us. 71,000 views. But I could see this doubling over the next week or two, which is just great news. Email, not much to write home about.

Jay Clouse [00:12:10]:
Website traffic was down and then podcast podcast consumption was up a little bit because of that video with Caleb. So if we look at our Spotify for Podcasters account here, we can see that this video had 2300 plays, which is higher than most of my episodes here. And this is Spotify specifically. So we can see here that this video is doing very well, relatively speaking. And it's because I think it is a Spotify video and Spotify is playing with a bunch of places where they can surface video inside the Spotify app. So I think a lot of this is new audience discovery. 812 people who discovered the podcast from Spotify and that's really encouraging. It makes me want to do more video on Spotify.

Jay Clouse [00:12:58]:
What we don't know is how many of those people then hit follow and then listen to a next episode. We just don't really have that number. But it was a. It was a good month of podcast growth despite releasing only four episodes. Typically we release five or six. I haven't been as good about my voice memo episodes lately because again, just resource allocation on the personal life side, good number of steps per day, which is a win. But that is the numbers. So let's dig into some of the takeaways, some of the good things that happened, some of the concerns and things unchanging because of it.

Jay Clouse [00:13:30]:
So good things that happened. Great month of revenue. Highest speaking gig ever. I think our book proposal is about 60% done for the first draft. Our goal is to have a first version that is ready to share with my prospective agent on the 1st of July. And candidly, the book is about trust and a highly practical here's what the psychology says about actions you can take that earn trust. I've got to figure out the sexiest packaging of that there are books on trust that exists, but they're all so theoretical and up in the air. I really wanted to say, okay, here is what the psychology and what the research says about earning trust.

Jay Clouse [00:14:09]:
Now let's ground that in specific behavior changes and ways of acting and communicating that you can make that are subtle, easy to do, but over time really stack up into earning high levels of trust with people around you. That is the gist of the book. I'm really excited about it. I'm really happy with the structure we've put in place. And like I said, we're about 60% through the proposal, I think, and feeling good about that. We've had 40 people register and get a ticket for the lab. IRL excited to see everybody here this week. I think we're gonna have a really, really good time.

Jay Clouse [00:14:41]:
Mal has done a fantastic job of planning for this. And we're actually bringing my mother along on the trip because we realized bringing the baby on the trip meant that in the evenings, Mal was going to have to stay at the hotel with the baby and miss a lot of stuff that she planned. So bringing my mother along, she's going to babysit so that Mal can partake in everything that we have planned. Just by virtue of talking about the fact that I'm writing a book proposal. I've gotten a lot of inbound from very cool, very legitimate, very nice and helpful people about the book, which is kind of overwhelming. And I don't know how to receive or action all of it. Because a lot of it is like, let me introduce to this person or this person. Let's do this.

Jay Clouse [00:15:21]:
And I can't have too many cooks in the kitchen at any given time. I gotta make sure that I have high conviction, feel really good about the direction this is going. But I've had a lot of conversations now around it, and it's just been so fun, so great. Really feel supported and loved, which is awesome. After a quick break, we'll be right back to my May Retro. And now the rest of my May Retro. We have a big month of travel this month. I'm counting that as a good thing.

Jay Clouse [00:15:50]:
On the life side, we have this Boise trip, obviously, but then in two weeks, I'm doing a family vacation with my parents, my older sisters, my sister's kids. So we've never really done this as a family. And I think that's very, very exciting. I think it's going to be very, very fun. And our basement is done. Obviously this studio has been done for a little bit, but all the aspects of the basement now, the wet bar, the countertops, the built in library stuff, all of that is done and we just, we just love it. What are the concerns that I have in the business right now? I shared this on LinkedIn a couple days ago and it got a really big response. I have been feeling very uncomfy over the last couple of weeks and really like it's a confidence thing.

Jay Clouse [00:16:34]:
Day to day I've just felt less confident than I have in months or years past. And I think what that layers back to is that confidence in my mind comes from evidence. When you collect evidence that you are capable and good at something, then it's easier to be confident. And with the book proposal, with this in person event, I don't have any direct evidence that it's good yet. And so these are big projects, big investments of time and resources and the return is uncertain, the quality is uncertain, the response is uncertain. So I'm just in the space of I think this is good, but I'm really kind of in it and isolated in it. I don't have any external real feedback yet. And so it just makes me nervous.

Jay Clouse [00:17:25]:
And that nervousness has crept in and it's just been this lack of confidence that's been really uncomfortable and feeling that lack of confidence, it's hard to just create content in my typical day to day, week to week because I don't feel like somebody that you should listen to. When I'm not feeling confident, it's. It's difficult. Now I do have plenty of evidence that I've done hard things before. I used to organize different types of events. So I try to pull on that and I try to look at what we've done and feel like okay, even just as an event attendee, I can see how this is going to be different in a really good way. I think it's going to be really good. But a book in particular, it's like I hope people are as into this as I am and frankly I hope that readers are as into it.

Jay Clouse [00:18:07]:
I have this sense that the timing, the moment for this book is right. I think we've never had less trust in institution, in people. I just think the public trust has really been poisoned and we're coming around to the idea that okay, we've been all optimizing for getting more attention. Attention is nothing without trust. It's kind of worthless without trust. And a lot of people will say trust is like the currency, trust is what's important. But no one backs it up with here's what you should do because of that. And so what I'm really trying to do is each chapter of the book is a discrete action that will help you build trust.

Jay Clouse [00:18:43]:
And I think that's such a unique value proposition. I've read basically all the books out there on trust that I can find so far and there are some through lines. But what's conspicuously missing is any type of concrete grounding direction on how you can actually earn trust. We definitely went over budget on the event. We were doing pretty good until I decided that I wanted to hire a videographer, which was not in our projections for what we should charge for the ticket prices that I wanted to bring my mom. The hotel was actually pretty close to being sold out on rooms when I made that decision, which meant that we had to spring for really nice room because that was what was available and that was very expensive. So we definitely went over budget on the event, which puts more pressure on. This needs to be something people really enjoy.

Jay Clouse [00:19:24]:
Otherwise I'm not going to want to do this again. But I think, I think we will. I think I'll really enjoy it. I think folks there are going to really enjoy it. And you know, the thing that we're really trying to do with this event is not stick you in a room and have you sit and like learn the whole time. Because there are things that being offline is particularly well suited for and there are things that being offline is not well suited for. Think actually knowledge transfer is not what you should be doing offline. Because if somebody produces a really high quality video that you can watch at 1 and a half or 2x speed, that's a much more efficient use of your time.

Jay Clouse [00:19:55]:
And you can do it on your own time. You don't have to do that in person. So what we've been really trying to do, we have three fireside chats with special guests that will not be recorded that I'm hoping goes a little bit off script and gets really candid. It's all about serendipity and creating conversations between folks that are there and moving our bodies, doing things in person. We have two group activities which I've shared with the whole group now, so I'll share here. On day one, we are doing a group escape room. On day two, we're doing this like axe throwing, ping pong games thing and then we have dinners planned each night in private rooms. It's all about conversation, all about connecting.

Jay Clouse [00:20:31]:
I think that's going to be really, really fun. I have a concern about the packaging of the book Can I talk about earning trust in a way that is compelling and interesting and makes people want to pick it up? I think a lot of people make the assumption that they understand trust, that they are trustworthy. And so I really need to get the right hook to say this is important and you should prioritize earning trust as a skill that you can develop. And here's how to do it. Because guess what? You're probably not as trustworthy as you think that you are. And even if you are relatively trustworthy, this will certainly help you build even more uncommon trust. So got to get the packaging on that right. But I think there's a lot of promise there.

Jay Clouse [00:21:12]:
I said a good thing on the life front is that we have a full month of traveling. That's also a concern on the business front that we have a full month of traveling, fitting in, recording, and getting ahead of content in such a way that that's not a problem, that I'm traveling most of the month. That is something that we need to get right. I don't know why I put this in concerns. Episode with Caleb crushed is a good thing. Our video pipeline right now is lagging behind. We only published one video in May. We really need to publish at least two videos per month.

Jay Clouse [00:21:39]:
And right now we're basically a full month behind on delivery for one of our sponsors. And it's challenging. It's challenging. We haven't found, like a dedicated editor that we truly want to throw all our weight behind yet. We've been testing and working with several different editors, and a lot of times the work product is good, but the pace and reliability and communication is kind of slow, though. We haven't gotten any of the efficiencies that come with having a shared language and working with people over a long period of time. Each one of these editors has had to be onboarded for the first time. And so it's difficult to get feed through this process because we're teaching, we're communicating, and for them it's the first time stepping through this.

Jay Clouse [00:22:20]:
So it's just been slow and it's so frustrating. So frustrating. But we're working through it. The work product itself has gotten better. Maybe I'm just saying that because the last video was done really well, but our next videos are with Colin and Samir. I actually just got a frame link to review the episode of Colin and Samir. We have my video about the studio rebuild coming out next month. So we have good stuff in the pipeline.

Jay Clouse [00:22:44]:
It's just slow and on the lifefront things that are concerning. Mal has gotten really into Vanderpump rules as a show and it's on in the house all the time and it's like it's brain rot. Interesting, but also it's such a slow show. They'll linger on the same drama for so long. It's like enjoyable, but it's also not really great. Okay. Changes and decisions I'm making based on all of this. I really want to pull more resources into the lab as part of the membership.

Jay Clouse [00:23:12]:
I'm talking things like more swipe file resources, more like plug and play type. This will save you time. I had a member reach out and said, I just made this really great resource to help people connect their content to actual sales of their product. And I said, okay, let's do it. Because I think if we can pool together our resources as a community and then I can go out to like third party brands and sponsors and say, can you make something available for us? Discount or some sort of unique perk that makes the membership more and more valuable. And again, it also de centers me from it, which I think we need. I think when the perception of the lab is that it's Jay's community that limits who would want to join to people who look up to me. And that's not really what I want.

Jay Clouse [00:23:56]:
Like, I want this to be a great community for creators at any size and scale. And I don't want to be the limiting factor based on my reputation, my success. I want to pull people in at all different, you know, scales above our application threshold and make that a great experience for them. And I think to do that, I need to create a space where it's much more clearly about these people joining and sharing and connecting with each other. And I'm facilitating this space, sure. But it's not about learning from me every step of the way. So to continue that thought forward, it's really about working to grow the communities that we have. Geographic and subject area expertise, density.

Jay Clouse [00:24:39]:
Because I really want to lean into this offline IRL stuff. And I've been saying this for a while. To do offline IRL really well, we need to have geographic density and that just means more members. And you know, we've got these mastermind groups that are going now, which seems to be a really positive experience for those groups so far. And so now that we've kind of cracked that structural problem, I think having a larger overall group and enabling those folks to connect in small groups solves some of our scale restraints. Not that I want to go from like 200 members to 2000 overnight by any means. But I do think that we can grow a lot more now that we figured out small groups in a really compelling way. I'm going to start exploring a new corporate structure for the business because I think it's time for me to start hiring people on W2, which will change our benefits packages.

Jay Clouse [00:25:33]:
Mal and I have been on solo 401k. I think it's time to explore W2s. Explore like company healthcare. I also need to think about if the book has interest from the market. Does that ip, does that book deal live inside of this corporate structure as it is today? Or is that IP that is owned by a holding company above this or a separate company kind of parallel to this? I need to think about that at this point. So I'm exploring corporate structures in that way. I'm gonna keep showing up as my full human sensitive self on social media because obviously people resonate with that and so whatever, I'll lean into it and show you how insecure I am. I'm hiring Kat Mulvihill to help me improve Creator hq.

Jay Clouse [00:26:17]:
Make some upgrades on that tool based on things that I wanna do. So we're gonna solve it for our company first, then we'll bake it into the template, then we'll teach you how to add it to your template if you're using Creator hq. I'm going to run a dedicated marketing campaign for the lab this month. I think it's time we see actually in the KPIs that the basic membership is growing faster than standard in vip, which makes a lot of sense because when I look at the numbers for my audience, only about 13 to 20% of folks who subscribe are eligible for Standard and VIP. So, you know, if there are four Basic members to every one Standard VIP member in my audience, it makes sense that that tier is growing faster and I might lean into that. I think I'm just going to keep making the basic experience better and better and better. Build the pathway to say, we're going to help you get to this $10,000 per mark or per month mark, and then upgrade to Standard and vip, where you're surrounded by folks who are doing this at an even higher level. But it's time to run a dedicated marketing campaign for that.

Jay Clouse [00:27:14]:
Mal and I are exploring options for a nanny to help us out. It's been so great having her help on this event and it's such a reminder that when she is able to make time to help in the business, it does so much and she's been primary caretaker for the baby since she was born and really doing that, plus taking care of the home. She doesn't have a ton of time to put towards the business and she's so talented, she can do so much. So we want to look at this as an option. Not saying we will go that direction, but it's something we're exploring. We've been cutting down on our doordash consumption because when I look at our bills, we are spending way too much money on delivery food and that's an easy way to claw some of that back. Okay, goals for next month. So on the profit and loss side, trying to continue the $70,000 per month and top line revenue number, it's probably going to be a little bit of a stretch in June depending on how well craft and commerce goes.

Jay Clouse [00:28:05]:
In terms of conversations I have with folks inviting them to join the community, I'm going to try to be proactive and let people know, hey, you're a great fit for the lab. You should join us. And if I'm successful in doing that then we might have a pretty good month. I want to close the books on the lab IRL to see exactly what were the costs so that moving forward I can have a better projection of the ticket price. What needs to happen to break even on that? I want to publish our Colin and Samir and studio tour videos, turn in our book proposal draft number one to my agent, run this marketing campaign for the lab and identify a lawyer to talk about corporate structure outside of that on the Lifefront, I'm trying to continue getting 8,000 steps per day, get down below 190 pounds again and enjoy the lab IRL. Enjoy the trip to Traverse City with my family, generally decompress, recharge a little bit after a couple months of doing hard things. Okay, that is the update for May. Hope this was insightful and helpful to you in some way.

Jay Clouse [00:29:01]:
If you're listening to this on the podcast feed, would love for you to consider joining us in the lab on any of the tiers, depending on what you are eligible for. Just go to creatorscience.com lab to learn more and join the basic tier or apply for the standard in vip. I do these every single month. Give you a look behind the scenes. If you're listening to this in audio, you don't know that I'm sharing my screen this whole time. Giving you a look into my dashboards, my metrics is something that a lot of folks say is one of their favorite parts of membership. Would love to have you in here experiencing it with us. Thanks for watching, and I'll talk to you next month.