#205: How I’d Start Today (If Creator Science Didn’t Exist)

Jay Clouse [00:00:13]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. I hope you are doing well. I'm excited to sit down and record this episode for you. I've got my baby monitor pulled up watching the baby girl try to take a nap. So we'll see how this goes. We'll see how long she sleeps and how long I'm able to go here. But I'm excited to create this episode inspired by 2 questions from listeners of the show.

Jay Clouse [00:00:38]:
1 is Jerica Long and the other is Cody Duncan. Jerica asked me if you were starting your business now, what are 3 things you would do and 3 things that you wouldn't do? And Cody asked me if you had to completely shut down Creator Science and all of your content channels, how would you go about finding a meaningful and fulfilling way to live your life and make a living? So I'm going to combine those 2 questions into the inspiration for this episode and basically tell you how I would start over today if creator science didn't exist in the first place? We're going to assume that I have the knowledge I do now. We're not going to put me back into the shoes that I was 7 years ago. I didn't have any of the knowledge of the Creator stuff. But if I were starting over today and building Creator Science was not an option or Creator Science did not exist, what would I do? That is what I seek to share with you here today. Now I've already thought through this. I've outlined basically 8 steps that I would go through. So I'm gonna go through those in order and I'm going to try to call out the number of the step that that is.

Jay Clouse [00:01:41]:
You can keep me accountable here to 8 different steps. And step 1 is I would decide what needs this business needs to cover for me. What needs is this business fulfilling? I know it seems kind of weird, but if we think about the different needs you have as a human, some of them are creative fulfillment, financial needs, emotional needs, having fun. I think a lot of times creators expect that their work as a creator needs to fulfill all of their needs, which is a lot of pressure to put on anything. It's a lot of pressure to put on a romantic partner. It's a lot of pressure to put on your work. It's a lot of pressure to put on anything in your life to expect it to fulfill all of your needs. And so you should at least rank stack these and say what needs does the business need to cover for me? Because if you are saying, yes, the biggest need this has to cover for me is my financial need, that is going to lead to different decisions that you will make down the line, different trade offs than if you said, actually, this just needs to serve as creative fulfillment for me because creative fulfillment is going to, again, lead to different decisions that you would make than if you have financial needs.

Jay Clouse [00:02:57]:
So ask yourself, basically, does this business need to serve financial needs for me? And if yes, does it also need to fulfill creative fulfillment? Because sometimes these things are a little bit at odds and you can cover your financial needs or your creative fulfillment needs outside of the business. You know, this is just one element, one aspect of your life. So first and foremost, what is the primary objective of this business? Is it financial? Is it creative? Because that's going to come up over time when you have to make certain decisions. For the most part, I'm probably going to assume that for listeners of this show and that question does have a strong financial component. We are hoping that this business serves to be a financial engine for our life and that informs a lot of the next steps that I'm going to share with you And really, I'm just calling again that step out because it's important to acknowledge that you don't have to have all of your needs fulfilled by the business. I see this come up when people have built a successful financial engine and then they start feeling creatively bored and they wonder, should I shut this business down and do something else? Because they think that business needs to serve all of their needs. And even if you had something, a new business, a new idea that could be more creatively fulfilling, to put financial pressure on that thing now is gonna be hard. So if this business is financially oriented, which it probably is for most people listening to this, then there will be times when you have to recognize that sometimes what is best for the business may not be best for your creative fulfillment in this moment.

Jay Clouse [00:04:29]:
And that might be a trade off that you should make in the immediate term so that it can serve its primary objective, which is to give you financial stability. Okay. I'm moving on to step number 2, which is arguably the most important step. It's, I think, definitely the most overlooked step and maybe also the hardest step and I'm calling that Premise Design. Now I think part of the problem is people don't understand what the word premise means. Let me try to explain premise in a really simple way. If you had a friend come up to you and they said, hey, have you seen this movie? Maybe they asked, like, have you seen the newest Harry Potter movie? I'm still living, like, 12 years ago, apparently. Have you seen the latest Harry Potter movie? If you haven't, your answer your response is often no.

Jay Clouse [00:05:17]:
What is it about? You know, it could be same with a book. Have you read this book? No. What is it about? Have you listened to this podcast? No. What is it about? The answer to the question what is it about is the premise of that thing, of that movie, of that book, of that podcast, of the work that you do. If somebody asks what is that about, the answer to that is your premise. Now a premise should be easy to explain because if I'm asking you what is it about and you can't respond to me in a coherent simple way for me to both understand to grasp it and to be compelled to check it out, then that word-of-mouth is going to be a failure. Your premise needs to be unique and compelling. If someone says it's about, you know, personal finance, that is not necessarily unique.

Jay Clouse [00:06:03]:
It might be compelling. I might have problems with personal finance. But why listen to you versus Torrey Dunlap or Dave Ramsey or financial independence people? It needs to be unique and compelling. If you are unique but not compelling, then we might say that's interesting but not follow through and actually check it out. So the most important thing for you to do here is figure out how do I explain the premise of my business in a way that is both unique and compelling. It's something people want and it's unique to me how I do it. Now, I didn't really do this in the beginning. This is especially important when you're operating in a competitive market because if you're in a competitive space, it's going to be really hard to be unique.

Jay Clouse [00:06:49]:
Even the space that I operate in, it's basically online business. Online business is so competitive. So what's my unique premise? I'm still trying to figure out how to explain this in a short way. But what people tell me they like about my business is it really has this combination of art and science. You know, it's taking a creative space and applying a sense of rigor and analysis to it that helps people understand and move forward. It's pretty innate in the name even. Creator Science that has this left brain, right brain piece of the name. So it's intuitive in a way what makes the name different.

Jay Clouse [00:07:30]:
But if someone were to say, hey, do you listen to the Creator Science Podcast? And someone says, no. What's it about? I hope they have a compelling answer to that. Something like, it's kind of this, like, best friend as a creator to give you an edge, you know, or it's like this analytical view of how to succeed as a creator. Maybe they threw the word experiment or experimentation in there. You know, in the lab, one of the core value propositions that I tried to lean on there is this is a place for creators to experiment and learn together. Experiment ties into the motif of science. It's unique. It's differentiated.

Jay Clouse [00:08:03]:
But the online business space, even the creator space, which I would say is a subset of the online business space, is competitive. And so premise design is really where the biggest leverage is for you to figure out what is unique about your creator business that people can explain, can be an advocate for. They feel like this is a different point of view than I typically hear. It needs to be unique and compelling. Okay. This is tough stuff. I would say the person that talks about this the best is my friend Jay Acunzo. He actually consults with people on this because he's realized there are a lot of really smart talented people who are brilliant and unique, but they don't tell that story in a compelling or clear way.

Jay Clouse [00:08:48]:
So if I were starting over this is like kind of 80 20 of where I would spend a lot of time thinking planning premise design and it's important as you're thinking about your premise that you are filtering for ideas, concepts, you know, this green pasture that you're going to play in. It needs to be something that you are basically endlessly curious about, something with a lot of potential for you to learn. You know, there's a lot of space. Sometimes people choose something that's unique and compelling, but it's kind of a small idea, like a small pool to play in and you kind of run out of things to explore. You get to a point where you've kind of said what you need to say. You've learned what you need to learn. There's not a whole lot learned that you can learn about it. If you can't learn more about something, you're not going to be inherently curious.

Jay Clouse [00:09:37]:
Your content is going to suffer because it's not going to be unique and interesting because you have lost interest in the thing. So it needs to be something you're interested in that has a high ceiling for learning that is something you can talk about in a unique and compelling way. Layer onto that, you probably want this to have a pretty large market either by the number of people that care about this or the budget size of the people who care about this. You know, do you have a lot of people you can serve? The people that you serve, do they have a lot of budget they can allocate towards this? Because you can see if that number is small either in the number of people you can serve or the amount of money in the space, it's gonna be tough to build a meaningfully large business here. And if you can't build a meaningfully large business, then you're going to get frustrated at some point. Oops. Baby is crying. Stand by.

Jay Clouse [00:10:29]:
Okay. It was just a little bit of gas. Crisis averted. Baby is back to sleep. What I was saying is if you don't have a large enough market, you might get to a point where you feel like you have reached as many people as you can reach and the business is not as large as you would like it to be. And that is frustrating because it feels a little bit outside of your control because you've chosen a market that is smaller. Now, this is also why a lot of times people will broaden out as they get bigger. There's a good argument you made to say let's pick something narrow that does not have a lot of competition so I can more easily be differentiated in my compelling premise.

Jay Clouse [00:11:06]:
And then once I really saturate that market, I can expand into nearby similar markets. I don't know that there is a perfect always correct answer as to should you start in a narrow niche and expand or think about a larger, more broad niche and zoom in over time. I do think over time, you want to be able to serve a large audience of people if you want to serve a large audience of people. And so I personally believe if that is true, if you know that you want to impact and serve a large number of people, you should think about the market size before you start. Again, this is me saying how I start today with the knowledge that I have now. Now that I have that knowledge, that is what I would do if I were starting over. Now again, market size could be a function of the number of people in the market or how much money is in that space. You might not have a ton of customers, but if you're solving a very valuable problem to a small number of customers, that can be a large business.

Jay Clouse [00:12:08]:
And it depends on what type of business, what style of business do you want. Do you want to serve a lot of people? Do you want to serve a small number of people? Are you optimizing for how large the business can be? These are questions you should answer and make sure that the premise you design is serving a market that fits those design constraints that you have. So that was step number 2, premise design. Again, I think this is kind of the 80 20 of where you should be focusing your time. There's a huge amount of leverage in choosing a good long term high potential premise. The 3rd step that I would take if I were starting over today is building for the future. Thinking about what future outcome do I want with this business. And for me, that would be choosing a company name rather than building explicitly a personal brand.

Jay Clouse [00:13:02]:
I'm not saying personal brands are not valuable. I am saying that personal brands are difficult to sell in the future. They're less valuable to other third parties than they are to you. And now that I'm a father, what I've come to notice over just the last 3 weeks is I am more and more interested in creating assets that are long term valuable, whether they're valuable to me or valuable to 3rd parties. And that looks like creating enterprise value. If you've listened to my recent episode with Nathan Barry, I believe it was episode number 200 of his podcast. The back third of that episode is Nathan and I talking about how creators can build businesses that are more optimized for enterprise value. That basically means there's value in the business that you're building that is valuable not just to you.

Jay Clouse [00:13:56]:
The value is actually within the enterprise, and that enterprise can be valuable to third parties. It means that it's not so dependent on you as an individual. And you can understand why a business that is centered around your name is inherently more valuable to you than a third party and why that would make it more difficult to sell or exit at some point in the future. So personally, I'm an advocate for building a third party brand name or a company name and operating underneath that rather than your name. You know, it's a difference between Creator Science and Jay Clouse. Yes. In the immediate term, people will likely synonymize the 2. You know, I think a lot of people really associate creator science with me and my name because I haven't done things like hiring others that can be a name, face, voice underneath creator signs.

Jay Clouse [00:14:51]:
We'll talk about that here more. But I would be looking in the future if I were to start over to build something with enterprise value that can be valuable to a third party that does not have this key man risk of me or at least see a future where I can build the business in such a way that there is not this key man risk. Now part of building for the future is also looking at what season of life are you in personally and how much time can you dedicate to this business? Because if I were starting over in my early twenties, I would work my butt off. I would go as hard as possible because as you get older, you have more obligations, more commitments, and less time. It happens to most people. You can, of course, design your life to have that not be the case. But as I got older, I found my partner. We got married.

Jay Clouse [00:15:45]:
We got a house. We got dogs. We have child now. All things that I love and that I want in my life, that's what I was building for, but there's less time available. Okay. So I'm building this in a season of life where I don't have those commitments, I'm working as hard as I can putting all of my time into this thing to create as much enterprise value as quickly as possible before you take on more obligations and commitments. If you're in a season of life where you already have commitments that are taking up a lot of time, then I think you need to design the business to fit within the routines and the time that you have. And you need to create some intentional margin on your time.

Jay Clouse [00:16:25]:
You know, our daughter is 3 weeks old now. Before she was born, I did not maintain much margin of time within my day. And so now that we're caring for her and spending as much time with her as possible, there are fewer pockets of time and that's taking away from not just margin that already existed, but time that was already being allocated elsewhere. So if you are in a season where you don't have as many commitments, go as hard as possible. If you're in a season where you have a lot of commitments designed to ensure the business fits around those commitments because it's hard to make the shift. We're learning how to do it. We're going to do it. But it's important you know, all these things are design constraints.

Jay Clouse [00:17:04]:
Whatever design constraints you have, you should be building the business to satisfy those constraints now and in the future. Alright. When we come back, we will go through numbers 4 through 8. So far we've gone through 1 through 3. Number 1 was what needs is the business covering? Number 2 is premise design. Number 3 is building for the future. Number 4, after we come back, will be about choosing what platforms to create on. So don't go anywhere.

Jay Clouse [00:17:30]:
We'll be right back. Alright. We're back with step 4, content strategy, choosing what platforms to build on. Now there are more platforms than ever before that you can be creating content on. So how would I prioritize and choose what platforms to build on if I were starting over today? Now you may have heard me in the past talk about the difference between relationship and discovery platforms. The TLDR on that is relationship platforms create an owned system of distribution, a system of distribution that you own that no third party is going to take away. These are email, podcasting, SMS and private communities. If you build an audience in email, podcasting, SMS or private communities, you have a reliable means of communicating with the people who have opted into that.

Jay Clouse [00:18:22]:
On the Discovery platform side, this is something that has a built in mechanism for connecting you and your content to individuals who are consuming content. But there's kind of a person or algorithm in the middle. These are social media, YouTube, even search to a degree. And I'm not saying one is better than the other or you should do one and not the other. They play together, but you just need to understand how they play together and how you choose where to allocate your time. So what I look at is I'm trying to build relationship platforms first and foremost because that will derisk the business over the long term. There have been a lot of people in the past who have built large audiences on social media platforms and discovery platforms and that platform changes their rules. They change what they value and now you can't reach the audience that you had become accustomed to reaching through that platform.

Jay Clouse [00:19:14]:
A great example here is Facebook Pages. It used to be if you had followers on your Facebook page, they would see your content in the feed then Facebook kind of changed the model and you really had to pay to have your content shown to most of the people choosing to follow your page. You don't want that. That has a big impact on your business. It basically creates a dependency on a third party platform. Whereas, if you build an email list, sure, you are choosing a tool whether it's ConvertKit or Beehive or whatever. But that tool is not going to take away your subscribers. You can move your subscribers to a new tool if you wanted to use that because the relationship exists between you and the subscriber they have opted in to hear from you and you can move that list of emails from tool to tool if you had to.

Jay Clouse [00:19:59]:
So what I would do is I would choose one relationship platform you really wanna build. And for most people, it's going to be email or podcasting. For most people, it's going to be email. But the caveat I'll throw here is if you have high conviction that you want to be a podcaster, that you really want to get good at the game and the competition that is having a podcast, the sooner you start podcasting, the better. Because it's so slow and so hard to build, but it's so valuable if you do actually reach listeners. It just takes a really long time. There's next to no discovery in podcasting. It's very hard to build.

Jay Clouse [00:20:34]:
You basically need to build an audience elsewhere and then convince that audience to listen to the podcast over time. And then over time, word-of-mouth helps. You know, that spreads. And if you get recognized, sometimes there are big spikes. You go on someone else's show. They have a big audience now. They follow you to yours, but it's slow. If you don't have high conviction that you want to be a podcaster, I wouldn't recommend podcasting.

Jay Clouse [00:20:58]:
I would say just focus on email as your relationship platform because email has been for decades the most valuable system of distribution for creators like you and I. There's more discovery there than there used to be things like the Creator Network from ConvertKit or recommendations in Beehive and Substack. This has made it easier for you to attract subscribers to your email ecosystem your newsletter. So for the most part for most people email is the choice here when it comes to relationship platforms. And again I would focus on 1 in the beginning email or podcast. They play well together, but they're different mediums. So for the sake of getting good at something and adding things on slowly, pick 1 or the other. More times than not, it's going to be email.

Jay Clouse [00:21:43]:
Then on the discovery side, you basically need to choose, do I want to get good at writing or do I want to get good at video? And writing pairs well with email. Video pairs well with podcasting because you can do a video podcast. If you do writing, just focus on that. Just just get really good at writing and don't try to do writing and video because they're completely different medians. Video is like the highest leverage, most portable form of content you can create right now because if you have a video asset, let's say a long form video asset, you can turn that into short form clips that can be posted on literally any social media platform at this point. Every social media platform likes and prioritizes video content. Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, even X and LinkedIn like video right now. So video is very portable and very valuable.

Jay Clouse [00:22:37]:
But if you don't have a strong interest in learning how to edit or pre existing skills of how to edit, it's going to be expensive for you to maintain and grow a video based platform because you'll need to hire third party help and that's in demand and it's it's a lot. So if you don't have a strong bias towards video already, then I would say maybe you should focus on writing. Maybe you should focus on X, LinkedIn, threads, and email. It used to be, I would say, like, just pick one platform, you know, be really good at Instagram. But to be honest, if you're really good at Instagram reels, it's pretty portable over to TikTok and YouTube Shorts at the same time. You know, you can repurpose things pretty strongly if you're posting on x and getting some traction pushing that over to LinkedIn is pretty effective as well. So if you like writing LinkedIn x threads on the discovery side, email on the writing side. If you like video, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, YouTube, if you wanna do long form.

Jay Clouse [00:23:43]:
Yeah. I think that's the way you would go. Don't try to do all of it all at once is the real takeaway here. Do not try to do every platform. Do not try to do writing and video out of the gate because even if you are talented, you have a zero sum amount of time. You know, you have a finite amount of time to invest in these platforms. And to win on any of them, you have to invest a lot of time to understand the game, get good at the game, know the rules of the game, learn the players of the game. Each of these different formats is like a professional sport at this point.

Jay Clouse [00:24:17]:
Are you trying to compete in multiple professional sports at the same time? That's very, very difficult. There are people who are dedicating all of their time to training and being really good in one arena. And you're gonna try to do both out of the gate when you're not great at either one. The winning strategy is to exercise restraint, get really good at one format. And then once that feels like what I call effortless maintenance, once it feels like you can maintain that pace and that quality effortlessly, then you can start to add on and grow your content strategy. This is number 4, content strategy. Again, I would focus on one relationship platform, probably going to be email for most people or podcasting, if you want to get into audio or video. And then choose a format for discovery, writing, or video.

Jay Clouse [00:25:06]:
Stick to that. Choose platforms that align with that. Let me throw one little bonus tidbit here, one additional morsel onto the content strategy. If you are really jamming on the previous step, building for the future, and you're trying to create something with enterprise value that does not depend on you, then you wanna think about how can we create content that does not depend on my name and likeness? That could be hiring third parties to create on your behalf and hiring compensation can look different ways. You know, maybe they are a partner. Maybe they're a part owner. Maybe they are on commission of some kind. Maybe they're freelance.

Jay Clouse [00:25:42]:
I don't know. Point being, you might wanna consider what would it look like for this business to create content and it didn't have to come from me. There's even a sneaky way you could think about this even if it is you creating content. If your face or voice is not shown, if it's writing, for example, you could use a pseudonym. You could write under a pseudonym so that people could get accustomed to that name. And if you were to sell the business someday, people could still write under that pseudonym. This is kind of a new idea to me. So I'm still thinking through that.

Jay Clouse [00:26:16]:
But I'm thinking to myself, what would it have looked like for me to create content without it being me? Obvious answer is to hire. What if you don't have the resources to hire? Well, could you get people to build a relationship with a pseudonym that the writing or the content could come from somebody else under that same pseudonym? I don't know. It's an idea. It's a thought. Moving on to step 5, let's talk about your revenue model. How does the business actually generate revenue? The big mistake that I made here is that I built too many products and they were not the correct products. This goes back to premise design. Your premise should be basically people know you as their trusted source for something or the person to solve some specific problem or the person to help them on their journey to achieve some specific goal.

Jay Clouse [00:27:10]:
If you have a defined premise, then you should have a signature product that helps people achieve that goal. Of course, like all of your free content, that should be related to achieving that goal. We should have one signature product that is basically the most condensed, best, fastest way for somebody to discover you and say I want that outcome. I'm willing to pay for it. With Creator Science, the products that I created were things like Podcasts Like the Pros, a great course on podcasting. Build a beloved membership, a great course on building a membership. Creator HQ is newer. That is the operating system that runs my business.

Jay Clouse [00:27:48]:
The lab, the membership community for professional creators. That doesn't include, like, a dozen one off workshops, like my newsletter masterclass. Before that, there was an email masterclass that I did. There was a community building crash course. I created a ton of products is the point here. And I only needed to create one. I only needed to create one product that helped people go from not a professional creator to a professional creator. If I would have done that, I could have built the entire business on that.

Jay Clouse [00:28:17]:
Because the great thing about a signature product when you do it well, it actually becomes its own top of funnel for the business and therefore the product itself. When you build a great product, people talk about it. People get results from it, and they talk about it, and it spreads. I spoke to a guy named Charlie who's a book marketer, and he said the best way to write a book or the best signal that a book is going to succeed is that it gets somebody a result so quickly that people around them notice and ask how they did it. And that's a perfect goal for your signature product is to say, how can I get somebody an outcome so quickly that people around them notice and ask them how they did it? And they tell them about this product, and that becomes its own flywheel for new students or new customers. A couple of great examples of this are TiVo Forte's building a second brain. Dickie Bush's ship 3430 you have Rachel Rogers' Millionaire Club, you have David Perrell's rite of passage. These programs are almost synonymous with the businesses of these people themselves.

Jay Clouse [00:29:24]:
They are so big and so successful. We know them for the product. That's an awesome place to be because when people say what's Jay about they can say oh he helps people become professional creators through this product. It turns into its own system of generating new customers and that is awesome. If you're going to build a signature product people's next question is often should it be a coaching program? Should it be a course? Should it be both? I just wrote about this in my newsletter last week, which you should subscribe to if you don't already. Somebody asked this exact question. Should I build a course, a coaching program, or both? And to me, the way you develop products, especially your signature product, should be a linear progression from live to self paced because then at the end, once you have a live program and a self paced program, you can basically sell both and say if you want to have the live experience, the full experience with us live, here's the program. If you want to do it on your own pace or have budgetary concerns, here's a self paced version.

Jay Clouse [00:30:24]:
But the great thing about doing a live program is it gets better outcomes because you can see where people get stuck and you can help them get through it. You can basically intervene. It gets you success stories because now you have outcomes. It really pressure tests your curriculum because you can see, are people picking up what I'm putting down? Are people following me with what I'm saying here? It helps you improve the way you explain it. And then now you have a lot more confidence to say, I have done this curriculum live several times. It hasn't changed that much now and people love it or they're getting outcomes. Now I know exactly what to try to produce into a self paced version. A lot of people go straight to self paced and they'll make something and they won't have the data.

Jay Clouse [00:31:07]:
They won't have the feedback of where did people get stuck and then people don't get outcomes and they don't have success stories and there's no flywheel for getting more people to buy the self paced course. So the best way to make a great self paced course is to make a great live course, pressure test the curriculum, then turn that into a self paced course. Let's add another wrinkle to this. If you were to create a signature product and you wanted to do that for a business that is built to sell, how would you do that? I don't have the exact answer for you, but I think asking that question is the way to build and experiment and test to find the right answer. Seth Godin did this early with Auld NBA. You were not interacting with Seth Godin in the Auld NBA. If you can create a program that you can pull in facilitators, you can pull in 3rd parties to teach the method so that, again, you can build enterprise value in your ability to deliver outcomes even if you are not the one teaching it. That is really valuable.

Jay Clouse [00:32:08]:
So I would be thinking about that with my revenue model. I would say I wanna build one signature product that gets an outcome that I could see a future where it's not me running that program or not me as the face of the course or not me as the face of the product, but it provides value. Now I'm saying signature product and then basically synonymizing that with an educational program, but it doesn't have to be. You can build any type of product as your signature product. You could build a food and beverage brand as a signature product, and that would be easier to remove yourself from. It's a harder business to build. But I don't want to limit your thinking to it has to be like information products, has to be a digital product. Your signature product can be anything that is aligned with the premise that gives people an outcome that they want.

Jay Clouse [00:32:50]:
And thinking about that from the lens of how do I remove myself from the delivery of that product is a really good thing to think about. If you have a large audience, advertising is also a revenue model that is valuable and may not require you at all. If you have a business that's creating content and that content doesn't depend on you long term, you know, maybe it does today. But if you can see a future where it doesn't depend on you long term and advertisers are paying to be featured in that content, that's a sellable business. So those were a couple of meaty steps. Steps 45. Step 4 was content strategy, choosing what platforms to create on. And step 5 was choosing your revenue model.

Jay Clouse [00:33:32]:
After one last quick break, we're going to get into steps 6 through 8, starting with step 6, which is all about hiring. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. Alright. We are back to step 6, which is all about hiring. If we're starting over, I would hire an operator slash generalist first rather than specialists. So as you grow, you start to realize that you need help. And when I was growing, I first hired a bunch of specialists to take on specific things that I didn't have the skill set for.

Jay Clouse [00:34:05]:
Things like audio engineering, video editing, design. These are all really valuable things and I couldn't have gotten to where I am without the help of those people. But it came a time when I realized I am a bottleneck in this business because I am doing everything operationally. I am both doing everything creatively and operationally. And that was challenging. And when I went to hire and train operators, even bringing my wife into the business, I was so bad at letting go of control because I have so many systems that were not documented that didn't make sense to anybody except me. And to hand that off, I would have to document it or explain it and train someone on it really well and trust that they can do it as well as I can. Now I got lucky in that I have a couple of operators, my wife and my assistant, who are great, and I trust them implicitly with everything.

Jay Clouse [00:34:56]:
But still training and delegating is a struggle for me. Now, if I would have hired an operator first, that person could have figured out a lot of the operations. And they could have hired specialists and trained the specialists or trained other, you know, individuals they hired over time. Because I held on to operations so long, now I'm in the bottleneck of hiring and training. And that's a problem because I don't have a lot of margin of time and I have to create stuff too. So even though it would take more money maybe in the immediate term to hire, like, a near full time operator, I think that probably would have been long term valuable. And this is an insight I got from Angus Parker, who is Ali Abdaal's COO. He made this recommendation.

Jay Clouse [00:35:41]:
He said hiring a generalist first so that they can train, hire specialists is more valuable. And I've come to believe that. I think having a operating partner is really beneficial to creative people like you and I. And in doing so, I would create a culture of documentation. I'm just now really starting to get into the weeds of creating more standard operating procedures so that it's easy to onboard people into the business and have them learn how to do things. I wish we would have been creating standard operating procedures earlier on. We're doing all of this in Creator HQ, by the way. There's an area of Creator HQ to create and track SOPs, and that's really the backbone of the whole business.

Jay Clouse [00:36:24]:
Now I'm glad that I have that now, but it's a lot easier to onboard people into a system than onboard people into a business where there is no system and try to hodgepodge and train people into everything. So I wish I would have hired a generalist, started outsourcing things earlier so that it wasn't all processes that I made and had to trade people on. I wish people would have the processes themselves and documenting that creating systems that are documented that we can leverage as more people come into the business. Step number 7, relationship building. Arguably, this could be an earlier step. I don't think there's ever, like, a too early to build relationships other than it's easier to build influential, valuable relationships when you're clearly doing something interesting. It's hard to reach out to somebody who's really in demand and really influential and build a relationship there when you have nothing to offer. Not that everything is transactional, but when you are in a position of authority and influence and people are coming to you and asking for your time, you have a filter for who you say yes to.

Jay Clouse [00:37:26]:
And you're going to say yes to people who you see there could be a long term future with somebody that you could really build alongside. And a lot of times when you are building something valuable and interesting and unique, that is like the best networking you can do because it attracts people to you. That's why I've put relationship building closer to the bottom here because I think you're going to have a better position of leverage when you have started building something and there's proof of work. There's reason to believe that you're not just a weirdo on the Internet. You're somebody who has something of value to offer the world and to other individuals. But, man, I cannot overstate how valuable relationships are in the content business. Because when you have relationships in the content business, you have a first degree connection or a second degree connection to 1,000, tens of thousands, 100 of thousands, millions of people because content creators are incredible hubs of attention. If you have a relationship with another creator who has their own audience that's a lot of people that you can tap into when the time is right when things make sense for everybody involved.

Jay Clouse [00:38:35]:
It's hard to do this alone. The world runs on people. It's just true. No matter how much AI there is or how much content you create, how much leverage there is and what you create, the world runs on people. There's always going to be value in relationships. And I did not do this as well as I could. I think I put a good foot forward with just about everybody that I meet. I am not great in the follow-up and the fostering of relationships.

Jay Clouse [00:39:01]:
I am not as consistently in touch and thoughtful with people as I would like. And this isn't just business, by the way. This is like family, personal. I need to be better with relationships generally. But it's so valuable. Somebody with great relationships in an average product is going to beat somebody with a great product in average relationships. They just are. There's just so much trust that is transferred to people when you are endorsed by other people that someone already trusts.

Jay Clouse [00:39:34]:
And so, yeah, there's just no end to how valuable this is and how quickly it can help you grow if you do have these relationships. And you could really tie this back to premise design. Again, since I am in a space of online business that's hyper competitive, a lot of the people that I would want to form relationships with, you can make a pretty strong argument that we are competitors. And even if they don't want to look at things competitively or I don't want to look at things competitively, there's part of you that recognizes it and makes it a little bit more hesitant to work with somebody who is a competitor to you. But if you're doing something unique and complementary to other people in the space, they're gonna be interested to work with you and collaborate with you. So part of your premise design is figuring out how do I complement other large players in the space rather than try to directly compete with them because that will make relationship building easier, which will make growth faster, give you a lot more leverage. It's just awesome. So couldn't recommend this enough.

Jay Clouse [00:40:34]:
And to just double click on this, to just underline this. If you have an hour a day that is just like slush time, I promise you that spending that hour fostering relationships is going to have a greater impact than spending that hour creating incremental new content because it's compounding. Relationships that you build, they are so valuable for such a long period of time And incremental new content, it might be valuable today, but a lot of that content you're creating is perishable content and it's not gonna be compounding. So relationships, relationships, relationships, something that I did not do well enough trying to do better now, but unfortunately, I have less time than ever to do so. So it's a challenge. So again, if you're earlier on in your journey, if you're in your twenties, work really hard, meet people, make friends. It could not be more important. Alright.

Jay Clouse [00:41:29]:
Finally, step 8, the last step that I have here. Focus on design. I've been talking about this for years. Some people really disagree with me. Some people really agree with me. Design is a loaded flexible word. Really anything we do is designed. So in a broad sense, design is incredibly important, not just visual design, but experience design.

Jay Clouse [00:41:52]:
So let's start with visual design real quick. Depending on how competitive your space is, a great way to differentiate sometimes a necessary way to differentiate is in your visual design having a great visual brand. I have felt a night and day difference between changing the name of my business from Creative Companion to Creator Science because again that has a more intuitive understanding of the premise of my business. But also recently, I felt another night and day difference in how I am perceived by the market when I really leveled up our visual brand. A lot of kudos here goes to Holly Arnett. You can find her work at makerandmoxie.com. Again, that's Holly Arnett. Holly did the visual refresh of the Creator Science brand and man, am I obsessed with it.

Jay Clouse [00:42:41]:
It is awesome. And the tools she gave me to extend that brand, that design, just so awesome. You know, you can start to see it now on LinkedIn, on Instagram. The brand is so cohesive across all platforms, and it gives us a lot of flexibility to do fun things. You know, I've actually hired a different designer to help me with my social media design, but he's using the same aspects, the same brand elements that Holly created. So when you have a great brand, you can really extend that into different areas, and it's really exciting. We're starting to do some stuff behind the scenes on YouTube, even some apparel, which I'm really excited about to show you. But all that comes from having a really strong cohesive visual brand that you have a lot of conviction behind.

Jay Clouse [00:43:30]:
And in a competitive marketplace, that can be really powerful. It can be really powerful in any marketplace, you know even if it's not competitive having great design is powerful but in a competitive marketplace having a great design is one of the things that you can use to differentiate people for right or wrong conflate trust with good design. They're going to trust you more if you have good design. They just are. So having great design really helps. People are going to distrust you if you have bad design. It's a bummer, but it's true. So focusing on visual design is something that I am 100% going to do for the rest of my life, but also experience design.

Jay Clouse [00:44:07]:
I wanna make sure that people are having a good experience. They're achieving the outcomes that they want. They're reaching the goals they want to reach through the content that I create to help them get there. And experience design for me really comes down to details as well. Everywhere in your business that there is a touchpoint with the audience, with the customer, that is an opportunity to stand out. And if you do not take that opportunity, it's a missed opportunity. I see this all time with like newsletter thank you pages. If I subscribe to your newsletter, you can either say, hey, you're subscribed.

Jay Clouse [00:44:39]:
Check your inbox. Or you can create a custom page and experience to say, hey, welcome. When you subscribe to my newsletter, which you should do at createrscience.com, after you subscribe, there's actually a video that I created that you see. This is intentional because I want people to see one that I do things differently. I put more work into things. 2, I wanted people to relate my actual spoken voice to my writing because I wanted people to read my writing like they hear me speak. That is a trust building exercise. So visual design, experience design, all things design, when you can show that you are different in the details, when you can stand out by going above and beyond and making every touch point and experience, that really stands out.

Jay Clouse [00:45:24]:
And that becomes even more important in competitive markets. So there you have it. Those are the 8 steps I would take if I were starting over today and did not have creator science. Step number 1 is deciding what needs this needs to cover for me. Is this a financial engine or is this about creative fulfillment? Those are the 2 that typically come at odds the most. And if it is a financial engine, then you need to make decisions that are in the best interest of that financial engine rather than your creative fulfillment. Of course, you would love to do both. You would love for it to solve all things.

Jay Clouse [00:45:57]:
But if you had to choose 1, which one would you choose? That's step 1. Step 2 is selecting a premise that is unique and compelling. Step 3 is building with the end in mind, building for the future, thinking about what is the long term outcome of this and how can I design this effort to fit that long term outcome? Step number 4 is Content Strategy, choosing what platforms to create on, thinking about what is my main relationship platform and what discovery platforms support that. Step number 5 is Revenue Model, designing your revenue model to be one signature product first and foremost that delivers on the premise of your business. If you can think about how to do that in a way that is not dependent on your name and likeness over time, that is also powerful if you're thinking about the end in mind. Step number 6 is hiring, and that is thinking about hiring an operator or a generalist before hiring specialists, thinking about building a culture of documentation, outsourcing early, using systems. Step 7 is relationship building, investing in relationships, finding people who can be great partners over the long term. And step number 8 is focusing on design, being different in your visual design and different in your experience design, being different in the details.

Jay Clouse [00:47:13]:
So that is it. If you want to go deeper on this, I've left some links in the show notes for a lot of the essays that I've mentioned here. I also recommend you check out my Professional Creator Crash Course. It's a free 7 day course that helps you get a crash course and becoming a professional creator, a creator who does this as a living. That is delivered to you free. It's at creatorscience.com/course. That is also in the show notes. And lastly, if you want to get up to speed and really learn everything that I have learned over the last 5, 6, 7 years, I have organized all of my long form content, my essays, my YouTube videos, my podcast episodes into what I call the rabbit hole.

Jay Clouse [00:47:51]:
It's a guide for binging the Creator Science catalog. You can go to creatorscience.com/binge, and that will break down category by category things that go deeper on content strategy, revenue strategy, monetization, process, and operations. Anything that I've created that's long form content in these topics, you can find there in order, so you can actually binge through my writing, audio, and video content in a linear fashion. Again, that's creatorscience.com/binge to get to the rabbit hole. That's a new project. I'm going to actually make a full episode about that, because creating an experience that people can binge through your content, I think is really, really important and impactful. So that's gonna be one of the next solo episodes coming your way soon.