#257: How to Build a Creator-First Business (That Actually Lasts) | The Strategy Hour Podcast

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hey. Last week, I was a guest on the Strategy Hour podcast with Abigail Pumphrey. Now Abigail is the founder and CEO of The Boss Project, an online education company. And Abigail is just a delightful person. I met her probably about a year ago. I was at an event and Teachable hosted a dinner, and I was there. Abigail was there. Jack Appleby was there.

Jay Clouse [00:00:35]:
It was a really fun time. I ate a lot of seafood. It was delicious. And Abigail and I connected. And it was kind of the type of thing where it's, like, I'm surprised we haven't met each other before, and I feel like we are going to be friends. We've been trying to get a podcast together for a while, but, you know, we had a baby. I was on paternity leave. It was just bad timing, and I was doing a lot of no guesting.

Jay Clouse [00:00:53]:
But I kinda wish I would have done it earlier because Abigail asked excellent questions. We explored some territory that we haven't talked about on the show before, you know. We covered a little bit of my my origin story, my current beliefs about consistency, and generating influence, how to create real value online, and treating newsletters as a product. We covered a lot of really good ground here that's new. And so I asked Abigail if I could share this episode here on the feed. I think you're gonna enjoy it. Like I said, it's new territory that we haven't explored on the show. And if you do enjoy it, then go to the show notes, subscribe to the strategy hour, which has been recognized by Inc.

Jay Clouse [00:01:31]:
And Forbes as one of the best podcast for entrepreneurs. I certainly had a good time. I'm subscribed to the show. I hope you check it out as well, and we'll get to that right after a quick break for our sponsors.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:01:42]:
Being a creator first business sounds great in theory, but it can be slow to grow. Today, I'm talking with Jay Klaus who's been there, built that, and now runs one of the most respected businesses in the creator economy, but it didn't happen overnight. In today's episode, we talk about creating content, building an audience instead of attracting a crowd, and how to create sustainability in an evolving industry. Hey Jay, welcome to the show.

Jay Clouse [00:02:13]:
Hey, Abigail. Thanks for having me. Can't believe 900 plus episodes of this show.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:02:19]:
I know. It's really, really wild. And I'm just glad we finally got you on here. I've been hearing good things about you for a number of years now. And so I'm glad you are finally on the show. And I'm excited to talk about your past and your present and your future because I know you got a lot going on. Everything from building an incredible newsletter business, a thriving community, you had a baby, you're writing a book, you're kind of a busy guy.

Jay Clouse [00:02:46]:
All true things. We should probably also talk about the seafood we had at dinner, that time we met at teachable's dinner.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:02:51]:
Yes. That was Delicious. It was good.

Jay Clouse [00:02:54]:
A lot of ground to cover.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:02:55]:
A lot of ground to cover. Well, for those people that are maybe a little bit less familiar with your story, I know before Creator Science, you cofounded and sold a ticketing startup, Ticksters. You later sold your community, Unreal Collective, to Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income. And along the way, you've invested in 10 different startups. But talk to me about the vision behind starting creator science and how it's led you to where you are today.

Jay Clouse [00:03:23]:
I'll be honest. There was no vision. Here's here's what happened, and I'm gonna tell the story because I think it's happening every day today. Basically, I was working in a job in 2017, and I didn't love it. And I wanted to not be doing it anymore. So one day, I quit. And I didn't know what I would do next, but I believed in myself that I could figure it out because I had started a company before, we had sold it, and I just thought, I can do this entrepreneur thing. I'll figure it out.

Jay Clouse [00:03:51]:
And in 2017, my grand aspiration was to be a writer. I was like, I'm gonna write books someday. And so I started reading other writers. And I started falling down the rabbit hole of people who were writing email newsletters as, like, their business model. And this is all, like, very known and familiar today. But back in the day, you know, I was just reading the emails from Seth Godin and Brian Harris and Matthew Kimberly, and I thought, wow. They're just writing emails. I can write emails.

Jay Clouse [00:04:21]:
I'm gonna be a writer. And on the back end of this, they are selling things. They're making some money. I wanna do that. And so I just started, like, investigating how does this work? How can I do this? And in so doing, the thing that I became most knowledgeable about was the creating thing. It was just I was investigating what people were doing. I would learn. I would write about it.

Jay Clouse [00:04:44]:
And because I had, like, a a deadline on myself to publish in the first year every day and then beyond that every week, the thing that I was writing about was the thing that I was studying, which was being a creator. We didn't really use that term at the time. And play that forward eight years, I'm still doing it, and I happen to have made it beyond the other side. But I think a lot of people are in the same space even today where it's like, I wanna be a creator. I don't know what to be a creator about, but all I'm doing is spending my time thinking about being a creator. And so now that's what I'm creating about also. And it can work, but I would encourage people to find some other interest to indulge instead.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:05:21]:
I know. I think documenting your journey is a lot more impactful than I think people realize because so many people have these thoughts, feelings, ideas, and they feel like they're so alone in all of it. But when you start talking about that journey out loud, so many people start to feel seen and heard and understood and, like, someone else is in it with them. So I think you starting that way is probably a huge reason why your community is as thriving as it is today.

Jay Clouse [00:05:49]:
Yeah. I mean, ultimately, content is is like an attractant. Whatever you create about is it brings people to you. So I do think I have this line I've said a few times. One of my favorite creators is Dan Runcie, and he writes about the business of hip hop. His business is called Trappital. And it'd be easy to look at Dan and say, well, he writes Trappital because he is an expert at the intersection of business and hip hop. But he didn't write Trappital because he was the expert.

Jay Clouse [00:06:23]:
He became the expert by writing Trappital. You know what I mean? So you kinda have to be forward looking and aspirational and say, what is it that I want to become one of the foremost experts or thought leaders in? And start studying that and writing about that. Because if you're willing to invest more time in learning about that thing than most people, compound that over a couple years, you will very quickly be one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on that subject if you stick with

Abagail Pumphrey [00:06:52]:
it. So talk to me about getting the traction, though. Like, how were you getting people to pay attention to the newsletter? Writing every day is obviously a huge part of that. You you had to have been sharing the fact that you were writing every day. But what did that look like then versus what it looks like now?

Jay Clouse [00:07:10]:
I mean, I was, but how was I sharing it? I didn't really have an audience. So I would share on Facebook that I was writing, and here's where you can sign up from a Mailchimp list. I was doing a lot of stuff in person in those days. I was organizing a lot of local events on behalf of, like, nonprofits and things that I was involved with, mostly in the startup space. So, like, literally, anytime I was given a microphone, I was like, by the way, go subscribe to my newsletter. It was it was just, like, small incremental things like that because I really didn't even take social media seriously until two years ago, maybe. You know? Because when I was getting started, everything was email. Everything I was reading from people was email.

Jay Clouse [00:07:50]:
I'm like, this is the way. Social media rented audience. Social media bad. And there's truth to that viewpoint. There's there's wisdom in that, but it's not so binary that you shouldn't do something at all because there are downsides and risks to it. There are also upsides and positives to it. So I was just dogmatically publishing the email for years and years and years, and wherever I could share that I was writing, I would. I think just for a long time, it was word-of-mouth.

Jay Clouse [00:08:20]:
It was people going to my website because they heard something about me, and the website was optimized for getting you to subscribe to the newsletter. And it was just small incremental growth for a very, very long time. Convert Kits, Now Kits, Creator Network has been big for me. I got onto that fairly early. Still not as early as I could have. I could have been what they call it, like, an alpha user before it was even public. I said, well, I'm using Upscribe by SparkLoop, which was like a thing that eventually they bought, and now they're the same thing. But that's been big for me.

Jay Clouse [00:08:51]:
But I try to tell people, like, there's never been some inflection point or some big moment where it's like, at this point, because of this decision or because this thing happened, everything changed. No. It's just been dogmatic consistency, showing up, writing every week, passing what I call the regret test. Basically, every piece of content that you publish, the goal of that piece of content is to make somebody more likely to engage with the next thing you publish. That's the regret test. If you do that, good things will happen over a long enough period of time. And that's just all I focus on day after day, week after week.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:09:28]:
Yeah. You're definitely one of the most consistent entrepreneurs I've seen out there. I think a lot of people will go hard, go fast, do a lot upfront, and then, like, completely burn themselves out, go into hiding for a few years, and then, like, reemerge and attempt to reclaim their territory. But you're just consistent. You're always there day in, day out. And, like, it doesn't it's not always flashy. It's not always, like, this big production. It can be.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:09:56]:
I've definitely seen you do some pretty awesome production. Don't get me wrong. But it can also be as casual as you pushing your daughter in a stroller. And but to that end, like, some of it is this, like, produced YouTube version that has this polished look, and some of it is you walking around your neighborhood with headphones in. Do you feel like one or the other has done a better job at connecting people to you? Or do you think it's the mix of both? Or is it more about consistency rather than quality?

Jay Clouse [00:10:31]:
Well, the one thing I believe to be true very, very deeply is that you don't earn influence through attention. You earn it through trust. And so I don't really care about being flashy. The model of, like, getting huge spikes of attention, this is mostly, like, a recent phenomenon, and it's pretty much strictly social media where you have algorithms that can magically bring people to you, which is, like, a big exciting thing. But then what? Let's say you have something that goes viral and a lot of people come to you. Okay. And what do we do with that? Well, I I think the assumption is, well, now that they're following me, they'll get more of my content. Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:11:13]:
And then what? And it's like, hopefully, they spend enough time with me that I do develop some sort of relationship and trust. And when I have something that can serve them, they say, okay. I'll give that a shot. Well, increasingly, I don't think that reality is true. What I'm seeing on social media is that the outcomes are getting more extreme in both directions. You're going to go really big or you're going to get almost nothing. The times of your follower count being correlated to some sort of baseline reach just seem to be going away with for you feeds. So if the thought is I'm going to go viral so that I get a lot of people following me so that my baseline reach increases, I just don't think that's true anymore.

Jay Clouse [00:11:58]:
And so for me, I ask myself frequently, like, what if I couldn't reach anybody new? What if I didn't have to do social media? What if I had enough people who are already invested enough in me and believe in me and trust me enough or willing to at least keep tuning in long enough that I can develop that trust and not worry about reaching new people. And I think if you ask yourself that question, it changes the way you would approach your content. And so I try to come from that lens more and more because I do think now I'm in a privileged position of I probably reach enough people that as long as I continue to be helpful to the people who are paying attention, the business will persist. And it's a nice place to be, but, also, I just think we're seeing there's a difference between having an audience and attracting a crowd. And I think social media encourages you to attract a crowd, but you don't really have a relationship with a crowd. You know? Think about if you go to Vegas and you're on the strip and you see, like, a street performer and you stop and you watch. Are you gonna go subscribe to that person's newsletter? Are you going to throw in when they pass the hat around? I don't know. You've probably had, like, sixty seconds of experience with that person.

Jay Clouse [00:13:14]:
I'm just trying to build deeper relationships and care less about the overall reach of of my content.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:13:24]:
I think that's so interesting that with such a focus on the content itself, but less worry on where it goes. I think in some ways, the lack of pressure probably makes for better content. But what keeps you motivated to keep showing up consistently? Because I think a lot of people, they get that high from the reach, from the validation of people liking and commenting and engaging. But if that's not the goal for you, like, what keeps you motivated?

Jay Clouse [00:13:56]:
Well, a high doesn't pay the bills. Like, a high isn't going to send my daughter to college. You know? Like, for me, the business pays for our lifestyle. It pays for everything we experience. So the motivation is I'm a dad now, and I've gotta provide. My wife and I are both full time employed, so it's important that I keep showing up. And as an entrepreneur, I know the only way to capture value into the business is to create value for people outside the business. So the the boring answer to your question is the business is a job.

Jay Clouse [00:14:31]:
It's a job that I've created. It's a job that I've chosen, but the business is a job and showing up is part of it.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:14:37]:
Mhmm. No. I I don't disagree. I I think consistency is such a huge important factor and very similar to what you described. Like, that first year, probably even two, I was publishing five days a week as well, and that frequency has gone down over time and some in some ways changed and morphed. Like, I used to do way more writing, and now I do way more podcasts, but I miss writing, and so I'm doing more writing again. But you producing content is obviously a way to deliver value. And I think a lot of people don't necessarily think of a newsletter necessarily as a means to an end.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:15:18]:
I think sometimes they think of it as part of a cog in the wheel. But I think what's unique about your business is the newsletter has seemed like a more foundational piece of it. Like, it's the business is the newsletter. I don't know if that's necessarily still true to for you with the membership and all of those things, but can you speak to that a little bit?

Jay Clouse [00:15:38]:
Well, I think the newsletter is, like, the most stable part of the business. It really derisks a lot of my activities because we we've just seen that your reach on any platform can fluctuate a lot, and it has nothing to do with anything. You have no control or influence over that. But your email list is a group of people who have raised their hand and said, I want to hear from you until I no longer decide that I wanna hear from you, and it shows up in their inbox chronologically. If they've engaged with it in the past, it's gonna go in their primary inbox. So it's just a direct line of communication, and it's it's a lot easier to get people to go from reading an email to making some sort of purchase or transaction or next step because it's just it's just closer. And they're in a different headspace too. Like, when you are primarily reaching people on social media, what you're doing is learning how to interrupt somebody's mindless habit.

Jay Clouse [00:16:36]:
It's like it's it's hard to create and derive real value from showing up in front of people who are essentially in the social media equivalent of being blacked out and getting them to linger on your video long enough to wake up a little bit and say, I like this person. I'm gonna go deeper. Because they have to do that for social media to play a meaningful part in your business. They have to have a good enough experience and then wake up from this blackout and say, I like this creator. I'm going to hit the follow button. Or better, I'm gonna go to their profile and watch more of their content. If I want you to spend fifteen minutes with me, to do that on Instagram is very challenging. Whereas, if you do that in a different medium, that has a higher barrier to entry.

Jay Clouse [00:17:27]:
There's more of an investment for people to say, like, I wanna show up and read your emails. I wanna watch your videos on YouTube. But even YouTube, that's a much closer comparison to Instagram than email. And on YouTube, you might still interrupt their habit by getting them to click on your video initially. But after thirty seconds, if I'm having a good time, I'm gonna keep watching. After a minute, if I'm having a good time, I'm still watching. You can rack up time spent with the consumer a lot faster on YouTube. So email is I think of every piece of content that I put out itself as a product.

Jay Clouse [00:18:00]:
It's free. But a product has to serve a need. Like, a product has to be hired to solve a problem. And it's true for your course. It's true for your newsletter. What is somebody hiring your newsletter to do? If you don't have an answer to that, if it's not solving a problem or scratching some itch for somebody, then it's not going to persist as part of their life.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:18:29]:
Yeah. I think a lot of people assume the reason you grow a list is so that you have a group of emails that when you're ready to sell something to, you can just send sales emails to. And I know your approach is far more. How can I reach these people consistently and teach them things and have them get value from that? But how do you articulate that when so many people are used to just like being bombarded with join my list and you'll get this thing and like all of these incentives and lead magnets and all of that. And I know your approach is different than a lot of people. How do you think you've been able to stand out in that way?

Jay Clouse [00:19:06]:
I think I just stick with it longer than most people. It's not like my calls to action are all that much more effective than other people. I probably make them more frequently, and I've been doing it for years. And it's it stacks up and it makes a difference. And it's unsexy, but, you know, as a as a sensitive guy who wasn't necessarily, like, successful in dating growing up, I have built this mentality that, like, I don't want people who don't want me. So I'm not trying to convince people that they need me when they're just getting started. Like, I'm gonna show up as me, and if that resonates with you and you like it, awesome. Here's where to to go deeper.

Jay Clouse [00:19:48]:
But

Abagail Pumphrey [00:19:49]:
a

Jay Clouse [00:19:49]:
part of me really fears overpromising and underdelivering, so I really underplay most things so that when somebody makes the decision, it's of their own accord, and I feel very confident that I can deliver on whatever expectation that they have. So, yeah, for me, it's just very slow. I want the work to speak for itself. I want people to recommend it. I will tell you that I'm doing certain things, but I I fail in a lot of ways at this. I publish a podcast every week. How often do I talk about that podcast on Instagram? Probably one out of every four weeks, I remember or, like, prioritize saying, new podcast episode this week. I should be doing that.

Jay Clouse [00:20:30]:
I should be promoting my own stuff more and more. Every time I promote my own stuff, I get more action, whether that's just listening, whether that's subscribing, whether that's purchasing. The more you advocate for yourself, the more that that happens. I don't think you have to be, like, over the top and loud. I kind of think of it as your personality, your content should be like the steady drumbeat, and it's gonna be at, like, a slightly unique frequency. But if you just keep, like, beating that drum over and over and over again, eventually, the right people are like, I keep hearing this thing over here. I'm gonna go explore that. And they find you, but you have to you have to just do it and do it and do it and do it and get better all the time.

Jay Clouse [00:21:16]:
But there's no single post that's going to save you. Like, if you do have something that goes super well, amazing. Guess what? Right back to work. You've just given yourself the opportunity to do more work. And so I I try not to get stressed out about doing the most or putting a bunch of pressure on any one thing that I do. It's just I'm gonna keep doing it. I'm gonna try to make the process as sustainable and comfortable as possible.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:21:51]:
Yeah. I I you make it sound so simple, and I I think a lot of people read into it. They wanna be liked. They wanna be respected. They want people to pay attention. And, you know, they're so used to everyone being so loud. The idea of just like not trying to convince anyone and just keep doing your own thing. I it's not as common as it sounds.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:22:12]:
I think what you're doing is kind of countercultural in a lot of ways, but amazingly so. I think that's why it's worked because it feels genuine. You feel like the guy next door, so to speak, and people want to be around you because you're not pressuring them to be there at all.

Jay Clouse [00:22:32]:
The trade off is this is not a fast approach. This this will not get you a self sustaining business this year. I tell people expect it to take three years, especially if you're taking my approach. You know? So that's that's the trade off is it's it's not gonna be fast. And I I never tell people to quit their job and go all in because, sure, you can compress things to a degree, but you can't you can't compress everything. Like, there's no amount of intensity that for the typical person without having some stroke of luck or abnormal background, some strange competitive advantage. The typical person can't quit their job, go all in, give it a % intensity, and be like, and now I have a fully sustaining business, especially if you have obligations like a family, a mortgage. Like, it's it's just tough.

Jay Clouse [00:23:25]:
So I don't think people it's not what they want. It's it's easier to win people over on the promise of this can be life changing, it can be fast, and it's gonna make a lot of money, and here's my secret for doing it. You can get lucky, and you can find monetary success in some forms faster. And there's a whole distribution curve. Some people will do it faster than others. But this process I'm describing is basically saying, I want this to be sustainable. What has to be true for it to be sustainable? I can't get burned out. It has to be something I inherently enjoy.

Jay Clouse [00:24:05]:
And, also, I'm going to remove financial constraints from this work, financial expectations from this work. When you have financial pressure on your work, you will make decisions that get you the financial outcome, which may not be the best decision for the work. It's probably not the most sustainable decision. And so that's why I see a lot of people even though they seem to have success quickly, they give up quickly also because they were doing things that inherently are unsustainable. I think it's increasingly hard to have fast, sustainable success in the content world.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:24:46]:
Yeah. I think specifically in the content world. I know for me the reason it worked out was the content was, like, simultaneously happening with me doing things that I knew I could do on repeat. I started as a marketing agency. I was taking I was doing web design and branding stuff with local people while I was broadcasting to the World Wide Web about everything else. And they were kind of two businesses that I called the same thing. They weren't they were they were not at all the same thing. The content wasn't the thing that was paying me initially.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:25:27]:
I'm lucky enough to your point to have that be a bigger part of what I do now, but it's still only a piece of the puzzle. Content isn't paying for every aspect of my business, and I'm sure it's not for you either. Or is it?

Jay Clouse [00:25:39]:
It is now.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:25:39]:
It is. Yeah. Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:25:42]:
Yeah. And and it has been since 2021, but that was four years to get to that point. And I probably four years, three years, somewhere between three and four years. And I probably work more than most people would be willing to, especially if you have a family and things. Because at the time, I was in my twenties. I had, like, nothing else to do. I had very low costs, very low commitments. I could just focus on doing this.

Jay Clouse [00:26:10]:
And I was able to compress things a little bit, but it's hard, and it's competitive. And it's people underplay the mental toll that doing this takes in a lot of ways. Like, our physiology as an animal is not evolved to understand scale, like, the scale of the Internet. We see this with celebrities more than anything else because they have to deal with fame on a level that we can't imagine. But even just, like, the small modicum of scale that you and I probably experience with our content is something that our grandparents could not fathom, would not have experienced. There was just no way of doing it. And we have to find ways to cope and deal with all this feedback we're getting constantly from these platforms of their content, which is giving us signals about, like, on one level, safety, giving us signals about status. And all of this is going through the wiring, the evolutionary wiring of, like, am I going to be safe? It's like a crazy it's a crazy thing.

Jay Clouse [00:27:21]:
And even when you have accumulated resources, even when the business is like, okay. Content's working. Products are selling. You have the new part of you that is, like, protection and resource hoarding. Like, how do I keep this? How do I make sure I don't lose it? It's is a trip. It's not for the faint of heart. I actively try to, like, talk people out of it because you kinda had to tell me, screw you. I'm gonna do it anyway to, like

Abagail Pumphrey [00:27:48]:
For me to believe that you're gonna do it anyway. Yeah. Totally. No. I mean, you're not wrong. The only way I cope is I I have to pretend like I'm talking to myself. Like, most of the time when I'm producing content, I'm writing for myself. I am recording on topics that I'm interested in right now.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:28:09]:
And not that I don't want it to benefit others, I do. That's definitely at the forefront of my mind. But if I think about the fact that I'm gonna email it to 50 or 60,000 people, like, it just makes me incredibly uncomfortable. So I just pretend they don't they're I send it to a list. It doesn't matter how many people are on it. I just send it out into the universe.

Jay Clouse [00:28:32]:
After one last quick break, we'll get right back to the strategy hour with Abigail Pumphrey. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation on the strategy hour with Abigail Pumphrey.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:28:43]:
I am curious about the monetization part though because I think people aren't quite sure what it looks like to be more creator first. There's obviously different ways to do this, ads, memberships, sponsorships, product sales, and I'm sure other things I'm not even thinking of. YouTube views, all of those things. But what was the beginning? Like, when you think back to when you were first monetizing, what was the first thing that felt like, okay, I can kinda rely on this or I know this is coming?

Jay Clouse [00:29:18]:
At the beginning, it was running mastermind programs, which was a concept that I didn't even, like, know. I I quit my job, and I talked to a friend of mine, and he was like I was telling him my situation. I I was gonna go out on my own. I was gonna do something. I wasn't sure what I'd do. He said, if I was you and I had the network that you had here locally, I would consider facilitating mastermind groups. I said, I don't even know what that means. What does that mean? He said, well, I'm in one.

Jay Clouse [00:29:40]:
Basically, you get a group of people together who wouldn't know each other otherwise. You kind of, like, do all the logistics, run the meeting, and you help them learn from each other so that they all come out better on the other side. I said, people would pay for that? And he said, yeah. People pay for that. Okay. Let's try that. So I I did the math, and I was basically like, okay. I'm gonna assume that this is gonna be twelve weeks long because I was working with another coach, and his program was twelve weeks.

Jay Clouse [00:30:04]:
So twelve weeks sounds like the right amount of people with the right amount of time. I think a group makes the most sense when it's five people plus me. And so six of us, five of them members, so we can give them each one hot seat or two hot seats, I should say. And that's ten weeks. We'll have an intro week and a graduation week. I just kinda, like, did all the math and figure all this stuff out. And, basically, it was like, okay. Here's the price that needs to be true for me to run these groups every 12 weeks and pay my bills.

Jay Clouse [00:30:34]:
And that's what I did for almost four years. I worked with groups of, in total, like, cohorts of 15 to 20 people, three times a year for four years. And on the back end of that, after they, like, finished the program, we just had a Slack channel, which is what we're using to communicate during the program, and they stuck around, and we had a little bit of a community there. All of this sounds, like, very ordinary today. Like, okay. You're running basically like a cohort based group course or you're you're having masterminds. You're using Zoom and Slack. These were new things in 2017.

Jay Clouse [00:31:09]:
People had never used Zoom. I had to teach people how to download Zoom, how to use Zoom, how to use Slack. But I built that community experience in Slack. And when 2020 happened, Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income was building an online community using a tool that was still in beta called Circle. And he's like, we have access to this new tool. It's not public yet. It's for online communities. We wanna use it.

Jay Clouse [00:31:33]:
You know community. Can you help us build this out and launch it? 2020, I was like, the sky was falling. We didn't know what's going on. My wife thought she was gonna lose her job. I was like, okay. I'm doing these groups, but I feel like I need to collect as much money and take on as many projects as are coming my way. Let me take this on. And so I helped them build their first membership called SPI Pro.

Jay Clouse [00:32:00]:
We hired a community manager, and they said, community the launch was a big success. So I said, community is gonna be, like, the future of this business. Can you run community here at SPI? I said, well, I'm I'm running these masterminds, and I'm trying to do content. I can't do that and work at SPI. They said, what if we buy your community? And you stop running the masterminds. You run them inside of SPI Pro. You can still do content on the side. Just come lead our community team.

Jay Clouse [00:32:28]:
And so that wound down that program, and that got me into the world of, like, better online community and memberships because finally, we had a tool that was actually built for it. Slack is not built for online communities. So, anyway, back to your original question. I was basically doing these small group masterminds, and that was what was predominantly paying the bills.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:32:49]:
It's so it's always so interesting what people start with because I think there'd be some people that that sounds like an incredible opportunity and others that are intimidated by it. But I do think part of why it worked was because it was kind of new novel and, like, up and coming. So if you were to make some predictions right now, like, what do you think is coming? What do you think people are just now touching their toes into that very well may be the future of this industry?

Jay Clouse [00:33:20]:
Well, one thing I really believe to be true is that courses are in trouble. I think I think course businesses are gonna take a big hit, and rightly so, because information wants to be free. And now we're getting better and better tools for learning at a very low cost, like AI, ChatGPT. This is an incredible teacher. It's infinitely patient. It's judgment free. It's private. It will meet you exactly where you are, extremely collaborative.

Jay Clouse [00:33:53]:
When you make an online course, you basically have to think, what does the typical student need? Where are they starting from? What are their typical problems? And let me build a curriculum to get them to this outcome. And it does a pretty good job, but it doesn't account for edge cases. There's no interactivity with, like, a prerecorded self paced course. Best you can do is comment and hope that you get your question answered by an instructor at some point. Whereas, if you're learning this stuff with AI, it's just the back and forth is immediate, and you can really get to a place of competency much more quickly, and it's pulling from a much larger data source. You and I are small language models. AI is a large language model. So I think education businesses, which is the bread and butter of the people that I work with, I think they're in trouble.

Jay Clouse [00:34:43]:
So what do you do with that? I think we're going to have an increasing interest and hunger for what I call verifiable human experiences, things that we know were made by, made for, experienced with other people. So community based offerings, I think, will remain strong if it's a good experience. So, ironically, I started doing mastermind groups. I think that's actually gonna continue to be popular. Ways of getting small groups of people together and learning from each other. They may all be independently learning from their own large language model for certain problems, but they can share that knowledge. Your ability to get information out of an LLM is dictated by your ability to prompt the LLM. And I think that interface is not great.

Jay Clouse [00:35:37]:
Like, you and I can use it. We're smart. We're competent. We're willing to fail and try things, and we're aware that it exists. So I think a lot of this will be lagging. Most people still aren't using these tools, not familiar with how to use these tools, let alone how to use them in a way that can educate them in a higher quality way than the courses that have been developed at this point. I think course creators can look at how do I leverage LLMs to teach my methodology and make my ability to teach better than what a self paced course does right now. Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:36:09]:
I would expect tools like Teachable and Kajabi because, obviously, their customers are the ones that are gonna struggle with this. I would expect them to create better tooling that allows you to create, like, an instructor led interface for learning something. So, anyway, I that wasn't an answer of, like, what's coming necessarily as to

Abagail Pumphrey [00:36:31]:
who

Jay Clouse [00:36:31]:
who should adapt. But I think community based experiences are going to continue to increase in value. I think a lot of people will recognize this, try to do it, do it half assed, not do it well. And so that will create, like, kind of a poisoning of the public trust in these programs. So you're really gonna have to stand out in terms of quality. I think virtual and augmented reality hasn't really reached this space yet, and it'll be very interesting to see how do I combine community experiences, learning or nonlearning, with AR and VR. I think we'll have cohort based courses in virtual classrooms, in virtual settings. That's not really a thing that's happening now because most people don't have a virtual reality headset at home or a way to use it or really even the software on the back end of virtual reality headsets to do these things.

Jay Clouse [00:37:24]:
But I think that will be coming. Increasingly, I think people are more interested in outcomes than education. So as I create new products that are not community experience based, which is mostly my focus, most of my focus is community focused products. But for products that are high leverage, hands off, I'm looking at how do I make this product have more pure utility, make it more plug and play rather than teach you how to do something so you can make your own plug and play resource. And I think that type of thing, anything you can do to save people time will continue to be valuable.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:38:02]:
Yeah. I think a lot of what you said is very much happening in real time. And I I think it can be intimidating, especially if you've been in this industry for a while. You're like, oh, I feel like I knew what was happening and now I feel like I have to change or I have to adapt. And that's scary, especially when you felt like maybe you had great timing in the beginning and now you're feeling like a dinosaur. Maybe I'm just speaking for myself. I'm not sure. But I want to see people successful, and I know you do too.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:38:35]:
And I'm curious if you were to leave them with some advice despite everything that's going on in the world and all that's changing. What's gonna keep people grounded? What's gonna keep people motivated?

Jay Clouse [00:38:48]:
Well, you know, the highest returns go to people who are on the front edge of innovation. So you have to ask yourself, do I want the biggest outcomes? If you want the biggest outcomes, then you need to be innovating and leading things and trying things that other people aren't doing. If that's honestly not you, if that seems scary, if you're not willing to fail a bunch doing that, you can try to be a fast follow and say, I'm going to see I'm gonna search for patterns and signals that something is working and is in in the early stages, and I'm gonna try to identify that and quickly follow on that and make my own version of that. It's a little bit more derisked. Probably has a lower ceiling. And as I said before, I would just make all of my decisions through the lens of how can I make sure I am proceeding in such a way that there will be wins even if this is largely a failure? I can look at this and say, here is how this benefited me even if it didn't go this way. I'm reducing my downside risk as much as possible, not burning the boats and going all in if if, you know, you're in the early stages and doing things that you enjoy the process of because I really do think you have to think long term. The only way you win the game is if you're playing the game.

Jay Clouse [00:40:12]:
And if you quit the game or get knocked out of the game, then you've got no shot. So I I really think it's just important to come from the place of, how can I set myself up to continue doing this, enjoy doing this, and win, even if the broader ruling on whatever I tried was a failure?

Abagail Pumphrey [00:40:31]:
Fantastic advice. You're always full of such wisdom. And then every time I have a conversation with you, whether in person or online, I always am left with things to stew on and think about. So thank you for that. I do know that people are gonna wanna read your newsletter and get connected and learn more from you. So where can they find you?

Jay Clouse [00:40:49]:
Well, you obviously like podcasts. So check out the Creator Science podcast. Just search Creator Science in your podcast player or go to creatorscience.com, and that's where I write the newsletter. Basically, anywhere you'd like to hang out, I'm probably creating content there. So search for my name.

Abagail Pumphrey [00:41:03]:
Amazing. Thank you so much for being here, Jay.

Jay Clouse [00:41:06]:
Thanks for having me. App you.