Bonus Episode with Zack Honarvar & Kate Ward

It's definitely not about what you teach, 'cause like the information's out there. Everyone's always like, oh, you're selling this course? Like, this is out there on YouTube. Totally. You could learn how to become a rocket scientist probably on the information that's now available on YouTube. But can you curate it? And can you also hold yourself accountable to studying it in ways that are actually going to help you retain the information? Anything that we do as humans, we'll do it far better if we surround ourselves with people who are just slightly better than us at that thing. That's probably the best way that we can all acquire skills in the fastest way.

Hi guys.

Hello. What's up, Gina?

Zach, Kate, I want you guys to introduce yourselves because you have done incredible things. You are sitting at such an interesting place in not just the creator economy, but I really think about it as modern entrepreneurship. And so maybe my first question is, introduce yourselves.

I'm Zach. I'm from Toronto, Canada, and I started my career working at Shopify, just in the right place at the right time. Shopify was a quickly growing Canadian company, and I got a really great chance as part of Shopify to work with a ton of like up-and-coming streetwear brands and men's fashion brands, which was the space that I was really interested in. And through that, I would travel a lot to the USA. And in one of those trips, I got lucky enough to meet a group of guys that had just started a YouTube channel called Yes Theory, and we became really good friends. We ended up starting their clothing line together called Seek Discomfort, and that went so well that we co-founded a merchandising business to help creators launch their own apparel brands and do something that was a little bit more elevated than merch. That progressed into me loving California and moving out to start a management company to represent the Yes Theory guys, and have been doing creator management in a number of ways ever since, but always with a small number of larger creators. And that's how Kate and I also started working together.

Pre-Zach, my story is that I started in education, built a research center at a university for a bit of time, focused on behavioral economics and gamification, really trying to understand how, like, if you have 10,000 students sitting in a square mile, how do you design a better, more engaging experience? where going to frat parties is less interesting than what is actually offered by the school. And then I taught in a 4th grade classroom for a little bit of time, and then met Zach probably a year or so later. I think we met like 5 years ago. Someone sent me a photo the other day of like my second day or something with you. I am a nerd and wrote an article about Yes Theory's business model that I cold emailed to Zach. So the kind of core thesis, and it's probably a lot of what we'll talk about today, is around this idea that businesses used to start with a product. They used to start with like a very clear thing. And so the example I used in the article was Nike. You know, Phil Knight started with a shoe. He said, let's make an amazing track spike. And then eventually Nike becomes this behemoth because there's a bunch of advertisers sitting in a room together trying to brainstorm what is a brand gonna look and feel like. I looked at what Zach was doing with the Yes Theory boys and was like, damn, they're doing the absolute inverse of that. They're making amazing content that has this like extremely deep ethos to it. They're building this amazing community. And then once they had done that, they were going, okay, what products can we sell them? Right? Which was where Seek Discomfort came in. And then about 3 years ago with a third co-founder, Arak, who was part of the management company, we started a company called CreatorNow, which was what we've been trying to do is just reimagine film school for creators. The digital skillset is far different from maybe traditional skillset. And there was no place to like go learn the skills to actually make YouTube videos and make TikToks and start to build a brand and an audience. and a community online. And so we've been kind of tackling that for the last couple of years and that's the whole origin story.

Tell us about CreatorNow. Tell us about kind of what you guys have built, some of the things that you teach, some of the things that you've learned from aspiring creators and what's working today.

Yeah, I think the biggest thing that we saw was that a lot of creators would have the passion to get started or aspiring creators, people that were creator curious, had the passion, but there was never really like an organized place for them to start. The traditional institutions of education were teaching something that was like 30 years in the past. And a lot of people would start, make a few videos that wouldn't go viral or, you know, would get like 4 views, and then they would get really discouraged and quit because they didn't know what to do to make them better. And they didn't really have anyone to go to that could give them credible advice. They'd go to their mom and they'd be like, that's great, honey, like keep going. And they're like, ah, that doesn't give me anything. And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to create something that was also more elevated than the courses that were being released because the courses were all prerecorded. At the speed in which it moves, it's way too quick to be able to prerecord educational content because a year later, that's no longer relevant, which is, I think, the reason why post-secondary institutions haven't been able to teach social media content creation, because by the time they even write the curriculum, it's changed. And so what we were thinking of doing was rather than going out and getting A lot of these courses are created by people who have never done the thing. They haven't gotten a million subscribers. They haven't made content that's gotten the viewership that people aspire to. Why don't we actually go try to take those people and turn them into educators or give them a platform or a place where these up-and-coming, aspiring, rising stars in the creator economy can actually have access to them?

The other piece was we created like a system of accountability. And this comes to the, you know, there was a lot of gamification built into the platform to get creators actually making things because our philosophy was the only way they're actually gonna learn is if they actually start. Um, and can we create a community and a vibe in a place where it feels like everyone is doing this and everyone's trying?

How did you identify the— like, was there an application process to get into the program? How did you basically decide on who was coming in? How many people did you reach and still reach to this day? CreatorNow is growing and thriving. And then what are some of those gamification Things you built?

That's a good question. So I'd say, well, I'll start with the gamification piece, which is, again, is like built around, can we actually get creators making stuff? Which was early, early on, we actually, we thought of CreatorNow as this 6-week experience. We didn't try to go after a certain group of creators. It was more just Zach and I literally sitting and having tacos. And we were trying to come up with ideas of a business to build with Eric that made sense. And Eric really only cared He cares about YouTube. Like, that's like literally what he cares about. And so we were like, well, we gotta do something in YouTube. And then it was the 3 of us being like, well, we are frustrated with the state of education, so is there something different? And so we imagined CreatorNow as a 6-week experience where we would get creators to come and post a weekly video for 6 weeks. The whole promise was, come here, we're gonna cap it at 300 people for the first one, and you're gonna try to post 6 videos in 6 weeks. And then we're gonna bring in all of our like friends that are amazing creators to come teach random things along the way. And then we put everyone into groups of 20 that were competing to see which team could hold the highest streak. The whole time have had a platform where we're tracking growth off of YouTube and like actually looking at, are these videos working at all? But the primary thing for us was actually making stuff is the leading indicator to the lagging indicator, which would be views and subscribers. So can we just get these like aspiring creators to actually be making stuff? And what we had realized in that first cohort was of that group of 300 that came in and tried and did this, We had over 50% of creators posted 6 videos in 6 weeks, and many posted their first video for the first time and then were able to make 6 in 6. So it was like this incredible feat. And that's when we realized like, oh my gosh, there's something really here, which is it's— it is— it was far less about us and like the educators we're bringing in, and it was more about can you create this sense of camaraderie and this energy of bringing people together that have a shared mission and shared goal, and then they get to go sprint at that.

Our team at Mighty just did this model, like built this model. So we looked across millions of courses, millions of, of the communities on Mighty. 93% accuracy, we can predict whether a community or a course is going to stick around, grow, bring in new people for free, you know, through word of mouth, and drive in like long-term retention. It was not about the content. It was not about the funnel, the way that they were marketing. It was one thing, member-to-member connection. Were members meeting each other? Were they talking to each other? Were they on Threads together? Were they DMing? Were they were they basically meeting and building relationships? That was and is the number one indicator of a successful community or course or paid membership.

Makes total sense to me. I mean, I think we, like a lot of our philosophy was around if we can basically just get creators to make stuff and get them to talk to each other, we'll have won. Like everything else will solve itself. And actually the education piece of having these instructors come in in a lot of ways was just an excuse to get everyone in a room together to get them to actually start meeting each other. in the chats.

Yeah, it's definitely not about what you teach because like the information's out there. Everyone's always like, oh, you're selling this course? Like, this is out there on YouTube. Totally. You could learn how to become a rocket scientist probably on the information that's now available on YouTube. But can you curate it? And can you also hold yourself accountable to studying it in ways that are actually going to help you retain the information? And I think anything that we do as humans, we'll do it far better if we surround ourselves with people who are just slightly better than us at that thing. If you just are just with people slightly out of your comfort zone, that's probably the best way that we can all acquire skills in the fastest way.

What do you think an aspiring creator needs to learn other than post the damn video?

I think that's been the challenge of it is even when we say like we work with beginner creators, we work with early-stage creators. There's some early-stage creators who have made 10 videos. They still only have, you know, less than 1,000 subscribers. They just don't know how to get that number up, and they consider themselves beginner. It's also beginner creator who doesn't even know how to edit, doesn't even know how to work a camera, doesn't even know the first little step to filming a shot. And so it's really hard to create the curriculum for them. We've started realizing that the people who have made it have usually just, for some reason, either through their own perseverance or determination, stuck with it long enough. to figure it out. And so our, I think, goal has become how do we just make it more fun for people so that they have more incentive to stick with it longer, to give themselves more at-bats, which increases their likelihood of having one of those hit in a way that gets the momentum building. Because I think the first 1,000 subscribers is always the hardest. And any creator will tell you, once you hit certain milestones, it becomes infinitely easier. But it's— most people quit before they ever get the chance to build the momentum to make it real for themselves.

One of the things that we certainly see, I certainly see and believe, is that having a purpose, having like a very clear point of view, a clear motivation, something that people can, can not only see in terms of you being the creator of it, but also the host of it in terms of their ability to like meet like-minded people. What do you guys see as the best way to get attention? Like you're making the videos, like, is it, is it about a purpose? Is it about a specialty? Is it Is it about a hook? Is it just about a personality? What, what are you seeing today across the aspiring creators that you work with?

I think it's different for everyone. I think it's different for bigger creators than it is for those early, early ones. And I'm sure you see this on the community side as well, which is if you have like a random 13-year-old being like, I wanna build a community, or I wanna like start a YouTube channel, likely what they're interested in at that moment is gonna be different from when they're 18, from when they're 30, from whatever, what all these different ages. I think what we see a lot with aspiring creators is when they're first turning on a camera, they think that they might wanna do something with a particular purpose or a particular style based on other people that they've watched. But there's this incredible period of experimentation that's required to figure out what is that actual purpose? What is that thing that makes you the most interesting? What's your competitive edge on the internet? What it like, who, what's the true self that come is coming from you? And how do you express that into some sort of format or something that an audience can watch?

What has been the easiest way to 1,000?

I actually think that that question is a dangerous question. If you hack your way to 1,000 subscribers, you might actually not build the right foundation to build the proper audience. I would almost say even just like the, the best way to get started is to not have the intention of trying to get attention. Yeah. It's the same way of like, how do you make money is like you probably don't go after just like looking for money all over the place.

Right, right.

You have to add value, you try to solve problems, and then the money comes to you. I think in the same way, there are a lot of unsustainable ways of starting to make content, and it probably looks like trying to do a trend hack thing to get somewhere. The more sustainable option— this is why we try to focus on the inputs, not the outputs. Wherever a creator says like, my New Year's resolution is to have a million subscribers, we're like, you don't actually control that. It's probably not the right goal to be setting. You can control how many videos you publish You can control the feeling that you have before you press publish on them. You can spend— you can control the number of hours that you spend editing videos, but you can't control how many views they get.

I was sitting there listening for, well, you could put a ton of hours into something and it sucks. Feeling though is something that's really interesting to me. Say more about that.

Often like call it the pre-publish scorecard. I think I stole it from Charlie Munger. He has something called the internal scorecard. where he's like, okay, I'm making investment decisions based off of how I actually like am feeling about something.

Yeah.

We try to get creators to pause before they press that upload and that publish button and be like, okay, that thing is now out in the world. It's no longer mine. How do you actually feel about that when it's going up? Do you feel proud of the work that you put into it? Do you feel like you punked out a little bit and like you didn't actually put all the energy you could have into it? Are you really proud of certain cuts that you have? What, what about this project do you feel like you learned from? Um, and like, can you just have that moment of reflection before it goes out into the world? Because everything that happened before you press publish is what you're in control of, and everything that happens after, you're— it's, it's up to the world at this point.

That's so well said. I've been very curious about this for a while, and you're the perfect people for me to ask this question. What's the difference between a creator and an entrepreneur?

It's a good question.

It's a really good question.

I would say, I think not all creators are entrepreneurs, although I think a lot of them are. But maybe it's to that point of a creator starts building the audience first, an entrepreneur starts with the product first. So not all entrepreneurs are creators either. You can have a really successful product or B2B SaaS company, and maybe you don't need to make any content or be even that creative in some aspects. And similarly, you can be a creator that doesn't try to build a business or doesn't try to even make money. But you're just doing it for the creative expression. But I think it's probably starting at audience community first and then reaching a product after is where you're a creative entrepreneur.

I think the way I break this down is it's almost like artist to entrepreneur is this extreme spectrum. Artist being someone who literally doesn't care at all about making money. It's like complete self-expression all the way to entrepreneur, which might be at the most rote version of that. It's like, How do I turn $1 into $2 and $2 into $4?

And yet what's interesting to me is in terms of the inputs versus the outputs, what you're describing over here with, in entrepreneur land, they're almost trying to hack it. They're, because to a certain extent today, if you don't have attention, it is nearly impossible to sell a product or service.

Yes, totally. I think what we're starting to see is both of these things moving to the middle more, right? Artists are realizing, okay, to break out, I have to care about TikTok. I have to care about putting stuff out, right? And this is where almost like the mentality of a creator is emerging between an artist and an entrepreneur in a lot of ways. And I think entrepreneurs are moving, realizing exactly what you're saying. I have to build an audience. I have to like, and also like the product that you're making, like that can be a form of art. Right? Where you're thinking about how does this make someone feel on the other side, which is very much what an artist would do with any work. And I think we're just starting to see more and more people move to the middle of like, okay, I have to have some sensibility about how to make money doing this for it to be sustainable. And I need to also like have it like contribute something, something to the world that's different. And oftentimes that comes from kind of this artistic impulse. But weirdly, you're seeing, yeah, creators that are like building audiences going, okay, what business can I launch to my audience? And then I think on the flip side, you're seeing even at the top, like top, top, top entrepreneurs, right? Like Mark Zuckerberg, for example, he's now like in content all the time and like making that a priority. And you're realizing, I think everything's kind of moving to the middle and we're realizing we have to play the pulse of culture.

Yeah, I think, I think both entrepreneurs and artists should be very aware of what's happening because To that point, I think we're all realizing that we're all— what we're all actually after is just time and attention. And so creators are now becoming some of the biggest artists in the world, as well as some of the biggest entrepreneurs in the world. And it's because of their ability to now create content and reach an audience for free because they understand these platforms and how people interact and use these platforms. And I think it's far easier to learn now because of things like AI, and because of platforms like Shopify, how to run your own business. And so the, the barrier to entry in almost everything is completely being reduced a lot faster than these businesses and these artists are learning how to make content. I think that's the big macro change that we're seeing under our feet.

What was true 6 months ago, a year ago, that just is no longer true?

Actually, one big one is when we started CreatorNow, one of the big things and the reason why we push people to post weekly was because Our belief was that if you post weekly content, that will give you the best chance of breaking out. And it wasn't until we captured about 3 years' worth of data, and we've also heard from top creators as well as small creators and medium-sized creators, that there's actually not a correlation between the consistency of your posting to the likelihood that you break out. Now, it does mean you have to post a lot or you have to put in a lot of work into those videos. But it's not as clear causation as we initially had anticipated. And so as long as you're not being indexed as inactive on these platforms, because I think there is a little bit of penalization in the algorithm where you do have to be posting, but it seems to be far more effective to ensure that your video is actually good and that you're improving your video after each and every single one versus You know, just punching the punching bag in the same way over and over and over again, hoping that things are gonna change.

And what does it look like to improve your videos from where you're sitting? Is it production value? Is it length? Is it kind of one message? Making them better is subjective.

You know, to Kate's pre-published checklist, most creators can watch a video and go, ah, I probably could have done this differently. Or through the feedback that they might get through from peers, they might realize, oh, I, I said um too much here, or I didn't start with an engaging intro, or my hook wasn't strong enough, or People don't really feel connected to this character that I was trying to develop. And so, if you make the next video and you just do the exact same thing the exact same way and not take those lessons and try to implement changes, then you're not making any progress. And I think a lot of us tend to just do the same thing over and over again and not learn from our mistakes. And so, I think the difference is just focusing on what was told to me that I agree on that could have been better, and how am I actually going to do something about it in the next video?

I agree totally. And I think I'll take it another step, which is I think most creators assume what they need to do is make all the cosmetic things better. So the production value needs to be better, my thumbnail needs to be better, like all of that. But the project is missing like a soul.

Yeah.

It's like missing a thing that would make you actually wanna watch it. There are kids that shoot videos on their iPhones, like sitting in their car just chatting that have thousands and thousands of views because the kid is saying something interesting. And so I think a lot of the advice, and I think we ran into this a lot with how we were educating, was early, early on, just start making stuff and like try to improve that it's actually delivering something to someone that's watching it. And then start to worry about the cosmetic changes. Because if you can learn how to make a video that has something that someone like wants to actually watch and is interesting, You can then add all of the layers of better production value, better thumbnails, better titles. Um, and that will like actually reach a larger audience. But if you do the reverse where you do all of the cosmetic stuff right, but you never put the energy into figuring out how to make things that are really interesting that people wanna watch, that's where you get lost. And we've seen a lot of creators, I think, do really good on the cosmetic and then quit because they never figured out like that main thing.

This is the, the, the. segment called Bad Advice. What do you think is the worst advice that is given to creators?

I think maybe bad advice that early-stage creators get is to figure out your niche. And I think there are a lot of creators who are like 2, 3, 4 videos in and they're like, I gotta figure out my niche. And I think that that shoehorns their, uh, like kind of spotlights their creativity in a way where they're not actually even figuring out their own self and creative expression. And so I, I think that that's bad advice because in the early stages you wanna go a bit more broad and figure out and make videos in like 4 or 5 different niches in order to uncover which one feels right. Um, I don't think a creator should figure out their niche until a lot further down the road.

What's your favorite example of an aspiring creator or even a big one, a big creator kind of in their earliest days doing that kind of exploration? And where did they end up?

I mean, the cheesy one is probably even MrBeast. Like MrBeast did a video where he is like counting to 100,000 and then doing a whole separate video about something. Like he really wasn't doing what he's doing and he's the example, right, that everyone uses. I think even Airrack is another example. He did trampoline videos. He did videos of himself in his backyard doing flips called Fresh Flippin'. And then, you know, that moved into like vlogs, that moved into like these more challenge-style videos that progressed into him being like, how do I actually try to copy what TV networks are doing and YouTubize it?

Many people's favorite story of entrepreneurship is, oh, I wasn't trying, I wasn't trying. I just, I accidentally stumbled on this multimillion-dollar business and like, oops, like, It's just my, you know, it's my natural charm. And, and, you know, that's what, that's what I've got. And meanwhile, that's never the true story. That is never the true story. I've been doing this for a very long time. But trying, you know, so many people come to community design and, you know, the masterclass I teach, and they're like, it has to be perfect before I can get started. And so what I'm hearing is a lot of a lot of similarities between just try stuff and stay curious. Just try it, stay curious. And whenever you're tempted to reframe something to failure, or like that initial instinct is failure, like, oh my God, I failed, like nobody cares, what am I doing with my life, which is really easy, like really easy to get to, is reframe it to what did I learn?

I think there's something that every small creator has that every, you know, larger creator envies, which is the ability to try stuff and have no expectations of who's watching. Where I know every single creator with over a million subscribers is very envious that they can't do that anymore, and that now there's an expectation. Now they've kind of fit a niche already. Now if they try to change stuff, their audience might actually be upset and not watch. They also have sunk cost. If the videos don't perform, they have a team that they gotta pay. Now there's all that. And so you don't realize it until it's too late that there's a great fortune, there's great advantages of being early.

Which is a perfect example of reframing. So it's like if you're sitting there with, you know, operating in obscurity, you get to try stuff and do things that big creators can't do. That is a total, That is a total reframe in a super cool way. I think this is a great segue into the state of play for big creators today. What is the opportunity that exists for a big creator today? And what are some of the challenges?

So the creator economy in a lot of ways has gone through these interesting hype cycles over the last, like, or one hype cycle essentially over the last little bit of time. And I think everyone, including us, we were building a business in the, in the space, like thinking That going to the moon. Yeah, creators are the future of everything, right? They're the future of Hollywood. They're the future of entrepreneurship. They're like like every industry can be upended by creators. I still think that that is true, but at a much less like crazy rate than maybe what we thought. And I think generating an audience doesn't necessarily translate to you being able to launch a business. I think that thesis hasn't. Played out in the same way we assumed, which is, oh, if you just aggregate 10 million people watching you, then you'll easily be able to build a massive business because that's a lot of people that like are a potential market for that thing. I think we're starting to come back down to earth in some respects and start to realize that, you know, yeah, attention is fractionalized. Fandom has changed a lot over the last number of years. The introduction of short-form content has really split the way that people are viewing content and people are not becoming stars in the way that they were 8 years ago even, where if someone had a million subscribers, that was a huge deal 8 years ago. That's no longer a huge deal when you have things like Shorts. You can just post a lot of Shorts and you can grow a million subscribers and that can translate to $0 in your bank account or like even real fans. So there's a lot of like the industry is definitely going through this transition in a lot of ways. And I think a lot of that is due to the introduction of short-form content and then also us coming down to earth to some degree, which was, I think COVID at some level overinflated the amount that we thought like the entire creator economy was worth because more people were making content and more people were making money from making content because everyone was at home. And so I think that's kind of what created the hype cycle. But I still think there's an immense amount of opportunity to build meaningful audiences and meaningful communities on these platforms. Again, if you kind of figure out those early things and you have a real thing that you're bringing, and then there become a lot of opportunities that actually do open up if you've done kind of phase one, which is figuring out, you know, what you're going to make and then aggregating a community around it. I think that has proved harder for like even creators at a large size than, than we maybe initially thought it would be.

Social media history in 60 seconds. These platforms started as places that we would connect with our peers and people that we know. and quickly turned into a place where we could upload content. We didn't really think that that was us being a creator. It was like photo albums of our trips to whatever. And I think, um, social media then turned into like, we follow a certain amount of creators or a certain type of creator, and then we see all of their content. So especially YouTube was very subscription-based. Um, that was how you found creators. And once you found your creator, you watched a lot of them.

The reason this is the case is not just because people loved it. It was the easiest technology to scale.

Hmm.

It was the easiest technology to scale to billions of people is I talk out at you, you consume my content. But the whole construct of the social graph, the idea that it would basically be like software that would connect people to each other, quietly fell by the wayside.

Mm-hmm.

Because when you're going after this massive scale, consumption is an absolutely easier model to scale, which is one of the reasons why today is such an interesting moment with advanced technology and AI, because you can actually finally scale those connections between people in a way that consumption alone was— I mean, essentially you had to dumb things down so that you could actually scale to billions of people.

100%. You talk about that in your book, which is like the— that shift from social network to social media that almost like happened right in front of our eyes.

Real quick.

But none of us like really noticed.

Yeah, real quiet, real quick.

And we assume it's all the same thing, but it's actually quite different.

We don't even have social network anymore.

It's so different. So different. Than audiences or what we have thought about as communities on rented platforms.

Exactly. And I think the— yeah, with creators, the move to short form changed a lot after basically like the D'Amelio and Addison Rae stars broke out of TikTok. I would say there haven't really been any breakout stars in social media where we go, that's the it person. And if it happens, it's someone who's around for a month or two And then we move on and they're no longer that person. That was very different than how things were in the past, where we would have a phenomenon like an icon come out and they would be the talk of the town for months, if not years. And I think that that's also happened in music. We haven't had a global breakout artist in the same way that we used to 10 years ago. And I think that's because we are fragmenting our attention across a larger, broader scope of artists, creators, and even some of the businesses that we use. I think we're just like fragmenting everything. So I think that's the kind of changing tide that's challenging a lot of creators because they no longer can potentially make the same amount of money either through the advertising revenue that they're seeing in their videos, but also through the connection that they can build with an audience on these social platforms alone that could lead to products.

How are you thinking about, you know, at the, at the high end of the market, at the, at the big creators. What's good strategy today?

The example that comes to mind, that, uh, is a creator named Ali Abdaal. He's a UK-based productivity creator. Uh, huge shout out and kudos to Ali. I think he's a gold standard of what a creator also being an entrepreneur looks like. And, uh, what I would say he's done incredibly well is he started making YouTube content as someone studying in med school, showcasing what it's like being a med school student, and that turned into his productivity advice and his general just like lifestyle advice. He's created different content through different mediums. So he has his short-form content, he has his podcast, he has his long-form videos, and he's found that he's been able to successfully launch businesses. So he had a platform very similar to CreatorNow that we thought was— has done a great job called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. Where he would teach other people how to do essentially what he's done, and then has also now written a book. And so he's now starting to worldbuild, which I think you as a creator, to face the challenges that we just talked about, you almost need to become a worldbuilder. You can't just become a content creator anymore. And that means that you need to have multiple touchpoints with your audience through different mediums conveying a similar ethos or vibe. He's done that incredibly well. in the world of like people wanting to be a content creator, but also just being like productivity nerds.

I think this distinction of creator, entrepreneur, audience, community, and I think about, you know, paid membership, anytime that you can host people, that they are actually, the value is similar to what you guys have built with CreatorNow of, are people meeting each other and is there value being created by those relationships of people meeting each other? That to me is a community. That to me is a social network. But there's something you just said that I think is super interesting. I didn't— I hadn't thought about it in exactly this way, which is the difference between creating content and creating an immersive world.

Mm-hmm.

That— and so what I hear in kind of the world building is multiple touchpoints, multiple kinds of ways of impacting someone. So teaching, hosting, facilitating, probably even bringing people together in person would fit into that, even if he's not necessarily doing it.

Yeah.

And how people actually meet people through the creators that they— and actually, in that case, the world builders that they know and love?

Yeah, I would say it starts with empathy to the person is where it should start. And so what Ali has done well is understand that there's this persona out there that is a productivity nerd, wants everything optimized, wants their systems and apps to be like working in sync with one another. And he's launched things in multiple touchpoints. So he launched a keyboard that was like a cool minimalist keyboard that people can use, knowing that people kind of like bringing back retro nostalgic keyboards into their computers. But he also has a book that can teach you how to do it. There's also like a playlist that you could play while you're working that has like lo-fi beats. So those are totally different things, but if I like the book, I probably like this thing, and if I like this thing, I probably use this keyboard. And so that's the world. I think some creators can build worlds where there's interconnectivity between the people, and that serves as a— benefit and an amplification of that message. And I think some don't, like productivity might not, you know, if you are a productivity nerd, you may not really care about like hanging out with other people who are productivity nerds. It's totally about self-optimization.

Although I will say, you know, we have, uh, the, the Bullet Journal guys. Mm-hmm. That community is, is on fire.

Yeah. People rave about that journal.

On fire.

Yeah. I'm not surprised.

Yeah, I guess I can see people like sharing their ideas and being like, oh my God.

I mean, because there's like, A certain type of productivity person, right? That's so obsessed with certain optimization things that you got to like meet the other ones.

Right. You got to know, you got to know what people are doing.

Yeah.

But that's really interesting. So how— what's—

what is an example from where you're sitting, Kate, in terms of like someone that's worldbuilding? Yeah.

Or even just like one of your favorite examples of multiple revenue streams, taking it sort of You know, one click down.

Ludwig is like mostly known as a streamer, is building a handful of companies kind of like in the streaming space. Incredibly entertaining character, hosts a podcast like in addition to what he does on stream, is constantly kind of— he's like this very internet-centric guy that's got his finger on the pulse. But then he's always like launching really random things. He launched a bidet company.

Or just a bidet.

Yeah.

Like, wasn't even a bidet company.

Okay.

Product drop.

You know, we're gonna do like a product drop that's a bidet, 'cause I like— mostly 'cause I like bidets. So like, I'm just gonna do this.

How many bidets has he sold?

I don't know.

That I feel like is a— is an action item I'm following up on.

Yeah, you should, you should look into it.

In show notes.

Um, and I like— I think the reason I appreciate maybe what he's doing is it feels less calculated, right? He's actually not like, oh, I'm in this very clear niche.

Yeah, I'm a gamer, so that means I need to—

He's like, ah, today I like we're going to like host a thing here where we're going to like tap some random kids and they're going to come together and they're going to like play Super Smash together. And like, we're going to host an event around that.

He did a livestream where he had chess boxing.

Yeah, he hosted chess boxing.

Chess while you box and like totally new format, totally unheard of before.

Like, this is so random, right? And then you're like randomly like, hey, guess what? You can buy my bidet. And like, it's like— but it just feels like him. Right. And so he's like building this universe, I think, for people to kind of enter in and play. And it's like fun. And there's not a clear reason that they're doing it other than like, yo, this is entertainment.

So this, this is a question that that raises for me, which is one of the things I see a lot just in, you know, my own work is how much do you follow the playbooks? how much do you follow, like, as a large creator, even as an aspiring creator entrepreneur, how much of it is follow what everybody else is doing?

I have like so many strong feelings about this question.

Ooh.

I have a theory which is like, for every trend, there's an equal and opposite trend. So to your point, it's like you look at what's trending and you just do the freaking opposite version of that thing, and there's a chance that there's an audience for it, right? There's a group of young people that have started this movement called the YouTube New Wave, which is almost like this counterbalancing force of like, how do we make things that breathe a lot more? They're much more about like our lives and things that we're interested in and we're not trying to be—

Who's like a great example of the YouTube new wave?

Max Reisinger is a good friend of ours. Natalie Lynn makes incredible films. Wholesome Simon, like Ryan Ng, all of the— there's a group of them that make amazing, amazing stuff.

Also, I love hearing that they've named it and claimed it.

Yeah, they've got a hashtag.

It's like, yeah, like a whole thing.

Yeah, it's like a proper movement, right? And so there's— yeah, you can have these kind of counterbalancing trends and pieces, right? You can look at the market and you can either be part of the market or you can like go against it. I think the most sustainable path is actually not doing any of that and it's just going, what, what do you want to make?

I would say not looking at what everyone else competing with you is doing is really, really important.

It's actually interesting for building communities. It's, it's a little bit different. What is your community gonna be able to do a year from now that they're not able to do today? Looking out a year from now, 2 years from now, what, what do you think the modern creator business content strategy What do you think it's gonna look like a year from now or even 2 years from now for the, for the people you care about, the people that you think about, you know, their businesses, their impact?

I think it really depends on if we see an adjustment to the way that people, young people especially, spend their time. Right now, it looks like they all spend their time on their phones, on the same 4 apps owned by the same 3 companies. And I don't think we should accept that as an inevitability forever. That very much could change in the same way that we don't listen to the radio anymore, and that seemed like something we'd probably spend all of our times doing. And so I think if that if that doesn't change, the answer is different. But I think the best thing that a creator can do to set themselves up for success regardless of what happens with the new entry is to start thinking about more. What is the audience that I'm trying to reach? Why am I trying to reach them? Once I reach them and gather them, what would I like them to do? Or what would I like to do with them altogether? And what are the necessary tools that I can use to accomplish that based on what's available to me?

I think many of the creators that we work with are kind of, that's where a lot of their attention and their energy is put is like, okay, how am I gonna get people to connect and be offline and have real experiences in the real world? And that to me is like, That's the promise of the creator economy, is like more people get to make the kind of stuff that they want to make, and that inspires more people to make awesome stuff and to like have better lives because of it.

I see it as moving from content creation and consumption to relationship building with actual other people. So how do we have a relationship and how do creators and entrepreneurs and even brands facilitate how we build relationships IRL and online and online into IRL. Because relationships create experiences, relationships create innovation, relationships unlock those moments where it's just like, oh my God, we are doing something different here. Like, This is special, this is unique. And I actually am starting to see more and more creators think about how am I making relationships possible. And I think that's going to just be a less depressing trend than all I do is consume now 10 hours a day of content.

The interesting thing for me where Mighty solves this massive problem in the world and this problem specifically is creators can have a, have a very big choice to make, which is, are they the thing that all the attention is going towards, or do they want to and have the ability to redirect the attention towards a thing that they believe? And there are pros and cons to that decision. By doing so, you— it may actually be harder because we like following people. But if a creator can direct that spotlight and say, actually, it's not about me, it's about this thing that I believe very strongly. And if you believe in this thing, then you can join a community or we can rally around trying to make this thing happen in the world. And that creates the world where people can start to have interconnectivity because they also share that belief. It's not about the egotistical, we're fans of this person. It's about I believe what that person believes. They're just the figurehead of it.

Yeah.

And I think that's where creators can make meaningful change. But it requires these creators to ask themselves a very challenging question, oftentimes at a very early stage in their lives, which is like, what am I willing to believe and stand up for more than anything else? And that's a very challenging question. I think a lot of creators probably don't do this because they think it's really hard to build a community and manage it. And, you know, to your, to your credit and what you're doing at Mighty is like, it's only getting easier. And some of the things that you guys have built now make it less of a, oh my goodness, I can't do this alongside all my content because then I would have to hire a team of moderators and I need this thing.

Most people are building communities on platforms that were built and created for people who already knew each other. And even like the new crop of communities and courses, they're not built for people who don't know each other. And the way that you get scale and create a really valuable world is when platform, platform, you know, is set up to introduce your people to each other. And I think you guys have done that so well with Creator Now, even before the technology was available for this. And now that is just getting easier and easier. And that is where not all places are created equal in this way. That's all right. I am so grateful for the time that you guys have spent With me, I feel like I've learned a lot. Thank you, Zach, Kate. Really appreciate you guys taking the time.

Appreciate you for having us.

Appreciate all of you.