10 Predictions & Trends for the Creator Economy

Hi everyone, my name is Matt and welcome to a new episode of Connect the Dots. This is a very unique Connect the Dots episode. If you're just listening to it, then you won't know or see any of this, but if you're watching this on the YouTube channel, then there are a couple of things that you will notice. The first one is that it's much darker right now. I don't know how these, you know, lights are working, but I have a new lighting setup that allows this recording, this video, to not look grainy, to look nice, because I've got my key light here and I've got my, I think, fill light here. Might be a little, might be a little too bright. Let's bring it down. Let's bring it down a little bit. And then in the back, this is what's known as the rim light. It's also, I said, midnight and I'm a little disheveled and I am just really excited about this episode. But as you might expect from someone recording, starting to record a podcast cast literally at midnight, I also feel a bit scattered and a little tired. But I am here to show up for you now so that I can show up for you on Monday or Tuesday, whenever this is going to go out. What I'm talking about today on Connect the Dots is a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. It's not as productivity-focused But I am going to be connecting the dots, as it were, with the experience that I have in the creator economy. I would say I'm pretty in, like, the current iteration of it. I'm pretty early stage creator economy. I was working as a freelancer back in, like, 2013, 2014. I started a podcast then. I started my YouTube channel in 2017. I've been blogging for over 10 years, and I also worked at ConvertKit. I worked at Podia, both of which are very creator economy-centric companies. ConvertKit, if you don't know all about it, is email marketing for creators, and Podia is a course membership platform for creators. I have a lot of experience not just being a creator myself, but being on the front lines of those companies who exist to help creators earn a living. Like, that's precisely what ConvertKit's mission statement is. So in this episode of Connect the Dots, I'm going to be giving you 10 predictions I have for the future of the creator economy. Okay? And I wanted to do this because predictions are fun because some are going to be true, some are not going to be true. But it gives me and others a pretty cool way to kind of connect the dots back and put a pin in it and say like, "Oh yeah, I talked about this in 2021." And so when it gets to be 2025, 2030, 2031, like 9 or 10 years from now, can look back and I can kind of measure those predictions against what actually ended up happening. So let's go ahead and get into it. The first prediction that I have is a pretty lame prediction, so I hope that you stick with me. But the prediction for me is that the creator economy and the way that people are starting their own creative businesses is not only going to increase— that would be kind of the lame part of being like, hey, more people are going to do this. Yeah, no kidding. But I think it's going to continue to increase at a very rapid pace. So I think there's just going to be more and more people that are starting side hustles, that are leaving their normal jobs, that are going to create something on their own. Dolly Parton— didn't think I was going to be bringing up Dolly Parton in this episode. She had a great song, one of her big hits of her career is is, you know, working 9 to 5. And she came out during 2020 with this great, like, flip on it that's perfect for side hustlers called Working 5 to 9, making something of your own now. And it feels so good to make a living off your know-how. And there's just going to be more and more of that happening in the coming years. The second prediction that I have for the creator economy is that it's going to be easier to do this as well. And that's part of why I have the prediction that it's going to increase and increase rapidly because I do think things like healthcare, technology support, better internet around, around the country, around the world, better financial support and systems as well, like, you know, taxes and accounting. And also I think there are going to be more child support systems that are available. Now a lot of this kind of all fits together. Now if there are more people running their own creative or solopreneur or small businesses because they have the resources to do that. Well, some of those are going to be people who help with finances, that help with legal, that help with, you know, healthcare and legislation and infrastructure, and also help with childcare. So I think you're going to see things like co-ops for these different types of like little companies that sprout up in neighborhoods or cities where a lot of these things are not just celebrated, but really supported. So number 1 and number 2 definitely fit together. I think that the creator economy is going to continue increasing at a rapid pace. And I think part of that is because the infrastructure, the systems, the support that help creators make that leap will become more and more available. The third prediction I have for the creator economy is that the biggest creators will start building or continue to build their own empires. And it won't always be in a way that necessarily makes sense because their fans are such big fans that basically whatever their favorite creator influencer wants to do, they'll just be on board with it. And there's some ups and some downs to that, some pros and some cons. But my favorite example of this recently is when MrBeast, the YouTuber, incredible YouTuber, just insane challenges that he does on his channel. He started basically a ghost kitchen kind of pop-up shop called the MrBeast Burger. And in 3 months, so this, this report that I saw was at the beginning of March, and in the first 3 months of having MrBeast Burgers available nationwide in the U.S., he sold more than a million MrBeast Burgers. So I'm recording this beginning of April. This was from, this is the beginning of March. And so over a million, and I think average order size is like $8 per burger, $7 or $8. And so he's done about $8 million in 3 months off something that just has kind of nothing to do— like, the only way I could think of, and I haven't seen all of his videos, but if he— the only way it has to do with burgers, like, his channel, is if he said whoever can eat this 5-pound burger in 30 minutes gets $100,000. Like, he does those kind of videos. But he spun up MrBeast Burger, million burgers, 3 months. He has nothing to do with restaurants or burgers, just like, hey, I'm MrBeast and here's the MrBeast Burger, I'm gonna sell a million. That's going to keep happening more and more. Maybe not on that type of scale, but I was a part of one of these companies in one of these ways that a creator, you know, used not just their revenue but their influence and their their knowledge to create a company, to build something much bigger than them. That's what ConvertKit started as. Nathan Barry was a successful designer and creator, and he sold an ebook/course kind of bundle called Authority. And Authority did, I think, total— well, I know overall he did over half a million dollars on Gumroad when he was on that platform, and he used a good chunk of that as the seed money to start ConvertKit. ConvertKit is 100% bootstrapped. And, you know, Nathan, Nathan owns ConvertKit. So it's really incredible what a creator, what an influencer can do with the revenue and with the fans that they have to start something way bigger than themselves and really, you know, build a lasting company, to build a creator empire based on what they do. The fourth prediction I have for the creator economy is that creators who start on their own and do their own thing like I'm doing will actually have an easier time getting rehired back into like normal companies and businesses if they so choose to. Like I would say even like 3, 4, 5 years ago, that wasn't necessarily the case. If you left to do your own thing, it was like, well, why would you leave a company? Like, why would you do that thing? And if you came back, it was kind of more like you failed. But I'm seeing more and more that successful creators some of them are choosing to go back to companies that they really believe in, are choosing to join maybe like, you know, bigger companies that have a purpose that they can help like prop up and impact and have an even larger reach and influence based on what they care about and what they want to do. A couple of examples of this are my friend Val Geisler, who I worked with at ConvertKit. She has been doing her own like email copywriting, like teardowns, agency onboarding. She does like so much amazing work around email. Well, she just joined Klaviyo, which is an e-commerce email platform, like works with a lot of the big— probably a lot of the biggest Shopify sellers that you have probably bought things from use Klaviyo for the email marketing. Val just joined them. Another example is my friend Jay Klaus. Both of these people are in Columbus, by the way. Shout out to CBUS. And he has been running his own podcast and kind of coaching community for several years now. And his, his, uh, show is called Creative Elements. I was a guest on it. You should totally check it out. I'll link to it in the show notes. But, you know, Jay just joined the Smart Passive Income, like Pat Flynn's company, to like be their director of community. I don't know if that's his his exact title, but it's something that kind of came out of the blue for him. He'd been working on his own for several years and he didn't ever think he'd have quote unquote a job again. But now he joined SPI. He's really excited about it. He has a couple of great interviews on it. One is on IndieHackers if you want to kind of hear about his story as well. But creators like Val and Jay who have shown like their success in doing things and in creating an audience and like building a platform of their own. I think more and more companies are going to look to like pull in these different creators to build their own brand and to almost leverage the creator's audience to bring into their product and that expertise and evangelism that they can bring. So like 5 years ago, I don't think I would have said this, but I think going forward, I predict going forward that creators who want to rejoin companies or like join, you know, join a company for the first time after working for themselves for a while, they're going to find that easier and easier. And I think they're going to actually find themselves being recruited to like stop doing their own thing because they're so good at it. And I don't know if that always would have been the case 3, 4, or 5 years ago. The 5th prediction that I have for creators and the creator economy is that you're going to see more creators gain equity in brands and companies that they're very closely aligned with or already working with in some capacity. So instead of what you would have normally thought of with affiliate revenue or sponsorship, kind of promotional revenue, they may still get that, but the biggest brands are going to— or even like startup brands that maybe have some initial like capital or seed round funding, from other investors will also give some equity to top creators to promote and to be an advisor and to be aligned only with their brand. An example of this are a couple of people and companies that I've already talked about. And like Pat Flynn is an advisor to ConvertKit who has some equity in the company. And so when Pat switched to ConvertKit, like I actually started at ConvertKit The day that Pat published his blog post, Why I Switched from AWeber to Infusionsoft to ConvertKit, that was like basically the day that I started. And we went from about 500 customers at ConvertKit the next month to 1,000 to 2,000, 3, 4, and it just went up from there. And so Pat is a, not an investor, but he has equity in the company as an advisor, and it is worked really well for both sides. It's definitely been a win-win. Another example of this, it didn't quite work the same way as far as I know, is that when Roam Research was like pretty, pretty new to people, my friend Nat Eliason wrote a like now viral blog post, went viral on Hacker News, about like why I use Roam Research and why I love it. And that post led to NAT doing a course about Roam. It's called Effortless Output. It's a wonderful course about Roam. You can actually check out a link to it in the description below. But he sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of that course, and then he turned around and used a good chunk of that money to invest early on in Roam. So it was a little bit different way, and I don't know what other kind of agreement they might have set up, But you're going to see more and more creators who are very closely aligned with certain products get equity in those brands and companies in, in, in return. That's the word I'm looking for. In return for staying closely aligned and only promoting those brands, like whether it's for life or at least for a span of probably several years to like really lock in that brand awareness and alignment. The sixth prediction that I have for creators and the creator economy is that creators are going to start to build their own like mentoring apprenticeship pipelines and allow, allow those apprentices to spin off into their own companies, into their own brands, into their own like, you know, channels and everything, but with kind of the blessing of the, like, of the mentor creator and also with access to some of their network. And in return, it'll kind of be the opposite of what I just described in terms of company creator equity. Now this will be like mentor creator to apprentice creator. The, the revenue that the apprentice generates for X number of years, a percentage of that will go back to the mentor creator. I've really been thinking about this a lot and I think it's going to happen. It may already be happening in some ways, but to give you a concrete example of what I'm talking about, this has not happened, but it would be like if I got connected to Tim Ferriss and Tim Ferriss brought me in as his apprentice. I kind of learned from him. I worked with him. He gave me like, you know, the Tim Ferriss playbook. Access to the network. I got to go on different podcasts. I just, you know, I helped him in whatever way I could, and he would help me in a lot of ways, obviously, also. And so for X number of years, let's say, after this agreement that I entered into with Tim, whatever revenue I made in my business, Tim would get a percentage of that. He would basically be an equity stakeholder in Matt Ragland, LLC. Now, there aren't ways to like invest in people like in that same way right now. Like there's not a stock exchange for people. You can't say like, hey, Matt— there's a thing called BitCloud right now that's kind of going around, but that's not necessarily what I'm talking about. It is a very loose approximation. If you've never heard about it, don't worry about it right now. But you can't say like, hey, the value of the Matt Ragland stock is at $20 right now. So I'm going to get 5 shares of Matt Ragland because I think he's going up. And yeah, I think I'm going up too. This would be more like, hey, Tim says, Matt, you're going to be my apprentice. And I'm like, cool, Tim, definitely, let's do that. And then for the next 5 years, whatever revenue I generate at all, let's say, could maybe be on specific projects, but let's just say for ease of conversation, for the next 5 years, a percentage of revenue that I generate goes back to Tim because he's my mentor. And he is the person who is like, you know, helping me do all of this and showing me the way and giving me access to things and kind of help promoting me as well. You could do this in more traditional types of creative media as well. Like let's say that a musician has a particular way that he like to make music and promote it and has a great agent and a different, like even indie musicians especially, like say they like have these different spots around the country. Once we kind of get back to music and live music again, you say like, hey, you got to go to these cities, we're going to promote you this way. You can like distribute your music like this. You can sell your back catalog. In this way. And in, in like exchange for doing that, the apprentice musician will give a percentage of his revenue, his sales, his royalties to the mentor musician. Prediction number 7 for creators and the creator economy is that hiring and team building and all of that and making the empire grow, whatever size kingdom you want to put together, is going to get a lot easier as well. And I guess I could have put this in with the structure as well. But that's more like life infrastructure versus like what I see for this is more and more creators, one, filling a lot of different roles that they are good at. So I hope and I predict that people and creators especially are going to lean more and more into their strengths and what they do well. And that means that there are going to be more video creators and editors who are available to help people who are like me, who are just, you know, good at shooting videos, very okay at editing. But I can shoot more videos if I have a talented editor who loves editing. At least I think Dalton, you know, who's Dalton and team who are my editors, and Noah, they are excellent at editing. And so the more people that I have doing really good work at what they enjoy doing as creators makes everything fit together so much better. Everyone's kind of running their own unique business and we can all support each other that way. And so I do think that there's going to be a better marketplace and a better way to create connections and find talented people to help, maybe not on an employee basis, but on an ongoing contract basis. And right now, pretty much the only way to do that is— one of the better ways to do that is just through word of mouth and through recommendations and references. And those will always be really strong. But I do think there's a marketplace out there that for people who are kind of past Upwork and Fiverr and 99designs, and there's nothing wrong with those platforms, I think for people who want some ongoing help and work but don't want to just kind of go into the grab bag of what Fiverr can often be, at least in my experience, then those people are going to be a little bit easier to connect, build teams, hire, create a collection of contractors. And like, I'm hiring video editors and podcast editors. And so like, I have some contractors that I'm working with. For those like editors that I'm working with, I'm just another contract for them. So I think the whole ecosystem of creators is going to get a lot stronger, a lot more visible, and the way that you can find people to work with who are super talented is going to get easier and easier. Okay, these last 3 predictions are kind of fun and interesting, and I think more and more of the way the creator economy and just creator fame in a way is going to like impact. Yeah, restart. The last 3 predictions that I have for creators and creator economy are fun, a little bit different, and something that I do think you're going to see more and more of in the years to come. The 8th prediction I have is that you're going to see more and more creators show up as themselves in more traditional media. And the example that I have for this is if you've seen the movie Project Power on Netflix, it's Jamie Foxx movie. It's, it's good. Kind of unique superhero movie. But one of the reasons I watched that movie, even knew about it, is because Casey Neistat is in the movie. And he is in it for, you know, he's in it for a scene, he has a few lines, but he's, he's not in there as Casey. He's in there as a character who's trying to buy Project— who's trying to buy Power. Could have done better with the name there.. But I think in the future you're going to see Casey show up in a movie as Casey Neistat. And just like you might have seen like athletes or like business people, mainly athletes, make cameos in movies in the past, you're going to see popular influencers and creators show up in movies, in TV shows, on albums as themselves. And I'm really excited to see more and more of that, to see like it— I have a broader topic about this that I'm kind of sorting through and researching that is basically the creator multiverse. And so between like content creation and like products like the MrBeast Burger and showing up in movies, you're going to see these different kind of universes of the creator start to expand and kind of move into more traditional media. And traditional media will become just more and more like what the creator, what the creators are making these days. So that's something to look out for. It's already happening in some ways, but you're going to see it happening more and more where creators are either, you know, characters in movies and TV shows and things like that, and they're just going to start showing up as themselves. So Casey Neistat doesn't show up as just a random character in a Jamie Foxx movie. He's showing up in a Jamie Foxx movie as Casey Neistat. My 9th prediction for creators and the creator economy is one that I'm really interested and intrigued about because it is that creators for the first time will be able to pass down their audience to their kids, to their heir, to whoever they deem worthy of their platform, their empire. And I find this incredibly interesting. Because maybe you could have said in the past, like, if someone was a famous author like Stephen King's son Joe Hill, you'd say like, I'm Stephen King's son. Stephen King could say, here's my son, pen name Joe Hill. He is an excellent writer. You should buy his books. You should— like, those kind of things have happened in the past. And so what happens when a big YouTuber or podcaster or writer, like blog or online writer, what happens when these people's kids get old enough and they decide, yeah, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do this work too. I don't— that it's not the same. It's not the same as like taking over the family business. Like, it is a little bit, but to just transfer an audience to them, to inherit an audience, that has not really ever happened before. And it's something I'm super interested to see how it's going to occur because we are in the first stage of these massive online platforms, people building massive online platforms that then will grow with them throughout their professional lives. Like if I do this, most likely for 30, 40, 50, 70 more years—I'd love to live to 100—70 60, 70 years? Like, what will that platform look like? What will it look like for all of these people? Now, not everyone will do like this kind of stuff for that long, but what does that look like then for my kids that I can just kind of give them an inheritance of an audience? And if we're looking at it knowing that all of these other predictions could be true, that you build these empires, that you have like all these different moving pieces, but you can get on and say, "Hi, I'm MrBeast and I have burgers available for sale now," and it sells a million. Like, what is that going to look like in the future? Like, the makeup artists on YouTube just crush it. There are all kinds of examples. So what happens when these people have kids or with the kids they already have, like me, in 10, 15 years when those kids are of age, 20 years when those kids are of age? What happens in 50 years when I decide, you know, we'll see in 50 years that I'm not doing as much content anymore. What happens with that audience? Do I just like give it to my son, my sons as an inheritance? Oh, the prediction is that it's going to be a thing. And I can't wait to see not just how I handle it, but how all kinds of creators handle a massive online audience and kind of transitioning that to their kids, because it's not the same as what you would normally have thought of with taking over the family business. It's not the same thing. So it's going to be super interesting. The final and 10th prediction that I have for creators and the creator economy is that creators are going to build political clout, and many are going to run for office and win. And that is something that I've been very interested in, have been doing a lot of research about, and very like curious about how online audiences are going to translate into like physical votes and political activism. I'm not just talking about like trying to get a particular person elected, I'm talking about trying to get like me as the creator person elected. And the probably like the biggest like drawback to that thinking initially is that locally or even statewide, you don't necessarily like have your fans. Like for most people, like locally as you do, like, you know, that's part of the beauty of the internet is you can have fans and you do have fans everywhere. But what will be so interesting is that creators know how to build movements. How to build audiences. So give them enough time in their city-state of choice and they will figure out how to build an audience and how to communicate a message to local and state voters in a way that I don't think we are really even scratching the surface of right now. Like, obviously there are a lot of very smart people who run like media and PR campaigns for like anyone who's getting elected, especially at like the state and national level. But it's not like those people getting elected have not built an audience. So what— I'll give you an example. So here in Nashville, someone who grew up in Nashville, he's a national radio guy now. So I said grew up in Nashville, is a national radio guy now, is Clay Travis. Whether you love Clay or hate Clay, there are plenty of people on both sides, is you can't deny the audience that he's built. And the audience that he has built has been based off of going live on Periscope and Facebook and YouTube pretty much every day, every weekday for the past 5 or 6 years. Now Clay's pretty unique because like I said, he was born and raised in Nashville, so he already has like a great network here and he has plenty of fans here as well, people who know who he is. But what happens, and he's talked about this on his show, what happens when Clay decides, "I want to run for mayor, I want to run for Senate"? Clay will go live every single day of his campaign. Clay will do Q&As with people, like, live on his show. He will just go through and he will like get his messages across. He will build an audience of voters. He will create a movement, whichever way you want to think he's going to take that. But he is an example, and partly I'm thinking about this because he talks about it on his show, of someone who has built a massive audience. Like I said, he's the Fox Sports morning, like morning radio guy. He's on for 3 hours to millions of people, hundreds of affiliates. But even just here on the ground locally in Nashville, he's got a lot of fans. He's got a lot of followers. And if he decides, I'm going to run for like mayor, or I'm going to run for state senate or like the national senate seat from Tennessee, he— I wouldn't like, I wouldn't bet against him because he knows how to build an audience. He knows how to get his message across to people. And so that's what I want to leave you with as the 10th and final prediction is you're going to see more of these creators, more of these movement makers that know how to build an audience and know how to communicate a message, use that, use those skills, use those talents to run for office, to impact change on a local, state, and national level. All right everyone, those are my 10 predictions for creators and the creator economy in the coming years. I can't wait to kind of come back and connect the dots and like pin some of these and be like, oh, you know, that was kind of off. But these are all things that I feel pretty strongly about. And yeah, especially ones that I'm kind of interested to look at are the last couple that I talked about, are creators becoming like major political players or like actually running for and winning political office, and then how the creator audience transitions from the, from the initial, like, family creator myself to, like, family members, to the two kids, especially as they grow up, because it's not the same as taking over, like, the traditional family business. Thank you so much for listening. If you have any predictions for the creator economy please just email me, matt@mattragland.com, or probably the best place is on Instagram or Twitter. I'm on Twitter the most, for better or for worse, and it's just @mattragland on Twitter. So hope to hear from you there. You can also sign up for my email list. Go to mattragland.com/daily is going to be the best place for that. And I can't wait to talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Bye.