The NEW Way to Become a Full-Time Creator in 12 Months (or less)

You don't have to have a following to be a creator.

I think everyone wants to be here. That is the Holy Grail. It's not some job where you're like, sure, I make $1 million a year, but man, it's hard working in the coal mines. You know, it's like, no, it's actually just good all around. Do you want to make a full-time living as a creator, but you aren't sure where to start? My guest today is Jed Eglinton. He helps creators become founders and founders become creators.

If you have a great skill set for telling stories, for capturing attention, you You're such a valuable asset to an in-house team.

Then there's this ability to learn skills and take a salary along the way.

Exactly.

What are the steps? We should have the categories that we want to pursue. We want to do the reps, build the body of work. We find a way to offer value to that brand directly, and then we make it very easy for them to say yes. Love it. And then that brings us to the last piece.

You need to have—

we're here to make money. Some people are like, I do it for the love of the craft. Me too. Part of the love of the craft is getting paid for it. I think we have a pretty good framework for a new way of how to earn a living as a creator.

This just excites me. It's like never been a better time to be a creator.

Judd, what's the biggest misconception that you see people have about the creator economy?

You don't have to be of influence or have a following to be a creator. You just have to know the skill set.

Okay, that's a bold statement. What was your path to get into you know, earning a full-time living as a creator like you are now?

Right. So I started at a direct-to-consumer brand called HiSmile selling toothpaste and teeth whitening kits. And I got in there and started to understand how to make ads. And from there, spent 3 years there and left and pretty much built that out as a service for other brands. And now on to step 3, which is Creator Room.

Okay, that's awesome. What's Creator Room?

So Creator Room is an accelerator program for founders and teams to learn how to make content in-house. 90% of your new customer acquisition comes from paid ads or content for these e-commerce brands, but they're outsourcing it. So I guess our whole goal as Creator Room is to teach them how to do that in-house.

So I want to dive into what that looks like as we think creator career paths, because there's the, the career paths that we talk about a lot at Kit, and then there's actually two others. One that I think doesn't get talked about nearly enough. So let's jump up on the board and map that out and go from there.

Let's do it.

So let's talk about how to earn a living as a creator and getting to full-time. There's one path that I think about all the time. We'll start there. And that's the founder. And this person is probably what we see the most at Kit, right? They might be an indie creator, you know, or they might scale all the way up to an established business. But it's, you know, selling your own products. You have your own audience and email list and all of that. And that's what we see the most often. What's kind of the second path that we, that you see, you know, as a creator?

Potentially like an influencer.

Okay. Yeah, talk about that some more.

Yeah, so I guess what's changed with influencers is now we have interest-based targeting. So I feel like influencers 5 years ago, they used to use their following as a distribution method for people.

Right.

Whereas now that it's interest-based, if you can create a bit of content around golfing, it's going to go out and reach a whole bunch of golfers that don't follow you. So I feel like the influence has kind of changed and it's favoring the creators that understand how to capture attention. And I think from a business model perspective, there's a lot of opportunities either offering services to other brands, making content for them, brand partnerships, and then you have things like TikTok Shop that are coming into play as well.

What are you seeing on TikTok Shop from the US?

I think What I am seeing is the people that can make sales-driven content that feels organic and feels like it's coming from a real human, they're the ones that are winning. It's trying to make something viral around a popular product.

Right, okay, that makes sense. So the founder creator is the one that I see the most. Influencer is something that people hear about a lot. But this third creator type is one that I don't hear creators talking about. As a career path and you're saying—

It's the in-house creator.

The in-house creator.

Yeah.

So why does the in-house creator matter so much?

Not all creators wanna be in front of the camera. Not all creators have a desire to have a following, but some just wanna be a part of great companies. And if you have a great skillset for telling stories, for editing, for capturing attention, you're such a valuable asset to an in-house team. To a company, whether it's e-commerce or a SaaS company, driving attention is typically what leads to sales and customers. So this person now, my belief is that they're one of the most important roles in every company.

Yeah, so we saw this, you know, particularly in software over the last, I don't know, 10 years or so where engineers were the number one role, right, that anyone was trying to recruit for. It's still absolutely true, right? Most of the recruiting we do at Kit is for engineers. That's our primary product. I'm seeing more and more this in-house creator who's like, hey, I have the skills, the angle, all of that to capture attention. Like, that is a very, very important role. But almost every brand that I encounter outsources this. They go to the influencer or they go like, hey, let's do user-generated content, right? So they're going to a marketplace or something and they're trying something like that. Why is it so important for the creator to be in-house rather than, you know, just working with the community?

I think there's a certain, there's a certain knowledge you get when you work in-house on a product. People that work in-house at KITT understand the product better than anything, so therefore they could probably tell the best stories and they speak to the customers more than anyone else. So therefore I think the storytelling aspect is a lot easier and obviously speed. You know, you've worked with people externally, some are great and some aren't that great. Yeah. But to have someone in-house that can move at speed I feel like that's a big factor as well.

Okay, so that's why it's so important to brands. But let's say I'm a creator and I'm early on in my career, right? Maybe I've got a few thousand followers on Instagram, something has worked and taken off, and then the next 4 things haven't really. And then as we're going from there, I'm trying to figure out what path that I want. Like ultimately the people that I follow, you know, maybe I'm looking at a Dan Go or a Justin Welsh or, Amy Porterfield, right? Someone who has built this amazing, you know, founder-creator business. And I'm like, I want to be like that. And so I dive in and I make my own product and it sells a few hundred dollars worth or a few thousand dollars worth. And then I'm looking like, I can't make a living off of that.

Yeah.

You're saying, hey, maybe you should put this on hold and focus on getting to an in-house role. Is that right? That's correct.

I think they all acquire different skill sets. Like in-house, if you can learn how to capture attention through whatever form of media they're playing in, mostly video, you will make for a great in-house role. You'll be a really good candidate for an in-house role, and there you will learn about the skill sets that might need you to become an influencer, that it takes to become an influencer. And, um, at least from my experience, that's I guess that was, yeah, that was my road to climbing this ladder was started in-house, learned the tools to become a freelancer or an influencer and then now founder.

So what's interesting in that is I think everyone wants to be here, right? That kit style of creator, that is the holy grail because it scales in a ridiculous way, right? You could get to someone, you know, the names would be the Sadaf, those are people who are earning literally millions of dollars a year off their creator businesses and have like pretty great lives to go with it, right? It's not some job where you're like, sure, I make $1 million a year, but man, it's hard working in the coal mines. You know, it's like, no, it's actually just, it's just good all around. But often when we go try to go straight for the goal, it ends up being a harder path. And you know, like this might be, we're trying to learn so many skills and jump all the way up there and, you know, grind it out along the way. But if you go in-house, then there's this ability to learn skills and take a salary along the way.

Yeah, and learn about the business that you're in.

Right.

And that's what I think, like picking a startup or a business that you love, trying to get in there and really understand what drives that. 'Cause that's gonna help you figure out what type of influencer you're gonna become and potentially how you're gonna run a company as a founder.

Okay, so I wanna break this down into two things. Right? We've established the type of creator that we're talking to, where they're at in their career. And I want to break down the skills that they need to build and then the steps to get that in-house role. So first, let's start with skills. What are some of those skills that you think are so important?

I think basic video editing.

Okay. Even if it's— so most people are like, no, I'm the talent, I'll hire someone else for video editing. But you're saying no, no, everyone should learn this.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. Why is that?

Because if I'm a founder and I'm hiring a creator, I need to know that you can try and do it end to end. Because with an in-house role, we can't hire a scriptwriter, an editor, someone to be in front of the talent. You need to be all of those, right? So I think you don't need to have the best understanding, but you need to have a basic understanding of video editing.

Well, let me stay on that one for just a second. What's the— if you had to send someone in the crash course, let's say like I'm in this position and I'm like, okay, I want to get good at video editing, or good enough for for this, where would you send me? What would I do first?

Honestly, YouTube.

Okay.

I would go to YouTube. Obviously Creator Room's trying to build out that for itself, but there's so much free information on YouTube for you to learn about these skill sets. So I would go there.

Okay, that sounds good. Something else that I did a lot as I learned design is I would try to do my own projects, but what really helped me was copying other designs. And not because I'm trying to put this into production and have that be the ultimate thing, but I would go to a website, like maybe it's for a clothing brand like Banana Republic, and I would pull that up on one screen, and then I would go on my other screen and I would go recreate that in Photoshop at the time. Now I'd use Figma, right? And be like, oh, like it's hard to notice all the details, the spacing, all those things. So for video editing, what I would do is I might go find a video on YouTube where I like the editing style and I might clone it with all of my own. Like, I might record my own shot of talking to the camera, and then I'm like, okay, so what cut did they do there? Why did they do a cut there? And I might just copy it and make that exact video, but instead of Peter McKinnon or Ali Abdaal or whoever else, it's just me.

Yeah.

And you'll, by copying, you'll learn so much. And then don't go in public, right? This was a skill-building exercise, not a—

I love it. And I'll do it a bunch as well. Copying other people to understand how they actually did it. And then once I have that core fundamental skill, I can then use it to, to use it. Yeah, I like that.

Okay, so video editing is really important. What else?

I would say storytelling or script writing.

Okay.

I think every great video starts with a good concept or a script.

There's an episode that we did a few episodes ago with Clay Aibert on, uh, it's called The Perfect Intro. And so he gets into some, like, how do you tell stories of transformations? So everyone should watch that episode. But also, you can follow a similar, like, copying format where you'll find that there's often a lot of the same hooks that are used, story formats. Like, if we talk about books for a second, there's actually only, like, 4 book titles that exist in the world. And they're things like, The This of That, right? The Psychology of Money, right? Or, you know, common category, unique modifier.

Right.

Right? Like Habits, common category, Atomic is the, you know, Atomic Habits. And when you start to see, like as you break it down, there's not that many unique book titles. They just all follow these patterns. And I bet if you went and studied 25 Instagram Reels that got at least 1 million views and you were like, what patterns do these follow? You would find you'd probably distill it down to 5. Yeah, I don't study it well enough. Is there anything that comes to mind of like a pattern, you know, that works well in storytelling?

Yeah, I think, I mean, there's normally a conflict that makes a great story, right?

A problem.

And then there's a resolution. So I think to everything you need to, to get people's ears listening, There needs to be a problem. I guess the story is about how are you finding the solution. Every great story starts with, I think, those two aspects.

So you can start to break down, start to look at stories that you love. Why did that work? You know, is this a, are we telling the story of a journey, right? Or is this a like overcoming an obstacle? Any of those things. And then also the book StoryBrand by Donald Miller is really good on this 'cause he does like sort of a modern take on Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey.

Yeah.

And so like, are you the hero or are you the guide? Well, pro tip, most of the brands you'd be working for, they're the guide, not the hero.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so video editing, storytelling, what else matters here?

I think you have to be both behind and in front of the camera.

Okay.

So I think having that flexibility to be comfortable being in front of the camera will allow for a better story and make your job a whole lot easier to become a full-service creator so that this founder like finds you really attractive.

You're not pitching to a brand like, hey, you need to hire 5 people to do this. You're like, I can do this end to end.

Yeah.

Something else on being better on camera. There's 2 people who I think are remarkable at this who I've watched build the skills firsthand. One is Cody Sanchez and the other is Nick Huber, and they've both built businesses doing tens of millions a year in revenue purely off of content. And hanging out with them in person, it's fascinating to watch them hone their craft where they'll do things like, I'm hanging out with Nick, we're actually driving a golf cart at this resort that we're at. And he's like, he pulls the cart over to the side 'cause I'm like, I gotta get better at delivering crisp lines on cue. And he's like, oh, the only way to do it is practice. He pulls the golf cart over and he goes, I'm here with the founder, Nathan Barry, the founder of Kite. He's built a business to $40 million a year in revenue. Nathan, what are your 3 biggest tips on hiring?

Go.

And I'm like, uh, uh. And he's like, no worries. Pause for a second, figure out your 3 tips. And he just like does it again and you go. And you're like, oh, that was actually not as difficult as I thought. And you're like, you can do multiple takes. So it's just that repetition and trying it I think makes a huge difference.

Another interesting thing on my end is we don't use big cameras. We use iPhones. 90% of our content's shot on iPhone. So I think—

So like one, I don't know if this is a skill or a step, but I'm gonna put this here. You know, most people are like, oh, I gotta have gear.

Yeah.

And we're just like, nope.

Cross that out. Yeah. Everything we shot on big cameras doesn't seem to work.

Oh, interesting.

It doesn't feel organic. I think this is what makes this role so attractive. Right, is the barrier to entry so low. We've all got a camera in our pockets, right? And if you feel like you're a good storyteller and you— this is for you, it doesn't take much to get involved and to get started.

I'm thinking of two people in particular where you're even talking about some of these skills of storytelling where they go very low fidelity, and that's, um, Karen Chang. She goes by Karen X online, online. And then Casey Neistat. Both of them will like get some random pieces of paper and some markers and the mix of them on camera and then like, you know, like writing something out with a top-down desk shot, like, and they do great storytelling and you're like, we're at like 85 cents worth of, you know, an iPhone and 85 cents worth of equipment here.

Yeah, the best thing I heard from Casey Neistat is like he kept dropping his cameras and he said, I view them as tools. They're not an expensive camera to me, they're a tool. Um, which I thought was really cool from Casey Neistat. Like, I know John Yousha sat down with him and was trying to break down how he tells stories, and Casey Neistat just couldn't figure out— he's like, dude, I just do it.

Um, but there's even like— Casey had this video, uh, the point of the video was when I run the New York City Marathon next week, I'm not going to wave at anybody. But what he did, and this is something that you see in a lot of, uh, short-form video especially, is he had these series, he had pre-written a bunch of stuff, and then he had covered it all up. And the like visual hook of like, well, what's behind the next? Yeah. And it's him like doing this very silly math of like, well, a wave takes this many calories, and if I retain this, then I get my speed up by 2 seconds per mile, and then I'll hit my 3-hour goal.

Yeah, it was a retention hack. Yeah.

Okay, so we've got the 3 main skills that are gonna be really important for going in-house. What are the steps, right? We, we have to go, we're going to learn these skills, but what does it actually take to go from like an interest in basic abilities as a creator to actually getting that in-house role?

I don't know if this is a hard step, and you might be able to help me with this, but I feel like finding the, the company that you really want to be a part of is kind of like the most important step, right? Because if you're in something you don't really want to be a part of doing those, getting those skills dialed in is just going to become a lot more difficult.

All right, so we have the company to pursue, and it's not that this is an all-or-nothing thing, like I want to be the in-house creator at Kit and everything I'm doing is for that one thing, and if I don't achieve it, my career is a failure. It's more of like having this guiding principle behind it. Like, there's a YouTuber named Matt D'Avella, and he has this Like, he, a great podcast. I think he's built his channel to 4 or 5 million subscribers. And sort of this running joke, this gag, and what he does is that for his podcast and videos, he wants to have The Rock as a guest. And so he has these recurring things. It's not that it's a failure if he doesn't have The Rock, but like in his studio where he records, there's this photo of The Rock and he'll refer to it every so often. And it like makes him more endearing. It's fun. And who knows, maybe it'll eventually happen. But the same way the company to pursue, it's not like that's the only company that matters. You could list out 5. But then as you study things, as we're studying video editing and storytelling on camera, maybe it's giving us ideas of the types of stories to tell. It's like, oh, I want to work for this amazing clothing brand. Like one that I saw, actually this is maybe not a great example 'cause I can't remember the brand itself, but I love aviation. Yeah. This clothing brand did this fantastic video of these pilots who fly in the backcountry in Alaska, and like, it was only marginally about the clothes.

Yeah.

But, you know, I was like hooked for the entire 18-minute video, and I loved every bit of it. And so you'd see like, oh, if I want to make something for this clothing brand or the software company or whatever else, let me try telling stories in that way. Let me learn the editing styles that they already use, or better yet, let me learn the editing styles that I think they should use.

Yeah, so I love that.

So one company to pursue, or probably I would probably list out like 4 or 5. Yeah, and, and see what we—

and I think making those 4 or 5 companies aligned with maybe step 2 or step 1, what is the category that you're passionate about? Yeah, and shoot for that direction because remember, we're trying to get learnings out of being in-house somewhere and we want that to help build our creator career up to step 2 and 1. So I think trying to find companies that will align with your future vision of yourself.

Yeah. So an example of that is let's say that I, you know, deeply care about like health and beauty content. Yeah. Right. And something that I really want to make all this about it. And then I'm like, but the in-house role I'm going to get is at a software company.

And you're like, exactly.

You know, you'll learn skills for sure that will translate. But you might have a 50% translation when if you were targeting something in line with where you wanna be as a founder, that could get you like 80%, 90% overlap.

Yeah.

Okay, so we have the companies that we're pursuing, but I think if we started out pursuing those companies immediately, we're not putting our best foot forward.

Right.

Right? I'm showing up as someone who's got, who's probably not a very good creator. Yeah. So what I think the next step is, is really to just get the reps.

Yeah, like as you said before, getting confident in front of camera, learning your editing style, learning how to storytell, get the reps. I think the question that will come with that is what do I create, right? You know, and that might lead to our third point.

Well, so yeah, let's talk about, uh, getting the reps, because on one hand you're generating ideas yourself. You're like, okay, um, brand I wanna work for, let me make a video. I may not show it to them, but let me try. You're relying entirely on your own knowledge at that point and like your own ideas. And so I think having an outside source of inspiration could help. So I'm curious what you think about this 'cause you're in the space more than I am. What I would do is I would start to go on some of these influencer marketplaces and do UGC content not because I think it's a great way to make money or, you know, maybe I think my time is worth more than the $200 per video that they might pay, but really I'm just trying to get the reps doing this, like hone the craft. And the two things that I get out of it, one, I get some money, but two, I get brands saying, hey, this is what I want. And then me putting my vision on top of it and having it.

And for a lot of the time, those brands might give you a script And that's where you could potentially break down how they're telling stories, how they're building out scripts.

Yeah, in your list of storytelling, you might be like, look, there's only 5 great ways to tell, like, to do short-form video. And you might come across, you're like, this is a good script. And actually, oh, maybe there's a 6th.

Yeah, you could exactly break it down. Yeah.

Okay, so the skills— I think there's almost another skill here that I'm thinking about, I don't know, a skill or a habit. It's like, I don't know, I want to say it's like learn with purpose. I think what a lot of people do is they just, they just do random things, and over a long period of time.

Yeah.

Yeah. What do you think?

You have a great thought, because I think there's a misconception with content. It's like, if I can make it look pretty, it's great, right? It's like, no, we need to get attention, and that's what we need to focus on. And it's really common for ugly ads or content to get the attention. You as a creator need to understand how do you get attention over how do you look pretty. And I think there's a big rut that people fall into on like trying to look too perfect, right? So yeah, like you said, learn with purpose. What's the purpose? How do we get attention, right?

I like that.

So for a lot of short-form content, I will jump onto pages I like and just go on their reels and see which one's popped off. And in my head I'm coming up with my own conclusions on why did they, why did this work over this? And then I'll go and try it for myself.

But then even like documenting that, so many people would do that but then they wouldn't track it in a spreadsheet that they could refer back to. I would track the performance of the video that I was copying or, you know, learning from. And then when I make a video, I would track that as a comparison, like how did it perform? But I would write down my hypothesis of why I think the original worked and why I think my version is going to work. So then I can have, you know, over the course of 20 videos, I'm gonna look back at my hypotheses and be like, oh, did that work? Maybe not. Like maybe I still believe in the hypothesis, but this video didn't take off. And so I might make another one following the same hypothesis. And if I use it 3 or 4 times, I'm like, I might be wrong about that.

Yeah.

Like I thought I figured out why something was working. I guess I didn't.

Yep.

And that spreadsheet would be really, really important.

Absolutely.

And then it would also let me see what hook or style I use. So other people know short-form video better than I do, but I would, if in storytelling, if we break it down, there's only 5 formats that actually work. I might in my spreadsheet have a dropdown for which format I used. And then later on, 6 months or a year later, I might take a step back and I might graph the performance of the videos by, format and see, did that teach me anything?

Yeah.

Then I might throw it all in the ChatGPT and say, hey, what did I miss?

Yeah.

Like, what do you notice in these trends that I didn't?

I love that.

And so it's just that learn with purpose of really breaking things down. Okay, so going to the steps, we're doing the reps, we're building up these skills. What's step number 3?

Building a body of work. Okay.

And what's the difference between the body of work and doing the reps?

A body of work is something that the brand can look at that they can maybe see it working for themselves. So I think aligning your body of work to show your skillset, but potentially also to align with the potential brand that you might be reaching out to. For example, if you are doing, if you're reaching out to a cosmetics brand, maybe grab a few different cosmetic products you like and know about and build a bit of content around it. You know, you might have got that opportunity through our UGC marketplace, looking at other people's scripts, or you might just be doing that for yourself.

So this is the, doing the reps is very focused on learning the skills. The body of work is using the skills to position, you know, it's your resume to basically say, hey, I'm in a good position to be this in-house role. Does that make sense? Okay, and then the last step is really somehow we have to take this body of work and we have to get it in front of the right companies.

Right?

Yeah. So what is that? What does that look like?

I think it's a real challenge at the moment.

Yeah.

I think I see a lot of creators making Canva templates and then shipping this out through DMs or on email and trying to get it in front of the right people. But I think what would be most effective is if you made a video that was potentially an improvement on what the company has done or an idea that the company could do. And they might take more towards that, but I'm not sure what your thoughts are.

[Speaker] Well, I think something that would work well is, yeah, say, hey, I love where you're headed with this video, this concept. Something that we do a lot at Kit is our creator stories, right? And so we have these great visuals and storytelling and all of that. I think someone could come in and there's two different pitches that they could do. One is they could say, hey, I love the way you're telling stories, but I think you're doing it too polished and you should do it like this. Like, here's me telling how, like, Amy Porterfield's rise to fame, right? And how she built this business, like super scrappy, and the hook is perfect. Yeah. And that would really, you know, maybe that's me on camera being the personality, right? And so I'm pitching that. Or maybe I want to really focus on the video editing and the hook. And so maybe I take an existing video like I go into their kids' YouTube channel and say, okay, here's a 17-minute video. You know, I don't have the accounts, I don't know the watch time and the attention curve on that, but you're like, hey, this is the hook that you had. Here's the first 60 seconds that you did. Here's the 60 seconds I would run with, and it's all of your footage. And so then you know they believe in that content 'cause they spent tens of thousands of dollars to produce it. But you're just like, hey, here's how I can take what you're doing and do it better.

So offering value. You wanna give the company value in some way.

I think there's one other point in that, and that's making it easy to say yes. And that's something that you mentioned we were talking before of if I offer this value, like maybe I recut one of your videos, right? Or I make my own take on this brand's video, and then I just say, hey, run it, it's yours. I'll sign whatever release you want, all of that. But if it works, hire me.

Love it.

Taking a step back, I think we've got the skills. We've established that gear is not one that matters.

Yep.

We want to learn with purpose, and then we should have the, the companies, or at least the categories that we want to pursue, because that will be a great frame for all of our learning. We want to do the reps. There's the only way to learn these skills is actually doing the reps. You can't just, you know, do Udemy courses or something. Like you gotta actually show up. Then we build the body of work targeted at the company. We find a way to offer value to that brand directly, and then we make it very easy for them to say yes.

Love it.

All right. I think we have a pretty good framework for a new way of how to earn a living as a creator and a direct career path to being in-house.

Love it.

But there's two things I'm thinking about. One is that I think a lot of people, they might not be thinking this yet, but if I'm in this shoes and I ask you in this process, I go, oh, you know what? I actually want to be a founder. Like I actually, I want to work for myself. I'm thrilled with this as a process to get there and to learn the skills and get paid along the way. But I want the, like, I ultimately want the freedom and the earning potential of being here. The second thing, and it makes me a little nervous to say this, is I'm like, wait, as we map this out, how many Kit team members am I going to lose as we have the full steps, you know, for them to go from this in-house role to a founder? Because you learn all of these skills.

Yeah.

What's the framework that you use to think about creators becoming founders?

Okay, cool. Yeah, I've got one.

So if we start with All right, I like a good jet diagram. Walk me through it.

Yeah, so the framework, we've got product, audience, and traffic. Most brands will sit here. They have a good product, they have the audience they're selling to, but they're trying to figure out traffic. That's where they're becoming creators.

Okay, so you're saying the overlap, the intersection between these right here is where the brand sits?

Yeah.

Okay.

Right. And with traffic and audience, this intersection is where most creators sit.

Okay.

I think what a lot of the skills that you honed in, in the in-house job will allow you to understand how to drive traffic. It's just whereabouts are you on your creator career? Do you have an audience or are you just getting into building an audience? You need to have these two circles filled to then go into product.

Okay, so you're saying as I go into this journey, right? I'm a creator who wants to become a founder. As I'm in-house, traffic is what I've got figured out. That's what I have dialed in, right? We've practiced this a whole bunch. And not just in traffic, like a big part of that is capturing and holding attention, right? Whether I'm trying to get it organically or whether I've got a $50,000 a month Meta ad budget behind me. Either way, I've gotta capture and hold attention. And then in that position, you've got to go to audience next if you want to become a founder. Is that right?

Yeah, that's correct. A really good example is DRock from GaryVee's team. This is, this is ages ago, right? So DRock was lucky enough to actually build an audience while he was working internal. So he comes out of that in-house process with a little bit of an audience. What I would have loved DRock to do is like double down on what it's like to be a video videography in-house. And then once he's built that, that community, that audience, does he go into products selling tripods or something along those lines? That's a good example of someone leaving an in-house role and coming out with an audience. But for a lot of us, I think we're going to come out just with the skill set of understanding how to drive traffic.

That's really interesting of building an audience in an in-house role. It's what I always think about when I'm building an audience is First, what area of focus do I want to have? Like, you know, I might have captured attention with a ton of different things, but the audience has to be narrowed, right? We need to be delivering value around a certain category so people know to keep coming back to me for this one thing. And then the second thing is what point of view or what access do I have that might be really interesting? So the way that I would pitch this, let's say that I am an in-house content creator at a software company like Kit. I'm making all these videos that go on social, that go, you know, are driving Kit's brand. And some companies, you know, if you started to build your own audience, might be like, oh man, like Jed's over here doing his own thing and like I feel like he's distracted or all that. So what I pitch instead is say, hey, I'm gonna keep doing everything I'm doing here, but now what I'm gonna do, Kit's audience is creators, so I have this idea of how we're going to hook more creators and I'm gonna like start making content about what it's like to be an in-house content creator.

Yeah.

Right? If I'm DRock, I'm gonna make that content like you said of, you know, what it's like to be a, you know, a video creator at GaryVee's companies. And so it still fuels the main brand. Perfect example of this is Charlie, who's our creative director. She's got 200,000 followers or subscribers on YouTube, all of this. What she does is she starts a podcast. She's like, look, I'm trying to learn how to be a great creative director. So let me just interview all the best designers at all the best companies. And that's my own thing. But everyone can see how it ties in very well to Kit.

Yeah.

And so it's not— it doesn't create any conflict.

Do you have a problem with that as a founder?

No, not at all. Right. Because I know that it elevates our brand.

Yeah.

I also know because I think that's—

sorry, I think that's something that founders are going to have to get used to.

Right.

It's like these people can act on their own. They can become the founder. So, but we still want them a part of our journeys.

So I think two things in that. One, you have to realize what this person's goal is. Some people's goal is to stay in-house forever for a very long time. There's a lot of amazing perks of being an in-house creator, right? Health insurance. We love health insurance. Yeah.

You know? Yeah.

A team, all of those things. So if they want to stay in-house, like do all the things to like really fuel that career, if you know that they want to be their own founder, like help them in that journey, right? They will be like, it's a long career. We're building companies that are gonna last for, you know, a decade or more. And so having that ecosystem of people, maybe this person, you know, in our example, like someone like DRock, maybe he builds this audience and it, while he has it, it contributes to the traffic and everything for GaryVee. And then over time he's like, hey, I'm gonna go out on my own. And they're like, cool, we're gonna miss you a ton, but let's still do some partnerships on this.

Yeah.

Right? And then over time—

Imagine the recruitment side.

Right.

It's like you've just told how great it is to work at GaryVee. Now just start, we're gonna give you all the job roles.

Yeah, exactly. Hey, we'll pay you a, you know, a recruiting fee, right? Yeah. Because you spent a huge amount on that. And what doesn't go well is when you say like, hey, no side hustles, you know, any of this stuff, and you like crack down on it. 'Cause then someone's just like, well, now I just gotta do it but hide it from you. Yeah. You know, or— That's right. Or then you're not playing the long game. There's someone that I worked with years ago at Kit who's now running his own business, and we're collaborating on some really exciting projects. You know, it just took a while for that to come back around full circle.

Yeah. So don't burn those bridges.

Yeah, never.

Like— Yeah.

There's so many things that you can do. As you build that audience, something I see a lot of people who are good at traffic do is they build a crowd rather than an audience. And I think that the current social media algorithms fuel this, right? Because it encourages you to chase whatever's working in that moment, and that might take you into these very different categories. And so something that I always want to see is you to build this core audience of, it could be 100 people, 500 people, who like are truly following you for the value that you deliver. Not necessarily the entertainment that you deliver. That's a value on top, but you know, that's where you're getting them to an email list. You know, using DRock as an example, he might have an email course that he puts together that says, hey, if you want to get an in-house role as a video creator at a brand like you know, one of Gary Vee's companies, then here's what I would do. Yeah, drop in your email address, right? And it's just 5 emails. You don't have to maintain that all the time, but then you're pulling people into this core audience.

What are those steps? If I've got a crowd, I'm great at getting attention. How do I change my content or my messaging to slowly build an audience? Like, because I feel like I might be in this seat right now. I've done 30 days of content. We've grown really rapidly. How much of that is my audience and how much of that is my crowd? Build more of an audience.

So we're going— our, our goal is to go from crowd to audience. So people think that they have an audience when actually they have a crowd. So an audience is the right people paying attention. It's not the view counts. It's not all of these things that a crowd is, right? It's not how do I get all of this attention? It's how do I get attention from the right people? So the crowd might be people who enjoy, you know, watching your reels or scrolling past it and they laugh at your jokes or whatever else. The audience is the group that is following you for who you are and the value you deliver. When we say the right people paying attention, it has to be like the right people paying attention for what? So what are you trying to do?

I'm trying to help founders become creators. So I think a lot of founders that need to understand how to create they're following us to try and build internal creative teams and become creators themselves. So it's, for me, building this audience, in my head, it's about offering value to the founders.

That's really interesting. So the first thing is, right, as we have a crowd, we've got all these different views that are coming in. I'm going to draw our crowd. We need to then figure out how do we get the right people in this crowd.

Hmm.

To pay attention. Right, so something that we talk about all the time in advertising now, as algorithms have changed, is that you do your targeting through your creative.

Yeah.

Right? And so you can start to do that exact same thing. It works in paid ads, it works in organic.

Yes.

Right? And so then now you're saying like, these videos are targeted at the founders, and like, yeah, you get views from other people. Yeah. That's great. And like, other people in the crowd are not bad.

Rock.

They might not be the founder, but they might be married to the founder. They might have a sibling that's the founder. You know, there's— yeah, like, they'll help it spread. But what I would be doing is I would say, okay, what is the video that I could create that speaks just to the founder who wants to be the creator? And so it might be some of these case study videos. Like, you would not believe how this founder created this much attention and got this, you know, outcome for their business because they understood this one thing. Brought the creators understand, you know, whatever. Yeah.

Um, and then as we go from there, I don't know where this works in the drawing, but what I want to get to is because I feel like I'm doing that and I feel like I'm getting those views, I'm just trying to figure out which ones of those are my audience and which ones of those are my crowd.

Yeah. And so the thing that helps with that is going to email because you have to break free. Like, the algorithm is amazing because it like helps discovery in so many ways, but you gotta go to email. And so what I would do is I would make that email course that is the 5 things founders have to understand, you know, to scale a business as a creator. The 5 secrets creators understand. I don't know what the copy is.

Okay.

Then brands.

So I'm not asking them to sign up to a newsletter. I'm asking them to download an asset. It's a value add.

Correct.

Okay, cool.

Because then you didn't sign yourself up. To now I have to send a weekly newsletter, you know, every Tuesday.

Do you think you need to have a weekly newsletter or something? Right. Because we did this early on in some of the short-form content. I had a performance calculator and we had a bunch of these people sign up for emails. But my, my concern was, am I supposed to nurture them through email? Am I supposed to—

better if you do, right? Like in the, in the spectrum of quality, like optimally executed, you know, there's a range of things. Like getting attention or getting traffic without converting it to an audience, at least you have traffic. Like you can do a lot with traffic. It's not the best thing, right? But then as we go to the audience, capturing it in any form is an improvement. The next step from there would be, hey, I'm gonna send you a monthly thing of what we learned, right? This is what I find interesting this month. Here's an update on, like what we're doing with Creator Room, you know, it could be monthly or it could be quarterly. Like that's an improvement. And then of course, if you went to weekly and you were delivering high-value content every single week of the newsletter, like that's the gold standard.

I'd love to ask this question. Is there a rule of thumb for how, you know, what's too many emails sent? Because my emails get flooded with newsletters I don't read. Right. And it turns me off the idea of being subscribed to them. And it's probably turned me off the idea of creating one for myself. So yeah, is there like an optimal amount that you should be creating?

Yeah, so there's, there's, if we think of the two things, quantity and quality. So what we want to do is we want to send emails at the highest quantity that we can maintain a particular bar for quality. So for some brands that might be, actually let's go to content creators.

Yes.

For some content creators, That might be once a year. But imagine that you follow this creator who everything they do is so fucking great that like if an email came from them, you would stop everything and read it. I think that Tim Urban from Wait But Why did this really well, right? Where he would put out these essays that you're like, well, now I have an existential crisis because of the way he made me think about my life divided up into weeks. Or like he did this whole breakdown of Elon Musk and how he's building his companies and had this insider access, right? The quality is so insanely high, but the quantity was very, very rare. Once a month, once a quarter.

And that's fine.

That's totally fine.

See, I love the idea of that. It feels like a gift when you get given that email. It's like a gift.

Now he's the top of the spectrum for quality.

Right.

Right. Now what you, then as you think about quantity, like quantity is good. 'Cause that's more opportunities to get our brand in front of people, to do commerce, to promote our product, any of that. But so I might say, okay, I can deliver super high quality content once a quarter, you know, or once a month. That's very manageable. But the problem where people get into the problem that you described is when they try to deliver really, really, they focus on quantity And so they're like, you know what, I want to get my product in front of people every single day. So let me send a daily email. But turns out I can't maintain quality as I do that. And then now the readers are like, I opened the last 5 and they weren't really worth it.

And so, so the quantity is decided on the volume of value that comes through you.

How often can you send an email while always maintaining your bar for quality?

Yeah, but what describes quality value?

Yeah, I think so. And you know, right? Like, did you finish something and you're like, oh man, I'm so proud. I cannot wait to get this in front of people. Or are you like, good thing we got the newsletter out this week. Yeah. You know?

Perfect.

And so I see brands, there's one called Uggmonk, Jeff Sheldon. He sends a monthly newsletter for his e-commerce brand. And that's because that's the frequency. He would sell a lot more if he could maintain like do a weekly newsletter, like it would drive more sales. But monthly is where he can maintain that high bar for quality, fits in with everything else he's doing to run his business, and, you know, still hit the quantum. Okay, so in this journey of creators becoming founders, right? You do the in-house creator, you build up the traffic, then we figure out how to get good at that, how to find our specific value that we want to deliver and who we want to deliver that to. So then we're going from a crowd to an audience, We're finding the right people out of the algorithm to then bring them into, you know, the email course. We're sending emails, you know, based on the quality that we want to hit and how frequently we can do that. And then that brings us to the last piece, which is the product, right? We're here to make money. I'm unashamed about pursuing making money. Some people are like, I do it for the love of the craft. Me too. Part of the love of the craft is getting paid for it. And there's, once you have the traffic and the audience, there's so many different products that you can do. I just, I think you don't have to figure it out from the beginning, but somewhere in that journey, you just, you know, be taking notes, learning with purpose towards that product, because then you can start to focus the angles of like, okay, how do I craft this audience? Because if I'm building product A versus product B, well, the right people paying attention is a little different, right?

Yeah.

And so you want to think about that early on.

Love it.

I think that is a great overview. Let's, let's sit down and kind of chat through it and recap it.

I think one thing I got out of this, probably being more of a Gen Z creator, we see a lot of crowd building, we see a lot of big followings, big view counts. And, you know, I probably didn't focus too much on the audience side of it. And I think for creators to really understand maybe what it takes to build that audience is going to be a really valuable step. To becoming a founder.

I love that because when you know where you're trying to go, then everything else that you're doing falls in line behind that. Right? If I'm saying, going from very broadly, like, I want to be a creator and I want to be able to pay my rent doing it. Like, that's so broad. But then if we come in and say, hey, actually the best path to do it is as an in-house creator, the best path for me, then all of a sudden the skills I need to learn and the steps become so much more narrowed. And then as you get into that journey in the future, then exactly what you're saying of like, okay, now I know that I want to build, you know, this founder creator business. And so now I can think about how do I leverage these skills to build the right audience and then build it into the product that I want.

Yeah, I think what's exciting to me is we could have kept drawing about all these different directions creators can go. And like the premise of the conversation is what a great time to be a creator. It's like never been a better time. Um, it's such a useful role for building your own personal brand or in a different company. And I think this just excites me about the future of creating and what it looks like for people just getting into the business, or maybe founders that are picking up cameras for the first time.

I love it. Jed, if people want to follow you and see what you're doing with Creator Room and everything else that you're making online, because the best way to learn is by like studying someone who's great at it And I've loved following your content. Where should people go?

Go to Creator Jed at Instagram. We just did a 30-day series. It's actually really great. We, we talk through a lot of topics on paid ads. So go there and I'll be building my audience at Creator Jed.

That sounds good. I love it. Thanks for coming on.

Cool. Thanks for having me.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show, then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.