Uncovering the Creator Economy: Insights from a Social Media Insider with Reagan Fry #110

There's a lot of talk about the creator economy. So much is going on with social media right now and the whole space seems a bit chaotic. We continue to consume this content at an accelerating pace. But why is the creator economy so important? Today we're going to look into the belly of the beast with someone who has been there, so stay tuned. Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with Sundish Patel. Welcome to another future podcast. Today we have with us Regan Fry, who is director of product at Kajabi, which is a platform that helps creators monetize their content by building a knowledge based online business. Now, prior to Kajabi, Reagan made his way through some of the biggest players in the space. Amazon, Google and TikTok. So Reagan is here to help us understand the creator economy and to fill us in on what is really happening behind the scenes of some of these companies.

Welcome Reagan.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

I'm excited to have this conversation because, you know, I feel like right now I'm living in the middle of all it because we've really just kind of been extending our presence on Instagram and TikTok and you know, of course we do all the YouTube stuff. So I'm very fascinated about, you know, sort of the creator economy piece of this and what you're doing at Kajabi as well. But before we get into all that stuff, could you just tell us a little bit about your journey? You've been to a lot of really interesting places.

So I actually started out in film and television production. My first gig after undergrad was as a production assistant on the Office, the US TV show. I quickly realized that I was probably better at the business side of things and enabling creativity as opposed to trying to do most of it by myself. That's really where my skills and interests align. So throughout my career, I've always tried to enable creativity from the business side of things. And so after that gig, I did a few startups, some marketing, some SEO stuff, and finally landed a gig at Amazon where I did marketing for video games. I really enjoyed experimentation and there's only so much of that you can do in the marketing world. I liked building things and seeing what happened, seeing if they solved customer problems. So I took a online class called Reforge specifically around growth and that helped me get into product at Amazon, working on retention for the prime membership program.

That, that's gotta be a fascinating area.

During my tenure there, we, we acquired Twitch and launched Twitch Prime. It was the early beginnings of Prime Video and Prime Music. Yeah, there was a lot going on and I think the biggest challenge, I think within prime was from a retention standpoint. You have Primes a huge programs, you have all these different benefits, right? But the reality is that most people sign up for prime for free two day shipping. And so we had to kind of build a system that introduce you to shipping and two day shipping and one day shipping and same day shipping and two hour shipping and then graduate you to Prime Video and then graduate you to music. Instead of trying to. When you sign up for prime, you get bombarded with all this stuff. You're like, whoa, what is all this? Right? It's. You need to build healthy habits and then build on those habits. You gotta get in the elevator first and then go up.

As an early prime member, you know, I, I'm one of those people, you know, I remember when it was a very low cost option to get the free shipping. And then it just, every year it seemed like there was more and more stuff and it got stickier and stickier and of course the price kept going up and up and up. But I, I mean, I do think you get a lot for your money with Amazon these days if you, you know, use all of it.

For sure, definitely. I think Jeff Bezos, you know, when he was kind of rallying the troops one time, he said, prime is. I want to make Prime a program that it's irresponsible not to purchase or be a member of because there's so much value as a part of it. And if you do use it, there is a ton of value for the price. So it's a really great program. But again, it's kind of, you need to be using it in order to get the value.

So then after Amazon, you, you went.

Where I was really interested in experimentation. And part of experimentation is understanding deeply the psychology of customers, Especially in a digital environment when you're just kind of click, click, click, clicking around. How do you build good experiences when the reality is half the decision making is through kind of just subconscious processes? Right? You're just kind of clicking through things often. And so I started reading a lot about behavioral psychology and around that time, because I wanted to see how we could leverage behavioral psychology in our experiments to build better product experiences. And around that time, Google reached out to me and said, hey, do you want to come join the growth and behavioral economics team at Google? And I was like, yes, I would love to. So the stars just kind of aligned for where I was at that point in my career. And so I joined the growth and behavioral economics team at Google, where we helped product teams across Google. I worked mostly with consumer products to help Google teams understand how to leverage behavioral psychology and behavioral economics into how they develop products in order to help their products grow more efficiently. And so that was a really, really interesting role because you kind of have a bird's eye view across YouTube, Google Pay, Google Play, all these different consumer Google maps, even Google AdWords, all these different teams across Google, what are their priorities, what major initiatives are they running, how did they perform? And so you get exposure to a lot of really, really interesting insights and key learnings from a lot of different product areas. So I was just kind of a sponge, soaking up all this juicy information, all these great learnings and insights from some of the smartest people that I've ever had the opportunity to work with.

That is some powerful information. Seriously, it's hard to. You're very, It's a very unique situation for you. I mean, you're getting some data that like, people don't get to see.

Even within Google, you're usually assigned to a specific team. I'm working on Google Maps and that's kind of my world. You don't really see what's going on, going on with Google Play for the most part, or YouTube or, you know, outside of some, you know, integration work or some conversations, you're really not exposed, unless you really work for it, to other areas of the business. Whereas my role was a centralized role, kind of looking at a bird's eye view of all these teams. And so it's a very unique, unique position to be in. And I'm really fortunate and thankful that I had the opportunity to.

And having dealt with Google for a While now and YouTube and, you know, all the different properties in it, I can say that from the outside, you can definitely see that everything is operated as an entirely separate unit. Even though everything interacts, nobody seems to be able to talk across channels there, which is really bizarre to me.

But at one point, Google One, which is Google subscription product for personal cloud storage, and a couple other things, they wanted that to be essentially the prime for Google where you get YouTube Premium, some play, subscription stuff, basically any of Google's products that offer subscription services or paid benefits, you get all of that under Google 1. The reason you can't, they couldn't get it done or executed is because it was just there's too many systems and too many teams and it's too big to retroactively kind of create this, this program.

You Know, if you have G Suite, like G Suite doesn't work with anything in Google. You know, that's sort of their, their premier premier, you know, office suite platform with email and stuff. But I can't use any of my emails. Unlike any of the home, or not the home kit, but the Google home stuff. Right, none of that works. You can't use those because those two systems haven't been integrated. I mean, it's 2023 now.

It's the challenge of a big company, bigger and bigger and bigger and older and older and older. And you have all this tech debt. All these old systems that were built separately with, you know, before Google acquired YouTube, they're not like, oh, let's build for YouTube, because you don't have that company. So you're not building with those types of integrations in mind. And so it's a, it's a real challenge for a company the size and scope of, of Google.

And I think, you know, one of the challenges with Google too, I always get, always had the feeling that they're kind of like a 80, 90% company. Like they get things like 80% of the way. There's, you know, and then they just don't quite put that last bit of polish on it, you know, which maybe is the integration or, you know, the nicer interface or, you know, that sort of thing. It's almost like they operate like a university in some ways. They just have these incredibly smart people, PhDs and all that, and they develop these incredibly cool, you know, technologies that somebody should take and commercialize and then, you know, they go off and work on something else and it's just like it kind of doesn't quite always make it all the way through the process.

There's a long list of projects that have eventually been axed by Google. You can go look it up.

Oh, the graveyard is large.

Yeah.

Someone keeps like a running tally, but that's part of innovation, right?

Which is great. Which makes them a great company.

Even if something is like, loved by people, there are reasons, business reasons or integration reasons, why you might like, need to kill a product if it ultimately doesn't work for the business and doesn't provide the value that you expect to your users.

So your next stop, you know, is currently one of the hottest properties on, in social media. You want to talk about that one?

In my role at Google, you. The benefit of being a bird's eye view is you get to see everything. The downside is that you don't really own anything, any one product. So you're not really building strategically for a specific product in a specific use case. And I kind of miss that. Right. So I was talking to one of my older managers from Amazon. He said he was going to TikTok. And at the time I was like, that teen dancing app? Why would you go there?

Yeah, a lot of people said that.

I have to laugh at myself too because I was so naive. And the way that he explained it to me was TikTok is not a short form video app. It's not a lip syncing app, it's not a teen app. It is the world's best recommendation and personalization engine. And when you look at the product through that lens, you almost immediately understand the potential of that product. Once I kind of understood what the opportunity was and what the real value of the product was, the real opportunity, I joined TikTok as one of the first product managers based in the US and when I joined, they didn't, they didn't say, okay, you're going to be doing exactly this. They're like, hey, great, great to have you on board. Figure out what you're going to do. I was looking at similar companies like vine, for example. I didn't want to go to a company that was going to go poof like Vine. So the question was, why did vine fail and how can we help TikTok not make the same errors? And there are many reasons, many nuanced reasons, what have you. But one of the reasons was that vine never was successful in helping their creators see success. And so eventually the creators just kind of left the platform, went to YouTube, went to other places, went to TikTok and Twitter, you know, what have you, right? And so I said, that's a pretty important problem. Is anyone like really working on this right now? And so I said, that sounds important, I'm going to work that.

And TikTok's an interesting one, right? I mean, because it's the new kid on the block, really. I mean, it hasn't, I mean, granted, Musical Ly was around for a while, but I think, you know, TikTok has very little in common with Musical Ly. And you know, I think that TikTok has really been rapidly evolving, but, you know, it was faced with such just astronomical growth, just absolutely astronomical growth. And the share of the attention economy that TikTok has now is just undeniably massive.

Right?

But I do think, you know, there they are really still, you know, there's things that are still growing pains. I mean, I think, you know, the creator fund was a really important step, you know, for them to take. But I still think, you know, spreading out sort of that compensation across, you know, a broader and larger audience and you know, who can take in a, you know, more potentially lucrative share probably, you know, is, is still something that needs to happen. And I think that, you know, right now they're suffering from just really challenging moderation issues, which I think is, you know, if, if there's any big problem with creators on TikTok, it's probably, you know, coming out of moderation issues.

We'll start with creator funds and then maybe go to moderation issues because they're somewhat, somewhat related. But there, there's two big problems. So we built Creator Fund very, very quickly. Yeah, TikTok had at the time, I think there were sponsored content, but most of it is just creators connecting with agents kind of offline. TikTok's not, wasn't at the time super involved. We had just released Creator Marketplace but it was very, very small at the time. And then you have live gifting and that was really all that was available to creators. Right? Ad revenue share, especially for short term, short form video is incredibly difficult to do well and at the time no one, no one had done it. Short form video was new, right? You load eight videos and then you see an ad. How do I attribute who should be receiving ad share for those eight videos? And that ad is not going to be as lucrative or valuable. The cost per click or whatever it is, cost per impression, however you want to calculate it is going to be much higher for a pre roll or mid roll YouTube video ad because it's. The attribution's easy. It's one video, one creator 30 second ad versus TikTok where you have to peanut butter spread attribution theoretically to eight different videos. And it's a small amount, a smaller amount of money per ad.

Right?

And at the time it was, we could either wait to build out an entire system and we're not sure that it's right for our business right now, or we could build kind of a hybrid or hacky type of ad revenue sharing model which is essentially what Creator Fund is, is it's ad revenue sharing, but in a very more simplistic way. Right. And also at the time there was a lot of drama, geopolitical drama around TikTok at the time. And we wanted to send a strong message to our creators that hey, we're not going anywhere and we are invested in our creators. This is a problem that we care deeply about and we want to solve but we don't want you to have to wait one, two years for us to solve it. And so we, we actually built creator fun in like six to eight weeks. Yeah, there are a lot of problems with Creator Fund. I don't want to say conspiracy theories, but a lot of misconceptions about how it works.

Definitely conspiracy theories. This is social media. Come on.

Definitely things that could have worked a lot better, things that we could have done differently. And with the benefit of hindsight, I think building very, very quickly, you lose out some of those things. You're not earning a ton of money from Creator Fund most people, and that's likely because maybe we made it too inclusive at the time. But no, I think it was a good first step and it also really kind of lit a fire under the creator economy writ large. And ultimately, even though the Creator Fund maybe wasn't the best implementation, maybe it didn't work in the way that the TikTok and creators really wanted it to. It really spurred an arms race across all these content distribution platforms to do more for creators and value creators more and help them share in a bigger piece of the pie. So if you view a creator from, from that lens, it was immensely helpful for creators in the long run, if not directly.

So in some cases it signaled to creators that, hey, you know, we do understand and respect you. So that kind of took some of the heat off of that, that whole, like, we're making a lot of content on this platform, it's making a lot of money. You know what, we're getting nothing. But I think the bigger thing for creators really is just the absolute monstrous power of TikTok to build an audience and grab attention. And then, you know, I see so many, you know, most of the tick tockers that I watch, you know, like, they make very little money directly from TikTok. It's really primarily a vehicle to generate revenue in so many different other ways too. Right. So, I mean, I think, you know, beyond just a creator fund because I think YouTube suffers from that same problem where it's like the monetization that people get from, you know, the ad revenue, ad share revenue that you get on, on YouTube isn't that much. Most people make it from affiliate programs and sponsorships and, you know, merch and, you know, selling lots of other things ancillary to all of that. And I think that's where the people who are making a lot of money on TikTok are really making the big money.

Right. Kind of the way the creator economy is shifting is creators need to diversify their sources of revenue. If we've seen anything recently, it's that you can't rely entirely on ad revenue share for a variety of reasons. And one of the reasons is these content platforms control distribution. And we talked, you know, they could decide we want more woodworking content, we want less computer repair content, and all of a sudden you lose all your views. Because these new content distribution mechanisms are more algorithmically driven rather than strictly audience based. And that creates uncertainty for creators because they don't know what content a platform is going to need, what tweaks are going to be made to the algorithm, and so they can lose views essentially overnight. Another way that you can use lose views, as we talked about, maybe touched on a little bit before, is moderation. And moderation is a huge challenge for these platforms right there. It's very, very difficult to get it.

Right, especially when you've got, you know, these one minute videos that are just.

Flying by, millions and millions of videos every day. And you can't, you can't realistically have a human review every single one of those. It just doesn't, it's not possible. Right? That doesn't, that ability doesn't exist in our world. So you have a hybrid approach where you're using AI and other automated technological systems to do a lot of the, I call it grunt work moderation or initial, like checks. And then humans come in depending on is this getting a lot of views? Is it, has it been already flagged or not by these automated systems? And so you kind of have as a video gets posted, gets passes the initial checks, starts to get views, you have tiers of moderation that it goes through, both automated and human moderated. And that's really the only way to do it. But the problem with a lot of these automated moderation tools is that they're just, they're not perfect and humans aren't perfect either. And as a creator, if you get dinged for moderation, you might not know why exactly. Like, what did I do wrong? And so that's another problem with having these platforms own the audience end to end. You know, you have algorithmic distribution depending on like what the algorithm thinks users want, you have the possibility of being over what we call it over moderated or mistakenly moderated. And if you want to build a business around your content, that uncertainty could be a killer to your business overnight. Especially if you're entirely relying on ad revenue and you don't own your audience and you're not diversified in your sources of income. Those three Things coupled with algorithmic distribution and moderation that is almost impossible to get right 100% of the time creates a lot of challenges for creators that view their creation as a business and that want to be creative full time.

And TikTok has a problem with I think also malicious moderation too, where like you get people who are mass reporting, you know, different channels and things like that that you know, like also play into that too.

Overall it's a super difficult problem and challenge to solve. With YouTube, I think the average video, it's like 15 minute videos, you're not having the volume that short form video has kind of enabled. And so you have to rely on a lot of automated systems, you have to rely on a lot of human people and then you have these guidelines that are essentially left up to interpretation in the case of like human moderators or the AI might get it wrong. Or as you mentioned, you might have scaled abuse patterns where a lot of people are going and down voting because this creator has a beef with that creator, they tell their audience to go down vote. And there are ways to detect that, but it's always a risk.

So Reagan, when you, when you say that there's a human element in the whole process, what, what does, when does the machine stop working and what does the human do?

I don't think I can get too far into like the moderation details. I don't know what's been disclosed publicly. It's, it's a tiered system, right? Whereas the more views that you get exposure as you're going and gaining in views, the more humans going to go in and double check it. To get 10,000 humans going to go in and double check it. 100,000. I'm just making these numbers up. 100,000 humans going to go in and double check it because we're, it's, it's, it's impossible as I said, to get it on percent right. So what you need to do in that situation is you have to account for scale and then you have to account for limiting potential damage if it's an unsafe video. I think the real challenge is TikTok is a two sided platform. There's creators, but there's also the audience and the audience happens to skew younger. And so for TikTok as a business and as a platform, it's critically important that you create a safe environment. You have billions of people and these videos are getting millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of views. It's critical for you as a platform to create a safe environment where you're Combating abuse, misinformation, violence, types of behaviors that are dangerous, et cetera. There have been, there's plenty of stories where a challenge gets, you know, catches on fire and it's a dangerous challenge and someone gets hurt. Like TikTok as a platform, it's critically important and to their credit, they realize this, critically important to create a safe environment. But if you look at a pendulum between creators and the safety of users, the further that you go in one direction, it comes at the expense of another direction. And I think right now it's really important. Given the number of views, given the age of the user base, given the scale of the user base, TikTok really needs to err on the side of creating a safe environment for the users of their platform, the viewers of the platform. And unfortunately at times that comes at the expense of creators. In some instances.

Yeah, you mentioned earlier that once you become a creator you get to a certain point and then you got to figure out how you're going to pay your bills and are you going to get invested in that, in your experiences since you've had so many. If a creator is trying to monetize what they're doing, what, what advice would you give that creator in general?

Just asking for a friend, by the way.

I think it comes down to, and I say this at the expense of cheapening creativity. I think as a creator you should always be creative. But you should also, if you're thinking about doing this full time, you have to think about this as a business. And when you think about creation as a business, you need to think like a CEO or think like a product manager. What do, who is your audience? Where is your audience, what do they like, what do they enjoy? And how can you provide value to that audience in a completely views based world? You know, it's kind of a race to the bottom where you're just, it's a lot of clickbaity and for some creators that works great, but the vast majority of creators, that's not going to work well for you because there's so much competition, because that type of content is not unique. And so what you need to do as a creator, my advice would be find your audience, find your niche. What are you really good at? Who is your audience that really likes this type of content, responds really well to it? Who can you provide the most value for and understanding the problems and needs of your audience? It's not always like a business transaction. If I'm a woodworking creator, like people need to know what tool do I use for this, if I'm going to create content about how to train dogs, like obviously your audience is people that have dogs and then people that have certain types of dogs and those kinds of things, right? So really finding your niche and understanding what your audience wants and needs. And then the last thing that is growing in more importance as time goes on is engaging and interacting with your audience, asking them what they need, responding to comments, doing live sessions with your most engaged fans, answering their questions in real time, helping them get to know you, and really adding a personal flair to your content into your brand. Because when you get into diversification of revenue streams, many of those are not strictly view based. Even sponsored content in many cases is more effective when you have a relationship with your audience and they trust you. And in Kajabi's world, knowledge, economy, merch, all that, all those things, in order for you to be successful, you need to build a relationship with your audience. They need to like and trust you. And for that to happen, you have to show up, you have to be there, you have to be a person. All the companies that are just taking Reddit posts and using AI to like post them automatically, yeah, you can get views from that. But in that scenario, the only model that's going to work for you is ad based views. The rest of the money pot and where a significant amount of revenue and creators that are making a lot of, a lot of money make more of their revenue from these alternative revenue streams than they do from ad ad revenue share.

I saw a YouTube video today. It's like make six figure income on YouTube and his pitch was go to YouTube, see if you can find like some really popular shorts and then go to TikTok, find shorts that fall into that area, download them, erase the TikTok watermark and upload them to YouTube shorts and reels.

Had their, their fund. When Snapchat had their fund and then YouTube had their fund, it was just you're posting video like the same video to all platforms, figuring out what works and then posting over here. So that's a huge problem because people are stealing other people's videos and content and at times financially benefiting off of it. I know there are strategies that platforms use to mitigate or reduce that, but I think you bring up a really, really good point. It's maybe like indirectly related, which is historically many creators were kind of1 platform. YouTube is the best example. Make YouTube videos, right? There's not really a mechanism on all these other platforms. The best people would always try and find their audience on other platforms, but I think it's increasingly the norm and required as a creator to be multi platform because what we're seeing with all this short form video is that the same content can be posted in probably five different platforms. If you only use one platform, you're missing out on this audience that is across five different platforms. So YouTube has their audience, TikTok has their, Snapchat has theirs. And with everyone doing short form video, you as a creator can post the same content to multiple platforms. You don't need to focus on one platform, you can post it to many platforms. And so you need to think about growing your audience and being multi platform than being kind of one platform. And in a multi platform world, it becomes more important to centralize your audience. And we talk about this idea of owning your audience and centralizing it in one place because at the end of the day these platforms can change. And then your, your sol if you don't own your audience, right, and it's less work for you as a, as a creator, it's a way for you to really hone in on who are your most engaged fans and audience and leveraging that audience to understand what do they want, what do they need, and building a relationship with them. To do that across five platforms simultaneously is, it's difficult. You're looking at changes in how creators are using these platforms and a diversion away from using just one platform.

That sort of brings me back to the idea of Kajabi. You know, you talked about, you know, like owning your audience and, and all of that and owning your content, owning your audience and, you know, kind of consolidating them. You know, that seems like right up Kajabi's alley. Could you talk a little bit about what, what Kajabi is all about and what you're doing there.

Kajabi is a platform that enables you to build. It provides all the tools that you need to build an online business so focused around your knowledge or your content. So anything from landing pages to emails, to automations that trigger if the customer does this or that, to selling a course product or selling a podcast product, selling a coaching product, all of these digital products can be sold on Kajabi. And you could build the landing pages, the emails, websites, all of that in one place. And community is something that we just relaunched recently. So all of our focus is providing you and all the tools that you need to capture, develop and build your audience and then ultimately to, to own that audience. So we have, you know, you can build your email list, you can build out a Community where all your most engaged fans kind of centralize that at one point that you own. So you're less reliant on these changes that these platforms are making. You know, ultimately it's less work for you to go to one place to engage this most engaged audience. So that's kind of what Kajabi does. I think in the creator economy, the biggest gap is owning your audience. And I think that's a niche that Kajabi has really solved. Over the past year or so, our creators have earned $2 billion in GMV. The average creator on Kajabi earns roughly $30,000 a year. And so these are creators that, you know, these aren't the Charlie d' Amelios of the world. These are creators that you might not have heard of, but they are making hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions. When they're successful. And they don't have 100 million followers, they have, you know, maybe a million followers. And they've just really found their niche and really found a way to provide value to that niche in such a way that their, their audience is, is willing to compensate them for their creativity. And I think one of the biggest problems in the creator economy, and I think owning your audience is a subset of this. One of the biggest problems is that the content of creators has kind of been undervalued. That the value that creators add to these ecosystems into you and me and everyone's everyday life and the platform that's earning a lot of money off of the value that creators are providing, they're kind of getting the short end of the stick. And so Kajabi was built and is continuing to be built to fill that gap.

As somebody who's participating in the creator economy, it's an enormous amount of work. I mean, to produce these and there's just not a lot of, for the amount of work, I don't think, you know, most people are getting any, you know, economic benefit from the amount of work that they're doing. I totally agree with you on that. Well, I mean, it sounds like Kajabi's a great way to like really take some of the cycles out of producing content as well.

There's several things that we're working on. One is how do we help you become a more successful multi platform creator? Like ultimately, how do we reduce the amount of work that you have to do? How do we make your work streams more efficient so you spend less time on essentially things that are like managing the business and more time on creating content, engaging with your audience, figuring out what they love and building your audience. Right. So we're focused on making it a lot easier to create and propagate this content in many different formats across substack. You could take one course video, you can create an email, you can create a blog post, you can create a short form video, you can create. There are a lot of different content mediums and one of the things that we're working on is tools to help you create one really good piece of content and then have that content kind of cut up and distributed and shown to customers on a variety of different platforms and a variety of different mediums in a variety of different ways. So helping make you, helping make your work streams more efficient, more content in more different ways. Because your audience, you know, you have short people that like short form videos, you have people that like substack, you have people that like longer YouTube videos. And how can you accommodate all of those different use cases without having to spend time writing a blog and time shooting a short form video on time, doing a 15 minute video. How do you take maybe a 15 minute video or 30 minute video and that's what you created and using, you know, there's a little bit of effort, but how do we reduce the amount of effort so you can post that content? A lot of places provide value in more places, build your audience in more places. So that's something that we recognize. It is very, very difficult to be a creator. It is a lot of work. People don't understand that art creators, how much work it actually is. And that's why we talk about it's undervalued, because they are spending, you know, more than more than eight hours a day on their, on their business. Right. It's, it's not a 9 to 5, but it's also there's this misconception that, oh, you're just creating videos. No, it takes a lot of work to create that video, to understand what your audience wants, to post it in different places, to capture your audience, etc. It's a lot of work.

That might be Chris's favorite part of this podcast right there.

Well, no, no, but you know, the thing is like making the content is the easiest part of the whole thing. That's the least time consuming part of all this.

How do you distribute it, how do you find your audience, how you grow your audience? How do you create a landing page and that triggers an email that when someone signs up, they get, you know, all that kind of stuff. It takes a lot of time.

Yeah.

And we, we at Kajabi and in the creator economy, creators and practitioners within the business side of the creator economy, we recognize that. And I think a lot of what is coming in the creator economy, what is going with the companies that are going to be the most successful are companies that help companies that recognize how much time it takes to do all this for creators and companies that help solve that problem and help creators focus more on engaging with their audience, creating the actual content, being creative, and less time on all the business side of things, which is a necessary evil. You have to do it. But how can you spend less time on that so it's less of pain of a pain point for you as a creator? That's the big problem I think to solve. And one of the parts of the future of the creator economy that I see, one of the future directions that I think is super important.

Man, you are saying all the right things. That's what I love to hear. So if somebody wanted to try out Kajabi, where would they? What's the best way to do that?

You can go to a link in the show notes that we provided for you. You can sign up for free. You can actually sign up without a credit card. Just play around, see what the tools are, see if it's right for you. A lot of times what I suggest to creators is just go create a landing page. If you're thinking about selling a product, create a landing page and say, ask your audience, hey, I'm thinking about creating this course. Are you guys interested? Go here to sign up and see if people sign up. It can take you five minutes. I think a mistake that a lot of people make is I have to create everything and everything has to be perfect. It really doesn't. You can create a landing page and in an email capture form and ask your audience and get feedback from them. Just like any startup should be, should be doing, right? Save yourself a lot of heartache, time and effort. If it's not what your audience wants, just go ask them what they want, ask them to sign up if they're interested and that way you can know like, hey, this has legs or maybe I need to pivot and try something else.

Well, Reagan, thanks so much for being on. I mean, this is just. I could literally talk to you about this stuff all day long. But, but, but those really, really long form videos don't seem to work for us. So we're going to have to maybe pick it up again later. But yeah, thanks so much for being on. Really interesting stuff. Good luck with Kajabi. It looks like a really cool platform. I mean as a creator you're definitely saying all the right things. That's really exactly the kind of pain points that we have. So good luck with that. Looking forward to watching it grow.

Thank you so much. It's a passion of mine. I really get excited and passionate about solving these problems in the creator economy because I'm not super creative myself but I've gotten so much value from creators and I think we all do. And enabling that, facilitating that and recognizing that value and routing some of that value that's created in this economy back to creators is something that I'm super passionate about. So I love talking about it. Thank you so much for having me on and yeah, I appreciate it.

Well, thanks for being on and thanks for doing what you do. Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for watching.

I love to hear from you in the comments. And please, please, please please please hit that subscribe button because that actually genuinely helps the channel right now and I will see you in.

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