The Genius Creating $320M+ For Course Creators - Tonner Jackson

What makes someone really good at generating rented media does not necessarily mean that they'll be very good at the owned part. It is a necessary skill set to building a really compelling, profitable business. There's maturity around how to build owned audience in a way that a creator might not want to shoulder. That's probably not the thing that gets them up in the morning, whereas there's certainly folks who'd want to support a creator who'd be like, "Hey, listen, I would love to stand up an email strategy with you and own that end to end, and a content strategy that supports owned media versus rented media." Welcome to The Creator COO, the show where we surface the operators behind your favorite content and creators.

I'm your host, Matt Estes. Today's conversation is with Tonner Jackson. Tonner is the CEO of Core Studio, a company that partners with creators to design and build digital products like courses, mobile apps, memberships, and websites. Core Studio has created over $300 million in equity value for content-driven businesses. Their team of 30 works with some of the world's biggest creators like Dr. Becky from Good Inside, Miss Excel, Colin Samir, and Esther Perel. In this episode, we discuss how to use rented media for audience discovery together with owned media for audience retention and monetization. We talk about how to harness the power of attention to turn creator personalities into big media brands, and we explore how combining course content together with community experiences is truly transformative for learners. So with that, I bring you Tonner Jackson. Let's dive in. Tonner Jackson, thanks for being here.

Yes, sir. Glad to be here, Matt.

With your deep expertise in the, in the course industry, I thought we could explore the world of perhaps rented media versus owned media and, and talk about the future of, of courses. How does that sound?

That sounds great.

So to start, tell us a bit about what you're doing, what, what your mandate is, and your expertise at Core Studio.

Yeah, that's a good place to start. So when I think about our mission, we want to be the world's leading product partner to creators. And the way that manifests is be a really important strategic partner to them directionally. Where do they want to go? How can we help them pick the right direction? I think we have a good track record at helping creators think of the right business to build. So that's kind of like one really important piece. The second piece is like the execution of that. So as it relates to design and development services, web apps, mobile apps, courses, memberships, we have a really, really strong point of view on that. And kind of dovetailing your first point, our position is that for a lot of creators, a course can be a really good first kind of bowling pin for their— as they want, if they're— if it is their first time selling something to someone, course is something that's very understandable. It's relatively inexpensive to launch and they can be like wonderful businesses. So as our name suggests, we do have a point of view on that. But those are the two big emphasis that we have, strategic partner to creators, and then we can help them kind of execute on things end to end.

For most, for most of the creators that you partner with, is the course their first journey into selling?

So I think a lot of the time it is. And we sometimes will even like, if we're going zero to one with a creator who has like a large audience, they've never done anything, we might even go like a step, even a lower commitment offer, which is like, can we get people to show up for a live thing and either charge them for it or just have them show up and have some sort of other like metric that we think has some commercial value? Will they give their email to something? That sometimes will be like our first thing. But for a lot of other folks, I think courses can be that first thing and we will recommend that. But I think the thing that matters most is there's kind of 3 variables that will help us determine if we can work with someone. One of them is the category, like what category are they in? There's some categories that just don't make sense for courses and you have to be sober and honest about that. But for a lot of folks who have a strong point of view in a space, in a category, and have an engaged audience, I think we can be a really good partner to help them think about a course, which can be a relatively inexpensive thing. For us to help them stand up?

I talk to probably 300 sizable YouTubers a year, and I encounter a surprising amount of resistance. I, I encounter a, a large number of, of bigger YouTubers who have never sold anything at all— course, merch, anything— and, and a surprising amount of resistance sometimes to selling anything and sort of building revenue streams outside of the kind of basic, you know, programmatic ads, brand sponsorships. Do you ever encounter friction like that with some of these bigger creators?

Yeah, all the time. And so I mentioned that we have 3 variables. One of them is category, and I think category can be one of the strongest leading indicators of what the right business could be. Um, I know you're probably familiar with Doug DeMuro, who has a, like, I think an auction bidding product that he set up around his, like, car review YouTube. Like, that's a good example of, like, a really good strategic decision to make in the context of his category. And the second variable that we, that we kind of use to inform, like, what is a good partnership for us, which is their audience size and audience growth velocity. And there's, like, submetrics underneath it, but, like, fundamentally, like, do they have a growing audience? And is the velocity of the audience growing at a rate that we think is really compelling for a business? And then the third variable is like conviction. And this is kind of like the— this is the variable that is like really hard to determine until you have like multiple touch points with someone. But like, I think, for example, I think there are YouTubers who have an allergy towards selling things. And I think the reason for that can sometimes be ill-informed, but sometimes folks just have really strong brand values where they're like, for whatever reason they don't want to. I think Andrew Huberman's kind of in this category. He's like, I, I want to make all of my stuff free for scientific education. I think you could like reverse engineer that to being he really cares about providing as little barriers to his insight as possible. Maybe he'll stand up other paid products in the future, but that third piece is the one that we get sometimes like will be the sticking point for us is like, especially because we do sometimes unique commercial agreements with our customers, like we're investing in something or want to take a royalty, that there needs to be like material I want to sell this thing and I'm going to throw my weight behind that because I have conviction in it.

I see. So it's conviction in the business line, conviction in the product or the merchandising strategy. Yeah.

And it is like a little bit tough to measure, but it's almost like the sentiment, like, are they— do they like the— one of the kind of analogies I'll use is like, do they want to empire build? And you can kind of get that from folks. Like, some folks aren't They just like, hey, I have an extraordinary living making content at this level of frequency, and that's totally cool. Like, that's— I like, I'm super, I'm super supportive that those incredible businesses can be built on the internet. But I think there's a second category of folks who are like, wow, like, I am— I find this notion of building a big business intoxicating, and they see the value in us supporting them on that. And those are like where we can be a really— there's a lot of productivity, I think, there for us as a, as a partner with them.

There's such a big diversity in the psychographic of creators.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's a great spectrum. It's like, and there's nothing necessarily good or bad, I think, about either end of the spectrum, but you have some folks who, some creators who are on the maybe more the lifestyle side, which is fine. And then some folks that are on the more ambitious side, the, as you put it, the empire building.

Totally. And that's like a big part of our discovery process. And again, it's not a value judgment thing. It's just like, it is, I think just important variable for us to be like really deliberate about who we can help a lot.

It's a mentality that it takes to build a really big, durable, sustainable business over time. You have to really want it and you have to be ambitious.

Yeah, because businesses are so hard, man. It's like, I saw a Sam Altman clip. He's like, there's no difference in difficulty between a small business and a radically transformative disruptive business. You know, there are businesses are hard. It's hard to build a brand. It's hard to acquire customers. So even if you have the advantage of an engaged audience in a category that's exciting, you have to be up for dealing with tough moments in high frequency. You know, it doesn't make it easy, but makes it slightly less easy, I'd say. Sorry, slightly less difficult.

Going one level deeper on the, the audience and category, audience makes sense to me because you, you would want a big enough audience to, to pull from such that the, the juice is worth the squeeze for the, for the creator and for your organization. Where does the category come in and where do category and audience overlap when you're making a business opportunity determination?

Yeah, I don't know how. So I've thought about— I think you actually, you have an interesting point of view on this. Like, I thought about making like an RFP process. Like, here are the categories Core Studio is really excited about and here's why we are really excited about them. I'll share just like a couple categories that— and like give you a value judgment on them to give you a sense of like how we might think about it. Like, for example, we work with someone in the parenting space, and what's clear is that parents as a category are a very valuable customer community. One of my favorite anecdotes is from one of the founders of— the founder of Vans. I forget his name, but his last name is Van something. And he has this moment in his biography where he is— this family comes into his store and they're looking at the shoe rack, and the kid's like, I really want that, I really want that. The dad's like, oh, I think that's cool. And the mom's like, no, we're getting this, which is like And moms in particular, I think, are still— they make so many purchasing decisions for the home. And that is a— so in other words, that, that category can represent a lot of commercial value for advertisers, which is really exciting. Like, and then for selling things to parents, I think there's a lot of educational products. I think we will see a lot of parenting creators launch direct-to-consumer physical goods that displace kind of very generic, homogeneous Procter Gamble products because there's no brand relationship to Procter Gamble. That's a category I'm excited about for those reasons.

It makes sense. I think I've seen a stat before. It's mothers. Mothers make something like 75 to 80% of the purchase decisions, control like 75 to 80% of the wallet.

Totally.

Family.

Totally.

And are probably very— and I think are very particular about what they buy. My, my wife makes and markets a product to mothers. So I see that. I see that a lot with her customer interactions. What are some other categories that you have high conviction in?

Yeah, for sure. I think actually I'll give another one that's like kind of that has really positive attributes and ones that I see some structural challenges with. So real estate, like we just recently launched a real estate course. And so I think real estate is an interesting category for educational products because there's so much margin there. There's so much, there's a lot of a A successful real estate career can be an extraordinary career. And even a small edge, a small insight edge can give you a tremendous amount of— can create a lot of commercial value for you as a realtor. So I think Ryan Serhant is the most famous. The dude's built a really extraordinary business selling educational products for realtors. And I think there will be other realtor creators that capture some of that value because it's clear to me that if you're a realtor and you're looking to shortcut your career, you want to start off with unfair advantages that maybe the previous generation didn't have, I think an online course and a membership is a really good category for realtors. By the same notion, I think one of the challenges is that real estate is really regional. So for example, if you want to start a real estate media company and you wanted to give people education and information on real estate, it would be difficult to provide value that's so universal to all realtors because the Costa Rican market is very different than the New York market, which is very different than the St. Louis, Missouri market. So there's some regional structural challenges, I think, with real estate, but by the same notion, I think there's cool opportunities. So yeah, that's it.

Yeah, real estate's an interesting one. It's my understanding, my viewpoint from the outside in is that there's— it's a very high commission, low base job generally. And there's a, there's a very large proportion of people who want to be real estate brokers or agents, but who for one reason or another don't stick with it. And so it's a, it's a, it, it might be a population of people who's like pretty, pretty high turnover, but with a very, very dedicated base, uh, and a new crop of folks every year who, who maybe fit the, fit the, the mold of person who wants to become a real estate agent for the first time.

Totally.

So I could see some pros and cons in there. It's a business purchase, so potentially high average transaction value, very different than perhaps the mother-targeted or family-targeted segment, which is maybe a bit more B2C.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Do you have a bias towards either B2C or B2B? Type segments?

I don't know. What I really— what we truly try to do is just be really, really sober and honest about what we see the biggest opportunity being. Sometimes that's B2C, sometimes that's B2B. We built a B2B app for people to purchase digital products for organizations because we recognize that was kind of like a market gap. I know like Udemy, I think, recently published that like an extraordinary amount of their revenues are corporate, which was kind of surprising to me. I think there's a lot— there's big opportunities there. Like, I, I wouldn't be surprised that if like in 5 years there was digital-first there's like a brand that we think of, realtors just go there. Like, if you want a realtor, you just go to this thing, you know, it's digital first. It's like, it's like really economical. I think there's an enormous amount of categories that could like fit into that. But yeah, in other words, I'm not super— I think there's bigger businesses to be built in probably B2B education, but for us, we don't go targeting that. Maybe we should.

You don't have a bias either way. Yeah, my sense in, in working with a lot of these same course creators and membership folks building courses, memberships, and communities is that it definitely feels like the sort of learning-focused info products hit a bit harder and earlier in B2C and what I would call like downmarket B2B, you know, sole props, small businesses. And but I'm seeing it more and more eat into true B2B and sort of corporate, corporate buying. And then that last piece that you hit on about, about a bigger real estate brand is interesting because one of the other dynamics I'm seeing a lot every week is this sort of transformation, transformation from sort of personality-led to sort of media brand evolution for creators. And I think your prediction there sounds right to me. The idea that The idea that there could be some consolidation in a, in a niche like real estate underneath a bigger brand umbrella, that, that makes intuitive sense based on what, what I'm seeing in the market.

Totally. Yeah. And like, I think the fundamental reason why that is like a reasonable prediction is like, if you just fundamentally think like, where are consumers' attention relative to where they were 2 decades ago, 3 decades ago? It's like they're on social, they're on YouTube, they're on— which I think gives tremendous opportunities for creators to like be the, be the individual or team that makes that media brand because they make content native to these platforms where consumers already are. They're meeting customers where they are, which is, I think, the exciting part for the creator economy. I think for, for both of our businesses, candidly, like, I think like it's, uh, it's folks who are natively creating content for where the world's attention is going, you know.

Let's talk about, let's talk about rented media versus owned media a little bit. What does— first, what do the terms mean to you? What does rented media mean to you and what does owned media mean to you?

For sure, really good question. To me, rented media is media that is intermediated by a platform and an algorithm in which you have less influence and control over how consumers see that. And I think that's a good thing and it's a bad thing. It's not like— it's like, I guess, It's the— so like, I would consider like any platform— YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok— the audience that they generate for creators, I would consider rented on the creator's behalf. They don't have it forever. I think even contractually they don't own the audience. So like, it's like, sure. And I think the upside of that rented media is that those platforms leverage some of the smartest people on the planet to help their content reach the right audience. It's like some smart people in the world have been focused on algorithms that help you find an audience But the downside with that is that I think those platforms capture way more of the value of that, which segues into owned media, which my view is like it often manifests in email, RSS feed, where these are people who have given you permission to communicate with them in a way that you have much more control over. And I think that's often the distinction where people— I think that gives a license to call it owned versus rented in a way that I find that I'm amenable to. I think is, is helpful.

You, you own the experience more, you own the customer data, you own the customer relationship, you can do more with it, you can monetize it totally, and you can reliably activate it.

Like, you, uh, I think there's this level, like, on a platform where if you want to push something out to someone, if they want to make a purchasing decision, or if you want to get a very specific piece of content out to them that you care about that maybe is not, like, algorithmically ready to go viral, email is a place you can do that in a way that's quite different.

I'd say I hear this common— I hear this misconception over and over. I would say it's a common misconception that, you know, I sometimes I'll hear from YouTubers, well, you know, do I still need YouTube? I've got this owned media platform, I've got this course or I've got this membership. Is this a replacement for YouTube? And I think that, that I would say it's a misconception because I would argue that they work. They're both important. They attack different parts of the funnel. They're important to the business for different reasons. How do you think In a perfect world with the creators that you work with, how would you say that rented media and owned media complement each other as opposed to being at odds?

Yeah, for sure. So one of the first concepts, this was very transformative to me when I understood it for my career. I didn't grow up in a business family. I kind of grew up thinking businesses kind of took advantage of people. Just like, I don't know if anybody, maybe people listening to this have no concept of that, but I grew up with a family of teachers and There was a later point when I went to business school, or maybe it was like in my entrepreneurial career, where like this notion of like a zero-sum game versus a positive-sum game. So like, just unpack that. Like, sports are typically zero-sum games. There's a winner and there's a loser at the end of the game. And I kind of thought business was like that. And I think a lot of YouTubers can sometimes think, or any person who has a brand who leverages primarily rented audience or leverages platforms, think that if I want to capture owned audience, that is in— that is at a cost, the cost of growing my channels. And I don't think that's true. I think these are more positive sums where like, not only can your YouTube or your social channels grow, I think you can also benefit by— I, I think, I think those things can be sort of both beneficial and synergistic with one another. So that's like one of the first things when we hear that sentiment from some of our partners, we will try to be like, give our point of view on is like we actually do see these things as quite positive sum if you do it strategically, if you're thoughtful about it. So maybe that's like—

Can I play devil's advocate real quick to that? Because I actually, I love that thought and I agree with it, but I'll give you an objection that I hear from YouTubers and other creators a lot, and that is, I understand how both rented and owned media are important, but my time is zero sum and I don't know you know, how much time do I spend on rented media? How much effort do I spend on owned? How do I staff it? How do I budget for it? How would you handle— so there's sort of a— I guess what I'm saying is there, maybe the resourcing to some degree, at least initially, is zero-sum. So how do you handle an objection like that?

Totally. It always comes back to that third variable I mentioned, like conviction, which I consider like a brand. It's a value. It's a brand value. What is this creator's goals? And if they say, I just want to do brand partnerships and make really good content and I have no desire to build a business that might be bigger than that, or I'd be like, that's fine, like that's cool. But if you don't, if that's, if you maybe have other ambitions, if you do want to build a business that sells things to consumers, and again, use this notion of empire building, it is absolutely crucial that you leverage these channels, these owned media channels. So I think so many things— I hope that doesn't feel like really reductive or simplistic— comes down to like what someone, what their core values are, what their brand values are. So I would maybe— that would be my discovery process with them. I would say like, cool, like maybe you don't want to do these things, but let me help you understand what your goals are. And if they at any point say, well, yeah, I would love to start a business that's selling things, I would say, we know these channels work. Like, it'd be silly for you not to do this. You told me what you value, you told me what your goals are. This is the path. There's no other path that I'm aware of. That would be my discovery process, I think.

Yeah, it makes sense. It's sort of— and I try to— I personally try to handle conversations around resourcing by making them in some ways explicitly about resourcing and goal setting. So it's like, what are you hoping to get out of this? Okay, let's think a year in the future, 2 years in the future, work backwards from there. How might you allocate your time? Your precious dollars such that you can— you have the highest chance of putting yourself on the right track and getting to where you want to be.

Totally.

Whatever that is.

Totally. I'm going to take that. Yeah, I like that. I think that's right. I think that's— we have to start regardless of whatever activity you're taking in a business, you know.

So I would say a lot of these conversations that you're having with creators, I would claim that you're acting as a creator COO or at the very least a creator operator. Have you thought about that term at all? And would you self-identify as a creator COO?

Yeah, I love this question. I, and like, I, so I think if you were to abstract away titles like CEO, COO, whatever, and you were to like look at the jobs to be done that Core Studio will often shoulder for our creator partners, 100% we are a COO-type partner with a caveat that I think like, maybe not caveat, I guess, but like, I think like what's very clear to me is the strategic value I think a lot of our customers really benefit from us is like, again, we'll take the audience, we'll take that category, and really think hard with them what the right product to launch is. And so I think that I haven't— we haven't really identified ourselves that way, but 100% I think we act that way to a lot of our customers.

You may not self-define as it, but you, you sort of— there's this presumably this abstract list of— there's a job description, and there seems to be some overlap between what you do and what a, what a creator CEO might do.

Yeah, 100%. And what I like about, like, that's a category that's not super well defined, you know what I mean? Which is kind of exciting, I think. Like, I think that it's so obvious to me that the jobs doing that Core Studio shoulders that I think could be defined as a CEO represent enormous opportunities for folks who want to participate in the creator economy, work with creators, because there's a lot of stuff that Again, coming back specifically to the Empire Builders and even more the lifestyle creators, I would say who like, there's a lot of stuff that's hard that needs to get done to help advance a business forward that certainly we delight in doing as a business. And I know a lot of other folks are as well. And I actually like, I'm super supportive of that being a more in the vernacular, you know, like creator CEO, like creators going out to hire for that, you know what I mean? Like, I think that'd be super exciting for I think that'd be exciting.

I think that there's this sort of pool, maybe this more broad pool of creator operators, but I like, I like the creator COO title in the sense that it elevates a particular type of creator operator to more of an equal status to the creator or the COO in the same sense that you would have in the tech world, you'd have a technical founder and a non-technical founder working together. So I like, I like that dynamic, but, but totally agree. It's a very undefined category and I've met with a lot of folks who operate as a creator COO, but maybe they're a business manager. They would call themselves a GM. So I'm excited to define the category more.

Dude, I think it's worthwhile. I'm excited for you to define it too. I, I have— there's— I have seen it before. But I think I see it. I'm like, I kind of, I'd almost be curious to like talk through with those folks how they think about themselves. So like having more definition in the category will A, attract more talent towards that, and I think catalyze creators to recognize, holy shit, like this job description is exactly the stuff, are my pain points, you know?

Back to the rented media versus owned media conversation. I, when I look at, when I've, and I don't know that I've been doing this as long as you, Tom, but when I look back at the last 2 to 3 years sort of seeing, seeing the creator economy and the market evolve, to me there's been a really tight correlation between the increased importance of owned media and the rise of more creator-operator types. And my hypothesis would be that, you know, when you, when you talk to some of these bigger creators who maybe they, maybe they grew a big following on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, they they're really comfortable in that, in that domain. They understand it super well. They understand how to build an audience, make super high-quality content. Once you start bridging beyond that to this more owned media sphere where you're talking about building out owned content properties and collecting email addresses and, you know, conversion rates at checkout, then the the skill set, the skill set shifts a little bit. And so I don't know if it's a perfect like one-to-one correlation, but I've— the rise of one seems to have driven the rise of another. Does that make sense?

I totally agree. And I think like to your point, what makes someone really good at generating rented media, which is like very top of the funnel, does not necessarily mean that they'll be very good at the owned part, which I think you and I probably both agree are necessary it is a necessary skill set, I think, to building a really compelling, profitable business. And I think there's, there's maturity around how to build owned audience in a way that a creator might not want to shoulder, right? Like, that's probably not the thing that gets them up in the morning. Whereas I think there's certainly folks who'd want to support a creator who'd be like, hey, listen, I would love to stand up an email strategy with you and own that end to end, and a content strategy that supports owned media versus rented media. And help you think strategically about how those two things can be synergistic or not. So yeah, totally. I see those as like— I see the rising tide of the creator economy, I think, has produced that. I think that, that CEO kind of opportunity, I think, for folks.

So I'd love to explore a little bit more with you. We talked about rented media and owned media, but maybe going a bit deeper into, into courses specifically. And part of the— one of the reasons I'm so interested in exploring the courses topic with you, besides the fact that you're an expert and have great perspectives on it is that it seems to me the courses market is changing and has changed a lot over the last decade. And I know talking to some creators that, you know, some people have positive associations with the course, with the courses word, and other people have, whether creators or learners, some people have negative associations with, with the word course. I think maybe in part because I think there's really good courses out there for sure, really high quality, drive real transformation in learners. But the market has— you can argue the market's been flooded with a lot of really low quality content as well. So curious, curious your take first, maybe on your perspective from the inside on how the market's transformed maybe over the last decade or half a decade.

Yeah, for sure. It's a good question. I think like I suppose I'm so positive in the space that sometimes like I'm such an evangelist that I maybe don't spend enough time to think about. I think a lot, there is, I think, a huckster reputation in the online course space, people selling financial products and get-rich-quick schemes. I think that there's like legitimate cautiousness that people might take to the industry because I think a lot of some of the earliest probably successes in the space were people who did that. I think though, what's like What's clear though, and certainly what gets us excited is that there's some people with such tremendous insight who have such unique points of view on things that it can be a really, really valuable— I think you used the word transformative. You can really provide transformative, inexpensive things for folks almost regardless of the category you're in. And my hope is that, to your point, as the category keeps maturing, that the reputation, I think, that the reputation of the space encourages more folks with interesting perspectives to share, to join it, and build really good business on it. And just because we see that, we see so many wonderful businesses being built on this despite maybe that original kind of icky feeling that some people get with the space.

And I don't know that everyone has an icky feeling, but I certainly think that there's— I get the sense that there are a lot of learners who have bought a lot of courses and maybe didn't follow through on them. And so what— you're an expert, I think, at building courses that drive real transformation. So What does— what can you do as a creator? What does Core Studio do to drive that real transformation and deliver on the course promise?

Yeah, that's a good question. So I guess the first point, not to like be evasive about it, I don't know if there's silver bullets for each course. I think there's a ton of variables that kind of inform how you should think about a course. For example, like, do you want to have a community component where you're proactively participating in creating accountability? It is very clear that that drives better student student outcomes, but that's kind of an expensive thing to do.

Can you say more about that? Why is that expensive?

Because I think the scarcest resource we all have is time. And I think for Crater, they're especially conscious of that. And so I love this notion of zero marginal cost, which is what is so good about the online course and membership spaces. You create an economic, a valuable thing, and you can distribute that infinitely with very, very low cost, which is why they can be such good businesses. Whereas if you're advertising a community that requires your time, you should be pricing your time as quite valuable. And so if you launch a course with a community, we've seen this with a lot of our folks, they will do it for 2 cohorts, 3 cohorts, and then they'll say, "Man, this is an enormous investment of my time." And a lot of times that's not what people get.

It's surprisingly time intensive to get the community flywheel spinning. And then to moderate it over time. And then to your point, it probably depends a bit on your, your category, your price points, but it's, it's not always clear. It's also not always clear maybe sometimes where community ends and coaching starts or vice versa.

For sure.

So then you have to, you have to sort of right-size the value and the pricing. Are you more a community? Are you more coaching? At least what I've seen.

Yeah, for sure. And I think like, and you just brought up a good point that I think I'm almost always really supportive of with our partners is like if they are launching their first digital product and we have a hypothesis about a really valuable course. And to answer your first question, one of our orientations is, is every piece of content that we put in a course, every lesson, would ask ourselves, is this something a year from now this student would reflect back on and comment as a valuable thing they took from the course? So that's kind of the lens you try to bring to any piece of like educational content we bring to a course. But to kind of come back to the, the kind of community notion, we are very supportive of folks launching communities, especially for their first product, just because the feedback loop is so— it's synchronous, it's live. You can hear, are the dogs liking the dog food? Which is like, that's maybe not the best analogy. It's analogy I use a lot to like understand product market fit, or whether a product is like finding resonance in a market. And I think that can be really, really valuable. You might get an insight like, hey, that, that like lesson had like such a like that helped me think about myself in a way I didn't think of. And maybe that helps inform your next launch, your next course, your next paid product. That's where it can be really valuable. The insight from a community can be great. And I think to your point, maybe people say they really love coaching and you love coaching and maybe you want to launch a— like, I think those touch points can yield a lot of insight that is tough to get in the absence of a community.

And then just to summarize that, so the pros and cons maybe of something like community as a way to deliver on transformations are pros. It helps people. It can help people deliver on transformations through accountability, whether it's like coach to learner or peer to peer.

Totally.

And it helps getting this like tight feedback loop to understand if your content is, is landing, if it's delivering. Cons: time intensive, can be time intensive, can be expensive. It doesn't have that sort of zero marginal cost distribution dynamic that you like.

Totally.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of people originally go into this space by thinking they can, they can build really good businesses that aren't enormous burdens on their time, which is why we'd very cautiously recommend that someone stand behind a cohort-based course forever, because you don't know how you're going to feel after a couple months after you've like, after you've gone through this. I, I don't want to misspeak, but I think like Ali Abdaal is a kind of a good kind of like bellwether for this. Like, I think he originally launched with a— and that this is like, this should be fact-checked, but I'm pretty sure this is the trajectory— launched a cohort-based course and then kind of realized that I think like they could deliver a lot of value asynchronously, which was much easier for them, and maybe have an upsell for something that's more— has the more coaching part. But like, my sense is that it is a common thing. You launch the core-based course, you get a lot of insight that helps inform your asynchronous course in a way that makes it more valuable and can potentially be less of a burden on your time.

I can see that being true. I mean, and I can certainly see— I'm trying to think of other cohort-based learning. I think of like, this is outside of the creator world, but something like On Deck.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Are you familiar with them? I mean, a very, very cohort-based approach to learning. I think a fair bit of it's in person, very expensive. So perhaps you can make those models work if you charge enough, but Again, it sort of, it violates your, your earlier principle of zero marginal cost to, to distribute. Different business. Are there any other, are there any other things you can think of that, that creators or creator operators can do to, when they launch a course, make sure that they're driving transformations? Anything beyond community or sort of I guess content quality was one that you named.

Yeah, I, I'm actually mixed views on the content quality thing. I like, I think, for example, some of our most successful customers launched with like a gated YouTube video, which was just like, I didn't know that was possible. But like, I remember when someone came to us like, hey, we're doing this thing. And I was like, that's incredible that you're making like a decent business out of this. Certainly it's like you elevate and you charge more. I think there's an expectation that people If someone's paying $1,000 for something, I think they expect a certain production quality where the synthesis and ingestion of that educational product is as good as it possibly can be. I think so. We actually— Course Studio actually built a product called Wobo, which we find is— it addressed a pain point in the space that we thought was quite important to address, I suppose. So we had originally— Simon Sinek has a course which is called It's like kind of downstream from his Start With Why, I believe is what it's called. And they had this feature where like you can note take inside of their app and kind of in a drag and drop editor throughout the whole course, note take, reference your goals, which is part of the education. And then at the end of that course, you kind of get a summary of all of your notes that had been written and contrasted against kind of some of the curriculum. So that's an example of a, for the right product, if you're a coach, that is a, I think that is a valuable thing that you can offer to your students because I think a lot of folks, they'll take a course and they don't get sort of a tangible artifact from the course. They finish like, oh, I just watched a bunch of videos. What was the thing I can take away from it? And so like, I think fillable PDFs can do that. A product like Wobo could help a creator do that. That's one feature that I think like we built a product because we had a lot of conviction in the fact that that would help drive stronger student transformation. But I think like, again, I think the one thing that I feel the most strongly about is like, ask yourself the question a year from now, will the student talk about this thing as something that helped them reach an outcome that they wouldn't have otherwise? I think so long as you do that for every single piece of content you do, you can create a valuable course.

How do you think about, like, if you're advising a creator on building a course's business, or let's say, I think based on what you've said, you often are actually advising creators on how to build a lot more than a course business, how to build a durable owned platform or owned media sort of platform that they can build a business on. How do you deal with the issue of the sort of transactional purchase behavior versus repeat purchase behavior? Or said a different way, like, how do you make sure that if somebody, if a learner buys your course, they're gonna buy more stuff from you over time?

Yeah, that's a good question. I honestly think you'll have, I think you'll have really good insight in this. I'll just give you a couple things I think about. I think I've shared this with you in a previous conversation, but like, I, for categories where people are achieving mastery, memberships are so good. Like for example, I play guitar. I had this very painful experience of trying to find a guitar teacher where I grew up. I like kissed a ton of frogs. I'd like go try, guitar teacher, felt it was terrible. Spent an enormous amount of dough doing that. And then I found this dude online named— this website's called activemelody.com, and he had this ad that was like, it was basically like fretboard mastery, like if you want to build fretboard mastery. And it was something like $20, it was super, super inexpensive, like extraordinarily low cost, extraordinarily high value for me for something I wanted to build mastery at. I wanted to participate and practice on daily. I was so ready to give this guy my credit card every month. The one thing I will say that is important if you're doing a subscription or membership is that some of the objections consumers think of is like, am I going to get recurring value from this thing? And one of the really easy ways to do that is to commit to providing more relevant content to that consumer month over month or quarter over quarter. There's a series of objections I think you have to address if you're launching a subscription product versus a course that they're, they're not like necessary to launch a good membership business, but I think they can help they certainly can help that conversion process in that selling cycle. But, but to summarize it all back, I think for, for categories where there's people or students are pursuing mastery, memberships can be such a wonderful product because it really aligns well with the value that they're trying to get.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think there's obviously, there's a, there's a pricing component to upfront sale versus subscription over time, but just to, just to point to that isn't enough because you could very easily sell a $1,000 course, but put Afterpay at the checkout and cut it down to, you know, $10 payments over, you know, however many months. So it's not just a payments thing. I certainly think that subscription memberships— I like the way that you put it. I think not in all cases, but in many cases, learning transformations take time. And so aligning the value— if you assume that the transformation is the value received by the member, aligning the value that is paid to the creator along that same time track can make conceptual sense and often ends up with happier, more engaged members who are driving real transformation. But I think that that's not true in all cases, as you pointed out. And I actually, I can think of a few different creators who have had, who combine courses, sort of one-time sales with membership models together. So I'm actually a big proponent of that, having sort of two different offers dependent on the transformation that you're driving. Perhaps they're different for the ideal customer profile, right? The the person that you're targeting, the segment amongst the broader audience that you're targeting. So it's a complex conversation.

Can you share an example of a creator who's done that really well? Like they've done the— and what you think about their— like, I kind of think of it as a bundle. I love like my— like you might have a— the course is a very discrete unit of things in the membership. You get a bundle of other things. I don't want to like project— that's kind of my bias when I think about these, but I'm curious like Who is a creator that you think has done that well and that, and what are the features of their offer that you think is compelling?

Yeah, the creator who immediately comes to mind for me is a gentleman by the name of Justin Rhodes who has a membership. He's got a, he's got a media brand called Abundance Plus, and he, he's got, he's got a few different revenue streams, but he does a good job. So he's in the homesteading category.

That's so cool.

He's got some faith-based and some family-oriented undertones, but he's He's predominantly a homesteader and a farmer, and he's built a shockingly large business around this. I think he's got about a million, a million subs on YouTube. And so he's got this bigger media brand that he provides membership access to. He's a really good example of a creator who has started to move away from the personality-led approach only. He started to cultivate He started to cultivate a community locally in his hometown of other homesteaders who he now produces content with. So he's not, he's not the only face, but from time to time he'll still have very specific things that he's teaching, like, you know, how to, how to build the perfect chicken coop and raise chickens and eggs for your family, or How to Raise and Slaughter Pigs. So I think you'll see, you know, his membership is a bit more, I would call it like edutainment. So it's a combination of sort of education, lifestyle, and learning together. And then his more transactional courses, products are pretty technical and pretty in-depth, right? So sorry to our, you know, to our vegetarian audience, but like, you know, how do you humanely raise and slaughter and butcher a pig? It's actually surprisingly technical thing to do. That a course might fit for.

That's very cool.

I think the— so there's, I mean, I think there's a lot to parse there. Like he's, he, he knows, he understands his audience really well. Obviously he understands his customer segments and he's able to create offers that— offers and pricing, I think, that appeal to different customers at different stages in their journey as well. Pretty neat approach.

Yeah, super cool. One of the like things that I think— one thing I'm pretty excited about in the creator economy industry as it relates to this kind of like the course membership distinction is like I think Amazon Prime is a good example of this. Like you sign up for Prime and you just get this enormous amount of— there's this enormous amount of features you get as a member of Prime. They kind of overwhelm— they can overwhelm you with that. You get obviously like the discounts on shipping and the delivery, but you get video, you get used to get music. Like, there's all of these kind of features you can get. And I think it's a good analogy for a lot of creators, is like, so there's like maybe the expectation that you set with your consumer that you're going to create educational content that you know is relevant for them. But maybe they get AMAs every 2 months, they get participate, get to— there's a community that maybe you're not necessarily setting the expectation that you will proactively participate in, but it's like-minded folks in your category. And that's a, that's really curated by that creator. I think that's where there's a lot of creativity to be built around membership businesses that I'm, I'm always trying to be supportive of and think of. And I try to keep them marginal, zero marginal cost. Like you want to keep them inexpensive, I guess, is— it's not the golden rule, but it's certainly one thing to be mindful of.

Yeah, keep, keep— I would say keep them— keeping the margin high either means it's either managing the cost and the time effort or pricing appropriately.

Yeah, well said.

In making, making sure that you're pricing value the right way. I think that's right. Yeah. Back to the Justin Rhodes example, he does a lot of that, a lot of that, you know, the AMAs, the lives, the sort of exclusive content. But I also think he wraps community in, in an interesting way into his membership. So he has some really fascinating use cases. Again, he's a farmer and a homesteader, and he has a base of, you know, thousands of members. In his community who will— they'll use his community to sell things back and forth, sell chickens and sell, you know, farm machinery, whatever. So we've seen— there's definitely examples out there of people doing them both together. And one of the cool things I think about being in this business right now is these use cases, these use cases are popping up so organically in real time.

Totally. Yeah, and what's cool about community too, I've actually— I haven't seen a ton of this manifest, but like that example, like if you build a critical mass of folks in a category, I think that also can kind of support brand partnerships too. It's like you have this like dedicated niche group of folks, provided those brands have like really aligned values with you. It's like another monetization opportunity for creators. Like if you have a bunch of folks who are obsessed with growing chickens and harvesting chickens, I'm sure there's like products that— there's brands that want to get in front of those folks. Provided you can do that in an organic way, that's compelling to me.

Yeah. I mean, another example in that same category, one of my favorite examples of somebody that does what I would call making the jump beyond info products is the folks over at Epic Gardening backed by the Chernin Group. They've done really well with, with, with ads and brand deals, done really well with info products. You know, they looked at, they looked at high margin products in their space and gardening, decided to buy They bought a seed company. So, they fully vertically integrated.

Yeah. And I think one of the insights there is that there's an enormous amount of undifferentiated products in the world that mostly live on Amazon that I think could be really compelling business opportunities if they were backed by a creator that people really, really trust. I'm sure before Epic Gardening, I don't want to make an assumption, but I'm sure that seeds feel relatively undifferentiated. Hopefully, people aren't like, I mean, maybe there are genetically modified ones that are creating some But I think most of the time it's more like, do I— your purchasing decision for that seat is like, do I trust that this is going to create the outcome that I want to create? And if a creator is putting their brand behind something, that's going to move product. So I think like, I think there's a lot of examples of undifferentiated products that if a creator were to advance and put their brand behind, feels like a really— like, there's— I think there's really big opportunities there.

So you talked a lot about high margin, high margin products and zero margin cost to distribute. How do you think, how do you think about the cost structure to produce a really good course? What, you know, if you're a big creator, let's say maybe you've got half a million or a million subs on YouTube or, or Instagram or TikTok, how do you think about the investment that you have to make to start this up?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think like one of the first pieces of advice I always give to some, I, I try to bring this to any business activation that even we would take at Course Studio is I think it's important to keep costs low and I like this notion of inexpensive mistakes. And so if someone's going to come to me and say, hey, I want to launch a course, how should I price this out? I would try to find a really inexpensive way to launch something to give a signal, to give us more conviction to invest more meaningfully in a full— maybe it's a fully fledged course. So maybe it's a really inexpensive live product just to gauge how much market reception exists to that. And if that goes really well, then we can wrap a more full-fledged course around that. But I think what's special about the industry is that you can do things relatively inexpensively and help validate a bigger investment. If you want to work with us end-to-end, anywhere between $50K and $100K, we would do the whole thing for you. We would think of the idea, do the instructional design with you, do the marketing, do the design, launch the whole thing with you. But we wouldn't want someone to bet the farm with us to do that first. We would hope that they have done something relatively inexpensively before that. Where we can help give them conviction in that. Well, like, we can say, hey, look what we did.

There's, there's these interim stages to, to validate the idea in a way that is hopefully low cost to get to the validation, which then gets you to the higher conviction level.

Exactly.

To make the bigger, more substantive investment.

For sure. And sometimes it doesn't. Like, sometimes they'll do that live thing and it's like, oh man, it's kind of a nothing burger. And like, and then everybody wins, you know what I mean? It's like they didn't spend an enormous amount of go to work with a partner like us who does have a strong point of view. And we don't feel like— we feel like we have— like we haven't gone down a path that was a really poor value exchange. Maybe, maybe it wasn't the right investment. So that is the counsel we try to bring to folks if they want to work with us.

I'm a big believer that a lot of, a lot of operating a business the right way is just— it's understanding how to make bets and making sure those bets are right-sized, that you understand like the risk-reward. The size of the payoff in relation to the size of the investment. But I, I also see, quite frankly, I see a lot of creators struggle with this type of thinking. And this is— this, I think, is one of the most common reasons where I see creator COOs entering the picture to help them think through the bets that they're making. Do you— are there any examples of creators that you've worked with who have a more dedicated creator COO or a business manager or some other kind of operational support already embedded? Or is that fairly rare for the folks that you're working with?

It's a good question. So one of our, we work with a creator named Dr. Becky who has a brand called Good Inside. She's a really good example of going from like creator to platform to media company. And she has a, like a proper co-founder and COO. And I think she was very prescient in bringing on someone or having someone to kind of own all of those operational things that weren't necessarily the highest leverage use of Becky's time. And I think that's been really, really productive for them as a business. Like Good Sides, they've created an enormous amount of value for parents. And I see a lot of like tailwinds behind what they're doing. And I think a big part of that is that her co-founder Erica has been able to shoulder so much, which is enabled Becky to keep kind of creating content, engaging with that audience, watching new features of their membership in a compelling way. But I think to your second point, we don't see it— that's, that's one that like definitely comes to mind. But I, outside of that, I think that, I think some creators are nervous about making that jump or having some sort of even part-time or full-time role.

Why do you, why do you think that is?

I think it's education, which is why I'm so supportive of like this being a more defined category. It's like if you were to do discovery with these folks, they would verbalize all of these pain points that they have that represent a job description of the COO, but they just don't. So I think that's one concern. I think the second is like commercially, how do you engage with someone and pay them for that work? And there's not great mental models for that. And I know this because at Course2U, like, we've had to make up stuff all the time. Like, we've done, we've done, we've done royalties, we've done, we've done investments, we've done fee for service. And we have like, we have like a trove of spreadsheets, like a graveyard of spreadsheets where we've tried to like make sense of things, but we're kind of making it up, you know. And I, and I'm hopeful that we're early enough where the stuff that we're making up becomes benchmarks for people and for us to continue like making intelligent decisions with creators in the future. But I think that's a challenge. I think how do you compensate these folks is a— I think that's something that hangs in people's head is like What's a good value exchange?

I hear that objection, that concern, I should say, all the time. How do I compensate somebody? How do I do it in a way that aligns them to the outcome that I'm trying to drive? This feels, you know, finding a creator COO kind of feels like a marriage. How, you know, how do I make sure that I'm legally protected, you know, in the event of a breakup? But there's a, there's a, there's a whole host of things to unpack there. And it's cool to see someone like you on the front lines. Figuring it out. And I agree, I would love to put together at some point a resource of, you know, common best, best practices for both the creator and the creator COO persona.

Totally.

I think it would be, it would be great to have people on both sides of the negotiating and structuring table with a bit more of an idea of maybe, maybe at least the best place to start.

And I'm 100% convinced that would help the category mature so much more is because like, I think what makes it difficult to do this is the fear that you're going to get You're going to make a bad decision. You're going to make an irreversible decision that you're going to regret. How do you fix that? It's education. It's like, it's, it's everybody having more clarity. Because I will say, it's like painful, like putting together these spreadsheets and like trying to think through these things is like, it's a lot of work.

It's, it's really hard to do a— and it's hard to do a custom negotiation every time. You know, in, in the tech industry, you've got all of these rules of thumb for, you know, for You know, if you're a, if you're a co-founder doing X, doing X, you get, you know, you get A% equity. If you're a co-founder doing Y plus Z, you get B plus C equity. And then you get on to roles like, you know, VP, C-level, and there's, there's all these bar— these, these market benchmarks that you can find. You can go to a recruiting firm and that recruiting firm will tell you, hey, over the last 12, 24 months, here's, here's what we've seen. Or if, or if you link up in a commercial relationship with the VC firm, there's this body of content, thousands of articles that you can read about how do you negotiate your way through that process. Nobody's really explored that yet for, I think, what you're doing and, you know, what some others like you are doing.

Totally. Yeah. And I think it's important not to take for granted, like, I know, like, Brad Feld is a— I think he runs Union Square Ventures or— I don't quote me on that. I think it's USV, but he's like a notoriously high-volume share content about the venture capital industry. He wrote a book called Venture Deals. My understanding was like before that, it was kind of— venture was kind of considered this kind of like cloak and dagger, very mysterious, like elitist ivory tower thing. But I think like, I think it's relatively new that we benefit from all this stuff. And so I think it's such a perfect analog for the creator economy space. I think in early immature categories, it takes time for the stuff to come to fruition. I think that was the case of venture capital, but now like everybody benefits from that. So I'm hopeful for that in the creator economy space, and I'm hoping you advance it, Matt. You have my vote of support, so if that means anything.

I appreciate that. Well, we try to wrap up these conversations with some pointed, specific advice for the audience, most of whom are either creators or creator COOs. So do you have any advice for Any advice for a creator who's looking to take their first step, their first foray into owned media? Any advice for, you know, I don't know, the 1, 2, or 3 most important things you think they should think about or, or do before they take that leap?

I think I said this before, but I guess I'll reemphasize it now because I mean, it's just, it is genuinely the perspective we bring to anyone who's asking that question. I would try to keep costs low. Try to have inexpensive mistakes and get inexpensive insight. It is relatively cheap nowadays to stand up a landing page to— and to give away a free piece of content in exchange for an email. Like, this is called lead magnets in the space, which is like— which is notionally just like giving away something that you believe is valuable in exchange for someone giving you their email address, which gives you license to market to them via email in the future. That is like, to me, a non-negotiable for any creator. Like, you should just be doing that. And if you were a COO and you're trying to like find a wedge in with a creator, I'd maybe approach them, maybe do that for them for free. Be like, hey, listen, I wanna create a piece of content that is so valuable, we're gonna give it away for free. And the reason why we're doing that is because we wanna experiment with generating our own audience. And I think that is a, that's maybe where I'd start. And that could be like a, depends on your category, but like just a, like maybe it's an ebook or a checklist or something that you know is a pain point that is not well addressed in a YouTube video, that is not well addressed in an Instagram video. Creating that in a format and seeing how many emails you can generate for that, I think is an awesome first step. Doing 3 or 4 experiments with that, I would consider that inexpensive and say inexpensive from a cost advantage, just inexpensive. And if there's validation there, then take more incremental steps.

That's great advice. Take first steps in a way that you minimize cost maximize learnings and give yourself the shot at taking bigger swings with higher conviction down the road.

Totally. And I think that's just like the philosophy of— that is a venture capital philosophy. That's like how The Lean Startup and like— and I think that it's a really valuable paradigm to bring to creators. So that's— yeah, I suppose that's my take.

Thanks for taking the time, Tonner Jackson.

Thanks so much, Matt.

I hope we do it again soon.

Cheers.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Creator COO. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. Also, please consider giving us a rating and a review as this helps other creators and creator COOs like you to find the podcast. This episode was produced by Rebecca Donovan at Uscreen with support from the team at Share Your Genius. It was edited by Chandler Chappell with artwork design by Spencer Marsh. I'm Matt Estes and you've been listening to The Creator COO. See you next time.