The creator economy, or the passion economy, makes a promise:

• Follow your passion.
• Create content around it.
• Build an audience.
• Then you, too, can make a living independently doing exactly what you want.

But does it deliver on that promise?

Not always.

Like the gig economy before it, the creator's road to financial freedom takes many harrowing turns. You can get far down the path, only to run into a dead end.

Creators, it turns out, need operators.

The term creator is a catch-all. Achieving success requires multiple skillsets:

1. Creativity
2. Audience building
3. Operational excellence

Some creators possess all three. These are the lucky ones. And usually the most successful. But for every Pomp, there are countless creators who master the first two but fall short with the third.

Even with a standout voice and a great audience, a creator's business can stall out if they lack an operational skillset.

Some of these creators have discovered the benefits of pairing with a skilled operator. The creator handles, well, the creative side. The operator looks after the business.

That's the arrangement for Kinsey Grant and Josh Kaplan's new venture, Thinking Is Cool. Kinsey hosts their eponymous podcast. She's the voice and face of the company. Josh oversees operations, growth, and monetization.

Kinsey and Josh first forged this partnership while working at a more traditional media company, Morning Brew. They took a more scaled back, creator economy inspired approach to going out on their own. But they retained a key media feature that works great (when it works): a creative side and a business side, working in unison to further shared goals.

David Perell has taken this approach as well. David started out on his own, doing everything. But he struggled under the weight of running a newsletter and launching his Write of Passage course. Then he found Will Mannon. Now, Will runs operations for WoP. And it's taken off like a rocket ever since.

Look also at the example of Barstool Sports. Barstool was a curiosity for many years. An oddball community led by an eccentric founder, Dave Portnoy. Portnoy dripped with creativity. But the business never achieved liftoff until Chernin Group invested and brought in Erika Nardini as the operator.

Yet in all the endless hype about the creator economy, you'll hear very little about operators. Instead, the conventional wisdom focuses on creators doing it all on their own. And of course, leveraging the creator platform and tools du jour. But that same discourse also bemoans the lack of a creator middle class and the proliferation of creator burnout.

What's missing? Operators.

There is something of a chicken-and-egg problem for creator-operator pairings. Only the most successful creators can afford great operators. Savvy operators rightly see the most upside in the already established creators.

Early creators may struggle to break out and hit a wall before they can get the operational help they need. Even when they achieve success, they may value their independence too much to share the wheel with an operator.

So how do we solve for this? Last week I invited Dror Poleg and Hugo Amsellem on Audience Builders to discuss a few solutions.

In his recent essay The Talent Portfolio, Dror posits that the future of the company may look more like a venture capital firm that bets on talent. Jarrod Dicker has explored a similar idea: that media companies should emulate record labels.

Dror suggests that future companies will invest in talent and provide operational support for them to grow and monetize.  If so, that may be one solution to the creator-operator puzzle.

Hugo provides some other ideas in his research on creator-funding models. If creators can tap funding sources for growth, they could presumably use some of that capital to hire operators.

Then there's the actual problem of how creators can find operators that complement their skillset. Even in today's hyperconnected Twitter DM world, creator-operator matchmaking is often random.

I recently spoke with Zack Honarvar, who manages Yes Theory. He grew up in Canada, worked at Shopify, and met the Yes Theory guys through mutual friends. After crashing on their couch a few times during business trips to L.A., they asked him to review some merchandising deals. That one-off request led to them inviting him to manage their business.

In the world of creator-operator meet cutes, stories like this are more typical than you'd think.

Matt Ragland, formerly of Convertkit and Podia, has been taking a different approach. He's offered up his services to fledgling creators.

The goal? Help them make their first $1,000 launching an online course. Clearly he's tapped into a need. I'm curious to hear how it goes.

Creators need a better way to get the early operational support they need. And there's a clear demand for a matchmaking service to pair established creators with skilled operators.

I've been thinking more about this as I plot out the evolution of my Audience Builders series. Stay tuned for more.

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"Replace yourself."

Founders know this advice well.

You shouldn't grip too tight to any role in your startup. As you scale, bring in the best recruits to take on each critical function. Then move on to the next developing area. Repeat.

But in the early days, becoming redundant is a laughable concept. You're doing everything. Wearing all the hats. If you don't do it, it doesn't get done.

That feeling weighed heavily on my mindset in the early Bleacher Report days. Shortly after we raised our seed round in 2008, I clashed with my co-founders over a long-planned trip to the Euro Cup soccer tournament.

They saw the trip as a justified perk of being in the sports business. I objected, on grounds that an extended break would slow our momentum. And what if a crisis came up?

So I stayed home in protest and to mind the store. In the end, all was fine and no crises arose. And by all accounts, the Euro trip was a blast.

Over the next couple years, B/R continued to grow. We brought in key people we trusted to keep things moving, even when we weren't around.

Soon, a new reality set in. Our startup had it's own momentum. It no longer depended on the founders alone to keep pushing it forward. Taking a true vacation became a real possibility.

It was a surreal feeling. And hard earned.

It was also a sign that we'd done our job as founders. We'd "replaced ourselves."

I thought of this evolution last week when I chatted with Khe Hy of RadReads during Audience Builders. We discussed the mindset of a creator. And we dug in on managing burnout.

Khe shared his plan to take a full two months off this summer. But unlike a startup founder, Khe can't really replace himself. He is RadReads. Such is the life of a solopreneur.

As a creator, you're not conditioned to replace yourself. Your audience and business revolve around you. Like me during the early days of B/R, you feel the pressure to be on all the time. Except there's no endpoint in sight.

What about the worry that you might lose momentum? It's real. Algorithmic platforms reward continuous posting. Getting juice in the algo takes consistent effort. If you don't use it, you lose it. I'm getting anxiety just thinking about it.

But not all creators live on this treadmill. A filmmaker like Quentin Tarantino releases a new film every few years. His audience expects this cadence. They don't "unfollow" him if the time between movies stretches a little too long.

Of course, even some traditional creators can test their audience's patience. Have you also waited over a decade for George R.R. Martin to finish Winds of Winter? I feel your pain.

So for web-native creators who feel burnout's creep, how do you take a break?

I asked the Twitter hive mind, and they obliged with some ideas:

• Take regularly scheduled breaks: TV shows have been doing this for a long time. They're called seasons. Podcasts do this as well. But even standalone creators can plan their breaks in advance. You might find it helpful to use the break time to organize your next "season" around a new theme or idea.
• Re-runs: To borrow another concept from TV, use a break to re-surface older content that your audience may have missed. At Inverse, we'd employ this during the end of year holiday season. With a slower news cycle and more staff on vacation, we'd prep end-of-year retrospectives on some of our best stories from the last twelve months. They would do great numbers. Just goest to show that older content doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.
• Bring in a guest host or writer: Radio shows and TV talk shows have done this for decades. Podcasts often do it as well. But you could also bring in a guest writer or writers for a newsletter. Jason Kottke will often hand over the keys to a trusted guest like Tim Carmody. Bringing in a guest can also be a way for you to spotlight up and coming talent to your audience.
• Let your community take over: Take it a step further by making your audience active participants in your time off. Ben Thompson of Stratechery will often feature audience guest posts while he's on a break. PewDiePie takes at least a one month break every year. But his fervent audience continues to post memes and jokes in his massive subreddit, so when he comes back he doesn't miss a beat.
• Give yourself permission: Khe talked about breaking free from  self-imposed pressure. For many creators, consistently creating is part of their identity. When the consistency is more important than the creativity, that's a problem. Giving yourself permission to step off the hamster wheel can be incredibly freeing.
• Just be transparent: Sometimes burnout creeps in and you just need to hit the brakes. When that happens, transparency is always the best policy. Many creators put undue expectations on themselves to maintain a high level of output. The audience is often much more understanding than they realize. That was the experience of Jessica Williams of #JessPicks.

Neil Young may have sang that "it's better to burn out than to fade away." But with all due respect to Neil, I'm here to tell you there's a better option.

Just take a break.

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Plenty of college kids sit in their entrepreneurship classes daydreaming about becoming the next Evan Spiegel or Katrina Lake.

Few fantasize about acquiring and managing self-storage facilities. But that may be starting to change, thanks to the tweets of Nick Huber.

Nick, known in the Twitterverse as @sweatystartup, joined me for last week's Audience Builders session. He shared his journey from Cornell undergrad to self-storage entrepreneur to amassing a huge online audience.

On Twitter, Nick's bread and butter are threads. He shares a mix of in-the-weeds real estate knowledge and high-level life advice from the trenches of building unsexy startups. His acerbic style and no-nonsense approach have vaulted him to over 125k followers.

But why would a self-storage tycoon care about building a Twitter following?

It all started back in his college entrepreneurship class.

Choosing the right game

While Nick's classmates set their sights on the high stakes game of tech startups, he decided to focus on a playing field with less competition and a more level pitch.

Nick's chosen game? Self-storage. He and a classmate started with one facility near their alma mater in Ithaca, NY.

By capitalizing on an overlooked opportunity in an uncrowded space, Nick put the "Bubba Gump strategy" into action.

Bolt Storage, Nick and his partner's business, started to grow and add new facilities. But as they sought investors to finance their expansion, they soon tapped out their personal networks.

Nick needed to expand his circle of influence. So he sat down at his computer one day and registered the domain name sweatystartup.com.

And thus began a journey that would change the trajectory of his business and life.

The inverted curiosity pyramid

With his new website, Nick launched a podcast called, naturally, The Sweaty Startup.

The pod featured a mix of Nick's business learnings, plus interviews of experts and entrepreneurs from the world of real estate and unsexy small businesses. Nick's show became the anchor content that spawned material for his blog and, later, his Twitter threads.

In other words, perfect execution of the Inverted Curiosity Pyramid content strategy.

Early on, he posted every podcast to the real estate community on Reddit. This was enough to get him to his first 1,000 listeners per episode.

But a much greater opportunity awaited him.

Gaining leverage

Redditors have a well-earned reputation for rejecting anything that reeks of too much self-promotion. The Sweaty Startup podcast soon met this resistance.

After hitting a wall, Nick needed a new platform. So he moved over to Twitter on the recommendation of a friend. The fit was instant.

Nick's friend, Moses Kagan, described real estate Twitter as an online country club. Membership is free and open to anyone. Best of all, you can source deal flow from investors all over the world with the tap of the tweet button.

As I've written, audience is leverage.

Nick learned that well. Since joining Twitter, he's raised over $7 million to finance a $30 million self-storage portfolio.

And 100% of that came from Twitter.

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The power of threads

When describing his Twitter philosophy, Nick shared this simple but profound shorthand:

If you want impressions, write tweets.

If you want followers, write threads.

Threads are controversial. They can be overindulgent. They clog up many a Twitter feed. But they've become so pervasive because they work.

As Nick describes it, people go to Twitter to learn. They come to soak up knowledge about topics like real estate, small businesses, audience building, or entrepreneurship.

And the best way to learn on Twitter is from well-written threads.

Nick spends up to four hours writing his most successful threads.

According to his back-of-the-envelope math, 0.5% of thread impressions convert into followers. So a big thread that gets 500k impressions will result in up to 2,500 new followers.

After six months of writing threads on Twitter, Nick had one break through into the stratosphere.

Like a lot of Nick's content, the thread draws on his very specific experience building his business. But then it connects that to universal themes that hit home for anyone trying to make it in today's world.

Last week, I asked Nick to walk me through the play-by-play of where he was when he wrote it:

So will Nick's success unleash a new generation of college grads looking to follow him into the self-storage world?

Perhaps.

But Nick is now playing an entirely different game.

And there may only be room on Twitter for one massively followed account focusing on that specific type of sweaty startup.

Or who knows, Nick could just be the tip of the iceberg.

Nick's story illustrates a universal truth that many overlook. There are near infinite niches in both the online world and IRL.

Find and own a niche. No matter how obscure it is, executing well can make you real money. Ready to add more leverage? Build an audience around your expertise.

Your goal shouldn't be to replicate someone else's journey. But to learn from the strategies of others.

And then forge your own path.

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In the movie Sliding Doors, Gwyneth Paltrow's character follows two parallel storylines.

If she catches a train, her life takes one path. If she doesn't, it leads another direction.

The film shows how a small, seemingly inconsequential change can drastically alter the course of your life.

Startups have sliding doors moments, too.

Over the course of building your company, you face several divergent paths. Some are obvious at the time, some only become clear in hindsight.  

At Bleacher Report, we faced many such decision points.

Two in particular stick out.

Barely not Barstool

In the early days, our approach to content moderation was lax to non-existent. While everything published to B/R needed a sports angle, we took a loose interpretation of that lens.

As a result, the site had it's fair share of unsavory content.

This included posts and photo galleries that objectified women in sports. They had headlines like "Hottest WAGs (wives and girlfriends) in the NHL" or "25 Hot Cheerleader Pics".

Looking back, I'm not proud to have contributed to the already misogynistic culture of sports.

We accepted these posts as part of the "authentic fan conversation" encouraged within our community. In a development that should surprise nobody, they became some of our biggest traffic drivers.

So in a regrettable move, we took it a step further by launching a standalone section for this content called "Barely Sports".

Cringeworthy, I know.

According to our logic, giving this content it's own section separated it from our more sports-focused coverage. After all, we told ourselves, if Sports Illustrated had a swimsuit issue, why shouldn't we have Barely Sports?

But we failed to recognize that by creating the section, we encouraged and legitimized more of this content.

When Barely Sports launched, we got some notes from disappointed readers. And while I'd like to say that negative audience feedback was enough to sway us, the reality is a bit different.

We changed our minds about Barely Sports not because of morals, but for money.

Our newly hired head of ad sales made nixing Barely Sports his first priority. To land deals with major brand advertisers, B/R needed to clean up our image. And that meant getting rid of the T&A.

Money talks. Barely Sports bit the dust.

We were all in on brand advertising as our business model. And we knew deep down that the B/R brand would be stronger if we took a more inclusive approach to sports fandom.

Around the same time, another digital sports publisher picked up traction by taking things further than we ever did. I'm talking, of course, about Barstool Sports.

As B/R took a more centrist approach to covering sports fandom, Barstool leaned into the extremes. And they built an incredible business doing so.

Barstool pulled off the strategy that B/R abandoned by making two critical innovations:

1. Barstool avoided depending on advertising as their only business model. Instead, their DTC approach cultivated an army of hardcore fans and monetized them directly.
2. To buttress the brand against controversy, Barstool put the personas of their creators front and center. Rather than journalists or commentators, they branded them as outrageous characters straight out of pro wrestling storylines. If Barstool is the WWE, then Dave Portnoy is their Vince McMahon.

They played their game, we played ours.

Almost The Athletic

A bit later down the road, B/R faced another crossroads that could have altered our journey.

From early on, we viewed B/R as the sports fan's replacement for declining local media. We talked about it in our very first fundraising pitch. With local newspapers collapsing and sports pages contracting, we planned to fill the void by empowering fans, bloggers, and up-and-coming writers to cover their teams.

But as the future we predicted played out, we saw a new opportunity: what if we hired displaced writers from local sports sections?  

Many well known beat reporters and columnists were losing their jobs and looking for new homes for their bylines. Hiring them could improve the quality of our coverage, bring some of their audience over, and boost our legitimacy.

We seriously considered the idea. But after debate, decided it wasn't for us. Again, our business model was a major consideration.

These sports journalists were well known in their local markets. But their name value didn't register with the national advertisers we worked with.

On top of that, our positioning in the market placed B/R as a fresh, young voice in sports. Hiring away experienced writers from the sports media establishment would dilute that story.

So instead we doubled down on hiring web-native writers who fit our mold. By establishing B/R as the place for fresh new voices in sports, we cemented our status as the place for big brands to reach younger sports fans.

Of course, we weren't the only ones to recognize the opportunity in realigning local sportswriting talent. I wasn't surprised when a few years later, The Athletic emerged and gained momentum.

What made The Athletic's approach to the opportunity work? It's the business model, stupid.

Rather than advertising, they built everything around paid subscription. By quantifying the amount of subscribers each new writer could bring, they knew exactly how much they could pay for talent.

And their market positioning as the replacement for the local sports page was crystal clear.

It's fun to reflect back on these moments. In an alternate timeline, Bleacher Report could have ended up more like Barstool. Or The Athletic.

But, as far as we know, we only have one timeline.

Everything worked out great for Bleacher Report. So I guess you could say we made the right choices.

Barstool got huge then had a big exit. The Athletic may not be far behind.

When startups face these big decisions, they're often framed in the most high-stakes way possible. One path could lead to success and riches. The other to failure and ruin.

The reality is a bit more nuanced.

In most cases, both paths are viable. The key is heading the direction that makes the most sense for your mission and business model.

And remembering, too, that your competitors face their own forks in the road. Depending on the choices they make, they may cease to be competitors at all.

The internet contains multitudes. Even for digital sports publications, there are many paths to success.

So don't worry about the paths not taken. Focus on the one you're on.

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VCs want to be creators.

Since Marc Andreessen invented the Twitter thread (née tweetstorm) in 2014, every GP, venture partner, and ambitious associate has been following his lead.

VCs have bragged, memed, and shitposted their way to building followings that help get them into deals.

Creators leverage their followings to become investors and founders.

Founding and investing in companies has been the true path to wealth for anyone with a large following.

Traditional celebrities like Rihanna, Jessica Alba, and 50 Cent have done it. Next-gen creators like Mr. Beast, Josh Richards, and Charli D'Amelio are in on it, too.

Now, there's an even more powerful hyphenate:

Founder-creator-investor (FCI)

Founders can attract audiences by creating content about their journey and building in public.

Those audiences create leverage, which give them super powers as investors.

All three activities feed back into each other in a virtuous cycle of learning, growth, and access.

I used to look with side-eyed skepticism at founders who were also prolific angels or spinning up seed funds.

How did they have time for all that?

By spending time chasing deals, weren't they taking the eye off the ball with their startup?

I thought the same for founders who became prolific creators.

Running a startup is a grind. How could they have time for all that tweeting and blogging?

But I realize I've been looking at it the wrong way.

With an army of supporters, collaborators, and followers accessible with the click of the 'Tweet' button, a successful founder-creator doesn't need to chase deals.

The deals come to them.

After all, the right FCI can add incredible value to their portfolio companies. Look at the instant cred an investor like Pomp can bring through his presence on the cap table, plus a tweet or two.  

As FCIs create content, they build an authentic connection with their audience.

For their own startup and the startups they back, that authenticity is more valuable than impersonal marketing. It's the kind of difference maker that delivers crucial early customers to their portfolio companies.

If you're a startup raising a seed, who would you rather have fill out your round?

1. Some random VC that may add little value beyond their check, or
2. A few targeted FCIs who can offer both advice from their operating experience and an in with their audience

So FCIs can get great deal flow, and they provide real value to their portfolio companies. But the value of being an investor also flows back to the FCI.

Consider Austin Rief, who parlayed founding Morning Brew and building an engaged Twitter following into launching a rolling fund.

Last week on Audience Builders, Austin shared how investing in startups sharpens his skills as an operator. He learns about common issues that other founders are facing. He has access to a peer group to crowdsource solutions.

Those learnings then become fodder for FCIs like Austin to share via their creator channels. Which grows their audiences, bringing in more deal flow and value for their startup.

The FCI flywheel keeps spinning.

As you may have heard, money is everywhere these days.

All that cash has to go somewhere. Loosened fundraising regulations, new innovations like rolling funds and syndicates, and the pure glut of money have created a perfect storm for minting new fund managers.

In this environment, FCIs are poised to emerge as the most sought after capital allocators.

I'd bet on it.

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More highlights from Audience Builders with Austin Rief

After I sold Bleacher Report in 2012, I did all the things that founders dream of doing when they strike gold in an exit.

• I chipped in with my co-founders to fly the whole company to Vegas for a blowout party.
• I roamed around Southeast Asia living out of a backpack for a couple months.
• I island-hopped the Mediterranean on a fifty foot sailboat.
• Most glorious of all, I didn't check email for weeks at a time.

After I got all that out of my system, I decided to re-enter the real world. So I did what I thought founders in transition were supposed to do.

I had meetings. Lots of them. Coffee meetings. Lunch meetings. Meetings for drinks. Meetings to catch up. To bounce ideas. To pick brains and have mine picked over too, like some kind of meeting-crazed zombie.

For an activity that is 75% bullshit, the meeting parade amounted to a lot of work. But I felt like I needed to do it to "stay relevant." That voice in my head that sounded like some over-the-hill business guru told me to "keep my network active." If I didn't use it, I might lose it.

But was that really the case?

Eventually, I started another startup because that's what I felt the world expected me to do. After all, being "in transition" means you have to transition into something.

Nine years later, I've sold that company, too. And after moving on, I'm taking a different approach to this next period.

First, I don't see it as a transition at all. By practicing mindfulness, I've learned to appreciate the present moment. I avoid the urge to look ahead to what's around the corner or over my shoulder at past accomplishments and failures. I keep my head in the now, for however long it lasts and wherever it takes me.

Second, I've opted out of the meeting gauntlet. Instead, I'm spending my mental energy creating content and building an audience.

Why? Because audience is leverage.

I don't need to schedule meeting after meeting to have the same small talk and repeat the same updates. Why do that, when I can have an ongoing conversation with thousands of people across several channels?

Before, I would throw out the same ideas at each one-on-one encounter to see if they bounced or fell flat. Now, I can hit 'Publish' to broadcast my thoughts to anyone who shares my wavelength. And I get instant feedback.

The content I create works for me when I'm having downtime with my family. When I'm sleeping, it's still going. Making new connections, generating opportunities, and creating deal flow.

For a crash course on the value of leverage, check out this explainer from Eric Jorgenson.

Creating content and building an audience is still work. It takes repeated, concerted effort. But compared to hustling from meeting to meeting, the work is infinitely more scaleable.

I'm late to the audience-building game. Which is a bit ironic, since I spent my whole career building huge audiences for Bleacher Report and Inverse.
But I never tried to do the same for myself.

These days, audience building is all the rage. Experts and builders from all over the business world have discovered that audiences create unfair advantages.

Last week on Audience Builders, I talked to James Camp and Codie Sanchez about this very topic.

Codie built a successful career as a public and private equity investor. She could have continued on that path and crushed it. But she's gone all in on building an audience.  

Contrarian Thinking, Codie's newsletter, grew to over 200,000 subscribers in a year. Her readers come for the unconventional cash flow ideas, and stay for the captivating writing.

Codie's an expert in applying financial leverage to grow wealth. And now, she's building audience leverage to do the same.

A lot of investors today, we're realizing that there's a new form of leverage out there

And who loves leverage more than financial professionals?

And that new form of leverage is audience.

- Codie Sanchez

James has a career as an entrepreneur, internet marketer, and website flipper. Now, he's executing a roll-up of e-commerce websites. And his Twitter audience is the secret weapon generating proprietary deal-flow.

Sure, there are risks to building audience. To gain the leverage, you put up your reputation as collateral. If you fuck up or do something dumb, you could ruin it.

This risk alone stops many people from ever starting out. It held me back for years. But a reputation is only as good as what you do with it.

As James said:

You'll never know how successful you can be until you stop caring what people think about you.

In other words, YOLO.

I still take meetings. As the world springs back to life, seeing people face-to-face feels more vital than ever.

But I've stepped off the meeting treadmill. I don't worry about staying relevant or keeping my network active.

With that pressure gone, I enjoy the meetings I do have a hell of a lot more now.

By creating content, I'm building leverage. By activating an audience, I'm applying it.

Day or night, I know it's working for me.

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Every week, I talk to prolific creators, founders, and builders about their craft. This phrase comes up over and over again.

The endings, though, vary:

• writing a newsletter
• posting threads on Twitter
• recording a podcast
• building an app

I can relate. About a year ago I felt starved for a creative outlet. So I started a writing habit. That led to posting on Twitter. Then to launching this website and newsletter.

Constraints inspire creativity. So what happens when the whole world goes through a year of social and physical lockdown? A creative explosion like we've never seen before. And we'll feel the results for years to come.  

While quarantine lit the fuse, the raw combustibles have been piling up since long before it. The creator economy has been building steam for a while now. First quietly, then with a BOOM!

You wouldn't know if from the relentless hype, but it's still early days. Spend long enough in the Twitter echo chamber, and your eyes start to glaze over every time they land on a buzzword. And 'creator economy' occupies a prime square in buzzword bingo.

Yet once you zoom out, it starts to fit into a jigsaw puzzle of what the future will look like. A future where the creator economy interlocks with trends like remote work, social tokens and crypto protocols, and startup cities.

You still have to squint a little to see what the future might hold. But the echoes keep getting louder. They're not going away. And as the pieces start to connect, they'll impact us in unexpected ways.

Each new Audience Builders conversation reminds me of this. While every episode has a distinct theme, the insights fit together in the meta-puzzle of where things are headed.

Last week, we focused on the O.G. creator platform, YouTube. One of my guests, Noah Kagan, has been messing around on the web for almost two decades.

I first met Noah back in the early days of Bleacher Report. He'd already logged time at Intel, Facebook and Mint. Soon, he'd parlay his personal blog, OkDork, into a sprawling software sales service, AppSumo.

A year ago, Noah felt bored during quarantine so he decided to become a YouTuber. Sound familiar? Fast forward a year, he's approaching 150k subscribers. And he's just getting started.

Along with Noah, Amy Landino and Ian Borthwick rounded out my expert panel. Some old and new friends stopped by. We had a great time.

I learned a ton about what it takes to run a successful YouTube channel. But the conversation also reinforced some meta-lessons about being a creator. More puzzle pieces from the future.

My key take-aways:

The law of 100

For any creative effort, commit to doing it at least 100 times to start. One hundred podcasts, newsletters, or videos.

Similar to the old '10,000 hours' trope, the law of 100 ensures you build the endurance to create. It provides enough runway for improvement. And it gives you time to find your voice and your audience.

Promote, promote, promote

Being a creator means you have to get comfortable with self-promotion. It feels icky at first. You just need to get over it.

Don't overdo it. You still need to be authentic and respect your audience.

But as the old saying goes:

You don't ask, you don't get.

You can't build an audience without asking. A lot. There's no other way around it.
In a future where we're all participants in the creator economy, self-promotion will be an essential skill. Start learning it now.

Choose your metrics wisely

Amy shared an insight that caught me by surprise. Subscribers, long considered the key to YouTube growth, are a vanity metric. If anything, they're a trailing indicator of performance.

Instead, she tracks the percentage of new viewers to each video. Over 50% is her benchmark. This is a clear signal that the recommendations algorithm favors her videos. That's the secret to sustained growth.

After new viewers, Amy and Noah obsess over thumbnail CTR. Noah even has a full-time thumbnail designer on staff.

While it's become fashionable to dismiss scale in favor of engaged niches, filling the top of the funnel still matters. No matter what you're creating on what platform, you need to reach new people. And ensure they're engaged when they find you.

Fast. Fun. Repeatable.

This framework from Noah was so on-point. He and his team run every idea through these three filters:

1. Can they do it quickly? Because quicker iteration leads to more learning.
2. Is it fun for them to do? Because if it's not fun to create, it won't be fun to consume.
3. If it works, can they turn it into a repeatable format? Because the best creators return to successful formats over-and-over.

Creating anything consistently uses up a lot of psychic energy. Frameworks like this help ensure you're doing it for the right reasons, and that you're staying on track with what's in your wheelhouse.

Content buckets

Generating new ideas is one of the most daunting aspects of being a creator. Content buckets are the solution.

What are content buckets? Simply, they're story frames and topics that you return to consistently. Because they work.

For Amy, this means women in business, brand authority, and work-life balance.

For Noah, it's topics like Mr. Beast, "How I Got Rich", and zero-to-one startup stories.

The key is to not have too many. Start with two or three that strike a chord with your audience.

Remember, constraints are a creator's friend. You don't have to drain the ocean searching for new ideas. Just pick out a few good buckets and start filling them up.

Skip the introductions

Watch one of Amy's videos, and you might feel more like a friend meeting her for coffee than a passive viewer. Because that's exactly the mindset she brings into creating them.  

When you sit down at a cafe table with an old friend, you don't introduce yourself and tell your life story. So skip the throat-clearing in your content. Get right into whatever you want to talk about. And assume your audience is up to speed.

As a former cinema major, I'm reminded of the concept of in media res. It means in the midst of things. The idea is to begin your narrative in the thick of the plot. Then, let the audience fill in the context as the story unfolds.

You don't want to bore your audience with long expository setup. Put them right in the middle of the action. Keep them on the edge of their seats. And let them put the pieces together.

Trust me, it's more exciting that way.

Don't put too much pressure on yourself

Ian recently took the leap from the business side of the creator economy to being a creator himself. He hit the bullseye with the name of his podcast and YouTube channel. It's called "The Business Side".

The transition helped him empathize with the pressures that all creators face. Walking the tightrope of creativity is hard enough. It's impossible if you pile on too much weight from unrealistic expectations. You need to build a sustainable approach to creating.

Dan Held chimed in from the audience to share how he built a following of 24k subscribers in five months. He preached taking a minimum-viable-product mentality to creating.

Per Dan, creators often overestimate audience expectations. Your production quality doesn't need to be sky high. Make sure the content is interesting and authentic, and that's good enough.

So just get started. Let boredom be your muse.

You never know where it will take you.

Every week, I host Audience Builders conversations with prolific creators, founders, and operators.

We share on actionable strategies and tactics for growing audiences and building communities.

Subscribe here to get the highlights each week along with invitations to future conversations:

My roommate the year after college was a bit of an odd duck. I'll call him Ian.  We both worked entry-level jobs at different Hollywood agencies. But the similarities ended there.

Every evening, Ian would return to our mid-Wilshire flat with the sullen hunch of getting beaten down by the rat race. After a bit of small talk, he'd retreat to his bedroom, straighten up his posture in his gamer chair, and strap on a headset.

Over the ambient ESPN on our living room TV, I could hear the faint sounds of Ian planning campaigns and launching counterattacks with his guild.

Ian came to L.A. to work in movies, but he spent most of his time in the World of Warcraft. The reality he found when he moved out west didn't compute for him. So he sought refuge in a game.

The Hollywood agency world that consumed our days was a game, too. But the rules were stacked against us. We started at the bottom, airdropped into the mailroom without armor or weaponry.

Over time, if we accumulated enough experience points and forged the right alliances, we could work our way up the food chain. If we put in a few years, we could make it to agent trainee, then perhaps junior agent.

Ian soon decided that the game he played at night was more interesting than his daytime gig. So he gave up his Hollywood dreams and moved back to the midwest. I can only presume he continued to level up in Warcraft.

I also opted out of the agency game. In its place, I chose a playing field where I felt more in control: the startup game.

Agency life was like the original Donkey Kong. Every day was a single screen full of ladders and barrels with only one way to advance. Progress was slow, and monotonous.

Starting a startup, though, transported me into a rich three-dimensional world. Instead of a single track with increasingly difficult bosses, I found limitless possibilities.

Two events of this past week got me thinking about Ian and the games we play in life:

1. First, I hosted a conversation on Twitter strategy, with gurus Matthew Kobach, Trung Phan, and Charlie "John W. Rich" Light.
2. Then, Packy McCormick released a brilliant essay describing The Great Online Game.

Packy's latest paints the entire online world as a massive multiplayer game. We're all the players, and our actions have real-world implications. Cryptocurrency is the in-game currency. Twitter is the leaderboard.

It's a fascinating, bright-eyed vision of the modern metaverse-meets-reality moment. The optimist in me loves the concept and has me ready to push in all my chips. But the realist in me has a grip on my collar trying to pull me away from the table before I lose my shirt.

You see, games are addictive by design. The mix of luck, skill, and variable reward strikes all the notes that create a craving for more.

If this great online game has a gateway drug, it's Twitter. In the web's public square, intellectuals, influencers, aspirants, and bad actors come together to compete for credibility points.

Last week, Matthew, Trung, and Charlie shared their unique approaches to mastering Twitter. To the observer, those three make going viral look easy. Yet underneath the surface lies deliberate strategy and concerted effort.

Read this thread for the best insights from Audience Builders with the Twitter experts.

How to win at Twitter without really trying:

You can't.

Growing on Twitter takes hard work, and don't let any growth hack threads convince you otherwise.

I spoke to Twitter sages @mkobach @Cokedupoptions and @TrungTPhan on last week's Audience Builders.

My key takeaways:

— Dave Nemetz (@davenemetz) May 11, 2021

One interesting thought bubble from last week's conversation:

Ever wonder why mega-viral tweets often originate from brand new accounts? That's just the Twitter algorithm minting another addict.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Yet as our conversation went on and more legendary meme dealers joined the fray, the tone shifted. The mastermind conversation started to resemble a collection of addicts, jonesing for their next fix.

They obsessed over scoring that next big viral hit, and feeling the rush of serotonin wash over them. Twitter is their game, and they're hooked on the game mechanics.

Live by the meme, die by the meme.

Gonna tell my kids these were the Avengers pic.twitter.com/7Ze0J2mBMA

— Dave Nemetz (@davenemetz) May 7, 2021

But there's a different way to play. A strategy that looks past the short term fixes and aims towards long-term leveling up. Instead of being a cog in the game's machine, this approach is all about adapting the game to your strengths.

As the memelords piled into the room, Matthew bid us farewell to go meet up with a Twitter friend out in the arena called "real life". He was playing a different game.

Twitter is a drug. But what kind of drug is it?

Used one way, Twitter can be more powerful than the most mind-expanding psychedelic. You can learn from and interact with some of the world's best thinkers. You can build a community of like-minded spirits. You can create an alternate reality where you're free to express your authentic self.

Used another, and it's digital crack. You feed off the dopamine hits from each like, retweet, and follow. Those moments are fleeting. As soon as one passes, you're chasing the next one.

So go ahead and play the game. But do it with intention.

Remember to define your purpose. Create–and stick to–a strategy. Don't get caught up in the short term dopamine hits and setbacks.

Play the long game. Online and IRL.

There are games you play for pleasure, and games you play for enjoyment.

Pleasure feels great in the moment. But it doesn't last. Chase too much of it, and you may self-destruct.

Games you enjoy challenge you and build character. As you go deeper, you'll find ever richer layers of learning, discovery, and fulfillment.

Make sure you know which one you're playing.

---

Every week, I host live Audience Builders conversations with prolific creators, founders, and operators.

We share on actionable strategies and tactics for growing audiences and building communities.

Subscribe here to get the highlights each week along with details on future conversations:

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A few months ago, I started hosting live Audience Builders conversations. Each week, I invite prolific creators, founders, and operators to share insights and tactics for growing audience and building community.

These conversations are a proxy for the "shop talk" that I used to have over meetups for coffee or drinks. Live social audio removed geography restrictions, and enabled anyone to join in the discussion. In a world starved for serendipity, that's a win.

My purpose for Audience Builders:

To learn from builders who I respect and admire, and to share those learnings with aspiring founders and creators.

Last week, I talked podcasting with Espree Devora and Danny Miranda. We covered the fundamentals for building a podcast audience. (Read on for those.)

But my big takeaway focused on a larger message. With any creative effort, there is an important order of operations to follow:

1. Start with your purpose
2. Design a process to support it

I live for good tactics. I want listeners to leave every Audience Builders with actionable takeaways. Too many podcasts and interviews stick to the 10,000 foot perspective. I strive to get down to the ten foot level, or lower if necessary.

But sometimes it helps to zoom out. Obsessing over process isn't the point. First, you need a purpose.

The idea of focusing on purpose, or "starting with why" as Simon Sinek would say, has become a cliche. But platitudes are platitudes because they're worth repeating often. So, ignore them at your peril.

Espree reminded me of this. And also of the importance of connecting your purpose with your process.

If purpose is your why, process is your how. And the why and the how should complement each other. That synchronicity will propel you forward.

The purpose is your North Star. The process is the ship that transports you towards it, and the map that guides your path.

Setting sail without a purpose puts you on a voyage to nowhere. But you're just as worse off if you define your North Star, then shred your map and turn your boat in the opposite direction.

And yet so many creators get so hung up on process, that they lose sight of their purpose.

So how do you change that?

Espree recommends aligning every part of your process to serve your purpose. She developed a framework that any podcaster or creator can put into use called "3Ps and M&M":

1. Purpose
2. Process
3. Production
4. Marketing
5. Monetization

And this is crucial: each step must be completely defined before the next can begin. And every decision must tie back to your purpose.

It's easy enough to start a journey with a clear purpose. But as obstacles and setbacks crop up, you can get thrown off course and lose your way.

To avoid that, try applying mental models that can help you connect your actions and back to your values and purpose.

To start, read Julian Shapiro's excellent explainer on mental models and how you can approach them.

Then, follow Julian's advice:

Schedule a recurring event in your calendar. Every second Friday, block out 20 minutes to step back from your life and run all your systems and decisions through [these] mental models .

Apply these models to your life as if you’re improving somebody else’s life. Research shows that when you act like you’re giving a friend advice, you sidestep your flow paralysis.

That’s all it takes to get started: every week, run your life through mental models as if you’re assessing somebody else’s life.

I've recently integrated this practice into my routine. I can already feel the benefits of newfound perspective. So give it a try for yourself.

Still curious about podcast tactics? Here are the other big takeaways from talking to Espree and Danny:

Map out your listener's journey

Create a diagram or written story describing your audience's experience. Start with how they discover you, then how they consume your work, and what they do next.
Understanding this will align your process, production, and marketing to serve your listeners best.
Espree recommends a mind-mapping tool called Scapple, but pencil and paper also work.

Focus on hosting style

Listeners might sample a podcast based on a topic or guest, but they stick around because of the host.
So work to define your hosting style. What do you bring to the table that is unique or memorable? And make sure to align your hosting style back to your purpose.

Research to bring out the best in guests

Danny Miranda established his podcast by booking huge guests like Gary Vaynerchuk and some guy named "Dave Nemetz." While Danny embraced "shooting his shot" to land guests, his research is what transforms every interview into a must-listen.

Danny recommends devouring each guest's previous podcast appearances and interviews. This uncovers interesting factoids to discuss, but also helps you avoid the same cliche questions. The goal is to put your guest at ease by showing you know their work, while still keeping them on their toes.

Ignore the metrics

I'm an analytics junkie, but I loved this advice. Podcast metrics are limited. Instead of obsessing over them, focus on quality content, engaging your audience, and following your purpose.

Create feedback loops

For a podcast, qualitative feedback reigns supreme over quantitative. Espree recommends building post-audio experiences that turn your listeners into a community. Once activated, a community can give you feedback for improvement and even take on a life of it's own.

Check out tools like Geneva Chat and Circle to build your podcast community.

For even more tools, processes, and resources, Espree recommends Josh Kaplan and Janel Loi's PodcastOS.

Every week, I host live Audience Builders conversations with prolific creators, founders, and operators.

We share on actionable strategies and tactics for growing audiences and building communities.

Subscribe here to get the highlights each week along with details on future conversations:

Newsletters fascinate me as a media product. They're simple, efficient, and perhaps a bit overhyped.

So why are newsletters are such an effective medium?

Newsletters "work" as a media product for three reasons:

1. They're personal.
2. They're predictable.
3. They're scarce.

Why they work for readers

They're personal.

Newsletters convey a conversational tone from a familiar voice. This aspect, delivered consistently, creates a relationship. Reading a well-written newsletter should feel like hearing from an interesting friend.

While newsletters are personal, they don't need personalization.  There are enough newsletters out there to "scratch every niche." This empowers readers to find voices that feel personal to them.

In a recent Audience Builders, Dan Shipper from Every spoke about how newsletters resonate with the vibe of an audience:

They're predictable.

Like periodicals and TV shows before, newsletters publish on a regular schedule. For audiences, this creates an expectation. They'll receive a specific amount of content, in a consistent format, delivered right to their inbox.

Fans of James Clear's Atomic Habits will recognize that newsletters by nature meet two of the key criteria of habit building:

1. Make it obvious: newsletters live in the inbox where readers already spend time, and are by nature obvious.
2. Make it easy: Once you subscribe, you don't need to seek anything else out. You just open and read.

The other two criteria, "make it attractive" and "make it satisfying", are up to the writer. If they can create a positive and fulfilling experience for the reader, they'll cement their newsletters as a habit.  

They're scarce.

Newsletters publish anywhere from once a week to at most daily. Not too much, not too little. Just right.

People who complain of newsletter overload are mostly media junkies. They signed up for too much of a good thing, and live with the consequences.

There are easy antidotes to this: Read only what you want. Batch consumption. Or if all else fails, unsubscribe.

In a world of overwhelming content delivered at random via algorithm, a predictable newsletter with a personal voice delivered with the right amount of scarcity becomes a respite of familiarity.

Why newsletters work for writers

They're personal.

Newsletters focus on hyper-niche subject matter written in first person. For a writer, this encourages authentic expression. It's no coincidence that newsletters are a primary medium of "the Passion Economy."

Blogs share this quality, but the business model for a blog is suboptimal. A blog with thousands to tens of thousands of readers has limited options for monetizing. A newsletter with a similar audience can do quite well selling subscriptions or sponsorships. Incidentally, a newsletter with a companion blog is a great model.

Newsletters also create community. Authentic conversations can develop between writer and reader. This leads to a more rewarding experience for the writer than publishing into the void.

They're predictable.

Putting out a consistent product to the same audience on a regular schedule reduces noise. This results in a cleaner data set, with tight feedback loops.

Writing for the web can create fuzzy signals. A story may go viral for unclear reasons. A quirk of the algorithm. The right influential person happens to share at the right time. Chasing repeat wins often leads to wasted effort.

With a newsletter, the signals are clear:

• Are subscribers opening?
• When they open, do they click?
• Are they sharing the newsletter with others?
• Are subscribers increasing?
• Is churn low?

These metrics are easy to track and tell a predictable story.

They're scarce.

Writing a newsletter enforces consistency and moderation. The writer publishes on a fixed schedule. At most, they hit send once per day. Contrast that with many online writers who publish several times per day.

The slower cadence shifts the onus from speed to insight. When a writer doesn't need to publish takes when they are still steaming hot, she can wait for stories to develop. She can look for deeper meaning. She can put ideas into broader context. She can connect the dots between multiple stories.

Of course newsletter writers can still miss deadlines, battle writers block, and feel the creep of burn-out. But due to their inherent scarcity, newsletters have built-in guardrails to prevent the worst.

Why newsletters work as a business

They're personal.

The personal nature of newsletters makes them prime vehicles for both ads and subscription.

The best newsletter ads assume the same conversational tone as the rest of the content. The audience has a relationship with the newsletter, so there's a high level of trust.

Newsletter ads are endorsements. For a writer to accept a brand as a sponsor, they need to believe in the product. Brands who clear that hurdle typically see great results. Which is why you'll often see the same brand sponsoring a newsletter over and over again.

Subscriptions work well because readers have a personal relationship with the writer. They aren't paying only for the content, they're also supporting the creator. Becoming a supporter often comes with opportunities to deepen the relationship with the writer through greater access.

They're predictable.

Because newsletters by nature are a consistent product on a regular publishing schedule, predicting their revenue trajectory is much more straightforward. This aids in everything from pricing and planning sponsorships to projecting subscription revenue growth.

Newsletter advertisers tend to be more performance focused. And if your newsletter performs well with a high open rate and a good click-through-rate, then your ads metrics will likely follow suit. In contrast, the performance of web inventory and branded content can be much more volatile.

For potential subscribers, predictability is a big selling point. They know they'll receive new issues on a consistent schedule in a similar format from the same writer.

They're scarce.

This is where the real magic of newsletter monetization works. Scarcity and urgency are secret weapons.

One of the biggest challenges for selling web advertising is creating urgency. In a world of infinite content and inventory, publishers need to create urgent situations to woo advertisers. Which is why you see so many seasonal programs, recurring annual features, and campaigns tied to one-off events.

None of this is necessary with a newsletter. You send out only so many issues per week. Those issues have limited ad space. Once an issue gets sent, the ad opportunity expires.

This combination of scarcity and urgency puts natural pressure on the advertiser. Use it to your advantage, and you'll soon start selling out inventory weeks in advance. Which means you can raise prices or increase the scope of your deals.

Scarcity works well for subscriptions as well. Higher volume web publications often struggle deciding what to put behind the paywall. Hence the rise of metered paywalls.

With less content, newsletters can set a clear line between free and paid content. With a lighter publishing schedule, writers can invest more time into differentiated subscription content.

For readers, scarcity can be a big motivation to subscribe. If they enjoy a once a week free email enough, they have a big incentive to pay for a second or third email every week.

Newsletter are so hot right now, there is a lot of talk about how to further optimize the experience. That could mean unbundling newsletters out of the inbox into a standalone app. Or trying to build in more social components.

But the simplicity of newsletters is what makes them so effective. Taking them out of the inbox would make them less personal. Introducing social sharing and algorithmic sorting would make them less predictable. Amping up their discoverability would make them less scarce.

Rather than trying to change newsletters, we should make other media products more like them. If you're working on something new in media, evaluate what you're working on and ask yourself:

1. Is it personal?
2. Is it predictable?
3. Is it scarce?

Every week, I host live Audience Builders conversations with prolific creators, founders, and operators.

We share on actionable strategies and tactics for growing audiences and building communities.

Subscribe here to get the highlights each week along with details on future conversations:

Strange things are afoot. The creator economy collided with the crypto movement, setting off a mushroom cloud of cosmic dust called the ownership economy. Or, if you’re one of the cool kids, web3.

My curiosity about this space has been heating up, and last week I decided to dig in. So I gathered some of the smartest web3 experts I know – Jarrod Dicker, Zoe Scaman, and Patrick Rivera – and we chopped it up on Twitter Spaces. Thanks to their insights, I now grok the basics of web3. But I still feel like a stranger wandering into an underground party that’s already raging at full tilt.

I’ve written before about the importance of having a beginner’s mind. I’ve learned the hard way about the dangers of resting on past success and taking knowledge for granted. Getting stuck in a fixed worldview leaves you with blind spots shading over new possibilities.

Over 15 years of digital media boom and bust cycles, my peripheral vision has a few dark corners. During the last twelve months, I’ve contemplated new paths. I felt a hunger to reinvent myself. My inner voice told me it was time to venture outside of the media world.

But in the last few months, my eyes have opened to a parallel media universe that’s exciting again.

First came the newsletter revival: a simplification of delivery format and business model that removes the excesses and pitfalls of the scale era.

Then the creator economy: a re-concentration of power and attention in the individual, along with the tools to cultivate and monetize communities.

And now, the ownership economy: the blockchain-enabled infrastructure to assign and share ownership rights and future economic upside, to the benefit of creators and fans alike.

Now, all three are merging into a supernova of web3 possibility. I’m not quite sure where it’s going. But the genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back.

If you're a creator or media operator, step one is to wrap your head around the space. The next step is to figure out your entry point. I asked Patrick, and here's what he said:

Once you look past the superficial headlines about record-setting NFT sales, you’ll find a wealth of exciting media-oriented web3 projects.  

With thanks to Zoe, Jarrod, Patrick and Wong Joon Ian for guiding me down the path, here are a handful that I’m currently excited about:

• Mirror: Mirror has cemented itself as the marquee publishing platform for web3. They’ve even gamified the process of joining the platform. Here, Jarrod shares his thoughts on Mirror, and explains their weekly $WRITE RACE:

• Seedclub: A social token incubator led by Jess Sloss, they recently announced their second cohort. The class includes a few media startups, an NBA Topshot analytics project, and a coffee shop. Yep, that's right.
• $GENERALIST: Mario Gabriele raised 20 ETH via a token sale on Mirror to fund his coverage of Coinbase’s IPO, with accompanying art from Jack Butcher. They then auctioned the resulting products as NFTs, to the benefit of the creators and token holders. 🤯

• Untitled Frontier: The brainchild of Simon de la Rouviere, Untitled Frontier calls itself a “shared story universe.” A collective of writers will contribute narratives around a common world. Fans following along can support the work by buying collectible NFTs. Sounds wild and experimental. Could it spawn the next MCU? Hey, crazier thinga have happened.
• PTM Token - Indie band Portugal. The Man created a community token using the Rally.io platform. Token holders get access to exclusive content, merch, and direct access to the band. It’s the fan club model, tokenized. I can see up and coming artists using this model to give early supporters the opportunity to literally invest in their success.
• Rally:  A platform that enables creators to launch tokens. Besides PTM, their roster includes Twitch streamers, art collectives, and cosplayers. Founder Kevin Chou previously built mobile gaming behemoth Kabam (which started as sports social gaming startup Watercooler, where he and I originally crossed paths.)
• Kyle Chayka’s sketch for a NFT-based media company: Just a concept. For now. But this sketch presents a compelling case for what a digital publication can look like in a web3 world.
• 1729.com: A newsletter that pays you to make newsletters. Sounds like a Ponzi scheme? But maybe it’s not. From the galaxy brain of Balaji Srinivasan.
• FriendsWithBenefits: A tokenized community bringing together creators and technologists. Despite a recent hack which forced migration to a new token, they have a waiting list stretching over 3,000 people long. The community organizes around thematic seasons to encourage collective effort.
• MCX: Besides the ubiquitous NBA Topshot, Mark Cuban and the Dallas Mavericks have taken the lead when it comes to combining sports and web3. They can thank Zoe, who leads the strategy for the skunkworks MCX studio. She’s led them down the rabbit hole into a mashup of sports, pop culture, fandom, and crypto, resulting in drops like Cuban-minted NFTs. Here’s Zoe explaining why normies shouldn’t write off web3 as a fad:

Back in 2017, the first crypto boom felt like an unstoppable wave. You’d often hear that the smartest people were spending their time working on blockchain. Then the wave receded back into the ocean. The waters calmed, and the tourists picked up and moved on. Some declared crypto dead. But while few were paying attention, the hardcore crypto converts kept plugging away. And web3 is the result.

One of the most common criticisms of crypto has been that it’s a technology in search of utility. The speculation inspired by Bitcoin’s incredible price growth only strengthened that narrative. But now with web3 knocking on the mainstream door, actual use cases have arrived. They look and feel strange.

But you can’t build a bridge to the future without pushing the envelope of weirdness. Some of these wild swings will miss. But with all the experimentation, enthusiasm, and energy driving the movement, some will stick. So embrace the weirdness. It's not going anywhere.

You know it’s gonna get stranger, so let’s get on with the show.

Every week, I host live Audience Builders conversations with prolific creators, founders, and operators.

We share on actionable strategies and tactics for growing audiences and building communities.

Subscribe here to get the highlights each week along with details on future conversations:

Get-rich quick schemes are everywhere these days. Scroll through your social feed, you’ll soon find a self-professed guru bragging about their “system” for making it big and–surprise!–pushing an online course as your blueprint to minting millions. Your lizard brain takes the bait, convinced that mastering the next growth hack will push you over the line into the land of oat milk and artisanal honey.

Easy there, reptile. Trust your neocortex: it knows better. It knows social media is like a funhouse mirror that perverts, rather than reflects, how things work in real life.

Packy McCormick reminded me of this in last week’s Audience Builders conversation. I first became aware of Packy on Twitter in mid-2020, and, soon after, subscribed to his newsletter, Not Boring. One of the first things I read was his bull case for Snapchat, which convinced me to build a position. That worked out pretty well, so thanks Packy! For a free newsletter, I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth.

More recently, Packy’s bullish on Web3, the grab-bag of crypto-creator protocols like currently buzzy NFTs, and ready-to-buzz social tokens, and DAOs:

Spending time learning about and playing with Web3 has asymmetric upside. It’s like playing around in the early days of the internet, except that you get rewarded for just playing. You don’t need to build the next big thing. Participating in the right community, buying the right NFT or social token, or backing the right protocol early brings intellectual and financial rewards.

If you’re interested in that topic, join this week’s Audience Builders with Jarrod Dicker, Zoe Scaman, and Patrick Rivera as we explore the evolving nature of fandom and ownership. And, as with all investment advice, caveat emptor.

In last week’s year-in-review post, Packy detailed Not Boring’s meteoric rise. After an April 2020 launch, he quickly picked up a few thousand subscribers and a top listing on Product Hunt. And clearly it’s Not Boring for his now more than 42,000 subscribers. As his momentum grew, Packy also launched an investing syndicate and built a thriving sponsorship business. All as a one-person team–with some incredible support, I must add, from his wife Puja and brother Dan.

As host of the Audience Builders chats, I keep my guests focused on real tactics that founders and operators can put into action. Packy shared plenty of those, including this crucial takeaway: there’s no substitute for letting things happen organically.

Key anecdote: On a day trip to the beach, Packy and Dan dreamed up a list of over a hundred growth hacks for Not Boring. He tested just a handful. Some worked ok. The rest failed, including the decision to post his newsletters on Reddit and Hacker News. Helicoptering in to self-promote without an authentic presence in those communities, Packy ended up getting shadow-banned with no traction for his efforts.

Instead, Packy doubled down on being genuine. His biggest assets are his writing style, his enthusiasm for the material (his posts regularly exceed 5,000 words), and the community of supporters that has sprung up around him, especially on Twitter You can’t reverse engineer that.

But Packy found newsletter-market fit only after putting in a year of solid effort with few tangible returns. Long before launching Not Boring, Packy took David Perrell’s Write of Passage course. It helped him establish a writing practice, and boosted his writerly confidence. He was ready, or so he thought, to start building an audience.

Packy then spent a full year writing a different newsletter, “Per My Last Email”. After 12 months of consistent output, his subscribers plateaued at 400. Same writer, different format, different subject matter, wildly different results. While Packy developed a regular cadence, he had the self-awareness to shake things up when growth flatlined. So, he pivoted. And things took off from there.

A common refrain in creator-to-aspiring-creator pep talks is that consistency is a key virtue. Put in the work, maintain a regular schedule for your creative output, and you’ll find your audience. But that’s not the whole story.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
– Anon., though often misattributed to Albert Einstein

How does this notion square with the consistency rule? Consistency is, it turns out, pointless without adaptation. Regular production creates enough of a body of work, that you can learn from both your wins and losses, and get better.

Packy’s year of slowly finding his voice in “Per My Last Email” was his own version of the Beatles gigging at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, or Luke Skywalker getting abused by Yoda in the Dagobah swamp. He needed to experience the struggle of slow growth, the pain of searching for something without a destination, to gain the clarity of vision that led him to his current path.

I’m returning to this lesson at an opportune time. Two years after selling Inverse, I recently left to embark on a new journey. I’m not sure yet where it’s going. Packy’s story, and my own experience, reminds me that focusing too much on the endpoint misses the point entirely.

Every journey begins with a single step. Then another. So I’ve laced up my most comfortable pair of shoes, and I’m ready for stride number one. And to let things unfold from there.

Every week, I host live Audience Builders conversations with prolific creators, founders, and operators.

We share on actionable strategies and tactics for growing audiences and building communities.

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Next time you have the chance … Go!

• Grab a sleeping bag.
• Hop in your car.
• Drive until the lights in your rearview mirror no longer glow like ten thousand push notifications.
• Lay out your sleeping bag under the open sky.
• Wait until it’s dark, and look up.

What do you see?

The three unmistakable dots of Orion’s Belt? The horns of Aries lowered and ready to charge? Ursa Major emerging from hibernation?

You see, for one, that you are in league with some Grecian who, thousands of years ago, looked up at that same starry sky and connected the dots. If that isn’t a parable about the shared human experience, well … maybe I need to lay off the edibles.

You'll also feel something more powerful than time and space. Way back in the day, Zorba the Greek stared at the stars long enough that he saw a bull. Then he ambled down to the agora and told some of his buddies. And they told their friends. And as a result, a few thousand years later, we’re still telling stories about a bull, a belt, and a bear.

And that’s the power of storytelling.

Now just because Zorba spun a good tale, it doesn’t mean we need to crown him King of Westeros. The matter at hand isn’t the storyteller. It’s the act of telling. Do it well, and what you say will carry weight long, long after the words leave your lips.

via GIPHY

A great story has the power to stretch time and bend the cosmos. Likewise, an awful story can blend a moment into a kale-green smoothie of existential dread. If you've ever been stuck at a cocktail party, backed into a corner during a going-nowhere-fast story, you can relate.

So if storytelling is an arrow in humanity's quiver, how do you keep your aim on the target – rather than pointed at your foot?

Storytelling, like any muscle, requires regular exercise to reach its full potential. But just like you wouldn't lift weights without a spotter, leaning on a storytelling sherpa can make all the difference in setting your words aloft.

I had two guest sherpas for last week's Audience Builders conversation on Twitter Spaces. Arvid Kahl (The Bootstrapped Entrepreneur) and Bilal Zaidi (Creator Lab) shared their own storytelling tool kits, with tips anyone can use to captivate an audience.

Study the classics

Bilal has interviewed hundreds of incredible founders, makers, and do-ers on his podcast Creator Lab. To recognize real lives that make for great stories, he has adopted the mythology template of great storytelling.

Bilal's go-to source, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, unpacks the core elements of a thrilling narrative. It worked for Homer. It worked for George Lucas. And it can work for you, too.

Frame it up

Bilal shared a clever interview framing tactic to prompt a great story. When talking to Jim McKelvey, founder of Square, Bilal could have asked:

How does it feel to be a billionaire?

Instead, he tweaked that question and asked:

Take me back to the moment you realized you were a billionaire.

The contrast is the difference between showing and telling.

Story living

Arvid's audience follows his unfolding journey as an indie hacker, from bootstrap to success. His advice, then, is to live the story first, then tell it.

Lived experience provides all the raw material you need for great stories. Provided, that is, that you take enough chances to push your arc to unexpected places.

You don't always have to stick the landing, either. Remember, audiences learn just as much from your failures as they do from your success.

Be the learner

Campbell readers and classic cinema buffs alike will recognize this narrative trope: an eager student seeks out the guidance of a wizened old master to learn the way.

Tropes endure because they work. In this case, the audience identifies with the novice and follows her journey along the path.

So in telling your story, cast yourself as the learner. Be open about what you don't know, why and how you hope to learn it, and share your discoveries along the way.

Every week, I host live Audience Builders conversations with prolific creators, founders, and operators.

We share on actionable strategies and tactics for growing audiences and building communities.

Subscribe here to get the highlights each week along with details on future conversations:

You can’t make it out of middle school art class without learning about a bloody ear. Yet only the most dedicated art historians know the story of Lavinia Fontana.

Compared to the legend of Van Gogh as a tortured artist, Fontana was a true anomaly. Her father, an art teacher, trained her from birth in the fundamentals of painting. She rose to become one of the most commercially successful portrait artists of the Italian Renaissance, a darling of the Bolognese nobility, and is considered Italy’s first female professional artist.

She was so in-demand, in fact, that when she married, her father offered her future painting income in lieu of a dowry. Credit Fontana with another milestone – the first ISA. But Lavinia also lived a stable, happy life. She balanced family with a distinguished career, painting for monarchs and cardinals as she raised eleven children. Sounds like the OG boss woman to me!

And still: Fontana’s story has been lost to the dustbin of history, while every twelve-year-old with a watercolor kit knows about Van Gogh’s razor-wielding rage. When it comes to creative genius, dysfunction and despair are considered the costs of doing business.

The myth of the tortured artist: it’s a convenient crutch. It provides a ready-made excuse for so many of us to shy away from creativity. If creativity comes at the price of sanity, it’s no wonder that many choose to follow safer–and saner–paths. Who wants to dance on that razor’s edge?

Sure, self-mutilation gets headlines. Yet there’s a different mode of creativity. It’s the path to fulfillment by pursuing your best work. It’s the path followed by Lavinia Fontana. It’s the path of craftsmanship.

Craftsmanship is the quality that comes from creating with passion, care, and attention to detail. It is a quality that is honed, refined, and practiced over the course of a career.

         “Principles of Great Design: Craftsmanship”, Smashing Magazine

In Mastery, educator George Leonard describes the patient pursuit of continual improvement. On human nature, Leonard writes:

“The human individual is equipped to learn and go on learning prodigiously from birth to death, and this is precisely what sets him or her apart from all other known forms of life.”

The key to mastery, Leonard suggests, is to find reward in the process itself. There are no shortcuts. Obsessing over goals only pushes them further away. When you’re pursuing mastery, get comfortable on the plateau. That’s the plane of practice without improvement–and it can stretch on for ages.

The plateau instills craftsmanship. Through repetition, and accepting the tools you have, you unlock a sustainable and nourishing form of creativity. “The best way to describe your total creative capacity,” Leonard writes, “is to say that for all practical purposes it is infinite.”

The choice is yours: Do you want to burn up your creative energy in one flash-bang reach for greatness, or ration your fuel to light the path of continual creative output?

Consider the two greatest pop songwriters to come out of the sixties: Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney. (Dylan fans: you can check out now.) Wilson’s soaring harmonies and intricate song structures equaled the intensity of his mental illness and self-destruction. He personified the troubled pop-genius.

For many of us, Wilson’s image is frozen in time: mop of hair flopping over dark sunglasses, curling his toes in his living room sandbox while sitting at the piano composing a teenage symphony to God. But sand clogged the gears and rendered the piano permanently out of tune. And the cursed symphony never materialized.

Then there’s Sir Paul. Despite losing his mother at a young age, he grew up happy, free of the trauma associated with most creative geniuses, including his bandmate and foil John Winston Lennon. When the drama and stress of the Beatles reached too high a fever, it wasn’t Yoko who broke up the band. It was Paul.

Now, did he set fires on his way out? Not quite. He retreated with his family to their farm in Scotland, where he reconnected with simple songwriting and played every instrument on McCartney (1970), his first solo album. To be fair: he did sue his former bandmates to cement the breakup. But even a lawsuit reflects a certain civility compared to an intrasquad bare-knuckle fistfight. (See: early Metallica.)

McCartney exudes craftsmanship. He doesn’t mine a haunted past to wring songs from his anguished soul. Rather, he’s dedicated himself to the craft of songwriting. As the son of a former jazz singer, he absorbed musical styles and structures. Driven by insecurity and a desire to be liked, he channeled his friendly rivalry with Lennon into a lifelong dedication to crafting the perfect pop song. He’s still chasing it today, and in doing so, has achieved true genius.

These days, creativity is within reach for all of us. Training, tools, and communities proliferate on the web. We can all try on the life of a creator, if we choose. But the web’s social dynamics push us to achieve more, to reach for higher goals, and to look for quick fixes and growth hacks. Slow, steady growth through small, sequential improvements isn’t sexy. But it works.

So … next time you’re sitting down to work on your side hustle, suspend your need for external validation. Focus on the craft itself. Perform the tasks at hand to the best of your ability. Take pleasure in the process. Know that genius is not an end state, but a spirit to be found through losing yourself in the work. And that’s how true breakthroughs happen.

“Perhaps we'll never know how far the path can go, how much a human being can truly achieve,” Leonard suggests, “until we realize that the ultimate reward is not a gold medal but the path itself.”

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In last week’s "Audience Builders" on Clubhouse, my co-hosts got right down to brass tactics.  No high-level pontificating. Polina Marinova (The Profile), Jonathan Hunt (Complex Media), and Brian Morrissey (The Rebooting) shared only smart, practical, and actionable insights.

For example, take Jonathan’s question to Brian about his time building Digiday:

In the early days, why did Digiday publish every story at midnight?

The reason was a matter of intuition. At midnight, every story needed to be wholly original. Writers couldn't just hop on the news cycle as fast followers. Their work had to stand on its own.

As a result, Digiday developed a solid reputation for leading conversations. By supplying unique takes (at an odd hour), Digiday became an in-demand source for industry observers seeking an edge.

As Brian gave his reply, my mind drifted, like a solitary feather floating down from the sky, all the way back to 1994. I'm talking, of course, about Forrest Gump. As my subscribers know, I rarely resist a dated pop culture reference. Cringe if you must.

My favorite part of the movie is the shrimp boat sequence. To fulfill a promise to his fallen comrade Bubba, Forrest acquires a shrimp boat. He then recruits nihilistic cripple Lieutenant Dan as his first mate, and, of course, the pair make terrible shrimpers. Even so, their boat, The Jenny, survives the hurricane that wrecks every other vessel in their stretch of the gulf. The novices score the motherlode of shellfish, and The Bubba Gump Shrimp Company is born. The Jenny, it turns out, is the ship that launched a hundred chain restaurants.

So, "fish where the fish are" is simple enough. But the Bubba Gump story teaches a different lesson: to haul in an epic catch, you need to fish where no one else is fishing. Or, simply, shrimp where no one else is shrimping.

Which brings me back to building audiences.

We live in an age of abundance, and few things are as abundant as content. In any given hour, humanity publishes so much content that it would take over a century to subtweet it all.

Despite the overload, you can still break through. The key is to find the white space. Avoid the logjams of well-trodden topics. Seek out – and claim – new ground. Change what – or when – you're publishing to stand out.

Yogi Berra, and many others, put it well:

Nobody ever goes there. It's too crowded.

So dig Digiday's strategy. Leading a new publication, Brian knew his team couldn't afford to regurgitate the news. They needed enterprising stories that started new conversations.

The midnight-publishing rule instilled this discipline on his editorial staff. I think it may have made an additional impact beyond encouraging novel story choice.

At Inverse, we had similar strategies for off-hour publishing. We arrived at that decision differently, but it still made an impact. Michael Cahill, our brilliant former head of audience development, developed a clever approach of creating heat maps to analyze publishing times.

One set of maps compared Inverse and our competitors and revealed, unsurprisingly, our stories bottlenecked between 9 and 5, like rush-hour commuters in a crammed subway car.

The next set looked at readership of Inverse stories. We discovered that the best performing stories went live during off-hours – late at night, early in the morning, or on weekends.

Per Michael:

“We learned that it wasn’t just about being a part of the conversation, it was about knowing when to enter the conversation. Small publishers could get lost in a crush of content but if we timed it just right we could find a way to be heard.”

The results rang true. Inverse’s audience wears the label ‘geek’ like a badge of honor. They hang out online at all hours, hungry for the next thing to geek out on. By sticking to daytime delivery, our competitors failed to meet that demand, and so had we.

So we switched it up. By scheduling stories to publish at all hours, our staff fed our audience with plenty of midnight snacks and early breakfasts. Inverse filled the void.

The internet never closes. Use that to your advantage. But time-shifting isn't the only way to identify where audience demand is high and supply runs low.

Here are some other approaches to the Bubba Gump strategy.

Choose a novel intersection

Brian covered this angle in a recent issue of The Rebooting:

Intersections are where two areas meet and create new dynamics.

Any publication should start with a well-defined and distinct intersection. Execute this to stand out from – and above – the competition.

Slice thin

Follow the advice in my recent piece "Slice it thin", and you're bound to find some white space.

Look forward

One more from Yogi:

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Do the work though, and it’ll pay off. Avoid joining the media horde obsessing over what’s happening right now. Instead, take a forward-looking view. Identify topics with obscure interest that you believe will have their moment in due time.

Inverse executed this when we started covering Elon Musk and SpaceX in-depth from our launch in 2015. At the time, these were still niche topics. Now Elon’s tweets make national news and SpaceX launches get massive live viewership. Inverse’s audience, too, has blasted off.

So next time you're wondering why your content isn't reaching an audience, think about Forrest and Lt. Dan on The Jenny. Are you trolling for shrimp in crowded waters? Or have you found pristine ocean overflowing with untouched bounties?

Use the Bubba Gump content strategy, and give your audience-growth efforts new legs.

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