You already know it's the creator spaces show. Do you consider yourself?
It's a bit of a weird word for me because I am a professional creative in terms of a designer I've been doing it for nearly 16 years. So I've been a creator for clients, myself, and throw the people. I prefer the term creative. Maybe it's a little bit more pompous, but the terms sounds nicer than create all, but obviously I'm Bo
could you break down this delineation? You're making. Between creative and creative,
I guess, as a professional creative clients pay me for my ideas so they can manifest themselves in lots of different farms, rarely from Brandon, doing logos for clients, designing websites, just anything visual Railey guys, me as a professional creative isn't even always as simple as that, sometimes it is just giving clients ideas for all kinds of rubbing things.
I see that as a creative part of it, not always selling your ideas, but coming up with ideas, also turning them into reality, I think is also important because I think we're all capable of coming up with ideas. It's just the often a lot of us don't turn them into things that people get to see. The Korea tall pop is the end. Part of the process is you come up with an idea, be that fall, a podcast, a YouTube video, or an email or a blog or a bull call, whatever it is.
And then you go away and create the thing. That's why the term feels a little bit strange to me because being a professional, creative for so long, it is understood that you are a creator.
What exactly do you. Let's stick to the creator side today because I think a lot of the work and correct me if I'm wrong, you talked about in the creative side is very much in line with consulting freelancing within creative disciplines. And I feel like that is ultra important work. It is probably the fastest path to somebody becoming a full-time creator is building up an income stream there because the revenue levels are so much higher than through individual products or anything like that.
Yeah. But the picture that the venture back creator academy would like to paint today is not one in which you do any sort of freelance or consulting work to backfill until eventually products make up your entire income or anything like that. But to solely rely on those things that get millions of views
on YouTube or whatever. How
do you build your audience now? And how did that change from when you started?
I've been a designer for 15 years and I'll promote myself wrong for 14 of them. Then it got to February, 2020. I was going to jump off Twitter, Instagram. I got sick of them all there. Wasn't serving me. They were controlling me more than anything else. And I couldn't bring myself to do it at how the Twitter account for 12 years at this point, let's give it one last hurrah. Let's try something with it.
Do something every day on Twitter and Twitter was the first place I started promoting myself when we talk about it. So I decided to write 10 tweets per day for 365 days. That was the initial challenge. And I went from February, 2020 to February, 2021. And I continued doing that. I grew a couple of thousand followers. I was at 600 followers or something when I started and now I'm a five and a half thousand Dawson purely from right. Tweets and sharing opinions.
Twitter became the thing that everything else looped around. So it wasn't the only thing I was doing to promote myself. I just went out on a publishing rum page basically because I've got all these skills to be able to make anything that I want. So I just started making YouTube videos. Every day. I started making podcasts and email newsletter. I started blogging. I started making daily visuals on a different Twitter account. I just went absolutely insane on the amount of output that I was doing.
And this was a culmination of all these skills that I'd built over 14 years, but never turned them to myself. And now I was doing it for the first time. And so
how's that turned out for you now?
Yes, we want to reflect on it in hot numbers, all this stuff that I did, that wasn't really anything to do with being a professional, creative, or running a design agency. A lot of it was nonsense. All of that stuff ended up leading to a couple of consulting gigs that I got through. So I ended up making in hob numbers around 50 K or something back into the design agency. They will consulting projects after people had seen me on Twitter.
And then obviously we have the numbers, which I went from 600 to five and a half thousand followers on Twitter. Then we have the intangibles, which is a little bit harder to understand where I've become known online, internationally as a designer, to some extent as an online person, I will take, in some sense, I have grown a little bit cold. To the Schilling and the promotion on Twitter. I don't tend to interact as much on Twitter as I was doing 15 months ago. Now I tend to write things on them.
Jump-off I spent a lot of my time since I started my email newsletter writing about the negative side of social media, how you should destroy your audience and all these kinds of things. So. I have somewhat solid to some of it, but it's still being quite good to me that I still do the same things I did default. I publish a lot of things.
Yeah. I think that's part of the growth curve, a platform like Twitter, especially where you reach a certain size. In which like interaction can still help you grow an account like yours, but your account is engaged enough that when you put something out, the level of interaction can be high enough that it can become overwhelming very quickly. I've got my own account, but then I work with somebody. Who's got an account around 30,000 followers now quite engaged, and there has been a similar.
And it becomes
tiresome a little bit. You tend to start answering the same questions from a lot of people. And the flip that I know is you might have noticed it as well, is that there's some point between 1000 to 3000 where people stopped treating you like a human and they start replying to you to build their own following numbers.
So you feel like you need to go onto broadcast mode to just maintain your on the final tech, because people are almost treating you like a mini celebrity or something to be abused, which is ridiculous because I'm just a guy with a couple of thousand followers on Twitter, but people do tend to stop seeing you as just an interaction game that was decided that kind of disappointing to me a little bit. And he made me retreat a little bit from Twitter. I
don't think you can get around that because as soon as you put numbers to something like this, there's a game. My personal plan is there's a new account and it's going to get my name on it. And this account is going to be just for this podcast in the future. And then that new account I'm going to start and it's going to be super heavily branded with a ghost writer and a team from day one, taking all of my existing content and repurposing. So it remains in.
And then that account is going to be my account. And I'm just not going to have personal social media that anybody knows about. There'll be things associated with my personal brand, but there'll be heavily
manufactured. Yeah. This way. I see it. It's you have to flip from just create art and whatever medium you choose, but you have to create out and put it online, promote the out, instead of promoting yourself. That's one of the switches that I made, even though a lot of the things I talk about is quite heavily personal. I realized that if you want to maintain your son, You can't continue to build a following online that's based around you.
It has to be based around the thing that separate from you and your case is a podcast. In my case, actually, it's a podcast too, but it has to be separate from you. And I think even
if you do decide to build a personal brand, there's a difference between a personal brand that is being built as a business around your brand and a personal brand that happens to exist. It has businesses around it. If that makes sense. Yes. I want to be the first one, because that seems easier to manage from a social perspective. Long-term where if my brand is solidified, then I don't have to be the one who
that's the way I see a lot of the things that I do. I'm at a YouTube video a while ago called content satellites, which was this idea that you make lots of different branded pieces of content, which are almost series's away from you that could end up being run by somebody else. If that's what you search. So I've got a lot of these kinds of things. I've got the visuals on one Twitter account, I've got a podcast on another place.
And another podcast, somewhere else, video series is on YouTube and all that kind of thing. And they all sit independently from me. They feature me and I always find that easily. To know what to do when I turn up to them. And then all my Twitter account becomes me just promoting those things. I'll talking about those things, which is a much easier way. I think of building a personal brand.
Some people build personal brands around the whole fact of building a personal brand, which just reduces the. The content and things that you can say down to next to zero. So the only thing you're talking about is how to build a personal brand and you get into this revolution, this big circle joke over and over. The only thing you talk about is building the thing that you build is like a gigantic Ponzi scheme. And you just run out of things to say, without repeating yourself,
how do you go about monetizing?
I'm looking I'm in the position where, while I've got the design agency, I don't want to tie up pretty much anything that I've got. I've got a couple of products on Gumroad, but monetizing isn't my primary focus right now. And that design
agency then pays the bills. I'm guessing what's your north star metric for success. How do you know you're on the right.
I'd say as long as I can get to turn up every day and make something I'm happy. I don't care about the numbers. I don't care about how many people follow me. How many people watch, listen, or look at anything that I do as long as I just get up and get to make something that's quite creative. That's good enough for me.
What's your current goal as a creative,
I want to be one of the only people who is still making something every day in 10 or 15 years time, I've been making things online for a long time. So since February, 2020, I haven't missed a day making something that I intend to continue doing that for as long as humanly possible. And you make and publish that day. Yes. The majority of the things I make and publish in one day, the podcast is a bit different, depending on what podcasts it is.
Sometimes it requires a bit of editing, but I still do have a podcast that I do make on a day and publish it on a day. Yeah.
If you could send a tweet back to your start, what would it be? And when would it be you be to choose.
Okay. I'll send one tweet to myself. When I first joined Twitter, the tweet would probably go something like this. I'm Craig, 15 years in the future. You've only been promoting yourself for one year. If you would have started this, when you started Twitter and you're on Twitter right now, you would be 15 years ahead of your current self. But the point I'm getting at is that I would encourage myself to start sooner and not wait for permission, which is something that I did for so long.
And then the second thing I would tell myself in the same. The numbers don't matter. The numbers will increase when you are interested in and make an interest in things. Um,