You're about to hear my conversation with Jay Clouse, the man behind Creator Science, and we talk all things Creator Businesses. Let's get into it. Hey, before I roll today's episode, here's my real time update on what I'm working on. I'm recording this update on March 8th, 2024. Well, if you've been following my story heading into this year, then you know I'm in a transition phase. I'm exploring some new directions to take in my business.
And this month, I decided to come back to my roots and focus my energy on what I do best, and that's building new products. So I've launched what I'm calling a product studio, and I'm calling it instrumental products. It's where I get to partner with fellow founders, creators, and SaaS companies on taking new product ideas from concept to launched.
And you know, since I'm a Full Stack designer and developer, my focus now is on continuously building new software products and continuing to grow that muscle. Sometimes I'm building products with clients, sometimes with partners, and building some new products of my own to grow out my portfolio at instrumental products. And as always, I love to build in public on my YouTube channel and on Twitter and you know, share the process of taking new product ideas to life.
So that's what I'm up to, building products in public. And I'm still running my SaaS product, Clarity Flow, which is doing its thing this year. All right, so that's my update. You can follow along with me on Twitter, on Cast Jam. I'd love to hear from you. If you have any feedback for anything I'm working on, especially this show on the podcast. And with that, let's get into today's show. So I'm about to roll my conversation with Jay Klaus. It was a really good one.
We recorded it on November 8, 2023. And we did a deep dive into what it means to start and grow and professionalize a creator business. Jay runs Creator Science. It's a fantastic blog and newsletter and YouTube channel and podcast and Twitter and all the things. Jay is the man when it comes to creator businesses and really taking it to the next professional level. I know I learned a lot just from talking to him here, but of course from following his other content as well.
You're really going to enjoy this episode. Here it is, my conversation with Jay. Enjoy. Jay Klaus, great to connect with you. Finally, live in person. Well, not live for those who are listening to this. Yeah, live for us. And that's what matters. That's right. That's right.
Hey, so this is like perfect timing for me to have you on the show here and to meet you and have this discussion because as I was just telling you before we started recording, I have been going down the Jay Klaus content rabbit hole for the last month or so.
And I'm just really, you know, what I really find awesome about what you do is there is so much content out there about the creator economy and growing an audience and this whole topic area, this space and like online education and community, these areas are not new. They've been around forever and there are so many people out there.
You know, just there's just a lot of noise as I'm sure you know, but your stuff really struck me as like a really like a bar above in terms of like content and depth and literally the science behind what it takes to be a creator, which is why you have like the perfect brand name for that. I want to get into that. So I just want to commend you.
And I'm like it's like for me, it's someone as someone who's like, I don't consider myself an expert with a huge audience or anything, but I'm not new to this game. I've been doing, I've been on the internet and doing have some level of audience for years. And I still find a ton of like really useful and insightful value today, you know, from your stuff. So thanks really awesome. I agree with you. I mean, what's old is new again. Like I mean Pat Flynn was doing this 2008.
I started tuning into this stuff like 2015, 2016 through Brian Harris and this guy, Matt Kimberly and kind of got into the course world and realized like that's really what got me into the creator space was I had a background in product and startups, which I loved, but I was always so frustrated because everything that I wanted to create, I had to force my vision through the process that is software development because I'm not a developer, I'm not a designer.
It's a lot of collaboration, which is great, but at the end of the day, the end product never felt like mine. And it was never exactly what I was hoping to achieve because I had to go through compromise as another people. And when I realized that content is a product and I am fully capable of producing that, I just blew my mind open and it was like all I wanted to do.
Yeah. Yeah. And it actually just that that concept of content as a product, that's something that started to click for me recently as I'm, I'm starting to really do a lot more research into what it takes to do this full time as a creator. And it's something that I'm looking to get a lot more into in 2024. I'm doing a lot of research into YouTube specifically right now. We could talk a bit about that, but treating every piece of content as its own kind of mini product. You know, yep.
So I mean, yeah, like why don't we get into that a little bit because you know, you have a podcast in a YouTube channel and you've been pretty well known on Twitter and your email newsletter.
How do you think about content strategy content topic and really like making sure that every piece is valuable because like the, again, like the more that I'm thinking a lot, a lot about this, it's not just about, I feel like there's a lot of focus on consistency and distribution of content and different formats of content. But like, none of that is important. If you don't have the right topic, that's actually going to speak to somebody's need and some of the problem. How do you think about it?
I'm more and more convinced that everything comes back to do you have a clear premise as a creator like the business as a whole, what you're trying to do. Is there a premise there that is clear and speaks to a specific person and is growable? Because we see a lot of people that just get into creating kind of for creating sake and it's, it's interesting.
Some of it might be interesting to some people, but it's also all over the place and, you know, a lot of my career as a creator has felt like writing a bicycle in first gear on flatland. It's like I'm moving, I'm moving forward, but I'm peddling like hell and I really feel like there's got to be a more efficient way to do this. And I started looking around and realizing that people that grow quickly, they have built this association between themselves and this specific idea.
And this is kind of what I would call your premise. But people have thrown around the word like niche is kind of the popular term and that's approximate to what I'm saying. But you know, when you think of me, I hope you think of creators and with like a little bit of a bent towards analysis, like some rigor in how you become a creator. I think of Justin Welch, I think of solar pernours, you think of Cody Sanchez and you think of boring businesses.
So like when you have that tight association between yourself and an idea, now any time that idea is a topic of conversation, somebody in that conversation has the opportunity to say, have you listened to the creator science podcaster? Have you heard of Justin Welch? He's taken Justin Welch's course on this or that.
That's how things spread because otherwise it's going to be completely dependent on you as a creator to push your ideas out to the market and you're only reaching people if you are pushing it. That's what's happening with so many creators who are struggling is they aren't building an association with an idea. So their growth is fully dependent on their ability to reach people directly. It's not spreading itself.
So the more you hone in on something that is an idea or a topic where you have proprietary ideas, language that helps you build an association, the better off you are. You know, at the ultimate level, you have people like Brunei Brown who are associated with vulnerability or James Clear with habits. It's really hard to go out of the gate and be like, I'm going to be the habits guy.
That's an ambitious thing to say I'm going to be the guy associated with this one word that is large and kind of universal. You get there eventually when you have a piece of work that is proprietary and gets you there. Like atomic habits is really what made James associated with that. Even though it's writing people about it for a long time. I feel like a lot of it is about association like literally with a word, right? And I know it's not that simple.
There has to be a lot more meaning and sense to that. But you know, like it's true. Like with you, like I think of you as like the creator guy or the creator business guy. And you know, a couple years back, I was talking a lot about productized services. I had a whole course around that and like people started to kind of associate me and my content with productized services specifically. You know. People abandoned all that.
We have such small compartments in our mind to associate with people that are not ourselves. Like most of our waking time is spent thinking about ourselves. But we interact with the world and we start to create tiny little associations between people and one idea. Like we are unable to associate one person with two ideas. There's none of space we don't care enough. So if we're going to be aware that you exist, we want to categorize you in some way.
And if you are able to influence what that categorization is in people's minds to be something that is aligned with the content that you're creating, you start to build momentum because now it's not all on you to spread this thing. Your alignment with that premise perpetuates itself through other people.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, you know, even the whole idea of like competition or imposter syndrome or, you know, if J is covering like the creator space, then nobody else can cover the creative creator space. I mean, what I found is like I learn from, I learn in every area from multiple people, multiple sources and each person has their own flavor or, you know, secondary association, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, I kind of want to like step back.
And again, like your whole brand is creator science and you do break it down. You break down literally the mechanics of what it takes to be like kind of like a professional full-time creator. This is, I feel like a lot of what you focus on is like not like kind of hobby stuff or doing it just for fun. But like if you're literally building a business and a career around this, I mean, there's so many different topics that we can kind of dive into.
One like open question that I have for you is the personal brand versus like the create or brand. You know, I know that like designing your brand and coming up with your brand is something that you've talked a lot about and you've gone through a few rebrands yourself before this show. I was kind of looking at your stuff like you have jclouse.com and you have creator science.com.
Can you speak a little bit about like the separation between the personal and like a creator brand and maybe the importance of each one? Yeah, I think there are multiple viable paths here. But a lot of people getting into the creator game, they're like, should I build you how my name should I build behind project name. And I think there's a lot of power to having a project name as the brand.
But I don't think it's worth rushing it and making it something that you don't have a lot of conviction in. Like my business fundamentally changed when I named it creator science. I was still doing very similar things before the name creator science existed and it's less than two years old that name has existed.
But the name was so aligned with who I was trying to reach and the style of writing, style of content creating that I do that once that alignment and that name existed it started to perpetuate itself in a really positive way. But I had a project name before that. It was creative companion. It didn't inspire curiosity or really any emotion in people when they heard it. So it didn't perpetuate itself. So even though that project name existed, it wasn't helping me.
I would have been just as well served not having that and building behind my name. So there's opportunity to have a good brand name. And when you do, not only does it help perpetuate, but it also has some long term optionality that it unlocks too. Because there's a world where I go full media company. I hire other writers, I build a creator science podcast network, maybe even have multiple YouTube channels underneath it.
And creator science is now this large overarching brand that has enterprise value that could eventually be sold someday. That's not completely dependent on my name, my work. Yep. When you're building behind J. Claus, like there's not really an exit strategy there. I actually just recently interviewed Amy Porterfield. It hasn't aired yet. And I talked to her about this. What's your relationship to this? What are you trying to do?
And she said one of the biggest projects that they've ever taken on and are taking on actively right now is building her business into a thing that is not dependent on her the individual and her name. It's a hard thing. So I think, you know, long answer, long story short, I think the optimal thing to do is build behind your name for a while until you really feel like you know who you are and what you're trying to do. You understand your premise.
And then spend a good amount of time building a brand that speaks to that premise that then you can kind of split off because you will always exist. You're probably always going to want to have a personal website that talks about you, what you've done in the past, your story, links off to your different projects. You know, as creator science grows and I talk about my story, there are so many elements of my career that now I just leave out of the story entirely.
And as it relates to creator science because it doesn't make sense. It doesn't help people understand it more. It doesn't help people get interested. But still a core part of my story, I care about it. I can talk about that on my personal website. I can give my whole story because it's basically, you know, my bio is the way in website form. It's interesting.
I'm glad you got into like building the brand with the, at least the potential option of being able to sell it as an asset or like a sellable asset. Right. I sort of went through that with with productize. I mean, I did sell the productize brand off in 2021. And for the years that I had it, like I think I started it back in 2014 and then over that period of time, like five or six years, I began to like feel a little bit torn. Like is this me or is this a product brand?
And then I went through the long like multi year process of like splitting out like, all right, this article is serving a purpose for someone who's interested in productize services. But that blog post is more of like my personal update. So then it's like that goes on personal site versus that goes on this. And then finally, when it came time to actually like build it as like a, as an entity, you know, the way that I think about it is like, it is like that.
Like each piece of content, whether it's free or a paid course or something, if it's intended to be some form of a product. And I sort of now I include free articles or free podcasts as products that like solve problems. You know, that belongs on the brand like product website. But if it's like personal story, backstory, what I'm working on now, my projects, maybe my turn of the year blog post, like, you know, that's a little bit more in the personal realm.
I think it's still important to have a lot of yourself in both, you know? Yeah. Creator, creator science, of course, is like a, it's like a product entity, but it's still very much J, like, you know, the show there. It's, it's still pretty synonymous with me. But if you ask somebody who like the typical reader of Morning Brew, you know, who is behind Morning Brew, they might not even know, you know, it's, it's really how you design the experience with the product.
Is it dependent on the person, the personality or not? And to this point, they're still very much linked. But having that project name is the first step in detaching and allowing it to go beyond yourself. It's, I think it's also a conversation that comes up in hiring. I think it's more difficult as a creator to hire really talented people and have them operate behind your name long term, then operate behind kind of a third party entity name.
Because, if you know, whether they have literal ownership or not, they'll probably feel more ownership over this third party project, you know, then they will your name. So there's a lot of reasons why it makes sense. I think it's easier to refer sometimes to, you know, I think fandom is a little bit weird. So if you're like, hey, do you read J. Claus's newsletter? Some people might feel some sort of way about that, rather than saying like, do you read creator science?
It's a little bit easier to refer, I think, sometimes. Interesting. Hey, real quick, this podcast is sponsored by Instrumental Products. That's my product studio where I and my small crew, we take new product ideas from concept to launched. I'm a full stack product designer and developer. And I love collaborating with fellow founders, creators and SaaS companies to bring that spark of energy into new product ideas.
Think of instrumental products as your shortcut to shipping that next idea and getting it into the hands of your customers as efficiently as possible. Got something to ship? Let's talk. Visit instrumentalproducts.com to learn more. So I want to like talk a bit about just your business, like running creator science as a business and kind of the mechanics of that and what it looks like for you. Because again, like I've been sort of shifting between all different types of businesses in my career.
And lately, the last few years, I've been focused on a SaaS product. And now as I look ahead into 2024, I'm looking a lot at kind of getting back into the audience game and the creator game, which I was years ago. I sort of let that sit dormant for a while while I went into the SaaS area. Now I'm kind of going back down that rabbit hole.
And so I've been doing a lot of research and poking around into like what does this actually look like with 100% effort and not just for fun effort, but taking this super seriously as a business, which obviously is what you do with creator science. So I want to get a sense for like what does this actually look like? I guess a place to start. And you give us like a breakdown of like your different products or product lines and your different areas of focus.
How do you see like the big pieces that make up your business? I look at my revenue as six buckets and in order of percentages, the membership is about 70% of my business. And that's the lab, my membership community sponsorship, which is split between podcasts, newsletter, YouTube. That's about 15% of the business, I think. And then affiliates, digital products, royalties, those are each, I'm not going to get the total percentage exactly right. I think they're around 3% each.
And then I'm missing something. I think it's services. So the majority of my business at this point is membership revenue, which I think kind of cannibalized digital products sales a little bit. That's a surprise. I knew that it's a big focus for you, the membership, but I didn't realize it was that large of the pie. The thing is it's a higher priced thing.
So even though the relative number of purchases isn't that high, like there are 200 members in the lab at any given time, the price point is $2,000 at a base level. So it just, it becomes an outsized part of the revenue. My goal for this year was to start to flip the business so that more revenue was coming from digital products. But I'm selling you before we start recording.
I'm making a little bit of a pivot away from that as well because I started mapping out like, what is the ideal product suite for creator science? I mapped out like the customer journey and all the pain points along that journey that I could serve. If I were to do it as well as I wanted and I was doing it from a digital product standpoint, I would be sitting here with like a dozen digital products.
I don't think that's really the type of business I want to create because each one would like solve a specific problem in the creator journey. I basically, I think of the business as kind of an assembly line where anyone who wants to be a professional creator, I should be able to help them or do for them a diagnosis of here's where you are in the process. And I'm going to take you by the hand and give you exactly what you need to get to this point, this outcome.
You started a different place, but we're all going to the same outcome. And to hit all the points on that journey that I felt like people might need help, if I did them as a digital product, it would be a lot of products, which becomes challenging to market. And so what I'm more interested in doing now is keeping the lab as is, but creating a lower priced membership that is more content oriented. I say the lab is more connection oriented.
It's more about connecting with the people and sharing between them, but a content-based membership where I'm just constantly adding to the library of helping people do specific things along the journey of becoming a professional creator. So basically everything in that community or in that membership would get to the point of I'm making good money now as a professional creator and now the lab makes more sense because there's not really a playbook at a certain point.
At a certain point it's teaching you how to experiment and innovate and figure things out for yourself. You know that? I definitely resonate with what you're describing there because I mean, like the lab is interesting to me. I might join it at some points. And the reason, like maybe some customer research for you here is like the reason why that looks valuable to me is joining a community and the small nature of it and the nature of the members are advanced.
I know that several years ago I go out to microcom basically every year for the last eight to 10 years. That's mostly a community of SaaS founders and I've developed some incredible relationships and learning and mastermind groups and really great friendships through that community. And it's really, really helped my career in the software world and products in general and SaaS startups. And I look at the lab as like a potential like community in the creator realm.
If I'm going to be taking that seriously in the next several years here, like that seems like a high level kind of thing. And also as I think about my own sort of like structuring what this, what a business could look like next year or the year after like I, my, my first thought was the more traditional approach like, okay, grow an audience and maybe sell some courses of some kind.
But the more that I think about it, and this is all super like in flux here, but like the more that I think about it is the content itself can basically serve as the educational stuff. And that can be mostly free stuff on YouTube, maybe some through email and content and things like that. But the paid stuff, the valuable stuff is really a membership or community.
And like it's like grow the audience, the distribution, the exposure through being helpful and teaching bite-sized lessons in the form of YouTube videos or maybe like many courses and things like that. But the value, the long term like, like business value, but like customer value is in some sort of like community membership, maybe even like extending into conferences and you know, things like that. Yeah. It's definitely, it's definitely a path.
Like I think it's, I think it's viable for anybody. I think that membership as a product are, I think it's the most difficult product to sustain. That's also what I want to ask you about too. It's like the, your energy level that goes into doing this well. It's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot and it's, it's indicative of the health of the membership. Like I had COVID a couple weeks ago. I was a little bit less involved in the lab.
There's a lot, that's like, there's a lagging experience. It's not exactly the week of, but it's typically like a couple weeks behind. If I am not as involved, then I see that reflected in the activity and the community. So it really depends on how you design the membership. One of the potential fatal flaws of the lab is the premise itself.
I promised a lot of my own involvement and I designed a lot of the experience around my involvement with live events and the monthly red shows I record and the material that I create in there. So if I am less involved, then it feels less valuable. If I had created a new membership, I would design the expectations and the experience differently. So it's a little bit more resilient.
But the problem with any membership that is more connection based than content based is you can't control the connections. All you can do is create the environment and try and create the culture. It's a little bit like the pool that I have at this house now. We bought a new house and we have a pool and I quickly realized that I don't understand pool chemistry. And if something gets off, you suddenly have problems that can be difficult to reverse. Reversible.
It takes time, expensive, got to diagnose what's wrong with it, got to have the right solution to it. And creating an environment of a membership that's connection based is a lot like that. It's just fickle. It's never done. It's not like SAS. It's not a utility where you set it. It's solving a problem for me. It requires input from the member. That has to be a gratifying experience. And you have to create the right conditions, but you ultimately can't control everything.
Yeah. This is actually look like for you, maybe like a typical week in the life of running your business. I mean, because it's not just as you were just talking about, like a big part of the success of your community is you being actively involved in engaging with your members and your customers, right? But to me, the other big half, maybe even more than half of your business is public facing content. Like your podcast. Your YouTube channel writing, you know, newsletters and things like that.
So that that that whole engine, that whole treadmill, if you will, is seems like a ton of commitment and time, especially when it looked like, you know, this podcast is super easy for me because I barely even prepare for it. I just invite friends on and we just talk. But your your stuff is clearly really well produced and not just from like an editing and music standpoint, but like the content seems really well researched and planned methodically.
So there must be a ton of effort that goes into that. I'm just curious like how do all these pieces come together and where are you spending most of your like creative energy throughout a week? To be honest with you, I I don't have like much of a hierarchy. When COVID hit, I eliminated anything like I was pretty involved in local community here in Columbus, Ohio for a while. When COVID hit, I didn't leave the house for like nine months.
We took it very seriously in the clouds hold and suddenly my wife was also worried that she might lose her job. So I was filling every hour on my calendar with stuff could be client work, could be creative work. And I'm still kind of in that paradigm. It's been hard to undo. So there's very little downtime that I have during the work week. I'm looking at my calendar this week and it's like, wow, I can't believe I did this to myself.
Well, the one thing I have been able to do pretty well is using SAPI Cal, which I think you're a fan of. I do not schedule anything on Mondays or Fridays. So Monday and Friday is basically when creative work happens.
Creative work, on the business work, I even do a lot of my like responding to people during that time because Tuesdays and Thursdays and some Wednesdays are so structured with conversations that anytime that's not like a live me showing up and talking to somebody or performing in some way or interviewing, I just feel like I need a break mentally. I can't even like think three things and respond to things. But there's no one task that takes up a disproportionate amount of space.
There's just so many little things. The one that I think draws, it's weird how like I've become really aware of how I manage my energy and the different types of energy that I need to be effective in different areas. When I'm working on the software product, I need like full days of just quiet deep work. I'm really concentrated, really complex, technical design and architectural problems that I love solving that stuff.
But then like other days, I'm doing stuff like this, like a podcast, which I tend to find it like kind of fun, but it's definitely energy draining. After this call, I'm not going to get a whole lot of important work done. I'm going to be pretty drained. But then there's this third area, which is not a big part of my life right now, but I think it's going to become a big deal for me next year. That's like content creation, especially like the pre-production of content.
Coming up with a topic idea that really resonates with my audience, doing the necessary research, how can I put the most creative energy into this one piece of content to make it really stick or really stand out among the noise and then the actual production of it, the recording or the writing of it, and then maybe bring in help to whether it's editing or publishing. But a lot of that initial creative energy, that seems like multiple days of work per week.
I'm curious how you think about all that. What is your kind of process? My process, I would say content creation, the actual production, probably feels to me a lot like software development time feels to you, where it's like deep work, put things to the side. Pre-production as you're describing it, like ideating, researching, thinking, I find that that just happens in the natural course of life. I don't have time on the calendar put aside for that.
It usually happens on the walks I go for in the morning, or if I'm working out, or if I'm in the shower, or if I'm doing dishes, you know, it's happening when my body is busy but my mind is relatively free. That's when a lot of the pre-production thinking happens. Research is different because research has to be kind of active. But a lot of my research is done in the form of audio because a lot of my research is listening to interview, listening to audio books.
My creative production time is a lot like your software time where it's Monday and Friday. I can't have anything else in the calendar. All I'm doing is dreading that block before it happens. Afterwards I'm kind of like, thank God that's over. I literally have to have a clear calendar on the day where I'm trying to just be creative.
As we start to wrap up this episode about the creator style businesses, I'd have to imagine that even though your stuff and your audience, to me it seems a bit more advanced, especially internally, like the level of substance.
But I would also imagine that the people who are really either discovering you for the first time or starting to go down the rabbit hole like I am right now with your stuff, it's people who are looking to make a transition or they're in this transition into getting serious about being a creator.
So I wonder if you could speak a bit about what does it take to go from, I guess, like hobbyist creator or someone who writes the occasional blog post or maybe does a podcast on the side, but it's sort of just a side hustle for them to someone who's making a full-time living at this. Like what kind of separates the full-time, the full-timer from the hobbyist, if you will? Like what does that look like? I think it's a characteristics.
I think it's a lot of patience and I think it's like an endless capacity for tiny, tiny iterations because I was listening to some piece of audio, I think it was a podcast, and they were talking about how you can still find Taylor Swift's original Tumblr account when she was just getting started. And she recorded like tens of thousands of comments on Tumblr because she was interacting with like literally everybody who did anything, talked anything about her music. She was a workhorse.
She was as engaged and supportive of her audience as like anybody has ever been. And you kind of have to do that. This is a struggle I'm having right now because my time is so full and so structured. Yes, it's still a priority for me to publish on like every platform that I'm on daily or weekly, but I'm running out of time to be as responsive to everyone outside of the community.
And it's killing me because you get to where I'm at by seeing people, appreciating people, communicating with people, responding to everything. And I can't quite keep up with it, but anyway, it's being responsive to the people who are paying attention, dissipating in discussions outside of your own content, believing that this will take three to four years. And just saying everything that I make, everything that I do, I'm going to keep raising the bar a little bit.
It needs to be a little bit better. I need to make this whole online experience of me a little bit tighter. You know, this is the only way that I've gotten where I am because I haven't had like some crazy viral things, except for maybe the YouTube video that we published like three weeks ago, but I'm in year six here. So up through this first six years, I didn't have some like turning point.
It's just been me brute forcing, making things a little bit tighter, a little bit better, a little bit more stand out, making the process feel different. Like every touch point somebody can have with my stuff, I want it to feel like, oh, Jay touched this. This wasn't just like what the software allowed him to do. He made a decision here. And all of that takes time. It all takes time. And everything that's like mentally, I think like the mental shift that I'm starting to make now with with that.
And I think the reason why I never really took the audience content game super seriously or had too that much of a commitment for myself is because it always just felt like a marathon, like a grind of just like, you just got to keep doing the same thing over and over again. And that's obviously true. And it is going to take years to really grow a significant audience.
But the thing that I'm starting to get a little bit more excited about now is treating every single piece of content like its own new product. Because I can get really excited about starting a new product. I'm like the king of the Chinese object syndrome. But if you treat every new podcast episode or every new YouTube video as like, how can I make this great for a particular audience and make it better than the one that I did last month or something like that?
Then it's like a new game to think about. Totally. A great way to approach it. Because everything that somebody has a touch point with should be accruing equity behind the overall project. Like it should be additive to the body of work. I think a lot lately about what makes something enduring versus, you know, ephemeral in today's like very fast food content world.
So I think a lot about like everything that I make, I want to make, there should be a case that, you know, not everything, but like 75% of the things that I make should still be relevant months from now, years from now. Even the system in the process is too. Like these things should be adding on to each other.
Yeah. So I guess like the last question, so related to this idea, like somebody who's transitioning to become a full-time creator and really starting to take this seriously, especially in 2024. What are you seeing as? You know, like I know it's not as simple as like if the question is like, which channel is the best channel to focus all of your energy on? Right? Like there are so many different ways to answer that question.
But like, how are you thinking about the different channels, especially how things are changing currently as we look ahead into 2024? There's one idea that's also starting to click with me. I think I might have heard it on one of your, you know, something from your stuff is, like I'm thinking a lot about YouTube right now and I see YouTube primarily as like an exposure channel, like an audience growth channel and then things like email and podcasts are more of a relationship channel.
That's where somebody already knows me. They then subscribe to my podcast or they subscribe to my email newsletter and that's where we go deep over the long term. Like the YouTube channel is like YouTube seems like a pretty option these days if you're willing to put in the time and effort because the algorithm can serve you up to lots of new people on a regular basis. That's the dichotomy people should understand discovery platforms and relationship platforms.
Discovery platforms have some organic or some mechanism for organic discovery. It's usually going to be a platform that the platform itself is kind of using your product as their product and they are monetizing with ads. So their incentives are to connect good content with consumers of content to keep people on platforms so they can monetize that attention with ads. So social media, YouTube, Google search, these are great discovery mechanisms.
And then there's relationship platforms which is the distribution system you build and own. It's more reliable but there's not any mechanism for new audience discovery the way that social media has. It's email podcasting SMS private communities. The game in my opinion is choosing a discovery platform and then directing that attention to a relationship platform that you build over time. And the most common relationship platform and the most tried and true was probably email.
So most people starting today I say email should be a part of your strategy. Even if you're not thinking that you're creating a quote unquote newsletter email should be part of your strategy and you should choose a discovery platform that is natural and interesting to you probably as a consumer because then you'll be better at learning the rules of that game. And there's kind of a dichotomy there between are you more of a written person or a video person.
It's rare that people are equally interested and capable of doing both. So you know, I think there's probably advantages to being a video person but I think it's also harder. Yep. Yeah, sure. Well, Jay, I mean we can keep going deep down so many of these these rabbit holes. I mean we can do it, you know, on another episode sometime but this has been awesome. Kind of learning about the science of being a creator. Yeah. Thanks for having me right. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks.
Thanks for coming on the show. I was going to say thanks for having me on. I forgot. Oh, this is my podcast. That doesn't for today's episode of the full stack founder podcast. As always, the show notes include links to the YouTube channel for this podcast where you can catch these full interviews on video and my YouTube channel. That's where I'm building products in public. See you next week.