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Discover how the best media brands and solo operators are winning at newsletter growth & monetization.
Hosted by SparkLoop's cofounder Louis Nicholls and SparkLoop's newsletter nerd, Dylan Redekop—we take you behind the scenes and share the strategies, trends, and tactics you need to know to build your email audience and revenue.
Featuring exclusive interviews with the smartest media experts and operators out there today. Including from the Hustle, Morning Brew, Workweek, The Pour Over, and more.
S+G Jay Clouse
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Louis Nicholls: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Send and Grow podcast. I'm your host, Louis Nichols. In my day job at SparkLoop, I spend all my time helping the best newsletter operators and media brands in the world to grow their audiences. So I get to see, first hand, what growth tactics, strategies, and channels actually work. Which ones you should copy, and what mistakes you should avoid.
And now, with this podcast, you get that access too. Every week, I sit down with a different guest, from industry experts to successful operators, and we go deep on the stuff that you need to know, so you can become really effective at growing and monetizing your email audience. Today, I'm joined on the podcast by Jay Clouse.
Jay has been crushing it with his newsletter, Creator Science. Since long before newsletters became cool, we're going to talk about monetization, growth, personal versus [00:01:00] business branding, and a lot more. Jay, thank you so much for joining me. Can you give the listeners a quick overview of your newsletter just to kick us off?
Jay Clouse: Creator Science is a full fledged multimedia platform at this point, and it's built to help people become smarter, more financially successful creators. We take a bent towards Analysis and experimentation, you know, that kind of falls into the science motif, but we write a newsletter. That's the oldest part of the business.
Been writing the newsletter for about six years now. In some form, podcast is about three years old and the YouTube channel is going on about a year and a half. So we are multi platform. Helping creators on any platform, build an audience and monetize that audience effectively. Very cool. And who is we, I say we, it's kind of a Royal we I'm, I'm the sole owner, but we have been working with more people lately.
I have a pseudo full time video editor named Connor. I have a thumbnail artist named Jonathan. I have an assistant [00:02:00] named Izzy. My wife will be joining the business here in the next few months. So the team has grown a little bit. I've worked with some agencies here and there and, and we have partnerships, but as far as full time employees and operators, still just, still just me.
Louis Nicholls: Very cool. Very cool. Brilliant. Well, I guess I'd love to start off by talking a little bit about the creative science newsletter. I know it's the core, the first part of the, of the media brand. How did that begin?
Jay Clouse: Starting in 2017, I was working at a startup company. My background is in product, product management.
And in 2017, I was itching to get out of that company, but I didn't know what I wanted to do on my own yet. I thought still at the time that entrepreneurship was really. Confined to startups. And so I worked with a coach who helped me identify this limiting belief that I thought it was not a creative person.
I thought that I didn't have my own ideas. I needed it to be like an operator or an integrator for somebody else. So my newsletter began as just self expression, a way for me to prove to myself that I was creative. [00:03:00] And then over time, you know, is really my journal for the first several years and through years of.
Solo preneurship, which was mostly freelancing. I discovered that content was a product. You know, my background was in product. And I started seeing, Oh, content's a product, digital products or things. I can do that. I have this background and that introduced me to the world of online entrepreneurship, which we now often call being a creator.
And it just began very meta in that way. I was studying other creators because I wanted to become a creator. And suddenly that's what I've spent years and years. Studying learning, really putting into frameworks and methodologies that I can teach in the newsletter has gotten a lot more structured than over time to be directed towards creators specifically, mostly on the education side, as opposed to entertainment.
And helping them improve their audience building and revenue building activities.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah. I mean, [00:04:00] obviously everyone who's listening to this probably should be subscribed over at creative science dot com. I think it's a great fit for anyone who's listening to this and enjoys the podcast, but for people who haven't subscribed yet, can you help us sort of picture the.
The content of the newsletter, like what's the, what's the format? How often does it come out? What are people taking away from, from the newsletter?
Jay Clouse: It comes out technically twice a week, but really once a week, I'm sending a long form essay that's designed to help you become a smarter creator in 10 minutes or less.
It's typically more evergreen and principles driven as opposed to like, Newsy, you know, I'm not really giving commentary on what's happening right now in creator land is much more geared towards. Here's something you need to understand to help you generate, generate more revenue. Or here's a way to think about how you build an audience on a discovery platform is a term I use sometimes, so it's, it's really helping people understand the business of being a creator and applying.
Specific frameworks to their own [00:05:00] business, to, to build their audience and generate more
Louis Nicholls: revenue. Awesome. And can you give a sense of the scale of the newsletter? Sort of, I don't know what, what metrics you're, you're comfortable sharing around subscribers, opens, revenue, anything like that.
Jay Clouse: We're at about 36, 000 subscribers, a little more than that right now.
Uh, open rate of about 40 percent and in some form going on seven years old. So I think that's, I think that's pretty good. A lot of the growth has come in the last 18 months. We renamed the newsletter to Creator Science about 18 months ago. And since that time growth has been a lot more. Aggressive and yeah, the podcast gets about 50, 000 downloads per month.
The YouTube channel now is about 14, 000 subscribers. So everything's ticking along.
Louis Nicholls: And how do those play together? The, the, the newsletter, the podcast, the YouTube channel, your Twitter profile and LinkedIn. How do you think about all of that?
Jay Clouse: So I think of all the platforms you can operate on as falling either [00:06:00] into what I would call a discovery platform or a relationship platform.
Discovery platforms have. Typically an algorithm, they have built in mechanisms for new people discovering your work, that is a feature of the product and a reason to use it because those products are typically ad supported. And in some ways your content is their product. Social media is a good example here.
YouTube. Even Google search, I would say those are discovery platforms. Then relationship platforms are distribution systems that are decentralized. And so you own that distribution platform, things like email, podcasting, SMS, and private communities. So my strategy and the strategy that I share with a lot of folks and encourage people in this game to think about is you utilize discovery platforms to get in front of new audience.
You want to transition that audience into your relationship platforms. So for me, I am most active on Twitter and LinkedIn for the purpose of driving people to email subscribing. And then typically [00:07:00] I will try to get an email subscriber to listen to my podcast for the first time.
Louis Nicholls: What's the advantage of having an email subscriber listen to the podcast?
What's the, is that more about the relationship? Is it that there's more, I don't know, emotional resonance when you have a sort of an audio relationship versus an email relationship, what's, what do you notice?
Jay Clouse: Yeah, I think if you were to stack rank the different formats of content and how quickly they build trust, I think video is probably number one, audio is number two, email would be somewhere behind that.
So for me, you know, my business grows and I get people transformation. The more time they spend with me, if people are willing to spend 45 to 60 minutes with me per week. Via the podcast, that's a really strong relationship that I build with people. So, yeah, I'm, I'm trying to deepen relationships to build trust as quickly as I can, and the podcast is my best vehicle for doing that.
I also, here's something else. I think I, that I think people should think about when people read your emails. I want them to [00:08:00] read my email in my voice. And so if you listen to my podcast, you actually know what I sound like. So you have a better experience with the newsletter as well.
Louis Nicholls: Definitely. And I was just going to say, one of the things that I think you do really, really well, better than most, if not all, is you inject a lot of your personality and a lot of your profile into the newsletter.
You have a really good welcome email and sequence. You have the image and the call out of who you are inside each edition of the newsletter that allows people to connect. It's very difficult to read your newsletter and not. Not necessarily to have heard your voice, but to have definitely, they can picture who you are and they remember the name and they know exactly who the person is behind the, the content that they're reading, which is something that a lot of newsletter operators don't do.
They send out really good content and it's just. I don't know. Did the same person write this as last week? Who knows?
Jay Clouse: Yeah, it's, it's an opportunity, but it's, it's also a limitation, you know, like it would be difficult for me to hire somebody to do the writing on my behalf because either they're posing as me and that's a difficult [00:09:00] circle to square or they are.
You know, operating on behalf of creator science, in which case they aren't writing in my voice under my name at all. So it's difficult to scale that because it kind of requires that I'm the one writing, but that's okay to me because that's what I want to do. Like I want to write and I want it to come from me.
If I were to put on my Entrepreneur hat and build a media company from scratch today. I might not make that same choice, but that's where we are today.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah. But I mean, you've, you've bridged that gap. I mean, you, you made the conscious decision to call this creator science or to rebrand as Creator Science.
I think before it was, was it Creator lab? Is that right?
Jay Clouse: Actually, it didn't even really have a name. The newsletter was called creative companion and the backstory of that rebrand is a hilarious mess, but it wasn't until I found this, this brand that I really liked of creator science, that things started to really click.
But yeah, I do like to marry these two things together where you do have a brand name, you have an organization because there's [00:10:00] a sense of legitimacy, it feels more powerful, you do have the ability to pull more people into the company and act on behalf of that. I think people even like working underneath a brand where they feel like they have some level of co ownership over it, as opposed to just me.
So there's, there's a lot of positives there, but when you receive an email. From creator science, the from name is still Jay Clouse. It's not coming from creator science. It's coming from Jay Clouse. Email Jay at creator science dot com has the logo. So I'm kind of playing in this middle ground, which is what I recommend to most folks, because there is still the opportunity to kind of move away from it and separate it and try to keep a lot of the equity within the company.
But it marries it with a real personal touch.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah. And I mean, it just, just having that separated out non personal brand, it just makes it so much easier should you need to in the future to divest from it or to expand that out into something different that is less on your own personal profile, if you're, you know, your own personal circumstances change, or you need to do something else, it gives you a lot of leeway [00:11:00] to, to be more flexible in a way that I think will be.
Be advantageous for sure. Very cool. Well, I want to talk a little bit more in about the business side of things. I know this is something you help a lot of creators work through. Before we do that, I'd love to look at the newsletter specifically and just talk through it. You said it's been in some format or other now for seven years, really taken off in a big way over the last 18 months since the rebrand.
What are some of the major sort of audience growth inflection points as you look back over those seven years?
Jay Clouse: Uh, it's a little challenging to remember all these points, but here's, here's something that I remember very strongly. I moved from MailChimp to ConvertKit in August of 2020, which is about three and a half years after starting.
And at the point of moving, I had 1800 subscribers. So for the first three and a half years, the outcome of that was 1800 people reading it. And since then, you know, if you draw the through line to today. It's just been a much faster pace of growth. Like today I'm looking inside a convert kit right now, I've picked up [00:12:00] almost 5, 500 subscribers over the last 30 days, about 1, 700 over the last seven.
So what's really powerful is when you start to look at your subscriber per day average, and it just adds up so quickly when you go from two subscribers a day to 10 subscribers per day. It's a huge change. Then suddenly you're at 20 and suddenly you're at 40. And you know, now I'm sometimes over 250 per day.
It's just a huge, huge change in a big acceleration. It adds up very, very quickly on a daily basis. I don't remember any major, major inflections outside of that. To be honest, a big reason why I call the business creator science is because my growth has all been through. Experimentation and very small improvements.
I have not had major inflection points through my career. And I think that my, my circumstance is not unique. It's, it's hard to tell somebody like, well, what you need to do is get started writing and posting on Facebook in 2014 when they're experimenting with [00:13:00] pushing, you know, publisher content. That's the story for a lot of creators.
We look up today to today, they hit timing and had. This outside event that accelerated their growth that you can't replicate today. And the things that I've done, you can replicate and nothing has been fast. Nothing has been crazy because I've made a lot of mistakes along the way. But if you're constantly innovating and experimenting and improving.
If you zoom out to the macro trend, everything is up into the right and that's, and that's what we're looking for.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, definitely. Well, let's talk about some of those mistakes. What are some of the mistakes that you, you've made that you think people, the average creator with a newsletter might be in danger of replicating?
Jay Clouse: Well, as I shared in the beginning, my newsletter was basically my journal. Who cares about that? People who care about me. So, you know, your growth is limited to people knowing who you are and caring about what's going on in your world and everyone's inherently self interested. So the biggest mistake that I made was not really having a purpose or a [00:14:00] core audience for the newsletter for years, for years, I didn't know who I was writing to, and I, I said, I didn't care, but I did, of course, I wanted people to read my stuff, but.
What was it for? Who was it for? What was it helping them do? I didn't have answers to those questions. That was, that was the biggest one is not understanding who I'm writing for. And really, if I would have gotten clear on that, I call that your premise. I think everything else would have been easier.
That's like the fundamental mistake that I made. I see people make all the time. They want to be a creator as they start creating, but they don't know who they're creating for. What, what, what it is that they're making, what they're helping people do. If you don't have that premise set, then everything else is harder.
Louis Nicholls: What led you to that realization? What led you to. To get a better understanding of who you are writing for and what the premise was of how you were going to be delivering, let's say, value to them.
Jay Clouse: I mean, it was just years of banging my head against the wall, wanting to be a creator. And so the thing that I had thought about for the longest time was how to be a creator.
You know, like my story is not indifferent from what I see a lot of people doing today where I started with [00:15:00] an identity that I wanted to have, and I just brute force white knuckled my way to, well, now I've spent seven years studying what it looks like to be a creator. I am now more knowledgeable on the subject than just about anyone out there.
So I can be one of the more credible creator educators or meta creators out there, but really. I should have looked at what are my existing skills? What earned insight do I already have? How do I write to or create for the person that I was three years ago and help them get to some outcome that they want?
I wish I would have understood that earlier.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's fascinating, isn't it? You have to, you have to be writing for somebody and providing value for somebody concrete, but at the same time. There's always that conflict, especially at the moment where newsletters are so trendy. A comment I hear all the time is, well, there's already a newsletter on marketing, or there's already a newsletter on how to be a better [00:16:00] creator.
And there's some importance, I think, to that combination of, you have to be writing about a topic that is interesting to somebody, but it's your perspective, it's your experience, it is your... Personality, your own point of view that will allow you to be interesting and stand out and to provide something that's unique, that they will want to read, even though there are other people writing about, but create a topic.
Jay Clouse: A lot of people hear the advice that you need to quote unquote niche down. And I don't like the term niche because a lot of people hear niche and they start thinking about a very specific person in terms of demographics or psychographics, but. They get like ridiculously narrow, you know, like this is a newsletter for moms who live in Colorado who like to knit, you know, it's like, well, that's, that's extremely specific.
That's going to be hard to build out from over time. That's not really that useful. And niches get competitive over time to, you know, like the [00:17:00] niche advice was trying to say, let's build a business around something where there's not competition, but niches can get competition where you don't get competition is your lived experience.
Your perspective, that's going to be uniquely you. So take a problem that people actually have an outcome that you can help people get to and apply your experiences, your unique perspective as a lens on top of that problem. And now you have this unique premise.
Louis Nicholls: I love that. And what I want to move on to from there is.
The idea of how you, or as a creator, how you think that a creator should be thinking about monetizing that effectively and turning that unique perspective into a business at the end of the day.
Jay Clouse: Yeah. So I have a little bit of a framework for this as well. I think in terms of direct revenue and indirect revenue, direct revenue comes between you and the audience.
It's a transaction between the two of you. There's not a third party involved. Indirect revenue. There's some sort of third party. An example of indirect [00:18:00] revenue to help you understand this would be a sponsorship or affiliate where you are getting people to purchase a product or service of a third party and they are basically buying the attention that you're aggregating and directing it towards their product.
There's nothing wrong with that. Great businesses are built on that. It's just a little bit more out of your control than direct revenue. You know, I had a friend of mine who. built an incredible affiliate business selling exclusively Amazon products in the outdoor category, which at the time was like their highest affiliate percentage is like 12 percent or something just overnight.
They basically said, eh, 8 percent now, or maybe they cut it down to 6%. I think it was like 6%. They cut it in half overnight. A decision that Amazon made cut his business's revenue in half because its revenue model was. Indirect in nature. So I look at direct revenue sources. First, if I'm getting started as a creator, the fastest way to revenue is always going to be selling your time and [00:19:00] expertise.
I call this services as a large umbrella. If you do services for awhile, you start to see patterns. Those patterns can sometimes be turned into a productized service where maybe there's still some fulfillment that you need to do, but at least, you know, the scope of the project is the same. The period of time of the project, the process of the project, the price of the project, all of that is known.
There's still fulfillment on your time and input, but at least now it's productized. Then you can go towards full on digital products is my favorite. Because these things scale infinitely with basically no incremental cost, things like templates or self paced courses or digital downloads or presets. To me, that's really the transit or the, uh, the pathway I would take is to say.
Service based product, productized service, digital product. Once you get to digital products and that's starting to work, then I would start to look at, okay, what are some of the easy indirect streams I can pile on here, whether it's affiliate [00:20:00] or sponsorship or licensing, things like that.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, I love that.
I love that. I love that the. The approach you're suggesting there, what I like about it is that you're starting at a place where you don't need a huge audience and where the ticket value of the item in general is so high that you can have, you know, a beginning audience and still with relatively few sales do quite comfortably.
For yourself. I mean, I think back to, to when I, I, I did not think about this in any structured way. I completely lucked into doing what you're describing before, before SparkLoop. I spent a year running a, well, I spent a year where initially I helped some, some technical founders, some, um, some developers do some, some sales on their software businesses.
So I was doing that more as a service. And then I said, well, I'll just do some coaching for you. And then I said, well, let's turn that into a live training that I'll do as a one off thing. And then it was, let's turn that into a cohort based course. And then it was, let's turn that into a self serve course.
[00:21:00] And each step I was learning more and each step I was, I went from, you know, this is a 10, 000 a month engagement to a 5, 000 a month, sort of once a week thing to a 500. One off class to 150 self serve course, but exactly as the audience was growing, the numbers sort of kept growing as well. And that was so for the time invested, so profitable and just such a, an easy way of really learning how to deliver async value.
And get paid to do it, basically, to learn how to do that.
Jay Clouse: When people hear me talk about services, they often go towards like freelancing ask or consulting type services. And that's possible. That's true. That's how a lot of people start. That's how I started. But it's also, as you described group coaching, it's cohort based courses, you know, where the fulfillment of the thing requires your time, but it can look really different.
And I think it's a huge opportunity for folks to start with. Group coaching or a cohort [00:22:00] based course. These are very similar. The great thing about that is people tend to value them more highly because your time is directly involved. So as you said, you don't need as many sales or conversions to generate real revenue and you're getting great outcomes for your students because you're right there.
You can see what's not landing. You can triage the situation. You can provide extra help. You get them to great experiences. You have great success stories. You've. Pressure tested the content, and now you really understand if I were to package this up as a self paced thing, I know exactly how I would do it.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, I absolutely love that. What are some examples you see of, of creators who are doing a particularly good job of this?
Jay Clouse: Well, we're seeing it a lot with folks who were early in the cohort based course space, like Tiago Forte, Ali Abdaal. They have now said, well, we started with a cohort based course, and now we are moving towards a hybrid model.
And I think the hybrid model is smart too, because. Either of those people could say, we know how to teach this. We're going to package it as a digital course. We're going to sell it [00:23:00] like hotcakes. And, you know, it's just going to be high margin, accessibly priced sales. But what they realize is you can make money doing that, but it doesn't necessarily get the best student outcomes.
And so they found this beautiful solution of. We're going to produce this so the knowledge transfer that happens is pre recorded produced. So it's the most efficient knowledge transfer possible. But now we're also going to have this mostly asynchronous component of support in the form of a 12 month membership community.
And so now they have created what could be sold as a one off digital product, but also created this product itself that is higher priced and a little bit less. Synchronous high pressure as a cohort based course. So I think I see it as a trend. You know, the pendulum always swings back and forth. Things go into trend and out of trend.
Cohort based courses were really hot a couple of years ago, which I thought was hilarious because this is the oldest way of learning, [00:24:00] like we learn from people live and in groups, that's what learning has always been. And now people are starting to see, man, running a cohort based course all the time is exhausting.
I got to launch it. I got to fulfill it. What if I produce some of this into a self paced course? I don't have to teach it over again. I think that's great as someone who has time starved. I don't want to sit in a 90 minute live session for you to teach me something that you could produce into a 20 minute video that I could watch at one and a half or two X speed when it's recorded.
You know, a live session is not the most efficient way of transferring knowledge, and so I'm glad to see that now we're coming back to the middle of this pendulum swing, saying we're going to combine the great parts of a cohort based course, which is peer to peer connectivity as we're learning something together with more efficient.
Asynchronous knowledge transfer. I think that's very smart.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, I absolutely love that. And I love the, the, I see so many different models of, of how you can provide the ongoing support coming up as well, for example, one that I really love is I saw Justin Moore doing this recently is his whole async [00:25:00] coaching thing that he does through, through clarity flow, where essentially you can pay a subscription for each month and you can just get.
On demand async quick video requests, right? You can send him a message, a short video and say, Hey, I'm struggling with this particular thing, or I have a, he works on sponsorships, right? So Hey, I have a sponsorship deal that's coming up. They're negotiating like this. They want this. How should I reply? And you don't have to book in an entire hour of Justin's time at whatever he costs, but I don't know a couple of thousand that I'm guessing to get a 10 minute answer that he could have given you.
He can, you can just send him the video. He can take a look when he has time. Takes him 10 minutes to reply, and he can do that way more affordably for you. And, uh, just help a lot, a lot of it. So I love all these different ways that people are doing it.
Jay Clouse: And this is why I want people to think about more is look at the creators that you look to.
As a producer or like an operator of their business, try to understand what is the revenue model that they're putting in place here? Because it's probably more robust than you think. Uh, what I see culturally is folks who start in video, [00:26:00] especially on YouTube. They think that the revenue model is AdSense and brand deals, and that can be a great party revenue model.
But to me, those are both indirect forms of revenue that over time may get price pressure. And move downwards, you know, I, I just think that a good revenue model combines direct forms of revenue with indirect forms of revenue. It's a lot more resilient. And I think it should start with direct forms of revenue.
What can you actually service and provide to your audience directly? Because if sponsors see your audience is valuable, you probably can too. You know, there's, there's something there that you can do and it doesn't have to be a course. It could be something totally different.
Louis Nicholls: I love that because it is true.
And I always want to expand on that. It's if you're building an audience that you know. You can sell, you know, to a good percentage of them, you can sell a four or five figure product, you know, there must be other people out there who could also will want to reach this audience to sell them four or [00:27:00] five figure products.
If you build an audience where, you know, somebody else wants to sell them a four or five figure product, that does not in any way mean that you will be able to figure out a four or five figure product that you could sell to them. So it's definitely not, you know, start with one and you'll, you'll find your way to the other.
Jay Clouse: For sure. Yeah. Uh, and we're seeing some really interesting stuff in the space where creators are vertically integrating a good example here. Kevin, Kevin spree to, he has a channel called epic gardening. He was an affiliate for, and worked with sponsorship deals for different gardening products. Now he produces his own gardening products.
That guy was telling you who had his revenue slash and half by Amazon. He's now producing his own products. He has them created. He has them branded. He has them shipped. That's an opportunity, you know, even physical goods in that way. Yes, it takes some work to get there, but man, you create a ton of enterprise value in the company when you are not only creating [00:28:00] content for these people.
But the products you're selling them or your own products as well.
Louis Nicholls: Definitely. I mean, you see that with everything from James clear and the pen he's been selling, which I love, I can't remember how much it costs, 60, 70, something like that, a pen, I don't want to even think about the numbers on how many of those he sold all the way through.
So if you look at the basketball sports, for example, they were doing. What are they doing? They were doing advertising for different spirits and alcohol products. And then they came out with Pink Whitney. You have Betches Media that came out with their own brand of hard seltzer last year. There's so many of them, right, that are moving into owned commerce and not giving up that percentage basically to someone else.
Jay Clouse: It's a big opportunity. Anything that some other third party would value. Your audience for there's an opportunity for you to provide something similar.
Louis Nicholls: And what I love about the mix of direct and indirect revenue is that especially when we're talking about the, the direct revenue being slightly more expensive, you just have a long payback period on that, right?[00:29:00]
If someone's going to be buying a, you know, let's say a 5, 000. Dollar course or service from you. Realistically, most of them aren't going to be buying that in the week one or week two. So it does make it difficult to, to acquire more of those, those people affordably, cause you can, you can afford to spend a lot to acquire them, but you're not going to make that back for a long time.
And that's where I think that the real is really interesting to combine the two. Cause if you take, for example, paid recommendations, you know, that's. For each person who signs up within a couple of days, you've already made 2 and now 2 compared to a 5, 000 course doesn't, you know, it's nothing right. But because you get that very quickly, it just gives you so much flexibility in how quickly and aggressively you can confidently grow the audience without having to have a huge sort of war chest to be able to invest.
Jay Clouse: For sure. For sure. It's a, it's a long term mindset and. If you're playing the creator game, I think you need to have that. Anyway,
Louis Nicholls: I mean, the, the create space is changing so much. It has changed so much over the last 18 months. I think it's really been, been, been revolutionized [00:30:00] by newsletters, having their own discovery built in by all the changes that have happened at Twitter and Facebook by TikTok coming up and YouTube changing things.
It seems to be the last 18 months to me seems completely crazy, but what I want to get an idea of is sort of if we look ahead to the future, let's say a year, two years, three years down the line. What do you think are some opportunities that creators should be looking at and thinking about? And I know the fundamentals are obviously going to say the most important part, but what are some of the things that you have on your radar?
Jay Clouse: Well, I know we're doubling down on video because I'm finding that YouTube just continually surprises me with how powerful it is. So, video is becoming more and more important to us. And if we think about the natural evolution of AI as well, I think it's going to be harder to generate video that people want to watch and feel like I'm getting the human experience here.
Whereas, [00:31:00] Writing faceless writing, even audio, it's going to be easier to generate that with AI. And we're going to have just so much content, just content is going to be so ridiculously abundant that we are going to be making filtering decisions on what we listen to on whatever value is important to us.
And I think a lot of people are going to value. Connection, real human interaction. And I think video is going to be something where we still trust our eyes to tell us, is this real? So that's one thing I see. I think that this is a fantastic time with the newsletter discovery features that you mentioned to be writing a newsletter, because we've never had this type of discovery or growth available in email, I don't know.
What it looks like two years from now, I think it's novel right now. And people are more willing to keep those boxes checked and subscribe to more emails at the same time. I don't think we've seen large scale abuse of that system yet. And I think [00:32:00] all of this is still kind of a question mark in my head personally, you know, will this, is this a window opportunity where people are more free with their email address?
Will this tighten down people's willingness to subscribe to multiple newsletters at once? Well, let's have an impact on open rates and readership of newsletters. I think it's going to really force newsletter operators to write better content, focus on the craft, because like I've seen in, in communities to this point, when there is abundance.
The pendulum swings back and we say, I'm going to value a very small number of these things with my attention. And how will you be one of the newsletters that people value with their attention? It's got to be great.
Louis Nicholls: Definitely. It's like, it's like YouTube, right? When there were, when there were 10 people making videos on YouTube, you probably subscribed and watched all of them.
Now that you can find 10 really great ones in 10 seconds by swiping through the shorts, you can see it as a threat as a way, you know, I can lose my audience quickly because. There's so much more competition for me, or you can see it as a way to [00:33:00] get in front of more of the people who are perfect for you.
If you create great content specifically for someone who really gets what you're looking for. Well, Jay, I'm so grateful for you to coming on and talking about this. One question I like to ask is, you know, we've had you here and there's so many different aspects of being a creator and a newsletter operator that we could have touched on, and obviously we didn't have time to go through all of it, but from the perspective of someone who's been doing this now for seven years, who's.
Taken off really strongly in the last 18 months. And, you know, things seem to be going incredibly well at Creator Science. I always hear great things about it. What's the question you think about, about newsletters or about being a creator in 2023 that I should have asked and didn't,
Jay Clouse: I think it did a pretty good job.
What I'm currently asking myself a lot is am I building a market driven business or a hype driven business and a market driven business has a lot more natural growth because. The market finds you when there's something they need so badly, and you are providing a great [00:34:00] outcome for people who need that outcome, the market comes to you and there's a lot of resilience in the business.
A lot of my success over the last 18 months has come from the space growing and me getting better at building a hype machine. But if my tools for generating hype, things like Twitter, which has now become X, if those things are dampened, then you feel it in the business. And so what I've realized is I have gotten really good at building a hype driven business.
What are the market driven qualities of that business that I should lean into more to create a more enduring, sustainable? Growth oriented business that does not require me turning the crank, you know, that's something I'm thinking about. And I see a lot of creators building hype based businesses and struggling because it really requires you to get great at volume.
Louis Nicholls: Interesting. What, what's it, what's an example of a market? Relate to think that you should be leaning more into that?
Jay Clouse: Well, [00:35:00] I'm still thinking about how to apply it to my business, but lemme give you an example of somebody whose business I can see is clearly a market-driven creator business. My friend Daphne has a business called Teacher Career Coach.
She helps teachers who want to transition outta the classroom, find ways to do that. Teachers who want to transition outta the classroom are looking desperately for resources and an understanding of how to do it. And. Daphne creates great content. So there's great word of mouth. When someone says I'm trying to do this, she's one of the first names out of their mouth.
And she's also found easily through Google search, you know, the ways that you would search for information. She's going to come up because she's one of the best things, best and only things out there. She showed me some behind the scenes of her business at times. And, you know, when you look at growth trajectory and numbers, it's some of the most aggressive up into the right type of, uh, curves that I've ever seen.
And it's because the market is pulling for that. And, you know, [00:36:00] when I have strong up into the right trajectories, it's usually because I've done some activity that is pushing my name and my work out to the market and it hits, but You got to find the things that the market is pulling for and make it easier to be pulled.
Louis Nicholls: I love that. I love that. I'd love to, at some point, explore that a lot more, but we will leave that here for today. We can do that in the future. I hope so. I think that's fascinating. Jay, where can people go and find you other than than creatorscience.Com?
Jay Clouse: That's probably the best place. Uh, if you enjoyed this conversation about revenue models, I've made this wonderful free resource for people to explore different revenue models for them.
You can go to creatorscience.com/revenue. It's a notion database with more than a hundred products and services people are offering. It has. The category is subcategory the price that they're offering it at It's a really good way for you to find inspiration for your own revenue model
Louis Nicholls: awesome stuff We'll stick a link for that in the in the show notes as well.
Of course, jay. It's been amazing Thank you so much for joining me. Hope to have you back soon. [00:37:00] Thank you, sir Thanks for listening to this episode of the send and grow podcast if you liked what you heard Here are three quick ways that you can show your support number one Leave us a five star rating or review in the podcast app of your choice.
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