There are some things that I get pretty annoyed with and this is one of them.
A beginner starts their creator journey.
They learn writing, marketing, branding, and other skills paired with their craft that allow them to be a one-person business because as a creator you need to be a specialized generalist.
In other words, you need to have a general understanding of all of these skills that allow you to do well in digital business because you're technically the CEO, you're the operations guy, you're the actual person doing the work.
You need a broad skill set to actually do that thing, but you also need to be very good at the one thing that sets you apart.
So good at many things, but incredible at one thing because the general understanding of the many things is what makes you good at that one thing.
So to start is that if you don't know the one thing that you're good at, it's because you haven't tried or learned enough of a lot of things.
So here's a graphic that we're going to refer to later in the video as well, but pretty much this represents what a specialized generalist is.
You have a bunch of concentric circles or overlapping circles and the darker circles represent skills and interests and then the center circle is your ability to solve problems within those.
So in the intersections of the overlapping skills and interests is where you can best identify profitable problems and solve them.
Another thing to take into account here is that these circles, the outer circles are like fields of awareness.
So the more knowledge and skill you have in one domain, the bigger the circles get and the more all of the circles overlap, making you more valuable and powerful when it comes time for you to narrow in on a problem and solve it by starting a business.
Now back to the story slash the thing that I get annoyed with.
The beginner creator starts because they want to make money and there's nothing wrong with wanting to sell a product so that you can stop selling someone else's because you are going to have to sell a product either way.
It might as well be your own.
Now here's the tricky part.
The beginner creator wants to help other creators with the skills they've learned, marketing, sales, branding, writing or whatever it may be.
They want to help other creators with the skills they've gained experience in in the business model they've gained experience in.
That makes sense. Where I get annoyed is when people call this a Ponzi scheme.
And this happens quite a bit, but so few people talk about it because they're probably afraid of being labeled as a Ponzi themselves, but I'm here to absolutely rip apart this argument as a whole.
The people that call it a Ponzi scheme don't understand business, so they only see the surface of what's going on and reduce it to that.
You're just a creator helping creators become a creator.
You're just a coach coaching coaches to become coaches.
I get it. I really do. That does sound weird and it looks bad on the surface, but so does really anything unless you try to look deeper or you actually gain experience in it yourself.
You're going to think of all meat heads in the gym as just vain due to stare in the mirror all day until you actually get in there and experience the progress and the meaning and the fulfillment and the lessons that come from actually doing something with your life.
The first thing this narrow-minded crowd doesn't seem to understand is what a Ponzi scheme is.
They just seem to think that helping other people do what you've done, aka the only thing you're actually qualified to do, is bad, so they call it a Ponzi.
If you think that's a Ponzi, good luck doing anything aside from working for someone else for your entire life.
A Ponzi scheme by definition is a type of financial fraud that pays returns to earlier investors with the capital of newer investors, rather than from profit earned by the operation of a legitimate business.
That's not what a creator business is.
So I'll handle more objections on this later, but what you need to understand is that a creator business is a business.
Creators can either operate as one person or with a team.
So by this logic, creators helping other creators, these people that label the creator economy as a Ponzi scheme, are also labeling B2B business, like a lot of businesses, as Ponzi's, because if there can be one person businesses and there can be one person creators and there can be creators with the team, and there's obviously businesses with teams, creators
helping other creators is like a business helping another business.
And if you're told to learn a marketable skill as your first skill, and your only option is to help another business with that, and a creator is a business and you're a creator because you're trying to attract clients with the marketing skill that you just learned, like do you see the problem here, you just don't understand what a creator is.
Ponzi schemes are characterized by dependence, deception, and manipulation.
Business in general, and especially the creator model, is characterized by independence, persuasion, and choice.
Nobody is forcing you to listen to anyone or buy their product.
Just because it isn't a fit for you doesn't mean it isn't valuable and worth paying for to someone else.
As you get larger, there's obviously going to be negative comments like the ones in my comment section right now, especially on a polarizing topic like this video.
But like you do understand that you can just turn off the screen, like you don't have to be angry at this, you're going to forget about it in a day anyways.
So why are you wasting your energy if you're not benefiting from the thing that you chose to watch.
Now let's look at this from an evolutionary perspective.
There are two types of hierarchies.
The first are dominator hierarchies, systems where the structure is maintained through force, power, control, and domination.
The relationships within this type of hierarchy are typically characterized by coercion, top-down authority, and fear.
So examples of this include most corporate structures, you under a boss, and having to do the work they assign to you and force you to do or else you don't survive.
And things like the animal kingdom, where male gorillas or male apes are the alpha male, and they have their choice of mates and food and whatever they want until they get overtaken or dominated by another alpha male.
And of course, certain political structures like dictatorship fall under that category.
Hierarchies reflect in everything.
On a biological level, a cancer cell can begin to create a dominator hierarchy unless reintegrated into the natural hierarchy of the body.
Ponzi schemes aren't exactly dominator hierarchies, but they are in a similar league.
What I'm trying to help you understand here is that everything is a pyramid.
Everything is a quote unquote pyramid scheme, but there's a distinction further than that that helps you understand which one you should go into because you're in one right now.
And you think you're so ethical and noble, saying that other people are Ponzi and pyramid schemes, you're in one right now, you have to to survive, you're just unconscious of it.
And so that's why you're very manipulative with it.
So the sad thing is that the people calling this a Ponzi scheme are trapped in probably a much worse scheme.
And when they don't realize that they close their mind to really the only way to get out of their misery.
So the second type of hierarchy is an actualization hierarchy or a natural hierarchy, which is inspired by theories like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and their structure to support the growth development and self actualization of its members leadership and such hierarchies aims to empower individuals rather than to control them.
So this is where innovative startups and the creator economy and progressive education, which is also the creator economy, because that's where education is nowadays, people watch YouTube and learn more on that than they do in something like a college course, I sure did at least that's my personal experience, maybe not yours.
But the thing here is that actualization hierarchies don't control the members, they empower them and allow them to evolve and kind of raise people up under them, right?
It's still a pyramid structure as anything is you being raised by your parents, and them teaching you what they know, so that you end up going to do the same thing as them.
If you were to look at that with a critical eye, like you are now the creator economy, you would probably also label that as a Ponzi scheme.
But since it's just normal life to you and how you're supposed to live, you don't see it.
So to the point, creators don't control what you do.
They are literally just media channels, they distribute information.
If you feel like that is bad, refer to the Tyler the creator tweet about cyberbullying and turn off your screen.
The defining characteristic of the creator economy is to improve yourself and then improve others to become valuable and then to help others become valuable.
And yes, if you somehow manipulate your perspective to make yourself feel good about trolling another person, you can paint that as a Ponzi or pyramid scheme when that's just the most fulfilling way to live your life.
So please don't close your mind off to that by labeling it as such, because you're just creating a miserable life for yourself, man, come on.
So the creator economy is based on the exchange of value, which has persisted throughout evolution.
That's what human communication is built on, solving problems and distributing the solution.
That's what writing is.
That's why we carved on the walls.
That's why we wrote scrolls is to pass down what we knew so that others could use it and do the same thing that got results.
A creator who helps another creator is perfectly within the realm of reason and it's arguably one of the most fulfilling things you can do.
Taking into account the independence, high skill cap, high earning ceiling, high agency and everything else that makes life worth living.
Being a creator in my eyes is the way of the future and many other influential people who have predicted creators as the future of work.
So you can watch my video on the future of work, but I recently read something from the CEO or the founder CEO or founder of LinkedIn where he's a very smart individual, but he's talking about how AI is going to replace a lot of the tasks that we do as humans, therefore decreasing the cost of doing those things, meaning more money in our pockets and less of those things
for us to do. So he is also on the same side as me, embedding that becoming a creator, starting a one person business using AI and just technology in general to be able to do what a 10 person team would do as one person and to really just enjoy your life and build what you want and idea to think about.
So here's what to expect in this letter.
Why the creator to creator market is new, weird and the opportunity you've been waiting for because you're always quote unquote too late to the rest.
My secret weapon for being perceived as an authority so you can overcome imposter syndrome and stop questioning everything you do and last the best path to starting a one person business as a creator, how to start the skills you should learn and what to sell in what order.
These are my favorite videos to create because I enjoy arguing.
So let's talk about the C2C market or the creator to creator market, similar to how there's a B2B market business to business and B2C market, which is business to consumer.
A content creator is a business model, meaning a creator helping creators is a business helping other businesses.
There are metric ton of creators out there.
Most of them don't understand business.
It's quite obvious why other creators who learn marketable skills like everyone tells them to would want to help and teach them by the narrow minded standards.
They're essentially saying that the entire B2B market is a Ponzi scheme.
Yeah, that's a reach. But to help you clarify this, you as a consumer or someone who would be labeling this as a Ponzi scheme, see a creator and you just expect that they know everything.
They don't know everything.
Some people just pick up a camera and they gain millions upon millions of followers.
Others have to actually develop a skill set so that they are worth watching.
And that's how they gain the subscribers.
So the people who grow and grow and grow and then don't know how to monetize because they may have gotten lucky in some case, or people just like how they look, they're hot.
And so people follow them.
But then they don't know how to actually make a living from that you would be surprised how many people with millions of followers are not making anything at all.
And the same goes with businesses.
Someone says I'm going to start a business because I have this skill.
And so they start, but then they realize, hey, business just isn't about my skill.
I need to learn marketing, sales, distribution, social media, all of these other things.
And so someone needs to help them with that if they don't have the time to learn it on their own.
That's the entire freelance market.
That's the entire coaching market.
That's the entire any of that.
And a creator who has direct experience with that thing is the most qualified person to help those people.
Now, the weird thing here is that the creator model is just so new.
Creators are both businesses and consumers, meaning they buy from other creators to learn because that's who provides the education and courses.
And they run a business with what they've learned.
Creators are in the center of a B2B and B2C Venn diagram.
And the lines are becoming more blurred every single day.
More big businesses are doing in-house creators or they're going more to social media and they realize that people don't follow company accounts.
So they need personal brands.
They need creators. And then since more people are becoming creators, the B2C market or business to consumer is slowly getting blurred.
It's all becoming this just big mesh of creators, creators with teams or businesses with marketing that is creator focused.
The reason people label this as a Ponzi is because they don't understand the model yet.
It isn't a normal part of society.
Boomers will still tell you to get a real job no matter how much you make as a creator.
They still think internet bucks are some imaginary currency and that it doesn't count unless you break your back over some manual labor that robots should and will eventually do.
So what I'm saying here is that just the fact that people are calling the creator economy a Ponzi is more of a sign than ever that one, it's new to its profitable and three, you should probably go into it if you don't know what to do with your life.
It's just like you probably missed out on Bitcoin and you're probably still going to miss out on it if it continues to go up.
Are you going to miss out on this one too?
People thought Bitcoin was a huge scam, a huge Ponzi potentially.
What I can guarantee there is when Bitcoin was so new and actually still to this day, I guarantee there are many people that call it a Ponzi.
So if you're into Bitcoin and you're still calling the creator economy a Ponzi, you're an idiot.
The creator to creator market is growing and thriving every day.
Creators as a business have to learn so many skills and span across any interest imaginable.
So when they go to teach that thing and the person learning it can become a creator with it because creators can build an audience around any interest, then I understand how that can be seen as an illegitimate thing.
But in that sense, everyone online is a creator teaching their audience how to be creators, whether directly or indirectly.
So even if it was a Ponzi, it's reality in your life still won't be very good with that pessimist mindset.
This goes beyond just marketing skills or becoming a creator.
This is the same thing with like the productivity niche where I've seen a few videos that trash on productivity accounts because they're just like, well, he just learned productivity and now he teaches productivity.
And I don't know that makes my brain short circuit.
So I can't understand that he should be making money from whatever he got his degree in.
Again, you, why do you go to school?
You go to school to learn things.
What do you do with what you learn?
You earn an income from them.
So does it really matter if you learn from school or you learn online where all of the information is there and people that are actually doing it have experience with it.
And then they go and teach it and help the other person and they're actually helped and it's not a scam.
There's a thing called a refund as well.
So if you don't like the service you got, you can request a refund and then go from there.
Incredible. You can't really do that in a Ponzi scheme.
So what about the scenario when a beginner creator is just getting started and they want to help creators with the skills that they learned.
So content, branding, marketing, maybe email, marketing, landing page design, whatever it may be.
My question there is what beginner creator?
What if the beginner creator is someone like Alex Hormozzi who hired a Twitter ghost writer when he was just starting on Twitter when that ghost writer didn't have any prior experience or really anything and he still got paid extremely well and he still did very well.
So a message for people that are just starting out is you're probably going to get trashed on a lot by people who just don't think you what you're doing is legitimate.
But the only way to break through that is to actually do it and get results because how else are you going to get results?
They're going to trash you until you have actual client results.
But you have to get a client without results in order to get results from a client.
So just do it. Another thing is that I've helped eight figure e-commerce CEOs start a personal brand and they have no idea what goes into it.
They're extremely good at building the e-commerce side of the business, but social media business is a completely different skill set for them and they don't know anything about it.
So they could hire a beginner creator that just got to 10,000 followers and then you would think that that like okay 10,000 follower creator who this is his first business and he's helping an eight figure e-commerce CEO like what's going on there.
That's super weird. But again, you're only seeing the surface and you don't understand the difference in skill set.
Then that's just how it goes.
Now, my favorite scenario, if you were to purchase a course on Skillshare or Udemy created by creators to learn about email marketing, would that be a Ponzi?
So when you learn it from someone who is a public creator who actually has results, why do you not apply the same mindset?
Is it not better to learn from someone who can get customers from an email list itself if they're teaching email marketing rather than relying on Skillshare or Udemy for the distribution of said course?
That's the entire point of email marketing.
No, why would you bias getting less results for yourself because the person teaching the skill does so from a place of public real world experience.
Anyone can create a course, but since creators on social media are a business, they are the ones with real validated results.
So the same thing goes with teaching social media branding or becoming a creator.
If you buy a Skillshare course on becoming a creator and the creator doesn't have an audience that is very large and they're using Skillshare of all things to distribute the course when they could just build a social media audience with that skill set and sell the course, you can see who's better to buy from.
It's not Skillshare is a authoritative reputable company, but you're going to get better courses from the people who are actually practicing what they preach.
And at that point, you're like, Oh, well, he's selling a course on how we sell the course and this, this and this, but that's the best place to learn.
Now, the last question is as a new creator, just learning new skills, is it ethical to help other people in exchange for money?
And if your answer is no, apply that same way of thinking to any other business model, how do freelancers initially start making money?
They learn the skill, maybe they build some portfolio stuff, but they haven't gotten clients yet.
They don't know if that's actually if they're actually skilled at it.
You have to start with a client for free or for a lower amount of money.
And then you gain testimonials, you get results, you get better, and then you work.
So as a new creator, yes, you should probably start helping people now and start trying to make money.
It doesn't matter how experienced you are, because you don't actually start gaining experience until you have the first client, because practicing without real world feedback, unless it's on your own business, which is a very huge pro for being a creator is that you're your first client.
And that's the entire magic of it.
You learn the skill, you sell the skill, you get testimonials, you keep going, you do whatever you want.
We'll talk about this later.
So the creator economy is so new.
And that's why there's an abundance of information.
And that's why there's a lot of supply and demand or there's a lot of demand, and that needs to be filled with supply.
And if that's where the money's going and what people want to actually spend money on, maybe not you because you think it's a Ponzi, but a lot of people want to learn this stuff because they see that their current life is a dead end.
And so technology and what has allowed for the creator economy to exist is an option.
So yes, it's a profitable, very profitable industry.
So with that, the only scam in this scenario is your inability to think for yourself.
By the way, I teach you how to be a creator in my course, digital economics.
But in reality, I just teach you every single skill that you need to know as a business owner in the modern age.
But if you want to call yourself a creator afterwards, because technically that's what you will be, then be my guest.
Now, we don't have to go through the pain of being perceived as a Ponzi.
So I want to go over my secret weapon for being perceived as an authority.
And the thing here is, is I'm probably not going to change the minds of people who don't want their minds to be changed.
It's like trying to change a Republicans or Democrats mind and trying to convince them to become a Democrat or Republican.
And that's probably just not going to happen, because it's an extremely rare yet valuable trait to be able to drop your beliefs in an instant once you're provided with a better one.
But most people don't because that would require them to change and most people just don't want to change.
So let's get into this. I'm a writer.
I teach people how to write.
Some would say that's a bit weird.
But as I mentioned, what else are you more qualified to teach than what you do and have experience in now where it gets tricky is that I'm also a creator.
So when I teach writing, I'm technically teaching people how to become a creator.
I'm a writer that uses social media, because as a writer, designer, musician, or anything, it's a bit stupid not to be on social media, because media is how you attract an audience to your work.
So you actually get paid and social media is the media right now.
So that makes others perceive me as a creator.
In other words, if you actually want to earn a living by doing what you enjoy, and want to teach or help people with what you do, because you're qualified to do that, and it's a perfectly valid and impactful business model.
So if you want to do those things, you are at risk of being called a Ponzi by stupid people.
So the secret to avoiding this is by understanding positioning.
It's suboptimal to say I help people become a creator.
It's more optimal to say I teach writing so you can attract people to your work.
It's suboptimal to be a coach that coaches coaches.
It's more optimal to have a lead generation system for service businesses and to bias your content toward attracting the coaches you want to help.
You can teach other creators and or people who want to become creators.
There's nothing wrong with that as technically anyone on social media that has a business, which is a lot of people, including most of the B2B market is a creator.
Just position yourself as someone who teaches X for Y benefit.
You don't need to directly teach people how to become a creator.
What I'm saying is to position as you would if you were a business selling to other businesses.
I'm not helping you become a creator by teaching branding.
I'm teaching you branding so that you can get XYZ benefits for your business.
Now let's talk about how to actually start as one person if you're wanting to do this one person business or creator thing because another common piece of advice that is just extremely annoying and people need to stop saying it and just mind their own business is you should start a real business first, then do the creator stuff and I get it.
I really do. But just listen to yourself.
You're telling me that I shouldn't leverage one of the best ways to generate traffic for a business just so I can suffer with your methods of cold email, cold calls and paid ads.
That's not very beginner friendly.
Now, is it I get that you have an identity to defend because your business mind was raised in an older generation of tactics, but there are better, more accessible ways to do things now.
Technology has allowed people to build one person media companies make a great living doing so attract audiences that older generations would be jealous of all that minimal to zero cost.
Thanks to writing on social media.
So the benefits of becoming a creator right now are pretty difficult to contain in one list, but I'm going to try.
First, you're forced to learn every skill required to run a modern business.
This is easier than ever.
Thanks to courses, tutorials and needs of access to tools for practice.
You build an audience, aka social capital.
So when you want to build a startup or the business you've always dreamed of, you don't need personal capital or venture capital.
You have users for your app and customers for your products.
Three, you have a network beyond your audience.
You can reach almost anyone on the internet for what you need.
If you have 10k followers and each person following them has 500 to 1000 followers and the same for the people following them, you effectively have a network of 10x your audience.
So no, you obviously don't need a lot of followers to make an income.
For you can do what you enjoy, attract like minded people, introduce new people to your skills and interests and create a meaningful business model you love showing up to every day, even if it's difficult at times.
And five, since your only levers are writing and building products or services, you can cut your work times down as much as you want.
If my audience is growing with 30 minutes of writing, and I send them to a good digital product, I technically don't have to work any longer than that.
Especially if my 30 minutes of writing generates more traffic than someone writing for eight hours on a book that won't be seen by anyone.
The same thing goes for just social media in general.
If I can write one post a day, and people like my posts more than other people's posts, and I grow my audience faster, and I have a digital product that I can plug, some people can spend five hours writing posts and not get anywhere because their writing isn't that good, and they don't understand social media, watch my video, how to grow and so how to build an audience
on social media from zero followers, something like that.
But with the whole like, how long do you work thing?
It's as long as you want as long as you're good at what you do.
So I'll leave it at that.
How do we actually get started?
First is start, then learn.
The best way to learn is not by taking course after course until you find yourself in tutorial hell with nothing built, no results and no money.
The best way to learn is by starting being overwhelmed and having no idea what you're doing.
That way your mind is hungry to learn and has something tangible to apply that learning to.
I will tell you right now that you are absolutely wasting your time if you are learning from a course, but you're not building anything alongside of it, especially the projects that the course offers.
You're just going through it to try to consume information super fast.
Stop. Everyone can watch a video on exactly how a top CEO built a billion dollar business in record time, but how many people have actually replicated that if it was as easy as following a step by step tutorial, I'm talking to you people who want these videos to be shorter than everyone would be billionaires by now.
It's not as simple as me giving a five minute step by step advice video.
There are plenty of those out there and we don't live in a utopia.
You don't understand what the learning process is.
It's your mind growing.
It's your mind lifting weights, getting stronger, the muscle being built and it needs more than just the weight lifting.
It needs the nutrition.
It needs the rest. It needs the recovery.
It needs the right conversation.
So when you're learning something, you need the right worldview not only to accept that information, but you need the right reasoning and the why and the idea that makes it click for you specifically so that you know how to get results outside of the step by step advice that was given to you.
You know how to make it work for your unique situation.
That's why I make these things so long is because now you have all of these ideas in your head that will slowly change your behavior more than any other short video out there over time because the ideas accumulate until they click.
So all of the stuff that you think is fluff in this video is just seeds waiting to sprout and you don't see the value in those seeds because they're buried under the dirt right now.
So you need both the right idea at the right time and experience.
Experience, experience, experience.
Experience is king. Experience is not only progress.
Experience is determined by frequency of failure like fighting a boss in a video game.
You try once and get destroyed.
You change your strategy a bit, try again and still lose.
You have a better idea, try it and almost win.
Then you lose five more times and question your sanity.
You turn off the game and touch grass.
Then the perfect idea crashes into your mind when you least expect it.
You boot the game up, go in with confidence and win with ease.
Remember this process whenever you're discouraged with your progress.
It's all a game. So here's how you learn.
You need a goal to frame your learning.
In this case, it's building an audience and making an income.
If you aren't making progress toward those, then you need to continue learning, testing and failing until you see follower and income growth.
If they aren't growing, it's a skill issue.
Two, you need to start with what you know.
It's pretty obvious that you need a profile on social media, regular content being posted and some way to monetize the people who see it.
Third, you need consistent ideas flowing for how to improve your process.
By courses to see other people's systems and experiment with them, have some form of inspiration entering your mind every day.
Four, you need specific information when you encounter a problem.
Research how to solve a problem when you experience it, not before, like how to start a newsletter or design a profile picture or build a website.
There has never really been a point where I learned a specific skill like graphic design or marketing.
I learned tools like Photoshop, but what you actually do with the tools or do with social media or do other things, that just came from practice and experience and getting ideas here and there that helped me refine and test my process.
It was less of a like, I'm going to sit down and learn this type thing and more of a, I'm just going to do this.
And then I noticed ideas along the way that I slowly integrated and I slowly got better.
It's like I start doing it.
And then I notice an idea on let's say Twitter, and then I try doing that thing.
And then by doing that thing and seeing results with it, that locks it into my skill set.
And I continue that process for years.
And then I'm good. Step two, after learning how to learn is choosing your domain of mastery.
So back to the topic of specialized generalism with this graphic of the overlapping circles, Valve, the company that created the video game Half Life mentions that their company is composed of T shaped people, people who are both generalists and specialists.
The top of the T represents being highly skilled at a broad set of valuable things.
The bottom portion represents being among the best in one narrow field of study.
This works because you become skilled at one thing, you become valuable in many domains, but you often aren't aware of how your skill can overlap with those domains if you don't have experience in them.
I would argue that I'm very good at writing, not because my grammar is that good or my writing is actually that good.
It's because I'm good at achieving the main goal of writing, which is sparking behavior change or just getting through to people.
Some people can do super academic writing, or just super clever or abstract or artistic or poetic writing and those each have their own goals.
But for my goal of sparking behavior change and changing people's lives, I would say I'm a very good writer at that.
And when I consider it from another perspective, writing isn't my main skill.
That's not the one thing that I'm very good at.
And I actually didn't know what that main skill was until people pointed it out to me.
So that's one thing to take into account is that you probably won't know what the one thing you're good at is, because if it's the same as something that someone else, the one thing that someone else is very good at, then you're competing with them.
It's usually something that's hidden and just expresses by you being a generalist.
I'm very good at holding multiple ideas in my head at once.
I can often work through entire strategies or business models or visions for the future, like with Cortex, I constantly have like the end goal in mind, and every single step along the way.
So I'm able to think through all of that and like change the strategy along the way and see what others can't within that so that we can actually stand a chance at competing with these other bigger companies.
But maybe writing is what led to that.
So at the end of the day, the best advice I can give is to just learn stuff and build stuff and just keep going.
So if I could rephrase what a T shaped person is, or what a specialized generalist is, or a generalized specialist, whatever it is, a person who can and will learn any interest or skill toward one project, goal or vision, they understand the mission, their role in it, and what they need to learn to make it happen.
This is very difficult in corporate positions or jobs that don't allow for autonomy or breaking out of your repetitive routine of tasks.
The larger your awareness surface area, the more valuable problems you can solve.
You stop competing with specialists and a given niche and start solving problems that nobody else can solve.
To start as a creator, you need value to share.
You need content ideas, you need something to monetize, you need a reason for people to follow and pay you.
So I don't think it helps much to get super obsessive and OCD over this and just write out a bunch of stuff and put them in little boxes.
Instead, I just encourage you to write out two to three broad topics that you want to write about and then start researching.
Okay, what are people talking about on Instagram?
What about YouTube? What about just Google search the topic and write down a few ideas that you can start writing about under that and let it go from there.
And this could be very specific to like marketing or programming or it can be something a bit broader like self improvement or psychology or really anything.
The point is to make noise and find signals.
So try everything just write, just write, get good, try new things, practice experiment.
And then some things will do better than others.
That's how you filter data.
It's like you see, okay, what went right, what went wrong, what's this little spike here?
Okay, I need to do more of that.
And then you do more of that.
So the first step was starting then learning.
The second step was choosing your domain of mastery.
So you have something to write about.
Step three is to learn the right skills first as habits.
So along with your current skills and interests and the topics that you want to write about, there's just a few skills that you need to absolutely learn to make the creator business work or any business.
The first is writing. So you need to write posts, emails, video scripts, landing pages, courses, DMs and course material.
I teach this into our writer to is speaking, which is an alternative to writing for distributing ideas in a consumable way.
This is often enhanced by writing first.
That's right. I write these videos as newsletters first because writing helps me become a better video maker and speaker.
Three is marketing. So understanding how your writing or speaking reaches people, where it reaches them, how it impacts them and what the result of that is.
Do they act or engage toward the goal you were leading them toward?
And then four is sales. So crafting your writing in a way that makes people perceive what you offer as valuable sales is the antidote to starving artistry.
And if you were to combine all of these, it would simply be persuasion.
That's the skill you need to learn.
And we're going to talk about that and break it all down in the next video.
We need to understand that that these are more so habits than they are skills, although that's kind of like a daily practice, right?
You're building the skill through the habit.
They are habits of successful individuals.
If you go to any crater or just successful individual for that matter, if they're still working in the business, if they're not completely retired, I guarantee you they are writing every single morning and that writing is backed with marketing and sales or it is a very persuasive writing.
You need to write every single day.
If you aren't writing every single day, you're not building a business.
Sorry, that's just how it works.
And I don't mean like writing a newsletter or writing content.
That's a major part of it.
I'm talking DMs, networking, communicating with other people.
Because how are you going to make money if you don't have someone else to pay you?
And if you don't write, how are you going to produce anything?
Writing is the foundational medium of communication.
Writing is tangible thinking and you won't get anywhere if your idea is staying in your head.
Writing is how you build and spread your ideas.
So where do marketing and sales come into play?
These shape how you write and speak.
If you just write whatever you want, however you want, you'll end up as an author with zero readers or a startup with zero users.
This doesn't strip you of your creativity because creativity happens within the limitations you provide.
In fact, it takes more creativity to remain authentic and get your message across in the most impactful way possible.
As an example, it takes much more creativity to build a business four hours a day without sacrificing your relationships or health than it does to build a business while forgetting about everything important in your life.
The former also leads to much more fulfilling results and more knowledge and experience.
Also, the best marketing and sales aren't detectable.
The most creative people make it seem effortless.
Like the book you get absorbed in, that's persuasive writing and it captures your attention.
It holds your attention.
That's what marketing and sales do.
They capture and hold attention.
So whether or not it's by what your perception of a sleazy marketer is, the writing you get hooked in, you can learn from that to learn how to market better and make your own more effortless.
Okay, so you've learned how to learn.
You've chosen topics to write about.
You know what skills you need to learn.
Now you need to focus on eyeballs.
The greatest mistake I see beginners make is that they just don't understand business.
Rule one, generate traffic.
Rule two, sell a product.
Rule three, optimize the system that bridges one and two according to your ideal lifestyle.
I don't know what's going on in people's minds, but if your audience isn't growing, you're doing something wrong.
And if you aren't making sales, you're doing something wrong.
Actually, I heard the word theory of constraints the other day used in this context, and I don't know what the theory of constraints is, but I'm assuming it's slowly constraining what it is that is causing the problem.
So if you're not growing, then you need to start to eliminate, okay, what am I doing wrong here?
Is it how I'm writing? Is it that nobody's seeing my content?
Is it that I just don't have any network helping me?
And the same thing with sales, okay, look at, are they clicking through the promotion that I plugged under my tweet?
Okay, are they clicking on the promotion in the email?
How many people actually made it to the landing page?
How many click the convert or how many click the buy button?
How many people actually paid?
Where are we going wrong there?
Is it the copywriting? Is it the headline?
Is it the offer? You start to test and improve these things.
It's not as simple as, Hey, here's my product, go buy it and then they go buy it.
You need to actually make it perceived as valuable.
Another thing here is that I've given exact strategies for the only ways to grow on social media.
And I mean, the only ways to grow on social media.
So if you want to read that again, watch the how to build an audience from zero followers videos.
But for now, just understand that you need to experiment and you need to try everything until it works.
It may be replies to large accounts, paid growth, building a network or cracking algorithm.
Everyone will scream about which ones are better, which ones are unethical and which ones suck.
If you listen to them, you may close your mind to the one that would have worked for you.
Then you quit and call it a Ponzi.
L a well, try everything and see what sticks.
A life well lived, not survived is a series of experiments.
Lastly, we need to talk about what to sell and in what order.
So I've talked about this many times before, I would encourage you to go watch zero to $1 million as one person while working four hours a day.
The title isn't that long, but you'll find it if you just type in zero to 1 million.
And in that, I break down how creative work must evolve if you want to earn more, but stay as one person.
Because otherwise, your only option is to hire others to help you.
So in my eyes, here's the best thing you can do.
First is create a minimalist offer.
This is actually a new concept that I just created that I feel like will help you understand a lot better.
But I'll create a whole video on it relatively soon.
In short, a minimalist offer is one, what you can help people with to a payment link and three optional, a questionnaire for warm traffic.
So literally, all you need to do is DM someone be like, Hey, what are your goals?
You don't ask this directly.
But you start a conversation with them and you start to understand what their goals are, what they're working on.
And then you try to identify where you can help them with your current skill set.
And then you offer to help them as a freelancer or a coach would then from there, you walk them through the sales script that you can start using at the start, but you just walk them through and be like, Hey, I have this valuable thing for you.
Do you want to buy it? I'm not going to teach sales right now in this video.
But I just want to make it known that you can DM people and execute the entire function of a landing page in the DMs, the entire purpose of a landing page is to make them aware of the problem, to amplify that problem, to tell your own story, to prove that you can get results, to show your offer or your solution.
And that's a static thing.
And that's what a sales call also does.
So if you're walking people through that persuasive process in the DMs, then that could be arguably better than a landing page, because the landing page is static, and you can change and pivot what you say to each person in the DMs and then help them with whatever skillset you can.
And then you ask for payment, and you build the offer on the fly.
I haven't read this book, but you can go buy $100 million offers by Alex Hormozzi.
And I'm sure it'll teach you how to create a good offer.
Because when you don't have a large audience, most of your sales are going to come from direct messages unless you understand what I teach in mental monetization that allows you to monetize with digital products a lot earlier.
But that's fairly advanced.
A lot of people won't understand it.
So your best bet is just going hard in the DMs until your business acumen comes up.
You write content that targets people's pain points, you respond to people's comments and take conversations to the DMs, you ask them about their goals further and give some free education.
This creates a network for yourself, even if they don't buy, you mentioned that you can teach them over the next few weeks, and that it would cost some money, but not much.
You help them achieve their goal with the skills or interests you've learned, you test what actually gets results and refine your own system, then you pack that up and charge more beyond step two, which we'll talk about.
So as an example, as someone who's into fitness, I can start talking to people, they're struggling to lose weight.
Oh, dude, I can help with that.
I've been into fitness for all of my life.
Is that something you'd want me to coach you on?
Then you start talking and then build off or out in the DMs and boom.
Now, if you want, you can create an intake form or a questionnaire that you would put in places like your social media bio or on your link tree or on your website.
And what that does is when people read your content and follow you and start looking around or if it's something that you want to promote under your tweets, then people can fill that out.
And make sure when you do this, on the questionnaire, you ask for their social media handle so that you can DM them afterwards.
But on the questionnaire, you ask them, what are their problems?
What are their goals? What are they trying to get help with?
And you can go a bit deeper than that if you want to as well.
If you're decent at marketing or you understand the sales process and then you reach out to them from there, take it into the DMs, help them out.
So now step two, after the minimalist offer, the minimalist offer is just to like test things.
It's just to start. It's to see what people actually benefit from.
So step number two is optional, but it's starting a service based business.
Now, if I were to go back, I would focus less on services and more on a cohort.
But at the time, I didn't know what I was capable of.
I didn't really think the audience thing was going anywhere.
And so service business was what I was already doing with freelancing before then.
But when I started as a creator, I didn't start by creating another service.
I started by creating a web design course.
And I sold that pretty well at 500 followers.
I was making around 2000 a month from the digital product alone.
So when people say that you can't monetize an audience with a digital product alone, it's complete bullshit.
When I started learning from other people ahead of me and just observing people like David Perrell and Dickie Bush who are running successful cohorts, that's when I started to pivot as well.
But now I see that as the optimal option.
But the thing here, when a service business is for you is when your account isn't growing month over month, you don't have a consistent flow of traffic.
But at that point, that's a bigger problem than starting a service business.
And you should probably fix the traffic problem and start growing your account.
If you're truly adamant on it, turn your minimalist offer into a freelance or coaching service.
You can go from there, you can research that on your own.
I frankly just don't like teaching service based work.
It's 100 times more complicated than just building a course or a cohort and guiding people through that.
Now the thing here is so step three is to spin it into a cohort.
And I say spin, because you're spinning something like a service into a cohort, you're not going to be teaching the exact same thing.
The thing with a cohort is that you can charge very high prices like David Perrell, I believe he was charging 3.5 K for a base tier of his cohort, a writing cohort, and 7 K for the highest tier.
And he did very well when he was starting out, he's recently just closed or is closing the cohort.
But that's not a testament against cohorts working for a lot of people.
So what I'm saying there is is that a lot of people will tell you to start a service business or a client business because you can charge 2.5 K or 1.5 K or however much higher per client, when you could just create a cohort and sell that for the same price and not have to do the annoying client work.
Now of course you would have to use kind of high ticket sales or DM tactics and do some cold outreach and have sales calls and other things like that for the cohort.
But still, it's a lot more fun than client work in my eyes.
And it transitioned seamlessly into the next step, which is turning it into a digital product.
But before that, what a cohort is is usually based around a beginner level skill or interest.
A cohort is just a structured course that you guide people through.
You set a start and end date, you have a curriculum, you have one to two calls every week to answer questions and go over material.
And sometimes you have a community for people to be in.
So now when you spin it into a digital product, you just take a portion of that cohort and turn it into a standalone product and sell it for 99 bucks, 150 bucks, however much.
So if you want to learn how I build these curriculums for the cohort or the digital product and understand how I sell them, check out again, mental monetization.
So the best place to start here is your main skill or interest.
Don't overcomplicate it.
Teach the skill or interest in the way you would want to be teached include projects, templates, tasks and a curriculum that covers what people need to know to reach a desirable end result.
Then step number five, we're getting into like uncharted territory here for the beginners, but it's to build something that you want but doesn't yet exist.
So at this point, you have an audience, a profitable business and excess cash flow, you can invest into a new type of business.
Or if you want, you can continue scaling the service business you started by hiring employees.
At this point, you know what your audience wants and needs.
So it makes sense to compliment your current audience and digital products and other things with a physical product or a software.
This is why we're building Cortex.
It's why I built a physical planner in the past because Cortex is just me taking the system that's into our writer and creating a software that allows me to do that system better and allows people to create their own systems.
The other thing is that notion just felt bloated and wasn't nice to write in.
And I've been trying these note taking apps as research and it's like you log into the app and I have no clue what's going on.
I remember the first time I started with notion, it's like, okay, you log in, okay, I can create pages, but I know there's more power to this.
Why do I feel overwhelmed when I haven't even started yet?
And it's, I don't know, it's just weird feeling.
And a lot of people don't have that much time to learn a new software, they just want to get started, get writing.
But this path isn't an impossibility for you either, you just need social capital, so an audience and you need results from digital products and other things.
And then you can turn those into a software or startup that you want to.
So depending on where you're at in your creator journey, I wish you the best of luck.
Thank you for watching.
Be sure to like, subscribe, check out the links in the description for free skill acquisition courses.
And to our writer to learn high impact writing, digital economics, join the cortex waitlist.
And that is it for this video.
Bye.
