Your guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses. Brought to you by beehiiv.
The idea of the creator as a lone wolf is a myth.
The most successful creators we interview tend to have at least one person on their payroll. A salesperson, a manager, a producer.
The question is, when should a creator bring in outside help? And what kind of help?
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
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Creating breeds collectivity
No successful creator truly works solo. Sustainable creator businesses — and work as a whole — are social.
At times, running a creator business means wearing every hat: creative director, producer, marketer, salesperson, accountant. So the work gets distributed — to collaborators, to freelancers, to software, to a partner willing to handle invoices at the kitchen table, or simply a peer group sharing tangible resources and encouragement.
Only 26% of the 427 creators we surveyed in our 2025 Monetization Report reported working with at least one collaborator — among those who do, the correlation with higher earnings and diversified revenue is clear.
The gap isn't just between solo creators and those with managers, but also between creators with any support infrastructure and those functioning without.
There are now over 200 million content creators worldwide, including more than 45 million professionals in the United States alone. As that population expands, so does the need for specialized support — not just at the top of the market, but across the long tail of creators who are sophisticated enough to know they need help, but not yet scaled enough to justify a full-time manager.
When a creator needs to bring in outside help
A good manager functions as the operational spine of a creator's business. They handle the work that sits between creative output and revenue:
Negotiating deals
Pricing services
Fielding inbound opportunities
Managing brand relationships
Coordinating logistics
Saying no to opportunity-shaped distractions
What managers typically don’t do is:
Grow the creator's audience. A manager is not a growth strategist. They typically don't tell you what to post, when to post it, or how to optimize your click-through rates … unless it’s part of a brand deal.
Produce their content. A manager won't edit your videos, write your newsletter, or shoot your reels.
Develop their creative strategy. A manager may have opinions, but the creative vision — the thing that makes you you — is not their job to architect.
Once a creator whose business has reached a level of complexity that disrupts their creative work, it’s time to start distributing the load.
Recent Spotlight guest Jack Appleby runs Future Social, a well-subscribed newsletter in the social media strategy space, alongside Hoop Forever, a basketball content brand he's grown rapidly on its own terms.
He understands the intricacies of creative strategy — teaching other creators how to price themselves and speaking at industry events about how to drive value. But once he signed with Wishly Group, run by Aneesh Lal — a manager for B2B content creators on LinkedIn — Jack discovered he had been undercharging for his services.
Aneesh was closing deals with numbers that Jack, for all his strategic fluency, would have been too nervous to even propose.
"I worked in ad strategy for a long time, but I didn't know how to price myself for the face of a brand campaign. I had no idea how to do that."
Operationalizing that strategy — turning vision into executed deliverables, managing pipelines, staffing the right people — is, by his own admission, something he's “the worst person in the world at.”
Having a manager fills that gap and, in doing so, has freed Jack to think about his business in terms of what he should be doing, rather than what he's failing to keep up with.
When we interviewed Sophie Miller last spring, she ran Pretty Little Marketer (PLM) — a marketing community and content brand with over 700,000 followers, and multi-six-figure annual revenue — entirely alone. She managed all social media, executed the email strategy, nurtured the membership community, created all content, and handled the business side.
After four years solo, she recently hired Louisa Douglas Kent — a marketer who works with founders on strategy, content, and campaigns. Not a manager in the traditional talent-rep sense, but an operations lead who manages the logistical backbone of PLM: event coordination, membership operations, speaker management, and community campaign organization.
"The impact has been massive. I can actually think bigger now because I'm not constantly firefighting. It freed me up to focus on growth — launching new products, planning our first conference, building out the team further, focusing on partnerships and creating content. The thing I love doing.”
For creators at this inflection point, the right hire depends on where the pressure is most acute — and it won't look the same for everyone:
If the pressure is operational — logistics, scheduling, community coordination, the machinery of the business — you may need what Sophie found in Louisa: an operations manager who keeps the business running so you can focus on building it.
If the pressure is commercial — pricing, deal negotiation, brand relationships, the gap between what you're worth and what you're capturing — you may need what Jack found in Aneesh: a talent manager or agent who understands your value and negotiates on your behalf.
But ultimately, the threshold is the same: the moment the work of running the business starts overpowering the work of being the creator — in a way that’s beyond your capacity — you might need some form of management or support, operationally or otherwise.
“They don’t know their value”
Kyle Sheldon, a former Spotlight guest and founder of the soccer marketing agency Name and Number, sees the gap in creator support from a different vantage point. Soccer brands — and brands looking to show up in the sport — come to his agency to make an impact; his agency handles content production, creative services, and marketing strategy.
Connecting brands with the right creators is one part of the mix.
He's not an agent or a manager, but working as a facilitator between brands and talent has given Kyle a clear-eyed view of when creators need representation — and what happens when they don't.
"It's kind of the wild wild west out there. There's very little consistency in how people value what a particular creator is worth, what their reach is worth, what their voice is worth."
Kyle has actually pointed independent creators toward agents he knows and respects, even while working brand-side in those relationships.
"Sometimes they don't know their value, or don't know their worth, or don't know what they should be charging."
The contract language alone — usage rights, term and duration, category exclusivity — is an area where creators benefit from having someone in their corner, "because they don't always know what they're signing up for."
Strategists, consultants, and the rise of the creator service provider
The creator support ecosystem contains multiple, distinct roles, and the smartest approach is to assemble the right combination of specialists for your business’s stage of growth.
It’s not about whether you have a manager or not; there’s a differentiated landscape of service providers, each occupying a specific niche within the creator's value chain.
If we zoom out completely, the way I see it, a manager supports a creator’s outcome (revenue, deal flow, business development) so that they can focus on their output (ideating, creating, producing).
But strategists, editors, and consultants help creators sharpen the output itself: streamlining creative processes, interpreting performance data, elevating production quality, or providing the strategic scaffolding that turns good content into a growth engine.
A YouTube growth strategist, a sports-specific brand facilitator, a thumbnail testing service, a virtual staffing partner — these are all forms of "help," but they serve different functions, charge different rates, and require different levels of trust and integration within the creator's business.
Your content isn’t growing, and you don’t know why: You need a strategist.
Hayley Rose spent a decade at Google and YouTube before founding the Upload Club — a growth consultancy whose clients collectively generate around 200 million views per month. Her team works in pods (a strategist, a data analyst, and a writer), offering channel audits, growth retainers, and thumbnail testing that happens before a video concept is even greenlit. This is the kind of granular, platform-specific guidance a strategist comes equipped to provide.
Your production quality is holding you back: You need an editor or producer.
Rachel Kisela, a veteran YouTube editor who has worked with creators including Mr. Beast and Hope Scope, describes the editor-creator relationship as extremely intimate — someone who looks at all the footage they don't want the public to see, and cuts it out. For many creators, this is the most consequential hire they'll make — someone with the technical skill and creative judgment to elevate the work itself.
You don’t know how to position, price, or launch what you’re building: You need a consultant — or just the right conversation.
This doesn't always mean a formal hire. Fernando Hurtado, a video journalist who launched In the Hyphen, lost five sponsorship deals after his first viral video because he hadn't yet learned how to price and package his offerings. A brand deal course, a pre-launch entrepreneurship lab, and the professional network he'd spent years building in journalism changed that. One year later, he's consulting for other creators on strategy — "an unexpected byproduct that I really enjoy doing."
Ultimately, creators just need the right people around them — peers, mentors, fellow creators a few steps ahead — who are willing to share what they've learned. That kind of support can't always be hired, but it might be the most valuable thing you find.
Buzzfeed is hiring an Editorial Fellow (remote in select locations)
This is a three-month program (with hopes of extending to a full year) and a crash course on creating content that captures readers’ attention, pushes the cultural conversation, and reaches a massive audience.
Listed compensation: Starting at $20/hr.
Buffer is hiring a Senior Community Manager (remote)
This role will help shape how Buffer shows up for creators and small businesses — from leading conversations on Reddit and Discord to designing community programs and partnerships that scale.
Listed compensation: $116K–$144K
Stan is hiring a Short-Form Editor (Contract) (LA or remote)
This is a company that understands short-form video; much of their momentum came from the founder’s own short-for content (we interviewed him about it in 2024).
Listed compensation: $30–$40 per hour
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