🔴 The future is led by creator-founders

Welcome to our fifth edition of Self-Timer — a fresh look into how successful creators run their businesses.

This month's guest is Gigi Robinson, a NYC-based creator and founder of Hosts of Influence, who’s leveraged her audience of over 500k to scale a business with five successful revenue streams.

In this issue:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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Gigi Robinson is an NYC-based content creator, speaker, author, and founder of Hosts of Influence, where she helps creators and small business owners build sustainable brands rooted in authenticity and purpose.

A chronic illness advocate living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and endometriosis, she uses storytelling to raise awareness and empower others to lead with empathy. Gigi has partnered with Fortune 500 companies like Adobe, Meta, and LinkedIn, spoken at institutions including the White House, United Nations, and VidCon, and authored A Kids Book About Chronic Illness (Penguin Random House).

Learn more about Gigi and Hosts of Influence.

The answers below have been edited for tone and clarity. Bolding and italics our own.

Gigi: The most significant shift happened when I graduated college and had to evolve from "ambassador and content creator for college markets" to something more sustainable. I was already sharing about chronic illness online, and that became the main component of my brand partnerships — working with pharma brands, lifestyle companies for confidence on bad days, even fashion brands around chronic illness advocacy.

But the real test came after a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit shoot. My TikTok audience shifted from chronic health followers to those expecting modeling content, and when I continued to deliver advocacy content, the account never recovered. So I doubled down on platforms where my authentic audience lived — LinkedIn and Instagram — rather than trying to salvage what wasn't working.

I recognized that my personal experience could become my professional expertise. Once I hit certain benchmarks in my content business, people started asking: "How did you make your website? How do you get press? How do you post on every platform with different personalities?"

That's when I realized I could package this full-spectrum knowledge into Hosts of Influence — offering 360-degree personal branding, web design, and creator coaching as one service instead of forcing clients to piece together solutions from multiple providers.

Gigi: I have different communities within my overall brand. There's the main Gigi Robinson audience focused on health and the creator economy, but I also have this fun community around my dogs' Instagram (@zekeandtrixie), where I'm a dog content creator.

Your community isn't relegated to who attends your IRL gatherings or joins your Facebook groups — it's simply anyone who relates to your content and follows you because of that. Every creator's audience has different segments: people who've been there since the beginning, people who joined because of a career moment, people who resonate with one viral video.

The longer you're a creator, the more you understand why people follow you. From there, you can leverage the depth of each segment (or multiple) to build external revenue sources like books, speaking engagements, or consulting that serve different groups.

Gigi: The goal for me — and what I believe is the future for creators — is to build enough income from content to bootstrap a company you can grow and scale. Brand deals then become icing on the cake, not your primary revenue source.

Look at Colin and Samir, for example; they took their individual influence to build a creator education platform. There will always be people interested in becoming creators or improving their skills, and that’s exactly what I’m aiming to do with Hosts of Influence.

I've been fortunate to make significant income from brand deals for three years, and I'm using that money to bootstrap this business. The future is led by creator-founders who leverage their influence to build scalable companies.

I don't want to be just another creator coach — there are millions of those. I'm packaging creator education with 360-degree personal branding, web design, and strategic consulting because creators need the full spectrum of business-building tools, not just coaching.

Gigi's diversified revenue model prioritizes brand partnerships at 70%, leveraging her chronic illness advocacy platform and 500K+ following to secure high-value collaborations.

Her strategic expansion into book sales (10%), consulting services (10%), and speaking engagements (5%) creates the multi-stream approach she recommends to other creators for long-term sustainability.

Gigi runs her multi-revenue stream business on four key tools, totaling $1,092 annually. This categorization reflects her focus on content creation tools and multi-site web presence, which aligns with her brand partnership and book promotion strategy.

Here’s how she powers her business: