Your guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses.
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It’s been a jam-packed quarter for this publication. Natalia Pérez-González joined the team as Assistant Editor, and we doubled our output — this is the 24th issue we’ve sent in Q2!
For this issue, we pored over everything we’ve done since the start of April and curated the best, most useful bits.
In this issue:
🧠 Five lessons from our Q2 interviews (by Francis)
💡 Five observations on how the creator economy works today (by Natalia)
— Francis Zierer, Editor
We’re at 2,198 YouTube subscribers as I write this. Our goal for this quarter was to hit 2,500. Five days left. Help us out? Subscribe to our channel!
How disability pride built a profitable 80K community (Creator Spotlight)
Transform your video content with these six effects (Instagram Reel)
How super-fans became creators (YouTube Culture and Trends Report)
By Francis Zierer, Lead Editor
1. Set stakes in public to drive growth (audience and revenue)
What: Designing time-limited, challenge-based content series to drive follower or revenue growth.
In practice:
This was the core insight from our interview with Thomas Yeum in April, who set a challenge for himself at the start of 2024: over the following 125 days, he would build a $10k/month income “from content alone.” At the time, he was making “about $52 a month from old YouTube videos.”
Thomas succeeded! In his final month, he made $11,453. He also grew his Instagram following from around 2.5k to around 20k. He failed to sustain that income on a monthly basis, but his audience continued to grow.
Takeaways:
Well-defined, time-limited stakes give audiences a reason to care. Thomas’ 125-day limit gave him a deadline to work against. It also makes it easier to care. I don’t want to watch a 1,395-minute movie! Give me 90 minutes.
Ask your audience for specific outcomes at specific times, not all at once. Ask me to sign up for your newsletter every single day, and the ask will quickly turn invisible. Ask me in an especially heartfelt manner four times a year, and I’m much more likely to sign up. Over-frequent calls to action create deaf ears.
There are many ways to run a pledge drive. If you’ve ever tuned in to public radio, you’ve listened to a pledge drive. Newsletterist Simon Owens wrote a great piece on his paid subscriber pledge drive a few years ago.
2. Improve by remixing (the 3% rule)
What: When stuck, copy parts of the media you most admire.
In practice:
This is another insight from our interview with Thomas Yeum in April. Fittingly, it’s not his idea; he credits it to Virgil Abloh.
“You take three of your favorite creators, the people who inspire you, create an amalgamation of their styles, and you change it by 3%. […]
Then, you iterate and see what you like and don't like. That's essentially how the learning process went for me.”
Takeaways:
Copy formats … don’t copy content. The last thing audiences need is a chain of creators imitating each other. Focus on your unique perspective and niche, but look for engaging formats and production techniques in other niches and adapt them to your own style.
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. You’re never going to be able to copy another person’s format exactly; the ways in which you inevitably mess it up become your own style.
3. Use partnerships to scale
What: You have a ceiling defined by your skillset, reach, and time. Formal and informal partnerships alike smash it.
In practice:
Amanda McLoughlin runs Multitude, a podcast collective and production studio, and is a podcaster herself. Everything she does is rooted in partnerships, but I’ll point to the network’s ability to quickly scale audiences for new shows. This is achieved through cross-promotion; there’s no better way to grow a podcast.
Former Spotlight guest Lex Roman recently wrote an excellent piece describing how newsletterists should cross-promote.
Adam Biddlecombe partnered with his friend Matt Village to launch a newsletter focused on AI. They split responsibilities: growth/strategy and editorial, respectively. In growing on LinkedIn, Adam built alliances with other creators who were also trying to expand their own audiences, cross-promoting each other’s content until they reached a self-sustaining growth velocity.
Takeaways:
The truly solo creator is a myth. Whatever you’re currently challenged by — growth, production, monetization — there’s a collaborator for that. You have more to gain in collaboration than you have to lose by sharing in revenue or ownership.
Informal partnerships are incredibly powerful. I’ve read at least half a dozen articles about group chats that “run America” or similar in the last year. Scroll Twitter long enough, and you’ll see pods of people replying to each other’s posts to boost reach. I know newsletter writers who frequently edit each other’s work. Networks based on trade and mutual interest are always effective. Form one!
4. Quality beats quantity
What: The more saturated the creator economy becomes, the greater the value of quality over quantity becomes.
In practice:
Adam Biddlecombe of the Mindstream newsletter (acquired by HubSpot 17 months after launch for an undisclosed sum) launched into a crowded niche: AI news and actionable insights. Especially once they began the conversations that ended in acquisition, Adam told me:
“The focus was always on editorial, but we knew we had to keep the quality of the product at the highest order.”
Takeaways:
“Quality” has a different definition depending on the audience and niche. Generally, for any creator, “quality” is about attention to detail in production, information sourcing, and presentation. The bar is usually lower the less saturated the niche. And the bar for different aspects of the content is different depending on the niche — a journalism audience might place more priority on quality of information sourcing, whereas an entertainment audience might seek production quality.
5. Diversification defines long-term success
What: There is no success in the creator economy without platform and revenue diversification.
In practice:
Every single creator we interviewed this quarter described having multiple revenue sources and distributing content across multiple platforms. It’s one of the defining aspects of being a creator, though it’s really downstream from the defining challenge of being a creator: a lack of protections and assurances afforded to traditionally employed workers.
Those creators who can earn a living off of subscriptions or any other form of revenue alone (consulting, brand deals, platform revenue share programs) are the absolute exception.
This pattern has held true as long as I’ve been interviewing people for this publication — our piece on Andrew Huang from last year is a great example:
Takeaways:
Always be experimenting with multiple revenue streams. Maybe you make 99% of your revenue from paid subscriptions and 1% from ads. Maybe you lose half your paid subscribers the next day — you’ve already built relationships with advertisers that help you make up the gap. It’s all about risk mitigation.
Publish content to multiple platforms and consolidate your most-engaged audience members to an email list. I’ll say it once again: a .CSV file full of email addresses is the only truly liquid form of content capital. Any platform that does not allow you to export your audience’s email addresses is a shaky investment.
By Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
This past quarter, I’ve written nearly a dozen creator profiles on newsletterists, strategic community builders, agency founders, and LinkedIn strategists who’ve built six-figure businesses.
Through these conversations, I’ve gained five key insights into how the landscape is shifting — and what it actually takes to thrive.
1. The definition of a Creator
When I first started writing for Creator Spotlight, my definition of a creator was simple: someone who’s inherently creative and consistently uses those talents to produce for a sizable audience. I thought of creators as people who primarily made content — YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagrammers sharing their artistic vision with the world.
But in the context of the creator economy, this definition falls short; creation is just one-third of the equation. The most successful creators we’ve profiled excel across three distinct functions:
Creating compelling content
Strategically growing engaged audiences
Building sustainable business models around their work
This expanded definition has implications for anyone considering a creator career — technical skills matter, but business acumen is what separates creatives from professional, capital C Creators.
2. Authenticity is your most valuable currency
In my first original essay as Assistant Editor, I wrote about the emotional labor of building sustainable communities online and the performance of authenticity.
Half of all consumers prioritize authenticity as a top quality in the creators they engage with. But given the word’s overuse in creator spaces, few of us truly know what authenticity means. Gigi Robinson, creator economy expert and founder of Hosts of Influence, aptly captured the sentiment during our conversation for this piece:
“I think we're misconstruing the word a lot. I think people say ‘authentic’ and they mean they want a creator that can tell a story, but when you say you just want an ‘authentic’ creator, a lot of the time, nobody really knows what ‘authentic’ is, because it also changes based on a [creative] brief."
The more creators we’ve profiled since then, the more I've realized that authenticity, in this context, is a level of vulnerability that serves both the creator and the audience. It's the difference between performative vulnerability designed to maximize engagement and genuine connection that respects your boundaries.
But it’s also your competitive edge — the one thing others can’t replicate because it’s based on your unique combination of experience, knowledge, and worldview.
3. As the creator economy matures, a new paradigm for career planning emerges
Traditionally, career planning has assumed a linear progression within established institutions — climbing the ladder, accumulating pension credits, and retiring with company benefits.
As the creator economy professionalizes, more creators are adopting strategic approaches to building wealth and planning their retirements, and climbing up the value chain from content production to strategic consulting.
Creators like Jayde Powell, for example, who’s on track to earn $250K from LinkedIn this year, are pioneering sustainable exit strategies. Instead of weathering the scrappy, entrepreneurial ecosystem that often lacks a safety net, she’s shifting to fractional work at premium rates and fewer hours — a path to financial independence without burning out.
4. Creating is emotional work; plan accordingly
There’s an insight that stuck with me from YouTube strategist Hayley Rose’s interview: uploading is emotional work, and building systems to make space for and sustain that work is vital.
“I saw so many talented creators struggle to structure themselves,” Hayley shared with us in the days leading up to her podcast interview. “Without systems in place, they’d lose consistency, burn out, and eventually lose trust in the people around them, leading to a total collapse of momentum.”
Creating content is fundamentally about human connection, which requires emotional intelligence and resilience. Creators who sustain long-term success should treat the emotional aspects of their work as seriously as they treat content strategy or audience growth.
Building support systems, whether through creator communities, co-founders, or taking regular breaks from the pressure to constantly produce, is a practical business strategy for anyone building a career that depends on their personal brand and creative output.
5. Community depth > reach
The most effective creator communities we’ve studied aren’t just Facebook groups or Discord servers where fans hang out — they’re intentional, value-driven, problem-solving spaces built for specific people.
More than two-thirds of internet users already participate in online communities, and one report found that 60% are more likely to stay loyal to a business that offers some form of community access. It’s why hyper-niche communities are so beloved — people are yearning for connection with others who share their specific obsessions and interests.
Ally Dye, a Creative Lead at Vidsy, shared an insight about community vs. audience that really resonated with me (and I’ll likely be repeating it continually when referencing thriving communities): “A community is when you can leave, and the party goes on without you.”
In every community we’ve featured this quarter — Grace Ling’s Design Buddies, Colin Rocker’s For the Firsts, and Tiffany Yu’s Diversability — this statement holds true. A community must be structured to outlast its facilitator.
