Your guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses.
Every creator, once they’ve monetized in earnest, is a form of startup.
The more business-oriented creators we interview already understand this and approach their work accordingly.
But the creators with strictly creative, journalism, or editorial backgrounds we interview lack the experience and even the language to approach their work in this way.
Readers often tell us they appreciate it when we bridge this gap, break down business jargon, and make it digestible. So let’s talk about Total Addressable Market and Total Addressable Audience.
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
The New York Times is hiring an Audience Editor, Video Shows (NYC)
This role will lead the rollout and growth of the company’s YouTube-first shows. Excellent opportunity for talented people working at the intersection of video and journalism.
Listed compensation: $120k–$135k
MrBeast is hiring a Head of TikTok (Greenville, NC)
This role will oversee all TikTok operations across MrBeast’s various channels and ventures. Manages a team dedicated to the function.
No listed compensation
Ramp is hiring a Social Media Manager (NYC or SF)
One of the most successful startups at the moment — crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue last year and was most recently valued at $32 billion. Dream role for the right person.
Listed compensation: $124–$170k
Do you want to advertise an open role in Creator Spotlight? Reply to this email.
The audience funnel
Creators are entrepreneurs. Creators are startups.
Traditional startups have a framework for sizing their opportunity, and venture capitalists measure the potential of their investment opportunities this way:
Total Addressable Market (TAM): The total revenue opportunity if you captured 100% of the market. Every possible customer, everywhere. A fantasy number startups put in pitch decks to sell the long-shot potential of their company.
Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM): The portion of TAM you could serve given your product, geography, and business model. The market you’d capture under fully ideal circumstances, like if no competitors existed.
Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM): The slice you could realistically win given your resources, timeline, and competition. The pragmatic number to base your true financial projections on.
Creators aiming to scale sustainably need to approach their businesses — specifically, their audiences (the addressable market) by the same framework.
Total Addressable Audience (TAA): Everyone who could theoretically care about what you make. This is your ceiling if everything breaks right — every person on earth who might watch a niche video about sewing, or marketing, or language etymology. It’s a completely unrealistic ideal.
Serviceable Addressable Audience (SAA): The portion you can realistically reach given your format, platform, and language. More realistic than TAA, but still delusional.
Serviceable Obtainable Audience (SOA): The audience you can actually capture given your time, skills, resources, and competition. This is where the business lives.
The market terms (TAM, TOM, SOM) apply to business outcome; the audience terms (TAA, SAA, SOA) are about content output — which is a means to a business outcome.
When to expand, when to deepen
Nicolas Cole, recent Spotlight guest, mentioned something in our interview that’s been simmering in my brain for a bit.
“Being a creator is like having a higher leverage lifestyle business in which you built yourself your dream job, but you still have a job.
That is a different path than if you were to go the entrepreneur route: How do I build a team? How do I build systems? How do I build this thing that can function without me?”
Cole’s distinction is specific. “Lifestyle business,” is typically a pejorative in the startup world; in his framing, for creators, it’s a business where you are the product. You’ve built yourself your dream job — higher leverage than working for someone else, more freedom, better economics. But you still have to show up.
If we were to separate the creator path and the entrepreneur path into different lanes:
The creator path is SOA optimization. You're deepening your relationship with an existing audience — extracting more value from people who already know you.
The entrepreneur path is SAM expansion. You're betting you can reach people who don't yet know you exist.
The most successful creators we’ve interviewed combine both paths.
Cole, I’d say, is firmly in the second lane. His Premium Ghostwriting Academy, he told us, makes up 80% of his $600K–$700K monthly revenue. Building it required a team of 30-plus people — sales, marketing, coaching, success. "Operational complexity is the moat," he told us. He's not optimizing a lifestyle business; he's scaling a company, which means constantly expanding his SAM to keep the machine running.
Nastja Mohren, former Spotlight guest, is a German-language DIY and sewing creator with over 245k YouTube subscribers. Her TAA is much higher than that,— she could use YouTube's auto-dubbing feature to instantly expose her content to audiences across languages, anybody interested in DIY sewing projects.
But, out of pragmatism, she doesn't; her SAM is not actually that large. She has no delusions about what she's doing; her primary source of income is partnerships with brands that specifically want a German-speaking audience.
"I want my community to be German because of the brand partnerships. Brands are asking for the demographics. I have 95% from Germany; that's a very strong, unique selling point."
She's realistic about her SAM — the brands she can work with on a consistent, profitable basis — and thus realistic about her SAA — the audience she focuses on. A smaller, geographically concentrated audience is worth more to German brands than a larger, diluted one. Her TAA is artificially capped, and her business is more profitable because of it.
Sophia Smith Galer, another former Spotlight guest, shows how to actively manage the SAA-to-SOA-to-SOM (reach-to-conversion-to-monetization) pipeline across her platforms, and why you might maintain separate audiences for different markets.
She built her audience making journalism explainers on TikTok while at the BBC — one of the first British journalists to successfully translate their work to the platform.
Her language content has a massive SAA — millions of people love etymology and linguistics explainers. The SAM for that audience, though, is comparatively small. At least when we spoke, she was not looking to build her business primarily by selling, for example, language education software.
Her journalism consulting work is the inverse. The SAA is smaller — fewer people care about newsroom innovation and vertical video strategy than care about fun language facts. But the SAM is comparatively high. Newsrooms, media companies, and research organizations pay real money for that expertise.
Generally, she's not chasing the largest possible audience, but routing attention toward the platforms that convert.
Audience growth is business growth
When we discuss audience size, it’s most effective to filter our questions and strategy through this framework:
Which audience am I talking about — the theoretical ceiling (TAA), the reachable population (SAA), or the people I can actually convert (SOA)?
Am I trying to expand, reach, or deepen? Each requires different tactics, different resources, and different definitions of success.
Do the platforms I’m using serve my current strategy? Different audiences behave differently on different platforms.
Do the audiences I’m committing resources to expanding, reaching, or deepening increase my SAM or SOM? Will the audience I’m working to develop provide financial gain beyond raw attention?
Jonathan Hunt, who runs HubSpot's media network, described the ideal setup as a flywheel:
"If you're a newsletter operator, being able to take that expertise and translate it for building up a presence on LinkedIn or YouTube, because those ultimately then also become marketing channels for you to push audiences back to your newsletter.”
Social platforms expand your SAA — they're discovery engines, where algorithms introduce you to people who don't know you yet. Newsletters convert SAA to SOA — they're where you capture attention, build relationships, and own the connection.
But audience is only half the equation if you’re working to build a sustainable business.
Audience is a means to market.
The framework doesn't tell you what to optimize for. But it forces you to connect two things creators may often treat separately: the people who follow you and the money you can make from or through them.
Audience is reach. Market is revenue. The work of a creator business — any media business — is to connect the two.
