A season of reinvention

An inside look at the next stage of business.

Last year was my best year in business. Creator Science generated $830,974 in revenue, which was a 46% increase from the previous year. Even better, it’s on a strong trajectory, with a median annual growth of 68% over the last five years!

If I just continue doing what I did last year, I’ll have my first seven-figure year since starting the company in 2017.

There’s just one problem: I don’t want to.

When your highest gear isn’t enough

My wife and I recently started leasing a new SUV. One of the decisions we had to make in the process was the size of the engine. Ultimately, we chose the smaller option – we couldn’t imagine needing the larger engine for our purposes.

While that smaller engine seems like MORE than enough for our needs, it does have limits. If I suddenly needed to tow a heavy trailer every day, that engine would struggle (and may even break down).

You know that sound of a car accelerating, when your engine reaches its highest pitch before shifting into the next gear?

R-R-R-R-EEEEEEEE

That’s what my business sounds like right now.

The engine of this “car” has reached its limits. It’s working as hard as it can. The problem is, our lean team is already operating at the highest gear – and if I don’t upgrade the engine, it will eventually burn out.

The crossroads

I’ve been at this crossroads for a while now. My wife and I are the only W-2 employees with a growing list of independent contractors. We’re running this hybrid business, part product company and part media company, publishing across most major platforms.

We sell our own products. We sell advertising. We publish a weekly newsletter, podcast, and YouTube videos bi-monthly.

It sounds like the best of all worlds – but it’s actually a bunch of complex capabilities that we’re doing, but certainly not optimizing. The content itself still largely relies on me. I’m operating as both visionary and integrator, splitting my time (and brain) evenly between creativity and operations.

I’m a huge bottleneck. The engine is operating at capacity, but it feels like we’re doing everything at 50% of what the car is capable of.

So we have two options:

1. Accept that this car is limited by its engine

2. Upgrade the engine

To this point, I’ve chosen door number one by default by sticking with the status quo. I love this car, and it does a lot for our family. However, this car is currently much more valuable to my family than anyone else – it works with ME driving it, but if I ever wanted to sell the car, the buyer would notice some limitations.

So, as the year has gone on, I find myself drawn more and more to the challenge of stepping through door number two.

And that door leads to reinvention.

The chasm that must be crossed

The biggest hurdle (I think) is structural – finance, legal, and benefits. Right now, my wife and I contribute to a Solo 401(k) plan, which has some tax advantages. To hire W-2 employees who are NOT my wife and I, we will have to change our benefits packages.

Full-time employees are more expensive than contractors when you factor in all the elements of compensation (yesterday, an attorney estimated about 9-10% more expensive). But that tradeoff comes with more stability, stronger employment contracts, and a generally stronger business.

One of my biggest hurdles to getting myself out of the operations of the business is the trust required to bring in a contractor into systems with privileged information (banking, payroll, payment processors, etc). The second biggest hurdle is mental. Hiring full-time employees is a commitment to them and their families. Of course, no employment relationship is forever (especially in today's world), but I take commitments seriously. And hiring someone full-time adds both financial and emotional stress (in the near term).

What’s on the other side

Ultimately, here’s the future I’m hoping to realize:

1. Get myself out of operations

2. Support growth in my membership

3. Build enterprise value

4. Create more time to fuel up

5. Double down on writing

Let me break down each of these…

Get myself out of operations

Before I was creating content, I was a startup operator. For a long time, being a good operator was my identity. In the early days, this served me very well – I could effectively split my time between business operations and content creation. But as the business has matured, both halves require more attention. And even more problematic, my available time as a new father has been dramatically reduced.

Ultimately, these are two very distinct roles that a mature organization divides into at least two people. The question is, which half do I take?

In a creator business where much of the audience relationship begins and ends with the creator themselves, the clear answer is to focus more on the content than on the operations. But, as previously discussed, integrating an operator is something I see as too high-trust and high-value to do on a contract basis (let alone what the courts may say about the technical classification of an employee).

Plus, the longer I’ve been in business, the more I’ve realized my own ego. Part of the reason I’ve been hesitant to bring in a true operator is that I believed no one could operate the business as well as I could.

But that’s ridiculous.

In fact, I’m more certain than ever that a true operator could operate the business much better than I could. And by creating new value, they ought to pay for themselves.

Support growth in my membership

The Lab (our membership for creators) has steadily grown since its inception in March 2022. We’re nearing 400 total members, $500,000 in ARR, and we’re focusing on facilitating small group experiences both online and offline.

Small group experiences (especially localized, offline experiences) require a certain level of scale to create geographic density. That is, if you’re growing as an online community first with offline experiences (top down), rather than an offline community with online experiences (bottom up).

Small group facilitation also requires logistical effort. If left to the members themselves, the experience varies widely (and often fails to coalesce at all). So, an optimal community strategy has staff support.

Stability is paramount in a community, not just among the members, but also the community leaders. So, to do it well, you want full-time team members whose incentives are aligned with the members.

Build enterprise value

Creator businesses often suffer from key person risk. Basically, when any business has a critical employee (or founder) who’s a linchpin of value, that’s a problem. What happens when that employee decides to quit, retire, or has some unforeseen disaster?

When the business’s success starts and ends with the creator, it’s a brittle business. Hopefully, you maintain enthusiasm forever and lead a long, healthy life.

But what if you don’t?

I’m grateful for the decision to build a true brand behind Creator Science, but I’m still a key person. But by building a larger content and community team, I reduce that risk and develop the inverse: enterprise value.

I have no intention of selling the company, but what if I built it as if I could? That’s just smart business practice. In that world, all of my effort not only creates value today while I’m at the helm, but potentially long into the future as well.

Open more time to fuel up

I interviewed James Clear on the second episode of the Creator Science podcast. We talked a lot about writing, and he shared the importance of reading:

I sort of think about writing kind of like driving a car. So I, I wrote for a few years, and then my audience kept growing, and I got to like 100,000 readers or so. And getting to that number made me think, ‘Oh, now people are really paying attention, so now I have to write like all the time, and now it needs to be really good.’ So I spent more time writing, and it actually got worse. And I think the reason is because writing is kind of like driving the car and going on an adventure…and reading is kind of like filling the car up with gas. The point of having a car is not to only fill it up with gas and stay at the station, you have to drive somewhere and go on an adventure at some point. But you do need to stop and refill every now and then. And so for me, if I ever struggle and don't have good ideas to write about, I need to read more need to fill up the tank.

I’ve always believed I was a slow reader. So, as my time became more scarce and valuable, I reduced my reading (because it was hard to justify the time). But I’m now seeing how short-sighted this was.

There are different types of fuel. Anything you consume is fuel for the tank, but books tend to be the most efficient, clean, and potent fuel. As I’m working on my book proposal, I’m reading more books than ever before. I’m reaping the benefits of dense, high-quality, highly-revised writing. But I’m also learning about different book writing structures. Different tones and voices.

It’s invaluable.

Your content is downstream of the content you consume. Besides getting more reps, the highest-leverage way to improve your content is to actually improve the content you consume.

Double down on writing

In my last post, I shared that I’m working toward my first book. Writing has always been my endgame, but I’ve consistently reduced its space in my life in favor of other needs of the business.

But with this eye towards business building and getting myself out of some of the operations, I intend to refocus more of my time toward writing. One worry I have with AI is that people will outsource their critical thinking capacity. When we stop working our muscles, they atrophy.

This can also be seen as a potential competitive advantage. The opportunity is to think more. Not shortcutting your thinking, but sharpening it.

Writing is thinking in action. And I want to do more of it.

Conclusion

This year is going to be awkward and painful. A lot of new capabilities need to be built. From the outside, it may look like my output isn’t changing, or may even get slower. But I need to dedicate my attention to upgrading the internal engine people can’t see.

A year from now, people will say, “Wow, you’re on fire!” and it will be the lagging results of this effort.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress!

If you enjoyed this, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below or Restack with your own thoughts if you’re inclined.

Book Proposal Update

For paid subscribers only ⤵

I’m absolutely loving the process of writing this proposal.

The biggest challenge is packaging. Now that I’ve spent three years on YouTube, I realize just how fundamental packaging is to everything.

If you’re not familiar with this term, packaging is the part of the product people interact with before making the decision to engage further. In a consumer product, packaging is obvious – the box your laptop comes in is physical packaging. For digital products, it’s a little different:

• Email: Subject line, preview text, sender name

• Podcast: Episode title

• YouTube video: Title, thumbnail, channel image

• Substack: Essay title or Hook in your Note

For a book, the obvious packaging elements are the cover and title. But with all products, there’s also the inherent idea of what’s being “sold.”

To go back to James, he’s talked about the packaging for Atomic Habits a few times publicly. He mentions that he has a chapter in the book about “deliberate practice,” which could have actually been the package of the overall book. But he determined that packaging was less compelling/accessible to the largest possible audience than habits.

With a book, the incentive (especially from traditional publishers) is to package your book in the most widely accessible way to maximize your TAM (Total Addressable Market). But the result of packaging done poorly is a title that is so watered down that you can’t reasonably grasp who the book is for or what the book is about.

This is the sticking point I’m having right now. The book I’m proposing is a practical guide to building trust. I want to take the idea of earning trust out of the soft, theoretical realm and make it extremely concrete. Tiny behavior and communication changes that are proven to earn trust over time.

Trust is a fundamental part of the human experience, and I will argue that it’s a critical, unspoken part of every interaction. But “trust” isn’t super sexy. My packaging brain encourages me to Trojan horse trust from the standpoint of influence or attention…but I don’t really want to do that.

In any case, I began writing the sample material this week and am having a blast. We have a target completion date for the proposal of July 1.

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