← Creator Science with Jay Clouse
Creator Science with Jay Clouse
#257: How to Build a Creator-First Business (That Actually Lasts) | The Strategy Hour Podcast
00:45:49
My interview with Abagail Pumphrey
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- [00:14]
Jay Clouse
Hey. Last week I was a guest on the Strategy Hour podcast with Abigail Pumphrey. Now, Abigail is the founder and CEO of the Boss Project, an online education company. And Abigail is just a delightful person. I met her probably about a year ago. I was at an event and Teachable hosted a dinner and I was there. Abigail was there, Jack Appleby was there. It was a really fun time. I ate a lot of seafood. It was delicious. And Abigail and I connected and it was kind of the type of thing where it's like, I'm surprised we haven't met each other before and I feel like we are going to be friends. We've been trying to get a podcast together for a while, but, you know, we had a baby. I was on paternity leave. It was just bad timing and I was doing a lot of no guesting. But I kind of wish I would have done it earlier because Abigail asked excellent questions. We explored some territory that we haven't talked about on the show before. We covered a little bit about my origin story, my current beliefs about consistency and generating influence, how to create real value online, and treating newsletters as a product. We covered a lot of really good ground here. That's new. And so I asked Abigail if I could share this episode here on the feed. I think you're gonna enjoy it. Like I said, it's new territory that we haven't explored on the show. And if you do enjoy it, then go to the show Notes. Subscribe to the Strategy Hour, which has been recognized by Inc And Forbes as one of the best podcasts for entrepreneurs. I certainly had a good time. I'm subscribed to the show. I hope you check it out as well. And we'll get to that right after a quick break for our sponsors.
- [01:43]
Abigail Pumphrey
Being a creator first, business sounds great in theory, but it can be slow to grow. Today I'm talking with Jay Clouse, who's been there, built that, and now runs one of the most respected businesses in the creator economy. But it didn't happen overnight. In today's episode, we talk about creating content, building an audience instead of attracting a crowd, and how to create sustainability in an evolving industry. Hey, Jay, welcome to the show.
- [02:13]
Jay Clouse
Hey, Abigail, thanks for having me. Can't believe 900 plus episodes of this show.
- [02:19]
Abigail Pumphrey
I know, it's really, really wild and I'm just glad we finally got you on here. I've been hearing good things about you for a number of years now and so I'm glad you are finally on the show and I'm excited to Talk about your past and your present and your future, because I know you got a lot going on. Everything from building an incredible newsletter business, a thriving community, you had a baby, you're writing a book, you're kind of a busy guy.
- [02:47]
Jay Clouse
All true things. We should probably also talk about the seafood we had at dinner that time we met at Teachable's Dinner. That was delicious.
- [02:54]
Abigail Pumphrey
It was good.
- [02:54]
Jay Clouse
A lot of ground to cover.
- [02:55]
Abigail Pumphrey
A lot of ground to cover. Well, for those people that are maybe a little bit less familiar with your story. I know before Creator Science, you co founded and sold a ticketing startup, Tixers. You later sold your community Unreal Collective to Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income. And along the way, you've invested in 10 different startups. But talk to me about the vision behind starting Creator Science and how it's led you to where you are today.
- [03:24]
Jay Clouse
I'll be honest, there was no vision. Here's. Here's what happened, and I'm going to tell the story because I think it's happening every day today. Basically, I was working at a job in 2017, and I didn't love it and I wanted to not be doing it anymore. So one day I quit, and I didn't know what I would do next. But I believed in myself that I could figure it out, because I had started a company before we had sold it, and I just thought, I can do this entrepreneur thing. I'll figure it out. And in 2017, my grand aspiration was to be a writer. I was like, I'm gonna write books someday. And so I started reading other writers and I started falling down the rabbit hole of people who were writing email newsletters as, like, their business model. And this is all, like, very known and familiar today, but back in the day, you know, I was just reading the emails from Seth Godin and Brian Harris and Matthew Kimberly, and I thought, wow, they're just writing emails. I can write emails. I'm going to be a writer. And on the back end of this, they are selling things, they're making some money. I want to do that. And so I just started, like, investigating, how does this work? How can I do this? And in so doing, the thing that I became most knowledgeable about was the creating thing. It was just I was investigating what people were doing. I would learn, I would write about it. And because I had, like, a deadline on myself to publish in the first year every day, and then beyond that, every week, the thing that I was writing about was the thing that I was studying, which was being a creator. We didn't really use that term at the time and play that forward eight years, I'm still doing it and I happen to have made it beyond the other side. But I think a lot of people are in the same space even today, where it's like, I want to be a creator. I don't know what to be a creator about, but all I'm doing is spending my time thinking about being a creator. And so now that's what I'm creating about also. And it can work, but I would encourage people to find some other interest to indulge instead.
- [05:22]
Abigail Pumphrey
You know, I think documenting your journey is a lot more impactful than I think people realize, because so many people have these thoughts, feelings, ideas, and they feel like they're so alone in all of it. But when you start talking about that journey out loud, so many people start to feel seen and heard and understood and like someone else is in it with them. So I think you starting that way is probably a huge reason why your community is as thriving as it is today.
- [05:50]
Jay Clouse
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, content is like an attractant. Whatever you create about is. It brings people to you. So I do think I have this line I've said a few times. One of my favorite creators is Dan Runcy and he writes about the business of hip hop. His business is called Trapital. And it'd be easy to look at Dan and say, well, he writes Trapital because he is an expert at the intersection of business and hip hop. But he didn't write Trapital because he was the expert. He became the expert by writing Trapital. You know what I mean? So you kind of have to be forward looking and aspirational and say, what is it that I want to become one of the foremost experts or thought leaders in and start studying that and writing about that. Because if you're willing to invest more time in learning about that thing than most people, compound that over a couple of years, you will very quickly be one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on that subject if you stick with it.
- [06:53]
Abigail Pumphrey
So talk to me about getting the traction though. Like, how were you getting people to pay attention to the newsletter? Writing every day is obviously, obviously a huge part of that. You, you had to have been sharing the fact that you were writing every day. But what did that look like then versus what it looks like now?
- [07:10]
Jay Clouse
I mean, I was, but how was I sharing it? I didn't really have an audience, so I would share on Facebook that I was writing. And here's where you can sign up for My mailchimp list. I was doing a lot of stuff in person in those days. I was organizing a lot of local events on behalf of, like, nonprofits and things that I was involved with mostly in the startup space. So, like, literally anytime I was given a microphone, I was like, by the way, go subscribe to my newslet. Or it was just like, small incremental things like that. Because I really didn't even take social media seriously until two years ago, maybe, you know, because when I was getting started, everything was email. Everything I was reading from people was email. I'm like, this is the way social media rented audience. Social media bad. And there's truth to that viewpoint, there's wisdom in that. But it's not so binary that you shouldn't do something at all, because there are downsides and risks to it. There are also upsides and positives to it. So I was just dogmatically publishing the email for years and years and years, and wherever I could share that I was writing, I would. I think, just for a long time, it was word of mouth. It was people going to my website because they heard something about me. And the website was optimized for getting you to subscribe to the newsletter. And it was just small incremental growth for a very, very long time. Convertkits now Kits Creator network has been big for me. I got onto that fairly early. Still not as early as I could have. I could have been what they call it, like an alpha user before it was even public. I said, well, I'm using upscribe by Sparkloop, which is like a thing that eventually they bought and now they're the same thing. But that's been big for me. But I try to tell people there's never been some inflection point or some big moment where it's like, at this point, because of this decision or because this thing happened, everything changed. No, it's just been dogmatic consistency. Showing up, writing every week, passing what I call the regret test. Basically every piece of content that you publish, the goal of that piece of content is to make somebody more likely to engage with the next thing you publish. That's the regret test. If you do that, good things will happen over a long enough period of time. And that's just all I focus on, day after day, week after week.
- [09:28]
Abigail Pumphrey
Yeah, you're definitely one of the most consistent entrepreneurs I've seen out there. I think a lot of people will go hard, go fast, do a lot up front, and then like, completely burn themselves out, go into hiding for A few years and then, like, reemerge and attempt to reclaim their territory. But you're just consistent. You're always there day in, day out. And like, it doesn't. It's not always flashy. It's not always, like this big production. It can be. I've definitely seen you do some pretty awesome production, don't get me wrong. But it can also be as casual as you pushing your daughter in a stroller. And. But to that end, like, some of it is this, like, produced YouTube version that has this polished look, and some of it is you walking around your neighborhood with headphones. And do you feel like one or the other has done a better job at connecting people to you, or do you think it's the mix of both, or is it more about consistency rather than quality?
- [10:31]
Jay Clouse
Well, the one thing I believe to be true very, very deeply is that you don't earn influence through attention. You earn it through trust. And so I don't really care about being flashy. The model of, like, getting huge spikes of attention, this is mostly like a recent phenomenon. And it's pretty much strictly social media, where you have algorithms that can magically bring people to you, which is like a big, exciting thing. But then what? Let's say you have something goes viral and a lot of people come to you. Okay, and what do we do with that? Well, I think the assumption is, well, now that they're following me, they'll get more of my content. Okay, and then what? And it's like, hopefully they spend enough time with me that I do develop some sort of relationship and trust. And when I have something that can serve them, they say, okay, I'll give that a shot. Well, increasingly, I don't think that reality is true. What I'm seeing on social media is that the outcomes are getting more extreme in both directions. You're going to go really big or you're going to get almost nothing. The times of your follower count being correlated to some sort of baseline reach just seem to be going away with for you feeds. So if the thought is I'm going to go viral so that I get a lot of people following me so that my baseline reach increases, I just don't think that's true anymore. And so for me, I ask myself frequently, like, what if I couldn't reach anybody new? What if I didn't have to do social media? What if I had enough people who are already invested enough in me and believe in me and trust me enough, or are willing to at least keep tuning in long enough that I can develop that trust and not worry about reaching new people. I think if you ask yourself that question, it changes the way you would approach your content. And so I try to come from that lens more and more because I do think now I'm in a privileged position of I probably reach enough people that as long as I continue to be helpful to the people who are paying attention, the business will persist. And that's a nice place to be. But also, I just think we're seeing there's a difference between having an audience and, and attracting a crowd. And I think social media encourages you to attract a crowd, but you don't really have a relationship with a crowd. You know, think about if you go to Vegas, you're on the strip and you see like a street performer and you stop and you watch. Are you going to go subscribe to that person's newsletter? Are you going to throw in when they pass the hat around? I don't know. You've probably had like 60 seconds of experience with that person. I'm just trying to build deeper relationships and care less about the overall reach of my content.
- [13:24]
Abigail Pumphrey
I think that's so interesting that with such a focus on the content itself, but less worry on where it goes. I think in some ways the lack of pressure probably makes for better content. But what keeps you motivated to keep showing up consistently? Because I think a lot of people, they get that high from the reach, from the validation of people liking and commenting and engaging. But if that's not the goal for you, what keeps you motivated?
- [13:57]
Jay Clouse
Well, a high doesn't pay the bills. Like a high isn't going to send my daughter to college. For me, the business pays for our lifestyle. It pays for everything we experience. So the motivation is, I'm a dad now and I've got to provide. My wife and I are both full time employees, so it's important that I keep showing up. And as an entrepreneur, I know the only way to capture value into the business is to create value for people outside the business. So the boring answer to your question is the business is a job. It's a job that I've created. It's a job that I've chosen. But the business is a job and showing up as part of it.
- [14:38]
Abigail Pumphrey
No, I, I don't disagree. I, I think consistency is such a huge important factor. And very similar what you described like that first year, probably even two, I was publishing five days a week as well. And that frequency has gone down over time and in some ways changed and morphed. Like I used to do way more writing, and now I do way more podcasts, but I miss writing, and so I'm doing more writing again. But you. Producing content is obviously a way to deliver value. And I think a lot of people don't necessarily think of a newsletter necessarily as a means to an end. I think sometimes they think of it as part of a cog in the wheel. But I think what's unique about your business is the newsletter has seemed like a more foundational piece of it. Like it's the business is the newsletter. I don't know if that's necessarily still true for you with the membership and all of those things, but can you speak to that a little bit?
- [15:39]
Jay Clouse
Well, I think the newsletter is like the most stable part of the business. It really de risks a lot of my activities because we've just seen that your reach on any platform can fluctuate a lot and it has nothing to do with anything. You have no control or influence over that. But your email list is a group of people who have raised their hand and said, I want to hear from you until I no longer decide that I want to hear from you. And it shows up in their inbox chronologically. If they've engaged with it in the past, it's going to go in their primary inbox. So it's just a direct line of communication. And it's. It's a lot easier to get people to go from reading an email to making some sort of purchase or transaction or next step because it's just. It's just closer. And they're in a different head space too. Like when you are primarily reaching people on social media, what you're doing is learning how to interrupt somebody's mindless habit. It's like, it's hard to create and derive real value from showing up in front of people who are essentially in the social media equivalent of being blacked out and getting them to linger on your video long enough to wake up a little bit and say, I like this person. I'm going to go deeper because they have to do that for social media to play a meaningful part in your business, they have to have a good enough experience and then wake up from this blackout and say, I like this creator. I'm going to hit the follow button. Or better, I'm going to go to their profile and watch more of their content. If I want you to spend 15 minutes with me, to do that on Instagram is very challenging. Whereas if you do that in a different medium that has a higher barrier to entry. There's more of an investment for people to say, like, I want to show up and read your emails. I want to watch your videos on YouTube. But even YouTube, that's a much closer comparison to Instagram than email. And on YouTube, you might still interrupt their habit by getting them to click on your video initially. But after 30 seconds, if I'm having a good time, I'm going to keep watching. After a minute, if I'm having a good time, I'm still watching. You can rack up time spent with the consumer a lot faster on YouTube. So email is, I think, of every piece of content that I put out itself as a product. It's free. But a product has to serve a need. Like a product has to be hired to solve a problem. And it's true for your course. It's true for your newsletter. What is somebody hiring your newsletter to do if you don't have an answer to that? If it's not solving a problem or scratching some itch for somebody, then it's not going to persist as part of their life.
- [18:29]
Abigail Pumphrey
Yeah, I think a lot of people assume the reason you grow a list is so that you have a group of emails that when you're ready to sell something to, you can just send sales emails to. And I know your approach is far more how can I reach these people consistently and teach them things and have them get value from that? But how do you articulate that when so many people are used to just like being bombarded with join my list and you'll get this thing and like all of these incentives and lead magnets and all of that. And I know your approach is different than a lot of people. How do you think you've been able to stand out in that way?
- [19:07]
Jay Clouse
I think I just stick with it longer than most people. It's not like my calls to action are all that much more effective than other people. I probably make them more frequently. And I've been doing it for years and it stacks up and it makes a difference and it's unsexy. But, you know, as a sensitive guy who wasn't necessarily like, successful in dating growing up, I have built this mentality that, like, I don't want people who don't want me. So I'm not trying to convince people that they need me when they're just getting started. Like, I'm going to show up as me. And if that resonates with you and you like it, awesome. Here's where to go deeper. But a part of me really fears over promising and under delivering. So I really underplay most things, so that when somebody makes the decision, it's of their own accord. And I feel very confident that I can deliver on whatever expectation that they have. So, yeah, for me, it's just very slow. I want the work to speak for itself. I want people to recommend it. I will tell you that I'm doing certain things, but I fail in a lot of ways at this. I publish a podcast every week. How often do I talk about that podcast on Instagram? Probably one out of every four weeks. I remember or prioritize saying, new podcast episode this week. I should be doing that. I should be promoting my own stuff more and more. Every time I promote my own stuff, I get more action. Whether that's just listening, whether that's subscribing, whether that's purchasing. The more you advocate for yourself, the more that happens. I don't think you have to be, like, over the top and loud. I kind of think of it as your personality. Your content should be like the steady drumbeat, and it's going to be at a slightly unique frequency. But if you just keep beating that drum over and over and over again, eventually the right people are like, I keep hearing this thing over here. I'm going to go explore that. And they find you. But you have to. You have to just do it and do it and do it and do it and get better all the time. But there's no single post that's going to save you. Like, if you do have something that goes super well, amazing. Guess what? Right? Back to work. You've just given yourself the opportunity to do more work. And so I try not to get stressed out about doing the most or putting a bunch of pressure on any one thing that I do. It's just, I'm going to keep doing it. I'm going to try to make the process as sustainable and comfortable as possible.
- [21:51]
Abigail Pumphrey
Yeah, you make it sound so simple. And I think a lot of people read into it. They want to be liked, they want to be respected. They want people to pay attention. And, you know, they're so used to everyone being so loud. The idea of just, like, not trying to convince anyone and just keep doing your own thing, it's not as common as it sounds. I think what you're doing is kind of countercultural in a lot of ways, but amazingly so. I think that's why it's worked, because it feels genuine. You feel like the guy next door, so to speak, and people want to be around you because you're not pressuring them to be there.
- [22:32]
Jay Clouse
At all. The trade off is this is not a fast approach. This will not get you a self sustaining business this year. I tell people expect it to take three years, especially if you're taking my approach, you know, so that's, that's the trade off is it's, it's not going to be fast. And I never tell people to quit their job and go all in because sure, you can compress things to a degree, but you can't, you can't compress everything. Like there's no amount of intensity that for the typical person, without having some stroke of luck or abnormal background, some strange competitive advantage, the typical person can't quit their job, go all in, give it a hundred percent intensity and be like, and now I have a fully sustaining business. Especially if you have obligations like a family, a mortgage, like, it's just tough. So I don't think people, it's not what they want. It's easier to win people over on the promise of this can be life changing, it can be fast and it's going to make a lot of money. And here's my secret for doing it. You can get lucky and you can find monetary success in some forms faster and there's a whole distribution curve. Some people will do it faster than others. But this process I'm describing is basically saying, I want this to be sustainable. What has to be true for it to be sustainable, I can't get burned out. It has to be something I inherently enjoy. And also I'm going to remove financial constraints from this work, financial expectations from this work. When you have financial pressure on your work, you will make decisions that get you the financial outcome which may not be the best decision for the work. It's probably not the most sustainable decision. And so that's why I see a lot of people, even though they seem to have success quickly, they give up quickly. Also because they were doing things that inherently are unsustainable. I think it's increasingly hard to have fast sustainable success in the content world.
- [24:46]
Abigail Pumphrey
Yeah, I think specifically in the content world. I know for me the reason it worked out was the content was like simultaneously happening with me, doing things that I knew I could do on repeat. I started as a marketing agency. I was taking, I was doing web design and branding stuff with local people while I was broadcasting to the World Wide Web about everything else. And they were kind of two businesses that I called the same thing. They weren't, they were, they were not at all the same thing. The content wasn't the thing that was paying me Initially, I'm lucky enough to your point to have that be a bigger part of what I do now, but it's still only a piece of the puzzle. Content isn't paying for every aspect of my business. And I'm sure it's not for you either.
- [25:39]
Jay Clouse
Or it is now.
- [25:40]
Abigail Pumphrey
It is.
- [25:41]
Jay Clouse
Yeah.
- [25:42]
Abigail Pumphrey
Okay.
- [25:42]
Jay Clouse
Yeah. And it has been since 2021. But that was four years to get to that point. And I probably. Four years. Three years. Somewhere between three and four years. And I probably work more than most people would be willing to, especially if you have a family and things, because at the time I was in my 20s, I had, like, nothing else to do. I had very low costs, very low commitments. I could just focus on doing this, and I was able to compress things a little bit. But it's hard, and it's competitive, and it's. People underplay the mental toll that doing this takes in a lot of ways. Like, our physiology as an animal is not evolved to understand scale. Like, the scale of the Internet. We see this with celebrities more than anything else because they have to deal with fame on a level that we can't imagine. But even just like the small modicum of scale that you and I probably experience with our content is something that our grandparents could not fathom, would not have experienced. There was just no way of doing it. And we have to find ways to cope and deal with all this feedback we're getting constantly from these platforms of their content, which is giving us signals about, like, on the one level, safety, giving us signals about status. And all of this is going through the wiring, the evolutionary wiring of, like, am I going to be safe? It's like a crazy. It's a crazy thing. And even when you have accumulated resources, even when the business is like, okay, content's working, products are selling, you have the new part of you that is, like, protection and resource hoarding. Like, how do I keep this? How do I make sure I don't lose it? It's is a trip. It's not for the faint of heart. I actively tried to, like, talk people out of it because you kind of had to tell me, screw you, I'm going to do it anyway. To, like, for me to believe that.
- [27:50]
Abigail Pumphrey
You'Re going to do it anyway. Totally. No, I mean, you're not wrong. The only way I cope is I have to pretend like I'm talking to myself. Like, most of the time when I'm producing content, I'm writing for myself. I'm recording on topics that I'm interested in. Right. Now. And not that I don't want it to benefit others. I do. That's definitely at the forefront of my mind. But if I think about the fact that I'm going to email it to 50 or 60,000 people, like, just makes me incredibly uncomfortable. So I just pretend they don't. I send it to a list. It doesn't matter how many people are on it. I just send it out into the universe.
- [28:33]
Jay Clouse
After one last quick break, we'll get right back to the Strategy Hour with Abigail Pumphrey. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation on the Strategy Hour with Abigail Pumphrey.
- [28:44]
Abigail Pumphrey
I am curious about the monetization part, though, because I think people aren't quite sure what it looks like to be more creator first. There's obviously different ways to do this. Ads, memberships, sponsorships, product sales, and I'm sure, other things. I'm not Even thinking of YouTube views, all of those things. But what was the beginning? Like, when you think back to when you were first monetizing, what was the first thing that felt like, okay, I can kind of rely on this, or I know this is coming.
- [29:19]
Jay Clouse
In the beginning, it was running mastermind programs, which was a concept that I didn't even know. I quit my job and I talked to a friend of mine and he was like, I was telling him my situation. I was going to go out on my own, I was going to do something. I wasn't sure what I'd do. He said, if I was you and I had the network that you had here locally, I would consider facilitating mastermind groups. I said, I don't even know what that means. What does that mean? He said, well, I'm in one. Basically, you get a group of people together who wouldn't know each other otherwise. You kind of like do all the logistics, run the meeting, and you help them learn from each other so that they all come out better on the other side. I said, people would pay for that. He said, yeah, people pay for that. Okay, let's try that. So I did the math and I was basically like, okay, I'm going to assume that this is going to be 12 weeks long because I was working with another coach and his program was 12 weeks. So 12 weeks sounds like the right amount of people or the right amount of time. I think a group makes the most sense when it's five people plus me. And so six of us, five of them members. So we can give them each one hot seat or two hot seats, I should say. And that's 10 weeks. We'll have an intro week and a graduation week. I just kind of like did all the math and figure all this stuff out and basically it was like, okay, here's the price that needs to be true for me to run these groups every 12 weeks and pay my bills. And that's what I did for almost four years. I worked with groups of in total cohorts of 15 to 20 people three times a year for four years. And on the back end of that, after they finished the program, we just had a Slack channel, which is what we're using to communicate during the program. And they stuck around and we had a little bit of a community there. All of this sounds very ordinary today. Like, okay, you're running basically like a cohort based course or you're having masterminds. You're using Zoom and Slack. These were new things. In 2017. People had never used Zoom. I had to teach people how to download Zoom, how to use Zoom, how to use Slack. But I built that community experience in slack. And when 2020 happened, Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income was building an online community using a tool that was still in beta called Circle. He's like, we have access to this new tool. It's not public yet. It's for online communities. We want to use it. You know, Community, can you help us build this out and launch it? 2020? I was like, the sky was falling. We didn't know what's going on. My wife thought she was going to lose her job. I was like, okay, I'm doing these groups, but I feel like I need to collect as much money and take on as many projects as are coming my way. Let me take this on. And so I helped them build their first membership called SPI Pro. We hired a community manager and they said, Community. The launch was a big success. So they said, Community is going to be like the future of this business. Can you run Community here at spi? And I said, well, I'm running these masterminds and I'm trying to do content. I can't do that and work at sbi. They said, what if we buy your community and you stop running the masterminds? You run them inside of SPI Pro, you can still do content on the side. Just come lead our community team. And so that wound down that program and that got me into the world of like, better online community and memberships, because finally we had a tool that was actually built for it. Slack is not built for online communities. So anyway, back to your original question. I was basically doing these small group masterminds and that was what was predominantly paying the bills.
- [32:50]
Abigail Pumphrey
It's always so interesting what people start with because I think there'd be some people that that sounds like an incredible opportunity and others that are intimidated by it. But I do think part of why it worked was because it was kind of new, novel and like up and coming. So if you were to make some predictions right now, like what do you think is coming? What do you think people are just now touching their toes into, that very well may be the future of this industry.
- [33:21]
Jay Clouse
Well, one thing I really believe to be true is that courses are in trouble. I think course businesses are going to take a big hit and rightly so, because information wants to be free. And now we're getting better and better tools for learning at a very low cost like AI ChatGPT. This is an incredible teacher. It's infinitely patient, it's judgment free, it's private, it will meet you exactly where you are. Extremely collaborative. When you make an online course you basically have to think what does the typical student need? Where are they starting from? What are their typical problems? And let me build a curriculum to get them to this outcome. And it does a pretty good job, but it doesn't account for edge cases. There's no interactivity with like a prerecorded, self paced course. Best you can do is comment and hope that you get your question answered by an instructor at some point. Whereas if you're learning this stuff with AI it's just the back and forth is immediate and you can really get to a place of competency much more quickly and it's pulling from a much larger data source. You and I are small language models. AI is a large language model. So I think education businesses, which is the bread and butter of the people that I work with, I think they're in trouble. So what do you do with that? I think we're going to have an increasing interest and hunger for what I call verifiable human experiences. Things that we know were made by, made for, experienced with other people. So community based offerings I think will remain strong if it's a good experience. So ironically I started doing mastermind groups. I think that's actually going to continue to be popular ways of getting small groups of people together and learning from each other. They may all be independently learning from their own large language model for certain problems, but they can share that knowledge. Your ability to get information out of an LLM is dictated by your ability to prompt the LLM and I think that interface is not great. Like you and I can use it. We're smart, we're competent, we're willing to fail and try things and we're aware that it exists. So I think a lot of this will be lagging. Most people still aren't using these tools, not familiar with how to use these tools, let alone how to use them in a way that can educate them in a higher quality way than the courses that have been developed at this point. I think course creators can look at how do I leverage LLMs to teach my methodology and make my ability to teach better than what a self paced course does right now. Yeah, I would expect tools like Teachable and Kajabi because obviously their customers are the ones that are going to struggle with this. I would expect them to create better tooling that allows you to create like an instructor LED interface for learning something. So anyway, that wasn't an answer of like what's coming necessarily as to who, who should adapt. But I think community based experiences are going to continue to increase in value. I think a lot of people will recognize this, try to do it, do it half assed, not do it well. And so that will create like kind of a poisoning of the public trust in these programs. So you're really going to have to stand out in terms of quality. I think virtual and augmented reality hasn't really reached this space yet and it'll be very interesting to see how do I combine community experiences, learning or non learning With AR and VR I think we'll have cohort based courses in virtual classrooms, in virtual settings. That's not really a thing that's happening now because most people don't have a virtual reality headset at home or a way to use it, or really even the software on the back end of virtual reality headsets to do these things. But I think that will be coming increasingly. I think people are more interested in outcomes than education. So as I create new products that are not community experience based, which is mostly my focus, most of my focus is community focused products. But for products that are high leverage, hands off, I'm looking at how do I make this product have more pure utility, make it more plug and play rather than teach you how to do something so you can make your own plug and play resource. And I think that type of thing, anything you can do to save people time will continue to be valuable.
- [38:03]
Abigail Pumphrey
Yeah, I think a lot of what you said is very much happening in real time and I think it can be intimidating. Especially if you've been in this industry for a while. You're like, oh, I Feel like I knew what was happening and now I feel like I have to change or I have to adapt. And that's scary. Especially when you felt like maybe you had great timing in the beginning and now you're feeling like a dinosaur. Maybe I'm just speaking for myself, I'm not sure. But I want to see people successful and I know you do too. And I'm curious if you were to leave them with some advice. Despite everything that's going on in the world and all that's changing, what's going to keep people grounded, what's going to keep people motivated?
- [38:49]
Jay Clouse
Well, the highest returns go to people who are on the front edge of innovation. So you have to ask yourself, do I want the biggest outcomes? If you want the biggest outcomes, then you need to be innovating and leading things and trying things that other people aren't doing. If that's honestly not you, if that seems scary, if you're not willing to fail a bunch doing that, you can try to be a fast follow and say, I'm going to see. I'm going to search for patterns and signals that something is working and it's in the early stages and I'm going to try to identify that and quickly follow on that and make my own version of that. It's a little bit more de risked. It probably has a lower ceiling. And as I said before, I would just make all of my decisions through the lens of how can I make sure I am proceeding in such a way that there will be wins. Even if this is largely a failure, I can look at this and say, here is how this benefited me. Even if it didn't go this way, I'm reducing my downside risk as much as possible. Not burning the boats and going all in. If you're in the early stages and doing things that you enjoy the process of, because I really do think you have to think long term. The only way you win the game is if you're playing the game. And if you quit the game or get knocked out of the game, then you've got no shot. So I really think it's just important to come from the place of how can I set myself up to continue doing this, enjoy doing this and win, even if the broader ruling on whatever I tried was a failure.
- [40:32]
Abigail Pumphrey
Fantastic advice. You're always full of such wisdom. And then every time I have a conversation with you, whether in person or online, I always am left with things to stew on and think about. So thank you for that. I do know that people are going to want to read your newsletter and get connected and learn more from you. So where can they find you?
- [40:50]
Jay Clouse
Well, you obviously like podcasts, so check out the Creator Science podcast. Just search Creator Science in your podcast player or go to creatorscience.com and that's where I write the newsletter. Basically anywhere you'd like to hang out. I'm probably creating content there, so search for my name.
- [41:04]
Abigail Pumphrey
Amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Jay.
- [41:06]
Jay Clouse
Thanks for having me. Abigail.