#285: Personal branding, building trust, and why most creators fail | Influence Anyone

Summary

Podcast Summary: Creator Science #285 – Personal Branding, Building Trust, and Why Most Creators Fail | Influence Anyone

Date: December 9, 2025
Host: Jay Clouse
Guest Host/Interviewer: Howie Chan (from Influence Anyone)
Episode Theme: The science and strategy of building trust and personal branding as a creator, and the most common reasons creators fail to break through.

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Overview

In this candid and deeply practical conversation, Jay Clouse—founder of Creator Science—breaks down the core elements and frameworks underpinning successful content creation in today’s noisy digital world. Interviewed by influence strategist Howie Chan, Jay shares evidence-backed insights into personal branding, the anatomy of trust, metrics that matter, and the real reasons most creators stall and quit. The dialogue weaves together psychology, personal anecdotes, and actionable strategies for creators, leaders, and anyone looking to build sustained influence.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Why Trust is Central for Creators

• Jay: “Trust is what gives you influence. I'm not saying attention isn't important, it's necessary, but it's insufficient.” ([02:40])
• High-trust relationships enable faster movement and greater collaboration—an advantage that’s been crucial since Homo sapiens out-competed other species.
• In the modern creator space, building trust is increasingly challenging as each generation becomes less willing to trust by default.
• Key Insight: You must now prove trustworthiness proactively; people overestimate their own trustworthiness while audiences become more skeptical.

2. The Four Pillars of Trust

• Jay: “There are basically four major traits to a person that contribute to whether we perceive them as trustworthy. That is their competency, their reliability, their level of empathy, and their integrity.” ([20:48]; also mentioned at [03:39])
• Not all four are equally important in every situation; context determines which matter most (e.g., reliability & competency in work versus empathy & integrity in personal interactions).
• Memorable Moment: “Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. You earn it much more slowly than you lose it.” ([22:38])

3. The Hidden Traps Most Creators Fall Into

• Chasing attention (“likes, views, engagement”) without optimizing for trust leads to fleeting influence and low conversions.
• Two problematic creator archetypes:
  • Those obsessed with speed and fast follower growth (often veering into manipulation).
  • Those who only focus on their craft, waiting for the right people to find them.
• Jay: “Most creators fail because they quit and they just don't stick with it long enough. It takes a long time.” ([33:43])

4. Personal Branding: What It Really Means

• Definition: Your brand is the sum of how others experience and perceive you—not what you say about yourself.
• You don’t have to share everything to be “transparent”—choose which parts of yourself to amplify for consistency.
• Jay: “Transparent is a spectrum. There are areas I'm comfortable sharing and areas I'm not… Marketing is choosing what to put forward intentionally.” ([08:21]–[09:22])
• Family and personal constraints can and should shape how you present yourself.

5. The Premise vs. Niche Approach to Standing Out

• Jay: “A good premise has to be compelling, legible, and differentiated.” ([37:57])
• Rather than only niching down, think about how your unique viewpoint (“premise”) on a broad market can become memorable.
• Practical Framework:
  • Legible: Easy to understand.
  • Compelling: Solves a problem people care about.
  • Differentiated: Stands out from similar offerings.

6. Metrics That Matter (and Those That Don’t)

• Only measure metrics that drive behavioral change in your business.
• The key metric: revenue—because it reflects true monetized trust.
• Jay: “I'm not saying attention isn't important—it's necessary, but it's insufficient. Attention is what fuels the engine. But it's trust that becomes conversion and ultimately impacts the bottom line.” ([23:33])

7. Building Trust with Consistency and Reliability

• Example: Publishing his newsletter every Sunday for eight years, never missing a deadline, powerfully signals reliability and competence.
• Early creators often fail because they underestimate how much consistency and time it takes to accumulate trust.

8. Systems for Developing Trust and Audience Relationships

• Every interaction you have either builds or erodes trust.
• Engage directly with your audience to clarify your offer and adjust your premise, product, or pitch.
• If things aren't working, diagnose: Is it that people don't understand (legibility)? Don't care (compelling)? Or choose competitors (differentiation)? ([41:57])

9. Jay’s Personal Journey & Lessons Learned

• Early hesitation to create content was rooted in fear of standing out/ridicule—he would advise his younger self to “start earlier.” ([60:42])
• Trust with high-profile early guests (like Seth Godin and James Clear) built through persistent relationship-building, social proof, and demonstrating reliability.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Trust:
  • “Trust is the currency that precedes the transaction.” — Jay, ([24:52], [62:01 original episode close])
• On the Pitfalls of Influencer Culture:
  • “Why are there the terms nano influencer or micro influencer? Because the term influencer has become worthless… It's more associated with a number of followers, a size of audience, than actual influence.” — Jay, ([19:08])
• On the Speed Trap:
  • "What is missing a lot of times in these contexts of high-speed scale... people excel at persuasion, but a lot of times persuasion veers into manipulation more than influence." — Jay, ([28:36])
• On Market Size for Creators:
  • “A lot of creators don't think big enough about their market, and they choose these niches that have a small total addressable market, which means they have to capture a large amount of that market to make good money. But if you find a way to attack a very large target market and just do it in a unique way... you can capture a much smaller percentage of that market and still have a much larger business.” — Jay, ([36:37])

Timestamps of Important Segments

• The Four Pillars of Trust Framework: [20:48]
• Discussing personal brand and ‘scatter plot’ analogy: [06:08]
• How Jay’s early podcast landed Seth Godin and James Clear: [46:13–50:22]
• Advice for creators who are struggling: [33:43]
• Why most creators fail—on quitting too soon and picking too small a market: [33:43–37:31]
• ‘Premise’ vs. niche and how to attract attention in large markets: [37:57–40:31]
• Jay’s hypothetical approach if starting from scratch in 2026: [54:40–58:53]
• Letter to his younger self—on starting earlier & overcoming fear: [60:21–61:49]

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Practical Takeaways for Creators

• Don’t chase attention for its own sake: Focus on building durable trust through reliability, competency, empathy, and integrity.
• Consistency is more powerful than you realize: Never missing your publishing cadence speaks volumes about your reliability.
• Market selection matters: Aim for a large market with a compelling, legible, differentiated premise.
• Talk to your audience: Direct feedback uncovers whether your offer is misunderstood, uninteresting, or simply less appealing than alternatives.
• Be intentional about your brand: Strategic transparency is powerful—show enough, but only what reinforces your desired image.
• Expect slow, steady growth: Success in the creator economy is exponential, but starts out looking linear and painfully slow; don’t quit prematurely.

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Final Words

“How you show up—competent, reliable, empathetic, and with integrity—determines whether audiences trust you enough to support your work. In the end, trust is the currency that precedes the transaction.” — Jay Clouse ([24:52], [62:01])

If you want to learn more from Jay and other evidence-driven creators, explore the Creator Science Lab community or tune into more interviews via his podcast.

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For further resources:

• Creator Science podcast: jclouse.com
• Influence Anyone podcast: howiechan.com
• Creator Science Lab community: creatorscience.com/lab

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This summary retains the tone, insights, and advice offered by Jay Clouse and Howie Chan. It’s perfect for creators, entrepreneurs, and anyone building influence, offering a roadmap to sustainable, trust-driven growth.

Transcript

[A]

Hello my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Before I went on my current podcast guesting hiatus, I sat down with a man named Howie Chan. I met Howie in person earlier this year at Matt McGarry's newsletter Marketing Summit. I thought he was fun, friends, friendly, thoughtful, just like he is on his podcast Influence Anyone? This podcast is all about applied influence psychology. Each episode, Howie sits down with experts and practitioners to uncover the hidden psychology that helps you influence yourself by mastering your habits, mindset and decisions. And get buy in from others, whether that's your team, clients or audiences. In this episode with Howie, we talk about my recent topic of studying Trust. We break down what I'm learning about how trust works, what it looks like to build a trust first creator business, and why some creators frankly don't care about that. We also talk about personal branding. Howie dug up this cringe TedX video I did in 2012 and then we talk about what I would do if I was starting over in 2026. I thought how he did a great job pulling this together, so I wanted to share it with you here on the feed. If you enjoy it, you can find a link to subscribe to Influence Anyone in the Show Notes. We'll get to that full episode right after this.

Have you ever had one of those conversations that feels like it completely changes your perspective, maybe even your whole life trajectory? Those are the types of interactions you'll have in the lab. Our membership for creators like you, I know you are a good fit for the lab just because you listen to this show. If you're drawn to the people and the ideas we showcase here, many of whom are members of the Lab. By the way, you would love the conversations we have inside the community, inside the lab. We all share the results of the experiments we're running, the good and the bad. By learning from the successes and failures of others, you will grow much faster. I'm running my own experiment for new members of the lab. I'm offering $200 off your first year using the promo code POD. $200 is 29% off the basic tier, by the way, so take me up on this. That's $200 off using promo code podpod at checkout. Just go to creatorscience.com lab there's also a link in the show notes Trust is what gives you influence. I'm not saying attention isn't important, it's necessary, but it's insufficient.

[B]

Are there systems to build trust?

[A]

There are. And the interesting thing is today on.

[B]

The Influence Anyone Podcast, I'm joined by Jay Clouse. He's the founder of Creator Science. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a community, and he's helped creators like Pat Flynn and Ali Abdaal build their communities as well. He's taught over 10,000 students how to be creators. But really, the key skill and expertise that Jay has is about building trust. Think about this. If you're a leader, if you're a business owner, it really doesn't matter. You are trying to have people who trust you trust in your idea, trust in your startup, trust in your vision. And there is no better teacher than Jay. So if you want to have trust be the engine of your influence, stay tuned. I'm Howie Chan. I'm an influence strategist and founder of the behavioring company let's get into it.

[A]

There are basically four major traits to a person that contribute to whether we perceive them as trustworthy. Their competency, their reliability, their level of empathy.

[B]

And you've helped a lot of creators, Jay, what typically are the trap? What do they do wrong?

[A]

I think most creators fail because they.

[B]

Jay, I want to start off with this. Let's hope you can hear this.

[A]

What do you like? I want you to think about that for a moment. A lot of you are thinking about things that you identify yourself as, things that you want to be. Some of you may be thinking about things that you think other people think you are like. My goal is to have those two views be one, and that is called your personal brand.

[B]

Jay, it was almost 12 years ago now.

[A]

Yeah, a long time ago. Early gosh, that video is hard for me to watch now. And I don't talk about it because I don't want people to find it.

Good on you for finding that. Yeah, 12 years ago, talking about personal branding, I was in college.

[B]

I know. So if you could go back to that time, maybe whisper to Jay before you got on stage, are there things that you would tell him about personal brand that you've changed your views on over the years?

[A]

Not really. I don't think I had any wrong assumptions. I just didn't have as much information at the time. But I think I was pretty prescient in a way. And I've been thinking about this for a long time. Obviously, I think what I would tell younger Jay is to push harder and move faster into doing this because that was 2011. I want to say 2011 or 2012, and I started writing a newsletter in 2017, but I really didn't take social media seriously until 2020. So imagine if 2011, 2012, Jay was like, maybe I should start publishing content on the Internet to build my personal brand.

[B]

Yeah, no, absolutely. It's always, you know, the best time to build your brand of 20 years ago, right. Earlier always. But when you strip away that word brand, what is it about putting out content? What is it about what we humans tend to be influenced by, what moves people?

[A]

I think it's emotion, I think it's connection. When I think about brand. And a geek out on this with a friend of mine who is, he's running a creative agency that's very successful. It's called Studio Freight. We talk about brand a lot because to him a brand is not only the promise that you make, it's people's experience of you. This is where my belief comes in, is basically your brand. You can try to direct it and tell people what your brand is, but ultimately your brand lives in the minds of other people. You can almost imagine like a scatter plot where people have positive or negative experiences with you over time or like some degree of positivity or negativity in interacting with you in any format, online, offline, in your brand. It's kind of like a best fit line of that scatter plot of both the sentiment they have in you, but I don't know how to visualize this, but also what their expectations of you are and how you meet or exceed or fail or change those expectations. So really we connect with people who we feel.

Seen by.

Related to. We could get into a whole thing about Renee Gerard and mimetic desire here. But I think, I think people connect and that's what attracts attention. Ultimately, I think trust is what gives you influence.

And that all comes from people feeling connected to you.

[B]

When you think about brand, I work in the area as well. A large part of working with companies about brand is.

Not showing everything because everything can be too much. Let's say you're building a product, you're shipping a product. You want to have a certain thing that's at the forefront. So a hierarchy. What is that most important thing you want people to know? And so that becomes almost the tip of the spear that can attract the right people. From a person perspective, do you feel like that still applies? Do we want to highlight a certain part of ourselves? What do you think about that aspect of personal brand?

[A]

People often look at my content and they think that I'm a very transparent person and I'm an honest person.

Transparent is a spectrum. And so there's a place among that spectrum and beyond where I feel comfortable being transparent and There are areas earlier on that spectrum where I'm not. I'm actually increasingly a private person, especially in my family life.

So I do think both for the purposes of practicality, people have a hard time holding.

Any notion of you in their mind, but they're probably going to limit it to, like, one thing. So as constraining and upsetting as that is to some people, it also gives you the opportunity to focus and say, because this is the idea we want people to have of us, we will be transparent with the aspects that reinforce that idea. And.

Marketing is choosing what to put forward intentionally. And hopefully you have systems in place that you don't unintentionally counteract that idea either. But, yeah, I think everybody is going to make choices all the time of what parts of me in my life and my ideas and my priorities and my interests do I expose publicly to reinforce or sometimes, I guess, contradict my brand?

[B]

No, I agree. I agree with that. I feel like that takes almost like a load off people's shoulders because I think, like, when people think about, oh, transparency, they're like, oh, I need to share everything about myself. You don't have to and you shouldn't. Again, like you said, who can really understand everything about you? And they shouldn't be doing it anyway. Except fishing photos on LinkedIn, by the way. So that's a good ad.

[A]

Well, listen, Connor and I, we've been thinking about the YouTube channel, and.

Family has become a big, important part of my life. It's a major constraint. It colors a lot of the decisions that I make, and it also limits me in some ways that I can or can't compete. And so if I am unable to compete with other people in my space because of my family priorities, we just made the decision that we're going to be honest with that and share that and make that part of the brand.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. It's almost like you are transparent in that aperture that you decide whatever the aperture might be and then you go full transparent in that aperture of whatever that might be. Yeah. Jay, you talk about trust a lot, and I think trust is so important. When you peel back the layers of what it takes to get trust, how do you think about that? What is the process? How do you think about it? Are there systems to build trust?

[A]

Yeah, there are. And the interesting thing is I've been researching this a lot for reasons that you may be aware of and human beings. Let's go back to the beginning. As crazy as it sounds, Homo sapiens existed on this planet about 300,000 years ago. And we were not really the superior version of the Homo species. There were Neanderthals, there were other kind of forms of human like animals. And especially compared to Neanderthals, Homo sapiens were not as muscular. They were taller and lankier, they had smaller brains. Homo sapiens succeeded because of their ability to communicate and collaborate. They are able to work together on a wide range of tasks, even outside of their immediate family. And that is what separates human beings as a species. And so play that forward literally 300,000 years. What human beings have found is that trusting one another even outside of their family species is typically an efficient and effective strategy because it reduces our need for oversight, surveillance. We move faster and accomplish more. We out competed other species. And as we move into like modern times, high trust societies outcompeted outdeveloped low trust societies. So today's developed countries were areas where high trust societies developed and were able to thrive. So as a result, human beings.

Have a default trust state. We are in this place that Daniel Kahneman, in thinking fast and slow would say, a lot of times our decisions to trust or not are system one decisions. And we make trust decisions for better or for worse on things like familiarity. Am I familiar with you? Do you even look familiar to somebody else that I trust? And sometimes these emotional, subconscious, automatic decisions were not the right decisions. System 2 thinking is this slower, more effortful, thoughtful decision making. And what has happened in modern society because of the amount of media we're consuming, the number of marketing and promotional messages we see, the increasing number of scams we are faced with or familiar with, we are jolted into system two thinking more than we have ever been, which means that we are making fewer automatic trust decisions. And if you look at the cohort data of people born every 10 years, every new cohort of human beings is less trusting than the last. So it's a, it's an interesting difficult time where historically we haven't had to think a whole lot about how do we present ourselves as trustworthy. And most people believe they are trustworthy. In fact, the data that I have found shows that three out of every four people believe they are more trustworthy than average, which mathematically doesn't make sense. And only one third of people agree with the statement most people can be trusted. So we have this giant blind spot where we believe we are more trustworthy than we are and people are increasingly less automatically trustful. So I think it's important that we spend more time thinking about how do I present and prove that I Am trustworthy. I'll pause there.

[B]

Well, I think that makes sense. A ton of sense. It's crazy too, when you think about trust, though. Like in today's age of AI, we talk about Chat GPT and Claude and things like that. There seems to be an innate sense of trust in these AI. So LLM generators. I don't know if you've seen this. I think there was a recent news article about a teenager trusting the chatgpt prompt so much that it actually aided his suicide. Have you seen that?

[A]

It's. I've seen a ton of stories in and around this, yes. Where. Because again, choosing to trust is an easier path when you aren't being rigorous in your thinking or you're not being vigilant. And should I trust this person? We'll stay in that state of historically, biologically, we have found that typically trust by default is an effective, efficient path forward. And we've had this just with Internet search results and memes in the past. There's that funny meme of the quote, don't trust everything you read on the Internet by Abraham Lincoln.

But, like, a lot of people will see something and if it's formatted in a way that looks like this is from a news source. All these theme pages on Instagram right now, they're posting these images that make it look like, oh, this is breaking news. And they're not citing any data at all in a lot of cases. They're just saying something that they know people want to see. Data shows.

Humans who watch football are smarter than average. You know, they'll like, just say something absurd like that with no citation at all. And the people who like football are just sharing this around, saying, look, I'm a genius and it's good engagement. So they keep doing it. So anyway, we are predisposed to this and it's only when we have been burned or there is something else that is cueing our reasons to need to question. We feel some sort of inherent risk. Then we'll do a little bit more work as I'm working on this book project. Chat GPT is a fantastic research partner. I'll ask questions, it'll give me research, and I'll say, can you give me the citation for where you found that? And then I'll go verify it and find that it incorrectly read a graph or it made this up. And so to me, I'm like, okay, inherent risk. Here I am seeing that there is risk that I reference something that is not real, which puts me into system two thinking. And I Take the extra time to verify and discern this. But if you haven't had that experience, and it's largely been a positive, rewarding experience to believe that the things you were told by AI, you will continue to trust it by default.

[B]

When we look at the context in which a business owner, someone who maybe wants to build a personal brand, maybe someone who started a marketplace in their university and wanted to build their personal brand much like you years ago, there seems to be traps in which people might fall into to go after engagement or to go after likes and views and neglect the idea of trust. How can someone step out into that world and make the right choices? What are the traps to avoid? What should they be doing?

[A]

Jay well, you certainly don't want to do things that burn trust. Like you can. You can earn attention in a way that is net neutral or net positive. You can also do it in ways that are net negative. But you want to I do think that trust is a greater, more impactful goal than attention alone. You know, we've seen this in the content space, the influencer space, for a long time. Why are there the terms nano influencer or micro influencer? It's because the term influencer has become worthless. It's more associated with.

A number of followers, a size of audience, than actual influence. So the term nano influencer means, yeah, this person has a small audience, but they're actually able to influence behavior. That's what people want. And you don't have to be a content creator to want to be influential. I think everybody would want to feel more influential on the people and decisions made around them in their day to day lives. And that does not come from just having somebody's attention. Speaking louder in the meeting does not mean that you're now more influential. You might have my attention, but it doesn't mean that I'm going to take your word or listen to you or seek out your opinion in the future.

[B]

Hey, quick break here. What J is about to share is the real anatomy of trust. It's the four signals every human brain is scanning for before they decide if you're credible, if they should listen to you or if they should buy from you. This next part is everything. But before we dive in, if you're serious about influence, I have something for you. It's a free seven day email course called the Behavioring Blueprint. I share six human truths, five levers of behavior, and over 40 proven methods to shift perception and drive action. And at the end of seven days, you even get a beautifully distilled Cheat sheet that you can download and you can use for any influence play that you want. Grab it [e-mail] behavioring or click on the link in the show notes. Okay, now back to Jay. He's about to drop this trust framework that you want to remember.

[A]

So there's been some seminal research on this that that has been proven and reproven time and time again that there are basically four major traits to a person that contribute to whether we perceive them as trustworthy. That is their competency, their reliability, their level of empathy, and their integrity. Now, not all four of those things need to be present in every situation. If I were asking you to babysit my daughter, I would care about more of those things or a certain combination of those things more than if you were editing my podcast and I just needed you to hit a deadline and be good at your job. I might care about the more competency based aspects of your character more than I care about your empathy or integrity if you're consistently delivering what I need in that situation. But broadly, those four ingredients matter the most in different combinations. Sometimes all of them, sometimes a couple of them. And so you need to be thinking in this context, what would make somebody trust me at work? It's probably more closely related to competency and reliability. And so you need to say, is my behavior forming the belief and confidence that I am somebody who is competent and reliable? If you're missing deadlines, if you're constantly late to meetings, if you blame other people, if your work is subpar, all of these things degrade people's expectation of your competence and lowers their trust in you. It's really small moments where these things stack up or erode. And the phrase that has become common and popular for good reason is trust is earned and drops and lost in buckets. You earn it much more slowly than you lose it. So a lot of people, they operate in ways that are kind of loose and they don't recognize that the speed of erosion of the trust people have in you is much faster than your ability to regain it.

[B]

Yeah, it's a shoots and ladders of trust. Hard to climb, easy to come down. You just slide all the way down. Yeah. Well, it's also interesting as you talk about using.

Influencers and in this nano and micro. And metrics, how do you look at your metrics, Jay? So as part of your funnel, you look at discovery, right? You look at deeper content, building trust. You look at your community in person.

[A]

How.

[B]

How do you look at that and look at metrics? What do you measure nowadays what's going through your head?

[A]

I measure a ton of stuff. I measure too many things, honestly, because I have come around to the belief that if the measure doesn't impact your behavior, it's not really worth the time to measure it. Exactly. You should only measure the things that impact your behavior. So for me, what I look at most is bottom of the funnel, end of the customer journey. How is revenue? And then if revenue is not trending in the direction that I want, what's upstream of revenue? It's conversion. Okay. Is conversion slipping? What's upstream of conversion? It's traffic. If conversion isn't slipping, then traffic must be slipping. So there is this continuum of. I'm not saying attention isn't important. It's necessary, but it's insufficient. Attention is what kind of fuels the engine. But it's trust that becomes conversion and ultimately impacts the bottom line. So I'm looking at revenue, I'm looking at conversion, I'm looking at traffic and figuring out what's failing if revenue is trending in the wrong direction.

[B]

Yeah. So it's almost the ultimate metric is revenue, because then you're monetizing trust. Basically, trust becomes what people pay you for.

[A]

Right.

[B]

They trust you, and so they're willing to open their wallet and pay you.

[A]

I would say trust is the currency that precedes the transaction.

[B]

So everything you're doing beforehand seeks to build that level of trust. What are some systems that you have in place, Jay, to get people down and become more and more trusting of you?

[A]

Well, I think it really is people's interactions going back to the beginning of the conversation. Every interaction somebody has with me is going to serve to reinforce, deepen, or degrade trust. And so in my interactions with people, both one to one, or through content, am I signaling that I'm competent? Am I signaling that I'm reliable? Am I signaling that I have high integrity? Am I signaling that I am empathetic and care about your interests? If I'm not signaling those things, then I'm going to erode the trust in the people who once believed that was true or had a blank slate. So things that have always been important to me that I think have intuitively and naturally built trust, that I didn't realize deadlines. Simply the act of saying, I have a newsletter that I send every Sunday and not missing that deadline for eight years, that signals a level of reliability and competency and even empathy, I would say. And I didn't. We've always heard, like, consistency is important, but I didn't realize, oh, this is actually probably a core lever driving people's experience of me that is positive. All this kind of happened because as the business has grown, I've just been like, wow, things are working. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. And I had a member of the lab, my membership community, he reached out and he's like, I have copied all of your systems. Literally all. My sales page is inspired by you. I'm doing all the things that you're doing and people aren't purchasing my membership. What am I doing wrong? And I thought about it and I was like, well, this is all brand new to you. You've been creating for fewer years than I have. I just think I have more trust with my audience because there's more history here. He said, okay, well, how do you build that? How did you build this trust? And I was like, that's a great question. And I don't know and I'll get back to you. And so that's what I've been studying.

[B]

It's so interesting, right, Because I feel like when you optimize for trust, there must be something that you're giving up, or maybe there aren't, but I feel like there's something that you're giving up because I feel like, all right, if you look at what's going on, whether it's on LinkedIn or the whole influencer creator world, there's always this. There's this group. I feel like not looking at, like, real data, just looking at what I've experienced. There's this group where it's like, speed. It's all about speed.

[A]

Right.

[B]

We're going to get you to whatever, a hundred thousand, two hundred, a million followers, and you're going to live the dream of a creator and influencer. That's that lane of people. And then there's another lane of people who says, I don't really care about all this stuff. I just care about my art, my craft. I'm going to do great work and the right people will come find me and buy from me. It's almost these two groups of people. But when you think about optimizing for trust, does it naturally lend itself to one path versus the other path, or does it not matter, you think?

[A]

I think it's possible in both circumstances. I think it's probably a little bit more difficult in a high speed results only context.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because.

What is missing a lot of times in these contexts of like, high speed scale as quickly as possible, a lot of people who go down that path and are really good at it. Excel at things like persuasion. And I think a lot of times persuasion veers into manipulation more than it comes from a place of influence. So my perspective is the most durable form of influence is a power with dynamic where you are basically granting me power over your behavior. I influence you because you trust me. And I think there are a lot of well tested, proven methods for creating transactions that are much closer to manipulation and power over. And that works once it's very difficult to build a long term relationship, have long term trust and influence with those people because they feel off, if not totally burned. They get to the other side of the transaction. They realize I don't think my interests were actually honored here. And that's the empathy bit of earning trust. I might have had enough trust to make the purchase ahead of time. But if I feel that I think your agenda was not in alignment with my agenda, at the end of the day, I'm probably not coming back. I might not be a promoter, I might not be a fan. I certainly don't trust you. And that's okay as long as you continue getting first time purchases filling the top of the funnel. And that's what a lot of businesses do. A lot of businesses optimize.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

If it's a one time purchase, if there's not a recurring nature to the relationship, it kind of doesn't matter to them. And they'll look at refund requests or less than five star reviews as like cost of doing business. And they'll say, well, the revenue we're driving outweighs this cost. And that's a totally legitimate, proven model that has worked where you say we think we're going to give. And by the way, those people aren't necessarily evil, but they are saying that we are playing the game of business through which the scoreboard is revenue, profitability. That's what we're going to drive at all costs and there's going to be some casualties. But if on the whole we have a net positive experience with our customers, we can just keep growing and everybody wins.

I think some, I think creators especially are predisposed. There's a class of creators who are predisposed to not like that model because we have a hard time letting anybody down because our business is so attached to our name, our likeness, our Persona, that any negative interaction from our audience or our customers feels like a failure. So I think there's actually, there's a little bit of resilience that needs to be built in creators to go the Other way to say you can't avoid all negative experiences. Sometimes people misinterpret what you're promising and it wasn't a good fit and they have a negative experience. And it wasn't that you were on the whole operating from a place of deception where you don't deserve trust. This just wasn't a fit. So I think you're right that there is a polarity and people certainly operate at the polls. People also operate in between.

[B]

Yeah. I think what you're saying, Jay, is there's no right or wrong. It's your strategy to pick whatever fits your needs the best. I do think what you said about. I think intent is important when I interviewed Robert Cialdini. Right. The premier godfather of influence. When you trick people with persuasion and it's not real, people will always remember who tricked them. They might not know the trick, the thing that you did to them, but they will always remember the person, the company that did that. And I think in today's world that's so high risk because every one of us is a media company. I mean, we can go and talk about that experience and it can go everywhere. So it would probably impact your first time customers are filling the funnel anyway.

[A]

I agree. It's never been easier for somebody who had a negative experience to poison the well of people who haven't had an experience at all yet. It is risky, but I think the more you aspire to have long term relationships with your customers and your audience, the more trust is important as a fundamental lever and guiding force for your decisions.

[B]

Yeah, you've helped a lot of creators, Jay. What typically are the traps or what goes wrong? What do they typically do wrong as they go about building an audience, trying to get trust, conversions, monetizing. What are top things that you feel like they get wrong?

[A]

I think most creators fail because they quit and they just don't stick with it long enough. It takes a long time. And of course everything follows standard distribution curve. And the people that we look to as models and compare our experience to tend to be people on the far end of the successful side of the distribution curve. So we think we should be able to quit our jobs and make a living through content in a year or some number of months. And that's just not my experience and it's not what I see from most long term creators. I think creator businesses follow the Lindy effect. If you're familiar with that, the longer you are in business, the longer you're likely to stay in business. And so a lot of people they quit within the first three years. And that's a really seminal time to find a sustainable way of operating. And if you do that, typically you'll get to, okay, I'm starting to replace my income that I had at my job, and it's up from there. The interesting thing is, if you look at income in the first few years, it feels linear and slow.

But also if you look at an exponential growth chart and you zoom in to the beginning of that chart, it looks linear and slow. It doesn't mean that it's going to be a linear path forever. But a lot of people, they look backwards to project forwards, and they think, this is just the way it's going to be. This, this isn't going to work.

[B]

Right.

[A]

When I got started, I had no idea how I would really make money doing this, because the first thing I was doing when I got started was selling these cohort programs for 15 to 20 people at a time. It was 400 a person, and I was netting like 40 grand a year, which at the time was enough for me to pay my rent, pay my bills. And it's like, okay, I have freedom. I am running a life on my own terms, but I'm not making a ton of money. And my model at that time was just people paying for this program. And I ran three programs a year, and it was hard to fill that. So to double my income, I would have to double the number of times I was running this, which wouldn't really work unless I was running them concurrently or double the people in the program. And I didn't have leads for that. So I was like, I have no idea how this will ever make real money. And I stuck with it. And eventually the model changed and I found new ways to earn revenue. And now it looks more like a exponential growth chart. But you have to have a little bit of faith and you have to have stick to it. Iveness. And most people just. They just quit too early. The other thing that I think both contributes to quitting too early and just overall failure is that a lot of creators don't think big enough about their market, and they choose these niches that have a small total addressable market, which means they have to capture a large amount of that market to make good money. But if you find a way to attack a very large target market and just do it in a unique way, where you find a segment of that market that is underserved because of their perspective, because of their constraints, because of their values, you can capture a much smaller percentage of that market and still have a much larger business. So that's what I would be thinking about a lot. If I were to start today or do something new or try to expand, I would be thinking about how big can this be? Because you can build a much bigger business if you just have a small percentage of a large target market.

[B]

That's really interesting in terms of this, the constant debate of tanish or not to niche.

[A]

Right?

[B]

To go small or not to go small. So if you were to attack a large market, what are some tactics or things people could do to attract and have people remember you? Because a large market also means a large number of competitors. A lot of people are serving the market. What are some things that people can do?

[A]

Jay So I think about this in terms of crafting a premise rather than a niche. So a good premise. Let's talk about the word premise. If someone recommends a book or a movie or a television show to you that you've never heard of, you'll say, oh, I never heard of that. What's it about? People's answer to what's it about? Will make you interested in that thing or not interested in that thing. And I think people should be able to talk about creator businesses and say, what's that about? What's he about? And answer that in a compelling way. And to do that from a premise perspective, you need three ingredients. You need to have a compelling perspective. It needs to be legible and differentiated. Let's start with legible, because I think this is the easiest. This means that when you explain what you do, I should get it. I should know what you're saying. So an extremely legible thing to say is I help people lose weight. Okay, awesome. I understand what you do. That also needs to be compelling. So I need to care about it. I need to understand it, and I need to care. So in my world, if I wanted to lose weight and you told me I help people lose lose weight and they don't have to give up ice cream. Awesome. That is both easy to understand and for me, that's very compelling because this is a big thing for me. I love ice cream. The third thing is differentiated. You need to say how this is different than other programs like it, because otherwise these areas here are big weaknesses. If you are legible and compelling but not differentiated, this is super competitive. That's your weakness. You're in a super competitive space. If you're compelling and differentiated but not legible, we just don't understand what you do. We don't get it. If you're differentiated and legible, but not compelling. We don't care. So you need all three of these things to fit in this magical zone in the middle where you are really poised for growth. So in a big competitive market, a large market with lots of competitors, you need to be very clear about what you do. You need to make your offer compelling. People need to want that outcome. And then you need to say, how is this different from the other players in the market? And if you're able to do that, that's a winning formula.

[B]

Jay, what's the premise of the lab?

[A]

Premise of the lab. So you can apply this at the macro level and the micro level. So I'm always looking for. The creator itself should have a premise, and then your products should basically, like, stack within that. It's kind of a fractal. So the top level of creator science is a business that helps creator creators grow, unlike other businesses that help creators grow. We focus on experimentation and rigorous data analysis. So the lab is for creators and we focus on experiments. That's what we're sharing in there. The experiments that we're running that we learn from one another. I hope that's clear. I hope those things are legible. I hope they're compelling and differentiated. That's what we've got so far. But what people should know about this exercise is you're always going to be tweaking. You're always going to be figuring out, how can I explain this in a more clear way? How can I explain this in a more compelling way? How can I position myself to be more differentiated? If you are feeling like I'm not getting leads or whatever, ask yourself why? Is it because your target market doesn't understand what you're offering? Is it that your target market doesn't care what you're offering? Or is your target market choosing competitors? They'll tell you which of these three things you need to polish and iterate on to make a better case.

[B]

What's your best way to figure that out?

[A]

Have conversations, like, do literal interviews with your target audience. Find people. Most content creators are present enough in the places where they publish, where they've become aware and familiar with specific people in their audience, in their target market. And a lot of times for our offers, we might even think about a specific person when we put that offer together and say, I know people like Howie need this. So we make it, we launch it. Howie doesn't buy the thing. I'm thinking to myself, why? I made this for you. So you get on a phone call and you Talk to them and you try to understand their problems. And I think you straight up ask if the thing is in market and say, why has this not been of interest to you? And just see what they say and you will know if they don't understand it or if they don't care or if they say, well, I thought about it, but I ended up going in this direction instead. And that's a competitive issue. People are afraid to talk to their customers. But you should just talk to your customers more frequently and say, hey, no pressure, I'm not going to pitch you on anything. I have a sense. Or I would think you might be familiar with this thing that I do or this thing that I offer. I would love to know your perspective on it and why it hasn't been something that's interesting to you.

[B]

Yeah, I feel like when you talk to, I mean when you really talk to people, you also start to develop this trust with that person because you are developing a relationship as well. So who knows, they might become a customer again in the future once they realize that you have actually done something to change your offer because of your interaction with them.

[A]

Selling things without having a direct one to one conversation is a difficult thing to do. It's magic that creators have learned how to get people to buy things without having a direct conversation. Most sales experiences throughout the world have required a conversation where there are objections and you overcome objections. But creators have figured out, okay, I can actually identify and overcome those objections in the sales page, the sales copy, everything around it so that they don't even need to talk to me. But we shouldn't forget just how magical and difficult it is to get to that state. So what a lot of people find when they do take the time to talk to their audience, their potential customers, is, oh, 50% of the time when I talk to somebody, they end up purchasing. Well, why is that? Probably because they were lacking some important bit of context that pushed them over the edge. A lot of times it's legibility. A lot of times I don't understand.

[B]

I just don't understand what it is.

[A]

Yeah, I don't know why I should care or I don't know if it's for me. And that might be a compelling issue. If it's not compelling, it's because I'm not sure this was made for me. I'm not sure this solves one of my problems. But then there is obviously also just competition where people say, well, I thought about it, but I ended up going over here. Even choosing a status quo is Sometimes a differentiation challenge where they say, I don't, I didn't see how this would be better than doing nothing. But yeah, A lot of times people find that when they actually do the work of having a conversation with leads or prospective buyers, it converts super highly because you did know your audience, you did know this would help them, but you didn't do a good enough job explaining it in a way that fits in the center of this Venn diagram on your sales page or in your email copy.

[B]

Yeah. I think that's why when someone's starting out, it's always better to coach people, have those interactions, develop the solutions through a service rather than outright drop a product, because you really don't understand what's going on if you do that. So it's a much better. I feel like it's a much better process. If you do want to develop a.

[A]

Product in the future, you need to know your customer to make something that they would buy. It's not going to happen by chance. So if you know your customer through delivering a done for you service and then you say, okay, well this isn't scalable and I want to change my model, then you can look at what was the inherent challenge, what are the patterns with people who wanted this service and can I develop an offer that allows them to self serve or be more of a group program so you can scale your time a little bit more?

[B]

Jay, I'm going to pivot a little bit because I'm super curious about this. When you first started your podcast, you did manage to develop trust really quickly because your first guest was Seth Godin. Your second guess was James Clear. What did you do to have that trust built so fast? And they came onto the show. I mean, you had like, I mean, number one, basically. Yeah.

[A]

I think it's interesting because trust looks different in different circumstances. So what did these two people trust me to do? Let's look at this. So in the Seth example, I went through a program of his called the Podcasting Fellowship. And I did that with a previous podcast. So we were already launching a podcast. He puts out this fellowship. I said, let's just join this and see what we can learn and apply it to this thing that we were already planning on launching. That was helpful. And we did finish the program with a podcast ready to go. And at one point we even got ranked in Fortune magazine as like a top business podcast or like top podcasts. As good as an mba, I think they called it. And so I took that link and I replied to one of Seth's emails. He's notorious for actually, like, responding to every email. I don't know how he does it, but I replied to one of his emails and I said, hey, wanna let you know, I was a part of your first cohort of the Podcasting Fellowship. And because of that program, we launched this podcast, which was just mentioned in Fortune magazine as the top podcast as good as an mba. And he responded. He's like, this is awesome. And we're going to put it on the sales page. So they linked to us as a success story of the program on the Podcasting Fellowship sales page for future potential students. Fast forward two years, and my life and interests in business were changing. And I was launching this new podcast for content creators. Even though I wasn't even using that word at the time, I think I was saying creatives and artists. And so I replied to the same email chain and said, hey, I'm launching a new podcast.

[B]

That's two years later.

[A]

Yeah, two years later, launching a new podcast for artists and creatives. I think you'd be a great guest. Would love to chat with you about it. I think actually I had already also interviewed James, so I didn't release these in the order that they were recorded. I think I had already interviewed James, and so I probably mentioned that email that I've interviewed people, including Jason Zook, James Clear, and he responded immediately, and we scheduled time.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

So a big part of my pitch to everybody and Seth at the time was social proof. But we also see that there is reliability and competency in this. I had already proven that I could publish a podcast and it could be good enough that it gets covered in a major news outlet.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And here I am again with James. We had a personal relationship, so I was able to reach out and ask for a favor. And all he really had to trust me to do was value his time. That's an empathy bit. So you gotta leverage your strengths. I think about sequencing a lot as a function of strategy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I think the fact that I actually did two or three interviews before I interviewed either of them for this new show as a practice situation, so that I knew I could show up and deliver a good experience and make a good episode out of it. Because ultimately, if they're going to do what is essentially a favor to me, they at least want to feel like I got something good out of it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so I practiced it. I reached out to James. We recorded reached out to Seth, published those two episodes as the first two episodes of the show, and now this is Social proof. Social proof signals at least competency, but also I would say empathy to say I care about the agendas of my guests, including people like this. And so I'm going to take good care of you as well.

[B]

That's amazing. What's something that you do today for new guests? Is there a system that you put people through in terms of developing a sense of familiarity, trust, so that when you come on, there's a vibe?

[A]

At this point, getting people to say yes is mostly a game of social proof. If I can get an introduction, obviously that's great because then I get the benefit of the trust the person has and their relationship to that person. But most of the time it's a cold email and I'm saying I've talked to guests like this, this and this. It has this many ratings on Apple podcasts. When I was on the HubSpot podcast network, I'd say this is on the HubSpot podcast network. So I was just really trying to show competency, basically, and that works. And now, especially now that we have the YouTube channel, we have the potential to reach far more people than just the audio show. So that gives me a strong lever as well. But I'll be honest with you, as I'm in the book writing process, yeah, I've actually realized recently that I have pulled back. I've actually like lost courage in asking.

[B]

People who, I don't know who are big. One of these posts. Yeah, I saw one of these posts on LinkedIn. You talked about that.

[A]

And it's like really frustrating to me that before I had any show, I reached out to Seth and James and made great episodes. And now I would be almost afraid to ask either of them to do the show. What's that about? It's a deeper respect for their time. I. I am less naive about the value of their time as I become more aware of just how scarce it is for people in their position. But now that I'm doing this book project.

I'm encouraging myself, pushing myself to make myself uncomfortable again and make some of these asks. But I'm also realizing if I get a book deal with a big publisher, that's a big feather in my cap that shows competency. And I feel like that's going to aid in my efforts to approach anybody. Some of them for the show, but I'm going to do a bunch of interviews for the. The book that I'll. Some of them I'll probably record and try to put on the podcast, but they're for the purposes of research, for the book, it's cool that it can double dip in that way, but it will be a lot more compelling to say, hey, this is me, and I have this podcast, but I just signed a book deal with insert publisher name here. And it's on the topic of this. I would love to talk to you about that. I think that's going to be a big addition to my. My arsenal.

[B]

It adds to the authority it adds to. It builds. Right. So back to this idea of, like, building influence over time. All these things occur in the background, and you might not feel like, oh, you're getting more revenue from it, or the metrics that you're measuring is naturally increasing. But these things do build over time and it leads somewhere.

[A]

Yeah, I think it's the most valuable asset that I have. You know, there have been times where I've seen, like, companies in my space get acquired, and I fantasize, boy, wouldn't it be cool if the company just got bought for millions of dollars? Which feels increasingly plausible. And that number just keeps getting bigger in my mind because it's hard for me to place a value on the relationships and trust I've built in this container and the opportunities that it creates for me. So I. I just think the business and the assets I've created are far more valuable to me than anybody else.

And more than anything else, it's the relationships and the trust that I've built with the people who follow my work.

[B]

Jay, knowing what you know now, if you had to start from scratch, let's say all your followers down to zero, everything's sort of gone social proof, all this stuff, what would you do? Would you still do it all together? Like, how would you approach it?

[A]

What do you mean, do it all together?

[B]

You know how you talked a lot about this, which is you're on YouTube, you're on Instagram, you're in podcasting, you're on LinkedIn, you're on so many different platforms. Would you still do a few at a time? What would be your strategy to start from scratch?

[A]

And the assumption is I have zero followers on any platform.

[B]

Yeah, you're starting from scratch.

[A]

I think subject selection is the biggest lever here. And I'm selecting the subject that I want to become world class at. I want to be able to be the number one person associated with an idea for merit, like, the depth of my understanding at some point in the future. And I want that subject to feel like it. It serves a large market. What a lot of people get stuck here is they think, well, I'm not an expert on this. Well, you know what my favorite example this is? Dan Runcy. Dan Runcy has a newsletter called Trapital and it's like the biggest, most well read newsletter at the intersection of business and hip hop. And Dan Runcy is an expert at the intersection of business and hip hop.

Because he put the time into writing the newsletter. It was the action of doing this for years that incentivized him to spend more time analyzing the subject. And over a long enough period of time, if you have more incentive to put the work into learning something than anybody else, it's just a time game. Time is on your side. At some point you are going to be more steeped in knowledge about this thing than anybody else. So you don't have to be an expert to start. You can be a student to start. You want to learn these things and work your way up to it. So topic selection I think is the biggest lever here. And you can think about it in terms of size of the overall market like I'm talking about. You can think about it in terms of the buying power of the market. I'm in the online business space. I think this is a small market in terms of number of people. Creators are a subset of entrepreneurs, which is a small subset of the population. Small number of people, I think it's overserved, but they do have good buying power. So I've been able to build a fairly large business in this small market because of the buying power of the customer. If I were to build a business entirely around trust, which I think is a much larger, more expansive idea that is naturally going to have an impact of my typical customer is going to have less buying power average. But I do still believe there are segments of that market that do have a large buying power where becoming more trusted is very valuable to them. So this is what I would be considering and I would start publishing through a specific medium that I am most interested in building. That skill could be video, writing, audio, or even I guess, imagery. Though I would say imagery skews writing more than anything else. I would prioritize writing unless you have a clear aversion to it for some reason. But email is still strong. Email is the easiest owned distribution to build. And I think in a world where AI gets better and better, what we're seeing is people are outsourcing their thinking to to AI and they're becoming worse thinkers. They might be getting net better outcomes because what AI does for them in their work is better than what their thinking did. But I think we are going to see that writing is going to become an increasingly high competitive advantage because good writing will force you to become a better thinker and better thinkers are going to become more scarce, in my opinion.

[B]

Yeah. So start. You would start publishing writing and that would be.

[A]

I would start publishing writing. So in my specific circumstance, I would probably look at the discovery platforms of LinkedIn and threads and maybe Substack. I'm not loving the direction Substack is going with their revenue model, but it's interesting because Substack is the only platform that has this marriage of long form writing, short form Discoverability. Discoverability actually proactively recommends your long form writing. So it's actually a wonderful place. But I don't think I would use Substack for their paid subscriptions. I think I would use it to build an audience.

[B]

Yeah. Because I think a lot of people are flooding Substack now because of the Discoverability in the platform.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I don't know whether it's because for paid, but definitely for this Discoverability.

[A]

Yeah. The way that they're moving right now, they are forcing authors to allow subscribers to pay through the app and through Apple, essentially, which removes your relationship to that customer, your direct relationship. It makes you dependent on Apple and therefore Substack by extension. So I would use Substack to build and grow an audience for my writing and then I would probably.

Either offer a paid offer outside of Substack, which is, I think, against their terms of service. They've used that as an excuse to shut people down in the past. Cody Saints, notably. But I would do that and I would be constantly pulling out the CSV of my subscribers and I might just move over to a tool like Kit at some point.

[B]

Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense, Jay. The time has just flown by. Conscious of that. And I'm also increasingly more aware of people's time. So I'm going to hit you with one last question. If you were given a superpower to write yourself a letter and send it back to Jay at any point in time, when would you like to receive that and what might it say? Knowing that space time continuum won't change, you'll still be where you are, when would you send it? What would it say?

[A]

I truly don't know. I'm so happy with where I've gotten that. The butterfly effect scares me. Like, it's so hard to be like, I don't know, I don't know. Yeah. Like the flippant answer is here's the winning lottery number. But if I were to Tell myself to focus on different things at different times. Yeah. I don't know what the downstream effect of that is.

[B]

So maybe it's what we just talked about at the beginning of the show, which was maybe start earlier.

[A]

Yeah, you could start. Yeah, yeah. I think that would be safely good advice, is to start earlier.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I think in college I was afraid of expressing myself because I was in an environment where that was ridiculed more than it was celebrated.

[B]

And to stand out. To stand out was more ridiculed.

[A]

To stand out and try to do like things outside of the norm, I think that's like the most positive thing I've ever done is to build my own path, go my own way, publish my own content and to literally try to stand out. But also, I think there's a lot. I think there's a bit of every content creator that's a little bit broken. That's why we're doing this. Like we are seeking attention because we're probably not getting the attention or respect that we want in other areas of our life. I think that's a solvable problem without building a content business. That being said, if you're predisposed to creating a content business, wonderful business model. Just going to take a few years to get it going. And don't stop, don't stop.

[B]

Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Jay. This has been tremendous. Would love to have you back. When you talk about your book, I would love to dive deeper into that.

[A]

You got it.

[B]

Thanks, brother. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. If there's one thing to take away, it's this. Trust is the currency that precedes the transaction. Jay said that so succinctly and beautifully. It's not attention, it's not persuasion tactics. In the end, it's about trust. If you want to get into deeper with what Jay is doing in his world, go to jclouse.com he helps creators build businesses. He helps people take experiments and really build that trust. First approach to creation. And hey, if you got any value from this and there are other folks that you feel like would get value from it as well, share it. Share this Show Share this episode Spread the word and you can maybe change somebody else's life. Until next week, my friend. Change behavior, change lives. Take care.