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Joe Casabona (6:26)

the first thing I'm thinking about when it comes to my business and when it comes to creators generally, is I think we need a return to the 1000 true fans model. This is an essay by Kevin Kelly, I think, Originally written in 2008, I want to say, where he advocated for this idea that you don't need millions of fans to make a living as a creative or an artist. You need about a thousand. And his math on this, you know, it's fairly arbitrary. His math was basically what I mean by a true fan is somebody that will pay you $100 for a thing, or somebody that you earn $100 in profit from per year, somebody who will buy everything you put out. So there's some, like, big ifs and qualifications in this theory. You know, a thousand followers on a platform are not a thousand true fans. A thousand true fans are a thousand people who, when you come out with something new, they're like, yes, I want that to the tune of about $100. Because his math was that will give you $100,000 per year. And that is a good living for an artist or a creator. Now, depending on what you sell and the price point, you can shift that quite a bit. And if you had a $500 product, well, you can bring that down to 200 true fans, and that can get you to your 100k per year. We have to take into account inflation. That was almost 20 years ago that he wrote this essay also. So I think you may want to aim higher in terms of revenue because taxes are a thing, expenses are a thing. But anyway, the general direction and the general idea that you don't need a million followers or whatever, I think still holds true and maybe more true than ever. I Wrote an essay a while back about how the pendulum in any industry, in any space always swings back. And I think for a while the pendulum has been swinging in the direction of very professional looking content and also very hyper engaging content. I think about it related to almost ultra processed foods. You know, they taste really good, but you realize these are empty calories and they're not doing anything. For me, I think a lot of the content we've seen produced over the last one to two years has really veered into the ultra processed foods category. And maybe it's just me, maybe I'm biased here. When I look at any of my feeds, any of the content that I've been following or subscribed to for a long time, I'm less interested in stuff that feels like it is mining my attention. It feels completely created for the purposes of retaining me longer. I'll tell you a specific example. I will see reels that are designed to get you to comment a word, to do something. There's nothing wrong with that. I actually think it's really good to use manychat and draw people into email, continue the relationship. But I saw this reel that was posted that was super. It didn't say anything. It was like a 60 second reel. It didn't say anything, but it was using this heightened language of like, oh my gosh, I just did this thing and you guys have to see it. This is something that I set up with AI in 30 minutes and it's blowing my mind right now. I can't believe what it's doing. I just need you guys to see it. And it didn't ever say what this was, but they understood the cadence in which they needed to engage you and kind of heighten your curiosity. And then eventually, like, you just got to comment and then I'll send this to you. But like, what a complete waste of my time. I'm sure it performed very well because of the way it was structured, but I didn't feel connected to that person. I felt like I was a pawn in their game and I just hate that. I hate that. I hate that. I hate that. I find that I'm more and more interested in engaging the artist side of my brain. You know, I think creators are one half artist, one half entrepreneur, and I'm more and more interested in engaging the artist side of my brain. And that will come at the expense of some level of optimization and performance of the content. But more and more, I just want to connect with people. I want people to like my work. I want people to be interested in what I have to say. And I don't care if it reaches the most people possible, I just don't. It brings me a lot of warmth and comfort that when I see who is engaging with my work, more often than not I actually recognize their name. I recognize their name, I recognize their face, I know them, I appreciate them. And I think that is a model that as a creator we should continue to lean into. The platforms are not set up for this. The platforms are set up to make you want to chase views, impressions. Virality and the creator economy as a whole as it continues to grow by economists estimates, is mostly from the realm of advertising. That is what virality serves. It serves an advertising interest. But if you have a direct relationship with your audience, you have your own products or services, you don't need scale, you just need to reach some number of the right people and build real relationships in your content. And that's what I want to do. I'm still on point number one of nine, by the way, so sorry for the rant, but to this end I'm thinking more and more that I need to get back to teaching at some point. I got so spread with my time that I have been creating less educational content on short form. Specifically, I think that the podcast, the YouTube channel, my newsletter, I think I still do a good job of teaching there, but I haven't repurposed that super well historically. We're making some strides on the team right now. I haven't repurposed super well historically and my short form content has tended to be shorter, sort of like pithy truths, things that I think that are short and bite sized but not necessarily substantial or super helpful if I'm honest. So in my content on social media, as far as I go and posting content on social media, I want to do more teaching because I think it's more valuable. And in this season, what I'm spending all of my time thinking about, learning about is trust, building trust with people. So I've been holding back a lot of that content for the purpose of this book project and wanting to get to the next stage before I talk about this a lot publicly. But that process has just been so much longer than I anticipated. And the result has been I've been talking about the fact that I'm learning about trust and then speaking very little about it. So I need to just start writing about this, sharing about this, creating episodes around it. And that is my plan this year. So that's point number one is getting back to a thousand true fans Realizing that slow growth is still growth. My entire business has been built on slow growth. If I'm honest, it has been a slog and anybody can do it. And you don't need to go viral to reach a thousand true fans. Point number two, I want to be more openly opinionated. I think the first 10 minutes of this podcast may be an indication of where my mind is at. The benefit of not being super sponsor or advertising based as a business is. I feel like I have no problem being extremely honest about my opinions of any company, of any person. I don't know that everybody needs to have opinions on every situation. You know, I've always been fairly close to the vest with a lot of my opinions because unless asked why, do I need to share it? But I think there's an opportunity for me to be a little bit more outspoken, maybe is a better word than opinionated about my views, my beliefs, trends that are happening, what I wish companies would do differently or better. I'm being more loud about software that I use. When they make certain releases, I like to push back a little bit and be like, okay, this is good, but what about this? And I think that can be my role in the creator economy is to help advocate more for the creator and help these companies understand that, hey, it seems like you're serving your own agenda here more than your users. I also think that calling out bad behavior is something that is worthwhile in certain circumstances. I'm actually very inspired by Rich Roll lately. Rich Roll is a great podcaster, but after the latest bunch of like the Epstein Files came out and there was that uproar about Peter Attia being in the Epstein Files, I thought to myself, man, I'm glad I never had him on the podcast, because if I did, I feel like I would really have to come out and address this. And I saw almost nobody who did platform Peter Attia come out and address this directly. But Rich Roll did. He came out in his podcast and he's like, this is very disappointing. And you think you know somebody, you clearly don't. This is very disappointing and we apologize for platforming this person in this way. And I thought that was such an upstanding thing to do and way to build trust this audience that I just want to emulate it. I want to be real with you because nobody matters. Nothing matters more to the business than people like you, people who've been supporting the work for a long time. So number two thing that I've been thinking about is being more outspoken over the course of the next Year priority number three that's on my mind this year is I want to increase the frequency of experiments, both in my business, but also in the lab and also shared through my channel. So obviously that could come from me or it could come from other creators like you. I truly, truly, truly believe that, number one, experimentation is the only way to consistently and reliably increase revenue over time in your business. Because things change, situations change all the time, things that used to work often become ineffective. And all the benefits of new strategies go to the people who are early movers, the person who discovers it, people who are fast followers. But any winning strategy degrades over time and it really demands that you're constantly experimenting, trying something new, and then also identifying when other people have found something new. That is why the core of our business is the lab, our membership. Because self paced education becomes obsolete in most cases, you know, especially if it's related to how to grow on social, because it just changes too quickly. But helping people connect to one another, share their own experiments of what's working and share that insight in real time is one of the best ways to get ahead, stay ahead at any point in time, is to have a group of people who are all experimenting, learn from each other and take advantage of those insights. So in the lab, what we're doing right now, I have declared the month of April a month of revenue experiments. I'm thinking about this, we'll see how April goes. But I'm thinking that month after month, I kind of want to declare each month some category of experiment to encourage people to get their mind thinking about, okay, how can I experiment in this way? And then also share those experiments. So what we're going to do, the revenue experiment month, is all about picking one area of your business and saying, okay, I'm going to run an experiment here and I encourage you to do this as well. So for us, I'm thinking, okay, how do I run an experiment to increase revenue in the business in the month of April? And I have a couple of ideas. You know, on one hand I'm thinking, okay, I have a couple of courses, namely the newsletter masterclass that I want to update. So maybe this is the push I need to update that product, run it live, and then have an updated newer version of that material. I think that actually will be the experiment I run in April is I'm going to update the newsletter masterclass. I'm going to run it as a live paid workshop and then I'll have that as an asset on the back end. I think that's going to be my experiment. But any area of your business is fair game. If you want to increase sponsorship, if you want to increase affiliates, if you want to increase speaking or some service you sell, I think you should architect some experiment to say, okay, I think this is a way that I can do that and I'm going to run that experiment and see how it goes. And so hopefully we have dozens of people in the lab who take part in this experiment. So far it looks like there's a lot of interest, and as the month progresses, I'm going to encourage them to share the results of their experiment in our experiments section and I will pick one person, get their permission, and hopefully bring them onto the podcast and interview them about their experiment at the end of April. So that's one way I'm going to increase experiments personally and in the lab. And like I said, I would actually love to share more experiments from the audience, maybe from lab mates, maybe from folks who are just listening like you, to share them in our newsletter on the podcast. Because I think that actually can be one of the most useful, valuable content strategies that we can do within the Creator Science ecosystem is encourage more experimentation, highlight more experimentation, share more experiments that people can learn from one another. That's priority number three. Priority number four is I want to update member onboarding and I'll actually expand this to not just be member onboarding in the lab, but also new subscriber onboarding. I haven't updated my welcome sequences. The last time I did this, the results haven't really panned out the way that I had hoped. So I badly want to change the welcome sequences for my email newsletter to be shorter, to be more about building trust, delivering really high value right away and moving people forward. Basically right now my welcome sequence is kind of a smorgasbord of greatest hits links where I'm like, hey, welcome. Depending on what you're interested in. Here are four of my best podcast episodes about email. Here are four of my best essays about building a membership. It's too link heavy and I've seen time and time again the more links or calls to action you have in an email, the fewer people that actually click or take action. So I want to simplify that quite a bit and basically say, okay, based on what I know about you, this is what you should do next. And really be pretty low pressure. Just all trust building material in email. Welcome. Remember, onboarding the lab is a little bit different because those people obviously have a lot of history and experience with me. That's why they purchased membership in the first place. But there are a few things that I've identified that I want to do differently and better. And if you listen to my recent podcast episode with Becky Pearson Davidson, we talked about personalization and your membership experience, and I want to, I want to hone in on that a little bit more. But I also had my openclaw agent kind of do a deep dive on our Circle community. I built a member CRM. This is something I'll talk about here in a little bit as I talk about internal tools that were built with my openclaw. But what we identified with new members is actually one of the best ways to predict retention is somebody that was commenting before they were posting, somebody who comments more than they post. And I love this insight because something I'm thinking about, it's a big part of the book I'm writing, this idea that everybody wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager. We want people to support us, but we also bristle at the fact or avoid the obligation of being a villager for other people. We live in a time of such hyper convenience that being a villager is decidedly inconvenient. There are a lot of things that are inconvenient about being a part of a community, but that's what makes a community special, because most people in our lives will not endure the inconvenience to help us, but a great community should. So I want to tailor our onboarding to set the expectation that, hey, this is a community of villagers. This is a true community. And instead of pushing people to introduce themselves right away, which we do now and works, I want to push people to welcome others like, hey, before you can introduce yourself, you should actually go and comment on the last two introductory posts and support them because that's what it means to be a villager. So one of the insights from just studying user behavior in the community is that our best members are commenting like 5 to 10x more than they're posting. And so I want to improve onboarding to share that. I also want to add this kind of best practices of hey, welcome to the lab. I'm sure your first question is, okay, I'm here now, how do I get the most out of this? And so I looked at the data and I found our 60 best members, best in quotes, meaning our most engaged members from an analytical standpoint. And I said, can you give me some tips about how you use the community for somebody who's coming in? So part of our onboarding will be Kind of a smattering of those insights to say here's a tip from some of our happiest, most engaged and longest standing members about what they've gotten from the lab and how they use it and how they encourage you to use it as well. It's kind of training, it's helping people understand how do you get the most out of this space? How can I fit this into my day and actually capture the value that was promised on the sales page? Now I've realized in my onboarding, I think I'm a little too intense with the messages for the first week or so. I'm sending an email and a DM almost every day in onboarding. Directionally, I think that's correct. But I actually want to increase the space between messages because I just think people are busy and I think it gets kind of intense. So I want to have at least two, maybe three days in between messages from me in the beginning of onboarding, just to space it out and feel like, okay, you're in the lab, but I'm not trying to take over your life right now. You know, I recognize you have other priorities and you're still trying to do other things. We have this member guide. I think this is a really good thing for onboarding is basically say, okay, you're in here, here's a short course to walk through so you know how to use this space. And over time I've just added more and more to that member guide because we have added more and more to the membership. Becky and I also talked about optionality and there's a lot of optionality in the lab in terms of ways you can get value out of this. But as a result, we have looks like 30 lessons in our member onboarding right now and I don't expect people to go through all of them. A lot of this is our Mastermind wiki, which I'll talk about here in a moment. But I'm going to simplify this. I'm going to break this down smaller so that people can get through the member guide in one sitting, hopefully right when they get into the community. Make it much, much shorter so that you get a win faster, you get in here and you get a win. It's better to get you all the way through something short than overwhelm you with something so long that you never engage with it in the first place. So I want to simplify that, which is a little bit adds with this next point, which is I want to improve our Mastermind wiki. Right now we just Put Masterminds together the beginning of February. We'll be doing another round of masterminds here in a couple of months. I'm leading a mastermind now. I'm actually in two masterminds that were put together in the lab. This is so comforting and warm and amazing for me is that my two masterminds that I'm personally participating in in my life right now both came from the lab because that's just the quality of people we have in there. But I stepped up to lead one in our latest round and I realized that I should have more guidance on how to wrangle the cats because there is some wrangling involved at the beginning of the process, getting people on the same page as to what to expect, when to meet, how to run these meetings. I have a little bit of material here that I've been building on ever since my time at spi. But having gone through this personally, now I think I can improve that again to make leading a Mastermind easier every time we go through it. So that's priority number four is improving member and subscriber onboarding. I'm going to take a quick break for our sponsors and I'll talk about my next five priorities that are a lot more future looking. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. I'm declaring the month of April the month of Revenue experiments. And so what that means for you is I encourage you to design and run an experiment in April to help you increase revenue in some space specific area of your business. Maybe that's product sales, maybe it's sponsorship, maybe it's affiliates, maybe it's speaking, maybe it's services. Pick one, design one experiment that the purpose is to increase revenue in that area and run that experiment. See how it goes. We're doing this inside the lab in the basic tier and standard, in VIP and all levels of the lab. We are running experiments in April to share them with each other and give each other inspiration. I invite you to participate in the month of Revenue experiments and if you want to join the lab and do that with community, I think that'd be great for you too. You can learn more@creatorscience.com Lab that's creatorscience.com

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Joe Casabona (27:46)

priority number five. This is actually more of an idea than a priority, but I recently had breakfast with Corey and Jessica Fick. They are known as the pioneers online. They're in the financial independence movement. They have this camper van they drive around. They're teaching financial independence. And a huge part of their business is these retreats that they do for their clients and their audience as a whole. And obviously we've been doing more and more in person events within the Creator Science ecosystem, but really within just the lab. We have our next two day event in June of this year. It's the 8th and the 9th. It's before craft and Commerce. We've rented space. We're going to have a bigger group this year than last year. It's going to be a highlight of the year for sure. But that's also only available to folks in the lab. And I'm realizing I am such a community person, maybe I should host more in person experiences for people who aren't ready yet to commit to a year long relationship with the community. Maybe people want to be a more engaged part of the Creator Science community, but they don't want to necessarily commit to a year. I think that's valid and maybe I can relate to that in different communities that I'm a part of, all the traveling that I want to do. It used to be strictly for speaking and I'm doing that less and less because speaking, it just isn't my favorite thing. It needs to pay a pretty good amount for it to be worthwhile for the stress and the planning of travel for me. But I do want to travel more with my family. And speaking has been kind of the outlet where I'm like, okay, well I just got booked for a gig in la. Let's go to LA for a week. But I think we could do that with events that we coordinate for the Creator Science audience. I think it could be really cool. So I'm thinking about that. It's probably not going to be a 2026 thing. That would probably be a 2027 thing. Although I will say if you' going to Kit's Craft and Commerce conference and you're not a part of the lab, we do plan to have an audience meetup on the Wednesday, which is June 10, the first day of craft and commerce. But really that's just registration day. We do plan to have a meetup on June 10th. We'll let our email audience know more about that. So if you don't subscribe to the newsletter, go to creatorscience.com and subscribe so that you know when we put out details about that June 10th event that you'll be up to date. But otherwise, if we were to do something bigger like a retreat or a two day event the way we do in the lab, but for the grander audience, that would probably be a 2027 thing. But it is something that's on my mind because I am a community person. I think it could be a really interesting model, especially as I'm less interested in creating like big self paced courses. I already have a membership, but if I wanted to diversify more in terms of our revenue, what would that look like? I think events or experiences I would say could be in addition. That makes some sense. All these priorities are at odds with priority number six, which is I want to get more time back in my life. I think I'm actually doing a pretty good job of this right now. But I have a personal goal to take off the months of November and December of this year, which is a big, A big ask. But I want to force myself to re engineer the business to make that feel less scary or less painful. And this is the year that I'm going to force myself to do that. I see a lot of people online, especially on X, talking about the ways that they're using AI, but they, they just don't actually talk about how they're using it or what it's doing for them. They just kind of seem like, this is so cool. I've. I have my AI doing stuff like all day. What stuff? What's it doing? Why aren't you talking about what it's doing? Is it actually saving you time? Is it actually making you money? Is it actually giving you time back? I wrote an essay recently where I talked about there was a study that was done on dopamine where they gave a rat dopamine if it pressed a button and that rat would press the button to the point of exhaustion, ignoring all of its other physical needs. And I think humans are the rat and prompting LLMs is the dopamine right now. It is magical to be like, hey, can you go and build this for me and see in moments it will generate something completely crazy. So crazy what you can do. And that is novel and it feeds our dopamine receptors. And I think people are actually spending more time working right now rather than less because they're having fun with it. And I get it, like, fun is good, fun is fine. But the way that I want to use AI in my business is to actually save me time, actually save me money or generate more revenue. And so as I think about my priority number six of getting more time back in my year, AI is going to be a part of that. And mostly from the standpoint of tasks, research, planning, not in content creation, but everything around that, my team is going to be a part of that. So it's going to be a lot of experimentation this year. And I'll share more about this on podcasts in the newsletter over time. But my big question this year is, can I reduce the time spent in the business without reducing the value the business creates for the audience and the value we capture in the business? Because I want to spend more time reading, I want to spend more time writing, and I want to spend more time with my family. I'm doing some things that are pretty interesting that are actually working. In the beginning, I thought this might mean posting less. For example, this episode I'm recording, I'm recording this on Tuesday, March 24th, in the morning. Typically we release on Tuesdays, but I'm just realizing that I'm at the point that I'm less concerned about the specific release day of this podcast and more concerned about the value I'm creating for the audience and the way the business fits in my life. So I could have recorded this on Sunday to make sure that we still published on Tuesday today. But I had bigger priorities on Sunday. I wanted to spend time with my family. I want to work on the book project with the time I did give myself. And so I made that choice. But I'm realizing that there are actually some ways that AI can help me in the ideation phase of content creation, which is one of the biggest time sucks for me, honestly, is like, what should I create an episode about? There are ways that it can help me and I'll talk about my internal tools that I'm building here in a moment. But party number six, just to put a bow on it, getting more time back for reading, writing, and family so that I can take off more time in the year. And this year I'm going to take off November and December. The team is going to be running the business and I'll be sharing a lot more about that over the coming months. Priority number seven, I'm building a Lot of internal tools for creator science. And this started when I saw a tweet about somebody's mission control they had created with their OpenClaw agent. So if you're not familiar with OpenClaw, this is an open sourced. How do you even describe this? Think about it like this. You can give OpenClaw access to your entire computer, all of your files, like there are no guardrails. Essentially, you can integrate this bot, which is powered by whatever AI model you would like or models you would like, and you can communicate with it via messages from your phone, from your computer, and have it do things. This was released at the end of January. I've been using it since the end of January. Over the last few months, Claude from Anthropic, they've rolled out a lot of functionality that's similar to this. So if you're like, I haven't jumped on the open claw train, should I do it? I do think it's better than just Claude, but I think it's also much more dangerous and easy to break things because there's no real guardrails. It's completely open. So for the past two months that I've been doing this, I've been constantly hardening security and following threads of people talking about this. And in the beginning there were a lot of people on X sharing, like, here's how I'm putting in place guardrails for my openclaw. And that's much less the discussion now because it seems like the people who are talking about this have kind of solved that problem. So I feel like there was a benefit to being early to this because I was hardening it and improving it, as the rest of the Internet was. But now Claude Cowork in particular is very similar. Claude Cowork and Claude Code can do a lot of the functionality that I'm doing with openclaw. And you don't have to install this open source thing or think about security. It's powerful. And if you want, I will link my original episode of the podcast called 48 Hours with Openclaw to tell you what that beginning experience looked like. But anyway, I saw somebody on X sharing that they built a mission control with their openclaw AI agent and I liked the design of it. I took a screenshot of their screenshot and I sent it to my openclaw assistant and said, can you build us a mission control like this? And it completely took just that screenshot and inferred what the navigation meant was in those sub pages and built a mission control. So Now I have, like, a locally hosted software app where I can see what my AI agent is doing, the skills it's learned, its memory. And also I'm using that as a place to build internal apps for creator science for the purposes of saving me time. So let me get. Let me run you through some of the internal apps that I've built. I have a Masterminds app. This is the first thing that I built in the lab because we've done now three rounds of Mastermind matching. I was losing track of what groups were matched, who is in them, who is leading it, when do they meet. And so I kind of like pulled down all the data I could from past spreadsheets of the groups that I put together by hand. I looked in circle, and we built an app that shows me the Mastermind groups and who's in them. This is not my best work yet because it was my first pass, but it was genuinely useful to see. Okay, we have 20 active groups across three cohorts. Each group has an average of six people. And I can see who are in those groups. So if that group asked me, like, hey, we would like another member. I can see who's in there and who might be a good member for that group. Otherwise, it's useful. It's very, very useful. So that was the first tool that I built. Second tool I built was a fitness dashboard. I've been taking my fitness very seriously. This is week 13 of me doing a fitness regimen that was created by Claude. And this fitness dashboard shows me my aura scores. It shows me my steps for the day. It shows my current weight, how I've increased my weight volume this week versus last week, average steps. And it visualizes all of this pulling from a spreadsheet that it populates. When I go out to my home gym and I'm working out, I say, what's my workout? And it pulls down the next unfilled workout, sends me a message about it, and as I do a set, I will just send it a message and it logs it in the spreadsheet. So I did bench press yesterday, and I said, okay, 205x7, which is me saying I did 205 pounds for seven reps, and it logged it in the spreadsheet. So it's taken me out of, like, plugging numbers into a spreadsheet. I just send a message. It's the action button on my iPhone to pull up my AI assistant. And all of that spreadsheet data populates this dashboard to show me how I'm doing On my fitness goals for the Last looks like 5 years I've had a KPI spreadsheet. I share this every month in the lab through my retros. So I have five years of month by month data on revenue, audience growth. And I've now turned that into a dashboard that I can look at over time and see how is follower growth changing? How is subscriber growth changing? How is revenue changing? How am I tracking for the year? All visualized just from the spreadsheet that I fill out once a month for my KPIs. I can look across year by year and see. Okay, memberships clearly has grown year over year. Sponsorship has mostly grown year over year. Took a small dip last year. Digital products took a big dip last year. It's extremely visual for me to track my KPIs and see where I am at any given time without having to stare at a spreadsheet. Then I built an inspiration app for me to think about short form content in particular. And what I did is I actually had my bot pull down my most popular posts on X and I also populated it with my most popular posts on LinkedIn. I used Shield app to scrape my LinkedIn data, fed that spreadsheet to this and now I can see all of my best posts from like 2022, maybe even 2021, so that I can repurpose my own content. I can sort this by date and see. Okay, I had this tweet from 2022 that I actually have an evolved thought on or maybe it's still good. I'm just gonna repost that. Very, very easy for me to access. Then I built this design app that basically lets me just input text and it outputs it in the form of like a Twitter screenshot. We've seen these for years. Is a little bit dated, but if you were to look at my Instagram account right now or my LinkedIn account, and if you see posts or carousels recently from me in the Twitter theme, like a Twitter screenshot theme that was created from my internal app where I just pasted text and it automatically formatted it in this way. And I have six templates now that I can do this with six different design templates where I just put in text and it automatically applies them. I can adjust it within the app and then I can download it and ready to go. I have a hard time with like Canva or Figma, there are too many dials and this I don't have to like create extra canvases. It automatically splits it into canvases for me. And I can just download it, post it as a PDF, post it as a png. It's been wonderful. And the last internal app I built was a membership CRM. I was paying like $120 a month for a tool called Chart Mogul, which basically just visualizes your stripe data. It was really useful because I could see how MRR or ARR or member counts, subscriber numbers, churn retention. I could see how all of this is visualized in the community. But it was $120 a month just to visualize my stripe data. So I built an internal tool that does the same thing and now I don't have to pay for that subscription anymore. It just uses the Stripe API to show me all the same charts that I want to see to show how the community is doing. I can see who is renewing in the next 30 days so I can proactively reach out to them. It pulls in data from Circle as well to show their participation in the community to basically see, okay, is this person likely to renew or are they likely to churn based on what we know? And it actually assigns them a risk score of likelihood to churn. So I can see proactively who's coming up for renewal. Are they at risk? Should I reach out to them, see how they're doing, see if there's anything I can do to help them in the immediate term? It's very powerful and this is just the beginning of what I'm thinking of as my membership CRM. But the next step of this to my previous point of saving time in the community is basically saying, what can I do to. To help make my OpenAI or sorry, my OpenClaw assistant. It was purchased by OpenAI. How can I make my OpenClaw assistant proactive as a community manager? Not that it's sending messages on my behalf, not that it's posting in the community, but that it's sending me intelligence to know here is somebody or something that needs your attention very proactively so that I can stay on top of things. It's also starting to go through. I haven't nailed this yet, but I think there's promise here. We send a weekly digest every week and I'm having it do some of the research through the post of the week to find like, okay, what is something that is worth including in the digest so it can kind of shortcut some of the trending posts for us, some of the work and actually putting that digest together. So those are just all internal tools I'm developing for Creator Science. And this is totally vibe coded with my OpenClaw. It's using Opus 4.6 for this coding. Some people use Codex, either would be fine, but it's useful to feel like, okay, I have tools that are proactively saving me time. And if you're curious to see more stuff I'm doing with this, I'm resisting the urge to become like an AI educator. I'm just not really interested in it. And a lot of this is me fumbling my way through. Like, I couldn't tell you exactly how I built these things. I basically had a vision for it and I talked to it and I tested it and I said, this is broken. What I am comfortable doing is sharing what I'm doing as inspiration. And I'm doing a lot of that in the lab right now saying like, okay, this is something I built, this is something that I did. And it's not a step by step, here's exactly how you can do it too. It's more for people who are building their own tools as inspiration to say, if you haven't thought about this, this is something that I'm working for that's pretty powerful. And generally you can take that direction and have something built in 20, 30 minutes. Because that's how I'm doing it. You know, I'm getting an idea or I'm seeing inspiration and I'm building it in 20 or 30 minutes. All right, let's move on to priority number eight. We have two more of these left. Number eight is long term partnerships. I've been doing less and less sponsorship partnerships in the business because I've just really tightened the filter on who I'm willing to partner with because I want my partnerships, I want my sponsorships to be a full endorsement from me. That's a very tight filter because that means that I've used the product that I love, the product that I truly believe in, and I'm willing to put my name and reputation behind the product. There's just not a ton of of partners that fit that, but there are a few and I've started having some discussions with them about long term partnerships on different parts of the business, within our events, within different areas of our content, trying to have some of those conversations so that I'm spending less time with specific short term sponsorship campaigns. But I'm not giving up sponsorship or partnerships within the business. It's just more targeted, more long term, more mutually beneficial. And so we have a couple of those in the works. I will share them as they come out Obviously. But I truly believe that your sponsorship strategy, even if you feel like you were just putting an ad in your content for a brand, if your audience trusts you, they are seeing that as an endorsement. And if you endorse a company that you don't actually align with or believe in, I think that has a long term negative effect on your brand, the trust your audience has in you. And I just don't think it's worth it. So I would be thoughtful about who you're partnering with because I do think it reflects on you quite a bit. If we're thinking about that Thousand True Fans model, that's something worth thinking about. Priority number nine. I know that was a quick one, but there wasn't a whole lot to say about that. Priority number nine. Last one I'll leave you with here is just making contact without expectation. What I mean by that is there has been nothing more valuable in my business than the relationships that I've built. And oftentimes it's surprising to me how a certain relationship can impact the business in a positive way and in a way that was unanticipated and took a long time to bear fruit. It's often people that. It's usually people that I met and had no agenda or expectation for how the relationship was going to go. And then we just continue to stay in touch, stay close, and years later, something big happened. And I think the best thing I can be doing right now, especially knowing that at some point, hopefully I'm releasing a book, is to just build relationships. I have no ask right now. I have nothing I need from anybody right now. But I think it's such a gift just to reach out to people that you respect and admire and say, I love your work, I love what you're doing. This is the way it's impacted me. It's been really positive. No expectation of even any of their time, but just letting them know how you feel. Get on their radar. Start building a relationship. Try to be helpful and valuable where you can, but realize that a relationship needs a starting point. And if the starting point is when you are hoping to get something out of that relationship, that's not a good foot to start the relationship on. So I am just trying to push myself to say, especially in what would traditionally be like wasted minutes. I think we've all had the experience of, okay, I have a meeting coming up in six minutes and I don't think I can do anything productive right now. Well, why not send a message, send an email, let somebody know you're thinking about them. Let somebody know you appreciate their work. Why not use that time just to start a relationship without expectation but just a starting point. That's something I'm trying to do more and more over the coming year. So those are my nine priorities for the year. My nine ideas for you. Let's recap them real quick. Number one was getting back to the thousand true fans model, recognizing that slow growth is still growth. Number two is being more openly I said opinionated, but now I want to say outspoken. Being more outspoken is priority number two. Priority number three is increasing the rate of experimentation, both the experiments that I'm personally running and then the experiments that I'm sharing in my channels. Number four is updating member and subscriber onboarding. Number five is running events and creating experiences for the broader Creator Science audience. Number six is earning more of my time back using AI and delegating to my team. Number seven is creating internal tools for creator science to help with that effort of getting more time back. Number eight is creating more long term partnerships with the small number of companies that I have a really positive relationship and feeling about. And number nine is making contact without expectation. I hope this has inspired you in some ways for your business and what you want to spend your time doing. If you've enjoyed this, please leave a rating or review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. We're getting so close. I've got another one of those reviews every time I put an episode out. If you're listening, pause, think, reflect. Have you left a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify? If not, could you please? It would help us a lot trying to get back on the charts. And lastly, if you don't subscribe to the newsletter, go to creatorscience.com, subscribe to the newsletter. I appreciate you for listening so much. Thanks for being here. I'll talk to you next week. Bad day? Watch this. TikTok is full of funny pets and heart melting moments. Laugh more, stress less and share your own Furry Star. Download TikTok now.