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