[Podcast] Creator Branding 101: How to Build a Creator Brand, Community & Business That Lasts with Jay Clouse

In this episode, we’re joined by Jay Clouse, one of the most trusted voices in the creator economy and founder of Creator Science, a platform helping creators become professional entrepreneurs.

Jay has built a standout brand around clarity, consistency, and community—without chasing hype or shortcuts. We dig into what it really takes to build a brand-led creator business that scales trust and stays aligned.

You’ll learn:
• Why community is a strategic asset, not an add-on
• How to balance personal brand with a business brand
• What brand clarity actually looks like for creators
• How “building in public” creates long-term trust
• What Jay learned from hosting his first live event

Whether you’re a strategist, creator, or brand builder, this is a practical look at what it takes to build a modern creator brand that lasts.

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Transcript

You got to give a s*** about people. Like, you’ve got to make other people successful and understand what they care about. Otherwise, they’re not going to care about you.

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Hello and welcome back to JUST Branding. Today’s guest is someone who’s quietly becoming one of the most trusted voices in the creator economy, and he’s doing it without the hype. We’re talking to Jay Clouse, who is a creator, educator, and founder of Creator Science, a platform helping creators become professional entrepreneurs. Jay’s built a powerful brand around clarity, consistency, and community, and he’s done it while staying deeply in line with who he is. And in this episode, we’re going to dig into why community’s the new moat for brands and creators, how to design offers, content, and spaces that scale with trust, and how Jay’s stepping into the spotlight with his first ever in real life event, even though that’s uncomfortable as hell. So, if you’re a strategist, a creator, or brand builder looking to turn your audience into something deeper, this one is for you. So let’s jump in. Welcome to the show, Jay.

Hey, thanks for having me. What an intro. Thank you.

No worries at all. Let’s get into your background, your journey, your philosophy, because that leads into our conversation. So for those who don’t know Jay Clouse, who are you? What’s Creator Science all about?

I’m a creator. I’m a teacher. Creator Science is this meta thing where I help creators, and typically, more advanced creators, earn more from the attention that they are getting. There’s really two halves of a creator business, right? You have the attention capture, and then you have value capture on that attention. And if I’m honest, I’m a lot better at the value capture side than the attention side. But out of necessity for the longest time, building any type of business as an entrepreneur, it’s just like, I need this to pay the bills. And when you don’t have a huge audience, you get really good out of figuring out how to be more efficient in turning what attention you do have, whatever resources you do have, into more revenue. And so that has become a strong suit for me. But you can kind of hear from the brand, Creator Science, a little bit of what we try to bake into the company, which is a data orientation. We’re very analytical. We like to take a lot of evidence and experiences and kind of distill it into something very specific. But where a lot of people in the space would say like, I did awesome. And so I’ll teach you to do awesome too. I come at it from a place of, I have done some stuff, but I’m actually going to pull together the experiences of the hundreds of creators I’ve interviewed on the podcast and the hundreds of creators that are in the membership and show you the patterns that I’ve pulled across all of these people so that hopefully that perspective is a little bit more tested.

Yeah, that’s definitely what made you stand out when, amongst all the others, is that you use that kind of data-driven approach and you’ve been sharing very openly in public for many years and also the insights from others. So I’m curious, often, you know, we have a brand lens on this show. So I’m curious, like your definition of brand and how it’s evolved from freelancer to like the creator and entrepreneur.

Well, I really like the idea that your brand lives in the minds of other people. So where it’s a good exercise to try to say, what brand do I want to create? Ultimately, what matters is what the marketplace is, your brand is, right? And so I’ve really tried to walk the talk in terms of taking a scientific look at all things creator business and try to show numbers, examples, data, do this build in public thing so that it does feel a little bit more rooted in evidence than some of the other content that is out there. But I will say, I also really emphasize, I call it being different in the details. I think there are just so many surfaces and touch points that any company has with their audience, with their customers. And I really take a lot of pride in customizing and putting a touch on all of them. Because to me, if you just leave any touch point as the default, it’s just a missed opportunity. And so I’ve really enjoyed trying to make every touch point you have with our company feel very cohesive and remarkable in that way.

Yes, consistency is very important when it comes to brand building. And when you say difference in the details, I have your Creator OS, and I must say that’s incredibly detailed. So for those who don’t know, it’s like a notion headquarters, if you will, like a platform with templates and a whole structure to run your whole life, more or less. And it’s very detailed. And yeah, it has helped me organize my thoughts. It’s helping me organize this summit that I’m doing at the moment and keeps me on track. And yeah, you have a lot of moving pieces, so I can see how you put that into play as well.

And when you have a lot of moving pieces, you really have to be thoughtful about those details because too many moving pieces for a small company, it’s just like you get lost in customer support or troubleshooting. And so we’re just like constantly automating, streamlining, improving, because I think a lot of companies just like throw people at the problem. But if you throw people at the problem, you’re also throwing money at the problem. And so I’m always trying to just keep things tight. But there are limits.

So I was going to say hi, Jay. Welcome to the show. Thrilled to have you on. Question, so how does all that link to community and what you’re doing around the brand and the community? Talk to us about your philosophy around those two subjects.

Yeah, so the community is called the lab. And so you can see the through line a little bit just in the brand name. Creator Science is the company, the lab is the membership, and the point of the membership is a place for professional creators to experiment and grow together. And when we were doing the branding exercise, or like the brand refresh that you see on all of our stuff now, we have this like consistent design element of this like blue tag, I want to say, and then there’s a white hexagon on one end, and inside the hexagon there’s some iconography, and then you have the name of the product on the other side of the tag. And so all of our products, Creator HQ that Jacob just mentioned, the lab, they share this iconography of the Creator Science brand. So there’s that through line. But even in just like the ethos of the community, really what we’re trying to do is give people the space to learn from the experiments of other people. Because you and I, anytime we run an experiment in our business, which I think publishing any piece of content is an experiment, but any experiment we do, we learn from that data. Now, if you aggregate that together with hundreds of other professional creators who are also running experiments every day, people aren’t sharing every one of the experiments that they’re doing. But just imagine the compounding of learning from not just your data, but other people’s data, their experiments. It’ll save you from doing certain things. It’ll save you from doing other things wrong. It’ll give you ideas for certain things to do. So that’s kind of the through line. And I hope the brand of the lab is something that is more impactful than the brand of Jay Clouse. Something I’m really trying to do is elevate the external perception of the company that I’m the most active member in there, but I’m not just teaching in there. The value comes from the other folks. So we saw that at the offline event that Jacob mentioned in the intro as well, where I’m trying to build this as a place for my peers. There are people in there who are doing much bigger businesses than I am, and that’s awesome. But I think from the outside, it’s easy to think of any community or membership to be like a cult of personality of the person who created it. And so really trying to elevate the brand of the lab to be bigger than the brand of Jay, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I recently launched a community as well, and I also had the same feeling not to be just about the one guru, but have this idea of multiple experts. Matt’s a resident coach there as well. And we learn from different people. And like you said, the data from everyone and the insights from other people is you’re going to grow much faster than just listen to one guru. Totally.

I have a mastermind community as well. It is called the Matt Davies Mastermind, but I also agree. I try not to make it all about me. I think you’re right, like learning off of other people. I like the idea of experimenting, right? And when someone’s tried an experiment to come back and share that. So how does that work then, Jay, like in your lab? Like are people literally setting hypotheses, trying some bits and bobs, and then coming back and reporting it? Is that kind of how it works?

Literally, yes, we have a format for this. And I encourage people to wait until an experiment has completed to share it, just because the mechanics of how a community space works. If you came in and updated the post later, there would be no notification of like, oh, the result was posted. So I really try to encourage people to wait until the experiment has run. But we have a format that is literally goal, hypothesis, experiment, result. So here’s the goal of what I’m trying to find out and accomplish. Here’s the hypothesis of what I think will happen. Here’s the experiment that I ran. Here are the results of that experiment. And those are the best hosts in the community. Because you don’t even know, like, people run wild, different experiments that you wouldn’t even think of. And maybe it doesn’t fit your business and that’s fine. But other times it’s like, oh, this either spurred an idea or I’m going to try that also. And people have follow up questions. It’s the most valuable part of the membership to the point where I was thinking this weekend, I’m just going to like incentivize more of this sharing. I started doing this in different ways in the community and stop me if I’m going off on a tangent. But there are certain activities that members can do that are just so valuable that I find if you just incentivize that behavior, not just like say thank you, but literally incentivize it, I think it’s a positive thing to do. So we have small group masterminds that are run in the community. And when somebody leads a mastermind, I give them like a credit on their membership towards their next year renewal. The same if they host a workshop. And so the same will be true if they post an experiment. So between that or if you refer a member, that’s like a recurring fee as well, I think people can pay for their own membership just with like showing up and being a good member. And to me, it’s worth it for you to just be a kick ass member and not pay me a dime because that just makes the community stronger. So I’m constantly playing around with little things like that. Some work, some don’t, but I think that’s kind of the work of being a community builder is saying, well, how do we actually make this place operate more asynchronously, more decentralized, genuinely align people’s incentives and expectations so that a good community is good for everybody. The tension we see sometimes in community is, it’s really exciting because people join early and it’s small and they get access to you and you build it and this is exciting for them. But then the success of that leads to growth and leads to growth. Eventually, at some point, sometimes growth in the community actually detracts from the value people had initially, which was like a small, intimate space. It’s like this interesting living organism that we constantly have to tend to. Maybe it’s not an organism, maybe it’s like a garden, that we constantly have to tend to and trim things back and just make small tweaks to try to make the balance just right.

Yeah, I love that metaphor. And yeah, I’m finding the same thing in our community as well. And I know you had like a limit of 200 and then after 200, then you kind of opened the doors up for like a lower tier membership and grew it that way. How did you find the success of that?

Yeah, this was a successful experiment that kind of came to bite me in the butt. So, because I had been a part of communities that had this exact problem I just described, which is like growth threatens what was awesome about the space, in the beginning, I thought, I’m just going to be super active here. I’m going to have a lot of access to me. And there’s a limit on what I can do. So I said, let’s prevent the problem of closeness going away and let’s prevent the limits on my capacity by just capping how many people can be here. And I did that and that was like new and innovative, capped at 200 people, got a lot of attention. And we hit that pretty quickly. But here’s what happened when we hit that limit. There were certain things that I wanted to do with the evolution of the community that I just couldn’t do. We’re trying to do more in-person experiences. We had the big event that we just did last week, but I want to do little pop-ups all around the country, all around the world and enable these like grassroots level small meet-ups, but if we’re at a 200-member cap and there’s only three members in Australia, I can’t solve that problem and make that a better experience without like kicking people out or only accepting people from Australia when we have open spaces. Same with like platform density. When we hit the 200-person cap, we didn’t have many people that were operating on Instagram or TikTok. How do I solve that problem if we’re at the cap? So there are things that I want to do. There are like small groups I want to create that have specific priorities, whether it’s location, whether it’s knowledge share. In a capped world, I just couldn’t do it. So we moved from a cap to an application. And this is after we did a town hall at the beginning of the year. And I said, here’s the situation. We’re at our cap. Here’s what I want to do. I’m proposing moving from a cap to an application because previous to that, we didn’t have an application. It was just first come first serve. But I realized that also if you have any type of customer journey, where somebody starts at point A and they could get ostensibly to point Z, if your community has folks that are at point G, they are not going to have that much interest in people that are still at point A. It becomes noisy. It feels like that space isn’t for them. So you really have to constrain your community to a very small portion of the customer journey. The only way you can do that is with an application. I said, this is what I want to do. I want to move to an application. I want to continue to raise the standard of what it takes to be a member here and remove the cap. Are you guys open to that? Do you trust me, basically? We had almost half the community fill out that survey. Out of the 70-something people that filled it out, only one person said, I’m concerned about this. I said, great, cap is gone, application is in place. We stuck around the 225 mark. So it hasn’t grown a whole lot, but it was challenging. We did have a lower tier as well, that I don’t count in that 200-level number. And that was another strategy that’s been okay. But the challenge has been, even folks in the community, some of them still think we have a cap. It’s hard to socialize any major change on something that has become so well known, internally and externally, that it’s been really difficult to change public awareness of the model.

Wow. Thanks for sharing your philosophy, Jay. I’d love to get into some more tactical things now. You mentioned that audience is not community. So can you unpack that for us from like a brand building perspective?

Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of people who have large audiences that just kind of refer to their audience as their community and they use community in like this very soft, broad way. And I’m not here to say that like you can’t do that. It’s just not how I think about it. To me, a community has mechanisms for creating peer-to-peer interaction. And you could say, well, yeah, I mean, you could comment on my Instagram post and other people can comment and that’s our community. And there’s some validity to that. But I think increasingly, even in the word audience, I think some people say audience, but what they mean is a crowd. You know, so if you think about, if you went to Las Vegas and you saw a street performer, you might see a crowd gathered around that person. I don’t know that I would say that group of people is an audience for that performer. To me, an audience is something that is a little bit more enduring, like it returns. It’s there to hear from you specifically. Whereas on a lot of these platforms, the audiences are just kind of groups of people that you’ve effectively captured their attention in a fleeting way. So you can kind of think of these as like concentric circles, I suppose, where like at the top level, you have like this crowd, this group of people that have kind of come into your orbit. Inside of that is probably your audience, this group of people who are a little bit more familiar and they return. And then inside of that, if you have a space and a mechanism for people to interact with each other, I would say that is probably a community.

Yeah, the word gets thrown around quite a bit. So, it’s kind of vague what community means. Because it’s like your Instagram community, your Facebook community, or you can be like a private paid membership community, but they are different things, as you said.

And I think if you were just to ask like the regular lay person, what communities they’re a part of, they’re going to respond with things that are so special to them that they tie it to their identity. Like a community in a regular person’s life is a serious thing where they feel like, I am a part of this, and it’s part of my identity. So I think a lot of people throwing around the word community, if you ask those people, what communities are you a part of, they would just not even think about this creator’s content as a community they’re a part of. And so if you are thinking about community building as a skill, as a strategy, I do think you want to get to the level of, I want to build something that people are so invested in, and I mean that in a figurative sense, so invested in that they feel like their identity is tied to it. That’s really powerful, but that’s a really high bar.

If you’re building a brand and want to do it right, this is for you. Join the Brand Builders Alliance for expert coaching, live masterclasses and a crew of brand builders who’ve got your back. Get on the waitlist now at joinbba.com. Now back to the show. So I can feel that because I’ve recently released some merch for our community Brand Builders Alliance. And to see them rep in that logo around the world, it just made me so happy because it shows not that they bought some merch, but the fact that they belong into a community and they want to stand behind it and rep the brand. It feels like they’re part of something bigger than just themselves. So I think that was something to aspire to is to get to a place like that as a community.

What I’m observing, just from taking a step back and thinking about this from a brand and a strategy perspective, is that it was interesting to talk there, Jay, about people finding it like being part of their identity. And I don’t know why, but my brain flashed to like the brand Harley-Davidson, right? Where people would buy the product, yeah, for sure. But it meant more to them than just a product, right? And so, there’s Harley-Davidson clubs and you go riding and all of this stuff together. Now, to be honest, that’s probably a very old school way of doing things. I’m sure they don’t exist where I am at the moment, but I’m sure there’s still clubs around. I just think that that’s like the pinnacle, isn’t it? Because when people feel that they’re part and parcel of something, that you’ve created a movement rather than just a product, that’s the opportunity then for you to start building value and places for those people to connect more and more, so Harley-Davidson being one of them. So what are your thoughts broader of just general brand building? Do you think every brand should be thinking like this? And if so, yeah, let me know.

I think it could certainly be aspirational for any brand. I don’t think every brand will do it. I think it’s a difficult thing to achieve. There needs to be a certain, like I said, there’s a community. There’s inherently an in-group and an out-group, right? Being in the Harley-Davidson community is like this kind of signal to certain people that I am a part of this. And I think this is something that people are increasingly looking for. They want to identify with a group of sorts. This is why politics worldwide are the mess that they are because people are increasingly drawn into like tribal groups. This is why we are actually seeing a return to religion in the western world, at least. It had been on the decline and we are starting to see it pick back up. It’s because people just want to feel like they are a part of something that’s larger than they are. Now, I don’t think it’s within most companies or brands’ skill sets to create genuine meaning out of the product that they are doing. You know, I am looking at my desk here. I have a RODECaster duo that I am speaking into. Is there anything that RODECaster could do to make me feel like I am a part of the RODE community? I don’t know. Probably not. There are just some things that aren’t going to be that interesting. A lot of people seek status in the communities and the brands that they go into. Luxury goods often have this opportunity, but non-luxury commodity goods, probably not. It would be much, much harder. So I think it could be aspirational and I think it’s a worthwhile exercise for any brand builder to say, how do we elevate the name of this brand and in fact elevate the people who associate with it so that they feel bigger, more important, more attractive, more something? How can associating with our brand make people feel better about themselves? Then you might be on the path to having this identity and association.

So what are some mistakes that you see creators making when they’re trying to build community?

The biggest mistake is that they’re just not actually trying that hard, to be honest. Like I think what I see a lot of times is people say, I have audience, community platform exists. Recurring revenue sounds cool. Let me just throw the two at each other. And what they don’t actually think about is the member experience or the outcome. Like if you have a big enough audience and you stand up a community platform just by law of big numbers, like some people will join because they obviously like you, they’re following you. But that doesn’t mean that they’ll stick. Communities are notoriously difficult from a retention perspective. So really what I see most people mistake is that it will just be easy and that like the community will self coalesce and run itself. And eventually I think you can get there, but you really have to build up that reality. Like it takes years, I think, to make the community experience so good that people do identify with it. Now other people want to kind of carry the flag and move things forward. I just think lack of effort is the biggest mistake that I see.

So how do you see community fitting in with other business models? You mentioned like road, it just may not make sense, but how does it function as like a strategic asset within a business?

I think a community is a value proposition within a membership sometimes, and the membership is a paid product. So if you’re talking about a paid community, what I think you’re actually talking about is a one-time purchase or recurring purchase product of which the community is one of the value propositions. So if it comes to your business and thinking about, do I want community to be a part of it? The question is, well, what role does it play? Is the community itself part of a paid product? And if so, is that a one-time purchase? Is it an added benefit to a one-time purchase? Is this the product itself with a recurring purchase attached to it? There are all kinds of different models and they’re all valid. But certain products, certain brands, lend themselves to different models a little bit better. Like it’s far more likely that a community on behalf of the company, Road, that I would be a part of, is probably gonna be like a support community. It’s gonna be like, I’m having a problem, can I learn from somebody and get this fixed? It’s probably less likely that Road says, hey, we are creating masterminds of some of our creators and you can join that. I think it’s possible, I think they could try to do that, but it’s probably not what I’m interested in transacting with Road for. So lots of different models, but it’s gonna kind of depend on the company and the brand. Probably the most common would be a recurring membership model for most folks. And that’s why a lot of people get into memberships is they want that recurring revenue. But to get recurring revenue, you have to provide recurring value. And unlike a software platform where the value is built into the software, and as long as you continue, letting it run, you’re gonna get the value out of it, a membership is never done. It’s like never… You can’t just set and forget it. There’s some level of involvement that you pretty much always have to do, which makes it a lot of work.

Great on that one. So let’s talk about Creator Science then as a brand, which you’ve been building up over many years. I’m curious, what came first when you built that? Did you have the audience? Did you have the content? Or do you just want to walk us through that?

Well, in some form, this was started in 2017 when I started writing an email newsletter and I was writing it every day. At that time, it was really just like me writing a public journal, basically, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my time. I was freelancing at the time. I was doing web design, some email copies, some just one-off consulting projects. And over time, I discovered this space of content. We weren’t really using the word content. We certainly were using the word creator, but there were people who were writing to an email list, selling information products, and as a former software product manager, this was fascinating to me because in my life, I had to work with engineers and designers so that I could get the thing that I wanted to exist into reality. And that always came with compromises because the business needed to move faster, deadlines needed to be moved up, this was unfeasible. So it’s so frustrating to go from, this is what I know people want, but I have to work through other people to make it real, and often, it’s not even the thing that I dreamed of in the first place. But content, I could make content. I could do writing, I could do podcasts, I could make a course. All that was in my control. And so suddenly, my product mind was just on fire, that I could do these things. So I started studying people who were doing it. And I didn’t know what I was going to make yet, but I had to publish something because I told people I’d publish every day and then every week. And so I just started sharing what I was learning, studying people doing the content thing. And so fast forward eight years, it’s just been a lot of me studying people doing the content thing and sharing what I’m learning. So the content came first. When I started to get my shit together and think of this as a company, as a brand, I first named it Creative Companion because I was like, I want to feel like a companion on the journey to being a creative person. And that brand just like didn’t take, it like just didn’t really work super well. I would go on Twitter, this is, you know, 2020, 2021, 2020, Twitter was like really hot then. It was easier to grow. People were like figuring threads out. And there’d be like a lot of lists of like best newsletters you should listen to if you’re a creator, best podcasts you should listen to if you’re a creator. And I was never on any of these lists and I was so frustrated. I’m like, what am I missing? I think the content is good, but people literally just didn’t associate me with the word creator. I put out a tweet and I said, what words would you use to describe my work? How would you describe my work? What words do you associate with me? Nobody said creator. And so I said, this is a problem. I want to be associated with that word. Maybe I should just put it in the brand name. So I started creating this list of like potential new brand names and just like a bolt of inspiration, I found the juxtaposition of creator and science. And I was like, I think I like that. I think that works. And I went into my community, which did exist at the time, but it was called the Creative Companion Club, also a horrible brand name. And I said, hey, I think I’m going to re-brand from Creative Companion to Creator Science. And the feedback was not good. It was like very mixed, but the people who were against it were super against it. They’re like, your brand is very warm and approachable and welcoming and this Creator Science brand seems very sterile and like clinical. But I just thought, I think this can work, especially if I make the visual aspect of it feel warm and welcoming and cool. And I’m super proud of myself that at this point in time, I had like enough confidence to basically go against feedback from my biggest, closest fans and advocates and say, I’m going to do it anyway, because it really worked out. I think there’s a pretty night and day difference in the business once I rebranded to Creator Science.

It’s clearly worked out. And it’s interesting to hear that you came from kind of like a personal brand in a way with your newsletters and that evolved into something bigger. I’m curious now, how do you balance like the Jay Clouse personal brand and the Creator Science brand?

I’m constantly trying to make Creator Science stand on its own two legs more, because I think the biggest risk for any Creator business is the key man risk of one, if I just got hit by a bus tomorrow, this business is dead, more or less. Two, if I ever wanted to like sell this as an asset, it’s also less valuable if I’m so intrinsically tied to it. So I’m glad that we’ve created the brand that’s beyond my name. I will always be existing online and doing projects. So I can’t get away from the fact that my name is going to be known and attached to certain things. I strongly believe that on social media, people prefer to connect with human faces and names. And so all my social accounts are under my name. The first line of the bio will be founder of Creator Science. But I haven’t really created company accounts on social media platforms or YouTube. And that’s a challenge, especially on YouTube, because there’s not really anything in our videos on YouTube that speak to the brand, Creator Science. It’s tied to my name, it’s tied to my face. We use the same brand elements and colors, but I don’t even think we really say the name in most videos. It’s on the channel artwork, I suppose. But yeah, it’s a little messy, if I’m honest.

It’s a common challenge and that’s why I asked it, because it’s always like, it is my business, but I also don’t want to be the front man of the business. So how do you manage that when you’re the face everywhere and you have personal accounts, I’m in the same boat. So yeah, it is a messy challenge.

I think this is an opportunity for memberships as a product, because I think a membership can be a valuable asset that does not have you at the center. So, you know, it’s recurring revenue, which is a valuable asset for business to create, but this is another part of the reason why I’m constantly just trying to de-center myself from it. Again, I want to be the most active member there, but I want people to join the lab for the lab experience and not for me being in there. And we’re making headway there, but yeah, I’m starting to look more and more at any project I take on, any new asset I create within the company, within the brand, from the standpoint of can I build this to be sold some day? Not because I have plans to do that in the immediate term, but because I think it’s a good business building exercise to say, what would it look like to build this asset to retain value and to create enterprise value in it, even if I die or am not involved, whatever the risk is, I want to reduce that key man risk.

That’s interesting. I’m massively failing on that. In fact, I think for me, a lot of the stuff, I tried to do that for nearly, I think about 10 years, I had a creative agency. Some of the listeners will know my story. But I came to the conclusion, because I was rubbish at what you just said, Jay, trying to take myself out of it, that frankly, I’m going to embrace it. Everything now has got my stupid face and beard on everything that I do, and I’m just like Matt Davies, and that’s it. So, it’s interesting to hear you talk about that. I think it is smart if you can pull it off, but it’s tough, right? It’s really hard. Because people buy people and they trust you, they trust Jay, do you know what I mean? So, suddenly, if you handed that off, it would probably damage their relationship then with the product or the membership community that they’re interacting with potentially. So, that’s the hardest thing, I would imagine, to detach yourself, if you ever did.

I think it really depends on the experience that you create within the space. Because if people’s primary experience with the space is, I’m showing experiments, I’m learning from experiments, I’m placed in a mastermind group, I’m learning from that mastermind group. If their experience of the value is not through you, then your involvement or your changing involvement, it just shouldn’t matter. I think they would have to trust and believe that any new steward would treat it well. I’ve long thought that if I were to ever go through an acquisition again, I would not announce the acquisition until months after it had happened, so that I could prove to people that nothing has changed. Because I do think that is the experience you need to have, especially in a product like a membership that is so, I don’t want to say fickle, but there’s the risk of negative network effects. Often people join a membership because people are joining a membership. But if you have a run of people leaving a membership, now other people are going to leave the membership because people are leaving the membership. So you don’t want that type of fear or worry. And so, yeah, if you ever did go through an acquisition, I think you would want to set it up in such a way that you kind of keep it on the down low, hush, hush, prove that the experience has not gotten any worse or changed. And then say, by the way, there is a change coming. In fact, it’s happened. And in fact, you probably didn’t notice because we designed it that way.

You’ve clearly thought about it before, right? How to do that. And you have the experience from prior acquisitions. There’s something you mentioned before about, you know, you’re choosing your name and you just had clarity. That was the right pick. How did you come to that decision? And, you know, for other people listening, how can they get clarity in such a situation when it comes to something like that?

I wish I knew, to be quite honest, because I am working on a book proposal right now. I’m going through the same issue with the title. And all I can describe it is like, anytime you’ve worked on a puzzle and you click two pieces together and you’re like, oh, that fits together. That was just a sensation that happened in my brain when I came across that name. And you know when you feel it, you know when it’s missing. And I wish I could say like, here’s how you get there. But honestly, it was like, it just felt right. And then of course, sometimes you have that feeling and you need to interrogate it a little more. You want to sleep on it, you want to turn it over, you want to look at it from different angles, different sides. And the signal for me is always, if as time passes, I have higher conviction, that’s a great sign. I think it’s easy to get like a positive signal and then be like, this is it. But then time passes and you start to like realize, there’s some holes here or there’s some jagged edges. And then you want to interrogate it more and more and more. But anytime I’m like, I think I figured this out. And then I wait and I wait and I talk to people and the signal gets stronger. That’s a really good sign.

It sounds like you’ve been looking inward as well. Like you knew that your brand was kind of rooted in this science or the data backed approach. So you’re kind of leaning in that direction and it just felt right. And then you tested it and over time it percolated and you’re like, okay, that’s the one.

There’s some things with naming in particular that I’ve just come to believe is true. I think you want simple, like common words, but you want them to interact in surprising and uncommon ways. So contrast, as we know, is like a big positive thing in design generally in branding. I really believed in having the.com, so that needed to be a thing. I think you want the name to be simultaneously like kind of surprising from the contrast perspective, but also intuitive. So it’s like, creator science, that’s interesting. There’s contrast there, but you also can kind of intuit accurately what to expect from that. If you can’t intuit something accurately, I think that’s kind of a problem. And then if you’re thinking about like identity and how you want people to relate to your brand, I think it’s important to think about the name and how it will reflect on them if they’re wearing it as a shirt, as a jacket, reading a book with it on the title. You want these things to confer status to them and not remove it if they’re seen interacting with this brand. So it’s a difficult puzzle to do anything from a naming perspective really, really well.

So you’ve mentioned a few things that you’ve been uncomfortable with, and that’s the book, right? And also your first in real life event. So I’m curious how that came about. Like, how do you get to those decisions around, let’s just talk about the event and like, why now?

Well, I think the pendulum is always swinging back and forth, right? So at one point, online communities were very novel, and then we go through COVID, nobody’s in person, so online is really big. Post COVID, people started getting back into in-person experiences and loving it. I think the pendulum is still swinging in that direction, where we haven’t had a lot of, we’re not tired of in-person experiences, and in fact, we’re reinvigorated still in that direction. And so I just have this belief that for anyone building a community, it is going to become standard and expected that, even if my primary interaction with this community is online, that people will want and even come to expect having offline experiences. So this is what we’re thinking now. The first thing I did at our IRL event was to say, rebranding the name of this event, it’s not the lab IRL, it’s the lab offline. You guys have a lot of experience with the lab online, this is the lab offline. We’re going to do offline experiences twice a year. So I think offline experiences are just… I mean, we even see this with like Zoom calls in the community. When you have a live interaction with somebody, that is going to increase your investment in that person’s success. So I always tell people when they’re launching a community, really over index on live sessions at the beginning, because then that small group of people, when they see a two dimensional name and face, they feel like there’s more of a human behind it. Offline events are like that on steroids, right? And I think it’s a competitive advantage right now to do offline events. I think eventually it’ll just become kind of a necessity because there’ll be enough of these communities that are offering this as part of their model, that again, it will be just expected of the few communities that we continue to engage with. I think we haven’t quite hit like a bubble burst yet. We’re seeing more communities created all the time. Most of them are done poorly. People won’t participate in five communities simultaneously. At best, they’ll oscillate between them while still being a member. But I think what will probably happen is people will say, I just need to consolidate my attention. I’m going to cut out most of my involvement and stick with one, maybe two communities that really serve a real need in my life. I think the bar for which community you stick with is going to be pretty high. And I just think you’ll want to be doing some form of in-person experience to compete in that world. And so our first event was two things. One, doing it so well that people raved about it. So the people who came are likely to go again. And they are going to, when asked by other members, say, yeah, you should absolutely do that. So first and foremost, the experiment or the experience had to be good enough that the people who came were glad they did and will come again. And second, I wanted to figure out the economics of it because it’s not something that I see as a revenue driver, at least not the type of event we just did. I see it as a retention mechanism. I think there are people who, especially the more busy and successful the creators in the lab are, the more intentional they are with their time and attention. So, a lot of them, they’ll jump into the forum once a month, maybe more than that. But those are the people who are like, I really value these in-person experiences because I can have this very concentrated two-day experience. I mean, there are a couple of people at the event that were like, listen, I might not have renewed my membership. I’ll renew my membership every year just to come to one of these. And so I just think it’s a really powerful way to engage people who are not particularly suited for an always-on asynchronous experience.

Well, it’s been the hardest part or surprising part of doing an in-real-life event like that.

The hardest part was the economics, figuring that out. And not even just figuring it out, but projecting it so that I didn’t lose my shirt on running the event. Right? I probably didn’t do a super effective job of marketing it internally, but we had 20% of the community show up. Like, we had 40 people, it’s a 200-ish person community, and so we had a really good turnout for the amount that I talked about it. There’s just a lot of logistics that we hadn’t done in this format before, right? And so leading up to it, I just didn’t know, is this gonna be good? I had to think through, what is the agenda? Where are we eating? What are we getting from the menu from this hotel? And by the way, I had to figure out how to do a hotel room block. And oh wow, that’s the economics of a hotel. I’m kind of putting myself at risk here to get a hotel room block. I wanted to bring in like special guests during it. I wanted to do a bunch of stuff that wasn’t sitting in a hotel conference room. So we had to plan stuff out of the event and figure out the timing of that. And everything, I was constantly trying to stack the deck for creating serendipity. I didn’t want to leave a ton of it up to chance. So when we were in the conference room, I had seating charts. And those seating charts changed every day, but they were extremely intentional. The name tags we had had little visual elements on it that were intended to spur and create conversation. So it’s just like a lot of little things like that. We had custom fortune cookies made, and all the fortunes were things like, your email will land in their primary inbox. So it’s just like a little fun stuff like that, that like ultimately you spend all this time planning, you spend money planning, but nothing matters if on the two days of the event, people don’t have a good time. So it’s just like months of planning and trying to do something good, but ultimately nothing matters if those two days aren’t a good experience for the people who were there. And we landed on a Sunday night, the event was Monday and Tuesday. Our bag was mistagged at the airport. All of our materials were in a checked bag that we were flying to Boise and that bag went to San Francisco. And we had less than 24 hours to get that bag back. And we did, but it’s like, ah, this is all really stressful. This shouldn’t be this hard. And now, you know, I put out the feedback survey last night. We had 40 people come, we have 25 responses so far. And out of 10, the how would you rate overall experiences in 9.4 right now. So it like went super, super well. And I’m just stoked about it. I think it’s a great part of the future. But again, because it’s not a moneymaker on its own, even if it breaks even in terms of revenue and cost, it does not count the cost of our time planning it. So like we run this thing at a loss and we’ll continue to run it at a loss to some degree. But again, I see it as a retention play and also like new member attraction because as I was saying, some folks, they don’t want to be in an always on forum. But I think the opportunity to attend the lab offline is gonna have people join the community that otherwise wouldn’t.

Yeah, will you do it again and will you get help next time?

Oh, 100%. And my wife did a lot of the planning. She’s in the business also, so she’ll continue to do it. We learned a lot that’s like very rinse and repeat for this. We will do it again. My plan is to do it twice a year. And I want to do one of them internationally per year. So we’ve got to figure out is Boise just like our annual US based event? Maybe, especially like knowing the hotel and that room works. Like it makes sense from an efficiency standpoint to kind of keep some of that constant. The hotel was rated 9.6 out of 10 by these 25 people so far. So that like is a big, okay, that worked. The big question is, will we do another one this year? And maybe, we might do one late in the year.

All right. Thanks for sharing your experience there. I’m going to jump to a different kind of topic and that’s building in public. And you’ve kind of done this for, since I’ve known you for quite a while, and it’s been a big part of your success. So I’m curious around, how do you think building in public is like a strategy? Like, what’s your approach there?

Well, building public used to be very pure. It was very much like wins, losses. This is just what I’m doing today. And then building public became like bragging public. It was like, I’m just going to show the highlights of the progress that I’m making. And that was effective from a marketing standpoint. But that tactic, I think we’re seeing like when you share big, exciting numbers and brag about like, look how awesome I did, it gets good engagement and you feel like, okay, this is what people want. So I encourage you to do more of that because it performs highly. And you’re like, this is good. But what I think it actually does even more is create envy in your audience, which I think is a big net negative. I think when you create envy as an emotional reaction in people, there’s at least a subconscious part of them that starts to resent you and root for you to fail. And so I’ve really changed my personal direction to get closer to the more pure build in public where it used to be, where it’s more just like living in public, and just sharing like, here’s what’s going on, here’s what I’m thinking. I’m a lot more transparent with some of my mental hangups lately, and people have been so receptive and so kind. And I’ve been a little bit more open then to sharing some of that. So I think it can still be an effective strategy insofar as it makes what to create kind of obvious, because you can just be like, what am I experiencing? What am I thinking? What am I feeling? And that can spur the content creation. But I think the build in public we’ve seen over the last three years was just share the highlights and prop yourself up. I think you’ll still get engagement if you do that, but I think it’s not a great long-term strategy.

It sounds like you’re leaning more into being more vulnerable, but still being transparent at the same time. But how do you balance that? It’s always a challenge of being like, how much do I share? How much, how vulnerable do I get?

It’s a spectrum. I think you have to figure out where you sit and feel comfortable on the spectrum. I think you can be honest without being 100 percent transparent. For example, my wife and I have made a decision that we are, as much as we can avoid it, not sharing our child’s name, not sharing photos of her. It would be very transparent of me to share my lifestyle at home with my daughter, but that’s a certain boundary that I’ve set. But there are other things where it’s like, okay, if I want to talk about the numbers in my business, inside the lab, I’m extremely transparent where it’s like, literally, here’s my P&L and here’s where that revenue came from, here’s what cost me money, here’s what I’m struggling with. But I don’t share all of that publicly, because I don’t know who’s seeing it. So I’ll share some things, like here’s maybe an experiment I ran and the data on that. But there’s just levels on the spectrum of transparency. And so I think you have to contextually decide where you want to be, what level of transparent. I will not be dishonest, but I won’t always be fully transparent, if that makes sense.

Thanks for sharing. All right, Jay, I think we’re wrapping up, Neil, we have a quick fire round for you. Matt, do you want to jump into this one?

Oh, yeah. I love a good quick fire round. Are you ready, Jay?

I am.

All right. One branding myth you’re tired of.

This is interesting. I don’t live in this world as much as you guys do. I will say there was something I heard once that I really, really bought into that I don’t know if I completely buy into it anymore, and that is a great logo should be able to be redrawn from memory by like a child.

Nice. Nice. All right. Go another one. One creator myth you’re tired of.

I get really tired of people like making the six-figure claim in their products. Like, this is gonna help you make a six-figure of this or become a six-figure that it sounds sexy, it sounds flashy and will sell programs, but it’s always over-promised in terms of timeline. And, yeah, I just think it’s dishonest.

Okay, most underrated tool or ritual in your creative workflow.

Oh, boy. I feel like it’s like one password. Like, I feel like I pay almost nothing for one password, but it keeps me secure. I never have to think about passwords, and I can easily share things with my team, with my wife. It’s, like, beautiful. I feel like I pay not enough money for one password.

Great.

Right. Another one. A creator or brand doing community really well right now that’s not yours?

I continuously come back to Dan Andrews and the Tropical MBA team. Their community is called the Dynamite Circle. They’ve been doing it for, like, almost 20 years. They were the original location, independent entrepreneur community. And I just feel like they’ve they figured out the model a long time ago, and we’re just getting hip to it.

What’s one thing you do differently if you’re starting from scratch?

OK, I have two things came to mind, but I’ll give you one unless you want both. I think the number one thing new creators could do to set them up for success is to think about the overall size of the market they’re targeting, because you can build a big business with a small market share if the market is big enough. You know what I mean? I think a lot of creators try to do this niche down thing, and they target a very small overall market in terms of number of people who would be target customers. And then they really have to either fight competition or capture a large percentage of that market to build a big business. Whereas if you just focus on a larger target market, then there’s a lot more slack in the system for you to like compete or, you know, just carve out a meaningful slice.

Right. What was the second one? I’m curious now.

Oh, the second one was just to exercise more restraint and what platforms that I’m on. Just like focus on one, do it extremely well and not worry about creating accounts and trying to be everywhere.

Right. Well, thank you, Jay. We’re going to wrap up, but before we do it, where can people find you? You know, join the lab, check out your stuff.

Everything’s at creatorscience.com. Since you’re listening to this, you obviously are a fan of podcasts, so check out Creatorscience and your podcast player. But otherwise, you can find me at creatorscience.com and learn about anything we talked about here today.

And lastly, what’s one piece of advice you’d leave brand builders or creators who want to build something that’s real and lasting?

You got to give a s*** about people. Like, you’ve got to make other people successful and understand what they care about. Otherwise, they’re not going to care about you.

Legend. Thank you so much, Jay.

Thanks, guys.

They’re awesome.