Table of contents
Hey Creatorpreneurs,
Imagine growing your audience to 1m across all platforms in 6 months. That's what Alex Hormozi did. This week, we'll be learning from his journey, as well as dealing with setbacks after there was a problem with the launch of our camera confidence course last Friday. Let's get into it.
🤫 Behind the Scenes
The reason we do this “behind the scenes” segment is to show that bigger creators and bigger brands still find things difficult, and to empower any smaller creator reading to keep going, knowing that all creators have more or less the same struggles. Having a team of course lightens the load each week, but no matter who we are we still have to try come up with good ideas for content and execute on them.
From the outside, it might look like Creatorpreneur is a well-defined new brand, but really it’s just two budding creators, Tintin and Gareth, who want to build a community and educational resource for creators, with Ali’s help (and audience 🤫).
Last week, we launched the Camera Confidence course, and the demand was good generally, but we had an issue where lots of people who bought the course on Shopify were not automatically enrolled in the course on Teachable. Luckily everything’s now sorted 😅 but it was a bit of a hurdle.
Takeaway: there will always be bumps in the road, or maybe even huge ditches, but if we believe in what we’re doing, we’re enjoying the process overall and we’re always trying to improve, then in the long term we’re way more likely to succeed.
💡Creatorpreneur Insight - 1m Followers in 6 Months
Alex Hormozi, a wealthy businessman, has blown up on all social media platforms over the past year. You might think he’s just another mega rich, muscled-up, un-relatable businessman who’s leveraged his wealth to pump out content, but there’s actually a lot to learn from him. Algorithms don’t care about how rich we are, they care about whether people like our content.
He shares his story and approach in this two part podcast (highly recommend listening to part 1 and part 2).
There are a few big takeaways. Alex’s whole content strategy is to talk about things he’s done. That’s it. He just shares what he did and how he thinks he did it, hoping it’s useful for others. He talks about making money, because that’s what he’s done and no one can question it. He focuses on his truth, not claiming to know the truth. This helps him remain likeable despite his lack of relatability.
So we should ask ourselves: what have we done that we can talk about?
Another thing he does is test out content first on twitter. He turns the more successful single tweets into short form content for TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, then turns the more successful threads into longer form content just for YouTube.
He also talks about how a lot of us are probably doing the right things, we’re just not doing enough of it. It’s hard not to sacrifice quality for quantity, but if you want to grow quicker, you have to figure out how to make more content. Simple, but difficult.
If you’re serious about content creation, those two podcasts are absolute gold mines for practical tips and inspiration, especially part 2, so definitely check them out. Links below.
p.s. Alex also came on Ali’s podcast recently, so keep an eye out for that episode 👀
📝 Creatorpreneur Diaries
A weekly update from Gareth and Tintin on their journeys as Creatorpreneurs.
Gareth
For the last year I’ve been using the cheapest lighting for my videos. It’s either been this $50 light/softbox I got from Amazon when I first started or natural lighting from my window.
The result being that I’ve been creating over-exposed videos pretty much since the day I started on YouTube. I genuinely look like a ghost in half of my videos lol.
So, this week I decided to make a change and try to figure out my lighting. Step one is to buy a better key light (which is the main source of lighting for my videos) starting with my purchase of a Godox SL-60W and a Godox P90L Softbox.
This won’t fix everything, I know, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. Once this is figured out I’ll probably look into better colour grading, sorting out the white balance, and finding some nice practical lights. There’s no rush. As long as I keep making small improvements every week then that’s all I care about :)
I’m trying to keep in mind the idea from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits that if you get 1% better each day for a year, you’ll end up 37x better by the end.
Tintin
It’s turning into a pretty exciting race between me and Gareth on the subscriber front. I know we’re not supposed to care about the metrics too much, and I don’t want to challenge Gareth in front of over 12,000 people, but I can’t help but notice I’m on 3.5k and he’s on 4.15k subscribers.
I will overtake him by the end of the year. Hold me accountable please gang 🚀
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about trying to be an efficient Creatorpreneur. Obviously I would do, but I really believe in this idea of systemising your operation and production as much as possible. I just love the idea of it feeling more like I’m existing within a system which I’ve made, and I just have to tick the boxes of the system each week, instead of reinventing the system.
The biggest changes I’ve made recently have been scheduling in time for writing and planning videos, (Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, 8-9am before work) scheduling in time on the weekend for filming (this changes depending on my plans, but blocking time out for it means it’s more likely to get done) and then finally outsourcing editing.
I’m hoping I can now just make videos systematically, with a little more peace of mind each week, because at times over the past year, I’ve been mega stressed.
🧰 The Creator Toolbox
- Cleanshot is a screenshot tool we’ve been using to capture different stages of website builds.
- Video from Paddy Galloway about how a YouTuber gained 1m subs in 6 months.
- Oversubscribed is a book about getting people waiting to do business with you, very appropriate for Creatorpreneurs.
- Typefully helps you write your tweet threads.
📝 Written by: Tintin & Gareth 🕴 Editor: Ali Abdaal
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