Table of contents
Hey 🙌
Today I want to discuss… you 👀
Turning your side hustle into a business needs some forward thinking. So today we’re going to talk about the different ways your future as a Creatorpreneur could look. I’ll also give you some questions which will help you visualise what you want from this journey 💪
If you signed up for the 5 day Creatorpreneur Crash Course email series, you may be familiar with this topic, but I think it’s important enough to deserve its own slot in the newsletter ✍️
Coming Up…
In the next five minutes, we’re going to cover:
- Why you should think about what your business will look like in three years.
- The three different types of Creatorpreneur.
- The exact questions to ask yourself to figure out what your aim is.
💬 Let’s get into it
As you transition from creator to Creatorpreneur, you need to look ahead. This is no longer about throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.
In his fantastic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey suggests that we should think about where we’d ideally like to be in three years. You need to know roughly where you’re going so you can figure out your next move.
Think of this on a sliding scale - the further up the scale we go, the more our hypothetical business scales too. Are we aiming to keep the production, overheads and team size to a minimum, or do we imagine this thing becoming a multi-million dollar business in the next five years?
Daniel Priestly’s brilliant book Oversubscribed describes three distinct points on the scale: Solopreneur → Lifestyle Business → Performance Business.
🙋♀️ 1 - Solopreneur
Usually a lone creator, making YouTube videos or streaming or writing online essays (etc). By keeping this thing small-scale, you keep the production process localised, and enjoy all the returns yourself.
You’ll be limited by your own capacity, so the business is unlikely to generate life-changing sums of money (obviously this varies, but anyone making decent money at this level will start to hire a small team).
Examples - UnJaded Jade, Kharma Medic
😎 2 - Lifestyle Business
At this level, things have started to scale up - everything from output, to team size, to (hopefully) revenue. In fact, at this level, the revenue you’re generating might start to have a decent impact on your life.
You’ve managed to turn your creative side hustle into a legit business, and your aim now is to live your best life while the business continues to be profitable.
If you’re really not sold on the idea of gathering a team, then this is probably not the place on the Creatorpreneur scale that you’ll be picturing. But for most people, this is a pretty sweet spot to aim for.
Examples - Patricia Bright, Ali Abdaal
🚀 3 - Performance Business
Once you’ve reached a point where your business has good margins, you’ve got enough money to live your best life, and your team are happy… where else is there to go?
At this point, money is not the incentive. Instead, it’s a commitment to the core mission of the business. You’ll reinvest pretty much every dollar into the business to keep creating better and better content.
If you’re aiming for this level, it’s probably because you can see that your business has the potential to scale up massively, to benefit thousands (if not millions) of people, and you know you want to build a team to make that happen.
However, as Daniel says in Oversubscribed:
“Not all people are suited for a high-performance business… Managing teams of 50+ people requires systems and structures that take the fun out of it for some people, whereas a team of three to 12 people is self-organising and dynamic by comparison.”
Examples - MrBeast, Linus Tech Tips
⏳ Isn’t It A Bit Soon To Think About This?
So why are we thinking about this?
In my opinion, thinking about the eventual scale of your business will impact the decisions you make tomorrow.
For example, if you know you have big plans for your business, it might be helpful to think about hiring your first team member, to start freeing up your time for the ‘visionary’ aspects of running the business.
You might realise you need to hire a P.A. to sort out frustrating admin, like answering email or organising your calendar. Or maybe you know you want to ramp up the number of newsletters you write per week, so you could think about hiring a writer-researcher.
Equally, if you know you would hate to start working with a team, then it’s good to plan out exactly what your ideal week would look like as a solopreneur, so you can optimise your systems for working towards creating that dream day.
🤔 What’s next?
Of course, how you feel about this now can and probably will change, but it’s good to have an idea of which direction to set out on.
So here are a few questions to ask yourself when thinking about where on the Creatorpreneur scale you sit. Personally I’d write down my answers, to really force myself to think deeply about how I feel…
- Are you more interested in working alone or with a big team? What does your ideal team look like?
- Would you enjoy managing people?
- Do you want to make millions of dollars or just enough to cover your expenses? Or is it something in-between?
- What impact are you trying to make with your creative side hustle?
- Look at your favourite creators, what are their business models? Which model sounds best to you?
Now, on the subject of what your dream creative side hustle looks like in 3 years…
- How are you making your money?
- How much are you working? Is all your time spent working on this creative business? Or do you have another job too?
- How are you spending your time? What does your ‘ideal ordinary week’ look like?
- How big is your audience?
- What content are you making?
- How big is your team? And what do they do?
It’s never too early to start thinking about this.
Have a great rest of your week,
George
Man at Typewriter @ Creatorpreneur
🚀 Part-Time Creatorpreneur
Our new course, ‘Part-Time Creatorpreneur’ is available now!
This self-paced course, presented by Ali Abdaal, distils all the lessons learned in his journey from casual YouTuber to ‘professional’ Creatorpreneur. After three years, dozens of business books, and tens of thousands spent on business coaches, Ali turned his creative hobby into a business which turned over nearly $5 million last year.
‘Part-Time Creatorpreneur’ gives you the principles, tools and resources to scale up your creative side hustle in the same way.
We’ll always offer tonnes of free content here, but for anyone who’s super serious about taking their creativity to the next level, scaling up efficiently without burning out, and driving revenue, this course will be super valuable.
| Enrol Now |
🐦 Creatorpreneur Twitter
We turn all our newsletters into tweet threads, so if you found this useful it’d be fab if you could show the thread some love ❤️ It really helps us reach new people :)
We tweet every day about Creatorpreneurs and the creator economy, and we’d love to keep the conversation going over there with fine folks such as yourself.
🎙 Creatorpreneur Podcast
We’re launching a podcast for Creatorpreneurs. It’s presented by me and Angus Parker (Ali’s Director of Operations).
Season One will launch in the summer, but to get warmed up, Angus and I sat down for a little chat about the Creator Economy, what we hope to get out of the conversations, and how we got our jobs working for Ali.
It’s available right now - check it out here.
