Explore all emails from Creator Spotlight

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/3d56938f-f7ce-4784-919e-dab3c8df5287/image__39_.png?t=1748354774) Follow image link: (https://creatorspotlight.com/) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/6be4cb74-d5fb-4c79-82a5-dad69e7247d7/image__206_.png?t=1784783016) Follow image link: (https://www.beehiiv.com/dive?utm_medium=newsletter-ads&utm_source=Creator-Spotlight&utm_content=EVG&utm_source_platform=newsletter&utm_campaign=EVG-July-2026) Caption: Center Consoles Only (CCO), which started as a custom boat photography aggregator on Instagram ten years ago, is now a multi-armed business branching even into SaaS for boat dealers. Slow Ventures’ Creator Fund recently invested $2.5 million in the business. To get the story, I spoke to CCO co-founders Alan Blanco, Brian Gonzalez, and Eric Taggart, as well as Slow Ventures partner Megan Lightcap. **In this episode:** * [09:35 | Refining the content to build trust over time](https://videos.creatorspotlight.com/v/turning-an-instagram-page-into-a-multi-million-dollar-business?t=575) * [15:53 | How content is CCO’s “opportunity creation machine”](https://videos.creatorspotlight.com/v/turning-an-instagram-page-into-a-multi-million-dollar-business?t=953) * [34:31 | A $2.5 million venture capital investment](https://videos.creatorspotlight.com/v/turning-an-instagram-page-into-a-multi-million-dollar-business?t=2071) View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/6f52d457-49eb-4661-aabe-3d1bf7a033ea/Group_33.png?t=1785242439) Follow image link: (https://videos.creatorspotlight.com/v/turning-an-instagram-page-into-a-multi-million-dollar-business) Caption: **[Listen](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/podcast/s/tcsp/turning_an_instagram_page_into_a_multi-million-dollar_business_ft_center_consoles_only)** to the podcast | **[Watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMTgtT2uD8g)** on YouTube | Scroll down to **read** our profile. _— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor_ ---------- ---------- ## Reaching your audience shouldn’t take 12 tools. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/42a6d7f2-8dee-492a-86da-41e88d31c65a/image__210_.png?t=1785177063) Follow image link: (https://www.beehiiv.com/dive?utm_medium=newsletter-ads&utm_source=Creator-Spotlight&utm_content=EVG&utm_source_platform=newsletter&utm_campaign=EVG-July-2026) Caption: Your newsletter is here. Your website is there. Your podcast analytics are a mess. Your community is just a Facebook chat. And somehow, you’re the one stuck connecting it all. [beehiiv](https://www.beehiiv.com/dive?utm_medium=newsletter-ads&utm_source=Creator-Spotlight&utm_content=EVG&utm_source_platform=newsletter&utm_campaign=EVG-July-2026) brings your content, audience, and business together on one platform. Create newsletters, publish podcasts, build your website, grow your community, and earn from subscriptions, ads, and digital products without duct-taping a dozen tools together. If you're ready to stop jumping from platform to platform, here's your sign to connect your entire business on [beehiiv](https://www.beehiiv.com/dive?utm_medium=newsletter-ads&utm_source=Creator-Spotlight&utm_content=EVG&utm_source_platform=newsletter&utm_campaign=EVG-July-2026). You'll spend less time managing your tech stack and more time building something people truly love. [Get started for free today.](https://www.beehiiv.com/dive?utm_medium=newsletter-ads&utm_source=Creator-Spotlight&utm_content=EVG&utm_source_platform=newsletter&utm_campaign=EVG-July-2026) _This is an advertisement._ ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/eb47a50c-ecc6-4903-9943-1c384b903960/IN_THE_SPOTLIGHT.png?t=1744661614) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/57a5adde-f358-4013-9f32-49c0ceea16f1/image__211_.png?t=1785185964) Follow image link: (https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/center-consoles-only) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/d06b7622-a275-476a-83f3-3947f79418de/Francis_Zierer__1_.png?t=1784233222) Follow image link: (https://www.linkedin.com/in/francis-zierer/) Caption: ## A $7k Instagram acquisition to a $2.5m fundraise Is $7,000 a good price for an Instagram page? Consider that the page has around 30,000 followers. Consider that it is 2016. Consider that you are Alan Blanco, and you are obsessed with center console boats. Consider that, earlier this year, a decade after purchasing the Instagram page, Alan and his partners raised $2.5 million in venture capital for a larger business grown from the seed of that page. They didn’t _need_ the capital injection, certainly not with any urgency — the business was already profitable. Alan describes Center Consoles Only (CCO), the media arm of his business, as an “opportunity creation machine.” More than anything, they raised because they needed seasoned partners to tackle their biggest opportunity yet. _(If you, like me, have not spent much time around boats: __**a center console is a type of boat where all of the controls sit at the center of the vessel**__, leaving ample space for passengers to maneuver around the edges for fishing.)_ **Today, the @centerconsolesonly Instagram page is just one piece of a business that spans media, software, and, yes, physical boats.** 1. **Center Consoles Only (media)** * **Core services now include:** classic social media promotion, bespoke content creation, social media management, event coverage, and custom solutions (including full-scale web development). * **1.72 million total followers: ** * Instagram: 543k * YouTube: 90.9k * Facebook: 460k * TikTok: 631.4k 2. **Orion Boatworks (boat manufacturer)** * Since 2022 — partnership with a man named Adriano who’d approached the CCO crew with molds for a classic boat hull. The CCO team designed the boat based on everything they’d learned over their years filming boats. Now run as a subcontracted operation. * 20 deposits collected before the first hull was completed (purely from their social media presence). Nearly 40 boats out on the water to date. 3. **Open Fisherman (e-commerce)** * Acquired the domain (“open fisherman” and “center console” are two terms for the same type of boat). Running for half a decade. Drop-ship model (apparel, safety gear, boat accessories). * Raised $600k for non-profits through raffles. * Still live, but not a primary focus. 4. [**Boats Only**](https://boatsonly.com/)** (social network, classifieds, creator hub, SaaS)** * Launched at the end of 2025, this is the major bet for the future of the business, and the bet that drove Slow to invest. * **Social network:** Think a Facebook group, built especially for boat enthusiasts, or a return to the early-2000s, interest-based forum format. There’s a feed, DMs, jobs, the works. * **Free classifieds:** Competitor to Facebook Marketplace specifically for boats (undercuts other sites that charge dealers thousands of dollars per month to post). * **Creator hub:** A B2B creator marketplace matching boat brands to vetted creators (think: specialized Fiverr). For example, a manufacturer could submit a video for remixing by multiple creators. Boats Only holds payment in escrow, to be released once deliverables are approved (and takes a transaction fee). * **SaaS tooling for boat dealers:** The newest and largest bet. Boat dealers might spend $10-30k per month on tools from CRM to accounting, none of which are purpose-built for the specific industry use case. Boil it all back down, and every part of the business comes back to a few people passionate about recreational boating leveraging their passion and skills to connect people selling boats with people buying boats. I asked Megan Lightcap, who led the investment on the Slow side, about identifying good fits for their Creator Fund: ““We want to find people who are so deeply passionate about this space and through that passion have built deep, deep community around that thing and have unbelievable trust with their audience. Like, they speak the same language. We joke around — these are sort of cult leaders, right?”“ — Megan Lightcap There’s no such thing as a creator, really. At this point in the evolution of the creator economy, as the field becomes increasingly professionalized, the word loses meaning. “Creators,” in the sense of social media users building and seeking to monetize an audience in earnest, are no different than startup founders. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## The acquisition that enabled the business Now in his mid-forties, Alan has been building and engaging in online, boat-focused communities since the early 2000s. He grew up fishing on center console boats with his father. It’s a lifelong passion: “I could name any boat, any year, and approximate price range when I was like twelve years old.” By 2012, Alan was running an Instagram page called Poop Deck. This was well before video content took over Instagram, and **Alan’s page was filled with aggregated (but credited, of course) boat photos.** By 2016, he says, he’d grown it to around **150k followers**, but he knew the page, name, and concept only had so much mileage. Then, a younger man named Ian Scott approached Alan asking for advice on growing his Instagram page, @centerconsolesonly — here was a concept he could run with. **Alan made Ian an offer for the page, which had around 30k followers at the time, and the two negotiated a final price of $7,000.** And he immediately made back half the cost in a deal with Streamline Boats, a company he’d already been working with through Poop Deck. Streamline was a young company (Alan remembers them having sold only one boat by then), but they paid him $3,500 in exchange for his help growing their business through the page. Alan’s work soon helped them sell “sixteen or eighteen” boats, and he collected a referral fee each time. Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DanoD-uuGaf/) View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## How the Center Consoles Only business was born Shortly after acquiring the CCO Instagram page, in 2017, Alan launched **a marketing content subscription business for boat manufacturers and dealers**. There were three tiers, priced on a per-post basis: * **1 post per month: $250 per month** * ** 2 posts per month: $500 per month** * **1 post per week: $1,000 per month** Businesses subscribing at these rates would provide their own content; otherwise, Alan began offering higher-ticket packages including quarterly shoots. Over time, CCO would increasingly lean into that original content. Acquiring customers was a cold-call grind at first. ““I don't know how many phone calls, how many emails I sent out to owners of boat manufacturers, dealers, and stuff like that presenting this to them. Obviously it took quite some time for them to actually give us a shot. Once they did, I think I had probably ten or twelve manufacturers that agreed to it.”“ — Alan Blanco All this time, CCO was a side project; Alan was working for his father’s construction company. Once he’d assembled that initial dozen-or-so customer base, he spoke to Brian Gonzalez, a developer, friend, and collaborator on previous products, and asked for help building a website. It was around this time, in the summer of 2018, when part-time work on CCO began generating almost as much money as Alan’s full-time construction job. After wrapping up a major construction project, Alan went to his father and expressed his desire to **take a month off, give CCO his full attention for 60–80 hours per week, and see what he could do**. This was a high-stakes bet, with Alan and his wife welcoming their first daughter that same month. ““It was the best and worst time to do it. Very stressful, but you know, in my mind, failure was not an option. I had to make this happen.”“ — Alan Blanco **By the end of that month, the CCO subscription customer base was somewhere in the “30 to 40 manufacturer range.” **More than enough clients to fill their content calendar at that point, and they began offering more custom content packages. Alan’s month off from construction turned plural. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## Much more than a content business Within a few months of committing to CCO full-time, Alan welcomed Brian to the team full-time as a co-founder. They were soon joined by Eric Taggart — a film-school-trained videographer who’d previously worked with the Miami Heat (and happened to be Alan’s brother-in-law). The content kept getting better. What started as a feed of aggregated stills, many eventually provided by manufacturers on that subscription model, became a video feed. First-person videos shot by Alan turned into documentary-style shoots with Alan as an on-camera character. They expanded from Instagram to TikTok and YouTube and, all the while, Alan learned more and more about the intricate details of how to build a boat. They stopped needing to reach out to potential shoot subjects, their inboxes filling with pitches. And, with a strong media-and-marketing business at the center, the crew began casting out all additional business lines. Some caught, some didn’t. In addition to the ongoing business lines described earlier, the group has **launched and moved on from others**, including **a waterfront real estate business** ($50–60M in sales in the first year, exists in a different form through a previous business partner), **a boat brokerage** (shut down in part due to conflict of interest), and **a boat club** (membership model, shuttered due to insurance cost). The boat club only lasted for about a year, but it caused them to shop around for equity partners for the first time, ultimately leading to their relationship with Slow Ventures. Key to both sides agreeing to funding was Boats Only, the combination social network, classified platform, creator hub, and SaaS. Though less than a year old, Boats Only has massive potential. The incumbent, Boats Group, (which owns major classified sites and charges dealers thousands a month to list) recently changed hands in a reported $2 billion private-equity deal. It's also facing broker anger over pricing: an antitrust suit filed last year claims subscription fees have climbed more than 400% in a decade, and while a first version of the suit was tossed out in June, brokers remain frustrated. **This tension opens the field for a grassroots operator like CCO, with a brand built on hard-earned trust, to come in and disrupt.** View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/2fcdb402-b4d5-473b-a1c0-f4223d290dc1/Screenshot_2026-07-28_at_11.38.12_AM.png?t=1785253111) Follow image link: (https://boatsonly.com/) Caption: That trust manifests in CCO’s WhatsApp group full of top boat manufacturers and dealers. This is the community they’ve produced over the last decade; this is the focus group for their big bet. And_ this_ is why Slow invested $2.5 million, one of just a few publicly-announced investments from their Creator Fund (Megan mentioned more completed investments yet to be publicized). **For now, Boats Only is still a bet, not yet a year old. I asked Alan what he hopes to have achieved in three years that he has not yet achieved today:** ““Right now what we're embarking on with boatsonly.com is, like, a thousand times more than what I ever dreamt was possible. Before, we [thought] — we'll create content, we'll build boats, and people might remember us from the content we created and hopefully providing value there. But now [Boats Only] really could be the savior for the marine industry, something they've never experienced before and no one has really taken the time to do, or had the capability to build — or had the knowledge just from being in the trenches with everyone to be able to put together properly.”“ — Alan Blanco Is Alan a creator? Sure, though at this point, we might just use the word “founder.” What’s the difference? View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: _Subscribe to _Center Consoles Only_ on _[_YouTube_](https://www.youtube.com/centerconsolesonly)_ or _[_Instagram_](https://www.instagram.com/centerconsolesonly/). _Learn more about _[Boats Only](https://boatsonly.com/). ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/627c8d76-6ca3-47bc-9fb4-0d53395a1047/Takeaways__1_.png?t=1776155609) Caption: ## Building trust with your audience Had Center Consoles Only remained a still-image aggregation page, it wouldn’t have built the business it has today. It’s not that a scaled, more polished version of that original idea wouldn’t play; rather, the value CCO continues to build today is rooted in Alan, his character, and Alan-as-character. None of this works without that personality at the center, and the content needs to foreground that personality. As the business evolved, here’s how Alan strategically leveraged this to build trust with his audience. ### Stage one: Obsession “At the beginning, obviously sharing other people's content, there [really wasn't any trust](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/hierarchy-of-trust),” Alan told me. All there was was his _curation_; he had an eye for boats and would Google around for great photos. His obsession kicked everything off, but his face wasn’t there, and he was shooting by himself, so it was more difficult to get his face in the shot. ### Stage two: From still to video As he gained customers and began offering custom content packages, Alan started going out to film boat videos himself. ““I would go with a GoPro and just kind of vlog it all the way through for YouTube. And then the social media content became like a first-person view of what I saw. So I would walk people through the boat, and really all you would see is my hand opening a hatch, pointing at something, and then my voice kind of narrating what it is that I'm seeing.”“ — Alan Blanco Now, his audience was learning with him, but still didn’t _see_ him. He was still less a character, more a messenger. This went on for a few years, until … ### Stage three: On-camera Finally, Alan’s brother-in-law and co-founder Eric joins him to shoot the videos. Alan is now walking his viewers through a boat in front of the camera, with better footage shot by a trained professional. At the same time, they’re using wide-angle lenses (before the 0.5 lens became widely available on iPhones; the perspective was novel), creating a unique look in their niche. Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/p/DbTRo9Vu2R4/?hl=en) Alan moving from behind to on-camera is pivotal. As he put it, “That's when the trust started becoming a little more evident.” Alan becomes more confident in his knowledge — he now feels comfortable sharing his opinion. He’s a face for people to relate to. This is around 2020. And this is what enables CCO to go from a few social media pages to an ever-expanding business. People start DMing the page to ask him questions. He still answers these messages himself, though the volume is often such that he can’t keep up. Oftentimes, he’ll even share his phone number — “I'll spend thirty minutes on the phone with these people explaining my experience, you know, comparing different boats that they have in mind.” The CCO, Alan-as-character approach differs from the first iteration of CCO and, as Alan puts it, “all these cinematic videos and dramatic, you know, drone footage with music.” It produces trust, durability, and the foundation for a more ambitious business. ---------- ——— You are reading a plain text version of this post. For the best experience, copy and paste this link in your browser to view the post online: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/center-consoles-only

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/1fb00cf4-5d66-4896-83ce-90f035e373aa/CS_Logo_Wide.gif?t=1705502632) Follow image link: (https://creatorspotlight.com/) Caption: A beehiiv production View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/976540f0-e3f4-44fb-a535-5a761141e355/image__178_.png?t=1784783016) Follow image link: (https://open.video/mcp?utm_source=creator-spotlight-july-3&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=creator-spotlight-0603&utm_id=creator-spotlight&utm_term=mcp-server-core&utm_content=mcp-creators) Caption: The creator economy does not exist solely on the internet and in our phones. Every city produces a different kind of creator, shaped by its industries, institutions, neighborhoods, and culture. Last year, I put a magnifying glass to the thriving creator economy in Chicago. Today, we’re applying the same lens to Boston. _— Natalia Perez-Gonzalez, Assistant Editor_ ---------- ---------- ## Run your video channel from a chat window View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/d4c41e2b-e72b-4661-92de-54e3ba0ca8d0/fablead.png?t=1784881761) Follow image link: (https://open.video/mcp?utm_source=creator-spotlight-july-3&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=creator-spotlight-0603&utm_id=creator-spotlight&utm_term=mcp-server-core&utm_content=mcp-creators) Caption: [Open.Video](https://open.video/mcp?utm_source=creator-spotlight-july-3&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=creator-spotlight-0603&utm_id=creator-spotlight&utm_term=mcp-server-core&utm_content=mcp-creators) gives you a video channel on your own domain, lets you keep 100% of your revenue, and now connects with AI tools to handle the busy work. With the [Open.Video MCP server](https://open.video/mcp?utm_source=creator-spotlight-july-3&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=creator-spotlight-0603&utm_id=creator-spotlight&utm_term=mcp-server-core&utm_content=mcp-creators), your favorite AI agent can publish videos, write titles and descriptions, optimize SEO, pull analytics, and more. Just tell it what you want. Already on YouTube? Import your entire channel in one click and keep both running. Every subscriber becomes a real email address you own. [Connect your agent to Open.Video today](https://open.video/mcp?utm_source=creator-spotlight-july-3&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=creator-spotlight-0603&utm_id=creator-spotlight&utm_term=mcp-server-core&utm_content=mcp-creators). _This is an advertisement._ ---------- ---------- ## The opportunity for Boston creators, at a glance View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/d18b4f2c-5b53-4774-9dbe-2634f70f13c7/image__360_.png?t=1784834195) Follow image link: (https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/boston-creator-city) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/6b2c528c-fba8-4c05-bbe6-5bbf9aa09892/Natalia_Pe%CC%81rez-Gonza%CC%81lez.png?t=1784233222) Follow image link: (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nmperez/) Caption: ““Being a creator is not unlike being an artist. Think about how an artist 100 years ago made their living. You do a lot of things, and you can make it all work."“ — Matthew Dickey, artist, urbanist, creator of @streetscapescurator **Creativity is a function of proximity, and few American cities are built for proximity like Boston.** Boston is one of the densest major cities in the country — ideas spread because people are consistently running into each other on sidewalks, in classrooms, at bars, on the train; in the spaces between home and work. Triple-decker homes, like the one I live and grew up in, are often stacked with families; my mother lives below me, in the apartment I grew up in, and a migrant family of four lives above me. The city’s brownstones are pressed shoulder to shoulder, like old, lifelong friends with mirroring stoops, and lined with cobblestone roads. The country’s oldest subway threads together universities, hospitals, startup offices, and neighborhoods where people have known each other for generations, grown up together, and built businesses together. Boston rewards creators whose expertise compounds. **The city's breakout creators are less likely to be entertainers than translators, publishers, educators, researchers, and cultural archivists** — people who build businesses by helping others navigate, experience, and understand the world around them. By most measures, Boston is the most educated city in America. Massachusetts has one of the nation's highest rates of bachelor's degrees, and Newton and Cambridge rank first and second among U.S. cities for educational attainment. That concentration of expertise spills into the local economy. Boston-Cambridge is the world's largest life sciences cluster, home to roughly 130,000 workers and nearly $56 billion in venture funding over the past five years. Add the hospitals, universities, financial institutions, and four professional sports teams, and you start to see the city's comparative advantage. Roughly five million people live across Greater Boston, but the city itself is remarkably compact. It has the third-highest Transit Score in the country and an average Walk Score of 83, making it easy to move between campuses, startups, neighborhoods, and coffee shops without a car. A founder, journalist, scientist, and creator can easily end up at the same bar after work. That proximity gives Boston a particular kind of creative energy. The city's punk and hardcore movements grew out of basements and all-ages venues. Neighborhoods formed strong cultural identities — Fields Corner's Vietnamese community, Mattapan's Haitian community, Roxbury and Dorchester's Cape Verdean community, East Boston's Salvadoran and Colombian communities. **This is a city of overlapping local worlds, and creators who spend time here rarely run out of stories to tell. ****They’re also well positioned to turn those stories into specialized businesses. ** Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/p/DJFuWcPS9Kb/) **Elijah Boivin (****[@elijah](https://www.instagram.com/elijahboivinmusic/)****[boivinmusic](https://www.instagram.com/elijahboivinmusic/)****) makes comedy about growing up in New England **— fluffernutters, Dunkin' runs, the specific trauma of a hallway light switch — mostly through a ghost pilgrim character named Bartholomew. His partners have included the Patriots, Gillette Stadium, Dunkin', and Papa Gino's. **Matthew Dickey (****[@streetscapecurator](https://www.instagram.com/streetscapecurator/)****), a Boston-based artist, urbanist, and cyclist, bikes the city photographing buildings, connecting his roughly 60K followers to a sense of place. **Since quitting his job and going fully independent last November, nearly all his clients have been in the civic world: * **A Better ****City** — a business-backed nonprofit that advocates for transportation, housing, and public space in Greater Boston. * **Boston by Foot** — a volunteer-run nonprofit that has led architectural walking tours of the city since the 1970s. * **Visit Massachusetts** — the state's tourism office * **Leventhal Map & Education Center** — the Boston Public Library's map and geography research center, free and open to the public. * **The City of Boston's 250th anniversary programming** — the city's slate of events marking the American Revolution semiquincentennial, a campaign Kate Bergman, who has run [@bucketlistboston](https://www.instagram.com/bucketlistboston/) for over a decade, also worked on. Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/p/Da3jCezBn5E/) Long before anyone talked about creator businesses or owned audiences, the city was often producing publications sustained by engaged, high-trust, tightly knit communities. On January 1, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing _The Liberator_ out of a Boston print shop. At its height, it had a paid circulation of roughly 3,000. Around three-quarters of those subscribers were Black, and free Black communities in Boston and across the North funded it directly. Black women in the city ran the fundraisers that got the first issues printed, and William employed Black subscription agents to build the list. By any modern metric, it was a small newsletter. Most importantly, it became one of the most influential abolitionist newspapers in American history. **This model, a small, engaged audience, funded directly by the people it serves, is one Boston creators are still using.** This is the spirit of Boston: gritty, resilient, combative, and fiercely loyal. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/2e5a6011-c657-481e-839d-63e2c92b1bb1/image__202_.png?t=1784894242) Caption: ---------- ---------- ## Small audience, big business On a notably cold week in January 2024, a TikTok by Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu popped up on my FYP. It was among the first posts in a TikTok series she’d called "Commute with Me," where she’d join Bostonians on their daily commutes to work. I watched as she stood by a ninth-grade teacher named Becky, who tracks the 501 bus on her phone, waiting in an unheated shelter. TikTok Video: (https://www.tiktok.com/@officeofmayorwu/video/7327848927938497822) Within hours, the video went viral, and Bostonians praised the campaign for its clever way of raising awareness of the city’s various commuting obstacles. Other videos in the series went on to cover speed humps, how to get the most out of a Boston Bike Pass, and MBTA closure reminders in English and Spanish. As more of the videos took off, city officials began to adopt content creation into the municipal communications strategy. **On May 6, 2025, the city convened Boston's first-ever Content Creator Summit at the Back Bay offices of Gupta Media, a local advertising agency that co-hosted the event. **Somewhere between 75 and 80 creators were present, and Wu worked the room with her infant daughter in tow, sharing with creators that what people consume shapes how their neighbors think about what they're capable of. Gogi Gupta, the agency's founder, called it "a conversation about the future of economic opportunity and cultural identity in Boston." [**Boston Magazine**](https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/local-news-influencers-future-of-media/)** read it as ****a deliberate effort to write creators into the city's story, amplifying the mayor’s message.** Kate Bergman, creator of [@bucketlistboston](https://www.instagram.com/p/DapvSpEEXNo/?img_index=1), was among the creators in attendance. Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/p/DapvSpEEXNo/?img_index=1) As a Boston University freshman in 2015, Kate had a camera roll full of Boston photos and nowhere to put them. She’d applied to IG Boston, a local photographers' collective you had to be accepted into, and they turned her down three times. "By the third rejection, I decided I didn't need them anymore," she tells me. "I was just going to post my photos on my own. And that’s how Bucketlist Boston was born." **As she was first building her audience, she promised herself she wouldn't miss a day of posting, and for two years straight, she didn't. "I attribute that to my success in a lot of ways,” she says. “The consistency and the constant flow of new content really helped me grow."** Her page is now approaching 3,000 things to do in the city, and she’s built a website full of thoughtfully curated guides. She’s amassed 241k followers on Instagram, her main platform. Eighteen months after quitting her job and going all in on her business, she now runs on four revenue streams: * Brand partnerships * Social media and brand consulting for local businesses * Speaking engagements at BU and other universities * UGC, where she shoots for brands Her production setup is a phone, occasionally a tripod, and a phone grip. "We're a slim team, but we get it done." Kate’s entire business runs on trust, on her audience _trusting her taste _and recommendations_. _Every Sunday, Kate opens a question box she calls “Bucket List Office Hours,” and the questions sprawl in. “Where should I host my bridal shower? What's a good day trip on public transit? What tailor did you use for your wedding dress?” She answers nearly all of them, most of them publicly, in a full story set saved to her highlights. "That's the biggest way that I build community and loyalty," she says. “"You start to see the same questions again and again, and you're like, okay, everyone's asking about the best antiquing in Cambridge — so I guess it’s time to spend a day in Cambridge antiquing. It's honestly a really good flywheel. I'm able to garner what people are needing or wanting right now, and then I can feed the wheel on the other side by answering their questions with more content."“ — Kate Bergman, creator of @bucketlistboston **Kate is also ruthless about speed. Her husband Teddy often quotes her mantra back to her: “no one cares about Halloween on November 1.”** "I used to have a manager who would overthink every single post, and I felt like we missed the moment dozens of times because of that," she tells me. Her own threshold is to check the caption, check for typos, make sure the timing hits the beat, then ship. “"Maybe if I spend another hour on it, it would get 2% better. But that's not enough that it's worth missing the moment, and it's not enough that anyone would realize the difference. If I showed you both versions, you're not gonna see one as significantly better than the other."“ — Kate Bergman, creator of @bucketlistboston Which is why she doesn't overplan. If it starts raining, she has a rainy-day guide in her back pocket. If the sun comes out mid-storm, she'll stand outside for twenty minutes waiting to see if a rainbow shows, then turn it around fast, because people only care about the rainbow while it's there. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## **Off the platform, into the city** A common thread among the creators I spoke to in Boston — they’re all avid researchers, captivated by the city’s charm. Behind Matthew Dickey, on our video call from his Dorchester triple-decker, hangs a painting he made of Gillette headquarters in South Boston, and another of a small gingerbread gatehouse in Savin Hill, the last piece of the estate that gave the neighborhood its name. Procter & Gamble has since filed plans to replace the Gillette 31-acre campus with a 20-building mixed-use development, a project the _Globe_ reported could take a decade or more to complete. Naturally, Matthew painted it now to preserve its current form. Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/p/DZaczaQhYoH/) "The thing that I love about cities is that they are in constant change," he tells me. He waxed poetic about Boston’s architecture, about the sense of time and place it creates. City design, he emphasized, should always prioritize humans. "You get to experience so much different urbanism in such a short amount of space," he says about Boston. **Matthew has posted on Instagram, his primary platform, more than 3,000 times; he answers nearly every comment, "because that's what community is."** And he is conspicuously uninterested in scaling for scaling’s sake. "Could it grow more? Could it grow better?" he asks of his accounts. "It's grown the way that it needs to." “"I don't really find that the difference of 60,000 to 100,000 following changes your value or worth when you're relating to brands […] You do not have to post every day. You do not have to do what everybody else is doing. You being you is the thing to be, because nobody else can be that."“ — Matthew Dickey, creator of @streetscapescurator What he optimizes for, instead, is getting off the platform entirely. "My favorite moment is when I can take it off of social media and bring it into the real world." He ran a bike tour for Boston’s A Better City, and fifteen people came — people he'd never met, but who he knew had been engaging with his work for a long time. Fifteen, he says, is the perfect number. More than that and it's hard to move a group through a city. **"It was great to know that I have the ability to bring people together," he says. "That's really what I like the most."** ---------- ---------- ## Creators to watch _Emergent communities aside, at the end of the day, it's all about the creators. Nothing is built without people to build for._ _After weeks of working on this story, I'll leave you with a few rising stars I'll be keeping an eye on._ _— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor_ View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/83f701f4-97ca-4446-b568-c855cdd5cd5e/image__362_.png?t=1784882888) Caption: * [Matt Shearer](https://www.instagram.com/reportermatt/?hl=en) | Reporter and creator-journalist * [Claudiane Philippe](https://www.instagram.com/nailthecocktail/?hl=en) | Lifestyle creator * [Keonté Henson](https://www.instagram.com/wannabestayathomedad/) | Food grader * [Alaina Pinto](https://www.instagram.com/alainapinto/?hl=en) | New England travel creator * [Adriana Lacy](https://www.instagram.com/adrianajlacy/) | CEO of Influencer Journalism * [Cafecito & Chisme](https://www.instagram.com/amigasenboston/) | Social club for women and nonbinary folks ---------- ——— You are reading a plain text version of this post. For the best experience, copy and paste this link in your browser to view the post online: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/boston-creator-city

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/3d56938f-f7ce-4784-919e-dab3c8df5287/image__39_.png?t=1748354774) Follow image link: (https://creatorspotlight.com/) Caption: A beehiiv production. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/95e52b18-5a20-460d-b6a1-ee85b3cbbf0c/image__358_.png?t=1784631518) Follow image link: (https://www.babbl-labs.com/?promo=SPOTLIGHT35&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=spotlight) Caption: Today’s guest, Seamus Hughes, will make around $100k from his newsletter this year, none of which is likely to end up in his own pockets. His newsletter is not a non-profit, but operates with a similar sense of social responsibility to such organizations. **In this episode:** * [11:00 | Growth to 10k newsletter subscribers ](https://videos.creatorspotlight.com/v/ep120-seamus-hughes?t=660) * [16:20 | Why this newsletter costs $100k to run ](https://videos.creatorspotlight.com/v/ep120-seamus-hughes?t=980) * [45:47 | Why Seamus doesn't sell ads](https://videos.creatorspotlight.com/v/ep120-seamus-hughes?t=2747) View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/8b5faf1d-e028-4156-b4ae-5e30e9aba491/Group_32.png?t=1784637657) Follow image link: (https://videos.creatorspotlight.com/v/ep120-seamus-hughes?t=2747) Caption: [**Listen**](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/podcast/s/tcsp/his_newsletter_makes_100k_a_year_he_keeps_zero_ft_seamus_hughes) to the podcast | [**Watch**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLKagOAnAZ4) on YouTube | Scroll down to **read** our profile. _— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor_ ---------- ---------- ## Meet Scout, your creator marketing carrier pigeon View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/f176554c-afb5-466d-87e7-137b67879e25/Scoutintro.jpeg?t=1784631437) Follow image link: (https://www.babbl-labs.com/?promo=SPOTLIGHT35&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=spotlight) Caption: Babbl Labs just launched Scout, an AI assistant that does your YouTube creator partnerships on autopilot. Every brand wants to be on YouTube, but between vetting creators, guessing rates, and managing outbound, most brands never get there. With Scout, you just describe your brand, and it flies off to find your best-fit creators, what they've charged, who they've sponsored, and connects you directly. You focus on the deal; Scout handles the rest. _Creator Spotlight_ readers get 35% off their first 3 months using the link below. **[Send Scout out →](https://www.babbl-labs.com/?promo=SPOTLIGHT35&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=spotlight)** ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/eb47a50c-ecc6-4903-9943-1c384b903960/IN_THE_SPOTLIGHT.png?t=1744661614) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/7da7dc5d-1005-4106-9e23-b4d8901266f3/image__359_.png?t=1784636403) Follow image link: (https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/seamus-hughes) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/6b2c528c-fba8-4c05-bbe6-5bbf9aa09892/Natalia_Pe%CC%81rez-Gonza%CC%81lez.png?t=1784233222) Follow image link: (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nmperez/) Caption: ## Mining the federal courts system for stories **Open the front page of almost any major American newspaper, and there's a decent chance one of the stories is written by a ****_Court Watch_**** subscriber.** Just over 10,000 people [read ](https://www.courtwatch.news/)[_Court Watch_](https://www.courtwatch.news/) — Seamus Hughes’s weekly newsletter covering stories discovered in federal court records — including many who shape the American legal system. Last year, it was cited by 200 news organizations, Seamus tells us. Federal judges read it; so do prosecutors in every US attorney's office, public defenders across the country, Big Law partners, and his personal favorites: a few librarians in Kansas who often email to flag his typos. ““We have a weird knack for finding the ‘unfindable’ in the byzantine federal court records system.”“ — As written on _Court Watch’s _About Page. **Seamus never set out to be a journalist.** He's a terrorism scholar for the University of Nebraska Omaha by day, a job that's made him an expert in the United States' arcane court records system. As the result of countless hours mining through PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), the sprawling federal database that houses filings across 94 district courts, Seamus started tweeting tips based on records he'd found that were notable but less relevant to his work. Journalists in his audience urged him to cover these stories, and he began working with _The_ _Daily Beast_. Soon enough, he was hired by _The_ _New York Times_, where he's been on Pulitzer-winning teams twice. Tweet: (https://twitter.com/SeamusHughes/status/2078921188856762547) [**_Court Watch_**](https://www.courtwatch.news/)**_ _****came to be because Seamus kept coming across stories he felt worth covering even when his editors didn't. His work, in this way, is a public service.** He once reported on [Dolly Parton suing a Tennessee restaurant](https://www.courtwatch.news/p/court-watch-91-dolly-parton-disappointed) for playing one of her songs without paying royalties. Seamus, surprised she’d be that litigious, emailed her reps to ask about it; the suit was dropped within a day. The same thing happened after he covered [Whataburger going after a small, family-owned restaurant](https://www.courtwatch.news/p/court-watch-80-when-a-multi-billion) in North Carolina, and again after he flagged a park ranger charged in an obscure jurisdictional fight out West — a request for comment to the Justice Department, and the charges vanished. “"If I somehow have the only skills in the world that can figure out where things are filed in different districts and I'm not using that for public good, what the hell am I doing in life?"“ — View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## The cost of staying non-partisan [**_Court Watch_**](https://www.courtwatch.news/)**_ _****will generate around $100k this year, and ****Seamus most likely won’t pocket a dime. ** * **Roughly $20k goes to PACER**, where he finds and downloads the documents his work depends on. * **Another $20k goes to freelancers**. * **Then come the legal fees**. Seamus routinely hires lawyers to file motions to unseal records he thinks should be public. A single motion can run him thousands, sometimes a $10k hit across a batch of cases, on filings that may never become stories. He does it on principle, and because it puts courts on notice that someone is watching. At the time of writing, _Court Watch_ has over 670 paying subscribers, four of whom Seamus recently gained from breaking a major story about a previously dormant federal court that got its [first case in thirty years](https://www.courtwatch.news/p/alien-terrorist-removal-court-has-its-first-case). (That same story brought _Court Watch_ about 200 new free subscribers, and their reporting was then picked up and cited by [_Politico_](https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/18/trump-alien-terrorist-deportation-court-01004184), [_AP_](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/justice-department-activates-untested-court-for-alien-terrorist-deportations), [_Axios_](https://www.axios.com/2026/07/19/trump-alien-terrorist-removal-court-first-case), and [_Newsweek_](https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-uses-alien-terrorist-removal-court-for-first-time-ever-12213771).) View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/007c20c1-e8ab-4750-be6a-633b28cf2e05/Screenshot_2026-07-21_at_8.27.25_AM.png?t=1784636864) Follow image link: (https://www.courtwatch.news/p/alien-terrorist-removal-court-has-its-first-case) Caption: **Seamus describes his operation as a for-profit that runs like a non-profit; for him, it’s a civic obligation. **He _could_ easily generate more revenue if he injected his work with partisanship.** **The political newsletters with the “angriest,” most direct takes tend to win the most subscribers and money. He won’t go partisan, though; outrage isn't his temperament. There's also a genuine market read here — as much of news and political commentary races toward louder takes, "just-the-facts" journalism becomes the scarce commodity, and that scarcity is Seamus’ leverage. It’s a smaller audience, to be sure, but it’s a defensible one, and that’s the bet his business rests on. Seamus’ plans for the future of [_Court Watch_](https://www.courtwatch.news/) rely on paid subscriber conversion. **Currently, his **[**paid subscriber retention**](https://www.beehiiv.com/blog/the-state-of-paid-newsletters-2026?srsltid=AfmBOoru8cQ4Bvyt6dxIVUG9ivjLbVYocO0RgNRx_tI61lHeSJr1eI-R#how-long-do-paid-newsletter-subscri:~:text=How%20Long%20Do%20Paid%20Newsletter%20Subscribers%20Stick%20Around%3F)** runs north of 90%, with open rates sitting between 60–65%, and click-throughs around 7%. **The newsletter’s paid subscribers and revenue have each roughly doubled every year for three-and-a-half years. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## **The team, the pipeline, and the legal infrastructure** For a newsletter this influential, there’s a simple org chart: Seamus, his reporting fellow, Peter Beck, and a rotating set of freelancers. Peter came aboard after cold-emailing Seamus as a college senior with no journalism experience. Seamus disproves of the unpaid intern model, so he offered Peter a paid fellowship instead. Two years later, the pair rarely need meetings — they work almost entirely through comments in a shared Google Doc. Seamus now ranks him alongside the best reporters he's worked with. **For freelance work, Seamus pays $500 per piece (up from $300) for original, court-records-based reporting of 500 to 1,000 words, and he's partial to hiring recently laid-off reporters. ** So far, [_Court Watch_](https://www.courtwatch.news/) has published about a dozen freelance pieces this year, with another batch in the pipeline, though a flood of AI-generated pitches has made it harder to tell which submissions are real reporting and which are just a court record run through a chatbot. Since his name and reputation are attached to everything _Court Watch_ publishes, Seamus increasingly leans on reporters he already knows or who come personally recommended. The pitches that stand out uncover stories hiding inside the filings. One Florida reporter — a former _Tampa Bay Times_ staffer — noticed a single litigant had filed 350 ADA lawsuits against local businesses. There are legitimate reasons to file an accessibility suit, and Seamus is careful on this point, but filing 350 is a different pattern, and it’s exactly the type of story that would fall through the cracks at a major newspaper. After _Court Watch_ [published the story](https://www.courtwatch.news/p/the-rabbit-hole-a-persistent-plaintiff), Seamus tells us, the litigant hasn't filed another suit. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/3c286ee8-f5c7-4039-91f5-e0bee8d22d18/Screenshot_2026-07-21_at_10.05.44_AM.png?t=1784642754) Follow image link: (https://www.courtwatch.news/p/the-rabbit-hole-a-persistent-plaintiff) Caption: **The most important piece of Seamus’ infrastructure, given the legal-system context of his work, is legal protection.** He’s part of [beehiiv's Media Collective](https://www.beehiiv.com/media-collective?srsltid=AfmBOor-yr06we4V-F3L5fXIdZ82WaPNZmbhHhcDyQXE1YhxU7wzL-OW), an invite-only program that provides liability insurance and legal support. _(Reminder: _Creator Spotlight_ is owned and operated by beehiiv.)_ He cold-emailed beehiiv's CEO, Tyler Denk, to get in, and the collective’s defamation coverage has expanded what _Court Watch_ is willing and able to publish. Independent journalists can be silenced by the cost of defending even a meritless lawsuit; with legal backing, Seamus can pursue stories about litigious public figures who might otherwise be too financially risky to cover. Once he joined beehiiv, Seamus tells us, _Court Watch_ became “an adult news organization” — with the legal infrastructure, retention, and revenue trajectory to match. He’s motivated by the grind, the readers who [find ](https://www.courtwatch.news/)[_Court Watc_](https://www.courtwatch.news/)_h _through a friend’s recommendation and end up subscribing. **As long as there are federal courthouses in news deserts, Seamus knows the work will find its audience.** View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: _Subscribe to _[Court Watch](https://www.courtwatch.news/). _Connect with Seamus on _[_LinkedIn_](https://www.linkedin.com/in/seamushughes/)_ and _[_Twitter_](https://x.com/SeamusHughes?lang=en)_._ ---------- ---------- **Your audience belongs together.** Why build your newsletter on one platform, your podcast on another, and your website somewhere else? The more disconnected your tools are, the more disconnected your business becomes. [beehiiv](http://www.beehiiv.com/dive?utm_medium=newsletter-ads&utm_source=Creator-Spotlight&utm_content=EVG&utm_source_platform=newsletter&utm_campaign=EVG-July-2026) brings everything together in one place, so your audience can grow together too. [Get started for free.](http://www.beehiiv.com/dive?utm_medium=newsletter-ads&utm_source=Creator-Spotlight&utm_content=EVG&utm_source_platform=newsletter&utm_campaign=EVG-July-2026) _This is an advertisement._ ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/627c8d76-6ca3-47bc-9fb4-0d53395a1047/Takeaways__1_.png?t=1776155609) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/6b2c528c-fba8-4c05-bbe6-5bbf9aa09892/Natalia_Pe%CC%81rez-Gonza%CC%81lez.png?t=1784233222) Follow image link: (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nmperez/) Caption: ## A few notes on building a self-sustaining, mission-driven newsletter Seamus’ model runs on nurturing a smaller, deeply engaged audience rather than serving a broader, lukewarm group. [_Court Watch_](https://www.courtwatch.news/)_ _now has over 10k subscribers, and its growth comes largely from word of mouth. Seamus is good at converting these readers to paying subscribers, and even better at retaining those paying subscribers once converted. His playbook is replicable for any niche, civic-minded media. * **Make one hard ask a year.** Seamus’ annual pitch is a state-of-the-newsletter post recapping everything _Court Watch_ did that year, followed by one email a day for five days. It reliably nets ~100 new paid subscribers each time. * [Study his three-year anniversary pitch](https://www.courtwatch.news/p/help-us-turn-four) * [And his two-year anniversary pitch](https://www.courtwatch.news/p/help-us-turn-three) * **Turn your paywall into a patronage ask. **Instead of locking his best work away, Seamus invites readers to unlock it _for each other,_ and offers to make his most expensive piece free for his entire subscriber list if 10 new readers convert to _paid_ that week. * A paywall asks, "Will you pay for access?” and a patronage ask asks, "Will you keep this alive for the next person?" For mission-driven work, the second question often converts far better, because your readers already believe your work should exist; _they want to participate in your pro-social mission_. If your audience values what y_ou do_, price the mission. * **Target a specific, high-value niche. **_Court Watch’s _readership includes federal judges, prosecutors in every US attorney's office, and reporters at every major paper — an audience so concentrated that advertisers or institutions would pay a premium to reach it. Seamus won’t broaden his coverage to reach a bigger number; the moment you write for _everyone_, you stop being essential to _anyone_. Define the exact reader your work is indispensable to, and protect that focus. This is not a ground-breaking strategy, but it’s _the foundation of any good paid newsletter strategy_. ---------- ——— You are reading a plain text version of this post. For the best experience, copy and paste this link in your browser to view the post online: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/seamus-hughes-f267

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/1fb00cf4-5d66-4896-83ce-90f035e373aa/CS_Logo_Wide.gif?t=1705502632) Follow image link: (https://creatorspotlight.com/) Caption: Brought to you by beehiiv. **We need your vote.** **_Creator Spotlight_**** is nominated for two Webby awards** — Best Writing and Entertainment & Culture Website. We're in the running but not winning yet, and the audience choice award is entirely down to whose audience shows up in support. **Will you help us win? It takes 10 seconds. ** * **[Vote for ](https://wbby.co/57609N)**_**[Websites & Mobile Sites: Entertainment & Culture](https://wbby.co/57609N)**_ * **[Vote for ](https://wbby.co/57622N)**_**[Best Writing (Editorial)](https://wbby.co/57622N)**_ Thank you. We write for your readership; your support here means everything. — _Francis Zierer & Natalia Pérez-González_ View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/dce31ef4-cdb0-4b4c-8a10-57451cd193f6/Help_Creator_Spotlight_win_a_Webby_.png?t=1775224204) Follow image link: (https://wbby.co/57622N) Caption: ---------- ---------- ## How should creator-newsroom partnerships work? _**By **__**[Natalia Pérez-González](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nmperez/)**_ I spent the past week in Chicago, chatting with journalists, editors, and creators at two conferences about how creators and journalists can best work together. * I started at [ONA](https://ona26.journalists.org/), digital journalism's largest annual gathering * Then went to Amplify Local by [URL Media](https://url-media.com/), a convening for creators and non-profit newsrooms across the Midwest In all the panels I spoke on or attended, we explored the gaps in understanding between journalists and creators, the metrics of trust between the two, and how they could more creatively leverage each other’s strengths beyond simple content exchange. Creators appeal to audiences for their world-building and their curation; their ability to make that audience feel they _belong_ to something. And **for journalism-focused creators, the appeal of traditional media companies is infrastructure **— the credibility, the lawyers, the institutional memory. **The challenge for newsrooms looking to work with creators is to fulfill ****_their appeal to creators_**** in a way that ****_does not dilute and even increases_**** the creator’s appeal to their audience.** Whether you’re a creator looking to work with newsrooms or vice versa, here are three lessons to guide your approach. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/3e1a9a20-27b0-4025-b6f6-071b7327de88/Featured.png?t=1775224149) Follow image link: (http://creatorspotlight.com/p/newsroom-creator-partnerships) Caption: ### Lesson 1: A creator isn't an extension of the newsroom In my conversations, I noticed many of the questions from _journalists_ were about _how to fit creators into their already established, traditional journalism models,_ how to train them to be reporters and researchers, how to follow a specific code of ethics. **This is the wrong approach.** Like any contractor, creators are independent entities with their own audiences, built-in trust, and production styles. Newsroom-creator partnerships work best when both sides understand this. Creators are _marketers, _a way of thinking that is foreign to so many journalists. **Creators are audience experts, meant to ****_complement_**** ****_the work_****, ****_amplify reach_**** and impact, and ****_add personality_**** to a newsroom’s institutional voice.** It’s one thing to produce compelling, thoughtful, well-researched reporting, but another to know how to distribute it well and strategically. Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DU346QCj59Z/) One of the most energizing sessions at Amplify Local paired Jen Sabella, co-founder of [Block Club Chicago](https://blockclubchicago.org/), with creator Shermann "Dilla" Thomas — a local, Emmy-award-winning historian. Dilla, who is known for his neighborhood bus tours, has built a loyal, civic-minded following through deep community knowledge. Block Club's approach, Jen explained, is that all of their reporters are truly embedded in their local communities. The insights she brought to the creator conversation were the natural extension of that: **how does a newsroom **_**embed itself in a creator's world**_**, rather than solely expecting the creator to assimilate to theirs?** Dilla’s partnership with Block Club went beyond traditional context exchange, using the in-person formats his audience already shows up for — like bus tours built around the history connected to a recent news story. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ### Lesson 2: Expert creators make for effective news distributors [Adriana Lacy](https://www.adrianalacy.com/), consultant and founder of Influencer Journalism, brokers partnerships between creators and newsrooms. Often, newsrooms repeat one mistake when casting creators. **"If you're truly serious about reaching an audience you haven't reached before," she told me, "you're not going to partner with a news influencer. **You're going to find someone who is a trusted messenger in the space you’re reporting on." Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/p/DT_GkrpjK2c/) The instinct to seek only creators who are perfectly aligned with journalism's language — people with news values, editorial sensibility, and a recognizable beat — is understandable. It’s safe; it’s limiting. **Newsrooms looking for creators who already produce creator-journalism content may expand their reach less than expected.** Adriana matches creators with newsrooms the same way a good reporter thinks about sourcing. If a newsroom wants to reach Black women navigating mental health challenges, the question isn't: who covers mental health? But rather, is there a Black woman who is a licensed counselor and also has an audience? Because that audience is already embedded — already trusting and engaged. ““A big question I've been getting from newsrooms is, why would they want to work with me? But when I talk to these creators — if you're a local newsroom and you're really in the community — **a lot of them are honored to work with newsrooms because they still feel like there's a level of prestige to it.** It validates the work that they're already doing, showing that a professional organization is taking them seriously.““ — Adriana Lacy When _High Country News_ ran a story on geology and deep time, they needed a partner who lived in that world; **rather than a science **_**journalist**_**, they just needed someone whose entire presence was built around science. **Adriana’s team found a geologist at the University of Oregon who’d built a following for her photography — she’d built a 30,000-strong Instagram audience for their royalty-free rock and nature photography. The collaboration was a co-post — the geologist promoted the story while layering in her own geological knowledge, contextualizing it for an audience that already trusts her eye and expertise. Adriana wants newsrooms to understand that for many creators, the goodwill is already there. “"I don't even think she would consider herself a creator. But going back to this idea of authenticity — big following, trusted messenger — she had everything you'd want in a partner."“ — Adriana Lacy View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ### Lesson 3: A creator’s role in a newsroom is expansive [Jonathan Rabb](https://www.instagram.com/jonathanrabb/), journalist and founder of [Watch the Yard](https://www.watchtheyard.com/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMjU2MjgxMDQwNTU4AAGnatvhUuSkCneTNqXRUH05jFS3f4eQpZpNYENheEQiehpYBAmGg_3JlA9BDoA_aem_eayY-j4BB0F4KlW-wPfliw), challenged the newsroom leaders in the room to** stop trying to turn creators into journalists. The skill set isn't the same, the incentives aren't the same, and the audience relationship isn't the same.** Instead, he pushed for more expansive thought into what a creator’s role in the newsroom could actually look like: Be it a … * **Talk show host **who does a creative read-through of the morning headlines * **A community anchor **who shows up in the neighborhood the newsroom covers and brings the audience along. * **A neighborhood foodie** who reviews the restaurant on the block your reporter just covered. … or anything that adds personality and a familiar face, and helps promote the work. He didn’t touch on credentials or ethics or editorial alignment. It was simpler and harder than that: **what does your newsroom need that it doesn't currently have?** There is almost certainly a creator out there who has already built a career doing exactly what it is your newsroom is missing — for an audience you haven't reached yet. **If you’re a creator with a loyal audience focused on a highly specific topic like history, food, or science, you have a great deal to offer to newsrooms (local and beyond). **Your challenge, if you want to utilize that platform, is to find folks who understand the value of what you’ve built. ---------- ——— You are reading a plain text version of this post. For the best experience, copy and paste this link in your browser to view the post online: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/newsroom-creator-partnerships

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/1fb00cf4-5d66-4896-83ce-90f035e373aa/CS_Logo_Wide.gif?t=1705502632) Follow image link: (https://creatorspotlight.com/) Caption: Brought to you by beehiiv. The creator economy is not a purely online phenomenon. Particularly over the last year, we’ve found more and more of the people we interview for _Creator Spotlight_ are throwing meetups, happy hours, and conferences. They’re hosting retreats and organizing panels. One of the clearest signals we’ve seen that a creator’s community has real depth is if people show up for one of their events. I’ve identified four main categories of creator event. _— __[Natalia Pérez-González](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nmperez/)__, Assistant Editor_ ---------- ---------- ## The business of showing up View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/d0643440-6bd7-4766-be70-03aba50af255/image__312_.png?t=1773964886) Follow image link: (https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/creator-event-models) Caption: _**By **_[_**Natalia Pérez-González**_](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nmperez/) It's 7:45 pm. Your panel ended fifteen minutes ago, and nobody wants to leave. The crowd has splintered into small clusters near the bar, by the windows, and in the center of a room now loud with talk and laughter. **In 2025, creators, podcasters, and authors sold ****[500% more event tickets than in 2024](https://www.axios.com/2025/08/07/stubhub-creator-tour-ticket-sales-2025)**, with tickets priced roughly 40% lower than those for traditional live entertainment. Over the past year, we’ve interviewed several creators who’ve integrated events into their revenue streams. The most successful event programs we’ve seen are extensions of that creator’s core mission, values, and product — whether that’s education, access, identity, or belonging. **Done right, these can be packaged into a repeatable format, generate revenue, attract brand sponsorships, and accelerate community growth.** When I spoke to **Jay Clouse, founder of **_[**Creator Science**](https://creatorscience.com/)__,_ he described community as a living thing, with a pulse to be monitored. “"A community almost feels like an extension of you. You can feel when it's doing well, you can feel when it's a little bit sick, you can feel when it's hungry, you can feel when it's bored."“ — Jay Clouse **I’ve identified**** four main creator-event models**, each with different economics, audiences, and demands on the host: * **Community meetups** * **Panels, mixers, and educational events** * **Flagship conferences** * **Retreats/premium experie****nces** View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/8eb959b3-6b4f-4bc7-b16b-7f57d6e78822/image__173_.png?t=1774016277) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ## Define your event model You’ve been to an excellent media or creator event, and you want to throw one of your own. What makes these events feel _alive_ is a great host, a tastemaker. We love parties that cater to our sensibilities — our affinity for a curated atmosphere: music, visuals, food, energy, the elements that make an event memorable. **Before you book a venue, you need to have a solid understanding of your value proposition:** * **What type of host are you?** * **What are your main goals and mission?** * **What do you want your community to take away from gathering in person? ** Knowing what type of host you are is key to knowing which event formatting works best with your style. **I’ve identified four types of host — Tastemaker, Connector, Architect, and Educator.** View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/1e520e15-318b-4bd4-aa66-eb657635dfad/image__314_.png?t=1774014980) Caption: [Brett Dashevsky](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/brett-dashevsky), founder of Creator Economy NYC, makes his living throwing events for New York’s creator community. An expert host, he looks to the every-touchpoint approach of a Disney theme park for inspiration. “"Good hosting is not even recognized. It’s just felt. When you go to Disney World, you don't feel all the things. You just want to be part of that flow — the drinks, the team, the vibe. Everything feels natural, and people just leave thinking: that was great."“ — Brett Dashevsky View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### Community meetups These are the most accessible starting points. Intimate by design — usually 30 to 100 people — they **prioritize recurring connection over one-time spectacle**. **[Colin Rocker](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/colin-rocker)**[,](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/colin-rocker) creator of **For the Firsts, a club for first-generation professionals** in New York City, runs this model; monthly events of 50 to 60 people, built around guided prompts and open networking at a community space in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. The end goal is always _belonging_. “"I always try to get to a point of accessible intimacy. At a traditional networking event, when someone mentions they have multiple kids, I'll ask them: who's your favorite? Because I usually get a real answer. And now we're in a different conversation — one that doesn't involve what year we graduated or what our major was."“ — Colin Rocker **Colin’s community meetups run on a tight structure:** * The first 30 to 45 minutes are for arriving and mingling. * Then, he introduces himself and sets some ground rules: no job titles, no pitching, and be who you are, not what you do. * Afterwards, the room breaks into two rounds of prompted small-group discussions, followed by open networking for the final hour. He consciously **avoids calling these ****_networking_**** events — he wants people to feel like they're joining something ongoing rather than attending a one-off.** The distinction is subtle, but it shapes _who_ shows up and _how_ they show up. TikTok Video: (https://www.tiktok.com/@careercolin/video/7584552639489264926) After a year of monthly meetups, he's now building toward a three-pronged model: a recurring meetup for connection, panel and fireside chat events for learning, and workshops for people ready to go deeper. **"I think about events like a form of media,"** he tells me. "I want to create something where, the same way as with certain shows — like Hot Ones — **a brand can get inside there and make it their own**. I want to do the same with For the Firsts." View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### Panels and mixers A work-and-play formatted event, this is **the most sponsor-friendly of the four. **Typically, this maps out as a 45-to-60-minute moderated panel on a relevant industry topic, followed by open networking. **The panel is the ****_draw_** — it gives your audience a reason to come, learn from notable industry leaders (who often have their own engaged communities), and a shared reference point for starting conversations. **But the mixer is the **_**real value**_. Brett hosted his first Creator Economy NYC gatherings at a Lower East Side bar in January 2023; more of a casual community meetup at first. He’s now logged over 8,000 RSVPs for his events, developed a panel-and-mixer model, and landed year-long brand deals with companies like Teachable, beehiiv, and Notion. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/d5949199-67e5-48d7-b04f-af9fab1c0488/Creator_Economy__SONOVISUALSS-56.jpg?t=1773961971) Caption: **For each event, Brett picks a theme, usually in partnership with a presenting sponsor, and curates the room himself **— reviewing every RSVP against the event's theme and the sponsor's goals. He has a small team that runs check-in, an entrance activation, and a panel before stepping back and letting the networking take over. He **doesn't charge for tickets** — he wants to keep the events free for his audience — so he never does an event without presenting partners, who pay anywhere from $20–30k per event, enough to cover the cost and keep operations running. **He offers two sponsorship tiers: ** * **Presenting partner** — brand name attached to the event title, editorial input on the panel topic, featured in all graphics and the newsletter, and access to the RSVP list * **Supporting partner** — brand presence at the event (signage, swag, product sampling), mentioned in promotional materials, with less editorial involvement “"**Events in and of themselves are not a conversion place**. You're building affinity and awareness. Brands are choosing to partner with us because they see this trust and this brand they also want to be associated with."“ — Brett Dashevsky Olivia Owens, Head of Product Marketing and Partnerships at Teachable, shared what that trust looks like from the other side of the table. Teachable has been investing in creator events for three years, including Brett’s, and for them **the core insight is simple: audiences don't want to hear from brands, but they do love to see a brand supporting a creator they follow**. “"When we're evaluating an event partner, it's got to make sense. Are they a user of our platform themselves? Is their community a potential opportunity for us — could they be Teachable users? And does the creator have a clear understanding of who their audience is? They should be able to speak really specifically to that."“ — Olivia Owens That specificity is what separates a pitch that lands from one that doesn't. She tells me **the creators who stand out come to the table with: ** * Knowledge of who the brand is investing in * An understanding of the brand’s competitors * A real opportunity to connect with their target audience in a unique way * The data points to back up their pitch The most successful Teachable activation at a Creator Economy NYC event, in terms of brand-creator-audience integration, was a series of mini expert sessions: community members with Teachable courses led 15-minute presentations on their area of expertise. “"The through-line was they were teaching something — a nod back to Teachable. The people who spoke have Teachable courses. The brand integration was really natural."“ — Olivia Owens The best brand presence at an event doesn't feel like a brand presence at all. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### Flagship conferences These annual events become **destination experiences** for a community, and it’s the format that requires the most infrastructure, the most lead time, and the most willingness to involve other people. **[Video Consortium](https://videoconsortium.org/)** is a global community connecting nonfiction storytellers. One of their flagship events, the **[Future of Nonfiction Video](https://videoconsortium.org/programs/fonv)**** (FoNV)**, is a yearly conference hosted at Columbia University. It brings together documentary filmmakers, video journalists, and content creators who wouldn't ordinarily be in the same room — a deliberately cross-disciplinary mix that shapes every programming decision. The conference began as a community first, a bar gathering of a few nonfiction storytellers ten years ago, and the conference grew from the relationships inside it. Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/p/DVMO03TEUwu/) Maggie Piazza Carroll, Manager of Community Gatherings and Engagement at Video Consortium (VC), is the conference’s lead event coordinator. Through their Slack community, surveys, and Instagram, she gathers what the Video Consortium community actually wants, then **builds a dense spreadsheet of ideas, finds the cross-cutting themes, and maps people and organizations to each one**. "We'd even reach out to people who were consistently posting interesting ideas and say: would you want to turn this into a session?" The result is programming that feels specific, curated, and earned. **Maggie runs FoNV with a scrappy team: ** * A community coordinator * A comms lead * An on-site coordinator at Columbia * Hub leaders from around the country. She deploys a network of volunteers in lanyards during the event so attendees know who to ask for help, prioritizes good food, and does a full debrief — internal team review, then attendee survey — immediately after every event. **Energy pacing matters more at conferences than at any other format, especially those that run for multiple days. "**You don't want a bunch of slower things back to back, or things that are too high energy," Maggie said. On Sunday, the final day of the conference, the programming moved from a meditation, to a higher-energy activity, to a medium-energy close — a deliberate arc designed around how people feel at different points in a long event day. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### Retreats and premium experiences **This is often the highest-trust, highest-ticket model.** Retreats give people concentrated, unstructured time with each other, in a place they traveled to get to, with **nothing else competing for their attention**. **Jay Clouse** has been building communities for creators for almost 15 years. He built his company, Creator Science, with the premise of helping professional creators run better businesses. **[The Lab](https://join.creatorscience.com/#pricing-section)** is the community arm of his business — a private, curated network of professional creators sharing results in real time. Last year, he hosted his first major in-person event for Lab members. On the itinerary: two days in Boise, Idaho, for 40 of his Standard and VIP members. * Planning sessions in the morning. * Small group masterminds that shifted every 16 minutes. * Seating charts designed specifically so the right people would be next to each other each day. * An escape room in the afternoon. * Dinners with the whole group in the evenings. **He priced tickets to cover costs — food, venue, and programming — not to draw a profit. **"I think about our events as a member retention and attraction mechanism rather than a profit center for the business," he told me. His Standard membership in The Lab runs $1,999 per year; VIP is $3,999. The retreat is part of what justifies those prices. Jay's framework for every programming decision was simple: **"Is this something that takes advantage of the fact that we're in person? Or could this be done online?** Because anything that could be done online, we shouldn't do in person." This is why, he argues, most conferences are terrible products. “"You sit in the audience, and you watch a presentation for hours surrounded by people you'd love to have a conversation with, but the environment is not conducive to doing so."“ — Jay Clouse Jay’s Boise event was** built almost entirely around conversation; no presentations, everything in groups of eight or fewer.** His main goal is to create what he calls _collisions between people_, serendipitous connections that couldn’t have been engineered online. This year, he's likely to add a title sponsor, which will let him invest more in the experience without raising ticket prices. That's the mature version of this model: events as a membership benefit, underwritten by a brand partner who wants to reach a curated room of professional creators. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: **The format you choose should ultimately align with your audience's needs: ** * Colin's community craved belonging and a different way to connect * Brett's community craved tactical knowledge and industry relationships * Maggie's needed a space where nonfiction storytellers across disciplines could work on the future of their craft together * Jay's wanted concentrated time with peers at the same career stage ---------- ——— You are reading a plain text version of this post. For the best experience, copy and paste this link in your browser to view the post online: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/creator-event-models

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/e653a8c2-e2c2-4654-a86d-62b13e446c84/CS_Logo_Wide.gif?t=1716992671) Caption: Hey! Francis here. The fact that you started reading _Creator Spotlight_ a few weeks back means the world to me. My colleagues and I put everything we have into this project each week, and we don't take your attention for granted. Getting to research fascinating creators, interview them, write about it all, then share what I've learned with you and 400,000 other amazing readers each week … it's surreal. As we’ve discussed countless times in _Creator Spotlight_, writing a newsletter is much more than _writing a newsletter_. And that’s where [beehiiv](https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=creator-spotlight) comes in. Without them, I'd just be writing some blog that only a few of my friends and family read each week. What started as a simple newsletter has grown into a full-on media company, with all the nuts and bolts — from designing the newsletter and website to monetization and growth — flowing through the beehiiv platform. I’d have no idea how to code all this! The beehiiv team gave me a [link](https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=creator-spotlight) to share with you for **20% off the platform for three months** if you're looking to build a newsletter (a media company!) of your own. **The link:** [https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=creator-spotlight](https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=creator-spotlight) And if you have any questions, just let me know. Nothing makes my day more than hearing from you. All the best, Francis 👉🏽 [Your creator journey starts here. ](https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=creator-spotlight) ----------

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/1fb00cf4-5d66-4896-83ce-90f035e373aa/CS_Logo_Wide.gif?t=1705502632) Follow image link: (https://creatorspotlight.com/) Caption: Brought to you by beehiiv We hit 100 episodes of the podcast this week. Incidentally, we were also nominated for the **Best Business Podcast** category at the **NYC Podcast Awards**. They’re doing audience-choice awards … it would mean a lot to me if you voted for us. **[Takes 20 seconds — please vote!](https://www.silver-nyc.com/nycpodcastawards/vote)** Today I wrote in detail about 10 things I’ve learned making 100 episodes of the podcast. _— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor_ **_P.S. If you click one link in this newsletter today, make it one of these:_** 1. [Subscribe to our YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@creator_spotlight_) 2. Leave us a rating on [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-creator-spotlight-podcast/id1734648463) or [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/2TQKr0lQpGKpb3LJt0SCKU) 3. [Vote for us to win Best Business Podcast](https://www.silver-nyc.com/nycpodcastawards/vote) at the NYC Podcast Awards ---------- ---------- ## Reflections on making 100 episodes of a podcast View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9bd6e33c-df25-484a-af87-401bce85df9c/image__172_.png?t=1772807395) Caption: _**By **_[_**Francis Zierer**_](https://www.linkedin.com/in/francis-zierer) This past Tuesday, we published the 100th episode of _The Creator Spotlight Podcast_. One hundred episodes. 100! Episodes! We actually crossed the 100 _newsletter profile_ mark one month earlier. I wrote four interview-profiles for the newsletter before we added the podcast. Who’s counting? **I’ve only been podcasting for two years and still have so much to learn about the medium. This issue is a journal entry about what I’ve learned so far.** **Here’s the table of contents if you only have time to skim:** 1. What a podcast is … and is not 2. Education vs. entertainment 3. Booking guests ad infinitum 4. How I prepare for a podcast 5. To video or not to video? 6. In-person vs. remote 7. How to be a good podcast guest 8. Solo hosting vs. cohosting 9. It takes a village 10. Making a podcast and a newsletter work together View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### 1. What a podcast is … and is not Easy way to kill an hour: find a podcaster and ask them “What is a podcast?” I’ve written thoroughly about **[what exactly defines a ](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/what-is-a-creator-2026)**_**[creator](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/what-is-a-creator-2026)**_, but this is a bit of pedantry I’ve avoided until now. **A podcast is anything you can listen to in a podcast app.** It comes down to the site of consumption for me, regardless of the conditions under which the audio file was made. A podcast can be a video, too, but **_it’s not a podcast if_**_ you can’t pull it up on your favorite podcast app, put in your headphones, press play, put your phone back in your pocket, and walk around listening to it._ Podcasts can be single-episode or endless, can be scripted or unscripted, released once a year or daily. AI-generated text-to-speech or three cohosts riffing, completely unedited. My first episode _was_ a podcast episode, for all of these reasons. But it wasn’t particularly well-considered. At the end of the day, I was interviewing a guest to gather enough information to write a brief profile and publish an excerpt from the transcript. I was not prioritizing the _listener_; I was prioritizing the eventual _reader_. The behind-the-scenes story of _The_ _Creator Spotlight Podcast_ is about a writer (me) slowly figuring out how to produce a _recorded conversation_ optimized for a listening audience. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### 2. Education vs. entertainment When interviewing someone for a written _Creator Spotlight_ piece, I need to gather facts: detailed subscriber growth breakdowns and specific numbers across revenue streams. These details make our newsletters stronger. A good _Spotlight_ podcast conversation also has these details. But I’ve learned not to overdo it. It’s exhausting listening to a tactical podcast that doesn’t properly interlace these details with entertaining stories. Plenty of the podcasts I listen to made it into my rotation for their educational value. But if they’re not entertaining — if the banter isn’t good — I don’t stick around. **A good (conversation or interview) podcast is more about follow-up questions, riffing, and chasing the tangents than it is following a strict, fact-chasing script.** Even educational podcasts need to focus on entertainment value. For _Creator Spotlight_, my highly scientific estimate is that our appeal is 65% entertainment, 35% education. The ratio varies episode-to-episode. Here’s an episode I think hit that ratio dead-on: Youtube: She Built a $100k Local Newsletter from Home (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiEFzlpXCNU&t=1404s) View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### 3. Booking guests ad infinitum **The best part of hosting an interview podcast is meeting a ton of interesting people. The worst part of hosting an interview podcast is finding, vetting, and convincing interesting people to come on every week.** Guest selection is more of an art than a science. I look for at least three things in every potential guest: 1. **Do they have the relevant background and expertise? **The three core jobs of media are _content production_, _audience development_, and _revenue_ _development_. A good _Creator Spotlight_ guest should have proven expertise in at least one, and ideally two, of these. 2. **Can they chat?** There are two factors at play here. 1. **Are they willing and able to **_**speak transparently **_**about their work? **Some people don’t want to speak about the details of their business. 2. **Are they charismatic and articulate in their speech?** Some people have all that expertise but aren’t great on the mic. Plenty of truly great writers aren’t built for the mic, the camera. This isn’t necessary for a compelling podcast, but the episodes that perform best, without fail, are with guests who are especially strong _speakers_. 3. **Am I, as the host, interested in them or their work?** None of the above matters if I’m not personally excited about spending my workday learning about this person, if I’m not jazzed to spend an hour in conversation with them, if I don’t think my producer will find the conversation interesting as he edits. If somebody meets all these criteria, I’ll reach out. Then it’s just a matter of whether or not they reply. Follow up. Follow up again. You’ve gotta be stubborn. I say no to most recommendations and cold emails, and my process is more detailed than I can describe in this newsletter. But I’m always open to pitches — francis@creatorspotlight.com! View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### 4. How I prepare for a podcast So, the guest has agreed to do the show. This is my order of operations: * **Book a 15-minute pre-call**. Even if I’ve already met this person before, I schedule this call. Non-negotiable. The purpose is twofold: * **Build rapport, get on the same page. **I explain what the podcast is about, who our audience is, and the topics I want to explore. We start to understand each other. * **Begin research. **I ask a few exploratory questions and suss out storylines and details that will shape my research. * If we haven’t booked the actual recording yet … book that here. * **One or two days before recording, research.** * Google them, open up every single relevant tab. Methodically work through the mess. * Listen to any recent podcasts they’ve been on (if applicable) at 2x speed. Identify questions they’re _always_ asked that seem to have canned answers. Sum up the answer so you can use it to push them past routine towards a new answer. * Scroll all their social media feeds for the last 3 months to a full year, depending on how prolific they are. * Write questions as you go! * **After the research is complete, send a confirmation email the day before recording.** * Include audio/video advice, reminding them that this is a video podcast. * To ensure you're on the same page, summarize the core topics in 4-7 bullets, including anything you especially need them to prepare for (e.g., questions about subscriber growth over time). * **Prepare to perform.** * A podcast is a performance, a conversation on stage for a delayed audience. Get a good night’s rest, have water and a caffeinated beverage at hand, and note paper. Mute your phone and all notifications. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### 5. To video or not to video? _The Creator Spotlight Podcast_ has video for one reason: I was told by a producer from a very popular show that the YouTube algorithm was the single best way to grow a new, independent podcast. He was right. It’s taken us a while to find momentum on YouTube. I didn’t even use a proper camera until 30-some episodes in. Our YouTube views this week were up _406% _compared to the same week last year. However! Video creates problems you don’t have with audio-only shows. As the host, you can control every aspect of your setup: * **Video quality: **Laptop cameras are fine, but if you’re serious, you eventually need to invest in a proper camera. * I use a [Sony ZV-E10](https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1649504-REG/sony_zv_e10_mirrorless_camera_body.html) camera with a [Sigma 16mm f/1.4 DC DN lens](https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1369132-REG/sigma_402965_16mm_f_1_4_dc_dn.html). * **Lighting: **Better cameras make it easier to nail lighting. But you need multiple light sources. My setup, which you can see in practice below: * My office is in a room with almost no natural light, so I’m starting from darkness as a blank slate. I wish I had beautiful natural light, but starting from darkness makes lighting much easier. * I have two lamps, my laptop, and my external monitor as light sources — I’ve adjusted the placement and setting on all of these. * **Set/background:** I live in a small New York apartment. You can see the heating pipes in my background. I’ve added plants and a couple of art objects to my shelf, but it’s still pretty bare-bones. I need to do more here eventually! View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/2d99a634-73e1-48b2-b9b2-ea09ca607b95/episode100videocomparisonstackedvert.png?t=1772741503) Caption: What a difference 22 months, a nice camera, and good lighting make. Some things never change — I still love denim shirts and talking with my hands. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### 6. In-person vs. remote In-person is better for every reason but two. **The ****_only_**** two things remotely recorded podcasts have over in-person:** * Your guest pool is exponentially larger. I live in New York, and there’s no shortage of great-fit guests for my show, but I don’t want to _only_ interview New Yorkers. * It’s cheaper! I record from my apartment. There’s no need to rent a space, buy a bunch of gear (cameras, microphones, lights), or hire one on-set staff. **But if you're doing video, in-person is better. ** * There’s no latency to disrupt conversation * You can fully control the environment, removing any burden from the guest to have their own equipment * With a great concept and set, you’re almost certain to reach a larger audience on YouTube We’re going to move to in-person soon enough. We’ve done it once, when beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk played guest — we rented a studio. But that just taught me that if we’re going in-person, we really need to own it. Refreshed concept, custom set. Youtube: Why beehiiv is Betting Big on the "Content Economy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3jTe6VT580) View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### 7. How to be a good podcast guest If a podcast is something you can listen to on a podcast app, at the end of the day, it’s nothing more than an audio file. It is the job of the host _and_ the guest to ensure that audio file is high-quality. This duty primarily falls to the host. A host’s job is hospitality — to create the best environment for the guest and the best product for the guest. But it is _also_ the guest’s duty to execute the recording to the best of their ability; why do it if you don’t want it to be good? * **When you agree to a recording block, focus completely on that recording block.** * Mute your phone and put it out of reach. * Turn off any notifications on your computer. * Avoid scheduling anything immediately before or after the recording block. * **You don’t need a fancy microphone to be a good podcast guest.** * If you’re a frequent podcast guest — even if you aren’t, but take tons of remote meetings for your job — you _should_ buy a good mic, though. The [Logitech Blue Yeti](https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/shop/p/yeti-premium-usb-microphone) is a great quality-for-price option. **If it’s a video podcast, take a few measures to show up as your best self on camera**. **Here’s the basic video setup advice I always tell my guests:** * Wear a top in a contrasting tone to your background. This will help you stand out and look better in the video. * Set your camera at or slightly above eye level. If you’re using a laptop camera, place the laptop on a stack of books. * You can see the difference in my screenshots below. My camera sits about 3 inches above eye level. * Avoid backlighting. If you can face natural light, great. If not, and if possible, set two diffused light sources in front of you, behind your computer. * We want to hold the same positions in our frames. Sat in the middle, with minimal space between the tops of our heads and the frame. We should look roughly the same size. * This is something I workshop live with my guests. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### 8. Solo hosting vs. cohosting The single biggest competitive advantage in podcasting is the dynamic between cohosts. For an interview show with only one host, episodes (the whole show!) can live or die on the rapport between the host and guest. Great cohost dynamics work because, as mentioned in item #2 of this piece … for podcasts, entertainment matters more than education. Cohosts mean there’s always a baseline level of banter. On occasion, we’ve brought in Natalia (_Creator Spotlight_ assistant editor) as a cohost … but not for a while. This was a resourcing decision; there are only two of us working on the publication full-time. We may try more cohosted episodes in the future. I have around a dozen podcasts on rotation, though I go months without listening to some of them. * Most of the podcasts I listen to regularly have at least two hosts. * All but one of the single-host interview podcasts I listen to are recorded in-person. From my own listening habits, I’ve learned that single-host interview podcasts are best for learning specific information from or about the guest, and cohosted podcasts are better for entertainment. **Did you know I do another podcast? I cohost **[_**Tasteland**_](https://www.tasteland.fyi/)** with Daisy Alioto of **_**Dirt**_** Media. We chat with our guests about media, marketing, and tech. Comes out every Wednesday.** View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### 9. It takes a village Look … I do not know how to edit a podcast. We hired out from the start. [Tom McCloud](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-mccloud-219ba5110/), everybody! View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/a6b72e47-c221-46ef-952b-7ff3a3aedbbb/Screenshot_2026-03-05_at_6.29.48_PM.png?t=1772753455) Follow image link: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgKJXjPxnik) Caption: Couldn’t resist choosing this screenshot from the 2026 predictions episode I did with Tom and Natalia a couple of months ago. That I don’t know how to edit a podcast is a miss. I’m going to have to sit down and figure out the basics eventually — I know I’ll be able to give Tom better feedback once I’ve done it myself. But it’s been a luxury having Tom this entire time. We put out a call for editors on Twitter, took a look at folks’ portfolios, and had a select few make test-edit social clips for us. Tom won out. After I’ve finished recording, I send Tom the Riverside link and a few notes, and he takes care of the rest. We riff on title and thumbnail concepts together and he puts the final assets together. He makes our clips. All the motion graphics and animation — all him. Could not do it without Tom. Shout out to Laura, our designer for the newsletter, who makes all the RSS-feed thumbnails. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ### 10. Making a podcast and a newsletter work together At the end of the day, we’re still a newsletter-first publication. It’s easier to read a newsletter than it is to listen to a podcast; most of our episodes are just under an hour long, whereas any of our newsletter issues might take 5 minutes to read. This issue of the newsletter was sent to 376k subscribers. Across all platforms, we had 4.5k listens on our podcast this week — not bad for a podcast, but minuscule in comparison. The podcast started as a byproduct of the newsletter — I was already doing these interviews every week, so hiring Tom to turn the recordings into podcast episodes and buying a microphone didn’t take much extra work. Over time, we’ve turned the two into separate products. Early editions of the newsletter were mostly cleaned-up interview transcripts! I didn’t write in-depth profiles until months into my tenure. The newsletter today is the product of us processing a few core threads, tactics, and factual details from the podcast. People who don’t want to read can just listen to the podcast, and vice versa. They’re complementary products. (Shout out to _Creator Spotlight_ editor Natalia Pérez-González, who writes most of the profile newsletters these days.) But the newsletter audience still cannibalizes the potential podcast audience. I haven’t seen many newsletter-podcast combos that don’t have this issue. I’ve yet to crack this one, but to make it to 200 podcast episodes, we’ll have to. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: Thanks for listening … and if you never have, our 100th episode is a great place to start: Youtube: A $2.5M Bet on Quality Food Journalism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY-O5ASon_k&t=1435s) ---------- ——— You are reading a plain text version of this post. For the best experience, copy and paste this link in your browser to view the post online: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/100-conversations-later

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/1fb00cf4-5d66-4896-83ce-90f035e373aa/CS_Logo_Wide.gif?t=1705502632) Follow image link: (https://creatorspotlight.com/) Caption: Your guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses. Brought to you by beehiiv. Surprise! It’s an essay about clickbait. “Clickbait” refers here to a specific type of hook: sensational, too good to be true, dramatic, and irresistibly tempting. Lizard-brain appeal. The 7th paragraph will shock you. Kidding …unless? _— _[_Francis Zierer_](https://www.linkedin.com/in/francis-zierer/)_, Lead Editor_ ---------- ---------- ## Responsible clickbait is good customer service View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/18f1ce82-267b-407d-bff1-600dc8b45376/image__169_.png?t=1771600693) Follow image link: (https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/clickbait) Caption: **_By _****[_Francis Zierer_](https://www.linkedin.com/in/francis-zierer/)** Three years ago this month, I was wandering the night market in Marrakech. Dinnertime. From every stall, a man waving a menu, shouting for my attention. Walk New York City’s Mulberry Street, Little Italy’s remnant vein, at mealtime, and you’ll hear the same shouts, only advertising pastas instead of grilled meats. My lens in a situation like this is cynical — I’m a tourist; this is a tourist trap. Don’t fall for it. But it’s fun, and you play the game, and after walking for a while, you give in and pick a vendor. The food at the stall I chose was fine. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/ccac6950-eda9-418b-b8e9-e8896effa981/IMG_6532__1_.jpg?t=1771595912) Caption: My one gripe with this spread: under-seasoned. More than the meal, what I remember is another stall’s barker, whose only failure was featuring too early in our market walk. **He alone felt honest: “It’s all the same! Just stop here, the next stall won’t be any worse! Ours isn’t any better!”** Short-form video feeds — TikTok, Reels, Shorts — are extreme versions of these streets and markets. You have to assume everything is the same, which is to say, _most of the content is not worth any more of your attention than the rest of the content._ The internet did not “democratize” distribution so much as it commoditized distribution. A tsunami is no cure for a drought. What digital distribution platforms _have_ done is increase and reward those among us with an aptitude for weaving market outcomes into creative work. The tourist in Little Italy or the Marrakech night market, seeking the “experience” over one specific restaurant or vendor, **relies on the barker.** For the scroller thumbing Reels, the hook provides that same service — all the more essential in this near-infinite marketplace. Among the best barkers I’ve **[interviewed for ](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/grant-beene)****_[Creator Spotlight](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/grant-beene)_****[ is Grant Beene](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/grant-beene)**, our podcast guest earlier this week, who recently crossed 1 billion lifetime views across his TikTok and Reels uploads. ““I love starting my videos off with something that feels like such just native internet scrolling content. Because if you're scrolling and it's brainrot, brainrot, brainrot, and then you see a really high-produced sketch, it can be like, I just want something a little lower commitment to watch.”“ — Grant Beene Youtube: How He Perfected Short-Form Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ww0dSXCWTY&t=1s) Until you’ve eaten at them all, the restaurants down Mulberry appear all the same, so too the night market stalls in Jemaa el-Fnaa square. I’ll watch any Grant Beene video that graces my feed today, but to_ earn that trust_, he had to lure me in. Great hooks bring you in, but the _product inside_ is where trust is built or ruined. Tourist traps aren’t reliant on repeat customers; creators are. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ## High-trust and low-trust markets When I’m navigating a tourist-trap zone, my guard is up. I’m hearing everything the barkers shout through a cynical filter; I don’t believe them. When I’m at my favorite local bookstore, my guard is down. I trust the place, trust the staff-picks shelf. Low trust, high trust. We can map any content delivery platform on this earnest-to-cynical spectrum: * **The inbox:** * _High-trust market. _My guard is down. * Emails come from people I know, newsletters I’ve signed up for, or brands I’ve bought something from. **Trust is established before senders gain entrance to the zone.** * The exception is cold emails. An unknown sender combined with a pitch or clickbait subject line puts my guard all the way up. * **Short-form video feeds:** * _Low-trust markets_. My guard is up. * This is an extreme barker market. Earnest content doesn’t always get a fair look. Like Grant said, “I want something a little lower commitment.” * **Trust is established **_**by the hook**_**, by the barker’s ability to sell.** * **YouTube:** * _Low-trust market._ * The metagame here is about optimizing titles and thumbnails. **This culture of optimization has transformed what **_**used to be **_**a high-trust market.** * **LinkedIn:** * _Low-trust market_. * **People are there to talk their book, **to raise the profiles — even when they’re sharing truly useful, earnest information. * However, I have become a more earnest LinkedIn consumer over time. I don’t think I’ll truly shift, but especially as I’ve become a more frequent poster, I have a better palate here. It’s easier to tell when a seemingly cynical hook, for example, is genuine. * **Twitter:** * _Low-trust_ market. * **It’s the most cynical market listed here. **There are people whose posts I take at face value, but the platform incentivizes cynicism; thoughtful, earnest posts rarely run up the numbers. In any channel or market, my attitude shifts over time, and individual participants earn and lose my trust. Instagram (as a whole, not limited to Reels) used to be a high-trust market. By 2016, when the platform introduced the algorithmic feed, the shift was complete. Advertising was first introduced in 2013 and completely opened up in 2015. Advertising _started_ the transition from high-trust to low-trust market. The endless algorithm-feed, transforming more _users_ into professionalized _creators_, sealed it. **Any platform with such gamified incentives, where a platform-to-creator payout is tied to the ability to farm attention, becomes a low-trust market **… which is still an honest market, as long as the participants understand what’s going on. The purpose of mapping these channels this way is to understand _when to deploy clickbait_. It’s not to be used in vetted, trust-based markets. It _has_ to be used in more open, cynical, crowded markets. Hooks become less effective over time as their usage proliferates (and later, after people stop using them, become effective again). **[Grant Beene](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/grant-beene)** and many others have seen success with Snapchat-style hooks (phone-quality camera, grey bar at the lower third of the screen as a backdrop for text). But if this style proliferates too far — if the people buying Instagram ads suddenly lean into the style — it’ll become a no-click symbol, a sign to put up your guard. TikTok Video: (https://www.tiktok.com/@tik_tok_bhadie/video/7149651737266195758?lang=en) It’s ultimately not about the market, but about the consumers you’re trying to reach. In Little Italy and the night market, the barkers are clocking and targeting tourists. They know locals know the codes, are immune to the bark, see the bait for what it is. **Clickbait is most effective for attracting new audience — low-risk, high-reward.** With an existing audience, clickbait is high-risk, high-reward. You still want your subscribers to _open_ your newsletter, for example, but if you fail to deliver on the subject line’s promise, you risk losing trust; you risk an unsubscribe. We enjoy a level of trust with our readers. Last Friday, Natalia wrote a piece about when and whom creators should hire as their businesses grow. **We titled it ****[“It's time to make a strategic hire. Which support do you need?"](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/building-a-team)** **If we were more cynical, we would’ve just titled it “Hiring!”** A title like that? I’d bet the $45 I paid for that night market dinner that issue’s open rate would’ve been multiple points higher. But we’re not hiring. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9fb93899-568a-4e9c-9fce-36e276cd65a4/Content_Breaks__2_.png?t=1724435922) Caption: ## How I learned to stop worrying and love the hook Nobody hates clickbait; they just hate the mouthfeel of a barbed and empty hook. **Great hooks are a service to the customer, who relies on them to rapidly judge whether a piece of content is worth their time.** I watched a nearly minute-long Reel about an engagement shoot last weekend. Both the couple and the photographer were complete strangers to me. * **The first half of the video is a “Karen” story.** * We see the photographer filming himself and two assailants, a man and a woman, running away. Text splashed across the video read something like, “So scary, I was taking photos and this guytried to take my camera".” * **Everything signals: this is messy, this is drama, somebody here is in the wrong, and I **_**have to **_**find out what happens.** * We’ve all seen videos like this before — a public argument, one or both parties filming themselves for protection. The couple chases the photographer down the trail until the man grabs his phone … and then the slideshow starts. The “angry couple” are the photographer’s clients. * **The second half of the video is a (rapid, soundtracked) slideshow of the photoshoot.** * This is the “purpose” of the video — for the photographer to advertise his services, to drive demand, and command higher rates In no world would I have stuck around for _just_ the photoshoot. But the build-up, leveraging a reliably entertaining format (danger, intrigue!), warmed me up, and I did. Were the photos exceptional? Just like all babies are cute, all engagement photos are sweet. The bark, the bait, the hook were exceptional, but I couldn’t describe a single photo. ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/151dec97-3a3a-4ae7-bf3c-0dc78de5da40/image__155_.png?t=1767710245) Caption: * **Notion **is hiring an [Influencer Marketing Manager ](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/notion/cb8fda28-bb65-4815-a02c-0e02827310f2)(hybrid, San Francisco or NYC). * This person will play a key role in developing relationships with influencers, creating content through partnerships, analyzing trends, and reporting. * _Listed compensation: $136,000 – $155,000_ * **Audible **is hiring a [Senior Creative Copywriter](https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/3156531/senior-creative-copywriter?cmpid=SPLICX0248M&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=audible&utm_medium=social_media&utm_content=job_posting&ss=paid) (Newark, NJ) * A role for a strategic, idea-driven storyteller — this person would be responsible for developing copy across all channels, from brand platforms and campaigns to social, digital, film, and experiential. * _Listed compensation: $155,400 – $210,300_ * **Mozilla** is hiring an [Editorial Producer](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/7624297) (remote) * This person will help run Mozilla’s flagship editorial platform, _Nothing Personal, _operationally._ _They’ll ensure smooth day-to-day operations and high-quality execution across stories, collaborators, and channels * _Listed starting compensation for U.S. applicants: $62,700 – $70,481_ _**Do you want to advertise an open role in **_**Creator Spotlight**_**? Reply to this email.**_ ---------- ——— You are reading a plain text version of this post. For the best experience, copy and paste this link in your browser to view the post online: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/clickbait

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/3d56938f-f7ce-4784-919e-dab3c8df5287/image__39_.png?t=1748354774) Follow image link: (https://creatorspotlight.com/) Caption: Can you make a living making posting just a few TikToks and Instagram Reels per year? If you’re Grant Beene, whose short-form videos recently crossed 1 billion total views … yes. **In this episode:** * 🎵 The final form of a particular style of TikTok comedy * 📱 Developing a 1-billion-view short-form video catalog * 🧠 Leveraging the brainrot _— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor_ ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/289d7beb-44df-4493-bd6a-7ea4b3c9d013/INTERVIEW.png?t=1744661158) Caption: Youtube: How He Perfected Short Form Content (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ww0dSXCWTY) * **00:00** Introducing Grant Beene * **02:34** The process behind a 120M view video * **07:32** Limitations creating uniqueness * **10:47** Early TikTok growth * **22:41** Pushing short-form content to the extreme * **26:22** Difficulties monetizing as a short-form creator * **34:45** The value of collaborating in the creative process * **41:03** From short-form creator to artist * **48:11** The role of faith in drive and discipline * **52:47** How the creative process changes with long form * **59:10** Unlocking the creativity * **01:05:45** Inspirations in art and film * **01:12:29** Make art, and it will take you to your goal 🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, [**we’re on Apple, Spotify, and all the rest**](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/podcast/ep-98-how-he-perfected-short-form-content-ft-grant-beene/dee9c330-f54a-44a5-941d-cf1c7f53a332)**.** ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/eb47a50c-ecc6-4903-9943-1c384b903960/IN_THE_SPOTLIGHT.png?t=1744661614) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/9d29db07-9075-49e4-9349-bcd64ab9d07e/image__166_.png?t=1771282670) Follow image link: (https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/grant-beene) Caption: _**By **_[_**Francis Zierer**_](https://www.linkedin.com/in/francis-zierer/) ## 1 billion views for organized chaos Grant Beene does not have a “day job.” He’s all-in on his craft as a short-form video creator. **When he first moved from Texas to LA in 2022, he told me, he was one of 10 guys living in one four-bedroom house.** With no job lined up, it was all he could afford. He’d been in LA for nearly a year and was running out of cash when he landed his first brand deal, with Spin Master Games. At that point, he was well into the absurd, group-sketch style he’s now known for, and the brand activation worked in seamlessly. **Any mention of a brand feels natural in the absurd world of Grant’s videos **— the rapid context shifts allow him to fit in a brand deal without compromising the creative vision. Since that first deal, Grant has worked with brands like Axe, Totino’s, and DoorDash. Though he now has representation, for the first couple of years, he negotiated brand deals himself. He has a list of demands any brand interested in working with him must submit. **At his rates and with his lifestyle, he says, he only needs “two, three brand deals a year.” This allows him to reject any poor fit.** The first video I noticed from Grant, which prompted me to follow him, was a sponsored video featuring Totino’s Pizza Rolls. It has 10.1 million views on TikTok and 61.3 million on Instagram; he declined to tell me how much the brand paid for the privilege, but whatever the rate was, I’d bet that much they were happy with the performance. For Grant, it’s a rate that **pays him enough to spend two months working on each ****new video, sponsored or not.** Only two of his six TikTok uploads last year were sponsored. TikTok Video: (https://www.tiktok.com/@tik_tok_bhadie/video/7415359479773941023?lang=en) View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## Quality over quantity Grant posted a grand total of six TikToks in 2025. They received a combined 113.5 million views. Though his content is native to TikTok, it’s doing even better on Instagram. Of those six videos from 2025, Grant uploaded four to Reels — for a combined 184.2 million views, or 46 million average views. **Demand for his content is only increasing. His most-viewed video to date is his most recent (October 22, 2025), with 64.9 million views on Instagram and 45.5 million on TikTok:** TikTok Video: (https://www.tiktok.com/@tik_tok_bhadie/video/7480299788836293934?lang=en) The majority of Grant’s views have come since May 2022, when he moved to LA, started writing more complex sketches, shooting exclusively at night, and working with a writing partner_._ **Since then (as of February 2026):** * 417.7 million views across 31 videos on TikTok * (165.3 million views across 101 videos previously) * 421 million views across 39 videos on Instagram * (0.8 million views over 3 videos previously) **As of this writing, Grant has a total, all-time view count of just over 1 billion.** View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## From Vine and Snapchat to TikTok **Grant’s videos are the ultimate form of a very specific style of video skit comedy:** lo-fi, short-form, feed-native, Gen Z, American. Evolving from Snapchat, through Vine, to TikTok — though the videos may command more attention on Instagram Reels these days, they are decidedly a product of TikTok’s tools and limitations. In an unending short-form video feed, every moment of video must earn the viewer’s attention for the next moment. Grant’s style was formed by this rule. **As one Instagram commenter put it, “I feel like I watched five reels without having to scroll.”** By the time Vine shut down in 2017, Grant’s account had around 30,000 followers. He’d developed a video style where two characters — both played by him — would have a “comedic conversation.” Not long after downloading TikTok in 2019, he started making and posting videos in the same style. His videos hit from the start, all garnering hundreds of thousands of views; six posts and barely one week in, he had his first million-view hit. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/b0c3117e-eab3-4196-ae15-2e9a18c5f466/Screenshot_2026-02-16_at_1.51.04_PM.png?t=1771267879) Caption: Grant’s first six videos immediately earned high view counts. **Just over one year after downloading TikTok, Grant moved from Texas to Utah to live in a content house with some of his friends.** “[Creator] houses were so big at the time,” he told me, and the crew was working with management, trying to become a proper group. The Utah creator house nearly soured Grant on content creation. ““When I started doing whatever the suit said, I was burning out, and I didn't love what I was doing for the summer of 2020. That was the first time I ever put stuff out I wasn't proud of.”“ — When he eventually landed his first sponsor, however, it came from a connection he’d made in Utah. Before and during his experience at the creator house in Utah, Grant filmed and posted videos at a rapid clip.** Ever since returning to video creation after that experience, he’s focused on quality over quantity — and his ****_following_**** and ****_views_**** have skyrocketed.** View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/ec03df79-032b-4067-8e65-151fb6840062/image__167_.png?t=1771291048) Caption: **Here’s how many videos (divided by year) are currently live on Grant’s TikTok:** * 2019: 36 videos * 2020: 57 videos * 2021: 6 videos * 2022: 10 videos * 2023: 9 videos * 2024: 6 videos * 2025: 6 videos View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## The evolution of a style The first video in the style Grant still works in today was published on May 9, 2022. **The key traits of this style**, evident in every video since, are: * **Filmed at night **(almost exclusively since this video, done to avoid inconsistencies in lighting during multi-day shoots) * **Multiple actors** (as opposed to Grant playing multiple characters himself) * **A twisting, turning script **where riffs are pushed to their extreme, collapsing into each other (constant context switching) TikTok Video: (https://www.tiktok.com/@tik_tok_bhadie/video/7095875133046361387?lang=en) Grant says this video was still in Version 1 of his style (and everything previously was essentially a different product). He moved on to Version 2 on February 8, 2024, with a video he calls “Golf.” The TikTok video has 28.1 million views at the time of writing. The top comment, with 99.1k likes, says “Just explained interstellar in 30 seconds.” TikTok Video: (https://www.tiktok.com/@tik_tok_bhadie/video/7333396301175999787?lang=en) The videos Grant is currently working on mark the transition to V3. The rules are changing. For previous versions, he wanted the videos to look easy to make: ““I don't want this big, overproduced-looking video, because I feel like it almost kills the relatability of the video. I want people to watch this and be like, dude, we could make this at a sleepover.”“ — **For V3, one change they’re making is the level of props.** For one video, they rented an ice-cream truck; in the past, they would’ve rented a U-Haul and just printed out pictures of ice cream to tape to it. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## Better together **Since May 2022, ****every one of Grant’s videos has featured at least one other person.** There are a few consistent collaborators and more one-off guests, but the ever-present thread is Jericho Mencke. The two friends met _before_ Grant’s time in Utah and moved there together, where they began to develop a common understanding. **They’ve worked as a duo since Grant moved to LA, and their followings have grown together:** * Grant has 1.8 million followers on Instagram and 3.7 million on TikTok * Jericho has 1 million followers on Instagram and 3.4 million on TikTok At any given point, Grant says, they’ll be writing two scripts, one for each of them. “The way a writing session will work is we'll write for me for like an hour and a half, and him for an hour and a half — we'll oscillate.” Once the script is written, the person whose video it is will handle production — shot list, props, casting. Grant says there are three friends who tend to work with them as actors nowadays. **Outside of their short-form work, the pair wrote a pilot episode for a 20-minute show. ** While Grant’s aim is to go into film, to be a writer-director, he says Jericho’s goal is to direct commercials for a living. As of this writing, Grant hasn't posted in nearly _four months _— but Jericho has uploaded twice in that time, with both videos featuring Grant. Grant has mastered his craft as a creator of short-form sketch comedy videos. **The question is how he’ll translate these sensibilities into 3-minute videos, into episodic content, and beyond.** That show pilot took them a year to write. It was not picked up. Reflecting on the process, Grant told me he learned that, in longer formats, the writing “can't just be random to be random. **It needs to be organized chaos**.” ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/50dcb72a-04dc-4d07-89e5-5d37a6ad34d2/STEAL_THIS_TACTIC.png?t=1744661337) Caption: ## Leveraging brain rot ““I love starting my videos off with something that feels like such just native internet scrolling content. Because if you're scrolling and it's brainrot, brainrot, brainrot, and then you see a really high-produced sketch, it can be like, I just want something a little lower commitment to watch.”“ — Grant Beene This is what’s at play whenever one of Grant’s videos starts with the Snapchat-style white text on a full-screen-width grey bar. It’s telling you that this was funny enough on Snapchat for someone to port it over to Instagram or TikTok — and that it’ll be short. Suddenly, 10 seconds later, you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of a @grantbeans video. He’s far from the only person doing this. Just the other day, I saw a Snapchat-style clip of somebody slipping on ice, filmed from across the street, which transitioned into a music video featuring the person who’d fallen. **Tempt the viewer with the sugar-high payoff of a familiar format. Tailor it to your project and trace an elegant transition.** ---------- ——— You are reading a plain text version of this post. For the best experience, copy and paste this link in your browser to view the post online: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/grant-beene

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/1fb00cf4-5d66-4896-83ce-90f035e373aa/CS_Logo_Wide.gif?t=1705502632) Follow image link: (https://creatorspotlight.com/) Caption: Your guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses. Brought to you by beehiiv. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/2fad6a69-4da1-4998-89e7-8f26f0290101/image__161_.png?t=1768500756) Follow image link: (https://taplio.com/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=nl_creatorspotlight_0213_021326) Caption: The idea of the creator as a lone wolf is a myth. The most successful creators we interview tend to have at least one person on their payroll. A salesperson, a manager, a producer. The question is, _when_ should a creator bring in outside help? And _what kind_ of help? _— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor_ ---------- ---------- ## Build a LinkedIn growth routine that delivers results View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/1be39e0e-8391-4b0e-81db-f2937ed20bd6/image.png?t=1770912068) Follow image link: (https://taplio.com/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=nl_creatorspotlight_0213_021326) Caption: [Taplio](https://taplio.com/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=nl_creatorspotlight_0213_021326) is an all-in-one LinkedIn growth tool designed to help you save time, post consistently, and turn visibility into pipeline. With Taplio, you can: * find content ideas instantly * create posts faster * engage with your network efficiently * track what’s actually working. It’s everything you need to manage LinkedIn in one place. Creators like Amanda Goetz used [Taplio](https://taplio.com/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=nl_creatorspotlight_0213_021326) to grow over 30,000 followers. Companies like lemlist used Taplio to generate over $3M in pipeline just from LinkedIn. Stop guessing. Start building a LinkedIn growth routine that compounds. [Try Taplio free for 7 days and get $1 for 1 month](https://taplio.com/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=nl_creatorspotlight_0213_021326) when you use code CREATOR1X1. _This is an advertisement._ ---------- ---------- ## Creating breeds collectivity View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/63b632b0-afd3-4095-8b79-ffd4098d48a2/image__304_.png?t=1770992589) Follow image link: (https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/building-a-team) Caption: _By _[_Natalia Pérez-González_](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nmperez/) **No successful creator truly works solo.** Sustainable creator businesses — and work as a whole — are social. At times, running a creator business means wearing every hat: creative director, producer, marketer, salesperson, accountant. So the work gets distributed — to collaborators, to freelancers, to software, to a partner willing to handle invoices at the kitchen table, or simply a peer group sharing tangible resources and encouragement. Only 26% of the 427 creators we surveyed in our [2025 Monetization Report](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/monetization-report-2025) reported working with at least one collaborator — among those who do, the correlation with higher earnings and diversified revenue is clear. The gap isn't just between solo creators and those with managers, but also between creators with _any_ support infrastructure and those functioning without. There are now over [200 million content creators worldwide](https://market.us/report/creator-economy-market/#:~:text=mature%20digital%20infrastructure.-,Creator%20Economy%20Statistics,in%20powering%20creator%2Dled%20businesses.), including more than 45 million professionals in the United States alone. As that population expands, so does the need for specialized support — not just at the top of the market, but across the long tail of creators who are sophisticated enough to know they need help, but not yet scaled enough to justify a full-time manager. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## When a creator needs to bring in outside help A good manager functions as the operational spine of a creator's business. **They handle the work that sits between creative output and revenue: ** * Negotiating deals * Pricing services * Fielding inbound opportunities * Managing brand relationships * Coordinating logistics * Saying no to opportunity-shaped distractions **What managers typically don’t do is:** * **Grow the creator's audience.** A manager is not a growth strategist. They typically don't tell you what to post, when to post it, or how to optimize your click-through rates … unless it’s part of a brand deal. * **Produce their content.** A manager won't edit your videos, write your newsletter, or shoot your reels. * **Develop their creative strategy.** A manager may have opinions, but the creative vision — the thing that makes you _you_ — is not their job to architect. Once a creator whose business has reached a level of complexity that disrupts their creative work, it’s time to start distributing the load. Recent _Spotlight _guest [Jack Appleby](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/jack-appleby) runs _Future Social_, a well-subscribed newsletter in the social media strategy space, alongside _Hoop Forever_, a basketball content brand he's grown rapidly on its own terms. He understands the intricacies of creative strategy — teaching other creators how to price themselves and speaking at industry events about how to drive value. But once he signed with Wishly Group, run by [Aneesh Lal](https://www.linkedin.com/in/aneeshlal/) — a manager for B2B content creators on LinkedIn — Jack discovered he had been undercharging for his services. Aneesh was closing deals with numbers that Jack, for all his strategic fluency, would have been too nervous to even propose. “"I worked in ad strategy for a long time, but I didn't know how to price myself for the face of a brand campaign. I had no idea how to do that."“ — Operationalizing that strategy — turning vision into executed deliverables, managing pipelines, staffing the right people — is, by his own admission, something he's “the worst person in the world at.” Having a manager fills that gap and, in doing so, has freed Jack to think about his business in terms of what he should be doing, rather than what he's failing to keep up with. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/87bc3d11-2cb9-4e7c-ac4f-bf0f06be5b1c/image__306_.png?t=1770998843) Caption: When we interviewed [Sophie Miller](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/folasade-daini-self-timer) last spring, she ran Pretty Little Marketer (PLM) — a marketing community and content brand with over 700,000 followers, and multi-six-figure annual revenue — entirely alone. She managed all social media, executed the email strategy, nurtured the membership community, created all content, and handled the business side. After four years solo, she recently hired [Louisa ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisadouglaskent/)[Douglas Kent ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisadouglaskent/)— a marketer who works with founders on strategy, content, and campaigns. Not a manager in the traditional talent-rep sense, but an _operations lead _who manages the logistical backbone of PLM: event coordination, membership operations, speaker management, and community campaign organization. “"The impact has been massive. I can actually think bigger now because I'm not constantly firefighting. It freed me up to focus on growth — launching new products, planning our first conference, building out the team further, focusing on partnerships and creating content. The thing I love doing.”“ — Sophie Miller For creators at this inflection point, the right hire depends on where the pressure is most acute — and it won't look the same for everyone: * **If the pressure is operational** — logistics, scheduling, community coordination, the machinery of the business — you may need what Sophie found in Louisa: **an operations manager** who keeps the business running so you can focus on building it. * **If the pressure is commercial **— pricing, deal negotiation, brand relationships, the gap between what you're worth and what you're capturing — you may need what Jack found in Aneesh: a **talent manager or agent** who understands your value and negotiates on your behalf. But ultimately, the threshold is the same: the moment the work of _running_ the business starts overpowering the work of _being_ the creator — in a way that’s beyond your capacity — you might need _some form_ of management or support, operationally or otherwise. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## “They don’t know their value” [Kyle Sheldon](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/kyle-sheldon), a former _Spotlight _guest and founder of the soccer marketing agency Name and Number, sees the gap in creator support from a different vantage point. Soccer brands — and brands looking to show up in the sport — come to his agency to make an impact; his agency handles content production, creative services, and marketing strategy. Connecting brands with the right creators is one part of the mix. He's not an agent or a manager, but working as a facilitator between brands and talent has given Kyle a clear-eyed view of when creators need representation — and what happens when they don't. “"It's kind of the wild wild west out there. There's very little consistency in how people value what a particular creator is worth, what their reach is worth, what their voice is worth."“ — Kyle has actually pointed independent creators toward agents he knows and respects, even while working brand-side in those relationships. “"Sometimes they don't know their value, or don't know their worth, or don't know what they should be charging."“ — The contract language alone — usage rights, term and duration, category exclusivity — is an area where creators benefit from having someone in their corner, "because they don't always know what they're signing up for." View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## Strategists, consultants, and the rise of the creator service provider **The creator support ecosystem contains multiple, distinct roles**, and the smartest approach is to assemble the right combination of specialists for your business’s stage of growth. It’s not about whether you have a manager or not; there’s a differentiated landscape of service providers, each occupying a specific niche within the creator's value chain. If we zoom out completely, the way I see it, a manager supports a [creator’s ](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/long-live-local-media)_[outcome](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/long-live-local-media)_ (revenue, deal flow, business development) so that they can focus on their _output_ (ideating, creating, producing). But strategists, editors, and consultants help creators sharpen the output itself: streamlining creative processes, interpreting performance data, elevating production quality, or providing the strategic scaffolding that turns good content into a growth engine. A YouTube growth strategist, a sports-specific brand facilitator, a thumbnail testing service, a virtual staffing partner — these are all forms of "help," but they serve different functions, charge different rates, and require different levels of trust and integration within the creator's business. * **Your content isn’t growing, and you don’t know why:** **You need a strategist.** * [Hayley Rose](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/hayley-rose) spent a decade at Google and YouTube before founding the Upload Club — a growth consultancy whose clients collectively generate around 200 million views per month. Her team works in pods (a strategist, a data analyst, and a writer), offering channel audits, growth retainers, and thumbnail testing that happens before a video concept is even greenlit. This is the kind of granular, platform-specific guidance a strategist comes equipped to provide. * **Your production quality is holding you back: You need an editor or producer.** * [Rachel Kisela](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/rachel-kisela), a veteran YouTube editor who has worked with creators including Mr. Beast and Hope Scope, describes the editor-creator relationship as extremely intimate — someone who looks at all the footage they don't want the public to see, and cuts it out. For many creators, this is the most consequential hire they'll make — someone with the technical skill and creative judgment to elevate the work itself. * **You don’t know how to position, price, or l****aunch what you’re building****: You need a consultant —** **or just the right conversation.** * This doesn't always mean a formal hire. [Fernando Hurtado](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/fernando-hurtado), a video journalist who launched _In the Hyphen_, lost five sponsorship deals after his first viral video because he hadn't yet learned how to price and package his offerings. A brand deal course, a pre-launch entrepreneurship lab, and the professional network he'd spent years building in journalism changed that. One year later, he's consulting for other creators on strategy — "an unexpected byproduct that I really enjoy doing." * Ultimately, creators just need the right people around them — peers, mentors, fellow creators a few steps ahead — who are willing to share what they've learned. That kind of support can't always be hired, but it might be the most valuable thing you find. ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/151dec97-3a3a-4ae7-bf3c-0dc78de5da40/image__155_.png?t=1767710245) Caption: * **Buzzfeed** is hiring an [Editorial Fellow](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/buzzfeed/jobs/7519434?gh_jid=7519434) (remote in select locations) * This is a three-month program (with hopes of extending to a full year) and a crash course on creating content that captures readers’ attention, pushes the cultural conversation, and reaches a massive audience. * _Listed compensation: Starting at $20/hr._ * **Buffer** is hiring a [Senior Community Manager](https://buffer.com/journey/4f0f6161-998b-4036-a118-2218b12cff40?ashby_jid=4f0f6161-998b-4036-a118-2218b12cff40) (remote) * This role will help shape how Buffer shows up for creators and small businesses — from leading conversations on Reddit and Discord to designing community programs and partnerships that scale. * _Listed compensation: $116K–$144K_ * **Stan **is hiring a [**Short-Form Editor (Contract)**](https://stanforcreators.notion.site/Stan-Job-Board-b8430f3ca1d44c46b8ba74d5434ff022?p=2cd1da90763245c79b0aa26eedff4e31&pm=s) (LA or remote) * This is a company that understands short-form video; much of their momentum came from the founder’s own short-for content (we interviewed him about it in 2024). * _Listed compensation: $30–$40 per hour_ _**Do you want to advertise an open role in **_**Creator Spotlight**_**? Reply to this email.**_ ---------- ——— You are reading a plain text version of this post. For the best experience, copy and paste this link in your browser to view the post online: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/building-a-team

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/3d56938f-f7ce-4784-919e-dab3c8df5287/image__39_.png?t=1748354774) Follow image link: (https://creatorspotlight.com/) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/cb959e9c-d4e5-42e8-9b24-c636d21b49a9/image__291_.png?t=1769782169) Follow image link: (https://elevenlabs.io/?utm_medium=partnerships&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=creatorspotlight) Caption: Lucie Fink has spent a decade in front of the camera — notably at _Refinery29_, then on her own. She's weathered trolls, algorithm shifts, and platform changes to build an audience of 1.4 million across channels, growing with the creator economy. **In this episode:** * 🪞 Dealing with negative comments and what it takes to keep showing up * 💰 The trap of 90% brand deal dependency * 📈 $50K from a viral video — and what it taught her about her audience _**— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor**_ ---------- ---------- ## The AI platform trusted by Duolingo, Meta, and Nvidia View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/6f8a3c43-ee80-4bdd-b447-c6a7fe0ba72d/image.png?t=1769720911) Follow image link: (https://elevenlabs.io/?utm_medium=partnerships&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=creatorspotlight) Caption: [ElevenLabs](https://elevenlabs.io/?utm_medium=partnerships&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=creatorspotlight) is the all-in-one AI creative platform built to bring your content to life. **A single platform to generate, edit, and localize premium audio and video content in minutes, powering millions of creators**, marketing teams, and media companies worldwide. Companies like Disney, Meta, Duolingo, and Mozart AI use [ElevenLabs](https://elevenlabs.io/?utm_medium=partnerships&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=creatorspotlight) to power expressive audio dubbing, multilingual marketing content, character voices, and song creation. **[Get started for free with 10,000 monthly credits on the Free Plan.](https://elevenlabs.io/?utm_medium=partnerships&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=creatorspotlight)** _This is an advertisement._ ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/289d7beb-44df-4493-bd6a-7ea4b3c9d013/INTERVIEW.png?t=1744661158) Caption: Youtube: “I’m Not an Influencer. I’m an Artist.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyg6P3wI3vM) * **00:00** Introducing Lucie Fink * **01:10** Confronting an online troll * **08:57** I’m an artist, not an influencer * **12:59** Building a personal brand while at _Refinery29_ * **17:02** First year challenges going solo * **20:58** Making over $100k as a creator * **32:30** Learning from previous course mistakes * [**39:52**](https://youtu.be/Uyg6P3wI3vM?t=2392)** Making $50k from one video** * **45:46** Adapting content to a shifting audience * **48:20** Maternal burst of creative energy * **51:53** Aspirations of a Netflix show 🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, [we’re on Apple, Spotify, and all the rest.](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/podcast/ep-97-i-m-not-an-influencer-i-m-an-artist-ft-lucie-fink/dee9c330-f54a-44a5-941d-cf1c7f53a332) ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/eb47a50c-ecc6-4903-9943-1c384b903960/IN_THE_SPOTLIGHT.png?t=1744661614) Caption: View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/66c11bf9-e9bf-4d49-bf9a-a30a99da9dbe/image__300_.png?t=1770677391) Follow image link: (https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/lucie-fink) Caption: _**By **__**[Natalia Pérez-González](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nmperez/)**_ ## Years of trolls Women who make lifestyle content often attract a particular kind of criticism: _your life is too charmed, you have no adversity, everything looks easy._ One day in 2020, Lucie Fink uploaded a video. Over the next few hours, a particular follower would leave a flurry of stinging comments. Lucie had spent over half a decade on camera up to that point — notably as a host for _Refinery29_, then as an independent creator — and had developed a thick skin for negative comments. In her early days, such comments triggered shame, embarrassment, a flight response. _Block, delete, pretend it doesn't exist_. Years of that, and you either quit or you calcify. This time, Lucie was curious; she sent the woman a direct message. Lucie wanted to know who she was, what her life was like, and what was driving her comments. Would she be willing to get on a call? The woman accepted her invitation. As they spoke, there was no vitriol, just raw and uncomfortable emotion. The woman said that everything good in Lucie’s life — her job, marriage, forward motion — was the inverse in hers. Two people on a call see each other much differently than the poster sees the commenter in the feed, and vice versa. Years of such comments had built up some mental callus, but they still had a cutting edge. That call dulled the blade. Nowadays, when Lucie responds kindly to a mean comment, one of three things tend to happen: the person deletes it out of embarrassment, they double down to fight, or they flip entirely — _Oh, I didn't know you were really here. Hi, I love your videos_. For a while, the woman Lucie called stopped leaving these comments. But only for a while. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## How Lucie makes money Lucie makes her living on the mic and in front of the camera. She started out making stop-motion videos on Instagram and a YouTube series for her college admissions office. After school, working as a production assistant at Ogilvy, Lucie connected with an executive who eventually left for _Refinery29_ and brought her along, asking her to help build out their digital video department. This was the pivotal moment: Lucie worked full-time as an on-camera host, spending half a decade building _Try Living with Lucie _into a hit show. By the time she left _Refinery29_, she'd already built 100,000 subscribers on her personal YouTube channel. And instead of walking away cold, she negotiated a transitional contract for her final year: $100k for 16 videos, more money than her previous salary for a fraction of the output. * **As an employee, she made**: ~$95k/year for 52+ videos (roughly $1,800 per video) * **As a contractor, she made**: $100k for 16 videos (roughly $6,250 per video) Instagram: (https://www.instagram.com/p/DTib01NkeeQ/?img_index=1) At first glance, this was an incredible deal, an upgrade. And it _was_, but as a full-time employee at _Refinery29_, she had a team of around 20 people who handled distribution and much else — editing, copywriting, posting across platforms. Alone, Lucie had to build that infrastructure from scratch. Nobody would do it for her; it took a year just to realize she needed to treat herself like a mini media company. Then she got married and had two kids. Her two maternity leaves became, unexpectedly, her most creatively productive periods. Lucie’s audience aged with her, shifting from majority 18-24 year-olds to 25-34 year-olds as her life and content evolved from girl-in-the-city to suburban motherhood. Since that _Refinery29_ contract ended, brand deals have been the backbone of Lucie’s revenue. She told us around 90% of her revenue has come from brand partnerships since. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/3d7558e9-78af-4a07-9992-2c2c5f205791/image__301_.png?t=1770686030) Caption: It's good money, she says, but it's fragile — dependent on algorithms, on trends, on brands continuing to spend. So Lucie started building alternatives. * **[A podcast with ](https://dearmedia.com/shows/the-real-stuff-with-lucie-fink/)**_**[Dear Media](https://dearmedia.com/shows/the-real-stuff-with-lucie-fink/)**_ that just started monetizing and is already outpacing her other brand deals. * _**[Creator Confidential](https://creator-confidential.beehiiv.com/subscribe)**_**,** a twice-monthly paid newsletter for creators to glean the numbers, screenshots, and behind-the-scenes strategy she'd never post publicly. * **[One-on-one social media ](https://luciefink.com/one-on-one)****[coaching](https://luciefink.com/one-on-one)** at $5,000 per month, where she builds custom content formats, series concepts, and full content calendars for clients — mostly professionals who need a social media presence but don't have time to figure it out themselves. * **[An 8-week, cohort-based ](https://dearmedia.com/shows/the-real-stuff-with-lucie-fink/)****[YouTube course](https://luciefink.com/youtube)** that teaches creators how to develop and launch their own series. The first cohort launched with 22 students, priced at $2,500. The goal is to reduce brand deals from 90% of her revenue to 50% — to build a diversified and durable business. Big picture, she's angling for an unscripted hosting role on a streaming platform — something that takes her off her own channels and back into the professional communicator role she started in. ““If there'sa show that I'm meant to host, I'm just trusting that if I tell enough people what I want to do and I'm putting out my creativity, it's gonna come to me somehow.”“ — Lucie’s career arc has flowed with the growth of digital video and the creator economy — a media startup giving a platform to millennial talent, who leaves to chase higher growth potential on their own. As the creator economy matures and integrates with traditional media, it would be certainly be fitting to see her join up with a streamer. ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/50dcb72a-04dc-4d07-89e5-5d37a6ad34d2/STEAL_THIS_TACTIC.png?t=1744661337) Caption: ## When viral growth doesn’t convert In April 2019, months into Lucie’s transition out of _Refinery29,_ a dance company invited her to film a 20-minute hip-hop class at their Brooklyn studio. No payment — just come in, learn the routine, and post it to your channel. She wasn't a fitness creator, and the video didn't fit her content, but she liked dancing — so why not experiment? Her audience responded as expected — just a few thousand views. She moved on. A year later, COVID hit, and everyone was stuck at home, scouring YouTube for inspiration on how to move their bodies. Lucie's video got sucked into the algorithm, and for a period, it was the top search result for "learn a dance." View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/b4fdb699-270f-4d32-a872-96cb950ec8e5/Screenshot_2026-02-10_at_9.27.42_AM.png?t=1770733681) Caption: It brought in: * 18 million views * $50,000 in AdSense revenue So she leaned in, filming more dance classes consistently over the next several years (her most recent one was posted a month ago). Five of her most-viewed videos are these dance tutorials. From these videos, she gained ~200,000 subscribers collectively — nearly 40% of her total audience. At one point, she genuinely considered pivoting: _Should I just become a dance channel?_ Though the numbers were tempting, she decided against it. And for anyone in a similar content crossroads, former _Spotlight_ guest [Andrew Huang](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/andrew-huang)’s ikigai-style system helps evaluate every idea through a five-circle Venn diagram: * **What do I want to do? ** * **What am I good at? ** * **What makes money? ** * **What's trending? ** * **What's worked well before?** **An idea is only worth pursuing if it answers at least four of these questions**. In Lucie’s case, she wasn't a dance creator, and she didn't want to become one. Her content had always been wide-ranging: lifestyle experiments, emotional storytelling, poetry, vlogs. Siloing herself into dance cardio would have meant abandoning everything else that made her platform hers. ### The plateau Between September 2023 and December 2024, Lucie's YouTube channel stalled, gaining only 4,000 subscribers. Her videos were still performing, but the channel was flat. Her large influx of dance subscribers had followed for hip-hop cardio; they weren't there for lifestyle content about suburban motherhood, podcast clips, or poetry reels. They showed up in the subscriber count but not in the engagement, which makes sense: they got what they came for, and Lucie moved on to other things. ### The takeaway Lucie still makes dance videos occasionally — she recently filmed one as a paid brand partnership. That's the play: monetize the format directly, but don’t hinge on audience growth strictly from those viewers. Former _Spotlight_ guest Sydney Graham, a sewing creator on YouTube, offers a useful contrast. Sydney grew her audience from 16K to 118K subscribers in a year, partly through SEO-driven content riding a trend, just like Lucie's dance videos. But Sydney is a product-focused creator; her offerings are streamlined. Her tutorial Ganni tie top dupe tutorial, for example, captured search traffic _and_ converted viewers into customers for her core product. That's easier when you're an expert-creator selling a skill. For lifestyle creators, the math is different. There's no product to slot into a dance tutorial. The value proposition is _you_ — your taste, your perspective, your story — and that takes a specific, thoughtful strategy to convert: bridge content that connects the trend to your identity, CTAs that point new viewers toward your core work, or email capture that lets you nurture the relationship beyond one video. ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/151dec97-3a3a-4ae7-bf3c-0dc78de5da40/image__155_.png?t=1767710245) Caption: * **Eleven Labs** is hiring a **[Short-Form Content Creator](https://elevenlabs.io/careers/026c23a4-a893-43f7-9dac-7dfe25cd5cfd/short-form-content-creator)** (remote) * Have you ever seen a role with only _one_ bullet under the “required” section? This one just says: “You’ve scaled at least one Instagram or TikTok account to 50k+ followers.” * _No listed compensation._ * **Chobani** is hiring a **[Senior Content Creator](https://careers.chobani.com/job/New-York-Senior-Content-Creator-NY-10001/1358428300/)** (NYC) * This role will build and nurture engaged communities across all platforms, and create original, high-quality videos—ranging from tutorials and product demos to behind-the-scenes moments and trend-driven formats. * _Listed compensation: $109k–$157k_ * **Figma **is hiring a **[Creator & Affiliate Marketing Manager](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/figma/jobs/5703160004?gh_jid=5703160004)**** **(SF, NYC, remote) * Significant opportunity to “build and scale Figma’s creator and affiliate marketing program from scratch.” * _Listed compensation $122k–$288k_ _**Do you want to advertise an open role in Creator Spotlight? Reply to this email.**_ ---------- ——— You are reading a plain text version of this post. For the best experience, copy and paste this link in your browser to view the post online: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/lucie-fink

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/1fb00cf4-5d66-4896-83ce-90f035e373aa/CS_Logo_Wide.gif?t=1705502632) Follow image link: (https://creatorspotlight.com/) Caption: Your guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses. Brought to you by beehiiv. Long live local media. Every time we interview a local newsletter operator, like Marissa Lovell, the guest on this week’s podcast, it’s a hit. Our team loves putting these stories together, and the metrics show that you, our subscribers, collectively love reading them. Why? There’s something for everyone. Let me explain. _— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor_ ---------- ---------- ## Local media is pro-social media View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/baf005b2-eb6f-4d01-b701-613889721aa8/image__164_.png?t=1770297120) Follow image link: (http://creatorspotlight.com/p/long-live-local-media) Caption: _By __[Francis Zierer](https://www.linkedin.com/in/francis-zierer/)_ We’ve published half a dozen “local newsletter” stories over the last two years. I keep returning to them because they always_ _work. They’re consistently among our most popular newsletter issues and podcast episodes. Our episode with Marissa Lovell this Tuesday hit 1,000 YouTube views faster than any previous episode. Youtube: How a Local Newsletter Became a $100k Business (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiEFzlpXCNU) One reason these stories are so appealing is that they present _a clearly rules-based game_. * They're catering to an extremely concentrated audience — the limitations are clear. The maximum possible audience is the metropolitan population. * They use tried-and-true formats (event aggregation is always at the core). * Replicable advertising business model working with local businesses. So often, from so many readers, I’ve heard some version of this question:_ I want to write a newsletter (make a YouTube channel, create a short-form series), but I don’t know what it should be about. How do I choose?_ **Creativity wants limitations. From friction, life.** Creating anything for a massive audience _on purpose_ is delusional. Doesn’t mean it’s not doable, just not for _most people_ in _most situations_. It requires the creator to have the startup founder’s mix of delusion, drive, and relationship management. Creating a newsletter to serve a city with a population of around 235k, as is the case with Marissa’s _From Boise_, does not require that delusion. **What a local newsletter like Marissa’s requires of its creator is genuine care for the community. From that comes the drive to consistency necessary to maintain the product, and the internal demand for quality that attracts advertisers.** View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## From, for, funded by community **Media needs funding. But funding for funding’s sake**** ****— media in thrall to capital rather than in service to community — never lasts. **It is profoundly and actively antisocial; a healthy society rejects it from the body politic. The local media operators I’ve interviewed for _Creator Spotlight_ have this in common: they’re made _for_ a community, _by_ someone rooted in that community, and _funded_ by businesses in that community. They foster a subculture within that community through their editorial choices, audience, and the _creator’s_ cultural values. This used to be all local newspapers, of course. Millions of words have been written about this week’s sweeping _Washington Post_ layoffs, and I was particularly moved by a story in _The New York Times_ about Martin Weil, laid off after 60 years covering local news for the paper: ““As Mr. Weil gathered bylines, the paper blanketed Washington and its suburbs with reporters, and reaped advertising dollars from the car dealerships, department stores and cultural venues across Greater Washington. Now the outlet is embracing more of the national news model that Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, has pushed since he bought The Post in 2013.”“ — [Erik Wemple for ](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/business/media/washington-post-martin-weil-metro.html)[_The New York Times_](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/business/media/washington-post-martin-weil-metro.html) Local businesses used to need local media to advertise; the advent of internet advertising is one of many straws upon the camel’s back. But! **Local businesses s****_till need_**** specialized places to advertise beyond Google Maps and other now-commoditized channels.** View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## Outputs and outcomes **Another reason the ****_Spotlight_**** audience consistently responds so well to local media operator stories is that they’re a mirror for every type of creator.** Over the last month, I’ve been looking at creators through an _output vs. outcome_ lens: * _**Output-focused: **_The priority is the quality of the content. The majority of energy is invested in creating the best possible content units (whether essays, newsletters, videos, podcasts, etc.). * _**Outcome-focused:**_ Priority is the business outcome. The majority of energy is invested in audience development, product conversion, and other _business_ _outcomes_. It all comes down to the bottom line — how much money are our actions generating? **The extreme-output version** of a local media operator is someone who is deeply invested in their community, who loves _specific people_ in that community, and seeks to serve them through published work. **The extreme-outcome version** of a local media operator is someone who understands the financial opportunity, without particular consideration for the community. Every time we see these major media layoffs, there’s a conversation across social media about the folly of telling newly-laid-off journalists to “just go independent” or “write a newsletter.” They’re right: there is no such thing as _one_ _person_ operating completely alone, tasked with reporting, writing, publishing, audience development, and business development. **Output people need outcome people. Reporters need ad salespeople.** Youtube: Building a $500k+ Local Newsletter Business (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHepIYEgtxs) View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## Community is a valuable outcome, socially and financially A product like [_From Boise_](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/marissa-lovell)[ ](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/marissa-lovell)or [_Catskill Crew_](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/michael-kauffman) is, in essence, a community service. There's typically only light reporting, if any, in these products, more like the classified and culture sections of a traditional newspaper. What these creators are doing is creating a pillar, a reference point, for a certain culture within a community. When I talk about output versus outcome, I mean _financial_ outcome. But **community-building is as worthy an outcome as you could find.** The outcome of a local newsletter is the reproduction of a community, the entrenchment and growth of a culture. **This is true beyond “local newsletters,” to be clear — it is a defining feature of any personality-driven media product, thus of the creator economy.** A [new study](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6183182) by Danny Hayes and Anusha Trivedi, both at George Washington University, found that **“people who regularly consume a lot of local news reported being 32% less lonely than people who almost never read or watch local news.”** The duo suggest that other habits or demographic data might be at play here, but the precision of that number aside, I have little doubt about the sentiment. Local newsletters work because they reproduce local cultures, and the resulting sense of community is valuable to advertisers. Audience and funding happily intersect. **Algorithmic social media fragments reality; we’re not all seeing the same feed. This is antisocial. A local media product achieves the opposite effect; the best local media is pro-social.** View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/febce6e3-a188-4d9a-9b24-8af21c486ca8/Content_Breaks__1_.png?t=1723054756) Caption: ## The future of pro-social local media The first local newsletter operator I [interviewed for this newsletter](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/ryan-sneddon-naptown-scoop) was Ryan Sneddon, creator of Annapolis, Maryland’s _Naptown Scoop_, nearly two years ago. He was inspired to start his newsletter ($200k revenue in 2023) after discovering 6AM City’s Columbus, South Carolina newsletter. 6AM is a network of local newsletters. When I interviewed Ryan in April 2024, they were operating in at least 25 different cities. Today, according to their homepage, they’re in _410 cities_ across all 50 American states. That exponential growth came from their acquisition of the AI newsletter startup Good Daily, as [reported in ](https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/good-dailys-network-of-more-than-350-ai-generated-local-newsletters-finds-a-buyer/)_[Nieman Lab](https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/good-dailys-network-of-more-than-350-ai-generated-local-newsletters-finds-a-buyer/)_. View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/757c5618-a830-4459-a1ff-233b5f953753/Screenshot_2026-02-04_at_10.07.44_AM.png?t=1770217669) Caption: In the above graphic, taken from 6AM’s homepage, you’ll notice there are 31 large, lilac dots and _many_ more small, golden dots. The lilac dots represent developed, staffed products. The golden dots are the more skeletal AI-driven products: ““We’re planting a seed in these cities that will allow us to establish great domain health, a positive reputation, and a list of subscribers that can then transition,” said Heafy. If any of those markets build up enough of an audience or revenue potential, he said, they’ll receive dedicated editorial staff.“ — From Andrew Deck’s article in _Nieman Lab_, [“6AM City acquires Good Daily’s network of more than 350 AI-generated local newsletters”](https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/good-dailys-network-of-more-than-350-ai-generated-local-newsletters-finds-a-buyer/) Good Daily represents the extreme financial-outcome-oriented option for the new local media operator. Before the acquisition, just one guy, serving hundreds of cities; you can be sure he’d never stepped foot in most of them. The polar opposite of the independent creators we’ve profiled. [Deck’s initial piece](https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/01/inside-a-network-of-ai-generated-newsletters-targeting-small-town-america/) on the work of Matthew Henderson, the founder of Good Daily, suggests that readers of the generated newsletters found the product useful, but advertisers and those publications being _aggregated_ by the product did not. A network like Good Daily is not the future of local media because that future must serve audiences, journalists, and advertisers alike. After acquiring Good Daily, as Deck reported, the 6AM team set to work to bring the network of newsletters in line with their “editorial, ethical, and advertising standards.” The newsletters are now treated as market-testers, beachheads for potential, properly staffed products. That is a step in the right direction. The future of local media is _From Boise_. It is _The Washington Post_. It is 6AM City. **It may not be any of these three operations ****_specifically_****, but it is these models: independent writers, storied institutions, and startups scaling their models nationally.** “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village,” wrote media theorist Marshall McLuhan in _The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man_ (1962). The world is _not_ a global village; it is many villages, and the social fabric is damaged when the world’s myriad village media products are cannibalized, their resources and eyes turned to the globe, away from the village. **Long live local media, progeny and progenitor of the village.** ---------- ---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/151dec97-3a3a-4ae7-bf3c-0dc78de5da40/image__155_.png?t=1767710245) Caption: * **Eleven Labs** is hiring a [Short-Form Content Creator](https://elevenlabs.io/careers/026c23a4-a893-43f7-9dac-7dfe25cd5cfd/short-form-content-creator?utm_source=www.creatorspotlight.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=she-built-a-6-figure-local-newsletter-business-in-boise&_bhlid=6a06586554b947b1df25222deff2ec50965c6508) (remote) * Have you ever seen a role with only _one_ bullet under the “required” section? This one just says: “You’ve scaled at least one Instagram or TikTok account to 50k+ followers.” * _No listed compensation._ * **Buzzfeed** is hiring an [Editorial Fellow](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/buzzfeed/jobs/7519434?gh_jid=7519434) (remote in select locations) * This is a three-month program (with hopes of extending to a full year) and a crash course on creating content that captures readers’ attention, pushes the cultural conversation, and reaches a massive audience. * Listed compensation: Starting at $20/hr. * **Buffer** is hiring a [Senior Community Manager](https://buffer.com/journey/4f0f6161-998b-4036-a118-2218b12cff40?ashby_jid=4f0f6161-998b-4036-a118-2218b12cff40) (remote) * This role will help shape how Buffer shows up for creators and small businesses — from leading conversations on Reddit and Discord to designing community programs and partnerships that scale. * Listed compensation: $116K–$144K * **Project C** (founded by former _Spotlight_ guest [Liz Kelly Nelson](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/liz-kelly-nelson)) is offering a [free workshop](https://luma.com/x969tsb1) for journalists interested in going solo, in light of this week’s layoffs at the _Washington Post_, _The Atlanta Journal Constitution_, _The Hechinger Report_, and more. **_Do you want to advertise an open role in _****Creator Spotlight****_? Reply to this email._** ---------- ——— You are reading a plain text version of this post. For the best experience, copy and paste this link in your browser to view the post online: https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/long-live-local-media

---------- View image: (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/72ea5da3-ed6c-4044-8d9c-fa1bb75ee012/CS_Logo_Wide.gif?t=1706230209) Caption: Welcome to _Creator Spotlight_! We work hard to deliver a quality newsletter week after week — it means a lot that you felt it worth your time to subscribe. And it’s gratifying to think our work might teach you something, give you a few minutes of entertainment, or even inspire you each week. **What is **_**Creator Spotlight?**_** A reminder:** * It’s a newsletter sent out every Friday. * It’s also [an interview podcast](https://rss.com/podcasts/thecreatorspotlightpodcast/). * I research a creator, interview them, then write about their story and any tactics worth applying to your own projects. * Only have 3 minutes? Just read about the tactics. * Have 15 minutes? Read the whole story. _Creator Spotlight_ is your guide to the newsletter world. We feature newsletter operators across [a wide range](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/garbage-pays) of niches, [styles](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/pj-milani), and [platforms](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/casey-lewis-after-school). Sometimes we even feature [YouTubers](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/andrew-huang) or [social media](https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/hannah-williams-salary-transparent-street) creators. Those links lead to a few of our most popular issues — check ‘em out. **I’d love to learn a little about you and why you signed up for the **_**Spotlight**_**.** If you don’t feel like sharing, no problem, but if you do, just **reply to this email**. It’ll land in my inbox, and I’d love to check out what you do. * Do you create content of any kind? Tell me about it! What platforms are you on? What’s your handle? * Who are your favorite creators? I’m always looking for interesting people to feature! * You can also just reply “hey” to say what’s up! Thank you once again — your subscription means a lot! — Francis Zierer, Lead Editor _Connect with me on __[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/francis-zierer/)__ or __[Twitter](https://x.com/FZierer)_ ----------