Creator Market Fit; Creator Interview: Laura Lewandowski; How to Go Pro as a Creator
Where creators grow their businesses.
We’re Passionfroot and this is a newsletter featuring must-read content for our creator community. Our vision is to empower creators as the next generation of businesses and contribute to a future in which everyone can make a living by sharing their truest authentic self. If you enjoy the content, share it with friends.
Hi all,
welcome to our first newsletter edition for our creator community. Our vision is to empower creators as the next generation of businesses and contribute to a future in which everyone can make a living by sharing their truest authentic self.
By writing this newsletter we want to give updates and insights on our company and founder’s journey, share must-read content and interview creators to inspire.
Follow along 👇🏽
On Passionfroot
We just launched our landing page for our product! Sign up if you want to save up to 50% of your time to run your creator business.
🎙 Creator Interview
Say hello to Laura! The Top 30 under 30 journalist, founder of Smart Chiefs and podcast-host of Meet Your Mentor shares learnings and best practices about what it takes to get the right podcast guests, why and how to launch a cohort-class and what’s the most important skill for any entrepreneur. Check out her full interview below.
Curated gems for you
We are also building an all-in-one library simultaneously so that you can access the curated content and resources at any time.
⭐️ Northstar
Creator-Market Fit 🔗
Li Jin is an investor in the passion economy and one of the best thinkers out there on the future of being a creator on the internet.
TL; DR
This framework is great to help you start thinking about your creator business as a startup.
Creators need to find creator-market fit similar to startups who need to find product-market fit.
Similar to the Ikigai concept, you'll find your sweet spot when you'll do something you love, get paid for it and the world needs.
Million-Dollar, One-Person Businesses 🔗
Dru Riley is building a community and newsletter for 40k entrepreneurs.
TL;DR
Building trust is hard. Monetizing trust is easy. With digital products, courses, paid newsletters, paid communities, NFTs, angel investing, physical products, ads and more.
You have a unique set of interests and experiences. Use this to build a micro-monopoly. Li Jin says monetize your individuality. Naval says escape competition through authenticity.
Focus on your comparative advantage. Once you’ve found a game that works. Focus. Concentration builds wealth. Put your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.
🗣 Distribution & Building an Audience
How to get your first 10k newsletter subscribers 🔗
Morning Brew is a media company focused on delivering business and tech news to 3M+ subscribers.
TL;DR
Do things that don't scale. Sometimes you have to handhold customers throughout a process. Morning Brew literally passed around pieces of paper at universities for everyone to write down their email in order to do the sign up for them.
They replicated and 10x this simple act by starting an Ambassador Program to scale.
Lenny Rachitsky shares best practices on how to make a living with a newsletter 🔗
He is writing a weekly newsletter about product and growth and has 28k free subscribers and 1400 paid subscribers.
TL;DR
Deliver consistent value to people (By making them smarter, making them money, keeping them informed, entertain them or letting them feel like they're part of something bigger).
Other creators sharing your newsletter is really effective.
Build an audience on multiple platforms.
Write guest posts where your target audience is.
Distribution flywheel: Send the newsletter, give away the goods, encourage. readers to share post, find ways to squeeze value out of each post.
💸 Monetization
Monetizing newsletters: when creators strive with ideas 🔗
Marie breaks down the different monetization options as a newsletter creator and writes about case studies, relevant tools and key questions you should ask yourself. Her framework applies to all sorts of creators while the tools mentioned are more focusing on newsletter creators.
TL;DR
Decide if you want to sell to brands and/ or consumers - both have pros and cons.
Think about if you want to diversify monetization options and just ask your community what they prefer (e.g. subscribers of Dense Discovery carried out a mini-survey and it turned out subscribers even in the paid version didn't mind ads as long as they're relevant).
Brands want to build meaningful relationships with creators who are becoming key community leaders.
The most ambitious creators will create DNCB – Digitally Native Community Brands - tomorrow's brands, community-based, strong, trusted brands.
📈 Growth
John Gannon of GoingVC breaks down how he built his 20,000 subscriber list, and made over $1mm in revenue as a creator.
TL;DR
Not everyone’s a blogger—pick a medium that you actually love.
Avoid the tools trap and don't spend weeks obsessing over the exact right tool.
Go pro as soon as possible (by hiring someone and paying out of your pocket to grow).
Steal a page out of the i-banker’s playbook ("Mini M&A", i.e. being open to be acquired).
Simple exercise he proposes to help you figure out how to get over the hump. The question is from E-Myth Revisited: “How can I do the work I love to do rather than the work I have to do?”
Tool stack of Dense Discovery 🔗
Dense Discovery is a newsletter and has 34k subscribers. Kai is summarizing his tool stack on how to create a weekly customized newsletter. His automations and tools are super helpful to automate content creation, delivery and even the sales process for ads.
TL;DR
👯 Team
Dave Nemetz built and sold two media companies and writes about media, startups, creativity, and mindset.
TL;DR
Even with a standout voice and a great audience, a creator's business can stall out if they lack an operational skillset.
Some of these creators have discovered the benefits of pairing with a skilled operator. The creator handles the creative side. The operator looks after the business.
Many creators don’t know exactly what to look out for when they hire team members. Here is a "template" by MrBeast if you are looking to hire a content strategist.
Favourite quote of the week
“Creators, to make art today, you have to be the CEO of your own media company” (Jack Ponte, CEO of Patreon on How the Creator Crisis forced artists to be founders)