Speaker 2
Today I'm very excited to be joined by J class. If you don't know who J is, you got to know J. He is the founder of Creator Science, a media company that helps people become professional creators and achieve financial freedom. The show is called the Creator Science podcast and his membership is called the lab, a place for pro creators to experiment together. J, welcome to the show. How are you doing
Speaker 1
today? Mike, I'm excited to be here. I'm feeling well caffeinated, well hydrated. I'm just
Speaker 2
feeling good. Hey, and the feeling is mutual. I am also well caffeinated and well hydrated. Today J and I are going to explore creating video podcasts on YouTube. But before we go there, J, I would love to hear your story. How did you get into podcasting? How did you get into YouTube? Start wherever you want to
Speaker 1
start. So I grew up the child of high school educators. Most of my extended family are K through 12 teachers. And when I went to college, I didn't know what I was going to do. But the one thing I did know was that I would never be a teacher because everyone was doing it. I just didn't want to do that. But I didn't really know what other options were out there. In college is where I learned that entrepreneurship was even a thing. I didn't have that model to me as a kid. I met some peers actually in the dorm who had started businesses in high school and it blew my brain wide open. I had no idea that I had that option. I don't have to pick a major and then work a job for 35 years and collect a pension. So out of college, I was on the startup route. This is when Facebook and Airbnb and Uber were really big. So entrepreneurship to me was high tech software startup who founded a software company. We did the traditional fundraising route. We sold that company and then took a job. But another venture company, I still thought entrepreneurship was startups. But I went out on my own, trusted that I could figure out how to make this work, started freelancing, realized that freelancing is another way to do the self-employed thing. And found the world of online courses actually through lynda.com, which became LinkedIn Learning. And because my background was in startups, my background was in products. I saw the connection between content and products. And this was so exciting because in the software world, if I wanted to build a product, I had to work with engineers, I had to work with designers. My vision was never exactly how I thought it should be. But in content, I could write something exactly how I wanted to write something. I could make a podcast exactly how I wanted to make a podcast. And there wasn't this compromise. So I got enamored with the world of content creation. And as I started publishing, people started asking me questions about what I was doing, how I was doing it. And it became me teaching other people the world of content creation. And fast forward today, Creator Science is what I'm
Speaker 2
doing full time. Okay, so I want to back the clock up a little bit. So when did you go independent? And what was your first course about?
Speaker 1
I went independent in 2017. That's when I started writing an email newsletter. It was not called Creator Science. It didn't even have a purpose other than proving to myself that I could publish consistently. My first courses on LinkedIn were actually about product management. And my first independent courses were about freelancing.
Speaker 2
And that was in 2019. Okay, so tell us a little bit about that journey and tell us how it led to the ultimate creation of what you're doing today. Yeah, well, once I had
Speaker 1
built the muscle, improved myself that I was a creative person, because that was really in 2017 when I started this, I had this limiting belief that I was only an operator. I needed somebody else to have good ideas and I could execute them, but I wasn't somebody who was creative myself. And so the newsletter back then, I published something every day to subscribers for a year. And that was just me proving to myself, I am creative. I can create things. Over that time, I fell into a trap that a lot of people fall into, which was, I don't really know what I want to teach people yet, but I do know that I really want to be a creator. And so enough time passes. The thing that I think about the most is what it means to be a creator, how to be a creator, how to be successful as a creator. And so suddenly the thing that I know the most about is the thing itself, and you get this meta creator cycle. But I think what has helped me stand out and actually build a real business on this is I'm really good at contextualizing and teaching, frankly, and empathizing with the reader and understanding where they are and breaking concepts down. A lot of that I learned with LinkedIn through LinkedIn learning and a lot of that that I've learned the hard way through trial and error systems perpetuate. So the more people that I taught how to do this, the more people have results, the more they told other people now I'm teaching more people. And today the newsletter has 50,000 subscribers. YouTube channel has 55,000 subscribers. The podcast has a couple million downloads. So
Speaker 2
it's just been self-perpetuating in that way. Okay. So what I'm hearing you say is you decided to go off on your own after you got tired of the startup world and you need to prove to yourself that you are a creator. You've already proven to yourself that you could be an entrepreneur, right? Because that was a new concept. You thought everybody had to go work corporate America, right? So you got the entrepreneur thing, you figure that out, get a couple software companies, just out of curiosity, what were the niches that you were developing software in?
Speaker 1
The first software company was called Tixers. It was a ticket platform. It was like a stub hub competitor. It was a little bit unique in terms of how we handled people selling tickets, but it was a ticketing company. And the second software business I worked within, I was an employee there, was in the healthcare space and the US healthcare space, not a place I want to play in.
Speaker 2
So you went off in your own, you started a newsletter and it sounds like it was in product marketing in the early days. Was that kind of your domain expertise? You were teaching people how to do product marketing?
Speaker 1
Honestly, it was just a journal in the beginning. It was like me just talking about what I was thinking, what I was learning, it was very reflective. It didn't have any particular audience. It was very, I would say immature, but I don't mean like in the style of content, it just wasn't fleshed out yet. Well, and somewhere along the way, Pat Flynn works into this story because I'm in a mastermind with Pat and I know that you worked somehow, some way supporting Pat. So what's that story? So in the beginning, the first real product I introduced as an independent creator was a 12 week mastermind program because I had met with somebody at the time. I had a really good network here, especially locally. And he said, you know, if I was you and I had the network that I, that you do, I would consider facilitating mastermind groups. I didn't even know what that language meant. So he explained, he's like, well, if you can get a small group of people who do similar things together, you can facilitate that conversation and help them come out better for it, then people would pay for that. And I thought that sounds pretty good. I think I could do that. So I started facilitating mastermind groups back in 2017. And on the back end of that, I was using Slack as a way to communicate with people in between. And, you know, we were meeting on Zoom, which all this sounds obvious now, but in 2017, Slack wasn't being used as a community tool. I had to explain to people what Zoom was and teach them how to download it. It was pretty novel then. 2020 comes along and we have COVID.
Speaker 3
I didn't literally have COVID. The world had COVID.
Speaker 1
Right. Pat and the team at SPI started accelerating their plans for building an online community. And Pat's business partner, Matt Gartland, had experienced my Slack community. And so he brought me into consult on their community strategy using this new tool at the time called Circle. Got it. We designed that together in 2020. And then in 2021, they acquired my existing Slack community to bring me on the team full time and build their community programs.
