Creator Spotlight

“I love how writing the newsletter gives me a moment to reflect. It gives me a moment to celebrate. It gives me a moment to sit in sadness if that's what I'm feeling. I’m very grateful for the process, which is why I carve out time to make sure 240 Days goes out every Tuesday morning.” Why are you doing what you're doing? As the year winds down, take a moment to really think about it. Jade Buffong-Phillips launched a newsletter generally about startup life, but after nine months, she hit a wall. It wasn’t giving her enough. The purpose was too vague. So, she hit pause and came back with a new concept, 240 Days to Raise. This time, the purpose was clear, driven by a countdown. She would write an update every week reflecting on her wins and losses as she raced to raise money for her startup. When your “why” is clear, everything else falls into place. It gives you the focus, clarity, and energy to keep moving forward. P.S. You’ll have to look up Jade’s newsletter to see what happened when the 240 days ran out earlier this year.

Local news is dying; long live local newsletters. For this week's Creator Spotlight I spoke with Michael Kauffman, who will have generated over $100k this year using a 1-year-old local newsletter (serving New York's Catskills region) as a platform. Full episode available on YouTube and all the pod platforms. Newsletter where I get into the weeds on what this means out tomorrow.

“Creators are just the first kinds of entrepreneurs who realize that the internet is the new distribution channel.” Spoke with John Hu, CEO of Stan, for last week's Creator Spotlight. Give it a read!

“Success, at the highest level, is a function of saying no and focusing,” says John Hu, founder of Stan — a company that’s helped creators make over $200M in the last three years. Adam Ryan, CEO of Workweek, agrees: “Learn how to say no. No to advertisers, no to clients. Nothing sells sexier than no. It doesn’t mean never saying yes; it means having the leverage to choose.” What’s one thing you could say no to this week to make room for what matters?

Setting goals is great. Hitting them is harder. Andrew Huang had 300k YouTuber subscribers and wanted to add a million more; here’s how he did it. Very simply: he committed to posting new videos every Monday and Thursday, ad infinitum. 18 months later, he was at 1.3 million subscribers. It’s like training for a marathon. Maybe you’re starting at zero, but if you run every day for a year … you’re going to be able to run that marathon. 1️⃣ Break it down: Identify the key actions (e.g., ideation, creation, editing, promotion, analysis). 2️⃣ Audit your time: Block out your hours for each task, spot time gaps, and eliminate distractions. 3️⃣ Commit: Test your schedule for a week. Can you sustain it? Adjust if needed, then stick to it for 3 months. Big goals are built on small, repeatable actions. Start small: What’s one action you’ll commit to next week? Stick with it. Create momentum.

Few people pull off "building in public" as well as John Hu. As CEO of Stan, he sells to creators; it helps that he's exceptionally capable as a creator. On the Creator Spotlight pod this week we talked about how his early success with Stan was entirely due to his posting TikToks, balancing CEO duties with creator duties, his vision of the creator-entrepreneur, scaling Stan's ARR from $1.7M to $14.7M in 2023 alone (they're well past $30M now), and plenty more. 🔴 Find the episode on YouTube and all the audio platforms.

Do you get stuck in brainstorming and never actually do the thing? Write down goals, map out plans, maybe even color-code a to-do list — and stop? Some advice for new-year planning: Too much planning can spoil the plan. Too many goals pulling us in different directions. It’s like trying to sprint in five directions at once. Here’s a fix: 1. Write down everything you want to achieve. 2. Simplify:   - Are some goals the same?   - Do they ladder up to one bigger idea?   - Combine, delete, refine until you have one clear goal. 3. Commit:   - Remove tasks that don’t support your goal.   - Focus for one to three months, whatever fits the goal. Say no to work that doesn’t work towards that goal. The magic isn’t in the planning — it’s in having focus.

When Adam Ryan’s parents dropped him off at college for his freshman year, walking by the business school, his mother asked him what people do with business degrees. “I have no clue,” he said. Safe to say he figured it out; Adam is one of the sharpest business minds in newsletterworld. Enjoyed chatting with him for last week's Creator Spotlight — give it a read!

"Learn how to say no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. All the mistakes you'll end up making are the moments that you should have said no." Had a great time chatting with Adam Ryan on the Creator Spotlight pod for today's episode. 💵 Struggling to convince advertisers to buy space in newsletters a decade ago to hosting an in-demand upfront event to sell newsletter ads this year 🎨 Everything Adam learned from attempting to become a creator to get better at working with and helping creators 🏫 Wild stories from Adam’s days as a highly resourceful campus brand ambassador (like convincing the mayor to close streets for a chariot race) Episode out not on YouTube and all the pod places. Newsletter out tomorrow!

Newsletter industry wisdom says email subject lines should be short. Not true! As a rule, yes, subject lines should be short enough to be read with a quick scan. But when you start every subject line with the same emoji, you can get away with long subject lines. We’ve tested it. 🔴 At Creator Spotlight, every email kicks off with a red dot — you see it, you know it’s us. 🟡 Semafor claims the yellow dot. 🐝 beehiiv has the bee. It’s not just about subject lines; the emoji becomes a visual cue across social media, too. There are nearly 4,000 Unicode emojis. Pick one, use it, stick with it. Make it an icon.