SPI 873: The Creator Business Model Secret Nobody Tells You

SPI 873: The Creator Business Model Secret Nobody Tells You

Pat Flynn: Not every business model works for every creator. Your personality actually determines which monetization strategies will feel natural and sustainable for you. I’ve been able to identify five different creator archetypes each that thrive in different business models. And by the end of this video, you’re gonna know which business models exist for each type of creator and where you fit in based on your unique personality.

So let’s dive in with archetype number one. First we have the professor creator. This person loves to teach. They like to break down complex topics and make them easier for other people to understand. And if this is you, you thrive when you know other people are learning from the work that you’re putting out there. You are methodical. You are research oriented, and you love to create to teach. Some examples that you might know about here on YouTube are people like Ali Abdal, A Doctor Turned YouTuber. Who’s known for productivity content and his courses. Mark Rover, former NASA engineer, creating educational engineering videos, but in a very fun way.

Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, Tiago Forte, who is a creator and author who helps people build a second brain. And of course, people like M-K-B-H-D, a prolific tech reviewer who educates through detailed explanations. Here are the five business models that tend to work best for a professor creator type.

First, online courses, and especially nowadays, things like cohort-based versions of those. Second, digital products, they might be eBooks guides or templates that you create to make things easier to understand and actually implement. Three, membership websites, which include educational content, but also the opportunity to bring people who are curious about that topic together to learn amongst each other.

Four, workshops and speaking, actually going out there and facilitating the learning in real time. And number five, affiliate marketing, which is recommending other products and getting paid as a result of bringing new customers in. Now, across all of these archetypes, we could also include the idea of being a creator and generating revenue, IE being on YouTube publishing content and generating ad revenue.

But we wanna go even further because in addition to that, you could utilize these different business models here. So if you are a professor creator, hopefully one of these definitely resonates with you. Before I move on to the next creator archetype, I do wanna share with each of them the cons of being that type IE obstacles or things to look out for that may get in your way of success. For the professor archetype, number one, it’s often a big struggle to sell knowledge because you might feel like you are selling out, or it might feel too salesy to actually step forward and actually sell stuff that you could in fact share for free.

Another struggle is with regards to creating content. It can feel very time intensive. All of the research that goes into the work that is then put out there or put into these courses or memberships or workshops or whatever they may be, a professor creator will often go way too far or do too much research before actually implementation happens.

Along the same lines, the output may actually be a little too beyond who their audience might be. They might be speaking at a different level or a little too inexperienced with what a beginner who’s going through the same process might feel. Now, despite all that, the professor creator is incredibly valuable in this world, and we appreciate you because not only do we get to learn these complex things that you get to break down for us, but in many cases we just get to go along the ride with you as you discover things. We learn with you too when you create on the go, and that is really cool.

Number two, the performer. The performer thrives on energy, entertainment and connecting emotionally with an audience. They’re charismatic. They are expressive. They naturally draw people in because of their personality. Of course, a prime example of this are creators like Mr. Beast. Of course, Lily Singh comes to mind, who became YouTube famous and then crossed over to traditional media and creators like Hank and John Green, who yes, are educators, but at the same time, we fall in love with their personality, who they are and how they share stories with each other and the world. Now, one big advantage that the performer creator has over the professor creator is that oftentimes the content that is created when done well is more shareable and can reach a much larger audience.

And as a result, growth can happen much faster on entertainment type channels versus more educational type channels, and of course if you can blend both of them together, that’s a major plus. Now let’s talk about some of the business models that work specifically for the performer creator. First, we have brand deals and partnerships, creators that can often garner a much larger audience and have a much wider reach, are often able to connect with companies who would pay them to get in front of those audiences. Number two, merchandise and physical products. People become fans of the person or people who are the performers. I’m reminded of a channel how ridiculous who has a T-Rex called Rexy that often sells out in minutes when Rexy goes on sale.

And of course you have Logan Paul and KSI and their Prime Drink, Mr. Beast and his feast bars. And more recently people like Ryan Trehan and his candy company. Number three, live events. One that I know personally very well because on my more performer based and entertainment channel, Deep Pocket Monster, which has 1.5 million subscribers now, which is really cool.

We host a live event called Card Party each year and we bring thousands of people into a space to nerd out on Pokemon every single year. Now, I will say from personal experience that live events are a lot of work. Even if you’re working with an event company and they’re not often profitable in the first couple years, and I can speak to that from experience, but they are so fun in an amazing way to bring people together and to create even more loyalty and fandom for your brand.

Four premium entertainment content. This might mean more membership base type stuff where there are exclusive videos just for members only, or special behind the scenes opportunities. Sort of the director’s cut, if you will, only available to people who pay. It might also mean some more premium content, like again, Mr. Beast, as an example, his recent Beast Games on Amazon. That is premium material available on a platform. Of course, that’s kind of a partnership deal as well, and he was paid millions of dollars, but that is again, another example, number five, media company expansion. Here I’m reminded of the School of Greatness hosted by my good friend Louis Howes who’s able to, through his connections and his ability to really build true relationships with people, invite these amazing guests on his show to interview, and then he gets paid as a YouTuber and podcast host and somebody who is now an owner of a media company, which is pretty cool.

Now there are of course, like with any archetype, some downsides. So let’s go over the downsides of the performer creator. Oftentimes, this kind of content is not necessarily as evergreen as more educational content like from the professor creator, so as a result, you have to continually show up. You have to maintain a presence in order to continue revenue coming in, and that could lead to another doubt sign, which is burnout by just going too deep into it or over exhausting yourself. You could eventually get to the point where you can’t do it any longer or you just get sick of it. The other trap that I see a lot of performers fall into is they keep churning out the same kind of content over the years when audiences are changing their consumption behaviors.

It’s important to get a read on your audience, stay involved in the community, to be able to adjust with them and not try to force your old content on them, but kind of keep up and create something new and exciting and fresh all the time.

The next archetype is number three, the engineer. The engineer creator is somebody who solves problems through systems, tools, and technology. They’re analytical. They enjoy optimization, right? And their satisfaction, or perhaps your satisfaction comes when you actually solve practical problems in unique and interesting ways. This reminds me of my good friend Bob, who has a channel at, I like to make stuff, a literal engineer who builds random solutions for random problems.

And he and I actually did a collab together to actually build a recording studio in a box. And that was really fun. And then there’s Diana Cowen, who is also known as Physics Girl. And because of her incredible experiments, the world grew to love her and got behind her when she was going through some terrible health issues very recently. The classic example are Adam and Jamie from MythBusters, but it’s not just people who do things with their hands and make things. They might be solving problems through coding or creating software. For example, DHH and Jason Free, the co-founders of Basecamp, they’ve written several books over at 37 Signals to teach the stuff that they’re learning and how they’ve solved their own problems and have helped made the world a better place by sharing those results. And somebody who I recently interviewed, Anne Laure Le Cunff, who wrote a book called Tiny Experiments. She’s a founder of a company called Nest Labs, and she helps create solutions for productivity using different tools and methods. Now, one big benefit that an engineer creator has is their ability to see the problems that are interesting to talk about and solve in real time for people who can then see a result. And when you share that solution and people can see, especially on content like here on YouTube, the result of the thing you’re doing, whether it’s some wacky thing or something that in fact changes somebody’s life, it’s amazing. It’s almost like magic. And we connect with the engineer as a result.

So here are the five different business models that may work best for an engineer creator. Number one, SaaS or software as a service, products or tools. If you find that there is something that needs to be done again and again, and you found a more convenient or better way to do that, you can create a tool to make it happen.

Just like the guys over at Basecamp did to make project management and communication with teams a little easier. Number two, templates and frameworks. A couple people come to mind who have done this very well, Thomas Frank, who I know has created several different notion templates. I use one of them, the content tracker for YouTubers.

It’s excellent. I’ll link to it in the description. Jay Clause, another person from Creator Science who has done some templates as well. Number three, API Services and integrations. And what this really means is partnering with your engineering mind and. Maybe what it is that you create with other companies that are out there, for example, integrating into tools like email service providers or different course creation tools or communities.

Your special ability can be integrated into them, and you could do rev share or partnership model of sorts that can work very, very well utilizing the power and even the reach of other brands to expand what it is that you have engineered yourself. Number four, productized services. Now, what this means is something that you would normally have to do for somebody.

Maybe you have a client and you’re doing something for them. How do you productize that? How do you make it so that it’s easy for you to just replicate that result for other people? For example, I know a guy named Brian Castle who productized his web design services. So at one point he was designing new and custom websites for all of his clients, but to actually scale up and ultimately generate more money, he decided to just stick with two to three different templates that he would only have to change slightly for each new client, and thus it just became more repeatable, more processed, and of course made more money. As a result, he was able to turn his service into now what was actually a product that people could buy and already know the outcome, generally speaking about. And number five, technical consulting. This is more obvious. That is, you might have some sort of specialty or expertise person needs it. You have it. Money.

Creator archetype number four. The detective, the detective creator, researches, they investigate and they uncover things and insights that other people may miss.

They’re curious, they’re analytical, and they love when they can discover hidden information and share it. Tim Ferriss is the first example. He deconstructs the performance and the productivity from world class high performers, right? You see it in his books. I mean, the four Hour Work Week is maybe the only anomaly.

However, that was still pretty radical in his research and the biohacking and mental hacking that he was doing back then. But from Tools of the Titan to Four Hour Chef and four Hour Body, these are all moments of sharing from things that he’s then discovered through a lot of extensive research, analysis and work.

You have people like Peter Attia, who is doing extensive research on longevity and living longer. His book Outlive is really, really amazing, and I would even put Michelle Carr here into this category. Somebody who investigates and discovers. What it’s like to work as a 911 dispatch person or a person in the FBI or a professional paintball player.

She puts herself in those situations to learn and discover and uncover new things and share them with us, and she’s also very entertaining as well. Now because the detective creator can thrive when he or she shares this information, a lot of the business models involve the access to that information or how a person might consume that, right?

So let’s start with number one, research reports and analysis, and distilling all of the things that you’ve discovered and offering them to people who might find use for them. I know some people who are, for example, more mathematicians and people who do research on stocks and stuff, and they can understand and even see things that they can then offer to those institutions who might benefit from that extensive deep knowledge about those topics. Somebody who I think is a great example of this is Neil Patel in the entrepreneurial space. Although he is teaching and educating, he’s also doing a lot of research, actually putting things to the test and then sharing that information and people pay, in fact, to get access to the information or at least subscribe to his newsletter, which I definitely recommend you do.

Speaking of newsletters. Our next business model is a curated newsletter. There’s a lot of people who now actually have newsletters that require payment to get access to, and whether you are using a tool like Kit or some other tool to be able to do that, as long as the value is there from within those newsletters that come into a person’s inbox, then it can be worth paying that amount to get access to that in a similar way.

Communities and having access to that curated and distilled information can be very useful and provide an ROI for somebody who invests into that community. Number four, consultations. There is value to the knowledge that you have learned and researched and discovered and distilled. And certain companies will pay for that understanding and want you to come in and actually teach this or actually become more of a go-to resource for them, in which case you could actually offer your services for a monthly or annual payment, which is really cool.

And of course, number five, like with examples we mentioned earlier from Tim Ferris and others, books. Putting these things into books to generate not just revenue off the book, but even other further down the road programs. Somebody who I know who has done this very well is Donald Miller, author of StoryBrand, somebody who uses that book as a lead generation tool for somebody to then learn more about StoryBrand and even becomes StoryBrand certified.

Now, the big struggle with a more detective type of creator is finding the connective tissue between what it is that you’re learning and what you’re presenting to somebody who then finds value in that, who has money to pay for it, right? Yes, you can generate revenue through just sharing that stuff for free, but how might you package that information or those discoveries into something that, for example, a company would pay for through consultation or research papers similar to the professor, creator.

Being able to share this in a way that is understandable and more wide reaching is important, as well as the idea of being able to speak at the level of your customer. And of course, just the fact that you’re doing this research means you have to do the research. It’s definitely not passive. And research can be time consuming for sure.

Now, the fifth archetype that I wanna share with you is one that is a little different from the rest because this is somebody who might be multidisciplinary. So here it is. Five is the Renaissance creator. The Renaissance creator explores multiple domains and they have different talents that are useful or not useful in different arenas.

They are versatile, they are adaptable. They’re often very curious about many different things, and if that is you, you find joy in diversification of your thought and what it is that you do. Now, the big challenge for a Renaissance creator is in this world where you need to show up and become known for something.

Supposedly, it can be hard to become known for all things right from the get go. Now, you can earn your way into this. You can start out by niching down, or as I say, riches are in the niches, and then expand out from there. This reminds me of a creator, Peter McKinnon, who was known as more of a performer slash professor in the world of photography back in the day.

Who now is able to create videos about anything he wants because people have built a relationship with him and he can kind of go wherever. Another creator who comes to mind is Matt D’Avella somebody who is primarily well known as a incredible videographer and storyteller, but what he was telling stories about were related to a number of different things from certain biohacks to certain productivity things.

He was trying out to now what it’s like to raise a family, and I would actually place myself in this category because I do have. Multiple interests. I do many different things. I have an invention with my videographer, Caleb, to I write and I speak, but I also am a performer on my Deep pocket Monster Pokemon channel, but I’m also an educator and more of a professor here on this channel for future entrepreneurs, and I find that the struggle for people who fit into this category who have yet to get started is the indecision of which part of my life do I pick to focus on, to build something out of. That’s a very difficult and frustrating mind space to be in. And unfortunately, the more you think about it, the more time goes by and the less action you’re taking and you need to take action to learn. So in many cases with students of mine who are in fact seemingly Renaissance people or creators, sometimes it’s just a matter of flipping a coin or throwing darts. Just to have something, select your first steps and your first go, and through the action that you take and the discovery of yourself through that, you will find your way to where you should go.

And it only takes time, but it takes patience and it takes doing. I can speak from experience and even say as somebody who is a seasoned entrepreneur who’s generated millions of dollars over the years. Still struggles with sometimes which direction to go down. So I’ve had to learn how to create frameworks and contain myself and my curiosity in a way that allows me to stay productive.

And I put a lot of these things in my new book, Lean Learning, which if you wanna check out, it’s available anywhere, books are available. And you could check out the bonuses available on LeanLearningBook.com if you are able to pre-order it before June 3rd. But, this is the way, it’s something that’s hard because we aren’t quite sure who we are in the beginning.

But as you take action, like I said, you will uncover what your next step should be, and please check out Lean Learning. If you wanna support the book and support the channel, that means a lot to me. And there are some bonuses again for you if you pre-order the book at  LeanLearningBook.com. Now, for business models, for the Renaissance creator, it.

Pretty much can be all of them, but a lot of times it depends on who it is that you’re serving and what is your interest right now and what is lighting you up, and where is your energy want to go. These kinds of things are important to read and understand, and it could be both a blessing and a curse to be a Renaissance creator who has a lot of things you wanna get involved with and to start, you need to pick one, but you could branch out from there. However, I know a lot of other Renaissance creators who find so much joy in just the one thing they’ve selected. They leave the other things for more hobby like approaches versus more going all in for a business.

So, which one of the five creator archetypes best describes you? And no matter which one it is, just know that you are valuable and you have something amazing to share in this world. And it’s only when you take action will we discover it. So go take action. Thank you so much and speaking of action, hit that subscribe button and I will see you in the next video.

Thank you.