Which of the headlines below makes your heart skip a beat?
- I make $20K/month with a social media audience of 2,000 people.
- I make $20K/month without a single sales call.
- I make $20K/month and don’t handle the marketing or sales of my products.
Each of these business models is viable, scalable, and time-tested. But let me ask you this: what name would you give people who run these businesses?
Content creator, freelancer, solopreneur, influencer, startup of 1, consultant, advisor, coach — these are just a few of the names we currently use to describe these digital-based, creator-led business models.
The problem?
We use them interchangeably and we’re unsure where one ends and the other begins. I’m not being pedantic about names for the sake of semantics.
Most advice online lumps these categories together and that’s bad. It’s bad because the kind of business you run dictates:
- Where your attention flows
- Who you should take advice from
- Where you should focus your effort.
If you don’t sell physical products and if you run a small team, your business most likely falls into one of these three archetypes. Of course, there are overlaps and most of us run hybrid businesses.
However, deciding where your business falls will tell you what its limitations are, how to market it, and where to spend most of your time and budget.
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Three creator-led archetypes and how to grow each of them
As a marketing and business strategist, I’ve worked with all these archetypes and pretty much any other type of business you can think of, from Fortune 500 companies to VC-funded or bootstrapped startups.
What all founders have in common is the shiny object syndrome. You see one of the statements above (“I made $20k doing X”) and YOU WANT IN. Desperately!
But that advice is an ill fit for your business model, so you end up wasting time and burning through a lot of cash just to try and fit a square peg into a round hole.
We can do better. You can do better.
Let’s find the right fit for you.
1. The Service Provider
The short of it: you have a skill set and people hire you to deliver services based on it.
Examples: copywriters, web designers, graphic designers, video editors, social media managers, programmers, fractional CXOs, consultants.
Why it’s great: you need a budget of exactly $0 to get started. You can start selling on freelancing websites, on social media, through word of mouth, and so on.
Why it sucks: it’s hard to scale and you usually need to hire more people when you want to scale. Of course, you can always up your prices but there’s a ceiling to that as well.
Quick note: you’ll see many people dissing selling services and calling it “the time for money trap”. This is a very limited perspective. There are huge companies out there that thrive on providing services. DHL, anyone? In the digital economy, agencies can get to 8 figures.
Providing services is categorically NOT a bad thing. It’s much easier to get a cushy, predictable revenue for fractional CXOs, for instance, than it is for someone who sells digital products.
Take it from someone who runs both a digital marketing agency and a creator business: revenue from a service-based business is often more predictable and easier to get, especially after a couple of years in the game.
What should service providers focus on?
- Forget about size, you need a relevant audience first and foremost.
- Credibility — this goes for whatever you sell. No one will buy anything unless they see you as a credible, trustworthy business leader.
- Case studies. You need to show that your services work and, ideally, you should go beyond testimonials. Schedule interviews with your clients and get their in-depth answers on how working with you was transformative.
- Content that you won’t monetize directly. Ideally, you won’t even gate it (i.e. ask people for their contact information in exchange for it). You write content to establish yourself as an expert. [A framework you can use to convert with educational content]
2. The Content Creator
The short of it: you monetize your content either directly (subscriptions) or indirectly (paid ads, selling digital products to your audience, consulting, and so on). You don’t sell your skill set as a service, you (usually) productize it.
Examples (we’re doing names this time): Katelyn Bourgoin, Sahil Bloom, Noah Smith, Justin Welsh, Dan Koe, Chenell Basilio, Neal O’Grady.
Why it’s great: it’s easier to scale, you don’t need a huge team — not even when your business takes off, and there are countless formats you can try your hand at: courses, downloadable PDFs, masterclasses, cohort-based events, webinars, and so on.
Why it sucks: you need a large audience to make a living out of it and you’ll need to be on more than one channel to do it. If you’re not good at marketing, you won’t get too far (unless you hire a fractional CMO or an advisor).
Most content creators started out by providing services. Some of them still do it, typically in the form of a 1:1 consultation. Others, like Neal O’Grady and yours truly, run an agency too, not just a creator brand.
Service productization is tricky, though. I wrote a good primer on productization here.
I won’t re-hash it, I’ll just say that content creators don’t get passive income — that’s a myth that deserves to die a fiery death.
Most of them spend dozens of hours a week on social media alone, building a personal brand. Plus the time they spend building the actual products, creating launch strategies, speaking in podcasts, and so on.
What should service providers focus on?
- Audience building. Yes, relevance still matters but size matters more than it does for The Service Provider because it’s social proof in itself. People will always rather buy from someone with 100K followers than from someone with 10K followers. And you can’t have a big audience without:
- Credibility — told you it would keep popping up!
- Sales, not delivery. In the service-based model, delivery takes longer than sales. In this archetype, you will focus on sales more than on delivery, which is usually automated.
- Testimonials, reviews, and other types of social proof. They are relevant to your own credibility and to that of your offers.
If you prefer to spend more time selling than performing your craft, this is the business type that fits you best. Please note, however, that, despite what you may have read online, no successful creator business happened overnight.
3. The One-Person Brand
[Welcome to the stratosphere!]
The short of it: once you’ve established a real brand (I can’t stress this enough), you can sell your IP (Intellectual Property) through franchises and other brand deals. You don’t work directly with your customers anymore, they access your IP through third-party trainers, companies, coaches, and so on.
Examples: franchises of any kind, Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead Facilitator Training, Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop Smoking, Tony Robbins’ Robbins Research International, and Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry®.
Why it’s great: this is actual passive income. Allen Carr passed away in 2006 and his method is still bringing in revenue for his successors. If you get to this level, you won’t need to market your products directly, you’ll need to keep building up your brand to attract people/organizations who want to teach your methods or sell your IP through a franchise(-like) approach.
Why it sucks: “It’s not easy” would be the understatement of the year. It’s incredibly hard and very, very, very few people get there. Plus, it’s complicated to get the legal stuff right, as shown by the Tony Robbins vs The FTC kerfuffle.
Quick note: see how I didn’t call this “personal brand”? I made the distinction because everyone can have a personal brand, whether they run a business or not. A one-person brand is something much bigger and much harder to build.
What should one-person brands focus on?
- Building a fanocracy — we’re past the audience stage here
- Credibility — if you lose it, so do your franchisees and your re-sellers
- On-going research — to feed the fanocracy and the re-sellers
- Building a multi-disciplinary team that can grow along with you — you may be the face of the brand but no one person can build all this alone.
The lines are blurry (and that’s a good thing)
Did you notice that consultants are listed in both The Service Provider and The Content Creator archetypes?
There are very, very few pure-breed business models. Most creator-led businesses have offers that match all three (or at least the first two) archetypes.
It’s a good thing because it allows you some wiggle room. You can adopt, adapt, and pivot as you see fit or as the market demands.
Can’t productize your services? Figure out a way to systematize them better and increase demand.
Can’t sell your products? What if you added a service layer to them, like a mini-consult with you after a pre-recorded course?
Can’t get sponsorships or brand deals? Promote your own offers — use that valuable space to generate leads for your own business.
Mix and match until you find the combo that works for you.
However, keep in mind that, at any given moment, you will need to direct your focus to one of these archetypes.
And herein lies the problem — I see a lot of service providers “stealing” playbooks from creators or vice versa.
Zero-in on YOUR goals, not someone else’s
Most advice you read online is inspirational, not actionable. More importantly, it doesn’t fit YOUR goals, YOUR current situation, or YOUR business archetype.
Take this tweet from Justin Welsh:
The overarching idea is 100% right: we tend to overcomplicate things and come up with convoluted strategies that we have trouble following. Better yet, I’m sure it’s what works for him. So it’s easy to think you can replicate his insane success.
Still, do not steal this business plan if you don’t operate in the same context he does (a combined audience of over 1 million people) or if your goals aren’t the same as Justin’s.
Whenever you read a piece of advice online, try not to fall for the appeal to authority fallacy. Just because someone is an authority in a certain field, it doesn’t make them an authority on your business, especially if they’re not giving you personalized advice.
Think critically instead. Ask yourself:
- Can I apply this to my own business?
- How is my context different? Can I tweak their advice to match my context or is it simply inapplicable to me?
- Am I after the same goals [authority figure] is?
- Am I running the same type of business they are? If not, don’t focus on what they do.
Popular creators like Justin are a great source of inspiration. Study what they do but take everything with a grain of salt and definitely don’t try to replicate their entire strategy — you don’t know the ins and outs of their business and your context is not the same as theirs.
The only way to meet YOUR goals is to build YOUR own strategy from scratch.
Take this newsletter issue for example: use the bits that are relevant to you and ignore the rest. Don’t waste precious focus on reverse engineering Tony Robbins’ businesses unless you’re a direct competitor of his.
Use that focus to figure out what works for your brand archetype instead.
Not sure how to get started? My Guided Strategy Template is designed to help you figure out your own growth, with advice from me at every step. Spend a couple of hours building your own playbook instead of dozens of hours “stealing” someone else’s.
Need more personalized advice? Book a 1:1 strategy session with me and we’ll figure out your next growth spurt together.
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Adriana’s Picks
- Last week, I opened the Masters of Email Marketing by Smaily conference. If you missed my presentation, you can find the recording here. All the presentations are amazing, so if you have a bit of time, tune in! Pro tip: you can also download the slide decks.
- More than 30 US states sued Meta for harming children and teens through addictive features like the infinite scroll.
- Apple has to play catch-up in the AI space. But worry not, they are the richest company in the world, so they can pay their way out of the hole.
That’s it from me today!
Until next week, remember that critical thinking is your best ally — that’s one piece of advice that applies to everyone, in every industry or business archetype.
Here to make you think,
Adriana
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Need me in your corner? There are three ways I can help you:
- Boost your chances of success by 400%: document your strategy with The Guided Strategy Template.
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- Book a 1:1 strategy session with me. Let’s unlock your growth in 60 mins!
