What I Learned After 1 Year Of Being A Full-Time Creator

I have been a full-time entrepreneur and creator for one year so in this video we're going to talk about the year one metrics everything that I did this entire year how much money I made how the videos do we're going to talk about wins losses and my thoughts on the year in general and then lastly some general learnings that I put together from year one like the most important takeaways I think if you're an entrepreneur you'll like those all right now quick background to orient you to where we're at before I went full-time I had

been making content for 9 months I started from scratch while I had a full-time job and I just posted every every single afternoon for those first N9 months now that was October 2022 to July 2023 at that time it was much much easier to grow on social media with short form video so I went from zero to about 312,000 followers in that first 9-month period I had done a couple of brand deals I did a big one from Adobe and that was all I needed to give me the validation that I should quit my job

and go full-time all right now let's get into the meat of the episode the overall metrics first Total posts so I had about 50 videos posted in this year I pressed post 1911 times that includes videos on multiple platforms I'm counting those twice that includes Instagram stories tweets LinkedIn posts I literally press post 1911 times about five times per day throughout the year those 150 videos pulled in 171 million views for an average of 1.1 million views per video I'm pretty proud of that given that this is my first year doing this with respect to

audience growth I increased my total followers by 233,000 followers and now we're at a total of around 547 th000 that's across all platforms and then on the revenue side so I've been transparent the whole way this year in year 1 we made $15,708 so our net profit for year 1 was $77,200 now that Revenue breaks out in the pie chart 22% platform CPM so that's things like AdSense or like Tik Tok Creator program 57% brand deals 19% Consulting and then 2% other like Affiliates or subscriptions so that'll give you a nice picture of how much

money I was able to make in year one now again I had nine months to kind of ramp this up so it's not like I was starting from 00 in terms of the number of followers but for the most part I had zero business when I started this a year ago a couple of other cool Milestones this year I actually got a chance to interview Mark Zuckerberg a few weeks ago that was definitely the highlight of the year and I've had a lot of celebrities follow me or interact with my stuff Patrick Dempsey who's McDreamy

Reese Witherspoon Gary ve Snoop Dogg sha a lot of people I've looked up to my whole life are actually sharing my content and interacting commenting on it so that's really cool all right so I want to get into my thoughts wins losses my goal with blueprint is to be as tactical as possible I want to speak to me 2 to 3 years ago if you're Me 2 to 3 years ago you're ambitious you're hungry you want this to work but you haven't really found escape velocity you haven't found the thing you want to do you're

still kind of lost in that wandering phase I want you to listen to this or watch this or read this and then run through a brick wall that's the whole reason I'm putting this together so overall I thought this freshman season was pretty good I was pretty happy with it I never have worked harder in my life I think I worked about 10 times harder than the past 5 years combined when I was on autopilot at my job I've learned 10 times more than those past 5 years combined but I'll be honest the biggest benefit

of this first year it wasn't the money it wasn't the growth although I think that's going to be a helpful Foundation it was the complete mental reconstruction I think a lot of people fall into this entrepreneurial phase where they have these Ambitions they want to do dope things but they're not actually taking the action and that is poison for the brain it it teaches the brain that you're not actually going to do or follow through with the things that you say when you go out on your own it put you in a fight or flight

and that fight ORF flight forces a mental rebuild it's a mental reconstruction for me I am now a complete Savage I am bulletproof mentally because of this process going through thinking about what I'm going to do executing day after day after day I am now bulletproof and because of that that's going to be a really important Bedrock moving forward all right let's go through some we'll call them losses and struggles these are like the top five things that I felt like I struggled with the most this first year the first one is finding complimentary Partners

so what you'll find if you're like me where you're good at marketing you're good at product but you're not good at operating a business in order to really win and build large Enterprises you need complimentary partners for me that's those operators I need people who are great AT Systems who love thinking about tinkering the operations who don't necessarily want to be front-facing who don't want to deal with sales and distribution that's what I want I need a complimentary partner what ends up happening is you attract people like you so I've met a lot of really

awesome Creator and entrepreneur types but they're like me if you put two of me together the business still has gaps can't win so I've really struggled to find those complimentary pieces so that's one big piece the second piece is automation I really waited too long to try to automate my content process and by waiting to automate I had to work harder for longer and I wasn't able to grow as fast because I was using up all my time to actually make the content there's a little distinction here that I like to think about the artist

versus entrepreneur the artist is one who likes to do the process manually because the craft is the art the entrepreneur is one who likes to start doing the process manually but as soon as they understand the process they automate or delegate it away so they can build upon that I stayed too much in the artist Zone this year mostly because I was procrastinating because I didn't know how to automate and I also knew how much time and effort it took to build those channels I didn't want to risk automating them dropping quality and then losing

adoption so that was another struggle I couldn't figure out the automation but we're going to figure that out in year two the third thing I struggled with was positioning my interests are super Broad and so when I started making content I figured why put guard rails on what I have to make if I'm interested in all these different things Brands Tech culture why don't I just make content on all of them the problem is by doing that you attract a very broad audience which is okay from a numerical perspective but you can't actually sell a

niche product into a broad audience or if you do you're going to have really really small penetration and so that was something I struggled with I should have gone more narrow from the beginning I should have traded speed in exchange for direction funneled that direction tighter into something that I could sell that would have made it much easier to monetize or at least give me insight into what to build so that was my third struggle the fourth thing is what I call a leaky bucket so I didn't have an offer or a product to sell

when I started making content and that's completely fine most people don't the reason they wanted to start making content is so they could build an audience and figure out what to build but over time I should have pressed the issue slowed down my content growth and figured out what to put at the bottom of the bucket a leaky bucket is I had all this traffic coming in the top nothing to capture it so the water was just falling on the ground it's not that it was wasted cuz I was building the audience and maybe those

people be interested in my stuff moving forward but I could have captured and converted so much more into dollars if I had an offer that made sense at the bottom I procrastinated and I was lazy about figuring out what that offer should be so I wasted a lot of that top of funnel traffic all right let's let's talk about some wins from year 1 so the first big one was a commitment to Quality I have this obsessive eye for Quality I can't always recreate that quality with my hands but my vision for what is acceptable

is extremely high and because of that I wasn't willing to put out stuff that was below a certain quality bar now I've realized I'm unique in that sense that commitment to Quality and because of that my stuff my videos they seem to cut through on the profile I just don't see a lot of videos at the Quality that I put it out at so I think that was a benefit and a win from year one the second big one was intensity I bring kind of like a chill laid-back energy but I'm very intense when I

decide to go at something I'm going all in and I'm obsessing to win I don't like losing and I think that intensity also was super helpful to kind of be a through line in everything that I did in year one that helped me win the third piece which I mentioned earlier was the entrepreneur friends I didn't meet a lot of complimentary operator Partners but I did make 10 2030 entrepreneur Creator friends that are just like me growing up I always felt there was something broken in my brain because I just thought differently than everybody I

was around turns out I just wasn't around people that were like me so now the internet has shrunk the world and allowed me to find more of those people super grateful for that and that's probably the biggest side benefit of this whole journey other than the mental reconstruction it's finding other people like me that I can build with bounce ideas off of Etc the last win from year 2 was short form video that single skill I think I'll be able to eat off of for the rest of my life and I think that's a really

important lesson if you're watching this and you do not have a hard skill pick a hard skill coding design writing video pick some hard skill spend 6 to 12 months mastering that hard skill and you can eat forever all right let's shift into the year 2 strategy talk so interestingly before I started any of this content I made this YouTube video called $100 million hold Cod I mean it's really shitty you should watch it but it's really bad but in the video I outlined my master vision for what a decade long process would look like

to build a $100 million holding company and what's funny is if you watch that video and then map to the actions that I've actually taken they are very much in line so in this section I want to kind of go through what is that Master strategy what parts have I knocked off on year one and then where am I focusing my attention for year 2 to continue along that path so the strategy is super simple step one develop content knowledge so Master the skill of generating funneling and converting attention at will for one specific format

step two use that content knowledge to build a personal audience via that format so we'll say short form is the first one I started with step three repeat steps one and two across multiple content formats step four automate the content creation process for each format without sacrificing audience trust and step five deploy that content knowledge Andor automated process against a business opportunity so in essence figure out how to generate attention use that attention to build one channel figure out how to generate attention and build the other channels figure out how to automate the process of

making the content and then use that knowledge or automated process against a business opportunity now there's four different business opportunity buckets that I could go after the first one is growing my own personal brand so this would be if I'm making Tech content it's becoming an MKBHD type figure where I am the center of the personal brand and everything I make is around that brand option two is growing my own Products company so this would be like I own a supplement company and I'm using both my own channels and my knowledge to build the supplement

companies channels to grow that company step three is build a services company so this is create an agency where I can advise other brands on how they should build content or option four apply my knowledge silently to help grow other brands so this would be like me creating faceless YouTube channels or Tik Tok shop accounts where I monetize by growing other brands but nobody knows it's me those are kind of the four business opportunities that I could apply this content knowledge against so in year one I figured out how to generate short form attention at

will I grew short form channels pretty big I've got 550,000 followers not massive but pretty big and I started down the path of figuring that out for YouTube and email newsletter although I haven't done those yet so in year two my focus is figure out how to automate the short form content process and then apply that against one of those four business opportunities and figure out steps one and two for YouTube and email figure out how to actually make YouTube and email work I'm not yet to an automate the YouTube and email part but I

can start automating the short form content process that's what year 2 looks like once I apply that against the business opportunity if I pick the right one that's where cash flow will really start coming all right in this last section I just want to go through a few lessons like General business takeaways entrepreneurial lessons that I picked up over the first year I really like coming up with these little I call them cisms these little aphorisms around business so hopefully these will be helpful the first one some games are rigged against you don't play rigged

games corporate jobs are rigged against you your salary your comp your incentive is capped in a band so if you're exceptional your comp cannot be exceptional it will only go to the top of that band that that is a rigged game what happens is if you're an exceptional player you then revert to the mean because you realize that extra effort is not going to get you an extra incentive if you special you don't want to play rigged games you want to find games that are not rigged when you play a not rigged game your extra

effort maps to extra reward find non- rig games make sure you're playing those number two is around delusional self-belief I'm actually going to read this one word for word cuz I I like the way it was written when you have vacuum sealed conviction it's impossible for long-term doubt to sneak in to win you must have an absolute certainty about yourself as the jockey I'll ride a thousand horses if that's what it takes because I have delusional belief in my own ability this belief is a prerequisite for doing amazing things if you don't have this delusion

but you want it spend hours inward via meditation to convince yourself some people are born with a higher predisposition to be this way but anyone can jailbreak their mind you need to positively brainwash your programming your thoughts are simply programs you can change the programming if you change your inputs easiest way to change the inputs is with your eyes closed fortunately I had some of this ability embedded in me but I forced The Last Mile this year via meditation and it changed everything I am now bulletproof mentally this is starting to sound a little woo

woo but I believe all successful people have gone through this process they just don't talk about it I will this has been the best thing I could have done this year I alluded to it earlier my mindset is bulletproof and if you don't believe in yourself you'll never achieve what you want want there is a systematic way that you can retrain your brain I call it jailbreaking the mind you can call it whatever you want you have to do that if you don't believe if you don't wake up look in the mirror and be like

I'm a dog you won't win you have to have that and you can say that's delusional it is you can say that's wooow woo it is but that's key and it works if you want to understand how to do that I'll talk about it in future episodes but to me if you don't have that it's not worth even moving down the path unless you figure that out all right the next one do interesting things to attract interesting people most of my life my early professional career all I wanted was for the interesting people doing cool

to notice me and they would never notice me and I would wonder why are they not noticing me and they weren't noticing me because I wasn't doing anything interesting if I found a way to sneak into one of those dinners and the conversation came to me and they said what are you up to what are you about I wouldn't have had anything interesting to say and that's when I realized you need to do interesting to get those people to invite you into rooms the most interesting thing you can do is build a project build a

company some initiative launch or make or create something you need to make something and interesting people will find you this is how to unlock the interesting problem the next one incentives are all that matter this is a really simple one the first thing you should look if you're not getting the thing you want from somebody or you're in a partnership it's not working incentives if someone is not incentivized to do the thing you want them to do they won't do it if they are incentivized they will do it always start with incentives figure out what

incentivizes something it's not always money figure out what they want and structure the contract or the terms or the rewards to give them that if you do that that you will win the next one you can't hit your ceiling with ankle weights on you got to really audit your surroundings are the people you're hanging out with the place you live your family the things you're listening to the things you're watching are those things holding you back or are they helping you are they headwinds or are they Tailwinds if they're headwinds you're just hurting yourself you're

putting ankle weights on your ability to dunk you want to dunk take the ankle weights off the next one skills are the currency you're looking for I talked about this earlier if you want to win you have to have hard skills management is not a hard skill you build a hard skill and then maybe you can manage but you have have to have the underlying hard skill because at the end of the day when comes to Bear people fire their managers because managers don't have hard skills hard skills are how you make things if you

don't want to depend on anyone else you need a hard skill coding design writing video paid ads there's so many hard skills but I think a lot of people fall into this trap of well I don't want to actually do anything I just want to strategize and tell people what to do that works if you have a hard skill Baseline that you could fall back on but if you don't you're not really defendable and if you're not defendable you're not going to be able to command high value in exchange for your services all right the

last two all you have to do is stay alive you're playing a forever game if I gave you 20 million and I said good luck you'd last about 6 months on beaches and messing around until you realized your brain started to Twitch and demand action brains are problem solving machines and if you don't give it a problem to solve it will create a problem for you to solve you have to realize that this is a forever game for me business is the game I want to play people are going to have to do things forever

if you don't do something you will start to atrophy over time that means you don't have to rush you can play the game forever and when you realize that it alleviates some pressure which means the only thing you have to do is stay in the game stay alive in the game long enough for Serendipity to start happening you will start to slowly win and then you'll realize it's a forever game that you enjoy playing and the last thing is greatness I believe if you have the ability to be great you owe the world an attempt

we'll leave it there thank you guys for watching make sure to like subscribe comment we're on a journey we're on a mission we're doing it together just remember keep going peace