Founder of Creator Science — running experiments, interviewing remarkable creators, and studying trust. 🎥 https://teapawt.org/t.co/bCJOkU7sqY
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Joined June 2009
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I'm building something new.
For a long time, most of my products have been designed for creators who already have some traction.
But I haven't had a useful, accessible product to help creators go from 0 to 1. And overwhelmingly, that's what I hear people asking for.
So, I'm building it.
It's called Traction Plan, and it's designed to give you a personalized plan to find traction with your content.
It's not a course (though it'll be educational). It's a guided, responsive experience that takes your inputs and workshops language and strategy in real time. The goal is to give you a plan that fits YOUR business, YOUR goals, and YOUR schedule.
I'm aiming to launch this in early November.
Is this something you'd be interested in?
More choices don't necessarily make a better Black Friday offer.
A huge catalog of discounted products might sound appealing, but it also creates more decisions for your customers.
Sometimes one compelling offer is better than ten decent ones.
Still very happy with @openclaw
I'm a Grok @Bot fan. I also can't keep paying for it like this.
Since August, I've gone all in. I built a team of 24 bots to run my business, and I've told everyone who would listen: newsletter subscribers, conference audiences, podcast hosts, and my mastermind members.
Then something changed. No announcement. No explanation. Suddenly, the same work cost far more than it used to.
This week I hit my weekly usage limit after just five days. That's never happened before. When it happens, Grok Bot keeps running on paid credits. On top of my $200 monthly subscription, I've spent more than $272 on extra usage. It's November 3.
Here's what scares me. Under the new limits, I'm burning about $14 an hour. At 10 hours a day, that's $140 a day, or roughly $4,200 a month, plus the subscription.
So I did what users do. I went looking for fixes.
1. Pause the routines. I paused 19 scheduled tasks this morning. It barely helped. Spending kept climbing.
2. Duplicate long-running bots. Others recommend copying a bot to start its conversation fresh. But the copy loses everything the bot has learned about you.
3. Rethink group chats. This turned out to be the real cost. Every message in a group chat wakes every bot in it, even the ones with nothing to say. Most of my usage now comes from conversations, not automation.
Here's where we are. I'm moving shared project context out of group chats and into notes the bots read only when they need them. One lead bot per project. Fewer wake-ups.
It's helping. But I shouldn't have to reverse-engineer the billing to use the product the way it's designed.
Let me be clear. I'm not a freeloader. I don't expect free AI, and I'm happy to pay for real value. Grok Bot delivers real value.
What I can't do is commit a business to a platform when I can't predict what it will cost from one week to the next. That uncertainty is the problem.
The Grok Bot team has built something remarkable. I don't want to find an alternative, but I may have to. It all depends on whether SpaceXAI fixes this.
New headshot just dropped.
btw you can get this hoodie here: shop.creatorscience.com
Everyone:
“You wouldn’t believe the cool shit I’m making with AI!”
Also Everyone:
“I’m so sick of seeing all this AI slop.”
Your secret sauce as a creator is your earned insight.
The knowledge you've gained through years of hard work. The lessons you've learned firsthand. The experiences that are uniquely yours.
That's difficult for anyone else to replicate.
This is helpful to remember with content too.
When a post flops, we tend to think everyone saw it flop and thinks less of us because of it.
But really, the fact that it flopped proves that NO ONE actually saw it.
Very freeing—take more shots!
Thinking about building your own team?
I've stepped away for paternity leave, and my team (of ~5) will be running Creator Science while I'm gone.
What questions do you have about building a team, delegating responsibilities, or running a creator business behind the scenes?
Would you rather follow a creator who publishes something great once a month or something good 3x/week?
I agree with this take, but willingly sharing passwords is a good sign that there is ALREADY trust.
trust does not demand transparency. transparency is useful in environments that do not have trust as a worse alternative (but does not CREATE trust)
If you're planning a Black Friday offer, don't wait until Black Friday to start talking about it.
Give people time to understand what you're offering and decide whether it's right for them.
Ideally, they're already thinking about buying before the sale even begins.
Where should we draw the line with AI?
If we need AI to help us describe our own children, have we become too dependent on it?
@jcasabona brought up an interesting story in The Lab (my community for creators) that's sparked quite a bit of debate.
Former Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, was asked by her daughter's teacher to share three things that made her daughter special.
She struggled to narrow it down, so she asked her AI assistant for help, and it suggested three qualities:
→ empathetic
→ creative
→ animal lover
She thought the answer was perfect.
A lot of people are criticizing her for outsourcing something so personal to AI. And I understand that reaction. But I also think there's an important distinction between using AI to think FOR you and using AI to help you think.
My wife and I have been struggling to choose a name for our baby boy. As a last resort, I asked my AI assistant for suggestions.
One of those names is now in serious contention!
Does that mean I'm outsourcing an important decision to AI? I don't think so.
It helped us consider an option we might not have otherwise. The decision is still ours.
I think AI is incredibly useful as a thought partner. But there's a difference between using it to explore possibilities and letting it make decisions on your behalf.
And as these tools become more integrated into our lives, that distinction is only going to become more important.
Curious for your thoughts here.
Lot of interest in!
Here’s the waitlist: creatorscience.com/traction-…
I'm building something new.
For a long time, most of my products have been designed for creators who already have some traction.
But I haven't had a useful, accessible product to help creators go from 0 to 1. And overwhelmingly, that's what I hear people asking for.
So, I'm building it.
It's called Traction Plan, and it's designed to give you a personalized plan to find traction with your content.
It's not a course (though it'll be educational). It's a guided, responsive experience that takes your inputs and workshops language and strategy in real time. The goal is to give you a plan that fits YOUR business, YOUR goals, and YOUR schedule.
I'm aiming to launch this in early November.
Is this something you'd be interested in?
In 2024, I generated nearly $100,000 during Black Friday. In 2025, I tried something different and generated about $33,000.
And the second campaign required a LOT more work.
Here's what changed:
In 2024, I focused on selling my existing digital products. I used RightMessage and Kit to recommend different products based on what subscribers had already purchased. Each person received an offer that was relevant to them.
The result was nearly $100,000 in sales without having to create or deliver anything new.
In 2025, I decided to create a brand new cohort-based course about building your signature product. We generated about $33,000, but I also spent December delivering the course.
Less revenue. More work.
My working hypothesis is that Black Friday works better when you're selling something your audience already knows exists. You're not asking them to learn about something completely new AND make a purchasing decision in a short window.
So this year, I'm leaning toward existing products, more accessible price points, and as little additional delivery work as possible.
Still experimenting, but that's what I'm taking away from the last two years.
Curious if other creators have experienced something similar.
