🔴 Launching live shows for creators

Over the last couple of years, livestreaming has become all the more important as a creator economy medium. Political streamers are on the news and in the news. TBPN was founded two years ago, then sold to OpenAI in a reported nine-figure deal this spring.

Taylor Craig, today’s guest, is a former television producer now helping knowledge creators (with experience-based authority on a topic) stand up their own streaming shows through his company, Launch Live Now.

In this episode:

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Livestream audiences boast some of the most favorable size-to-value ratios in the creator economy. Why?

Taylor Craig, a former live television line producer now running a business producing live shows for creators, puts it down to a mix of interactivity and niche authority.

In the years before he decided to go into nichecasting, Taylor remembers “all this doom and gloom [he'd] hear in the control room” about the death of TV, which he was always skeptical about because of the sheer volume of content audiences consume today.

Increasingly, Taylor noticed that social platforms were focusing on livestream features:

What is nichecasting? Creators streaming hyperfocused business shows for small but valuable insider audiences.

In terms of audience value, size, especially in business niches, is secondary to makeup; advertisers would rather reach 10 likely buyers than 1,000 irrelevant viewers.

When the weekdaily tech business show TBPN sold to OpenAI for an undisclosed price this spring (estimated at around $200 million), commentators noted its relatively small audience — Forbes pegged it at around 70,000 average per-episode views.

The TBPN sale was announced on April 2, 2026. One month earlier, The Hollywood Reporter published Andrew Zucker’s definitive article on nichecasting. He notes that broadcast TV morning shows have about half the viewership they had 15 years ago, and these creators are filling the gap in part.

Taylor and his team at Launch Live Now produce that car dealership show, one of eight shows in their roster at the time of our conversation earlier this summer.

Like many of the people we’ve featured in Creator Spotlight, Taylor started his business with severance money. He’d been working as a line producer at CNBC for a year and a half when the show he worked on, Last Call, got canceled.

Taylor went to his roommate, Daniel Mesko, a software engineer by trade who streamed flight simulator sessions on Twitch, and pitched a political show called Common Threads; their model was born.

Today, they combine traditional broadcasting production techniques with internet streaming infrastructure to produce niche, business-focused creator livestreams for a slate of clients.

What does a line producer do? “They are in charge of every single pixel on screen,” as Taylor sums it. It takes many people to run a live television show; a line producer is the connective tissue between them all.

Before CNBC, Taylor spent four years as a producer at Cheddar, with three years of experience before that across FOX Business and a local station in his previous home of Miami (he’s been working in New York City since 2017).

All of this experience is valuable to Launch Live Now’s creator clients, who may have never worked in traditional media themselves.

What defines a good-fit client for Launch Live Now? They’re already bought in on the nichecasting thesis, of course. They’re typically “knowledge creators” as opposed to “typical influencers” — “people that have an authority on a topic and want to connect more with their audience,” Taylor says.

Clients typically come in with “tens of thousands” of followers across a few different platforms; Taylor acknowledges that starting from zero audience with a live stream is difficult.

Their client roster, as of late July 2026, had a total following of 2.94 million. Current shows include:

All of these shows are live once weekly except for Daily Dealer Live, which goes live every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

By the time I interviewed Taylor for our podcast this July, he and his team had produced 538 live episodes across their show roster over nearly two years in business.

Taylor did not provide specific revenue figures, but he did share the cost of their core products. When I did the basic math to arrive at just over half a million total revenue since the business’ founding two years ago, he affirmed the estimate.

Taylor says there is typically a 1.5–2 month period between when a client comes in and when their first episode goes live.

Buildout sees the Launch Live Now team helping with everything from the show’s look to specific segments to the core concept — working with the hosts to determine how best to highlight their specific skillsets.

Each episode takes place over a three-and-a-half-hour window. For that $1k-per-episode price, clients have two producers running each episode. There is a two-hour prep period before each episode goes live:

Half an hour after a live episode wraps, Taylor’s team has it published as an on-demand podcast.

With a staff of four producers besides Taylor and his co-founder Daniel, they can run three shows per day. When we spoke, they were onboarding two more producers to increase capacity. At the beginning, it was just the two co-founders. One year after founding the business, they’d doubled to four; two years in, they’re doubling again.

Clients pay per quarter, ensuring stable revenue. Taylor described five revenue pillars, only two of which are currently active:

The existing two revenue pillars are:

The three unbuilt revenue pillars are:

One area Taylor says they will not venture into is building their own shows; they are “dead focused on being a plug-and-play live solution.” So far, he says, they have no competitors offering exactly their services — just “a lot of clients” telling them Launch Live Now is “exactly what we were looking for.”

We are, as Taylor put it to me, “ so early in the game when it comes to livestreaming and nichecasting.”

Learn more about Launch Live Now on their website.
Connect with Taylor on LinkedIn.

If you already have a loyal audience of at least tens of thousands and a strong desire to work in the format long enough to build momentum … maybe.

If you already make a video podcast, maybe; there’s a logical format translation. But not every video podcast with a loyal audience needs a livestream. What defines the ones who should try making a live show? A desire for community.

When you can create a room where people want to talk to each other and can talk to the hosts, Taylor says, community blooms.

I asked Taylor what questions he’s asking of new clients to solidify their ideas and determine how they might work together. He’d approached Investopedia, the 27-year-old financial internet media business, who were looking to evolve their existing podcast, The Investopedia Express.

Below, I’ve paraphrased some of the questions Taylor remembers asking during that process, as well as some more general questions to be asked of any such show:

Livestream view counts are typically lower than view counts for similar on-demand videos; assess these numbers with that in mind. Here are the metrics Taylor says are most important: