🔴 Creators are entrepreneurs

No guest today. If you’ve read more than one issue of this newsletter or watched a couple episodes of the podcast, you’ll know I ask everybody I interview to define the term “creator,” and I aim to form a unified, cross-platform definition.

I’ve been stuck on one definition for the past two months.

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. No new podcast episode this week. Great time to browse the backlog!

What is a creator?

A creator is an entrepreneur.

More specifically, a professional-grade content creator is an entrepreneur whose business is built on digital media production and distribution. The problem is that not all creators understand themselves as entrepreneurs and those that don’t are disadvantaged.

In the creator economy, the creator-entrepreneur has three jobs: create, grow, sell. In other words: make the content, build the audience for it, and leverage that audience to sell products (the content itself, advertisements, physical goods, consulting services, etc.).

There are at least two types of creator, defined by where they do business: closed-platform and open-internet.

• Closed-platform creator: Primarily sticks to one platform where their growth, and sometimes monetization, is powered solely by that platform’s algorithms (i.e., Instagram, TikTok, Substack, YouTube).

• Open-internet creator: Uses various closed-platform algorithms, but as strategic parts of a larger business, usually centered around an owned website and email list.

I wrote about the concept of “content capital” in November, essentially a creator’s following and reach. If it’s locked into one closed platform that doesn’t allow for audience email list export, it’s illiquid and not truly yours; the only liquid form of content capital is the email address. This is what the open-internet creator cultivates and converts to financial capital.

Increasingly, as the creator economy has matured, creators have matured with it, becoming open-internet operators earlier and with more sophistication. Open-internet creators are necessarily all awake to the realities of entrepreneurship; they’re playing an open-world game, competing on multiple fronts, usually alongside multiple collaborators. They may have moved beyond the “write” job to focus more on “grow” or “sell.”

Not quite a spectrum

When I interviewed Matt McGarry a few weeks ago, he said he considers himself a founder more than a creator because he “always start[s] with the end in mind, and most creators don’t do that.”

I’ve taken to speaking about a “creator-to-entrepreneur” or “artist-to-businessperson” spectrum to describe the ranger of operators in the creator economy — see the illustration at the top of this letter — but it’s too one-dimensional, as is Matt’s statement.

Maybe it’s only because they have the same first name, but I’m thinking of the artist Matthew Cerletty. One look at his painstakingly rendered object paintings suggests they start with the end in mind — both what he aims to render and with the intent of a sale.

Journey and destination share a permeable border in art and entrepreneurship alike. There are artists who are businesspeople and vice versa; everyone has to make a living, and everyone has to live. Art is a business, and business is an art; there are those who try to stay on one side of the line, but the conditions of 21st-century life don’t encourage it.

My favorite example of a person who embodies both — a perfect creator-entrepreneur — is Andrew Huang, a musician and YouTuber I interviewed one year ago. He’s been making a living as a musician on the internet for two decades, starting by selling his songwriting services on eBay and eventually becoming a beloved YouTuber. He’s an open-internet creator; YouTube is his main vehicle, but he’s on all the social platforms, all of which serve as top-of-funnel marketing for bespoke music-making services (he has soundtracked and appeared in brand commercials).

In 2016, with his YouTube account sitting around 300,000 subscribers, he decided to go for 1,000,000. Over the next 20 months, he added precisely that number of subscribers. He released two videos a week nearly every week of that period, constantly generating ideas into a spreadsheet and using the below framework (a tweak on the concept of ikigai) to prioritize. Is that not the process of an entrepreneur?

What is entrepreneurialism?

A recent piece by the New Yorker columnist Anna Wiener offers a critical perspective on entrepreneurialism. It’s a compelling essay and also functions as a review of Harvard lecturer and historian Erik Baker’s new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.

We are living in an era of entrepreneurialism. The gig economy, the creator economy, venture capital-funded startups — all are structured to advantage those who embrace entrepreneurialism because they were designed by practitioners of entrepreneurialism.

Why refer to practitioners instead of just writing “entrepreneurs”? I’m currently reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s expertly-woven memoir, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. In one passage, after reflecting on his grandmother’s commitment to playing the lottery (this is a book about hopes and dreams, striving and failing, the author and LeBron James), he writes:

Entrepreneurialism is a game with a higher success rate than the lottery but both are games of hope and risk; one just happens to be more winnable and skills-based. One rewards ambition. The other recycles hope. Both encourage religious devotion.

Entrepreneurialism, per the Cambridge Dictionary, is “the ability to start new businesses, especially when this involves seeing new opportunities to make money.”

An entrepreneur, per the same source, is “someone who starts their own business, especially when this involves seeing a new opportunity.”

I completely agree with these definitions, but let me offer traits. The entrepreneur:

• Accepts risk in exchange for increased earning potential

• Has a bias towards action

• Is competitive, with an eye trained to identify strengths and weaknesses

• Is creative in the sense of being a font of ideas

• Is discerning and knows how to make the most of limited resources

• Is resilient — the entrepreneur must have a financial, spiritual, mental, and/or physical ability to take two steps forward after being pushed one back

Bushcraft and entrepreneurcraft

The folks on the entrepreneur end of this loose spectrum get it: you can just do things. My goal with this essay is to show the folks on the creative side of the spectrum that same sentiment, to illuminate a trailhead.

You will not survive a month lost in the wilderness without knowledge of bushcraft, either pre-existing or gained by sheer force of will to survive. Neither will you thrive long-term in the creator economy without knowledge of entrepreneurialism.

When I say “creator economy,” I mean “business oriented around the production, distribution, and monetization of digital content.”

Every creator — everyone producing and distributing content on social, algorithmic platforms or the open internet — is an entrepreneur by the structure of the creator economy. If you’re just posting travel photos on a private Instagram for your friends and family, you’re not engaging in entrepreneurialism, of course, but once you open your profile to the public and incentivize your production to find traction in the algorithm and collect likes and follows from strangers, you are. The question is whether you know and accept that.

There’s no linear path to success as an entrepreneur, just forward motion through a wilderness. One more entrepreneurial trait, arguably the most important: drive. Grit, stick-with-it-ness. Where do you source that? Survival, pure greed, love, hate, hunger, desire. Your mileage may vary by fuel.

Tools help. Learning the language helps. Above all, it’s about forward motion. In entrepreneur-designed-and-advantaged systems, there is little more sacred and rewarded.