🔴 Creators have made $200M through his tool

Today’s guest is John Hu, also known as @jayhoovy on YouTube and TikTok. I first came across his work in early 2022 on TikTok, where he was making videos about growing his then-nascent company, Stan (a monetization tool for creators and entrepreneurs). It’s now a thriving company with over 40 employees and over $33 million in annual recurring revenue on the books.

In this issue:

• 🤳 How TikToks helped build a company generating over $33 million per year

• 💲 Stan has helped creators generate over $200 million to date

• 🧱 What it means to build a creator middle-class

And down in the “Steal This Tactic” section:

• ▶️ John’s production process for longform YouTube video essays (his get hundreds of thousands of views)

• 🤔 The only piece of advice that matters (according to John)

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to my full conversation with John or watch it on YouTube.

TikTok videos helped build a company that’s helped creators make $200 million

Nearly three years ago, scrolling through TikTok, I lingered on a video of a cheerful, energetic 20-something holding a lav mic: “Y’all, I just raised $5 million for my startup, and I am so excited to share this with you."

Three weeks ago, I recorded an episode of The Creator Spotlight Podcast with @jayhoovy, real name John Hu. When I’d first seen his videos in 2021, his company, Stan, was still getting off the ground. By the end of 2022, it was generating $1.7 million per year; by the end of 2023, that number had increased more than eight-fold to $14.7 million. It’s doubled again this year to over $33 million.

Stan, as John describes it, is an “all-in-one monetization tool for a creator or an online entrepreneur.” Think of it as a branch of the link-in-bio concept, a digital storefront users put in their social media bios, where visitors can click out to all of a user’s other channels and projects or — crucially — purchase digital products directly.

In other words, if you’re selling your bookable time, courses, access to a community, or Notion templates, you might use Stan to do so. “$9 to $47” products, John says, are where the platform sees the most movement, like a $7 makeup guide he saw one creator generate five figures from recently.

Stan costs $29 per month; rough math suggests that there may be around 95,000 paying users. When we spoke, John told me that they’d just hit a new milestone: 11,000 people had officially made at least $1,000 through Stan.

Many of those 11,000 creators have made much more than $1,000; in April of this year, John shared that they’d surpassed $100 million made by creators through Stan.

It took two-and-a-half years to go from $0 to $100 million and only another half-year to double up to $200 million, which, as John told me when we spoke, they’ve just surpassed.

A creator is an entrepreneur

Creators are not a monolith. I always ask the people I interview for this series how they define the term; John’s definition is explicitly entrepreneurial, unsurprisingly given the company he’s built.

He spoke of a creator spectrum they discuss internally at Stan, the “artist to entrepreneur spectrum.” On one end is a pure artist, someone who is “purely there for the intention of the art, to the detriment of the audience.” No creator is fully on the entrepreneur end because you still need to make something to be a creator; the closest to that might be the people making AI slop purely to generate a Facebook audience and collect a share of the platform’s ad revenue.

The types of creators Stan serves, John told me, are those “who look to be entrepreneurs within their creative journey.” He used Taylor Swift as an example of somebody in the middle of the spectrum; she’s lauded for both her art and her ability to build a business around it.

Financial success as a creator depends on a mix of entrepreneurial skill and creative skill. These two things don’t always come together; Stan’s success depends on increasing the number of creators who are capable of building a business around their work, at least enough to justify spending $29 per month on this particular software subscription.

John-as-creator (it takes one to know one)

John is a highly capable creator. He started on TikTok and is now more focused on less frequent, longer-form YouTube videos. The latter have a far higher production value than the former, but even when he was figuring out TikTok on his own while still working on an MBA, he was putting out well-produced work, both purely comedic and genuinely educational.

His ability as a creator springs from no artsy background; he was a finance guy. But it’s good because he has that entrepreneurial understanding — a sense of marketing, a sense of building something that fills a need. First and foremost, his content is a product meant for consumption.

On YouTube, John has 129k subscribers and counting, surpassing his TikTok follower count of 102k earlier this year. His content isn’t solely designed to propagate entrepreneurialism, but many of his most popular videos are.

John says Stan is planning to hire a team to create this kind of entrepreneurship-education content in-house. They’ve 17 open roles listed across the organization at the time of writing, including Professional Memer, Creator Partnerships Manager, and Stan Creator Search.

Building the creator economy’s middle-class

“The entirety of my success was due to building an audience online,” John says of getting Stan off the ground in the early days. For the first “one or two years” building Stan, John estimates some 60% of his mental energy was consumed by content work. He ground that audience out on TikTok, but he hasn’t “made a TikTok in over two years.” The company is in a place that no longer requires this of him.

Much has been written about the notion of a creator economy middle-class. There is none; there is one. Stan’s success — arguably the long-term success of any company building tools for the creator economy — depends on the expansion of such a group.

This is their mission; they’ve lain plenty of bricks (see: those 11,000 creators who’ve sold $1k+ through Stan), but there’s a long way to go yet. As in the regular economy, the majority of dollars are earned by a minority of players.

Attention — the raw material of the creator economy, what we all compete for — is a zero-sum game. I asked John if this worries him. It doesn’t. “We’re still in such early days,” he says, “both in terms of business scale and market adoption. [The creator economy] is not going away anytime soon.”

For the full story, listen to the podcast or watch it on YouTube.

🎙️ This was an excellent conversation. It was impossible to fit every topic we touched on in this newsletter — here’s some of what we touch on in the podcast:

• 🤳 Building a company in public on TikTok — John says that in the early days, “the entirety of my success was due to building an audience online.”

• 🧠 John’s take on what each creator platform is best used for, having collected tons of data through Stan

• 🛍️ What kinds of digital products tend to sell best and why

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

How to make a top-quality, million-plus-views YouTube video

John’s most-viewed YouTube video is titled “Everything I Learned at Stanford Business School in 28 Minutes”. As I write this, it’s been online for 7 months and has 1.4 million views. On concept alone, it’s easy to see why so many have watched it, but the production level is there, too. I asked him what goes into producing a video like this.

1. Start with one question: “How can I provide as much value as possible?”

As we’ve discussed in this newsletter before, the title and thumbnail are the most important parts of any YouTube video. John and his collaborators spent over 40 hours on this video, starting with the concept and then determining the packaging (title and thumbnail) before actually making the thing. It's risk mitigation.

2. With concept, title, and thumbnail figured out, move on to scriptwriting

3. Film and execute

Once again, the best piece of advice is to say no

For last week’s Spotlight, I interviewed Adam Ryan from Workweek. I asked him for his best piece of advice, which was “Learn to say no.” I asked John if he’d seen any commonalities among successful creators besides consistency — showing up time and time again — which he’d mentioned on another podcast.

The Final Entry Deadline for the 29th Annual Webby Awards is ONE WEEK away! Since 1996, The Webby Awards has been recognized as the preeminent international honor for Internet excellence, and this year, they’ve introduced a brand-new suite of categories for creators.

Join past creator winners like MrBeast, Java Doodles, Abi Marquez, Recess Therapy, and Mark Rober in new categories such as Best Editing, Best Series, Best Narrative, Storytelling or Writing and honors across Art & Culture, Comedy, Gaming, Music, Social Impact, and more.

Don’t miss your chance! Create Your Mark and Enter by the Final Entry Deadline on Friday, December 20th!

Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the weekly podcast about media, tech, and business hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

This week we’re joined by Trevor McFedries to talk network spirituality, techno-optimism vs. techno-pessimism, the content "gold rush" that's all picks-n-shovels and no gold, building a better world for people vs. humanity, and more.

We’re also accepting listener questions for a mailbag episode. If you have questions, send them to [email protected] before Thursday, December 19th, and we might answer them on the pod!