Opportunities in the creator economy

Most Industry reports are boring. Nobody wants to read a 23 page PDF on the state of the creator economy in 2023.

But such reports can also be a gold mine for finding new business ideas and opportunities.Or even just for validating your existing hypotheses.

I recently came across The Tilt’s “Content Entrepreneurs Benchmark” research report for 2023, it’s worth a read.

Sharing my favorite insights from the report here -

Biggest challenge for creators

• 64% creators feel audience growth is their biggest challenge.

Audience growth is the holy grail for every creator on any platform.

By a big margin.

Helping someone grow an audience will always be profitable. This is an evergreen industry now.

Top Channels for creators

Not surprisingly, social media is the top channel for most creator entrepreneurs.

And it remains so as they go from hobbyists to business owners.

• 89% creator small businesses have social media as their primary channel.

How creators spend their time

Most creators spend most of their time creating content.

Not distributing it, not doing sales and promotion, not doing admin work.

• 46% of their time goes in content creation. That’s HUGE!

How creators make money

This one is important.

Consulting and Coaching are the number 1 most profitable monetization channels for creators.

Not “passive income” you see. Most people enter this world with the hopes of passive income, but the reality is far from it.

• Consulting and coaching services account for the primary money channel for 49% creators.

How long to get successful?

This is a good reality check.

You see success stories of the top 1% creators where they found massive success just 2 months after quitting their jobs.

But that just doesn’t happen for most people.

• On average, it takes 18 months to build a successful creator business.

I’m 22 months into this journey, and only now getting to a place where I can say I can comfortably sustain myself.

Good thing I started with 24 months of runway 😅

This road is long!

I know this first hand, I realised this very early on that people need help, support and guidance along this path. That’s why I started a community, so that all of us have a group of like minded people around us during this 18 month period and even beyond.

There are more interesting insights in the report, do read the whole thing here.

All the research from the guys at Tilt, I think they’re fantastic, signup to their newsletter and listen to their podcast.

Especially if you want to build your own content business, or build tools for creators who’re building content businesses.

💡 Opportunities in the creator economy

Let’s look at a few ideas you can build to leverage these insights

Tools to -

• Help creators build a social media audience - scheduling, engagement, analytics etc.
• Help creators own their audience - tools for newsletter and community growth. Platform risk is real, probably the worst fear of any creator is to get their social media account shut down. Help them build a backup. Sparkloop did this really well, got acquired by ConvertKit last week.

Services to -

• Help creators create content and grow audiences - this will always be a profitable business. No wonder the biggest players like Sahil Bloom, Alex Lieberman and now even Andrew Wilkinson are running ghostwriting agencies.
• Help creators own their audience. Nathan Barry launched a newsletter growth agency last week.
• Help creators monetize their work through e-books, courses, cohorts. Will Mannon is the course director for Write of Passage and Building a Second Brain. Managing and running cohorts for creators can easily be turned into a profitable productized service.

That’s it for today, hope you found this useful.

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Cheers,
Ayush🙏