Creator Science with Jay Clouse

My guest is Dorie Clark, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, 4-time Thinkers50 honoree as one of the world's top business thinkers, and longtime faculty member at Duke and Columbia Business Schools.

Dorie is, by her own description, a LinkedIn person. She has close to 500,000 followers there, which puts her in the top half a percent of accounts on the platform. But in January 2026, she decided to learn Instagram. She started with 22,000 followers on an account she'd had since 2015 that was mostly personal photos. For the next 4.5 months, she treated it like a part-time job: 10 to 20 hours a week, 99 Reels. Her net gain was about 350 followers. Thirty-five percent of those videos earned her exactly zero new followers.

Then in June, it turned around. She gained more than 146,000 new followers across June and July. By September, she was past 400,000.

The reason I was excited to talk to Dorie specifically: she didn't win by buying production value. She films and edits all of her videos herself, all of it self-taught over the past few months. Her approach feels like one we can all actually learn from.

In this episode, we talk about:

By the end of this episode, you will have a practical, doable framework for building a high-growth Instagram presence without a production team, a big budget, or a hot take machine.

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Cold open: money is not the variable buying you success

(00:27) Introducing Dorie Clark

(03:29) Why Instagram after a decade of LinkedIn dominance

(05:37) The 4.5-month slog: 99 Reels, 350 followers

(07:21) Eating her own dog food: The Long Game in real life

(12:30) Cross-posting Reels to LinkedIn and what transfers

(21:53) When things turned around — and why

(23:24) Celebrity reactions as an entry point for strangers

(27:36) Early business results: CNBC, Chicago TV, sponsorships

(32:11) The full workflow: idea capture to posting

(35:10) The 30-page AI context document and how she built it

(39:48) Filming in batches with wardrobe changes in New York

(50:59) Dorie's immutable laws of Instagram growth

***

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#316: Kallaway’s EXACT System For Going Viral (Almost Every Time)

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My guest is George Blackman, a YouTube scriptwriter who got his start writing full-time for Ali Abdaal and has since written scripts for creators from 30,000 to over 10 million subscribers.

This is George's second time on the show. Three years ago, we talked about scriptwriting fundamentals. Since then, George has started writing his own videos with AI, and he's spent most of this year building PlayWriteAI, an AI scriptwriting app with more than 700 people on the waitlist. Building it taught him something most creators haven't noticed yet: AI will tell you, very confidently, that it did ten things it never actually did.

This episode is his full process, from voice memo to a script that's ready to record.

In this episode, we talk about:

By the end of this episode, you will have a repeatable system for writing scripts with AI, and a clearer sense of which parts of the work you should keep for yourself.

George's Website / YouTube / X⁠ / ⁠LinkedIn⁠ / Newsletter / Community

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Introduction

(02:32) George's process today

(05:10) Easy mode vs. advanced mode

(09:53) The 3 blocks of a YouTube script

(11:04) Target, transformation, stakes

(18:06) Why setups matter most

(19:52) Inside George's scriptwriting app

(22:34) Rethinking the payoff

(28:16) How many segments a video needs

(33:00) How George ends every video

(35:14) Ending on a sales video

(38:34) Where humans still matter

(43:50) How George really feels about AI

***

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162. George Blackman: How to script your videos like Ali Abdaal and Ed from Film Booth

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My guest is Jessica Lackey, founder of Deeper Foundations and author of Leaving the Casino: Stop Betting on Tactics and Start Building a Business That Works. She helps coaches, consultants, and service providers build expert-led businesses on strong foundations.

Jessica tried the social media game. She hired a social media team for two years, ran Ship 30 for 30 on Twitter, tested Instagram. She never cracked 1,700 followers. So she built her business a different way: 50 guest podcast appearances, 50 guest teaching spots in other communities, 20 to 30 programs joined and participated in over four years. Every visibility opportunity landed 10 to 20 new people on her email list. It was slow, linear, and intentional. Today she has 2,000 people on her email list and 200 paying members in her membership. That's a 10% conversion rate on her list, against the creator industry standard of 1 to 3%.

Her business has earned over $300,000 for three consecutive years. Almost nothing she sells is one and done. The whole thing is built on renewals and retention, not growth and virality.

In this episode, we talk about:

By the end of this episode, you will have a clear picture of how a small, deliberate audience can support a thriving six-figure business — and what it actually costs to build one that way.

Deeper Foundations

Leaving the Casino

Deeper Foundations Membership

Aggressively Human

Community as a deliberate Business Model

“For You” or “By You”: The K-Shaped Content Era

The Zone of Enoughness

Sacred Sales Hour

LinkedIn

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Cold open: the trade-off Jessica has chosen

(00:19) Introducing Jessica Lackey

(02:34) Why the social media game didn't work for her

(04:05) The relationship-first growth strategy

(06:53) Her offer stack: 1:1, cohort, and membership

(09:39) Revenue breakdown and pricing

(10:52) How the membership grew from 30 members to 200

(12:52) The 30-minute welcome call that doesn't make economic sense

(18:29) Free monthly workshops for 4 years: the Deeper Business Dialogues

(20:21) The KPIs that actually matter for an expertise business

(22:26) Is there a ceiling on this approach?

(26:45) Why Jessica has chosen her ceiling on purpose

(43:53) How to follow people around the internet like a puppy, not a stalker

***

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#319: How Tamara Grominsky Predictably Grows Her Membership Each Month

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David Altizer is the co-creator of Thumbnail Academy and has quickly become one of the most sought-after thumbnail designers around. David’s clients include Kurtis Connor, Jolly, Max Fosh, Hayden Hillier Smith, and now me.

David’s thumbnails have earned nearly 350 million views—and in this video, he’ll show you why creating thumbnails is actually easier than you think.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Full transcript and show notes⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠Hire David⁠

⁠Join Thumbnail Academy⁠

David's ⁠⁠Website⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ / ⁠Twitter⁠ / ⁠YouTube⁠

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Intro to David Altizer

(05:20) Rule of Thirds Explained

(06:26) The Key to Composition

(11:07) Special Offer on 1of10

(15:02) Different Styles of Thumbnails

(19:39) Clickbait is Good, Actually

(22:05) The Key to More Clicks

(24:27) Thumbnail Text Strategy

(29:44) Learning from Far Side Comics

(32:57) Mastering Thumbnails and Outliers

(35:41) Working With Thumbnail Designers

(45:46) AI's Role in Thumbnail

***

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→ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠#280: How to LEGALLY Protect Your Channel (YouTube Lawyer Tyler Chou Explains)⁠

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My guest is Tamara Grominsky, founder of PMM Camp — a private, application-only membership for senior product marketing leaders with 280+ members.

Tamara spent 15 years in product marketing, eventually landing at Kajabi as VP of Product Marketing. She went there with a specific agenda: study how the best creators build their businesses, then reverse engineer it for herself. She started a newsletter, surveyed her audience, learned the thing they needed most was connection, and launched a membership in March 2023. Six months later, she left Kajabi. Her model isn't always-open or quarterly-launch. It's application-gated, opens for exactly five days on the first of every month, and runs on Kit workflows and Circle. She's been on this monthly cadence for nine months and now forecasts her revenue 12 months in advance. She's hit every number this year.

Tamara is also in our Lab mastermind, which means I've watched this system get built in real time. This conversation is nine months of mastermind updates compressed into a podcast episode.

In this episode, we talk about:

By the end of this episode, you will have a complete model for running a membership like a product — with systems, baselines, and experiments that make revenue forecastable.

PMM Camp (Home)

PMM Camp Community (Membership + Pricing)

PMM Leadership Bootcamp (6-Week Cohort)

Newsletter Archive (188 editions, every Sunday)

Tamara's LinkedIn

Tamara's X

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Introduction

(01:26) What product marketing actually is

(04:43) From Kajabi to PMM Camp

(06:49) What she learned studying creators

(11:28) The decision to leave

(13:23) Finding the founding 25

(16:47) Inside PMM Camp today

(18:29) The welcome call and onboarding doc

(25:25) Why evergreen broke her business

(27:52) The monthly open cart model

(33:17) The Kit workflow behind the cart

(36:09) The conversion rate problem

(44:54) The visibility hypothesis

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

#313: How Tom Ross Doubled His Community Engagement and Retention With Training Pathways

#318: The $9/month membership earning more than $500k/year AND buying Smart Passive Income — Pt. 2 featuring Liz Wilcox

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🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)

🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)

🧞‍♂️ Get a Personalized Offer

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My guest is Liz Wilcox, the creator behind Email Marketing Membership — a $9/month newsletter template subscription she’s kept at the same price for six years, that now generates close to half a million dollars a year.

Liz built the whole thing as a single parent with no support system and no reliable internet, working from library parking lots and Lowe’s lots during nap times. She launched in February 2021, kept the price at $9, maintained a 5% churn rate, and grew to over 4,400 paying members. She and her sister run the operation — no upsells, no masterminds, no group coaching. Just the membership. Then in April 2026, she quietly closed a deal to buy Smart Passive Income — the 18-year-old creator education brand Pat Flynn built from scratch. She spent five months operating as SPI’s director of community before anyone outside the deal knew it had happened.

This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Last week, Pat and Matt told the seller’s story. This week, Liz tells the buyer’s.

In this episode, we talk about:

By the end of this episode, you will understand how a $9 offer can compound into a half-million-dollar business — and what it actually looks like when someone buys a legacy brand and tries to honor it.

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Introduction

(01:14) The $9 membership

(03:48) The retention rate

(07:54) Low stakes for both sides

(11:06) The four thousand member math

(12:39) AI and the membership

(14:55) Who this model isn’t for

(16:38) Growing without social media

(20:23) Single parent, no backup plan

(31:41) Buying Smart Passive Income

(34:51) What made the deal happen

(43:49) Why she hasn’t cross-promoted yet

(48:34) Merging the two memberships

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

#317: Selling Smart Passive Income (And What We Can Learn From It) — Pt. 1 featuring Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland

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📬 Creator Science Newsletter

🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)

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🧞‍♂️ Get a Personalized Offer

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This week I’m joined by two longtime friends — Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland.

Pat is the founder of Smart Passive Income, the creator education brand he started in 2008 and ran for 18 years. Matt came on around 2018 — first as an advisor, then as CEO — and spent years making SPI operationally strong enough to stand without Pat at the center. They spun SPI out into a separate entity called SPI Media, pivoted from courses to community with recurring revenue, and quietly prepared the business for a sale they weren’t sure would ever happen. In September 2026, they announced that SPI had sold. The deal had closed five months earlier.

The buyer is Liz Wilcox, an email marketing expert who spent those five months operating publicly as SPI’s “director of community” before anyone knew the deal had closed. The community doubled in size during that window. Part 2 is next week, with Liz.

In this episode, we talk about:

By the end of this episode, you will understand what it actually takes to build a creator business that could outlive you — and what the groundwork for an exit looks like years before anyone is thinking about it.

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) The news

(01:44) The first seeds of the idea

(03:10) The VC and PE offers

(05:52) Building for optionality

(13:20) Running two companies at once

(18:11) Why real partnership is the unlock

(21:17) Who to hire first

(38:16) Why the negotiation wasn’t about money

(40:38) What seller financing actually means

(41:24) The due diligence process

(45:26) The transition strategy

(47:37) Part 2 preview: Liz Wilcox next week

***

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#122: Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland – Courses, community, and the future of education

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Meet Kallaway, the creator behind the Kallaway Marketing channel and the founder of Sandcastles — an AI research tool that helps creators find and validate viral video topics before they ever hit record.

Kallaway started 4 businesses. All 4 failed for the same reason: no one knew who he was. No audience meant no customers, no leverage, no second chances. So he made it his mission to understand how audience growth actually works.

He cracked short-form content at scale after years of building online businesses, and he built the research system he wished he’d had from the start. Now he has over a billion views, a 50% viral hit rate, and he built a tool to help other creators do the same. This episode is the full system.

In this episode, we talk about:

By the end of this episode, you will have a clear research system for finding validated, high-trust video topics — and a framework for staying creative while using data to de-risk almost everything else.

Book a free discovery call with 1of10 Strategy
Try Sandcastles for free

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Intro to Kallaway

(01:03) Introducing “content minutes”

(02:12) The modern content stack

(03:45) Why you want a narrow ICP

(05:40) The 3 metrics that matter

(14:38) Sandcastles demo: building a channel watchlist from scratch

(16:14) Why you study mid-size creators, not mega-famous ones

(22:18) Deep video analysis: hook formula, storytelling structure, contrarian angle

(24:59) Kallaway’s research flow

(30:47) Solving structure and scripting problems using your own channel’s data

(36:34) Data-enabled creativity: the thesis behind the whole system

***

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#303: Riley Brown — The AI Content Creator Who Doesn’t Write With AI

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Caleb Ralston is a strategist and brand builder for some of the biggest names in business. His breakthrough was back in 2018 when he grew GaryVee’s TikTok from 300k to 3.5 million followers in just 3 months. In 2022 he joined Alex and Leila Hormozi’s team as content employee #1, where he grew their audience from 1.2 million to 11.5 million. Caleb just doesn’t miss – and now that he’s out on his own, he’s here to help YOU.

In this episode, you'll learn the content strategy he used, how to improve your content, and where to start if you're feeling overwhelmed.

⁠⁠⁠Full transcript and show notes⁠⁠⁠

Caleb's ⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ / ⁠Instagram⁠

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) The Secret Man Behind GaryVee and the Hormozi’s

***

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→ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠#175: Angus Parker – Ali Abdaal’s right-hand man shares a YouTuber’s guide to hiring.⁠

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📬 ⁠⁠⁠Creator Science Newsletter⁠⁠⁠

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Our first-ever 6-figure launch started with a cold email I didn’t respond to. Twice. The third time, I wrote back. A few months later, we ran a 3-day free virtual summit that drove $101,666 in revenue — with a $78,400 margin. This is the full breakdown of how it happened, what we’d do the same way again, and what we’d change.

Joining me for this behind-the-scenes recap is Anna Reich, the integrator here on the Creator Science team. This was Anna’s first launch — 3 and a half months into the job — and she was right in the middle of all of it. We ran this summit in partnership with a third-party team called After Harvest, who pitched us on the whole concept via cold email and worked on a 15% performance-based fee.

In this episode, we talk about:

By the end of this episode, you will have a clear-eyed view of how a virtual summit launch actually works from the inside — with all the numbers, the chaos, and the lessons on the table.

Work with Sean and the After Harvest team

Build a Beloved Membership — 50% off the self-paced version

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Introduction: the first-ever 6-figure launch and what this episode covers

(03:44) Registration and attendance numbers: 3,145 registered, 1,000+ live on day 1

(04:34) Revenue breakdown: $63K cohort, $9K upsell, $17K downsell, $11K VIP tickets

(08:29) Cost breakdown: After Harvest’s 15% deal, $1,800 in affiliates, $7,800 domain

(10:01) Timeline: cold email in February to contract in April to summit in June

(13:56) Things we’d do the same: VIP ticket, compelling web work, full offer stack

(16:12) Why the $47 VIP ticket was the biggest surprise of the whole launch

(20:54) The live day-2 pitch — 30 minutes, almost no drop-off, and why the bonus mattered

(24:30) Things we’d do differently: simpler structure, drop WebinarJam, build launch capability in-house

(36:24) The core mistake: building all the assets before locking the presentation content

(42:10) The 80/20 version: what to lock in before you open registration

(52:28) Skipping affiliates for high-ticket offers, and why one-click opt-ins backfired

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

#144: Bari Baumgardner – How to create the perfect 3-day event (IRL or virtually)
#191: Breaking down my $60,723 product launch

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