The Creator Economy in 2024 with JLD and Jay Clouse

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like the Goal Digger Podcast. Today is a pretty interesting episode, Fire Nation. I actually presented live at HubSpot's conference inbound in Boston. This was in September of 2023. It was a really cool conference. I was glad to be there. I had a really interesting and fun conversation with Jay Klaus. So tune in as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. Online Marketing Made Easy podcast, hosted by Amy Porterfield, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with a focus on online business, including digital courses, list building content, and more.

0:50Online Marketing Made Easy breaks down big ideas and strategies into actionable step-by-step processes. A recent episode that will help you get more results with a whole lot less stress is on four ways to avoid burnout. Listen to Online Marketing Made Easy wherever you get your podcasts. Many EO Fire listeners have launched non-food franchises, and Fran Bridge Consulting has guided them. Fran Bridge's founder and frequent EO Fire guest, John Ostenson, has done more placements than any other in the country, and his service is free. Sign up for a consultation with John, or get a free copy of his book, Non-Food Franchising, at franbridgeconsulting.com.

1:26Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining us. My name is Jay Klaus. I host a podcast called of creator science. It's very meta. I interview other creators about how they've built their business, people like John. It's on the HubSpot Podcast Network. And I'm joined by the one and only John Lee Dumas, the host of Entrepreneurs on Fire, legendary, legendary podcast, early mover in the space with over 4 ,000 episodes, more than 150 million lifetime downloads, 2 million listens per month, and seven figures in annual revenue. JLD is just getting started. We are here to talk to you about the creator economy in 2024 and beyond.

2:11I want to get a little bit of a sense of the room. Who here is publishing content themselves on a regular basis? Okay. How many of you folks are publishing content independently? Okay, fair enough. And how many of you are publishing for your team in-house? Very cool. Okay. One more question. Who's doing video? And who's doing writing? We'll call it a newsletter. Great. All right. Love to see that we have some full-time creators here in the house. I think, John, we got to start with AI. It's the obligatory topic of the time. I'd love to hear, what do you think about AI? And maybe as a starting point, how are you using it in your business today?

3:01Is anybody here in the audience using AI currently? Joe of hands. Looks like maybe 10 or 15%. And I think that's pretty much what I expected and what I've seen across the board. Somewhere between 10 to 15 % of active content creators are actively using AI in their business. With Entrepreneurs on Fire, We're not actively using AI on a day-to-day basis. We do use a tool called PodScribe to get transcripts of our podcasts pretty accurately and quickly, which has been very effective. There's been some kind of interesting use cases I've thought about when it comes to using AI for a platform like podcasting.

3:45And I'll share that now to maybe give some people some ideas. or maybe people will be thinking along these lines right now that they're actually doing something along these lines. So I had this kind of concept called dead legends. Because a lot of people are like, John, if you could interview anybody in the world, you've interviewed over 4 ,000 people, who would you interview? And to be honest, most people that I would have as a dream interview idea are no longer walking on this earth. People like Benjamin Franklin Winston Churchill or Gandhi or all these amazing humans of our past that, of course, I have no access to sit down and have a conversation with.

4:29And so with AI, it's kind of spurred these ideas that are actually pretty practical, which is using a tool like a ChatGPT to say, how would Benjamin Franklin answer these six questions? And then, of course, ChatGPT in seconds can go and scrape all the information that's ever been written by Benjamin Franklin about Benjamin Franklin and probably give some pretty accurate responses to those questions. Then you can use another tool to take those answers and feed them in text-based and it will spit out an audio clip that will speak like Benjamin Franklin. Then you can take a picture of Benjamin Franklin, use another AI tool that will make that MP3 that you feed it into move his mouth like he's talking.

5:19And then you can have yourself sitting down on a video and then a split screen and a Benjamin Franklin lookalike, soundalike sitting next to you, you asking him questions, him answering you. And now you're having a conversation with the best version of Benjamin Franklin that you can in a pretty easy and seamless manner that you can do and you can replicate at a pretty interesting degree. So the podcast is called Dead Legends. I don't have a trademark yet, so nobody can steal my idea, please. But something like that you could do in your area of interest. Maybe it's a sport, maybe it's fashion, maybe it's whatever it might be.

5:59And you can use AI to have some pretty interesting conversations with otherwise unobtainable human beings. What is time to be alive? Really interesting. So really interesting potential use cases, but I'm in the same boat as John. I'm not using generative AI that much in my business right now. And so it'd be interesting to hear from you, you know, do you have any particular hesitations or things that are slowing you down? I have some of my own reasons as well, but curious to hear if there's anything on your mind that you think I'm looking for it to be able to do this, or this is why I haven't adopted it faster?

6:35One thing that I always like to share with my audience is the higher the barrier, the lower the competition. So when you can do something in this world, in life, and specifically in business, that's really hard to do, that's really hard to replicate, the level of competition and the amount of competition is going to be so much smaller as a result. So if you can apply that mentality to what you're doing, you're going to win at a lot higher level, which is why 11 years ago, when I launched Entrepreneurs on Fire, I said, what are people not doing in the podcasting space? And I kind of filtered down to quantity.

7:14People were doing a once a week show when they were interviewing entrepreneurs, but nobody was doing twice a week or three times a week because it seemed like it was too much work. and I said, well, what if I did every single day, seven days a week, that is way too much work, but that will scare away my competition, that will create a very high barrier that will ensure that I am one of the only, if not the only seven day a week podcast interviewing successful entrepreneurs. And so that was one thing that really helped my podcast, my business stand out. And here we are 11 years later, 4 ,000 episodes later, it's still the only daily podcast interviewing the world's most successful entrepreneurs.

7:54So to really answer the crux of your question, what makes me nervous about AI is that when you utilize it in a way that makes things easy to do, it's also easy to replicate. And it just means everybody can replicate it. And if you were at Neil Patel's inbound talk, the main stage just a couple of minutes ago, he had a whole topic about the where's Waldo. How are you standing out instead of just blending in? And so if you have a really great idea with AI, but you do something that's really easy to be replicated, then if you do have success, other people are just going to copy you. And how are you going to maintain your uniqueness and not get saturated with that concept you move forward with?

8:38Which is why with my Dead Legends idea, I'm still a major part of that idea. I'm still a human being sitting in the video asking the questions. So that raises the level of difficulty because over 11 years, I've developed interview skills and public speaking skills and presentation skills that other individuals haven't developed over that timeframe. So that's kind of one of my unique selling propositions. Whereas if I just had an AI Benjamin Franklin and an AI person doing that conversation, it might still be very interesting. But if it really took off, then anybody could just copy that with a pretty easy workflow.

9:17Do you remember Web3? I remember Web3. I still have dozens of worthless NFTs. And what I learned from diving into Web3 was technology is awesome. Technology should solve problems. And I look at AI as technology. And I'm still looking at which problem does this solve for me? And when that happens, I'll use it. Um, but right now I I'm seeing a lot of, Hey, we've got a technology that we're trying to create use cases for. And I'm looking at where are the problems in my business that this is going to save me some time. And transcription you mentioned is actually one of the first use cases that I found that saved me a ton of time.

9:57I used to use a transcription tool that did like an okay job. And then I would have it cleaned up by a human based on the transcript. And now I'm using a tool called cast magic. Ramon is here. And it does such a good job on the transcripts right away using AI that I don't have to have that human component anymore. That's a perfect layup. This is a great use case for me. Cast magic. So good. And the other benefit of tools like Cast Magic, what we're seeing is the ability to take a large amount of input, which could be your podcast episode, and create short form content out of it. Now, I agree with you.

10:35This is a situation where this is also something that is easy. We're going to see a lot of people replicating this, or we're going to have just like more internet junk. But what I think is an interesting opportunity in the near term is you could use AI to augment your own consumption of information. Let's say you just want to dive really deep on the podcasting space, but there are dozens of people talking about podcasting. you could actually learn what all of the content being created this week says about podcasting by uploading it into chat GPT or a similar tool and saying, what are your takeaways from this?

11:13You could actually augment your consumption, have a greater curation opportunity by using AI. But I'm slower to adopt new technologies post Web3. I'm looking for some real problems and use cases for myself. I want to move on to podcasting. Let's keep this, let's keep this train going. You obviously have been in the podcasting space for a long time. You have the largest community for podcasters out there. I'm interested to hear your perspective on video podcasts, because I'm seeing a lot of that today. Do we have any podcasters in the house? Raise your hands. Now, any audio only podcasts? Keep your hands in the air.

11:56All right. A lot smaller number. I'm in that category. I'm audio only. Any video podcasts? Just video podcasts? Okay, cool. So the reality is I love video podcasts. And I get asked all the time, like, John, you have an audio only podcast. Does that mean you hate video podcasts? And I said simply, no, I really do love and appreciate video podcasts. the reason why I have an audio-only podcast is simply because of the production time it takes to do a daily podcast, a daily interview with entrepreneurs. And the audio-only side of things is a lot. To add a video component on top of that is so much more that it might be unmanageable.

12:45I probably would not have lasted 11 years, 4 ,000 episodes if I had gone that route. Now, if I was doing a weekly show twice a week, maybe three times a month, to me, then it's a no-brainer because the beautiful thing about video podcasts are they're the same content, but now you can take that video and you can utilize all these other amazing platforms that are out there and upload that content, repurpose that content in a very meaningful way via YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, all these different platforms that really do thrive on video is going to allow you to take that video podcast you've done in the podcasting space for maybe Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Google Play, whatever platform that might be, and leverage it across different forms where an audio-only podcast is not going to perform nearly as well on those video-first platforms that I mentioned.

13:48So I love video podcasts. I think there's a lot of great ways you can take them, you can leverage them, you can do some meaningful things with them. And something we'll get to a little bit deeper is how things like YouTube Shorts are becoming pretty new and exciting. So platforms like that can be pretty cool. I agree with you in a lot of ways there. we started producing a video podcast 14 months ago. We've been doing audio since 2020, started doing video 14 months ago. And to stand out, to do YouTube well, you have to understand packaging. You have to understand, okay, if my strategy is the recommended page of YouTube, I am competing literally with the Mr.

14:27Beast of the world and people who are playing the entertainment game on the homepage. And so I think that there's huge opportunity on YouTube but I think you have to understand how to play and win the YouTube game because I frankly don't think that if you're doing a remote interview show the way I do, and I believe the way you do, it's hard to compete with people like Stephen Bartlett of the world who are doing in-studio, in-person interviews. You were talking with him at four o 'clock today on the main stage. And so to compete, I find that for a remote interview show, you've got to produce things to a high, high degree.

15:05I tell my editor, I want our video podcast to be as visually compelling as TikTok, which means that we're doing pretty consistent frame changes, zooms, pans, on-screen animations. It's a big investment. So to do that on a daily basis, it just would be impossible. Yeah, and one of the great things about doing daily interviews with the subject matter experts in their industry is I get to interview people like YouTube experts and I get to learn from them as I'm being the host and as I'm interviewing them. And it blew me away when I recently interviewed a guy and he was just breaking down how critical it is just the thumbnail on the YouTube video.

15:46It's everything. And he will change his YouTube thumbnail on average of 17 times before he gets it right. And it really takes off in the way that he wants to. Of course, sometimes he gets to write the third time or the 10th time, but sometimes it takes up to 17 times on average to get the right YouTube thumbnail. And unless you're able and willing to put in that kind of energy, those are the people that you're competing against, which is again, another reason why I was hesitant about diving into that game. Because I'm like, hey, unless I'm going to do it great, I'm not going to really want to do it.

16:19And that's why I'm a big believer in the phrase, which I'll kind of circle back to, is how can you become the number one solution to a real problem in this world. And for me, the only way I could do that was niching down into being the only daily podcast interviewing entrepreneurs. So the day that I launched Entrepreneurs on Fire, it was the best daily podcast in the world. It was the worst daily podcast in the world. It was the only daily podcast in the world that was interviewing entrepreneurs. That's specific of a niche, which I think people need to be willing to dive into niching down until they get to that point where either they are the only fill in the blank, or the competition is just weak enough down there where you can come in day one and dominate.

17:09So here's an interesting trend in podcasting you and I were talking about. The listening statistics of podcasts continues to grow. More people are listening to podcasts than they ever have. The overall listening time continues to increase. However, for the first time ever, we are seeing fewer people create and publish podcasts. Why do you think that is? So there was definitely a multi-year kind of land grab in the podcasting space when people saw the headlines of Joe Rogan getting bought by Spotify for hundreds of millions of dollars and other big name podcasts getting bought and a lot of these great conglomerations coming together, fantastic companies like HubSpot, creating the HubSpot Podcast Network and bringing the top business podcast together in one amazing place for people to access.

18:05You were seeing this happening for a while. And then of course, something we're all tired of hearing about, but it's just the reality. COVID happens and now everybody's at home all day, semi-bored out of their minds and having a lot more time on their hands. And they're like, why don't I just launch a podcast? So podcast creation and hosts skyrocketed during that timeframe. And they all followed a very similar and very unsuccessful route, which is what are the successful podcasters doing? Okay, let me copy that. And so then you had all of these individual podcasters who were becoming, excuse me, becoming these pale, weak imitations of successful podcasts.

18:51And nobody wants a pale, weak imitation of a thing when they can have the real thing. What people want is the real, genuine actualness of yourself, like who you are, the transparent version of you, the genuine value that you can bring to the world. That's what people want, but they weren't being delivered that as a listenership. So these podcasts that were being launched by the thousands and thousands were getting zero traction and started dropping off like flies when the world kind of started to get back to normal. And in the last year plus, the podcasts that have been successful are the ones that I was just sharing are those that have said, you know what?

19:31This is one single real problem in this world that I can uniquely solve. It's one problem. It's real. It's actually painful to people. And I am uniquely positioned to solve it. I am going to launch a podcast, a content creation series around solving this problem better than anybody else is. And those smaller, nicher podcasts are doing fantastically well, where the broad, vague, I'm just going to copy what the entrepreneurs on fires of the world are doing, those podcasts not getting traction are dropping off. So there's a clear path to success in podcasting. And the opportunity is fantastic because, as you mentioned, the listenership continues to grow.

20:22But that clear path is what I mentioned. One solution to a real problem and being the best solution to that problem. So this past year, you published your first book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success. I'd love to hear your perspective on books as an opportunity for creators in 2024 and beyond. Awesome. Do we have any published authors out in the audience? A couple of them. Okay, just a couple. Any aspiring authors, people that just want to write a book? Some more hands. A few more hands, not a ton, but there's definitely more people out there. Well, those few people that raised your hands may not be a big fan of mine in a couple minutes, but I will share with you this.

21:14I published my first traditionally published book. It was called The Common Path to Uncommon Success. I enjoyed the process. Because of the audience that I built over the last 10 plus years, I was able to garner a very big upfront advance from HarperCollins. So I had a great publisher, a great editor. I really felt like I had great content from the book because I'd interviewed, at that point over 3 ,500 entrepreneurs. So I was able to draw off of their genius, their knowledge to create what I considered a 17-step roadmap to financial freedom and fulfillment, the common path to uncommon success.

21:53I'm proud of the book. I think it's a great book. I love it. But at the end of the day, if I sit back as an individual and I say, was that worth my time? Can I honestly recommend to other creators that it's worth your time and effort to write a book, I would, in most cases, not all, because there is some situations where I do think it would be the case, but in the vast majority, 90 plus percent of cases, I would say it is not worth your time or effort to write a book because it takes so much time, so much effort. The process is so long and drawn out that when it comes time that your book is published, a lot, if not most of the content within that book is going to be irrelevant and outdated and people know it.

22:41They know that book is already dusty on the shelf because things are moving so fast. Everything in this world is happening on a minute by minute basis, not a month by month basis anymore. And people want their content today. They want that YouTube video that was published five hours ago. They want that Instagram story that was published within 24 hours. They want relevant content today. So do I love the fact that I wrote my book and I can still pass it out? Yes, because I was somewhat knowledgeable about what I just shared. So I was very intentional about being evergreen with the content as much as I could and just being very structured with what I think will be relevant today and in 10 years.

23:28But at the end of the day, people are going to look at a book that was published in 2021 and say, is this really relevant in 2023? And a lot of times the answer will be no. So I think for most people, there's a lot better ways to use your time than to write a traditionally published book. Now, if you're one of those people that are like, I'm just going to sit down this weekend, write an amazing novel or amazing book and publish it on Amazon this coming Monday, and it's going to be out in the world, awesome, do it. Because that could be what people want and what people need. And that could bring in great leads, great traction for you, great authority, great influence.

24:06It could open up some doors. But to go to the traditionally published routes, I think is not the right situation or path for most people. I'm going to take the other stance. I'm going to try to. Granted, I haven't published a book, so take it with a grain of salt. And maybe I'm romanticizing it. But one of the greatest opportunities I see for creators right now is going a little bit deeper, going more long form. A book is, of course, like an extreme example of that. But the amount of rigor and effort you have to go through to create a book worth publishing, on the other side of that, you're going to have some really strong intellectual property, great frameworks, great methodologies.

24:49And every single day. There seems to be new, young, energetic, enthusiastic people who will just tweet me into oblivion because they have the energy to tweet 12 times per day. But what are they tweeting about? They're often tweeting about things that they learn that are well-articulated frameworks, methodologies. I think if you have unique earned insight into a space and you're willing to go through what sounds kind of painful to write a book, you'll come out the other side with some incredible intellectual property that you can leverage in short form. It's probably a great card to play to try to get on some other platform where someone else has an audience they want to bring you on to talk about it.

25:32I think it can be done and leveraged well. But what I hear you saying is you got to acknowledge the opportunity costs and see if the opportunity cost is worthwhile to you in this moment. And one thing I don't like about panels and talks is a lot of them just end up being people agreeing with the same ideas. So Jay and I have actually intentionally got together and said, like, where's a couple of areas that we can play devil's advocate that we can actually truthfully disagree with each other on some things? Because honestly, I think that's more healthy, more realistic, and it kind of leads to more interesting conversations.

26:08Let's move into a segment I call overhyped and underhyped. What do you think is overhyped right now? You know, one thing I think is really overhyped is something that I just touched on, but I want to dive back into it because I think it is so important is for a long time, a lot of people say, hey, look at the influencers, look at the authority figures and just like and do what they're doing because they're obviously finding success. So do what they're doing. And I saw that happening and working in 2013, 2015, 2018. Like in the past years, that was a model that did lead to some success and people would carve out many niches and areas of expertise that they would develop.

26:49But that's to me really becoming overhyped in 2023 and beyond. I'm just seeing so many people just tired of seeing these, again, pale, weak imitations of other individuals that are just kind of parroting and repeating what everybody else is saying. So what I am really wanting to just get across to everybody in the audience today that's creating content, that's writing content, that's recording content, that's producing content, that's advising other people on their content creation, is to really say to them or say to yourself, hey, can I look in the mirror right now and honestly say that I am creating and distributing the number one solution to a real problem in this world?

27:39And if the answer is no, you're going to have a really hard time carving out a meaningful niche because unless you're solving people's problems at a really high level, they're not going to find you. They're not going to care about what you're talking about. But on the flip side, if you really are creating and distributing the number one solution to a real problem, people will beat a path to your doorstep. When you are holding the number one solution to their real problem in this world, they will find you. They will talk about you. They will become your evangelists. They will spread the word about the content you're creating and sharing.

28:18And if you're the second best solution to their problem or the 10th best solution, they're going to ignore you because they want the best. They want the best solution, which is fine for you because recognize it's all about discovering and uncovering the niche that you want to get into. It's not about trying to compete with the hub spots of the world. It's about saying, okay, where is this product or this service coming up short. What are the one and two star reviews of this product, of this service that people are complaining about that I can uniquely come in and service at a meaningful level and carve out some amazingness within this?