S06.EP12 - Creator Branding 101: How to Build a Creator Brand, Community & Business That Lasts with Jay Clouse

0:00You got to give a s*** about people. Like you've got to make other people successful and understand what they care about. Otherwise, they're not going to care about you.

0:11Hello and welcome to Just Branding. The only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Kass and Matt Davies. all right before we jump in if you're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business the brand builders alliance is for you inside you'll get live master classes mentorship from our eight resident coaches a stacked resource vault and a global network of brand builders who actually get it if you're done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the wait list.

0:58That's joinbba.com. Now let's get into the show. Hello and welcome back to Just Branding. Today's guest is someone who's quietly becoming one of the most trusted voices in the creator economy, and he's doing it without the hype. We're talking to Jay Klaus, who is a creator, educator, and founder of Creator Science, a platform helping creators become professional entrepreneurs. Jay's built a powerful brand around clarity, consistency, and community, and he's done it while staying deeply aligned with who he is. And in this episode, we're going to dig into why community is the new moat for brands and creators, how to design offers, content, and spaces that scale with trust, and how Jay stepping into the spotlight with his first ever in real life event, even though that's uncomfortable as hell.

1:50So if you're a strategist, a creator or brand builder looking to turn your audience into something deeper, this one is for you. So let's jump in. Welcome to the show, Jay. Hey, thanks for having me. What an intro. Thank you. No worries at all. Let's get into your background, your journey, your philosophy, because that leads into our conversation. So for those who don't know Jay Klaus, Who are you? What's creator science all about? I'm a creator. I'm a teacher. Creator science is this meta thing where I help creators and typically more advanced creators earn more from the attention that they are getting.

2:26There's really two halves of a creator business, right? You have the attention capture and then you have value capture on that attention. And if I'm honest, I'm a lot better at the value capture side than the attention side. but you know out of necessity for the longest time building any type of business as an entrepreneur it's just like i need this to pay the bills and when you don't have a huge audience you get really good out of figuring out how to be more efficient and turning what attention you do have whatever resources you do have into more revenue and so that has become a strong strong suit for me but you know you can kind of hear from the brand creator science a little bit of what we try to bake into the company, which is a data orientation.

3:10You know, we're very analytical. We like to take a lot of evidence and experiences and kind of distill it into something very specific. But where a lot of people in the space would say like, I did awesome. And so I'll teach you to do awesome too. I come at it from a place of, I have done some stuff, but I'm actually going to pull together the experiences of the hundreds of creators I've interviewed on the podcast and the hundreds of creators that are in the membership and show you the patterns that I've pulled across all of these people so that hopefully that perspective is a little bit more tested.

3:48Yeah, that's definitely what made you stand out when amongst all the others is that you use that kind of data driven approach and you've been sharing very openly in public for many years and also the insights from others. So I'm curious, often, you know, we have a brand lens on this show. So I'm curious, like your definition of brand and how it's evolved from freelancer to like the creator and entrepreneur. Well, I really like the idea that your brand lives in the minds of other people. So where it's a good exercise to try to say, what brand do I want to create? Ultimately, what matters is what the marketplace says your brand is, right?

4:29And so I've really tried to walk the talk in terms of taking a scientific look at all things creator business and try to show numbers, examples, data, do this build in public thing so that it does feel a little bit more rooted in evidence than some of the other content that is out there. But I will say I also really, I really emphasize, I call it being different in the details. I think there are just so many surfaces and touch points that any company has with their audience, with their customers. And I really take a lot of pride in customizing and like putting a touch on all of them. Because to me, if you just leave any touch point as the default.

5:17It's just a missed opportunity. And so I've really enjoyed trying to make every touchpoint you have with our company feel very cohesive and remarkable in that way. Yes. Consistency is very important when it comes to brand building. And when you say difference in the details, I have your Credo OS, and I must say that's incredibly detailed. So So for those who don't know, it's like a notion headquarters, if you will, like a platform with templates and a whole structure to run your whole life, more or less. And it's very detailed. And yeah, it has helped me organize my thoughts. It helps me. It's helping me organize this summit that I'm doing at the moment and keeps me on track.

6:02And yeah, you have a lot of moving pieces. So I can see how you put that into play as well. so and when you have a lot of moving pieces you really have to be thoughtful about those details because too many moving pieces for a small company it's just like you get you get lost in customer support or you know troubleshooting and so we're just like constantly automating streamlining improving because i think a lot of companies just like throw people at the problem but if you throw people at the problem you're also throwing money at the problem and so i'm always trying to just keep things tight but there are limits so i was gonna say hi jay welcome to the show thrilled to have you on question so how does all that link to community and and what you're doing around there you know the brand and the community talk to us about your philosophy around those two subjects yeah so the community is called the lab and so you can see the through line a little bit just in the brand name creator science is a company the lab is the membership and the point of the membership is a place for professional creators to experiment and grow together.

7:06And when we were doing the branding exercise or like the brand refresh that you see on all of our stuff now, we have this like consistent design element of this like blue tag, I want to say. And then there's a white hexagon on one end and inside the hexagon, there's some iconography. And then you have the name of the product on the other side of the tag. And so all of our products, Creator HQ that Jacob just mentioned, the lab, they share this iconography of the creator science brand. So there's that through line. But even in just like the ethos of the community, really what we're trying to do is give people the space to learn from the experiments of other people.

7:46Because you and I, anytime we run an experiment in our business, which I think publishing any piece of content is an experiment, but any experiment we do, we learn from that data. Now, if you aggregate that together with hundreds of other professional creators who are also running experiments every day, people aren't sharing every one of the experiments that they're doing. But just imagine the compounding of learning from not just your data, but other people's data, their experiments. It'll save you from doing certain things. It'll save you from doing other things wrong. It'll give you ideas for certain things to do.

8:17So that's kind of the through line. And I hope the brand of the lab is something that is more impactful than the brand of Jay Klaus. You know, something I'm really trying to do is elevate the external perception of the company that I'm the most active member in there, but I'm not just like teaching in there. The value comes from the other folks. So we saw that at the offline event that Jacob mentioned in the intro as well, where I'm trying to build this as a place for my peers. There are people in there who are doing much bigger businesses than I am. And that's awesome. But I think from the outside, it's easy to think of any community or membership to be like a cult of personality of the person who created it.

9:06And so really trying to elevate the brand of the lab to be bigger than the brand of Jay, if that makes sense. Yeah, I recently launched a community as well. And I also had the same feeling not to be just about the one guru, but have this idea of multiple experts. Matt's a resident coach there as well. And, you know, we learn from different people. And like you said, the data from everyone and the insights from other people is like you're going to grow much faster than just listen to one guru. Totally. Yeah. I have a mastermind community as well. It is called the Matt Davis Mastermind. But I also agree.

9:43I try not to make it all about me. I think you're right, like learning off of other people. And I like the idea of experimenting. Right. And when someone's tried an experiment to come back and, you know, share that. So how does that work then, Jay, like in your lab? Like are people literally saying hypotheses, trying some bits and bobs and then coming back reporting it? Is that kind of how it works? Literally, yes. We have a format for this. And I encourage people to wait until an experiment has completed to share it just because the mechanics of how like a community space works. If you came in and updated the post later, there would be no notification of like, oh, the result was posted.

10:16So I really try to encourage people to wait until the experiment has run. But we have a format that is literally goal, hypothesis, experiment results. So here's the goal of what I'm trying to find out and accomplish. Here's the hypothesis of what I think will happen. Here's the experiment that I ran. Here are the results of that experiment. And those are the best posts in the community because you don't even know like people run wild, different experiments that you wouldn't even think of. And maybe it doesn't fit your business and that's fine. but other times it's like oh this either spurred an idea or i'm going to try that also and people have follow-up questions it's the most valuable part of the membership to the point where i was saying this weekend i'm just going to like incentivize more of this sharing i've started doing this in different ways in the community and stop me from going off on a tangent but there are certain activities that members can do that are just so valuable that i find if you just incentivize that behavior, not just like say thank you, but literally incentivize it, I think it's a positive thing to do.

11:16So we have small group masterminds that are run in the community. And when somebody leads a mastermind, I give them like a credit on their membership towards their next year renewal, the same if they host a workshop. And so the same will be true if they post an experiment. So between that, or if you refer a member, that's like a recurring fee as well. I think people can pay for their own membership just with like showing up and being a good member. And to me, it's worth it for you to just be a kick-ass member and not pay me a dime because that just makes the community stronger. So I'm constantly playing around with little things like that.

11:57Some work, some don't, you know, but I think that's like kind of the work of being a community builder is saying, well, how do we actually make this place operate more asynchronously, more decentralized, genuinely align people's incentives and expectations so that a good community is good for everybody. The tension we see sometimes in community is it's really exciting because people join early and it's small and they get access to you and you build it and this is exciting for them. But then the success of that leads to growth and leads to growth. And eventually at some point, sometimes growth in the community actually detracts from the value people had initially, which was like a small intimate space.

12:40So it's like this interesting living organism that we constantly have to tend to. Maybe it's not an organism, maybe it's like a garden that we constantly have to tend to and trim things back and just make small tweaks to try to make the balance just right. Yeah, I love that metaphor. And yeah, I'm finding the same thing in our community as well. And I know you had like a limit of 200 and then after 200 then you kind of open the doors up for like a lower tier membership and grew it that way how did you find the success of that yeah this was a successful experiment that kind of came to bite me in the butt so because i'd been a part of communities that had this exact problem i just described which is like growth threatens what was awesome about the space in the beginning i thought i'm just going to be super active here i'm going to have a lot of access to me and there's a limit on what I can do.

13:34So I said, let's, let's prevent the problem of closeness going away and let's prevent the limits on my capacity by just capping how many people can be here. And I did that. And that was like new and innovative. I capped it at 200 people. It got a lot of attention and we hit that pretty quickly. But here's what happened when we hit that limit. There were certain things that I wanted to do with the evolution of the community that I just couldn't do we're trying to do more in-person experiences we had the big event that we just did last week but i want to do little pop-ups all around the country all around the world and enable these like grassroots level small meetups but if we're at a 200 member cap and there's only three members in australia i can't solve that problem and make that a better experience without like kicking people out or only accepting people from australia when we have open spaces.

14:29Same with like platform density. When we hit the 200 person cap, we didn't have many people that were operating on Instagram or TikTok. How do I solve that problem if we're at the cap? So there are things that I want to do. There are like small groups I want to create that have specific priorities, whether it's location, whether it's knowledge share. And in a capped world, I just couldn't do it. So we moved from a cap to an application. And this is after I did like a, we did a town hall at the beginning of the year. And I said, here's the situation. We're at our cap. Here's what I want to do. I'm proposing moving from a cap to an application because previous to that, we didn't have an application.

15:08It was just first come first serve. But I realized that also, if you have any type of like customer journey where somebody starts at point A and they could get ostensibly to point Z, if your community has folks that are at point G, they are not going to have that much interest in people that are still at point A. It becomes noisy. It feels like that space isn't for them. So you really have to constrain your community to a very small portion of the customer journey. And the only way you can do that really is with an application. So I said, this is what I want to do. I want to move to an application.

15:43I want to continue to raise the standard of what it takes to be a member here and remove the cap. and are you guys open to that? Do you trust me, basically? And we had almost half the community fill out that survey and out of like the 70 something people that filled it out, only one person said, I'm concerned about this. So I said, great, cap is gone, applications in place. And we stuck around like the 225 mark, right? So it hasn't grown a whole lot, but it was challenging. We did have a lower tier as well that I don't count in that 200 level number. and that was another strategy that's been okay.

16:19But the challenge has been even folks in the community, some of them still think we have a cap. Like it's hard to socialize any major change on something that has become so well-known internally and externally that it's been really difficult to change public awareness of the model. Wow. Thanks for sharing your philosophy, Jay. I'd love to get into some more tactical things now. You mentioned that audience is not community. So can you unpack that for us from like a brand building perspective? Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of people who have large audiences that just kind of refer to their audience as their community.

16:58And they use community in like this very soft, broad way. And I'm not here to say that like you can't do that. It's just not how I think about it. To me, a community has mechanisms for creating peer-to-peer interaction. and you could say well yeah I mean you could comment on my Instagram post and other people can comment and that's our community and there's some validity to that but I think increasingly even in the word audience I think some people say audience but what they mean is a crowd you know so if you think about if you went to Las Vegas and you saw a street performer you might see a crowd gathered around that person.

17:39I don't know that I would say that group of people is an audience for that performer. To me, an audience is something that is a little bit more enduring, like it returns. It's there to hear from you specifically. Whereas on a lot of these platforms, the audiences are just kind of groups of people that you've effectively captured their attention in a fleeting way. So you can kind of think of these as like concentric circles, I suppose, where like at the top level, you have like this crowd, this group of people that have kind of come into your orbit. Inside of that is probably your audience, this group of people who are a little bit more familiar and they return.

18:17And then inside of that, if you have a space and a mechanism for people to interact with each other, I would say that is probably a community. Yeah, the word gets thrown around quite a bit. So it's kind of vague what community means, because it's like your Instagram community, your Facebook community, or you can be like a private paid membership community, but they are different things, as you said. And I think if you were just to ask like the regular lay person, what communities they're a part of, they're going to respond with things that are so special to them that they tie it to their identity.

18:51Like a community in a regular person's life is a serious thing where they feel like I am a part of this and it's part of my identity. So I think a lot of people throwing around the word community, if you ask those people, what communities are you a part of? They would just not even think about this creator's content as a community they're a part of. And so if you are thinking about community building as a skill, as a strategy, I do think you want to get to the level of, I want to build something that people are so invested in. And I mean that in a figurative sense, so invested in that they feel like their identity is tied to it.

19:29That's really powerful, but that's a really high bar. if you're building a brand and want to do it right this is for you join the brand builders alliance for expert coaching live master classes and a crew of brand builders who've got your back get on the wait list now at join bba.com now back to the show so i can feel that because i've recently released some merch for our community brand builders alliance and to see them repping that logo around the world it's like it just made me so happy because it shows not that they bought some merch but the fact that they belong into a community and they want to stand behind it and you know rep the brand it feels like they're part of something bigger than just themselves so I think that was you know something to aspire to is to to get to a place like that as a community what I'm observing just from a just taking a step back and thinking about this from a brand and a strategy perspective is that it was interesting to talk there Jay about people finding it like being part of their identity and I don't know why but my my brain flashed to like the the brand Harley-Davidson right where people would buy the product yeah for sure but it meant more to them than just a product right and so there's Harley-Davidson clubs and you go riding and all of this stuff together now to be honest that's probably a very old school way of doing things I'm sure they exist they don't exist where I am at the moment but you know I'm sure there's still clubs around I just think that that's like the pinnacle isn't it because when people feel that they're part and parcel of something that you've created a movement rather than just a product that's the opportunity then for you to start building value and places for those people to connect more and more so Harley Davidson being one of them so what are your thoughts broader of of just general brand building like do you think every brand should be thinking like this and and And if so, yeah, let me know.

21:21I think it can certainly be aspirational for any brand. I don't think every brand will do it. I think it's a difficult thing to achieve. Like there needs to be a certain, like anytime there's a community, there's inherently like an in-group and an out-group, right? Being in the Harley Davidson community is like this kind of signal to certain people that I am a part of this. And I think this is something that people are increasingly looking for. They want to identify with a group of sorts. This is why politics worldwide are the mess that they are, because people are increasingly drawn into like tribal groups.

22:03This is why we're actually seeing a return to religion in the Western world, at least. It had been on a decline and we're starting to see it pick back up. It's because people just want to feel like they're a part of something that's larger than they are. Now, I don't think it's within most companies or brands skill sets to create genuine meaning out of the product that they're doing. You know, I'm looking at my desk here. I have a roadcaster duo that I'm speaking into. Is there anything that roadcaster could do to make me feel like I'm a part of the road, like the road community? I don't know.

22:39Probably not. There are just some things that like aren't going to be that interesting. a lot of people like seek status in the communities and the brands that they go into. So luxury goods often have this opportunity, but non-luxury like commodity goods, probably not. It'd be much, much harder. So I think it could be aspirational. And I think it's a worthwhile exercise for any brand builder to say, how do we elevate the name of this brand? And in fact, elevate the people who associate with it so they feel bigger, more important, more attractive, more something, you know, how can associating with our brand make people feel better about themselves?

23:21Then you might be on the path to having this, this identity and association. So what are some mistakes that you see creators making when they're trying to build community? The biggest mistake is that they're just not actually trying that hard, to be honest. I think what I see a lot of times is people say, I have audience, community platform exists, recurring revenue sounds cool, let me just throw the two at each other. And what they don't actually think about is the member experience or the outcome. If you have a big enough audience and you stand up a community platform, just by law of big numbers, some people will join because they obviously like you, they're following you.

24:01But that doesn't mean that they'll stick. communities are notoriously difficult from a retention perspective so really what i see most people mistake is that it'll just be easy and that like the community will self-coalesce and run itself and eventually i think you can get there but you really have to build up that reality like it takes years i think to make the community experience so good that people do identify with it now other people want to kind of carry the flag and move things forward. I just think lack of effort is the biggest mistake that I see. So how do you see community fitting in with other business models?

24:42You mentioned like road, it just may not make sense, but you know, how does it function as like a strategic asset within a business? I think a community is a value proposition within a membership sometimes. And the membership is a paid product, right? So if you're talking about a paid community, what I think you're actually talking about is a one-time purchase or recurring purchase product of which the community is one of the value propositions. So if it comes to your business and thinking about, do I want community to be a part of it? The question is, well, what does, what role does it play? Is the community itself part of a paid product?

25:23And if so, is that a one-time purchase? Is it a, is it an added benefit to a one-time purchase? Is this the product itself with a recurring purchase attached to it? There are all kinds of different models and they're all valid, but certain products, certain brands lend themselves to different models a little bit better. Like it's, it's far more likely that a community on behalf of the company road that I would be a part of is probably going to be like a support community. It's going to be like, I'm having a problem. Can I learn from somebody and get this fixed. It's probably less likely that road says, Hey, we are creating masterminds of some of our creators and you can join that.

26:01I think it's possible. I think they could try to do that, but it's probably not what I'm interested in transacting with road for, you know? So lots of different models, but it's going to kind of depend on the company and the brand, probably the most common would be a recurring membership model for most folks. And that's why a lot of people get into memberships is they want that recurring revenue. But to get recurring revenue, you have to provide recurring value. And unlike a software platform where the value is built into the software, and as long as you continue letting it run, you're going to get the value out of it, a membership is never done.

26:44It's like never, you can't just set and forget it there's there's some level of involvement that you pretty much always have to do uh which makes it a lot of work 100 agree with you on that one so let's talk about creator science then as a brand which you've been building up over many years i'm curious like what came first when you built that did you have the audience did you have the content or like what do you just want to walk us through that? Well, in some form, this was started in 2017 when I started writing an email newsletter and I was writing it every day. At that time, it was really just like me writing a public journal, basically.

27:25And I didn't know what I wanted to do with my time. I was freelancing at the time. I was doing like web design, some email copies, some just like one-off consulting projects. And over time, I discovered this space of like content. We weren't really using the word content. We certainly were using the word creator, but there were people who were writing to an email list, selling information products. And as a former software product manager, this was fascinating to me because in my life, I had to work with engineers and designers so that I could get the thing that I wanted to exist into reality.

28:01And that always came with compromises because the business needed to move faster. Deadlines need to be moved up. This was unfeasible. So it's so frustrating to go from, this is what I know people want, but I have to work through other people to make it real. And often it's not even the thing that I dreamed of in the first place, but content, I could make content. I could do writing. I could do podcasts. I can make a course. All that was in my control. And so suddenly like my product mind was just on fire that I could do these things. So I started studying people who were doing it. And I didn't know what I was going to like make yet, but I had to publish something because I told people I'd publish every day and then every week.