The 7–11–4 Rule That Changed How I Think About Content

Welcome to all the new faces here 🤩 I’m so glad you found your way to this corner of the internet and I’m so excited to keep building with you. If you’re interested in building a business you actually want to run, you’re in the right place!

A quick reminder of what you can expect: I go deep with founders and creators, unpack how they’re building their businesses, and share the frameworks, content strategies, and behind-the-scenes lessons I pick up along the way. I’ll also drop in updates from my own journey (aka my building in public experiments) and the things I’m reading, testing, or paying attention to in the creator economy.

If you’re new, here are a few recent pieces you might enjoy:

You know when you find the right video or podcast at the right time and it just feels divine? Like it’s THE exact kind of content you need right now.

For me, that person has been Daniel Priestley. In fact, I’ve spent the past several months reading his books, listening to podcast interviews, and literally trying to soak up all the knowledge he has to share.

His basic argument is that to be successful (no matter the field) you need to be a Key Person of Influence, someone that people trust and people come to. In order to create those relationships, you have to rely on content to build those at scale (hence the tie to creator economy!)

For the past 20 years, Daniel Priestley has been building like an entrepreneur who deeply understood the creator game — even before the creator economy existed.

At 21, he launched his first company, Triumphant Events, with a $7,000 credit card — hitting $1M in revenue within a year. By 24, he was reportedly doing $1M in monthly sales and had passed $10M in lifetime revenue. In 2006, he moved to London with nothing but a suitcase and a credit card, and within a year built another million-pound business.

But what’s interesting is how early he realized that building businesses wasn’t enough on its own. By the time he published Key Person of Influence in 2014, he was already teaching that the most successful entrepreneurs needed to be influential voices in their markets. They created demand before launch. They positioned themselves so people came to them for answers and insights.

Today, we’d call that person a creator. Back then, Priestley was describing the same fundamentals: turning expertise into content, building reputation around ideas, and using influence as leverage for the business.

Fast forward to 2025, Priestley might be what call niche famous. He’s deeply respected by entrepreneurs and business leaders, but unknown to the broader content world.

He’s run multiple 7 & 8-figure companies, published books that became cult favorites, and helped thousands of founders build credibility and grow revenue. But all of this happened while he didn’t necessarily have a mega platform of his own.

Long before anyone was talking about the creator economy, Priestley was building its blueprint.

His Key Person of Influence framework laid out a five-part roadmap that still holds up today: Pitch, Publish, Product, Profile, Partnerships.

In Oversubscribed, he explained how to generate demand before you launch. And his 7-11-4 rule — seven hours of content, eleven touchpoints, across four platforms — has become one of the most useful ways I think about content distribution.

I’ve applied it in my own business over the past six months… and it works. Just today, I had someone reach out to me who had found me on LinkedIn and then fallen into the rabbit hole of my content, ending up subscribing to this newsletter. That right there is 7-11-4 in action!

Here’s what I think is so valuable about Daniel’s story for creators and entrepreneurs today:

→ You don’t need new ideas.
→ You need a better system to distribute the ones you already have.
→ And you need a structure that makes your ideas work harder for you across platforms, over time.

Daniel built a visibility machine. Then spent years, if not decades sharpening it and refining it. Eventually, that machine started working on his behalf.

I wrote a longer deep dive into his journey, frameworks, and what creators can learn from them. You can read it here:

Not to get too ~sentimental~ on main, but this week marks three years since I started working for myself. 🥳

This year has been a big one:

But here’s the truth: the first 18 months were filled with routine “should I quit?” moments. If only you could’ve seen August 2022… it was chaotic (if not downright scary). And yet, sticking with it got me here.

Looking back, here are the lessons that stand out most:

The biggest shift for me, though, is how I define success. It’s no longer about the bylines or logos on my portfolio. It’s truly all about alignment: Does this feel connected to my mission? Does it excite me? Does my life feel full and diversified? That’s the north star.

That’s 10X more fulfilling than chasing external validation.

So if you’re in year one or two and wondering if it’s worth it — keep going. And if you’re waiting for a sign to start, here it is.

Creator Diaries is all about telling the stories of builders. If you’re working on something interesting — a newsletter, a business, a community, an experiment — I’d love to hear from you. The weirder and more nontraditional the better.

That’s all for this week!

Taylor