Last week I went to the New Media Summit in Austin, and I’m still buzzing! SO many lessons, learnings, and thoughts that I need to get out of my brain. So here's my attempt to recap it all (s/o out to Granola for helping me word vomit all of this for the past 30 minutes so I could shape some of my key learnings!)

(Not sponsored but…Granola if you’re out there and reading this hello 👋🏻)

The past few weeks have been a great reminder about the power of showing up IRL and the power of building online; I get so much energy from both of those things and excited to keep building.

I also have some exciting professional news to share as of next week - stay tuned for more 🤐

- Taylor

I was basically beta testing my messaging all week. And where I landed is this space around the creator-founder divide — really understanding how people are building businesses in the creator economy.

If I had to nail my target audience, it's two groups:

Group 1: You're a creator. You've built an audience on a certain platform, and you're like, how do I actually scale this into a real business?

Group 2: You're a founder. You've started a service business or an agency or you have a product, and you're like, I really want content as a main function of the business — whether that's a newsletter, podcast, YouTube, whatever.

The thing that unites this entire group is an entrepreneurial, builder mentality.

The what you're building and the how might change, but the why is the same: you understand inherently that building an audience and having distribution will help move whatever ventures you want to pursue. You want to do more than just play small. And I'm not saying that means you have to want to create the next AI startup. But you want to have a good living, do something you love, and you know it's possible to build that.

And I think what I bring to the table is being a tastemaker — selectively choosing who I interview and the stories I tell to show what's possible.

Because I think what's wrong right now is that we only see the success stories of the super big. You know the MrBeast's. You know the Alex Hormozi's. You know the things that are really working at massive scale. But you don't know all these stories of people who have built multiple six-figure, seven-figure revenue doing simple things — doing what they love, starting super niche media brands, etc.

That's what's really exciting because I think the average person just wants to know: can I do what I love and make money?

Ok so I have many fun ideas for Creator Diaries in the next 6-12 months and I’d love to hear from you. What would you like to see more of?! If you want to elaborate any more on your response, reply to this email directly.

Codie Sanchez is one of the people who truly understands this content economy — where we're going, the power of building an audience, having distribution. She talks a lot about having an owner mentality, and I think that is going to be the thing that gets people by in this age.

The thing I walked away with: your goals are probably too small. She talked about how even for Contrarian Thinking, she realized they wanted to create a million financially free people and this many small business owners. And someone — the CEO of Replit — was like, why not even more ambitious? You should be unreasonable.

This resonated with me and my goals too. What does this look like to grow Creator Diaries into a full-scale media brand? We just saw Starter Story get acquired by HubSpot. What would have to be true for things like that to happen? That's the kind of thinking I want to be doing now.

She also said something that I’ve been thinking about sense: be crystal clear on your mission, and be open-handed about the how (which is a super solid North Star for anyone!)

Sam Parr’s interview was really interesting because he's all about quality being the thing that really matters — and creating actual fandom around what you're doing.

When he was building The Hustle (which also sold to HubSpot), they moved into a community group, and then the community wanted to meet in person. They realized they were building true fandom. Now he's building Hampton as an extension of that, because people want to meet in person and get off screens.

And I see this pattern everywhere in successful newsletter and media brands — this URL to IRL arc:

They all follow this pattern: talk about what you love online → build an email list → continuously create content → draw an audience → that audience wants to meet in real life.

It's as simple of an arc as that. And your barometer for testing if people really love what you're doing? If they'd show up for it IRL. And if they do that, they'll do anything. That is building for your thousand true fans.

Chenell Basilio’s (founder of Growth in Reverse) talk was so good that I need to sit down and watch it again and take a ton of notes. But her framework for creating insanely valuable content was all about: how do you differentiate yourself? How do you give away so much value that people want to stick around?

That combo of insanely valuable content plus momentum is what's behind all of the top-growing creator and newsletter brands right now.

AI came up so much at this conference. One of my big takeaways: just because you can doesn't mean you should.

There are areas where you absolutely should fully embrace AI — replace yourself in some areas, systems, admin stuff. And there are areas I don't think you should touch, especially as a creator.

What I'm walking away with is that I am fully bullish on personality-driven content. Across platforms. Do not do something that can be replaced or easily imitated. You should infuse so much personality and originality into what you do that it has to come from you.

That's one of the reasons I want to go more into video. I think you can feel more connected to people when you hear them in long form, see them on video. And I don't even want to overly edit it. I want it to feel like, oh, I'm chatting with you in the living room, chatting with you over coffee. You know me. You know how I'd be in real life.

It's what I've been experimenting with on LinkedIn, and it's been working: if anyone else could post it, I wouldn't post it. I'm only going to write the thing that only I can write.

Chandler Bolt's talk reinforced what I already believe: the book is an old medium, and it's still one of the most powerful ways to get your ideas across and build a business.

If you were to put me on a long-form to short-form spectrum, I'm going to invest heavily into long-form, high-quality content. I don't really want to play the short-form game.

What that looks like for me: long Q&As, written Q&As, long-form essays, case studies, deep dives, eventually YouTube videos. I want to get those long-form assets right first, and then use social media to drive back to them. Not the reverse of trying to blow up on Reels or Shorts and then figuring out what to do from there.

I want to be known as someone who has a high-quality, long-form asset.

Quick aside on this — I met a creator at the conference who had more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, was doing a lot of cool stuff, writing a book, killing it. And then he revealed to me: "I don't know how to turn this into a business." And I was like, oh my god, you're sitting on a gold mine. You have the audience! So we went to the diving board for like thirty minutes brainstorming ideas, what he could potentially do. He'd already done the hard work of building the long-form asset. What he was missing? A newsletter.

Which leads us to our next point…

I met with Tara Knight from Creator Match outside of the conference, and so many good conversations came from that. They basically can't hire people fast enough for all the brands that want to spend money — that's how explosive the creator space is.

But the big thing: newsletters are the biggest area of opportunity for creators, and most of them are sleeping on it. They don't know how to run a newsletter, don't know what to talk about. And yet, brands are literally dying to hand money over to sponsor newsletters. Huge area of opportunity.

It was fascinating to meet with and learn from so many newsletter experts at this conference. I still feel like I’m trying to soak up all these learnings and would love to help more creators get started with their newsletter.

Absolutely loved talking with Alexis Grant, founder of They Got Acquired. We had so much to jam on about people selling content and media businesses.

This came from a personal pain point of hers — she had sold a business and at the time didn't even know it was possible to know what it was worth. Since then, she's realized there's actually a market: most people who've built content businesses don't know they could sell, what a sale looks like, or how much things are worth.

And this is very related to my work because — just in the past couple of months, look at some of the headlines:

There is so clearly momentum here. And these companies are smart to recognize the power of having a content business and an audience.

I think the most important thing from Alexis's talk for creators is this: you have to build a business that's not solely relying on you. And I think this is a really underexplored area. People are told to build your personal brand, build your company of one. And you see creators try to launch products with their face on it, but if you are central to the thing and the business is relying on you being the one delivering the service — that's only going to cap how valuable it is to an investor or buyer.

“Small exits change lives,” Alexis said in her talk. They're still super meaningful, but they're not the stuff you're going to see on a magazine cover. And that's exactly why I want to tell these stories.

If the average person understood that you could get a six- or seven-figure exit from building a newsletter? That is actually an insane reality. These deals are happening every day. And just because it's "only" six or seven figures — that's not considered a big deal in the M&A world — but for most people? That is massive. Massive!

Aside from follow up from all the amazing conversations I have, here are some of the big things I want to focus on after this conference.

The mission is clear. The how is still wide open. And none of it would have happened if I hadn't just started posting.