The Ultimate Guide to Building Creator Business

1 month ago I published an edition on Creator Economy Predictions 2024, and in the very second point I stated: most creator businesses will go bankrupt this year, but I’m quite optimistic about a few brands:

These are the brands that I think will break through this year and go onto find PMF. I have intentionally not considered big brands like Feastables, Prime, etc., and based my selection criteria on betting on the potential and took into account Early-stage (even Pre-product) companies. These are the places where I see real value being created for creators & enablers driving the economy forward.

1. 1of10 Finder

1of10 is solving for creating outlier videos taking deep inspiration from already viral ideas.

They believe: Ideas, titles and thumbnails are 80% of why videos get millions of views. One of the many ways to develop viral ideas is by inspiring yourself from outliers and iterating off of those in your own style.

Founded by Richard (ex-YouTube strategist for MrBeast) and Riad (an ex-Microsoft & AI engineer), 1of10 can help you market research specific niches and find viral video ideas saving you a lot of of time and accelerating your views!

Some of the Top YouTubers in the space have vouched for the tool referring it as a great product, super promising and makes their job 10x easier.

The tool is undergoing a complete design revamp optimizing for smooth performance and responsive design. The app has also undergone major changes.

The platform has features built to enhance your Research and Optimization.

Advance Filters gets you past the clutter and precisely target your search. Toggle filters like Multipliers, Views, Median views, and views:sub makes your search more specific getting you on-point viral ideas to take inspiration from.

Competitor Tracker monitors outliers across all channels on YouTube. This feature helps you make a repository of channels doing well to track their progress and maneuver it to your channel.

Thumbnail Vision Board saves your top thumbnail picks in your Vision Board to derive inspiration from later. Their Thumbnail analyzer comes with their Chrome extension that puts your thumbnail, title, and channel name on your homepage and lets you compare how it looks amidst other videos.

If you want to research on top an outlier you think has potential, the Similar Topic feature pinpoints your research by finding more videos around the outlier that you liked.

Their database of 1M+ outliers gets you to recognize patterns providing inspiration for your next idea, title and thumbnail.

I personally think, 1of10 is a great tool that improves your pattern recognition, which is one great skill every creator should develop.

YouTube’s filtering is not engineered to present you with viral outlier ideas, rather it focuses on pushing either new content to find their next set of viewers or promote a video that has done well in the past.

This is what 1of10 is solving for!

2. Viewstats

Viewstats, co-founded by Chucky Appleby (CEO) and Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) is concisely a public version of a data analytics dashboard that Team MrBeast uses internally to optimize his videos.

“We realized that we should create a data site to help people understand their analytics, to make it easier to make better video ideas. Jimmy and I are obsessed with content. And our approach was to say, ‘We are only going to add features that we know actually affect the performance of a YouTube video.'” ~ Chucky

It started with the goal of making people understand how analyzing small details to make incremental increases in clicks and retention can “make a difference” and add up to a lot of views and the vision of building it upto a point where it becomes so valuable that YouTube creators check it every single day.

Having direct funding from both co-founders, Viewstats is operating as an independent entity from MrBeast, LLC and incorporated as Cstats, LLC. 

The beta version has metrics to track views, subscribers, revenue, channelytics and projected growth, incorporating features like: viewing results of A/B tests, tracking title changes, rankings of each channel’s best performing videos, break down views across long-form and short-form uploads and is both subscription and ad-free as of now.

Over the next few months, Team Viewstats will introduce tools that will help with ideation and thumbnail design while improving the top lists feature to add filters like country, language, and paid ads.

A new tool called “competitors” that allows you to track & get actionable insights and notifications is been worked upon; engagement rate metrics are coming too.

3. Creator Startup

Creator Startup, released in partnership with Kajabi (a platform for creators to build websites, facilitate payments, and more) by Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry; better known as their internet alias Colin and Samir.

Creator Startup is a 30-day cohort and incorporates interactive live sessions, structured worksheets, and instructional videos. Its primary focus is on dissecting the four fundamental aspects of a creator business: defining your audience, figuring out your value proposition, understanding your process, and, of course, how to monetize.

Colin and Samir is on a mission to empower & educate the next generation of creators and have multiple IPs built around the brand (YouTube, podcast, newsletter, Discord community).

They are the pioneers of the creator economy that breakdown any topic from a creator’s perspective. Also, they were the first few who built and sold a YouTube channel.

Creator Startup’s primary objective is to help creators build or strengthen their partnership business (a key pillar in any creator business). Building you focus to create by delivering frameworks for generating consistent revenue is what they are solving for.

The curriculum aims to educate creators, who have worked with brands in the past/have a system for video creation/has team or want to build one on operational day-to-day tasks anyone will come across in a creator business: how to get more deals and on a consistent basis, factoring-in predictability in your cash flow, developing a mindset for decision-making, how to use a pitch deck, how to price yourself to create consistent income, navigating working with brands once the contract is signed, storytelling and a lot more.

Their first cohort is already sold out, which was listed for $1797 on Kajabi; you can join the waitlist for their cohort 2 here.

I’m personally very excited about Creator Startup’s version of building a creator-led company.

These were the 3 brands I think will have a BREAKOUT year in 2024. I’m on a constant look out for more companies & will surely add to this list.

I believe that creator & enabler-led companies are going to be the future of consumer products.

Let me know your thoughts on the same, and do share what brands do you think are going to BREAKOUT; I enjoy studying various companies building cool stuff in the space and would love you go through them!