How to Become a Full-Time Creator: Research Study
There has never been a better time in history to earn a living as a creator.
Who is a Creator?
A creator is defined as someone who brings something into existence.
Traditionally, you could create art or music or photography. Or write something, record something or build something with your hands.
But today, creation takes many unconventional forms. There are literally thousands of ways you can be a creator in 2019.
You can stream video games on Twitch, design custom objects to be 3D-printed on Shapeways, create memes on social media, produce beats for artists on Splice or start a podcast.
The company I founded, Teachable for instance, has helped 25,000 people become a creator by teaching and sharing their expertise.
A 2016 study estimated 15 million people in America (2% of the entire population) earned money as a creator. That’s a whole lotta creating and this movement is only getting started.
Why Now is The Best Time to be a Creator
Traditionally, if you wanted to earn a living as a creator, you had to win the somewhat arbitrary approval of a gatekeeper.
Television networks, movie studios, record labels, universities, publishing houses, museums, magazines are all gatekeepers. These gatekeepers historically had an almost monopolistic control over distribution. Without their support, your creation would not be able to find an audience.
Today, we live in a brand new world. The Internet has democratized access to an audience and gatekeepers are now completely optional.
Writers no longer need publishers, teachers no longer need universities, musicians can get famous on Soundcloud and you can build an engaged viewership of millions on Youtube.
This is a fundamental paradigm shift.
The rise of social networks and marketplaces have further accelerated the impact. There now exist thousands of websites where your potential audience congregates that you can tap into.
The convergence of these trends, along with the fact that there are now lots of brand new ways of being a creator that never existed before make this the single best time in history to earn a living as a creator. And it’s only going to get better from here on.
Becoming a Full-Time Creator is Still Hard
That said, just because everyone now can earn a living as a creator doesn’t mean everyone successfully does. Becoming a full-time creator is still really, really hard.
Broadly speaking, there are three stages to earning a living as a creator:
1 — Creating.
Whether you write, teach, paint, sculpt, podcast, live stream, weave or design, the journey begins with the act of creating.
2 — Building an Audience
Unlike the old world of gatekeepers, to become a professional creator today, you need to build an audience of people that care about your work.
3 — Monetizing Your Audience
Once you have an audience of people supporting your work, you can now convert this into an income.
The most likely reason you will NOT succeed at becoming a full-time creator is because you will fail at the second stage. It turns out that building an audience is hard.
The act of creation is completely in your control. Ultimately, you have complete control over whether you launch that podcast, write that book, record that song or post that video. And if you do succeed at building an audience, you can follow a relatively straightforward playbook that we have seen thousands of Teachable creators employ to earn a living.
That leaves building an audience. It’s the hardest and least controllable of the three stages.
So How Do Creators Build an Audience?
Since building an audience is the trickiest stage of earning a living as a creator, I want to study how successful creators have done this.
I’m going to begin by collecting survey responses from at least 200 full-time creators i.e. people who earned a full-time living as a creator in 2018 covering these questions:
- Where did they start building an audience?
- How large an audience did it take to support a full-time living? How long did it take?
- How much did they earn from their audience in 2018?
- What specific channels did they use? What worked and what didn’t work?
My goal will be to collect as diverse a data set as possible — not just diversity of age, education level, ethnicity and geography of creators, but also as many different forms of creating as possible.
As I collect these responses, I’m going to identify trends and themes, dive deeper into a few individual stories and attempt to build a generalized framework that can be universally applied. I’ll then test this framework on a few brave volunteers and see if they too can cross the chasm into full-time creator territory.
While I’m not sure what the final form factor of this research will be, I intend to share the data, findings and experiments along the way. If you are interested in following along, please do sign up for email updates.
I’ll also be taking a meta approach and seeing if I can apply these learnings to build an audience from scratch myself. Presumably, if I can’t teach myself how to do this, I shouldn’t be teaching other people.
Aside from an academic fascination, there is a very strong level of self-interest here. Teachable is a very powerful tool to help creators monetize an audience. The more creators that build an audience, the greater the universe of successful Teachable creators.
I Need Your Help
If you are interested in getting involved, here are all the ways you can help:
- Do you think this is cool? Share this post.
- Are you a full-time creator? Email me, I’d love to send you the survey.
- Are there full-time creators you want me to survey? Let me know.
- Want to stay involved and receive the occasional email with updates and findings? Sign up here.
