The ways solo creators collaborate

Solo content creators need to work in community with others to manage the numerous tasks involved in running a venture. There are a variety of ways you can collaborate with others, each with its benefits and drawbacks.

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Whether it’s launching a newsletter, YouTube channel or podcast, solo content creators need to work in community with others to manage the numerous tasks involved in managing a venture. There simply isn’t enough time to do it all alone.

There are a variety of ways you can collaborate with others, each with its benefits and drawbacks. Use the examples shared here as an actionable roadmap for collaborating effectively to amplify your impact.

Key takeaways include:

• Collaborations should begin with a clear understanding of what each partner hopes to gain and how individual goals line up with shared ones. Write this down and make sure it aligns with expectations of each party’s role and planned outcomes.
• The best opportunities to collaborate are like a Venn diagram, with each creator bringing their own assets to the table and an area of common ground that makes the collaboration worth doing. For example, collaborators could have distinct but overlapping audiences, so that the shared content is of interest to each of their respective audiences and both sides have the opportunity to expand their reach through the collaboration.
• Collaborations can be one-off, such as the creation of an e-book or investigative piece, or longstanding, as in the case of subscription pools and collectives.

Journalists are increasingly launching solo ventures, be it a newsletter, podcast, or video channel, for a variety of reasons. It may be to fill a pressing gap in the news ecosystem, give voice to an ignored issue or community, achieve greater professional success, or strike a better work-life balance.

Whatever the motivation, once you get your product off the ground, you can quickly find yourself overwhelmed and distracted from your original goal because of the seemingly endless number of hats you must now wear. On any given day, solopreneurs may have to toggle between being publisher, editor, producer, fundraiser, salesperson, marketer, audience developer, customer service agent and so much more. As your solo venture grows, creators feel pressure to pile on more and more roles, without additional resources or time.

Collaboration can be a useful tool in addressing this challenge. It can take many forms — from simple cross-promotion — a shout-out to each other’s ventures — to longstanding partnerships. They can encompass any aspect of the business. Collaborators can work together on content, reader engagement, marketing and revenue.

This report will explore ways you can pool resources and work with others to amplify your product and its impact.

Multitude is a podcasting collective comprised of 10 individual shows and 25 creators. CEO Amanda McLoughlin founded the company in 2017 to enable podcasters to help one another succeed, a model she says is not common in the space.

The creators of each show lean on one another for help on a variety of tasks, from administrative to promotional. They appear on each other’s shows, recommend guests to one another and pitch in when someone needs help with a spreadsheet. Multitude also sells ads on behalf of its shows and shares that revenue with hosts.

“Collaboration is really at the heart of what we do,” McLoughlin says. “We are pooling our skills. There’s somebody who is great at structuring podcasts and good at copywriting. Someone is great at editing, someone is great at spreadsheets. There’s no reason why everybody needs to become a renaissance person and become really good at all 12 of those things.”

What makes the collective work is careful vetting of who is in it and a clear set of expectations about what each party gets. When podcast hosts recommend each other’s shows, it’s crucial that their recommendations are worthwhile for listeners, McLoughlin says.

When considering new shows, McLoughlin says she looks for a Venn diagram between Multitude’s current audience and that of the proposed project. Ideally, there should be enough overlap that the existing audience would be interested in the show, but also enough opportunity to expand to new listeners through the new content.

The hosts of Multitude shows are expected to promote each other’s podcasts with on-air plugs, and each show gets a shoutout from others in return. All of this is outlined in the contract, McLoughlin notes, so that hosts know exactly how they will benefit from being in the collective and what they get in return.

Other ways to collaborate around marketing include hosting events together, guest posting on each other’s newsletters or appearing on each other’s podcasts, cross promotion on social media, proposing conference panel ideas together and co-creating promotions such as raffles. Itay Paz, the creator of Morning Dough, recently posted online to find other newsletter owners who want to collaborate. Other places to find partners include Discord channels for Substack publishers and podcasters, Facebook groups such as Newsletter Creators and Swapstack, whose community Slack helps writers find sponsors and meet one another. Being resourceful and finding others to help amplify your message is crucial when you don’t have a big budget, McLoughlin notes.

“Wondery has millions of dollars that they spend on marketing every month. Almost nobody else has that kind of resources,” she says. “So, shouting from the rooftops when your friends do something that you are proud of is really worthwhile. Elevating them is something that we see as pretty essential.”

The Yappie is a nonprofit news platform focused on covering politics for young Asian American and Pacific Islander professionals. Andrew Peng launched the venture with his longtime friend Andrew Huang in 2018, shortly after Peng moved to Washington, D.C., for an internship and realized how small the pool of Asian Americans was inside the Beltway. Collaboration has helped them expand the venture to more than 1,000 subscribers.

In addition to bringing on two partners, they secured fiscal sponsorship from the Asian American Journalism Association. That means the Yappie pays AAJA a fee to use its nonprofit tax status to apply for grants and accept tax-deductible donations. It also lends credibility to the venture to have the nation’s premier professional organization for Asian American journalists back it.

Since then, The Yappie team has applied for a grant with Gold House, which invests in Asian Pacific Islander companies. A Solutions Journalism Network grant has enabled them to do deep-dive reporting on falsehood and disinformation campaigns on ethnic media platforms.

Last year, The Yappie collaborated with another journalism outlet for the first time. The staff at the Harvard Asian American Policy Review, all students at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, reached out to The Yappie with an idea to co-produce a piece on data disaggregation and the Asian American Pacific Islander identity. It offered mutual benefit to both partners: Working with an established publication like the Review helped lend credibility to The Yappie and expand its audience. In turn, The Yappie team had the bandwidth to develop a reported piece for the volunteer-run magazine, which otherwise tends to run essays and research papers.

“It was our first cross-website collaboration. They published it in print, and it was also on both websites,” said Peng.

“It took a lot of months, but it’s pretty astronomical how much we got through it.”

The collaboration was the first time The Yappie signed a content sharing agreement. No money changed hands, but the agreement outlined how the two sides would collaborate on the editing, promotion and publishing of the shared piece. Doing so ensured the project ran smoothly, and both sides were happy with the resulting coverage. The Yappie is now exploring another content partnership with a different magazine.

“I can’t think of any partnership that we left disappointed,” says Dan Hu, editor of The Yappie. Other forms of collaboration have come about through grants from journalism nonprofits like the Solutions Journalism Network. These special projects usually entail funding for a specific article or set of articles, as well as institutional support and guidance.

“Since we are so small, we have been just saying yes to a lot of things, as long as they align with our mission,” Hu noted. “I think in the future, especially as how fast the app is growing right now, we will probably need to start turning down some opportunities, and we’ll have a better idea of what the line is for us.”

The co-creation model is just one way for collaborators to work together on their products. Collectives are another, where creators bundle their offerings. The creators of Every started off by pairing together two Substack newsletters as the Everything Collective. They now pitch their expanded offering as a new kind of media model.

“A writer collective is a set of editorial and financial structures designed to give writers the autonomy and upside that they get from writing alone, and the support and security they get from working for a media company,” they explain in a manifesto on their site.

Creators can also collaborate on products behind the scenes, offering to edit each other’s pieces, share lists of interview subjects or help with calendar planning. They may work in the same platform or complementary ones, such as a podcast host pairing up with a similarly themed newsletter for an enhanced offering. Whatever the format, it’s key that the fit make sense for both sides, Peng says.

“Our project with the Review worked because they really fit our niche,” he noted.

Generating revenue can be the most challenging aspect of a solo venture, something that Dino-Ray Ramos, founder of Diaspora, knows all too well. The longtime film and TV news journalist broke out on his own in 2021, launching a platform to cover news about multicultural film, TV, media and culture in the entertainment industry.

Keeping the venture viable has been a challenge, and Ramos has a host of side gigs that help him amplify the Diaspora brand while also generating money to sustain the venture. He consults for the advocacy group GLAAD and also seeks out regular speaking and moderating gigs that get him in front of audiences where he can discuss his work. He appears and guests hosts podcasts.

Ramos has been hesitant to bring on a partner, because he said the person would have to be on the same page as him. He is wary that others may want to take advantage of what he has built.

“I have to be a CEO, publicist, marketer, journalist, producer, host, booker. None of it is paying me,” Ramos said. “The bandwidth I have is so limited that I really have to be mindful of where I put energy.”

The paid opportunities Ramos seeks out through other platforms can also be a way to collaborate with other creators. Some have tried developing shared consulting companies that pool their experience to offer speaking, design or marketing services.

Another way to collaborate around revenue is subscription pools. These allow readers to pay for one subscription that provides access to a group of newsletters or podcasts, with revenue split through a defined agreement. Subscribers to The Atlantic get access to a pool of newsletters through their magazine subscription, for example.

Creators can also co-promote a shared sold product, such as an e-book or a how-to guide, or co-create an award that will generate money through sponsorship and attendees. For example, BrainPint publisher Janel Loi and podcaster Josh Kaplan created a collaborative manual on how to launch a podcast. Another example is Nectar Ads, a group of art and design publishers who share ad sales and revenue.

The first step to collaborating with others is identifying partners who would be a good fit for your product and ambitions. Whether it’s around marketing, revenue or the product itself, journalism creators benefit when they find ways to work with others who complement their own ventures.

Not every collaboration is worth doing. The Yappie has passed on corporate sponsorship opportunities that would have required compromising on their ad-free model. At Multitude, McLoughlin frequently turns away podcasts that are not a good fit for the collective.

Shared work requires careful planning and evaluation to ensure that it works for both parties and offers benefits to each that align with their respective goals. Knowing when to say no is equally as important as identifying opportunities to work together — and having a clear idea of what does fit your needs will help you identify the right ways to collaborate.

This is one of six case studies — launched by J+, the professional development arm of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY — that aims to provide journalism creators building their own newsletters, podcasts, and other niche projects with in-depth analyses of what works and what doesn’t in the journalism creator ecosystem. This case study was supported by funding from the Meta Journalism Project and was written by Krystal Knapp, an Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program alumna.