If You Want to Become a Successful Content Creator, Here’s the First Step

Every social media influencer has to take it

Aaron Dinin, PhD
The Startup
Published in
3 min readAug 18, 2022

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Photo by Eduardo Gorghetto on Unsplash

If you’re reading this article — an article posted to social media — then you’ve likely encountered the phrase “creator economy.” You might even consider yourself a creator. You certainly view content on social media from people with thousands upon thousands of followers, and you probably personally know someone with a decent number of followers. You may even occasionally refer to that person as, “My friend who has, like, 100,000 Instagram followers.”

Considering the ubiquity of social media creators in our lives, I was surprised by how people reacted when I decided to teach a class at Duke for content creators. The class was so strange to people that lots of news organizations contacted me, including Bloomberg, which published a featured article about it. I can summarize the theme of that Bloomberg article as: “Can you believe colleges and universities are teaching people to be content creators?”

Umm… yes… I can believe it. Why wouldn’t they? Some of the most influential and impactful people in the modern world are social media content creators. Ignoring that reality seems like a gross violation of academic responsibility. But let’s not dive into that issue at the moment.

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Aaron Dinin, PhD
The Startup

I teach entrepreneurship at Duke. Software Engineer. PhD in English. I write about the mistakes entrepreneurs make since I’ve made plenty. More @ aarondinin.com