The Creator Lifecycle
How can you turn your audience into an empire?
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There are no limits to what creators can achieve with an audience. Audiences are the wind of the Internet Ocean. Leverage them, and you can sail anywhere. Some have leveraged their audiences to build a 25B+ views media empire, some to build a billion-dollar DTC business, and some to launch a country-wide burger chain. These days, we're even talking about creators getting ready for an IPO!
How are successful creators transforming audiences into empires? To better understand the process, here’s the framework I use: The Creator Lifecycle.
I love this! I think enabling engagement at all of these different depths is a powerful mental model for what's happening in the space. I guess my one challenge with this model is that it makes it feel linear, almost suggesting that all creators should be moving towards building ownership for their audience in a way that allows them to share future financial upside. Do you think that's accurate? Is there a simple way to think about which creators might actually not actually want to enable the full depth of engagement? For example would it actually make sense for Taylor Swift to sell of fractional shares of her future upside given that she has no real need for upfront working capital?