How to Go Pro as a Creator

Hi there! Dan here. I think a lot of people on this list either are, or want to be creators on the internet. And there's a lot to learn about the process of becoming a professional—everything from how to get started, to how to grow something that's already working. I invited John Gannon of GoingVC to write a guest post about how he built his 20,000 subscriber list, and made over $1mm in revenue as a creator. This post breaks down what he's learned into a 4-step process—I learned a lot from it, and I think you will too.

Back in 2008, I started a blog about how to break into VC. I knew how hard it was to break into the industry and I wanted to give back. I had no idea that that blog would turn into an email list ~20,000 subscribers strong. That list led me to launch a cohort-based education program (we’re on our eighth cohort!) and community, GoingVC, as well as a related VC investment arm.

All in all, the programs, products, services, and companies I’ve created or co-founded have grossed over $1MM lifetime revenue. Yet when I started my journey as a creator, the thought of how I would monetize my work never even crossed my mind. Plugging away week after week after week, newsletter after newsletter, project after project, I was unwittingly playing the long game, well before I even knew what the long game was. Maybe not knowing exactly what it would all come to is how I ended up a 10+ year “overnight” success—a creator who’s built a platform that’s begun to look more like a business than a blog, and throws off enough income so that I can spend more time... creating.

But like any entrepreneurial creator, I’m always looking for a new challenge. Which got me thinking… Could I take another subject area I’m passionate about, become a creator in that space (like I did with VC), and get to $1MM in revenue again? What would I need to do? How would I do it more efficiently, and more quickly, than the first time around? And what would I do the exact same way? 

More importantly, I wanted to share what I would recommend you do to get to $1MM+ revenue as a creator, based on the same playbook—and by learning from some of the mistakes that I’ve made.

So I boiled it all down to a 4-step process: 

• Beginner mode: Steps 1 and 2 are for getting started in a way that’ll make turning your side project into a creator career a whole lot easier. (Even if you’ve already started or if you’re starting something new, it’s never a bad idea to go back to basics!)
• Pro mode: In Step 3, I’ll share what I learned and what I wish I’d done sooner to prioritize what I was building and treat it like the career it would become.
• Advanced mode: Step 4 covers something that creators rarely do, but that can generate massive benefits.

Each piece on its own will help you on your journey, whether you’re just getting started or you’re a few years in, so feel free to bite off whatever you think you can chew. Or use them all for maximum results. Let’s get started going pro!

Beginner Mode

Step 1: Not everyone’s a blogger—pick a medium that you actually love

Why? The people who tell you to “just start writing” are, well, writers! You got the advice to start a Substack from reading their Substack, didn’t you? :) 

Here’s the cold, hard truth. Writing online doesn’t actually work for most aspiring creators. Just look at the evidence strewn all over the web. Hundreds of thousands of blogs, Medium publications, and Substacks that have just a few posts on them, and no audience to speak of. And it’s not surprising. I don’t mind spending hours on a post like this one, but I know this is not most people’s idea of a good time. They’d rather be out taking pictures, recording music, going out to eat, or meeting new people. But sadly, because they get sucked into the trope of “must write to build a brand,” the chance for them to share their gift with the world (and build a platform and personal brand in the process) dies on the vine. 

Don’t worry, though. If the thought of writing an article makes your skin crawl, or just feels like too much work, there are so many other mediums you can use to build an audience as a creator. Jonathan Lehr and Matt Turck built their brands in the VC world by creating meet-ups (New York Enterprise Tech Meetup and Data Driven), and superconnector Laurel Touby took a similar approach with her Cereal Entrepreneurs Breakfast. Jason Gaignard built his network through his Mastermind Dinners, and Jenny Gyllander used Instagram to build a following which has transformed into a VC backed startup. 

Hopefully these examples inspire you to look outside blogging and into your past for other ways you can leverage your own interests and talents to build an audience as a creator. Like, maybe growing up you were the person who always loved to make videos for your family and friends. Cool. Then maybe YouTube it is! Did you DJ or do college radio? Well, maybe a podcast would be something to think about as the focus of how you’re going to build out a platform and audience. Do you cook or love food? Start a dinner series. The possibilities are endless, and I truly believe you can make almost anything work as a medium or method as long as it’s something you actually enjoy doing. 

Step 2: Avoid the tools trap

Once you pick out your medium, it’s possible you’ll need some software based tools to help you start creating or promoting what you’re working on. It’s another decision point that looks innocent enough, but can stop you in your tracks before you ever really get started. Before you spend days or weeks obsessing over the exact right tool for your needs, know that the tool you pick will have basically zero impact on your ability to bootstrap and grow your audience. And you can always switch it up later on when you’ve outgrown it. You just need to do the work and break through the resistance that’s native to any creative endeavor.

An example I love to give about why tool selection just doesn’t matter is my own newsletter. I used MadMimi as my email provider for years—it took me from zero to 10,000+ subscribers, and from zero to hundreds of thousands in revenue across all of my products and programs. A few years ago I moved over to a more full-featured email service provider, and I did spend a lot of time thinking through options at that time. But it would have been exactly the wrong thing to be thinking about on Day 1. I’m so glad that I just went with MadMimi and got started instead of spending weeks finding the “just right” tool. Because evaluating three different email providers before ever sending an email would have sucked the wind right out of my sails.

A related pitfall is focusing on automation too early. If you’re doing anything content related, you can go a long way with tools like Zapier and with virtual assistants or people you hire straight from your audience. To this day, I still have someone helping me out part-time who manually follows a process to find and then post VC jobs to my blog. I hope that shows you that you don’t need to hire a developer to build some automated machine learning thingy to post content for you, when maybe paying someone $20/hour to post stuff by hand would get you launched today (versus six months from now).

Pro Mode

Step 3: Go pro as soon as possible

One thing I didn’t realize until many years into my journey is how important it is to “go pro” before you think you’re ready. My definition of what it means to go pro comes straight from Steve Pressfield, in his book The War of Art. In fact, he devoted a whole chapter to this critical topic.

“The amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps. To the amateur, the game is his avocation. To the pro it’s his vocation. The amateur plays part-time, the professional full-time. The amateur is a weekend warrior. The professional is there seven days a week.”

You don’t need to take Pressman’s words literally to get value out of the powerful mindshift he’s proposing. Here’s my version of “going pro.”