Last week, I met Jack Appleby, a LinkedIn thought leader in social media strategy who moonlights as an Instagram basketball influencer (and just went pro in Europe at the age of 35 - definitely a frontrunner for Most Interesting Man in the World.)

He asked me a question I’ve been mulling on since:

“Are you a content person or a flywheel person?”

I think what he really meant to ask me was:

“Do you make content because you like it, or to sell something?”

He then pointed out that he himself is a “content person”, while someone like Justin Welsh, the “King of LinkedIn” who has sold over $10M in digital products, is a “flywheel person”.

As for me?

The truth is, I’m somewhere in between and I should probably pick one.

A framework I often share with my corporate advisory clients is the Artist-Entrepreneur framework.

It's very simple: All Creators fall somewhere along a spectrum from Artist to Entrepreneur.

Jack’s “content person or flywheel person” framework is very similar. The way I interpret it is that:

I act like a “content person”, spending time and effort writing about a variety of topics that please me regardless of platform or audience.

However, I don't make enough money from my content directly - i.e. from brand deals, affiliates, content subscriptions, etc. - to make a living.

More than 80% of my income is from offering Advisory services to companies that need my knowledge and experience to help navigate important Creator-related decisions and initiatives.

These companies find me on LinkedIn from a relatively small subset of my posts - the ones where I talk about my experiences as an executive working with Creators.

That’s maybe 10% of all the posts I do, because I both find it boring to tell my own stories on repeat, and want to help Creators as well as companies.

Still, it’s those stories that make me money.

So what should I do?

Honestly, I don’t have a good answer right now. I need to spend more time thinking through it.

But I’ve come to realize, at least, that this is a question every Creator should consider:

Are you a “content person” or a “flywheel person”?

If you already know for yourself, reply to any Creator Logic email and tell me! I’d love to hear from you.

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Some friends of Creator Logic launched a Creator-interview podcast called Driven; the first guest is 32M-subscriber YouTuber Jordan Matter (and his million-scale YouTuber son, Hudson).

Jordan is an incredibly interesting person and there are a ton of great takeaways from this interview. One that really stuck with me was his advice on investing in your content: don't be afraid to spend money. Jordan's video budgets range from $1,000 to $20,000. Hudson spent over $100k on his first hire and made back 4x that amount. Their philosophy is simple: if you want to scale, you have to be willing to invest.

I've been on the fence about hiring more expensive help, and this conversation convinced me to pull the trigger. You might find a worthwhile takeaway yourself.