I’m cutting 72% of my revenue - here’s why

(2 min read) Why I’m exiting my Creator Partnerships consulting and doubling down on serving the Creator Middle Class

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Avi Gandhi & Melody Song
December 17, 2024

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I’m going to exit my Creator Partnerships consulting business in 2025 and turn down all but one advising client.

As a reminder, here’s my revenue breakdown from 2024:

You might be thinking:

Avi, are you out of your mind? You’re about to leave over 72% of your revenue behind!

Yes…but it’s not that simple.

Let’s get into it!

I’m exiting Creator Partnerships consulting for 2 reasons:

The macro trends are against Creator Partnerships consulting

The type of consulting my firm did involved helping startups do partnerships with Creators - everything from original content to creator acquisition to influencer marketing.

Two (2) years ago, this was a high-demand skillset:

  • There were lots of Creator-facing companies with millions of dollars in venture capital funding

  • Most of them had teams who came from tech and didn’t really know how to work with Creators

  • The market had a shortage of experienced Creator-facing people

Today, the market is very different:

  • Far fewer venture dollars are flowing into far fewer companies

  • Many Creator-facing companies have contracted, laying off thousands of employees including hundreds of experienced Creator Partnerships execs

  • All the inexperienced people from two years ago now have 2 years of experience working with Creators - as do the founders

As a result, despite my reach and engagement growing on LinkedIn and Creator Logic, inbound deal flow has slowed to a trickle. To get new customers, I’d have to try a new growth channel - likely outbound prospecting. I wouldn’t be able to do that well while also building Creator Logic.

I want to focus on one mission

I initially believed it would be possible to have two businesses with two completely different customers:

  • Partner with Creators to serve Creator Economy companies

  • Creator Logic to serve Creators

After trying it for nearly a year, I’ve realized I should take my own advice about focus. By trying to split my creative brain across several audiences and my business brain across several businesses, I ended up underserving all of them.

At the end of the day, I guess I’m no Elon Musk.

I want to focus on the mission that motivates me most - and that mission is to build the Creator Middle Class, by helping a million Creators cross the $100,000 income threshold.

I believe this is a worthy pursuit to spend the next 5-10 years of my life, and so I am leaving behind my consulting business to focus on it.

My strategy for 2025

Despite leaving a big source of income behind, I still believe I will earn more in 2025 than I did in 2024.

Here’s my 3-pillar strategy to do it:

Short-form video as top-of-funnel

I’ve doubled down on short-form video, with a focus on LinkedIn. My career has been served by being early in high-growth spaces, and I think creating high-quality educational video on LinkedIn - where they are investing in video - could meaningfully contribute to my mission:

  • Bite-sized educational videos have the potential to reach millions of Creators, and even a single insight can meaningfully impact one’s business

  • I see Creators from other platforms joining LinkedIn every day, because they want more partnerships and LinkedIn is where the decision-makers are

  • It’s easy to syndicate this video to other platforms using platforms like Later or Repurpose.io, so I can slowly build a presence without much effort

I can use the organic distribution I get from LinkedIn and other socials to drive organic growth of this newsletter, which will become the middle of my funnel.

If you’d like to support me in this effort, I’d deeply appreciate it if you followed me / Creator Logic on the various Creator Logic socials:

Creator Logic as mid-funnel

For two years now, Creator Logic has been a labor of love. It’s grown to 37,000 subscribers and made me around $10,000 this year (including a payment I just received that wasn’t included in the above breakdown). That’s nowhere near profitable relative to the amount of time and effort I’ve put into it. I spend 10-20 hours a week on Creator Logic, so that would put my hourly wage at $10-$20 an hour. Compare that to my consulting rate of $250-$500 an hour…

HOWEVER!

I believe the Creator Logic newsletter serves three (3) purposes:

  • Helps self-invested Creators looking to make real money learn more and faster through deeper content

  • Generate srevenue through sponsorships and affiliates

  • Funnels the most driven Creators to my new community, The $100k Creators Club, so they get real support in their push to $100k in income.

This newsletter is an investment. It’s not yet generating ROI, BUT it serves my mission. I meet readers and get positive feedback at every meetup, convention, and dinner - and I’ve seen the impact it’s made to inspire Creators to push forward in their journeys. It’s bigger than me, and it also has the potential to pay off as an investment - so I’ve got to keep going with it.

The $100k Creators Club as my core offering

Knowledge makes a journey possible, but community makes it happen (just ask the Fellowship of the Ring 🤓)

I would not have made the money I did this year had I not had a strong community who did things for me like

  • Introducing me to a $137,000 client (!!!)

  • Getting me a panel at a major conference

  • Offering a perspective that grew this newsletter 300%

Their support made my journey less lonely and more achievable, and it even put money in my pocket - but I didn’t always have them. I started this Creator journey in my spare bedroom, and it was incredibly lonely. I looked for communities, but many were for established Creators - there weren’t any good ones for early-stage Creators.

I had to figure a lot of stuff out on my own, and I’m fortunate that both my extroverted nature and the fact that my content involved talking to a lot of other Creators made community-building easier for me.

Not everyone is so lucky, which is why I decided to launch The $100K Creator Club.

If you’re early on the journey from making content to making money, and want resources, peer support, and opportunity-sharing - maybe The $100k Creators Club is right for you.

I intend to spend 2025 focused almost entirely on creating video content, writing Creator Logic, and running my community - building them into a funnel that monetizes through sponsors, referrals, and paid membership all the way down.

It’s a scary leap, but one I feel I have to make - to serve my mission of building the Creator Middle Class, to serve all of you as you build your own businesses, and to serve myself as I seek fulfillment and self-actualization from my career.

Thanks for being on this journey with me - I’m excited for what next year will bring!

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Written by Avi Gandhi, edited by Melody Song,
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