I’m quitting my #1 goal for 2024

(3 min read) The three reasons I decided to fail fast and ditch my bid to grow to 100,000 Creator Logic followers

Author

Avi Gandhi
May 14, 2024

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One of my goals for 2024 was to hit 100,000 followers…but not anymore, and I’m about to explain why.

But first:

I’m giving away a 4-day Industry Track Ticket to VidCon Anaheim, taking place from June 26 to 29, 2024 at the Anaheim Convention Center 🎉 

Connect with fellow Creators and industry leaders at meetups, learn the present and future of the business at panels, and attend some epic afterhours parties while you’re at it!

To win, all you have to do is refer a friend to Creator Logic using your personalized link below. The more people you share it with, the more chances you have to enjoy an Industry pass to one of my favorite events.

So what are you waiting for? Get sharing! I’m speaking on no fewer than THREE (3) panels, so you won’t want to miss it 😁 

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To hit 100,000 followers by the end of 2024, my strategy was to drive growth for Creator Logic’s TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram accounts by using the video recordings of the interviews I do for this newsletter. 

The tactical approach was simple:

  1. Hire an experienced editor / social media manager

  2. Edit interviews into long-form videos for YouTube, released weekly

  3. Cut down the long-forms into short-forms and release 2-4 a week

  4. Drive growth by cross-promoting via the newsletter, LinkedIn, and guest socials hoping that every once in a while, something goes viral

It took longer than expected to spin things up, but once we were going, we were really going! 

We consistently put out a 30-60 min long-form YouTube video every week, on the same day, at the same time, as well as 2-4 shorts across platforms.

More importantly, though, our videos were getting better each time!

Then after a few months and 10 or so videos, I opted to cancel the initiative.

There are a few reasons why…

Let’s get into it!

0. I was losing money

Since I’m a self-funded Creator, the resources I can invest are limited. Every dollar I spend on this has to return more than a dollar, otherwise I’m just depleting my kid’s college fund (at least, that’s how it feels). As a result, my budget is limited and the emotional stakes for investing it are high.

Since I am a business-minded person, and this newsletter is about the business of Creators, money is the base logic for most of my frameworks. Testing a new business for a few months and seeing a negative ROI would ordinarily be enough to pull the plug - which is why this is “reason 0”. It’s table stakes.

However, video is a long-term investment. You have to take a negative ROI for an extended period of time before you get a positive ROI, but the upside can be huge in success.

There are, after all, an order of magnitude more million-scale video channels than million-scale newsletters.

But how does one sustain the kind of long-term investment for the duration needed to actually get to positive ROI?

My hypothesis: you need a different kind of return on investment…

You need to enjoy it.

And I did not, for three reasons:

1. Video isn’t easy for me

Making video requires skillsets (lighting, editing, cinematography) and a level of patience I just don’t have. As a result, I had to spend money on the things I could afford (like editing) and just accept the things I couldn’t (like my background and camera setup). That always left my videos feeling incomplete, imperfect, and/or unsatisfying. No matter how good the conversation or well-edited the video, I couldn’t ignore how I didn’t like the timbre of my audio, the angle of the camera, or the clutter in the background 😅 

2. I’m not super passionate about video

Creatively-speaking, I’m a writer - I enjoy writing and did it for fun before I started gathering a following. I’ve never made videos for fun, and I don’t really find the creative process that’s involved to be entertaining. Add to that the complexities of thumbnails, titles, and all the other optimization nuances and the launch of every video felt wildly stressful. 

3. I can’t yet afford to focus on video

Between writing two emails and 4-6 LinkedIn posts a week, delivering brand deals and advisory work, and doing sales and strategy calls, I produce a lot of output each week. While I’m certain I could figure out how to make video work for me if I dedicated 90% of my brainpower to it, the same way I did when I started with LinkedIn and then again with Creator Logic, it’s just too soon in my larger business for me to do that. 

If making video was lucrative, easy, enjoyable, or I had space for it, it might have been worth continuing to do.

Instead, it was expensive, hard, unsatisfying, and impossible to focus on. As a result, I always felt guilty - like I was investing both too much and not enough simultaneously.

So I stopped.

It was a tough choice, mostly because my editor was (and, fortunately, still is) a friend of over 15 years.  Working with him was the one piece of the process that WAS fun. I’m lucky that as a Creator himself, he understood the mental toll the project was taking on me. That made the process of letting my grand vision of a video business go that much easier.

So what now?

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Robert Burns

Despite failing fast on video, there are other aspects of my Creator business that are going very well:

  • My newsletter continues to grow and, as I am sure you have all noticed, recently started monetizing with sponsorships and affiliates (by the way - please continue to check out and support my sponsors - that’s the best way to support Creator Logic)

  • I crossed 20,000 followers on LinkedIn - a follower count that seemed impossible just 2 years ago - and have made more than the US median income in sponsorship and referral revenue from that audience

  • I brought on a partner for my consulting business, Partner with Creators, who has been delivering great work for our clients

My strategy for the rest of the year will change out of necessity, and hopefully for the better. That said, I’m still working through exactly how. Once I have those details worked out, I’ll report back.

As for video - it’s still a goal of mine. Though it will likely never be easy for me, at some point in the future, I am confident that I will feel more passionate about it and be able to allocate more attention to it.

Then, hopefully, I will find building a video business more fun than I do right now. 

As always, thanks for reading!

I recently went on my friend Justin Moore’s show Creator Debates to argue that evergreen content > trending content. It’s a fun discussion, check it out here.

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Written by Avi Gandhi, edited by Melody Song,
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