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🚀 Taz & Alessia's Massive 400% Revenue Growth: From Lockdown Content to a Thriving Multiplatform Business 💡

Explore Taz & Alessia's 10-channel, 6-revenue-stream Creator journey

Author

Avi Gandhi
March 28, 2023

The Creator

I actually do have that percentage.

It was a 400% increase in our brand revenue.

Taz and Alessia are a couple from Melbourne who started making content during COVID; what started as an amusing way to pass time eventually turned into a significant multiplatform business with a larger mission - “to help quash stigmas around lesbians and inspire other queer people at the same time.” We won’t get into their mission here, as the linked Refinery29 article does a great job of it. Instead, we’re going to dig into their highly diversified business that spans 10 social channels and 6 streams of revenue.

For premium Superlogic subscribers, I’m now releasing The Stack on Tuesdays, along with The Business! One email a week with both the regular and premium content will keep your inboxes clean and my sanity intact. Keep scrolling and click through to read about why they chose:

  • To pay a VA instead of paying themselves

  • Manual uploading over re-distribution tools

  • Self-editing over a paid editor

  • Their current, excellent management company over another that approached them

And much much more.

Let’s get into it!

The Business

Breakdown

Links

Observations

Brand deals make up 65% of their revenue, but the real number increased 400% year-over-year - much more than any other revenue stream. Thus, this breakdown was likely very different in 2021 (more on this in The Stack below).

There's so many brand deals every week… we’d get offered 10 brand deals and we would turn down 90% of them, sometimes all of them.

  • TikTok, despite being widely considered less valuable than other platforms for driving conversions, does drive the majority of their business due to the brand marketing opportunity.

  • Taz and Alessia are only accepting about 10% of the brand opportunities that approach them!

  • While I am generally bearish on talent managers, their management firm has done a phenomenal job of increasing both their deal flow and their fees, leading to a massive increase in revenue! This is great evidence that a great management company / agency actually can provide a ton of value.

I asked what they consider when accepting deals:

We look at the fee. The brand itself. Do we know it? Do we use it? Do we really want to promote it to our audience, like do we like the product that much? Have they worked with the LGBT community before? If the brand has some good morals behind it too, that always helps - we work with a brand called Modibodi and they do a lot of charity work. So we feel good about working with brands like that too. So we kind of look into their backstory as well. You know, where is the product made, is it ethical. We have our own apparel that we sell, and we get those questions from our audience. So I can only assume that they have that purchasing behavior when purchasing from large companies as well.

Another really important factor is - what does the brief look like? Like, what do they require us to do? Is it fun? Can we align it with the content that we create? If we can, we’re definitely way more inclined to do it. It could be our dream brand, but if they want us to do a dance, we might not do it because that would be so different to our usual content.

It sounds like the checklist for brands to get creators interested includes:

  • Pay reasonably

  • Pick creators whose content and audience aligns with the brief

  • Run an ethical business

Moving on…Taz and Alessia get 20% of their revenue from LinkedIn, despite having just 0.05% of their audience there. That’s a 400x relative ROI!

  • LinkedIn is a powerful sales channel for creators because brand, speaking, and other buyers hang out and network there.

  • At this point, I’d have to recommend every creator build a presence on the platform, even if it’s 80% engaging with other Creator Economy content and posting 1x weekly.

This year, we've started doing some speaking and consulting, which I think has come mainly due to LinkedIn. I mean, we don't have many followers on LinkedIn at this stage, probably only 100-200 each, but we've already been able to get some speaking gigs out of those….they're really fulfilling for me. I love sharing value and speaking to audiences.

Snapchat, once again, is 0% of revenue despite being >17% of audience. They started producing on Snapchat because a 3rd party got them into a limited monetization program in 2021 that ran out after a few months…but by that point, they had a big enough audience that they continued to invest. My hope is that their revenue sharing beta becomes more widely available soon.

  • I connected Taz and Alessia to Snap’s team, and hopefully they get monetizing soon!

Taz and Alessia also launched a paid community via their Team TANDA (T and A, get it?) app. It sounds like they expected that to be a big revenue source, and while it hasn’t panned out that way yet, they’ve found other value in it.

When we first started the app we wanted it to be like a big percentage on the wheel. We actually even thought maybe we can get it to a point where we don't need to take on brand deals anymore, we could just basically work for our community in a way.

But I don't think we want to ask anything of our community. Really, we don't even ask them to gift. Just them being attentive to the content, showing up to events, is really important for us. If they want to support financially and subscribe to the app, that's just like an extra bonus.

At the start, when we were building the app, we really saw it as like “We have 500,000 followers on TikTok, if we can get this many percent to subscribe, then we're sweet.”

But really, we want a more intimate group. We don't just want random people on the internet who follow us for a video here and there to connect on the app, we want people on the app that truly have an interest in connecting with the community as well.

So yeah, it's been a very big change in how we viewed the app in the last five months.

Reading between the lines, I think Taz and Alessia have realized something many creators do when they try to launch paid subscription members (around content, community, or both) - membership is hard. It’s hard to convert fans to pay, and it’s even harder to deliver value that fans feel is worth their investment; however, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.

We love these kind of smaller, more intimate events, and just listening to the feedback. It’s hard to facilitate a group of 50 people in comparison to maybe 25-30, because all of our events currently are online. In terms of people finding a space to speak, it was quite difficult, and they definitely let us know about that….

So we found that it's actually more valuable for us personally to have more of an intimate events group, where we can actually get to know each individual person, hear them speak, hear their story, connect them with like-minded individuals in that same group.

It’s clear they love their community, and they get value out of being able to speak directly to their most passionate fans, but their expectations for it as a major driver of the business have changed dramatically over the last year.

The last interesting thing I’ll highlight is that they get 15% of their revenue from creating content for brands. This is more for-hire creative work, where they don’t have to leverage their socials.

For example, we worked with some brands to produce content for their social platforms. So, it doesn't get posted on ours.

…

We like those as well because we don't have to post them on ours, so our followers don't have to see those ads come up, but we can still work with the brands that we love.

…

We say no to less of those - like, we like doing them, regardless of the price. The price obviously does come to play, but it's not being posted on our account, so we're more inclined to do it because we're not bombarding our audience with an advertisement. It’s for the brand’s audience. Obviously, we we have to like the brand, we always have to align with the brand, and the brief.

Here they highlight a common concern by creators doing brand deals - that they don’t want to bombard their audience with advertisements - and provide an interesting solution for brands. It’s worth noting that Taz and Alessia charge more if the brand is going to boost the content; however, for brands that want to be in the Creator Economy mix, but also want to build their owned social presence, leveraging creators to make content for brand-owned socials seems to be a great secondary strategy to build credibility with audiences.

Thanks for reading! Keep scrolling for this week’s Operating Stack!

My mission is to enable millions of people to benefit from the emergence of the Creator Economy. I believe that the more successful both Creators and the companies that serve Creators are, the better off humankind will be.

I help companies succeed in the Creator Economy. If you want to work with me, book a time.

The Stack

Team

Representation - Born Bred Talent

  • They were hesitant to get management in general

    • Taz worked in music, was jaded about management

  • They spoke to another management company called Zooz

    • They were really nice, but didn’t really connect

    • Zooz didn’t follow up on their conversation

    • Their talent list didn’t resonate - it was a bunch of beautiful IG models, not really many LGBT talent

  • Born Bred

    • They’re leading the TikTok space in Australia

    • They offered a 3 month trial, extended it to 6 months

      • Really showed what they had to offer

      • Got them comfortable with the day to day manager

    • Taz and Alessia laid out specific asks that Born Bred were willing to meet them on

      • Meeting on a fortnightly basis

      • Wanted to carve out projects unrelated to social

      • Wanted to carve out revenue from existing / owned projects like app, livestreaming revenue, etc.

      • No management email in bio, just management company name

    • They signed at the start of 2022

    • They saw a whopping 400% revenue increase YoY

    • Their growth was part of it, but they don’t think they could have consistently got the kind of work they are now (QUOTE)

      • Born Bred solved the consistency problem

      • Taz and Alessia still get inbound emails, but Born Bred are still bringing them a lot more revenue

I don't know if we could have consistently got that amount of work before them. We were landing some really great contracts. We'd work with Doritos and Tinder just on our own; we had really worldwide brands coming to us as well, and for great prices.

But the problem was, we wanted consistent work. And they solved that problem really easily. They were able to get us consistently good quality work, which we loved.

Most of my readers will know that I’m not a representation maximalist at all, but their story with Born Bred is a great reminder that excellent representation - where the reps are hunting for and bringing in new business, not just fielding inbound offers - really can take a creator’s earnings to the next level.

Content Production - Currently just them

  • Previously worked with some editors

    • Met through Upwork and through their community

    • They were great but Taz and Alessia don’t post YT content regularly enough to have one on hand

  • They prefer to edit their TikTok videos their own way

    • Alessia has a way of doing it and she’s comfortable and confident

      • Doesn’t trust anyone else to do it the way she would (QUOTE)

      • If it doesn’t work, she knows it’s on her

If it doesn't work, I'm like “Okay, cool. It's my own fault.”

Where if if it didn't work for someone else, I would be like “What are they doing wrong? They're not doing it like me!” and I don't want to put that pressure on someone else, you know, I'd rather it be on myself.

This is a common mindset among artistic creators - for example, David Dobrik and Emma Chamberlain have voiced similar points of view. If what the creator does themselves seems to directly contribute to audience and revenue growth, there’s a lot of fear and risk aversion that needs to be overcome in order to hand off that work to someone else.

Operations - Virtual Assistant - Jenn - via Outsourced Doers

  • In Philippines

  • Got an ad on Instagram for an agency that lets you hire a VA from the Philippines but handles all backend - legal, holidays, etc.

  • They LOVE her

It was a massive decision because at the time, we weren't even paying ourselves, so we were going to pay someone else while we were still working our other jobs. We saw it as a way that we could still have someone working on content creation stuff and admin while we were doing our day-to-day job.

It was kind of motivating for me knowing that every day we would be working on our dream in some way by having Jenn being a part of that. But it was a massive decision and a risk because it was financially a considerable amount to go through that agency. Like, in comparison, you can go on Upwork and hire someone for a really low price, but we wanted to make sure we were doing it the right way.

It was no lock-in contract, so we tried it for I think three months with the intention of “If this isn't right for us, we'll step away.”

But it was just great from the start.

Content Creation

Video - iPhones + Sony ZV1 + PC for Streaming Gaming + Ring Light

  • Sony for food content + YouTube videos

  • The rest on their phones

Audio - Rode Wireless Mics

Editing - MacBook Pro + Adobe Premiere Pro + Splice

  • Taz used Adobe for many years - she was a DJ

  • Alessia used Adobe in HS and while working for Channel 9

  • “Industry standard” - they are planning for a future where they work with editors, and having their process be on Adobe will make that easy

  • Splice = similar to Capcut, used for short-form video editing on iPhone

Asset Management - Google Drive and Google Photos

  • Store and share assets for brand work

  • Back up photos

  • They’ve used Dropbox and OneDrive in the past, but prefer the Google Suite because they like the docs, sheets, email

Project Management - Asana + Clockify + Loom + 1Password

  • Asana for both content planning and brand deal management

  • Their managers use Trello, but Taz and Alessia don’t like it, so they just use it to see stuff management shares

  • Why do they like Asana?

    • They started with Asana

    • Like that you can add goals and progress tracking in Asana

    • Can start chats with people in Asana

    • Prefers the UX

    • Prefers for long-term projects

  • Use Loom to communicate systems and processes for virtual assistant

    • Record how they do a task so VA knows how to do it as well

We were on a trip with a lot of creators and there was a creator in front of me on the bus on her notes, and it had passwords to all of her accounts! And I was just thinking - if there was a horrible person sitting behind her, they could just write all of those down and be able to blackmail her for her accounts, which happens a lot for creators.

So I think Password security is something that I would encourage any creator to invest in.

  • Use 1Password to share passwords securely with VA, editors, etc.

    • 1Password has “vaults” - they can choose which passwords/accesses go into the vault

    • Can give 1-time links, etc.

    • Alerts

Design - Canva + Adobe Illustrator + Miro

  • Canva for most things

  • Illustrator for merch

  • Miro for brainstorming, though Canva now has a whiteboard feature they haven’t tried yet. If it’s good, they might switch because Miro is a different subscription and an additional cost.

Podcast Production / Distribution - Anchor

  • They’re planning to launch a podcast

  • They’ll be repurposing their weekly reminders from the app as mini podcasts

    • These are 2-8 minute videos with advice, tips, perspective on different subjects for followers including CTAs

Distribution - Virtual Assistant manually uploading

  • They tried a bunch of scheduling / uploading tools, but ultimately chose to have their VA do it manually

    • Later - Were using to repurpose content to Pinterest and IG, but it didn’t have Reels support

    • Planoly - It has Reels support but it wasn’t worth paying for a tool that only was useful for one platform

      • It also wouldn’t remove the watermark

    • Repurpose.io - saw a >50% drop in views!

      • Can remove watermark

      • But if the views get nerfed then it’s not worth it

  • Currently all manual through their VA

Bio Links - Liinks

  • They had the most customizability for branding

    • Website-level customization

  • Taz used Linktree personally in the past, but Liinks gave way more customization

  • BONUS - they verified them - their first verification!

The verification piece sounds like a joke, but it’s an interesting idea - verification of creators can make them feel special, and that specialness can create loyalty. With bio links, which are super low friction to change, that loyalty can make a huge difference in retention.

Email - Clavio

  • Was using Active Campaign, but super expensive and weren’t sending enough

  • Looked into MailChimp, but didn’t have automations for the sequences they wanted

  • Segmentation, sequences, price were most important

    • Loved the notes and CRM aspect of Active Campaign

Business Management

Communication - WhatsApp + Slack + WiseStamp

  • WhatsApp for internal team

    • VA is in Philippines, so easy neutral way to communicate

    • Has had WhatsApp for ages

    • Easy to use

    • Likes keeping personal texts separate, so WhatsApp is work and texts are personal

  • Slack because management uses it

    • Slack is easy to forget about

  • WiseStamp for email signature

    • QUOTE - Always trying to find little ways of standing out

    • This was an early choice, so were price sensitive + lots of customization options (IG feed, quotes, etc. in email signature)

I'm always trying to find little ways of standing out and being memorable. I feel like our first email signature was just a font with a color, and it didn't look as professional. So I've wanted something to show we're serious about content creation and you can trust us…and I feel like an email signature can sometimes give that vibe. It's also a great way to display a portfolio without saying to someone “Do you want to see our content?” It's right there at the bottom. It was just a way that we could connect with people we were communicating with by email.

I love this so much I might steal it.

Credit Card - Quantas

  • Personal, occasionally uses for business

  • Currently running the business on cash flow

  • Haven’t really needed a credit card, it’s the last thing on their mind

  • It’s a great challenge for Taz to manage the cash flow and train her to not overspend

Bank - Commonwealth business account + Up account

  • Up = Banking for Gen Z in Australia

    • They like it, may move business banking there

      • Easy to use

      • Easy to navigate

      • Fun, colorful

      • Can make “folders” to separate money within accounts

      • Can set up automations easily

    • Solid interest rates

  • Commonwealth is long-standing Australian bank

Finances - Accountant

  • Had Xero, but it was expensive and they didn’t use it

  • They do all accounting on Google Sheets

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If you have questions you’d like me to ask creators, or want to work with me on your Creator strategy, please reach out to me at [email protected]. I can’t promise I’ll get every question answered, but I can promise that I will do my best to get the most relevant, interesting ones!

Thanks again for being part of this community. See you next week!

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