To Thrive In This Ultra-Competitive Creator Economy, Do the Inefficient Things

Shipping everydays, getting bruises, and spotting quirks will be 3 of them.

The Creator Economy is that place where someone won’t turn off their ad blocker but would pay $10 to have their dick rated on OnlyFans.

Bizarre times. Kids no longer want to be astronauts, and why would they? Too much lag to stream from Mars. They want to grow up to be YouTubers now, put food on their tables with Patreon pledges.

This is, on one hand, exciting. Imagine everyone following their creative instincts instead of clocking up exploitative shifts at an Amazon warehouse.

But it also means more content creators to compete against.

We’re over 50 million people in this Creator Economy that is taking over the world. And as more people join the creative force, the winner traits will get subtler. 5-step checklists and hard data are so 2015 anyway.

Now’s the time for soft skills and human connection, which are organically inefficient. But as the landscape gets more competitive, inefficient practices like these 3 will be essential to rise among the crowd.

1. Ship your “everydays”

When I first heard about the NFT hysteria, I thought people were paying millions for PNG files you can’t copy-paste. I was sort of right.

But what does it take to sell $69 million of your art in a single day, as Beeple did? Why him?

Of course, Mike Winkelmann, codename Beeple, took advantage of the NFT trend. But the title of the work he sold tells you the story: “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS.”

Five thousand days, five thousand creations. A prolific routine that made Beeple amass a following of 2.5 million across all social media by the time of the auction. All 5000 pieces compiled into a single, gigantic, digital collage.

Turns out it takes thirteen years of daily work to become an overnight success.

Like me, you’ve probably ignored the “be consistent” advice before.

So here’s another take. It’s not about “pleasing the algorithms.” It’s about the question, why you?

I’ve always romanticised the artist-hermit lifestyle. Lock up in my tower for months like Carl Jung, rise and write at first light, Hemingway-like. But with 50 million participants, the Creator Economy has become a massive party that never ends.

No one ever goes home to bake thoughts in solitude anymore. It’s all done impromptu. In public.

That means you can’t show up to this party uninvited and wiggle your lead magnet in our faces, expecting to lure us like curious capuchin monkeys. We’ve seen it all already. Our little primate stomachs are full of your disconnected market research.

Consistency is about one thing.

Familiarity.

Being familiar is the true end-game. You can catch my attention by being disruptive and novel, but you won’t keep it that way. To keep it, you need to build familiarity, rapport, trust.

So why you? Because you’ve been to this party every single day. You’ve been sharing experiences, entertaining guests, getting involved, pouring drinks, sharing dirty secrets and hooking people up.

Meanwhile, I was being the artist-hermit. I died alone in a cave and nobody heard an echo.

Forget about pleasing the algorithm: consistency is about pleasing people. And I’m confident that, in the near future, those two will mean the same thing.

2. Spot the unspoken quirks

Jimmy Donaldson gets YouTube. Here are some titles of his videos:

• “Last To Remove Hand, Wins House Challenge.”
• “I Ubered Random People In A Tank.”
• “I Gave A Homeless Man A Home.”
• “Tipping Pizza Delivery Guys $10,000.”
• “I Gave People $1,000,000 But ONLY 1 Minute To Spend It.”

Those are not clickbait. Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. MrBeast, has accumulated more than 200 million total views on those videos alone. They are the YouTube algorithm’s love language. They are like sugared water for hummingbirds, the Ring of Power for Gollum.

And sure, you could think, “Well of course I’d go viral if I had a spare $1 million to throw on a video,” but a preposterous budget has nothing to do with “getting it.”

MrBeast went viral long before the million-dollar sponsorships

After a rough, experimenting beginning, Jimmy began to notice what kind of content YouTube wanted. Soon he was captivating the algorithm for the cost of a fidget spinner.

What’s that thing we always say? “I guess you had to be there.”

You won’t see 7-figure numbers in his first viral videos. But you’ll notice the same absurd, over-the-top ideas that YouTube loved so much:

• “Reading The Entire Dictionary In One Sitting”
• “I Counted To 100,000!”
• “Spinning A Fidget Spinner For 24 Hours Straight”

That was a low-budget Casanova pulling of some first-class, algorithmic flirting. Now he has close to 60 million subscribers, so we might safely guess it worked.

To rise above other creators, you have to “get it”

Each platform, community, and craft have their unspoken quirks and implicit rules.

You know when you tell a friend a hilarious story, but the reaction you get is crickets? What’s that thing we always say? “I guess you had to be there.”

But here’s the thing about attending a party: you can stand in a corner, facing a wall, interacting with no one. “Getting it” goes beyond showing up. It’s about engaging, examining, understanding. It’s more than “being there,” it’s being present when things happen.

If MrBeast didn’t pay attention to what people really wanted to watch, he’d still be struggling to chase the trends instead of giving away Lambos.

Don’t just show up on a platform. Become the platform. Engage with it until you “get it.”

3. Get the bruises

Jack Conte runs Patreon. He basically pioneered the Creator Economy. In 2019, they sent half a billion dollars to creative people scattered around more than 100 countries.

Yet he’d rather go on stage to do a big sob and talk about his misses.

He would talk about the box with thousands of CDs of footage he recorded as a teenager. The camera gear he tried to invent. The stop-motion animation he worked on for entire summers. The music albums he’d recorded and mixed entirely.

Shut up about “victimhood.” What that skinny guy needs is that you teach him how to flirt on Tinder.

None of that was used, released, shared, or sold. Ever. They all went nowhere. But none of them compared to one of Conte’s biggest flops.

In 2014, Jack maxed out two credit cards to make a music video involving robots and a replica of the Millenium Falcon cockpit. One million views later, his YouTube dashboard said he made $166 in ad revenue. Basically, a “fuck off” notification.

That was the painful situation that inspired Patreon.

He said in an Inc interview:

There are so many folks these days that have millions and millions of followers online and they’ll post videos or podcasts or whatever it is that they post and they’ll get, you know, 50,000 people seeing it on a regular basis and then they get their ad revenue cheque at the end of the month and it’s 50 bucks. And that sucks.

Ten years ago, that was just the status quo. The thing is, Jack wasn’t able to isolate this problem so eloquently because he read a couple of Fast Company articles. To learn about people’s pain points, get the bruises yourself.

But as the Creator Economy gets more competitive, the pain points will drift into the long-tail. They will get more niche and specific. And thus, harder to find.

We can’t aim at the obvious problems anymore

“Unleash my potential”? Please let that cheesy line die when Tony Robbins retires to his plot of land on the Moon. Self-help is getting so much hate lately precisely because of its “one-size-fits-all” approach.

Shut up about “victimhood” already. What that skinny guy needs is that you teach him how to flirt on Tinder.

Our itches are moving farther down our backs. But that doesn’t mean we’re not willing to pay you to scratch them. They’re just harder to find now. That will require us to move swiftly, fail fast, and get bruises. Like Jack Conte, the only way to know how much it sucked to be a creator is to create a lot and suffer it yourself.

So here’s a summary:

1. Do the everydays. Not for the algorithms, but for the people. You can catch our attention for a second if you’re disruptive, but if you’re familiar, you’ll keep it.
2. Spot the unspoken quirks. Don’t just “show up every day.” Pay attention, understand the game you’re playing. Engage until you get it. You can’t cater to people’s desires unless you find out what do they actually want.
3. Show me your bruises. To understand people’s pain points, get the bruises yourself. Eating too much gives you a stomachache, but so does a kick in the balls. Same pain, different audiences.

All three practices are painfully inefficient, yes, but this is good news. The extreme competition only means we can afford to get really niche into the things we like and still be profitable. Showing up every day only means we’ll find friends instead of leads. And getting bruises only means we’ll now have a good story to tell our friends.

And if you don’t find my story funny — well, I guess you had to be there.