🎨Notes from a Night with Creators
Hey team 👋
Earlier this week I got to attend the Creator Leaders Summit at the VaynerMedia office in London - an event hosted by the lovely Aydan Al-Saad and Gabrielle Nussbaum 😊
There were 100+ amazing creators all hanging out in the same room and the team had arranged for some awesome talks and panels too. Lots of knowledge was dropped so I thought I’d share some of things that stuck with me 👇
💬 Panels
🔥 Fireside Chat: Simon Squibb
Simon is the founder of HelpBnk and a Sunday Times Bestseller with his book: What’s Your Dream? and it was the first time I’d really heard him speak (yes, I’ve been living under a social media rock 😬) but I was really impressed with how he spoke.
I think the thing I liked the most was how humble and down to earth he is. His mission is to help as many people as possible, but you can feel that he genuinely cares about it and he’s not just saying it.
His whole philosophy is about helping one person a day. It’s simple, it’s doable, and it’s what resonated the most with me.
For me it’s not the money - it never has been 🙂↔️
You don’t need a big platform or loads of money to make a difference - and I think that’s what drives me the most.
In Simon’s case, he manages to helps one person every day by either giving them money, mentorship, or just a little bit of belief. Sometimes it really is as simple as just listening and offering support.
It’s truly being able to help someone. And that can happen in one conversation, one interaction or even one shout out.
There was also one practical thing he said that I actually did remember to write down and thats was: “Hire someone with opposite skills, but the same moral code”
🌱 Monetise Your Community: Lara Acosta, Anne-Laure Le Cunff & Sophie Miller
Switching gears a little, the wonderful Alexis from Circle hosted an awesome panel with some awesome people all about community - this was defo my favourite one.
The panelists were:
Lara Acosta - Founder of Literally Academy
Anne-Laure Le Cunff - Founder of Ness Labs (and author or Tiny Experiments)
Sophie Miller - Founder of Pretty Little Marketer (great name btw)
As someone who ran the incredible (yes, I’m biased) Part-Time YouTuber Academy for Ali Abdaal for almost 4 years, I know just how important community is and it’s something I really care about - so it was awesome to hear 4 people I respect talk about it and learn from them.
There was lots of nuggets here, but my 2 biggest takeaways were:
😓 It takes hard work to build community - it’s not a get rich quick scheme. Lara was super honest about how much commitment, consistency and hard work it takes to run a successful community. She said that if you're not ready to show up consistently and really invest, it’s probably not the move for you and I love that 👏
😌 Keep is simple. The more you give people, the more they have to not take advantage of and then the more they feel like they’re not getting their money’s worth and that will make them more likely to cancel their membership. Sophie talked about her community’s first year, and how trying to offer too much actually backfired. People were overwhelmed, didn’t use most of what was available, and ended up feeling like they weren’t getting value — even at just £20 per month. Sophie now just has 3 clear pillars as part of her membership now that she delivers on (Pillar 1: Easy keeping up - where Sophie sends a daily email with the latest trends / news; Pillar 2: Access to experts; Pillar 3: Community)
🚀 Scale Your Creator Business: Nathan Barry & Chris Donnelly
Hosted by they lovely Haley from Kit - Nathan (Founder of Kit) and Chris (Entrepreneur & Host of The Wake Up podcast) talked about how important it is to start your newsletter (so yes, here I am restarting 😬).
It’s the usual (totally correct) advice about owning your own audience (which you don’t do on social media platforms) and how useful lead magnets are for growing your audience 🧲
🧡 People
Aside from listening to very smart people share very useful things, the other cool thing about these events is the super cool people you meet. It’s always the real highlight for me.
First things first, I got to go with my 2 amazing friends: Irem & Kaelyn 🙌 And then there were lots of familiar faces at the event itself - from old work friends to people I’ve met throughout my creator journey and it was just really lovely to catch up IRL.
There were also lots of new faces, including friends of friends who instantly felt chill and easy to talk to 😊
There’s something so energising about being in a room where everyone’s doing their own thing but still feels up for cheering each other on.
As I’ve said over and over - the creator world can feel very lonely (something me and my buddy Becky are trying to help with in our own way with our podcast - Small Creator, Big World) and it’s events like these where you can all of a sudden see that you’re not alone and there are many wonderful humans doing the same things as you.
For anyone that’s ever been on the fence about rocking up to things like this - I would highly recommend just going 🫡
💪 Pep Talks
And finally, one of the unexpected highlights of the night was a spontaneous little coaching session from Jamie Whiffen and Robin Waite (author of Take Your Shot - which I highly recommend to anyone who’s looking to start their business / sell products or services to people).
I was telling them about this new freelancing chapter I’m trying to figure out, and they were both like, “Yeah. You got this. Stop overthinking it and get on with it.”
And honestly? I really needed to hear that 😂
Imposter Syndrome is real people, and even though I know that I know my stuff - I still like to doubt myself and make excuses 🤦♀️
So with that in mind and as a very next action that I can do - here’s my Calendly if any of the 2 people reading this want to jump on and jam with me on anything they might need help with in the world of systems, processes, automations, community, or basically anything creator world related 😊
Ok bye ✌️
(P.S. Massive shout out to
for being the reason I finally published this and also to Jin for forcing me to write when I really didn’t want to haha ❤️)📝 Update Log
🎙️ Released episode 2 of the Small Creator, Big World podcast - this month we were talking about consistency vs quality, especially for small creators. You can check that out here if you’re interested (or on your podcast player of choice) 😊
📚 Finished The Squiggly Career as part of this month’s Book Club Read - would highly recommend this to anyone who’s at a turning point in their career or looking for a change
🧠 Just finished week 1 of a live 4-week cohort being run by my friend, Joe Gannon, called Personal Brand Mastery - which is perfect for me because I really need to sort out my LinkedIn profile and actually start building myself a personal brand 🤓
💪 Went down a mini women’s health rabbit hole after seeing a clip of Dr Stacey Sims on a podcast talking about how women (unlike men) actually NEED to eat before they exercise. The main 2 pods that I listened to her on were: (1) Huberman Lab and (2) The Mel Robbins Podcast (this one is shorter and slightly easier to take in)
📺 Watched this really good ‘Timeline of World History’ video that starts when written records became a thing around 3300 BCE mark to now 👀
Ahhh what a lovely event!!