I cover creators at Like & Subscribe, a standalone Ankler Media newsletter that’s being sampled today for subscribers to The Ankler. I wrote about Tubi’s creator business and whether we’ve reached peak newsletter.
For most aspiring entertainers, moving to Hollywood is a sign that you’ve made it. For Kinigra Deon, it was moving away.
The scientist-turned-YouTuber had spent three years in Los Angeles making scripted relationship dramedies for an audience of more than 1 million subscribers when her husband, Reggie Washington, convinced her to move her operation back home to Birmingham, Alabama, where they could afford to make a bigger play at building a studio of the future.
“I saw the potential right away,” Washington told a standing room-only crowd of rapt creators and media executives at Ankler Media’s first-ever Creator Thesis salon on Monday at Soho Beach House in Miami Beach. “So I’m like, ‘If we really try to scale and structure this thing, we can make a lot of money off what she was doing.’”
Five years later, Deon and Washington operate out of 40,000 square feet of studio space in Birmingham, where they employ a cast and crew of around 50 in all and produce five new videos a week across two YouTube channels with more than 7 million total subscribers.
And if you build it, they will come. Hollywood is now pounding at the door of entrepreneurial creators like Deon and Washington as legacy entertainment companies look to attract young, distracted and very online audiences. Take Rock Squad Studios, the company behind a family-friendly YouTube channel with 5 million subscribers. Last year, Rock Squad entered into a partnership with Tubi and now devotes much of its 25-person staff to producing programming for the streamer. (You can read more about Rock Squad’s Tubi partnership in my column about how Tubi is winning the creator wars.)
But this kind of operation doesn’t happen overnight. All across the country, entertainers who got their start on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube are grappling with how to grow their businesses as demand for their work skyrockets — from when and what to delegate to how to pitch themselves to brands.
That’s why, on the eve of the annual Adobe MAX conference this week in Miami, Ankler Media convened a VIP crowd including creators JustJules, Dayna Marie and Patience Ojionuka and Scopio CEO Christina Hawatmeh for a conversation about The Creator Studio Playbook, presented in partnership with Adobe. With views of swaying palm trees and aquamarine waves behind us, I interviewed Washington, Rock Squad Studios founder and CEO Nicole O’Rourke and Leah Walker, Adobe’s head of influencer and creator marketing — and together they gave the packed house a master class on how to handle every stage of a creator business’ growth.
It’s a playbook that applies not just to digital-first talent, but also to nearly everyone in media these days. As Walker noted in her opening remarks, “Almost all of us are creators in some way, shape or form.”
You can watch the full conversation on The Ankler YouTube (above) or read on for the top tips from Walker, O’Rourke and Washington on how to turn attention into a scaled media business.
Tip No. 1: Make Your Content a Business — From the First Post
“Really look at your business like a business,” O’Rourke advised the crowd, adding that creators should also map out “the longevity path” — i.e., how they see their involvement with that business evolving. She originally launched her YouTube channel to promote the haircare line, Rock Your Hair, that she’d started with her then husband. She never appeared in the videos herself, instead choosing to spotlight up-and-coming talent. It was an early decision that paid off. Today, Rock Squad retains its young audience by working with an always evolving cast of fresh-faced stars.
While O’Rourke acknowledged that it can be hard to fund the work early on, before a channel grows big enough to get a share of ad revenue or to attract brand partners, she said that the path to success starts with posting consistently. “Just do it,” she said. “Start posting.”
That’s how many creators hone their voice, something that Walker noted is important to landing the right brand partnerships. “Post, learn, iterate, and then really articulate what is it that you offer,” she said. “Then you have something to pitch.”
Tip No. 2: Don’t Be Afraid to Delegate
Because of her experience running businesses like Rock Your Hair, O’Rourke immediately understood the power of handing off work to other members of her team. “If you don’t love it, definitely delegate it,” she said. “If you don’t love it, but no one else can do it, you have to do it.
Washington said figuring out what to hold on to and what to let go was a challenge for Deon. At first, she appeared in all her own sketches, but as her operation grew, she realized she needed to take a step back. She began introducing her fans to new actors, and now she works primarily behind the camera as a writer and director. “My philosophy, when you’re going into a business, is always try to surround yourself with people that know more than you do,” added Washington, who also writes and directs many of the sketches that appear on the channel.
Sometimes delegating includes adding new technologies to your workflow. Walker told the crowd that she recently sat in on a creator workshop where a group was using Adobe Firefly, the company’s three-year-old AI studio, to try out different video thumbnails, changing the colors and positioning of the images to see what would resonate best with audiences. Adobe wants to be a partner to creators that can “help you scale without losing some of the things that make you uniquely you,” she said.
For O’Rourke, that means holding on to the scriptwriting on Rock Squad projects — because it’s part of the job she enjoys and also because she hasn’t yet found someone who can tell stories with her preferred voice. “When people give me scripts, I’m like, ‘That’s not how kids talk,’ and so I keep sending them back,” she said. “Now, with voice memo’ing, I can write them faster than they can make them. So it’s fine for now.”
Tip No. 3: Grow Your Own Talent
When O’Rourke is ready to hand off the writing to someone else, she might want to take some advice Washington shared: that often it’s better to grow the talent you’ve got than hire someone else. “You’ve got to give people the space in the room to mess up,” he said. “We groom and we grow talent all the time. I feel like we can make anybody an actor.”
And once someone on the team understands the job, they can pass that knowledge on to the next hire. O’Rourke likes to hire editors full time because once they learn her style, she can trust them to jump into any project. She also empowers them to bring new employees up to speed. “I have one head editor and now he’s in charge of hiring the next editors,” she said.
Tip No. 4: Learn From Other Creators
Because the job of a creator can be so singular, sometimes fellow creators are the best people to turn to for help. O’Rourke and Deon, for example, have become close friends in their time as creators and now regularly call each other to share notes. (Deon even sent in a question for O’Rourke to answer during the panel.)
“It’s not a competition,” said O’Rourke. “We’re all in it together. I think that’s the difference [from] Hollywood.” When she first started Rock Squad, she would regularly collab with other creators like Salish and Jordan Matter, and she still often teams up with other channels to help amplify both their work. Even bigger creators can get value out of those partnerships if the smaller creator serves up a great idea, she noted.
Walker said that over the past year she tasked her team at Adobe to “support creators who support creators.” That mission was made manifest at MAX when Adobe announced The Adobe Creator Playbook, a free, 10-part masterclass series for which top talent including Deon, Dhar Mann, Airrack, Michelle Phan and others created courses offering tips on everything from scaling a business to producing long-form scripted programming to perfecting hooks and thumbnails.
The project encourages creators “to share what they wish they knew when they were starting out,” Walker added. “We truly hope that it can become that first go-to resource for creators.”
Tip No. 5: Define Your Voice
While there’s a lotof debate about the use of AI in all kinds of workplaces, creators have already embraced many tools to ease workflows. Both O’Rourke and Washington celebrate how powerful new technologies are streamlining their processes and cutting costs.
“It makes things a lot easier,” said Washington. “You can hit a nail with your hand or you can use a hammer.” He and Deon use Firefly to generate new thumbnail ideas that they can then share with their editor. “It enhances the creativity of the creator,” he said.
O’Rourke, meanwhile, uses AI to put together her production calendars, accounting for the availability of certain actors or crews. “We’ll dump the scripts in and say, ‘Hey this actor can only work these two days. This actor can work these three days. Put out a production calendar based on their availability,’” she explained. “You can give them all these things that used to be so annoying.”
But as AI lowers the barrier of entry for emerging talent, it’s also raising the floor and the ceiling of creative work. All the more reason, said Walker, to “define your voice.” The tools have evolved, yes, but “your vision, your voice, the idea is still at the heart and the core of it,” she added. “The idea is still going to win.”
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