So look, we're entering a new era. Everything is changing: the way we live, the way we buy, the way we work, and the way that we do business. We are entering what experts call the content economy, and there are a bunch of 20-year-olds making more than a doctor or lawyer by taking advantage of this new opportunity.
So look, if you clicked on the short video, it's because you want to create an online business, so pay attention. I personally made $263,000 in a single year in high school as a growth operator partnering with a creator, and today we'll be diving into exactly what a growth operator is and why it's the best business to start in the new content economy. So look, transparently, any business that you see online probably does work.
Anything that you see someone talking about as a good way to make $10K a month online probably does work, but obviously, every business has its pros and its cons. So we'll be diving into the pros and cons of every single business model that's out there right now. Let's start off with what a growth operator is.
A growth operator is basically someone that goes and partners with a creator and helps them run a business. There are tons of content creators out there now; I think there are 200 million content creators currently, and only 2% of the content creators that are out there making content have actually been able to monetize their audience. They have tons and tons of attention—there are tons of creators that have really big audiences—but only 2% of them have even made more than $50,000 from their audience.
I like to say that a lot of these creators are suffering from what's called "broke influencer syndrome. " They have millions and millions of followers, but they're still broke. They don't even make that much money from their content; they’re typically getting paid through brand deals or maybe getting paid by views from the creator funds, but a lot of that money is insignificant—it's little compared to how much they could actually be making with the amount of attention they have.
So a growth operator goes and finds a creator, partners with the creator, and runs a business on the back end of the audience while the creator just focuses on making content, building up an audience, and getting attention. That duo is extremely powerful because if you can have attention, people say that where attention goes, money flows, right? So if a creator can go get a ton of attention and have someone on the back end that will actually take that attention and turn those followers into dollars, it's an extremely powerful duo.
What you're doing specifically as a growth operator is helping creators sell info products and info communities—these are digital products. Now, one of the most popular businesses currently is e-commerce or dropshipping, which involves selling physical products. I'm not a big fan of that, honestly.
You can make a lot of money doing that, but look at it like this: if you're going to start an e-commerce brand or start dropshipping, you're going to need some money up front. A lot of people will tell you that you don't need money up front, but realistically, you will need some money up front. With physical products, you're going to have to fulfill an order.
So let's say you start a clothing brand and you sell a lot of orders; you're going to have to package and ship those orders. You're either going to have to do that yourself or hire someone to do that for you, and hiring someone is going to cost money. The products themselves are going to cost money.
A lot of people will claim to make a lot of money with e-commerce brands or dropshipping, and they'll show screenshots of them making like $10,000 per month, but in reality, the amount of profit that they're actually taking from that is like $2,000 to $5,000. Their profit margins are like 20% to 50% realistically, and so no one wants to do that, right? All that work just to get like half the profit.
As a growth operator, you're selling info products. So instead of selling physical products, it's digital. You can build it once and then sell it an infinite amount of times.
A good example of a type of info product you could sell as a growth operator is a paid community, like a Discord or School. These work perfectly for creators because the creators already have big audiences, and they're just not centralized; they will just be in the comments, but they have no place to go and centrally talk about one topic—whatever the creator is making content about. So let's say you find a fitness creator.
It's very easy to go work with them and build a fitness Discord where the creator's audience can go learn about fitness, interact with other people that are on their fitness journey, share their progress, get support, and receive help from other people in the community or directly from the creator itself. The cool thing about these online communities, these paid communities, and info products is that you only have to build them once. I personally built a Discord in high school that was centered around sneaker reselling, and it took me maybe two days to build out the Discord.
That Discord is still running to this day. It took me two days to build it out, and we were able to sell thousands of memberships—thousands of people—into the Discord. We charged $75 per month for access, and at the time when I was.
. . Running it, I was able to sell over 2,000 people into it, working with the creator that I was working with, so you can do the math on how much money that would have been.
Um, but I no longer work with them, and they're still using the same product that I built out for them over a year ago. They were able to make $150,000 last month using the same exact product that I built out once, which took me two days. With info products, it's amazing because you literally just build it once; it'll take a few hours to a few days, and then you're able to sell it an infinite amount of times with really high profit margins, as opposed to e-commerce or dropshipping, where your profit is going to be really, really slim.
Another popular model that people like to talk about is doing digital services, such as social media marketing agencies (SMMA), where you're selling marketing as a service. Now, these I personally have tried, and I made some money doing it, but I realized that selling services is still selling your time. You don't want to sell your time because you can't really scale.
At a certain point, everyone only has 24 hours in a day, and you're going to get capped at how much time you can put into this. There will be a limit on how much money you can make doing it. Of course, you can outsource and hire people below you to do the physical services, but managing teams is very, very stressful, and it's hard to manage.
Once you hire a team below you, you're going to cut into your profit, and no one wants to do that. All right, with digital products, you don't have to hire a team. I operate right now; I think we're doing about $50,000 a month with our info product.
I have me, my business partner who's currently operating for me—I'm the creator—and we have one virtual assistant that helps us with some tasks, and that's it. We're able to maintain really, really, really high profit margins, and the fulfillment is super, super easy. It only takes us about a few hours of work per week to manage.
Another way of doing online business that people typically go into is they'll start off as freelancers. They'll get one skill and start selling that skill and freelancing. For example, they'll learn copywriting and start writing emails freelance for different businesses, where they'll get paid like $20 to $150 to write an email here and there for different businesses.
Or they'll learn video editing and go freelance, doing video editing for different businesses. But no one wants to do that; that's basically just like working a job—it's a glorified job—and you can't really scale that super fast. No one wants to get paid $50 to write an email.
The next step up from that is people go from being a freelancer to running an agency, where they start taking retainers or get clients who will pay them monthly to do the services. Again, this is just another version of a job; it's a glorified job where you're doing work for other people. You're selling your time, and at a certain point, you're going to get capped.
You can't really scale it, because if you want to scale, you're going to have to hire a team. Managing a team is typically a really, really, really big bottleneck in a lot of people's businesses, and it cuts into your margins. Ideally, you want to keep as high profit margins as possible because no one wants to make $10,000 and only walk away with $1,000 profit.
As a growth operator, you don't have to worry about any of that. You just need to find one creator that has a big audience and isn't selling anything, and you partner with them. That's your one client, instead of being an agency owner with 10 clients, all paying you $1,000 per month to do services, which will be a headache.
You'll have one client who pays you $10,000 to $20,000 a month because you're working with them, and you're taking 50% of the profit you make them and building one business with them. All it takes as a growth operator is one whale client; one creator with a big audience will make you a lot of money. You can use the 1% rule to calculate how much a creator's audience can make you.
The 1% rule states that 1% of any audience will become buyers at any given time. So, let's say you find a fitness creator who's not selling anything already. You can do the math.
Let's say they have 100,000 followers. Right? 1% of those followers will become buyers, so 1% of 100,000 is 1,000 buyers.
That creator has 1,000 buyers in their audience. Let's say you partner with them as a growth operator and help them build out a paid community, like on a platform such as School, and you charge $50 per month for access to their paid community, where they talk about fitness. There are different discussion categories in there about fitness.
They can even put together an online course, which is a version of an info product, that they can charge for access to inside the community. Then, they'll also just be paying to be inside of the community surrounded by like-minded people. Let's say you only charge $50 per month for that.
Community to their audience, and they have 100,000 followers. If 1% will buy, that's 1,000 people. 1,000 people paying $50 per month is $50,000 per month.
If you split that with the creator, that's $25,000 in your pocket every single month. That's how this model works. All you have to do is go find one creator and partner with them.
It'll take a day or two to build up the paid community and info product. You can get them to film an online course if that's what you guys want to help build, or you can just sell the community. In high school, I was running a Discord that was centered around reselling.
There wasn't any course in there; it was literally just a community where people would learn about reselling and interact with other resellers. People were paying $75 per month for access. Community is one of the most powerful things.
In 2023, everyone is online, and everyone feels disconnected. Technically, everyone's super connected because of the internet, but a lot of people still feel disconnected. Being inside of a community where you're surrounded by others who are interested in the same things you are is very powerful because humans naturally want a tribe.
This is why selling a paid community is very, very powerful and fulfilling as well. So, again, basically, a growth operator is someone who finds a creator with a big audience—there are literally millions of them, 200 million creators to be exact—and partners with just one creator. This will realistically take you about a week or so to find.
All you have to do is send a few DMs to creators. You can find them on TikTok, Instagram, or on a website called Find Creators. Just message creators who aren't selling anything and offer to partner with them to help build a paid community or sell some type of info product, like a course or coaching program, to their audience for anywhere from $50 to $500 per month.
Honestly, it could be a little less; I've seen people do it for $5 or $10 per month, all the way up to $500 or even more. You'll do everything on the backend; you're basically like a Discord mod. When I was in high school, I spent a lot of my time on Discord just chatting with people about reselling and also helping sell them into the paid community, which was $75 per month.
The cool thing about being a growth operator is, as I mentioned, I built out the Discord in high school. It took maybe two days to set it up, and after that, it was just a few hours of work per week to manage it. All I had to do was really make announcements, letting people know when we were accepting spots for the paid community, and provide updates in the announcements channel about what was happening inside the community.
The cool thing about being a growth operator is you're going to build skills as you do it. You don't need any skills prior to starting. I began in high school with no skills.
I was a 16-year-old kid who didn't know what I was doing. As I worked with the creator, he had a really big audience, bringing in tons of leads, and I was able to get a lot of reps in for the skills that go into running a business, like sales. I was having different conversations with all the leads he was bringing in, trying to sell them the $75 a month version of the Discord.
I was able to have dozens of conversations every day, which helped hone my sales skills. Instead of becoming an appointment setter or closer, which typically involves working under a business to do sales specifically for them—like texting or calling leads to book appointments or actually taking calls and closing deals—you, as a closer and a setter, are still working a job. Many people turn to online business because they're looking to become their own boss.
As a setter or a closer, you'll be working long days, only to get 5%, 10%, or maybe even 20% of the revenue you bring in for the business. But as a growth operator, you can still talk to leads and close deals. Instead of only getting 5% to 15% of the revenue, you’ll get 50% because you're splitting it with the creator.
As a growth operator, you're technically your own boss; you're a business owner. In contrast, as a setter or a closer, you’ll have others breathing down your neck telling you what to do. Now, let’s say you aren't a fan of sales and don’t want to engage with leads in sales conversations—no worries!
As a growth operator, you can hire people below you; that’s the beauty of this model. So, let’s say you become a growth operator and partner with a creator who has a big audience, like 100,000 followers, and you expect about 1,000 buyers. If you don't want to do the sales, no worries—hire a setter below you, give them 5% or 10%, and you're still going to take.
. . 50% of the total profit that the business brings in—um, that's the beauty of it.
Let's say that you don't want to do copywriting, which is a skill that you'll learn as you write announcements in the community. Cool, no worries! You can hire a copywriter below you.
You're a business owner; you can scale it. You can outsource everything if you wanted to. Um, like I said, it took about two days to build out the community on Discord.
A new platform for paid community communities, which I personally use nowadays, is School, and I'm a massive fan of School because it's super simple. I think the current community that I'm running took me maybe a few hours—maybe four or five hours—to build out, and we've been running with it since. You can take payments through School, which is awesome.
But yeah, as a growth operator, you have more leverage instead of working a job—a glorified job—which a lot of these business models that people talk about really are: just glorified jobs. You'll be a true entrepreneur where you'll learn skills as you go. I started off in high school, didn't really know what I was doing, and I just developed skills through repetition.
I'm a big believer in learning by doing. A lot of people will tell you to go study and do a ton of research before you actually get started with something, so that you can get good and learn it. But you're not going to learn by just studying; you're going to learn by actually doing it.
And so, that's my big belief about this: you're going to learn skills as you go and do this. Um, so yeah, basically summarizing, a growth operator is someone that goes and partners with a content creator to help them build and launch a paid community for their audience, where they charge anywhere from $10 to $500 per month for access. All it really takes is to go find one creator that has a big audience.
You take a 50% split with the creator, and then you'll take maybe a day or two to build a paid community for them. You can get the creator to create a course to put inside the community that will allow you to charge more because it'll provide more value to the audience. From there, you're really just focusing on managing the community, making sure people inside the community are happy, and selling more people inside the community.
This is personally what I did in 2022 while still in high school; I was still like 16 or 17 years old when I made $263,000 in a single year. It's honestly the best opportunity that's out there because there are so many creators, and none of them know how to actually take advantage of their audience. All of them are suffering from "growth influencer syndrome," where they have 100,000 or a million followers, but they're still only making $200 to $300 per month from their audience.
But they could be making a lot more. Like I said, the 1% rule: someone that has 100,000 followers has 1,000 buyers. If 1,000 buyers pay $20 per month, that's $20,000 per month.
You split that 50/50 with the creator; that's $10,000 in your pocket each month. So I appreciate you guys watching. Hopefully, you got some value out of this video.
Um, don't forget to like and subscribe, and if you want to learn more about how to actually land a creator client as a growth operator— which will only take a few days—I’ll be making a video about that. So go ahead and watch the next video, where I'll show you exactly where to find creators and what to say to them to actually get them to agree to work with you as a growth operator. Peace out!
See you in the next one.
