When creator Jay Clouse switched to Kit in 2020, he had 1,800 subscribers.
Now, he has over 50,000 and counting.
This is how he grew his list and his revenue using automations and flywheels.
The challenge: Inconsistent revenue as a creator from relying on platforms you don’t control
Jay started his content business Creator Science in 2017 where he created newsletters and later a podcast in order to help other people become professional creators.
He defines being a professional creator as someone “who is not just publishing, but actually making a living from that effort.”
I think one of the biggest challenges I see professional creators face is they don’t have consistency of income. It’s often because they’re really focused on some social media platform or another.
But there are other people in charge of those rules. And the rules are changing. It’s really challenging for people to go through these seasons of a lot of success, a lot of growth, and then suddenly be in the season of, “Oh, that’s not working anymore.”
In the early days of his business, Jay also struggled to figure out how to create consistent income.
Everything felt so manual, so nonstop, so unsustainable.
He was grateful for the freedom of this new creator life, but he also knew he couldn’t live on this hamster wheel of content creation forever.
He wanted to find a better way.
The solution: Switch to Kit and build flywheels
To start, Jay looked around at what his creator friends and the creators he admired were doing.
I started realizing that a lot of my friends and peers who were doing this creator thing were using Kit. So I thought, okay, let me give that a try.
I literally remember the day I signed up for Kit and watched the first tutorial video of what you can do with automations and sequences. I thought, “I can’t believe I waited this long to do this.”
It was like a light bulb moment. Now I could customize and personalize.
In 2020, Jay imported his 1,800 subscribers to Kit.
Now, instead of just sending newsletters, he was on a mission to use the tools in Kit together to build a system—a flywheel—to create consistent income and grow his list.
This is how he did it.
The strategy: Use automations to build a system of flywheels to drive continuous audience and revenue growth
Jay describes a flywheel as “this process or phenomenon where every successive effort of doing a thing gets easier over time. It’s something that might take a while to get turning, might be hard in the beginning, but gets easier and spins faster over time.”
When it comes to a creator business, flywheels look like building out automated systems, which take time in the beginning, but, if done well, give creators back more time, audience growth, and revenue on an ongoing basis.
That’s exactly what happened to Jay.
To begin, he built each flywheel with a single goal in mind. But they all interconnect to grow his audience and revenue.
These are the top three flywheels he’s using to power his business right now and some behind the scenes into how they work:
1. Newsletter writing flywheel
1. Once a week, Jay sits down to write a long-form essay that is meant to help someone become a professional creator.
2. After he writes the newsletter, he posts about the topic on social media along with a link to sign up for the newsletter.
3. Once they subscribe, they get an automated email welcome sequence in Kit where, in one email, Jay asks, “If I were to dedicate one issue of my newsletter to an issue you were specifically facing, what would that be?”
4. He uses those answers to write his next essay, turning the flywheel again.
He says every time he runs this flywheel it gets easier because the more people that join his list and respond to the welcome emails, the more relevant writing topic ideas he has. And the more relevant his newsletters are, the more people are compelled to sign up when he posts about it on social media.
2. Subscriber growth flywheel
In addition to growing his list by sharing his newsletter on social media, Jay is also part of the Kit Creator Network and uses Recommendations, where other creators recommend his newsletter and he does the same for them.
To date, he’s received 16,855 subscribers from Recommendations.
Since growing his list on the Creator Network was working so well he also decided to join SparkLoop’s Partner Program to run paid promotion for his newsletter through Paid Recommendations.
After being accepted to the Partner Program Jay set up his promotion parameters for what kinds of subscribers he’d want to attract and his promotion budget, and then turned on this new flywheel and let it work in the background. It looks like this:
- Someone signs up for a newsletter run by a creator whom Jay has paid to recommend Creator Science.
- Jay gets a new subscriber that he nurtures in his welcome sequence and that creator gets paid for driving a new quality lead for Jay.
- Some of the new subscribers who have joined Jay’s list through the Partner Program promotion purchase one of Jay’s digital products.
- Jay uses some of that new income to reinvest in the SparkLoop Partner Program, and thus the flywheel keeps going.
To date, he’s gained 3,960 subscribers through the Partner Program in 2 months and estimates that at least 43 of those subscribers have made a purchase so far.
3. Revenue flywheel
This is the flywheel Jay uses to sell his digital products on an ongoing basis:
1. Someone subscribes to Jay’s newsletter.
2. They get the automated welcome sequence.
3. At the bottom of one of those emails, Jay has a “PS” that asks subscribers to answer a short survey so he can learn more about them and tailor further emails to their interests.
4. That takes them to a form that they fill out, and that syncs with custom fields in Kit that Jay set up.
5. Depending on how they answered the questions and what tag they got, they are given another personalized email automation that gives them a specific pitch for one of his four courses (Creator Catalyst Workshop, Newsletter Masterclass, Podcast Like the Pros, and Build A Beloved Membership).
6. That pitch links to a sales page for that product which has a ton of testimonials from other creators who’ve purchased and been helped by that product.
7. People read those testimonials on the sales page and buy that product, and when they finish it, they receive another automated email prompting them to leave a testimonial, which further strengthens the sales page the next time someone goes to it.
The result: Continuous subscriber growth and highest passive revenue month to date
As a result of all of these flywheels working together, Jay says he’s recently seen a month-over-month increase in digital products sold and total revenue increasing.
This revenue flywheel is only a couple of months old, but I’m really excited about it because last month it led to my highest month ever in digital product sales where I didn’t have some other dedicated launch. Over the last two months, this flywheel alone has generated $15,000 in revenue.
I am now a W2 employee of my own company, and my wife is becoming a W2 employee of the company. We not only pay ourselves a salary because of efforts like this, but a lot of money stays in the business and gets invested in future projects.
I love Kit and I love email because it really puts a lot more of this in your control and gives you a lot more consistency.
And that consistency is what helps him, as he says:
Wake up every morning and have a choice for how I want to spend my time, who I want to spend it with, and what I want to spend it on. That’s really why I do this.
If you’re trying to tie audience growth, revenue growth, and email together, Kit is the best way for you to build that flywheel for your creator business.
