Creator Science with Jay Clouse

This is my October retro, recorded from paternity leave a week after our son Louie was born. Every month I share a retro with members of The Lab, and a few times a year I share one here on the podcast feed.

October was a month of good signals at the top of the funnel. We had our second-best month of follower growth, our biggest month of podcast listening all year, and a new YouTube-to-email process that brought in 96 new subscribers from a single video. But I'm also questioning one of our bigger decisions this year. Moving The Lab to a monthly open-and-close model took our join rate from 1 in 4 applicants to 1 in 10.

In this episode, I talk about:

The numbers: $51,000 in revenue, nearly $20,000 in sponsorships booked, and digital products still under $1,000

Why I'm probably going back to rolling invites for The Lab

The trap I see creators fall into when their content becomes about "you're awesome" instead of "you're helping me"

Why 2027 will be my year of video, and why I'm leaning harder into interviews

By the end of this episode, you will have a model for running your own monthly retro, and an honest look at what's working and what isn't inside a creator business.

Explore The Lab

Traction Plan

How Dorie Clark gained 500K+ Instagram followers in 5 months

George Blackman's system for writing scripts with AI

jay.blog

Full transcript and show notes

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TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Baby boy Clouse and the closet project

(02:30) October's numbers

(07:08) Introducing the Team tier

(11:26) Rebuilding our website

(14:07) Inside the Lab Concierge

(17:23) The Dorie Clark effect

(19:41) A repeatable YouTube-to-email process

(23:06) Is monthly enrollment working?

(26:00) Building Traction Plan

(29:22) Building as a distraction

(32:24) 2027, the year of video

(33:56) Back to my roots

(36:04) Why I'm leaning into interviews

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

#322: How Dorie Clark gained 500K+ Instagram followers in 5 months

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My guest is Milly Tamati, the founder of Generalist World, a newsletter, job board, and community for people whose careers don't fit in a box.

Milly started Generalist World in 2022 from a Scottish island with a population of about 191 people. Today the newsletter has more than 55,000 subscribers, she's posted on LinkedIn just about every weekday for roughly 1,400 days, and this September, International Generalist Day had more than 100 volunteer-led meetups in 40 countries. She runs it all with one full-timer and a couple of contractors, hired straight out of her own community.

The business makes about $400,000 a year, and Milly finishes work most days around 2:30. Her number one KPI is a regulated nervous system. When another podcaster asked about her dream for Generalist World, she told them she's already living it.

In this episode, we talk about:

Why she will never schedule a LinkedIn post, and the cringe but undeniable power of the selfie

The two fill-in-the-blank formats that took the stress out of a twice-weekly newsletter

Why X, not LinkedIn, is where she closes sponsorship deals, sometimes within half an hour

Why she deleted all of her recurring revenue to make every member a lifetime member, and the year-long beehiiv partnership that brings in recurring revenue instead

By the end of this episode, you will have a new way to think about what the right size for your business actually is.

Generalist World

The Generalist Archetype Quiz

Generalist World newsletter

Generalist World community

Milly on LinkedIn

Milly on X

beehiiv

Milly on Growth In Reverse

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Cold open

(00:39) Introducing Milly Tamati

(09:07) A regulated nervous system as a KPI

(13:51) Two fill-in-the-blank newsletter formats

(18:12) Milly's immutable laws of LinkedIn

(22:38) Why she still bothers with X

(24:03) Why she'll never schedule a post

(27:15) The undeniable power of the selfie

(30:58) Which LinkedIn link gets the clicks?

(37:12) The right size of business

(40:05) Deleting all recurring revenue

(44:46) The beehiiv partnership

(50:12) Be more weird

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

#320: Earning $300K+ Per Year Without Social Media | Jessica Lackey's Relationship-First Approach

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WHEN YOU'RE READY

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🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)

🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)

🧞 Get a Personalized Offer

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💼 Connect on LinkedIn

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Jonny Miller is the creator of Nervous System Mastery. It teaches evidence-backed protocols to cultivate calm, build resilience, and increase aliveness in 45 days. It’s a five-week, cohort-based course that is just wrapping up its sixth cohort in the last three years. In those six cohorts, Jonny has served nearly 1,000 students and earned more than $800,000.

Here’s the best part – Jonny doesn’t have a massive audience. When he launched Nervous System Mastery, he had a couple thousand followers on Twitter and a small email list. This is the magic of a well-designed Signature Product – and Jonny is the perfect example.

In this episode, we get into the weeds about how he’s grown NSM – what’s worked well, what hasn’t, and how he’s found himself on large podcasts with people like Lenny Rachitsky, Ali Abdaal, Chris Williamson, and more.

→ ⁠Join Nervous System Mastery⁠

⁠Full transcript and show notes⁠

Jonny's ⁠Website⁠ / ⁠Twitter⁠ / ⁠Instagram⁠ / ⁠LinkedIn⁠

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

→ ⁠#221: Ryan Hawk – Anatomy of a $12,500 membership earning $400,000+ per year⁠

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→ ⁠Submit your question here⁠

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WHEN YOU'RE READY

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My guest is Dorie Clark, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, 4-time Thinkers50 honoree as one of the world's top business thinkers, and longtime faculty member at Duke and Columbia Business Schools.

Dorie is, by her own description, a LinkedIn person. She has close to 500,000 followers there, which puts her in the top half a percent of accounts on the platform. But in January 2026, she decided to learn Instagram. She started with 22,000 followers on an account she'd had since 2015 that was mostly personal photos. For the next 4.5 months, she treated it like a part-time job: 10 to 20 hours a week, 99 Reels. Her net gain was about 350 followers. Thirty-five percent of those videos earned her exactly zero new followers.

Then in June, it turned around. She gained more than 146,000 new followers across June and July. By September, she was past 400,000.

The reason I was excited to talk to Dorie specifically: she didn't win by buying production value. She films and edits all of her videos herself, all of it self-taught over the past few months. Her approach feels like one we can all actually learn from.

In this episode, we talk about:

The 4.5-month slog where nothing worked and the single data point that gave her permission to keep going

Why celebrity reactions are a growth hack for strangers, and the Dolly Parton video that got her on TV in Chicago

Her complete workflow: from raw idea capture to batching, scripting, filming, editing, and posting

The 30-page AI context document she built to keep her voice consistent and her hooks sharp

Why she outgrew her team's video editing and what taking it back herself unlocked

By the end of this episode, you will have a practical, doable framework for building a high-growth Instagram presence without a production team, a big budget, or a hot take machine.

Dorie Clark — dorieclark.com

@dorieclark on Instagram

The Long Game (Dorie's book)

Nausheen Chen — Instagram growth story referenced

Sandcastles by Kallaway — research tool Dorie uses

Recognized Expert — her flagship course and community

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Cold open: money is not the variable buying you success

(00:27) Introducing Dorie Clark

(03:29) Why Instagram after a decade of LinkedIn dominance

(05:37) The 4.5-month slog: 99 Reels, 350 followers

(07:21) Eating her own dog food: The Long Game in real life

(12:30) Cross-posting Reels to LinkedIn and what transfers

(21:53) When things turned around — and why

(23:24) Celebrity reactions as an entry point for strangers

(27:36) Early business results: CNBC, Chicago TV, sponsorships

(32:11) The full workflow: idea capture to posting

(35:10) The 30-page AI context document and how she built it

(39:48) Filming in batches with wardrobe changes in New York

(50:59) Dorie's immutable laws of Instagram growth

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

#316: Kallaway’s EXACT System For Going Viral (Almost Every Time)

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WHEN YOU'RE READY

📬 Creator Science Newsletter

🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)

🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)

🧞 Get a Personalized Offer

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CONNECT

🐦 Connect on Twitter

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My guest is George Blackman, a YouTube scriptwriter who got his start writing full-time for Ali Abdaal and has since written scripts for creators from 30,000 to over 10 million subscribers.

This is George's second time on the show. Three years ago, we talked about scriptwriting fundamentals. Since then, George has started writing his own videos with AI, and he's spent most of this year building PlayWriteAI, an AI scriptwriting app with more than 700 people on the waitlist. Building it taught him something most creators haven't noticed yet: AI will tell you, very confidently, that it did ten things it never actually did.

This episode is his full process, from voice memo to a script that's ready to record.

In this episode, we talk about:

The framework behind every educational hook George writes

Why the setups and payoffs inside each segment matter more than the hook

The ending George puts on every single video, and a twist I want to try on mine

Where a human still has to make the call, and why AI will keep "improving" your script forever if you let it

By the end of this episode, you will have a repeatable system for writing scripts with AI, and a clearer sense of which parts of the work you should keep for yourself.

Free download: YouTube Script Partner skill + George’s Claude project files

PlayWriteAI

Claude Scriptwriting Project Setup

The Exact Claude Project Setup for YouTube Script Writing

Free YouTube Script Template

Free Audience Avatar Template

The YouTube Scriptwriting Playbook

AutoCut by 1of10

George's Website / YouTube / X⁠ / ⁠LinkedIn⁠ / Newsletter / Community

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Introduction

(02:32) George's process today

(05:10) Easy mode vs. advanced mode

(09:53) The 3 blocks of a YouTube script

(11:04) Target, transformation, stakes

(18:06) Why setups matter most

(19:52) Inside George's scriptwriting app

(22:34) Rethinking the payoff

(28:16) How many segments a video needs

(33:00) How George ends every video

(35:14) Ending on a sales video

(38:34) Where humans still matter

(43:50) How George really feels about AI

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

162. George Blackman: How to script your videos like Ali Abdaal and Ed from Film Booth

***

ASK CREATOR SCIENCE

Submit your question here

***

WHEN YOU'RE READY

📬 Creator Science Newsletter

🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)

🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)

🧞‍♂️ Get a Personalized Offer

***

CONNECT

🐦 Connect on Twitter

📸 Connect on Instagram

💼 Connect on LinkedIn

📹 Subscribe on YouTube

***

SPONSORS

💼 View all sponsors
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices