I Spent 10 Hours Analyzing the top 1% of Creators
Lesson 3: The 9th wonder of the world
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Jay Clouse — $250,000+ net income.
Justin Welsh — $ 4.15 M+ in revenue.
Codie Sanchez — $17.7M+ net worth.
In 2025, creator-first businesses are taking over traditional faceless brands, and I expect that trend to grow and grow.
I spent 10 hours breaking down their landing pages — the structure, the copy, the calls to action — and spotting what they all had in common.
Here’s the list 👇
Dan Koe
Ali Abdaal
Justin Welsh
Codie Sanchez
Alex Hormozi
Jack Butcher
Rachel Rodgers
Jay Clouse
Sahil Bloom
Here’s what I learned:
Lesson 1: Centre your brand around a ‘core’ idea
As a creator-first brand, people have one question in mind when they discover who you are: what’s this person about?
What people need is a recognisable, digestible idea that they can categorise.
It’s got to be simple, differentiated, and succinct.
What you can’t do is over-engineer and over-complicate. If you do, people won’t understand what you do, and they’ll click off before they can build a connection with you and your brand.
Step one: get them to understand who you are.
If you want to stand out on the internet, you must be known for something.
Make it short.
Make it sharp.
Make it stand out.
Remember, there are a million and one people on the internet, all trying to compete for your attention, show them who you are, and do it in a way that makes you instantly recognisable.
If you’re in doubt, after someone has read your bio, they should be able to say ‘oh yeah, the ______ person’
Here are some examples:
Jay Clouse — the ‘science of creating’ person.
Codie Sanchez — the ‘buying ‘blue-collar’ businesses’ person.
Justin Welsh — the ‘building a one-person business’ person.
Ali Abdaal — the ‘productivity’ person.
A strong identity is the first step in creating a big creator-first brand on the internet. But what’s next will surprise you.
Lesson 2: Create an easy, *risk-free* commitment step
Almost all the creators in this list are asking for something smart from *new* people entering their ecosystem. What these creators understand is that they need readers to take the first step into their world, they know that their audience doesn’t go from browsing to buying within a day, they know that cultivating relationships takes time, a lot of time.
And helpfully, that’s how they’ve designed their world.
❌ Hi → Buy my thing.
✅ Hi → Subscribe to be part of this → Learn from me → Build a relationship → Buy.
The journey from a random person on the internet who knows nothing about you, to getting to know you and having enough trust to buy off you is a long one. And not one that can be rushed.
Instead of going hi to buy, these creators know that they’ve got a long road ahead of them to prove their value, so they ask people to take a small first step and build a relationship with them first.
No risk, no payment — just pure value first.
Remember, people need to build a relationship with you first *before* committing to buying from you. Build your brand around that idea.
Patience now = reward later.
Lesson 3: The 9th wonder of the world
If compounding interest is the 8th wonder of the world, the 9th wonder of the world is consistency.
Back in 2023, I remember reviewing the best tweets of almost all these creators. That was 2 years ago, and then most of them had been going for 4 years+ at that point. What often tricks us into thinking people go from zero to hero seemingly overnight is actually just pure commitment.
All of these creators on the list have been going for a good while.
What that means is they have built up ALOT of content and a lot of opportunity to get into as many eyes as possible.
The sad reality is, no matter how good your content is, people forget, and they forget quickly. Like any good brand, you need to show up, but you need to show up consistently.
Big brands fall victim to this same reality, if they don’t show up consistently, they get left behind — it’s a simple as that.
Lesson 4: Monetisation strategy
Broadly speaking, there are two big ways to monetise:
Leverage your platform and use it (often to sell higher ticket items)
Go low but for high volume
You can do either or both. (just remember, more isn’t always more).
Sahil Bloom does mostly one and dabbles in the other. Here’s got over 800,000 subscribers on a newsletter. That means when he emails about something, he causes a huge wave of people to listen.
He thinks about who is in his audience and what they are trying to achieve, and builds business around that.
In this case, he thinks of his newsletter as a B2B opportunity.
AKA the thinking: Who’s in my audience? What businesses do they own? What are they spending money on? How can I build a service *from* that?
Alto Studios — Comms strategy & content agency.
OffMenu — Design agency.
Landed — Recruitment agency.
Paperboystudios — Newsletter growth agency.
Inflection — Experience agency.
But then also, for the other 750,000+ (just a guess) people in Sahil’s audience that aren’t building a business or actively spending money on agencies, he has a small ticket, high volume offering, his book:
The way to think about this is:
Who is in your audience?
What are they spending money on?
How can you leverage high-ticket / low-ticket offers?
How can you think about high/ low volume sales?
Lesson 5: How can you make it about them?
I’ll start with this: people are selfish.
That’s not a bad thing, it’s a real, honest, and right thing. People are selfish. They are innately interested in what you can do for them. They like you because of what you can do for them— that might sound harsh, but it’s a truth worth exploring.
It’s got to be all about them.
Your brand needs to make their life better after all, why else would they invest their time and money with you? This is a business; people pay (either with their attention or time) for something in return.
Take a look at Rachel Rodger’s homepage:
It’s super clear, within the first 2 seconds, what she wants to do for you. This is about money, and it’s about making you richer. Simple. It’s very clear it’s all about the person on the other side of the screen.
Put your audience at the heart of everything you do. You are serving them. You are trying to help them get from where they are to where they want to be. It’s all about them.
Lesson 6: Put your face on the thing
You know what’s funny, a creator-first brand involves an identity. A face. A name. Often, that gets left behind in the scramble to do all the other things that need to be done.
But every single one of these creators on this list has their name and face front and centre of their brand.
You must, at the very least, introduce who you are and what you are about. Remember, this is a creator-first brand, it’s the opposite of a faceless brand, so you must have a face to put to your name.
We build relationships with people, and part of that is knowing who the person is and what they’re about. Being able to see a face when you’re reading somebody’s work is really important when it comes to building an affinity with that brand.
Lesson 7: Be polished
Here’s a snapshot of these creator businesses:
What do you notice about all of these?
All of these websites have a clear brand. Whether that’s all black, accents of blue, dark green, colourful, or a strong singular colour.
They all have an identity. Something that makes them unique.
This is to be taken really seriously. The bar is higher than ever. If you want to create a business for the long term, invest in your brand. Spend the time making it look ‘polished’.
A strong, polished brand gives confidence and reassurance that you know what you’re talking about.
That’s all for today, I’ve got tonnes more I want to write about and more creators to explore, but Substack has told me this is ‘near email length’ limit, so I’ll leave it there for today.
Loved writing this one, let me know if you want more like this!
Much love—
Eve
Founder - Part-Time Creator Club