This is the first post in a multi-part series where we'll introduce you to a framework we've used to create our content business.
Corporate America Won't Make You an Entrepreneur
I’ve spent 25 years building and launching products in areas such as software, data, analytics, and AI. All of this at the intersection of technology and industries like Sports, Financial Services, Media, and Entertainment.
You'd think this might make starting a content business easy, right? Not so fast.
Twenty-five years at large companies can teach you things, but when you're given budget, support, recruiters, teams, and resources it doesn't necessarily teach you how to be an entrepreneur – never mind a flavor that is specific to the creator economy. This is a much different journey.
So, How Did We Start?
Data Punk Media started with blogging about sports analytics – you can probably still see some of this in our content. In the beginning, though, there was no concept of a business; it was about starting a niche newsletter and more generally learning about this whole content thing. The more we pushed, though, the more we saw boundaries give way to new possibilities. And eventually, content creation gave way to the dream of doing something bigger.
Along the way, a key discovery was just how much of my previous career applied and how much didn't. For example, you may know about product development, understand data and analytics, have some depth on AI and sports, and this can get you to a place where you can create decent content. However, creating a content business forces you to learn a whole new set of skills and habits such as building an audience, developing a brand, creating content consistently, understanding SEO, producing video, managing social media, experimenting with ads, building courses, creating digital products, and figuring out what people want versus what they are willing to pay for. Crap, this isn't going to be easy.
So, How Does this Help Me?
Truth be told, we're not writing this series from the finish line. There's no way in hell I’m going to tell you that we built a newsletter in 30 days, generated $3 million in passive income, and discovered the seven secrets everyone else has somehow missed.
What I will tell you is that Data Punk Media is a work in progress. And anybody who's honest about their own adventure will likely tell you the same thing. And that, my fellow data punks, is the beauty of the journey – it doesn't end and you actually learn to love it!
So yes, some things have worked and some things haven’t. Some ideas that I thought would take off went absolutely nowhere. Booo! Other experiments surprised me. Yeah! We’ve spent time and money on things that weren’t worth it – or weren't worth it at that specific time. We’ve learned new software, created systems, changed strategies, rebuilt parts of the website, experimented with different types of content, watched analytics obsessively, and occasionally wondered whether anyone was paying attention at all.
But gradually, something started to emerge: a business framework.
And in the spirit of helping others out there who want to find some manner of personal freedom and are just crazy enough to start your own content business, we've packaged up our system into something called You, Inc. – which encapsulates the idea that you are the product and you can build something great!
The framework is built around six dimensions—Vision, System, Skills, Brand, Storytelling, and Finance—and the idea that you should think about yourself, your career, or your content business as a product that you are deliberately building. And not only is it built from 25+ years of experience, but also Data Punk Media has become the laboratory for putting those ideas into practice. And that's what we will share with you in this multi-part series.
From Content Creator to Content Business
Creating content and building a content business are two very different things – though one can evolve from the other. For example, you can write great articles, produce amazing videos, or create beautiful visualizations and still not have a business.
A business requires answering a minimum set of questions, such as:
- Who's your target audience?
- What problem will you solve?
- Why does your audience care?
- What are you uniquely good at?
- How will people discover you/your work?
- What systems allow you to produce consistently?
- What offering creates and sustains a business?
Wrangling these types of questions, we stopped seeing Data Punk Media as just a website or newsletter and started thinking about it more as a product portfolio. That is, articles, data stories, videos, courses, workshops, and so on. However, we also had to start thinking more about an offering – a key distinction between content creation and business, and how content is (and can be) positioned vis-a-vis the offering. As you'll see in the framework, there's a way to arrange the content against one or more offerings that you can then sell.
What's Next?
You might think You, Inc. as a framework is a bit abstract. Yeah, thinking about yourself as the product? It might be a bit weird at first. But once you let you as the product sink in a little and think about how whatever you build will be an extension of you (and your team), the idea begins to come to life.
Across this multi-part series, we're going to break down the You, Inc. framework for you and show you how we're building a content business through the same six dimensions. We'll start by showing you how to assess where you're at, and then we'll go through each step and give you practical steps and potential points of failure (i.e., areas where we didn't see around the curve and had to learn the hard way).
Your First Challenge: Assess Where You're At
Your first challenge is to complete the self-assessment. It'll take you 5 minutes to complete and a personalized email will be sent to you with a final score.
👉 Take the You, Inc. Survey
In each lesson in this series, we'll take an example creator (Mara Ellison) and walk through what their scores indicate, lay out some specific steps to take and highlight challenges (or our own points of failure) along the way.
Now, I'm not promising that following these six steps will magically produce a successful business. They're going to give you a recipe and process to follow, but you're the chef; you need to design and bake that amazing cake that is your content empire.
But, what I can promise is that we'll approach the subject the same way we've approached most complicated problems throughout my career: build something, measure it, learn from it, improve it, and repeat.
