5 creators who turned their knowledge into businesses

Everyone who has acquired knowledge can create an info product.

It’s a trend I’ve been watching develop as a part of a global shift to the “creator economy” where anyone can build an audience and monetize their work, whatever it may be that you create. It applies to anyone — a person with no former experience creating a business, a student, a worker in a niche business, or a founder with multiple businesses.

Actually, successful founders creating books has been a common event for a while now, but writing a book is just one option for founders these days. They’re also creating Twitter threads, newsletters, podcasts, videos, and so on (“build once, sell twice.”) And there are also people who have 20 years of experience doing something niche — they’re now learning how to gain a massive following and convert their quiet knowledge into products.

What I think a lot of people don’t realize, though, is everyone has something to offer.

If you’re really good at taking care of cats, start a newsletter and teach how to take care of cats.

I’m highlighting five creators who turned their knowledge into info products and successful businesses to prove it. Then I’ll share a few recommendations that I have for getting started. Each of these creators also openly shares their experience online, so I encourage you to click through and learn more about them.

Jack started his own advertising agency after 10 years of working as a creative director for multi-billion dollar brands. But as a full-stack creative serving many clients, he burnt out quickly. What he caught on to around this time though was that he had spent a lot of time refining the process of creating a pitch deck — something that agencies don’t even get paid for; it’s just a part of winning over the client to begin with.

So he pivoted his agency and decided to try focusing on how to help companies visualize messages to get a concept across, which he called “visualized value.” A Twitter and Instagram account helped him with inbound marketing. Eventually, demand outran his capacity for new clients. So:

“I started building education products, and have since just been experimenting with all sorts of different stuff,” he told The Business of Business in an interview.

Over time, Jack Butcher grew Visualize Value into a $1 million dollar business featuring courses, articles, merch, and more.

“The insight behind this transition? Productizing myself,” writes Jack. “Now I spend all of my time making things that make it easier to learn, teach, build, and sell."

Anne Laure worked as part of the Digital Health team at Google before she left to start her own company, while also pursuing a PhD at King’s College London where her research was focused on the neuroscience of education.

“I've always been fascinated by the weird ways our brains work,” she wrote on her Product Hunt launch page. "I use what I study at school and my worries and hopes building a business to write 5 weekly articles about neuroscience, productivity, and creativity. Each week, I send a digest as well as some cool stuff I only include in the newsletter, such as fun brain games and hacks to try, as well as thought-provoking articles from around the web.”

At the time of the Product Hunt launch, Anne-Laure had already amassed 2,300 subscribers and almost 100K visitors organically and through social. In an AMA, she credited her growth to writing consistently (every week), posting on Twitter and the news website Hacker News, and asking for feedback (you should definitely check out more of her advice here).

By June 2021, the newsletter had grown to 35,000 subscribers and generated revenue through sponsors, including Notion, Obsidian, and MindMeister (other knowledge base products).

Daniel has documented his experiences working for himself and “emerging from the unknown” on his blog.

His story starts with him quitting his job of 8 years at Amazon with a rough plan to create a software product. To be safe, Daniel wanted some fallbacks so he decided to start writing. The problem: “I was unknown to the world. I had no audience—and there was no reason for one to exist. I had no illusion that people would find whatever I was going to offer, and even if they did find me, why would they want to do business with me?”

Daniel started writing about the only thing he could think of that was “plausibly interesting enough to gather some attention. It was the story of why I decided to abandon a successful high-paying career well before its peak.”

He posted to his first articles Hacker News and they made it to the front page for a short time. Spurred on by the attention, he started using Twitter — without any prior experience — to document his choices on what he would create. “Within three months, my blog posts were read by over 100,000 people.”

Since then, Daniel has expanded his work, continuing to make and sell educational info products. Examples include a 1.5 hour video course on building a Twitter audience ($240K+ in sales), a short technical ebook about AWS ($135K in sales), and a membership info product with financial results, for those interested in the behind the scenes of his business ($32K in total sales).

Daniel shared his experience with the Product Hunt community in an AMA last year. One of his bits of wisdom: “Don't focus on one project. Do many at the same time.” You can read more here.

Unlike the past couple of creators, Steph has continued working full-time while branching out and earning income as a creator. She works at the Hustle (acquired by Hubspot) where she leads Trends, a subscription-based research and media platform for entrepreneurs.

“In 2018, I decided to learn to code. Inspired by other creators who had become completely financially independent, I set out on my creator journey and started building my own products,” explained Steph Smith in her Product Hunt AMA. “Fast forward four years and I now have a profitable book, Doing Content Right, that has sold over $125k in ~1 year.”

Doing Content Right is a resource about everything Steph knows about publishing online to help creators write and scale successful blogs and newsletters. Although she only took 49 days to write it, she emphasizes what it really took was six years and 49 days. “I always like to remind people that the book was actually 5+ years in the making (learning and distilling the expertise).”

Janel Loi pivoted from corporate life to tech. “I started my curated newsletter, BrainPint earlier this year to move from consumption to creation,” she shared with Build in Public. When she did, she went down “the newsletter rabbit hole” while writing, tweeting, and running cross-promotions to promote the newsletter.

She used the popular project management and note-taking tool, Notion, to create an “operating system” that could help her manage her newsletter and store the resources she curated to write it. Newsletter OS, as she called it later, helped her track her progress and important milestones.

While working on other projects, it clicked that Janel had a great product sitting right in front of her. She poured months into Newsletter OS — “Why not give it a facelift, upgrade the content, systems & workflows and put it up for sale?”

Janel collected $1K in pre-orders within the first 24 hours. Newsletter OS has now helped more than 1,100 newsletter writers start, grow, organize, and earn from their newsletters.

Getting started begins with intangible and practical steps.

On the intangible side, for a lot of people, getting started begins with understanding that they don’t just have to be the consumers of other people’s content. They can create.

No one is stopping you from creating. Information is abundant and everyone has access to it — it’s the choice you make and the action you take to get started. Even if you have the same expertise as another creator, your own perspective is unique. And once you do create, you should expect to play the long game, which is where the more practical part comes in.

My advice is to build your community first — audience first, content second.

I also suggest that new creators start out offering their products for free. Literally, give away your knowledge, even though you know it has monetary value on the Internet. In doing so, you're building four things: credibility, leverage, social proof, and trust. People begin to trust you as a creator because you’re delivering value and giving knowledge away.

In a way, you’re also building guilt when you give something away for free. You don't have to put a price on your product. On Gumroad, for example, you can ask the consumer to pay whatever price they want. If they want to pay $0, fine. If you do that 10 times and 99% of people convert for $0, you’ll often find that by the 11th time, someone will pay.

That’s what I did. I shipped 15 projects over the last three years and I never charged for anything, even though I knew that I could. Then when I launched my product, Shoutout, and charged for it, people saw value in it and paid. They trust me and rewarded me for what I did in the past.

So my advice to every wannabe creator who is reading this is to start small, build a community, be consistent with creating content, give your work away for free, earn trust and leverage, and eventually monetize when you feel the time is right.