The Creator

Gigi Robinson is a multiplatform creator, public speaker, model, designer, photographer, and entrepreneur who talks about socially-impactful topics like chronic illness, mental health, body image, and women in business, as well as the Creator Economy. We met via LinkedIn, where she is a voice of the Gen Z creator community.

Let’s dig in!

The Business

Breakdown

Observations

Gigi's business is primarily B2B. She's hired by brands and companies to:

• Create and promote content to her audience, and

• To speak on a variety of topics, including chronic illness and mental health.

Instagram drives 70% of her business, despite only housing ~10% of her audience. This implies:

• B2B content, influencer, and speaking buyers spend a lot of time on the platform, despite my preconception of Instagram as a B2C platform, and

• The size of her audience is not the driving factor for her buyers.

Brands and buyers seem more interested in what she has to say and how, than how many people her content reaches organically.

• It's not the performance marketers who are reaching her, but the brand marketers.

• The quality level of her work also helps her stand out, as she shoots 4K with a DLR while her peers are shooting on iPhones.

LinkedIn brings in 15% of her revenue despite being ~3% of her audience.

• Clearly, the audience on LinkedIn has B2B spending power!

She sometimes gets brand and speaking opportunities directly from platforms, via her Strategic Partner Managers.

• Having direct platform relationships can literally lead to revenue. This is my first time hearing of this, especially for a sub-1M-scale creator.

Her #1 audience platform (Snapchat) makes her absolutely no money (yet).

I've connected Gigi with someone from Snap, so hopefully she gets into their monetization program and this story changes for her soon!

The Stack

Content Creation

Editing - Adobe Creative Suite

Asset Management - Google Drive

Design - Canva + Adobe Express

Podcast Production - Riverside

Other reasons:

• Riverside's Self View isn't off to the side and so doesn't draw gaze away from the camera

• They've advertised with her

• They have clip editing features she likes (but doesn't use because she has an editor)

Podcast Distribution - Anchor

• It's easy

• It's free

• She's shopping around for a podcast monetization deal that will likely include hosting, but it was a great place for her to launch and grow initially.

Business Management

Communication - iMessage

Bank - Chase Business

• It seems convenience trumps specialization for Gigi, on the banking front. It wasn't even something she thought about

Credit Card - JetBlue Mastercard, Karat

• I'm sensing a theme here - again, convenience trumps specialization

Finances - QuickBooks Online + CPA + Financial Advisor

• You guessed it...convenience

• She started out doing her own bookkeeping, but now has a CPA

• QuickBooks lets her track bills, send invoices, and even get paid directly (though she dislikes their 2.9% credit card processing fee)

Team

Representation - Collective Speakers

• Sees value from the credibility of a speaking agent + their bringing her business

• Has spoken with other agencies and management companies, but opted to have her day-to-day team handle the rest of her business because she finds negotiating brand deals to be pretty straightforward

Content & Operations

Gigi employs a team of young, female college students - all part-time and paid $15+ hourly - who work with her to produce her content, manage her socials, and deliver on her brand deals. They include:

• Copy editor - Penn State

• Video editor - U Washington

• Executive assistant - NYU

• Executive producer - NYU

• Multimedia producer - Parsons

• Designer - Parsons

By delegating work to a part-time, up-and-coming team,. she's able to scale herself beyond just content creation, and can source more business opportunities for herself. In my experience, this makes her an outlier among video creators, many of whom are less willing to outsource aspects of production and would prefer someone else handled their business.

I'm curious if this is a generational trend. Do millennial creators look up to Artists, while Gen Z creators look up to Entrepreneurs? 🤔

Next Time

Next week, we’ll cover key learnings from my conversation with Gigi, including quotes, insights, and my own analysis. Free subscribers get three (3) learnings from every creator conversation.

If you’re a member of my paid Superlogic subscription, though, you’ll get access to an additional 6-10 learnings from every creator. Three (3) of this week’s seven (7) additional learnings are included below for Superlogic subscribers. If you’re looking to really learn as much as possible from each conversation, I’d encourage you to become a paid Superlogic subscriber.

As a bonus, paid subscribers get to see who I’ve got scheduled for upcoming interviews, and can email me to submit questions for them. Subscribe and check out the list below!

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Thanks for being a paid subscriber! Your membership makes the amount of time and energy I’m investing into executing and analyzing these creator conversations worthwhile. I am grateful for your partnership! Here are your 3 learnings for this week:

1. Snap's audience is huge, highly-engaged, and worth nothing (unless you're well-connected).

Snap is by far Gigi's biggest platform, in both followers and actual viewership. It's distribution algorithm is powerful, and her content seems to resonate well with its Gen Z audience.

However, monetization on Snap is still widely unavailable; you have to be among the select few creators and media companies that Snap's internal gatekeepers deem worthy of monetizing. If you are, you can make a TON of money...or so I hear from companies like Jellysmack, Overtime, and Doing Things Media, as well as about creators like David Dobrik. My own efforts to syndicate and monetize creator content on Snap, back in 2020-2021 while running Wheelhouse DNA, didn't result in much ROI.

Ironically, Snap is the one platform where Gigi didn't have a partner manager, and therefore couldn't get monetized.

I connected her with a colleague at Snap. Hopefully, by the time you read this, she's making some money on the platform!

I'm bullish on Snap as a business, and really hope they open up monetization to all Creators on the platform. This can only be good for their business, if YouTube, Twitch, and other creator revshare programs are any indicator.

2. Pinterest is a sleeping giant.

Gigi's Pinterest audience isn't worth counting - literally, it was an afterthought and I didn’t include it in the breakdown - and aside from a sponsored post deal with them, she hasn't made any money off them. That said, her observation about how on-trend boards can amass huge viewership is interesting.

I'm not sure how one would monetize those boards. Affiliates? Can creators do that?

I need to talk to someone who makes a living on Pinterest. Please hit me up if you know a creator that does!

3. Being first is often enough.

Gigi uses Riverside to record her podcast. This came up because I use Zencastr, and we talked about which is better. She told me she like Zencastr a lot, but prefers Riverside, and I asked her why. Her answer was simple but deeply revealing:

There were other reasons:

• Riverside's Self View isn't off to the side and so doesn't draw gaze away from the camera

• They've advertised with her

• They have clip editing features she likes (but doesn't use because she has an editor)

That's to say - the product is good. But so is Zencastr's, so is Anchor's, so are many others.

The first thing she said was that she used Riverside first...and it seems like that was enough.

Likely, she got used to using it, and then after that, everything else would have just...been different. Why change?

For creators, my takeaway here is to put in energy into researching and selecting tools and partners, because switching is hard once you're used to something.

For companies, my takeaway here is to focus on creators who WOULD benefit from using a product like yours, but ARE NOT currently using any similar product. It's likely easier to get them to start than to change.

Thanks for learning with me! Next week, you’ll get four (4) additional learnings on top of the 3 free ones that everyone will receive, for a total of 10 learnings from this conversation with Gigi.

Upcoming interviews include:

• Jay Clouse - One of my favorite metacreators, Jay and his Creator Science business help aspiring creators go from amateur to professional. His approach to his stack is one that would make Jeff Bezos proud, so you’ll find the discussion valuable!

• Bryce Adams - One of the top creators on OnlyFans, generating over $6M in annual revenue with a team of 20. Her story and approach is absolutely fascinating!

• Maya Lê Espiritu aka MaiStoryBook - Maya is an elementary school teacher-turned-creator who makes wonderful supplemental educational content for parents, children, and other teachers. I learn a lot about a segment of the Creator Economy that doesn’t get much coverage, and I think you will to!

• Tejas Hullur - Tejas is Gen Z’s metacreator, educating an emerging generation of entrepreneurial creative minds through his own journey. He tries to be a “non-regrettable view”, which I love, and there’s a more lot to learn from him!

I’ve already done these interviews, but still have plenty of time to follow up with additional questions.

Other creators I’m talking to but haven’t scheduled yet include:

• Jerry Won - Jerry is the outspoken big brother of the AAPI creator community, who has parlayed his advocacy and voice on LinkedIn into a lucrative speaking business. He now also teaches other creators how to become speakers themselves through his mastermind program, and I can’t wait to chat with him to learn more about his model, processes, and partners!

If you have anything pressing you’d like to know from any of these creators, please email me at [email protected]. I can’t promise I’ll get every question answered, but I can promise that I will do my best to get the most relevant, interesting ones!

Thanks again for being part of this community. See you next week!