2024 Year in Review

I just closed the books on year eight as a creator and, in many ways, it was the best year yet:

• My wife joined the business
• We had our best year financially
• We welcomed our first child into the world

Business, taken as a single graph, looks good!

I share this graph each year because it highlights a few important truths:

1. I've been doing this for eight years
2. It took me four years to have my first 6-figure year
3. My revenue actually dropped in year three
4. You can see how powerful compounding is

Along this eight-year journey, most of my peers have quit. A lot of them were talented and even found success! But this path is hard – and if I would've quit in years 1-5, you can see what I would've missed out on.

Remember that comparison is the thief of joy. I empathize with the desire to benchmark your performance against someone else's, but you need to give yourself some grace. If you're early in the journey, you shouldn't compare your numbers to those of someone in year eight.

In this year's review, I'll cover the highlights, but I also received a lot of requests from people who wanted to hear about the lowlights, failures, and lessons learned the hard way.

So I've broken this into two sections: Business and Personal, each sharing highlights, lowlights, and lessons learned.

Let's get into it.

Business

Highlights

Hired my wife full-time

It feels special to be full partners with my wife in everything. She previously transitioned from being an executive assistant to a community manager, and she's a fantastic real estate agent on the side. Bringing her into the business meant we could both fully focus on building something together during our working time.

She's great at community, graphic design, and organizing events – and I trust her implicitly. Even if we weren't married, she's the perfect hire.

As the only two full-time employees of the company, we're each eligible to contribute to a Solo 401K through Carry (which is a great tax strategy for a self-employed couple).

Diversified my revenue (while also growing it)

One of my biggest goals for the year was to increase digital product revenue to reducing my dependency on memberships while still growing membership revenue. To diversify even further, I figured I could increase sponsorship revenue by bringing operations in-house and eliminating the percentage of sponsorships I paid to third parties.

As you can see, this paid off! Digital product sales increased thanks to:

1. The launch of CreatorHQ
2. Using RightMessage to improve my email segmentation and automation strategies to pitch relevant offers consistently
3. Adding upsell logic to Teachable checkout and email post-purchase

Sponsorship revenue increased as we focused on cultivating our own brand relationships and cross-selling multiple platforms per sponsorship package.

This allowed us to save more money in the business than ever before. We opened a Money Market Account and started earning 4-5% interest on the cash we keep in the business. For the first time, it feels like we a safety net in the business itself (which I affectionately call the "Bank of Creator Science.")

Doubled our YouTube subscribers

We published 23 new long-form videos this year, picked up over 3,000,000 views, and adding more than 56,000 subscribers. That meant we broke 100,000 total subscribers and got our YouTube play button!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jay Clouse (@jayclouse)

YouTube has become our biggest source of new audience discovery, and we plan to double down on that this year by building a new state-of-the-art home studio and hiring a second editor for the channel.

Deployed a visual rebrand (that I'm obsessed with)

I worked with Hollie Arnett to develop the Creator Science visual identity you see today, and she knocked it out of the park. Deploying and working within this brand system was not only a blast, but it had a really positive impact on the overall brand perception.

There are lots of easter eggs sprinkled into the brand, but this is one of my favorites:

Made three new private investments

We started the year off hot with the Creator Science Syndicate, making two new investments in the first quarter:

• Carry
• RightMessage

I was also personally able to invest in Kick later in the year.

These are companies I use and love, and it's an honor to be a part of their story. If you're an accredited investor who wants to participate in future investment opportunities, you can join the Syndicate here.

Spoke at some major conferences

I spoke at several events last year, including CEX, Craft + Commerce, and VidSummit. At each of these events, I hosted private events for members of The Lab and welcomed many new members into the community, too.

It's absolutely bizarre to me how many people recognize me at industry events now. Public awareness of me has grown much faster than my personal self-esteem, so there's this weird cognitive dissonance between being complimented by strangers in public and my own feelings of "success." As an introvert, it's challenging from an energy perspective at these events, but I'm grateful for the love and working on accepting it more graciously.

Ran three successful launch campaigns

The biggest reason digital product sales increased this year was the launch of CreatorHQ in April. I productized my Notion setup (the operating system I built in Notion to run Creator Science) and launched it over four days.

CreatorHQ – Complete Operating System

Grow your creator business with an all-in-one workspace designed to save you more time, create more content, and drive more revenue.

Get it now ($297) ↗

That launch campaign generated more than $60,000, which was my biggest launch ever (by far). Even more importantly, it continues to sell on evergreen and receives stellar reviews from creators. As of this writing, 733 creators are using CreatorHQ, and it has generated $131,856 since launch.

In October, my producer Conor and I launched a 4-hour workshop on turning your audio podcast into a video show on YouTube. That workshop outperformed my expectations, earning just shy of $30,000.

Podcast Like A YouTuber

A comprehensive masterclass teaching you the strategy we used to attract 105,000 subscribers and 5,000,000 views (in just two years)!

Enroll now ($199) ↗

Lastly, our first-ever Black Friday promotion resulted in:

• 91 sales of CreatorHQ
• 64 new members of The Lab (Basic)
• $50,000+ in total revenue

The Lab is more active than ever

We're nearing the three-year anniversary mark for The Lab, and it's never been more active:

Paternity leave was scary because I had to slow down my involvement in the community. Not only did the community not slow down, but it actually seemed to pick up some steam. Now, even when I get to new posts quickly, other members have already been as helpful (or more helpful) as I would've been!

I also started creating a true community experience for the Basic membership tier – members who aren't yet eligible for the Standard or VIP tiers but want to work towards it. We now have more than 150 members in the Basic tier, and that community space is extremely vibrant, too.

Lowlights

Failed short-form video investments

I tried several different short-form video experiments, ranging from hiring individuals to agencies. I invested between $15,000 and $20,000, and these experiments generally underperformed. There are some bright spots that I'm continuing to pursue.

Disappointed with old products

I had some older workshops available for sale that weren't to the standard of my newer products. As a result, some enthusiastic customers of my NEW products purchased some of the old ones and came away disappointed. As a result, I recently unpublished several of my older paid products.

Failed to complete several projects

I started (but failed to complete) several projects, including:

• Creator Science merch
• YouTube visual upgrades
• Automated email sequences
• Automated email scoring

These projects have huge potential but got shelved by other priorities, and they are all sitting in limbo. I've invested thousands of dollars into them, so dropping the ball on them is frustrating.

Underestimated sponsorship operations

I underestimated the effort required to run a smooth sponsorship operation, and it ate up a lot of my time throughout the year.

While we increased our overall sponsorship revenue by ~41% by bringing it in-house, we more than doubled the time we put into sponsorship operations.

That time comes at a massive cost because any time I spend in sponsorship operations is taken away from creating content, building relationships, and serving The Lab.

Canceled a book project

Near the end of 2023, my friend Joe Pulizzi approached me about being an early author with Tilt Publishing. It's an innovative approach to self-publishing, and there were some perks to being an early author. So I agreed!

Unfortunately, I was more excited about the opportunity of a book deal than any particular book concept. As the year passed, I felt the weight of that promise (that I was not fulfilling) and ultimately decided to back out of the deal. It felt like I let us both down.

Overpromised and under-delivered on YouTube integrations

Right before our daughter was born, I had three great sponsors looking for long-term partnerships on our YouTube channel. They each wanted to sponsor three videos, and because they were perfect partners, I signed deals with each of them.

The plan was to publish three videos per month for three months – a slightly faster pace than our typical two videos/month. I told them they could expect one video per month (each) over those three months. They should've been fulfilled by October.

Then, our daughter was born, and I took paternity leave.

We didn't increase our video output, and in fact, it slowed down. I still have two integrations to fulfill and feel awful about it.

drive

Stalled email and podcast growth

My email subscriber growth exploded in 2023 – but it increased much slower in 2024. Part of that is my insistence on keeping my list clean and engaged, but part of it was a general slowing down of new subscribers. I just didn't drive as many new subscribers from my discovery platforms as I did in 2023.

Similarly, podcast growth was pretty flat. Not that I didn't attract new listeners, but the rate of new listeners was roughly equal to the rate of listener churn. Listener churn in audio podcasting is rarely discussed, but it's a huge growth problem for most shows. If you don't retain your listeners week-to-week, you need to attract new listeners just to maintain the status quo.

Slowed the business due to family leave

As the only two full-time employees in the business, my wife and I taking family leave was tough on the business.

I took 6 weeks off from calls but did my best to continue publishing my long-form content (essays, podcast episodes, and YouTube videos). Mallory took two full months, and we're still prioritizing family over work for her time.

Preparing for family leave wasn't as simple as getting ahead of our content calendar – we needed to change how the business operates and empower more of our extended team. I didn't prepare us well, and those two months post-birth were the lowest months of revenue for the business.

Haunted by The Lab's previous member cap

When I launched The Lab, I explicitly limited the number of members to 200. This was unique and got a lot of attention! There were some major benefits like:

• Maintaining closeness
• Improving retention
• Creating real scarcity

Word spread! Other creators adopted the model. But I realized that 200 was an arbitrary number, and what I gained in closeness I lost in density. I wanted more members in the same geographic area so I could support in-person meetups. I wanted more members with experience on TikTok so we could have more institutional knowledge in the community of all platforms.

But with a member cap, I was stuck.

So, in January, I got the community's buy-in to remove the explicit cap and shift to an application-based model. The goal was to elevate the standard of joining, increasing platform and location density, and still maintain closeness.

This has mostly worked – the typical member of The Lab now generates $29,977 in monthly revenue, we have just a hair above 200 members, and we have more platform and geographic density.

...but the market still thinks we have a cap. Worse, they think we are currently at capacity.

This has inhibited new applications and new members to a degree, and we haven't grown as much as we could've. Changing that public perception has been a challenge.

Burned out hard to end the year

I was flying high on sponsorship and speaking opportunities in Q4. I was getting great offers left and right, and I've always tried to "make hay while the sun is shining," – so I said yes to many of them.

Suddenly, all of my sponsorship inventory was filled for months:

• Every YouTube video
• Two newsletters per week
• All of our podcast ad units
• Even a few social posts

There was no margin for error if we missed any of these deadlines, and we needed to constantly create (and get approval on) new ad creative.

As a result, the last two months of the year felt like I was a passenger to decisions I had made weeks prior. Every morning, I woke up feeling behind. I had to focus on what sponsors needed and not what my audience or customers needed.

Of course, sponsors are my customers, too – but it felt like I was failing my audience, my members, and my other customers.

This cognitive dissonance and the inability to slow down our publishing cadence completely burned me out. I struggled to get back to the keyboard, and I'm still pulling out of it.

Lessons Learned

Ask for sponsor payments upfront

When I work through third-party agencies for sponsorship campaigns, it's typically 1-3 months to receive payment from campaigns I've fulfilled. But when we took it over internally, I just started invoicing for the entire campaign upfront when signing the contract. Sure, a few partners asked for different payment arrangements, but even those typically paid 50% upfront.

This has been great for cash flow, eliminates the risk of non-payment, and reduces some of the administrative work on the backend of campaigns, too.

Every sponsorship is an endorsement

I used to think about my sponsorship inventory as available to anyone who wanted to purchase it. It's just an ad, right? The consumer will know it was paid for and not necessarily my endorsement.

I've changed my mind. I see anything I include in my content as an implicit endorsement, so I've decided to lean in and only accept partners I feel comfortable explicitly endorsing. That means I must be familiar with (and truly believe in) the product. As a result, I accept far fewer partners, and the campaigns have steadily improved effectiveness.

Order bumps really work

I really leaned into order bumps in Teachable this year. When I created the opportunity to purchase other products within my checkout flow, about 25% of people added to their order. This was a non-trivial increase in digital product revenue.

I'm limiting the business by being the face AND the operator

The biggest bottleneck in the business is that I am both the main operator and the main face of the business. Both roles are more than full-time, and by owning both, I limit my ability to do either to their fullest. At this point, I either need to delegate or accept that the business has a ceiling.

People love short podcast episodes

I've started publishing <10-minute, ad-free podcast episodes. These are one-take recordings in the style of a Voice Memo, and listeners love them. The retention is so high that I am prioritizing recording more of them:

90% of the benefit comes from 10% of speaking/guest opportunities

Most speaking/guest opportunities require more time than they're worth. More often than not, I can't attribute any outcome to guesting on a podcast, YouTube channel, or virtual event, but they really draw on my time and energy. With time even more scarce, I’m being way more picky about speaking and guest opportunities in 2025.

Exceptions this year were in-person speaking events (CEX, Craft + Commerce, VidSummit) and this interview on Ali Abdaal's channel (that generated thousands in course revenue from an offer I made at the end):

I need to connect YouTube viewers to email

Despite generating millions of views on YouTube this year, I can only attribute a few hundred email subscribers to those videos. I failed on three fronts:

1. Creating a compelling CTA in the video
2. Having some form of email capture attached to that CTA
3. Tracking that email capture on a video-by-video basis

All of this is possible; it just requires a little more effort before publishing. But that effort is well worth it, and I will do it for every video I publish in 2025!

Building anticipation > Pre-selling

I used to presell a product before creating it to validate and de-risk the effort. This worked to a degree, but I never had a big "launch" with this approach.

With the launches of CreatorHQ, Podcast Like A YouTuber, and our Black Friday campaign, I saw how powerful it is to build anticipation for a product before you can purchase it. It led to much bigger launches and it wasn't even close.

I explain this strategy in episode #191:

Breaking down my $60,723 product launch

Listen to Breaking down my $60,723 product launch from Creator Science wherever you get your podcasts!

Short-form video is all about the hook/content

In my short-form video experiments, I thought the key would be creating a unique visual style. So, I hired different agencies and created some unique visuals – but the videos fell flat. It turns out that what matters more than anything else is coming up with a compelling hook and keeping the viewer's attention – which you can do with or without flashy visuals.

When I hired an agency to create these videos, even if they promised to develop a script, it wasn't quite good enough. Not bad, but not good enough to compete with people who really know what they're doing. And without a good script, the visuals didn't matter. So, this year, I'm planning to practice short-form scriptwriting.

What gets measured doesn't always get managed

As anyone in The Lab will tell you, I track a LOT of different metrics in my business. But I realized that tracking a metric doesn't matter if you don't use that data to influence your decisions.

What good is tracking your Instagram follower count if you aren't actively trying to influence its growth? It becomes a monthly data entry exercise (ultimately just a time cost).

In 2025, I'm tracking fewer metrics and focusing on those I plan to influence.

Personal

Highlights

Became a dad!

This is the biggest news of the year – our firstborn! Parenting is everything people told us it would be: amazing, fun, challenging, frustrating, etc., but to an even deeper degree than I could've ever imagined.

Being a dad is awesome. It's amazing watching her learn and develop, and Mal is an incredible mom. I want to have more kids. And it's changed my priorities in life and business, which I wrote about on my personal blog.

Lost ~30 lbs

I was able to go from 210 lbs to 180 over the course of a few months, thanks to the team at MyBodyTutor. This was a HUGE win for me, and I feel much more healthy, flexible, and in control of my overall fitness.

My approach was honestly dead simple:

• I tracked my calories in MyFitnessPal to stay in a caloric deficit
• I walked 7,500-10,000 steps/day (often on a treadmill)
• I weighed myself each morning

Each day, my trainer would check in and give me feedback on my exercise and food choices. If I did those things, I lost weight.

Got LASIK surgery

I've had comically bad eyesight since I was in grade school. This year, I got LASIK surgery, and it's been absolutely life-changing. Driving at night is a challenge because I still get halos/starbursts, but it's been well worth it.

Officiated a friend's wedding and gave a toast at my sister's

I officiated one of my best friend's weddings (who first officiated MY wedding!) and gave a toast at my sister's. This was a different writing exercise than I've ever done before, but I got some good advice:

• It's better to be too short than too long
• No one is there to see YOU
• Don't make too many inside jokes
• No one remembers what you said, but how you made them feel

I think both speeches went really well (and both were WAY more stressful than speaking on stage)!

Home upgrades

We moved into our current home last July, and since then, we've made some major improvements (most of them by choice, a few of them because things died). This year, we remodeled our kitchen, nursery, and laundry room and began finishing our basement (home of my future studio)!

Won my fantasy football league

We have a league with an auction draft that's really competitive. I drafted well, got lucky with injuries, and despite making some questionable trades at the end of the season, I finished with the second-best record and won the championship.

Lowlights

More time stress than ever

Despite reducing our overall financial stress, I've never felt more time stress. Time passes quickly, and there never seems to be enough of it. As a result, ANY free time feels so high stakes because I could use it "productively" (although I rarely have the energy to).

The loss of deep work time, partner time, and alone time

It's so challenging to be a parent while running a business that demands a lot of my time. I try to contribute a lot as a husband and father, but that has come at the cost of extended periods of deep work, alone time, or partner time. My best working time is the mornings, but I take the morning shift with the baby so Mallory can (try to) catch up on sleep from the night before.

Of course, it's still possible to find deep time, partner time, or alone time, but they require more planning and communication than before. Plus, having uninterrupted time puts a greater strain on my wife as the primary caretaker.

My inner circle has gotten smaller

As life has gotten more complex, I've spent less time talking and spending time with friends. As a result, I have fewer close friends than I used to and sometimes feel lonely because of it.

Less time with family

I go on a couple of fishing trips each year with my dad, and two years ago, Mallory and I went on a short vacation with my parents. But with the birth of our daughter happening midyear, we lost that family vacation and a fishing trip.

General exhaustion

We got lucky – our daughter has been a good sleeper for most of her life. But she goes through a sleep regression from time to time, and the loss of sleep with a newborn is real.

Baby is finally asleep for the night? How does working an hour or two before bed sound? (Terrible, actually!)

I've never been more tired in my life.

(Re)gained 10 lbs

After hitting my goal weight, I stopped meal tracking and began focusing on strength training. But, as time has passed, I've gotten too relaxed on my calorie intake and stress has led to gaining a few pounds back.

Lessons Learned

Parenting and work stress feel like marital stress

When we're at our best, Mallory and I are perfect teammates in life and the business. But how often are parents of a newborn at their best? 😅

When I'm stressed about work, she can feel it. When she's stressed from caretaking, I can feel it. We've really had to learn (and relearn) how to best communicate in a way where our stress doesn't take the lead.

Before Mallory joined the business, we pre-emptively did some couples counseling to help us prepare for healthy, open communication. It helped us then, and the experience has continued to help us now! It's easy to misread or misinterpret parenting or work stress as marital stress, but we're doing our best.

If you win on diet, exercise has lower stakes

As I try to maintain my fitness in smaller pockets of time, I've learned that if I have better habits around my diet, there's less pressure on exercise. But the worse my diet is each day, the more important movement becomes just to maintain the status quo.

I need exercise

On the other hand, I'm like a working dog; if I don't exercise, I get restless. But instead of having zoomies around the house, I just get grumpy. I NEED to move my body to quiet my mind (or the whole Clousehold suffers).

I crave routine

When I was on paternity leave with an open calendar, I felt unmoored. At first, it was great to have no time constraints...but open space has historically been so rare that I couldn't help but feel like I was "wasting" this "free time." Obviously, that was my WORK brain chiming in and trying to steal time from my wife and child, but it was a struggle nonetheless.

Although time is in short supply, having more structure back in my day has helped me feel more inner peace.

My relationship with work is probably not healthy

It's no secret that I work a lot – and I think may actually have an unhealthy compulsion around work.

I'm not a psychiatrist, but a driving force in my work is a frequent feeling that I have to do something just to (temporarily) reduce my anxiety.

I complete tasks because when they're NOT done, I feel deeply uncomfortable (both psychologically and physiologically). And when I complete that task, I don't even feel good about it so much as I feel less bad. It's like I start each day in a deficit and my contributions just get me back to baseline (but rarely above).

Unfortunately, there are so many aspects of a creator business that are never truly "done," just done for today – like publishing a newsletter every week or posting on Instagram every day. When you stack that all up, I start the day with a pretty large deficit.

Again, I'm not a psychiatrist, but I've heard this described as a compulsive behavior – and it really resonated with me. How much of my business success can be attributed to an unhealthy compulsion I'd wish not to feel most days? Probably a lot.

Conclusion

All in all, 2024 was the best year of my life. I've never had a more life-changing experience than the birth of our daughter, and despite nearly two months of family leave, the business had its best year ever.

We're in a good position to continue our momentum into 2025, but it's become clear that we have some major time constraints, and my previous strategy of outworking the competition is no longer viable. I need to simplify, work smarter, hire, and empower.

I start every year with some level of fear that everything could go away and anxiety that there's no way I could match these results again next year. This year is no different! I have those same feelings.

But I'm attacking the year with enthusiasm while also recognizing that my priorities have changed. Of course, I want the business to continue growing, but I'm also not willing to sacrifice my involvement as a husband and father for that growth.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are your expenses so high?

When people see this chart, they often ask about my expenses. It's basically:

• 50% payroll
• 25% contract labor
• 25% misc (equipment, software, travel, etc.)

In 2022, I started filing taxes as an S-Corp and paying myself as a W-2 employee from the business – you can see that jump in expenses. This is a tax strategy that based on the business's revenue (and you should talk to your CPA about it). In 2024, my wife joined as a W-2 employee as well, so you see another jump in expenses.

Outside of that, I've consistently hired more help for the business (especially on the video side) and experimented with one-off projects (like the brand refresh). I could save more money by spending less, but I enjoy using the revenue the business generates to invest in projects I think have future potential. The YouTube channel, in particular, has been a break-even project for two years now (it actually operated at a loss for quite some time).

How much do you work?

Time at the keys is lower than ever, but the real question is how much I think about work, which is almost constant. I really struggle to turn my brain off.

Before having a baby, I was probably "working" 10 hours per day, including weekends (though I now see how inefficient that time was). Now, I probably spend closer to six.

If everything goes according to plan, my day looks like this:

6am: Wake up and feed the pets while Mallory feeds the baby
7am: Take the baby, try to get her back to sleep
7:30am: Workout
8:30am: Give the baby a bottle and hang out with her
10am: Start work
12pm: Lunch
1pm: Back to work
4pm: Feeling tired, give up on work
7:30pm: Start putting baby to bed
8:30pm: Baby is asleep
10pm: Go to bed

Don't let those larger time blocks fool you – there are constant interruptions with family and pet needs. So when I AM working, I really need to get into flow fast (but that's easier said than done)!

How do you balance creating + being a parent?

Mallory and I are full partners. I'm CEO of the business, she's CEO of the home/family. So our 50/50 looks a little bit like a 70/30 on both sides of that equation – I spend more time on the business, and she spends more time on the family. Of course, we share responsibilities in all things. When I need extra time to create, we make a plan to create that time. When she needs some time to herself, we make a plan to create that time.

How does this impact your 2025 strategy?

I want to simplify the business. Fewer things done well.

I'm doubling down on what is already working and making it better. Improving The Lab by adding more in-person and small-group experiences. Any new product(s) I create will be added to the membership – members get complimentary access (and they get it before the public).

I also plan to reduce sponsorship operations by pausing sponsorship integrations on podcasts and YouTube. Those platforms take a lot more time and effort than the newsletter, and I want to make sure our editorial schedule is driven by our own taste and enthusiasm (not sponsor deadlines).

Lastly, I'm constantly thinking about what we can do uniquely well (and be difficult to emulate). Our time resources are more limited than ever, but we have more financial resources to yield now than before. So, even though I'll be working less, I'm trying to create more people-hours in the business through hiring more contract help.

If you enjoyed this essay, you'd love The Lab. This is the type of depth and honesty you get in every conversation there – and it's never been more alive.