‘You’ve built a real business.’

Eric Wei to Victor Navarez (Internet Shaquille):

Eric:

Well, Victor, if I’m being honest, there’s a reason why you are the first creator we’ve ever done a financial deep dive on. Okay? And this is by design. And this is why:

You’re smart, and you’ve built a real business. But you haven’t— you’ve chosen not to scale this into some corporate, soulless machine.

There’s a lot of the soul still left in you. So you— yeah, you make $250,000 gross — half from your own pottery, 30% brand deals, 10% Patreon, 10% AdSense — because that’s how you’ve chosen, on principle, how to live your life.

Like, that’s an inspiration to anybody out there who’s thinking, like, 

‘Can I make a living as a creator? How can I do so without becoming MrBeast?’

Victor:

Right.

Eric:

‘…or, needing to be MrBeast?’

Victor:

Right.

Eric:

‘…or just, like, posting kinda— [having no idea] how to make any money, whatsoever?’

Victor:

Yeah, there is a very Godin-esque concept called smallest viable audience — it’s very similar to minimum viable product you guys probably work with — and it’s just, like,

‘What is the smallest group of people I can serve that will get me where I want to go, and get them where I want them to go?’

And I am beyond that, and I don’t have any desire to go much further.

— end of vid clip: @ minute 46:32

Can’t help wanting to see Victor’s revenue at minimum 5x what he’s currently doing. Life gets expensive.

And those of you who’ve been around here a while already know I cringe when I see a creator relying on Patreon in any way.

That said, Victor’s in business, as Eric points out. He’s in the tiny minority of creators who make most of their money from self-owned product offers — a major milestone on the way to platform ownership.

— Tang

Eric Wei is co-founder at Karat.

Victor Navarez’s owned platform is: Barkley Ceramics.