Creator Science with Jay Clouse

Creator Science with Jay Clouse

The best creators experiment. Creator Science goes inside the strategies, systems, and decisions behind the world's most successful creator businesses. Practical, specific, and grounded in what's actually working today—not what used to. Each episode features candid conversations with creators like James Clear, Ali Abdaal, Tim Urban, and Codie Sanchez. We explore the experiments they're running, the data they're tracking, and the frameworks they use to grow their audience, build trust, and increase income. Jay Clouse is the founder of Creator Science, a multi-million dollar creator business, and was named Content Entrepreneur of the Year by The Tilt in 2023. 300+ episodes. New every week. This is growth for creators, down to a science.

Episodes

#295: Community Building Trends for 2026 with Becky Pierson Davidson [Greatest Hits]

June 25, 2026 • 56 mins
I brought back Becky Pierson Davidson to compare notes on where community is headed — and we found a few areas of disagreement. Becky works with 6, 7, and 8-figure businesses helping them build memberships and courses through design thinking and customer research, and she's seeing a major shift right now: course businesses are slowing down, and the smart ones are pivoting to membership models. The difference? Shared learning ...
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#309: A Deeper Look at Circle Eclipse with Circle CEO Sid Yadav

June 17, 2026 • 53 mins
Sid Yadav is the CEO and co-founder of Circle, a community platform trusted by creators like Jay and thousands of others to build membership businesses. Today, Circle has ~280 employees and has raised around $30 million. Before Circle, he was the third hire at Teachable, where he helped build the infrastructure for the creator economy before the term even existed. He spent four years as a tech blogger, writing about startups five ...
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#308: Live Podcast Audit: Jeremy Enns Diagnoses What’s Holding Creator Science Back

June 9, 2026 • 58 mins
Every few years, someone asks you the question you've been avoiding. For me, this was it: does your show actually have a premise, or does it just require people to already know and like you? Jeremy Enns is the founder of Podcast Marketing Academy, where his primary product is podcast audits. He has spent years analyzing what separates shows that grow from shows that stall, and he runs Podcast Marketing Academy to help hosts fix bo...
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#307: Richard van der Blom — The state of LinkedIn in 2026 (based on data from 1.3 million posts)

June 2, 2026 • 50 mins
Richard van der Blom published his first LinkedIn algorithm report years ago as a curiosity project. This year, he and his team analyzed 1.3 million posts from 50,000 creators — and the headline number is hard to ignore: reach is down 60% for active creators over the last two years. Even harder to stomach: 80% of the comments Richard receives in the first five minutes of any post are written by AI. Richard is the author of t...
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#306: What 16 Years Behind YouTube's Biggest Channels Taught Josh Mattingly About Hiring And The Current State of YouTube

May 26, 2026 • 70 mins
Josh is the founder of Upright Media, an operating partner for content creators handling operations, consulting, recruiting, and post-production. His clients include some of YouTube's biggest channels — Erak, Smosh, Emma Chamberlain, Dude Perfect, Matthew Beam, and Chris Williamson. He runs 11 full-time staff and about 40 contractors worldwide. He describes himself as a creator without a channel. This conversation also took a...
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#305: Big 3: Three Wins, Three Concerns, and Three Experiments for May

May 19, 2026 • 35 mins
Every month inside the Lab, I do a full retrospective: wins, concerns, experiments, with all the numbers on the table. I've never felt comfortable putting the whole thing out publicly, but I do think the practice itself is worth sharing. So this episode is my lightweight version: three big wins from April, three things I'm genuinely worried about heading into May, and three experiments I'm kicking off. I'm also testing a new name f...
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#277: The best and worst income streams for creators (ranked) [Greatest Hits]

May 12, 2026 • 20 mins
I’ve been a full-time creator for 8 years now and have earned $2,192,000 since 2022. I’ve spent a LOT of time and money experimenting with different ways to make money on the internet, so I’m going to rank them. The best and the worst. I show you 15 different revenue streams and rate them from S to F based on their potential versus the effort required. By the very end of the video, you’ll know which ones ar...
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#304: Sam Vander Wielen’s Beautifully Elegant Business: $8M+ From One Product. No Pivots. No New Offers. No Down Years.

May 5, 2026 • 52 mins
Sam Vander Wielen is an attorney turned entrepreneur who built the go-to legal template shop for online businesses. Her flagship product, the Ultimate Bundle, a package of fill-in-the-blank contracts and video trainings, has generated over $8 million in lifetime revenue and now earns close to $2 million per year with essentially one full-time employee. She published her first book with Hachette in April 2025, and she runs everythin...
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#303: Riley Brown — The AI Content Creator Who Doesn’t Write With AI

April 28, 2026 • 55 mins
Riley Brown posted the first TikTok video about ChatGPT the day it launched. It got 20 million views and took him from zero to 200K followers in less than two weeks. Since then, he's built an audience of 1.5 million across platforms, raised $9 million to co-found a vibe-coding startup in San Francisco, and developed a content system so systematic that a single viral video gets reposted across seven accounts every week for the rest ...
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#302: Coaching Session: Overcoming My Delegation Problems with Michael Bungay Stanier

April 21, 2026 • 67 mins
This episode is a little different. Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit, with over a million copies sold, reached out and offered to do something I didn't expect: a live coaching session, recorded, here on the podcast. The topic: my delegation issue. Not the tactics (I know the tactics). Something deeper has its foot on the brake. What unfolded was one of the most honest, vulnerable conversations I've had on this ...
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#301: How To Stop Limiting Yourself (Backed By Science) with Nir Eyal

April 14, 2026 • 60 mins
Nir Eyal has spent his career studying why people don't do what they know they should. After writing Hooked and Indistractable, he kept getting a strange kind of call: readers who'd read the book, knew the steps, and still didn't do them. That puzzle led him down a six-year research path into the one variable missing from every motivation model: belief. In this conversation, Nir shares the science behind his new NYT bestseller Beyo...
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#300: I Spent Three Days With A Dozen New York Times Bestselling Authors

April 7, 2026 • 48 mins
I recorded this just a few days removed from an author's mastermind in Franklin, Tennessee. I got a call from Haley at Kit a few weeks ago—she was putting together a small group mastermind with James Clear, and I was on the list. What I didn't expect was that the rest of the list was a dozen New York Times bestselling authors, including Jefferson Fisher, Vanessa Van Edwards, Amy Porterfield, Nir Eyal, Sahil Bloom, Tori Dunlap...
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#299: What Nobody Tells You About Publishing a Book—with Award-Winning Podcaster Eric Zimmer

March 31, 2026 • 61 mins
Eric Zimmer launched The One You Feed podcast in 2014 with no audience, no name recognition, and a podcast name that took explaining. Twelve years, 850+ episodes, and 500 million downloads later, he released his first book — How a Little Becomes a Lot — a title that is, in every way, the story of his life. In this conversation, we talk about how incremental progress actually works, why you can't see it happening in real...
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#298: 9 Things I'm Doing Differently in My Business

March 26, 2026 • 50 mins
Nearing the end of Q1, I've been doing a lot of reflection on where the creator economy is heading, and where I want to take Creator Science. There's something interesting happening on the ground: the same energy that used to funnel beginners into content creation has largely shifted to AI and vibe coding. And honestly? I think that's a good thing. The people still showing up for this work seem to have their heads and hearts in the...
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#297: Joy Sullivan — How She Built A Living As A Writer On Instagram and Substack

March 17, 2026 • 52 mins
Joy Sullivan is a Portland-based poet who quit her corporate job mid-pandemic and built a thriving creative business through writing carousels on Instagram (115K followers), her Substack "Necessary Salt" (23K subscribers), and a 250-member paid writing community called Sustenance on Circle. She's a former Lab member, and in 2024, she published her first book, Instructions for Traveling West, with Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin R...
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#296: Meet The Man Who Solved YouTube (With Data)—Richard from 1of10

March 10, 2026 • 51 mins
Richard is the co-founder of 1of10, a research platform built by YouTube strategists, and his team has quietly been behind the scenes for some of the biggest channels on the platform—helping creators accumulate over 2 billion views through a repeatable, data-backed system. In this episode, Richard walks through his complete four-phase ideation system—audience identification, outlier research (using five distinct method...
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#295: Community Building Trends for 2026 with Becky Pierson Davidson

March 3, 2026 • 56 mins
I brought back Becky Pierson Davidson to compare notes on where community is headed — and we found a few areas of disagreement. Becky works with 6, 7, and 8-figure businesses helping them build memberships and courses through design thinking and customer research, and she's seeing a major shift right now: course businesses are slowing down, and the smart ones are pivoting to membership models. The difference? Shared learning ...
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#294: Rob Walling — SaaS godfather turned creator talks team building and vibe coding

February 24, 2026 • 48 mins
Rob Walling is a godfather of the bootstrapped SaaS movement — he's started 6 companies (5 bootstrapped), built and sold Drip for 8 figures, and created the infrastructure behind MicroConf, TinySeed (which has raised nearly $60 million and invested in over 210 SaaS companies), and Startups for the Rest of Us (820+ episodes over 15 years). But here's what surprised me: Rob told me he's more of a creator these days than a softw...
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#236: Mike Michalowicz – How the author of Profit First stays lean by licensing his ideas [Greatest Hits]

February 17, 2026 • 54 mins
Mike Michalowicz is the author of ⁠Profit First⁠, which is used by hundreds of thousands of companies across the globe to drive profit – Creator Science is one of those companies. Profit First has helped me develop sound financials for my business. He’s also the author of Clockwork, a powerful method to make any business run on automatic, and seven other books as well. With more than 500,000 book sales, all of Mike&rs...
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#293: 12 Ways To Stand Out In 2026

February 10, 2026 • 36 mins
The world is changing faster than ever, and sometimes it feels like the old playbooks just aren't working anymore. In this solo episode, I share 12 opportunities I see for creators in 2026—ideas that range from the practical to the philosophical, from the obvious to the genuinely weird. These aren't predictions. They're possibilities. And you don't need to pursue all of them. But keeping a running list of where opportunity ex...
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