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

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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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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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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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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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, and ...
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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 time, and w...
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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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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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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 methods), idea rem...
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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 experi...
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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 software fo...
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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’s books have t...
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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 exists c...
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This week I'm joined by my good friend Chenell Basilio, creator of Growth in Reverse and one of the most thorough newsletter analysts in the space. We spent over an hour diving deep into what's really working in email right now — from the death of newsletter hype to the opportunity hiding in recommendation networks. Chenell shared her framework of "insanely valuable content" (the one thing that matters more than any growth hack), a...
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Over the last 48-72 hours, I completely fell down the rabbit hole with a new AI tool called Clawdbot (rebranded TODAY to Moltbot). Instead of my planned episode about what's on my mind in January 2026, I decided to share my raw, unfiltered experience setting up this AI assistant that runs 24/7 and integrates with all my tools. This isn't your typical AI chat interface—it's an always-on assistant I can text through Telegram that pro...
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Every month inside The Lab, I do what I call a monthly retro. It's short for retrospective. The idea is that, on a regular basis, you look back at what you have just done to learn from it, course-correct, and move forward. So in my monthly retros, I look at the good things that happened, how I performed against my goals, the concerns I currently have, the changes I'm going to make moving forward, and my goals for next month. → J...
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Paul Millerd is the author of The Pathless Path, which has earned Paul $325,000 in royalties to date. In the process, Paul turned down a publishing offer from Penguin, one of the major publishers in the industry. Then, in December, Paul decided to double down and produce a new version of The Pathless Path, an ultra-premium hardcover book that is just beautiful. So in this episode, we talk about that decision, the dark side of tra...
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A few weeks ago, I came across a post on X from a user named Yoni Smolyar. It said, "Posting a video on Instagram every day for 508 days in a row taught me that I never want to do that again." I realized that I had seen and followed Yoni on Instagram, where he has over 190,000 followers. In the process, Yoni built an iPhone app called Brainrot, which had a $10,000 launch that he credits to his social media presence that he built d...
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Today I am sharing an episode between Josh hall and myself. Josh hall is a good friend of mine, a business owner, and a creator here in Columbus, Ohio. His business is all about web design and he has a podcast called Web Design Business with Josh Hall, and I was a recent guest. So this is a conversation with Josh as friends, talking about what I've learned over the last year. Plus as a new father, how that has impacted my work a...
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In 2020, Ankur Nagpal sold his course platform, Teachable, for around $250 million. But he knew that the sale would come with a giant tax bill. So Ankur became obsessed with the tax code, and he wanted to make it easier for everyone to legally operate within it. That led him to discover Solo 401(k)s. So he built a new company called Carry that helps you legally keep more of what you earn and invest it the way you want. This podcas...
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