Standout Creatives: Business, marketing, and creativity tips for solopreneurs launching their ideas

What if the thing keeping your idea stuck isn’t a lack of money, connections, or credibility?

What if it’s just that you’re aiming for the finished version before you’ve made the pilot?

Darnell Brown calls himself a multi-passionate creative polymath, and after 18 years in branding, design, and storytelling, he’s earned the title. He helps non-creatives find their voice through design, and runs Forge, a...

What if you lost almost everything, except the one thing you were building?

Migdalia Sanchez and Claudio Soriano (aka Migdy and Clau), didn’t set out to become authors. Migdy is a professional counselor and life coach. Clau has a background in electrical and process engineering. Both spent twenty years mentoring young adults, first as volunteers, then as certified life coaches, long before either of them thought about putting ...

What if the thing standing between you and your best work isn't a strategy problem? It's a permission problem.

Christi Johnson spent ten years as a wedding photographer, earned a master’s degree in piano performance, and later burned out so badly as an online business manager that she stopped sleeping and had to shut her business down for six months.

Now she runs the Dream Biz Playground, teaching creative and neurodivergent en...

What if the tool everyone else uses isn’t the only way in?

Tiffany Yu is the author of The Anti-Ableist Manifesto and the founder of Diversability, an organization she built to help disabled people move through what she calls their shame-to-pride transformation.

She was in a car accident at nine years old where her arm became permanently paralyzed. And she lived a decade feeling like there was no community built for someone lik...

What happens when the thing that defined you for most of your life suddenly isn't yours anymore?

Bridget Baker has reinvented herself so many times she’s started to consider herself an expert in it. Her reinvention journey spans a car accident at 21, a Las Vegas tiger show, five years in a travel trailer, and a writing group she started on a whim that’s almost two years old.

She’s a brand and website designer, a cre...

What if the book you never planned to write became the business you were always meant to build?

Cathy Derksen didn’t grow up wanting to be an author. She wasn’t a writer. She’s dyslexic. Books weren’t even on her radar, let alone publishing them. But somewhere between a divorce, a career change, two teenagers, and a quiet voice she couldn’t ignore — she ended up in a book. Then another. Then she s...

What if the secret to creative success isn’t your portfolio... but your people?

Melquea Smith is a children’s book illustrator and artist who creates clip art of black and brown kids.

Her journey from side-hustling artist to full-time creative is built on one foundational truth: community changes everything.

In this conversation, Melquea shares why the lone genius myth is killing creative careers, how she’s learned t...

What if your biggest breakdown became your creative breakthrough?

Maya Sarin didn’t plan to become a poet.

Her journey began in beauty marketing. And she wrote consistently but never quite found her voice.

Then illness forced everything to stop.

In that stillness, something changed. Poetry emerged from fragments. Healing became creation. And the beginnings of her book were born.

In this conversation, Maya shares how trauma reshape...

What if the book you were meant to write has been sitting inside you for years and all you just needed someone to help you bring it out?

That’s the question underneath everything Anita Henderson does.

She calls herself the Author’s Midwife. And the more she explained what that actually means, the more I realized how perfectly it fits. She doesn’t write your book for you. She helps you bring it into the world the rig...

What if the thing that makes you feel like an outsider is actually your greatest business asset?

Danielle Anderson figured that out after 15 years as a paralegal.

She didn’t have an English degree. She’d never worked at a big New York publishing house. She wasn’t an agent with industry connections. But she had something else: a way of combining structure with soul that authors desperately needed.

In this conversation...

What if the genre you dismissed as too dark was actually the most honest thing you could read?

Lee Murray has spent twenty years writing horror from the edge of the world. She’s won five Bram Stoker Awards, a New Zealand Prime Minister Award for Literary Achievement, and a medal from the King.

And she’ll be the first to tell you she’s barely making grocery money. That gap between recognition and reward is just one o...

How does a daughter’s simple wish become a full creative enterprise?

Osayi Lasisi didn’t set out to launch a product line. She set out to find a brown plush doll for her daughter.

When that search came up empty, her daughter didn’t just get disappointed and move on. She said, let’s make them ourselves.

And that’s where everything started.

In this conversation, Osayi shares how Pocketlings was born, what it...

What if understanding money was the thing that finally set your creative work free?

That’s the quiet truth running through my conversation with Hannah Cole. She’s a tax educator, an artist with over 20 years of experience, and the founder of Sunlight Tax.

We talk about why there’s no standard path for creatives, how the story you tell about your worth shapes everything, and why financial literacy might be the most u...

What if the stories you grew up with weren’t just entertainment… but training?

Dr. Bailey Lang didn’t become a book coach and editor by accident.

Her path moves from hyperlexic child… to marketing professional… to PhD… to founder of The Writing Desk. And when you zoom out, none of it is random. Every season sharpened how she sees story, structure, mindset, and the humans behind the pages.

In thi...

What if the book you want to write isn’t waiting for the “perfect time” but for a version of you who’s willing to start messy?

Jennifer Locke helps people turn ideas into books.

Not someday books.

Real books that get written in the middle of family life, busy schedules, self-doubt, and the very normal fear of being seen.

In this conversation, Jennifer shares what it really looks like to follow through on a writi...

What if the thing you thought was pulling you away from writing was actually preparing you for it?

Andy Hodges didn’t set out to follow a single creative lane. His path winds through anthropology, academia, fiction editing, and now novel writing, all held together by curiosity and a deep respect for story.

In this conversation, Andy and I talk about what it really means to balance structure and freedom in your creative work, wh...

What if the thing you’ve been taught to ignore is actually the thing guiding you?

In this episode, I talked with Julia Carmen, a curandera, spiritual healer, and founder of the School Without Walls. Julia has spent her life walking between the physical and non-physical worlds. Seeing, sensing, listening. Not as a party trick, but as a way of being.

Julia talks about presence, self-worth, grief, choice, and the courage it takes ...

What if writing the story you’re afraid to tell is the exactly what your readers have been waiting for?

Leigh Carron, author of Fat Girl and other body positive romance novels, didn’t set out to follow trends, chase algorithms, or fit neatly into what the publishing world expects. She set out to tell her truth. And in doing so, she’s built stories centered on body diversity, biracial identity, desire, and authentic...

What if the thing you’ve been trying hide is actually the reason people remember you?

Rachel Lee is a brand stylist and designer who built her business by doing the opposite of what she thought “serious” creatives were supposed to do. From growing up as an imaginative art kid to hiding parts of herself in traditional design roles, Rachel spent years trying to fit in before realizing that belonging to herself matter...