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Justin Moore, sponsorship coach and founder of Creator Wizard, shares his journey from a corporate job to pioneering in the brand partnership space. He details how a simple request to collaborate on YouTube with his wife led to unexpected financial success and a shift towards helping creators secure sponsorships.
Justin discusses the evolution of buyer behavior post-pandemic and offers insights into creating effective partnerships that resonate with empowered buyers. His strategies focus on accelerating trust-building and authority to convert audiences faster.
Learn from Justin’s transition into a niche influencer agency and gain practical advice on negotiating better deals and enhancing your platform’s profitability!
Watch the next episode on YouTube ‘Secure Paid Partnerships and Grow Your Revenue with Justin Moore‘ (releases January 22nd)
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Justin’s Links:
- Connect with Justin on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn
- Watch or listen to Justin on his YouTube and Podcast channel
- Pre-order his Sponsor Magnet book now!
Speaker 1:
Welcome back to another episode of the Art of Online Business podcast. Jamie’s gone today because our daughter has a parent-teacher conference sort of thing at school, so she says hi, but she will not be with us. However, if you have clicked in the show notes already and navigated over to the YouTube channel, you can see that there is a gentleman across the screen from me and his name is Justin Moore. You’re going to like this episode and the next one coming up, because if you’ve ever tried to get a sponsor for your YouTube channel, for your podcast, what have you then? You know how nerve-wracking it can be to find the right businesses, talk to them and then wonder how you should respond to what they’re saying.
Speaker 1:
And he is a specialist at this. He’s a sponsorship coach. He’s the founder of Creator Wizard, which is a school and community that teaches you how to find and negotiate your dream brand deals so that you stop leaving thousands on the table. I’ve had the pleasure of talking with him as I was navigating a sponsorship deal, which I did so successfully for this very podcast. Justin brings a unique perspective. Not only has he been a creator in the trenches doing sponsorships for years, but he’s also run an agency and we’re going to talk about that more in this episode as we just kind of explore and see how he’s ran business for the past decade and a half. Justin, Is that about right?
Speaker 2:
That’s about right. Yeah, almost 15 years. 15 years Wow.
Speaker 1:
So you got insider knowledge behind the scenes how to get big brands to choose which influencers to partner with, because you ran an influencer agency back in the day and you know why they pass on others. You just told me, before we hit record, justin, that you’ve uploaded over 2000 videos to your YouTube channel.
Speaker 2:
It’s crazy, man. I mean we, you know. The quick story is that my, my wife, april, started her first YouTube channel in 2009,. Actually, so, like way back in the day, and I was not even doing any of this, I was in medical devices, I was going on the corporate kind of nine to five career trajectory and she just kind of got an email from a brand essentially saying, hey, like can we send you our thing for free? And she was like, yes, awesome. And so she started getting she’s like Is this legitimate? And I was like I think so. And so she started getting a bunch of free stuff.
Speaker 2:
And then ultimately, you know, after you know, that kind of the lure of that wore off a bit. You know, I was in business school at the time, going through all these like sales and marketing classes and things like that. So I basically told her. I said April, I feel like these brands should be paying you. Like there there’s all these people in your comment section saying, oh, thanks so much, I just bought it. Or I went to the store and I picked this up, thank you so much for the recommendation. And so I said the next time a brand reaches out offering a free thing. Ask them if they have a budget to collaborate with you. She’s like there’s no way anyone’s going to pay me. I said, just try it, and so so the next time, the next brand that reached out it was I remember this it was a Korean skincare brand called I’m a Moco.
Speaker 2:
And they reached out asking I I’ll never forget this. And they asked her you know, again, free stuff? And she said actually, do you have a budget to collaborate with me? And they said said sure, if you include us in two videos per month like a shout out, we will pay you $700 a month for six months. Mind you, we are like early twenties, like no money, basically right out of school, and so that was like the like almost all of our rent right At that time. And so immediately in our mind was just like wow, it was just this. Like you know, when you’re in a normal kind of W2 corporate job, it’s like your paycheck is like you make the same amount a month, same amount every month, and then maybe a cost of living raise every year or a little bit of a bonus or something Right. But like once we our eyes opened up to like this wow, you can make money in these uncapped ways where there’s no ceiling. That really started this whole journey for us. Wow.
Speaker 1:
That had to have been exciting and clearly it shaped like your path over the past years. Before we continue to go back and focus on that and just learn about your journey, can you give us a snapshot of your business now?
Speaker 2:
Sure. So almost like a, like a, you know, if you look at the arc of it, like you know, we were very much creators in the beginning and in the trenches and all that stuff too. And, like now, our kind of personal creator journey is sunsetting a bit, where we’re able to take a step back on personally creating content on the channels that we came up on, because I’ve now shifted to educating creators with this new business. So for the last four years or so I’ve run this company called Creator Wizard, where I focus on sponsorship strategy education, and so the snapshot for our business today is I have three full-time employees a director of ops, a operations coordinator and social media admin. I have a bunch of a smattering of contractors.
Speaker 2:
You know we have our offer ladder is essentially in its current form right now. We have our a course which is $1,497, $1,500, an on-demand course called Brand Deal Wizard, which is has been kind of the signature offer for the longest time, and then we have a coaching program which is called Wizards Guild and this is something kind of an inversion on the traditional management model, typically like when you are someone who has built up an audience and you’re collaborating with brands. You almost in the past you almost always retained an agent or a manager who would essentially negotiate on your behalf and take a cut of whatever income that you derived. And so usually those people sometimes can take 20, 25% a manager of your deals, which can be very sizable if you are doing very large deals. And so the model that we kind of pioneered to some degree it’s fee only, so we don’t you keep a hundred percent of what you make, you just pay us a flat amount every month and we’ll be kind of a coach on speed dial for you.
Speaker 2:
So these two offers, we have a spattering of other things that we do. Obviously I have a book coming out which is going to I still kind of look at that as an offer, even though it’s only probably going to be 20, 30 bucks or something like that, and we’ve tried various challenges and paid things and but really those two things are our primary bread and butter. And if you kind of looked at where the revenue, oh, and sponsorships, that’s like another big income, you know source for us. So if you look at it I would say that I would say the course is like maybe you know right now 40 to 50% of our income. Coaching is 20 to 30%, and then sponsorships makes up the remainder.
Speaker 1:
That is pretty sweet. I like how you say coach on speed dial. Like I, having talked with you before and gone through just the process of finding a sponsor, it definitely feels like I felt like I needed a coach on speed dial. Speaking of which your new book coming out, sponsor magnet you told me something which I kind of think is an unbelievable deal. But anyone who goes to the link in the show notes below hops on the wait list for this book, gets 15 scripts, basically how to respond to what various things brands might say over email. And because I’ve had this too, it’s like a brand said this. It’s like what do I do now? What do I say back? I just want the best deal possible and you have scripts for this. Thank you for offering that. You want to share anything else about that?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, honestly, this is one of the biggest obstacles I’ve found for, especially for creators who don’t think sponsorships are for them or sponsorships are really a meaningful revenue stream. They’re like I’d rather, you know, sell my own things directly or whatever. They just think sponsorships are distasteful. And so what I’ve learned is that if you’re armed with just some really simple like if then you know type scenarios, like if the brand says this, then say this. If you at the very least have something like that, you’re going to be way ahead because you’ll look professional, you’ll probably make more money and the brand will probably want to hire you again, and so it’s a lot of these things where you can educate yourself, and so, yeah, I thought that would be a really fun kind of little bonus as part of this book launch.
Speaker 1:
I mean that’s a great bonus, that I feel like that could be its own offer itself script to help you get the sponsorship deals that you want at like the price you want, so to speak. That’s that’s, that’s great. I’m going to put that in the show notes below and, of course, on the upcoming episode we’re going to go and talk about that book in detail. But the URL is sponsormagnetcom forward slash podcast. Sponsormagnetcom forward slash podcast. And thank you.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely man.
Speaker 1:
Thank you. I mean a book. I love books because it’s knowledge that the author took. I mean how many mistakes and how many sponsorship deals would you say on estimate went into your journey before you created this book and just gave us, like the best of the best wisdom that you gathered from all that?
Speaker 2:
this book and just gave us, like the best of the best wisdom that you gathered from all that. Yeah, so I mean I have solid numbers because, you know, since we started our very first sponsorship, I was using accounting software to create these invoices for these sponsors that we were working on. So we’ve done my wife and I personally have done over 550 sponsorships, which you know has netted us over 5 million. And then when I ran an agency which we’ll probably get to in a bit I facilitated thousands of sponsorships for other creators, and so I have a lot of mistakes to pull from, a lot of wins to pull from, and I think really that’s what this book is at its core is it’s a distillation of a lot of those learnings, I mean that’s huge, that’s huge.
Speaker 1:
So thank you for taking the time and the energy and going through the trials and tribulations to actually write this book. And because I know it’s not easy and I look forward to reading that, take us back in time to when you decided, because you said your journey kind of started off as a creator and you said that you were in the medical tools field before medical devices medical devices, yeah, medical devices, but your wife started out first on youtube. Is that right?
Speaker 2:
she did yeah, she was, yeah, yeah, so so she was a preschool teacher actually and so I’m an engineer, kind of computer engineer, by training. And again, like back in the day, like this was creating content on the internet was still very novel, right, it was, like you know, when people found out that we were, like, uploading videos on YouTube, it was kind of a novelty. People would kind of poke us with a stick, like oh, how’s that YouTube thing going? Like, oh, what are you, what are you talking about on there? Right, the, the, the.
Speaker 2:
My favorite was like when we started making a little bit of money, everyone was so fascinated by that. Like you know that you could make money on the internet. Like what, how do you? So how do you make money doing that? That was always the next question when we said we had a YouTube channel or whatever, and so we’d have to explain it and it was this whole thing and you know, and so when we my wife quit her job, so so really, like I think the story is the most interesting part of the story is like when we it was, it was a side hustle for years, right, I think a lot of we see these like stories that like, oh, we like quit my job overnight and like it was a, you know, a rocket ship to success. And it was never like that, right, it was years of, of, of, especially April, my wife grinding, essentially like this. This story I can tell is that I okay, so I wear an eye mask to sleep.
Speaker 2:
Okay, like to, you know, cross and yeah yeah, right, and but the reason that I started wearing an eye mask is because April would stay up after she got back from her preschool job. She would stay up literally until like 123 in the morning grinding on YouTube, and so she had wanted to have the lights on and I was like I gotta sleep, I gotta go to work. So I started wearing an eye mask. But like, back in the day, this is what you did. I don’t know if anyone listening still remembers when YouTube had an inbox, you could actually message people on YouTube, and so this was like the growth hack is like you would message people and be like oh, please, subscribe to my channel, or you’d comment on other people’s channels, and so you were just doing that. There was no box, it was all manual, right, and so it was the grind.
Speaker 2:
And so you know April, essentially we hustled to a point where you know she started making some pretty consistent income on both AdSense and sponsorships on her YouTube channel. She created multiple YouTube channels. So initially it was like a beauty and cosmetic skincare channel. That was her first channel. Then we started a cooking channel that we did together. Then we started kind of like a family vlog channel that we did together and so we started. You know, the the the more family that the the the universe started expanding and so she quit her job in 2012, her full-time job and then I quit my full-time job in 2014, which was six weeks after her first son was born. So that was, in and of itself, was nerve wracking. It was like quitting after having our first child. So that was like our creator journey was many years of grinding until we finally made enough to do it full-time.
Speaker 1:
I’m like trying to find the YouTube channel and I cannot find. Oh, is it Cook With April?
Speaker 2:
Cook With April is one of them. Yep Cook With April, and then her first channel was April Athena 7.
Speaker 1:
Nice, nice, that’s a solid amount of subscribers. Okay, so you’re an engineer by training. Then you were in the medical supply field. At what point, though, did her success really, I guess, motivate you to give it a go yourself?
Speaker 2:
Well, initially I was fully behind the camera, in front of I was not talent, basically right, I was like help, helping, facilitate, helping her edit equipment and camera gear, like filming and stuff like that. But the one time her followers were like hey, like do a boyfriend tag video? Like have your, I wasn’t even a fiance at that time, I was a B, I was a boyfriend. And so I got in front of the camera and oh my god, dude, if you go back and watch these, they’re still live on YouTube. So awkward. I was so awkward.
Speaker 2:
I didn’t know how to like be on camera. I felt so uncomfortable and you know a lot of people say like how are you so gregarious and outgoing on camera? Believe me, I was not like that in the beginning. I am now because I’ve done thousands of videos.
Speaker 2:
But like, yeah, in the beginning it was super uncomfortable and so started doing that more, started doing more videos, and but really it was when brands in earnest started reaching out regularly and she basically just said, like you know, you have, you’re getting your MBA. Can you just like handle this? I hate this stuff. Like I don’t want to get on phone calls with brands or email with them and I was like I love this stuff, sure, I’ll do this Right. But again, like I was making tons of mistakes, I was learning on the fly and getting on phone calls and trying to talk smart and, you know, emailing our, our family lawyer and being like hey, can you create a contract for us for this thing? And they’re like what are you? What are you doing this thing on the internet that you’re doing that? You?
Speaker 1:
need this contract for, yeah, so the internet that you’re doing, that you need this early back. Yeah, so early there, yeah that was like not a thing, right.
Speaker 2:
and so this is I. I just I, I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship and I was doing my own kind of entrepreneurial side, hustle things on, and but but really it was like my wife was like building this like youtube empire under the radar here and finally I realized, like what I just need to like stop doing all these like side projects that aren’t amounting to anything and like just fully support my wife and and that’s when things started to grow Love it.
Speaker 1:
I can relate with the early days of recording YouTube videos because my previous business, elementary Chinese. I remember the first at least 20 videos Like people would still you can still go back and read the comments People be like you’re so scary, so scary dude, because you never blink. And it was because I kind of was just scared and didn’t know what I was doing in front of the cameras. And every like eight minute video must have had at least like 30, 40 cuts and somehow, like I would just cut out all my bleakings.
Speaker 2:
Oh, man, that’s so funny. Yeah, youtube, youtube, yeah, youtube. Commenters are notoriously like very brutal. I love it.
Speaker 1:
And then you click through to their channel and it’s like they have zero videos uploaded and I have subscribers. Yeah, exactly, I love the armchair critics, you know. Totally, I love the armchair critics, you know.
Speaker 2:
Totally.
Speaker 1:
So I had read up and you said that actually before Creator Wizard, you had started an agency with influencer, marketer agency.
Speaker 2:
So I think that was like the kind of the next step of this journey was. You know, we things were going well, we were kind of like on autopilot with our business, but I’ve always been the person to just kind of like want to know where the puck was moving instead of like where it was at, and so I was always thinking like there’s no way that this current level of success we can sustain that Right, like there’s, you know, especially in the in the family focus space, like a lot of the it’s it’s very driven by life milestones. So, like you know, when my wife got pregnant with our first son, there was so much excitement and enthusiasm around that and pregnancy journey and buying a new house and like all these like life milestones that people are really get interested in and excited about. But, like, once those are over, right, it’s like I just always thought like it’s just it’s gonna wane, like people are not gonna want to watch us for 50 years, basically, right. So I was always like what can?
Speaker 1:
we do yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:
And I think a lot of people and I’m not saying any names, but I think a lot of people do that but really, this was, this was. I was like we’ve got this kind of tiger by the tail, so to speak. What can we? How can we leverage the network and the experience set that we have right now into parlaying that into something to help diversify frankly, diversify our family’s income? And so the agency is is this idea that I have? That was like look like somehow it seems like our, our, these brands that we’re working with keep coming back to us.
Speaker 2:
And I tell my friends that, who are also creators, that we’re like getting repeat deals. And they’re like how are you doing that? Cause we’re brands, are only ever reaching out to us once. Would they do a deal with us? And they never talked to us again.
Speaker 2:
And I was like well, so I would start asking these questions. Like, okay, well, like you know, are you putting together a rap report at the end of the campaign where you’re talking about learnings and opportunities for the next campaign and things? And they’re like no, what’s that? And so it’s like these things that I would learn in the kind of a corporate setting that I applied to our career as creators, and so I started to realize there was like something we’re doing differently than other friends that we had. And so I was like what, if I go to these brands that we’re working with and say, hey, it was great working with you, but guess what, I’ve got this roster of a bunch of other other great, amazing creators that you know would love to work with you, what do you think I could help kind of manage or facilitate, be the liaison for this campaign and basically manage it for?
Speaker 2:
For a campaign fee essentially and man like it was, that pitch was was pretty compelling, especially because I had an angle on it. I said we only work with family friendly creators. That was like the angle, because back at this time I don’t know if you recall this, but like youtube was going through like a brand safety crisis, there was a lot of these big brands where there was these exposés, where their, their ads were being run against like hate content, where, like videos, extremist contests, and like a bunch of these brands like coca-cola and pepsi and AT&T, they pulled all their advertising off of YouTube. I don’t know if it was called the adpocalypse, it was like a big thing.
Speaker 1:
Was it 2019, 2018?. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it was like it was a big deal. And so here I come with my pitch of like we’re only working with, like you know, squeaky clean creators and they’re like where do we sign? Right, and so it worked really well in the beginning. We started, you know, signing lots of clients. I started hiring employees. You know we were working on these, like you know. Yeah, we started working on these, like you know, six big multi, six figure engagements, you know, rfps that we were responding to and things like that. And so it worked. It definitely worked in the beginning. But, okay, okay, here we go. Here’s where the story turns. Okay Is that lots of other people also acknowledged identified slick software dashboards of things that I just didn’t have as like a sole kind of small agency. Basically, right, so imagine the ability to like, use a dashboard to filter creators by every criteria you could imagine where they live and their ages and their channels and their following and their demographics, and all these things which are, yes, useful, they’re absolutely useful.
Speaker 2:
But, you know, I just didn’t have the financial means to compete with the tens of millions of dollars that some of these companies were raising, and I made the mistake of trying. I invested $50,000 of kind of my own money basically to create a dashboard for our client and try to emulate some of the things that we were doing, cause, look, we were in these meetings, these pitch meetings, and brands were saying like, hey, do you have dashboards? Like this other company. I’m like, oh God.
Speaker 2:
Right and so we would, we would lose deals, and so the long story short is that when COVID came, it crushed the business. I had to lay off all my employees, all the contracts that you know a lot of the contracts that we had got pulled rug, got pulled out from under them and I was $100,000 in debt to top it all off, and so it was really it was really.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it was. It was well. I had taken out lines of credit for you know, just general operating expenses and hired some you know kind of senior sales employees, thinking that that was going to help with the whole process. There’s a lot. There was a perfect storm of like awful things that happened that led to that, but it was like one of the darkest times of my life. Man was like I thought that this bit, this agency, was going to be kind of, frankly, my family’s ticket to like kind of diversifying the next, the next chapter for us and to kind of have it all fail and to be in huge amounts of debt. It was really humbling, whoa. And at that time you had still only one kid or two. I had two kids at this time my, my, my youngest was three. So I, my oldest was seven or six and my youngest was three at that time when it failed.
Speaker 1:
I’m sorry because I understand COVID wrecking like my life, so I can only imagine like what you thought was gonna be the ticket for your family completely unraveling plus revised quarantining plus. You’re like what do I do dude life? It was good, brutal, it was brutal. What were some of the conversations like? Was this like around april, march 2020?
Speaker 2:
yeah, I mean. So, yeah, like to your point, like to top it all off, like we were terrified of the global health crisis and like you know who, who, who knows, like, like, really, what the crux of it was is a lot of our clients were like retail, consumer electronic, you know, consumer packaged goods, food, you know. So, like a lot of the categories that got eviscerated in terms of the advertising strategy had to change, and so, like we, you know, do you remember this thing where it was like brands were still running these commercials with like people sharing a food or something like, oh yeah, try this.
Speaker 2:
And they’re like, oh, this is so tone deaf You’re not social distancing Like brands who didn’t pull their ads in time. You know that they had like booked to buy a couple of months ago or something. So it was like it was just a crazy time, and so the conversation was just like when is this ever, when is advertising ever going to come back in the same form that it was before? That was really what, what, what it was, and so, like I would, we were kind of stealing ourself for it to be this kind of multi-year journey out of that, unwinding all that and what.
Speaker 2:
What ended up happening, thankfully, like grace, like we were so fortunate that we still had kind of our personal social media businesses that we were doing, and basically what happened was that you know a lot of the brands, especially who were advertising for the Olympics billions of dollars, had to divert those funds elsewhere because they you know the Olympics were basically didn’t happen Right, and so a lot of those, a lot of brands basically discovered like, oh, we can’t do these big in-person production shoots anymore for TV ads. What can we do instead? What can we do with this money? Oh, wow, there’s all these people on the internet who have really professional equipment, cameras and things like that. Let’s go give them some of the money and make ads for us, and so that year, bizarrely, was one of our best years ever, personally because of that.
Speaker 1:
I mean effectively. I see it on YouTube all the time. I don’t know if the listener like is watching, like YouTube videos, but it’s like YouTube creators are set up to make commercials, especially the ones that have great gear, great editing chops, you know, or a small team. It’s like we are able to do that and brands picked up definitely on that big time over the past five, six years. So that’s kind of what got you through.
Speaker 2:
I can write yeah dude, I don’t know.
Speaker 1:
Did I already tell you my story about being stuck in Mexico because of COVID?
Speaker 2:
No.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so quickly. I was in China for 12 years and teaching English there, and then I started this business Elementary Chinese, teaching Mandarin Chinese to expats who were living in China, had a lot of fun, grew social media nothing like super successful, but like it was, business was growing. Then we took a vacation with our two kids me and my wife, one luggage to Mexico, because my wife would speak Spanish to our kids and I really wanted to learn Spanish too, and so this was January 13th of 2020. And then we got stuck in Mexico. Then China shut down the borders and since I had a business incorporated over there and I was heavily niched to teaching folks in China how to learn Mandarin Chinese, like that, that and nobody was running around using like my social method of learning that’s what crippled and then just decimated my business.
Speaker 1:
And so, like I can relate to you when you’re having these conversations, I wasn’t a hundred thousand dollars in debt, but everything I was working up to at that point like I couldn’t pivot, and so I was like in mexico and then, after the tourist visas expired, in the basement of my in-laws in in michigan, basically with no job, praying in circles, actually infinity signs, in their big old basement, because when you like are walking and like crying in the morning and praying, you get dizzy in a circle. But if you do it in infinity then you’re always turning and so you don’t get dizzy like that was my whole summer if I didn’t survive the pandemic and make it through.
Speaker 1:
But yeah, and that was the genesis of me coaching online course creators and then doing facebook ads. So I’m right there with you.
Speaker 2:
That was a tough time dude it was, you know it’s. Thanks for sharing that man, because I I feel like this is the type of stuff that’s not very often talked about on the internet, because everyone wants to flex their wins and everyone wants to. I think the reason that more people don’t talk about failures and things like that, especially if we are trying to pitch ourselves as like this expert right Of a coach or a expert that you want to hire to help you do something Somehow if you share your failures, there’s this fear. I had this fear that that that it was like know, if you share your failures. There’s this fear.
Speaker 2:
I have this fear that that that it was like oh well, people won’t want to hire me or trust me If I like say, it seems like I don’t want to know what I’m doing Right and people won’t invest their money If, like the the, you know I talk about these failures that I have, and I actually think it’s totally the opposite. I think people want to feel seen in in you and I and I have felt like I’ve gravitated to others so much more when they have opened up and been vulnerable about this type of thing, because I feel like this is more the reality than the stratospheric rise to success. No failures along the way Like that basically happens to no one, you know so I appreciate you sharing that man.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it’s very, very true that at least most of the successful people I’ve talked to have had major failures, and a number of them. It seems to be like the number of failures is somehow correlated to the level of success that folks get. And yet I respect people who share their journey and that’s part of why we’re here today, because people can see you as the creator wizard and it’s like your media is on point. Everything seems to be going well. I relate better with people who have had to pull up their belt straps or suspender straps or whatever you want to call it, and go through some stuff to get to where they are. It’s just we, we relate to that Cause.
Speaker 2:
A lot of us, most of us, struggle through something you know you know the the, the one thing not to go off on too much of a tangent here, but I do think it’s important to talk about which is like like, the thing that often doesn’t get discussed is our partners, our spouses, our wives, our husbands.
Speaker 1:
This is a good tangent we can talk about.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s the role that it’s. It’s not easy being married to an entrepreneur. I know that for a fact, you know. And so, like I always have to remember, and I like bringing this up because, like my wife has been so patient with me, because like I am an entrepreneur, right, and it would be easy, you know, I could have gone back to the medical devices or I could have got I’ve learned all this stuff. I could have gone and worked for a brand in marketing or I could have done a lot of the things that I could have done. But she knows my DNA, she knows inside of me of like this is I am an entrepreneur and I create things, you know. And like you know it was it was not clear for a while there that there would be a path to success. And so, like I just think it’s so important to give a shout out to the partners in our lives who like put up with us, essentially because it takes a lot, it does it does those early morning no-transcript through the pandemic?
Speaker 1:
you went through that and I think well, I know me, but I think the listener too is like all right, so was that the genesis of creator wizard, or did that come slightly later, because now we’re up to like at the time of the recording of this video about four years ago?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so that was the genesis like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Well, actually I wallowed for a couple months. For sure I was like, wow, my life sucks, I suck, I have no value, I have no idea what I’m going to do. So I definitely did some good wallowing there. It wasn’t good but it was solid and, yeah, it was a good wallowing effort.
Speaker 2:
But then somewhere along the way, a couple months into it, I started thinking about this pretty interesting perspective that I had now, where I, as you mentioned at the top, about how I’d been this creator in the trenches for many years doing deals, but also now I’ve run this agency and I’ve kind of been in the room with these brands and these advertisers, where they’re, you know, they’re saying, hey, we want to spend like a million dollars, like across hundreds of creators. That’s a very different strategy than a brand paying us five grand or something. That’s like a very different conversation. And so I was like you know what? That’s actually kind of interesting. Maybe I should make some YouTube videos about you know these kind of behind the scenes secrets that I heard when I was having these conversations running the agency, and and that’s exactly what it did. So I started uploading some YouTube videos and I never thought, dude. I never was like, oh, this is going to be my new business. I would not. I was like I don’t even know what the business is. It was just like, let me make some, let me scratch the creative it edge. I’m a YouTuber at heart. Let me make some YouTube videos, right. And people liked them. They said, hey, can you make a video on this? Can you make a video on that? They started DMing me, they started emailing me. Then someone said, hey, I’m working on a deal. Right now I don’t have a manager. Can you help me? And so I was like sure, I’ll hop on a call with you and I’ll pretend to be your manager. Basically, I’ll just like be your manager, basically just like be your advocate, right. And so that was how I started doing one on one coaching.
Speaker 2:
And from the beginning I mentioned earlier, like from the beginning I was very much like I do not want to be a manager. I I have experienced, I’ve worked with a lot of managers. I don’t like that process. My wife and I had some horror stories of being with managers and networks and things like that in our early days. So I was like I’m not doing a manager, I’m not taking a cut, I’m just not doing that. And so it wasn’t clear to me, like, what the business model was going to be.
Speaker 2:
Ultimately, it was like, okay, maybe I’ll like coach people and I’ll help them understand how to do this stuff. Then the idea some people messaged me hey, do you have a course? And I was like I don’t know, just doing the whole thing. I was an idiot, I had no idea what I was doing and so, just like this incremental process of learning, so I launched a cohort course first. Then, you know, honestly, only recently, six months to a year ago launched the on-demand version, created a coaching program, because a lot of our alumni were asking for that. And so it was just all of a sudden this like you know, I started a newsletter and that grew really significantly, which is actually a big part of my success. We could talk about that, if it’s interesting, the newsletter. But like, yeah, dude, this business has kind of sprouted up overnight.
Speaker 2:
And really at the core of it, dude, is that my main advice that I give to people is just like, don’t be like a diva, don’t be a divo, just like, be easy to work with. Like, be responsible, be responsive, be communicative, and brands will want to hire you again. Like that, that is at its core. That is what I teach and like the majority of what the majority of the advice that’s out there on the internet is not that. The majority is like brands are trying to screw you. Brands are the enemy You’ve got to. You know, get every last dollar off the table from them. And I was just like watching these TikToks and I was like this is terrible advice, right, and so I think that really was a lot of people have told me like that was what they appreciated about me. Is it just felt more practical than a lot of this hyperbolic advice out there on the internet?
Speaker 1:
I mean, you said it, I can’t add anything more to that. I was thinking how did we meet? And I believe it was at the time where I was asking folks in this group that I’m in like, are there any other genuine guys out there? And I think that’s where your name had first come up. Or maybe it was a friend who mentioned you to me when I was getting sponsored for the podcast. I don’t exactly remember to you to me when I was getting sponsored for the podcast.
Speaker 2:
I don’t exactly remember, but what you just said, made me think about, like, my quest for just genuine folks, not being divas. I will, I I it, regardless of how you found me. Both of those scenarios that would make me very happy. Uh, and I think it actually speaks to a really important point about online business is that from from the beginning, when I started doing this, I never my goal was just like let me just help people, I, I. In the beginning, you couldn’t even pay me, I didn’t even have, I wasn’t coaching, I didn’t have a course, I literally had no way that you could compensate me. And my goal was like, okay, let me just like be helpful to people, let me give advice, let me give you know perspectives on things and hopefully that that will build goodwill. And you know to your point, like the, the, the, the Holy grail is just like if someone says, who do I talk to about this? And someone says, oh, go talk to that guy or go talk to that gal, and so, like that was the strategy, it was just like let me do a full court press on just being known as the sponsorship guy. That was like the goal. And so I hired a content strategist and for literally, I said, okay, I wanna put out five tweets a day, repurpose some of these into Instagram posts and I’m just gonna do this for two years straight. That’s it. That’s it. I’m gonna talk about sponsorships over and over and over and over.
Speaker 2:
And it was a risk because it was like I was paying money. I wasn’t. I had no income coming like, no revenue coming in from this business, but I was like I’m hiring this content strategist and I just have this. Like once I saw the early kernels of like interest into this space, I was like, okay, let me, I’m gonna go like double down on this, like I think this could be a thing and just help people. Honestly, if someone is like releasing, you know, a new podcast or launching something, I would DM them. Hey, let me share it in the newsletter. Hey, I’ve got this newsletter with 5,000 creators, or now it’s up to almost 35,000. But, like at the time, it was like I was just like trying to do person and help people and like I think it all just comes back around.
Speaker 1:
I think in this next episode when we talk about your book, if you could touch on this theme about how helping people in a way that’s not designed just to go ahead and get their help in return, but just helping people out of the goodness of your heart how that has contributed to other ideas that’s gone into this book, that would be awesome.
Speaker 2:
A hundred percent dude, a hundred percent, yeah, and, and funny enough when we’ll talk about it on the next episode. But like I hired a book I’m a big fan of like hiring consultants, like to to help me for things that I don’t know what I’m doing.
Speaker 2:
And so yeah, yeah, it is right, I hired my friend. I’m trying to open this water and I like closed it like a cheese. This is so tight. This is, by the way, little inside baseball. This is the very first time that I’m recording in this new studio because I recently moved. Terrible idea to turn on the fireplace. It’s, it’s an oven in here.
Speaker 2:
That was cool and I was like you know what you know I’m gonna do. I’m gonna turn it off right now because it’s way too hot. Are you cool with that? I’m gonna turn this dang fireplace off.
Speaker 1:
Turn it off no but that is great.
Speaker 1:
I can’t listen as he turns his oh my god, I’m gonna cover for you and just give a monologue about your book, but wait, as we finish this episode, I just want the listener remember I put the link in the description below hop on the wait list to get his book Sponsor Magnet, and you’re going to get 15 scripts Like if, then this, that, if somebody says this, how do you respond? And the goal is obviously to get sponsors. Oh yeah, and that is super valuable. So that link is in the description below. It’s sponsormagnetcom forward slash podcast. Sponsormagnetcom forward slash podcast, and your next episode releases two days from now, at least for the time that the first episode drops. What’s the last thing you want to leave with the listener before we say goodbye?
Speaker 2:
for this episode. I would say that if you have never thought that sponsorships were for you, this is something that happens a lot. I have a conversation with someone and I tell them what I do and they’re like I don’t do sponsors, I don’t want to like deal with brands, or I don’t want to deal with their them giving me feedback or creative edits, or that just seems terrible. I prefer to just sell my own stuff or my coaching or my courses or books or whatever it is, and I just don’t even want to deal with sponsors. Be open-minded. Be open-minded a bit about how profound of an impact that this can have on your business.
Speaker 2:
The one anecdote I’ll share is that you know, I’m a course creator too. I have, you know, my book sponsor magnet and I’m thinking very critically about how I can tap into brands and sponsors, customer bases, to increase distribution for my book and increase enrollments in my course. So I think a lot of people think of sponsorships as, like, the only way in which it’s valuable is that if the brand, if you talk about the brand, on to your kind of organic distribution, your audience, your following. But what I’m a big fan of is like trying to forge these deals where it makes a lot of sense for the brand to send out an email to their 100,000 customer base and be like hey, justin Moore’s got this new book coming out or Justin Moore’s got this amazing course, you should go check it out. So it’s like those are the types of deals that you could forge when it’s kind of this win-win thing, and so this is what I want to leave you with is like, if this is intriguing to you and you’re like I’ve never thought of doing something like that, then make sure to come on over into my universe. Sponsor magnetcom slash podcast awesome.
Speaker 1:
Well, thank you for this episode. Thank you in advance for the next one that we’re going to record together, justin, and I guess, until the next time, take care, be blessed listener, and we’ll see you in the next one.
