Hey! Welcome back to the (150TH IN A ROW) Creator Economy NYC newsletter, your weekly dose of insights and strategies to help you build, monetize, and scale as a creator.
What happens when you go really, really deep on one niche?
For Eli Mack, it started with a Ninja Creami and an obsession with finding a way to eat ice cream every day while hitting his fitness goals.
A few years later, he’s built Fitness Product Finder into a business consistently generating around $50K+/month, and now he’s making the jump from creator to founder.
This week, we sat down with Eli to unpack how he did it.
Let’s get into it.
Also, stoked to see Creator Economy NYC featured in Entrepreneur Mag - see here!
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Relay’s 2026 Cash Flow Compass explores what’s putting pressure on owners, and the habits that help them stay in control.
How Eli Mack built a $50K/month business around protein ice cream
In 2024, while in college posting protein ice cream recipes, Eli Mack landed his first brand deal: $50 and a tub of protein powder.
“I showed my roommates and they were like, dude, let’s go, we have protein powder for the month.”
At the time, Eli wasn’t thinking much about building a business. He loved ice cream, had gotten more serious about fitness, and bought a Ninja Creami so he could figure out how to have both.
He started testing lower-calorie, higher-protein recipes. Then he started posting them.
Since then, Eli has tested hundreds of recipes and built an audience of 1M+. Fitness Product Finder now spans social, an 85K-person newsletter, digital products, brand partnerships, consulting and more.
His first product was simple: a cheap digital recipe book. It originally cost around $6 and sat quietly in his bio.
“I never really pushed it at all,” Eli told us. “I was always like, if you want all my recipes, it’s in the link in my bio.”
For the first two years, he barely made money.
Today, his recipe books make up the largest revenue stream in a business consistently generating around $50,000 per month. (And he has some Top Secret plans to launch a product of his own in the works 👀)
So, what changed?
1. He made the path from follower → customer much shorter
One of Eli’s biggest business unlocks came in early 2025: using ManyChat automations on his recipe videos.
You know the type:
“Comment RECIPE and I’ll send it to you.”
Instead of hoping someone would watch a recipe, click Eli’s profile, find his link and eventually buy a book, ManyChat gave them an immediate next step.
And the results were shockingly good: Eli says the change helped 3X revenue without changing the content itself.
2. His 85K-person email list became a sales channel
ManyChat helped Eli turn viewers into customers. But he also wanted somewhere to keep them.
Eli began offering free recipes in exchange for an email address. Those subscribers now get a weekly newsletter called “The Sunday Scoop”, featuring a recipe, a product review and an “In the Lab” section where he goes deeper on an ingredient, technique or product.
That list now reaches around 85,000 people.
And recently, Eli has gotten much more serious about what happens after someone subscribes.
A recipe video might disappear from someone’s feed tomorrow. An email subscriber gives Eli another chance to reach that person next week, next month, or when he launches something entirely new.
🔒 Don’t fuhgeddaboudit: Your newsletter doesn’t have to become a separate media business to be valuable. Sometimes its most important job is making the rest of your creator business stronger.
3. He started investing in the business beyond himself
For years, Eli did almost everything himself.
Now he’s building a team:
A business advisor
An agent
A newsletter + email expert
A Meta ads specialist
“I did do all of it on my own for so long,” he said. Eventually, though, Eli reached the breaking point most successful creators face: you can’t do everything yourself and still grow.
As revenue became more consistent, he became more willing to invest it back into the business.
Klaviyo alone costs him around $1,300 a month. Team members cost money. He only recently started experimenting with Meta ads, with no guarantee they'll work.
“They’re expensive. All these things are expensive,” he said. “And you’re not guaranteed anything.”
He’s also experimenting with entirely new business channels.
“The biggest lever I’ve pulled in the past six months is starting to post on LinkedIn,” Eli told us.
Unlike his consumer channels, LinkedIn puts him directly in front of people working at the companies he talks about every day. It’s already led to paid consulting gigs and inbound brand deals.
“Not a lot of content creators [are] there,” he said. “And that’s where all the money is.”
4. Now he’s turning audience feedback into a physical product
Eli graduated from college in May 2025 and spent about nine months working full-time while building Fitness Product Finder on the side.
He was already considering quitting when he got laid off (a classic creator narrative arc!). “It was really just like a blessing in disguise,” he said.
Going full-time also gave him the space to revisit an idea he’d had for months: developing his own Ninja Creami mix.
His idea is that customers could use one premixed product instead of buying several different ingredients to recreate the recipes. The formula is fairly finalized, he says, and he’s currently aiming for a Q1 2027 launch.
“Everything takes way longer,” he said. “Way longer than you think.”
But Eli enters the process with something most first-time CPG founders don’t: years of direct feedback from the exact customers he wants to serve.
His content has effectively become customer research for the company he’s building next.
🔒 Don’t fuhgeddaboudit: Your creator business can be the R&D department for whatever you build next.
Steal this: The niche-to-business playbook
Zoom out, and there’s a pretty clear pattern to how Eli turned one specific interest into a $50K/month business.
He kept finding more valuable ways to build around the same expertise.
1. TEACH IT
Share what you know for free and become the go-to person for a specific problem.
Eli shared hundreds of Ninja Creami recipes for free, building expertise and trust around one very specific niche.
2. PACKAGE IT
Turn that expertise into something your biggest fans will pay to access.
Eli sold paid recipe books that contain his top recipes and remain his biggest revenue stream.
3. OWN THE AUDIENCE
Give followers a reason to leave the feed so you can reach them again.
Eli uses ManyChat to build an email list of 85K people. Email now drives around 20% of attributed revenue.
4. PRODUCTIZE IT
Look for the problem your content and digital products still haven’t solved.
Eli is building recipes that require 4+ ingredients. Now he’s building one product designed to make the whole process easier.
Thanks Eli for sharing your story! You can follow Fitness Product Finder here.
Closing out the year with our biggest ones yet
We're gearing up for our final events of 2026, and we've got some exciting things in the works!
While more details are coming soon, you can get ahead and apply to join our upcoming events now.
Two free tools top creators use to keep themselves moving
The Creator Goal Setting Guide (FREE): A simple but powerful document to help you declare who you want to BECOME in 2026. Get it here.
The Creator Accountability System (FREE): Your visual companion for consistent creation in 2026. Get it here.
Eli’s first brand deal was $50 and a tub of protein powder. Today, he’s built a $50K/month business around the same niche.
What’s one thing you already teach that you could package up? Start there.
F*ck It, Create It,
Brett and Taylor