Hey! Welcome back to the Creator Economy NYC newsletter, your weekly hit of insights and strategies to help you build, monetize, and scale as a creator.
I'm still coming down off our event last Tuesday. We packed the Freehand for our Creator Summer Mixer with our friends at TopFan, and the panel we put together turned into one of my favorite conversations we've hosted in a while.
The theme was owning your platform. Everyone nods along at that phrase until you ask the harder version: if your biggest social account disappeared tomorrow, what kind of business would you actually still have?
This week: three things that came out of that room, one bonus lesson, and what the rest of you had to say about it.
Aright, let’s get into it.
What top creators taught us about owning their platform
We built this month's panel around one question: what does it actually take to build a creator business that outlasts any single feed?
So we brought together four people who are each answering it differently.
Varun Rana is building a larger creative world around the absurdities of work and tech, starting with sketch comedy and video essays and expanding into live experiences, films, books, and original IP.
Amy Wang has built a deeply engaged audience through YouTube and is extending that relationship through education, digital products, a second channel focused on finance, and a newsletter with more than 36,000 subscribers.
Hannah Wilson is helping push creators beyond one-off paychecks and toward ownership, equity, and long-term brand building, while also running an agency focused on turning audiences into deeply loyal communities.
Jeff Kohn is the founder and CEO of TopFan, where he helps creators, artists, teams, and entertainment brands build direct-to-fan businesses on infrastructure they can actually own.
Here are the takeaways:
1. Owning your audience is only half the job
Most of you already have (or are working toward) some version of an owned audience. An email list, a phone list, a group chat. Something you can reach without asking an algorithm for permission.
Owning your platform is the layer underneath. It's the infrastructure the business actually sits on: the part nobody can kick you off, change the rules on overnight, or take the relationship away from. In practice that's an email list, a paid community, your own site, a product. Anything sitting on infrastructure you control instead of infrastructure you're borrowing.
Worth being honest about one layer here: even your email list probably lives on somebody else's platform. There's a real spectrum between renting and owning. Social sits at one end, where you own nothing. Email sits further along, you own more, but you're still a guest in someone's system. What Jeff's building at TopFan sits at the other end of that spectrum: infrastructure a creator actually owns outright, rather than leases with nicer terms.
Now, nobody on that stage told creators to quit social. Social is still where you get found and build trust. But the test the panel kept coming back to was this: picture your biggest account gone tomorrow. Do you have a list of names and emails you can reach directly? A place people already know to look for you? A product or offer that exists outside the app?
If the honest answer is no to most of those, that number is borrowed. And borrowed things can be taken back.
🔒 Don't fuhgeddaboudit: If you can't take it with you, you don't own it.
2. What creators can learn from HBO's Game of Thrones mistake
The wildest story of the night came from Jeff, and it wasn't about a creator at all.
He was in a meeting with a few execs at HBO, talking about Game of Thrones. One of the biggest shows ever made, with an enormous, obsessive, global fandom. And they never did a proper job of capturing who those fans actually were. No emails. No real record of the people watching every episode twice.
So when it came time for a follow-on series, that meant remarketing from scratch. HBO couldn't tell you which fans were most leaned in, or who was engaging most, because that information didn't sit with them.
Who owns that? Often, the platforms do. They're not handing it over, and if you want it back, you're buying it as ad targeting.
The fix is smaller than it sounds. Every giveaway, waitlist, event, or gated post is a chance to capture a name, email, phone number or more.
🔒 Don't fuhgeddaboudit: If you can't directly communicate with the people who showed up, you'll pay to reach them later.
3. All in all, ownership is really a data question
We started on ownership in the big abstract sense and kept ending up somewhere much more specific. Email and phone number are the entry point. Most creators know that by now, and a lot of you have started.
But the conversation went a little deeper. What you ultimately want to know is what your audience is interacting with inside your world. What links they're clicking. What content they're watching, and rewatching. What they're buying.
Meta is not going to tell you which of your videos your best fans rewatch. That's not a gap you hustle around. It only exists if you build somewhere it can exist.
None of this requires a data science degree. Tag your links so you know which posts actually drive clicks. Ask your list one direct question this month, what they want more of, what they'd pay for, that's real data. If you sell anything, look at who's buying twice before you worry about who's buying once.
🔒 Don't fuhgeddaboudit: If it can't tell you who your best fans are, you don't own it yet.
Bonus: Build a world through your content
One thing all four panelists had in common: none of them were optimizing for a single channel. They're each building something bigger than that.
Strip that down and it comes back to three moves:
Scaling beyond social platforms
Creating a connective space where your audience and experiences live together
Owning the data and the interactions within it
Simple to say. Much harder to do.
🔒 Don't fuhgeddaboudit: However big the world gets, people still need one clear door in.
What the room told us
After the panel, we asked the crowd what stood out most. A few answers stuck with me.
"The future of the creator economy is ownership. My framework is that the 4 levels of creator monetization go: RENT (your audience), SELL (your services), BUILD (your offering), OWN (IP and equity). Excited to see more creators getting to OWN."
"My favorite line was the reminder to be the CEO of your own life: cut what isn't working, execute on what is, and optimize from there. The real shift is moving from chasing exposure to owning your natural gifts, data, and equity in what you build."
"Hannah talked about building a lifestyle around what unapologetically made her be her best self. No cooking, no house, great exercise, and a real virtual assistant instead of relying only on agents. Good stuff, made me move forward on hiring a VA."
"Having more than one stream of income when making content is key for staying in the game. Also, you need to be thinking about the data side of the business, because that's how you open the door for more opportunities down the line."
Four different answers, same thread running through all of them: ownership is a decision you make now, one list, one dataset, one asset at a time.
Steal this playbook
Three moves to take past this newsletter:
Build one thing today a platform can't take from you. An email capture, a DM list, a waitlist page. Doesn't need to be fancy, just needs to exist.
Start tracking one data point beyond followers. Clicks, rewatches, repeat purchases, pick one and start watching it this week.
Give one story or theme from your content a home outside the algorithm. A mini-site, a live event, a chapter of something bigger. Start small.
Oh, and give TopFan a look.
Our next event(s): coming soon…
We’re taking a quick breather after our latest event, then getting back together for a Creator Walk in Central Park later this August.
After that, we’ll return with our next full event in early September alongside our friends at Relay, who you may remember from our event back in April.
Stay tuned for details in the coming weeks.
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.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who came out this week. Pick one thing from this list you don't currently own, your list, your data, your time, and start building it this week.
F*ck It, Create It,
Brett
+ With research, interview and editorial support by Taylor Cromwell - a newsletter and creator economy expert and founder of Creator Diaries. Follow Taylor on LinkedIn.
