Welcome back to the Creator Economy NYC newsletter, your weekly dose of insights and strategies to help you build, monetize, and scale as a creator.

When was the last time you actually thought about the process behind what you make? Not the content but the steps between idea and published. The stuff around the creative work that somehow eats all your time.

Most creators are operating off vibes. And vibes work until they don't.

This week: 5 systems mistakes we keep seeing creators make and the fixes that are simpler than you think.

Plus, our next event happening April 7 - details below.

Let's get into it.

If you're managing brand partnerships, talent deals, or client pipelines, you already know the chaos. Contracts in your inbox, notes in five different apps, follow-ups falling through the cracks.

And if you're anything like me, that stuff used to live across a million tabs, inboxes, and random docs.

I recently moved everything into Attio and honestly wish I'd done it sooner. It's a CRM that's clean, fast, and connects with tools you're already using — Gmail, Slack, Granola — so nothing falls through the cracks.

But the feature I keep coming back to? Ask Attio. You can just ask your CRM questions and it pulls context from your emails, notes, calls, all of it.

Stuff like: → "Prep me for my meeting with [brand] today" → "Which deals haven't had a touchpoint in two weeks?" → "Draft a follow-up to [brand] about Q2"

Whether you're a creator managing your own partnerships, a manager juggling talent, or an agency running campaigns, this is the kind of visibility that actually saves you time.

We talk a lot about building the business side of the creator economy at CENYC. This is one of those tools that makes that real.

We’re running it back to one of our most popular panels last year. While the topic was tools and tech, we learned so much about the systems behind the work that creators do. These come from a convo with Gabby Beckford, Shervin Shares, Julia Fei, and Brandon Smithwrick.

As you wrap up Q1 and plan for the next stretch in the year, it’s a great time to take stock of what systems are working for you, where you can reduce friction in your business, and how you can focus on the things you do best.

As Brandon says… you don’t rise to the level of your ideas, you fall to the level of your systems.

Here are the mistakes costing you, and how to fix them:

When you hit a wall in your creator business, you might think you need to outsource your content. Stop.

A 10X move you can make is to systemize your operations instead. 

Gabby Beckford created a 50-row spreadsheet of operations in Notion so she can keep the "chaos" in her creative process while traveling. 

Her system is simple: she brain-dumped every single daily, weekly, and monthly task she does into a list. Then, she categorized every row by what she loves doing, what she’s good at, and what she absolutely sucks at.

Gabby doesn't even write those SOPs herself. She uses AI to generate the exact step-by-step instructions for her draining tasks, like writing Instagram captions, drops them into Notion, and hands them straight to a virtual assistant.

Who else is guilty of trying to slap another SaaS tool on your stack to fix a problem? Next thing you know, you have six recurring charges you don't even use.

Many of the things you’re trying to solve can be fixed by a lower-tech solution first. Julia, despite being a data scientist, uses a physical push-button timer to time-box her editing.

Gabby bought a second iPhone to physically separate her "creator mode" from her "personal life." Brandon just uses recurring Google Calendar invites that tell him to "write newsletter."

This helps you build stronger baseline habits before you introduce expensive software.

Ever stared at a blank doc knowing you needed to post something and felt like, F*CK. I have nothing to say? I have for sure. 

Building a content calendar is hard, and the truth is you probably don't need to plan three months out. Shervin explicitly plans only 1-2 weeks out so he can stay agile and jump on trends. Brandon just keeps a "brain dump" Notion doc and writes down ideas whenever he's talking to someone or listening to a podcast.

At the end of the week, he looks at the doc and asks: What post ideas do I have?

AJ Eckstein has a helpful way of thinking about this too: document over create. Stop trying to invent net-new ideas from scratch, and just capture the problems you're solving, the decisions you're making, and the conversations you're already having.

Some ways creators avoid the blank page: 

These systems eliminate the pressure of the blank page. When it's time to schedule, you aren't starting from scratch; you're just picking from the menu.

One of your biggest priorities as a creator is to actually create things. The problem that happens as you scale is that your process gets too heavy.

As Julia said, “If there's too much friction with a big camera, I will never film anything.”

Your job = recognize the points of friction and engineer them out of your life

There’s a fine line between things you want to be meticulously involved in and things you want to let a robot handle.

Brandon still publishes manually on LinkedIn. But he automates his email collection, using Zapier to send Gumroad downloads straight to his beehiiv list.

Gabby uses ManyChat to instantly send her travel guides to anyone who comments "Colombia" on her Reels, entirely automating her lead generation while she sleeps.

Before you go, here are the tools that kept coming up on the panel:

We're partnering with Relay — the business banking platform built for the way creators and solopreneurs actually run their finances — for our next event.

The focus: what happens when the money actually starts coming in. Brand deals, sponsorships, product revenue - it arrives fast, and most creators aren't ready for it.

One day you're "getting paid," the next you're running a business you never quite signed up to run. So, we're bringing together a panel of top NYC creators and industry voices to get into it:

​Each offering a different perspective on how creators earn, manage, and grow their money.

​And April is Financial Literacy Month, so let's actually talk about it.

The F*ck It, Create It Workbook is the thing that finally gets you off the sideline.

It’s a guided system — with companion videos — that walks you through the exact mental blocks keeping you stuck and forces you to ship your first piece of content, product, event… whatever you’ve been sitting on.

One time purchase of $57 for the workbook and companion videos.

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! If even one of these fixes saves you an hour this week, that's worth more than any tool subscription. See you next week.

F*ck It, Create It,

Brett