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.

Quick check: when's the last time you tried a format that could've completely flopped?

If you have to think about it, that's worth sitting with.

This week: the trade every creator quietly avoids, what happened when we made it ourselves on our own signature event, and a simple filter you can use to make it too.

Let's get into it (plus, our next event on July 28th).

If you're juggling a pipeline of brand partnership conversations, sponsor calls, and follow-ups, this one might save your week (and give you more time back to content creation).

Attio is a CRM, and its new Workflows feature automatically kicks in after a call: it summarizes the conversation, updates the deal record, and drafts your follow-up email using the actual specifics from that chat, not some generic template. 

You just review it, tweak what needs tweaking, and hit send.

For creators and marketers juggling a real roster of brand deals, the lag between "great call" and "follow-up actually sent" is usually where momentum quietly dies. 

Worth a look if that sounds familiar.

Here's why that check from the intro is worth sitting with: your brain is making a bad trade…

It's comparing something proven against something unproven, and unproven loses that comparison every time, even when it shouldn't.

Here's the concept I want to give you this week: Known-Good vs. Unknown-Better.

The only way to find out is to spend the resource that scares people most: the risk of doing worse than your own baseline, on purpose, for a little while.

Most creators never spend it. They keep collecting more known-good instead, which feels like progress but is really just repetition with better production value.

We decided to spend it on the one thing at Creator Economy NYC we'd least want to mess up: our own signature event.

Growing up, whenever a teacher whipped out Jeopardy in class, you knew it was going to be a good day. It fired up this competitive streak in me and I knew things were going to get fun.

Turns out the things that made learning engaging as kids still work remarkably well for adults.

Our mixer and panel format was known-good. It had worked for three years, and this was the moment to put it up against unknown-better.

Instead of the usual setup, we built three high-top tables, flip-style scoring signs, a buzzer, and a $20 piece of software. Creator Jeopardy was born.

This all goes back to our F*ck It, Create It mission too. If you're not willing to risk known-good, you'll never find out what unknown-better could've been.

When something works well, you might be tempted to run it back forever. This is especially true for creators, because known-good is measurable and unknown-better isn't, until you actually try it.

But your audience might get format fatigue before you do. If every event, video, newsletter, or podcast episode looks exactly like the last one, you might not be giving them the best reason to keep showing up.

This is the same lesson Oren John gave us: if you're not flopping, you're not trying. Savvy creators who break through plateaus and keep growing their business are the ones still spending that risk budget on unknown-better, even after they've found what works.

Creator Jeopardy wasn't a random bet or a side plot. Everything we do at CENYC comes back to the same why: be the place creators meet, learn and earn. A mixer & panel does that well.

Turns out a game show does it even better. We weren't risking known-good on just anything, we were risking it on something that still served the same mission. And the community felt that.

As long as your unknown-better still points at your original why, spending the risk is a F*ck yes.

Jeopardy has existed since 1964. We didn't invent anything novel here. We just took a familiar concept and applied it in a new context. If you're staring at a blank page trying to invent a format from scratch, stop.

Look at what already works somewhere else, or what's working for another brand, creator, or company, and ask what it looks like in your world.

And one more, maybe the most important:

Remember why you're doing this. Somewhere between the content and the brand deals and the growth strategy, it's easy to forget that the whole point of this is supposed to be fun.

Summer is in full swing and after a packed few months of events, launches, conferences, and creator chaos, we're bringing the community back together.

​Join Creator Economy NYC and our friends at TopFan for an evening of networking, conversation, and connection with creators, marketers, platforms, and industry leaders shaping what's next.

​We'll explore what it means to build a creator business that lasts, from audience ownership and direct fan relationships to creating opportunities beyond the platforms we rely on every day.

We're excited to be partnering with Creator Economy Live East, the industry's largest influencer marketing conference, taking place July 29 in Midtown Manhattan (right after our July 28 event)

The event brings together creators, agencies, platforms, and brands including Anthropologie, Estée Lauder, Disney, American Express, and many more for a full day of conversations, networking, and industry insights.

As part of our partnership, I was able to secure 20% off any ticket exclusively for the Creator Economy NYC community, just use code CENYC20.

Hope to see you there!

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! Pick one piece of known good you've been running on repeat and spend a little of that risk budget 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.