We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jake Voorhees. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jake below.
Hi Jake, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?
Introduction The focus for this conversation is profitability challenges faced by creative entrepreneurs, including artists, designers, content creators, camera professionals, etc. I’ve been working with more creative professionals, curating events for these folks, and will soon be running more support programming for creatives all year. Creative entrepreneurs fail to succeed in business normally because of the business-side of things. Their art, their craft, their skillset that fuels their business is next level. However, the skills for example to run a successful bakery vs. be a great baker are entirely different. Here are three pitfalls and issues that creatives generally create for themselves, and some tips to avoid these.
1. Show Your Work
My background is engineering, tech and innovation, and lately I’ve started to work with more creative professionals. So I bring lessons from the startup world, including my experience being on ABC’s Shark Tank with NERDiT NOW. More creative professionals need to learn to show their work, test and validate assumptions, then tweak and refine, put it in front of customers again, etc. Here is the opposite. example, called, “waterfall engineering”.
Waterfall engineering is where a business/team/project will extinguish most of your time, energy, and resources to build towards a perfect solution based on their understanding of the problem they are trying to solve in the world. After designing something in isolation for a time period, the team puts their product or service or solution in front of their target audience – and generally they have one or more critical assumptions wrong.
The proper approach is to build towards a minimum viable product, or MVP, and put that in front of their target audience. Utilize the least amount of time/resources in order to get user feedback, direction, and data on future customers. Good teams are always testing, and assuming they have things wrong and their product can improve. Creatives and artists need to show their work more, get customer feedback, not wait until something is “perfect”, which can be a fatal flaw. Many creatives know about Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work – this is my personal way to relate to this.
2. Never Eat Alone
In the technology and innovation space, there is generally two people working on a project. You have the builder and the seller. When you look at many simple business models, even a brick-and-mortar store or restaurant, generally there are two folks running it. You have the executive chef in the back who may not need great communication, leadership, etc – but they can make a great product. I have memories of meeting bakery owners and coffee shop brother/sister teams. Often time you will see one social outgoing one who is the face/sales of the business, and the other person who has the talent to make the stuff, build the thing, make the art, etc.
However, many times a creative entrepreneur or artist is what we can call a “solopreneur” – they have no business partner and are forging ahead with their venture alone. And typically, if you had to put creatives/artists in a box, they aren’t as communicative, could be socially awkward, and may be intimidated by an approach to meeting customers, partners, mentors, and others who can help you along your business journey. I am a very social person and love to build relationships and network, and one of the books and concepts that has helped me tremendously in my career is Keith Keith Ferrazzi’s book Never Eat Alone. He runs through tips and suggestions on maintaining a powerful network, getting out there and meeting people properly, and how to ping people and keep in touch with strategic individuals so you can help one another win in business.
No entrepreneur makes it alone. And I fear that too many artists think that if they just stay in their studio, improving their craft, eventually someone will discover them and their career will change. And unfortunately this is a misnomer. This is why there are so many struggling artists who have unbelievably skillful work, but they don’t know how to market it, don’t know how to meet the people who can help them with their career. Gallery owners, studio curators, art show facilitators, museum directors, etc – you have to get out and find these people, build relationships, figure out their business and career goals/needs, and explore synergies for you both to help each other along. Ask for nothing, and you get nothing. So book more lunch meetings, coffees with people, and email and ping folks every few weeks while maintaining a spreadsheet of your outreach. Do this for a year and your life will change.
3. Collaborate
I worked on a YouTube project for a few years. 200+ videos, 110,000+ subscribers and six years later, one of my biggest takeaways from YouTube is the focus on collaborations. Once people have somewhat of an audience, a fanbase, and customer following, etc, you should be leveraging this in order to market yourself as a valuable collaborator. In order to do this successfully, you have to truly lean into tip 2, or never eat alone. You have to create for yourself a pool of collaborators by networking and getting out there online and in real life, meeting people and building relationships with similar or adjacent professionals. Once you meet some new friends, you vibe with them, and your work/art has some sort of synergy, maybe you can do an art collab. Maybe you can feature one another in your content – feature people on your blog, instagram, website, etc. I see many artists and creators incorporating other artists/creators into their work in order to shout them out and help and support them. YouTubers did this well because someone with a channel and subscribers base will go on another similar YouTuber’s channel for a collab. Afterwards, they will switch, and the opposite YouTuber will then be featured on the other person’s channel, so they cross market their audiences. Podcasters are great with this too. As a podcast host, ideally you feature only people with an audience of their own, and you do a “one for one”, where you go back and forth on one another’s shows.
Even though the focus for this tip so far is on audience cross pollination, there are far more benefits to collaborating than audience mixing. Collaborating keeps your work fresh and interesting, it builds a relationship with another creator in such a powerful way, can provide access to different resources and work locations, can expose you to new markets, etc. I notice that successful individuals in all fields are constantly collaborating with other successful entreprenrus. Let’s use King Saladeen, local Philadelphia artist for an example. King collaborates with MANY different industries and puts his art on products that you’d never expect, and people who would typically never see his work are now exposed to it. Some examples of collabs for King include: Listerine, Lamborghini, Nike, Topshot, etc.
Conclusion
So there are my common pitfalls and profitability challenges that creative entrepreneurs face. Remember to show your work and test and validate before you assume you’re on the right path, that you network for success and never eat alone, and that you collaborate with as many other professionals as possible for success. Thank you!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m Jake Voorhees, as seen on Shark Tank, a marketing agency owner, civil engineer, conference planner, community builder, and startup founder. The problems I solve for my clients are content marketing strategy, community building, and conference planning. What sets me apart is my unique combination of engineering and design background, along with my startup experience, and creative marketing skills. I am most proud of being on Shark Tank with NERDiT NOW in the fall of 2019.
My focus today is building the Create ‘n’ Hustle community, a grassroots event series in Philadelphia, with planned podcast and other online community aspects in 2024. Be a part of the journey on Instagram @JakeVoor and @CreatenHustle, and www.JakeVoorhees.com to keep in touch and follow along. Thank you so much!
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
Our Shark Tank story
In 2018 I left my engineering career behind to join a startup called NERDiT NOW. I was critical employee #1 where the business has nearly 20 today and making a few million dollars a year (I left in 2021). In my early days, we were in the business of winning pitch competitions. We had gotten really good at them, were winning up to $10,000 checks, and started to go bigger and bigger in terms of the competitions, the distance we would travel for them, etc.
And in April 2019 we drove 10 hours, from Wilmington, DE to Louisville, KY where there was a big business conference the week of the Kentucky Derby. We had no real plan, to pitch put together, drove 10 hours while hungover on a Sunday, and showed up late in the day. We got food, practiced all night, went to bed at 3AM, woke up at 8 and got in line. We were number 187, and eventually got in the building, and pitched for 1min. The single judge we pitched to took 5min of notes and we really felt like we’d advance.
Weeks and weeks later, it became clear to us that we’re on a path to be on the show. But most of our advisors, along the way, told us we were stupid and risk taking and all this to have tried for Shark Tank. We got stranded on the way home, barely had enough money for repairs, spent time and resources on this big marketing expense that, didn’t really make any $$$. And the business nearly died.
But we made it, and lived to tell the Shark Tank story, and it was worth it! The lesson is to literally, “go for broke”, and go big or go home. Take calculated risks and go for it!
How did you build your audience on social media?
In 2018 I committed to 100 YouTube videos in 12 months. It took 4 months to get to 100 subs, another 4 months to 1,000, and by the one year goal and 100th video, the channel was 10,000 subscribers. At this point I stopped uploading and joined NERDiT NOW, but over the following 2 years, the channel grew to 50,000 subscribers without a single new upload. I returned some during COVID, uploaded another 50, and grew the channel to about 80,000 subscribers, etc.
I have a ton of lessons from this journey, the channel now being about 110,00o subs, making money passively, and it gives me a lot of credibility with clients and content marketing projects. The one I want to focus on is the following – make calculated video topics/titles.
Here is what I mean. At episode 26, I made a critical YouTube discovery. Rather than simply ideating, and coming up with video ideas I thought my audience wanted, I started researching. I’d look at popular keyword searches in my niche, and make a list of good ideas. Then I would go to YouTube and explore how much competition existing for each video title. If there were a bunch of videos with the same title, I’d skip it. But if there were none, or few, or they were bad – I would try to make the best video that would be top of search when these people entered their query into the YouTube search bar. And this worked. This was a game changer for me.
So if you’re a blogger or social media person, or podcaster, you have to do some research and figure out what your audience actually searchers for online, and literally understand what they type into the search bar. Because if you can make your content entitled the same as what they are searching, the platforms will rank your content super well against that search query. Good luck!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jakevoorhees.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jakevoor/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JakeVoor
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakevoorhees/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jakevoorhees
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/JakeVoorhees