We recently connected with Justin Shaifer and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Justin thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

I remember when I first moved to New York City to build Fascinate full time in 2017. I planned to work part-time for another media company. Unfortunately, I made the rookie mistake of quitting my job, moving to New York and moving into an apartment before I had a signed contract from them. Shortly after, the opportunity fell through, and I was left stuck in New York City with no job, my savings dwindling, and a burning desire to inspire young people with creative content around STEM subjects.

I could’ve gotten a job at this point, but I decided to bet on myself. This was the most challenging and least rewarding year of being a business owner. I was 22 years old, and completely clueless- I never studied entrepreneurship and had no idea how to run a business. I knew if I could survive this year in NYC, then I wouldn’t go back. I made it work. I ate one meal per day, created educational content online, built out after-school programming and wore my clothes out until they had holes in them.

6 full-time years later, I look back on that time with nostalgia. I remember feeling hopeless, wanting to give up many times, working through my birthday. But that experience serves as a powerful reminder of what I’m capable of. As I continue to take on challenging creative projects that seem to have no end, I know they pale in comparison to how much I struggled that year.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Justin “Mr. Fascinate” Shaifer, and I am the founder of Fascinate Media. Through Fascinate, I produce and host educational science and tech TV shows for young diverse audiences. I’ve created and hosted series concepts for networks such as PBS Digital Studios, Discovery and commercial tech companies such as Intuit and NVIDIA.

As “Mr. Fascinate”, I travel the world speaking to educators and students about how I got into STEM, and how they may build a STEM Success story of their own.

Our team has recently opened Fascinate House, a 2700 sq ft. event space and commercial production studio available for rent in downtown Los Angeles. At Fascinate House, our team takes a tech-forward approach to creative work, leveraging cutting-edge creative tools such as virtual production, generative AI, and VR/XR to execute advanced creative projects, such as A Second Home- a virtual production project where we place a physicist on the surface of different planets to teach the audience about their properties.

Growing up in Chicago, I didn’t often feel like I had access to the types of career paths that are often well-paying today. It is my passion to ensure that people from all backgrounds feel like STEM / STEAM careers are for them.

The best way to think of my work these days is if you combined the careers of Bill Nye and Tyler Perry.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Although I have a pretty solid following on Instagram and Twitter, the social media page that truly powers my business is my LinkedIn. I am a LinkedIn Top Voice in technology and have over 50,000 followers on the platform.

Many people still only see LinkedIn as an online resume platform, or a place to find jobs, but it’s much more than that today. I was an early adopter on its social platforms, and benefitted greatly from the outsized engagement my posts would get.

One of the most powerful features on LinkedIn is that you have the ability to uniquely build your audience by job title. As an educator that was making media content, I needed to connect with producers, educators, conference organizers, and I literally searched for these jobs titles and manually added the people I wanted to connect with. These people became the foundation of my LinkedIn audience, who would often share my content to their network of peers with similar jobs.

If you’re just beginning to grow a presence on social media today, consistency is more important than everything. When people start creating social media content, they imagine they’ll *always* be motivated to create. This is rarely the case. If you can create a system that makes content creation easy, not mentally taxing and allows you to show up unmotivated and still create content, then you have a winning formula!

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Today, creative fields are in jeopardy. SAG and WGA strikes along with the rise of generative AI has many creatives fearful about innovation and mistrusting of big companies. While these sentiments resonate with me, I don’t think stagnation is the answer.

In fact, I’m more motivated than ever to lean into my innate desire to adopt new technologies, and to find job opportunities for creatives in emerging fields. Through Fascinate, we want to teach people about all of these new creative tools that can make creatives lives easier.

My passion for STEM literacy for all goes hand-in-hand with empowering creatives to leverage tools such as Generative AI, VR/AR and virtual production. These are in-demand careers today, that will certainly be prerequisite skills tomorrow. I am excited to be on the side of progress in these tumultuous times.

Contact Info:

• Website: justinshaifer.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/mr.fascinate
• Linkedin: linked.com/in/jshaifer
• Twitter: twitter.com/fascinatesci
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/fascinatesci

Image Credits
Main Photo: Navik Nanubhai Photo with Justin in Director’s chair next to camera: Toni Weathers Photo with Justin in Fascinate T Shirt Holding camera: Kris Lassiter All other photos: Fascinate Media