Creator Science with Jay Clouse

Jonny Miller is the creator of Nervous System Mastery. It teaches evidence-backed protocols to cultivate calm, build resilience, and increase aliveness in 45 days. It’s a five-week, cohort-based course that is just wrapping up its sixth cohort in the last three years. In those six cohorts, Jonny has served nearly 1,000 students and earned more than $800,000. Here’s the best part – Jonny doesn’t ha...

My guest is Dorie Clark, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, 4-time Thinkers50 honoree as one of the world's top business thinkers, and longtime faculty member at Duke and Columbia Business Schools. Dorie is, by her own description, a LinkedIn person. She has close to 500,000 followers there, which puts her in the top half a percent of accounts on the platform. But in January 2026, she decid...

My guest is George Blackman, a YouTube scriptwriter who got his start writing full-time for Ali Abdaal and has since written scripts for creators from 30,000 to over 10 million subscribers. This is George's second time on the show. Three years ago, we talked about scriptwriting fundamentals. Since then, George has started writing his own videos with AI, and he's spent most of this year building Pl...

My guest is Jessica Lackey, founder of Deeper Foundations and author of Leaving the Casino: Stop Betting on Tactics and Start Building a Business That Works. She helps coaches, consultants, and service providers build expert-led businesses on strong foundations. Jessica tried the social media game. She hired a social media team for two years, ran Ship 30 for 30 on Twitter, tested Instagram. She ne...

David Altizer is the co-creator of Thumbnail Academy and has quickly become one of the most sought-after thumbnail designers around. David’s clients include Kurtis Connor, Jolly, Max Fosh, Hayden Hillier Smith, and now me. David’s thumbnails have earned nearly 350 million views—and in this video, he’ll show you why creating thumbnails is actually easier than you think. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Full transcript an...

My guest is Tamara Grominsky, founder of PMM Camp — a private, application-only membership for senior product marketing leaders with 280+ members. Tamara spent 15 years in product marketing, eventually landing at Kajabi as VP of Product Marketing. She went there with a specific agenda: study how the best creators build their businesses, then reverse engineer it for herself. She started a newslette...

My guest is Liz Wilcox, the creator behind Email Marketing Membership — a $9/month newsletter template subscription she’s kept at the same price for six years, that now generates close to half a million dollars a year. Liz built the whole thing as a single parent with no support system and no reliable internet, working from library parking lots and Lowe’s lots during nap times. She launched in Feb...

This week I’m joined by two longtime friends — Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland. Pat is the founder of Smart Passive Income, the creator education brand he started in 2008 and ran for 18 years. Matt came on around 2018 — first as an advisor, then as CEO — and spent years making SPI operationally strong enough to stand without Pat at the center. They spun SPI out into a separate entity called SPI Media,...

Meet Kallaway, the creator behind the Kallaway Marketing channel and the founder of Sandcastles — an AI research tool that helps creators find and validate viral video topics before they ever hit record. Kallaway started 4 businesses. All 4 failed for the same reason: no one knew who he was. No audience meant no customers, no leverage, no second chances. So he made it his mission to understand how...

Caleb Ralston is a strategist and brand builder for some of the biggest names in business. His breakthrough was back in 2018 when he grew GaryVee’s TikTok from 300k to 3.5 million followers in just 3 months. In 2022 he joined Alex and Leila Hormozi’s team as content employee #1, where he grew their audience from 1.2 million to 11.5 million. Caleb just doesn’t miss – and now that he’s out on his ow...

Our first-ever 6-figure launch started with a cold email I didn’t respond to. Twice. The third time, I wrote back. A few months later, we ran a 3-day free virtual summit that drove $101,666 in revenue — with a $78,400 margin. This is the full breakdown of how it happened, what we’d do the same way again, and what we’d change. Joining me for this behind-the-scenes recap is Anna Reich, the integrato...

Richard is the co-founder of ⁠1of10⁠, a research platform built by YouTube strategists, and his team has quietly been behind the scenes for some of the biggest channels on the platform—helping creators accumulate over 2 billion views through a repeatable, data-backed system. In this episode, Richard walks through his complete four-phase ideation system—audience identification, outlier research (us...

Most productivity advice operates in one of two categories: you’re missing a skill or system, or you have a mindset problem. Cat Mulvihill thinks both camps are right — and both are incomplete. There’s a third category that almost nobody is talking about, and she argues it’s the one most likely to be the actual culprit when you’re stuck. My guest this week is Cat Mulvihill, a speaker, trainer, acc...

Closing the doors to a membership is supposed to hurt signups. But one of Tom's clients did exactly that — closed it, added an application, doubled the price, then reopened. His next launch sold out in 4 minutes. Same community. Same people. Just different mechanics. My guest this week is Tom Ross, the founder of Learn. Community, where he helps community builders design learning experiences that...

This week, my wife Mallory joins me for only her second podcast appearance ever to break down everything from The Lab Offline Powered by Circle — our second annual 2-day in-person retreat for Lab members, hosted June 8–9 at Hotel Renegade in Boise, Idaho. Mallory planned essentially everything: seating charts, venue contracts, menus, swag, run of show. She's been at it for roughly 6 months. In thi...

The highest month of membership revenue in Lab history was also the setup for the highest month of churn. One year later, February delivered both records. I have been building community in some form since 2012. I ran Startup Weekend events in Columbus, led online Mastermind groups, consulted on the launch of SPI Pro, and spent 2021 leading the community team at Smart Passive Income before going ba...

Brad Hoos is the CEO of Outloud Group, one of the top influencer marketing agencies in the United States. His clients include AG1, Chomps, KitchenAid, and Whirlpool, and he’s managed campaigns across tens of thousands of creator partnerships. Jay found Brad while researching for his book proposal on trust, trying to track down the agency behind AG1’s dominance in podcast advertising. In this episo...

For the first time ever, I'm teaching my most popular course, Build A Beloved Membership, live over four weeks. You'll learn the exact approach I've taken to building The Lab to a ~$500K/year membership. Here's what you'll get: 4 weeks live. 10 sessions taught by me (July 3 to August 3). Kickoff call (Friday July 3) and Sendoff call (Monday August 3). Recordings of every session. A Circle space fo...

I brought back Becky Pierson Davidson to compare notes on where community is headed — and we found a few areas of disagreement. Becky works with 6, 7, and 8-figure businesses helping them build memberships and courses through design thinking and customer research, and she's seeing a major shift right now: course businesses are slowing down, and the smart ones are pivoting to membership models. The...

Sid Yadav is the CEO and co-founder of Circle, a community platform trusted by creators like Jay and thousands of others to build membership businesses. Today, Circle has ~280 employees and has raised around $30 million. Before Circle, he was the third hire at Teachable, where he helped build the infrastructure for the creator economy before the term even existed. He spent four years as a tech blo...

Every few years, someone asks you the question you've been avoiding. For me, this was it: does your show actually have a premise, or does it just require people to already know and like you? Jeremy Enns is the founder of Podcast Marketing Academy, where his primary product is podcast audits. He has spent years analyzing what separates shows that grow from shows that stall, and he runs Podcast Mark...

Richard van der Blom published his first LinkedIn algorithm report years ago as a curiosity project. This year, he and his team analyzed 1.3 million posts from 50,000 creators — and the headline number is hard to ignore: reach is down 60% for active creators over the last two years. Even harder to stomach: 80% of the comments Richard receives in the first five minutes of any post are written by AI...

Josh is the founder of Upright Media, an operating partner for content creators handling operations, consulting, recruiting, and post-production. His clients include some of YouTube's biggest channels — Erak, Smosh, Emma Chamberlain, Dude Perfect, Matthew Beam, and Chris Williamson. He runs 11 full-time staff and about 40 contractors worldwide. He describes himself as a creator without a channel....

Every month inside the Lab, I do a full retrospective: wins, concerns, experiments, with all the numbers on the table. I've never felt comfortable putting the whole thing out publicly, but I do think the practice itself is worth sharing. So this episode is my lightweight version: three big wins from April, three things I'm genuinely worried about heading into May, and three experiments I'm kicking...

I’ve been a full-time creator for 8 years now and have earned $2,192,000 since 2022. I’ve spent a LOT of time and money experimenting with different ways to make money on the internet, so I’m going to rank them. The best and the worst. I show you 15 different revenue streams and rate them from S to F based on their potential versus the effort required. By the very end of the video, you’ll know whi...