State of the Creator Kitchen

and looking ahead to 2025

Hey, it's Jay! We launched the Creator Kitchen to the public in April 2023. We told members that April to Dec 2023 was our "spaghetti on the wall" phase, and I jokingly called our 2024 the "gnocchi on the wall" phase (more focused, but things still felt highly experimental and really focused on Mel and my learning as rapidly as we could).

Now, we're flipping the analogy around to you as we prepare for a more focused, more productive, and higher-momentum 2025. But before I say more, here are some quick thoughts on our 2024…

2024 Reflections ⏪

Two things guided our year the most as cofounders:

1. We relaunched of both tiers in September:

We have 61 total members, and 1 VIP cohort of 6 elite creators. Our goal in 2025 would be to add a 2nd VIP cohort in the first half of the year and continue slowly growing our Standard tier.

As of September, Standard became a slightly lower priced tier and re-focused around the features you told us worked best for you (namely, educational content like masterclasses and special guests, with a secondary tier of value being the group roundtables and office hours). While some groups are great for community engagement and connection, it’s clear our competency both as cofounders and as a membership is education and coaching.

We feel the next iteration of your membership will build more on those two things and where they meet: facilitating more shipping of better work in the real world.

We recognize that behind the list of features you said you loved most, we have our Slack group, and that’s been a little less clear in use-cases than we would have liked. Moving forward, Slack will play a stronger role but not a larger one, meaning it won't take up more of your time, but it will have a clearer purpose in why and how we each use it. Maybe this means migrating to a new community platform or maybe it means Slack remains. Regardless, we are going to crack the code on our community forum in 2025.

2. We Refocused our value proposition on one core transformation:

While we’ve always had lots of themes and principles we talk about (craft, creativity, quality, storytelling, etc.), we imagine one core transformation people experience in the Kitchen and plan to optimize for that more moving forward (details below). That core transformation is to take someone who is kind, smart, creative, focused on serving their audience, and brings real expertise and substance to others ... and turning them into a more trusted leader in their space. Someone who competes on the impact of their ideas, not the volume of their marketing.

Call that a trusted voice, a thought leader, a storyteller—the label matters less. The outcome + the actions along the way matter the most.

That's what we want. That's our core value to you. To live up to that promise, here are steps we are taking moving into 2025…

Looking ahead to 2025 ⏩

Our big question as membership leaders and teachers: how can we be MORE useful in making the work more fun and consistent, as well as something you feel clear and confident doing? We understand now that the insights we offer members (classes, guests, templates) are world-class and our coaching (group roundtables, office hours) are inspiring and empowering. How do we combine education + coaching to ensure you ship more, better, and differentiated work?

We start by turning our metaphors around (spaghetti on the wall; gnocchi on the wall) to YOU, creating a theme for 2025…

Our next year will be defined by one idea:

Feel of the flour 🤌

Our emphasis as a membership is going to be on the small but tangible actions we can take to have a big impact on our projects, platforms, businesses, and audiences—each of us in our own work but guided and energized by the membership.

Feel of the flour is a reminder to us all and a guiding principle for us to embrace that this work is mainly trial and error. It unfolds in the making itself, not in theory. What can WE do as membership owners to empower YOU to create your work more freely, confidently, and successfully? What can YOU do to execute more and better, moving out of theory and into the real world?

Our educational material and insights we offer help facilitate your trying, your attempts and drafts and shipped work, while our coaching can help you navigate your errors. Make no mistake, we can’t remove the trying nor the errors. That’s the work, you see. Clarity, creativity, and results all happen in the making process itself. You take a stab, notice something, make a change, and try again. The good stuff happens in the moments where you feel the flour on your fingers, taste the sauce as it simmers, and keep trying to cook something delicious for yourself and others. 

Our worst fear is creating a convenient place for you to hide; a place to feel productive but ultimately not produce anything (or anything better than before). Our worst fear is giving off any perception that we can remove the need for trial and error.

No. But we can facilitate your trial and error to ensure you feel more confidence, joy, and momentum going through it.

So we can't help you avoid trial and error, because that’s not a thing that exists. Instead, we are going to help facilitate your trial and error better than before — guiding you to try more things, try better things, try different things, and then respond to what you learn and any errors you make, with greater confidence, joy, and momentum.

Here are 4 things coming in 2025 👀

🎁 Near-term feature additions

Coming soon will be...

  • A member database (a long-requested feature! we'll ask you to fill out a brief form to add yourself, if you wish) 

  • A prompt database (which won't be full of prompts to start; instead, we'll announce a new creative prompt every couple of weeks, use Slack to celebrate progress or work through challenges, and ultimately equip you with a way to try small things or take small steps that have a big impact on your work. As needed, we can point back from the prompts to larger resources in the Kitchen to support your creative momentum and clarity).

🔑 Greater access to Mel and my other initiatives

We do lots of stuff. You should get subscription access to that stuff, to varying degrees and with varying extras for members only.

The Kitchen contributes a healthy but small chunk of revenue to Mel and my respective businesses. We share in all things CK, but most of our careers are built separately with separate sources of revenue we do not split. For instance, membership revenue will land somewhere between 13% and 14% of my income this year; 39% will be 1:1 client work; 23% sponsorships; 16% speaking fees; 7% misc. including book sales and the the bootcamp I piloted in November). BTW, ask me anything about my business anytime.

The point of all this is to share that we do NOT want CK to become our main source of income, but we do want to inform all our projects with CK-related materials a bit more closely—and have those other things benefit YOU more directly.

An easy example is bootcamps. I’ll be running several in 2025, some about speaking, some about business storytelling. Some will be two days, some a half day. Lots to explore and try. But there are several ways YOU can benefit (and will, with more details coming soon)…

  • Early access (before selling seats to the general public)

  • Pilot access (that is, before I launch the next TYPE of TOPIC, why not let members try it first as part of your membership fee, which also helps me test things and improve quicker?)

  • Free or discounted access (depending on the project/bootcamp)

  • Members-ony bonuses (maybe a coaching call or members-only group call for chefs who join a bootcamp of mine)

Even members who DON’T join my bootcamps should somehow benefit from the fact that I run them. For instance…

  • I can repurpose templates created for bootcamps into the Pantry as evergreen resources available to all chefs.

  • I can look for ways to feature more chefs in my examples. For my speaking bootcamp, for example, I want to film a couple short videos dissecting elements of others’ speeches. Those examples should be YOUR speeches, which then turn into resources available in the Pantry too. (As a soloist, I need things I create to be multi-use to avoid bottlenecking my business. This is a perfect example of ways my content away from CK can benefit members inside it.)

📕 Slowly but arguably the biggest step: the CK curriculum

I can't share much yet, but Mel and I are developing a curriculum that will let members go through a self-paced process, focused on building a high-impact platform with your unique ideas.

This would be a phased, module-based approach new members would START by executing, and existing members like you would be invited to access and pilot at no additional cost.

The material will blend short video lessons, assignments and prompts to execute (made easier by templates and resources for those tasks provided by us), and a clear understanding of how to use our coaching and community elements (roundtables, office hours, and Slack) to work through the curriculum and get unstuck as needed.

This curriculum will be at the core of everything in the Kitchen, will NOT require you to pay any extra to access it up front or forever and ever (as long as you’re a member), and the emphasis of the material will be on DOING not VIEWING. 

(That's a Mel Deziel joint, and I will be playing it on repeat for years, alongside saying “feel of the flour” ad infinitum.)

😜 Enabling the fun by finding our focus.

In making this membership higher-impact for you and more tangible for all involved, as well as more sustainable for Mel and I to run and make it financially viable, we know we will enable more of the fun stuff too! Merch, in-person events, collaborative membership-wide projects (books? a show or film? a virtual talk series? something to raise money for charity?)

It’s fun to daydream. We want to dream big, and we can do that more confidently when standing on a sturdy foundation.

***

Thank you, chef!

Thank you so much for being part of the early phases of the Kitchen. Maybe someday I will drop the "early" tag, but maybe doing this right means constant evolution. (Maybe that maybe is unnecessary.)

Keep making what matters, and know that the year to come is going to help us all keep cooking things we love and others love too.