Creator Kitchen VIP Mastermind
Our VIP mastermind is one of two tiers of membership on offer in the Kitchen. This particular tier is intended for established entrepreneurs and experts who have existing revenue and audience traction.
VIP is our highly vetted, application-only, paid network of individuals with existing audience and revenue traction.
We’re getting the right few people in a group together to discuss how we develop, distribute, and monetize our IP and the various work we do in support of that. At our stage, we don’t need generalities. We need personalized input from a trusted few who get it and get us.
expect a commitment of ~2 hours per month
We’ve filled our first group. We’re targeting early 2025 for the next.
highly vetted, Application-only
If you’re anything like us, you rarely get the chance to connect with peer-level people with any regularity. CK VIP is built to create a density of those people for you, connecting you with the same small group on regular calls, so you have sustained context with each other, giving and receiving personalized support.
Generic advice and theoretical playbooks aren’t what you need.
Small, vetted groups are better for contextualized, real-world advice.
When you’re usually the advice-giver, CK VIP is where you go to Get it
Meet monthly with your core mastermind group of 6-8 peers, facilitated by Jay and Mel.
Access a small, carefully cultivated group of VIPs on-demand through our community forum.
Work through tough problems, get meaningful feedback, find collaborative opportunities, and more.
our members Have been featured in:
CK VIP Members are known for their differentiated ideas and Deep expertise
Jay Acunzo
A master storyteller and performer, Jay has a long career crafting incredible B2B and B2E content: books, speeches, docuseries, and podcasts. The former Google and HubSpot marketer has spent nearly 2 decades teaching others to stand out, showing them a better way than grimy online tactics.
Melanie Deziel
One of the leading voices in content marketing, with past stops at the New York Times, HuffPost, and TIME Inc, Mel has authored multiple books on creativity and given speeches across the world. Her specialty is teaching the frameworks and systems underpinning one’s creativity.
Michelle Warner
Michelle is the secret weapon of many top-tier entrepreneurs selling high-ticket services. She is a business strategist and designer with decades developing both her own multi-million-dollar ventures and designing solo ventures for herself and her clients. She’s a writer, podcaster, and advisor whose 1:1 work and bootcamps have transformed countless small business owners and experts.
Brendan Hufford
A top voice in SaaS marketing with a huge and passionate audience, Brendan offers advice and consulting to founders and execs growing from $10M to $100M ARR. He’s known for his industry analysis and commentary on the growth strategies behind some of the world’s top brands.
“Too much repurposed content lacked a purpose to begin with.”
Margo Aaron
Margo is an unabashed and refreshing truth-teller, writer, and mentor in arenas like creativity, copywriting, and the psychology of societal norms. She built The Copy Workshop with Seth Godin, hosted a hit YouTube series, and has run a marketing consultancy, virtual coworking space, and social network for building dream projects.
Justin Blackman
Justin is a brand voice expert who cares way too much about words. (He's not judging your grammar, just analyzing it.) He works with top industry experts and personal brands, diving into what makes their writing unique so copywriters can scale their style without sacrificing authenticity.
"It's not about being able to write. It's about having something to say."
Sarah Stockdale
Sarah is one of the leading voices among marketers, whose distinct perspective on the internet’s return to communities and closed networks has helped her serve her digital audience, in-person event attendees, and hundreds of students for her course-and-community platform, Growclass.
“The lonely genius is a myth. Success happens with and through other people.”
Susan Boles
After 20+ years in the productivity-and-achievement style business world, Susan founded Beyond Margins to teach entrepreneurs how to make calm their new KPI. As a fractional COO/CFO, podcaster, and teacher, she works with execs and owners to take back their businesses from burnout and design + run things their way.
Mastermind at a glance:
The heartbeat of your experience in CK VIP is a recurring monthly call with your core mastermind group. We carefully vet and accept only the right members, looking at their traction (audience and revenue), their content’s quality (publishing strong ideas, consistently), and their values and ethics (we have a strict No Butthead Policy 🚫🍑😐).
By doing so, we ensure a density of the best peer-level people imaginable.
📅 Monthly small group calls, facilitated by Jay and/or Mel
Your consistent core group of 6-8 VIPs, with call times decided together to ensure they work for everyone.
👋 Community forum for all our VIPs
Includes a private channel just for your core mastermind group.
⚡ Direct access to Jay and Mel
Our founders are both group facilitators + active community members of CK VIP.
🔐 VIP-only benefits
Additional benefits included with membership will be rolling out soon, guided by your input: in-person summits, a preferred vendor list, collaboration and cross-promotion opportunities, and more — your voice matters in shaping our group’s future.
💛 All VIPs also gain access to everything our Standard members enjoy in the Creator Kitchen:
Monthly masterclasses (back catalog + new)
Monthly guest speakers with audience Q&A (back catalog + new)
2x monthly office hours hosted by Mel (these are “drop in, drop out” opportunities)
2x themed roundtables hosted by Jay (these are “craft + catharsis” calls to go deep on key ideas)
Private Dining, our members-only podcast (access member content on-the-go)
The Pantry — our library of resources (session recordings, templates, prompts, suggested readings, etc.)
Frequently Asked Questions:
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Yes we did! This has been completely reimagined to better fit the needs of our members. Across our first year running VIP, we learned that VIP-level people ask fundamentally different questions to peers and mentors than our Standard members.
Standard members ask, "What should I create?" VIPs say instead, "I'm creating this thing. How can it be better?" They aren't seeking confidence and "correct" answers. What they seek is deeper, more personalized and nuanced.
Standard members ask, "What's the right way to create this?" VIPs say instead, "How did you make that?" They don't need a blueprint so much as examples and stories. They'll confidently take what they need upon hearing from others, without the 5 key takeaways listed for them.
As a result, we now proudly offer two tiers of membership based on these distinct needs with our Standard and VIP tiers. -
If any months of your current membership overlap with your CK VIP membership (set to begin Sept 1, 2024), we'll refund you those months. You will never pay twice.
Basically, we gotchu.
Let's say you were a VIP member under our old plan. Call that VIP 1.0. And that plan is set to renew December 1, 2024, but you decide to enroll in our new CK VIP which begins in Sept.
In this scenario, you'll receive a refund for your VIP 1.0 months of Sept, Oct, and Nov 2024.
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VIP membership costs $10,000 per year, and we only offer an annual plan at this time. However, as we are all cashflow-focused business owners, we are open to discussing a payment plan within reason with you. (We're not enrolling so many members to this that we can't talk to you 1:1 about this or really anything you're wondering.)
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The success of this membership is based on sustained context with each other over time. As a result, we want to avoid people coming and going as best we can.
However, if you realize during the first 3 months of your membership that you'd like to cancel and not participate for the rest of your year of membership, we are happy to refund you 50% of your membership fee. -
You'll get out what you put in, but we have designed this expressly for very busy pros. That means across a given month, a handful of hours is plenty.
This would include your mastermind pod's recurring call, the occasional post or comment in our VIP community forum, and picking and choosing other initiatives that might benefit you throughout a given month (e.g. watching a masterclass; attending a guest interview; attending a VIP roundtable; listening to our private podcast, etc.)
But the heartbeat is the recurring call with your dedicated group and any async connecting you do with your cohort.