Welcome to the Creator Kitchen!

Here’s everything you need to do right now to access your membership + get started.

First, please watch a quick video from our founders, Jay Acunzo and Melanie Deziel:

⏬

Please complete your membership setup

1: Find a mirror, Look into your eyes, and Speak the words “I am awesome.”

You speak the truth. You ARE awesome. That’s well said.

2: confirm your subscription via email if you haven’t yet.

If you’re anything like us and also Aerosmith, you don’t wanna miss a thing. (The answer is yes, our jokes come standard with your membership. It’s a great deal.)

♥️ Our weekly roundups + event invites are the heartbeat of your membership. Please do not skip this step.

3: Access all elements of the Kitchen

We also suggest downloading Zoom to your desktop and/or mobile device, as we use it for all our live calls.

*It’s important to note that Slack and other community forums can often be distracting, like a place to hide and feel productive but never actually produce the work. For that reason, we offer a chat forum as a means of supporting your learning and work, not replacing it. Although we enjoy our Slack, it’s not the main focus of the Kitchen. We’re an education-and-coaching platform, and we all benefit from a degree of learning- and creating-in-community!

4: Schedule your Bonus Call with Jay!

We’d love to offer this free, additional call to you as a new member. It’s a chance to hear more about your work, why you’re here, where you’re feeling challenged, and any initial questions you may have. Plus, we’re then able to better support you and suggest the best resources within the Kitchen to get you started.

🛑 STOP! (Kitchen Time)

Please do NOT skip any of the above steps, as your entire membership and possibly the fate of the universe depend on it. (And if you understood the pop culture reference in the headline above, we just became best friends…)

Ready to start cooking?

🍅 Explore our back catalog, the Pantry

Access masterclasses, guest interviews, templates, prompts, and more, all available on-demand and grouped by creative skill — what we call Menus.

💌 Watch for 2 types of emails coming your way:

1. A few more onboarding emails to help you get the most of the Kitchen as a new member.

2. Our regular email, This Week in the Kitchen, arriving every Sunday morning.

Welcome, Chef!

Still here? Love the enthusiasm.

Let’s throw open a window to get some fresh air into a stale internet

The “Who” Behind the Content

A little ditty about pushing ourselves creatively

The Creator Kitchen began after years of feeling both frustrated and hopeful about content creation and content marketing. Jay has worked in editorial and marketing roles for ESPN, Google, HubSpot, a small startup, and a VC firm — Melanie for the New York Times, HuffPost, TIME Inc, and her own small startup. Both of us have also worked for years as creators, writing books, giving speeches, serving clients, producing premium storytelling series, and generally trying to find ways to use creativity as a form of leadership — and to execute our own creative works in ways unique to each of us.

All the while, we recognized how much of the status quo felt frustrating — but we never lost sight of what we thought content creation and marketing could be. We’re living through the onslaught of sameness, of copycat thinking and a new “savior” technology or tactic emerging every day — if you believe the hype on social feeds. This isn’t new. This is how it’s always been.

And we’re ready for something better.

When we started, like anyone, we experienced the now-famous idea of “the gap,” originally described by Ira Glass of This American Life here:

But then, as we experienced some success, gained some audience, and shipped lots and lots of work, we both had the same realization, separately in our respective careers:

“Oh, crap: another gap!”

(And another. And another. And another.)

We realized, after creating “stuff” stops being the issue, creating remarkable stuff becomes the focus. And our desire to do that left us feeling isolated on the internet, frustrated with the status quo (and often, our own output and resource constraints), and yet still inspired and hopeful for what might be.

We felt the same yearning feeling as when we started. If anything it got a little worse. Maybe you felt something similar? Your ambitions grew. The world changed (hello, A.I.). The things you imagine creating still feel far ahead of what you can actually create.

Oh, crap: another gap.

When you aspire to create remarkable things, both confidently and consistently:

It’s not about volume. It’s about power.

It’s not about followers. It’s about trust.

It’s not about reach. It’s about resonance.

The world doesn’t need more commodity content or generalized expertise.

It’s time for something more creative, valuable, even personal.

Something only you can create.

Mastering your craft is a lifelong pursuit, but it should feel more enjoyable, more concrete, and more accessible. Creating with power doesn’t mean “going big.” It means mastering the “three Ps” that make up your craft:

1. Your posture (how you see the world + your work)

2. Your process (the workflow, techniques, and tools you use to guide your work)

3. Your practice (your consistent repetition, reflection, and reinvention)

Mastering all three can be transformational, and we intend to push you across all three dimensions, consistently.

More than ever before…

making what matters means recognizing how much you matter to the work

We’re honored to play a small role in helping you continue to create with more power and your next gap (and the next one, and the next one, and the next one…)

Welcome to the creator kitchen!

💛

Jay & Melanie