How's your relationship to social media? Do you wish you could pull back, but think it's a "necessary evil"?
I hear that a lot, and I totally understand where that sentiment is coming from. If I'm honest, that's how I feel a lot of the time!
Well, what if it really wasn't that necessary?
This week on the podcast, I'm speaking with Jessica Lackey. Jessica's a long-time member of The Lab, and I'm continuously impressed and inspired by how she runs her business—she runs the business she WANTS to run, with no compromises.
She earns more than $300,000 per year without any singing and dancing. Her business is predominantly email-driven, with approximately ten percent of her subscribers becoming customers.
Huge!
You may be wondering, "How does she grow that list?"
We talk about that in our episode, linked below.
Inside this edition:
Helping AI Find And Recommend Your Brand
On The Podcast: Jessica Lackey's Relationship-First Approach
Ask Creator Science (And Get On Our Podcast)!
SPONSORED
Make AI recommend your brand
When somebody asks ChatGPT, "Who are the best creators in your niche?" — does it say your name, or does it mention your competitors?
Because a response will only share a few names. And with LLMs, if you’re not cited, you might as well be invisible. And that’s at the exact moment someone is deciding who to follow, or what to buy.
The first step is finding out just how visible or invisible you are to LLMs like ChatGPT. And Ahrefs built a new tool called Brand Radar to show you where you actually stand. It tracks your mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews, and Copilot, and gives you an AI "share of voice" against your competitors — how often you get named when your topic comes up, and whether you're being mentioned or actually cited as a source. It's built on 481 million real prompts, making it the largest AI visibility database out there.
This isn't about gaming AI. It's about finding out whether the work you're already doing — the content, the authority, the backlinks — is translating into AI visibility.
Jessica tried the social media game. She hired a social media team for two years, did Ship 30 for 30 on Twitter, and tested Instagram. She never cracked 1,700 followers. So she built her business a different way: 50 guest podcast appearances, 50 guest teaching spots in other communities, 20 to 30 programs joined and participated in over four years. Every visibility opportunity landed 10 to 20 new people on her email list. It was slow, linear, and intentional. Today she has 2,000 people on her email list and 200 paying members in her membership. That's a 10% conversion rate on her list, against the creator industry standard of 1 to 3%.
Her business has earned over $300,000 for three consecutive years. Almost nothing she sells is one-and-done. The whole thing is built on renewals and retention, not growth and virality.
In this episode, we talk about:
How she built from 200 to 2,000 email subscribers through relationships and guest appearances, not social media
Her 3-offer stack (1:1 consulting, 6-month cohort, and membership) and how each piece supports the others
Why she does a 30-minute welcome call with every new member at $50 per month — and how she thinks about the economics
The KPIs she tracks with clients instead of followers and views: outreach count, visibility opportunities, and what she calls seeds, sprouts, and fruits
The trade-offs she's made by choosing this model and why she's made peace with them
By the end of this episode, you will have a clear picture of how a small, deliberate audience can support a thriving six-figure business — and what it actually costs to build one that way.
When I went on paternity leave two years ago, I created a series called Ask Creator Science. I asked for your questions and answered them via our newsletter and podcast. Those Q&A episodes are some of our most popular on the feed!
It was so great, but then I stopped doing it. Why? That's a great question—sometimes I just move on from things too quickly!
So I want to bring it back. And now that I'm a month away from my second paternity leave, it feels like there's no better time than the present.
Send me your questions! It can be a specific situation you're in, a decision you're stuck on, or something about our business here at Creator Science. Nothing is off limits, and if you think it's a question I wouldn't want to answer, that's an even better reason to ask.
You can submit your questions anonymously or for attribution.
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Apple pushed him out. His partners left. His investors lost faith. Then everything changed. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ FS | BRAIN FOOD Sept 6th, 2026 - #697 - read online - Free Version Welcome to Brain Food, your weekly signal in a world full of noise. Tiny Thoughts * Whatever pattern is repeating in your life has one common variable: you. ** One of the worst qualities a person can have is the need to show how smart they are by catching others' mistakes. In some areas, this may be useful, but in general life, it's a disaster. *** We tend to think the people who get ahead have more talent, better connections, greater opportunities, or better ...
