I recently read this excellent article about becoming a "full-time creator". In fact, it was so good I read it a second time stopping to think about the impacts of the content of the article.

I'm not sure I loved all the outcomes of the article though. Specifically, the idea that you should "sell your sawdust" doesn't sit as well with me as it maybe should. My biggest area of sawdust is 12+ years as a WordPress Developer. I could easily sit down and record the following courses with very little prep.

  • How to Set Up a WooCommerce Store

  • How to Set Up a Membership Site with WooCommerce

  • How to Set Up a Membership Site with Restrict Content Pro

  • How to Set Up a Membership Site with Paid Memberships Pro

Yes, I'd need to outline them and check out a few other courses to make sure that I'm covering everything someone would need, but I don't want to be focused on my WordPress experience as a creator. It's simply not as interesting to me as the "other" stuff I'm doing currently.

I'd rather do a course on reading well, but it will take a bunch of work that I'm slowly doing to gather research and add to the ideas.

I'd rather teach a course on being productive with an iPad. After 5 years of trying to do most of my work with an iPad I have some thoughts.

I'd rather turn my Analogue Productivity book into a video course.

Clearly, I have some other "sawdust" around, and I think that the courses I could produce from that more recent sawdust is possibly of more interest to my current audience.

Those 4 courses revolving around all my years as a developer could mean that I suddenly have enough extra income I don't need to worry about writing more code and could focus on making more courses for things that I'm currently interested in. Of course, they could also flop and I'd have spent time working on them without seeing a return. Plus I wouldn't enjoy doing them as much as an iPad course, which could also flop but at least I'd learn more and have more content for YouTube.

What Would It Take

Whatever the outcome of these thoughts, I do need to start thinking about YouTube and my creative output as a business. That means I need to ask one of my favourite questions:

What would it take to run a profitable one person business focused on creation.

The "what would it take" question is one of my favourite questions to ask when thinking about business ideas. It would take possibly a week or two off YouTube as I used my Monday time to flesh out scripts/notes for a course and then started filming it. Then I could put the "sawdust" from that work on YouTube again.

So my question to you (which you can email to me [email protected] or answer in the comments for the web version of this), what types of courses are you expecting as members?