Every week, I get DMs like:

How did you do it?

I want to be a creator.
I have a full-time job, but I wanna do the whole content thing.
I have so many ideas…

Where do I actually start?

And of course, “How do I travel the world and get paid to do it?”

The honest answer is: most creator advice you will read stops at the wrong finish line. It teaches you the really obvious ways that we all know how to make creator money: pick a niche, stay consistent, create brand content to get their attention, grow an email list! And maybe even launch a ***dun dun dun***course.

The truth is, most people don’t want to get comfortable with flopping in public until their thing works. Again, follow the above advice, and that’s most of the work required to start the build, however…

The advice I don’t see enough of is what to do with the money once it starts arriving.

And there’s actually an even harder question which is:

what is your actual leverage in this economy, and are you building anything you own?

If I had to start all over again today with zero followers, I would build the career, the leverage, and the wealth in parallel.

Not one, then the next, then the next. All three, from day one.

This article is that alternate-universe blueprint. The version I would hand myself when I was a freshly graduated 21-year-old self on a plane to China. And the version I am mapping out to give to you as someone who has scaled as a creator over the past 2.5 years full time and spent almost a decade in this industry from inside brands, broadcasters and as an entrepreneur.

Well-paid is a lifestyle, a nice one. Wealth is an engine for a lifetime of profit, diversification, and fun.

Before any tactics, there’s a mindset shift we gotta do. When you don’t come from a wealthy family, like me, your psychology and approach towards money needs to be rewired.

A well-paid creator earns money. A wealthy creator earns money, identifies their leverage, and turns income into assets that produce income for them whether they post today or not.

Most creators think the goal is a bigger brand deal. It is only part of the equation. The goal is a bigger, diversified asset base. Brand deal flow stops when you stop working. An asset base keeps producing whether the algorithm loves you this month or not.

Every well-paid creator I know at my level is one bad quarter away from panic, because their income is entirely dependent on them continuing to perform. Every wealthy creator I know has an asset base that keeps producing whether or not they open the app that day.

The mental model to hold from day one has four steps.

1. Content is the visible lever.

2. Leverage is what makes the income defensible.

3. Income is the raw material.

4. The asset base is the moat: where the “fuck you money” mindset gets interesting.

Most creators optimise for step 1.

Wealthy ones optimise for step 4 from day one.

What actually is leverage? And why just having followers doesn’t count.

Leverage is the thing you have that the market cannot easily buy, replicate, or take from you.

Followers are not leverage. The platform can take them from you tomorrow. Any brand can rent similar followers from a thousand other creators. Follower count is the currency you exchange for opportunity. It is not the asset that outlasts the exchange.

Leverage looks like this.

An owned relationship that the platform cannot mediate. A distinctive point of view that the market cannot easily copy (spoiler alert: cute b-roll, trending audio and a relatable caption ain’t gonna cut it). An access advantage your competitors cannot buy. A skill the market values but few possess. A network you can mobilise on demand. An asset that produces value whether you show up today or not. And don’t forget: a good network i.e., friends in high places. That last one can’t be built overnight, but by God, can it pay back tenfold.

Every creator has some of these. The wealthy ones build their whole career around identifying the one or two they can compound the hardest, and letting everything else remain marketing.

The seven leverage plays. Pick one or two.

Welcome to the leverage menu: choose whichever 1 or 2 you won’t get tired of metaphorically eating.

1. The owned audience play. Build a direct relationship that the platform cannot take. Substack, Beehiiv, private podcast, membership community. Every subscriber is a name and an email address you can move with you if any platform disappears tomorrow. Best for creators whose superpower is depth, writing, or ongoing intimate connection with a specific audience.

Disclaimer: I do think “having an email list as the preodminant way to own an audience is very shallow advice and I am sick of this being the only way people talk about. I haven’t opened an email newsletter for at least a year? I dont care for emails. If your account got deleted then you email me to say follow you back… will I do it or (likely) just forget? Maybe this is just my opinion but I think I’m right on this one.

2. The equity play. Take pieces of the brands you are already helping build. Instead of getting paid in cash for the campaign, get paid in ownership. When the brand grows, exits, or scales, you scale with it. Best for creators with cultural fluency in specific categories, real trust with a specific audience, and the appetite to think like an investor.

3. The product play. Own the thing you are selling. Emma Chamberlain has Chamberlain Coffee. Grace Beverly has Tala and Shreddy. Isobel Lorna has Agende. Your leverage is that people are already buying from you emotionally. You just capture the margin. Best for creators with aesthetic-driven, expertise-driven, or category-defining audiences.

4. The proprietary access play. Be the first to know. Own the rooms, the deals, the information. Substacks like or live entirely on this. Journalists, investors, connectors, insiders. Your leverage is that you know what your industry knows six months before anyone else does. Best for creators whose superpower is being genuinely inside a specific world.

5. The methodology play. Own a framework, a system, a way of doing things. Ali Abdaal, Codie Sanchez, James Clear. The framework becomes the leverage. Books, courses, licensing, keynotes. Best for teachers, systemisers, and creators whose superpower is making complicated things simple.

6. The relationship play. The connector economy. Salons, dinners, communities, curation. Your leverage is who else shows up when you invite them. The value you create is bringing people together who would not have met otherwise. Best for hosts, curators, and creators whose superpower is being the person everyone trusts to introduce them to the right people.

7. The company play. Build a real operating business alongside the personal brand. Agency, studio, media company, fund. The personal brand becomes the marketing arm of the actual business. Best for creators who want to build something that outlasts the personal brand and can be sold, scaled, or handed off. Think Stan store or cultish hehe.

Pick one or two. Focus is the game aka - stay in your lane.

How to work out which is yours:

Ask yourself four questions.

• What comes easily to me that other creators find hard?

• What do people in my industry ask me for that they cannot get from anyone else?

• What would I still be doing in five years if the algorithm stopped rewarding me?

• Which of the seven plays maps most naturally onto that answer?

My primary leverage plays are equity and relationships. I am a master networker. I get in front of the right people, I genuinely love people, and I am an instinctive negotiator. My secondary is the company play (Cultish, the agency I co-founded).

The two-track structure.

Every creator career worth building has two tracks running in parallel from day one.

Track One: The Career Track. Post, grow, monetise. The visible track. The one everyone can see and everyone measures you on.

Track Two: The Wealth Track. Save, invest, deploy, compound. The invisible track. The one that determines whether you end up rich or just well-known (on the internet).

Most creators only run Track One. That is why they hit ceilings. Wealthy creators run both in parallel.

A general monthly rule I like to follow:

The monthly income gets split three ways: 50% to lifestyle, 20% to reinvestment in the business, 30% to the wealth track.

The wealth track starts before the money is meaningful. Even at $500 a month in creator income, 30% goes into the wealth track. Because it is the habit that compounds. Not the amount.

What’s below the paywall

The rest of this letter is for paid subscribers. Below the fold:

• The month-by-month plan for months 1 through 18 across both tracks

• How the specific leverage play you chose maps onto each month

• The three specific income milestones and how to hit them

• The three specific wealth milestones and the investment vehicles I would use at each stage

• The moment to stop trading time for money and start building assets that outlast the algorithm

• Two personal wealth mistakes I made that cost me real money. That I want you to avoid.

Below is for paid subscribers.

[ PAID — The Blueprint ]

Part 1: The Foundation Month (Month 1)

Career Track this month:

Write the sentence “I am the creator who helps you ___” and stress-test it against three questions.

Would a brand know exactly which product to send you within thirty seconds of visiting your profile? Could a stranger describe your niche in one sentence after watching three of your Reels? Is there a specific problem your niche solves that would make someone forward your account to a friend?

If all three are yes, you have a niche. If any one is no, you have a graveyard. Rewrite until all three are yes.

Then buy your domain. Set up a professional email. Choose your one primary platform. Not two. Not three. One. Treat yourself like a business from day one.

Leverage Track this month:

Commit to the one or two leverage plays you picked. Set up the first real infrastructure for whichever ones you chose.

If owned audience: launch the newsletter this week, before you have followers. The subscriber list starts at zero regardless of when you begin.

If equity, write down your investment thesis in a note on your phone. What categories interest you? Why are you the person to spot them? This becomes the foundation of everything you say publicly about investing from here.

If product: start a notes file for every product idea you have. Do not build yet. The muscle you are training is noticing what your audience needs that does not exist.

If access: start attending events in the industry you want to dominate. Small ones. Local ones. Any event where you can be in a room with people already doing what you want to do.

If methodology: start writing down your framework. Rough, ugly, incomplete. The point is capture, not polish.

If relationship: host your first dinner this month. Six women you want to know better. That is enough to start.

If company: incorporate the entity. Register the domain. Even if the company does nothing for six months, the infrastructure exists.

Wealth Track this month:

Open a separate business bank account. Revolut Business, Wise, or your local equivalent. Every incoming creator payment lands here first.

Open a savings account specifically for the 20-30% wealth-track allocation. Nothing fancier yet.

Set up an automatic transfer rule for the day the money lands or at the end of the month.

And for studying: read a book about money psychology, make friends or date a rich person, ask them questions, or simply add one money-related podcast to your daily listening.

Part 2: The Testing Phase (Months 2-3)

Career Track:

Post daily. Post one hundred pieces of content in these eight weeks. Track what works.

Do not adjust your strategy. Do not change your niche. Do not overthink. The pattern of what works is invisible before one hundred posts. Just post.

Kill any format that has not produced results by post fifty. Double down on the two that have.

Leverage Track:

Every piece of visible content routes to your chosen leverage infrastructure.

If owned audience: every post, every video, every Story drives people to sign up for the newsletter. Every single one. The visible content is the funnel. The newsletter is the destination.

If equity, your thesis becomes public. Posts, videos, and content that make clear what you understand about specific categories. Founders read this and remember you.

If product: your content is a proof-of-concept for the product you have not built yet. If people are asking you for the thing every week, you have validation.

Same principle across all seven plays: the visible content feeds the leverage play. It is not there for its own sake.

Wealth Track:

The first $500 to $2,000 of creator income arrives. Twenty percent of every payment goes into the high-yield savings account.

Do not invest it yet. The muscle you are training is not spending it. That is the hardest muscle than any investment strategy.

Set up a tax reserve account. 20-30% of gross goes here, separate from the wealth track. You will thank yourself when tax season comes around.

Part 3: The First Money (Months 4-6)

Career Track:

The milestone: your first $1,000 from creator work.

Route one: brand deals. How to pitch when you have three to ten thousand followers. Do not use a template. Send five personalised pitch emails a week to brands you actually use. Reference specific campaigns of theirs. Suggest specific content. Include a rate. Do not apologise for the rate.

Route two: a small product or offer. A digital download, a template, a mini-course, a consulting hour. Priced at $50 to $200. Not $9. Nine-dollar products train your audience to see you as free.

Route three: paid Substack subscriptions. Turn them on the moment you have 500 subscribers, not before.

Leverage Track:

Your leverage play should be showing early proof by the end of month six.

If owned audience: newsletter with 500 to 2,000 engaged subscribers.

If equity: first pitch conversation with a founder in one of your categories. Does not need to close. Just needs to happen. The muscle of asking for equity has to be built before you actually get offered it.

If product: first prototype, first sample, first proof-of-concept.

If access: you have been in at least five rooms that nobody else in your peer group was in.

If methodology: your framework has a name and a first draft written down.

If relationship: your dinner series or community has repeat attendees who describe it to their friends.

If company: the business has its first real client conversation, even if it does not close.

Wealth Track:

Move the wealth-track savings into your first passive investment. A broad-market ETF, index fund, or the local equivalent. Not stock-picking. Not crypto. The boring, proven, compound-for-decades option.

The specific target: build a base of $10,000 in a broad-market index by the end of month 12.

This is not the exciting part. This is the part that makes the exciting parts possible.

Part 4: The First Real Income (Months 6-9)

Career Track:

The milestone: $3,000 to $5,000 a month consistently.

Diversify into two revenue streams. Never rely on one.

Start being selective about brand deals. Say no to more than you say yes to. Every no is a signal to the market about your rate.

First hire. Editor, VA, or accountant. Which one first depends on your bottleneck. If content production is your bottleneck, hire an editor. If admin is drowning you, hire a VA. If your money is a mess, hire the accountant first.

Leverage Track:

Your leverage play is now becoming a real asset.

If owned audience: 3,000 to 5,000 engaged subscribers.

If equity: first equity-instead-of-cash conversation with a brand actively pursued. This is the pivotal month for the equity play. Refuse at least one flat-fee brand deal specifically to signal you are equity-available. The market notices.

If product: first small product launched. Real feedback loop from real customers.

If access: you are being invited, not asking to be included.

If methodology: your framework is being taught, sold, or cited publicly.

If relationship: your community has a distinct culture that people describe to others.

If company: real revenue coming through the business, not just the personal brand.

Wealth Track:

Open a retirement account. Roth IRA in the US, ISA or SIPP in the UK, local equivalent elsewhere. This is money that compounds tax-advantaged for the next thirty years. Start now, even with tiny amounts.

Start reading about angel investing and private deals. Not participating yet. Just learning. Follow five syndicates and three creator-friendly funds to see how deals actually get pitched. Cherub, Female Founders Fund, Receipts VC, AngelList, Republic. Read their newsletters. Watch how they evaluate deals.

Part 5: The Business Structure + First Investable Capital (Months 9-12)

Career Track:

Set up your company. LLC in the US, Limited Company in the UK, local equivalent elsewhere. Do this with an accountant, not alone. The £500 you spend on setting it up correctly saves you thousands in the first year.

Build the pipeline. Brand deals plus digital product plus Substack plus speaking. Four legs, not one. Real business structure. Real invoicing. Real contracts.

Start saying no to anything under your rate card. Introduce yourself to the network: three coffees a week, three follow-ups, one dinner a month. The room is the multiplier.

Leverage Track:

Your leverage play is now the core asset of your career, not a side project.

If owned audience: 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers. First paid tier turned on.

If equity: first equity deal ideally closed or in serious negotiation.

If product: first product doing real revenue, not just aesthetic revenue.

If access: you are the person others are trying to get into rooms with, not the other way around.

If methodology: first course, book, or licensing deal.

If relationship: your community is a business asset, not a hobby.

If company: the business has its own P&L, separate from personal brand income.

Wealth Track:

By end of month 12 you should have: $10,000 to $20,000 in passive investments, $5,000 to $10,000 in tax reserve, $5,000 emergency fund.

Then: join one syndicate as an LP with a $1,000 to $2,500 commitment. You are now technically an angel investor. Not writing $25,000 checks. Writing $1,000 checks into deals someone else is diligencing.

The purpose of this first year of investing is to learn what a deal looks like from inside. Not to make money. Frame it as tuition.

Part 6: The Wealth-Building Year (Months 12-18)

Career Track:

The milestone: breaking $10,000 a month consistently. Real optionality. You can turn down brand deals under your rate card without panic.

Start being asked, not asking. This is the fundamental shift that changes everything.

Leverage Track:

Your leverage play is producing income independent of your daily content output.

If owned audience: 15,000 to 25,000 subscribers. Meaningful paid revenue that lands whether you post today or not.

If equity: your name on at least one real cap table. Additional deals in play. You are now a creator-investor, not a creator who might one day invest.

If product: the product is a real business, not just a personal brand extension.

If access: your rolodex is a monetisable asset. Consultancy, introductions, retainers all become possible.

If methodology: the framework is generating income that lands whether you work on it today or not. Books, evergreen courses, licensing.

If relationship: your network is opening equity, deal, and career opportunities you would not have found alone.

If company: the business is starting to be worth more than the personal brand. This is the actual finish line for the company play.

Wealth Track:

At $10,000 a month, the wealth track allocation is $2,000 a month. Meaningful money.

Layer in your first direct angel check. $2,500 to $5,000 into a deal you personally believe in. Via a syndicate or SPV, not directly. You are still learning how to diligence.

Layer in your first equity-instead-of-cash brand deal, if you have not already. This is the point where the career track and the leverage track converge into the same move.

By end of month 18 the wealth track should be: $30,000 to $50,000 in passive investments, $10,000 to $20,000 in private deals, a real accountant, and a real financial structure.

You are officially not just well-paid anymore. You are building wealth.

Part 7: Two personal wealth mistakes I made. That I want you to avoid.

Mistake 1: I thought having a rich partner meant I was rich.

For too long, I had a partner who worked in finance and made real money. I told myself the story that I did not need to think about investing yet, because the future would sort itself out. He was good with money. I would be fine.

I was so wrong, I still cringe when I think about it.

What is coming in and going out of your own bank account is the only number that matters. Your partner’s financial situation is not your financial situation. Your partner’s investments are not your investments. Your partner’s future is not your future, no matter how sure you are of the relationship.

I did not start investing until I was 27. I am now 29. Two years in, the difference is genuinely insane. Because my finances are intact and mine, not borrowed against someone else’s.

If you take one thing from this whole piece, take this: start the wealth track for yourself, from your own income, regardless of who you are with or what they earn. It is not romantic to opt out of your own financial security. It is not clever. It is not modern. It is a specific mistake I made that cost me at least three years of compound growth I will never get back.

The wealth track is yours. Nobody else’s. Even if you never break up. Even if you get married. Even if you have children together. Yours.

Mistake 2: I got brand deals by luck. I should have been engineering for them.

For the first two years of my career, my brand deals came from luck. A brand happened to see a post. A friend of a friend made an introduction. Someone in the DMs offered me something.

I told myself this was manifesting. Lucky girl syndrome. The universe providing.

The universe was not providing. I was just too disorganised to see that I could be building a pipeline instead of waiting for one.

The real move is this: you can absolutely believe in lucky girl syndrome. You can absolutely believe that opportunities will find you. But you should also have a strategic backbone underneath the manifestation. Because luck compounds much faster when it lands on someone who has done the work to be ready for it.

The engineered version of a brand-deal pipeline looks like this. You know exactly which twenty brands you want to work with in the next twelve months. You have a running spreadsheet of every person you have met who works at those brands. You send five pitch emails a week to companies you actually use. You track which land. You follow up on the ones that go quiet. You have a real rate card. You have contracts ready. You are not scrambling every time a brand replies.

Lucky girl syndrome is a great personal mindset. It is a terrible business strategy on its own. Manifest and engineer. Never one without the other.

This part is really important: LOOK IN THE METAPHORICAL MIRROR

Not talent. Not luck. Not follower count.

The willingness to look at your own numbers honestly every single day and adjust.

The reason most people fail this playbook is not that the playbook is wrong. It is that they cannot do the daily honest conversation with themselves. They post what feels good instead of what works. They chase vanity metrics instead of business ones. They stop at month three because nothing is happening. They quit at month seven because they have not hit the milestone they arbitrarily set.

You do not own your audience because you have followers. You own your audience because you have identified your leverage and built ownership around it. You do not own your career because you have income. You own your career because you have assets that produce income whether you show up today or not.

Everything else is rented.

Start today. Not when you are famous. Not when you have hit six figures. Today. Even if the first move is naming your leverage play out loud and telling one person. The habit is the entire game.

Ninety days of nothing. Six months of small wins. Twelve months of real momentum. Eighteen months of a real career, real leverage, and real wealth compounding in the background.

The blueprint works if you work the blueprint. That is the whole promise. And the whole condition.

Working with me

If you are a founder building in one of the categories I am watching, my DMs are open.

If you are an investor or fund looking for a creator co-investor on consumer deals in these categories, you know where to find me.

The party is just starting yasssss

Hannah xxx

“shit, I wanna be really rich”.

Read more

Oh, and a framework to help you not be so sucked-in.

I want you to know something about the person writing this to you (it’s me hehe).

My screen time last week was twelve and a half hours a day.

DA FCK IS THIS?!?!

Twelve and a half hours, every single day, from a phone that has become an extension of my hand. It is the first thing I touch in the morning and the last thing I put down at night.

I run a creative studio. I have a million followers. I am, by any external measure, one of the people who has made it in this industry.

And I cannot tell you what I watched three scrolls ago.

This is a piece about four questions I have been unable to stop thinking about.

Why is the creator economy bigger than ever, but so many creators are quietly broke?

Why can I spend twelve and a half hours on my phone every day and remember almost none of it?

Why are brands paying more to reach the same audiences they used to reach for free?

And why has an entire industry accepted, quietly, that creators are disposable labour on land they will never own?

Let me take you through it.

The system in one paragraph

Platforms make their money by holding your attention long enough to show you ads. To hold your attention, they use algorithms that get sharper and faster every year at predicting what will keep you scrolling. Creators are the raw material: they make the content that the algorithm serves to hold your attention. Brands pay the platforms to reach you through both the ads and the creators. Everyone in this system except the platforms is being squeezed.

You are squeezed for your attention.

Creators are squeezed for their unpaid labour.

Brands are squeezed for their marketing budgets.

The platforms sit in the middle, taking a cut of the attention, a cut of the ad dollars, and a cut of the creator’s leverage.

That’s the entire creator economy in a quick, sassy paragraph.

The rest of this piece is what that looks like when it happens to you.

The American Dream, in HD

The creator economy is not shrinking. It is not dying. Despite how many articles you read stating

“THE INFLUENCER ERA IS OVER!”

In fact, it is quite the opposite.

The creator economy is bigger than it has ever been in human history.

Global valuations run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Brand budgets are up year on year across every platform and every category. Speaking fees, book deals, product launches, agency deals: the ceiling of what a creator can be worth has been raised so high in the last five years that the numbers at the top are, genuinely, historically unprecedented.

The dream is real.

The prize is real.

The work required to get there is also real and that’s the part that your feed doesn’t really show you.

Here is what I mean. Log on tomorrow and scroll for ten minutes. Count the number of creators you see who look effortlessly successful. Count the number of businesses you see that look easy to run. Count the number of quasi-glamorous “look at me building!”

Social media is the highlight reel of ambition. It shows you the outcome and edits out the ninety-day grind that produced it. And the algorithm loves this because the shortest possible route from confusion to dopamine is watching someone else’s win, not watching your own effort. So the feed is a slot machine of visible success and invisible labour, and we are all playing it every day.

There’s a whole generation of women who looked at creators who did make it and reasonably decided I can do that too. And so they should. The dream is real. My whole career is proof that it is real. What is not real is the timeline social media suggests. What is not real is that you can skip the middle. What is not real is the idea that the successful creators are winning because they are lucky, or beautiful, or in the right room at the right time. They are winning because they did the years of unglamorous work that nobody posted about.

This is the American Dream, digitised. The prize is real. The path to it is longer, harder, and lonelier than the platforms want you to see.

Why you cannot remember what you watched

Let’s stay with the twelve and a half hours for a second.

I have spent months trying to work out how a person, a functional adult, running a business, with meaningful relationships and real ambitions, can consume more than half a day of media and retain almost none of it. It has not been a single dramatic moment of recognition. It has been a slow, dawning realisation, playing out over weeks, that something in me has fundamentally changed since I started living inside these platforms.

The version of me from ten years ago read novels. Watched films. Held opinions about them for weeks. Could recite the plots of things I loved in specific, granular detail. The version of me today has spent twelve and a half hours on my phone in the last twenty-four, and could not tell you the plot of the most-watched thing I saw. Not because my memory has failed. Because there was nothing to remember in the first place.

Here is what I think is actually happening.

The algorithm has gotten so good at prediction that our brains have offloaded the work of deciding.

In the early years of social media, you had to actually think about what you were seeing. You had to hold information in your head, decide whether you liked it, decide whether to share it, decide whether to remember it. Now, the algorithm makes those decisions for you. It knows in half a second whether you will like the next video. It knows whether you’ll save it, share it, skip it. And because the machine knows, you have stopped needing to know.

You receive pleasure; the little hit of this is a good video, without the corresponding act of paying attention. Your body reacts. Your brain barely engages. You save the video. You do nothing with it. You do not act on it. You do not remember it. It is a full transaction of feeling with no transaction of thought.

I am telling you all of this from inside the twelve and a half hours. Not from the other side of the problem. From inside it. Because I want you to understand: this is not a piece written by someone who has escaped the algorithm. This is a piece written by someone who is being extracted from by it right now, and who has decided that the least I can do while it happens is name the mechanism out loud.

What to actually do about it — my SOCIAL framework

Before I go any further into the diagnosis, I want to give you the framework. Because the worst version of this essay would be the one that describes the problem beautifully and leaves you with nothing to do about it, and I hate that (capricorn action queen, always).

Here is the operating framework I have built for how to survive and win inside a system that is quietly trying to extract more from you every year. I call it SOCIAL. It is a mnemonic. Use it. Print it. Put it above your desk.

S — Spend where it matters. Not on paid ads. Not on boosting posts. Spend on time with your audience and on production quality. Ads are a rental. Trust is an asset. The brands and creators winning right now are the ones investing in content and community, not the ones with the biggest ad budget. If you are a brand reading this, this is the single most important reframe I can offer you. Stop asking how much you spent on paid. Start asking how much you spent on being interesting.

O — Organise your consumption. You are not going to fix the algorithm. But you can fix what you feed into it. Curate. Categorise. Follow deliberately. Unfollow ruthlessly. Your feed is a diet. Treat it like one.

C — Cut. Block, mute, remove. Be rigorous.

I am going to be specific here because rigorous is doing too much work as an abstract word. After my last serious relationship ended, I muted every account associated with that person. His friends. Their partners. The couples we used to see together. The mutual friends who might inadvertently show me his life. Every single one. It felt slightly insane at the time, in that am I being petty way that women have been trained into. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made about my own headspace. My feed became mine again. No ghost of a former life, no algorithm accidentally serving me content that would have destroyed my afternoon.

The lesson generalises: whatever is currently costing you a specific kind of psychological rent: an ex, a rival, a category of content that makes you feel worse about yourself - cut it. You do not owe the algorithm access to your worst emotions. You do not owe anyone the courtesy of continuing to see content that hurts you. There is no news in my feed either. No accounts that trigger comparison. It is a place I have deliberately curated. You are allowed to make your feed a happy place. Cut.

I — Own your IP. Develop a style, a format, a voice, a signature aesthetic that is unmistakably yours. Something that would still be recognisable if you moved platforms tomorrow. The people who own their IP are the people who survive platform changes. The people who only own an audience on a platform are the people who wake up to a deleted account.

A — Analyse. Watch other people’s content actively, not passively. Ask why did that work, what did they do structurally, what would I do differently. The passive scroll is where creativity dies. The analytical watch is where taste is built.

L — Learn. Optimise your consumption for learning, not for entertainment. This does not mean only watch educational content. It means: after every viewing session, what did you leave with? What did you take? If the answer is nothing, adjust. The people who consume for learning end up building. The people who consume for entertainment end up scrolling.

Now put this in your pipe and smoke it:

SPEND, ORGANISE, CUT, IP, ANALYSE, LEARN.

Now let me tell you what happens to people who don’t run something like this.

The three thefts

The algorithm isn’t just taking your time: It is taking three specific things from three specific groups of people, and if you’re a creator, a brand, or a consumer, you are being extracted from in ways you probably haven’t fully named.

First theft — your attention

I’ve already made this argument. Twelve and a half hours a day. The dawning realisation. The inability to remember what you watched. You are being taxed in the currency of your own attention, and unlike money, you cannot earn it back.

I want to be direct about the seriousness of this. Attention is the substrate of thought. If you cannot pay sustained attention to anything, you cannot think complex thoughts, you cannot build complex arguments, you cannot make complex work. The creators, thinkers, artists, and founders you admire have one thing in common - they are able to hold their attention on a single thing for long enough that something new emerges from the holding. The algorithm has been quietly training you out of that capacity for years, and you have been paying it in engagement for the privilege.

That is the first theft. The one that is happening to you, reader, whether or not you ever make a piece of content in your life.

Second theft — the money

This will change your entire mental model of what a successful creator actually is.

A million followers is not a business.

It is a media asset.

And a media asset without a business built around it is worth almost nothing.

I have seen creators with a million followers who make almost no money. I have seen creators with 3,000 followers who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The difference between the two is not luck. It is not aesthetic. It is not the algorithm. It is whether the creator has structured themselves as a business unit around their audience, or is still assuming the audience itself is the income.

I wrote a whole essay about this a few weeks ago: A Million Followers Can’t Pay Your Salary, and I keep coming back to it because it is the single most misunderstood thing in the creator economy.

Followers are not currency.

Followers are eyeballs.

Business structures around those eyeballs are currency.

Brand deals negotiated properly. Direct product sales. Newsletter subscriptions. Speaking fees. Agencies, courses, consulting, IP. The people making real money in this industry are not the ones with the biggest audiences. They are the ones who have built actual businesses around their audiences, regardless of size.

This is the point at which the American Dream collides most brutally with reality. You have been sold a story that says build the audience, and the money will follow. It will not. The audience is the precondition of income, not the source of it. And the platforms know this; they profit whether you monetise properly or not. They have no incentive to teach you the difference between an audience and a business. They just want you to keep making the content.

I structured myself as a business the moment I understood this. That is why I launched Cultish. That is why I have a rate card, a Notion pipeline, contracts, and strict discipline about invoicing. A FAT investment portfolio and emergency funds, which mean that even if I didn’t work for a year, or make a single penny, I would not stress.
Not because I love spreadsheets.

Because having followers or a rich boyfriend were never going to save me, and I worked that out just in time.

If you take one thing from this second theft, it’s that your audience is not your income. Your business is your income. And if you do not build the second, the first will quietly extract from you for years and leave you wondering why the numbers on your account grew, but the numbers in your bank account did not.

Third theft — the creator as disposable labour

I have creator pals with real audiences, real bodies of work, real income, whose accounts have been deleted in the last twelve months. No warning. No appeals process that actually works. Years of work, gone in a click, because an algorithm flagged something the human moderator would never have flagged. When they try to appeal, they get a template response. When they try to reach a human, they cannot. Their income for that month, sometimes for that year, evaporated in the time it takes to refresh the app.

You do not own your account. You are a tenant on land the platform can seize at any time, for any reason, with no legal recourse and no right of appeal that matters. And the industry has trained creators to accept this as just how it is. You do not accept this in any other job. You accept it here because you have been sold the American dream of build a big enough audience and you’ll be free, without being told that the freedom is contingent on the platform’s continued goodwill.

Creators are the entire supply chain of the media economy the platforms have built. And we are still, in 2026, treated as nice-to-have labour: replaceable, expendable, disposable. That is the third theft. The theft of your basic right to own the thing you built.

The larger point

I am aware I have written a piece that is kinda like, “the algorithms are bad boohoo” in an era when everyone has written that piece.

Let me tell you why I think I have something useful to add.

Most of the “algorithms are bad” articles are either technophobic (delete the apps, log off, touch grass) or defeatist (nothing we can do, the platforms have won). I do not belong to either of these camps.

Because? I love social media. It’s my livelihood and the home of my career. But I sit so closely inside of it that I want to help us all use it in a way that doesn’t rob us.

The algorithms have not won. They are winning right now because we, collectively, have not yet built the language, the framework, or the discipline to push back.

You cannot push back by leaving. You leave, and the extraction continues on everyone who stays. You push back by staying and changing how you operate inside the system.

For consumers, that means curating your feed until it is a place you deliberately want to be, not a place that happens to you.

For creators, that means owning your leverage and ownership in a diversified manner: email, Substack, direct relationships, equity, investments. So that when the platform decides you are inconvenient, you do not lose everything you built.

For brands, that means investing in proper creator relationships and genuine content, not in more paid boosting to reach the followers you already have.

None of this is easy. All of it is more work than the alternative. But the alternative is another decade of having your attention, your money, and your industry economics extracted to an unfair degree.

I am writing this from inside a twelve and a half hour screentime habit. I am writing this as someone actively being extracted from, actively participating in a system I have just described as a heist, and actively benefiting from it in ways that make the whole picture more complicated than a log-off essay would let me admit. All of that can be true at the same time.

Take the good parts of these platforms. Build your career on them, connect with your audience, and discover things. But do it with your eyes open, your framework built, and your exit strategy quietly in place.

The algorithms will not save you. Only the version of you that acts as a strategic business will save you.

That, more than any tool or system, is the operating principle behind everything I write.

LOVE U,

Hannah xxx

The comments swelled in waves, all carrying the same line: "okay, but what am I supposed to be doing instead?"

This is the answer. Or, more accurately, this is the first half of the answer.

I’m splitting it into two pieces because the honest version of “how do I run a creator business as one person” is two completely different conversations. The first is the operating system: how you actually do the work, day to day, from your phone, without a team. That’s this Tuesday. The second is the business backbone: how you price yourself, send the invoice, set up the company, treat yourself like a business, and turn the operating system into actual money. That’s next Tuesday, paid subscribers only.

This Tuesday is free, because the operating system is the foundation, and I want every single one of you to have it. NAE GATEKEEPING HERE, you know the Tough Love drill.

One thing before we start, and I want to be very explicit about it: I am not an expert. This is just what works for me. It is the system I have built by trial, error, and a lot of drinking copious amounts of caffeine, living out of my suitcase and trying to appear like a sophisticated girlboss. Take what’s useful. Throw out what isn’t. The worst thing you could do is read this and try to copy it line for line: the entire point is to build the operating system that fits your actual life, not mine (because my life is a pyramid of organised chaos - oh the joys of being a type B queen).

Now. Quick framing, because I know how this is about to sound.

I currently run all areas of my content biz and I also just launched my agency CULTISH with my co-founder.

Insane or productive? A bit of both to be honest. And the only reason any of it is possible is the system I am about to walk you through. Without it, I would be in pieces. With it, I am the calmest I have ever been while being the busiest I have ever been. That paradox is the whole point of this article.

Let me draw a hard line before I go any further. You do not need a team. You do not need a new camera. You do not need to learn DaVinci Resolve. You do not need a Notion dashboard the size of Belgium. You do not need to invest in your setup before you start running your life like the business it actually is.

The number of creators I know who have spent months building elaborate productivity systems instead of building their actual business is genuinely, deeply upsetting. They have beautiful dashboards. They have a workflow for organising their workflows. And they have nothing to show for any of it. I’ve been there and trust me, it’s fluff: action drives results.

Here is the truth: you can run a one-woman enterprise single-handedly, mostly from your phone. The content runs from my iPhone. The business runs from a laptop sometimes, when I need it, and my phone when I don’t. There is no studio. There is no expensive software stack. There is just discipline, a few extremely well-chosen tools, and a refusal to confuse complexity with competence.

If a tool is on this list, it is because I open it every day. If a habit is on this list, it is because I do it most days, even when I do not want to. Nothing has been added for credibility. Nothing has been removed for embarrassment.

Let me walk you through it.

The operating principles (do these before any of the apps)

1. The daily honest conversation with yourself

Before any tool, any app, any framework: this is the thing that makes the rest of it work.

Every morning I have a brutally honest conversation with myself about what actually needs to get done today. Not what I want to do. Not what I’d enjoy doing. What moves the business forward.

Then I write it down. three to five (sometimes 10) things. Each one is specific enough that future-me cannot lawyer her way out of doing it.

“Work on Cultish” is not on this list. “Send the brand deck to [name] by 2pm” is. “Post stories” is not on this list. “Film and post Tuesday’s business of being you video by end of day” is. Each one has a deadline. I treat each as a non-negotiable milestone of the day.

The thing that separates productive people from unproductive people is not the system. It is whether they are willing to look at their own to-do list and tell the truth about what’s actually on it. Most of you are lying to yourselves on your to-do list. Self-care is not a task. Strategy is not a task. Thinking about my business is also not a task. Tasks have verbs. Tasks have deadlines. Tasks can be finished by a time.

Lying to yourself on a to-do list is genuinely one of the most expensive habits in modern work. Stop it.

BONUS: Start with the hardest thing. Once that’s out of the way, everything feels easy. The walk downhill after a hike is always more enjoyable.

2. The Sunday session

On a Sunday afternoon, coffee in hand, I get ahead of the week. It’s like buying a bonus day of the week that hasn’t even started. And then? On a Thursday afternoon, if you fancy an Aperol spritz? You bought the time. (Girl math).

The Sunday session asks three questions:

• What is the one thing this week that, if I do nothing else, will have moved my business forward?

• What is filming, posting, or shipping this week, and what state is each of those in right now?

• What is the honest state of my energy, my calendar, and my mental capacity going in?

Then I block-schedule the week from that. Not in a colour-coded productivity influencer way. In a I know what I’m filming Tuesday and what I’m posting Wednesday and what I’m pitching Thursday way.

The Sunday session is the single most valuable hour I have all week. It is also the one I am most tempted to skip. The discipline is doing it on the weeks I am the least in the mood because those are the weeks it matters the most. Skip it once and the whole week wobbles. Skip it twice, and you’re back to vibes-based content creation, which is the most expensive content creation modality on earth. I am saying this because I am a repeat offender - don’t be like me. LOCK IN.

3. Google Calendar is the backbone of your week. Put everything in it.

If there is one habit in this whole piece that has changed my life more than the apps and the AI and the discipline put together, it is this: every single hour of my week lives in Google Calendar.

Not just meetings. Everything. Filming blocks. Editing blocks. Substack writing time. Dinner with friends. The 4 pm gap, I need to do nothing. Mum’s garden drinks on Sunday. The pilates session with my bestie, the 5km in my marathon plan or the negroni date with mystery man. The brand call. The Cultish strategy session with Alex. Everything.

When every hour is in your calendar, you stop having the “ah shit, it’s mum’s garden drinks” problem. You stop double-booking. You stop accidentally taking on three new things on a Tuesday that was already supposed to be a writing day. You stop feeling vaguely behind on everything, because the calendar tells you exactly what you’ve committed to and what you haven’t.

Every hour of your day is a business hour, and you build around it. Friends and family included. Especially friends and family. The version of me that pretended personal time didn’t need to live in the calendar was the version of me who kept double-booking, kept arriving late, kept apologising to people I loved for being scattered. It made me a worse friend and business operator. That version is gone, cya queen. Everything is in the calendar.

The other thing this does is that putting things in your calendar makes you realise how much capacity you actually have. When write Substack takes a 90-minute block on a Tuesday morning, you know what’s possible the rest of the day. When editing a video that lives in a 2 pm-4 pm block on a Wednesday, you know not to schedule a call against it. The calendar is the truth-teller. Your brain is the liar.

Use it.

4. Content planning, the honest version

I know what formats I am creating and why. I know what days they post on. I know how far ahead each one needs to be filmed.

Tuesday is the Substack article and a business-focused video, for example. Filming happens one day before posting without exception, because filming and posting on the same day is how content gets lazy.

I write long-form pieces (like this one) in one sitting where possible because the alternative is the cursed I’ll work on it tomorrow loop that produces nothing for nine days and then a panic on the tenth.

If you want a content plan, this is the entire instruction: decide what your content pillars are, decide which day each one posts, decide how far ahead each one needs to be filmed, and stop building dashboards. I know that’s annoying advice. It’s also the only advice that works.

The thinking stack ☁️

5. ChatGPT vs Claude: keep them separate, and here’s why

Before I tell you how I use either of these, the most important AI hack I have learned this year:

I use ChatGPT for personal stuff. I use Claude for business. I never mix them.

The LLMs are learning from how you use them. If you spiral into ChatGPT about a guy who hasn’t texted back, and then ten minutes later ask it to help you write a brand pitch, you’ve muddied the model’s sense of who you are. It starts giving you brand-pitch advice in the same register it gave you the breakup pep talk. It’s worse at both because it’s confused about which version of you is in the chair.

So I keep them clean. ChatGPT gets the emotional brain dump. The boy. The friendship drama. The 2 am spiral about whether I should have said yes to something. The please tell me I’m not crazy for thinking this moments. ChatGPT is the slightly less emotionally guarded one of the two: better at being a confidante, less sharp at being a strategist (imo).

Claude gets the business. Substack pieces. Pitch emails. Strategy stress-tests. Brand-deal negotiation language. The Cultish positioning work. Anything where I need sharpness over warmth.

Two different rooms in your head. Two different rooms in the cloud. Keep them clean.

Tip: I switched to Claude a few months ago, and it’s been life-changing lol. I asked Chat to prepare a handover document for me, and Claude was good to go. Here’s the prompt I used:

The ChatGPT → Claude handover prompt

I’m preparing a handover document so I can brief a different AI (Claude) on who I am and what I’m working on. Treat this as if you’re writing a brief for a new senior collaborator joining my team — they need to understand me quickly and start being useful immediately.

Write the document in five sections, in this order:

1. Who I am. Name, what I do, current professional positioning, the audiences I’m building for, anything personal that’s relevant to how I work (location, ADHD, etc.).

2. What I’m currently working on. The active projects, the launches in motion, the priorities for the next 30–90 days. Be specific about what stage each one is at.

3. How I communicate and what I expect. My voice, my tone preferences, what I hate (corporate language, AI-sounding writing, generic advice), what I respond well to (directness, pushback, Tough Love framing). Include any verbal tics or signature phrases.

4. The systems and frameworks I work inside. My weekly content rhythm, my franchises, the publications and platforms I run, the people I collaborate with (named), and any locked-in rules I follow (e.g. filming day always one day before posting).

5. What I tend to ask AI for vs. what I refuse to outsource. Specifically: what kinds of work do I use AI as a thinking partner for, and what creative work do I always do myself (e.g. my Substack articles, keynotes, anything that has to sound like me)?

Write it as if it were going straight into a new LLM’s system prompt. Tight, specific, no filler. No hedging language (”she might be…”), only assertions you’re confident about based on our previous conversations. Bullet points are fine where they help; full sentences where context matters. Aim for something I could paste at the top of a new Claude conversation and immediately get useful work back.

Do not write it in the third person. Write it in the first person — as if I am introducing myself to Claude directly. That way I can paste it cleanly into the new chat without rewriting.

6. The Claude conversation we need to have

Before I tell you how I use Claude, we need to talk about how most of you are using it. Because if you’ve been outsourcing ALL your scripts to ChatGPT, your DMs to ChatGPT, your captions to ChatGPT, your thinking to ChatGPT… I love you, but I am about to be slightly mean to you.

The content you are producing is starting to sound like everyone else’s content. Your captions have the same three-act setup. Your reels have the same here’s why this matters hook. Your DMs have the same suspiciously perfect grammar. You think you sound more professional. What you actually sound like is one of forty thousand creators who have all hired the same intern. Your audience is starting to notice. The algorithm already has. And you can feel it too.

I’m not anti-AI. I’m writing this piece with Claude open in another tab right now. I am anti losing your voice to the same five rhetorical patterns the chatbot defaults to when nobody pushes back on it.

The rule is one sentence. Tattoo it. Print it. Put it above your desk.

Use AI to think with you. Never to think for you.

That distinction is the whole game. Here is how I actually use Claude, in five workflows. None of them involves asking it to write anything for me.

Voice-note → structure. I record long voice notes. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes of me thinking out loud about a topic. I dump the transcript in and I ask Claude one thing: find the spine. What’s the strongest argument buried in here? What through-line am I circling? What’s the line that’s actually doing the work? Then I write the piece. From my voice. In my words. With the editorial sharpness of someone who has already had a second pair of eyes on the raw thinking.

Sharpening, not generating. When I’ve written a draft, I paste it in and ask: what’s flabby, where am I hedging, what would you cut? It catches things. I do not always agree with what it says, but the process of disagreeing is itself useful. Every time I push back, I sharpen what I actually meant.

Strategy stress-test. Before I commit to a content direction, a pricing change, a brand pitch, I talk it through like it’s a strategist on retainer. Here’s what I’m thinking, here’s what I’m worried about, what am I missing? It catches blind spots I would have missed. Not always. Often enough that I do it before every major call now.

Research synthesis. When I need actual data on creator economy numbers, what’s happening on a specific platform, Claude searches and summarises. Saves me the spiral of opening seventeen tabs and reading none of them properly. I already have 30 tabs open at all times lol

Everything that is not the creative work. Pitch emails. Brand-negotiation language. The DM I want to send carefully but don’t have the energy to write cold. Not my articles. Not my keynote scripts. Not the stuff that has to sound like me. But all the connective tissue of running a business, where polish is more important than originality.

The rule, again: think with it, never for it. The day this Substack starts sounding like a chatbot wrote it is the day it stops being worth subscribing to. You’d cancel. I would cancel. And that’s a good standard to have.

Use the tool. Do not become it.

7. Wispr Flow - if you take one tool recommendation from me this year, take this

I am about to be evangelical for a paragraph. Bear with me.

Wispr Flow is a voice-to-text dictation tool that runs everywhere: in your email, in Slack, in Claude, in Notion, in any browser. You hold a hotkey, you talk, and it transcribes what you said into the box you’re hovering over. With punctuation. In real time. It is not Apple Dictation. It is significantly better than Apple Dictation. It is the closest thing to thinking directly onto the page that the current consumer tech stack will give you.

I dictate first drafts of almost everything. Substack articles get dictated on a morning walk. Long DMs and pitch emails get dictated while I’m getting ready in the morning. Voice notes that would have been recorded on my phone are now dictated directly into the Claude conversation, which means I’m cutting out the step of transcribing them later.

The reason this matters for a one-woman business is structural. The bottleneck for almost everything you do is the speed at which you can move thought into text. Typing is slow. Voice is fast. Wispr Flow closes that gap permanently. I produce meaningfully more written output than I did two years ago because of this single tool.

(Paid. There’s a free trial. Worth every penny.)

8. Notion, and the warning that comes with it

Notion is where my entire business backbone lives. Content calendar, brand-deal pipeline, pitching tracker, financial overview, CRM, idea bank.

Notion has personally destroyed more one-woman creator businesses than the algorithm ever has. Not because Notion is bad. Notion is great. The problem is that building a Notion dashboard feels exactly like running a business and it is not running a business.

My rule: build the page when the problem appears. Not before.

I started with one page. A master to-do list. I added pages only when something genuinely could not fit on the master to-do list anymore. The content calendar got its own page when I started running three franchises. The brand-deal pipeline got its own page when I had more than four active conversations.

Build ugly. Stay useful. The fancier your Notion setup, the less you’ll actually use it. Next Tuesday I’ll show you the actual Notion pages I run my business out of.

The creative production stack 🧱

9. Your phone is the studio. Stop waiting for the upgrade.

All of my content is shot and edited entirely on my iPhone. Reels. Stories. The lighting and framing decisions matter more than the camera. The kit you already own is more than enough, and the limiting factor was never the equipment.

If you are reading this and the thing standing between you and posting consistently is I’m waiting until I have a better setup, I am telling you with absolute love that you will still be waiting in a year. The compound effect of imperfect content posting consistently is the single most underrated force in this industry.

I personally use CapCut: timeline cuts, transitions, captions, deliberate music sync. I have never paid for the pro version, and I am doing just fine. Instagram edits are also good for efficiency with music/ sometimes I tell myself Ig will push it more if I post from edits, but I guess that’s just my superstition.

For graphics, brand assets, and pitching for Cultish, I use Canva Pro. I use it for fast design. The line between fast and production matters. Conflating them is how creators waste hours making mediocre graphics nobody asked for.

When I’m pitching clients or keynotes: Gamma. Faster than PowerPoint, smarter than Canva, produces decks that look like a 2026 brand rather than a 2014 corporate template.

10. The unsexy capture stack

Three tools that are not glamorous but get opened more often than any of the above:

• iOS Notes app. I know. But it is the single most-used app on my phone after my camera. Voice notes. Article drafts. Idea capture. Capture should always be friction-free. The fancier the capture system, the less you’ll use it. Argue with the wall, not me.

• Apple Reminders. For the daily to-do list. I have tried every fancy task app in existence. I have come back to Reminders every single time.

• Voice notes to myself in WhatsApp.

The pattern across all three: the boring tool you already own usually beats the exciting tool you’re considering buying.

The consumption diet 🍔

11. Curate your inputs like your business depends on it. Because it does.

The inputs you choose shape the operator you become.

Most people consume randomly. I am guilty of this too: getting into a Euphoria finale 1-hour deep-dive on YouTube. Eight thousand hours of breakup content from people who can’t get over their exes.

I am guilty of all of this. The Euphoria deep-dive specifically. We are all guilty.

The shift I have been making, deliberately, is to curate a consumption world that’s good for me. Not aspirat`ional in an unattainable lifestyle way but aspirational in a these are the operators I want to think like way. Specifically:

• AskCatGPT for AI workflows and tool discovery — she’s where most of my best stack ideas have come from

• Nara Delrey for productivity and the aesthetic operator energy

• Grace Beverly for founder mode and what it looks like to scale a business as a young woman

• Savannah Sachdev for running, discipline, and the just show up, even when it’s a bad day school of consistency

To name a few.

It creates a little consumption world of stuff that’s good for me and the compound effect of that is wild. The people you spend time with become the people you start thinking like.

Audit your inputs. The accounts you follow, the podcasts you listen to, the people whose newsletters you actually open. If they are not making you sharper, drop them. The wrong inputs cost you nothing in cash and everything in clarity.

The habits underneath the system

12. Start documenting.

A great habit is to document your life.

Have an idea and write it down. Notice something - write it down. See something on the street that made you think - write it down. Have a moment that surprised you - write it down. Then, when you feel compelled to share something, post a Story. Not because Stories are a strategy. Because you have built the habit of paying attention, and the Story is the natural overflow of that attention.

Document everything. Share what serves the work. You don’t miss a beat when you’re paying attention. And you do not know, in the moment, which idea is going to turn into the next piece, the next product, the next pivot. Capture first. Decide later.

13. The non-negotiable exercise

I run ultra-marathons. You do not have to.

What you do have to have is one form of physical practice that is non-negotiable, that gets you out of your head, and that you do early enough in the day that the rest of the day cannot eat it.

The reason it matters for a one-woman business is not solely for aesthetic purposes. The days I do not move are the days I make my worst decisions. I get reactive. I get small. I take meetings I should have declined and decline meetings I should have taken. The exercise is operating infrastructure, not wellness content.

Force yourself to do it at the time of day you have the most control over.

14. Get dressed. Properly. Every day.

This may be controversial, but hear me out before you close the tab.

I get fully dressed every day. Hair done. Makeup on. Real clothes, not sweatpants, not the in-between, not the “I’ll change later” compromise. Even on days when I am writing alone at my desk and nobody is going to see me.

I know this goes against the current cultural moment, which is soft life, no-pants Substack, productivity in a hoodie. I am telling you, from inside the experiment, that it is a trap. The version of me who works from home in sweatpants is a slower, fuzzier, less decisive operator than the version of me who has spent twenty minutes getting ready before opening the laptop. And it is not even close.

This is not vanity. It is psychology.

There is a real, published concept for this called enclothed cognition: a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that people perform measurably better on tasks when wearing clothes with symbolic meaning. Doctors in lab coats became more focused and performed better simply because of what they were wearing. The clothing is not a costume. It is a signal to your own brain about what kind of work is about to happen.

I know. I know. Hannah, I’m a busy mum, I’m a creator on the road, I don’t have time, this is unrealistic. I hear you. Here is the actual rule, stripped down to what matters:

Wear something you would not be embarrassed to be photographed in. That is the bar. It is not full glam every morning. It is not the same hoodie three days in a row. It is the version of you that, if a brand DM landed and they asked to hop on an unscheduled call in fifteen minutes, you would not panic about how you look.

I am not telling you to perform. I am telling you to show up for the operator you are trying to become. The clothes are the cheapest, fastest possible cue to your brain that the work is about to start. The makeup is not for the camera. It is for the version of you who is taking herself seriously this morning.

15. Reply now. Or you will never reply.

I am ADHD as f*ck, and I am about to tell you the single hardest-won lesson of my professional life:

If I sit on an email for more than an hour, I will start to fear it.

The fear compounds. The longer it sits, the bigger it gets. After 48 hours, an email I could have answered in 30 seconds has become a thing. A weight. An item on the to-do list that gets carried over week after week, growing more anxiety-coded every day, until it finally becomes the email I never reply to at all.

This is the single most expensive habit in a solo creator business.

So here is my rule, and I follow it ruthlessly: reply immediately, even if the reply is two lines. “Got this. Let me come back to you by Friday,” is a reply. “I’m slammed this week — can we book a call for next Tuesday?” is a reply. “Yes, interested — sending a full response tomorrow,” is a reply. The point is not to answer the full question. The point is to keep the loop closed in real time so it does not grow into something terrifying in your inbox.

Reply now. Edit later. The cost of replying badly is small. The cost of not replying at all is enormous.

16. Set up meetings. Always. Both online and in real life.

The compound effect of a one-on-one coffee, a Google Meet with a stranger, a let me intro you to X conversation, a let’s catch up properly next week is the most underrated growth lever in this entire industry. The brand deals I’m closing right now started life as a coffee with a girl I met once at an event. The speaking gigs started as a Google Meet with someone who’d seen one of my reels and wanted to chat. The Cultish first-client conversations started as DMs that became calls that became meetings.

Get in the habit of saying yes to coffees, Meets, and dinners with people you find interesting. Put them in your calendar (per the rule above). Show up properly, not as promoting yourself, but as genuinely curious about what they’re doing.

And finally — the philosophy underneath all of it

18. Learn to love rejection.

A rejection is one of the most valuable signals you can receive. Get more of them.

Last month I pitched myself for a brand deal I genuinely wanted. I spent real time on the pitch, the deck, the rate card, the angle, the case studies. I knew it was good. I sent it.

They said no.

The old version of me would have spent three days feeling slightly sick about it. The current version of me has trained myself to do the opposite: feel the no, log the no, and treat it as a data point.

I know the love rejection advice sounds like girl-boss wellness content. It is not. It is the most operationally useful mindset shift you can make in this work, and it applies everywhere. The brand that ghosted you? Information. The agency that passed on your application? Information. The investor who said no? Information. The guy who hasn’t texted back? Amazing — he’s not interested, you now know that, stop wasting time.

A no is a closed loop. A no lets you move on to the next thing. A no is the single best thing that can happen to you on a slow day.

If you are not currently being rejected by something regularly, you are not pitching enough. You are not asking for enough. You are not putting yourself in front of enough rooms. Pitch more. Get rejected more. Move faster.

The creators making real money are not the ones who never get rejected. They are the ones who get rejected, log it, and send the next pitch within the same hour.

That, more than any app or system, is the actual operating system.

The one-woman business stack…

A bad creator with a beautiful Notion dashboard and a four-camera setup produces nothing. A disciplined operator with an iPhone, Claude, Wispr Flow, and an honest to-do list builds a career. The tools are downstream of the operator. If you have not built the daily honest conversation, the Sunday session, the franchise structure, the calendar discipline, and the non-negotiable exercise then no productivity stack on earth will save you. You will just have a more aesthetic version of the same problem.

So the actual lesson, if you take one from this piece, is this: be the operator first. Add tools second.

You can be disgustingly productive from your phone. I am proof of it. So is every founder I admire. Stop waiting until you have the right setup to start running your life like the business it actually is.

The setup is you. The stack is everything else.

LOVE YOU,
Hannah xxx

Next Tuesday: the part that makes you money

This piece is the operating system. The how you do the work layer.

Next Tuesday I am publishing: the business backbone. How to price yourself. How to know what to charge. How to set up the company properly from day one. How to send the invoice. How to chase it when it doesn’t get paid. The five revenue streams of a creator business, and which one you should be building first.

That one is for paid subscribers. Not because the operating system isn’t valuable, but because the money conversation is the conversation that deserves the protected room.

If you’ve found this piece useful, that’s the room you want to be in next week 💛

The thing. You know the one. The business idea you keep talking about. The DM you keep typing out but never send. The job you would apply for if you felt just a little bit more qualified. The city you would move to if it felt less reckless. The product you would launch if you knew it would work. The book you wo…

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A note before we start: this issue is completely free, because we're talking openly about money. I am a big advocate for financial transparency in this industry, and I genuinely think my honesty here can help someone. So no paywall, no upgrade prompts, no gatekeeping. Read it, share it with the friend who needs it, and if you want to support this publication, the paid tier is for the issues that come next. Cheers ❤️

Last year, I made 7.5x my old corporate salary.

So far this year, I have made $13,000 (but there’s a good reason why).

You might be thinking, “shit, that’s tragic” or “that’s decent” - money is subjective, but that is a BIG drop.

I think a lot of people reading this need to see those two numbers next to each other from a creator who, to the outside world, looks like she’s killing it. Instagram doesn’t show this. Travelling around the world constantly doesn’t show this. Trust me: money is a discussion worth having, and I am coming in hot with my philosophy, receipts and action plan that will turn me (and my readers) into financially thriving little lions.

Tough Love doesn’t work if I’m performing the rich-girl part of the personal brand while the actual finances are doing something else entirely. So here it is.
The honest version.

A million followers can’t pay your salary. Likes can’t pay your salary. Saves can’t pay your salary. Going viral last Tuesday can’t pay your salary. Let’s just say it straight: the gap between being known and being paid is enormous, structural, and getting worse.

You cannot simply post about yourself consistently and expect that to turn into cold, hard cash.

That is not how this industry works. The people who are making real money from this are running a business with a strategy that happens to use social media as one of its inputs. The broke people are doing the inverse: running social media as the entire output, with no business strategy underneath it, and hoping the numbers eventually convert into rent.

They rarely don’t.

A lot of creators’ finances are f*cked…

Some creators I know personally, with huge followings, cannot afford their rent. You spend money to look rich, whilst barely having enough money to tickle the positive balance of your overdraft. In the social media space, the image is the job, the job doesn’t pay enough to maintain the image, and the only way to keep the job is to spend money you don’t have on the appearance of having it. It is the most expensive treadmill in modern work, and it is everywhere.

It's less performative than it was in 2016–2020. The creators leaning into genuinely unglamorous, authentic lives are thriving. But make no mistake: social media is still a luxurious highlight reel.

The structural reason this happens is that the industry is built on a misalignment. The platforms make money on creator output. The brands make money on creator output. The agencies make money on creator output. The creator is the only person in that chain who is paid in exposure and expected to convert it themselves. And most creators have no idea how to convert it because nobody taught them, because the entire culture rewards posting more rather than building anything underneath the posts.

I am going to be candid with you, because this is the kind of letter where I should be: I would rather have half the amount of views and a proper business than be able to pose in a bikini in the Bahamas while racking up credit card debt. I have seen what the second version of that life looks like up close. It is not enviable. It is a slow-motion financial fire dressed in linen.

For the record, I will continue to post the bikini pics. But I’ll be doing it from a financially secure business, not from a credit card balance, hehe.

That distinction is the entire point of Tough Love. You are allowed to want the lifestyle. You are allowed to want the trip, the apartment, the outfit, the visibility. What you are not allowed to do, if you actually want to own any of it, is mistake the image of the income for the income.

A million followers can’t pay your salary. Neither can a car you don’t own. Neither can the dinner you got invited to, but couldn’t afford. The income comes from the business underneath the brand. If there isn’t one, the visibility is the thing that’s bankrupting you, not the thing that’s going to save you.

So let me share my personal experience with this.

How 6-figure revenue became minimum wage.

Two things, and neither of them is the algorithm’s fault.

One: I made a choice. After the worst breakup of my life last October, which genuinely had me crying enough tears to fill 10 Empire State Buildings, I took time. To be clear: I had bought myself the time by working like a horse the entire year.

I went to Bali to heal myself (how cliché, I know).

I did not pitch. I did not chase deals. I did not optimise content. I rebuilt myself, on purpose, knowing it would cost me. I do not regret it. The version of me that came out of Bali is the version of me writing this, and the version of me that existed pre-Bali could not have built the trajectory that I am building now (I have crazy plans for this year, more to come).

I wouldn’t have the clarity, I wouldn’t have the hunger, I wouldn’t have the business ideas.

I pride myself on being the woman who can do it all, but from December to April, I gave myself one single job that came before anything else: get back to my usual Hannah Banana state, but with a healed, happy heart and a clear mind.

Plot twist: post-breakup Hannah is even fucking better than before. YAAASSSS.

The financial hit was the entry fee for the rebuild.

That “break” ended up giving me so much more value than a $ amount. Within the first week of arriving in Bali, I got a random DM from a girl called Alex. I didn’t know it at the time, but is a Substack bestseller and would go on to become one of my best friends/ family and…
Is now, my co-founder! For a new venture we are launching soon…

The months I have been quietly punishing myself for as “lost income” were the months I met the person I’m now building a company with. And the version of me I am so proud of you (she’s an even tougher cookie). Bali was not the reason for the revenue loss. Bali was the reason the rest of this year is going to be different. You cannot tell, in the moment, which version of the story you’re inside.

Two: the most expensive lesson I’ve learned in business so far.
When the fit between you and the people you work with isn’t right, it will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Let me give you the texture of what that actually looks like, because I think most creators reading this assume “bad fit” means something dramatic, and it doesn’t. It means tiny, ordinary, very fixable things that, repeated weekly, drain six figures out of your year.

It looks like the hire who missed one email — a single email — and as a result I didn’t get to attend an event that would have put me in the room with the exact people I had been trying to get in front of for a year. One inbox oversight. Months of relationship-building gone.

It looks like an assistant I genuinely loved as a person, who would sit on emails for two days without responding, in an industry where two days is the difference between yes and they went with someone else.

It looks like management that, on paper, is excellent — and in reality just isn’t built for the kind of business I am trying to make. No bad intent. No villains. Just a structural mismatch between what they’re good at and what I need now.

None of these stories are about anyone being a bad person. Every single one of these people I would still recommend, still vouch for, still work with again in a different context. Always keep your relationships sweet. People’s time and skills are valuable, even when they don’t fit with where you are right now. The industry is small and careers are long.

But this is the part Tough Love readers need to hear: keeping the relationships sweet does not mean keeping the arrangements the same. It is your job, especially as a one-person enterprise, to be ruthlessly strategic about who is in your inbox, who is pitching for you, and who is making the small decisions that compound into your annual income. I wasn’t strategic enough, for too long. I am restructuring now. And I am restructuring without burning a single bridge, because I have learned that the people you let go of kindly will refer you for the rest of your career, and the people you let go of badly will quietly cost you opportunities you’ll never even hear about.

But the truth is, neither of those reasons is the whole story. There’s a third one. The one I’d actually like you to take seriously, because it’s the one that’s probably costing you money too, even if you don’t realise it.

The third reason — and this one applies to you.

This is my screen time from today jump scare. 12 hours!!!!!!

I’m not writing this from the other side of solving it. I’m writing it from inside the problem. My phone is six feet away from me as I type this, and I have already picked it up twice in the last paragraph.

Twelve hours. That is half a life. That is more time than I sleep. And the part that should bother me most — the part that bothers me when I let myself look at it directly - is that for most of those twelve hours, I felt like I was doing something.

I was watching creators talk about creativity. Saving reels about pitching brands. Reading threads about negotiation. Bookmarking podcasts about how to build a business. Adding to a Notes app stuffed with ideas, frameworks, hooks, half-thoughts, and things I was definitely going to do something with.

I wasn’t building anything. I was browsing. The Notes app was a museum of someone I was planning to become, curated by a version of me who was actively avoiding becoming her.

And this exact loop is the third reason creators are quietly broke. We have confused input for output. We have confused research for action. We have confused the feeling of productivity, the dopamine of saving, scrolling, planning, watching, learning… with the actual thing that generates revenue.

You are not building a business by saving reels about how to build a business. You are not pitching brands by reading threads about how to pitch brands. You are not making money by watching content about how to make money. You are consuming the appearance of progress. And it feels exactly like progress, which is what makes it the most psychologically expensive thing you can do with your time and the most financially expensive thing you can do with your career.

A Notes app full of ideas does not pay your salary. The salary gets paid when you take one of those ideas, drag it out into the world, and let it be judged.

The Tough Love you actually need:
Shut up and do something.

Here’s the bit that is going to annoy some of you: the standard advice for breaking out of a consumption loop is to go inward. Stop scrolling. Delete the apps. Sit with yourself. Find your voice. Journal. Meditate. Be alone.

I’m going to push back on that, because I think it’s wrong.

Going inward, alone, without input, isn’t the opposite of consumption. It’s just consumption of yourself. You sit there with the same thoughts you had yesterday, the same taste you’ve already calcified, the same ideas you can’t tell are stale because there’s no friction against anything. You don’t develop a voice in a vacuum. You don’t build a business in a vacuum either. You build both when something pushes back.

The corrective for over-consumption is not isolation. It’s other people. Real ones, in rooms, who can challenge you in real time.

Every meaningful jump I’ve made in my work in the last two years has come from a conversation, not a meditation. Someone told me my videos ideas were generic: I went back to the drawing board it. Someone said my prices were too low: doubled them.. Someone said “why aren’t you charging for that?” so I started. Someone said “why are you wasting time on that?” I stopped.

A Notes app full of ideas is just a graveyard for thoughts that were never tested against another human. Your taste is being diluted by constant consumption and by constant solitude. The way out is action that involves other people watching you.

So the real question is not how do I consume less. The real question is: what am I willing to put out into the world that someone else will see, judge, and pay for? Until you answer that, you are still in the museum. And the museum doesn’t pay.

What I’m actually doing about it

I want to give you something useful, not just a confession. So here’s the breakdown of what I’m doing, structured around the framework I keep coming back to:
Body · Brain · Bank Account.

The structure is deliberate. Most “how to unfuck your finances” advice picks one lane: discipline, productivity, money tips. The problem is bigger than any one lane.

Body

The way I combat the consumption loop physically is by signing up for things I am underprepared for.

Last month it was the London Marathon. I had one month’s notice and took the spot anyway. Because the thing about a marathon entry is that it is non-negotiable in a way that nothing in your life otherwise is. The date is on the calendar. Other people know. The training plan exists. There is a literal start line you either show up to or you don’t. There is no “I’ll start Monday.”

The point is not the marathon. The point is that I stopped being able to negotiate with myself. Most consumption — and most under-earning — is fuelled by the constant negotiation we do with ourselves. I’ll start tomorrow. I’m researching. I’m just gathering information. A public physical commitment removes the negotiation. You either run or you don’t. You either show up or you’re the person who pulled out.

If you are stuck in a consumption loop, find the most visible, most public, most non-negotiable physical commitment you can sign up for in the next 60 days. Pay the entry fee. Tell ten people. The deadline does the work your willpower won’t. And the same principle scales up.

Brain

The brain part is the one most people get wrong, because the default advice is learn a language, learn an instrument, take a course. Sure. Fine. But I think most of that is itself a sophisticated form of consumption: feeling productive while not actually changing anything material in your life.

The question to ask is sharper: what is the one skill that, if I were genuinely competent at it, would unlock the next level of my actual income?

Not what’s interesting. Not what’s enriching. Not what makes you sound smart at dinner. What is load-bearing for the future you are trying to build?

For most ambitious women I know, the honest answer is one of three things: negotiation, money, or sales. All three are unsexy, none of them are romantic, and almost nobody learns them properly because the consumption version is so much more comfortable. You can watch finance reels for years and never open a brokerage account. You can save negotiation threads for months and never push back on a single rate. You can read about sales and never make a pitch.

The brain commitment isn’t learn something. It’s learn the thing that’s been quietly costing you money or power for years and that you’ve been avoiding because it’s hard. Take the negotiation course. Hire someone for one session and learn how they price. Read one actual book on investing — and then open the account.

Mine, currently: deeper financial literacy. Not the Instagram-version. The boring, real version. I’m two-thirds of the way through a book on macro and three sessions into working with someone on long-term planning. Neither is content. Both are work.

Bank Account

The consumption response to a money problem is to save personal finance reels. To watch budgeting videos. To read threads about side hustles. To feel, for ninety seconds, like you’re handling it.

I’ve done all of that. None of it moved a single number on my P&L.

What moved the numbers (what is moving the numbers) was making things. Pitching things. Launching things. Asking for things. Showing up to rooms.

Specifically, the 30-day plan I’m running right now has three legs.

LinkedIn. Most of my audience is on Instagram, but the people who book me — for stages, for paid work, for partnerships with budget — live on LinkedIn. I’m posting four times a week minimum, in a format I’ve designed specifically for that platform. Not Instagram captions reposted. Actual LinkedIn writing for the audience that pays. If you only take one thing from this whole letter, take this: the most underpriced platform for creators right now is LinkedIn. It’s where decision-makers are, it’s where budgets are, and it’s where almost no creators are showing up properly. I will be coming back with my learnings next month ;)

Substack. Big, in-depth articles like this. Daily Notes. The publication you are reading is itself part of the rebuild: not a hobby, not a side project. I want this to become a legitimate part of my personal brand business.

My new venture with . More about the launch coming soon…

The whole point

The creator economy has been sold the idea that proximity to information is the same as having done something with it. It isn’t. A Notes app full of frameworks is not a strategy. A Saved folder of business ideas is not a business. A million followers is not a salary.

You have to make things. You have to put them in front of people. You have to be challenged. You have to do the unsexy version of the thing you’ve been romanticising via content.

The actual antidote to being broke and known is exposure. Exposing the work, exposing yourself, exposing the half-formed idea before it’s ready. The Notes app is the place ideas go to die comfortably. The world is the place where they get paid.

I will tell you honestly: I don’t have my screen time down yet. I haven’t fixed the consumption loop. But I am building things while I am in it, which is the only way I have ever known anything to actually change. You don’t think your way out of this. You don’t journal your way out of this. You build your way out, ugly and in public, while the loop is still happening.

Make something. Pitch a thing. Sign up for something hard. The saved folder is not. Just having followers is not a salary.

So go earn some MONEYYYY xx

LOVE YOU,
Hannah xoxox

*head spinning, saving a thousand new reels, hoping you’ll go viral*

FOR WHAT, BABE?!?!?!

Ok, deep breaths.
You ARE going insane, but so is everyone else.
But I genuinely think I have a fix…

Last week, I posted the first episode of my new series:
“The Business of you: how to get paid for who you are”.
I received a truckload of comments and DMs, with one similar thread…

They were, almost without exception, some version of: |
"I feel trapped in my niche."
"I don’t know how to grow without losing what makes me, me."
"How do you keep pivoting without it tanking everything?"

I actually had another issue prepared to release today, but we gotta talk about this. The more I read those messages and talk with creator friends, the more I realise the actual problem isn’t strategy. It isn’t pivoting. It isn’t the algorithm.

The problem is that most people want a personal brand without being… a person.

The tough love nobody wants to hear…

You want to build a “personal brand”.
You want an audience that loves you for who you are. You want to be known for your taste, your humour, your perspective, the specific, weird way you see things.

You also will not, under any circumstances, post anything that reveals what those things actually are (make it make sense).

You watch other creators be themselves, and you go:
“SEE! THAT’S WHAT I WANNA DO.”

Then you sit down to film, and you hear yourself doing a high-pitched monotonic telephone voice. Or the random trend you saw someone get 1 million likes for. Or the same get-ready-with-me video we’ve seen in a gazillion different fonts. The Instagram caption you 100% copy-and-pasted from ChatGPT and didn’t even delete the obvious—em dashes (come on, sis). You make content that is technically fine and emotionally indistinguishable from forty thousand other accounts, and then you wonder why your numbers are flat.

Here’s how I like to see things: every creator is a storefront. You cannot open an unmarked shop in the middle of New York, refuse to put anything in the window, and then act surprised that nobody comes in. Nobody owes you a visit. Nobody owes you a follow. The audience is not withholding their love because they’re picky. They’re withholding it because you haven’t shown them a single reason to give it.

The current creator economy is a copy-paste machine. People watch what’s working, replicate it, and then feel personally betrayed when the algorithm doesn’t reward them for the eighteenth identical text on video funny relatable meme slop. We’ve collectively confused mimicry with strategy. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

You can copy people for a long time. You can hop on every viral trend. You can do the dance, the trending audio, the format-of-the-week. And you’ll get some growth. But you’ll also wake up at thirty-one with three hundred thousand followers, no idea what you actually want to make, and a creeping suspicion that nobody (including yourself) would notice if you disappeared tomorrow.

That’s not a personal brand. That’s a content output. Those are different things.

Who am I to judge 🐸🫖?

I’ve reinvented what I do publicly more times than is probably advisable: the Insta360 camera girl, making TikToks for Shop Cider, a TV presenter in CHINA? (wtf), to the girl who taught her smelly boyfriend how to take pics, and now this era. With every pivot, I’d always get the same hesitation, “YOU NEED TO STICK TO YOUR NICHE”.

Well, I now have almost a million followers and a full-time career out of this because…

My “niche” is my life, and no one can be me better than ME.

That’s the part most creators get backwards. They think the niche is the brand. The niche is not the brand. The niche is the doorway. The brand is what you do once people are inside.

Be like a brand.

Take Matilda Djerf.
She didn’t build Djerf Avenue because she liked designing pyjamas: she built it on a vibe. A very specific soft, ‘70s-leaning Scandi look. Hair tutorials, then clothing, then homeware. The product changed. The thing underneath: her taste, and her point of view, didn’t. That’s why the audience followed her into every new thing.

This is also why the workplace allegations in 2024 hit the way they did. When the brand IS you, your behaviour becomes the product. There’s no hiding behind the logo when the logo is essentially your face. That’s not a reason to avoid building a personal brand. It’s a reason to be honest about what the audience is signing up for and to be unapologetically who YOU really are. If you’re a fiesty little kitten that cannot talk to people before 5 espressos in the morning (like me), then USE it, don’t pretend to be a decaf-morning breathwork yogi.
The throughline is your taste, but it’s also your conduct.

Your personal brand needs a moat. Not a niche.

”Wtf is a moat?”
Something that makes you a defensible business unit: not a person who can be replaced by the next imitator three days later (meme content-AI slop, yes, I am looking at you).

Which brings me to the actual framework…

How to unf*ck your personal brand 💋
Let’s cook up something original.

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