Claude Pro — $20/mo

You know we’re big fans of Claude around here. It’s basically an employee at this point, I use claude for:

• Brand pitch tracking. I send a lot of pitches. I keep a running record of every brand I’ve reached out to, what I said, and where it stands, and Claude helps me keep it organized so nothing falls through the cracks — including flagging who I haven’t followed up with before I even think to check.

• Caption editing. I write my captions rough and messy first, then run them through Claude to tighten them up. It’s not writing them for me — it’s cutting the fat and making sure they still sound like me, not like a marketing brief.

• Content ideation. Some of my best hooks have come from talking through a half-formed idea with Claude until it clicks.

• Formatting The Uncut. Every issue goes through Claude before it hits Substack — headers, spacing, making sure it actually reads like a newsletter and not a wall of text.

• The unsexy stuff. Fitness plans, what I’m eating that week, grocery lists. Genuinely, if I have to think about it and it’s not creative, there’s a good chance I’ve used miss claude.

Wispr Flow — $12–15/mo

Voice-to-text, but not the garbled mess your phone’s built-in dictation gives you. I talk, it writes clean, formatted text — no fixing capitalization or punctuation. I dictate emails on the go, brain-dump content ideas while I’m walking, and it’s genuinely changed how much I get done in a day. I’ve never been the fastest typer, and Wispr Flow means I don’t have to be, I dictate somewhere around 200,000 words a month, which is 200,000 words I didn’t have to type out with my thumbs. There’s a free tier if you want to test it too.

GET A FREE MONTH!

Wati — DM automation

Wati runs my DM automation, and I love it so much because it is a simplified version where you can see all of your chats across all of your platforms all in one inbox. This saves me from jumping back and forth, and nothing gets lost with a bunch of different tabs.

I also love DM automation for two reasons:

1. It’s increasing your engagement on socials + more revenue (esp if you’re selling courses!!)

2. You don’t have to be glued to your phone at all hours responding to DMs and comments

Plans start at around $39 a month and scale upwards depending on how much automation you’re using and how many seats you need.

DM automation is an essential part of any funnel, and Wati is a fantastic platform.

WATI FREE TRIAL

iCloud+ 2TB — $9.99/mo

Unsexy but non-negotiable. I shoot content constantly: raw footage, backups, screen recordings, and an unhinged number of screenshots and 2TB is the tier where im not stressed the “storage full” notification will pop up mid shoot.

& Google One (100GB) + Gemini — a few dollars a month

This one’s less about the storage (100GB is honestly modest) and more about staying inside the Google ecosystem so Gemini can actually pull context from my Docs and Gmail when I need it to. I use it for the boring paperwork side of this job: backups of contracts, brand agreements, invoices — the stuff you don’t think about until you desperately need to find one email from four months ago. Google’s restructured their AI pricing more than once this year, so if you’re shopping this exact combo, double-check what’s actually bundled with what before you buy the cheap storage tier and the AI features aren’t always sold together anymore.

Total damage: somewhere around $85–90/month, all five combined. For what it’s replacing — a content calendar tool, a separate transcription app, a CRM, unlimited cloud storage, and a research assistant — that’s genuinely cheap.

If you want the deeper breakdown on any of these my actual Claude prompts, how I’ve got Wati’s automations set up,let me know.

— Mia xx

The Gmail tracking system is one piece of it (read that article here).

So this week: what else Claude actually does for my business, how to set it up, and the exact prompt I use to get it to stop being polite and actually tell me if my content is good or shit.

What else I use it for

Outside of the outreach tracking, this is the running list:

• Auditing my actual content!!

• Brainstorming hooks and angles when I’m staring at a product and drawing a blank

• Pulling apart a contract before I sign it **not instead of a lawyer, but a first pass so I know what to actually ask about**

• Looking at what other creators in my exact niche are doing and posting that’s working.

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Quick debrief.

I’ve got a few questions on what brands are actually looking for when they’re trying to content hire a creator. Brands aren’t just looking at follower count, they’re looking at whether your content actually looks like something they’d want their product inside of. And a lot of creators are still posting the same low-lift, iPhone-in-a-messy-room content.

Here’s the blunt version: brand teams skip the majority of pitches they get because the creator’s existing content reads as generic: same script, same “OMG guys I’m obsessed” “run don’t walk” energy that could be slapped onto literally any product. What actually gets a brand to reach out first, unprompted, is content with effort.

I (And a ton of other people) call this high-lift content. This is the type of video that takes an hour to shoot and forever to edit. It converts for a reason. This is talking head videos with interesting edits, day-in-the-life videos. This is not seven-second videos with text on screen, High lift content does not hop on trends. High lift content is phenomenal in a signature series.

If you have been firing off a ton of pitches and haven’t been having a lot of luck, I urge you to send me your portfolio, number one. Also, be very brutally honest with yourself and with your content: is it actually up to the standard of the brand you were reaching out to?

If the answer is no, spend some time fixing that. That’s okay, we’re all here to learn, but if a brand is paying you for content, your content better be good.

Okay — clock in.

This Week’s Creator Job Board — 19 Brands

Fire Department Coffee, Poppy Barley, BRACHA, La Canadienne, Summerhill Resorts, Dear Green, Boursin, Kosmo’s Q, Athletic Brewing, Simple & Dainty, Lorvae, Waldor & Co., TopFoxx, bloom daily planners, Weavve Home, NEWBELLA, Boho Betty, Strathberry, Orangetheory Fitness + more — 19 Brands Total

Read more

So I became a travel creator instead.

I had done one travel UGC partnership before this trip. And I’m going to walk you through how I turned that into multiple Travel UGC deals.

I reached out to 50 travel brands and hotels (if you’re wanting to do the same for Toronto, I did an entire creator job board on this. You can see it linked here).

Start with your portfolio

If you haven’t read my article on building a UGC portfolio, go read it first. (Link here) The framework for travel content is exactly the same. You need content before you can pitch. Nobody is going to offer you a comped stay based on no evidence or three blurry iPhone photos from your last vacation.

Here’s where travel UGC is slightly different from product UGC though: a skincare brand doesn’t care where you filmed they care how the product looks. A hotel cares about the space itself. The content exists to show what it feels like to be there.

Which means if you have zero travel content, you need to go make some before you pitch a single hotel. I would 100% just book an Airbnb or a hotel room for a day or a night and spend the whole time filming. You don’t need a brand partnership to create your first shoot. You need content that proves you can capture a space a room, a lobby, a bathroom, a pool, and make it look like something someone would want to stay in.

Film everything. The more range you have, the more a hotel can picture exactly what you’d do with their property.

What your travel portfolio should include:

• A mix of photos and short-form video — you want to show range

• Interior shots: rooms, bathrooms, common areas, any detail worth noticing

• Lifestyle shots: you in the space, not just the space alone — hotels want to show the experience, not just the architecture

You will spend money on this first shoot but it is an investment that WILL pay off.

Who to pitch and who to skip

I reached out to 50 travel brands and hotels for my Toronto trip and had multiple partnerships. A good pitch-to-conversion rate in cold outreach is roughly 5-10%, and I hit that so don’t let the math discourage you. Most of those 50 were a no or a non-response.

When you’re starting out, here’s how I’d think about who to approach:

Boutique hotels before major chains. The smaller the property, the more likely an actual human is reading the inbox — and the more likely they care about fresh, local content. A 60-room independent hotel in a city doesn’t always have a team producing content. A Marriott does. Start where you have leverage.

Hotels in cities you’re actually going to. This sounds obvious, but pitch specifically. When your email says “I’m heading to Toronto in July,” the hotel knows the content is real, the trip is happening, and you’re not just mass-emailing every hotel in the world. Specificity builds trust immediately.

Check their Instagram before you reach out. If the feed looks tired, outdated, or like nobody’s touched it in a while — they need you. If it’s already beautiful and clearly produced by a studio — you’re less valuable. Go where the gap is.

For finding the right contact: look at the hotel’s website for a marketing or social media person. Check LinkedIn. Look at who’s responding to comments on their Instagram. Do not send to a general info@ inbox if you can avoid it. It goes nowhere.

The pitch strategy that actually got me results

Before I explain what worked for the Toronto hotels, I want to talk about the Kimpton in Seattle, my one previous travel UGC partnership before this trip.

I worked with them and learned what there marketing strategy was, their goal is to focus on organic lifestyle imagery. They said photos are just more versatile for them. One good image gets used across multiple platforms — turned into a carousel, put on the website, run as an ad, included in an email. It’s evergreen content. A beautiful photo of a well-lit hotel room doesn’t expire the way a trending video format does.

That was very useful information. If that’s what one well-run hotel chain wants, it’s probably what a lot of them want.

So when I started pitching Toronto hotels, I didn’t lead with a video package. I led with lifestyle imagery — photos for socials, for ads, for the website — and I specifically mentioned that this is what I’ve found works best from previous hotel partnerships. I framed it as something I learned from experience.

Positioning yourself is everything in this pitch. The way you paint the picture of what they’re going to receive is the whole job. I’ve only done one travel partnership before this, but I understood what worked for that brand, understood the strategy behind it, and then pitched that same thinking to the next hotel — based on what had already performed.

What hotels are actually “buying”

CONTENT!!!

The marketing manager at a boutique hotel does not care if you have 50,000 followers if your photos are bad. They care about what the output looks like and what they can actually do with it after you leave. Ask yourself honestly: does my portfolio prove that I can make a hotel room look like somewhere someone would want to pay to sleep/experience?

Here’s what they do with the content : social media carousels, website, paid ads, press kits, email campaigns. A good shoot produces assets that last them 12 months or more. That’s the actual value you’re delivering.

So when you’re building your offer, think in deliverables. How many final edited photos? What turnaround time? Are you including usage rights? (You should be.) Are you offering both vertical and horizontal crops for different platforms? The more specific and professional your offer sounds, the more it reads like a business transaction.

Where I landed

My accommodation was covered for my entire stay in Toronto ( I stayed with friends and family for some nights too).

And this is my second ever travel partnership.

I’m not a travel creator with years of credibility and a hundred thousand followers. I had one previous hotel deal, a portfolio I built intentionally, and an understanding of what the brand on the other side actually wants. That was enough.

The gap between getting a yes and getting silence on a hotel pitch is rarely about followers. It’s about how clearly you show them what they’re getting, how professional you make the offer sound, and whether you’ve done even the smallest amount of homework on what hotels actually use creator content for.

If you’re planning a trip anywhere in the next few months start pitching the hotels now, the worst they can say is no.

Ask me anything in the comments or email!!

— Mia xx

“I think I could turn everyone in this room into a full-time creator.”

That’s the line I opened with. Bold claim, I know — but I wanted to start with something that actually grabbed a room full of creators, not ease them in with a slow build. So yes: I think I can turn every single person in that room into a full-time creator. That’s an exciting thing to promise, and I stand behind it.

The receipts

Before the how, here’s the why-you-should-listen-to-me part. I’ve done influencer management and organic social for Paris Hilton’s beauty brand Parivie and did all organic social editing for Coachella. I’ve ran social strategy for Sports Club Atelier, Lauren Kyle McDavid’s clothing bran. I’ve negotiated brand deals for creators like Sarah Stage, Tiziana (the creator of the anti-brain-rot series) Negotiated deals for her with brands like CNN, National Geographic, Wikipedia, and Sony, plus worked with Katelyn Petterson and Annalise Sara.

I’ve also worked with creators who aren’t at those huge tiers and are still making a full-time income off content: people like Mackenzie Dempsey, Sophia Spags, and Whitney Klassuko. Micro doesn’t mean you can’t make money. It means a smaller following, but if you swap your mindset and find different ways to monetize, you can have the exact same earning potential.

Here’s the actual point of that list: none of these creators have something you don’t. If you’re reading this and you haven’t started posting, or something’s holding you back these people aren’t different from you. They just took the leap, actually tried to learn, and put themselves out there. I know that’s scary, but that’s the whole secret: there’s no way to hack the algorithm or some secret that nobody is telling you. It’s literally just to show up consistently and authentically on socials.

Treat social media like a lottery ticket

Every post you make is a lottery ticket. Every post is another shot at the one video that changes your life. And unlike an actual lottery ticket, the more tickets you buy the more you post the better your odds get. You genuinely have a better shot at going viral and having social media change your life than you do at winning the actual lottery. And let’s be honest, basically everyone’s bought a lottery ticket at some point in their life.

So how do you actually win? You never know which post is the one. So if a video tanks, who cares. If it’s stuck at 200 views, nobody saw it, it doesn’t matter. Don’t spiral. Go into your analytics and actually figure out why:

• Was the hook weak?

• Did the editing style not land?

• Were your Closed captions added in app? (They should always be!)

• Did the algorithm understand what your video was about?

The only way you’re going to learn is by flopping and then figuring out why that flopped. Now you know how to make the next video better.

And the thing that actually separates you from the creator sitting next to you — the thing AI can’t replicate and nobody can copy — is your personality. Your specific humor. Your voice. Your energy. Lean into it, don’t sand it down trying to sound like everyone else. We don’t need more New York City cookie-cutter influencers.

“I have good content but I’m not getting brand deals”

This is the question I get more than any other, so I spent a real chunk of the talk on it.

Brand deals are about positioning. Think of yourself as a salesperson because that’s exactly what you are at that moment. Brands are getting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pitches a day. You need something that makes you stand out: a strong media kit, a genuinely distinct personality, a content style nobody else is doing, or a signature series people already associate with you.

The other big lever: bundle your content. A single post is the easiest thing in the world for a brand to say no to. If you’re pitching “$2,000 for one Instagram post, plus $500 more for a story set” — don’t. Bundle it. My go-to bundle is one Instagram Reel syndicated to TikTok (fancy way of saying cross-posted — brands love a fancy word) plus one story set, two to three frames, with 30 days of usage.

And always, always charge separately for:

• Usage rights

• Exclusivity

• Whitelisting

The bigger move underneath all of this: position yourself for a long-term partnership whenever you can. It’s better for you: recurring income, a deeper brand relationship and it’s actually a better deal for the brand too, since they get you at a discounted rate in exchange for the commitment. Win-win.

The live media kit roast

Easily my favorite part of the day. A few brave people handed over their media kits and let me review them live, in front of the whole room. So much fun, and a lot of people told me they learned more watching that than from anything else I said up there.

So — if you’re in my paid Substack community, send me your media kit and your pitch and I’ll review it before you send it out.

On being terrified and doing it anyway

My friend and I had one rule going in: we’re not nervous, we’re excited. I held onto that the entire walk up to the stage, and the second I actually started talking, most of the nerves disappeared. That’s basically always how it goes — the buildup in your head is always so much worse than the thing itself. I’d made it into this huge deal, and it just wasn’t. I was excited the second I started.

It’s the same lesson with content. You overthink what people are going to say about your post far more than they actually will. Your first posts are not going to be good and if your first attempt at anything comes out perfect, that means you waited too long to start. You played it too safe. Failure is just part of the business. It teaches you fast what doesn’t work, and that’s exactly how you optimize for what does.

So: say yes to the scary thing. Make the post you’re not sure about.

— Mia xx

Morning debrief:

Let’s talk about leverage, because it’s sales & negotiation 101. You’re leading with why you love the brand and that’s not leverage, that’s a compliment (lovely but doesn’t make $$$). Leverage is knowing their pain point before you open your mouth. As the Queen of sales (Shelby Sapp) says: stop selling, start figuring out what’s actually motivating them to say yes. Ask a question instead of pitching. Find the gap. Then show up as the solution to a problem they already have — not a stranger asking for a product.

Right now you have more leverage than you think!! The creator economy is sitting at $234 billion in 2026, 72% of marketers expect their creator budgets to grow 50%+ this year, and 95% of marketing leaders plan to keep or increase spend. TikTok is where brands say they want to put that money first, so if you’ve got numbers worth flexing there, lead with them (get on TT shop rn!!). Don’t let a brand’s size scare you off, nano and micro creators (1K–10K followers) make up over two-thirds of the entire global creator population, which means you’re exactly the size brands are actually working with. Brands adding real creator content to product pages are seeing conversion lifts over 150%. That’s leverage.

Okay — clock in.

This Week’s Creator Job Board — 18 Brands

POPFLEX + Toronto Heli Tours + Scandivv + Hulken + Lisa Says Gah + Adanola + BRACHA + Andiata + Native Shoes + La Canadienne + Crocs + TopFoxx + ALCO Jewelry + Osmow’s + Sober Carpenter + Rosso Coffee + SMACKIN’ Sunflower Seeds + Fairmont Royal York — 18 Brands Total

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50 pitches a week sounds like a lot. It is a lot. But it works because I built a system around it and part of that system now runs on Claude.

Why volume matters first

My reply rate is roughly 10-15%. My conversion rate meaning a yes, a partnership, actual money is lower than that. Which means for every 50 pitches I send, I get maybe 5-7 replies and 2-3 real deals. That may sound discouraging, but that’s still averaging two to three brand partnerships every week.

If I was sending 5 pitches a week and getting one reply, I’d have one conversation a week and maybe one partnership a month.

Volume is not the enemy of quality. They can coexist if you set up a proper system. The problem most people have isn’t that they’re sending too many pitches — it’s that they’re sending too few and then wondering why nothing is happening.

The pitch formula

Every pitch I send has some variation of the same subject line format: Mia Macnair x [Brand Name]. That’s it. I wish I had time to do clever hooks for every single one, and if it’s a brand I’m really gunning for, I will. But the main reason I do this isn’t even strategy — I just want to make my outreach emails easily searchable. Which matters a ton when you’re managing this many conversations at once, and it’s also what lets Claude track everything on the backend.

The body is short and gets to the point immediately:

• One sentence on who I am

• A specific product, campaign angle, or content idea I’ve already thought through for that brand

• What I’m offering and what I’m asking for

• My portfolio link

That’s the whole email. Brands read a lot of these and most of them are long, vague, and completely self-focused. Short, specific, clear ask then the portfolio does the rest.

How I find the right person to email

If you’re sending to info@, support@, or a contact form, your email is going into a ticket queue and dying there. This is where most people waste the most time and get the worst results.

I spend time finding an actual name before I send anything. I obviously have the Creator Job Board where I share everyone I’m reaching out to strong leads for the week with real contact names and emails and that’s available to paid subscribers every Tuesday. I’ve built that list through years of talent management and being in this industry. I have over 5,000 contacts and it’s continuously growing.

Where Claude comes in

Sending 50 pitches is one part of it. Keeping track of what you sent, who replied, who needs a follow-up.

I send three follow-ups if a contact doesn’t reply. I also want to know who said no, who said “not right now,” who is warm.

This is where I use Claude.

At the end of each week, I pull my sent mail for every email with “Mia Macnair x” in the subject. It’s designed to be searchable. I run Claude through my Gmail sent folder and have it extract every brand I pitched: the brand name, the contact name, the email address, and whether there was a reply in the thread.

Claude then organizes the whole list:

• Which brands replied — and what they actually said

• Which ones came back warm versus sent an auto-response

• Which ones I followed up with and which ones are still sitting cold

• Who said a hard no versus a “keep us in mind in (month)”

It does this every week on a Saturday, so when Monday comes around I know exactly who I need to follow up with, who’s interested, and I have an itemized to-do list ready to go. Without this, conversations get lost. A warm lead goes cold because you got busy and assumed you’d remember. You don’t!!

My favourite hack for when a brand says they don’t have campaigns running right now but might in two to three months: I use Gmail’s “Remind Me” tool. I’ll set the email to resurface on a specific date when I want to reach back out. You can also schedule a follow-up email in advance for that date if you’re worried you’ll forget.

The biggest thing for me is how easily I can take the mental load off myself so I can stay on top of things without actually having to stay on top of everything. It’s just a system running in the background.

I know myself. I don’t have the bandwidth to remember all of this. That’s not a bad thing. You just have to know that about yourself and figure out the best way to move forward.

How to set this up yourself

Step 1: Download Claude for desktop and connect your Gmail.

You need the Claude desktop app not just the browser version. Download it at claude.ai, then go into Settings and connect your Gmail account under integrations. This is what gives Claude actual access to your inbox and sent mail. Without the Gmail connection, none of the tracking works.

Step 2: Set up a scheduled task.

In Claude desktop, you can schedule tasks to run automatically at a specific time each week. Go to the scheduled tasks section and create a new task with your chosen day and time. I run mine every Saturday. By Sunday morning the output is sitting there ready, and I know exactly what my Monday looks like before the week even starts.

Step 3: Write your prompt.

This is the part that matters most. The more specific you are, the more useful the output. Here’s the prompt — copy it, swap in your name, and adjust from there:

Every week, search my Gmail sent folder for emails with “[YOUR NAME] x” in the subject line sent in the last 7 days. For each email thread, extract: the brand name, the contact’s first name, the email address I sent to, and whether the brand replied. Then organize the results into three groups:

1. Brands that replied — note what they said and flag whether it’s warm, neutral, or a no 2. Brands that need a first follow-up (no reply, sent 3+ days ago) 3. Brands that need a second or third follow-up

Output a clean organized list by category. Flag any warm replies at the top.

What the output looks like.

Every Saturday night I get a list: here’s who replied and what they said, here’s who needs a follow-up Monday, here’s who’s gone cold and might need a re-pitch. I wake up Monday and I already know what to do. No inbox scramble, no forgotten threads, no warm leads that died because I got busy.

One thing you have to do for this to work: use a consistent subject line format from day one. If your emails are all over the place, Claude can’t reliably pull them. My format — [Name] x [Brand]. Pick your format before you send your first pitch and don’t change it. It’s a tiny habit with a big payoff once you’re running volume.

The follow-up cadence

Most deals don’t happen on the first email. I follow up three times: first follow-up three days after the original pitch, second follow-up three days after that, third about a week after. After three touches I let it go, but I’ll reach back out in a few months.

The follow-up is not “just checking in.” That gets ignored. It’s a second pitch, a new angle, a specific content idea, something that gets your email resurfaced in their inbox and gives them an actual reason to respond. Right now with back-to-school casting happening, a follow-up that references the season specifically performs way better than a generic nudge.

One scheduling tip that’s made a real difference: I send my pitches Monday through Wednesday rather than spreading them across the whole week. Open rates are higher earlier in the week, and spacing them out at different times through the day means Gmail doesn’t flag your account as spam. Small thing. Worth doing.

What this looks like as data

The reason I can tell you I reached out to 50 hotels and travel brands for my Toronto trip and got three partnerships is because I know the exact number. I’m not estimating. I tracked it.

Knowing your numbers tells you things. It tells you which categories reply more than others. It tells you if your reply rate is going up or down. Without tracking, you’re flying blind and almost everyone is flying blind, which is exactly why most people give up after two weeks of outreach and assume pitching doesn’t work.

50 pitches sounds enormous until you break it down: 10 emails a day over 5 days. Claude handles the tracking and organization on the backend, so you’re not also trying to remember who you’ve already talked to, when you sent what, and what they said back.

The payoff

If you’re a paid subscriber, you already know where this system goes: every Tuesday I publish the Creator Job Board — 15-20 brands (sometimes 40, depends on the week) I’ve personally pitched, with the actual contact name and email address, real notes on the brand, and a specific content angle you can pitch them today. That board is built entirely on this process.

The board exists because the tracking system exists. You can’t put out researched brand contacts on a Tuesday deadline without a backend that’s actually organized.

Start tracking your outreach!!!

— Mia xx

I want to be upfront, though: I would not call myself an expert on Substack growth. I’m someone who is genuinely obsessed with this, has done a ton of research on it, and is still figuring it out in real time, but I have got a ton of questions on my strategy. I’m still seeing organic, consistent growth, so I’m going to keep building on what’s working.

Everything starts with the funnel

If you take one thing from this post, take this: growth on Substack is a funnel, and you should implement this across all social platforms.

• Get as many eyeballs as possible

• Convert those people into new subscribers

• Nurture those subscribers into paid subscribers

That’s it in a nutshell. Every decision I make — what I post, where I post it, what I gate behind a paywall — gets run through my funnel.

As you guys know, I’m obsessed with analytics, and that’s the biggest thing I do for consistent week-over-week and month-over-month growth: I actually look at it. Go into your Substack dashboard, click into Audience Growth, and check it. I do this every 7 days, and I’m specifically looking at where I’m getting unique visitors, new subscribers, and new revenue — and which source each one is coming from. If you’re not checking this weekly, you’re flying blind.

Don’t just start posting — build a lead magnet first

If you’re thinking about starting a newsletter or a Substack right now, I actually wouldn’t recommend just starting one and posting. What I’d recommend instead is building a lead magnet first.

A lead magnet is something people can download for free in exchange for their email. I pushed mine hard and built my subscriber list to about 2,000 people before I ever published a single email on Substack. The logic here is simple: I wanted the most effort for the return I was going to get. There’s no point putting a ton of work into a post if you’re writing it for two people.

Once your list hits a number you’re comfortable with — for me it was 2,000, but it could be 1,000, it’s completely up to you — that’s when you start moving people onto Substack. Here’s exactly what I did: I downloaded a CSV of my list, used Pillar (my LinkedIn bio tool) to push the lead magnet hard, and then moved everyone over from that lead magnet into a real subscriber list on Substack.

One more thing on this: your lead magnet should be directly tied to what you’re actually going to write about. Mine was a bundle of email templates for creators. That meant everyone who downloaded it was already an aspiring or working content creator — exactly the audience that would get real value from the content I was about to publish. If your lead magnet and your newsletter don’t match, you’re building a list that won’t convert.

Find your highest-converting content, then make it recurring

Once I had people in the door, I needed to figure out what actually converted them into paid subscribers. For me, that’s the Creator Job Board.

I always knew the Job Board was going to be paid. It’s consistent, so people know exactly what to expect from it every week. It’s something I can produce over and over again without running out of ideas, and it gives me my highest engagement of anything I post.

The lesson here isn’t “go build a job board.” It’s this: find the one piece of content in your niche that converts the best, and then repeat it, over and over, until it’s recurring. That repeatability is what turns one good post into an actual growth engine.

The churn problem nobody warns you about

Here’s the part I want to be really honest about, because I think it’s the most useful thing in this whole post.

The Job Board also gave me my highest churn rate. I had a 7-day free trial running, and people figured out they could grab a week of paid content — hundreds and hundreds of emails worth — take everything they wanted, and unsubscribe right after. They weren’t paying me anything. They were just collecting and leaving.

I had to find a workaround. I ended up taking away the free trial, because people were getting access to way too much value for free and bailing the second the trial ended.

But that created a new problem: the Job Board was great at getting people in the door, but I needed something to actually keep them once they were in. That’s why I introduced the Weekly Debrief — a deeper, more in-depth piece that goes out alongside the board. It doesn’t convert nearly as well as the Job Board does. But it’s packed with value that it’s become the thing that keeps people subscribed and coming back to my page.

So now I think of it as two different jobs: the Job Board is for acquisition, the Debrief is for retention. Don’t expect one piece of content to do both. Figure out what’s pulling people in and what’s actually keeping them — they’re not always the same thing.

What’s actually working on social (and what isn’t)

I’ve tested a lot here, so let me save you some time.

Substack Notes has not worked for me. I’ve tried a bunch of different approaches, and I just haven’t found growth or engagement there. I wish it worked. It doesn’t, at least not for my account.

What has worked: Threads. I recently started posting there. I’ve gotten a lot of new viewers specifically through Threads. I’ve noticed way better engagement and conversion from Threads than I get from posting on Instagram or TikTok and linking back to Substack, or from my Link in bio.

The takeaway isn’t “post on Threads instead of Notes.” It’s: be strategic about where you’re spending your energy. Find your niche, find what’s actually converting, and put your effort there instead of spreading it evenly across every platform because you’re “supposed to.”

Build the habit of reading your stats like it’s part of the job

Substack actually gives you a ton of data — how many people are recommending you, what your audience looks like, what your retention is. Pay attention to where your traffic is actually coming from.

For me, my number one traffic source is email opens (kind of obvious). After that, it’s sharing direct links, which then convert into paid subscribers.

If you’re seeing a lot of fluctuation in your numbers, don’t just stare at the dashboard — go to your unsubscribe page. That page will tell you exactly who left and, often, why. Sometimes it’s price. Sometimes it’s not enough content. Sometimes it’s the type of content. People will I sometimes leave comments. That feedback is some of the most useful data you’ll get.

The bigger pattern across all of this: the more you post on social, the more your name is out there, the more eyeballs find your page — and that genuinely moves your account. There’s no replacing visibility.

Where I’m at right now, honestly

I want to close with where things actually stand for me, because I think the honest version is more useful than the highlight reel.

I’ve had a bit of a downfall in consistency recently, and I’m working to climb back. My open rates used to sit at 50-60%. Right now they’re sitting around 30-35%, which is tough — genuinely tough. But the answer isn’t to panic, it’s to do the same thing I do every week: go back into the stats, figure out what’s actually performing right now, and find a way to recreate it, optimize it, or change it so it works again.

That’s really the whole strategy, end to end: build the funnel (eyeballs → subscribers → paid), build the right lead magnet to start it, find the type of content that converts best and make it recurring, build something separate to actually retain people once they’re in, and then check your stats constantly so you know what’s working before it stops working.

I’m still learning a lot of this as I go. But it’s working, and I wanted to share exactly how.

— Mia xx

Quick debrief before we get into it.

Brands are already casting for back-to-school. These partnerships go live in August — not September. By the time school actually starts, the content is already filmed, edited, and posted. So if you’re in a niche that touches anything a student would buy — bags, snacks, eyewear, coffee, activewear, jewelry, dorm supplies — this is the window. You need to be pitching and locking in right now, not in three weeks when everyone else has the same idea.

If back-to-school isn’t your niche, Start pitching fall content instead.

On actual content ideas you can pitch right now: “what’s in my college bag” works for any bag, accessory, or snack brand and it’s performing all over TikTok. Study setup and dorm desk tour content is massive right now, especially if you can tie in blue light glasses, a planner, a coffee brand, any tech. Morning routine before class is consistent for skincare, coffee, and fashion. Pick one format and name it explicitly in your pitch email — “I want to do a ‘what’s in my college bag’ video featuring your [specific product]” is a completely different email than “I’d love to collab.’

The other thing: stop pitching a single post. I mean this especially the second time you negotiate with a brand. Some brands will test you on a one-off first — that’s fine, let them. But from day one, plant the seed for something longer. When you go back for round two, that’s when you push for the package: a quarter, a series, multiple deliverables. More money for you, same or less outreach on your end. Build the relationship first, then build the package around it.

Okay — clock in.

This Week’s Creator Job Board — 20 Brands

Brixley Bags , Bryan Anthonys , Melinda Maria , FYTOO , Cactus Club Cafe, Olive & Piper, Cavalinho, Kits.com, Rosso Coffee, FlightHub, Busbud, CarryU, Rather Green, Tubby Todd Bath Co., RIND Snacks, Crocs, Ekster, Adanola, Trtl Travel, Anthropologie — 20 Brands Total.

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I had to put my phone down (I threw it across the room)

And first — if you’re here from Threads, hi. Come in, sit down. I did not realize how engaged that community was until this week, and I’m genuinely so happy you found me here. There are so many of you with so many good questions, and I want to actually answer them properly. So consider this the long in depth version.

The problem with SO many creators is that you’ve never been taught how to negotiate. Nobody teaches this because, unfortunately, this industry is full of gatekeeping. So today we’re fixing that. We’re talking about how to raise your rates, how to hold your negotiating power, how to figure out what your number even is, and how to stop leaving thousands of dollars on the table because you were too scared to negotiate.

The one rule: whoever says the number first loses

This is the single most-asked question in my inbox: how do I avoid being the one who says a number?

It’s just the most important habit you can build. The rule, the one they teach in actual sales training, is this: whoever says the number first loses. (Yes, there are always exceptions, and nothing is definitive)

Here’s why it you never wanna blurt out a number — I want you to understand the WHY, because you need to comprehend this during negotiation and I’m a nerd who loves to go deep, especially when it comes to money and psychology.

When you say a number first, one of two things happens. Either you go too high and you scare them off or get screened out before negotiation even starts — or, way more common, you go too low and you’ve just capped yourself. You said $300. They had $800 sitting in the budget for this. They are not going to correct you. They’re going to say “perfect!” and keep the other $500 to reallocate to another creator.

The deeper issue is information. The brand almost always knows something you don’t: they have a budget. A number their CFO (chief financial officer) approved, a range they’re working inside. You’re walking into the conversation blind, guessing — which is hard to win from.

How to actually get the brand to give budget first

The phrase brands love to open with is some version of: “What are your rates?”

Most creators fold instantly because they just want to seem easy to work with. Don’t fold. Redirect!!

Here’s the line I use:

“I’d love to put together a quote for you! My rates fluctuate depending on the SOW. Are you able to share the deliverables, usage, and the budget you’re working with for this campaign?”

Notice what this does: it keeps the conversation warm. You’re not refusing to talk money — you’re getting the full scope of work. Big difference. You come across as someone who’s done this before, which, side note, is half of negotiation. Confidence reads as experience, and experience reads as “worth paying.”

You ask the budget question, then do not rush to overcompensate and say “but I’m flexible!” or “it can be whatever works for you!” This is a technique used in salary negotiations to make the other side bump their offer without you saying a word. It works because most people cannot tolerate an awkward silence (this works SO much better on a call) and will start sweetening the deal just to end it.

So: redirect, ask for their budget, and then shut the f*$k up!!

The redirect works until the brand pushes back. And they will. “We don’t have a set budget, what are your rates.” I don’t want you to panic and undershoot by hundreds of dollars.

Here’s what were going to chat about:

• What to say when a brand forces you to name a number first — all things price anchoring.

• The full menu of upsells that takes a $300 video to $1,000 — for zero extra work on your end.

• The exact entry package I send when a brand won’t give me scope, engineered to upsell in the same breath.

• The bundling trick I used when negotiating for creators with +2M followers, so you keep all your leverage.

• How to flip gifted collabs into paid ones — the word-for-word -script

• The mindset shift that gets you to stop apologizing/minimizing for your rates.

This is the stuff that actually scales for business. I would much rather do one video for $1,000 than ten videos for $100 because you can scale 10x as quickly!! so grab your pen and paper and take some notes.

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And here’s what I figured out, mostly by getting it wrong first: the work that actually pays you isn’t about being the prettiest girl on the feed, and it is not about your follower count. It’s about social proof and conversion.

I had one cheat code most creators starting out don’t have. Before I was ever pitching brands for myself, I’d been on the other side of the inbox. I sat in the brand seat. First, doing social media management. Understanding how to create branded content that leads to sales.

Then, influencer marketing, reading creator pitches, deciding budgets, choosing who got hired. I’ve worked on organic social and content for skincare brands, on full social strategy and UGC for paid ads. I’ve also managed and pitched on behalf of other creators, negotiating their rates for them. Brand side, talent side, creator side. Three seats, same industry.

So when I tell you what gets someone hired, I’m not guessing. I’ve literally been the person deciding.

And the single biggest thing is your portfolio and how well you can paint a picture. If you don’t have a good portfolio, landing partnerships is brutally hard. If you do have a good one, brands come to you already half-sold. Your portfolio needs to be content-heavy. Less about you. More about proof.

Why your portfolio matters SO much

Brands hire UGC creators to do exactly two things: generate revenue and create social proof. That’s the whole job. If you can do those two things and ignore literally everything else, you become very, very hard to say no to.

When I was on the brand side, those were the only two questions actually running through my head: Can this person make us money? Can this person make us look trusted? Everything else, the cute intro paragraph, the “I’m so passionate about your brand,” was noise (and I honestly would just ignore it).

So here’s my biggest piece of advice: study content that already performs. Recreate it in your own style. Build a portfolio so visual, so obviously built to sell, that saying no to you feels like a mistake the brand will regret.

And underneath all of this, there’s one number that quietly decides how valuable you are.

EMV (earned media value)

EMV is the metric that decides how valuable you are as a creator. In plain terms: it’s the dollar value your content generated for a brand, measured against what that same reach would have cost them in paid advertising.

Say a brand hires you for $1,000 for one video. That video goes out and does the work of a $4,000 ad campaign. You didn’t cost them $1,000 — you made them $3,000. That makes you a 4x EMV creator. And a 4x creator is a good creator, which means a 4x creator gets rehired.

CPM

Some brands will also estimate your CPM, which stands for cost per thousand. The math is some version of your impressions multiplied by an estimated cost-per-thousand, or a flat dollar value assigned to each like, comment, view, or share — for example, a benchmark of roughly $0.10 per like on an Instagram post.

Simpler: Every like, every save, every share has a tiny price tag stapled to it. At the end, they add it all up to see what your post would have cost if they’d had to buy that attention with ad spend instead of earning it through you.

Influencer-created content generated an estimated $236 billion in earned media value in 2024 alone, and that number climbs every single year.

The loop you actually want to be inside

If you’re a creator with high EMV, you get rehired. You get rehired, you get put on retainer. You get on retainer, and suddenly you have the kind of brand relationship that compounds — where the work comes to you instead of you chasing it.

A one-off video that doesn’t perform will rarely get you hired again. And that’s not the brand being cruel. That’s just business. They are not going to rehire someone who can’t generate them revenue.

The brand goes into its quarterly review to discuss marketing budget and what that budget actually produced. Your name comes with a number attached. If that number helped them hit their outcome, you stay. If it didn’t, you’re gone not because they didn’t like you, but because you aren’t making sense for their business. Nobody in that room is thinking about how how pretty your content was.

This is exactly why your portfolio and your content matter more than your follower count.

Most UGC platforms and most brands genuinely do not care how many followers you have. They care whether the content converts. I would rather have a creator with 800 followers and three videos that clearly drove sales than a creator with 80,000 followers and nothing to show for it.

I’ve also watched a real shift: more and more brands are deliberately leaning into smaller creators, because the ROI is so much bigger. They can hire someone smaller for less, get content that converts just as well, and pocket the difference. Small is not the disadvantage you think it is. Sometimes it’s the entire reason you get picked.

What actually needs to be in your portfolio

Keep this stupidly simple. Brands are scrolling through hundreds of these a day, so the easier you make it for them to say yes, the more often they will.

Your portfolio should have:

• Your name. Very minimal text linking to all your socials. Your email. Clean, up top, takes 0.2 seconds to find.

• Then content. Lots of it. Very, very content-heavy, in different formats so they can see range — talking videos, product tutorials, ad-focused content built for paid spend, and organic-style videos that look native to a feed.

Build it like a traditional website, so the brand can scroll it top to bottom like one. The brands hiring you want to see everything in a single scroll — not click through five tabs to find what they are looking for. Canva is my favourite place to make this, and you can do it completely free.

I organize mine by niche, and I’d strongly suggest you do the same. (Exactly how to structure that is one of the first things I break down below and it’s a simple shift that’s gotten me hired fastest.)

List the brands you’ve worked with so far. If you don’t have any yet, that’s completely fine — just add them in as they come. And if you don’t have a single client video to start with: go into your own house, find a few things you genuinely love using, and make content around them. You will have to do some things for free to build this up, and free is not a bad word here. It’s strategy — as long as you’re doing it with intention, not just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks.

I need to be clear about one thing, because there’s a real misconception floating around that this industry is oversaturated, or that there are simply too many creators now to break in. I don’t believe that. I’ve watched too many people prove it wrong to say anything else: if you actually follow a real framework instead of guessing, you can get a brand deal. I know that sounds like a big claim. I’m making it anyway, because I’ve coached creators to success too many times for it to be luck.

I’m going to hand you the actual framework — the part I use, the part that’s gotten my clients and me paid:

• The niche-by-niche portfolio structure that makes it is easy for brands to find what they’re looking for.

• The difference between ad-focused and organic content — and the specific, slightly sneaky way to find out exactly what’s already working for any brand you want to pitch, using a free tool, in under five minutes.

• My exact seven-day, zero-budget plan to build a portfolio that actually converts, from nothing, this week.

• The outreach script I actually send — close to word for word, plus the follow-up and how to find the right person to send it to.

• The three portfolio mistakes I see constantly that tank conversion, even when the content itself is good — including the one that’s costing you all your negotiating power.

Everything above this line is the why. Everything below it is the how. If you’re serious about turning this into actual income instead of a hobby, this is the part that gets you there. If you are a paid sub, send me your portfolio, and I'll tell you exactly what's killing your conversion and what you should change/add!!

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Quick debrief before we get into it.

Brands are going to start looking for creators to lock in back-to-school budgets soon. I have been talking with a TON of brands and a lot have been asking to reach out in July so they can discuss their back to school/ fall campaigns.

Industry-wide, creator content spend is still climbing — IAB has it at $44 billion for 2026, up from $37 billion last year — and a lot of that growth is going to mid-tier/ smaller creators, not just the mega accounts. Brands are also leaning harder on authenticity right now, since it’s the one thing AI-generated content can’t fake, so being a real, responsive human on the other end of an email is worth SOOO much. Please take the time to relationship build.

Okay — clock in.

This Week’s Creator Job Board — 22 Brands

Bur Bur, Made By Mary, RIND snacks, CAIA cosmetics, Strathbury Sam Edelman, Heys + more — 22 Brands Total. LOTS of smaller/ brands you probally haven’t heard of buttt those are typically the brands that pay smaller creators!

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Quick agenda, since this one’s dense: we’re covering SEO — yes, it matters just as much on Instagram and TikTok as it does on Google — exactly how to get your video correctly “read” by the algorithm, caption and hashtag rules that work differently than most people think, and one habit I genuinely believe does more for your reach than any single tactic on this list.

Before I get into it: none of what I’m about to say is going to guarantee you a viral video, or guarantee a video performs well on Instagram or anywhere else. There’s no blanket rule, and nothing works the same for everyone. Trial and error is still the best teacher you have. What I can tell you is what’s worked, consistently, for me and for the creators I manage.

Here’s the fundamental thing to understand before anything else: SEO — search engine optimization — is so, so important on Instagram and TikTok. Both platforms are heavily SEO-operated, the same way Google is. Every time you post, you need to feed the algorithm as many relevant words and phrases as you can, so it actually understands what your content is about and who to show it to.

That’s the part almost everyone skips: the keyword placement, the hidden-text trick I use on literally every video, and the hashtag rules that are completely different on Instagram versus TikTok.

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Quick debrief before we get into it.

This isn’t the usual 18-brand mix,. If hospitality isn’t your lane, the non-hotel local stuff is further down: restaurants, attractions, tours, a few shops, and you can pitch for UGC/Media Stays

Okay — clock in.

The Toronto Job Board — 40 Brands

Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Hyatt Regency Toronto, Gladstone House, InterContinental Toronto Centre, SoHo Hotel Toronto, Le Germain Hotel Toronto Mercer, Old Mill Toronto Hotel, Alt Hotel Toronto Airport, Bisha Hotel Toronto, The Drake Hotel, Stay Inn Suites, The Westin Harbour Castle, The Waterside Inn, Windsor Arms Hotel, Chelsea Hotel Toronto, Easton’s Group of Hotels, Pod-Inn Hotel, Heaven Like Stay, Delta Hotels Toronto, Kimpton Saint George, Ace Hotel Toronto, Westlake Boutique Hotel, Waterfront Hotel Downtown Burlington, Hotel Victoria, The Postmark Hotel, The Jane Toronto, MOCA Toronto, Museum of Illusions Toronto, Casa Loma, Downsview Park, Ontario Place, Vegandale, Niagara Toronto Tours, Palapa Tours, Queen Tour, Secret City Adventures, Bon Voyage, Ode Toronto, Crop Shop Boutique, Sister Golden, — 40 Brands Total

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Quick debrief.

Most brand partnerships close after 5–7 touchpoints. Your follow-up is SO important. I recommend three strategic, well-timed follow-ups after a cold pitch and most creators send exactly zero..

Sending 40 copy-paste pitches gets you 40 ignored emails. Sending 10 pitches with a specific contact name, and a real follow-up cadence gets you deals. The more personalized notes you send, the faster you close — because a pitch that references someone’s actual product launch or current campaign is not going to be ignored.

Two things you should be building pitches around right now: FIFA World Cup 2026 and the summer-to-fall handoff, where brands are locking creators for August and back-to-school.

Okay — clock in.

This Week’s Creator Job Board — 13 Brands

Peace Collective x FIFA World Cup 2026, NEOSTRATA, Vaseline, Bath & Body Works, Fahlo, PINK, Ranger Station, Everyday Dose, Ellips Hair Care, Blaze Beauty, Birch Babe, Isomers, Jofay Fashion, DRMERS CLUB — 13 Brands Total

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If you don’t have one yet, keep reading. I’m covering that too.

Media Kit vs. Portfolio — What’s the Actual Difference?

Genuinely, they’re interchangeable. I use them almost synonymously. But if I had to draw a line: a portfolio is more for UGC work: it’s visual, it’s heavy on content examples, it shows what you can make. A media kit typically has more statistics in it: follower counts, engagement rates, audience demographics, this is tailored more towards influencers.

Call it whatever you want. Just have one.

From my experience, a portfolio or media kit works best when it shows a lot of content, enough that a brand can scroll through it and genuinely picture their product integrated into what you make. A full picture of what working with you looks like.

The more they see you, the easier it is for them to say yes. You are trying to take all the guesswork out of hiring you so that by the time they reach the end of your kit, they already know exactly how the content will turn out, what the quality looks like, and what they can expect.

If they’re left with questions, your media kit hasn’t done its job.

Show Content Range & Variety.

It’s not enough to have a lot of content if it all looks the same. Brands are looking for different things and you don’t know which format they’re going to want until after you’ve already landed the deal.

Your media kit should show:

• Voiceover videos — you’re not on camera, the product is, your voice is directing attention

• Talking-head / testimonial content — you, on camera, speaking directly about a product

• Storytelling content — narrative structure, a problem and a solution, a before and after

• Lifestyle integration — product naturally woven into your day, not a formal review

The more directions they can see you go, the more flexible you seem (flexibility is a HUGE selling point). A brand might come to you wanting one thing and realize mid-scroll that they actually want something else entirely. Your job is to show them all the options.

What Not to Include (Please)

I’m going to be honest with you: nobody reads the About Me section.

I know that’s not what you want to hear if you spent two hours writing yours. But a brand partnerships manager is scanning dozens of kits a week they are not reading your origin story. They’re looking for: can this person make content I can use? Everything in your media kit should answer that question. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t belong there.

Cut these (or make them shortttt):

The Long About Me. One or two sentences is fine. “Vancouver-based lifestyle and beauty creator, 20, known for clean aesthetic and high-retention UGC” — that’s enough. Done.

The “What is UGC?” explainer. If someone is hiring a UGC creator, they know what UGC is. Including a definition makes you look like you’re not sure who you’re talking to.

Mission statements. “My passion is to authentically connect brands with audiences” Don’t use any language that seems like ChatGPT or AI wrote.

Your media kit should be dense with content, not words.

The Stats That Actually Matter

If you have brand deal history, this section is where you win or lose the pitch.

The number most creators don’t know to ask for: your EMV — earned media value. This is how much revenue or value your content generated for the brand relative to what they paid to create it. Some brands track this closely; some don’t. But if you’ve done paid ads for a brand in the past, follow up and ask. Even a rough number (”their ad using my content got a 4x EMV”) is massively more compelling than a follower count.

Other things worth including if you have them:

• Click-through rate on any ads your content was used in

• Organic views on content you posted yourself

• Paid views if the brand boosted your content

• Hook rate / retention if you have access to the analytics (TikTok Creator Marketplace gives you this, some brand portals do too)

If you don’t have any of this yet — that’s okay, we’ll get to that. But the second you start working with brands, start asking for numbers. Performance data is the thing that turns a good portfolio into an undeniable one.

Case Studies: The Thing Nobody Is Doing But Should Be

This is the one I push hardest and the one I see the fewest creators actually use.

A case study is a deeper look at a specific partnership — one brand, one campaign, broken down properly. What were the goals? What did you make? What happened?

Here’s a simple structure:

Brand: [name] Campaign goal: [what were they trying to do — awareness, conversion, launch, etc.] What I created: [format, number of deliverables, usage rights] Results: [views, CTR, ROAS, EMV, repeat bookings — whatever you have]

Even one or two sentences per section is enough. You’re not writing an essay. You’re showing a brand that you understand how content works as a business tool — not just as a piece of creative.

Case studies work because they shift you from “creator for hire” to “strategic partner.” Any creator can make a pretty video. Not every creator can walk a brand through what happened after.

If you’ve worked with a brand more than once, lead with that. Repeat business is the strongest social proof you have.

If You’re Starting From Scratch

No stats. No brand deals. No case study. That’s fine — here’s how to build something real.

Step one: make spec content. Pick three to five brands you genuinely love and create content for them as if you were hired. You do not need to be paid to show what you can make. This is how every creator starts. It fills your portfolio and — if it’s good — sometimes lands you the actual deal when you send it to the brand directly.

Step two: be your own first brand. Film yourself using products you already own. The goal right now is volume and variety. Lighting setups, voiceovers, talking head, lifestyle integration. Show range.

Step three: gifting deals count. If a brand sends you product in exchange for content, that is a real partnership. Log it. Get the content live, screenshot any performance, and add it to your kit. Don’t gatekeep experience from yourself because you weren’t paid cash.

Step four: update constantly. Your media kit is not a thing you make once. It should reflect your best work. I’m consistently adding to my media kit, and I have videos that I created three years ago still in there.

Format and Delivery

I LOVE a live link. Canva websites are free to make and so easy to use.You can hyperlink it in your emails, and it’s easy for the brand to share. Do not make someone download ten separate files. One link, one document, everything in one place.

Length: There’s no rule; I’ve seen a lot of people saying to keep it to two to three pages. I disagree with that. If you’re going for a Canva website, you can make it pretty long. Mine is quite in-depth.

Send it proactively. Don’t wait to be asked. Every pitch email should have it attached or linked.

Your media kit is a sales document.

It should make a brand look at it and think I know exactly what I’m getting not this is a lot of text about someone’s creative journey. Volume of content, real performance data, a case study if you have one, and zero filler.

I’ll be reviewing real media kits live on June 17th in Vancouver. If you want yours looked at!!

— Mia xx

Quick debrief before we get into it.

Q3 budgets opened June 1st. That means right now, brands have fresh unallocated money.

Also Amazon Prime Day just got confirmed for June 23 through June 26. Every beauty, wellness, and lifestyle brand with an Amazon storefront needs content live before Prime Day to build social proof and drive traffic to their listings during the sale. Which means brands are looking for creators and trying to get UGC produced and posted. If you pitch a beauty or wellness brand today say you have a quick turnaround and can produce content before Amazon Prime Day.

And Father’s Day is June 15th. Men’s brands, gifting brands, experience brands — they’re making their final gifting decisions this weekend. There’s also a ton of brands in this job board who just had a new launch and is looking for content!!

Okay — clock in.

This Week’s Creator Job Board — 14 Brands

Good Protein (new launch), Fahlo (paid UGC campaign), Guess Where Trips, Byoma, LUX Skin Lab (new launch), Nuda Sunless, Three Ships Beauty (new launch), MERIT, Dermalogica, Windsor, Edikted, Charcoal, ARMRA, Guru Energy, Maryse — 14 Brands Total

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Where I do all the heavy lifting so you don’t have to. This is your fast track to paid campaigns, PR opportunities, and collaborations that creators spend hours hunting down. Every brand in this list is actively looking for creators right now and has campaigns running.

Think of this as your secret shortcut to the opportunities most creators spend hours or even days digging for. I comb through hundreds of brands to give you a curated list that is ready to act on, so you can focus on the opportunities that will actually move the needle for your business. It’s time to clock in!

Quick debrief before we get into it.

Here’s something I want you to actually sit with for a second. Micro-influencers (creators with between 10K and 100K followers) are now delivering 60% higher engagement rates than mega-influencers, at roughly a tenth of the cost per post. Smaller influencers, which is most of you reading this, consistently outperform every other tier on trust metrics and conversion rates. That’s industry data from 2026 brand studies. The small creator era is SO strong.

So if your follower count isn’t the problem, what is? From what I’m seeing in my own pitches and what brand contacts are telling me — it’s the portfolio and the media kit. Not because you don’t have one, but because most people have one that doesn’t show the right things. I did a TikTok specifically on this: what needs to actually be in your media kit, what brands open versus immediately close, and what makes yours stand out. Watch it HERE before you send a single pitch this week.

The other shift worth knowing: brands in 2026 are moving away from one-off gifted deals toward long-term creator relationships. Which means the goal of your first pitch isn’t just to land free product — it’s to get in front of someone who could become a repeat partner. Plant the seed for a relationship, not just a transaction.

Brands inside this drop [37 total]: SmartSweets, Canada Goose, CSB, Edikted, Naked Wardrobe, Bershka, Babyboo, TELFAR, Kosas Cosmetics, Paula's Choice, Smashbox, Steve Madden, Polène, Wildflower Cases, DJI + more!

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For a long time I was the creator who said yes to the $200 UGC ask because I was scared to lose it. I let brands run my content as paid ads for free because I didn’t know I could charge for usage. And to be honest, sometimes I’m still that creator.

Two days ago I almost said yes to a partnership that was low-balling me — because I genuinely love the brand. I knew the second I signed that contract I was capping every future rate I’d ever get from them. So I turned it down, but I did contemplate it for a while. I’m not gonna lie to you.

This whole industry is about how you position yourself, and the scarcity mindset will cost you more money than any other single mistake you’ll make as a creator. If you are negotiating for yourself (not with a Talent Manager), which means you are trying to do business strategy and find your “self-worth” at the same time, is genuinely a lot and it’s very hard to step away from partnerships when you’re so close and intertwined with them.

This is also why talent managers exist and the reason a manager can negotiate a higher rate than the creator — it’s that the $200 deal doesn’t feel like survival to me (the Talent Manager), the way it feels like survival to you. I can walk away. And if you don’t have a manager, that’s okay. I’m going to teach you how to be that person for yourself.

Once you start negotiating like you have options — like you’re fully booked out, like the brand is lucky to be in your inbox (but still, be humble. Don’t have an ego!!), like the only thing you actually care about is making good content — that’s when you start making real money. It is genuinely that simple. And genuinely that hard.

So today: a long, honest piece about money!! The state of the industry right now, why most of us are leaving so much on the table, and the specific moves to actually stop. Settle in xx

The State of the Creator Economy

Okay so this is the data section. Stay with me here. Numbers are important, and an educated creator is a powerful creator.

The creator economy is now a $33 billion industry, up from under $10 billion in 2020. To put that in context: that’s more money than the global recorded music industry made last year. 74% of brands moved budget INTO creator programs in 2026. There is more money flowing into our work right now than at any point in the history of being a person on the internet.

And yet.

78% of creators report burnout. 58% can’t figure out monetization. Over half of all creators earn less than $15,000 a year. The top 10% of creators take 62% of all ad payments — three years ago, that number was 53%. The gap is widening, and extremely fast.

So the question you’re probably asking yourself, sitting there with a $200 brand offer in your inbox, is: well, where IS all that money, and why is none of it being offered to me?

Don’t worry. I have answers.

The middle is winning. Micro and nano creators are now capturing 45.5% of total influencer spend. Brands have actively walked away from mega-celebrities because the ROI just wasn’t there. If you have anywhere from 5K to 500K followers and you’re operating like a small business — meaning you have a strategy, you have systems, and you’re making content that’s actually good — the wind is genuinely at your back.

If you’re OVER 500K: the money is still very much there. I managed creators with 2M+ followers who are crushing it. But the strategy is different. At that scale, our strategy is focusing on very long-term partnerships, creating product launches, equity-based partnerships

79% of marketers say ROI is their #1 challenge with creator marketing — which means the creator who can show data is the creator who gets re-booked. This is also why you’re seeing so many Story-only partnerships right now: brands are using Stories as a low-cost test before they commit to bigger spends.

Trust is why creators get paid. I know you’ve heard this a million times but here’s the data. 91.9% of creators are now using AI tools, while consumer enthusiasm for AI-generated content fell from 60% to 26% in two years. The audiences are tired. They can smell the ChatGPT brain rot scripts. Every creator is using the same five frameworks to make the same videos, and audiences are not stupid.

The creators making the money you want to make have one thing in common: their audience feels like they actually KNOW them.

Every burned-out creator I’ve talked to this year has one thing in common: one revenue stream. You’re working four times harder than you should be for a $200 brand deal — because that one deal is the only thing standing between you and a bad month. The creators NOT burning out have four to seven streams running at once.

Here’s the Part I Really Want You to Hear

The variable that decides which side of the gap you end up on isn’t talent. Isn’t follower count. Isn’t aesthetic. Isn’t even hard work.

The variable is how you’ve structured your business, the mindset you negotiate from, and how well you can sell a product.

Business is a mindset. Negotiation is an art. And if you’re coming at every pitch from scarcity — terrified of losing the $400 deal — you are never going to be in a position to land the $4,000 one.

The creators taking that 62% of the money are not better than you. They are not even necessarily more talented than you. They just decided, somewhere along the way, to negotiate like they have options and to actually build a business underneath the content.

There is one more piece of this that almost nobody is doing the math on. If you have a talent manager, your “wins” get smaller a lot faster than you think. Do the math with me:

You negotiate a $2,000 brand deal. Feels great.
→ 20% goes to your agency (you’re at $1,600)
→ Then 20–40% goes to taxes, depending on your bracket.
→ If you’re in the 40% bracket and you have an agency, you are taking home roughly $800 from a $2,000 deal.

So when a brand DMs and offers $2,000 and your gut says *”oh wow that’s so much,” it’s not so much. It’s $800. And $800 for a Reel + a Story + usage rights + a week of back-and-forth emails. Let’s be honest, maybe not as exciting as the $2,000 invoice made it look.

This is exactly why creators with managers learn to negotiate harder. The math has to be done with the agency cut and the tax cut already baked in. You better make sure your take-home is worth the work.

The good news: monetization, negotiation, strategy are all learnable. The reason most creators never figure it out is just that nobody has handed them the tools. So if that’s where you are, here are some tools. If you already have some of this figured out, here are some tools to sharpen the edges.

What you’re Going to Learn in this Newsletter:

→ The income streams I actually use to make this a real career (some of my favorites, and how to succeed).

→ The 3 pricing mistakes that most creators are making.

→ The tentpole calendar for June and July what types of brands are casting, what to pitch, and exactly when the windows close. If you don’t know what a tentpole campaign is, I will explain that too!!

Every paid subscriber gets ongoing pitch help from me. Reply to any post or send me an email with a pitch you’re working on — cold outreach, follow-up, rate negotiation, anything and I’ll send it back with the specific edits to make it better.

If you’re already paid: keep reading, thank you for being here xx

If you’re not yet one paid brand deal at literally any reasonable industry rate covers your annual subscription many times over. The math is mathing.

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Good morning. It’s time to clock in. I got so sick over the weekend and have been sitting on my couch. Lucky for you guys, you’re getting a lot of brands this week as I’ve been doing a ton of pitching. I’m giving you 44 brands this week because I’ve literally had nothing else to do besides being curled up in blankets with a cup of tea on my computer. Also, lucky for you, I’ve been getting lots of responses, so I’m very in the know right now with what brands are currently casting and exactly what they’re looking for so the notes under each brand are a little bit more in-depth this week!

And to debrief a little bit, there’s a structural shift you should know about. Brands are moving away from the old “annual budget lock” model toward quarterly reallocation. In plain English — they’re reserving 25-30% of their creator spend as flexible mid-year capital, and right now is when that money starts deploying. Q3 budgets are also opening as we speak.

A lot of these brands right now are doing paid partnerships, and if you land even one paid partnership for $300, this Substack just paid for itself for two years. The math is mathing (And not even girl math. This is legitimately good ROI)

Okay let’s clock in.

This Week’s Creator Job Board — 44 Brands

SKIMS, Anthropologie, DSW (Designer Shoe Warehouse) JW PEI, Spell, ESPA, Il Makiage, Bali Body, Kookaï, Petal & Pup, Runaway The Label, Pleasing, Front Row (JLo Beauty), Lush, Manebí, Tocco Toscano, Simons, Ogee, Pacifica, Nine West, Yves Rocher, Kit and Ace, Dynamite, Garage, Simmi London, Charcoal Clothing, That's So Fetch, PÜR Beauty, Flourish Pancakes, Inspired Go, Snowbank Brands, LUX Skin Lab, BC Laser and Skincare Clinic, Dairy Boy, Phin Skin, Iho Skin, Purplle, Elhora, Cinnabar Green, Namaste Jewelry, Mikash Skincare, House of Savoy, Beauty Court.

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