The Secret of Treating Your Creator Business as a Startup

Planning 2026 based on Peter Thiel's "Zero to One"

I’ve recently been reading “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel.

If you haven’t heard of the book, it’s essentially a guide to key principles for building a successful startup, based on Peter’s experience building PayPal and serving as an early-stage investor in companies like Facebook, Stripe, SpaceX, Palantir, and many more.

It’s an essential read for any startup founder or entrepreneur, and many of its principles are directly applicable to anyone in the creator economy trying to build a successful brand and business.

What makes Zero to One so powerful is that it reframes how you see what you’re building. Thiel teaches both how to build a successful startup and, more importantly, how to think like a founder. Once you apply these principles to the creator economy, you begin to separate yourself from the sea of copycat creators “working on their offer” or hacking the algorithm with surface-level growth tactics instead of building something truly differentiated.

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Your Creator Business Is A Startup - And You Are The Founder

The more you can see yourself as the founder of your own startup (your personal brand and creator business), the more successful you will be in the creator space.

When you shift your identity from “trying to build a personal brand” or “just creating some content and some offers” to “I am the founder of XYZ company and my personal brand is my greatest point of leverage,” you begin to play the game completely differently.

You start seeing the bigger picture. You begin thinking in longer time horizons. You start building your business around the principles startups use to create exponential returns (like moats, network effects, & economies of scale) instead of tactics platitude-master creators use to build a following (like commenting 100 times a day - YUCK).

But just seeing the game clearly isn’t enough. Most creators never break through to the level they aspire because they never combine their vision with a real, tangible plan.

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My First Well-Executed Long-Term Plan

Back in 2023, I was planning to launch my first cohort.

I had been a ghostwriter for about a year, was working with a few performance-coaching clients, and had participated in a few cohorts as a student.

I was ready to take the next step and launch my own. I had the brand-building, marketing, and performance coaching experience under my belt. Now, I just had to figure out how to market, position, and build a cohort.

From September through January, I executed a 3-month plan to launch my first cohort, “The Creator Performance Cohort” (in hindsight, kind of a sh*tty name haha).

I built a world-class free performance course for creators, launched it on Twitter, and got over 120k views, 500 downloads, and 500 leads. A few weeks later, I launched the full cohort around Black Friday on building a brand and business in the creator economy through the lens of performance and systems.

The cohort did $23k in revenue. Not bad for a first launch. With this move, I transcended the freelancing trap and solidified myself as an entrepreneur. But it was the 3 months of planning and execution of a strategy that led to the cohort’s success, not constantly “working on my offer.”

Looking back, the reason it worked was that I approached it the same way a founder approaches a startup: with a clear plan, a defined outcome, and the belief that the future could be shaped through deliberate action. This is exactly what Thiel is talking about in Zero to One.

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Why Most Startups (and Creators) Fail

A common principle in the startup world is to “stay lean and flexible.” Thiel says this is code for “unplanned.” The line of thinking that follows is that iteration, flexibility, and experimentation are more valuable than planning.

But Thiel says the opposite is actually true:

“A bad plan is better than no plan.”

Thiel says as a startup, you NEED to plan constantly, as the future that you are trying to plan for is malleable and more under your control than you think. Planning matters because the future is not random. It’s shaped by those willing to form a definite view of what it should look like and commit to making it real.

Steve Jobs shared a similar sentiment:

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you, and you can change it, influence it, build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

While most of startup culture prioritizes adaptability and iteration, the true business Titans, like Jobs, Thiel, Bezos, Buffett, and Musk, prioritize vision and planning.

On a similar note, most creators stay in the experimentation phase for far too long without ever taking the next step to solidify themselves as true entrepreneurs.

They trust their future will be better than it is now (what Thiel calls “indefinite optimism”), but they lack the conviction and resoluteness to create a plan and stick to it (“definite optimism”).

• “I’m just testing my offer.”

• “I’m just trying to create content consistently.”

• “I don’t want to monetize, I’m just having fun.”

This is fine in the beginning, but if you want to go to the next level (I’m talking full-time income, influence, and leverage), you have to start thinking more like Steve Jobs and Peter Thiel, and less like a Money Twitter influencer who grows an audience by telling people how to grow an audience - lol.

To think more like Jobs and Thiel, you have to start planning like them.

Let’s talk about how:

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Creating a Plan for 2026

As a creator, I see 3 key pillars when creating a plan.

Of course, there is much nuance for each person’s brand and business, but these principles will be a good starting place.

1. Define a clear goal

As we learned from Thiel, any successful founder or company needs a plan to create their vision for the future.

Without a plan, you will drift aimlessly without direction.

But to create a plan, you first need a goal.

A goal creates direction. A goal reveals priority actions. A goal reshapes your identity to become the type of person who achieves the goal as a byproduct of how you see yourself.

As you enter 2026, you should have one clear, defined goal for your brand and business.

• Hitting your first $10k month

• Creating $5k/month of recurring revenue

• Growing your brand to 10k followers

Take the time to think about this, as all your actions throughout the year will be downstream of your goal.

2. Define your levers

Once you have a clear goal, you simply have to reverse engineer the levers to pull (actions) each day so that the goal will manifest.

As a broad outline for creating your levers, I like to use “The 5-Lever System.”

1. Build products, services, & assets

2. Create long-form and short-form content

3. Distribute your content to your network so you can grow

4. Network to expand your luck surface area, create alliances, and sell offers

5. Study to expand your mind and skillset to increase your value in the market

Once you have a clear goal, your reverse-engineered levers should become obvious.

I’d recommend making sure you cover all five of these bases when doing so.

I outline the 5-lever system in more depth in our free course and community, CreatorLaunch.

3. Define your pivot and expansion points

This is a key differentiator between creators who stay in the freelancing or coaching cycle and those who transcend 1:1 work and access real leverage.

You need to take the time to map out your entire brand vision and plan your pivots and expansions to higher points of leverage that capture a larger pool of the market.

Sure, it will change as you go, but as Thiel said, “a bad plan is better than no plan.”

I personally like to do this in Figma, in a notebook, or on a whiteboard (the best).

Think about these questions as you plan your brand and business expansion for 2026:

• What social media platforms do I want to dominate, and what type of content cadence do I think is the way to make this happen?

• What is my highest-leverage path to monetization, and how can I turn it into leveraged income rather than trading my time?

• What curriculums can I cross multiply to multiple areas?

• What free community can you create that leads to a mid-ticket course or community, which then leads to a higher-ticket offer?

• How can you maximize the number of people who enter your free community?

• Can you expand to different niches or even physical offerings (retreats, events, workshops)? (Btw - Bezos started by dominating the book market, but his secret vision was always to become the everything store)

• What roles do I need on my team to allow the business to expand, and who do I know who can fill these roles?

The questions can go on and on, and they will present themselves as you take the time to outline the vision for your digital ecosystem, or what I call “Your Digital Universe.”

Your Digital Universe

For a short period, I was a brand and marketing consultant for Aubrey Marcus.

I came into his operation to help with content strategy and create a marketing gameplan for his upcoming book and portfolio of businesses. Long story short, I left after a few months because I simply hate working for other people.

Now, I consult creators independently with the same strategies I used for Aubrey (among Dan Koe, Nick Sweeney, and many others).

I usually only work with creators in larger containers (like our Creator Accelerator Program or Conscious Creators Skool).

But through the end of the year, I’m opening up 60-minute brand and business vision calls for creators who want to go to the next level in 2026.

I usually charge $500 for these calls, but through January 1, you can book a call for just $199.

In 60 minutes, we will create a strategy to grow your brand, define your highest leverage path to monetization and scaling, and outline your ecosystem of offers and services (which I call your “Digital Universe”).

You will enter 2026 with more clarity than ever before.

You can book a time to chat here:

https://calendly.com/jackmoses808/vision-call

Thanks for reading, happ[y planning, and until next time.

Jack

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And if you’re interested…