Why Creators Publicly Sharing Their Income Is BS

The $100 MBA Show

Host Omar Zinhome challenges the popular creator trend of publicly sharing business income, arguing that it attracts competitors and shifts

Key takeaways

• Publicly sharing revenue metrics functions as ego-led marketing that fails to demonstrate how a product solves customer problems
• Effective messaging requires laser focus on a specific audience's pain points rather than broad, vanilla positioning

Main topics

• Creator economy income transparency trends
• Value-based marketing fundamentals

Notable quotes

"If you're publicly sharing your revenue and calling it marketing, you can attract the wrong customer, lose leverage with their competitors, and worst of all, make ego-led decisions instead of customer-led decisions."

Conclusion

The episode delivers a practical blueprint for shifting from vanity-dr

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) If you're publicly sharing your revenue and calling it marketing, you can attract the wrong customer, lose leverage with their competitors, and worst of all, make ego-led decisions instead of customer-led decisions. The problem is it feels like marketing, but it usually doesn't clearly show how you help your customers. You see, every public action is a signal. It's something that you're communicating. So instead of broadcasting your metrics online, show the real problem you solve. Give real examples of how your product or service helps your customers. Today, I'm going to show you the difference between marketing that signals income or status and marketing that actually communicates value to move your customers through the buying journey. Speaker 1 (0:48) Welcome back to the $100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Speaker 1 (1:01) Hey, if this show has helped you in any way, leave me a quick review wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps us reach even more people who need the same no-fluff practical business advice. It literally takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey. Listen, I get it. Creators share their income online because it feels like an easy way to market, to share your journey, to show how you're building your business. Building in public, they call it. But today, I want to show you that this is actually not helping you. It's not actually helping your customers understand the value that you offer. Think about it for a second. By posting how much money your company made this year, who is it attracting? Who are you even talking to? Your competitors, your colleagues, your customers don't really care about that. What they really care about is how you can help solve their problems with your product or service. And in fact, by showing off your metrics, it can shoot you in the foot and customers might feel like you're just boasting and you're not about actually helping customers, you're not putting them first. Think about the last restaurant that you went to and why you went to it. You probably went on Google, read the reviews, and the reviews said something like the food was great, the service was amazing, I really enjoyed the desserts, maybe they gave you some recommendations. No one said this restaurant made $3 million in revenue last year, and that's why I came. No, that's not any value to you. What you want to know is is it worth you going to this restaurant for your anniversary, for a party, for a special occasion. You want to make sure that you're choosing the right restaurant for the best experience. And that's really what matters. The experience that you're offering your customers. So where does sharing your income publicly start? Well, back in 2012, business education businesses, like people selling online courses, started sharing their income. They wanted to show people that, hey, building a business makes you money online. The intent of it was to make people feel like building businesses or selling courses is possible and actually can make you money. But it started to shift away from a feeling of being inspired to really just showing off. At the start, it is inspiring to see a creator make $5,000 a month or $10,000 a month or $20,000 a month. But once the creator hits $100,000 a month, it starts to feel less relatable. This trend then moved into the SaaS space, the software as a service space, where there was actually a company called BareMetrics, I think they're still around, where companies would show their actual revenue that they made in Stripe and share publicly to see how much money they're making every month, every year. even their churnery. I know this for a second because I was in the height of that moment when I was building my company, Webinar Ninja, my software company. And I got to be honest with you, a lot of those companies that I was looking at and comparing myself to are now out of business. And the reason why that happened is because they called that marketing. But in reality, it's just low effort marketing. You're not really showing what you can do for the customer. In my software company, Webinar Ninja, we didn't use this type of marketing. We didn't try to show off our revenue to attract customers because I just felt like it didn't make any sense. And we did something instead, which I'll share with you today, to quickly get in front of our audience and start to grow our actual business and sell our actual product to the people that actually need it. So how do we do this? Well, let's start with step one, which we're going to go back to marketing basics. You've got to get in front of your audience and understand what values they have, what they actually want. Once you know that, you can then start to create content and information and ads and everything to show that value, to show what they actually care about and how your business, how your product does that for them. You've got to be laser focused about this. You have to clearly... articulate. What do you actually do? What problems do you solve? What are you doing to help solve those problems? And who are you solving it for? Effective marketing is talking to the right person and giving them the right message so they feel like they're being seen. They feel like, yes, this is exactly what I'm going through. This is exactly my problem. Oh, there's a solution for it. One thing that you learn in marketing, if you've been doing it for as long as I have, is that The better you describe a problem, automatically the person that's hearing this feels like you have the solution. They just assume that if you know this problem so well and you're able to articulate it so well, then you must understand how to solve this. And here's the secret of business is that you don't really need to solve the problem immediately. You just need to understand the problem first. Because by knowing the problem, then you can create the solution. And this is an easy way for you to actually sell something that people want. All right. A lot of people, they actually just create solutions without any problems, right? They create a product that has no real problem. They're like trying to create something great in the world that no one asked for, right? It's not really serving any need. So true marketing really starts with the problem, understanding a problem that