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Amanda Northcutt, founder and CEO of Level Up Creators. Level Up Creators

"The vast majority of my professional life was comprised of lots of fun incidents," starts Amanda Northcutt, founder and CEO of Level Up Creators. "My career path is extremely irregular and non-linear. But that tends to be the path of most people. We tend to end up in the place we're supposed as long as we're being intentional and strategic."

The family jokes that she never spoke until my brother went to university. "My brother's an extremely well-known lawyer, but his practice took over most of the airspace within the home. He started college when I was fourteen and was about to enter high school. I began to come into my own as that airspace was readily available within the home."

Amanda's first job was at an online shoe shop. "Everyone believed that I'd fail miserably because I was very shy. I completely came out of my shell, and I began selling shoes with aplomb with record sales across the nation. I loved it! I was enthralled by business around the age of 16 so I knew at this point that's what I wanted to pursue."

In the following years, Amanda attended university and connected with a fellow student who was starting a website and required someone to market advertising on the site. "This was in 2005 when the selling of online ads was similar to banner ads. It was as if you were selling air! I heard the word "no often and got past any apprehension of selling to others quickly," she recalls.

In the process of being tossed into the deep of the

"I learned my craft by being thrown into the deep end," she continues. "I took that small selling gig into a larger sales position at a small company named TexAgs.com and was there for more than a decade. This is where I learned the most about business." At this point, she figured out the membership model, recurring revenue, adding value, increasing LTV, and the sale of sponsorships.

"It's not a cool tiny site anymore. It's like the largest collegiate fan website in the world. It was my second time working there and was a total blast." she smiles. "I learnt how to run and manage people. That's where I discovered the membership model and the recurring income. This was back in 2005. In the next year, I'll have been in this space for over two decades. Crazy how time flies!"

The company attracted thousands of customers who paid $13 per month for information about Texas A&M University sports teams. "We have also broken the secret to moving from banner ads to sponsorships (brand contracts in modern terms). Companies were trying to reach our readers and we gave the access of very specific points which could be tracked and helped those firms," she says.

Amanda used the same model to started Northcutt Media, using the sponsoring model they had developed at TexAgs then applied the same model and applied it to websites throughout the nation. "That was the first time I had a business when I was 22 years old. We got to travel a lot and such things."

However, a couple of years afterwards, her health started to suffer. "I had to get some time off and as well, I needed to adjust my lifestyle architecture," - Amanda needed to adjust the balance of priorities in her life, mainly her husband's health, as well as her newborn son.

Amanda has started to share the details of her medical journey publicly and plans to do more. Amanda has discovered that women working in high stress jobs are more likely to be afflicted with an autoimmune condition or similar. "The more I am vulnerable, the more I am able to lead in that way," she says. "Every time I say something concerning my experience, somebody who isn't familiar with me comes in and texts me and says 'Hey, could we have a chat?', and it's so amazing."

Amanda altered the way things were done. "I needed to be a mom. I was required to be a person who was in charge of my health, and I was required to work as consultant." In order to get back to a normal job, she and her husband sold their business partner from Member Up and took it on, and made it run as a consulting company.

"I had a wonderful experience helping members run businesses which covered all sorts of topics. It was stuff people would not even think about until you're in the world and you know that there's a niche to suit every type of interest as well as people on the internet who want what you have." Following a lengthy period in the industry of membership her focus was shifting to the fractional executive work at various SaaS businesses around the globe.

In this new more balanced way of life, Amanda reduced her work to 20-30 hours a week. She aimed to be "extraordinarily impactful" at each of the organizations she worked for. Amanda left Silicon Valley at the end of 2022, to found Level Up Creators: "I was looking to bring everything I learned from this B2B market, specifically SaaS world, and bring the knowledge to creators particularly women.

"I'm really interested in helping women build wealth generation cycles and apply their expertise through providing enormous worth to their communities of followers and get paid in kind."

The products offered by Level Up Creators

So what does Level Up Creators do? "We're looking to optimize the impact of our work and increase income for female creators in particular. We are confident that we have the most experienced team of entrepreneurs in the world," she replies.

They aid people to determine the place they're at, where they're heading and what's preventing their progress from happening. Then they orchestrate ways to remove those barriers to get you where you want to go. "Our sweet spot is if you've gathered followers around one specific topic - that's very crucial - and you have over 50,000 social media users and/or over 2,000 email subscribers."

"When you come to us, I'll probably ask you about a hundred questions at first," says Amanda. "I'm always seeking to know before I can be understood." She gathers both qualitative and quantitative data collection from the creator, so they can assist them in determining their choices.

"We would like to help the subject matter experts develop an entire product line. We want an initial lead magnet, and then a course, perhaps the three-part masterclass, or similar Then we could move into a recurring revenue product. It could be a $49, $179 or even an annual membership of $249."

Then Level Up Creators would move customers into group coaching and more recurring revenue levels. It's when "you can prove that you're in a position to deliver consistent, repeated worth that's right for your audience of followers and customers," she says.

The Level Up Creators team - image (c) welevelupcreators.com

It's how she helps people to develop their creative mindset. "Oftentimes the subject matter experts creators are hesitant to do deal with brands or even to create products that ask for their fans to buy them. It's my goal to assist creators in understanding that they're in such an amazing position to continue providing value above what can be provided by social media for free.

"We all desire to be respected, power, love, relationships - foundational desires," she continues. "We think we have connections to the creators that we admire. We know so much about their lives, and want to be more like them." Amanda believes that if creators can provide opportunities for us to be more similar to them, then there's an possibility for them to market items that are valuable to help followers realize those desires, creating "a positive cycle of value".

"We have a greater respect for the creators we work with than we do these gigantic global legacy brands, because we're talking to a human and not just a logo. The first mission we have is saying, 'It's okay to market your products - since consumers want to purchase what they can get.' We don't do icky marketing or sales, as well as we won't collaborate with creators who are not offering real value to their communities. It's like tables stakes."

The future and the death of brands that have been around for a long time

"I'm happy to be in the position where we're helping creators in a new way, and also increasing our efforts to help women,"" Amanda muses. The company is a professional company, however we're working toward mirroring our client companies, and being a creator-first business our own." Amanda sums it in the sense that they're working to teach creators the ways to be CEOs in their thinking and effectively run their companies.

"We are developing some amazing product!" she laughs. In fact, the team is launching their Level Up Creators School on March 1st 2024. This is a subscription-based business school for creators. "We'll share our experience and know-how to offer the right training, community, tools as well as high-touch assistance to help creators reach their next big income milestone - the first of which is for a lot of creators, $50,000 million in revenue. We'll also be using the Fastest Path To 50 framework to help people reach that goal. This is awesome!"

As a last thought on the business in general, Amanda concludes: "The trend is towards a direct-to-consumer system where creators hold more control with regards to consumer spending and content curation. It's crazy the level of affinity that followers have for creators they love."

Amanda clarifies that millennials as well as Gen Xers do not rely on big legacy brands to get their updates anymore "These big cable networks are nothing but dinosaurs! You can choose to get on the train or are gonna die."

"I have decided to take my shot": that's the way of the future. I've built a company to propel that future into reality and help people be wildly prosperous. I'd like money to be distributed to creators, rather than huge companies. It's like, 'All right, let someone else have a turn!' The time is right to be a content creator!" she smiles.

More information

Amanda Northcutt is a consultant, coach and six-time exec who has developed and scaled online companies for D2C B2C, D2C, as well as B2Bs.

She created Level Up Creators to help powerful creator educators develop sustainable businesses. Level Up Creators offers strategies and systems to people with at minimum one current product or service in areas such as personal finance, wellness and sports. and who are prepared to increase the value and earnings of these products. For more information, visit welevelupcreators.com.