Decoupling From Your Own Relevancy
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Caspar Lee's shift from entertainment YouTuber to co-founder and investor came from one assumption: personal relevancy expires. Entertainment creators, unlike gaming or education channels, have no external content supply and rely entirely on staying interesting, so he began building assets that would still exist when audiences stopped caring. The method is to move value out of your own face and into companies, brands and teams that survive without you. He deliberately chose B2B over consumer because he was bad at selling to his own audience, built technology underneath the businesses so they were not just services, recruited operators better than himself, and settled into a visionary and board-level role while other people ran the day-to-day.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Assume your relevancy has an expiry date
Ask what happens if nobody cares about you in three to five years, or when you are 60 or 70. Caspar saw very early that entertainment creators rely on their own relevancy in a way gaming or education creators do not.
Watch out Views and subscriber ratios can decline while you still feel successful. He points out that entertainment creators have no equivalent of a new game release to ride.
- 2
Start companies while the audience is still there
Use the attention and access you have now as the raw material for businesses that will outlive it. He launched his companies during the channel's run, not after it ended.
Pro tip Your leverage may be capital to invest or simply a network you can introduce people into. Work out which one you actually have.
- 3
Look at B2B, not just consumer products
Most creator businesses sell products to their own audience. Caspar deliberately went the other way because he was not good at selling to his own audience, and businesses spend money in order to make money.
Pro tip He estimates only around 10 percent of creator businesses are B2B, which makes it a less crowded position for someone who understands the space.
Watch out You lose the ability to launch by pointing your audience at the product, so distribution has to come from somewhere else.
- 4
Put technology under the business
Build a product layer, not just a service. At influencer.com the technology pulls campaign data directly from platform APIs rather than relying on creators sending screenshots, which is what makes the workflow defensible.
- 5
Hire people better than you and let them operate
Caspar calls this his secret to everything: find people better than him and get them to help him do what he does, or help them do what they do. He is not checking students into rooms at Proper Living.
Pro tip Check that the people running it are genuinely passionate about the thing, because you will not be there day to day.
- 6
Take the visionary seat, not the operator seat
Settle into the role only you can play. As Chief Visionary Officer he is the CEO's sounding board, guides product using what he knows creators want, and advises brands on creative strategy across platforms.
Watch out This only works if the operating team is genuinely strong. Without it the visionary role is decoration.
- 7
Spread the bets rather than betting on one asset
He explicitly dislikes having all his eggs in one basket, so the portfolio runs across influencer.com, the Margravine management company, Proper Living student accommodation, and the Creator Ventures fund.
Pro tip Each partnership should have a clear complementary edge. He says the fund does not exist without his partner Sasha, and hopes Sasha would say the same about him.
In the wild
A South African student accommodation deal was brought to Caspar purely as an investment. Instead of writing a cheque, he noticed the sector had terrible social media, marketing and branding, so he negotiated to build a brand on top of it: he would invest, but future buildings would carry his brand and his company would consult. They started with a 90-room building, added a third within the year to pass 200 rooms, and built a waiting list of around 1,500 students in Cape Town. He sits on the board while a management team runs operations.
→ A branded, scalable property business with a 1,500-student waiting list that requires none of his personal fame.
Caspar met a 20-year-old founder through his then girlfriend, spent three hours with him, and backed his idea of helping creators work with brands at scale. The stated vision was meaningful relationships between brands, creators and audiences. They spent the first four or five years building product for advertisers so brands would spend more with creators, then turned the product focus back to creators with media kits that auto-pull stats. The company grew from two people to 93 across five countries, with a CEO running it and Caspar as Chief Visionary Officer.
→ A 93-person B2B company across five countries, valuable independently of Caspar's channel.
Common mistakes
Building only products your own audience buys
Consumer products launched off your channel keep the business chained to your relevancy and to your comfort selling to fans. Caspar found selling to individuals hard and points out that B2B buyers spend money specifically to make money.
Staying the operator in everything you start
If you are the day-to-day operator of four companies, nothing scales and nothing survives your attention moving. His approach is to assemble teams who want him involved, then let them operate while he elevates.
Waiting until the channel declines to diversify
The leverage that lets you start companies, raise money and attract partners is at its highest while the audience is still growing. Caspar launched his companies during the channel's run, not after the 2019 break.
From the transcript
“especially when I'm 60 or 70 years old what am I going to do then uh and so that's also partly why I launched the…”
“that's like the secret that's literally my secret to anything I do in life is find people better than me and get them to help…”
“business is very valuable because it's not tied to you as an individual in your own personal relevancy”
From the episode
Caspar Lee: How He Built A 10+ Million YouTube Following In His 20s (And Why He Quit)
Caspar Lee