What's up everybody, sorry for being a day late — I thought I'd match our forthcoming daughter's style given she is 2–3 days late and won't come out!! Continuing the trend from last week, one essay this issue. What I'm up to and how Creative Radar is developing. Strong signal coming out of it that I think unites us freelancers and creatives.
Me and my little sister Megan :)
Since graduating my MFA program in August, I've wanted more consistent work in film. I moved back to commercial production — but I'd grown tired of that work before, that's why I went to grad school. I enjoy making videos. I really do. But underneath, I was wanting more. The seed has been searching for the right soil for months. Some problem for people like me that I could fix. What did I know? Who could I service? A lead-discovery tool, then a scoring layer. Maybe lead packages, maybe software, maybe me as a consultant. I really didn't know.
I'd spent a long time as a freelance video guy, figured I knew the problem well enough. But at some point you just start shoveling, and that's mostly what I've been doing. Shoveling dirt looking for water. Building software tools, research tools, even this newsletter.
About three weeks ago I made a different decision. I stopped building. I picked three creative freelancers, brought them on one at a time, and decided to run the whole thing by hand for a stretch. No automation, no software, no shortcuts.
I was simply going to help them get more work, whatever that means. The internet's version of sweat equity.
I'm about ten days in, and what's already shifted in my head is bigger than I expected.
The first person I started working with is a spiritual guide who helps people in Berlin. Five-week 1:1 program for women — the kind of work that actually changes people…yeah, you read that right. I built a system for video producers, and the first person to respond doesn't do video. If you know me, I'm the least spiritual dude you could come across. But I love working with her.
What's interesting about her case isn't her niche. Her language only made sense to people who already knew her. New visitors bounced because they couldn't follow the words to the door. So I wrote a translation layer — keep her voice, just add a deck to the backyard and a fresh coat of paint. Somewhere around day five she started writing it herself, in her own language, sharper than anything I'd have drafted for her.
My job was to read across her drafts and point at the lines that mattered most, and let her decide. That's not a job I knew was the job.
The second person is George, a commercial director in LA. We came up in the video business together a long time ago.
Day three, I needed to give him a list of brands to pitch — brands that fit his price band, his style, his geography, his actual sensibility. The CR app I'd already built does this. Feed it category and budget, get a ranked list. I had a hunch the tool would miss what George needed, so I wrote his list by hand. Memory of our calls, what he'd shown me, a few hours on the web, and a running judgment about which brands actually fit him and not just the filters.
The list came out faster than the tool. It also came out closer to him. Turns out finding the right sauce for one person and going to find it is way f***ing better than analyzing online presence at scale. Now it's about systematizing the personalization for hundreds or thousands.
The third producer is Emilio, a director and filmmaker in Phoenix. Five different niches from commercial promos to feature films to political ads — and a roof over his head to pay for. The usual advice is "pick a niche." Sometimes you can have multiple, each needing different attention. I take his needs, fears, and practicalities into account — I don't jam my anecdotal/how-to/my-way-or-the-highway "system" down his throat. Creative Radar takes as much learning as it does instruction to function.
So we're working on a shape, together. A steady base in the theatre and arts world. A short-term plan to aggressively pursue political campaign ad gigs. The work he most wants to be doing seeded inside both.
Three different cities. Three completely different crafts. Three different goals. And the same three lines came out of every single onboarding call, almost word for word.
“I know I should be doing something for my business. I don't know what.”
“I tried hiring help. They didn't get my work.”
“I stop hustling the second a job comes in.”
I had a hypothesis going in. Eighty percent of the freelance business problem is universal across creative work. Branding, niche, client acquisition, pricing. I expected it to hold. I didn't expect it to come out in the same words, in the same order, from a guide in Berlin and a director in LA and a filmmaker in Phoenix. I'm no genius hypothesizer — I just think the 80/20 rule applies to everything in life, and somebody already came up with it. Low effort, high value. My kind of philosophy.
Here's the bar I've set. Each of these three producers lands a client, a contract, or a new job inside thirty days. Maybe sixty — voice work and household-budget realities stretch the timeline. If I hit that across all three, in three cities, doing three completely different kinds of creative work, that's not a coincidence. That's a serious signal. If one producer gets one client, I'd levitate with joy.
The biggest thing with this work is the timeline. It's not a quick fix. Not "buy 3 widgets at $5 a piece, resell for $10, walk away with 15 bucks." Creative freelancing requires a bespoke approach. Running your own thing is about being uniquely yourself, and no system someone else defined will give you the definition of you. It needs an organic, evolutionary flow to work. Scarier product to build — but this is the path I'm on.
Here's what I'm starting to wonder about. For a long time I thought I was building a tool. I might still be. But I was looking at the output and calling it the product, and what I'm watching now — me, at a desk, reading three producers' actual lives, writing things by hand — looks like a different shape than the thing I'd been writing software for.
The product, I'm starting to think, is that journey — with an added level of judgment. The thing that reads George and decides his list by hand. The thing that reads Cecilia and decides not to flatten her language. The thing that reads Emilio and works out two lanes instead of forcing him into one. That might be what the software is supposed to be when I get back to building it.
I'm still building it in the background. The plan is one person running this for twenty or thirty producers eventually, and more after that. But I can't write the software well until I've actually done the work by hand.
Doing this work is fun for me. Three producers I genuinely like. Three different shapes of the same problem. The chance to build something that respects creative work instead of trying to project-manage it.
This is the part for you. If any of this is recognizable — whether you make videos, take pictures, write, design, compose, coach, advise, or run any creative practice that lives in the gap between projects — I'd really like to hear from you. The eighty percent only stays interesting if the sample widens.
So reply. Tell me what you responded to, what doesn't fit your work. Even if we never end up working together, that calibration is what makes whatever I'm building right for the people it's actually for.
Appreciate yall taking the time.
All the best,
Matt