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

"The most of my work was comprised of many happy incidents," starts Amanda Northcutt the founder and CEO of Level Up Creators. "My journey has been incredibly irregular and non-linear. But that tends to be the case for most people. The way we end up is where we're supposed to be in the event that we're intentional and strategic."

Her parents always joke that she was never a talker until my brother went to college. "My brother's an extremely accomplished lawyer, however it was him who occupied every inch of airspace in the home. He attended college when I was 14 and was about to enter high school. I began to come into my own when that space was readily available within the home."

Amanda's first gig was an online shoe shop. "Everyone believed that I'd not be successful because I was shy. I burst out of my shell and started selling shoes with aplomb with record sales across the nation. I was awestruck! I was enthralled by business around the age of 16, and I was sure at when I was 16 that that's where I'd like to take."

In the following years, Amanda attended university and teamed up with a fellow student who was launching a website and needed someone to sell advertisements on it. "This was 2005, when the selling of online ads was similar to banner ads. It was similar to selling air! I heard the word "no frequently and got past any apprehension of selling to others quick," she recalls.

In the process of being tossed into the deep of the

"I gained my skills by being thrown into the deep end," she continues. "I made that selling gig into a larger sales job at a new company known as TexAgs.com and eventually worked there for almost a decade. That's where I really learned how to run a business." In this period she worked out the model of membership, recurring revenue, adding value, maximising LTV and selling sponsorships.

"It's not a cool tiny website any more. It's the biggest collegiate fan site in the world. I was the second employee there, and I enjoyed it to the fullest," she smiles. "I learned how to manage and lead employees. That's where I was enthralled by the model of membership and regular revenue. It was 2005. In the next year, I'll be in the space for two decades. It's amazing how fast time passes!"

It attracted thousands people paying $13 a month for information about Texas A&M University sports teams. "We have also broken the mystery of switching from banner ads to sponsorships (brand agreements in the modern world). Companies were trying to reach our target audience, and we gave them very unique access points that were trackable and moved the needle for those firms," she says.

Amanda adopted the model and started Northcutt Media, using the sponsorship model that they refined at TexAgs Then, they expanded the same model and applied it to websites throughout the United States. "That is my very first business aged 22. We traveled often and other things like that."

A few years later, her health started to decline. "I required the time off but as well, I needed to adjust my lifestyle architecture," - Amanda needed to change the order of her priorities which included her husband's health, as well as her newborn son.

Amanda is now sharing about her journey to health more publicly and plans to do more. She has found that women with high stress jobs are more likely to suffer from autoimmune diseases or similar. "The more I can be vulnerable, the more I can lead the charge by being vulnerable," she says. "Every when I speak up about my circumstances, someone who isn't familiar with me comes in and texts me and says 'Hey, can we talk about it?' which is fantastic."

Amanda has changed the rules. "I wanted to become a mother. I needed to be the one who managed my health. I was required to work as an expert." To restore some normality to her career, she and her husband purchased their other business partner at Member Up and took it on, and made it run as a consultancy.

"I have had an amazing experience helping members run businesses that dealt with all types of topics. It was stuff one would never even consider until you're in the world and know there's a niche to suit every sort of topic There are people on the internet who would like what you offer." Following a lengthy stint in the membership niche her focus was shifting to the an executive role that was a fraction of SaaS businesses around the globe.

In this new more balanced way of life, Amanda reduced her work to 20-30 hours a week, but she was determined to be "extraordinarily effective" in every organization she worked with. Amanda left Silicon Valley at the end of 2022to create Level Up Creators: "I decided to apply everything I had learned in this B2B market, specifically SaaS market, and transfer it to creatives, especially women.

"I'm very interested in helping women build wealth generation cycles and apply their expertise by providing tremendous amounts of worth to their communities of members and receiving compensation in cash."

The products offered by Level Up Creators

What exactly does Level Up Creators do? "We're trying to maximize impact and income especially for female creators. It's my belief that I've gathered the best team of operator around the globe," she replies.

They help people identify their current location, the direction they're headed and what's preventing the way to get there. Then they orchestrate how to knock down those barriers to get you where you want to go. "Our best time to start is when you've built a community around a certain topic, which is very important - and you've got over 50,000 social media users as well as over 2,000 email subscribers."

"When you come to us, I'll probably inquire about 100 questions," says Amanda. "I'm always seeking to know before I'm able to comprehend." She gathers a quantitative and qualitative data collection from the creator, so they can help them identify the options available to them.

"We want to help specialists in the field create products that are a suite. We'd like to create lead magnets. Then, a course, perhaps a three-part masterclass or something similar to that And then, we'd shift to a recurring revenue product. Maybe that's a $49 or the $79 price, or perhaps an annual membership of $249."

When you do that, Level Up Creators would move customers to group coaching with greater levels of recurring income. This happens when "you are able to provide consistent, repeated worth that's right for your audience of clients and followers" she states.

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

She helps others professionalize their creator mindset. "Oftentimes experts in their field of expertise creators are hesitant to do brand deals or to make products that ask for their fans to buy their products. It's my goal to help creators understand the incredible position to provide value over and beyond what is available for free on social media.

"We all want power, respect, authority relationship, love and respect - foundational desires," she continues. "We believe that we are connected to the creators that we admire. We are familiar with their lives that we would like to emulate their style." Amanda believes that the creators who create an avenue to us all to become more than them, it's a great possibility for them to market products that can add value to the lives of their followers and help those followers achieve those desires, creating "a positive cycle of value".

"We are a lot more appreciation for creators than do these gigantic global legacy brands because we're talking with a person and not just a logo. Our mission number one is to tell people that it's OK to make money from selling stuff because consumers want to purchase what you have. We do not engage in unsavory sales or marketing, and we do not work with artists who aren't giving real, legitimate benefits to their community. That's tables stakes."

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

"I'm excited to be in a place in which we're helping creatives again, and really increasing our efforts to help women," Amanda muses. The company is a professional company, however we're striving to mirror our clients' companies, and being a creator-first firm for ourselves." She sums by saying that they're helping creators learn the ways to think like CEOs and run their business effectively.

"We are building some killer product!" she laughs. The team has announced an initiative called the Level Up Creators School on March 1st 2024. This is a subscription-based educational institution for creatives. "We'll offer our knowledge and experience to provide the exact training, community, tools and support that will aid creators to reach the next milestone in their income - the first of which for many artists will be $50,000 in RR. We'll be using our Fastest Path To 50 framework for helping people get there. I'm pumped about that!"

As a last thought on the business in general, Amanda concludes: "The world is moving toward this direct-to-consumer system where creators are having more power when it comes to spending on content and curation. It's crazy the level of affection that fans are feeling for the creators they admire."

Amanda clarifies that millennials as well as Gen Xers do not rely on the big brands of the past for updates anymore "These major cable networks are dinosaurs! You can choose to get on this train or they will be dead."

"I am totally calling my shots: that's the way of the future. I've built a company to help bring that vision into reality, and to help others become extremely profitable. I want money to be distributed to creators, as opposed to gigantic companies. It's like, 'All right, let someone else have a turn!' The time is right to become a creator of content!" she smiles.

More details

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

She created Level Up Creators to help influential creator educators build profitable businesses that are sustainable. Level Up Creators offers strategies and solutions to individuals with at minimum one product that is already in use, such as fields such as wellness, personal finance and sports. and who are prepared to increase their impact and income. For more information, visit welevelupcreators.com.