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Amanda Northcutt, founder and chief executive officer of Level Up Creators

"The most of my career is comprised of many happy incidents," starts Amanda Northcutt who is the CEO and founder of Level Up Creators. "My career path is extremely irregular and non-linear. However, that's common for the majority of people. We tend to end up in the place we're supposed when we're deliberate and strategically."

The family jokes that she never spoke until my brother went to college. "My brother is a highly successful lawyer, but his practice took over every inch of airspace in the house. He started college when I was fourteen and heading into high school. I began to come into my own once the airspace was available inside the house."

Amanda's first position was in the shoe store. "Everyone believed that I'd be a failure due to my shyness. I burst out of my shell, and I began selling shoes like crazy, breaking national sales records. It was amazing! I was enthralled by business at the age of 16, and I was sure at that time that's the path I wanted to pursue."

Then Amanda went to university and connected with a friend who had a site up and running and required someone to market advertisements on it. "This was back in 2005. selling online advertising was like banner advertisements. It was similar to selling air! I was hearing the word "no' a lot and was able to overcome any fears of selling to others fast," she recalls.

Being thrown into the deep of the

"I gained my skills from being in deep water," she continues. "I made that sale into a much bigger sales gig at a young business called TexAgs.com and was there for almost a decade. It was there that I truly learned how to run a business." In this period, she figured out the concept of memberships that recurring revenue can bring, increasing value, increasing LTV, and selling sponsorships.

"It's not a cool tiny website anymore. It's more like the biggest college fan website in the world. I was the second employee at the site and enjoyed it to the fullest," she says with a smile. "I learnt how to run and manage individuals. This is where I fell in love with the concept of membership as well as recurring revenue. It was 2005. The next year, I'll be here for more than two decades. Crazy how time flies!"

It attracted thousands customers who paid $13 per month for details about Texas A&M University sports teams. "We also cracked the code on switching from banner ads to sponsorships (brand deals in today's terms). The companies were trying to get their message out to our audience and we gave the access of very specific points which could be tracked and made a difference for these firms," she says.

Amanda adopted the model and created Northcutt Media, using the sponsorship model that they refined at TexAgs, and took the model to other websites across the United States. "That was the first time I had a venture in business when I was 22 years old. We traveled often and other such things."

However, a couple of years afterwards, her health started to suffer. "I needed to take some time off and also dial in on living a healthy lifestyle," - Amanda needed to change the order of her daily life priorities including her husband, health and baby son.

Amanda has started to share the details of her medical journey publically and is planning to share more. She's found that a lot of women who have work that is stressful, intense and demanding tend to be afflicted with an autoimmune condition or similar. "The more vulnerable I become at risk, the more likely I am able to lead by being vulnerable," she says. "Every whenever I talk concerning my experience, somebody who isn't familiar with me comes in and texts me, asking could we have a chat?', and it's so wonderful."

Amanda has changed the rules. "I had to be mother to my children. I was required to be a person who was in charge of my health, and I was required to work as a consultant." In order to get back to a normal job, she and her husband purchased their other business partner at Member Up and took it over to operate as a consultant.

"I have had an amazing moment helping businesses with memberships that dealt with all types of subjects - stuff that people would not even think about unless you're in this world and know there's a niche for each kind of passion as well as users on the web who would like what you offer." After a prolonged time in the niche of membership then she switched to an executive role that was a fraction of SaaS organizations around the world.

In this new more balanced lifestyle, Amanda reduced her work to between 20 and 30 hours per week but focused on being "extraordinarily influential" for all the companies she worked for. She quit Silicon Valley at the end of 2022to create Level Up Creators: "I was looking to bring everything I had learned in this B2B market, specifically SaaS industry, and apply the knowledge to creators and specifically women.

"I'm keen to help women create generational wealth cycles and leverage their knowledge by providing tremendous amounts of value to their communities and members and receiving compensation for it in the form of a gift."

Level Up Creators offers services. Level Up Creators

What exactly does Level Up Creators do? "We're looking to optimize the impact of our work and increase income especially for female creators. 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 going and what's stopping their progress from happening. They then plan how to knock down those barriers to get you where you want to go. "Our sweet spot is if you've built a community around a specific topic - that's very crucial - and you have more than 50,000 followers on social media and/or over 2,000 email subscribers."

"When you approach us, I'll probably be asking you around a hundred questions first," says Amanda. "I'm always seeking to know before I'm able to comprehend." Amanda gathers the quantitative and qualitative information of a creator to ensure they can help them identify their options.

"We are looking to assist the subject matter experts develop a product suite. We'd like to create lead magnets. Then, an educational course, maybe an introductory masterclass of three parts or similar, and then we would move into a recurring revenue product. Perhaps it's $49 or the $79 price, or perhaps the $249 monthly membership."

In the future, Level Up Creators would move customers to group coaching with greater levels of recurring income. This is when "you have proven you're capable of providing regular, consistent value that's really on point for your community of clients and followers" she says.

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

It's how she helps people improve their professional mindset as creators. "Oftentimes experts in their field of expertise creators are hesitant to do brand deals or to make products and ask their audience to buy their products. I'm on a mission to educate creators about the fact the amazing position to continue to offer value above and beyond what is available by social media for free.

"We all want the power of respect, honor, authority, love, relationships - the basic desires of our society," she continues. "We feel that we know the people we follow. We know so much about their lives and we want to emulate their style." Amanda believes that when creators provide opportunities to us all to become 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 beneficial cycle".

"We have so much more respect for the creators we work with than we do these gigantic global legacy brands because we're talking to an individual, not the logo. Our mission number one is to tell people that it's OK to sell stuff - because customers want to buy the products you have.' We don't do unsavory sales or marketing, and we don't work with creators who are not providing real legitimate benefits to their community. It's like tables stakes."

The future and the death of legacy brands

"I'm thrilled to be in a position in which we're helping creatives again, and really expanding our help to women,"" Amanda muses. The company is a professional company, however we're striving to mirror our clients' businesses, being a creator-first firm for ourselves." She sums it up that they are helping creators learn the ways to be CEOs in their thinking and run their business effectively.

"We are building some killer items!" she laughs. In fact, the team will launch their Level Up Creators School on the 1st March in 2024. This is a subscription-based business school for creators. "We'll offer our knowledge and know-how to offer the exact training, community, tools and support that will assist creators in reaching their next big income milestone which is for a lot of creators, $50,000 in RR. We'll use the Fastest Path To 50 framework for helping people get there. This is awesome!"

As a last thought on the business in general, Amanda concludes: "The industry is moving towards this direct-to-consumer system where creators hold more control in consumer spending and content curation. It's incredible the degree of affinity that followers are feeling for the creators they admire."

Amanda says that millennials and Gen Xers do not rely on the big brands of the past for news anymore "These major cable networks are a dinosaur! They have the option of getting on this train or they will die."

"I have decided to take my shot: that is the future. I've created a business to propel that future into realisation and assist people to become extremely successful. I want money to be distributed to creators, rather than huge companies. This is like saying, "All right, let someone else take over!' The time is right to be a content creator!" she smiles.

Additional information

Amanda Northcutt is a consultant as well as a coach, and six-time executive who has created and grown online businesses for D2C B2C, D2C and B2Bs.

She established Level Up Creators to help influential creator educators build viable businesses. Level Up Creators offers strategies and systems to people who have at least one existing product in fields such as personal finance, wellness sports, travel, or wellness and are ready to scale the impact of their work and earn a profit. For more information, visit welevelupcreators.com.