What if the easiest business to start this year is one you could begin with a single DM?
Justin Moore, sponsorship coach, founder of Creator Wizard, and author of Sponsor Magnet, has earned over $5 million in brand partnerships with his wife April, and spent seven years running an ad agency where he heard what brands say about creators behind closed doors.
Today, he’s sharing why building an audience may be the most AI-proof business you can start, why a tiny niche audience can out-earn a huge one, how to answer “what’s your rate?” without losing money, and the contract words that should make you run. If an extra couple thousand dollars a month would change your life, this episode shows you one way to get it.
Key takeaways:
You don’t have to call yourself an influencer to build an audience that pays
When Justin started coaching, he assumed his clients would be TikTok and YouTube creators. Now more than half are professionals, like people building focused LinkedIn audiences around HR or other B2B expertise. Offline counts too: events, conferences, even a local breakfast club. His case for why this works now is simple. Everyone has an AI assistant in their pocket, and people still want to do business with humans they trust.
A small, specific audience can beat a big, vague one
Justin’s clients include a podcaster getting hundreds or thousands of downloads (not hundreds of thousands) who does great with sponsors because she’s a big fish in a tiny pond, and a Boise-area breakfast club with about 25 members that gets sponsored by local businesses. Brands pay for relevance, so your job is to be the obvious fit for the right partner.
Stop answering “what’s your rate?” with a number
The biggest mistake Justin sees is creators firing back a price, then getting ghosted or countered down. Instead, get on a call, ask about the brand’s goals for the year, and come back with three or four custom packages. Now they’re picking a package instead of deciding whether to hire you.
When you work for free, you set the price for every woman who comes after you
Justin says it plainly: women undercharge, and a lot of it traces back to money messages from childhood. When you accept free or underpaid work, the brand learns that’s what women will accept, and the next woman gets the same lowball. Justin’s fix is to get yourself out of the commodity category. Show the brand what you offer that 10,000 other creators don’t, like a private community or an in-person event.
Read your contracts like your future depends on it (because it kind of does)
Justin’s top red flag is “perpetual” or “perpetuity,” which lets a brand use your content, name, or likeness forever. Push back on exclusivity by shortening the term or narrowing the category, and I’ll add one more: always get an out clause. Early in their career, Justin and April traded a video for $2,000 in clothing credit and later saw her footage in a broadcast TV commercial. They had signed away the rights without realizing it. This is general education, not legal advice, so loop in a lawyer when the stakes go up.
Confidence comes from doing it
Justin’s advice before you talk yourself out of your idea: start with one person. Help them, get a testimonial, and use it to find the next one. My first website in 2016 had a logo I threw together on Canva, and I launched anyway.
Notable quotes
“Everything that you want is on the other side of climbing cringe mountain.”
“One of the biggest mistakes, I think, is realizing that the brand needs you as much as you want to work with them.”
“When you accept free or undercompensated labor, it’s not just a personal individual problem. It then sets the precedent for the brand.”
Episode at-a-glance
00:00 Intro
01:18 Why building an audience is the most AI-proof business
03:03 You don’t have to be an “influencer” to do this
08:29 Side hustling the 5-to-9
11:05 What you actually need to start (one person)
14:37 Why Justin started calling out the gatekeepers
17:03 What running an ad agency taught him about how brands pay
19:37 Who undercharges most
24:55 How to answer “what’s your rate?”
29:10 Justin’s 8-step partnership system
38:53 Contract red flags: perpetuity, exclusivity, out clauses
43:46 Why Justin says don’t hire a manager
48:47 My half-million-dollar agency mistake
53:32 The $1 million math on a 20% cut
54:24 Rapid fire: free product, worst pitches, follower myths
58:37 One thing every creator should do today
Thanks to Rocket Money for sponsoring this episode!
Thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode!
Justin’s Links:
Website: https://www.sponsormagnet.com/
Also Mentioned in this Episode:
This Mistake Cost Me $500,000
Jasmine Star: How to Build a Business from Nothing
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Meet Justin
Justin Moore is a Sponsorship Coach, author, and the founder of @CreatorWizard, a school & community that teaches you how to find & negotiate your dream brand partnerships so that you stop leaving thousands on the table. His latest book, “Sponsor Magnet,” offers a succinct distillation of his ideas and frameworks for securing successful brand collaborations.
Along with his wife April, he has been a full-time creator since 2014 and has personally made over $5M working with brands. He also ran an influencer marketing agency for 7 years that helped other creators earn millions more.
Justin brings a very unique perspective because not only has he been a creator in the trenches doing sponsorships for years but by running an agency, he has insider knowledge behind how big brands choose which influencers to partner with and why they pass on others. Justin’s mission is to enable creators big and small to land 1 million paid brand partnerships by 2032.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
If you’ve been wanting to be an entrepreneur to make immediate money and are confused as to what business to start, this is the easiest business to start this year. Today’s guest is Justin Moore. He is a sponsorship coach, author, and founder of Creator Wizard, a school and community that teaches you how to find and negotiate your dream brand partnerships so that you stop leaving thousands of dollars on the table. His latest book, Sponsor Magnet, offers a succinct distillation of his ideas and frameworks for securing successful brand partnerships. He has personally made over $5 million working with brands, and he is just my go-to person for talking about how to create and grow a business, I think arguably the easiest business to start right now, and in a way that actually makes you money almost immediately. Justin’s mission is to enable creators big and small to land one million brand partnerships by 2032, and he is absolutely distilling everything you need to know in this episode. Let’s get into it.
But first, a word from our sponsors.
Okay, Justin, make the case to someone who’s skeptical. What is the easiest business to start and why?
Justin Moore:
I have to answer that it’s building an audience today. This is the most AI-proof thing that you should be doing this year because at the end of the day, people trust humans. And if you’re able to gather a large enough group of them together, being influential in that regard can make you a lot of money.
Tori Dunlap:
You mentioned AI, but specifically beyond AI in 2026, what makes this easier compared to maybe other businesses or other business models?
Justin Moore:
I know a lot of people are allergic to the word influencer or the word creator sometimes, especially if you’re in more of a corporate job or a traditional career path. But I think that at the end of the day, especially in-person gatherings is going to be massive. Of all the creator friends, of all the media business friends that I have, they’re all doubling down on in-person experiences this year and beyond because everyone is wondering, “When everyone has a infinitely knowledgeable, hyper-personalized, basically free assistant in your pocket, as a business owner, where should you be focusing your time?” And I think at the end of the day, humans want to do business with humans. So doubling down on that expertise if you want to build a business, I think, is a really important skill.
Tori Dunlap:
When we pull our audience, it’s about 98, 99% women, half of those women want to be entrepreneurs, but don’t know where to start. And you mentioned influencer creator. For any woman listening who would never call herself that, does this business still include her?
Justin Moore:
Yeah, 100%. I mean, it’s funny because when I started this business doing what I was called sponsorship coaching, help people collaborate with brands, I though that my primary customer was going to be influencers, the person on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram or whatever. But more than half of my clients now are what you just described. It’s the professional, it’s the person who has built up a hyper-focused audience on LinkedIn, let’s say, and they’re in an HR, they’ve built up a bunch of credibility around some sort of B2B expertise. It might shock people to think that you could actually make a lot of money building an audience in a very specific niche, more of a corporate type niche. So I think that you don’t have to be dancing on TikTok necessarily to build an audience. There’s lots of ways up the mountain.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, for anybody who clicked on this episode thinking, “Cool, that sounds great, but it’s not for me,” one of the things I hear, and it’s a very real reality for women, is you will get certain abuse online that men won’t. I can speak to that very candidly in my own business, but also it feels very scary to put yourself out there. So what do you say to someone who is like, “Okay, that sounds great, but Tori or Justin know something that I don’t know, or I don’t have that it-factor to put myself out there as a public person”?
Justin Moore:
I can speak firsthand to the vitriol and abuse that women especially experience online because my wife April… I got into this because of her. I just want to be clear.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Talk to me about April, because her story is incredible.
Justin Moore:
Yeah. I was on the traditional corporate career path. I went to school for engineering, I went and got my MBA, and I was in medical devices. I was down that whole traditional route, but my wife April started a YouTube channel in 2009. This was way back in the day before you could really-
Tori Dunlap:
Wow, that’s early.
Justin Moore:
… yeah, make money on the internet. She started it as a hobby. She just didn’t really have friends in real life who was into beauty and cosmetics and skincare, and all the stuff that she was, and so she started this YouTube channel to just express that creativity. Over the years, we started creating content together and… I mean, just the trolls that would come out of the woodwork saying just such awful things about very innocuous interactions that we would be sharing on the internet, it was really, really hard for a long time, especially because a lot of the moderation tools that YouTube in particular offered to us were not great. You could probably appreciate that it can get overwhelming.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, yeah.
Justin Moore:
I say this because, number one, what we ultimately learned after going through that was that someone will never cut you down if they’re doing better than you. It’s always the people who are looking up like this and wanting to slink mud. The other thing too is that everything that you want is on the other side of climbing cringe mountain, I like to say. There’s this whole idea that putting yourself out there, you’re going to get people throwing tomatoes at you. You’re going to get people being like, “What the heck are you doing? That’s so cringe.”
But then you get up to this certain point, you’re near the summit and you start getting successful, you start getting opportunities and now all of a sudden it transitions, especially friends, family… Not just people on the internet, friends and family might ridicule you too. You get towards the summit and all of a sudden people are saying, “Hey, that’s pretty cool. How are you doing that? Can you teach me how to do that?” You’ve probably experienced this too, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Justin Moore:
So all this to say that everyone wants to make fun of you until you start being successful.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I mean, my favorite is getting messages from my high school bullies on LinkedIn asking me if I can connect them for a job and I’m like, “Absolutely not. Absolutely not.” But you’re exactly right. I think about all the time, and whether it is putting yourself out there and building a business or asking somebody on a date or all of these things that seem like risks, the only way you get comfortable risk-taking is by making these tiny decisions in places that actually are very safe. You can decide at any time, “Oh yeah, I’m going to just do something that feels a little scary today.” Once your brain and body realize, “Oh, I survived that?” and maybe even, “I learned something or I had a positive outcome,” then you start reconfirming to yourself, “Oh, this might be possible for me.”
Justin Moore:
100%. I want to tell a quick story because when April and I were just starting out doing this. We didn’t dive into building an audience full-time from the beginning. We were side hustling for many, many years. And really the reason that we basically spent… We were at our 9-to-5s because my wife… She was a teacher and server. She had two jobs. We were young, we didn’t have any money. So we were just kind of juggling jobs, trying to make it work. But both of us felt inside that there was something more waiting for us. That was a palpable feeling that we always… We didn’t really know what it was. We didn’t know what business we wanted to start. So we kind of stumbled into creating content, to be honest.
But basically we spent all of our day at the 9 to 5 and then the 5 to 9, or maybe the 5 to 10 sometimes afterwards, we would come home and we would just be wholly dedicated on trying to build this nascent business. There is a period of intensity, I think, that’s required when you want to create something, when you want to start a business that other people in your life might not understand like, “Why are you working so hard? Go enjoy, watch TV or whatever.” But I do think that there is something to be said about putting in the hours, putting in the effort to hopefully see it yields something down the line.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I mean, that literally happened to me. I had a coworker at my first job be like, “You’re 23. You don’t have to work this hard. Take a break.” I had to quit my job two years later to run this company full-time and making more money than I’ve ever made before, and having a bigger impact than I’ve ever made before. And I do agree, of course, we don’t want to be in a hustle season forever, but there are times where you do… If you want something, you are willing to sacrifice certain things for that. So when we’re talking about this person, the other misconception I hear a lot is like, “Oh, I need a bunch of money to start or I need a bunch of equipment.” What does somebody actually need to start, and what do people wrongly think they need?
Justin Moore:
When it specifically comes to building an audience or trying to build an event, it doesn’t have to be online, by the way. I work with a lot of people who have offline events and conferences and experiences, and all that. You’d think that you need to develop this massive audience, “I need 500,000 people to come to my event or I need to get 10,000 followers on Instagram or whatever to start monetizing, to get a coaching program together or get brand partnerships, or launch a course or write a book, or whatever it is.” The way in which I started, candidly, when I started teaching about sponsorships was one-to-one in the DMs. I would just send voice notes to people. I would send personalized messages to people. And that is over time, it was a lot of work. But when I focused on providing a transformation for one particular person, for me it was like, “If I can help this person make more money on this one brand deal, maybe that one person will tell their friend, ‘Hey, Justin helped me negotiate that. You should talk to him.'”
That was really how it started building over time. So I think it’s the same parallel with starting any business is like, “How can you provide an outcome or transformation for one particular customer, get a great testimonial…” This is hard though. You got to go to them and say, “Hey, will you share your experience?” Because maybe there’s this worry in your head like, “Oh, what if they weren’t happy? What if they say no? ‘How dare you? I’m not going to give you a testimonial.'” But you have to get past that piece of it and then armed with that new testimonial, you use that to get the next client. So I think it’s really this idea of how do you create momentum, so that then the social proof of how you’re helping a lot of people starts snowballing.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, what you just said there that it’s so easy for somebody listening to miss is that you’re not trying to serve everybody. And the thing I say that I said last year at one of the conferences we met at is, trying to be everything to everybody makes you nothing to nobody. It’s so easy to think, “Yeah, I want more customers and I want to be palpable.” And the thing is doing that, trying to do everything for everybody, you have this level of confusion then when somebody interacts with you going, “Is this for me? I don’t know if I need them.” It’s so difficult then to decide as the consumer, as the user, the potential customer, “Oh, can this person actually help me?” You actually want to have them give you a very definitive yes or no.
A no is not a bad thing. It actually gets people off the fence. It removes the fence sitters. My content is not geared toward men. There’s men who follow me, but I am for the girlies, that’s very, very clear. I’m specifically for feminist women. So I could say, “Yeah, I’m going to try to appeal to everybody, but it would not have helped my company or helped my business.”
Justin Moore:
I’ve gained a lot of inspiration from you in that regard because for a long time, I was scared about talking about the gatekeepers in this industry because I have a lot of friends who specifically in talent management, agencies, brokers, networks, multi-channel networks, the infrastructure layer that most every creator or influencer builds an audience or media company thinks like, “Okay. In order to land partnerships, I need to get on the radar of some other person who will then night me and say, ‘Okay, great. You, I’m going to go hustle for you now.'” My wife and I have had such terrible experiences with representation over the last 15 years. We’ve been independent now for over a decade, but I didn’t talk about this thing for several years. It’s only kind of recently where I basically have started to share, “Here’s the top 10 reasons why I think that hiring a talent manager is the worst mistake you can make as a creator, as an influencer, as a business owner.”
It’s hard because I get lots of angry people in my DMs. I get managers who are like, “How dare you? This is a misrepresentation,” but this is my truth. This is what I truly believe. Like you said, I am going to repel people who like, “No, I like having a manager, I like having the agent.” Great, but really what I want to attract is the people who believe that you don’t need the gatekeeper, you don’t need the agent. Honestly, one of the reasons why I wrote my book Sponsor Magnet is to democratize this knowledge and empower people to think, “You can do this. You don’t need someone else’s permission to do brand partnerships.”
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
We’ll talk about the book later because I truly… I’ve read it, I love it. I literally gave it to one of my friends who is trying to grow her Instagram. You and I talked about it.
Justin Moore:
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Tori Dunlap:
I think I texted you and I was like, “She needs to read it because she joined your challenge.” But on the agency side, you ran an agency for what, seven years?
Justin Moore:
Mm-hmm.
Tori Dunlap:
How did that experience shape your teaching now? What did you learn about how brands actually decide to pay, and why do creators usually get that wrong?
Justin Moore:
It changed everything. I mean, it went from before my wife and I landing 5, 10, 20K brand deals ourselves and feeling like we had it figured out like, “This is how you get brand deals.” To then when I ran the agency, basically being in the boardroom with a lot of these advertisers and decision makers where they’re saying, “Hey, we don’t want to just pay you, April and Justin, 10K. We want to spend a million dollars across 300 creators. What platforms should we activate on? What types of partners should we collaborate with? Tell us more about what the strategy should be basically.” So it’s a totally different conversation. I also was privy to when the brands would say, “Don’t ever send us that recommendation again, we would never work with that person for the following reasons.” For example, a very traditional incumbent type brand, a conglomerate type brand has a very different risk profile than a startup, a direct-to-consumer brand who’s trying to be edgy and does different types of marketing with edgier people.
So a lot of these conversations, this is one of the reasons why I started creating content and started the podcast and all that, was kind of speaking truth to power a bit like, “Hey, here’s what the brand is saying about you behind your back.” They’re not going to say this to you, but you should probably… If brand partnerships are collaborating and doing this is a major part of your revenue stream, maybe you shouldn’t do tons of clickbait headlines and super controversial stuff and talk about drama all the time because your dream brands don’t want to be associated with you because of that. So there’s a line, of course, because you don’t want to hold back and you want to speak your truth, of course. But at the same time, you also need to understand that you’re running a business and the types of people that want to be in business with you also have ethical standards, moral standards, their own set of editorial standards that partners need to adhere to. So running the agency changed everything in terms of the advice that I give creators.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, you’re pretty blunt that people are leaving thousands of dollars on the table. In your experience of watching hundreds of deals, is there a pattern to who undercharges?
Justin Moore:
100%, women undercharge. It’s one of the reasons why I was excited to get on this show and talk about it because having run the agency… There’s a lot of reasons, I think, obviously, a lot of the stuff that you talk about on the podcast in terms of power dynamics and all that, especially in this industry, but a lot of the things that I have… The things that surprise me doing this coaching is that a lot of this stems from childhood where if you were raised in a household where money was tight or it was taboo to discuss. And now, all of a sudden, you’ve built this audience, built this business, you’re negotiating, you’re in this power dynamic with this brand, “Oh, my God. There’s this brand, they’ve got all this money, they’ve got the fancy marketers and they’ve got all this stuff. Who am I to ask for more money? Who am I to counter offer all this?” So you just say, “Oh yes, thank you. Please, may I have another?”
It’s this idea where it’s just like you can’t find the strength to even go back and ask for even minor modifications to the deal. So this is one of the biggest mistakes, I think, is realizing that the brand needs you as much as you want to work with them, and taking back some of that power and realizing that your distribution channel that you’ve built is very valuable.
Tori Dunlap:
I see this so much with women and specifically the big sexy brands. I am going to pick on Sephora for a second. That seems like the one people will bend over backwards to work with, sometimes for free. The problem is when you accept free or undercompensated labor, it’s not just a personal individual problem. It then sets the precedent for the brand where the brand’s like, “Cool. Okay, I can get a bunch of people who aren’t going to charge me anything.” And that’s the expectation then is it’s like, “Well, if I accept unpaid work, it’s not just for me, it’s now for every single woman who comes after me. This brand is just going to have the audacity to do whatever the fuck they want.”
That’s the really hard thing, as well as an industry… This is what you mentioned a bit, is the power dynamics of this industry. I think there are some brands who deeply undervalue women’s work, and we see it time and time again. There are a lot of male creators who, I’ll say very, again, selfishly who have not nearly as much followers or influence as I do, and they’re able to charge three times more. I think that’s just the reality of sexism in any workplace or any job or any company is you are going to have to navigate that.
Justin Moore:
100%, and I think I hear this a lot. It was like, “Man, there’s all these people out there charging a little amount or they’re doing it for free, and it’s making it so much more difficult for the rest of us.” A lot of what I talk about is like, “Okay, yes, that is true, but what can we do about it?” So a lot of my advice and how we counsel folks is, “How can we help this brand take you out of the commodity category where there’s 10,000, 100,000 other people that they could replace you with to work with? They’re only looking at you as a raw number. You never want to be in that situation?” How can you come to them and say, “Look, I understand that you are offering me this thing for free or offering this for a very little amount, but here’s why I’m so much different than these other people”?
“I’ve got this private community with 2,000 of my most engaged audience members in there,” or, “I’ve got this offline event where I have these masterminds with 50 women and it’s super impactful, and it’s way different than partners that you’ve worked with before.” So a lot of what I talk about is how can we have some kind of pattern break here where they realize, “Wow, Tori is different, Justin is different. Let’s get on a phone call with them because it seems like they’re approaching a partnership strategy in a different way than we’ve ever considered.” And it’s hard. I understand this is a hard thing, especially if you’ve never had the confidence to like, “Who am I to do this? I’m not an expert.” But this is the way in which you can start breaking the cycle is really helping them realize that you’re different.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and one of your students went from being embarrassed about how much she undercharged to doubling her rates. So can you talk about what changes in someone between those two moments, the undercharge versus the, “I’m getting paid double now”?
Justin Moore:
We could talk about it from both a strategy standpoint and a tactical standpoint. Let’s talk about the tactics first, which is… Let’s say a partner comes inbound and they say, “Hey, we’d love to collaborate with you. Regardless of where you’ve built your influence, we just want to work with you in some capacity. How much would you charge for X?” I think a lot of people listening probably can appreciate that there’s some sort of exchange that they’ve experienced like this in the past, where someone wants to work with you and they’re asking what your rate is basically. The biggest mistake that I see people making is they just spit back a number. They just say, “Oh well, of course, it’s going to be 1500 or it’s going to be 5,000 or 200, whatever it is.” And then either you get ghosted, you’re like, “What the heck? I thought this was going to be exciting and they wanted to work with me,” or they try to lowball you or counter offer or whatever.
So the most important change that you need to make in those scenarios is you say, “Hey, super excited about this opportunity. Sounds really cool. I would love to hop on a phone call with you to learn more about what your objectives are for collaborating.” And then you get on this call and you just ask them questions. You say, “Tell me about your business objectives for this year. What types of products are you launching? What types of features are you launching? Is the economy… Is tariffs wreaking havoc to your supply chains right now and you can’t keep stuff on the shelf?” So you act interested in their business and what they’re trying to accomplish, because clearly they’re trying to market. They reached out to you, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Justin Moore:
And then at the end of that, you say, “Hey, this was so great. Thank you so much for sharing all this information. I would love to go back and put together a proposal for you, a customized bespoke recommendation for how I can help you accomplish your business outcome.” And then you come back to them with packages. You say, “Package one, package two, package three, package four. Here’s all the different ways in which I could serve you.” And then now it’s not a question of, “Yes or no, are we going to work with Tori? it’s, “Which package are we going to choose?”
Tori Dunlap:
The same logic is applied in job interviews and that’s something I tell people all the time is if you get asked, “What are your salary expectations?” you should never ever give a number because likely you’ve had a 20-minute phone interview with a recruiter. You don’t really know how to price that accurately. You don’t know what they’re exactly looking for in the range. So if you can learn more about what their objectives are or even more about what their budget is, “Okay, cool. We can work within that budget. If I know their budget is 5K, here’s what I can offer for 5K.” We still do this with Her First $100K negotiating deals. There are oftentimes where the brands are not able to meet my rate and they only have a specific amount of money. And then it’s like, “Okay. Well, I might not be able to give you this, but I can give you these three things instead.” You mentioned you have an eight-step system to land partnerships, and I think your book dives into this more, but tell us a bit about what this eight-step system might look like.
Justin Moore:
Let me rapid fire. It’s pitch, negotiate, contract, concept, produce, feedback, publish, and analyze. The reason that I tried to distill the partnership process down into these eight simple steps is to try to make it feel not so overwhelming. Basically, after you pitch the brand and do the outreach and try to get them on the phone call, that’s just step one. And then essentially, there’s sub-steps between each step to really make this process a lot more palatable. I think that the biggest reason that people have found success using this framework is that when you get to step eight, which is analyze, now you are pitching that brand or that partner on the next collaboration. So rather than brand partnerships feeling like this very one-off kind of transactional thing, now you are getting into relationships where you’re working with this brand repeatedly. I know, Tori, I’ve heard you mention that Squarespace has been a partner for over five years for you, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Justin Moore:
So it’s like that’s the dream scenario, right? It’s like you find a partner that you really love, they value you, and you rinse and repeat. Partnerships doesn’t have to be this thing where every month, you’re constantly trying to find the next partner because that can be exhausting.
Tori Dunlap:
One of the things I have talked on the show with Jasmine Star about, who I know you know as well, is this idea of, again, the person listening who is going or wants to build a business. There’s this belief that, “Oh, it has to be what Tori’s built or what Emma Grede has built. It’s multi-millions of dollars. It’s very splashy. It’s millions of followers,” and that feels very intimidating immediately. The things she and I kept talking about is, “What if you just made an extra $2,000 a month? For the average American, what would an extra $2,000 a month, $24,000 a year do for your life?” I think for almost anybody listening, that would radically change their life, give them ability to pay off debt, give them the ability to take another vacation with their family.
There’s so much power in just saying, “Okay, this doesn’t have to be this huge, big, sexy thing if I don’t want it to be. This can be a lever that I am pulling that is just geared toward bettering my personal finances.” Obviously, talking about on Financial Feminist, we talk about personal finances all the time, and it’s a lot easier to make more money than it is to continue cutting things and making yourself miserable. So give me the financial case of this. Somebody listening who’s like, “I am trying to pay off debt quicker,” why should they think about becoming a creator?
Justin Moore:
Let me answer this by telling you a story of a specific person. There’s a creator, her name is Adriana Lopez, and she is a DIY creator on Instagram. I did an interview with her for my audiobook actually to share what the impact of my teaching has had on her life. And what she shared was that… She’s a stay-at-home mom. She has a child that’s on the spectrum, which anyone listening knows the toll that that can take on a family. And of course, it’s such a beautiful thing for their family. But at the same time, what creating content has become for her family is, like you said, they are now able to take these vacations. Every couple months, she said, “We stay at the Four Seasons, we stay at the Ritz-Carlton because of these partnerships that I’m able to bring in.” The fun extra money that she’s able to bring into her family, it’s been so empowering for her.
She’s the type of person where… I’ve heard this story many times where there’s a lot of people who… They may not want to become a full-time creator like, “Oh, I’m going to do this. I’m going to do the whole thing.” It’s like, “I want to keep my job. I like doing this, but man, I like bringing in a couple of extra thousand dollars a month.” Like you said, paying off debt, putting it aside for your emergency fund or whatever. That is a reality for actually, I think, the majority of creators out there. Most people are not full-time creators. The majority of people are doing this on the side and just making this extra cash, which can be pretty transformational.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I think if that is the motivation, that takes a little bit of the fear out of it as well as the… I think a lot of people just think, “Oh, if you want to be an influencer, you’re a narcissist.” I’m like, “No, I think at the end of the day, somebody who creates content online or somebody who’s an expert online or even somebody who hosts events, maybe social media is on the back burner for you.” I am in this to provide value to people. Yeah, there’s a sexy part of my job, absolutely, and that’s super fun, but I am here to distinctly provide value for people.
I think if you take that sort of stance before you start creating content or before you sign up for your account, that’s the motivation that, one, is going to make you feel good about doing this and motivate you to actually do it, but also, two, it’s going to allow you to really stand out. Because if you’re committed to, “How can I help people?” and also, “How can I maybe make money doing this that allows me and my family more financial freedom?” those are great motivations as opposed to, “I love being the center of attention.” I don’t think most people are online for that reason.
Justin Moore:
Let me share a personal anecdote, if it’s okay.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Justin Moore:
As my business has grown over the last five or six years since launching it, I’ve had so many people in my ear like,” You got to scale this, Justin, paid ads. You got to hire a bunch of coaches and certify your methodology,” and everyone has an opinion-
Tori Dunlap:
I probably said it to you at some point.
Justin Moore:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Sorry, I probably did.
Justin Moore:
No, I think everyone has an opinion about what my business should be. I am in this moment of my life where my kids are getting a little older, they’re 12 and they’re 9, and… Sorry.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re good.
Justin Moore:
I look at the next couple of years as kind of these magical years where it’s not too much longer where they’ll be gone, out of the house. And it’s not too much longer actually even that they want to hang out with their friends more than they want to hang out with me and my wife. So no, I don’t want to scale my business. I want to have time and freedom. I want to have the optionality where if my kid bounds into my room at 3:00 PM from school and says, “Dad, will you throw the ball with me in the front yard?” I want to be able to just say, “Yes, I want to do that.” So I think part of building a business and taking the pressure off of you, if you’re trying to imagine what your dream life is, is that you get to invent what your life is. You get to invent the business that you want to create.
So if someone wants to look at my business and say, kind of muttering under their breath, “Oh, he just has a lifestyle business,” I’m proud of that. I’m proud of that because… Yeah. Maybe there’ll be another season for me or another chapter where I go hustle hard or whatever, but right now, I’m in this great place. Like you said, I’m helping people, I’m providing value, and I’m just cruising along and I feel content.
Tori Dunlap:
There’s a joke on the show, Justin, that I always cry and I can’t believe we got a guest to cry before me. Honestly, it’s such a milestone. No, I’m a little teary after that. I do think that there is a level of when we’re talking about building something of your own, it gets to look like what you want it to look like. And the only reason, to everybody listening, that Justin has that freedom is because he put in work to build something. So actually that means success that you get to choose whether or not you scale the thing as opposed to, “I have to do this because I have to make money, I have to survive.” That is success of, “Cool, I built the thing and I get to decide how much gasoline I pour on this fire.” That’s an incredible thing. That’s what I think anybody listening wants.
We’ve been talking a lot about how do you do this, how do you build this. What is the most expensive mistake you or somebody you’ve coached has made and one that you need to save a beginner from, anybody listening?
Justin Moore:
I think if you’re ever looking at a partnership agreement and you’re trying to decide what are the gotchas that you need to care about, just look for the word perpetual or perpetuity, because this is when a partner or a brand or a company is trying to get the right to do something with your content, your name and likeness forever. That’s what the word perpetual means. And that’s absolutely never something that you should agree to.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Justin Moore:
You don’t want what happens when you blow up and you’re a big star now or you’ve got this big business, and that brand from six years ago is still running advertising with your name and likeness. You may not even really fully support the product or the brand anymore. There’s this funny example of Simu Liu, the action star, did stock photography. He did a shoot for a stock photography, and you’ve probably seen these images.
Tori Dunlap:
Mm-hmm.
Justin Moore:
He really embraces it and I think it’s funny now, but in reality, this is something that can happen. So again, there are certain other things that you for sure need to avoid, exclusivity. Basically, whenever you collaborate with a partner or a brand, sometimes they may say, “Hey, you cannot work with any of our competitors for a certain duration.” And that represents a direct opportunity cost of you may not be able to do future collaborations with a partner down the line, and so these are all things that you can negotiate. You can reduce the term, the duration of that competitive protection. You can confine the category. So instead of it being this broad category of other people that you can’t work with, it’s more narrow.
I’m not trying to overwhelm folks of all these things, but again, you need to protect yourself because if given the opportunity, the brand, the company, the partner will try to get as much as they can. So educating yourself about what you need to avoid is paramount.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I would say the last one is an out clause. You need the ability to get out if you need to. We have had the experience of needing to use that out clause and not having it, and also having the experience of having the out clause and needing to use it. So it’s a very different reality of… You realize, “Oh, for whatever reason, we’re not going to be able to work with this brand anymore,” and you being handcuffed into that deal because there is no out clause.
Justin Moore:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, these are the kind of things that are so important to talk about that is more nitty-gritty. And as you get into it, read your contracts. Some people might not be at the point where they need a lawyer, but at the very least, this is not iTunes, accept your a million page contract where you just click a button and you’re like, “Cool, okay,” because none of us read the terms and conditions. This is a contract you have to read. You have to know what’s in it.
Justin Moore:
Let me share a story. April and I, back in the day… This was early on when we didn’t have a ton of reps. There was a clothing brand that reached out offering to give her $2,000 in free clothing credit in exchange for a video. She was just like, “New wardrobe? Let’s go.” We had no money at the time. They sent over this agreement and… We didn’t understand legalese. We didn’t know any lawyers like… “Eh, it looks fine.” Probably it’s fine, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Justin Moore:
So signed it. A couple of months later, we were watching TV and a broadcast TV commercial comes on with her footage from her YouTube video. We turned to each other and we’re like, “Did we grant the brand the rights to do that?” Went back, looked at the contract, sure enough, signed away broadcast TV rights. Not even for money, it was for free clothing credit. So that’s just a terrible story of all the painful lessons that we’ve learned along the way that I’m trying to help creators avoid.
Tori Dunlap:
So if somebody is starting to build this business for themselves, and maybe somebody’s listening who is starting to make some money, you had mentioned at the top, and I agree with you, that hiring a manager seems sexy and it seems exciting and it’s really not all it’s cracked up to be. So for any lay person listening who maybe is just at the start of this, what starts happening as you build your brand is you’re going to get reached out to sometimes by massive agencies like CAA or UTA, and an agency is there to represent you, kind of like an actor has an agent. And then there’s a lot of these smaller agencies typically for smaller creators, and they’re there to negotiate deals. They’re there to sometimes pitch on your behalf, but then they’re taking a percentage of anything that comes in and usually they’re managing all of it.
Even if they didn’t go out and chase a deal and the deal came inbound to you and your inbox, they’re taking a percentage of that. So you tell creators not to hire a manager and keep 100% of what they make. Talk to me about why you feel so passionately about this.
Justin Moore:
I like answering all your questions with stories if that’s okay, because I think they hammer home the point the most.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s great.
Justin Moore:
When I ran my ad agency… Just to clarify, I had an ad agency. I was not representing talent. So that’s the difference is that I was hired by brands. My brands were my clients and they said, “Hey, Justin, we want to run this campaign. Go execute this for us.” And then we would go out to non-exclusive talent-
Tori Dunlap:
Go find an influencer.
Justin Moore:
… We would go find an influencer to collaborate that would be a good fit for the campaign. So what would happen is we would be in the discovery phase for a campaign. We would make a short list of who we thought would be a good fit for it. We would go to the brand and be like, “Hey, we think these 20 people would be good.” They said, “Okay. Yeah, these five people are on the short list for us. Go reach out to them.” We would go to that person’s website or profile on Instagram or wherever, and it would be their manager’s email address in the bio. So we’d email the manager and we’d say, “Hey, we’ve got this opportunity on behalf of our client. Do you think that your client would be interested in this?” And the manager would immediately say, “Hey, yeah, I think she might be interested, but do you need more people to work with? Because I’ve got 19 other people on my roster, and here’s their rates and here’s their profiles. Would you like to work with any of them as well?”
Tori Dunlap:
Sounds familiar, Justin.
Justin Moore:
You can imagine a less scrupulous brand or agency would say, “Oh yeah, great. I like those three other people instead. Let’s work with them instead, and they’re cheaper. Let’s go work with those people.” So if the only way in which your representative is eating is their cut of your deals, these types of awful financial dynamics are going to occur because again, they don’t care if they get their 20% from you or the 20 other people on their roster. This is just one example of really bad behavior that I’ve seen. Again, this is different if you are compensating someone in a flat capacity, they have a retainer, they’re consciously pounding the payment for you. But if they’re just a glorified inbox manager and they’re responding to inbound on your behalf, there’s absolutely no reason why either, A, you can’t learn this yourself or, B, you hire someone directly on your team to own this competency in-house.
Again, it’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book is you can do this. A lot of people think there’s these gatekeepers and, “If I get on the radar, magically, I’m going to get all these opportunities and…” Very rarely, me as an agency, would I go to a manager and be like, “Hey, do you have 10 people for me?” It’s like, “No, I’m going to do my own due diligence and find the people that I think would be the perfect fit for this. So that’s one of 20 stories I could share of all the reasons why I think it’s bad, but it definitely was an eye-opening experience.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
I mean, I have my own. I’ve told it on the podcast. The episode is literally called, This Mistake Cost Me Half a Million Dollars. The reality was with this podcast, we went through agencies, which is so common. Almost any podcast you listen to, whether that’s at SiriusXM or iHeart or Spotify or Sony or Wondery, these are agencies that sell the ads on the podcast. And what happened is when Financial Feminist blew up, we got reached out to by all of these people who wanted to work with us and it very much felt like, “Oh, this podcast is now a certified thing.” It felt very validating of, “Oh, we’re a big deal now. That’s great because all these companies want to work with us.” At various agencies over the past three or four years, we had some better experiences, some not so great experiences. But at the end of the day, it was really, really difficult to give 20, 30% of the money that we were making on the show to somebody else, especially since we were paying for all of the production. We pay for our team to be able to produce the show.
I think the other really interesting thing about that split is that when you are one of many, like you were saying, Justin, it feels very exciting like, “Oh, I am on a network or I am repped by this person or this company that reps all of these other people.” And we were told, “Oh yeah, you’re going to get on this show because they were repping them too, and you’re going to be on this show.” It was the same thing where a brand would come and really want to work with us, want to sponsor Financial Feminist. And then we would discover that maybe they were sponsoring our show, maybe not, but they were also then sponsoring somehow the other 6, 10, 25 shows on the network. So that kept happening in a way that it’s just really difficult to know that we are standing on our laurels and a bunch of other people who we don’t really have access to and access to their audience.
They’re also benefiting from that in a way that we didn’t negotiate. We don’t get a cut of all of their ad revenue now. And that’s just one of many stories of… There is something to be said, I think, for people who are starting a business who are like, “Okay, cool. I just get to wipe my hands, and I get to not worry about it.” But I will say, and I’ve said this time and time again, if you are running a business, you don’t get to opt out of the financials. You don’t get to say, “Oh, I’m just going to be the creative. I’m just going to not look at my money. Somebody else is better at it. Somebody else can handle it.” Especially for women, if you listen to this show, you know this is a narrative that is repeated. Whether it’s your personal finances or your business finances, the narrative that you are not smart enough or you don’t know enough to do this and somebody else who’s a better expert should come in.
We had Jonathan Van Ness on the show, who’s now become a friend, and literally I went on his podcast three years ago, talked to them about money and they realized that they were not paying attention to their own haircare line that’s at Sephora. They were not involved in their business because they had been told, “You’re the creative, you’re the talent, don’t worry about it.” So when she came back on my show, she was just like, “Oh, my God. There was so much that I wasn’t paying attention to that now that I’m in it, we’re having better profits than ever before. I just know what it’s like to run the company now.” That’s my long-winded way of saying I completely agree with you. I also think that you just can’t believe the narrative that is going to be fed to you time and time again, especially as you start making money, which is somebody else is smarter or better at handling this or, again, this gatekeeper, like you said, will give you certain opportunities. And I’m like, “No, I create my own opportunities.”
Justin Moore:
The other thing is… I just want to share this quick number for you, which is that, like you said, it may seem, “Oh yeah, fine. I would rather have 80% of something-
Tori Dunlap:
80%, yes.
Justin Moore:
… than 100% of nothing.” It’s this old adage, right? I’ve been pretty transparent about this, but my wife and I have made over $5 million in brand partnerships over the last decade plus. And had we paid 20% to a management company, that is a million dollars. So it might not seem like a lot on a deal by deal basis, but especially if your business starts growing, this is real money. That’s a house, that’s a boat, this is serious money.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s a college fund.
Justin Moore:
100% agree.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay. Justin, let’s do a rapid fire because I have so many questions for you. I think I know your answer already, but free product instead of money, is this ever worth it?
Justin Moore:
Absolutely not. No, never.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay. The worst pitch you’ve ever sent?
Justin Moore:
“Hi, I’ve been using your brand for three years. I would love to collaborate. Justin.”
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Justin Moore:
Sliding into brands’ DMs.
Tori Dunlap:
Didn’t you also message somebody about a honeymoon hotel?
Justin Moore:
I did, yeah. I tried to get some free accommodation… Actually, I said, “I would love to get either complimentary or discounted accommodations.” So I was negotiating against myself from the very first email.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s so funny. You’re like, “Either I want it for free or I want you to give me 20% off.” They’re the same thing. It’s fine. Biggest myth about who gets sponsored?
Justin Moore:
Oh, it’s that you have to have a large following. In fact, the majority of our clients, they have a much smaller following, but a much deeper niche. Dr. Aleks, she is a veterinarian or physician. She has a podcast called Digital Pathology Place. She’s a doctor, and she’s getting hundreds or thousands of downloads on her podcast. Not hundreds of thousands, hundreds or thousands. And yet she is absolutely crushing it with brand partnerships because she is a massive fish in a very tiny, tiny pond. So it’s not just about follower count, it’s about relevancy of your content niche.
Tori Dunlap:
I want to be really specific. When you say small audience, some people… What does that actually mean? How many followers are we talking?
Justin Moore:
We have people in our coaching program who have in-person hyper-local businesses where they have breakfast clubs around Boise, the Boise, Idaho area, and they have 25 people that come to them and they’re getting sponsored. So this is not a, “I need thousands and thousands of people,” it’s, “Can you be relevant and help accomplish a business outcome for the partners that you want to work with?” In that hyper-local example, if she is going out and pitching the local coffee brewery or the local coffee chain, and they have some sort of promotion to try to drive more foot traffic in there, they come and do their breakfast club at the coffee shop, all the women who are there, they are creating content there, they’re tagging the brand, and that’s one of the key deliverables of that partnership, that could be worth a multi-thousand dollar investment for this little tiny organization that has just 25 or 30 members. So again, it’s not about the follower size, it’s about the format and the relevancy.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, I will tell everybody listening, now granted this was 2019, but I went full-time in Her First $100K with 9,000 Instagram followers.
Justin Moore:
Let’s go.
Tori Dunlap:
I was making-
Justin Moore:
Let’s go. Sorry, I had to do it.
Tori Dunlap:
That was incredible, and I hope it came through on the mic. Oh, my God. I need that. I need it so bad.
Justin Moore:
I had to do it.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, it’s so good. No, but again, this is the belief is it’s like… I was making $77,000 in my corporate job, and I was making as much money in my business at that time with less than 10,000 followers. I remember, January 2020, so this is pre-pandemic, but barely we had our first course launch and I made $22,000 and I split that in half with my co-collaborator. I remember thinking, “Oh, my God. This is more money than I’ve ever seen in my life,” and that was with about 10,000 followers at that time.
Justin Moore:
That’s incredible.
Tori Dunlap:
One thing every person with an audience should do today.
Justin Moore:
Survey them, figure out what’s going on in their lives, what challenges they’re experiencing. They’re not a faceless hoard. They’re individual people. So if you can put up a poll on Instagram stories, “Hey, DM me. What’s going on in your life? Are you married? Do you have kids? What types of jobs do you have? What problems do you have? What brands and products and tools are you using and interested in right now?” Maybe you can use the data from some of those surveys to go and reach out to those brands and say, “Hey, people in my audience are already interested in the types of things that you’re working on. I would love to expose my full audience to it.”
So I think learning more about how you can serve your audience in particular. In fact, this is another mistake is when you think about who you want to partner with, you just create this dream brand list in your head like, “I would love to work with brand one, two, three, four, five because I love them.” It’s not about you. No, it’s not about you at all. It’s about, “How can this partner solve a problem for your audience?”
Tori Dunlap:
A brand reaches out and wants you to drop the disclosure, the hashtag ad or hashtag partner, what do you say?
Justin Moore:
You tell them to kick rocks.
Tori Dunlap:
Truly.
Justin Moore:
And you send them the link on the FTC website, the Federal Trade Commission, where it talks about the disclosure requirements for doing partnerships, “Come on, let’s go.”
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. For anybody, again, who is a beginner to this, and we all probably know because we’re all on the internet, but if you get paid by a brand, you have to disclose it legally. Brands will often try to get you to hide it or try to get you to do it at the end of the video. And the truth is is that if you are legally liable for that campaign, the brand is not going to take the heat for it. You’re going to take the heat for it. And if hypothetically they do, they have tons of attorneys. They have a legal team most likely. So it’s always really, really important that you disclose properly because you could be in hot water if you don’t, absolutely.
Justin Moore:
Well, it’s not just a legal thing. It’s about your commitment of integrity to your audience.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, integrity.
Justin Moore:
Right?
Tori Dunlap:
Absolutely. I got paid to do this.
Justin Moore:
Yeah, I was compensated. There was an exchange of value here. By the way, it’s not just money. The FTC, the Federal Trade Commission is very clear that you also have to disclose. If you receive some sort of perk or benefit, you got your tickets upgraded to an event or whatever, you have to disclose that relationship because it could materially impact how you’re discussing the product or the brand. So you have to be very careful that it’s not just about money.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I see this a lot with influencers is they will suddenly be at this really nice hotel and they give this whole room tour, and I’m like, “That was comped.” It was a comped room, but there’s no #gifted. There’s no, “Thank you so much for hosting me.” There’s none of that on there. So as a user of social media, it’s really also helpful for you to know and to read between the lines and be like, “That creator is not disclosing this partnership properly,” and do with that information what you will.
Justin Moore:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
All right, my last question for you. There’s a woman listening right now who just has an idea for getting started or again is motivated by, “How do I just make a little bit extra money every single month?” But she is thinking to herself that real businesses require money she doesn’t have or a following she hasn’t built, or confidence that she is lacking. What is the one thing you want her to do before she talks herself out of it?
Justin Moore:
Cut the toxic people out of your life who are telling you you can’t.
Tori Dunlap:
What if that toxic person is you?
Justin Moore:
Oh, that’s a good one.
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t mean you, Justin. I mean you, in your head.
Justin Moore:
Therapy?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Justin Moore:
I think therapy is important. Doing the self-work, doing the hard work internally to figure out why it is that you’re your own biggest critic. I think the place to strive to be in my mind is being proud of trying regardless of the outcome. And I think that if you can get to that place, whatever you try, you’ll be proud of yourself for doing it.
Tori Dunlap:
The other thing very tactically I’ll say is that, because I know our audience really well, the average woman in our audience believes she has to have all of the answers to all of the questions, even if she doesn’t know what the questions even are yet. The truth is you will figure out the questions and the answers, but only through action. The quote I’m seeing all over the internet right now is, “Confidence does not come from research or from preparation, it comes from action.” So if you want to actually build your confidence and feel capable and build that level of self-trust, it is not going to come from doing more Googling or getting in your head more, or making sure you have the 12-step plan even if you only know the steps 1 through 3, it comes from actually doing it.
I’ve told this story before, but if you look in 2016 when I launched what later became Her First $100K, it wasn’t even called that at the time, it was the ugliest website you’ve ever seen with a logo I whipped up on Canva, when Canva wasn’t even that good. It was so ugly. I can look back on that and be like, “You know what? She was doing so well with what she had. And she decided, ‘I’m just going to launch one day,’ as opposed to thinking, ‘I have to have the perfect logo or I have to have the million followers or I have to know exactly how to create content before I ever hit post.'” The truth is you will figure that out as you go, you will iterate as you go, but none of that will happen if you don’t actually do it.
Justin Moore:
To kind of do a little clap at the end, the little snap at the end of that, going back to what we were talking about earlier is rather than having this big vision of the impact that you want to have, and that’s great, keep that on your vision board, but get real down to the minutia here, “How can I have an impact on one person? How can I help this one person out?” Whether it’s content, whether it’s coaching, whether it’s going to help them with one thing in particular, just start small. It’s all about baby steps.
Tori Dunlap:
I love your book. I truly think it is like anybody who is wanting to even try or has any sort of questions of, “Maybe this is right for me.” It feels more like a workshop than a book to me. So plug away my friend, because I do think it’s so, so helpful.
Justin Moore:
I super appreciate that, Tori. This has been a dream opportunity. I’ve admired you for a long time. Like I said, we really just kind of scratched the surface of the advice that I give around brand partnerships during this conversation. So if you want to hear more, you can go to sponsormagnet.com. And a lot of people have told me that they got a lot of just general business advice of how to interact with other people. So you don’t necessarily just have to be a creator, influencer, media company or whatever to get value out of it, especially I think we’re all trying to become better negotiators regardless of where we’re at, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, amazing. Thank you so much for being here.
Justin Moore:
Thanks, Tori. This was great.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists, produced by Her First $100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists, produced by Her First $100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to http://herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Ellice Ellis and Tamisha Grant. Audio and video engineering by Jonathan Kirk. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First $100K, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Rae Wong, Daryl Ann Ingman, Meghan Walker, Marciella Baietto, Demi Ganim, Taylor Toll, Zoe Rezek and Stormy McBride. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.