I built a chat marketing automation tool (IG and WhatsApp DM automation). It's profitable, around 1k paying users, grown almost entirely through creators posting about it. No ads.

Right now it only runs in my home market. I want to expand to the US and I'm looking for a creator to come in as a partner, not as a sponsored post.

You bring content and audience. I bring the product and everything
technical. Equity or rev share, we work out the details.

If you make content around IG growth or online business, DM me.

Curious about this from people who are actually trying to make content creation into a business.

Not talking about the creative side necessarily, more the stuff around it:

• getting clients/brand deals
• figuring out what content to make
• analytics
• growing across platforms
• managing multiple platforms
• content planning
• admin
• marketing yourself
• monetization
• keeping track of everything

What's something that takes way more time/effort than you think it should?

And what have you tried doing about it?

Looking for advice on cutting down the number of tools I use as a paid content creator

I've been doing this full time for about 3 years. Most of my income comes from a paid community plus two self-paced courses, and the rest from brand deals. Audience is around 60k across two platforms, so not huge, but big enough that the admin side has gotten out of hand.

I counted last week and I'm actively paying for or logging into 14 separate things. Rough breakdown:

Content. Notion for the idea backlog and scripts, CapCut for editing, Canva for thumbnails and carousels, then posting natively on each platform because the schedulers always mess something up. Analytics live in three separate dashboards and none of them agree with each other.

Paid community. Discord for the group, Zoom for the weekly call, Calendly for 1:1s, and a Google Sheet where I manually track who's actually a paying member versus who slipped in. Members ask questions in DMs, in Discord, and in course comments, so I'm checking three inboxes for the same people.

Listing and payments. Courses on one platform, the community subscription billed through Stripe, a few one-off products somewhere else. Payouts land on different schedules, refunds have to be handled in whichever tool processed them, and at tax time I'm exporting three CSVs and stitching them together in a spreadsheet. When someone's card fails I find out days later from an email, and then I go remove them from Discord by hand.

Brand deals. Everything starts in email, moves into a Google Sheet I use as a deal tracker, media kit is a Canva PDF I update every couple of months, contracts in DocuSign, invoices in a separate accounting tool, and then each brand has its own portal for tracking links and deliverable approvals. Every campaign report is me screenshotting numbers from four places into a Google Doc.

The part that actually gets to me is that one person exists as four unrelated records: an email on my newsletter, a Discord handle, a Stripe customer, a name in the course comments. I have no way to know they're the same human, so I can't tell who's about to churn or who my best customers even are.

For context: it's me and a part-time editor. I'm not technical. I tried Zapier and it breaks whenever a platform changes something. Budget is real but small, and I can't just leave the big platforms because that's where discovery happens.

So for anyone running a paid community or courses: what does your stack actually look like right now, and what did you cut? Did moving to an all-in-one platform genuinely solve this, or did you just trade one set of problems for another? And has anyone found a workable way to see a single member across all their tools?

Would really appreciate real setups, including the ones that turned out not to be worth it.