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VZJ6RfBTGUHwxvJxkGHY Amanda Northcutt, founder and CEO of Level Up Creators. Level Up Creators

"The most of my professional life is comprised of many happy accidental events," starts Amanda Northcutt, founder and CEO of Level Up Creators. "My journey has been incredibly fluid. However, that's the case for most people. It's not uncommon for us to land exactly where we're supposed to be in the event that we're deliberate and strategically."

Her parents always joke that she didn't speak until my brother went to college. "My brother's an extremely successful lawyer, but it was him who occupied most of the airspace within the home. He started college when I was fourteen and heading into high school. I began to come into my own once the airspace was readily available within the home."

Amanda's first gig was the shoe store. "Everyone was convinced that I'd fail miserably because I was very shy. I completely came out of my shell and started selling shoes like crazy and breaking sales records across the country. It was amazing! I was enthralled by business around the age of sixteen, and knew from that time that's the path I'd like to take."

In the following years, Amanda attended university and teamed up with a colleague who was starting a website and was looking for someone to sell advertisements on it. "This was back in 2005. selling online advertisements was similar to banner advertisements. It was like selling air! I heard the word "no frequently and was able to overcome any fears of selling to people pretty quick," she recalls.

Being thrown into the deep at the bottom

"I got my chops by being thrown into the middle of the ocean," she continues. "I took that small selling gig into a larger sales job at a new firm known as TexAgs.com and was for a long time. This is where I learned the most about how to run a business." At this point, she figured out the model of membership, recurring revenue, adding value, maximizing LTV and the sale of sponsorships.

"It's no longer just a fun tiny website anymore. It's the biggest collegiate fan site on the planet. It was my second time working there and had an absolute blast," she smiles. "I learnt how to run and manage individuals. It was at this point that I fell in love with the concept of membership as well as the recurring income. It was 2005. Next year, I will be in the space for two decades. Crazy how time flies!"

The company attracted thousands of customers who paid $13 per month for information about Texas A&M University sports teams. "We were also able to crack the mystery of moving from banner ads to sponsorships (brand deals in today's terms). The companies were trying to get their message out to our target audience, and we allowed access to them in a unique way that could be tracked, and thus moved the needle for those companies," she says.

Amanda adopted the model and started Northcutt Media, using the sponsoring model they had developed at TexAgs, and took it to similar websites around the nation. "That is my very first job when I was 22 years old. It was a great opportunity to travel frequently and do similar things."

A few years after, her health began to decline. "I had to get the time off but also dial in on living a healthy lifestyle," - Amanda needed to redress the balance of her daily life priorities, mainly her husband, health and the baby boy.

Amanda has started to share the details of her medical journey publically and is planning to share more. She's found that women who have work that is stressful, intense and demanding tend to be afflicted with an autoimmune condition or similar. "The more I can be vulnerable, the more I can lead the charge in that way," she says. "Every whenever I talk about my situation, someone new comes forward and messages me, asking could we have a chat?', and it's so amazing."

Amanda changed things up. "I had to be a mother. I was required to be a person who was in charge of my health, and I needed to be a consultant." To get back to a normal career, she and her husband purchased their other business partner at Member Up and took it on, and made it run as a consultant.

"I have had an amazing experience helping members run businesses which covered all sorts of topics. It was stuff one would never even consider except if you're living in this universe and know there's a niche for each kind of passion There are online users that want the same things you do." After a prolonged period in the industry of membership, she pivoted to fractional executive work at various SaaS companies around the world.

With this more balanced lifestyle, Amanda reduced her work by 20-30 hours a week but focused on being "extraordinarily impactful" in all the companies she worked with. She quit Silicon Valley at the end of 2022, to found Level Up Creators: "I wanted to take everything that I had learned in this B2B and primarily SaaS industry, and apply that to creators - and specifically women.

"I'm very interested in helping women to create wealth cycles that last generations and apply their expertise by providing huge amounts of worth to their communities of people who follow them and receive compensation in cash."

The services offered by Level Up Creators

What exactly does Level Up Creators do? "We're trying to maximize impact and income especially for female creators. I truly believe I've assembled the most experienced team of entrepreneurs on planet earth," she replies.

They aid people to determine the place they're at, where they're headed, and what's keeping their progress from happening. Then they orchestrate ways to remove these barriers and get you there you're looking for. "Our sweet spot is if you've got followers gathered around a specific topic - that's very significant - and have over 50,000 social media users as well as more than 2,000 email subscribers."

"When you approach us, I'll likely be asking you around a hundred questions," says Amanda. "I'm always looking to understand before I can be understood." Amanda gathers the quantitative and qualitative information set from a creator so they are able to help them determine their choices.

"We want to help the subject matter experts develop a product suite. We'd like an initial lead magnet, and then an educational course, maybe an introductory masterclass of three parts or something like that Then we could shift to a recurring revenue product. It could be a $49, the $79 price, or perhaps a $249 a month membership."

When you do that, Level Up Creators would move clients to group coaching, which comes with higher tiers of recurring revenue. This is an indication that "you are in a position to deliver consistently high-quality, repeatable value that's really on point for your community of followers and customers," she states.

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

This is how she assists people to develop their creative mindset. "Oftentimes, subject matter expert creators are hesitant to do deal with brands or even to create products that ask for their fans to buy them. It's my goal to educate creators about the fact the incredible position to offer value above and over what's available with no cost on social media.

"We all desire to be respected, power relationship, love and respect - the basic desires of our society," she continues. "We believe that we are connected to creators we follow. We have a lot of information about their lives, and want to live like the way they live." Amanda believes that the creators who create opportunities for us to be more like them, there's an opportunity for creators to sell items that are valuable and assist followers in achieving their goals, resulting in "a positive cycle of value".

"We have a greater respect for the creators we work with than we do the massive legacy global brands because we're speaking with a person, not a logo. Our primary goal is to say, 'It's fine to make money from selling stuff because people want to buy what they can get. We don't engage in icky marketing or sales, and we don't work with people who aren't offering real benefit to their communities. It's like table stakes."

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

"I'm happy to be in the position in which we're helping creatives again, and really doubling down on helping women,"" Amanda muses. We're a professional service company, however we're trying to emulate our client companies, and being a creator-first company our own." She sums by saying that they're here to educate creators on the ways to be CEOs in their thinking and properly run their businesses.

"We have been working on some awesome products!" she laughs. Actually, the group is launching their Level Up Creators School on the 1st of March 2024. It is a member-based business school for creators. "We'll offer our knowledge and know-how to offer the exact training, community, tools, and high-touch support to help creators reach the next milestone in their income which is for a lot of creators, $50,000 million in revenue. We'll also be using the Fastest Path To 50 framework to help people reach that goal. I'm pumped about that!"

In a final thought about the business in general, Amanda concludes: "The industry is moving towards this direct-to-consumer approach where the creators hold more control with regards to consumer spending and content curation. It's amazing the amount of affection that fans feel for the creators that they love."

Amanda says that millennials and Gen Xers aren't relying on big legacy brands to get their news anymore "These big cable networks are nothing but dinosaurs! You can choose to get on this train or they will die."

"I completely believe in my shot": that's the direction of the future. I've created a business to propel that future into reality, and to help others become wildly prosperous. I want money to be given to creators directly instead of huge corporations. It's like, 'All right, let somebody else take over!' It's a good time to become a creator of content!" she smiles.

Additional information

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

She created Level Up Creators to help prominent creators and educators create sustainable businesses. Level Up Creators offers strategies and tools to those with at minimum one current product or service in areas like wellness, personal finance sports, travel, or wellness and who are prepared to increase their impact and income. For more information, visit welevelupcreators.com.