Why You Don’t Need Millions of Followers to Make Money as a Creator – Avi Gandhi

Most creator advice defaults to one of two things: grow your audience or die trying, or slap some affiliate links on your content and wait for the checks. Avi Gandhi has spent 17 years in the creator economy — at WME, Wheelhouse, Patreon, and now running his own creator business and Creator Access Network — and he’s watched both of those playbooks fail people repeatedly.

What he’s building instead is aimed at the creators nobody talks about: the ones with tens of thousands of followers, not millions, who are trying to pay a mortgage and raise a family, not go viral.

What Nobody Tells You About Being a Creator (Until You Become One)

Avi’s path to becoming a creator wasn’t planned. He was laid off from Patreon — his second layoff — with a baby on the way and a mortgage to cover. He’d already been posting on LinkedIn for fun, getting traction, and suddenly people wanted to pay for his time. So he leaned in.

But what changed most wasn’t his content strategy. It was his understanding of what creators actually deal with.

“As an agent, we were always pitching creators to do more — to work with more brands, to produce more content, to do more partnerships. We thought their capacity was infinite. But today, as a creator, I understand that capacity is not infinite. It takes time and a lot of effort to deliver. It also costs money. So not every partnership is profitable.”

That shift in perspective — from the business side of the table to the creator side — is exactly what’s missing in most industry conversations. Agents, platforms, and brands treat creators like rational business operators making clean ROI decisions. But creators aren’t fully businesses and they aren’t fully consumers. Avi calls this a third category: B-to-Creator.

If you’re selling to a corporate director, their company pays them to take your call. A creator takes that same call on their own time — time they could be making a video or closing a brand deal. The opportunity cost is structurally different, and most people working with creators never account for it.

The Creator Middle Class Is Real — and Massively Underserved

The word “creator” still conjures images of MrBeast thumbnails and eight-figure YouTube revenue. That’s not the industry Avi is describing — and it’s not the one most creators actually inhabit.

Research Avi cites puts the number of full-time creators in the US somewhere between 1 and 11 million, with up to 27 million people making money from content in some capacity. The overwhelming majority of them don’t have a million followers. Most don’t even have 100,000. And yet many are making real money — not because they went viral, but because they built trust with a specific audience and figured out how to monetize it.

“I don’t even have 100,000 followers and I make a great living — pay my mortgage, contributing to supporting my family. I think anybody should be able to do that and I want to make it possible.”

This is the creator middle class. Not side-hustle hobbyists, not MrBeast. People running lean, focused creator businesses around real expertise — IT professionals, consultants, niche educators, local business owners — who use content as a customer acquisition channel rather than a fame machine.

Avi makes the comparison direct: running a creator business is as hard as running a coffee shop or being a plumber. You have to program a media property consistently, build and maintain community trust, figure out how to monetize without eroding that trust, and repeat it — while also handling the operations, the finances, and the partnerships. It’s a generalist business that asks you to be good at almost everything simultaneously.

Why Monetization Fails (And Why That’s Normal)

One of the most honest parts of the conversation is Avi’s account of his own failed business models. Before finding what worked, he burned through six or seven attempts:

• A paid membership that cost him $3,000 over two years with minimal returns
• An affiliate program inside his newsletter that took dozens of hours to set up and made no money
• Various consulting and course structures that didn’t fit his content or audience

What eventually worked? Inbound consulting from companies that found him through LinkedIn. Not because it was the obvious answer, but because it was the right fit for his specific audience, expertise, and content style.

The broader point: there is no universal creator monetization playbook. Take five Minecraft YouTubers — one monetizes through AdSense, one sells merch, one runs a paywalled server, one does brand deals, one sells courses. Same niche, five completely different models. What works depends on your audience, your personality, your content format, and how much operational complexity you can handle.

The problem is that figuring this out through trial and error is genuinely expensive. Every failed experiment costs time and money. That’s the gap Creator Access Network is designed to address — by reducing the baseline cost of running a creator business while creators figure out what actually works for them. At $49 a year, the model is built so that a single discount from one of their partners covers the membership fee. The rest is margin creators keep.

AI: Not the Apocalypse, But Not the Savior Either

Avi’s view on AI in the creator economy is more nuanced than the usual panic or hype. The explosion of AI-generated content is real, but the content saturation trend isn’t new — it’s been accelerating since YouTube launched 20 years ago. What AI changes is the speed of that cycle.

The “slop” argument doesn’t hold much water for him historically. When he was a junior agent at William Morris, TV agents were dismissing YouTube as cat videos and kid pranks — the equivalent of slop. Today, those creators are outperforming studio films at the box office and taking over streaming. Quality and taste are subjective and shifting, but human taste isn’t going away.

What AI does do — and what Avi is clearly more excited about than worried — is lower the barrier to entry for real-business owners who want to use content for customer acquisition. The coffee shop owner who can now post more consistently. The IT professional who can script a LinkedIn video without spending an entire day on it. The laid-off corporate employee who wants to build something of their own.

He points to his own experience building the AI-powered savings calculator on the Creator Access Network homepage — a tool that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to build with a dev team. He built it in a week and a half. That’s the unlock: not that AI replaces creators, but that it removes enough friction that more people can participate in the creator economy at all.

The real risk Avi flags isn’t AI slop. It’s the broader economic context that’s pushing people toward creator businesses in the first place — which leads to his bigger thesis.

The Creator Economy as Economic Safety Net

Avi’s macro take is worth sitting with. He argues that the employer-employee model most people grew up with — the corporate job as the default path to stability — is a historically recent phenomenon, and one that’s eroding fast.

Before the industrial revolution, most people were small business owners, freelancers, or farmers. The large corporation as primary employer is a 19th and 20th century construct. AI and the relentless corporate push toward profitability — more output, fewer people, flatter wages — is accelerating the return to something older: building your own thing.

Wages have stagnated for decades while costs have risen. The traditional markers of the American dream — home ownership, family, stability — are increasingly out of reach on a salary unless you’re senior enough to have real leverage. The creator economy doesn’t fix that systemic problem, but it offers an alternative path. One where you find your own customers, build your own leverage, and don’t depend on a manager’s annual review to determine whether your income goes up.

For Avi, this isn’t abstract — he’s been laid off twice and dealt with enough corporate politics to have no interest in going back. Creator Access Network exists specifically to make that alternative path more accessible and less financially punishing for the people who are trying to walk it.

What Creator Access Network Actually Is

The pitch is simple: a $49-per-year membership that gets creators access to negotiated discounts on the tools and services they’re already paying for — newsletter platforms, AI tools, accounting, and more. Every partner in the network offers a deal worth more than the membership fee on its own, so the math works from the first redemption.

Avi’s model deliberately prioritizes creator savings over affiliate revenue. When partners offer a 30% discount plus a 20% referral fee, he negotiates it the other direction — a 50% discount and a 5% referral fee. The bulk of the value goes to the creator. The business is built on volume and loyalty, not margin extraction.

His own math: if the deals available through Creator Access Network had existed when he started his creator business, he would have saved $3,000 in his first year alone — covering his accountant, his newsletter platform, AI tools, and other core costs. With a newborn and a mortgage, that kind of saving isn’t trivial.

The network is also intentionally small. Avi has no interest in building a venture-backed company that raises prices to satisfy investors. He’s explicit that he wants to keep the team under 10 people, keep the price accessible, and only make money if creators are actually getting value.

It’s a business model built to serve the creator middle class it claims to support — which, in an industry full of companies that say that and mean something else entirely, is worth noting.