Digital first entrepreneur Sam Barcroft kicked off TellyCast’s first-ever How To Make Money In Digital by telling a packed room of delegates how he did just that – turning a loosely-formed idea into a £25 million business.
Barcroft, who sold Barcroft TV to Future Media and now runs Creatorville, said the barriers to entering the digtal-first business now are incredibly low – but that anyone who embarks on the journey to being a creator needs to be in it for the long term.
“Launching a YouTube channel is easier than building a piece of IKEA flatpack furniture. You’ve just go to get out and do it. But you also have to realise that it can take a long time to build a business that you can sell. You need to be looking at 10 to 20 years of commitment and lots of mistakes along the way.”
With the digital first economy growing fast, Barcroft said now is a great time to get involved. But he advised would be creators that “you need to differentiate from everything else out there – and you need to go niche. Today, you don’t need to be number one in the world, you need to be number one in your niche.”
For creators seeking to build a saleable business, Barcroft laid out five creative and commercial lessons – know your superpower, write your own fairy tale, get your numbers pumping, be prepared to fire yourself and build FOMO. On the fairy tale point he said: “If you can’t tell your own story about how you want to change the world, why should anyone else care? If you write your fairy tale it is really powerful, because humans are designed learn and connect and get inspired around your stories.”
As for firing yourself, this is an inevitable part of preparing to sell a business, he explained: “This is really difficult, because you have built something for a decade, two decades, with a group of people going to war with you every day. But whoever buys the business wants to know it will keep functioning if you’re not around.”
