Unleashing Creativity: Zealous Takes on Creators’ Tasks, Unburdens Time

Launching “The Created Economy” podcast in 2022 was the first time I considered myself a real creator. I knew it would be a long and arduous process, not only to get the show off the ground but also to keep it going. Unfortunately the adage “if you build it, they will come” doesn’t hold water.

Between myself and my co-founder Gregarious Narain, it seemed like we had things under control. Being a writer and journalist, spitting out post-production work like transcripts and blog posts should be easy. And as a startup founder in the Creator Economy space, Gregarious should be good at distribution.

Like most first-timers, our eyes were bigger than our stomachs.

Are You Aware of All the Jobs to Be Done?

We soon realized that a tremendous amount of time and effort was required — even as part-time creators. It’s not just about recording and editing the podcast episodes; there’s also the task of promoting the show and engaging with our audience. Additionally, we wanted to expand our reach by creating written content, such as articles and newsletters related to our podcast.

As the workload piled up, we found ourselves struggling to keep up with everything. Both Gregarious and I had full-time jobs at the time and keeping up with the minutiae of podcasting took a toll on our creativity — there just wasn’t enough time in the day for us to tackle these things.

This wasn’t unique to us either: 66 percent of creators are churning out content part-time. And a majority of all creators say they find creating at least somewhat stressful.

Here are a handful of tasks we had to handle:

• Drafting and editing podcast episode scripts
• Creating transcripts for each episode
• Writing blog posts to accompany each episode
• Promoting the podcast on social media platforms
• Producing audiograms or shareable clips

Devote More Time to the Creative Process

Instead of spending countless hours with all the post-production work, wouldn’t your time be better spent doing what fans expect from you: Being creative?

Gregarious recognized this problem and has shifted his startup Zealous from being a live video service to a platform streamlining the creators’ marketing process.

Now, with but a single source file, you can quickly generate a slew of content, from transcriptions to audiograms, extracted quotes, entire blog posts, newsletter blurbs, and social media posts. One promising benefit is it’s all under Zealous, eliminating the need for creators to jump from Discord to Premiere, Canvas, Descript, Figma, and any number of other apps.

A study by the royalty-free soundtrack provider Epidemic Sound revealed content creators used an average of 4.5 tools for their content production, spending $2,500 annually. The higher these costs are, the less profit creators get from their earnings, and there comes a need to find ways to cull spending.

Creators may be transforming their personal brands into businesses, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll necessarily understand everything that’s needed. The same goes for marketing. Your job isn’t done once you’ve hit publish. Now you need to take steps to promote it to the world. Zealous says its artificial intelligence can expedite things and do content marketing at scale.

Among its features:

• Archival support of live audio from Twitter and podcasts
• Audio recording
• Transcription services
• Automated content production and marketing help
• Audiograms
• Publishing distribution support
• and more

There even seems to be a foundation for Zealous to be a community platform beyond its production offering. Its pricing list shows permissioning features and gating controls for NFTs and Discord.

Think Beyond the Common Definition of a Creator

As the creator economy continues to grow, it’s important to think beyond the traditional definition of a creator. It’s not just the individual YouTuber, TikTokker, Instagram or Snapchat star. Creators can be from brands too, and Zealous could be extremely useful for them.

Whether it’s webinars, podcasts, public speeches, or even a live audio session on a social media platform; if it’s recorded, why wouldn’t brands want to capitalize on this asset and use it for promotional purposes? With an offering like Zealous, teams won’t need to invest much in procuring tools to produce quality output. And it won’t take that much time either with AI helping out.

At the end of the day, brands and creators want to achieve the same thing — reaching their most ardent followers and showcasing their expertise. But all the behind-the-scenes legwork impedes that mission, slowing things down. Zealous eliminates the Jobs to Be Done to help you continue to do what you love best.