Adult creator business decisions and the 90 days after

Blog Post Written By: Melrose Michaels

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Last season of Love Island ran somewhere around thirty episodes and I watched every single one of them. During that same stretch I was waking up at 5am and leaving my office at 11pm, then curling up on the couch anyway. I kept asking why the work was not getting easier, and the answer was that I had made myself available to something with no connection to my goals..

I only have language for that because of a line sitting in my phone notes app, one of four I have collected over the years from people who were not talking to me.

So we are going to start with those four quotes, because nobody sits adult creators down and hands them a philosophy of business. Then, I will get into what happens after you use that permission, which is 90 days of holding a decision that nothing has confirmed yet.

Where the permission actually comes from

I have been in this industry 14+ years and I run four businesses, and in all that time nobody handed me a framework for any of it. The assumption sitting underneath that is that what we do is not real business, so I built mine out of pieces of other people's advice that were never meant for me. I walk through that in this week's YouTube video, and they came from a gym owner, a post-apocalyptic television series, a text that is roughly 2,000 yrs old, and a post on social media.

The first is Alex Hormozi saying there is zero advantage in being accurately judged. That reframed years of walking into rooms and watching people stop listening the moment they placed what I do for a living. Somebody who has filed you in the wrong drawer is not building an accurate model of you, and they will not see you coming, which is an edge you cannot buy at any price. I stopped correcting people once I worked out that correcting them was costing me the only advantage I had.

The third is a common rendering of a line from the Bhagavad Gita about how those who commit to nothing are distracted by everything. Saying no has always been hard for me, and the yes is usually formed in my mouth before I have checked whether I have the capacity to honor it. That line changed what the word no means to me, because no stops being rejection once you hear it as the sound of a commitment you already made.

https://youtu.be/mwXZdTCa1_w

What it costs to keep a promise you outgrew

I built SexWorkCEO on a promise that I would never gatekeep, and that promise came out of asking cam performers in 2011 what camera they were using and being told to figure it out myself. I gave away free education for close to five years after that, funded entirely by my own labor and my own OnlyFans income.

Then I built GPTease, and realized, I had to put a price on this tool.

The thing I struggled with was the backlash I expected from this community for building something and putting a price on it. That fear delayed the launch and cost me sleep and a stretch of time I do not get back. What I had really done was let a principle written by a version of me who no longer exists sit in the room for every decision I made.

There is a line from the Fallout series that got me out of it, which asks whether the things you want survive you becoming somebody else entirely. It asks about you rather than about the plan, and that is a completely different question than the one I had been putting to myself.

I launched GPTease, I charged for it, and the backlash never came. Not one comment, not one DM, not one tweet about the price. I get into what that whole stretch actually cost me in this week's newsletter, along with what I think is really happening when creators send me DMs asking me to make their decisions for them.

The 90 days nobody warns you about

Giving yourself permission to make the business decision is the adrenaline part and it is also the easier half of the job. The hard part starts the next morning, when you have made a call nobody cosigned and there is nobody around to tell you it was the right one.

https://youtu.be/8c5a6BQCqCo

I've laid out what those 90 days actually feel like, because knowing the shape of it in advance helps more than you would expect.

At day 90 most creators check revenue and check how they feel, and I explain why both of those will lie to you. I also get into the business I closed after carrying it far longer than I should have, with no checkpoint and no number I was watching, which cost me more than closing it ever did.

There is a conversation on the other side of this that nobody warns you about either. Some people disagree with your decision and some people are grieving the version of you that made the old one. Those two look identical from the outside and they need completely different things from you.

Here is one practical thing to do with your attention during the quiet stretch in the middle. Put it on something you can actually move, like a test you are running or a wish list you have not restocked in months.

What ties all three together

Nobody is coming to sign off on your next move, and that is the good news and the bill arriving at the same time. The decision itself takes an afternoon and holding it takes a quarter, which is the part that gets skipped in every conversation about being your own boss. Write the checkpoint on the day you decide, while you can still see your reasons clearly and before your ego has attached itself to being right.

Do this before you close this tab

Name the thing you have been waiting for permission to do, and you probably knew what it was about 2 minutes into reading this. Then put an actual date and an actual number on it before the adrenaline wears off and takes your clarity with it.

P.S. Come grab the Availability Audit inside CEO Society, which is free and takes about 10 minutes to run. It walks you through pulling the hours that are already spoken for out of your week, and the number left over is usually smaller and more alarming than most creators expect.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the interview are those of the guest speaker and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of SexWorkCEO or MelRose Michaels. Anything said or written is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone else.