Hey Reader,

Before this weekend's Production Oracle lands in your inbox, I want to show you what I've actually been doing all year when I disappear into the studio for days at a time.

It started over a pile of crab legs. 🦀 I was hanging out with Veronica Yanhs when she mentioned an old YouTube channel she'd walked away from eight years earlier, and she remembered leaving behind about 2,300 subscribers. I wiped off my fingers, pulled up YouTube on my phone at the table, and found 16,500 people who had kept watching, commenting, and subscribing the entire time she was gone.

She thought she needed help making new videos. What she actually had was an audience that never left, and nobody had built anything to catch them.

So the studio built it. We figured out what she should be talking about and who it was for. We coached her on camera until she sounded like herself instead of an "internet person." We set up a production system that doesn't live inside one person's head, along with an email list so viewers could become subscribers she actually owns. Her Instagram went from about 1,000 followers to nearly 12,000 in under three weeks (with one Reel that passed 256,000 views and counting) and we spent exactly zero dollars on ads.

The part I'm proudest of isn't the viral Reel, though. It's that we hit the brakes on purpose. Going viral is the beginning of the problem, not the finish line, because attention doesn't pay the bills until something is built underneath it.

👉 Read the full case study​

Speaking of finales... Episode 10 is live, and it closes out Season 3 of the School of Moxie podcast. Veronica shares what it took to leave a decade-long relationship where "security" came at a real personal cost and rebuild her business on her own terms.

🎧 Listen on your favorite podcast app​
📺 Watch us on YouTube​

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And with that, the School of Moxie podcast is officially wrapped. Across ten episodes, ten women walked us through their businesses, the trade-offs they made, and the moment they decided their business had to pay for their life. That isn't a vanity metric. It's a survival skill, and most of you are closer to it than you think.

What comes next is less talking about the work and more showing it. Everyone Wants to Be Famous is the new studio show pulling back the curtain on real projects at Sasquatch Media Grounds. You're about to hear more about this with some topics and questions a lot of you have been asking about all year!

Talk soon,
Mary 🌱

P.S. - If you read that case study and thought "I want someone in my corner like that"... that's exactly what the Creator Economy Dojo is for. It's part-time talent management for creators building toward bigger opportunities, so you get the strategy, accountability, and industry preparation of a talent manager without hiring a full-time one. 👉 Join the Dojo​