Creator Finances: How to position yourself to make a living doing what you love

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This is Creator Finances, a presentation that I gave at Archon 2024. The subtitle is How to Position Yourself to Make a Living Doing What You Love.

Who I am: My name is Matt Davids. I am a full-time role-playing game book creator. And you heard me right—I am full-time at this.

I’m doing this presentation to help other people see if they can get into a position to do what they love. This cover here is one of my books, and you can find those through the links in the description below. So, let’s jump in. Alright, before we get into finances, I just want to give a few basic tips.

If you want to create an online business:

Be clear on what you are trying to do

This may seem kind of obvious, but if you don’t know what you’re trying to do, it’s going to be very difficult to start your online business. So be clear on what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to make a little extra money? Do you want to go full-time with this?

Those are very important decisions that you need to make.

If you are clear on what you’re trying to do, things will go way, way better for you once you start diving in and doing all the work that is necessary.

Look at how you’re spending your time. This exercise was huge for me. What I did was actually lay out how many hours are in a week—you know, 168 hours in a week. I laid it out and looked at how I was spending my time because I knew I wanted to do something, but I had to work a full-time job, and I had a wife and young children.

I thought, “I don’t have time to do this,” but I wanted to do it. So I laid it out and looked at my time and how I was spending it throughout the week. I was shocked. I was spending 45 minutes on Facebook and an hour and a half on YouTube every night after I got home from work, just not doing anything, just kind of vegging out. I would have told you I was spending time with my family, but I wasn’t even doing that. I was just looking at social media and watching entertainment programming.

So when I decided to start making tabletop RPGs and resources, I took a hard look at my time so I could figure out what I was capable of doing. And guess what? I cut out some of that other stuff. I cut out Facebook, and I cut out mindlessly staring at YouTube, and I had time. I had time to work on my business.

Make things and release them

This is quite simple, I know, but one of the most important things we can do is start making things and just getting them out there.

I thought when I first started making tabletop role-playing game resources that I would be making campaign settings and adventures, and maybe even original tabletop RPGs or something like that. However, random tables are actually what took off.

And it just so happens that I love random tables and I love making them. I was making them for my own games.

But that’s what people wanted. I thought I was going to be making other things, but that’s what people wanted, and I would have never learned that unless I had put out a few campaign settings and other books. So, make things, release them, and see what happens.

Build an audience or borrow one

When we start an online business and release a product, we’re just releasing it out into the internet. There’s nobody there. So, you’re either going to build an audience or you’re going to borrow one. One of the easiest ways is to borrow an audience by posting your products on Etsy, Amazon, or DriveThruRPG. That is borrowing their audience and getting your stuff in front of people, but you also need to build an audience by collecting email addresses and building a social following on some platform.

Then, when you release products, you’ll have an audience to actually sell them to—an audience that wants to know what you are creating.

Creator Finances

The finances part. Now, I’m not a financial planner or a tax expert, but I’ll give you a few basic principles. I know finances are difficult to talk about; finances are the leading cause of divorce. We can’t even talk to our most intimate friend about finances. That’s ridiculous. We should be able to talk about these things.

We should be able to talk about our finances, but I think people get all tied up and think others are passing moral or ethical judgments about them depending on how they spend money. Most of us know the basics, right? We know not to spend more than we make, and that putting money on a credit card is unwise, but we do it anyway. And when someone calls us out, we feel defensive because we know it in our heads, but for some reason, our behavior traps us. So, what I’m talking about here are some principles to help you understand how to position yourself so that, at some point, you can do what you love—especially if it’s a creative field.

It is a privilege if we’re able to do something that we love and make a living off of it.

But we have to position ourselves to be in a place where we can start earning money doing what we love.

Here’s the first principle:

Get out of debt

I know this is easier said than done, but I understand that. I totally get it. But if you have debt, debt is a dream killer.

If you have all this debt hanging around your neck, it will be very difficult to start your online business. You have just turned the difficulty knob up to 11 if you have debt. I understand there are some kinds of debt that are unavoidable, like mortgages or possibly student loans.

But little credit card balances hanging around with a few hundred dollars or a couple of thousand dollars will slow you down and possibly kill your dreams of doing something creative. Frankly, one of the worst things is a car payment. Do you want a car more than you want to do something that you love? You have to think about that before getting yourself into a huge car payment where every month, there’s $600 or $700 just going out the window for a car. There are plenty of cars that you can buy outright that are affordable and safe.

If we get these payments, it’s a dream killer. So, get out of debt—whatever you can do to get out of debt.

Slash unnecessary spending

Again, I know this is where people start getting defensive. Please don’t. I’m not here to judge anybody. I have made some of the most ridiculous financial mistakes in my life.

Just think about this: If you’re running into a gas station and buying snacks or coffee, and you do that regularly, and it adds up to $50 a month, that $50 could have paid for a month of Wix so you could have a website for your business, and you’d still have $20 or $30 left over. The little things eat away at our dreams. They eat away at us being able to start our business.

I had to have a reckoning with myself on these things too. Like I said, I’m not judging you. I’m just telling you that this will kill your dreams if you keep doing stuff like this.

Slash your unnecessary spending. Because what would you rather have? A few drinks or snacks here and there, or a business doing what you love?

Seed money

You’re probably going to have to put a little bit of money into your business before it takes off, and that’s okay. I put about $500 to $800 into DiceGeeks before it started making any money that I could use to buy things or pay for things that I needed for the business.

But one thing we don’t want to do is keep giving the business money over and over. We need to find a way to get a little bit of money in there to start the ball rolling. We don’t want to be in a situation where we’re just giving the business money over and over again. You have to start somewhere.

Get a little cash into your business, but then try to get the ball rolling. Use the money that the business makes to pay for things from then on, and don’t keep using your personal money. If you’re in a business where you have to keep giving it personal money all the time, it’s not a good business.

Start with what you have

There is no reason to go out and buy all kinds of tools unless you’re in a very specific business. But there is a trap—the tool trap. We all want new tools when we start a business or a new hobby. It’s like, “I’ve got to have this new tool.” No, start with what you have.

“But I want to start a YouTube channel, and I need a camera.” No, you don’t. Use your phone or a webcam on your laptop or desktop. Start with what you have. Don’t fall into the trap of buying tools and then not going anywhere with the business or hobby.

You want to see what you can do first without those things. Plus, the adversity of starting without them teaches you valuable lessons. When I first started laying out books, I used Scribus. Why? Because it was free. I learned how to use it, and yes, it was cumbersome and had bugs and problems—of course, because it was a free product.

But I started with that until I got to a place in my business where I could buy Adobe InDesign. Then I switched, and guess what? Because I had used Scribus, InDesign was super simple. If I had just jumped into InDesign and started paying for it, it would have put a financial strain on my business before it was making any money. Start with what you have. The camera on your iPhone is better than most television and movie cameras were 10 years ago. It’s a great camera.

Your computer is fine; start with that. When your business makes money, buy a better computer or whatever you need. But start with what you have.

Do it yourself

When we start an online business, we’re going to have to do things ourselves because, first of all, we want to learn the process. Later, if we need to hire somebody, we’ll have a frame of reference for what we’re hiring them to do. If we have no idea how to lay out a book and we hire a graphic designer, we open ourselves up to all kinds of pitfalls. But if we know some of the basics behind graphic design because we’ve laid out our first books, then when we hire a graphic designer, we’ll have a frame of reference to understand what this person is actually doing.

Also, do it yourself because we can’t afford to hire anybody when we’re just starting. If you can afford to hire people, then you have way more money than I did when I started, and I wish you the best.

We’re going to do this ourselves to learn the process, and we’re also going to do our marketing and advertising ourselves. Again, it gives us a frame of reference for the future. If one day the business is making money and we’re able to hire someone to do marketing or advertising, that would be phenomenal. But we need to understand what they’re doing. If we don’t, that’s when people get taken advantage of, lose money, or don’t know how to manage people they hire.

We don’t want to be at the mercy of someone else. So, we do it ourselves to save money, gain skills, and establish a frame of reference for when we might need to hire someone.

For example, I design all my covers and do the layout for my books. That has given me skills that, if my business were to fail, I could take elsewhere. We’re improving ourselves, saving money, and gaining a frame of reference so that if we need to hire someone, we at least know something about the task. We won’t be at the mercy of someone who may not know what they’re doing either. We can assess their expertise more effectively.

Keep business money separate from personal money

This is huge. It’s very simple, but it is huge. Keep business money separate from personal money by setting up a separate bank account, like a checking account, which can be free with one of the big banks.

Set it up there, make sure there are no fees, and keep your business money in that account. When you get paid, all business money goes into that account. When you make transactions, the money comes out of that account. If you need to pay yourself, transfer the money from your business account to your personal account.

This will make your life very simple, especially if you get into a tricky tax situation. If you need to go to a tax preparer, having separate business and personal accounts will be incredibly helpful.

It’s also key for business deductions. If you’re running ads, buying equipment, or paying freelancers, those expenses need to be handled from your business account. If your business and personal money are all mixed together, it will be very difficult to separate them to get your deductions when you file your taxes.

Say you’re running a graphic design business and meet a client at Starbucks. If you buy their coffee and put it on a personal card, it becomes difficult to prove later that it was a business expense. But if you use your business card, there’s no confusion between personal and business expenses.

Save money for taxes or make estimated tax payments

If you don’t have a W2 job and are working full-time on your business, you’ll need to make estimated tax payments. This means sending money to the IRS every quarter, as well as to your state if it has income tax. It’s easy to do on their website.

If you have a W2 job and your online business is a side hustle, you’ll need to save money for taxes when they come due at the end of the year, especially if you’re making a significant amount.

Save at least 25%, probably 30%, of your business income for taxes. This will depend on how much you make. If you have a W2 job and earn, say, $2,000 from your online business, it might not significantly affect your taxes. But if you’re making $5,000, $10,000, or more per year from your side business, put that 30% away in a high-yield savings account.

You don’t want to owe money to the IRS. While they’re not sending people to prison for being late, you’ll end up with a payment plan, and that’s just another financial burden. It creates a vicious cycle. So, save some of that business income for taxes just in case you owe.

If you’re working on your online business full-time, make your estimated tax payments once per quarter to both federal and state (if applicable). It’s important to send in enough to avoid penalties.

For those with W2 jobs, saving for taxes can be easy to overlook, especially if your side business suddenly earns $10,000 or $15,000 in a year. Save 25–30% of that income just in case. When you report it as 1099 miscellaneous income, it will be taxed, and you might owe some money.

I hope this is clear. We don’t want to mess around with this.

If you have questions, drop them in the comments, and I’ll try to answer them.

Thank you so much for listening. Links to all my books and tabletop resources are in the description below. Thank you.


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