CHAOS explains: Co-Creation
Get started with it effectively for better experiences and more interesting outputs.
We’ve received a few comments, questions and concerns about collaborating with others to produce content.
“Creating alone is hard as it is, how and why would i do it with someone else??”.
So we'd like to clear the air, show the way and the benefits of co-creation.
LDF also having her share in co-creation, Reka has co-authored with 8 people and co-recorded videos with a handful. It honestly helped so much to improve confidence, output frequency, quality of content and growth as a creative. Getting feedback on your work is extremely valuable, not to mention if someone adds to it or takes away when necessary!
10x better content. No more creators block. Double the network effects.
How to get started is fairly simple but requires a lot of self-reflection.
HOW:
Step 1: Starting with a Goal in mind
Before you do anything, find your ‘why’ — creating content with others can take on many different forms, vary in the amount of work and time it can take, and will be most successful the more you know what you want to get out of it (and therefore can communicate it clearly with your partner and audience). It’s easiest to get this part out of the way so the rest is optimizing for one goal.
Are you a subject matter expert looking to share information with the world?
Are you stuck in the draft phase and looking for more accountability for publishing?
Do you want to deep-dive on a new subject and think that will be more fun with a friend?
Is this a forcing function to put thoughts down on paper for something?
Are you wanting to play around with new skills like video?
Do you have a deadline you want to hit?
Step 2: Self-reflection
Once you understand your goal, you have to discover what your strengths and weaknesses are regarding the full process of creation. Are you more of a note taker, a planner, a creative who fabricates sentences that are true treats to consume?. Are you a control freak or comfortable sharing your knowledge and work with someone in a way? Are you comfortable being on video?
Once self analysis is progressing you can go two ways:
Look for a 50/50 co-creator
Look for an editor
I recommend starting with the latter. Finding a writing buddy that you can share your drafts with is much easier and lets you get used to others tinkering with your baby.
Step 3: Finding your buddy
Who is in your circles that you enjoy chatting with? Do they produce content that you enjoy? Are they fun and knowledgable?
Reach out to everyone who fits your favoured answers to these questions, see if convo is fun, see if you click in a way, and then ask them to look over a lil something that you wrote.
They'll most likely do it without hesitation. If you like their comments and feedback you can clearly communicate your intentions to become editor buddies and what your goals are. From then on you can periodically help each other create things. You can have multiple at the same time, so that there is less pressure and more types of input and feedback.
AI will be super interesting in this step, possibly replacing co-authors entirely. We'll do a separate piece about what it's like to have AI as your buddy for editing, suggesting new points and phrases as we've played with that quite a bit at this point.
Step 4: Leveling up to a 50/50 state
This is where things get spicy. Once you know your strengths and weaknesses, you've been through the buddy state, you'll know exactly what to look for in a creative bestie.
We've capitulated to this state very quickly, because of previous experience and extreme alignment on goals. CREATIVE BESTIES AT FIRST SIGHT. 💕
It's a deeper relationship than just an editor/buddy that you could potentially also just hire from Fiverr, it requires full trust with the other person. If you want this to be actually helping both of you in producing high quality and efficient content, you need to let go of your control issues and trust each other to add or take out anything from the creation at any stage. This is also the step where media ore complicated than written comes into play more easily. Livestreams, workshops, grant applications, speaker gigs, podcasts, videos and anything else you can imagine to create.
Our co-creator flow now
We are at a level that is an extension to the 50/50 state because we are co-creating on multiple platforms and over multiple types of media formats as well, so naturally our frustrations with the available tooling came up. There are so many hiccups in this level of trustful collaboration on the tech level, which we'll also uncover in later videos when we dissect creator tools. It's the only third week of our deep collab publicly, but we've already been through a lot of loops with trying different tools.
Let's see our current stack:
Notion, Telegram, Twitter, Google Meets and Docs, Mirror, Substack, Medium, Farcaster, Lens, Riverside, Youtube, Photo Booth, Restream, Descript, CapCut and iMovie.
Breakdown for a written piece:
Telegram for ideation and discussion
Meets for the same but live sync at least once about the piece
Docs/Notion for actually writing it
Notion for keeping track of the to-dos
Mirror, Substack and Medium for posting it
Twitter, Farcaster, Lens and Telegram for distribution
Breakdown for a video:
Telegram for ideation and discussion
Meets for the same but live sync at least once about it
Docs or Notion for a script if necessary
Notion for keeping track of the to-dos
Restream to Youtube and Twitter livestream any processes we want to share
Riverside, Meets, Photo Booth, Restream or phone for recording
CapCut, Descript or iMovie for editing
Youtube for posting it alone, adding them to Substack, Mirror, Medium with it's written form
Twitter, Farcaster, Lens and Telegram for distribution
Distribution of tasks:
Who's more inspired by this topic/ Who came up with it?, What are our personal strengths?Battling timezone differences is actually positive in our case. LDF is in ET Reka is in GMT. We share a lot of waking hours, and engagement wise, we are spread across more time to chat with others.
Our content is so much more juicy, because even if one of us "leads a topic” the other can add a lot of insights, points and feedback the other did not think of before.
We don't micromanage each other or report about every single thing, but try to keep communication about goals, expectations and availability abundantly clear, plus keeping the other up to date with what we are doing.
We have about 3 live meetings a week, one of which is already the recording itself. We plan, distribute tasks per item with each different piece of content.
“Oh LDF has a hot discussion topic in mind? Great, how can i help her bring that to life.” We look at our own calendars and break everything up to the above steps. We try to keep it proportionate, if you wrote the written part (long af step) I'll distribute it (annoying copy paste/ rephrasing for many platforms step). But we make sure to keep clarity on who does what.
Constant iteration
Being flexible and open to change are great virtues generally, but we keep a large emphasis on staying sensitive to notice if something doesn't work well and the ability to iterate on it. Our stack is not perfect yet, we are running into a lot of inefficiencies, small details and issues about most of these products that cause friction and frustration in the process. We already needed to optimize a lot on it, that is why we posted our “2 weeks in and already pivoting” piece.
For example, Capcut doesn't work well with files over 500MB so the best feature( the auto captions) is already out the window for a proper Youtube video. OR if we record in a Meet which is most convenient we will loose audio quality for one of us.
These small, inconvenient issues only come forward once you are already using the tool so it is highly important we openly share this information with you. That is why we are also focusing on discovering what other tools are out there that might be better, trying them out, so we could have to most efficient stack of tools at hand and find all the missing features and stupid lil inefficiencies that make this process much longer than it needs to be.