Hi everyone, I’m looking for advice from people who have built and scaled businesses, particularly from content creation into a real company.
My wife has had pretty rapid growth as an anonymous/faceless art content creator. In her first 11 months, she made just under $30,000. About $2,000 came from brand deals, with the rest coming primarily from TikTok ad revenue.
This year, she’s now monetized on YouTube Shorts and Facebook (still waiting on Instagram), and she’s on pace to surpass last year’s revenue despite barely posting for 2–3 months due to several major life events. She also has a small Etsy shop that’s made a few hundred dollars, but it hasn’t been a focus yet. She’s also started landing larger brand partnerships and is beginning to build a portfolio of recognizable national companies.
We’ve always wanted to own a business, but never knew what path we’d take. Now we’re starting to feel like we have a real opportunity. Rather than having her continue trying to do everything herself, we’ve decided to split responsibilities. She’ll focus on the creative side of content, product ideas, and the brand, while I’ll focus on operations, systems, finances, analytics, partnerships, and building the business.
We’re both in our late 20s and have never built a company before, so we’re learning as we go.
My biggest question right now is about building the operational side of the business.
What software and systems would you recommend for creating the foundation of a scalable company?
I’m less concerned about accounting software (we know we’ll need bookkeeping, spreadsheets, etc.) and more interested in things like:
SOPs and process documentation
KPI dashboards
Business operating systems
Project management
Product roadmaps
Company wiki/knowledge base
CRM
Task management
I’ve seen Notion recommended quite a bit, but I’m curious what people who have actually scaled businesses are using and what they wish they had set up earlier.
Our long-term vision is something like:
Content creation → Digital products & Etsy → Standalone website → Branded physical products → A larger consumer brand in our niche.
I understand that’s a long road, but I’d rather build the right foundation now than have to rebuild everything later.
Any advice, lessons learned, or resources you’d recommend would be greatly appreciated.