Reports to: Fadi Saleh (Head of Paywall) - Remote - $60-75K
The short version
We're looking for someone passionate about the creator economy and who's used AI to operate a business, startup, or personal project (does not need to be creator related). If you know how to use AI to automate work (with a focus on maximizing quality/speed and minimizing errors), are a systems thinker, and are obsessed with efficiency and prioritization, and want to help creators build strong direct-to-fan businesses, you'll have a blast here.
Overview
About Shorthand Studios: Shorthand Studios is a creator-first agency powering growth for creators and brands through strategy, content, and data-driven social storytelling. This is where creativity meets analytics. We've partnered with 500+ creators to date and provide end-to-end services across content distribution, publishing operations, channel management, post-production, metadata optimization, monetization, affiliate revenue, and custom paywall strategy and execution.
We're a division of Underscore Talent, the next-generation talent management firm representing top global creators across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Snapchat, gaming, and podcasting. Underscore Talent is a part of TheSoul Group, the digital studio behind 5-Minute Crafts and one of the largest social publishers in the world.
About the Paywall Division: The Paywall division designs, launches, and grows product and membership businesses for creators on Substack, Patreon, Mighty Networks, Kit, and similar platforms. We operate end-to-end: paywall and content strategy, execution, publishing, customer support, marketing assets, paid ads, and retention. Our roster includes established top creators across wellness, finance, education, and culinary verticals, with new engagements added regularly.
We don’t plan to scale with headcount. We scale with systems, a playbook of 126 growth levers, SOPs that AI agents and VAs execute through a ClickUp task queue, and audit loops that help us prioritize growth strategy for each client.
Right now I'm the only person who can build and improve that machine. The job is to become the second.
What you'll actually do
- Run point on client engagements with me: strategy calls as a second brain, follow-ups owned, playbook plays shipped, loops closed between calls
- Own VA output: assign through ClickUp, QA against the rubric, and when the same error shows up twice, fix the SOP so it can't happen a third time
- Build the machine with me: the playbook, the audit cadence, ClickUp workflows, AI agents
- Drive the strategy loop: pull data from Substack, Patreon, Mighty, Kit, and Meta dashboards, find the conversion lever, draft the rec, ship the change
- Own the messy in-between: the unscoped problems that don't fit a process yet. You turn them into one
- Talk to clients directly: calls, recaps, email and text updates, getting them unstuck
You might be
- The person who ran your campus newsletter or channel like a business and refuses to accept that media means being broke
- A consulting or banking analyst, 14 months in, building automations at 11pm and wondering why the day job can't feel like that
- An AI tinkerer who's done selling one-off n8n builds and wants one compounding machine with real revenue behind it
- A creator's right hand — channel manager, producer — who hit the assistant ceiling and wants to run ten businesses instead of one
What you've done:
- AI native. Claude, agents, and automations are already your daily tools, and you've learned to be the abstraction layer above them
- Systems brain. You see workflows where other people see tasks
- Sharp written communication. You can email a creator with a real audience, confidently
- Comfortable in a mess. We're early and moving fast. If that's exciting instead of terrifying, keep reading
- Bonus, not required: ClickUp/Notion/Airtable at real depth, small ad budgets run, code-light (Python scripts, serious prompt engineering), and actual opinions about the creator economy. You've launched anything publicly.
What you get
- Comp: $60-75K
- Direct partnership with me on real client strategy, from day one
- The full stack of creator-owned business building, from the inside
- A real path to Operations Manager or Paywall Growth Strategist inside 12 months if you're the person
