Pay The Creators: A Manifesto
Emily and I founded Freeman and Forrest on a simple yet controversial belief: it’s okay to get paid for doing work.
You might think this would go without saying. Even in the beautiful, passionate, self-motivated world of tech, many indie developers eventually need funding in order to build, research, and create.
Ethical hackers get paid in bug bounties.
Open-source maintainers, who have been toiling for years under demands for free work, finally are gaining widespread recognition that they deserve to get paid, through GitHub Sponsors or other interesting initiatives like Tidelift and thanks.dev.
The work contributed to a technical community goes beyond code. There are blog posts, docs, how-to videos, curated newsletters, podcasts, interactive tutorials, demo projects, useful Twitter threads, tool reviews, and more. Millions of tech professionals enjoy these for free every day. And we believe these creators should get paid what they’re worth.
If you want to get paid for creating freely available technical content today, you have a few options.
Go to work full-time for a tech company as a developer advocate.
Start a Substack, a Patreon, or a tip jar, and hope that your friends throw money into it.
Use the content as marketing for some other business, like a paid course.
Accept corporate sponsorships.
All of these can be valid ways to fund your work. And each has certain disadvantages.
Full-time work: You’ll only get to create content about the technical products your company makes, and you will have to at least pretend to like them.
Tips and paid subscriptions: You will have to convince many, many individual people to sign up for yet another recurring subscription.
Promotional material for paid courses: You will have to make, sell, and maintain the paid courses on top of all the free content.
Corporate sponsors: You’ll have to convince companies to give you money, over and over and over again.
Of the non-full-time options, corporate sponsorships have repeatedly proven to be the most lucrative. But devs tend to be most skittish about accepting sponsorships. They fear selling out, looking like shills. They worry that if they take corporate money, nobody will take their opinions seriously anymore. (For some reason, people don’t seem to worry about this as much when accepting full-time gigs.)
Devs who do accept sponsorships sometimes try to hide it, soft-pedaling their corporate ties. Trust me, your favorite big creators probably take sponsor money. And we love that for them! Why shouldn't they get paid for all the work they do?
In my experience as a technical marketer, marketing teams know that developers are shy about sponsorships. They see your recalcitrance to accept payment as an arbitrage opportunity. The corporate “developer communities” and “ambassador programs” out there are mostly attempts to wring free content out of you. The companies extract far, far more value out of those programs than they put in.
We don’t think that’s fair. We believe that creators — just like bug hunters and OSS maintainers — deserve to get paid for what they do, without shame or suspicion. Contrary to what you might hear out there in the chatterverse, high-quality, original technical content created by real humans is more valuable than ever in the age of generative AI. If you put that stuff out there for free, the LLMs will be thrilled to suck it up with no benefit to you. You might as well get paid on the front end.
Maybe I “deserve” to get paid, but is anybody out there actually willing to sponsor me?
Here’s the weird part: it’s way easier to get companies to pay for great content than it is to get them to fund an OSS project. The dev team who uses the OSS project doesn’t have a bunch of money floating around to sponsor developers. They have to make a complicated case internally for why they should spend money on something they’re already using for free.
But marketing teams have money and they want your attention. Every venture-funded tech startup out there has a pile of dollars specifically marked “Growth.” They are plowing those dollars into scattershot, low-ROI stuff like display ads and content syndication networks. (Have you ever read something on a content syndication network? Do you even know what a content syndication network is? Exactly.) Both Emily and I have been tech marketers. We have borne witness to this nonsense. Every marketer we know is desperate to point that leaf blower full of money in the direction of good content and real customers.
Now that said, keeping a sales pipeline full of high-quality sponsors, negotiating rates, and then chasing payments is miserable work. I’ve had to do it myself as a newsletter author. It’s annoying, to say the least. Freeman and Forrest was founded to take care of the overhead so creators can focus on earning top dollar for what they do best: creating.
So how do you get paid what you’re worth without selling out?
To borrow a line from my buddy Corey, who has done a wonderful job maintaining his unique, acerbic voice over the years while running a successful sponsor-supported newsletter: It’s okay to let companies rent your attention, but never your opinion.
That means two things:
Only accept sponsorships from companies in technical areas where you know enough to be taken seriously. In my case, I know certain things about cloud (I worked at Google Cloud and was an AWS Hero before that), and am generally pretty attuned to the DevOps / platform engineering world. I don’t know the first thing about Javascript frameworks, and if I started opining about them, you’d be right to tune me out.
Make sure sponsors know that you aren’t necessarily going to be 100% positive about their product. I’m not saying be a jerk. But savvy companies (i.e., the companies that sign deals with Freeman and Forrest) aren't going to want you to come off like an uncritical shill. They are paying for your thoughts on their product. They want you to tell it like it is. If you really don’t have anything good to say, you can always decline to take their money.
In a weird way, taking sponsor dollars can actually make you more credible. For one thing, it signals that you’re good enough at what you do that someone was willing to pay you for it. For another, if you disclose that a company is sponsoring you to create a specific product review or tutorial, you can give your opinion without people thinking that you’re “punching down” at a company that was just minding its own business. They stepped into the arena with you. Your job is to be as professional and honest as you can. No punches pulled.
This can be a challenging balance to find. Freeman and Forrest specializes in coaching creators to find it. We never want you to shy away from your authentic voice, and are committed to helping you maintain it.
What am I even worth?
Your voice as a developer is probably worth more than you think. You have hands-on expertise and technical influence that no marketer at a developer tools company can match. Even if you have a social media following of just a few hundred people, the odds are good that those people are more valuable to the marketing team of your favorite developer tool than 100,000 random impressions they could buy on Google Ads.
Weekly newsletters with just a few thousand high-value subscribers can be worth multiple thousands of dollars a month in sponsorships. A single YouTube video with 20-30K views could be worth upwards of $10K to the right sponsor. Again, there’s nothing shady about this. The money is there. If you don’t take it, it’s just going to be wasted on ads nobody clicks on. You deserve to be paid for what you create.
But, of course, you are right to consider how you can monetize your work in a responsible and community-friendly way.
Creating the magical win-win-win with Creator Sponsorships
With that said, Emily and I are excited to introduce Creator Sponsorships.
Here’s how it works:
Apply to become a member of the Freeman and Forrest influencer network — if you have at least 1,000 followers in a tech community, you’re eligible!
If you are accepted, Freeman and Forrest will sponsor your work on behalf of our clients. This can take two forms:
Sponsorships to hack on side projects and create cool demos.
Sponsorships for your newsletter, podcast, video, or other content channel.
We coach you through the sponsored relationship to make sure that you are comfortable, successful, and respectful to the community in what you create.
You get paid hundreds to thousands of dollars in sponsorships for every collaboration!
The end goal of Creator Sponsorships is to create a win-win-win — for creators, companies, and the community.
Content creators get funded to explore and share about their favorite technologies, without having to wrangle the logistics of sponsorships.
Companies get predictable, managed influencer marketing campaigns that reach the people they care about most.
The community benefits from an explosion of useful content.
If you resonate with that, we’d love to have you join our mission to share the bounty of tech — one creator at a time.
