Smooth Ops

Our thesis? The future is bright for creators. For thoughtful people with the unique ability to entertain and educate through modern storytelling. For creatives from all walks of life who are capable of building a true audience.

At Smooth Ops, we see boundless promise within the rapidly expanding creator economy. That’s why we do what we do—complement creators with the business and operational support they need to maximize their potential and capitalize on their opportunities.

Because we’ve all read enough thinkpieces to get it: The creator economy is transforming every single day in new and equally exciting and confusing ways. Smooth Ops is here to make the most of it for eager, talented creators and the communities and businesses they’re building.

The founding team at Smooth Ops is a ragtag bunch of misfits who...wait, that’s not it. We’re actually ex-Morning Brew teammates who learned the ropes of the modern media world by building and scaling a newsletter company into a full-fledged multimedia juggernaut that notched a $75 million exit last year.

After a year of writing the Brew’s daily newsletter to millions of people every morning, Kinsey transitioned into the audio world. She created and hosted Morning Brew’s Business Casual podcast, its first foray into anything outside the email inbox.

There would have been no podcast (or Star Wars references) without Josh, who single handedly got Business Casual off the ground as the show’s strategy and operations lead. Josh was also responsible for bringing other new media products like industry-specific newsletters and live events from half-baked idea to wildly successful reality.

And Jenny? Well, Jenny’s the glue. As the team’s head of growth, Jenny skillfully took the Brew’s ecosystem from 200,000 subscribers to 3 million in the span of just two years. She’s sharp as a tack, especially when it comes to growing promising media enterprises and reviewing craft beers.

Ali is the team’s in-house Gen Z correspondent. A recent graduate of the University of Michigan (Go Blue), Ali does it all—manages partnerships, builds out new projects, and generally keeps the lights on.

We’re a group of people who are passionate about empowering creators—we know them, we love them, we are them. Creators with big ideas should be able to own their craft and their upside. That’s the first commandment here at Smooth Ops.

If you want to know more about our company culture, look no further.

We provide content creators with the services they need to operate and scale their businesses. How? Glad you asked.

This is what we call the Creator Growth Hormone. High quality content creation can only happen alongside efficient content operations. We love to study the dark arts of posting frequency, email subject lines, and more. Seriously, we’re going to go grey and buy tweed blazers and teach this in a college course someday. Armed with that passion, our team helps handcraft content calendars and strategies, audience development tactics, and systems designed to delegate tasks like editing, booking, and cross promotion.

If that paragraph has too much jargon for your taste, consider this metaphor: Creator Growth Hormone is all about squeezing as much juice as we can from the high quality content you’re already cranking out. Simply put, we take stock of everything you're doing now—from content production to promotion—to identify potential efficiency boosters and audience growth levers.

We want to help you maintain an efficient output of high-quality content, develop a full-funnel audience growth strategy, and build consistent systems and processes.

Forging a sustainable, independent creator business requires multiple revenue streams across multiple platforms—gone are the days of the one-trick ad pony. Smooth Ops gets you there by facilitating ideation, testing, production, and management of revenue-generating products that serve your audience as much as they serve you.

Broadly, these revenue streams fall into two buckets:

1) Brand Partnerships (the artist formerly known as ads). Whether you’re exploring monetization through brand partnerships or you’re already ad supported, our team can help you build and scale your advertising operations.

We'll create your ad offerings and media kit; manage both inbound and outbound sales; handle ad production, execution, and reporting; and manage accounts receivable.

2) Direct to Consumer. While we're believers in good, value-add brand partnerships, we know the value in direct audience monetization. Our team will evaluate the direct revenue streams that align best with your content strategy and audience—whether that’s online courses, merch, job boards, membership models, communities, or DTC cheeseburgers. There's no one-size-fits-all approach. We guarantee we'll work with you to determine what's right for your business.

And once we figure that out? We’ll identify the right partners and tools, develop and test the product, and execute the launch and operations of the new business line.

The core function of the executive support team is to help with basic business administration and ensure best practices in legal, finance, and accounting are being followed.

We'll help you decide which tools to use, determine capital allocation into new projects, negotiate with other partners and their counter-parties, engage in crisis management when needed, and more. It's not sexy, but it's important.

Ultimately, though, this is support—not management. We firmly believe that you should own both your content and your big strategic decisions. We’re just here to make those decisions a little easier. We do the nitty gritty so you can focus on what matters most—your content.

To get to know us and our approach to media, check out some stuff we've written.

We believe creators should have operators working for them, not the other way around. Want to work with us? Reach out →