Why (Most) Creators Are Playing the Wrong Game 🎲

Happy Wednesday,

Lawson McDonald is one of the co-founders of the Hockey Guys, a group of former college hockey teammates-turned-content creators who have been at it since 2020.

He was actually one of our first guests back on episode 2 of season 1, which makes him officially the guest with the longest gap between appearances in Sportonmics history.

This week, Lawson came back to talk about what six years of building a creator brand actually looks like from the inside: the plateaus, the pivots, and the question nobody in this space has a clean answer to yet:

How (and when) does a content creator's career actually end?

🎧 [Listen to the full episode]

In his 2019 book, Simon Sinek popularized the “infinite game” framework (introduced by philosopher James Carse in 1986):

I'm not sure he had content creators in mind when he wrote it, but he might as well have.

Traditionally, careers have a shape to them: you start somewhere, you get promoted, you might switch jobs, but eventually there's some kind of exit (retirement, the company gets sold, etc.).

Content creation doesn't work like that. There's no finish line or graceful exit. You either keep going or you stop.

Lawson has been doing this longer than almost anyone I know (6 years), and the honest answer he gave when I asked him about winding down was basically: “Why would I?”

The brand is already built, the network is already there, and the effort to maintain it is a fraction of what it took to build it. The upside (getting sent to the World Cup, the Indy 500, the Stanley Cup Final) still exists as long as the page stays alive, so he keeps going.

What I think is actually interesting about that answer is what it says about the asset he's built. Most creators think about their page in terms of current metrics: views, followers, and engagement rate. Lawson has started thinking about his page the way you'd think about a piece of real estate. It doesn't need to be performing at peak every month to have value; it just needs to exist and be maintained.

I don't think most creators think about it that way, but I think the ones who do will end up with something worth far more than those who are constantly chasing a number.

1. Compounding network > compounding views. Lawson's views have plateaued. By his own admission, some videos flop completely. But the brand deal opportunities have stayed consistent. The reason: six years of showing up means he's top of mind at agencies that need reliable creators. The network compounds even when the algorithm doesn't cooperate.

2. Brand gets you in the door, but metrics set the price. When I pushed Lawson on what actually drives brand deals (the Hockey Guys brand or their analytics), his answer was both, but they serve different purposes:

3. Your avatar is how people describe you in rooms you're not in. This was the cleanest definition we landed on in the whole conversation. Your “brand” isn’t based on your follower account, or even your niche. Instead, it’s the six-word phrase someone uses to pitch you internally at a brand (your “avatar.”)

For the Hockey Guys, it's "a friend group that travels and does sports." That framing got them a Coca-Cola World Cup deal, not because they're soccer creators, but because they represented an avatar that Coca-Cola is trying to sell you (friends who are sports fans).

4. Build skills, not just content. Lawson has spent the last two years learning paid ads, email marketing, website copy, and e-commerce operations through NOBAD. His reasoning: platforms change, algorithms shift, but the skills stay. If NOBAD fails, he knows how to build the next thing. If the Hockey Guys slow down, the skills transfer.

5. A group account survives on friendship, not strategy. Most group creator accounts don't last. The Hockey Guys have outlasted almost all of them, but not because they had a better content strategy. Instead, Lawson credits it to the fact that they were actually friends first.

The content came from the friendship, not the other way around. When life pulled the group apart, the friendship kept the page alive. That's hard to replicate, but it's worth thinking about before you build something with people you don't actually like.

The thing that stuck with me most from this conversation is that Lawson is one of maybe a hundred people in the world who have been doing this long enough to have a real answer to the question:

What does a content creator’s career actually look like over time?

And his answer is essentially this: you build an asset, then you maintain it. You stop thinking of it as a job with a performance review and start thinking of it as a piece of infrastructure that generates opportunity as long as you keep the lights on.

I think about that a lot for my own stuff. The views matter right now, but what I'm really building (the network, the relationships with agencies, the reputation in the sports business space, the hard skills) compounds, and unlike the algorithm, it doesn't reset every time I don't post for a few days.

Nobody told us how this career ends; we're all just figuring it out as we go. Luckily, Lawson's a few laps ahead.

🎧 [Listen to the full episode]

📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.

See you then,
Tyler & Jake