Uscreen

We've covered dynamic duos in Theorist Media videos before, but this may be the best one yet. Check out Gwen Miller and Amy Roberts at Open Sauce this weekend!

LinkedIn has opened more doors for me professionally than almost any other channel. So when Rebecca Larzik came up with the idea of a LinkedIn challenge for our team, I was genuinely excited. Here's what I love about it, and what makes it different from the kind of challenge you'd expect from a company: 1. No requirement to mention Uscreen. 2. This is about building a habit of creating, not just consuming. And that distinction matters more than most people realize. 3. We work alongside creators every single day. We encourage them to show up, post consistently, climb the cringe mountain, and build in public. Now it's our turn to actually do the hard thing ourselves. It's not about reach. It's not about going viral. It's about building the muscle. Really proud of our team for leaning into this — and really grateful to Rebecca for her leadership in making it happen. Here we go. 🏔️

Happy Friday! Today we have Rob Balasabas 🤘 Week 20 of this little series, and I'm still loving it. Once a week I shine a light on someone in this industry whose company I really value. So much of what we do happens over email, on calls, across WhatsApp threads and deal rooms… but we rarely stop to introduce the actual people behind all of it. So this is a short weekly series to share: – what people actually do – how they can help others right now, – what kind of help or connections they're looking for – and one small personal thing that makes them… them 😁 The idea is simple: help good people find each other — and hopefully create more opportunities in this network. Same four questions every week 👇 👤 Who are you? Rob Balasabas, Head of Partnerships at Uscreen. Husband and dad living in Vancouver, born in the Philippines and immigrated to Canada at around ten. At Uscreen our mission is to help creators build sustainable businesses through recurring revenue, by launching and growing memberships. 🤝 How can you help others in this network right now? "My main goal is to connect people so they can do awesome things together. That could be connecting creators with our team, or with brands, or with other creators. It could mean connecting industry professionals, agencies, and others in our space so they can launch or grow businesses. Ultimately I see my role as a connector." 🧩 What kind of help or connections are you looking for? "Two things I look for every day: 1/ Creators who want to build a recurring revenue stream they actually own — not dependent on the algorithm, with full ownership of their content, their audience, their first-party data, and their revenue. 2/ Operators, managers, and agencies who support creators and want to align strategically to help those creators build those recurring revenue streams." 🏠 What makes you famous at home? "A saying stuck with me from a teacher I admire: his goal at home was for the people who knew him best to respect him the most. As a husband and a dad I don't always get it right, but I want to set an example of working hard while staying humble in success or failure, being generous with your time, your treasure, and your talents, owning your mistakes, and putting God first." 🫶 If Rob sounds like someone you'd want to know — or if you think you could help him — drop a comment or DM me. Always happy to make the intro.

Now that I've been at Uscreen for nine months, it seems like a good time to check in. The headline: it's an exhilarating experience here! I've been a "Generalist" for as long as I can remember. I started my career as an Engineer, became a Designer, moved to Client Services and eventually Product Management. PM is really just a title, I love to wear all the hats. One time I was chided for opening a Pull Request because I wasn't supposed to be touching code - I couldn't help it! The team here is embracing modern tools like Claude Code and truly enhancing them to make them accessible to everyone at the company. I feel quite fortunate to be working with such a forward thinking crew. Nine months in and happy to report that opening pull requests while evolving design systems and outlining Product plans is extremely welcomed. "Generalist" is no longer a curse.

Few creators embody "own your audience" better than Caleb Hammer and this team at Hammer Media. In four years, Caleb & crew turned Financial Audit into a content business doing 250M+ views a month across nine shows, plus the Dollarwise app and Hammer Elite, one of the largest membership communities on YouTube with 115,000 monthly subscribers. And last month he did something I think a lot of creators will be watching closely: he launched a dedicated streaming app and membership platform for Hammer Elite with Uscreen, without pulling anything off YouTube. That's the part I love. This isn't a bet against YouTube. As Caleb put it, "YouTube's our bread and butter, the platform we love until our dying days." He's keeping the membership identical on both platforms and simply giving die-hard fans another way to go deeper, on a platform he owns. Robert Kaliati, President of Hammer Media, framed the business case perfectly: better economics on subscription revenue, while still crediting YouTube for bringing the audience. Both things can be true. The line that meant the most to our team: "Uscreen has been super easy to work with. They've delivered exactly what I wanted, on time. Nothing but happy things." Huge props to Caleb Hammer, Robert Kaliati, Cristian Paz, Tyler Lindo, Brandon Cavazos, and the rest of the Hammer team for making it happen! This is exactly why we do what we do at Uscreen: helping creators build durable businesses on platforms they control, alongside the reach of YouTube, not instead of it. And if you want to hear it firsthand: you can catch Robert's conversation with Joshua Cohen on the Creator Upload Podcast. Also, Caleb and Robert will be keynoting at VidSummit alongside our CEO, Allison Yazdian. Big thanks to Derral Eves and his team for the opportunity to share that success story. It's going to be a great event. cc Tubefilter

I've been excited to see this feature go LIVE: the Uscreen MCP. Here's why. For years, if you wanted to know how your membership business was really doing, you logged into an admin panel, clicked around, built a report, exported a CSV. The Uscreen MCP flips that. You connect your Uscreen business to the AI tool you already use (Claude, ChatGPT, and others) and you just ask. "How's my business doing this month? Give me MRR, active subscribers, and trials vs. last month." "Who's set to cancel at the end of the period, and whose trial ends in the next 7 days?" "What's my most popular video this month?" No exports. No reports to build. Just answers. The most fun part has been watching early customers find uses we never scripted. One creator is pulling his top-performing videos and turning them straight into captions, email campaigns, and ad scripts in the same flow. Another said the magic for him is membership intelligence: asking who's active, who's gone quiet, who's mid-trial, without pulling a report every time. And we just shipped the first write actions, so you can edit and publish content right from the conversation too. It's early. This is a beta, and we're learning a ton from the creators already using it. But it already feels like a real shift in how you run a membership business. If you're a Uscreen customer, or just curious how it works, I'll drop a link to an overview in the comments. Also, on a completely different note: if you happen to be in Las Vegas next week, Morgan Edwards and I will be in town for the Coach360 event, hanging out with Kathleen Ferguson & crew, and we'd love to see you there. We're also hosting a creator happy hour, so if you're around, come by!

Nobody says you have to go all-in on a membership from day one. There's a 3-step on-ramp that lets you test your idea while you build! 1. Check your analytics. 📈 On YouTube (Or wherever you post) what's getting the most saves, shares, and questions? That's what people want to go deeper on.  2. Survey your email list. 📨 What do they want to see more of? What problems are they trying to solve? What solutions are they currently paying for?  3. Sell something small first. 💸 This could look like a live workshop or a mini-course. Prove people will pay you, and grab some testimonials while you're at it! (And now that Uscreen has a Starter Plan, you can do step 3 AND launch your subscription on the same platform for just $49 a month. So there's really no excuse to keep sitting on the idea.) Full video below if you want the whole breakdown. https://lnkd.in/gr4JCtdK

Oopsie. Sorry I forgot to post, I’m on the beach sippin piña colada‘s (playing rust and don’t want my base raided). We are on our quarterly break :) one episode this week, and we will be back to full force next week! And not that I have to explain, but for those interested in behind the scenes stuff at a video company… due to the high level and consistent amount of production that we do, my team cannot take standard time off… so for the last year, and going forward, we take one week off a quarter so they can enjoy some much needed rest and vacation time. See you Monday!

Now that I've been at Uscreen for nine months, it seems like a good time to check in. The headline: it's an exhilarating experience here! I've been a "Generalist" for as long as I can remember. I started my career as an Engineer, became a Designer, moved to Client Services and eventually Product Management. PM is really just a title, I love to wear all the hats. One time I was chided for opening a Pull Request because I wasn't supposed to be touching code - I couldn't help it! The team here is embracing modern tools like Claude Code and truly enhancing them to make them accessible to everyone at the company. I feel quite fortunate to be working with such a forward thinking crew. Nine months in and happy to report that opening pull requests while evolving design systems and outlining Product plans is extremely welcomed. "Generalist" is no longer a curse.