technicality check: today is the day i made the teague media slack workspace exactly one year ago.

the idea for teague media had lived rent-free in my brain for quite a while before that. it bounced around my head as i took therapy calls on my lunch break at my finance job (wish i was joking lol), in chaotic notes app brainstorms, and in several (several) 2am "what if" spirals. but today was the day i stopped thinking about it and actually set up infrastructure.

(also, "the day i made a slack workspace and a channel named #general that had literally zero other humans in it" is objectively the funniest founding moment i could pick. because when you're starting a business, you're moving too fast to even circle day one on the calendar. so 🎈🎈🎈)

📸 the full year-in-review in my feelings dump + thank yous are in the IG caption below. go read it + like the post ✨

but this is teague talk, and teague talk is where we go deeper than a caption allows. so today's letter is less "mushy year-in-review" and more "here's exactly what year 1 taught me about founder money + content strategy." because that's what you're here for.

on today's agenda:

grab your emotional support latte and let's get sentimental ↓

i'm gonna resist the urge to give you flawless founder finance advice and instead tell you one thing that saved me + one thing that's still messy.

→ what saved me: the 1/3 rule. early into my launch, my dad told me to open a separate savings account and move a third of every deposit i received into it for taxes. i did it. when quarterly estimates and taxes came, the money was sitting there waiting. if you take ONE action from this letter, make it this one.

→ what’s still messy: paying myself. confession… i didn't pay myself a dime in year 1 and i probably won't in year 2 either. agency income is too volatile to commit to a fixed paycheck. one month is a campaign windfall, the next is ghost town invoicing. the "pay yourself first" advice assumes predictable revenue, and that's just not the stage most early companies are at.

so if you're in the same boat (hi! right there with ya) we go percentage-based.

every time a deposit hits, 30% goes to taxes + 40% stays in the biz account as runway. the rest is fair game. volatile-income-proof while still making rent <3

→ the meta-lesson: most founder money problems are solved by separation. one account for taxes. one for runway. one for whatever's actually available to you. the second you're using ONE account to manage everything, you've lost the plot.

year one was an experiment. some posts were genuinely cringe and embarrassing. some were gold and made me beam with pride.

here are the three bets i made that actually moved the needle:

→ bet 1: the work speaks for itself. this one i learned rather quickly. do GOOD work for one client and another one will find you. when i launched, i didn't run ads and i didn't have a massive following. what i had was a handful of campaigns that i worked really hard on and went really well. the second one led to the third one and the third led to tenth one. the best pipeline strategy is a portfolio of results + happy customers!

→ bet 2: post the receipts. the content that actually made brands reach out wasn't my hot takes or trend commentary! it was the real work i did for real brands. showing your work > talking about your work.

→ bet 3: one idea → five formats. every teague talk issue becomes a carousel, a thread, and a linkedin post. different people read about you in different places. so stop creating from scratch every single day! make one great thing and remix it until it's unrecognizable. you’ll never run out of ideas this way. this move that gave me back probably 10 hours a week!

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now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

trend: claude tips are taking over creative instagram. the creatives finally caught on that claude is the superior ai tool for writing, strategy, actual thinking, basically everything so you’re not pumping out chatgpt-flavored content mills. if you haven't built a claude workflow into your business yet, consider this your weekend homework.

comic relief: a new yorker cartoon of a guy presenting a downward stock chart in a team meeting felt very year 1 business owner core.

tool: notion ai meeting notes. i stopped manually note-taking in intro calls and just let the notetaker transcribe + summarize. it pulls action items i would've missed because i was too busy nodding. the combo of notion AI + noupe handling inquiries on the website means y2 callie finally has a fake full-time ops team.

quote: "a year from now, you'll wish you started today."
maybe a little on-the-nose for an anniversary issue… but it's true every single year. getting started is the hardest part. but you gotta bet on yourself, because nobody else will!

totally random: my new apartment has this one corner where the 4pm sun hits just right and i genuinely think it's responsible for 40% of my best business ideas this year. bullish on vitamin D as a content strategy 😎

also i'm writing this from hawaii because PTO is not a thing when you’re a business owner. year 2 of business ownership will have callie's first real vacation… unless i figure out how to get signal in the middle of the ocean on a cruise. then year 3.

→ 🎈 teague media is ONE. no launch, no sale, no sponsored anniversary post. just me saying thank you for being here the last year!

→ 💼 new offerings are LIVE. year 2 is starting with a cleaner menu of what we do + how to work with us. if you've been waiting on a "should i reach out?" moment, this is it: teague.media/work-with-us

→ 📬 year 2 roadmap coming next month. i'll share actual numbers, what's pivoting, and what i'm building next. strap in because it's about to get real nerdy round here.

→ 🏪 UGC + creative strategy booking open for Q2! if you're a brand or agency who wants a creator who actually understands strategy (and not just trends), reply "ready."

okay short sappy moment:

the IG caption did the heavy lifting on the mushy year-in-review this week, so i'll keep this brief. if you're reading teague talk, you're part of the reason year 1 happened! thank you for being here 💌

here's to year two! bigger swings, better work, still refusing to make anything that sounds like an ad :)

xo, callie 🤍

p.s. if you've been reading teague talk for a while — hit reply and tell me the first issue you ever opened. trying to piece together this community's origin story and yours is part of it 🫂

p.p.s. the "technically it's the slack's bday" thing is still killing me. if anyone else out there is building something, let this be permission to pick whichever date feels most ✨ narratively satisfying ✨ and call it your founding day. rules are made up.

p.p.p.s. forward this to one person who's been in their own year-1-of-something era. that's the whole anniversary ask 🎈