Creative Growth Strategy: A Different Kind of Digital Playbook

At the beginning of the year I joined a handful of other solo business owners in creative industries to work on growing our businesses led by Matilda Lucy.

The beginning of the year always goes by quickly; I cannot believe it is almost April. Those first few weeks when everyone still says “Happy New Year” to each other at all levels of correspondence is a time filled with optimism and gumption. There are so many possibilities of how the year will play out. I want to tackle all my problems at once. And, as night falls early (at least in the northern hemisphere), I anticipate how productive I will be. I dream big. But, I am not always productive with my time. The year can be a grind. External developments can take you places you did not expect throughout the year. So, when I saw that digital strategist for startups Matilda Lucy was holding a sprint for solo business owners to channel this energy over six weeks, I immediately signed up.¹ I have been following Matilda for awhile. I appreciate her Substack, Broken Growth, because she tackles marketing in a more meditative, holistic, and dare I say individual way. It is the kind of way I like to think I run my own business. In today’s newsletter, I will walk you through what the Creative Growth Strategy was, what I learned in the process, and what I got out of it.

A screenshot from our working document highlighting my Growth Donut, 2026.

Officially titled the Creative Growth Strategy Sprint, it was six 90 minute sessions filled with digestible activities to cultivate your business as a lifestyle.² It started the first week of January and was held on Wednesdays. The cohort consisted of solo business owners and freelancers from Europe, the UK, and the east coast of the US. Matilda laid out terms like Type 2 Growth.³ An alternative growth structure to the up-and-to-the-right hockey stick of positivism. She also gave us building blocks to make a Growth Donut (pictured above), a way to quantitatively look at our time and put boundaries around what activities we engage with. This was used to great effect to reveal the activities that I did not like or want to do. Each 90 minute session included: some personal time for reflection and jotting ideas down, small breakout groups to talk freely and get to know your cohort, listening time to hear about the theme or concept of the week from Matilda, and reflection time to ask questions and recap what we went over. As Matilda is based in London and I am in Los Angeles, these sessions were first thing in the morning for me. It was a great albeit sometimes challenging way to start a hump day. Despite the time difference, I always felt energized by the time the session was over at 7:30 in the morning with the sun barely even rising.

I came in holding a couple of thoughts from the buzz of the New Year. First, Dataland is opening this spring.⁴ As excited as I am about the launch of the museum’s in-person experience, as a business owner I see this as a crucial moment to evolve my business. The launch of Dataland presents case studies in how I would like to work with future clients. I want to capture that to make the next five years of my business as full of growth as the first five have been. Second, I wanted to create a better pipeline to produce social media content. Ever since the pandemic, I have withdrawn from trying to grab the potential five second spotlight of social media virality. Recently, I miss structuring my own visual work in a way that I can share it online. I wanted to use Matlida’s sprint as a way to refocus and make good on these motivations. The sessions were eye-opening. As each week passed, it was more obvious that social media as a format for producing content just did not match with the type of experiences I want to produce; nor does social media offer the value I truly seek for my business. The sessions also gave me better insight into how I should go about putting together case studies for landing that next big client through smaller actionable steps: create client personas, send out feedback questionnaires to current and former clients, see the landscape of who my competitors are. Do these smaller steps represent opportunities to collaborate with others? If so, that could be the spark that starts a bigger relationship.

In all, the six sessions built on top of each other. They also presented different analogies and games or lenses to understand what you are doing. Each week we filled out a notion template that Matilda created for the sprint. At the end of the six sessions we had a robust Growth Strategy document (click the button above to see mine). It has the Growth Donut, brand taglines, keyword diagrams of what makes work important to me, a competitive landscape of other inspiring creatives in my space, and activities that I can do to make meaningful progress toward my longterm goals. Or as Matilda describes when landscaping our garden, our Big Ol’ Tree. The document is my personal output and accountability to stay focused and channel all that good intention from the beginning of the year. But, I will remember the Creative Growth Strategy sprint for the journey and colleagues I met along the way.

If you read my Growth Strategy document, I would love to hear your reactions to it. And, if you run your own business, I highly recommend considering Matilda for brand strategy needs.

—Jono

1. Creative Strategy and Momentum for Small Brands. Matilda Lucy. https://www.matildalucy.com/

2. Grow your solo business this spring 🌷Save your spot

3. Type 2 Growth. The Technium. 2024. https://kk.org/thetechnium/type-2-growth/

4. Check out first look images of L.A.’s trippy museum of AI arts — and its new opening plan. Jessica Gelt. Los Angeles Times. 2025. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2025-10-23/dataland-museum-of-ai-arts-los-angeles-opening-date