Finding Your 'Precious': How Your Passion Can Build a Better Agency

Introduction and Context

The session opens with host Stephanie Hudson introducing Jonathan Watson as "a really smart agency guy" from Creators Web Pro. Watson immediately undercuts the flattery: the talk, he says, is actually the story of how long it took him to become that. He is explicit from the start that this is not a tech talk, not an AI pitch, not a guide to increasing MRR through new software. It is a personal story about how passion shaped — and could have shaped far sooner — the trajectory of his agency.

He offers two pieces of personal context that serve as the thematic backbone of the entire presentation: He is a lifelong Star Wars fan. Star Wars was formative in childhood; he and his brother were deeply immersed in the universe and waited eagerly for the franchise to continue.

He is an even more committed Lord of the Rings fan — one who read Tolkien before Peter Jackson's films existed. His bookshelf, visible behind him during the session, is filled with Tolkien volumes. He credits Tolkien's prose with shaping his love of literature and language (Watson holds an English Literature degree). His Lego collection includes a large Rivendell set.

These two fandoms are not incidental. They set the stage for the founding of his first major web project and explain the title of the talk — "Finding Your Precious" — a direct reference to Gollum's obsessive devotion to the One Ring in Tolkien's work, used here as a metaphor for the thing that drives you most deeply.

The Phantom Menace Line: Where It All Started (1999)

In 1999, the announcement of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace galvanised Watson and his brother. A group of fans organised a line outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard to wait for the film. Watson joined them. In total, he spent 230 hours waiting — not continuously, but checking in regularly across the six-week period, with a mandatory continuous presence in the final 48 hours. He describes sleeping in a tent on the sidewalk, sharing the space with a 20-year-old stranger, choosing to be there in what he acknowledges is "a weird thing to do."

What made the experience significant was not the film itself (Watson diplomatically declines to say whether it was worth the wait) but the community that formed around it and the technology challenge it created. In 1999, with no social media, no YouTube, and no streaming infrastructure to speak of, Watson got involved in setting up live streaming from the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard. He describes a makeshift setup: a brick wall, a cluster of routers, computers, and himself in a chair coordinating it all. This was a genuinely novel undertaking for the time.

It was in this environment — sitting on a Hollywood sidewalk surrounded by fans with genuine shared enthusiasm — that Watson had his pivotal realisation. He loved Lord of the 1.

Rings. There was no online fan community for it. Pre-social media, if you wanted to find like-minded people around a niche interest, a dedicated website was the only mechanism.

Watson bought the domain TheOneRing.com in March 1999 and launched it shortly after. He notes, with some residual regret, that he did not also buy TheOneRing.net, which someone else claimed independently, producing a 25-year parallel existence of two Tolkien fan sites operating under nearly identical names.

Pre-social media, if you wanted to find like-minded people around a niche interest, a dedicated website was the only mechanism.

Building TheOneRing.com: The First Niche Web Community

The site took off rapidly. Within six months of launch, TheOneRing.com was receiving approximately 50,000 unique visitors per day. To manage the scale and features a fan community needed — message boards, polls, image galleries, voting systems, comments, user profiles — Watson and his team built their own content management system entirely from scratch. He is careful to note the historical context: this was before WordPress, before Drupal, before Joomla. The nearest comparable tool, Movable Type, would not arrive until around 2002. Every piece of infrastructure had to be invented.

The technical demands came with financial consequences. Hosting at the scale required was expensive. AWS did not exist. Vultr did not exist. The team found themselves spending close to $3,000 per month on servers. They responded by building two revenue streams: advertising and sponsorships from external companies, and a premium membership tier for the community. Members who paid a small monthly fee received access to a chat system, badges, titles, and status markers — what Watson compares to the cosmetic reward systems now familiar from games like Fortnite, but invented years before such systems became standard practice.

The model worked well enough to cover costs. The team was not making real profit, but they were not accumulating debt either. Watson is clear-eyed about this period: the work was sustained by genuine passion, not by sound economics. He loved building for the community.

He loved the feedback loops of understanding what fans needed and delivering it.

The Dot-Com Bust and the First Wrong Turn

The dot-com bubble burst and took Watson's advertising revenue with it. He cites Real.com as a specific example: a company that owed TheOneRing.com close to $4,000 in advertising fees simply ceased to exist overnight. Emails bounced. There was no recourse. The poster-child example he offers for the era more broadly is Pets.com.

Stripped of advertising income and unable to sustain the site on premium memberships alone, Watson made what he now identifies as his first major strategic mistake. He and his team looked at the CMS they had built for the fan community and decided to strip out all the fan-specific features — the message boards, polls, community engagement tools — and sell a generalised version to any business that would buy it. They called it Site Director and started a company around it.

Watson acknowledges the logic: CMS as a category was genuinely novel at the time.

Businesses needed ways to manage web content. The product found buyers. Being paid by strangers for software he had built felt remarkable to a man still in his early twenties.

But the cost of stripping the product down was the loss of everything that made it interesting. All the community features, all the fan-specific functionality, the things that had actually driven the site's growth — gone. Replaced by a generic, business-facing product with no particular audience, no niche, and no passion behind it. Watson's framing: he had a niche (fan communities), he understood what that niche needed, and he deliberately abandoned it in favour of a wider but shallower market.

Twenty Years of Building Websites for Anyone

The pattern established in the dot-com bust years would define Watson's agency for roughly two decades. He built websites for any client in any industry: forklift rental companies, aftermarket automotive products, rare earth minerals and magnets, the San Pascual Band of Mission Indians, spray foam and polyurea coatings. He is honest about his relationship to these projects: he did not know these industries, did not care to know them, and did not have the time to learn them properly because the business model required constantly moving to the next project.

He uses a pointed analogy: the agency became a TV set. It works, it displays content, and the moment a newer or cheaper model appears, it is easily replaced. There is no loyalty, no strategic partnership, no reason for a client to stay when a competitor offers the same capability at a lower price.

Watson identifies several specific costs of this model: Inability to become a strategist. Without deep knowledge of a client's world, he could not anticipate their needs, bring ideas to the table, or push back intelligently on bad requests.

He recounts one client who asked for a feature set "like Amazon does it" on their e-commerce site. Watson did not challenge the request — not because it was reasonable, but because he had no basis to establish what was actually appropriate for that client's situation. He did not know the industry well enough, and did not care enough to find out.

Clients can sense the lack of passion. He is direct about this: clients can tell when an agency does not genuinely care about their business. That perception prevents the kind of trust and openness required for genuine partnership.

The value proposition was meaningless. The agency's tagline was essentially "we build great websites for businesses." Watson notes that this describes what every agency attempts to do. It is the equivalent of a TV manufacturer saying they make good TVs. It communicates nothing differentiating, generates no referrals, and gives no potential client a reason to choose you over anyone else.

No referral engine. Referrals come from specificity. If someone meets a dentist, they will mention a web agency that specialises in dental practices. They will not mention a general web agency in the same way. Watson spent twenty years locked out of organic referral networks because his positioning gave people nothing specific to say on his behalf.

Throughout this period, Watson continued running TheOneRing.com in a lower-intensity way. He rebuilt the design in the early 2000s (a version he still admires, noting it was built entirely in HTML tables with no CSS frameworks), and the community accumulated hundreds of thousands of registered users and millions of forum posts over the years. But the site was a labour of love running alongside the main business rather than informing it.

The Lord of the Rings Premieres and Relationships Never Leveraged

One of the most striking passages in the talk concerns what Watson had — and failed to use.

Running a major Tolkien fan site gave him access that most people in the web industry would never have. He had relationships with merchandise companies, toy manufacturers, and card game producers. He knew the Chief Marketing Officer at New Line Cinema. He attended press events, roundtables, and red carpet premieres for the Lord of the Rings films.

He describes sitting in a roundtable press session alongside journalists from the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Time Magazine, interviewing Peter Jackson, Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Liv Tyler, Howard Shore, and Bernard Hill (who played King Theoden), among others. He recorded these sessions on an old iPod. He later stood on the red carpet beside Entertainment Tonight and Inside Edition, with a sign in front of him reading "TheOneRing.com."

His response to all of this? Embarrassment. He was self-conscious about the fact that he ran a fan site — something he perceived as a "funny side passion thing," nerdy and not serious in the way a proper business should be. He describes telling himself that building websites for businesses was the mature option, the real-business option. The fan site was a distraction.

As a result, he never strategically leveraged those relationships. He had access to the entertainment industry at a level most agencies could not reach, and he walked away from it because he was uncomfortable being identified as a superfan. He now looks back on this as a significant missed opportunity — a period when his passion had already done the work of opening doors, and he simply did not walk through them.

The Second CMS and Further Distraction

In the 2010s, Watson attempted another product pivot. Observing the early growth of Squarespace, he and his team built a new CMS called Core Canvas — a brochure-site builder designed to compete in that emerging space. He sold approximately a thousand copies at low price points with cheap hosting attached. He describes the outcome with his recurring phrase: "It was fine."

Fine is the word he returns to repeatedly in this section of the talk to describe a business that was perpetually keeping its head above water without making meaningful forward progress. They were treading water: not drowning, not propelling themselves forward.

The Core Canvas chapter ended as the Site Director chapter had ended: through commoditisation. By the mid-2010s, Squarespace and Wix had matured, WordPress theme builders like Divi, Elementor, and WP Bakery had hit their stride, and there was no longer a viable market for a small custom CMS product competing on features alone. Watson and his team migrated to full-time WordPress development and set Core Canvas aside.

During this same period, from 2010 to 2016, Watson had four children. He is candid that this life change shifted his focus dramatically. Supporting his family and keeping the business financially stable became the overriding priorities. Strategic thinking went on autopilot. His growing family replaced the fan community as the thing he was most passionate about day to day — and he does not frame this negatively; he describes it as the right call for that season of life.

The Pandemic, the Move, and Slowing Down

The COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 proved to be an unexpected turning point. Watson was based in California, which he describes (with notable understatement) as "perhaps notorious for how much it shut down." He references beaches being closed and skate parks being filled in. He had already been considering leaving California; once the business went fully remote and the physical office closed, his reason for remaining disappeared.

He moved to Tennessee — closer to his roots in Western Pennsylvania, more business-friendly by his assessment, and without state income tax. Crucially, it gave him space.

Without an office to manage, without staff physically present, without the overhead and pace of the California operation, Watson found himself with time to think for the first time in years.

That slower pace prompted him to look again at TheOneRing.com, which had continued operating quietly for years on a kind of autopilot. He decided to rebuild it properly in WordPress, reimport years of community content, and re-engage with it as a genuine project rather than a maintenance obligation. He also got involved with an existing Lord of the Rings podcast community, met like-minded people, and launched his own podcast — Exploring Tolkien — which he describes as consistently ranking as a top result for Lord of

the Rings podcast searches, releasing episodes every two weeks covering Tolkien's books and commentary on adaptations.

He mentions in passing that AI audio restoration tools have been enormously helpful in improving the quality of recordings he made on an old iPod at those early Lord of the Rings press events, making those 25-year-old interviews listenable.

The Pivot: Creators Web Pro

Re-engaging with the fan and creator community surfaced a problem Watson recognised immediately from his own history. Creators — YouTubers, podcasters, community builders — were renting their audiences from platforms. A YouTube channel with 100,000 subscribers can be demonetised or shut down by algorithmic error overnight. The audience belongs to the platform, not the creator. The creator has no home of their own.

Watson had spent 25 years building exactly the kind of infrastructure that solves this problem: community sites, membership systems, owned-and-operated web presences where an audience cannot be taken away. He had built it for TheOneRing.com in 1999 before any off-the-shelf tools existed. Now he had modern tools, deep experience, and a genuine personal stake in the creator ecosystem.

He founded Creators Web Pro, a focused agency that builds "the online homes where creators own their community." The positioning is precise: it answers a specific problem for a specific type of client, and it does so with language that those clients use and understand.

He knows YouTube Studio, Super Chats, Patreon, Discord, monetisation strategy, membership systems, and the dynamics of different platforms because he lives in that world as both a creator and a fan.

The business results at the time of the talk, while still early, are already striking: Under the old general-agency model: approximately $75 per month per client, across a large and difficult-to-manage client base.

Under Creators Web Pro: approximately $400 per month per client, with only six clients at the time of the talk.

Watson acknowledges he has not yet replaced his income from the general agency work, but the trajectory is clear: fewer clients, higher revenue per client, dramatically less time spent scrambling to understand industries he does not care about.

He also notes the qualitative difference. He can pick up the phone with a creator client and immediately speak their language, understand their context, and offer ideas without preparation. He is a partner, not a pair of hands. The question "what do you do?" now has a real answer that people can repeat to others. Referrals flow naturally from the network he already inhabits.

The Three Pieces of Advice

Watson closes by framing what he would tell his 1999 self on the sidewalk in Hollywood. He structures this as three direct pieces of advice: One: Your passion can lead you. Do not treat a passion project as merely a side job or a hobby. It can be the thing that directs your business toward something meaningful. Watson also makes the point that a passion project is lower-stakes in a healthy way: if you are a little late, that is fine. You are not reporting to a client. You are building something because you love it, and that changes the energy entirely.

Two: Do not be embarrassed about what your passion is. Watson's embarrassment about being a "Tolkien nerd" cost him two decades of opportunity. He points out that any genuine passion has a community around it: cooking, electronics, retro gaming, anything.

Wherever there is a community, there are people who need web infrastructure. And passion for a subject generates a kind of energy that is hard to manufacture. He describes it as "life-giving" — a phrase he returns to more than once.

Three: Do not get distracted by shiny technology or what looks like a bigger opportunity. The decision to abandon the fan community CMS for a general product looked rational at the time: why serve one niche when you can serve everyone? Watson now understands this as a false trade. Breadth without depth is not a bigger opportunity; it is a slower road to nowhere. Leaning into the niche, even when it feels smaller, is the better path.

You are building something because you love it, and that changes the energy entirely.

Closing and Q&A

Watson closes by acknowledging the full arc of what it took to return to his starting point: a dot-com bust, two forgotten CMS products, 25 years of unfocused agency work, four kids, a pandemic, a cross-country move. He says he is now back to building the same kinds of relationships, serving the same kinds of communities, and finding the same kind of energy he had in 1999 — and that it took him more than half his life to get there.

He points listeners to Creators Web Pro (creatorswebpro.com), the Exploring Tolkien podcast, and his social media presence, while noting with some self-deprecating humour that his social accounts are new and largely empty. He also mentions TheOneRing.com directly as both the origin point of his career and a living demonstration of his current agency's approach.

Stephanie Hudson, wrapping up, remarks that she had been planning to take a nap before the session but found herself unable to leave. She notes that the 230 hours Watson spent waiting for The Phantom Menace works out to approximately nine and a half days.

About the speaker Jonathan Watson Creators Web Pro

Jonathan Watson runs Creators Web Pro, where he works with agency owners on finding the specific niche or passion that makes their business distinct and sustainable.