Creator economy startups

[andyfoundlight]

Yooo good luck to everyone that applied! In the meantime are there any fellow founders targeting the creator ecosystem?

I worked at an A16Z funded startup that targeted this space and handled their entire creator partnerships funnel. Got to learn from some really awesome peeps, including the founders of WhatNot. Now, I’m tackling the hardest thing I encountered while I was there: How to find creators with real fans, not just viewers.

If this is a problem for you — I’d love to connect. I realized that for the most part working with creators is kinda 50/50. Engagement metrics aren’t always the best predictors of ROI, and it’s hard finding the hidden gems with a solid fanbase but won’t charge you $10k/video sponsor.

Here are some things I’ve learned though:

1) Golden Niches: If your product is geared towards monetizing creator communities, make sure they’re in “golden” or expensive niches. You probably want to work with folks doing Warhammer 40k vs DIY decorations.

2) Community is in the comments: Not all comments sections are created equal. Look for comments that are talking to the creator and not talking at the content. Easy way to tell is to compare them vs tiktok or insta reels, the comment sections for shorts are filled with viewers talking to each other or at the content.

3) Content is a full time job: Creators barely have time to manage their channel, much less their community. That’s a real pain point, they are also very careful with what they promote to their community as well.

4) Shorts for awareness, Long form for action: Probably learned this a little late, but if you want conversion, go for long form creators on YouTube or streamers on Twitch.

 

[urbanredneck]

@andyfoundlight Hey there! I'm a creator with 130k on tiktok and 42k on YT - My cofounder and I were actually creating a tool for the creator economy but decided to pivot 3 days before applications were due and submit something else.

From our experience (both as engineers and as creators), for creators, unless it directly helps them make money, it usually doesn't solve a burning enough problem to warrant paying or using a tool.

On the marketing side, it's pretty over saturated with solutions that no one is asking for..

From our understanding of being creators, and talking to a ton of marketers and creators:

Creators want ways to monetize off platform

Marketers want ways to stop wasting money with influencers who bring no results

Finding a solution to that is a pretty tough one hahah.

 

[andyfoundlight]

@urbanredneck Oh man you’ve definitely echoed my experience. I’m pretty sure all marketing platforms/tools scrape from same sources. They all use engagement metrics which honestly are hit or miss.

The a16z startup I worked at tried to solve the monetization angle for creators — but that was kind of a miss, since the crux was they needed to have real fans first. And the bigger problem then was most that has fans, likely monetized them through patreons or some kind of subscription service.

Right now we’re focused on the second problem you mentioned. I actually remember seeing your post a while back. Interested in hearing more about what happened

 

[markinsydney]

@urbanredneck Can you elaborate by "Creators want ways to monetize off platform"? Specifically the off-platform part, I'm assuming you mean that direct donations through the platforms (e.g. twitch/yt) are saddled with heavy fees or just hard to monetize directly. Are the existing solutions of patreon/ko-fi insufficient?

 

[urbanredneck]

@markinsydney For example, I got 11M views on Tiktok in the last 2 months. I made $0 off of it. Tiktok doesn't give creators in Canada access to the creator fund. And even creators who do have access, the RPM is extremely low.

Also, companies like stan.store exist for the same reason - to monetize your existing following.

Right now it's sorta easy to build a following and go viral with shorts, but they don't carry the same personal brand that having a large Twitch or YT channel might, so there's a big gap there. You can't really start a patreon or anything off of a TT following, unless you've migrated your followers elsewhere.

 

[andyfoundlight]

@urbanredneck Yea exactly this. But also shorts don’t convert well to a real community or fans. It’s very rare for viewers to have a connection with a creator, and much more likely for them to connect with the content, get a dopamine hit and move on to the next.

When it comes to short form content, creators are slaves to the algorithm and completely depend on discovery to get viewers to see their content more than once. I firmly believe that short form creators get the short end of the stick (pun intended) and it’s kinda damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

 

[markinsydney]

@andyfoundlight Parroting another comment I made below, is it that A) users simply don't actually like TT creators/content enough to ever give any money because the algorithm prevents viewers from actually getting attached to creators or B) the casual nature of tik tok means the right donation size is

 

[andyfoundlight]

@markinsydney From a sociological perspective, I would say it has more to do with identity and context switching than anything else, and while this varies from individual to individual, the nature of short form is defined by REALLY calculated dopamine hits:

A) it’s partially this, the swiping/scrolling motion is very mind numbing, where the connection is with the content over the creator — it’s self indulging in a way that’s vastly different from long form. Especially if you think about when people engage with short form: on quick breaks, to kill time, before bed. They want to turn their brains off and be rewarded at the same time with quick dopamine fixes

B) Most people don’t engage with tiktok to be generous. But this part largely has to do with algorithm influence what I refer to as “content contextualize.” You’ll notice that sometimes Instagram or tiktok will promote content (in a row) that follow the same theme. Whether or not this is intentional, I can’t say, but it plays a big role in framing one piece of content to the next. For example, if you see a guy doing an ice bath talking about discipline, and then you see a recipe for easy healthy meal prep, and then a clip with motivation quotes on success, and then a video about someone’s fitness transformation, AND FINALLY an ad for fitness coaching or a trial for gym membership near you — your more likely to check it out than if you saw the ad immediately after a random video on emperor penguins

Since creators do not have enough time to properly frame or create context for support (in most cases), you’re unlikely to see any kind of donation.

The friction for supporting a cause or creator doesn’t lie with the amount of money they’re trying to raise, it’s all about the mental forklift going from puppy videos to “my house burned down can you help me” — for lack of better words, some mental/emotional/psychological foreplay is necessary to help ease the consumer into the mindset of giving or supporting

Whereas for long form, even though there algorithm plays a role in discovery, the user makes a conscious decision in clicking on a video to watch — this makes a world of difference

 

[markinsydney]

@urbanredneck Is even a ko-fi page a non-starter? Ko-fi's avg use case is a one-time donation on the order of $3-10. But it still requires you to go off platform to kofi's website and pull out your cc/paypal, so maybe this is too huge a barrier for tiktok's low commitment users who want instant/seamless gratification.

The question to me is whether A) users simply don't actually like TT creators/content enough to ever give any money or B) the casual nature of tik tok means the right donation size is

 

[lovecraftfan]

@urbanredneck Solutions are found where they are sought .
That's been my experience. I hear you and you play a great pro and con game with yourself - and the winner is?
Active mind I relate and then overwhelmed because it's too much.
So hasn't AI separated us enough on this endeavor to keep up with AI and the social media trip?
This sounds like wanting no personal involvement with other humans with human issues. Hopefully I am wrong, forgive me.
But we can all use a second chance and I have learned through my AI lessons, that original thought is sacred. Play nice please it can't hurt to try again, together.

 

[fadeaway]

@andyfoundlight Applied with www.drip.re

Creator economy with discord bot integrations. We've onboarded 530 communities and 700k unique users thus far in 3 months. Brought in about 100k in revenue. We have got most of our traction from social media boosted engagement solutions. UGC and ai sentiment analysis of community members and trends has been of interest to our current customers.

 

[andyfoundlight]

@fadeaway Looks awesome! Thanks for sharing, seems like there could be some synergy here — the AI model we built
would actually be able to measure strength of these communities more qualitatively.

We’re exploring API integration use cases rn, if that sounds interesting, let me know! Would love to connect.

 

[fadeaway]

@andyfoundlight Sounds great. Can you email me at scott@drip.re, let's get on a call and explore a bit.

We have a plugin model for lead generation on products that are interesting for communities. e.g, we are integrating an AI based UGC API ATM.

 

[yousee]

@andyfoundlight Have been working on something that’s sort of like perplexity for creator search. Submitted our app to the batch last sunday. would love to connect!

 

[andyfoundlight]

@yousee let's do it! sounds really cool, i'd love to learn more -- shoot you a dm!

 

[hamarr]

@andyfoundlight What's your opinion on billo and other apps like mini.social?

 

[andyfoundlight]

@hamarr did you mean minisocial.com ? I think UGC definitely has a lot of room to grow, but I would say where remain difficult will be creator on-boarding and discovery. The sweet spot is the long-tail creators who have reached their growth limit on YouTube since they're not chasing trends or trying to game the algo, but at the same really perfected making authentic content and their fans are proof. If you are building something in this space, let's definitely connect since this is exactly where I really to help -- the AI model we've built excels at identifying these hidden gems!

 

[hamarr]

@andyfoundlight Thanks for your insights. I believe the YouTube game is a long shot whereas Instagram and tik tok are fairly smaller. For creators, it's probably easier to monetize on the latter two as the brands payment is made immediately the UGC is created whereas on YouTube, most payment is via ads or the platform itself. How do you think AI can help in this space? I'd be glad to talk with you in greater detail to find synergies and exchange ideas.

 

[andyfoundlight]

@hamarr AI in general — I can’t speak to, but for me, I spent the last year getting real close with the space and ended up making a mode that measures the depth of trust and loyalty fans have for creators. So as part of that, the model can help tell you which videos resonated best with fans.

One area for UGC that I believe brands are getting better at is that not all content are created equal. Authentic content is key, in fact — I really enjoyed the Henson ads I’ve been seeing on Instagram. That’s a great example to authentic story telling coming from the brands themselves, where less is more.

AI definitely will make ideating, scripting, and maybe even some of the content creation. But I’d err on the side of caution for AI generated images, voices, etc. that being said, I’m more on the side of quantifying qualities that aren’t easy to catch. That’s honestly where my interest is for AI in general.

My background is in sociology + data science, and I’ve always been an advocate for qualitative research. The problem is that it’s very costly and doesn’t scale. So where AI could be helpful is “watching” a bunch of UGC and “reading” the comments to see how people react and then tie that to actual engagement + conversion — BOOM you have a predictive model that can tell you what content works best with your brand and why.

That’s ultimately what I’m building towards, but for now it does a good enough job of analyzing audience interactions and giving insights as to which creators have real fans and what content resonates with them.

 

[hamarr]

@andyfoundlight That's a great way to make creators aware of what's performing better in real time. I'm sure that scripting and ideating wrappers will become commoditized very soon with flooding of various apps/ models.

One area for UGC that I believe brands are getting better at is that not all content is created equal.

This is so true in every form of content that's out there, for brands and creators alike: to each their own.