Navigating the creator economy is a formidable challenge. Unlike conventional markets where monetary investments often yield insights, here, empathy and authenticity are the currencies that earn creators' trust. Despite its difficulty, the creator economy stands out for its rapid growth and resilience, offering boundless potential. Consider Patreon, a prime example: launched a decade ago, it thrived without extensive marketing or constant feature updates. Its initial focus on product-led growth forged a robust brand synonymous with the creative community. Enticing as it may be, breaking into this market requires persistence. For startups or AI firms eyeing this space, I offer insights and tips in this article.
Key Takeaways:
- Develop products for creators by understanding their needs, complementing platforms, and addressing recurring pain points.
- Establish connections with creators through KOLs, targeted outreach, and tailored messaging for successful product launches.
- Prioritize community-building over cash incentives, fostering trust and engagement for sustainable growth.
- AI implementations must solve real user problems to drive growth; mere integration doesn't guarantee retention or success.
- Utilize crypto for global transactions to reduce fees; integrate a simple calculator for better decision-making.
This article is a case study that draws from firsthand experience in growing subscription-based platform tailored for creators. The product aims to empower creators with global audiences through enhanced eCommerce capabilities, AI translation services, minimized international processing fees, and crypto transactions. Here, I outline the accomplishments of our product, development, and go-to-market (GTM) over the course of 1 year.
- Monthly organic growth of 20,000 new users
- 37% increase in monthly user base
- Reached 100k users in 13 months since launch
- 55k weekly active unique ( WAUq )
- 15025 daily active unique ( DAUq )
Build a Creator-first Product
The challenge inherent in developing a product for creators lies in the entrenched loyalty they often have toward platforms where they've already cultivated a following. Convincing creators to migrate to a new product is an uphill battle, typically requiring a significant growth potential to entice them. The creator economy is notoriously sticky; despite grievances with platforms like YouTube or Patreon, creators are wary of losing their hard-earned followers by making a switch. They're only inclined to consider alternatives when faced with a problem that truly reaches a tipping point—what I like to call the "painful meter." This pain threshold is only crossed when the issues they encounter become intolerable, such as recurring uploading glitches, exorbitant payout fees, or legal complications in their local regions.
Go-to-market Strategies for UGC Platforms
- Tailor your product to a niche community that you fully understand there pain points. Utilize social listening tools to track platforms like Reddit and Twitter and provide solutions to users when questions and complaints are posted.
- Offer supplementary features or addressing specific pain points without necessitating a full migration, you can attract creators without demanding a complete overhaul of their established workflows. A good example is one page profile like
linktr.ee. - Target recurring frustrations. Pricing and calculating fee questions are common in content creation communities.
A quick poll survey on Reddit:
GTM: How to Reach Out?
At the core of a successful product launch within the creator economy lies on 1 go-to-market strategy: the ability to establish connections with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). Familiarity with the community and a nuanced understanding of their needs can significantly ease this process, allowing for targeted outreach to potential early adopters. A strategic approach involves leveraging mid-level creators who share similar challenges and actively seek validation within the community. By aligning with these individuals and building credibility over time, gaining the trust of KOLs becomes more attainable. Thorough research prior to engagement is crucial, ensuring that your messaging resonates with their perspectives.
Utilizing Reddit and Discord
Closed communities on platforms like Reddit and Discord offer valuable opportunities for social listening and initiating cold outreach. These platforms attract highly engaged participants, making them ideal spaces for refining outreach strategies through iterative scripts and public polling. For those targeting the East Asian market, Telegram presents another viable option. However, it's essential to communicate your intentions with moderators before engaging with community members.
Crafting a Simple Pitch
Effective communication of your value proposition is paramount in any startup pitch. Failure to convey this indicates potential issues with your script, product, or community targeting. Through experience, we've observed that the conversion rate of cold messaging early adopters initially stood at 3%. However, by aligning the right solution with the right user within the appropriate community and platform, we managed to increase this rate to 8%. Over the course of one month, we successfully invited 20-30 creators, each with the potential to bring in an average of 61 followers.
Streamlining Outreach Efforts
Unlike B2B marketing strategies, which often involve purchasing or scraping prospect lists, reaching creators requires a more tailored approach. Building a comprehensive creator list entails active participation within the community and staying abreast of trends. A simple method involves using a targeted Google search query within the creators' platform of choice, coupled with relevant keywords for segmentation. Scrape the resulting URLs and utilize a script to access each link, extracting social contact information for outreach purposes.
Avoid Cash Incentive Sign Ups
Avoid relying solely on ads during the early stages of your venture. Instead, if resources permit, prioritize investing in initiatives that contribute positively to the community, thereby establishing your authority within it. Spending $10 on Google ads for just one signup, especially considering the high churn rate of over 80%, is hardly worthwhile. In contrast, employing effective promotion methods within relevant communities, such as Reddit, blogs, or forums, tends to yield better results. Users within these platforms are more receptive to taking action when there's a collective positivity surrounding your brand. Moreover, seizing these opportunities for interaction allows for a deeper understanding of prospects' perspectives, fostering community engagement. The impact of your actions reverberates throughout the community, contributing to brand recognition and trust. In our experience, it took approximately six months of concerted effort to establish a notable presence within a specific creative category, resulting in 70,000 users gained from scratch.
Does AI Integration Drive Growth?
Simply integrating AI into your product won't necessarily lead to user retention if the underlying problem remains unsolved. Our attempt to leverage the AI trend by incorporating AI translation into our platform serves as a prime example. Recognizing the potential in passionate fans translating original content for free, we integrated ChatGPT, enabling creators to translate their posts effortlessly. However, despite the convenience, creators fail to see the value in the tool. The disconnect arises from the fact that foreign fans, despite their efforts, don't directly engage with creators due to language barriers, resulting in a lack of tangible incentive for creators to utilize the free translation tool. Conversely, diehard fans, who may be willing to pay, often shun machine-translated content, leaving a significant portion of users—primarily "leechers"—to rely on these services. Notably, "leechers" typically don't contribute financially, rendering profitability at a small scale unfeasible. Fortunately, integrating and training ChatGPT proved relatively straightforward, requiring only around two days to compile a dataset of niche term translations and train the model. While incorporating AI into your product can be an enjoyable endeavor, it's crucial not to overstate its significance. AI may drive a few clicks on Google through SEO, but it alone doesn't determine the success of your product or business.
Utilizing Crypto for Global Transactions
In the creator market, where business spans across borders, predicting the origin of the next customer or fan is virtually impossible. However, the conventional international payment systems such as Stripe, PayPal, or Payoneer often incur substantial fees. For instance, when transactions are conducted in USD, they are subjected to processing fees, international transaction fees, currency conversion fees, and unfavorable conversion rates. These fees are further compounded when payments are routed to creators, resulting in a significant reduction in their income—particularly impactful for creators based in countries like New Zealand and Australia.
In contrast, leveraging crypto for transactions presents a viable solution, with fees limited to gas fees, a nominal taker/maker fee of 0.6%, and receiving fees. The transparency of these transactions coupled with substantially lower fees offers creators a more favorable alternative. However, a key challenge lies in the general public's lack of sensitivity towards hidden fees and the complexity surrounding crypto exchange operations.
To address this challenge, I propose integrating a simple calculator within the platform to illustrate the potential savings in a clear and concise manner. This tool will allow users to compare the fees associated with traditional payment systems against those of crypto transactions at a glance, thereby facilitating better-informed decision-making. By providing users with a tangible understanding of the cost-saving benefits of utilizing crypto, we can overcome barriers to adoption and drive greater uptake of this more efficient payment method within the creator community.
