For a number of years I’ve have had the pleasure of working with Adam Lurie and Christian Gammill as investors in (and advisors to) influence.co. Holed up in the same office in Culver City we’ve had countless coffees and lunches talking about the evolution of the creator economy and all the ways that it’s disrupting traditional media, commerce, and platforms.
Like all of you, we’ve seen an incredible explosion in the number of companies building for the creator economy. Having spent the greater part of my life building startups in emerging communities like Boulder and Melbourne, I started to notice a similar feeling about what was happening.
To some extent, the creator economy feels like a new virtual startup city with all the same excitement, opportunity and challenges that you see in real communities. How do you organize the angel investors in a city to get their money into entrepreneurs hands? How do you find the best service providers that are knowledgable and care about growing the community? How do we get the attention of a few brand name VCs to take the first step of investing in the community so others will follow?
I naturally gravitated towards a familiar role of connecting, sharing and helping as many folks as possible in the community. Ryan (who I write this newsletter with) and I met through cold outreach when he moved to the Boulder community. I’m a big believer in #givefirst and the value comes back to you over time. I’ve started to have similar incredible experiences in this new virtual community.
Already the community has accomplished a lot of these goals: there are great chat groups for the creator economy, brand name VCs are becoming common on creator economy cap tables, and there are even some legal firms that know a thing or two about the creator economy. What else can we do?
While the entrepreneurs have been getting organized in this industry, we thought we could do a lot more to help them connect with the platform operators, talent managers, creators and active investors in the sector. Understanding the dynamics of this quickly changing landscape is imperative, getting access to your customers as early as possible is critical, and knowing who to call when its time to fund raise is a relief. Its also nice to have a bit more cash to work with :)
So today I’m helping launch Creator Rising. Creator Rising is a platform for programs and products that stimulate the creator economy. Our first product is a $25K equity program paired with an incredible member directory of some of the best operators and creators in the industry. On top of that, influence.co is contributing 6 months of its PRO product which will help companies building for the creator economy get access to the huge influencer and creator community on our platform. We designed the complete application process to be less than 30 minutes total so it will be time well spent for anyone starting to build in the creator economy.
Like all forms of creation - this is a first draft that we’ll be iterating on as we learn. We hope you check it out and tell anyone you know building a company in the creator economy about it. Applications are open today and we hope to select our first recipients shortly.
Feel free to retweet or dig in here for more information!
- Niel