# Building Big Businesses with Creators with Emily Herrera

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrTXx4-iF8s
Duration: 57 min
Language: English
Words: 10289
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/IrTXx4-iF8s

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[0:00] all right M what's going on I'm good I'm happy to be here I've been a fan for a long time yeah and I've been a Twitter fan you're always like posting interesting gen Z research stuff Creator stuff and then also just what's on your mind and I feel like Twitter's become a very cookie cutter Place recently and I wanted to bring you on the show just to just to crawl inside your brain and see what you're thinking is in store for 2023 [Music] before we get into it tell tell people what you do and and what what is night media sure so I work at a fund called night

[0:52] Ventures which is out of a media company or Creator management company called night media and the way that it works now is I mean there's a whole backstory to it but essentially it is a company that manages a bunch of really high profile creators and essentially around a year-ish or so ago there was this big crater economy boom and a lot of creators that were on the talent roster were offered kind of the opportunity to invest in Syndicate sometimes as Angel checks sometimes it's full on VCS and read who's one of the GPS but also the CEO of the entire company was like I'm sure we could actually build out a

[1:36] proper structure for this and figure out what's the deal Taste of these individual creators but then also you know we don't want to necessarily go into the whole financial advisement kind of thing so let's just find someone who really knows how to do this whole time so ended up talking to Ben Matthews who is another GP at the fund and he was at Bessemer for the for a number of years and for a long time he was really interested in what we now co-create or go to market and that looks like anything that's actually effective marketing and everything it's not paid ads um and kind of what he had seen a couple

[2:09] of years ago was that the future was going more towards Creator as being a part of product as creation but then also as a point of distribution so he was super interested in general in the Creator space and they kind of both partnered together brought in also as a GP the president of media who was also CEO of full screen and Rooster Teeth a number of other different kind of media companies and those are the three GPS and I work under these three guys and it is a wonderful experience so basically what we invest in is a bunch of different consumer companies so that could be consumer Healthcare could be

[2:42] education could be real estate could be more on the fun um you know General rural consumer cpg side but we're really trying to figure out one what's the best use in creators in the VC ecosystem is that them being Angel Investors is that them being GPS being LPS or is that kind of just a point of research where we can get closer to them better understand their communities and what they need and then invest off of that criteria cool and then you know I'm just on your website knife Ventures it says rlps are some of the most famous people on the internet they drive popular culture to billions of

[3:23] consumers across YouTube Tick Tock twitch podcasts and elsewhere so that's another piece of it it looks like so there are you know you have some of the biggest creators in the world invested in the fun right yeah so basically the structure of night media and definitely night Ventures is that the creators are our bosses so we basically hear everything about culture about Society about what people actually want and invest off of those Frameworks so um 50 around 50 percentage or so of rlps are creators they're some of the most famous people on the internet and they're people who are in our creator roster but then people who are also

[3:58] within the ecosystem who kind of have like a different Niche um that maybe we couldn't have found in our roster or people who have just expressed interest to read or Ezra or Ben before that they want it to be involved in the kind of VC space but not necessarily as a full GP yet yeah so what I find really interesting about night media night Ventures is we recently did an episode around product Studios oh yeah and how product studios are like the future of startups you know this idea around you know how do you partner with creators on launching startups how do you launch multiple a year how do you you know

[4:36] bootstrap them and what I like about what you're doing is either on the investment side or on the incubation side you're kind of looking at it like hey um I want to launch this product but this product makes a lot more sense with XYZ Creator here's the fun thing and this is what I was with our extension now because Knight is open to incubating with creators that are in our kind of talent roster for the people who are not also is we find a lot of creators come to the studio and are like hey I'm known now for this product and we feel weird kind of keeping referring people to different

[5:18] products with ingredients I don't know maybe they have morals that I don't necessarily agree with and I don't necessarily have the experience of making a full-on company I also don't have the money right now to front that um what's the best kind of course of action and that could be raising Venture money after they incubate the entire project or not but what's cool about kind of the different Suites of night is that you can really start from incubating really your community and continuing what your career could be and really validating what that Community likes and wants then you also could be going into creating that product or

[5:52] company and then you can really scale it out to the mass audience um so you're really kind of encapsulating what you want to be known for and what you want to make and also this you know creator has a majority of ownership here's a hot take from me I find that there are a lot of um here we go take number one we're like two minutes in and I just decided to just let it ride uh let it ride but I will admit I'm not fully on the studio side that's more of one of the partners been um and also he hired at a bunch of

[6:23] people who have backgrounds in in more of the incubation and product side but I do see a lot of it so by the way the fun fact on there just interrupt I I bet you know I have a fun night media story which is Ben actually called me and said one of the companies needed help fleshing out their product so we worked with rare candy um and yeah which is for those who don't know they're launching soon but they're basically a live auction like breaking of Pokemon cards and they paired with Pokemon YouTuber one of the biggest in the space and we helped them sort of like flash

[7:01] out their products so that's my night media story yeah and you got to work with Ben did you get yeah there you go I got to work with Ben yeah Ben Ben was my boss for a minute but it goes to show you right it goes it's like Ben is working for that group right Ben is like okay you need help with products you know you might not have the internal resources I'm gonna call like the best product people I can find I'm going to connect you with them boom so that's like a bit of the value add for the totally yeah so a lot of his background

[7:30] is in traditional VC but I think that that is like one of the actual redeeming qualities of the big VC mindset is that there are probably four at least it used to be that there are like 400 people that know how to do this better than I do so I'll just go find those people and bring them to you uh that traditionally is what used to be it's like that way at night Ventures and throughout night media okay em let's get into it hot take number one okay so my main interest going into the Creator space was really to be around people who have more attention and trust with consumers than

[8:02] I ever could or any of the founders that I was working with ever could and I think with that there are a lot of individual people who approach these creators and celebrities with the pitch that they want to create these companies for them I am definitely not the right person necessarily tonight to be talking about this but it's something that I care about because I meet a lot of these creators who have really good intentions who care a lot about their communities but there are a lot of individuals out there who want to start these brands with creators and they will help them up to launch not necessarily with a high

[8:37] interest in product quality or how to make it sustainable but for me most importantly um not necessarily with the accurate funding to make it be sustainable and grow as a business and I think that's one of the hardest things I've worked at a couple different consumer funds before this in kind of growing and launching and scaling specifically cpg businesses is so hard and capital intensive that I think it's sometimes a really unfair uh misunderstanding with creators is that this is something you can just launch and necessarily passively have on the side unless you're doing more of a Drop Shipping thing but I'm finding a lot of

[9:13] creators want to do more custom projects and that's wonderful um but one of my hot takes is to go to a actual product studio and don't necessarily work with just one one-off individual who just so happened to do a drop shipping business for a number of years not say that that's not very reputable but if you're doing a custom product that needs to be sustained as an accurate business enough where you're taking attention and time off of what your actual day job is which is creating content and cultivating this community you should be doing it with someone who is going to kind of have long-term domain ownership on how to scale that

[9:50] business and also who might be financially invested in it because I think that that is sometimes a Miss I'll see some really good company is kind of start off strong and then die off um and they'll the creators will kind of take it personally and I hate that but I think that that's a conversation that has to be had especially in the Creator cpg kind of industry is that these businesses are actually very expensive to start up and sustain as businesses and if you rely solely on your individual community and your individual uh Persona one you could take it personally if it doesn't necessarily pop off the way you want for it too and then

[10:29] two it's a missed opportunity to collab with other communities that are similar to yours other creators or similar viewers if you just look at skins probably the most famous one she's just totally removed herself from most of the of the PRN campaign ad work she's now spot letting people from different cultures who have better reputation than she does or different kinds of communities um different age groups and I think that's kind of the goal especially if you go to the cpg route um is to try to to partner yourself with other creators who are just as excited about staking themselves into your business and yeah that's my hot tape is that it's

[11:06] really hard so yeah it's really hard that's one thing you're saying but you're also saying like maybe it makes sense to sort of have like a collective of creators versus just one right oh yeah that's something that you're definitely going to see cashiers creators themselves creating kind of like their co-founder relationships and then finding an operator to be a third co-founder I also think one of the reasons why that's really important and I'm curious your perspective on this is communities get fatigued with product offerings often right so if you're you know Logan Paul and you're just like pumping Prime every like third word of your you know the

[11:44] prime drink uh every third word of your YouTube videos the audience might get a little right so the beauty about the collective is you're spreading out that cell among multiple creators I want to see research or I can kind of participate in that in community exhaustion how so all these brands have this community strategy and it's wonderful but how many BR how many communities can an individual be a part of until the previous one drops off it's now kind of out there that I used to be a One Direction fangirl I had the toothbrushes I had the you know the White Strips I had the bedspread I had everything for

[12:25] what it's worth I did not know that in this conversation this conversation is over no but I I kind of had that Affinity with that um with that Community for a really long time yeah um but as I literally just experienced more of life I just cared less and I think that that's really simple like when you say it out loud but it's kind of hard to remember when you have really high engagement Community strategies within companies that just because you have them for the first year or so it doesn't mean they're gonna stay for life with that being said you know we're at a moment with creators

[13:02] where they have the ability to Market themselves I will say also specifically men are a little bit it's a little easier for them to Market themselves as the entrepreneur and I'm doing my hustle and this is the way that it works um but also women have been doing this for many many years um and kind of when they would post these different products regardless of whatever they are if they're a lot of them necessarily probably weren't the healthiest but that goes back to kind of the ability to front capital and the ability to kind of create these businesses from scratch with the large amount of ownership but that was kind of

[13:33] considered to be the sellout but I think we're at the moment where this is the right time for creators to range 2023 to kind of lean into this entrepreneurship lag and show the work that they're doing behind the scenes which you see a lot of creators doing maybe you thought on their individual channels but they'll go on other channels and show their Production Studios they'll show the production work of of the product they're doing um and that is a way for them to quietly do the side hustle thing but it is very very tricky I have two thoughts two thoughts on that on the how many

[14:07] communities could a person possibly be a part of yes I believe that number is five and it relates to the Dunbar number are you are you familiar that's exactly where I'm getting it from yeah yeah so for those of you don't know Dunbar number 150 it's the amount of people that uh someone could possibly basically be friends with uh you know more than 150 like you can't possibly be friends with 500 700 people um so Dunmar you know I think he was a social scientist he basically came up with this number and he said this is the amount people could could actually be connected with uh the five number I call

[14:48] it the Eisenberg number yeah of course and we're waiting for this yeah of course and I believe that you know we exhaust after five um for some people it's actually three I think it's in the three to five range but it's basically you can't be a die-hard fan slash the biggest part of it is your identity like you can't have the identity of a One Direction fan and the identity of a Jonas Brothers brand and an identity of XYZ fan because it it then then your identity becomes muddled and when your identity becomes muddled that's when everything breaks so that's why I think that number is five so

[15:27] that's my Eisenberg number piece I really like the Insight that you have around how do creators showcase how this sausage is made around the products that they're building and there's a brand we actually brought the founder uh on the show called midday squares which basically is this like clean chocolate bar and when you pick up like I just bought the chocolate bar and Whole Foods yesterday and like the back of the chocolate bar there's literally like the pictures of the founders you go to their Instagram they've got like a hundred thousand followers and they're talking about their Journey here's how we raise money and here's how we do this they have this

[16:04] like Willy Wonka style Chocolate Factory and they're just like literally showing how the sausage is made and I think with creators especially bigger creators like the Logan Paul's of the world like I don't just care that you're selling me Prime water or whatever I want to be deeper connected to this story totally and I think that's the opportunity in 2023 for creators you know I grew up in the 90s and 2000s you know to me celebrities were people I saw on TV and movies can you talk about this new this next generation of creators and how do you see creators deeply connecting with younger audiences so

[16:48] this is going to be my hot take number three and I'll just throw it to the to the Future for a minute but I I still think that the definition of Creator is changing in the next year or two um only because there are so many people that now understand the value of attention even more so than money I think they get I'm gonna go buy this thing and support this person and that's kind of a concept now but that's been that way even with like Backstreet Boys and sync back in the 90s but now it's more when I give my attention in my time when I talk about other people younger

[17:23] individuals are more conscious that they're doing that when they spend time consuming this content that they're doing it for the benefit mostly of the Creator even if they're not super excited about whatever the thumbnail is um they will continue to watch this content because they like the person um and that's kind of the switch I think back from uh a number of years ago to now is that there is a stronger Affinity with the individual I mean this goes kind of back to the night thesis of institution to Brand to individual as kind of like that power shift throughout the past 50 years but mostly now you'll see younger

[18:05] individuals what they call grow up with a person and they feel a sense of nostalgia if you're like me where you're you know around your early 20s and you kind of grew up mostly on the internet now if I see someone that I used to watch around eight years ago I probably will have a stint where I'll watch them for a couple more years and if they launch a company up maybe I'll buy it or maybe at least I'll talk about it um but really younger people right now are conscious that content creation is a job they know that these people are mostly doing their job but they like the

[18:38] job that people are doing and they like the people that are doing the job are they there more from because you said something really interesting which is they just like the person yeah are they are they are they consuming the content more for the topic or the person it depends on who you talk to but I'll make a very strong generalization where it's about the person I'll say probably Mr Beast is one of the most impressive content creators on the planet right now um when you mostly talk to the younger people that are fans of his they are obsessed with him as a person almost as

[19:16] much as his content but a little bit more of him as a person as a as someone who's made it as a Creator as someone who's incredibly generous as someone who's very real and open um and I would kind of argue on the other swing of the pendulum being someone like Emma Chamberlain who kind of has created lifestyle content forever so it's a little bit more natural to kind of fall in love with her as an individual person because she's really just doing her own individual thing um but kind of it's the the idea of the person the idea of the authenticity the idea of someone who's been incredibly

[19:50] successful but still humble those are kind of age-old tales that have been going throughout celebrity ER and Community engagement for a number of years but now I fully boiled down to what we would now consider to be everyday people and what's really interesting is when these individuals get so much attention now you're really swaying of influence in between so the Creator status and celebrity status and those two people are kind of the creators that come to mind but really they are celebrities at this point they go to red carpets they get PR packages they're brought into these mainstream conversations as people who have expertise in kind of influence and

[20:26] creating content and really anything I mean it could really be anything now um but I think what's what's cool about younger kids is that they are they've seen a lot of creators fail they've seen a lot of mistakes you kind of had that cancellation I would call it like the dark period of Beauty at the end of the 2010s where you had all these different creators what you call quote unquote canceled for either quality of product or things that they've said or things that they've done or people that they've worked with and I think that that's made a lot of these new creators hyper conscious of kind of

[21:01] both their business decisions but also kind of how they handled their lives as almost like celebrities they know that they have attention and that it can be brought to them at any point and that's really different from the way that people used to create back in the early 2000s early 2010s but I think the way that younger people are consuming um now at least a younger wave I would say like gen alpha or kind of younger gen Z people have heard of the stories but they didn't really feel the emotional push and pull of being in a community that had a lot of really strong division so they're a little bit

[21:33] more open to the person and the personality and learning about their mistakes and things that they've grown about they're more open to the actual person that I think kind of more of the older gen Z Generations like a lot of people ask me Greg how do you build products that Foster Community well I've got good news that's exactly what late checkout does my company we partner with the largest brands in the world and fast-paced startups to design products that resonate with your community we add a couple interesting clients every single year so if you're interested and that sounds like you email front desk at latecheckout.studio with what you're

[22:18] working on what you need help with and don't forget to mention the where it happens pod thank you [Music] do you have any examples of you know not Mega Creator celebrities like Mr Beast but are like smaller up and coming creators that you look to them and you're like wow this this person is an example of where creators are gonna go in 2023 and Beyond absolutely um kidney well it's not a kid's a grown man but he's this one guy who's a friend of mine and I love him his name is Marcus Malone and he runs this brand called minted and it's out of New York

[23:02] um and his creation story is mostly on the he makes a lot of content about fashion and lifestyle it's more of like a big brother Persona he's very much so on the up so first it was more for his fashion and taste but now that he's made a clothing company his focus is mostly on quality and I think that that is really hard to do is to get your audience to trust you enough that you're going to produce something really good in quality and the craziest thing is that and I love him and I love you more just don't get mad at me but he's a he's he's

[23:39] pretty slow to put out products and even when he hears from his audience that he wants to see changes in whatever the product is he's very slow to push it out and I've never seen anyone be able to kind of hold back an audience enough where they know that if they wait long enough the products is even going to get like better with time and I think that that is an example of where I see creators going is he really knows how to get the trust of an audience and to make them kind of wait for it until it's really good and I've just never seen

[24:12] another Creator do that before I think it's dude okay so I I just I'm just on this guy's Instagram at Marcus Malone m-i-l-o-n-e the guy is like also like a really good looking guy you know um do you have to be good looking to be a top grader you know actually I love this question there are different kinds of mediums that will cater to whatever you feel like you're good at as an example just for myself I am still a younger girl and I am kind of

[24:46] going I'm not a younger girl I'm 23. that is such a meme um I'm a grown woman but I think I'm a little bit less comfortable necessarily being on camera as people would think that I am and it's mostly because I still have kind of some insecurities and I don't exactly know how to tackle that yet so I really decided to put all my energy onto Twitter where you really only see one photo and you just think about my thoughts and you interact with me as a person and you get to know my personality and I think that is really the medium that I feel the most

[25:19] comfortable with and I think when it comes down to personality or attractiveness you're really gonna succeed wherever you feel the most comfortable you'll maybe see a lot of creators who have amazing Aesthetics and never show their faces there are so many UTC creators who know how to create homes and create environments create food or you never see their faces and that's because they are more comfortable creating those visual Aesthetics and other people does it help yeah with uh with Marcus like you know we have thousands of people listening who are probably checking out this guy's Instagram and checking out his website yeah and seeing a lot of Engagement

[25:59] I would call them like a micro influencer like I don't know he's 72 000 followers on Instagram but it seems like he probably is selling millions of dollars worth of stuff I just pulled out Marcus's Tick Tock he's he's got 346 000 followers on Tick Tock he's got 10 10 million likes and his average engagement rate which is I I have I use a tool called vid IQ it's a chrome access extension to figure that out um is eight percent so it's you know the engagement rate is a great indicator of the performance of a video it is calculated using the number of likes comments and shares and Views so an

[26:36] eight percent engagement rate is is really high um so he's got a really engaged audience his Playbook just looking like if I were to analyze it is build a lot of attention on tick tock bring those people to Instagram nurture them on Instagram through uh if you go to his website it's like basically an email list when he has sales he posts it posts it we're recording right now between Christmas and New Year's and he's just like I'm off I'll send you an email basically like if you go to his website it's basically like happy holidays we'll be in touch put your email down which is like pretty legendary

[27:12] I think in your case you have a similar approach and some you know you don't have a product that you're selling really although You could argue that night Ventures is the product that you're selling but you're generating attention on Twitter and then you're trying to convert that attention so I think Twitter Tick Tock LinkedIn are great platforms to build attention and then you want to figure out like the framework for thinking about it is like how do you build attention where are you building attention where are you nurturing that attention and then how are you monetizing that nurtured attention totally totally and I will say that's

[27:47] the scariest moment for anybody who has any kind of attention is what is the next platform that I actually want to push my audience onto because it could work really well it could work terribly and I think it's fully dependent on if your audience is open to new forms of media and it also I mean like if your audience is mostly 50 something year old you know individuals who don't just have tick tock on their phone who say hey open a tick tock they're not gonna care uh it's kind of similarly to if a majority of your audience and I think a lot of my audience mostly is uh people

[28:29] who are in Tech at this point uh it used to be mostly younger women who were in Tech but now I just have General audience um just reflective of the platform itself which is a reminder to everyone Twitter last I checked was around 70 men and typically a little bit um on the younger side and I'm very happy to engage with that audience but I don't exactly know what they want because if I were to just stick with my original audience which was mostly younger women then it's a lot easier to kind of bring them on to tick tock because I know they're spending most of

[28:57] their time there um but I had a really interesting conversation with a friend of mine and her name was Gabby Goldberg and she's an investor at tcg I've been a fan of her for such a long time and I'm super fortunate that we've been able to become friends over the years because she was really creating like the Creator personal essays and curation essays uh back two and a half years ago that I actually found super engaging and I I really think we're kind of the more professional narratives that I identified more going into this job so she and I were kind of talking about what kinds of content she wants to

[29:33] create on Tick Tock and she decided to she sort of kill me for sayings on this podcast but she has a running Tick Tock um and I was asking her a number of questions on why she decided to not just go the full uh crypto route because I know that she loves it a lot she talks about the lot and kind of her thought process behind that was like just based off the algorithm itself it depends on what you're consuming it will that that will directly reflect on how your content is doing putting it out there so if I mostly consume and then that's so real like if I'm consuming mostly

[30:05] lifestyle content all day and I sit there and I'm like I'm gonna create a venture capital Tick Tock it's just not gonna really do as well just depending on the algorithm kind of holds you accountable that the communities that you're engaged with throughout the entire day um that's kind of what's going to make it happier or not which is also kind of how uh Twitter works but in terms of that decision on I have attention and how do I hold it I think it's really scary kind of for someone who doesn't really identify as a full-time Creator because it's like do I make a blog like

[30:37] I don't know maybe like traditional really great PCS used to make blogs and now if I kind of sit on there and I start making tick tocks it's like yeah I can do another attention grabbing thing and maybe it can kind of solidify a new kind of community should everyone be a part-time Creator like should do you recommend everyone start being a part-time Creator in 23 and then see if they can gain some traction get some love and and then maybe they like it so much they become full-time I would say to try it I think everyone should try it just from friends of mine from just experience with them you kind

[31:13] of need like five people who are gonna say hey I will like your stuff even if it flops um as long as you can find five people who will like your stuff it'll make creating content a lot easier because at least it will become kind of a joke between you and your friends if it goes terribly but I think the pros are so so intense if it if you learn how to do it well as an example for my specific job as a VC I make sure that I'm able to kind of get in contact with anyone that would be on Twitter within two days um and I've just figured out who knows

[31:52] what and who knows where and all that kind of stuff so I can basically promise my bosses I can get anyone on the phone in two days and my advancement as a Creator is just getting that that time lower so it really depends on what kind of job you want um and also what I'm really interested in is when people are tired of it and they get burnt out and I really don't want to do it anymore um how do you shut it all down and still kind of maintain the other part of your business right once you become a Creator part-time or full-time you essentially

[32:25] are on this treadmill whether you like it or not and it just depends on are you at 7.0 like are you running as fast as you can and you're just running running running AKA full-time Creator aka Mr Beasts of the world um that level or are you Tweeting once a week but it's crucial for your job to continue to tweet once a week oh yeah it's been it's been really helpful even if you saw on this past week I was doing a road map on consumer cyber security and what are the companies that can assure people that when they get their account hacked they can get them back

[33:05] um and kind of monitor kind of brand amongst different platforms make sure people aren't impersonating you those are companies that right now I'm really interested in looking at but I know I mean this is really bad but I I've known almost nothing about cyber security um so I just started aggressively tweeting for the past week someone get on the phone with me that knows way more than I do and if I weren't to have a Twitter in order to sit here I would have to call up friends manually and say who do you know can you email but can you and that's just so old like I I've

[33:34] had access to like seven people who've spent hours with me and very very fortunate to do that so I can be able to do my job right my hot take on you know being a professional Creator part-time or professional meeting like a beat you know we're in like the B2B world is it is the highest leverage thing you can do with your time like think of all the time we spend like flying to LA or New York or these different places and going to like meetups and like going for dinner with this person or going for drinks with that person or going for lunch with you know these people like if

[34:05] you can actually like in 2023 removed like 90 of those like discovery type meetings and replace that with like I'm gonna go heads down create content and see what kind of opportunities I attract that way I think it's such a good use of time because you can you know go go from zero like I went from zero to three hundred thousand followers basically in two years and it completely changed my life where I could sit from you know I have a house in the middle of nowhere in Canada you know in the forest in the mountains I can just like sit from there hop on a conversation via

[34:46] this podcast or on Twitter and be having incredible conversations that can really move my business forward my hot take is going to be not only should you like minimize those discovery meetings as much as possible IRL but every person in business should spend some amount of time as a part-time Creator I also think that especially if you're going into a consumer-facing business whether it's kind of like a traditional smaller business or within startups in general consumer experience is the most important thing to focus on that I have observed and I think that the Creator mindset and mentality will be baked into every single product that a person can kind of identify with

[35:38] and I know that I mentioned this before but I really really really think that Creator is just a new way of looking at consumer in general and the idea that someone can experience your product and experience your brand while also being a click away from immediately engaging with your direct competitors is a new way of creating product and running a business and that's something that I know feels super new to us but wasn't really the case 15 years ago and the only people that you really had to fight against was someone on a store shelf or just the right sales person to really nail a deal but now people have

[36:26] access to so many different choices in the world I think it gives especially a founder or really any operator or really anybody a Competitive Edge to not only have their own community that that they can learn from um but also kind of just better understand where you are in that flywheel I just think that Creator and consumer are essentially going to become the same thing it really is how open are you to your customers sharing their experiences with your product and with you as a person and that is going to give someone either the biggest boost in the world and essentially make their company regardless and if it's kind of a

[37:02] more intense company or if it's a kind of a passive consumption kind of thing that is really what's going to create a sticky company within the next 10 20 years so if you want to create a sticky company you know either become a Creator or or part or partner with a Creator you know right oh yeah I was having a conversation yesterday with Alex Lieberman he was the he's the co-founder of morningbrew yeah we'll do and he shared with me the four types of Creator businesses that he sees and I'm gonna pull them up and I want to get your opinion on it and tell me who you think is the most

[37:42] interesting example of each of these buckets so number one is Creator originated so he writes a creator has an idea for a business that they believe is authentic to their brand and will resonate With Their audience so what's an example of a Creator originated company that you think is really interesting I guess like Chamberlain coffee because she talks about coffee so much I mean that that fit makes sense okay Chamberlain coffee so can you for the people that don't know what Chamberlain coffee has explained who Emma is and what the brand does totally totally so Chamberlain coffee is a direct to consumer now kind of full sweet beverage brand

[38:26] um they originally started off with making coffee beans and ground coffee going into mixers and straws cups merch going into the matcha space now and they're sold currently in very specific retail stores like an erwan um and kind of now has this California La Vibe very Carefree but the originator and the founder of that is a Creator named Emma Chamberlain she she's in her early 20s and her brand is very authentic and it's built a very cult following off of her authenticity and realness she's been seen interviewing celebrities on red carpets and also modeling for a lot of very large campaigns but her love at the moment if

[39:16] you consume a lot of her long long form content a lot of it goes back to her company she is very fully invested in in this coffee brand that is kind of locally sourced and has ethical ways of um kind of creating these beans but then also kind of sharing this love of coffee that gen Z kind of has as a part of their identity and it's a part of Emma's identity too right it's super authentic like she loves coffee she's brought coffee into the conversation before she even had the company yeah I mean almost every Vlog that she used to make for the past like five years started with her

[39:55] making cup of coffee in the morning in her kitchen so it was very natural to see her come out with a bunch of different coffee brands I do wish that she would make more behind the scenes content about the company that's an example I would eat that up easily as a video cool okay I like that example because it's a mainstream example which you lose a couple points but you gain a couple points because it's an authentic like damn it's an authentic brand that's getting a lot of traction right now so yeah okay number two bucket number two operator originated an operator has an idea for a brand and wants to find a

[40:34] Creator to launch with it to have day one distribution two examples of that include Ken Austin's alcohol Brands good sport yeah if you can give me you can deduct points because she's not necessarily A Creator maybe a nepotism baby but also our favorite one Bella Hadid and Ken it's a celebrity but I would I would I mean if you talk to me any day I would say that celebrities and creators the whole thing but I will say Ken might be a common answer but that was my favorite merger um because it was very unexpected it was a very hot take people were like what is this girl doing getting into this kind

[41:13] of business kin is a euphorics drink company and there's an entire science behind you Forks it's very herbally based and basically when you drink this drink um it makes you feel kind of relaxed or very excited um there are different levels of herbs and caffeines and different mixture and there was a toss-up really in the past three years of these alternatives to alcohol and these these a bunch of these different brands popped up you had house rip you had Ken you had Gia you have really a whole Suite of them to a point where now if you go to a lot of different larger cities there are

[41:52] non-alcoholic almost like liquor stores and basically it's a battle of who can get the most attention and I think in my eyes Ken is really one and that has been that Bella Hadid who is a very famous model also someone who's gotten a lot of attention from her Instagram posts and tick tocks but mostly she's like one of the most famous models ever right now uh she decided to become a co-founder of an already existing euphorics drink company called Ken and it was very controversial because people were like why you already make so much money you don't need to do stuff like this but it really when it came

[42:33] down to a lot of her interviews said and she was really interested in the business itself the mission behind kind of taking people off of just drinking alcohol and having alternatives to alcohol there's a very large wave of younger consumers who don't want to participate in both purchasing and sharing alcohol um so this was a pretty pretty natural Mission alignment where she's very interested in alternative medicine very interested in wellness and that is where I think kin lives but it was a super interesting toss-up now you have some alternative alcohol companies that shut down recently just because it's decently Capital intensity business but I think probably the most successful one I could

[43:17] think of yeah I think when you're in a space like that where it's a new space and you're trying to define a category doing so with the Creator often makes a lot of sense um because you're educating the market right so when you're educating the market um hey like you shouldn't drink alcohol for these reasons and hey like there's this alternative and it's amazing and when you have an audience of people that already trust you it makes your job a lot easier as Founders often what we're doing is we're doing two things we're creating a product which is really really hard and then we're creating distribution which is really hard the

[43:59] beauty about you know Bella in this example is like the distribution's already there she just has to focus on what is the authentic product what does it look like how do I co-build it essentially with my audience see how they take it up and then eventually how do I get that to retail how do I get that to other channels so I like that example a lot uh bucket number three uh this was an easy one for you Creator incubated Creator wants to launch a business but doesn't know what to launch figures out business to launch with a partner and then launches it and the example they use is feastables which I

[44:34] think I was gonna say festivals can I just explain Facebook and I'll actually get my answer yes um Okay cool so feastables is a company that was incubated out of night Labs which is our incubator at night media and that story goes that Mr Beast kind of I mean he has made billions of videos about it but he was kind of creating this brand for a number of different reasons and wanted to make this large video about becoming Willy Wonka and um is very very interesting one of the most famous videos that he's he's done so far but he went to read and and Ben and the entire lapse team and was like I

[45:13] want to make this a sustainable company so if I put my attention behind it that it launches properly and it has good quality behind it and I think what was really frustrating for Mr Beast in that moment was that the quality of candy and snacks for younger individuals really is not there and if it is if there are alternative snacks it's really the granola mom kind of um frou-frou branding that I think a lot of especially younger guys just didn't identify with and so he thought that it was a myth because usually those are decent products that just aren't printed properly or they are branded properly

[45:48] and they're terrible for younger people so in creating this video he also incubated this company and happened to find one of the co-founders of kind Barr whose name is Jim and they created this real full Suite of almost gamified snacks so I mean Mr Beast is like a legend because of many different reasons but one of them is that he just knows how to sell product properly so he wants to continue really the sweepstakes aspect and uh all of the community engagement I can't like spill anything on this podcast but he wants to keep people engaged with the different launches of snacks and to show off that

[46:36] they have these snacks as a way to engage with his content that's how I can say it um so we call it really gamified snacking but to anybody listening he really tried to recreate the Willy Wonka aspect um with this video and also within feastables so that was an example because he was a Creator who was creating content who just so happened to also create product while creating that content and um night and Mr Beast decided to kind of seek out a operating and also previously co-founding professional who knew how to create a massive uh snack company and that just happened to be um very morally adjusted too so it was

[47:18] really like the happiest Union I've ever seen here's what I'll say here's what I like about it so I like the idea that snacking is a ritual similar to Emma's Chamberlain coffee like you wake I mean I woke up in the morning if you're watching this on YouTube you know we're recording this in the morning I pour some coffee it's like my ritual right um snacking is a ritual that a lot of us have and as a Creator if he can create like a more Creator focused snacking set of rituals and then connect that with his content which he's shown that he's done with like his Willy

[47:54] Wonka videos Etc it creates this beautiful Union around like the content makes snacks better and the snacks make the content better so love that example uh last bucket is number four creator brokered so the business already exists and the Creator is brought in to accelerate growth so an example would be Aviation gin so what's an example of basically a business that exists but the Creator comes on board and is basically there just to promote and distribute it so we also run syndicates at night Ventures that brings creators into some of the companies that we see here some of the companies that we invest in and for people kind of listening that

[48:36] looks like opening an individual investment vehicle where we go around and say hey this is why we're going to invest in it if you want to Independent independently participate and you're not an LP um and you want to kind of have more of an Engaged relationship with the founder you can essentially Angel invest into this Syndicate and we break off some of the allocation for creators themselves so that's that's one of the fun things that we haven't really done as much recently but um we used to do a lot here's the sad thing that I think it's gonna I think it's gonna stop um all of the examples I can think of

[49:14] because I want to say a software product they're more like Creator tooling companies let's hear it out for beacons obviously Elon hates it because Lincoln bio is not cool on Twitter which means it's actually cool in Real Life Link tree is a late checkout client so we're we're kind of we were homies in the beginning the beginning of this pod is doing great work I'm kidding go ahead I'll say before that I think the war of Lincoln bios is mostly the job that you have and I think when it comes to creators and personas that want to display media articles I think beacons wins I think if it's like a link tree it's more

[49:59] geared towards smaller operating businesses and that just the people that I see mostly using them are more like that but also career so they they both kind of intersect and for people who are trying to figure out what I'm talking about um these Lincoln bios are the ones that you click in in any creators bio or any really any person's bio and you see the little drop down of buttons that you can interact to go to either a different social media account or to go to their businesses themselves and why it kind of became hot in the Creator side is because all these creators really create

[50:32] content on different platforms but then also they want to collect kind of the higher engagement things like emails or kind of in the future sell them a product um so there are a lot of them but Beacon specifically the reason why they wanted to get involved with night is because they wanted to have a lot of Angel Investors that were creators and I think that in terms of so I'm kind of doing a little Switcheroo on your question in terms of the best engagement for a Founder um to get with a Creator like if you have a Creator in mind that you want to work with I would be open to the idea of

[51:12] them becoming an angel investor because I also have a friend named Nate O'Brien who runs uh Roadrunner BC and he is a he is a cheerleader he is like you know all of his I mean a lot of his poor coaches are not Creator tooling but the ones that are he is very happy to bring into his everyday life and to his content and I think that it's lame because I think that creators are also very effective in other kinds of businesses but I think that's also just a Founder mindset shift is like I want to bring in this Creator rather than another VC uh to help me

[51:50] with whatever I'm interested in doing I like it that was a good one I like it well done and it's a good segue to my the last thing I wanted to bring up with you which is have you heard of subscribe.so a lot of people here obviously know about affiliate marketing you see it all over social media use promo code Greg Eisenberg to get 10 off XYZ product yeah um in a Creator world it's it's getting bigger and bigger because of of course what's happened with Facebook and iOS 14 and and just the blockage of AD budgets there people are looking to creators to get their their products sold there's a

[52:33] new product this is for people to check out you can go to subscribe.so I'm not involved and and in any way I just thought it was really cool but it's this idea of paid creators and Equity so I'm on their website now creators bring the audience startups bring the equity we provide the legal marketing and budgeting tools to align incentives for the long term uh it's a y combinator company and it's this idea that you're rewarding founding creators with equity and they just it's a whole dashboard around it uh what do you think of this idea yeah curious if this is like retro to creators who

[53:09] just so happen to be in your community and are excited about your product and you want to kind of reward them after their excitement I think this is a great tool I would be curious to kind of figure out what the creators themselves think once they I want to know how much Equity they're given that I've got to know it and if it's different than if a Creator were to just kind of write a five to twenty five thousand dollar check into a syndicator directly into the company because there are different workarounds in terms of ownership and I want to see like what the Creator's interests are so

[53:45] that's that's one thing the opposite side of the coin is just because a lot of my friends are creators I think that this is something that a lot of them are open to which is great but if it's so if it's not retro and it's really just a Founder wants for a Creator to interact with them I am very very opinionated on that you should pay the creators that work with you that is to me number one um because I think Founders themselves know as much as they're very excited about their company respectfully these people at the end of the day have bills to pay and they sometimes have families

[54:21] and they need money so if you want to bring on a Creator and have them kind of help you with your marketing or distribution you need to pay them period And I think that Equity is not the alternative to it did you see like recently like maybe six months ago four to six months ago Shopify employees had this new feature where they can like log into their dashboard and basically say like hey I get paid a hundred thousand dollars a year I actually and I get ten thousand dollars of stock I'm actually okay getting like do you know sliding on the scale and saying I'll I'll take

[55:00] eighty thousand dollars but give me fifty thousand dollars a year of stock and it allowed the employee to basically shift where you know how much risk they were willing to take I think what would be really cool here if I'm subscribed is if they can do that with creators and say like depending on uh if you have you know if you have a family or you want to take less risk for example there should be some slider where it's like I want some cash and you know maybe more Equity or more equity and less cash but I think the idea of Affiliates being 100 cash is not also fair to some of the creators

[55:41] because if you look at if you look at like some creators who have pushed uh or promoted companies like um yeah you know I'm an advisor to public.com um you know they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars I know a lot of creators who you know public.com has sponsor them those people probably just got cash I would imagine um so they weren't able to get the upside of that of that business so I like your opinion my take is uh a slider would be really cool all right we are so out of time but this was really fun I learned a lot of just about how to think

[56:17] about working with creators putting yourself in their shoes and some of the opportunities and some hot takes so thank you so much M where could people find you on the internet I guess Twitter my Twitter handle is it's really embarrassing I'm showing my age it is Emily and then Herrera but the first e is an X if you just go to my website which is just my name emilyherrera.com all the links are already there Emily herrera.com One Direction you know that's where that's where it's at kidding uh no thank you so much give her a follow on Twitter it's an excellent follow and and thank you so

[56:58] much for learning about uh creators with us today

[57:10] [Music]

[57:17] foreign

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