Don’t let ‘perfection’ get in the way of ‘creation’ – just start. pic.twitter.com/GgD2iWml0b
— Eze Vidra (@ediggs) February 4, 2021
50 million people already consider themselves pro or semi-pro “creators”, according to Sigalfire’s in-depth “creator economy” report. Although there’s some overlap with freelance platforms, where creators look for paid ‘gigs’, I’d argue that while creators are looking to monetize their craft, they care about “artistic freedom”. To do that, they need to build and engage an audience, create unique, quality content and monetize it in different ways.
First, we need to understand who’s a creator, what do they produce and how do they monetise. While this is a partial list, you get a sense of just how broad the spectrum is in the Creator Economy:
Taking a look at the list above you can get a sense for what tools are needed for creators to create, distribute and monetize their content. It’s also a reminder that these creators are making themselves into a business, and so a lot of the tools they require are also SMB/Freelancer tools. This is a big area of opportunity for startups.
The landscape for creator economy tools is evolving rapidly. Here are a few of the directories aggregating the emerging tools for creators:
On the platform side, in the past, a few large platforms like Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok were the core distribution mechanism for creators. Now they are diversifying to more vertical, specialised platforms tailored to their needs.
Li Jin curates the Side Hustle Stash as a free resource to find platform-based work.
SMBs and freelancers, whether they are creators or not, need a range of tools to get their work done. From setting up a website to creating contracts or sending invoices. FYI curated a list of 171 free resources for freelancers:
Heywith created a list of 100+ tools to monetize your social media following. Ranges from memberships to donations.
Nuton created a creator stack, with collections of tools grouped by the type of output a creator makes (newsletters, podcast, gaming stream, etc)
Finally, Hugo Amsallem created a landscape of the tools for the creator economy in his newsletter, Arm the Creators
For more in detailed thoughts on this topic, see my previous VC Cafe post on the creator economy and check out my interview with Techcrunch (published yesterday, Feb 7 2021), where I shared my opinion on the challenges and opportunities in the creator economy, alongside other prominent VCs investing in this space.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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