3 things I learned building for the Creator Economy

I've been working on Cereal (trycereal.com) and focusing my time on the creator economy for the last few months. Wanted to share some of my takeaways from this journey so far. This is not exhaustive of course, but it's a little opinionated, and mostly I hope it'll give an interesting perspective on this market to others. Most of the below is going to apply specifically to video content creators as that's been my focus.

1. Distributions wins over product

As someone with a core background in product management it was very easy for me to be in the "a great product always wins" mentality (still am, but like, way less extreme now thanks for asking). This is exceptionally true in some markets, and the creator space is one of them. So much of customer acquisition benefits from relationships with existing creators and players in the space to get rolling, and word of mouth by the right people can propel you to great heights. One common question I get from other new founders in the space is "Do you have creators I can talk to?". One founder also described it as "this market is a club, and you have to be invited in".

2. This is a B2B product space with a consumer wrapper

The growth in the creator sector in the past year has encouraged more people to start channels and participate, and it's reminiscent of the growth around dropshipping a few years back. Even though most of our customers are individuals that behave more like consumers rather than businesses, they are still businesses. This brings a really unique approach to product development and marketing, as you need to provide a consumer appeal while keeping in mind their business objectives. It's interesting to see how the strongest brands in the space handle this - A fun exercise is to check out their marketing pages with this idea in mind.

3. Crypto is the future, but for video creators at least, it's not the present

Before the backlash rolls in, let me finish. Any conversation about the creator economy will invariably touch on web3. However when you talk to influential creators it's clear that we're still on the early adoption curve of web3 for this space - the vast majority of video creators aren't ready and don't understand it well enough to jump into it. It may be the right time to build for web3, but education is still a significant hurdle. Whoever is best able to teach and translate web3 into creator value for rising creators wins this game. And while web3 for content creators is getting really exciting, nobody has actually cracked this in a meaningful way yet.

If you're working in this space let me know what you think! Follow the journey on my twitter as well - https://www.twitter.com/malone_co