I’m now a few years into my journey into the creator economy. As Google's first Head of Creator Relations, then Koji's Head of Creators, I’ve learned a ton about the challenges of creators of all types and sizes. Some are similar, some very different: “Creator” is a wide term with lots of different ways to slice and dice, and a WordPress recipe blogger has very little in common with a ASMR TikToker.
I've also learned a ton about me. I learned that while I enjoyed diving into the problem space of growth–marketing, community, partnerships and the likes–I'm much happier (and effective) building products. I also continue to be drawn to the world of entertainment and storytelling, a world that Koji isn't directly focused on any longer: Koji's stronger-than-ever team is now on a mission to disrupt selling on social media, targeting the millions of social media sellers for whom complex storefronts are too antiquated and cumbersome. It's a path that I helped pave and strongly agree with, but as I realized, it's not the one for me.
I’ve always been fascinated by finding ways to accelerate and improve the workflows that make creatives successful in their jobs, and in the case of creators, making it easier and faster for them to tell more creative, entertaining, and powerful stories. From my many conversations with creators, the laundry list of fascinating creator problems I captured became so large that I couldn't help but finally set out to make finding ingenious, novel solutions my sole focus for the foreseeable future.
So today, I’m excited to announce that I’ve found a great partner in building powerful new creator tools in Spotter, the creator economy company that provides capital, knowledge and community to YouTube creators to accelerate their creative endeavors and businesses. I’ll be joining Spotter as their Executive Vice President of Product & Creator Tools to build innovative new tools that help the Spotter creator community level up in many content creation areas, ranging from ideation to production to optimization. I’ll also be hiring for roles mission critical to our success: If you are an experienced PM, UX Designer or Frontend/UX Engineer with a knack for rapid R&D and tooling and a deep curiosity, I'd love to hear from you.
If you’ve been following my work in the past, you know how building tools is a common thread throughout my career - from developing novel ways to build UI, to game engines, to expanding the reach and capabilities of developer tooling, coming up with new forms of content creation, it’s kinda my jam.
Or to quote Daft Punk, by helping creators
Work it harder, make it better
Do it faster, makes us stronger
Onwards!