How does a creator ‘figure things out’ and become successful?
I was just asked that question on a podcast (coming out in a few weeks), and there are a million ways I could answer that sound smart, but only one that rings true: Experimentation.
Unfortunately, experimentation can kill any business quickly if it is costly and time consuming. In the world of creators, this often happens when creators are over-optimizing for production quality on their first videos over, to paraphrase Jimmy Donaldson, making their first 100 shitty videos. The emphasis here is on “shitty”: That simple word gives a creator permission to experiment quickly.
So great, content experimentation is relatively cheap now. But what about the business side of being a creator? That’s where things get more quickly. Say you want to experiment with subscriptions, tips, merch, paid video, and so on..there’s often a tremendous investment and opportunity cost attached, which can stop you in your tracks. Hence, the key is to make experimentation at the *business* level as cheap as on the content side.
The creator economy startups that align with this need will win, and in the process, truly help creators become creator businesses. In our case, at Koji, this is at our core value proposition: Through our open app store for creators, we make it an order of magnitude easier for creators to experiment. It takes minutes (vs days with standard website builders) to add new functionality in form of a powerful mini app to your creator offering/profile. Stuff like payment processing and account management happens at a shared infrastructure layer, making things largely frictionless for creators.
Know other great examples of products and platforms that make experimentation easy for creators? Let me know!
