The creator journey and the invaluable asset: attention
By: Eddie Chan
Tags: Community, Creators, Creator Economy, Micro Entrepreneurship

Are you listening to me?

So how do creators grow?

In my previous post, we talked about the larger infrastructure needs that creators have. From a creator perspective, these needs manifest themselves across the content creation journey, from to content creation, to community engagement, to business building, to monetization. However, when we look at these entrepreneurs, their core needs are not dissimilar from any other business — access and ownership of their key customers.

50% of SMB revenue comes from repeat business and that number only becomes more aggressive as we trend down towards smaller and smaller microentrepreneurship endeavors. In a world where we swing the pendulum back towards a mom-and-pop-store level of connection and experience (albeit virtually), entrepreneurs need to cultivate a where-everybody-knows-your-name relationship with their customers. Instead of increasing the number of gatekeepers across the business building process (distribution aggregators, customer analytic aggregators, etc), creators need opportunities to own the communication, data, and end relationship with their fans. Not only does this foster sustainable growth from a creator perspective, but engenders loyalty that results in long-term partners endemic to the platform.

So what do we need?

The inability of new creators to find, develop, and own their consumer relationships leads to a breakdown early in the creator journey. Failure to generate a strong community around the brand manifests in the difficulty in finding one’s 1000 true fans.

With barriers to content creation continuing to lower and making personalized content table stakes, the priority must be around a loyal fanship. And where does this connection come from? It starts with knowing your consumers — who they are, what they value, and why they are repeat viewers.

Speaking to creators, it is amazing that many have reached millions of subscribers, yet have no conception of why they are popular in the first place. The imposter syndrome weighs heavily and directly contributes to entrepreneur burnout.

Secondly, it is key to translate that consumer information into interactive engagement. Finding ways that thread the needle between intimate feeling content while maintaining a low effort of content creation makes for sustainable connections. Naturally, with scale (in both reach and frequency), authenticity tends to decrease; it is the ability to push the frontier on this curve that will allow microentrepreneurs to create defensible businesses. These are built-in shortcomings of personality-driven businesses, but the diversification across content types from traditional personalities (Joe Rogan) and digitally-native ones (Ryan Higa) show there are good businesses to be built here.

In order to continue this fortuitous cycle, creators then need to own the data around these connection points and be free to migrate them from platform to platform. Without this flexibility, creators will always be subject to their distribution platforms. Inherently, this leads to creators being commoditized across the industry as they are replaced with an endless supply of content by living subject to algorithmic recommendations. This can be explicitly witnessed in the game streaming space. With the largest creators consistently recommended and pushed, it is highly unlikely to draw in viewers beyond the top 3–5 channels per game; longer-tailed creators are forced to accept this community issue and resort to tactics like “working the nightshift” to try and outmaneuver the supply-demand curve.

All in all, the current state of the industry is still incredibly beautiful and continues to allow new opportunities for voices to be heard and businesses to be built. The goal should be to stop the commoditization of the individuals who take risks to provide these personalized services by focusing on the value consumers receive from content and not just the mindless attention optimization loop, Platforms that support and solve any of the above pain points will serve to accelerate the viability of this microentrepreneurship ecosystem.

Building something or just have thoughts on the space? Let’s chat. Follow me here, LinkedIn, or on Twitter @edwardchanone. Thank you to the many investors, entrepreneurs, and subject matter experts I spoke with for this article.