The Startup Ideas Podcast - Building Big Businesses with Creators with Emily Herrera

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Today, Greg is joined by Em Herrera, an investor at Night Ventures. In this conversation, Greg and Em talk about how content creators and startups can amplify each other through partnerships.►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comEmily Herrera:https://twitter.com/emilyhxrrerahttps://www.emilyherrera.com/SHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro4:14 - How creators can partner with VCs14:04 - How Dunbar's Number applies to communities (Isenberg's Number)16:28 - How creators can connect with younger audiences30:50 - Should everyone be a part-time creator?37:11 - The four types of creator businesses52:30 - Compensation models for creator partnerships

All right. M. What's going on? I'm good. I'm happy to be here. I've been a fan for a long time. Yeah, and I've been a Twitter fan. You're always like posting interesting Gen Z research stuff, creator stuff, and then also just what's on your mind. And I feel like Twitter's become a very cookie petter place recently. And I wanted to bring you on the show just to just to crawl inside to your brain and see what you're thinking is in store for 2023. Before we get into it, tell people what you do and what is night media? Sure.

So I work at a fun called Night Ventures, which is out of a media company or creator management company called Night Media. And the way that it works now is, I mean, there's a whole backstory to it, but essentially it is a company that manages a bunch of really high profile creators and essentially around a year or so ago there was this big creator economy boom and a lot of creators that were on the talent roster were offered kind of the opportunity to invest in syndicate sometimes it's angel check sometimes it's full on bc's and reed who's one of the gp's but also the CEO of the company was like, I'm sure we could actually build out a proper structure for this and figure

out what's the deal taste of these individual creators, but then also, you know, we don't want necessarily go into the whole financial advisement kind of thing. So let's just find someone who really knows how to do this full time. So ended up talking to Ben Matthews, who was another GP at the fund, and he was at Vesmer for a number of years. And for a long time, he was really interested in what we now co-creator go to market, and that looks like anything that's actually effective marketing and everything that's not paid ads. And kind of what he had seen a couple of years ago was that the future was going more towards creator as being a part of product as creation, but then also as a point of distribution. So he was super interested in general in the creator space,

and they kind of both partner together, brought in also as a GP, the president of Knight Media, who was also CEO of Full Screen and Rooster Teeth, the number of other different kind of media. companies. And those are three GPs, and I work under these three guys, and it is a wonderful experience. So basically, what we invest in is a bunch of different consumer companies. So that could be consumer healthcare, could be education, could be real estate, could be more on the fun, you know, general consumer CPG side. But we're really trying to figure out, one, what's the best use in creators in the VC ecosystem? Is that them being angel investors? Is that them being GPs being LPs or is that kind of just a point of research where we can get closer to them,

better understand their communities and what they need and then invest off of that criteria. Cool. And then, you know, I'm just on your website, Night Ventures. It says our LPs are some of the most famous people on the internet. They drive popular culture to billions of consumers across YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, podcasts, and elsewhere. So that's another piece of it it looks like. So there are, you know, you have some of the biggest creators in the world invested in the fund, right? Yeah.

So basically the structure of night media and definitely night ventures is that the creators are our bosses. So we basically hear everything about culture, about society, about what people actually want and invest off of those frameworks. So around 50 percentage or so of our LPs are creators. They're some of the most famous people on the internet. And there are people who are in our creator roster, but then people who are all. also within the ecosystem who kind of have like a different niche that maybe we couldn't have found in our roster or people who have just expressed interest to read or Ezra or Ben before that they wanted to be involved in the kind of VC space, but not necessarily as a full GP yet.

Yeah. So what I find really interesting about Night Media and Night Ventures is we recently did an episode around product studios. Oh, yeah. And how product studios are like the future of startups, you know, this idea around, you know, how do you partner with creators on launching startups? How do you launch multiple a year? How do you, you know, bootstrap them? And what I'd like about what you're doing is either on the investment side or on the incubation side, you're kind of looking at it like, hey, I want to launch this product, but this product makes a lot more sense with XYZ creator. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Here's the fun thing, and this is where I think, that's kind of the original framework, but I think the fun extension now, because Knight is open to incubating with creators that are in our kind of talent roster, but the people who are not also, is we find a lot of creators come to the studio and are like, hey, I'm known now for this product. And you feel weird kind of keeping referring people to different products with, you know, ingredients I don't know. Maybe they have morals that I don't necessarily agree with. And I don't necessarily have the experience in making a full-on company. I also don't have the money right now

to front that what's the best kind of course of action. And that could be raising venture money after they incubate the entire project or not. But what's cool about kind of the different suites of night is that you can really start from incubating really your community and continuing what your career could be and really validating what that community likes and wants. then you also can be going into creating that product or company, and then you can really scale it out to the mass audience. So you're really kind of encapsulating what you want to be known for and what you want to make.

And also this creator has a majority of ownership. Here's a hot take from me. I find that there are a lot of... Here we go. Hot take number one. We're like two minutes in and I decided to just let it right. But I will admit, I'm not fully on the studio side. That's more of one of the partners, Ben, and also he hired out a bunch of people who have backgrounds in more of the incubation and product side.

But I do see a lot of it. By the fun fact down there, just to interrupt. I have a fun night media story, which is Ben actually called me and said one of the companies needed help fleshing out their product. So we worked with rare candy. Oh, love. And yeah, which is, for those of you don't know, they're launching soon, but they're basically a live auction, like breaking of Pokemon cards. And they paired with Pokemon YouTuber, one of the biggest in the space. And we helped them sort of like flash out their product.

So that's my night media story. And you got to work with Ben? Did you get to. Yeah. There you go. I got to work with Ben. Yeah. Ben was my boss for a minute.

But it goes to show you, right? It goes, it's like Ben is working for that group, right? Ben is like, okay, you need help with product. You know, you might not have the internal resources. I'm going to call like the best product people I can find. I'm going to connect you with them. Boom. So that's like a bit of the value had for the following.

Yeah. So a lot of his background is in traditional VC, but I think that that is like one of the actual redeeming qualities of the big VC mindset is that there are probably four, at least it used to be that there are like 400 people that know how to do this better than I do. So I'm just go find those people and bring them to you. But traditionally it's what used to be. It's like that way at Night Ventures and throughout Night Media. Okay.

Ann, let's get into it. Hot take number one. Okay. So my main interest going into the creator space was really to be around people who have more attention and trust with consumers than I ever could or any of the founders that I was working with ever could. And I think with that, there are a lot of individual people who approach these creators and celebrities with the pitch that they want to create these companies for them.

I am definitely not the right person necessarily, and I'd be talking about this, but it's something that I care about because I need a lot of these creators who have really good intentions, who care a lot about their communities. But there are a lot of individuals out there who want to start these brands with creators and they will help them up to launch, not necessarily with a high interest in product quality or how to make it sustainable. but for me most importantly, not necessarily with the accurate funding to make it be sustainable and grow as a business.

And I think that's one of the hardest things. I've worked at a couple of different consumer funds before this. In kind of growing and launching and scaling, specifically CPG businesses, is so hard and capital intensive that I think it's sometimes a really unfair misunderstanding with creators is that this is something you can just launch and necessarily passively have on the side. unless you're doing more of a drop shipping thing. But I'm fine that a lot of creators want to do more custom projects, and that's wonderful. But one of my hot takes is to go to a actual product studio and don't necessarily work with just one,

one-off individual who just so happen to do a drop shipping business for a number of years. Not say that that's not very reputable, but if you're doing a custom product, then it needs to be sustained as an accurate business, enough where you're taking attention and time off of what your actual day job is, which is creating content and cultivating this community, you should be doing it with someone who is going to kind of have long-term domain ownership on how to scale that business. And also who might be financially invested in it. Because I think that that is sometimes amiss.

I'll see some really good companies kind of start off strong and then die off. And they'll – creators kind of take it personally. And I hate that. But I think that that's a conversation it has to be had, especially in the creator CPG kind of industry, is that these businesses are actually very expensive to start up and sustain as businesses. And if you rely solely on your individual community and your individual persona, one, you could take it personally if it doesn't necessarily pop off the way you want for it to. And then two, it's a missed opportunity to collab with other communities that are similar to yours. Other creators are similar to yours.

if you just look at Skim's probably the most famous one. She's just totally removed herself from most of the PR and campaign ad work. She's now spotlighting people from different cultures who have better reputation than she does or different kinds of communities, different age groups. And I think that's kind of the goal, especially if you go to the CPT route, is to try to partner yourself with other creators who are just as excited about staking themselves into your business. And yeah, that's my hot take.

It's that it's really hard. So, yeah, it's really hard. That's one thing you're saying. But you're also saying, like, maybe it makes sense to sort of have like a collective of creators versus just one, right? Oh, yeah. That's something that you're definitely going to see coming up in the next year. It's creators themselves creating kind of like their co-founder relationships and then

finding an operator to be a third co-founder. I also think one of the reasons why that's really important and I'm curious your perspective on this is community. communities get fatigued with product offerings often, right? So if you're, you know, Logan Paul and you're just like pumping prime every like third word of your, you know, the prime drink, every third word of your YouTube videos, the audience might get a little like, stop selling, right? So the beauty about the collective is you're spreading out that cell among multiple creators. I want to see research or I can kind of participate in that in community exhaustion.

So all these brands have this community strategy and it's wonderful. But how many communities can an individual be a part of until the previous one drops off? It's now kind of out there that I used to be a One Direction van girl. I had the toothbrushes. I had the white strips. I had the bed spread. I had everything. For what it's worth, I did not know that in this conversation.

This conversation is over. No, but I kind of had that affinity with that community for a really long time. But as I literally just experienced more of life, I just care less. And I think that that's really simple, like when you say it out loud. But it's kind of hard to remember when you have really high engagement community strategies within companies that just because you have them for the first year or so, it doesn't mean they're going to stay for life. With that being said, you know, we're at a moment with creators where they have the ability

to market themselves. I will say also specifically men are a little bit. It's a little easier for them to market themselves as the entrepreneur and I'm doing my hustle and this is the way that it works. But also women have been doing this for many, many years. And kind of when they would post these different products, regardless of whatever they are, a lot of them necessarily probably weren't the healthiest, but that goes back to kind of the ability to front capital and the ability to kind of create these businesses from scratch with

a large amount of ownership. But that was kind of considered to be the sellout. But I think we're at the moment where this is the right time for creators going into 2023 to kind of lean into this entrepreneurship leg and show the work that they're doing behind the scenes, which you see a lot of creators doing. Maybe it's not on their individual channels, but they'll go on other channels and show their production studios. They'll show the production work of the product that they're doing.

and that is a way for them to quietly do the side hustle thing. But it is very, very tricky. I have two thoughts, two thoughts on that. On the how many communities could a person possibly be a part of? Yes. I believe that number is five. And it relates to the Dunbar number. Are you familiar with the Dunbar number?

That's exactly where I'm getting it from. Yeah. Yeah. So for those of you don't know, Dunbar number, 150, to the amount of people. that someone could possibly basically be friends with, you know, more than 150, like you can't possibly be friends with 500, 700 people. So Dunmar, you know, I think he was a social scientist. He basically came up with this number and he said this is the amount people could could actually

be connected with. The five number, I call it the Eisenberg number. There you go. I'm waiting for this. Yeah, you've been waiting. Of course. And I believe that, you know, we exhaust after five. For some people, it's actually three.

I think it's in the three to five range. But it's basically you can't be a diehard fan slash the biggest part of it is your identity. Like you can't have the identity of a One Direction fan and the identity of a Jonas Brothers fan and an identity of XYZ fan because it then then your identity becomes muddled. And when your identity becomes muddled, that's when, if everything breaks. So that's why I think that number is five. So that's my Eisenberg number piece. I really like the insight that you have around how to creators showcase how the sausage is made

around the products that they're building. And there's a brand. We actually brought the founder on the show called Midday Squares, which basically is this clean chocolate bar. And when you pick up, like I just bought their chocolate bar and Whole Foods yesterday, And like the back of the chocolate bar, there's literally like the pictures of the founders. You go to their Instagram. They've got like 100,000 followers.

And they're talking about their journey. Here's how we raise money. Here's how we do this. They have this like Willy Wonka style chocolate factory. And they're just like literally showing how the sausage is made. And I think with creators, especially bigger creators, like the Logan Pauls of the world, like I don't just care that you're selling me prime water or whatever. I want to be deeper connected to this story. Totally.

And I think that's the opportunity in 2023 for creators. You know, I grew up in the 90s and 2000s. You know, to me, celebrities were people I saw on TV and movies. Could you talk about this new, this next generation of creators? And how do you see creators deeply connecting with younger audiences? So this is going to be my hot take number three and I'll just throw it to the, to the future for a minute, but I still think that the definition of creator is changing in the next year or two, only because there are so many people that now understand the value of

attention, even more so than money. I think they get, I'm going to go buy this thing and support this person. And that's kind of the concept now. But that's been that way, even with like, Backstreet Boys and Sink back in the 90s. But now it's more when I give my attention in my time, when I talk about other people, younger individuals are more conscious that they're doing that when they spend time consuming this content, that they're doing it for the benefit mostly of the creator, even if they're not super excited about whatever the thumbnail is, they will continue to watch this content because they like the person. And that's kind of the switch, I think, back from a number of years ago to now, is that there is a stronger affinity.

with the individual, I mean, this goes kind of back to the night thesis, so institution to brand individual as kind of like that power shift throughout the past 50 years. But mostly now, you'll see younger individuals, what they call grow up with a person. And they feel a sense of nostalgia if you're like me, where you're, you know, around your early 20s and you kind of grew up mostly on the internet. Now, if I see someone that I used to watch around eight years ago, I probably we'll have a stint where I'll watch them for a couple more years. And if they launch a company, maybe I'll buy it. Or maybe at least I'll talk about it.

But really younger people right now are conscious that content creation is a job. They know that these people are mostly doing their job, but they like the job that people are doing the job. And they like the people that are doing the job. Are they there more from, because you said something really interesting, which is they just like the person. Yeah. Are they consuming the content more for the topic or the person?

It depends on who you talk to, but I'll make a very strong generalization where it's about the person. I'll say probably Mr. Bees is one of the most impressive content creators on the planet right now. When you mostly talk to the younger people that are fans of his, they are obsessed with him as a person, almost as much as his content. But a little bit more of him as a person, as a someone who's made it as a creator, as someone who's incredibly generous, as someone who is very real and open. And I would kind of argue on the other swing of the pendulum being someone like Emma Chamberlain who kind of has created lifestyle content forever. So it's a little bit more natural to kind of fall in love with her as an individual person because she's really just doing her own individual thing. but kind of it's the idea of the person, the idea of the authenticity, the idea of someone who's been incredibly successful but still humble.

Those are kind of age, old tales that have been going throughout celebrity, PR, and community engagement for a number of years, but now awfully boiled down to what we would now consider be everyday people. And what's really interesting is when these individuals get so much attention, now you're really swaying of influence in between. So the creator status and celebrity status, And those two people are kind of the creators that come to mind, but really they are celebrities at this point. They go to red carpets.

They get PR packages. They're brought into these mainstream conversations as people who have expertise in kind of influence and creating content and really anything. I mean, it could really be anything now. But I think what's cool about younger kids is that they are, they have seen a lot of creators fail. they've seen a lot of mistakes. You kind of had that cancellation. I would call it like the dark period of beauty at the end of the 2010s, where you had all these different creators,

what you call quote unquote canceled for either quality of product or things that they've said or things that they've done or people that they've worked with. And I think that that's made a lot of these new creators hyper-conscious of kind of both their business decisions but also kind of how they handled their lives as almost like celebrities. They know that they have attention and that it can be brought to them at any point. And that's really different from the way that people used to create back in the early 2000s, early 2010s. But I think the way that younger people are consuming, now at least the younger way, I'd say like Gen Alpha or kind of younger Gen Z people have heard of the stories, but they didn't really feel the emotional push and pull with being in a community that had a lot of really strong division.

So they're a little bit more open to the person and the personality and learning about their mistakes and things that they've grown about. They're more open to the actual person that I think kind of more of the older Genzy generations like. A lot of people ask me, Greg, how do you build products that foster community? Well, I've got good news. That's exactly what Late Checkout does, my company. We partner with the largest brands in the world and fast-paced startups to design products that resonate with your community.

We add a couple interesting clients every single year. So if you're interested, and that sounds like you, email front desk at laycheckout. Dot Studio with what you're working on, what you need help with. And don't forget to mention the Where It Happens Pod. Thank you. Do you have any examples of, you know, not mega creator celebrities like Mr. Beast, but are like smaller up-and-coming creators that you look to them. you're like, wow, this person is an example of where creators are going to go in

2023 and beyond? Absolutely. There is this one kid named. Well, he's not a guy. He's not a guy who's a friend of mine, and I love him. His name is Marcus Malone, and he runs this brand called Minted, and it's out of New York. And his creation story is mostly on the, he makes a lot of content about fashion and lifestyle. It's more of like a big brother persona.

He's very much so on the up. So first, it was more for his fashion and taste. But now that he's made a clothing company, his focus is mostly on quality. And I think that that is really hard to do is to get your audience to trust you enough that you're going to produce something really good in quality. And the craziest thing is that,

and I love him. I love you, Marcus. Don't get out of me. But he's pretty slow to put out products. And even when he hears from his audience that he wants to see changes in whatever the product is, he's very slow to push it out. And I've never seen anyone be able to kind of hold back an audience enough where they know that if they wait long enough, the products is even going to get better with time.

And I think that that is an example of where I see creators going is he really knows how to get the trust of an audience and to make them kind of wait for it until it's really good. And I've just never seen that they're going to do that for. I think it's cool. Okay, so I just, I'm just on this guy's Instagram at Marcus Malone, M-I-L-O-N-E. The guy is also like a really good-looking guy, you know? Do you have to be good-looking to be a top creator? You know, actually, I love this question.

there are different kinds of mediums that will cater to whatever you feel like you're good at. As an example, just for myself, I am still a younger girl and I am kind of going, I'm not a younger girl, I'm 23. That is such a meme. I'm a grown woman, but I think I'm a little bit less comfortable necessarily being on camera as people would think that I am. and it's mostly because I still have kind of some insecurities and I don't exactly know how to tackle that yet. So I really decided to put all my energy onto Twitter where you really only see one photo and you just think about my thoughts and you interact with me as a person and you get to know my personality. And I think that is really the medium that I feel the most comfortable with. And I think when it comes down to personality or attractiveness, you're really going to succeed wherever you feel the most comfortable.

you'll maybe see a lot of creators who have amazing aesthetics and never show their faces. There are so many UGC creators who know how to create homes and create environments, create food, but you never see their faces. And that's because they are more comfortable creating those visual aesthetics and other people. Does it help? Yeah. With Marcus, like, you know, we have thousands of people listening who are probably checking out this guy's Instagram and checking out his website. Yeah.

And seeing a lot of engagement. I would call him like a micro influencer. Like, I don't know, he's 72,000 followers on Instagram, but it seems like he probably is selling millions of dollars worth of stuff. I just pulled out Marcus's TikTok. He's got 346,000 followers on TikTok. He's got 10 million likes and his average engagement rate, which is I have.

I use a tool called VidIQ. It's a Chrome extension to figure that out. is 8%. So it's, you know, the engagement rate is a great indicator of the performance of a video. It is calculated using the number of likes, comments and shares and views. So an 8% engagement rate is really high. So he's got a really engaged audience. His playbook, just looking like if I were to analyze it is build a lot of attention on TikTok,

bring those people to Instagram, nurture them on Instagram through. If you go to his website, it's like basically an email list. when he has sales, he posts it. We're recording right now between Christmas and New Year's. And he's just like, I'm off. I'll send you an email basically. If you go to his website, it's basically like, happy holidays. We'll be in touch.

Put your email down, which is like pretty legendary. I think in your case, you have a similar approach. You know, you don't have a product that you're selling, really, although you could argue that Night Ventures is the product that you're selling. But you're generating attention on Twitter. and then you're trying to convert that attention. So I think Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn are great platforms to build attention. And then you want to figure out, like the framework for thinking about it is like, how do you build attention?

Where are you nurturing that attention? And then how you monetizing that nurtured attention? Totally. Totally. And I will say that's the scariest moment for anybody who has any kind of attention is what is the next platform. that I actually want to push my audience onto because it could work really well. It could work terribly. And I think it's fully dependent on if your audience is open to new forms of media.

And it also, I mean like if your audience is mostly 50 something year old, you know, individuals who don't just have TikTok on their phone. If you say, hey, open a TikTok, they're not going to care. It's kind of similarly to if a majority of your audience, and I think a lot of my audience mostly is people who are in tech at this point. It used to be mostly younger women who are in tech, but now I just have a general audience just reflective of the platform itself, which is a reminder of everyone. Twitter last I checked was around 70% men and typically a little bit on the younger side. And I'm very happy to engage with that audience. but I don't exactly know what they want because if I were to just stick with my original audience,

which was mostly younger women, then it's a lot of easier to kind of bring them on to TikTok, because I know if they're spending most of their time there. But I had a really interesting conversation with a friend of mine, and her name was Gabby Goldberg, and she's an investor at TCG. I've been a fan of her for such a long time, and I'm super fortunate that we've been able to become friends over the years because she was really creating, like, the creator personal essays and curation essays. back two and a half years ago that I actually found super engaging.

And I really think we're kind of the more professional narratives that I identified more going into this job. So she and I were kind of talking about what kinds of content she wants to create on TikTok. And she decided to, she said to kill me for things on the podcast, but she has a running TikTok. And I was asking her a number of questions on why she decided to not just go the full crypto route because I know that she loves it a lot. She talks about it a lot. And kind of her thought process behind that was like, just based off the algorithm itself,

it depends on what you're consuming, that will directly reflect on how your content is doing, putting it out there. So if I mostly consume, and that's so real, like, if I'm consuming mostly lifestyle content all day and I sit there and I'm like, I'm going to create a venture capital TikTok, it's just not going to really do as well, just depending on the algorithm kind of holds you accountable that the communities that you're engaged with throughout the entire day, that's kind of what it's going to make it happy or not, which is also kind of how Twitter works.

But in terms of that decision on I have attention and how do I hold it, I think it's really scary kind of for someone who doesn't really identify as like a full-time creator because it's like, do I make a blog? Like, I don't know, maybe. Like traditional really great DCs used to make blogs. And now if I kind of sit on there and I start making TikToks, It's like, yeah, I can do another attention grabbing thing and maybe it can kind of solidify a new kind of community. Should everyone be a part-time creator?

Like, should you recommend everyone start being a part-time creator in 23 and then see if they can gain some traction, get some love? And then maybe they like it so much they become full-time. I would say to try it. I think everyone should try it just from friends of mine, from just experience with them. you kind of need like five people who are going to say, hey, I will like your stuff, even if it blops. As long as you can find five people who will like your stuff, it'll make creating content a lot easier

because at least it will become kind of a joke between you and your friends if it goes terribly. But I think the pros are so, so intense if you learn how to do it well. As an example, for my specific job as a VC, I make sure that I'm able to kind of get in contact with anyone that would be on Twitter within two days. And I've just figured out who knows what and who knows where and all that kinds of stuff.

So I can basically promise my bosses I can get anyone on the phone in two days. And my advancement as a creator is just getting that time lower. So it really depends on what kind of job you want. And also what I'm really interested in is when people are tired of it and they get get burnt out and I really don't want to do it anymore. How do you shut it all down and still kind of maintain the other part of your business? Right. Once you become a creator part-time or full-time, you essentially are on this treadmill,

whether you like it or not. And it just depends on are you at 7.0? Like, are you running as fast as you can and you're just running, running, running, a full-time creator, aka Mr. Beast of the World. that level or are you tweeting once a week, but it's crucial for your job to continue to tweet once a week? Oh, yeah. It's been really helpful. Even if you saw on this past week, I was doing a roadmap on consumer cybersecurity. And what are the companies that can assure people that when they get their account hack, they can get them back and kind of monitor brand amongst different platforms,

to make sure people aren't a person of you. Those are companies that right now I'm really interested in them looking at. But I know, I mean, this is really bad. But I've known almost nothing about cybersecurity. So I just started aggressively tweeting for the past week. Someone get on the phone with me that knows way more than I do. And if I weren't to have a Twitter and artists to sit here, I would have to call up friends manually and say, who do you know?

Can you email? And that's just so old. Like I've had access to like seven people who've spent hours with me and very, very fortune to do that so I can be able to do my job right. My hot take on, you know, being a professional creator part time or professional meaning like a beat, you know, we're in like the B2B world is it is the highest leverage thing you can do with your time. Like I think of all the time we spend like flying to L.A. or New York or these different places and going to like meetups and like going for dinner

with this person or going for drinks with that person or going for lunch with, you know, these people. Like if you can actually like in 2020, remove like 90% of those like discovery type meetings and replace that with like I'm going to go heads down create content and see what kind of opportunities I attract that way. I think it's such a good use of time because you can go go from zero like I went from zero to 300,000 followers basically in two years and it completely changed my life where I could sit from I have a house in the middle of nowhere in Canada, I, you know, in the forest and the mountains,

I can just like sit from there, hop on a conversation via this podcast or on Twitter and be having incredible conversations that can really move my business forward. My hot take is going to be not only should you like minimize those discovery meetings as much as possible, IRL, but every person in business should spend some amount of time as a part-time creator.

I also think that, especially if you're going into a consumer-facing business, whether it's kind of like a traditional smaller business or within startups in general, consumer experience is the most important thing to focus on that I observe. And I think that the creator mindset and mentality will be baked into every single product. that a person can kind of identify with. And I know that I mentioned this before, but I really, really, really think that creator is just a new way of looking at consumer in general.

And the idea that someone can experience your product and experience your brand while also being a click away from immediately engaging with your direct competitors, is a new way of creating product and running a business. And that's something that I know it feels super new to us, but it wasn't really the case 15 years ago. And the only people that you really had to fight against

was someone on a store shelf or just the right salesperson and really nail a deal. But now people have access to so many different choices in the world. I think it gives, especially a founder or really any operator, or really anybody, a competitive edge to not only have their own community that they can learn from, but also kind of just better understand where you are in that flywheel. I just think that creator and consumer are essentially going to become the same thing. It really is how open are you to your customers sharing their experiences with your product and with you as a person?

And that is going to give someone either the biggest boost in the world and essentially make their company, regardless of if it's kind of a more intense company or if it's a kind of a passive consumption kind of thing, that is really what's going to create a sticky company within the next 10, 20 years. So if you want to create a sticky company, you know, either become a creator or partner with a creator, you know, right? Yeah. I was having a conversation yesterday with Alex Lieberman. He was the co-founder of Morning Brew.

Yeah, we'll do. And he shared with me the four times. types of creator businesses that he sees. And I'm going to pull them up and I want to get your opinion on it and tell me who you think is the most interesting example of each of these buckets. So number one is creator originated. So he writes, a creator has an idea for a business that they believe is authentic to their brand and will resonate with their audience. So what's an example of a creator-originated company that you think is really interesting? I guess like Chamberlain Coffee, because she talks about coffee so much.

I mean, that fit makes sense. Okay, Chamberlain Coffee. So for the people that don't know what Chamberlain Coffee is, explain who Emma is and what the brand does. Totally, totally. So Chamberlain Coffee is a direct-to-consumer now kind of full-sweet beverage brand. They originally started off with making coffee beans and ground coffee going into mixers and straws, cups, merch, going into the macha space now. And they're sold currently in very specific retail stores like in Airwan. And kind of now has this California, L.A. vibe.

Very carefree. But the originator and the founder of that is a creator named Emma Chamberlain. she's in her early 20s and her brand is very authentic and it's built a very cult following off of her authenticity and realness. She's been seen interviewing celebrities on red carpets and also modeling for a lot of very large campaigns. But her love at the moment and if you consume a lot of her long form content, a lot of it goes back to her company.

she is very fully invested in in this coffee brand that is kind of locally sourced and has ethical ways of kind of creating these beans but then also kind of sharing this love of coffee that Gen Z kind of has as a part of their identity. And it's a part of Emma's identity too, right? It's super authentic. Like she loves coffee. She's brought coffee into the conversation before she even had the company. Yeah, I mean, almost every blog that she used to make for the past, like, five years, started with her making a cup of coffee in the morning in her kitchen.

So it was very natural to see her come out with a bunch of different coffee brands. I do wish that she would make more behind-the-scenes content about the company. That's an example. I would eat that up easily as a big fan. Cool. Okay. I like that example because it's a mainstream example, which you lose a couple points, but you gain a couple points because it's a couple points because it's, you gain a couple points because it's, It's an authentic, like, it's an authentic brand that's getting a lot of traction right now.

So I'll give you that. Okay, number two, bucket number two, operator originated. An operator has an idea for a brand and wants to find a creator to launch with it to have day one distribution. Two examples of that include Ken Austin's alcohol brands, good sport. Yeah. If you can give me, you can deduct points because she's not necessarily creator, maybe an epitist, and baby but also our favorite one. Bella Hadid and Ken.

It's a celebrity. But I would, I mean, if you talk to me any day, I would say that celebrities and creators is the whole thing. But I will say kin, it might be a common answer. But that was my favorite merger because it was very unexpected. It was a very hot take. People were like, what is this girl doing, getting into this kind of business? Ken is a euphoric drink company.

And there's an entire science behind euphorics. It's very herbally based. And basically when you drink this drink, it makes you feel kind of relaxed or very excited. There are different levels of herbs and caffeine, and different mixture. And there was a toss-up really in the past three years of these alternatives to alcohol. And a bunch of these different brands popped up. You had house rip. You had Ken.

You had Gia. You have really a whole suite of them to a point where now, if you go to a lot of different larger cities, there are non-alcoholic, almost like liquor stores. And basically, it's a battle of who can get the most attention. And I think, in my eyes, Ken is really won. And that has been that Bella Hadid, who is a very famous model, also someone who's gotten a lot of attention from her Instagram posts and TikToks. But mostly she's like one of the most famous models ever right now, she decided to become a co-founder of an already existing euphoric's drink company called Kent. And it was very controversial because people were like, why? You already

make so much money. You don't need to do stuff like this. But it really, when it came down to a lot of her interviews said, and she was really interested in the business itself, the mission behind kind of taking people off of just drinking alcohol and having alternatives to alcohol. And There's a very large wave of younger consumers who don't want to participate in both purchasing and sharing alcohol. So this was a pretty natural mission alignment where she's very interested in alternative medicine, very interested in wellness. And that is where I think Kin lives. But it was a super interesting toss up. Now you have some alternative alcohol companies that shut down recently because it's decently capital intensive business.

but I think probably the most successful one I could think of. Yeah, I think when you're in a space like that where it's a new space and you're trying to define a category, doing so with the creator often makes a lot of sense because you're educating the market. So when you're educating the market, hey, like, you shouldn't drink alcohol for these reasons. and hey, like, there's this alternative and it's amazing. And when you have an audience of people that already trust you and makes your job a lot easier, as founders, often what we're doing is we're doing two things.

We're creating a product, which is really, really hard. And then we're creating distribution, which is really hard. The beauty about, you know, Bella and this example is like the distribution is already there. She just has to focus on what is the authentic product? What does it look like? How do I co-build it essentially with my audience? see how they take it up and then eventually how do I get that to retail how do I get that to other channels so I like that example a lot bucket number three this is an easy one for you creator incubated

creator wants to launch a business but doesn't know what to launch figures out business to launch with a partner and then launches it and the example they use is feastables which I think I was going to say feastables can I just explain what feastbles is and I'll actually give my answer yes um okay cool so Feastables is a company that was incubated out of NightLabs, which is our incubator at Night Media. And that story goes that Mr. Beast kind of, I mean, he has made billions of videos about it, but he was kind of creating this brand for a number of different reasons and wanted to make this large video about becoming Willy Wonka. And it was very, very interesting.

One of the most famous videos that he's done so far, but he went to read and, and Ben and the entire lab team and was like, I want to make this a sustainable company. So if I put my attention behind it, that it launches properly and it has good quality behind it. And I think what was really frustrating for Mr. Beas in that moment was that the quality of candy and snacks for younger individuals really is not there.

And if it is, if there are alternative snacks, it's really the granola mom kind of frou-frou branding that I think a lot of, especially younger guys, just didn't identify with. And so he thought that it was a miss because usually those are decent products that just aren't branded properly or they are branded properly

and they're terrible for younger people. So in creating this video, he also incubated this company and happened to find one of the co-founders of Kinebar whose name is Jim. And they created this real full suite of almost gamified snacks. So, I mean, Mr. Bees is like a legend because of many different reasons, but one of them is that he just knows how to sell product properly.

So he wants to continue really the sweepstakes aspect and all of the community engagement. I can't like spill anything on this podcast. But he wants to keep people engaged with the different launches of snacks and to show off that they have these snacks as a way to engage with his content. that's how I can say it. So we call it really gamified snacking. But to anybody listening, he really tried to recreate the Willy Wonka aspect with this video and also within feastables. So that was an example because he was a creator who was creating content, who just so happened to also create product while creating that content. And Knight and Mr. Bees decided to kind of seek out a operating and also previously co-founding for

who knew how to create a massive snack company and that just happened to be very morally adjusted too. So it was really like the happiest union I've ever seen. Here's what I'll say. Here's what I like about it. So I like the idea that snacking is a ritual similar to Emma's Chamberlain coffee. Like you wake, I mean, I woke up in the morning. You're watching this on YouTube. You know, we're recording this in the morning. I pour some coffee. It's like my ritual, right? Snacking is a ritual that a lot of us have. And as a creator, if he can create a more creator-focused snacking set of rituals and then connect that with his content, which he's shown that he's done with like his

Willy Wonka videos, et cetera, it creates this beautiful union around like the content makes the snacks better and the snacks make the content better. So love that example. Last bucket is number four creator brokered. So the business already exists and the creator is brought in to accelerate growth. So an example would be aviation gen. So what's an example of basically a business that exists, but the creator comes on board and is basically there just to promote and distribute it? So we also run syndicates at Night Ventures that brings creators into some of the companies that we see here, some of the companies that we invest in.

and for people kind of listening, that looks like opening an individual investment vehicle where we go around and say, hey, this is why we're going to invest in it. If you want to independently participate and you're not an LP and you want to kind of have more of an engaged relationship with the founder, you can essentially angel invest into this syndicate and we break off some of the allocation for creators themselves. So that's one of the fun things that we haven't really done as much recently, but we used to do a lot. Here's the sad thing that I think it's going to stop. All of the examples I can think of because I want to say a software product.

They're more like creator tooling companies. Let's hear it out for Beacons. Obviously Elon hates it because Linkin bio is not cool on Twitter, which means it's actually cool in real life. LinkTree is a lay checkout client. So we're kind of, we were homies in the beginning of this pod. I'm kidding. Beacons is doing great work. I'm kidding.

Go ahead. I'll say before that, I think the war of Lincoln Bios is mostly the job that you have. And I think when it comes to creators and personas that want to display media articles, I think Beacons wins. I think if it's like a link tree, it's more geared. towards smaller operating businesses. And just the people that I see mostly using them are more like that, but also create. So they both kind of intersect.

And for people who are trying to figure out what I'm talking about, these link in bios are the ones that you click in in any creator's bio or any really any person's bio. And you see the little drop down of buttons that you can interact to go to either a different social media account or to go to their businesses themselves. and why it kind of became hot in the creator side is because all these creators really create content in different platforms, but then also they want to collect kind of the higher engagement things like emails or kind of in the future sell them a product. So there are a lot of them. But Beacon specifically, the reason why they wanted to get involved with Knight is because they wanted to have a lot of angel investors that were creators.

And I think that in terms of, so I'm kind of doing a little switchy-ru on your question, in terms of the best engagement for a founder to get with a creator. Like if you have a creator in mind that you want to work with, I would be open to the idea of them becoming an angel investor. Because I also have a friend named Nate O'Brien who runs Rogue Runner VC. And he is a, he is a cheerleader. He is like, you know, all of his. I mean, a lot of his porcoes are not creator tooling, but the ones that are, he is very happy to bring into his everyday life and to his content. And I think that it's lame because I think that creators are also very effective in other kinds of businesses. But I think that's also just a

founder mindset shift is like, I want to bring in this creator rather than another VC to help me with whatever I'm interested in doing. I like it. That was a good one. I like it. That was well done. And it's a good segue to my, the last thing I wanted to bring up with you, which is, have you heard of subscribe.s.o? A lot of people here obviously know about affiliate marketing. You see it all over social media.

Use promo code. Greg Eisenberg to get 10% off XYZ product. Yeah. In a creator world, it's getting bigger and bigger because of course what's happened with Facebook in iOS 14 and just the blockage of ad budgets there. People are looking to creators to get their products sold. There's a new product. This is for people to check out.

You can go to subscribe.org. I'm not involved in any way. I just thought it was really cool. But it's this idea of paid creators and equity. So I'm on their website now. Creators bring the audience. Startups bring the equity. We provide the legal marketing and budgeting tools to align incentives for the long term.

it's a Y Combinator company. And it's this idea that you're rewarding founding creators with equity. And it's a whole dashboard around it. What do you think of this idea? Yeah, curious. If this is like retro to creators who just so happen to be in your community and are excited about your product and you want to kind of reward them after their excitement, I think this is a great tool.

I would be curious to kind of figure out, what the creators themselves think once they, I want to know how much equity they're given. I don't know it. And if it's different than if a creator were to just kind of write a $5,000 to $25,000 check into a syndicator directly into the company. Because there are different workarounds in terms of ownership. And I want to see what the creator's interests are.

So that's one thing. The opposite side of the coin is just because a lot of my friends are creators, I think that this is something that a lot of them are open to, which is great. So if it's not retro and it's really just a founder wants for a creator to interact with them, I am very, very opinionated on that you should pay the creators that work with you. That is, to me, number one. Because I think founders themselves know, as much as they're very excited about their company, respectfully, these people at the end of the day have bills to pay and they sometimes have families.

and they need money. So if you want to bring on a creator and have them kind of help you with your marketing or your distribution, you need to pay them, period. And I think that equity is not the alternative to it. Did you see like recently like maybe six months ago, four to six months ago, Shopify employees had this new feature where they can like log into their dashboard and basically say like, hey, I get paid $100,000. a year. And I get $10,000 of stock. I'm actually okay getting like, you know, sliding on this

scale and saying, I'll take $80,000, like give me $50,000 of your stock. And it allowed the employee to basically shift where, you know, how much risk they were willing to take. I think what would be really cool here if I'm subscribed is if they can do that with creators and say like, depending on if you have a family or you want to take less risk, for example, there should be some slider where it's like, I want some cash and maybe more equity or more equity and less cash. But I think the idea of affiliates being 100% cash is not also fair to some of the creators because if you look at some creators who have pushed or promoted companies, like,

Like, you know, I'm an advisor to public.com. You know, they've raised hundreds of millions and dollars. I know a lot of creators who, you know, public.com has sponsored them, but those people probably just got cash, I would imagine. So they weren't able to get the upside of that business. So I like your opinion. My take is a slider would be really cool. All right.

We are so out of time, but this was really fun. I learned a lot of just about how to think about working with raiders, putting yourself in their shoes, and some of the opportunities and some hot takes. So thank you so much. M, where could people find you on the internet? I guess Twitter? My Twitter handle is, it's really embarrassing, and I'm showing my age. It is Emily and then Herrera, but the first E is an X. Great. Well, at least the X. If you just go to my website, if you just go to my website, which is just my name, emilyherera.com. All the links are already there.

Emily Herrera.com slash one direction. Oh, God. You know, that's where it's at. Kidding. No, thank you so much. Give her a follow on Twitter. It's an excellent follow. And thank you so much for learning about creators with us today.