We saw it happen 20 years ago with software (bits), where building on web/mobile infra birthed Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat. Now, as software becomes commodity, the same collision is racing towards hardware (atoms) and biology (cells).

Here’s what happens when hard tech becomes pop culture.

Bits: Code as Content

In 2004, software was heavy. You needed $500k for servers and sysadmins. Then, the floor dropped out. AWS and App Stores turned expensive problems into cheap commodities, allowing founders with taste to express themselves (Instagram, Airbnb, Snap).

Software became pop culture.

But today, the Transformer has lowered the floor so drastically that code is just content. Trends emerge, everyone copies, trends die. “Building software” is no longer differentiating.

The most rebellious builders are suffocating. They are looking for friction and leverage. They are migrating to where the curves meet next: Atoms.

Atoms: Hardware as Fashion

Hardware used to be a startup graveyard. Today, Shenzhen is an API. You can pull sensors off the shelf like code libraries, collapsing the cost of execution. And just like in fashion, when friction disappears, behavior changes.

Hardware is now built - and worn - like fashion. When specs die, “vibe” takes over. Voice AI accelerates this by ending the tyranny of the touch screen, liberating the form factor from the black rectangle. We see this aesthetic shift clearly in Kickback, who treat gadgets as cultural artifacts. By designing for MoMA rather than Best Buy, they prove that in a world of infinite supply, one of the only moat left is culture.

But fashion has a vulnerability: cloning. If Shenzhen can build it in weeks, they can clone it in days. Because hardware now behaves like software, defensibility requires a network effect. Eno is built entirely on this premise. They sell a wearable AI badge that acts as a personal bodyguard, but the device is just the Trojan Horse. The real product is the safety mesh connecting users to one another and to emergency systems.

This brings us to the second rule of the fashion industry: supply chain is destiny. In this environment, commoditization opens the door for Second Movers to win purely through financial discipline. That’s what Orion is doing to the smart cooling mattress market. They utilize solid-state thermoelectric chips to aggressively optimize unit economics. Plus, as hardware is now becoming the “hard excuse” to sell a subscription, hardware margins begins to *sometimes* look suspiciously like SaaS ones.

And finally, we arrive at the ultimate atom: Robotics. But consumer applications mean human interaction, and humans are messy. Starlife bridges this gap with a teleoperation hybrid. They allow human operators to “teleport” into humanoid robots, effectively turning physical labor into remote work. By keeping humans in the loop, they handle the nuance of reality today while building the training data for the autonomy of tomorrow.

Hardware in 2025 is Software in 2009. Atoms are cool. You know what’s cooler? Cells.

Cells: The Body as a Platform

Biotech today looks like the Internet in 1994. You no longer need a PhD or a $10M wet lab to play. The stack is commoditizing into a familiar Read/Write loop, where sequencing lets us read the code and synthesis lets us write it.

The technology is ready, and thanks to Covid, the culture is too. The State’s monopoly on health - what Foucault called “Biopower” - fractured during the pandemic. As trust in institutions dissolved, consumers began using their own capital to gain agency. Different Health operationalizes this shift, allowing users to run clinical tests to optimize their biological age. It turns out that narcissism is often the quickest path to consumer adoption.

To democratize the results, you must democratize the hardware. Acorn Genetics solves the lab centralization problem by shrinking a standard sequencer into a portable, low-cost unit. This immediately changes the unit economics for SMBs: dairy farmers and brewers can now run tests on-site, saving weeks of waiting and preventing wasted batches. And once this hardware is validated on the farm, and cost goes down, it will inevitably migrate to the home, bringing clinical-grade health testing to the consumer.

Access to data inevitably creates a demand for action. GLP-1s triggered the main event, but the explosion of gray-market peptides shows that consumers aren’t willing to wait for regulatory permission to edit their own code. Because this demand outpaces the FDA, startups must find structural workarounds. Metabologic is the perfect case study. Instead of a decade-long drug trial, they launched their sugar-deleting enzyme as a supplement. They get to deploy hard science with the speed of a consumer brand.

Biology is finally moving at the speed of culture. Longevity trends now cycle like fashion. A peptide goes from a subreddit rumor to a bestseller in weeks. It looks like a toy right now - unregulated and vanity-focused - but that is exactly what a frontier looks like before it becomes the standard.

Narrative as a Moat.

There is one catch.

When you play on the frontier, the public is watching. Robotics and bio-hacking feel like magic. They also feel scary.

You need a story. You need a narrative that is transparent and optimistic. If you don’t control your story, the internet will invent one for you - probably dystopian.

The frontier needs storytellers as much as engineers. The next wave of consumer adoption will be driven by people who can turn increasingly complex tech into culture. Who can make a wearable AI feel like a superpower. Who can make longevity supplements feel like self-improvement.

The Consumer Frontier moment is here. The tech is easy enough. The culture is ready enough. The only thing left to do is build.

If you are, let’s chat!

Well, I know what you’re thinking. Wrappers are easy to build, each ChatGPT release kills hundreds of them. But all wrappers aren’t created equal. There’s 2 types of wrappers: Thin and Fat. Thin Wrappers are like burritos: simple AI wrapped in a thin tortilla-like UI, most often used as a tool, which Sam Altman promised to steamroll. Fat Wrappers are like burgers: AI in the middle, with human buns on both sides to perform an hybrid end-to-end service for the user.

Thin Wrappers won’t unbundle ChatGPT, but Fat Wrappers could. Here’s why:

Thin Wrappers: AI tools

When LLMs happened, builders shipped the obvious thing: thin wrappers. Clever prompts wrapped in apps, maybe some workflow and a paywall. That works for a moment. But when code becomes as easy to produce as content, it follows content rules: trends emerge, everyone copies, trends die. When your product is mostly a prompt and a feed, copying is trivial. Everyone converges on the same tricks. Competition flattens. Most hit a $30M ceiling and spend their days A/B-testing paywalls and doing great collabs e.g. the Thin Wrapper GOATs Cal AI. And that’s awesome.

But consumers now behave like kings: They DEMAND (agentic) services, not (AI) tools. ChatGPT gave them personalized content on demand. Now they want the next level: personalized action. “Do it for me, my way, now.” Where users paid $10/month for Thin Wrapper tools, they’ll pay $100/month for Fat Wrapper services. At that price point, hybrid human+agent services can work today with real margins, where pre-AI tech-enabled services couldn’t.

10x experiences are now about magical outcomes, and a few (portfolio) companies have started to deliver: Taxes filed by Deduction, trips booked by Miso, skin checked by Thea. Welcome to the age of the Fat Wrappers, where most of the value will accrue.

Fat Wrappers: Agentic services

Not so fast, though. That’s a nice theory, but in practice things are way messier. The issue is that AI is middle-to-middle, not end-to-end. It’s great at the workflow center - drafting, planning, reconciling, synthesizing. It’s clumsy at the operational edges - messy goals going in, real-world execution coming out. As AI speeds up the middle, excellence migrates to the new bottlenecks: prompting and verifying.

Luckily, Fat wrappers are built for that reality. They’re like an AI sandwich: humans handle the edges, agents work the middle. The top bun handles intake, the middle does the heavy lifting, the bottom bun handles verification and real-world action. This is the only way to compete with ChatGPT: Go where OpenAI doesn’t want to go: the complex human-AI hybridization that actually gets things done.

But fully autonomous agentic is hard. Worse, today it’s impossible.

The hard things about agentic things

Indeed, full agentic autonomy isn’t here yet. Think self-driving: the last 1% takes longer than the first 99%. Most products today are level 2 or 3 - agents under human oversight. Level 4 (agents handle most tasks, humans manage exceptions) might happen in 18 months. Level 5 (true independence) could take 5 to 7 years.

But builders aren’t waiting. They’re designing the handoff. Starting 80% human, 20% AI, then pushing boundaries inward until they hit 20% human, 80% AI. They treat reliability as a product feature: auto-approve above X confidence, route to human below. Turn human judgment into policy, then tools, then agent skills. Every solved edge case becomes data and IP. The key is building systems designed to evolve from day one and let the bun get thinner as reliability rises.

Take Deduction: their CPA dashboard lets humans review and edit AI-generated tax responses, building a proprietary dataset with every correction. Thea will route prescription decisions to dermatologists while auto-approving routine consultations. Miso handles simple cash bookings automatically but sends complex award redemptions to ops teams. They’re systematically retiring edge cases.

You know what that sounds a lot like? Ops.

Ops teams will win the Fat Wrapper era

You thought AI killed Ops - well, they’re back. Software is now a world where you need to hold 2 truths in mind simultaneously:

1. Product is key, but not enough. In the fat wrapper era, great product means great ops. While everyone chases the latest AI models, the companies with the best operations will take dominant positions. Great ops enable magical experiences today, not 5 years from now.

2. Distribution is key, but not enough. Even distribution becomes ops-heavy. The best teams now run UGC campaigns at massive scale, testing thousands of creatives per week, building systems to make sense of the operational chaos. You wouldn’t believe the intensity that a company like Thea applied to distribution/content Ops to take over TikTok.

As software commoditizes, nailing both product and distribution via operational excellence is (one of) the only way to build defensibility. The best teams will excel at both. Let’s not forget that one of AI’s biggest exit is an ops company: Scale AI.

The Fat Wrapper playbook

Bundling and unbundling hasn’t gone anywhere. ChatGPT rebundled the web; the unbundling will come from vertical services that own the edges. Thin wrappers flattened the market and taught us about attention. Fat wrappers will build trust by finishing the job.

If you’re building: pick a consumer job that’s high friction, high consequence, and recurring. Define “done” so it’s verifiable. Make the buns excellent - intake that never drops context; verification that never waves risk through. Price the outcome. Miso charges €200-300/year for trip booking outcomes, not search queries. Thea started as a thin wrapper, reached $1M in collected revenue, and is now building agentic features. Deduction targets $1M ARR at 2,000 clients. When you own the full job completion, you can price like a service, not a tool.

Measure agentic coverage, cycle time, defect rates, human minutes per outcome. Celebrate every edge case you retire. Start with a thick bun. Make it thinner on purpose. Keep the service invisible. March toward level 4, keep level 5 in sight, and let the system upgrade itself as the frontier moves.

In the end the metric that matters hasn’t changed: Did the thing get done, my way, on time, without me?

And of course, if you’re building a Fat Wrapper, you know where to find me.

The consumer is dead. For decades, "consumer" meant building for zombies - passive users buying soap or mindlessly scrolling feeds. That world is over. Today's consumers are creators. They're networked, leveraged, and ridiculously active. Millions have become creators, artists, prosumers, founders. The B2C vs B2B debate is dead: Welcome to Consumer+, where the winners capture hearts like consumer brands, and scale like enterprise giants.

Consumer isn't a market. It’s a moment that happens when two curves collide: technological barriers dropping and cultural momentum rising. When they cross at the "consumer boiling point," entire industries explode overnight. We saw it happen with software (bits), where building on web/mobile infra birthed Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat. Now, as software becomes commodity, the same collision is racing towards hardware (atoms) and biology (cells).

This new frontier demands a new definition: Consumer is the intuitive, intentional, and intensive pursuit of cultural change through technology. This manifesto is for the founders obsessing about the cultural wedge as much as the core tech. You're not alone. Alongside this manifesto is a curated, double opt-in list of 100 angels and 75 VCs who actively back consumer founders at pre-seed. These investors are allies with skin in the game who've committed real capital to founders moving culture.

You're building in the right place, at the right time.

Let’s move culture together.

Manifesto:

1. Consumer = culture. Not consumption. Consumer is what happens when technology moves culture. It means obsessing about the cultural wedge as much as the core tech. Whether building with bits, atoms, or cells, the hardest problems aren’t just scientific - they’re also cultural.

2. Weird is the way. Pay strangers online, swipe faces for love, sleep at a stranger’s place, watch others play games. Before culture moves, people don’t - only a tiny niche sees the magic. Embrace the weird. Once you've moved culture, it's the high you’ll always want back.

3. Chasing the C-Spot. Consumer isn’t a market - it’s a moment. One that happens when tech gets easier and culture gets eager. When these two curves cross, we hit the “C-Spot” and new giants are born. Software had it first, hardware and biology are just getting started.

4. Arm the creators. The era of passive users buying soap or mindlessly scrolling feeds is over. Everyone’s a creators now. Time to arm millions or artists, coders, designers, founders and prosumers with scalable means of creation. Time to crush the gatekeepers.

5. Gen-Z is a tsunami. Two billion internet natives flooded the mainstream continent into an archipelago of hyper-personalized subcultures and ultra-specific niches - often at the price of loneliness. Fast content, fast commerce, fast communities - slow movers won’t survive.

6. Davids will win. Winning isn’t just about data and distribution; it’s also about taste and trust - something tech giants lost. Midjourney wasn’t built by Adobe, Perplexity by Google, Cursor by Microsoft. There’s never been a better time to be Davids fighting Goliaths.

7. Cheap until it clicks. Pre-PMF building is getting cheaper every month wit AI-leverage, but post-PMF is getting more expensive as channels saturate. Founders will only need 2 funding rounds: A pre-seed from amigos with soul in the game, a Series A from padrinos with deep pockets.

8. People pay for power. Forget scaling to millions who pay nothing - users were ready to pay yesterday. Mortgages and tuition can wait; people want to invest in themselves now. Charge upfront, then let your power users pay extra. The tail is fat, and so are the whales - happy fishing.

9. Scaling is chaos. While 0 to 1 is more accessible than ever, 1 to 10 is uncharted territory. Speed might be the only moat. Or network effects. Or taste. Who knows? There's no playbook, only new rules to write. But when magic happens, 10 to 100 unfolds in months - ask Sama.

10. Ambition needs company. It’s tough to stay ambitious and slightly delusional in a vacuum - tougher when surrounded by B2B SaaS founders. Surround yourself with people who get it, the sooner the better. Ping me if you’re around SF or NYC - might have something for you.

Angel / VC list:

This is a very biased list of people I know and like who get and love backing consumer tech companies at pre-seed. There’s a good number of great VCs doing great things at Seed and Series A - I’ll cover them in another article probably.

Angels:

1. Alex Mashrabov : Higgsfield AI founder - pushing boundaries of media through AI; merging creativity and tech.

2. Alex Zaccaria: Linktree co-founder - gave creators a single link to rule them all; power-user of the creator economy.

3. Alexis Barreyat : BeReal founder - created the no-filter photo trend that took Gen Z by storm worldwide.

4. Andy Dunn: Bonobos founder - pioneered D2C menswear and sold to Walmart; knows how to scale consumer brands.

5. Antoine Francoeur : Roblox corp dev lead - behind big acquisitions in gaming; knows how to spot interactive fun.

6. Anu Atluru: Slang founder - doctor-turned-product thinker who writes viral essays on social tech and creativity. Best substack ever.

7. Armand Saramout: Growth advisor extraordinaire - quietly helps scale multiple consumer apps behind the scenes.

8. Ashley Lundström: EQT Ventures Partner - one of the most consumer friendly investor I know - write angel checks in US/EU companies.

9. Ayah Bdeir : littleBits inventor - trailblazer fusing tech and DIY creativity; champion for new gen hardware.

10. Bryant Detwiller: Ex-Google/Vine/Snap product leader - helped shape the social video era; go-to advisor for viral apps.

11. Casey Winters: Ex-Pinterest growth master and Eventbrite CPO - the go-to advisor for scaling user bases.

12. Ceci Mourkogiannis : VP Product at Snap - design leader behind Snapchat’s camera & AR; now advising emerging social apps.

13. Christianne Molina : Head of Consumer at Anthos Capital - brand and consumer obsessed, also part of an all-women angel group writing $25K checks.

14. Christina Brodbeck : YouTube founding team designer - helped build YouTube from day one; now invests with a keen product eye.

15. Christopher Wu: Moxxie Ventures VP - boots-on-ground helping founders in health and consumer, writes angel checks and helps a lot.

16. Claire Valoti & Amir Nooriala: Ex-Snap EMEA leaders now launching their own fund - they helped Snapchat conquer Europe, now they’ll help you.

17. Cliff Weitzman: Speechify founder - turned a personal need into a wildly popular text-to-speech app; hustle meets heart.

18. Dandan Li: Popshop Live founder - pioneered live commerce in the US, making shopping a social event.

19. Danny Trinh: Ex-Path & Snap design guru - created iconic mobile UI at Path, Zenly & Snapchat; now leading Meta’s AI design.

20. Dave Nemetz: Bleacher Report founder - started a sports media empire from a blog; knows how to build fan communities.

21. David Booth: On Deck CEO - runs a global founder fellowship community; can plug you into a vast network of builders.

22. David Zhou : Ex-YC founder turned angel - always tinkering on ‘something new’; small checks with big startup instincts.

23. Dennis Crowley: Foursquare co-founder - put the check-in on the map; veteran of local social and city gaming.

24. Derek Yang: Roblox product lead - designs playful features for 200M kids; expert in user-generated content loops.

25. Dhruv Bindra : Stealth founder and crypto whiz kid - backing social apps like vibecode with early conviction.

26. Dylan Field : Figma cofounder/CEO - built a $20B design platform from scratch; product visionary extraordinaire.

27. Edward Lando: Pareto Holdings co-founder - one of tech’s most active angels (first checks into Misfits Market, Ramp etc.).

28. Eric Setton: Tango founder - a video chat pioneer who scaled to 400M users; seasoned in viral growth.

29. Eugenia Kuyda: AI companion app creator (Replika) - mixing tech and emotion to redefine social connections.

30. Eyal Baumel: Yoola CEO - global YouTube network mogul (manages Like Nastya, one of YouTube’s biggest stars).

31. Fidji Simo: Ex-Facebook App head & Instacart CEO - scaled products to millions; now bridging AI and consumer at OpenAI.

32. Flo Crivello : Ex-Uber PM now founder of Lindy (AI assistant) - blends real-world ops with AI to create magical user experiences.

33. Gabby Dizon: Yield Guild Games co-founder - pioneer of play-to-earn gaming communities in Web3.

34. Gaby Goldberg : Gen Z investor building a cult following on Twitter - connects web3 and consumer culture effortlessly.

35. Greg Isenberg : Late Checkout founder - community-building expert turning online communities into products (and profit).

36. Greg Tkachenko: Cactus app founder - consumer product hacker crafting mindful social experiences.

37. Hamish Shephard: Co-founder at HelloFresh and BrideBook, knows all things CPG/Brands by heart.

38. Jack Brody : Ex-Head of Product at Snap - helped craft Snapchat’s core features; product exec turned investor.

39. Jacob Andreou: Ex-Snap #2 for 8 years - helped scale Snapchat; now leading consumer AI at Microsoft.

40. Jad Esber : Koodos Labs founder - artist and techie bridging web3, memes, and culture into new social products.

41. Jaireh Tecarro : Apple UX lead - shapes the interface of devices in your pocket; guru of intuitive design.

42. Jake Brooks: Triumph Arcade founder - gaming fanatic building social competition experiences for the next generation.

43. Jennifer Fleiss : Rent the Runway co-founder - revolutionized fashion rental; formidable operator turned investor.

44. Jeremy Yap: Prolific SF angel & connector - known for hosting founders at epic gatherings from SF to Paris.

45. Jill Fisher Bowen: Bain Capital scout - bridges founders to a top VC’s resources; quietly writing angel checks in SF.

46. Johannes Heinze: Popcore games co-founder (acquired by Zynga) - hyper-casual gaming expert turned global investor.

47. Josh Constine: Ex-TechCrunch editor turned VC - saw every consumer trend early and now backs them at SignalFire.

48. Julian Kabab: Fruitz dating app founder (exited to Bumble) - understands how to crack Gen Z hearts.

49. Kayvon Beykpour: Periscope founder and ex-Twitter product head - knows what it takes to make an app go viral overnight.

50. Kerry Trainor : Ex-CEO Vimeo & SoundCloud - led two major music platforms; now investing in the creator economy.

51. Lenny Rachitsky: Ex-Airbnb product lead turned newsletter icon - Lenny’s Newsletter guru for growth and product tactics.

52. Luke deWilde : Digital marketplace expert at Claim - product leader turning resale and secondhand into slick user experiences.

53. Maria Raga: Depop CEO - scaled a fashion resale app to a $1.6B exit; expert at community-driven commerce.

54. Marina Mogilko: YouTube creator with millions of followers - navigates the creator economy from the inside.

55. Mateo Price: MrBeast’s strategy chief - right-hand man behind the world’s biggest YouTuber’s business empire.

56. Max Marchione: Superpower founder blending tech and wellness - on a mission to make self-improvement addictive.

57. Max Mullen : Instacart co-founder - built on-demand grocery to a $10B+ giant; deep expertise in marketplaces.

58. Mene Mazarakis : Ex-Meta product manager turned Chapter One VC, now co-founding stealth startup Anon - blends big tech product chops with investor savvy.

59. Mercedes Bent : Lightspeed alum now GP at a new consumer fund - fintech + consumer expert with insights about behavioral change

60. Michael Philippe: Jellysmack co-founder - built a creator content powerhouse used by top YouTubers and celebrities.

61. Mika Salmi: AtomFilms creator and ex-MTV digital chief - media trailblazer now investing in Europe’s next hits.

62. Mike Lee: Co-founder of MyFitnessPal - scaled a fitness app to millions; now advising the next health hits.

63. Mohit Jitani : Spotify product director - drives the playlists and features loved by billions; a true music-tech insider.

64. Nalden: WeTransfer co-founder - turned file-sharing into a lifestyle brand; beloved by creatives worldwide.

65. Namat Bahram: Stealth fund GP - early investor in ElevenLabs and Praktika; merges cutting-edge AI with consumer vision.

66. Nathan Sharp: Serial consumer founder (now building Retro) - product brain always one step ahead of user trends.

67. Neil Waller: Whalar founder - world's leading creator agency, also building The Lighthouse, the 1st IRL creative campus & studio playground (LA/NYC)."

68. Nicolas Steegmann: Serial media founder (Stupeflix) - built creative tools acquired by GoPro; now fuels new media startups.

69. Omid Ashtari: Ex-Citymapper GM - navigated urban mobility at scale; brings operational chops to consumer transit apps.

70. Peter Sellis : Discord VP Product - leads the playbook for building passionate online communities at scale.

71. Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty: Uber Eats global chief - scaled Uber’s food arm; high-level operator now eyeing European consumer deals.

72. Rahul Vohra : Superhuman founder (previously sold his startup to LinkedIn) and prolific angel (120+ startups) - literally wrote the product-market fit playbook.

73. Randy Hunt: Ex-Etsy design head - crafted beloved user experiences in e-commerce; champion of good design.

74. Reggie James: Eternal founder - blending hardware and consumer culture; literally writing the book on it.

75. Rich Waterworth: Ex-TikTok EMEA GM - launched and scaled TikTok across Europe; master of viral growth and youth culture.

76. Sameer Singh: Speedinvest partner and newsletter writer - dissects consumer tech trends and backs EU consumer gems.

77. Samir Sama: Chapter One founder - ex-NFL Director of Investments connecting sports strategy with startup hustle.

78. Sari Azout : Sublime founder - thought leader writing about tech and building tools for the creator economy.

79. Scott Belsky: Behance founder and Adobe CPO - design community builder turned Fortune 500 product chief.

80. Scott Heiferman: Meetup co-founder - built the original IRL social network; decades of community building experience.

81. Sebastien Borget: The Sandbox co-founder - early metaverse builder bringing user-generated gaming to the mainstream.

82. Seth Farbman: Ex-Spotify & Gap CMO - branding magician who made Spotify cool; now advises startups on brand and growth.

83. Severin Hacker : Duolingo co-founder/CTO - made language learning a game for millions; tech genius with consumer flair.

84. Shreya Murthy: Partiful founder - bringing back party planning with Gen Z flair (say goodbye to boring e-vites).

85. Sima Sistani : Houseparty co-founder - her video chat app sold to Epic; serial social app builder and now WW CEO.

86. Snir Kodesh : Ex-Lyft engineering leader - scaled infrastructure for millions of rides; now diving into AI startup world.

87. Soleio ​: Facebook’s first designer (invented the Like button) - design legend now backing creative startups.

88. Suchit Dash : Co-founded Dubsmash (early TikTok predecessor); now leads consumer product at Reddit.

89. Suhail Doshi: Mixpanel founder now riding the generative AI wave (Playground); product savant with two unicorns under his belt.

90. Tal Shachar: Infinite Canvas founder - ex-BuzzFeed strategist merging gaming and content for Gen Z creators.

91. Tarek Mansour : Kalshi founder - cracked the code on regulated prediction markets; fearless fintech entrepreneur.

92. Thilo Konzok: Sequoia scout in Berlin - plugged into the European consumer startup scene and Sequoia’s playbook.

93. Tomer Cohen : LinkedIn’s Chief Product Officer - leads a platform for 900M professionals; master of engagement at scale.

94. Tyler Denk: Beehiiv co-founder/CEO (ex-Morning Brew early team) - built Brew's viral referral engine, now helping newsletter creators go big.

95. Varsha Rao : Ex-Airbnb & Clover Health exec, now Zeal founder - blending online and offline for real-life social discovery.

96. Will Mayer : Innovative brand builder - co-founder of Better Half studio helping consumer companies craft cult followings.

97. Will Wu: CTO of Match Group - oversees tech for Tinder & co; knows how to scale love connections globally.

98. Xiaoyin Qu: Run The World founder - built a virtual events platform, now onto a new AI social venture.

99. Zac Stern: Official app founder - reinventing modern dating for couples; tapping into how Gen Z maintains love.

100. Zach Sims : Codecademy co-founder - taught millions to code; knows how to engage users and scale edtech globally.

101. Zehra Naqvi : Lore founder & Z-List curator - super-connector of under-the-radar talent in NYC consumer scene.

VCs (follow):

1. Aditya Agarwal : Early Facebook engineer & Dropbox CTO - tech heavyweight now funding builders at South Park Commons.

2. Alexia Bonatsos : Dream Machine founder - ex-TechCrunch editor injecting weird and wonderful ideas into consumer tech.

3. Allen Gannett : Author of The Creative Curve - turned storytelling into investing, backing creativity-driven startups.

4. Ally Bell : Baukunst principal - new guard VC blending art and tech vibes into consumer investing.

5. Ammar Amdani : Adapt Ventures GP - globally connected family office investor bridging Middle East and US in tech deals. Loves consumer.

6. Andres Lauer: Fairway Partners investor - turning a German industrial fortune into fun investments in music. Advisor to Cercle festival and Colors studio.

7. Anthony Vennare : Fitt Insider co-founder turned VC, backing 20+ health & fitness startups - deep network across the wellness industry.

8. Barrett Parkman : Goodwater investor - part of team behind Facebook & Musical.ly funding; plugs founders into consumer VC gold. Leads Genesis program, $50k pre-seed/seed bets.

9. Ben Zises : SuperAngel fund founder - first money in quip & Caraway; the go-to guy for DTC before it’s cool.

10. Brian O'Hagan : Sorare Head of Growth and active angel investor backing NFT/gaming startups - sharing his playbook for scaling communities.

11. Brian Truong: Graph Ventures partner - quietly seeding ambitious ideas at day zero and helping them find product-market fit.

12. Chris Zarou: Visionary music mogul (signed Logic) turned VC - brings star power and hustle to consumer investing.

13. Clara Lindh: 528 VC GP - connecting London and Stockholm consumer scenes; ex-Resident Advisor exec building global networks.

14. Cory Levy : Z Fellows founder - built networks like Internapalooza; now empowering up-and-coming founders.

15. Daniel Gulati: Treble Capital GP - ex-founder and author using his playbook to amplify promising consumer startups.

16. Dave Ambrose: Bungalow VC GP - ex-media founder who got acquired; now pays it forward to the next gen of creators.

17. Dave Font: HF0 founder - runs elite hacker houses in SF to turn brilliant coders into the next wave of founders.

18. Dave Haynes: FOV Ventures GP - Europe’s VR/AR guy, investing in the future of immersive entertainment.

19. Den Dmytrenko: Roosh VC partner - Ukrainian VC doubling down on AI and next-gen consumer apps.

20. Erica Wenger: 3x founder (with an exit) turned solo VC (Park Rangers Capital) backing community-driven startups - champion for first-time founders.

21. Ezra Galston: Starting Line founder - early Cameo backer; Midwestern VC proving great consumer startups come from anywhere.

22. Anti Fund co‑founder, Archive & Ketone‑IQ entrepreneur – seed investor in Ramp, Chronosphere & Simplebet; elite product & GTM instincts.

23. Hugo Amsellem: intuition GP - ex-The Family and Jellysmack writing about how tech moves culture at interentculture.co

24. Jamie Elliott: Upside VC GP - UK seed investor backing consumer and CPG startups with a transatlantic mindset.

25. Johnnie Yu: Listen Ventures investor - knows the CPG game and has an ear for what consumers want next.

26. Justin Caldbeck: Ex‑Lightspeed & Binary partner who seeded early hits like Stitch Fix and Grubhub - deep roots in transactional consumer tech.

27. Lawrence Chu: SilverCircle partner - Hollywood meets tech, backing media and entertainment startups from SF.

28. Lorrain de Silva: Best Nights VC GP - backed by Jägermeister to invest in nightlife and entertainment experiences.

29. Matthew Lee: Progression Fund investor - championing media and entertainment startups with founder empathy.

30. Maya Bakhai: Spice Capital partner - ex-Apple PM fueling daring consumer bets with a fresh, global perspective.

31. Michele Attisani: FACEIT co‑founder turned angel investor - built esports platform with 20M+ users then led gaming partnerships at EFG.

32. Nicole Ripka : Betaworks partner - helps launch experimental products (like Giphy) in the heart of NYC’s tech scene.

33. Niklas Jensen: Blinkist co-founder - proved people will pay for knowledge snacks; now investing in subscription consumer apps.

34. Noé Gersanois: OPRTRS partner - invests video game fortune money into consumer startups (for Voodoo’s founder).

35. Owen Willis : Opal Ventures GP - healthcare meets consumer specialist turning wellness tech into approachable products.

36. Patrick Mandia: Uncommon.fyi GP - ex-founder with eye for social apps; writing big checks to uncommon consumer ideas.

37. Philipp Moering: TinyVC partner - Berlin micro VC backing quirky early projects; keeps it lean and founder-friendly.

38. Rana Taghdisi Argenio: Palette VC GP - injecting color and creativity into consumer seed deals, even from outside Silicon Valley.

39. Roger Ehrenberg : IA Ventures founder turned sports owner - early Twitter investor now bringing fintech savvy to sports/media startups.

40. Ryan Engel : Cade Ventures GP - early Peleton employee, hardware geek funding the next Nest or Oculus out of NYC.

41. Ryan Hoover: Product Hunt founder turned VC - the ultimate maker’s champion now writing checks at Weekend Fund.

42. Salomon Aiach: Origins partner - Parisian investor linking sports, culture, and consumer startups with global capital.

43. Sandy Cass: Red Swan Ventures GP - ex-founder with a nose for consumer goods, following Bonobos’ playbook.

44. Sarah Drinkwater: Ex-Googler who built London’s startup community (Campus London) now funding feel-good consumer ideas at Common Magic.

45. Sasha Trower: Solo GP at Circle & Co backing pre‑seed and seed consumer tech on both sides of the Atlantic – early investor in Runna & Workflow.

46. Scott Birnbaum: Red Sea Ventures GP - early NYC investor behind buzzworthy brands (from Compass to food startups).

47. Severin Zugmeier: NR Ventures partner - merges Vienna’s creative scene with capital, backing new media experiments.

48. Shaad Khan: SevenStory GP - probably the most networked micro fund GP in SF, community beasts.

49. Tamar Vidra: Twelve Below associate - deep dives into consumer thesis, leads rounds with conviction and focus.

50. Terri Burns: Type Capital founder - ex-Google Ventures prodigy bringing fresh perspective as one of VC’s youngest GPs.

51. Tim Holladay: Spacestation investments - teams up with YouTube stars to fuel the creator economy rocketship.

52. Turner Novak : Banana Capital founder - Twitter meme king turned savvy investor with an eye for viral consumer startups.

VCs (lead):

1. Andrew Chen: Ex-Uber growth lead (took Uber from 15M to 100M users) - now a16z partner funding viral consumer apps.

2. Andrew Marks: TQ Ventures GP - taps cultural icons’ capital (like Scooter Braun) for consumer bets.

3. Anne Lee Skates: Ex-a16z consumer partner, now built Parable, backing consumer tech - early to spots trends in social and gaming communities.

4. Amber Atherton: Patron GP, former founder acquired by Discord, she’s the queen of internet communities, published the best book about it.

5. Arielle Zuckerberg: Longjourney VC partner with deep Silicon Valley consumer tech roots. Always up for a crazy bet.

6. Aubrie Pagano: Alpaca VC GP - ex-founder bringing hands-on brand-building savvy to early consumer startups.

7. Ben Lerer: Lerer Hippeau co-founder - Thrillist founder who’s built and backed iconic consumer brands. Writes $50k checks at pre-seed.

8. Blake Robbins: Hidden Ventures GP - young VC with gaming and creator economy cred (invested in esports hits). Great podcast.

9. Bradley Horowitz : Ex-Google VP turned seed investor - helped build Google+, now backing the next gen of consumer tech meets happiness.

10. Charles Hudson : Precursor Ventures founder - pre-seed pioneer who’s funded dozens of consumer founders early.

11. Christopher Harper: Torch Capital partner - brand-focused seed investor with a knack for spotting consumer trends.

12. Connor Ling: Neo principal - part of Ali Partovi’s network nurturing young prodigy founders in consumer tech.

13. David Brillembourg : Runs Dune Ventures - former entrepreneur turned VC hungry for the next big consumer play.

14. David Tisch: BoxGroup co-founder who seeded Warby Parker, Vine

15. Eze Vidra: Reimagine Ventures founder - ex-Google Ventures exec investing in gaming, media & Israeli startups.

16. Hubert Thieblot : Founders, Inc. creator - seasoned founder (sold Curse gaming to Twitch) now fostering a new builder hub.

17. Ishan Sinha: Point72 consumer investor - connects Wall Street scale with startup hustle in consumer deals.

18. Jaren Glover : Robinhood early engineer turned investor bridging tech and culture in new fintech and social startups.

19. Jason Chapman : Konvoy co-founder with $260m fund backing Axie Infinity and 40+ gaming startups - plugs founders into global game dev ecosystem.

20. Katie Stanton : Moxxie Ventures founder - ex-Twitter exec championing consumer startups and women founders.

21. Marshall Sandman: Animal Capital GP - partners with TikTok stars to fund Gen Z consumer startups (culture meets capital).

22. Nico Wittenborn: Adjacent’s founder - quietly backing design-driven consumer products before they break out.

23. Niko Bonatsos: General Catalyst GP - led Snap Series A, looking for young technical founders building for themselves

24. Nikhil Basu Trivedi : Footwork GP - ex-Shasta Ventures prodigy with big wins in consumer marketplaces and social.

25. Rex Woodbury: Daybreak Ventures GP and Gen Z whisperer sharing insights on digital culture and social trends.

26. Sam Kirschner : Village Global partner - taps a network of tech luminaries (Zuck, Bezos) and definitely leads rounds without hard feelings.

27. Sasha Kaletsky: Creator Ventures GP - ex-founder who knows the influencer game and content monetization. Pre-seed backer of 11Labs.

28. Tony Conrad: True Ventures co-founder - serial founder (Sphere, about.me) turned early-stage VC.

29. Warren Shaeffer : Pear VC partner - founder-turned-VC mentoring consumer upstarts (co-founded audio startup Knowable).

The Internet's Failed Promise

The internet turned the world into a massive battle royale, dropping billions of people into an arena of infinite possibilities with no playbook for navigation. Our first attempt to tame this chaos was the feed—algorithmic sorting that worked brilliantly for static entities like products and content, but fell short with the most complex entities of all: humans.

But humans aren't static content to be optimized and served. Yet that's exactly how we built our connection tools: Dating apps reduced rich human chemistry to binary swipes, professional networks flattened careers into keyword searches, and social platforms compressed our multifaceted lives into performance art. We solved for distribution, but lost the essence of human connection along the way.

So when millions started turning to AI companions for deep conversations, it wasn't just another tech fad. People are choosing AI not because it's new, but because it promises to restore what the feed era stripped away: the feeling of being truly seen, heard, and understood. After a decade of treating humans like content to be sorted, we're finally admitting that connection needs a new paradigm.

The feed era is over.

The Death of the Feed

To understand what comes next, we need to look back at how our attempts to connect billions of people online have evolved—from digital wandering to algorithmic feeds, and now to AI-powered conversations:

• 1st wave - Profile-first: MySpace championed digital wandering, like exploring a vast city of personal spaces. Users discovered each other by following trails of interests and connections—a digital flaneur experience. Serendipity came from human exploration, much like stumbling upon a fascinating shop while walking through a new neighborhood.

• 2nd wave - Feed-first: Facebook's revolutionary News Feed transformed social media into a passive consumption experience. The algorithm became our curator, ranking and filtering content based on engagement metrics. While this increased content discovery, it also created echo chambers and turned meaningful interactions into a game of likes and shares.

• 3rd wave - Chat-first: Now AI-powered conversations enable uniquely tailored interactions, replacing passive consumption with dynamic exchanges that evolve based on real-time context. Like a skilled host at a dinner party, AI enables more natural discovery of both content and connections, making each interaction genuinely personal.

The Social Renaissance

Just as Web2 platforms cracked social with likes and feeds, a new generation of AI-first companies is rewriting the rules of human connection. Their secret? Three unlocks that could usher a new wave of social:

1. Voice-first: Voice is becoming our default digital interface—universal, intuitive, and infinitely richer than text. As costs plummet, a powerful flywheel emerges: more people naturally engage through voice, generating emotional and tonal data that makes AIs better at understanding human nuance, which in turn drives more voice interaction. This wealth of voice data becomes the foundation for understanding users in entirely new ways, enabling the next breakthrough in social connection.

2. Non-declarative: Building on this rich voice data, we're finally moving beyond explicitly signaling who we are through LinkedIn skills, Facebook interests, and Insta stories. Real connection rarely works through declaration. Early platforms like Airbuds (intuition portfolio) and Bump showed how organic signals like music and location could spark natural connections. Now, AI companions analyze our voice patterns and casual conversations, catching Miles Davis references and space enthusiasm through natural chat, creating a detailed map of who we are without ever asking us to fill out a profile.

3. Individualization: Where social platforms once relied on static profiles and feed algorithms, voice data and non-declarative signals now enable AI to build dynamic, living representations of who we are. While personalization merely optimized feeds for consumption, individualization lets our different modes emerge naturally—professional, music nerd, athlete. By replacing rigid profiles with fluid, AI-mediated understanding, we're moving from carefully curated personas to authentic, multi-faceted connection.

The New Social Protocols

It’s time to Make Internet Social Again. The pieces are finally falling into place. Voice is becoming natural, AI is becoming ambient, and most importantly, we're tired of performing online. What's missing isn't better AI models - those are becoming commoditized. What's missing are new social protocols made possible by AI that make the internet feel human again. AI companions are fun, but as always, the real game begins with multiplayer.

The pattern feels familiar. Instagram started as a single-player tool, helping users enhance their photos with filters, before evolving into a multiplayer social protocol that created a new marketplace for connection. Similarly, today's AI companions are starting in single-player mode, helping individuals feel seen and understood. But the real revolution will come when these companions enable multiplayer connections, using their deep understanding of each user to facilitate authentic human matches. We're moving from a Fortnite-like social era where everyone competed for attention in a massive battle royale, to a Minecraft-like future where AI helps us build meaningful connections and collaborative experiences together.

So, while tech giants struggle to retrofit AI into aging platforms, a new wave of startups is inventing social protocols native to the AI era. These pioneers aren't just building smarter chatbots—they're crafting new languages of human interaction. Yes it’s clunky, weird, sometimes scary—but here’s to these experiments making the internet less lonely, one connection at a time. And ofc, if you’re building around the thesis, ping me 🤝

• 🎮 Gaming & Virtual Worlds: Gaming is emerging as the perfect testing ground for new social protocols. Inworld AI and Artificial Agency are transforming NPCs from scripted characters into sophisticated conversation partners, using voice AI to create natural dialogue and living ecosystems. Ego AI takes this further by enabling voice-driven world creation, while AI Dungeon adapts multiplayer stories in real time. These platforms aren't just making games more interactive—they're creating social spaces where AI analyzes player interactions to match compatible teammates, resulting in 3x better team retention.

• 💬 Social Platforms & Communities: The social media landscape is being reimagined by companies like Social AI, which transforms passive feeds into interactive dialogues. Status is gamifying social interaction with AI character integration, while Shapes and Butterflies AI builds evolving narrative networks. Replika, known for pioneering AI companionship, is now exploring multiplayer modes that use voice chat to facilitate human connections. These platforms are using AI hosts to analyze conversations and facilitate introductions, creating micro-communities based on detected passions and compatible thought patterns.

• 💼 Professional Networking & Collaboration: In the professional sphere, Boardy.AI is revolutionizing networking through voice-first proactive introductions, while Mercor transforms hiring by analyzing workplace chemistry and communication styles. Delphi (intuition’s portfolio is pushing boundaries by creating personal AI clones for networking, envisioning a future where our digital twins meet first. These platforms are particularly focused on matching complementary problem-solving styles and pairing big picture thinkers with detail-oriented executors.

  ❤️ Dating & Relationships: The dating landscape is being transformed by platforms like Gigi (angel portfolio), which combines AI matchmaking with conversation coaching. These new approaches analyze voice patterns to predict compatibility and detect chemistry in group settings, making matches 4x more likely to succeed. Activity-based matching and real-time behavior analysis are replacing traditional profile-based matching.

• 📚 Education & Learning: Educational platforms are creating more effective learning environments through AI-powered matching. Knowunity enables peer connections with AI tutoring support, while OKO Labs facilitates group learning through interactive problem solving. These systems create learning circles matched through teaching patterns, resulting in 60% better knowledge retention, and form study pairs based on complementary learning styles.

• ✈️ Travel & Experiences: Travel is becoming more social through platforms like Pilot, which transforms trip planning into collaborative experiences through AI-assisted group coordination. These systems match travelers based on conversation styles and shared passions, creating group journeys that connect explorers with compatible energy levels and curiosity types.

• 🛒 Commerce & Shopping: In the shopping realm, platforms like Haz are creating community-driven commerce experiences through AI-curated purchase tracking and sharing. These systems match shoppers based on decision patterns and preferences, facilitating group buying and social product discovery.

• 💪 Health & Wellness: Health-focused platforms are creating more supportive communities. Wisdo enables precision-matched peer support through AI analysis of shared experiences. BringSoul transforms gratitude practice into interactive conversations, while Rosebud turns journaling into supportive dialogue through AI-guided self-reflection. These platforms create support groups matched through voice-detected coping styles and recovery circles grouped by compatible motivation patterns.

• 🎬 Entertainment & Lifestyle: The entertainment sector is evolving toward more social experiences, with platforms matching viewers based on compatible commentary styles and shared media preferences. Similarly, fitness and wellness platforms are creating workout groups matched through motivation patterns and achievement networks paired by accountability styles.

90s gamers have become enterprise decision-makers, Gen-Z think of themselves as businesses, and AI is eliminating traditional gaps. For the first time, consumer and enterprise adoption curves—that used to be years apart—are converging.

I call this consumerization of the world “Consumer Plus”, giving birth to a new category of hybrid companies that are turning B2C love into B2B gold at unprecedented speed.

Let’s see why and how a new playbook is being written:

The Great Divide (2000s)

Back in the late 90s, consumer and enterprise software existed in entirely different dimensions, separated by an ocean of culture, expectations, and most importantly, time. Consumer adoption of new technology would usually precede enterprise adoption by 5-7 years, creating two distinct ecosystems that rarely intersected.

In the consumer universe, gamers initially ruled the adoption curve. They were the cowboys of the digital frontier, always first to try new technology, but notoriously resistant to paying for it. The culture was all about open source, hacking, and sharing. Adoption happened at breakneck speed, but monetization was almost taboo. These early adopters would eagerly beta test anything new, but the moment you asked them to pay, they'd disappear faster than a Steam sale.

Meanwhile, in the enterprise universe, the pace was glacial but the budgets were astronomical. Corporate buyers, mostly boomers who had climbed the corporate ladder, approached technology with deep skepticism and even deeper pockets. They weren't interested in innovation for innovation's sake – they wanted proven solutions with clear ROI. This led to a peculiar dynamic where enterprises would pay millions for outdated software with terrible user experiences, simply because it came with the right certifications and support contracts.

The gap between these worlds was so vast that companies had to choose their lane. You either built for consumers and accepted that monetization would be a nightmare, or you built for enterprise and accepted that your product would feel like it was designed by a committee of accountants. Hence, 2 adoptions curves so far out, that the same company could rarely perform on both. Just look at TeamSpeak, IRC, MegaUpload, Xfire, and Skype—all these consumer products could have been enterprise hits if they'd launched a few years later. Meanwhile, Slack, Zoom, Yammer, and Stripe built similar products at exactly the right time for enterprise adoption.

The Facebook Effect (2010s)

Then something remarkable happened. Consumer companies like Facebook and Google didn't just succeed – they redefined what software should feel like. Their products weren't just functional; they were beautiful, intuitive, and addictive. For the first time, consumer software wasn't just faster to adopt; it was fundamentally better.

This created a new kind of tension in enterprises. Employees who spent their evenings on Facebook and their weekends on Gmail started questioning why their work software looked like it was designed in the Clinton era. The "consumerization of enterprise" became a movement, but the fundamental adoption gap remained.

Why? Because the decision-makers inside enterprises were still from a different generation. They valued stability over innovation, security over speed, and process over progress. The tools got prettier, but the gap persisted.

The Perfect Storm (2020s)

Today, we're witnessing something unprecedented. Three massive cultural and technological forces are converging to eliminate this historic gap, creating perfect conditions for a new breed of company.

• First, those teenage gamers from the 90s have grown up. The generation that was modding Quake servers and building MySpace layouts is now in their late 30s and early 40s, with purchasing power in enterprises. They don't just want better software – they demand it. These digital natives have become the decision-makers, and they're bringing their consumer-grade expectations to enterprise software.The gamers have suited-up, Thomas Anderson has become the managing partner.

• Second, Gen Z has entered the chat, and they're rewriting all the rules. Unlike their millennial predecessors who believed everything on the internet should be free, Gen Z arrives with both the willingness to pay for value and a native understanding of digital tools. They don't see a distinction between personal and professional software – they just want tools that work to help them scale. More importantly, they view entrepreneurship as the default career path, and don’t want to bring a knife to a gunfight. For them, being a creator isn't a side hustle; it's the main event.

• Third, and perhaps most dramatically, AI has accelerated everything. It's not just another technology wave – it's a tsunami that's washing away the traditional barriers between consumer and enterprise adoption. What started as individual experimentation with ChatGPT has turned into a full-scale enterprise revolution in months, not years. We're witnessing the fastest technology adoption in human history, and it's happening simultaneously across consumer, creator, prosumer and bottom-up enterprise sectors e.g. most of the new fastest-growing AI-first apps like ChatGPT, Runway, ElevenLabs, Gamma, Cursor, Granola, Photoroom, Suno etc.

This acceleration has given birth to "shadow IT" on steroids. When employees can access AI tools that make them 10x more productive, they're not waiting for IT approval – they're just using them. The traditional enterprise barriers of security, compliance, and procurement are being overwhelmed by the sheer utility and leverage these new tools bring.

The New Playbook: Enter the Consumer+ Era

This convergence creates space for a new type of company – one that can successfully navigate both consumer and enterprise waters simultaneously. Call it Consumer+, B2C2B, or even Crensumer (consumer + creator + enterprise + lol) or something else entirely, but the playbook is clear and it's revolutionizing how software companies grow.

Unlike traditional software companies that pick a lane and stay in it, modern companies are following a new ascent pattern - one that turns consumer love into enterprise gold. Here's how the playbook works:

Step 1: The Consumer Launchpad

The journey begins with consumers, but not for the reasons you might think. While the consumer market is bigger, its real value is as a high-definition laboratory for product development. Through platforms like TikTok and Reels, you get instant, raw feedback about what works and what doesn't.

PhotoRoom and Customuse (intuition portfolio) exemplify this perfectly. PhotoRoom didn't start by selling enterprise-grade background removal to e-commerce companies – they focused on individual Etsy and Instagram sellers first. Similarly, Customuse began by enabling the Roblox generation to create professional-grade 3D assets. Both companies turned consumer platforms into powerful product labs, getting real-time data on what features matter, what people will pay for, and how their products actually get used in the wild.

The results speak for themselves: PhotoRoom's individual sellers are becoming e-commerce powerhouses, while Customuse's teenage creators are evolving into the next digital luxury brands. This isn't just about quick iteration cycles – it's about building with the users who will shape the future of your market.

Step 2: The Creator/Prosumer Bridge

Here's where things get interesting. Today's consumers aren't just consumers – they're potential enterprises in waiting. Take Argil and Delphi (both intuition portfolio), two companies redefining how creators scale themselves through AI. Argil lets creators clone themselves visually, turning a simple video into an AI avatar that can produce endless social content. Delphi goes even further, enabling coaches and knowledge workers to create AI versions of themselves, turning individual expertise into scalable digital businesses.

This is the new creator playbook: use AI to transform individual capacity into enterprise-grade output. Just like Shopify helped merchants scale from side-hustles to empires, these tools are helping creators evolve from content producers to full-fledged businesses. A single creator can now run a media company, a coaching practice can serve thousands, and individual expertise can be productized at scale.

The key is following your fastest-growing customers, letting their journey from consumer to entrepreneur guide your product evolution. When your users can scale themselves, your business scales with them.

Step 3: The Enterprise Ascent

The final act is where consumer love transforms into enterprise gold. Beehiiv (angel portfolio), a publishing platform, exemplifies this evolution perfectly. They started by serving individual newsletter writers with a consumer-grade experience, but quickly understood that the same tools powering solo creators could serve major media companies. By adding enterprise features like advanced analytics, team collaboration, and API access while maintaining their user-friendly DNA, they've built the bridge from individual writers to enterprise publishers.

This is the power of the Consumer+ approach: when your product is loved by individuals, it's already halfway into the enterprise. Just like Figma's journey from individual designers to company-wide adoption, you're not selling to enterprises so much as responding to demand from your champions inside these organizations. Your product isn't just another vendor solution – it's the tool people already trust with their personal brands and livelihoods.

Looking Forward

The future belongs to companies that refuse to choose between consumer and enterprise. This new playbook is elegantly simple: start with consumer love, grow through prosumer success, and scale into enterprise adoption. It's not B2C or B2B – it's B2C2B, and in today's AI-first world, it's becoming the most natural way to build a software company.

This evolution is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. What historically took Amazon and NVIDIA 20 years, and Dropbox 10 years, new AI-first companies are accomplishing in 2-3 years. The gap between consumer and enterprise adoption isn't just shrinking – it's disappearing.

The implications of this convergence are profound. The most exciting companies of the next decade will serve both worlds simultaneously, and the opportunities will fall to investors open-minded enough to look beyond traditional venture boxes.

Welcome to the age of Consumer+, and if you’re building around these lines, hit me up.

Access, Distribute, Create:

• Web 1: Access (1989—2004): Before the internet, information was mostly gated physically (books, university, libraries), and gated organically in people’s brains. Web1 brought institutional knowledge (science, history, etc) and personal knowledge (cooking, reviews, etc) onto a giant free marketplace. Netscape, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Wikipedia—Web1 primarily democratized access to information through static pages: Anyone can learn.

• Web2: Distribute (2004—2022): Then, information began to organize itself into new networks, centered around pockets of interests, connecting the right people with the right content at the right time. Facebook with students, YouTube with video, Twitter with news, Spotify with music—Web2 democratized the distribution of information through dynamic feeds: Anyone can reach.

• Web 3: Create (2022—): Recently, thanks to the quasi-infinite amount of data provided by Web1 and 2, LLMs have started abstracting the creation of information, increasingly in any format. What happened to access and distribution is now happening to creation: OpenAI, Midjourney, ElevenLabs, Suno—Web3 is democratizing the creation of information through natural language: Anyone can create.

But we know how the story ends: the more leveraged we become, the more self-sufficient we are—and the lonelier we feel. AI takes this paradox to the extreme, offering the ultimate leverage by democratizing creation and fueling an endless flywheel of content: more to learn from, more to create, more data to feed back into the cycle. Yet, there’s an unexpected twist. AI doesn’t just supercharge our ability to create; it also curates an online world tailored to us, cutting through the noise and unlocking connections that we thought were lost in our increasingly isolated digital lives. In doing so, AI has the potential to fulfill two fundamental human desires: the drive to Create and the need to Connect. Here’s how:

1. Single-player mode: Create.

No tool in human history has leveled the playing field more than the internet. In this post-permission world, anyone can learn, create & distribute anything, with virtually no marginal cost of reproduction. This has enabled startups (leveraging code) and creators (leveraging content) to create empires without asking the permission from gatekeepers. Yet, until now, our creations were bound by the limits of our imagination and skills. With AI, those boundaries have dissolved—the power once exclusive to a select few is now in everyone's hands. And without noticing it, AI has made us all a bit more like superhumans, enabling us to achieve more than ever before.

• Creativity: Anyone can express their creativity in any form of content, regardless of skill level, at a fraction of the cost. In less than 10 years, a team of 5 people empowered by AI will win an oscar. If the industrial revolution gave organizations weapons of mass (physical) production, the AI revolution is giving individuals weapons of mass (digital) creation. We’ve armed the rebels, and they’re leading us into a creative renaissance.

• Productivity: LLMs gave everyone a Creative Director for free; AI Agents is extending this to other roles: COO, CMO, CFO, and more. Now, anyone can become CEO, focusing on core high-value activities, while AI Agent co-founders automate mundane tasks and enhance workflows. Combine this technological unlock with the cultural phenomenon that is Gen-Z, and you get the most entrepreneurial generation in history.

• Performance: Technology makes us kings and gives us all a royal court, made up of the best experts in the realm: Context-aware, hyper-personalized, multimodal, always-available teachers, coaches, doctors, advisors—ready to help us live our best life. These AI co-pilots will be the personal counterparts to the professional ones of the previous category, completing our AI squad.

But if anyone can be a superhuman, it can only mean one thing: the lower the entry barriers, the higher the competition, the larger the size of the arena. Every day, your feed on X hits you with a new toy,  a new “Flux with Lora + Gen-3 Alpha image-to-video,” making humanity more powerful but leaving individuals feeling smaller. Are we destined to live in a world of super-creative gods who feel increasingly lonely?

2. Multiplayer mode: Connect.

After three waves of internet evolution, we've become nearly limitless, enjoying unprecedented freedom and leverage. But this newfound power has also plunged us into a global arena where everyone's competing for attention, money, and status, creating an exhausting and isolating experience. Life can't just be a competitive single-player game; it needs to be a collaborative multiplayer experience. This is where AI offers a cure. While Web2 is like Fortnite, throwing everyone into a battle royale, Web3 has the potential to be more like Minecraft, where people (and AI) come together to build, create, and collaborate, crafting their own worlds and experiences in a shared space. 

• Social: Web1 was profile-centric (e.g. Myspace) enabling people discovery, Web2 was feed-centric (e.g. Facebook) enabling content discovery, and now Web3 is becoming AI-centric (e.g. C.ai, Replika) and will enable community discovery. By providing a human-like presence that allows us to express ourselves and feel seen, AI also unlocks personalized curation at scale, helping everyone to discover their communities to belong online and offline.

• Gaming: Human culture and society have always been built around communication and play. Where Social is mostly about content and conversations, Gaming is about shared online experiences—now going through a massive acceleration: From a UGC explosion, to a new agent-based multiplayer infra to tools that empower game developers—AI is transforming how games are made and experienced.

• Identity: Culture moves at the speed of bits—identity follows. Now that everything is trending all at once, we’re witnessing an archipelization of the mainstream into infinites sub-cultures. This turns many formerly utility-based sectors into identity-based and community-powered ones. People want to belong: Commerce, Travel, Health and even Finance are increasingly turning into multiplayer games, enabled by AI who’s becoming a personalized curator, supercharging activation and retention.

Create like a god, connect like a human.

As AI and Web3 redefine what's possible, we stand at a crossroads. We now have the power to create without limits, but true progress lies in our ability to connect deeply. The future isn't just about wielding superhuman capabilities—it's about using them to build a world where technology enhances our humanity. How we choose to balance creation and connection will shape the next chapter of our shared experience.

This cultural dynamic has fascinated me for over 15 years. I’ve started companies focused on both creation and connection, written about the intersection of creativity and loneliness, and now this idea is the core investment thesis at Intuition. If you’re building or want to invest in this space, let me know.

–
Thanks to Clara & Etienne for reading drafts and edits.

The Internet was supposed to make the world more open and connected. Yet, trillions of friend requests later, we’ve never felt more isolated. The latest stats are heartbreaking: 60% of Americans are lonely. As disturbing as it may be, what used to primarily be an issue for seniors is now spread over all generations: The younger you are, the more likely you are now to feel lonely.

Loneliness isn’t just making us unhappy, it’s silently killing us: Social isolation is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If the situation is so critical, why aren’t we doing more to fix it? Because we’ve been collectively ashamed to talk about loneliness. Our silence has incubated one of the most insidious crises our society has to face. It’s time to act, but how?

I believe in technology and entrepreneurship to solve the world’s biggest problems. For the past couple of years, I’ve witnessed an uprising in startups waging a war on loneliness, COVID acting as a catalyst. In this article, I’ll cover 160+ companies leveraging AI, gaming, dating, and more to solve loneliness at scale, all sharing one core belief: Technology can help us belong.

Before we jump into what I believe will be a tidal shift in consumer habits and startup investment, let’s hit reverse for a sec to piece together the backstory. How did we get here?

Technology and the individual.

Throughout history, we’ve always been part of something greater than ourselves. A religion, a family, a village—belonging wasn’t something we chose but something we needed: It was impossible to survive as an individual. But belonging came at a cost: Dependency and lack of agency. As a result, a few institutions dominated our everyday existence, sometimes preventing us from becoming the architects of our own lives.

As technological progress advanced, the balance of power shifted: It used to take a village to raise a kid; it now takes an iPhone with an internet connection. The more leverage we have as individuals, the less dependence we have on others. We've been sacrificing human connection for years—transacting things that traditionally had to be done by someone who cared about us. Uber instead of our parents picking us up from the airport, Doordash instead of cooking with our roommates, and TikTok instead of hanging out with our friends.

Technology makes our lives easier. Convenience has, however, come at a cost.

We are free, independent, and sovereign.

But we are lonely…

It’s time to belong.

Yesterday, we were born as part of a community and had to find our way as individuals. Today, we are born as individuals, free to find our community. We have every reason to celebrate this new-found individual autonomy & freedom of choice. But if everything is going so well, why are we so addicted, stressed, and depressed?

In my opinion, loneliness is the root cause of our mental health crisis. Loneliness is now one of the most important problems our generation has to solve, alongside climate change and obesity. It’s time to find a balance between individualism and collectivism, between solitude and solidarity, between independence and interdependence. It’s time to remember that as individuals, we are the beginning but not the end. It’s time to belong, again.

This leads me to the central question of this article: How can technology help us belong? It’s very easy to blame technology for our loneliness and want less of it. But it’s important to remember that technology follows ideology, not the opposite. We’ve built our modern world on the dream of individual autonomy, and technology made it a reality. We are now wishing to become part of something bigger than ourselves, again. I believe technology will answer this call too.

Fortunately, it has already started. Hundreds of companies are addressing loneliness, building products and services to help us belong. In this article, I’ve decided to cast a well-deserved light on 160 of them, ranked under six core institutions that traditionally provided us with a sense of belonging: Religion, Family, Neighborhood, Friend Group, Couple & Company. Hopefully, this inspires a few entrepreneurs to start building in this direction.

Let’s dive in.

1. Religion

Religion is the meta of all institutions. Its place has been historically so central to our society that it became its operating system. Through its complex rituals, religion traditionally orchestrated many of our social interactions and incentivized our altruism. It’s a secret to no one: we’re losing religion. Church membership recently fell below 50% for the first time in history, and many of us are left alone to explore our new selves without any churchgoer, priest, or God to talk about it.

Nature abhors a vacuum; the mind does too. So, we’re slowly replacing religion with weaker forms of cults: 30% of U.S. adults already consider themselves as spiritual but not religious.

Unbundling religion can be a very wide trend and can also encompass categories like Psychedelics, Yoga, Meditation, Activism or Fasting apps. We could even frame the rise of the Creators as part of this unbundling since creators are becoming the new priests. But I’ve decided to focus on just a few sub-categories replacing the social aspect of religion rather than the ritualistic or transcendental aspect.

• Alcoholic Anonymous for X: AA is one of the first successful unbundling of religion, despite using a secular yet quite spiritual framework. Group therapy has since 1) expanded to other verticals and 2) massively moved online. HumansAnon, Circles, YoniCircle, and SunnySide are connecting groups of people through audio spaces to find support & belonging. This could be seen as an unbundling of Reddit & Clubhouse and a smart approach to build vertical social networks with the optionality to evolve into full-stack mental-health social memberships like Real or social wellness platforms like BlueFever and Wisdo.

• Astrology: ​​Astrology is benefiting from the unbundling of spirituality from religion and is projected to reach $22.8B in 2031 (they probably also used astrology for the prediction). Inherently social astrology apps like Co-Star have been downloaded by a quarter of all women aged 18–25 in the US, followed by others like ThePattern or Sanctuary. Social Tarot platform Moonlight is bringing card reading online through interactive rooms.

• From fitness to wellness clubs: People are turning to fitness classes for meaning, ritual & community. Brands like SoulCycle and CrossFit and Barry’s have scaled belonging, and the parallels with churches are striking. New companies like Othership are going above pure fitness and expanding their social-bathhouse concept leveraging a deep sense of belonging to drive retention. The social wellness trend is going strong, with players like Peoplehood and Remedy Place leading the charge.

• Daily Prayer apps: Let's not bury religion just yet. God used to be the ultimate scalable friend, and even if daily prayer apps are not social, they ultimately connect us to something greater than ourselves. Religious apps have received $175M in 2021 alone, still a long way from their secular meditation/mindfulness counterparts Calm and Headspace. Christian apps Glorify and Pray and Catholic app Hallow both raised dozens of millions from top VCs and Muslim app Guider is following the trend. We’re also starting to see religious/meditation hybrid apps like Ritual.

2. Family

In the past century, we have experienced what is perhaps the most rapid and significant transformation in family structures in human history. Transitioning from extended families to nuclear ones and eventually to blended families has consequences: In the past 40 years, the size of families shrunk massively. The number of households composed of married couples with children and households consisting of 5+ individuals both decreased by 50%.

Smaller family, less support, more loneliness. So what replaced the help once provided by extended family (especially women), like child care, babysitting, tutoring, and emotional support? Paid services. Wealthy parents can afford these expensive resources to support their children's growth and keep their marriages strong, but lower-income families often cannot. Technology is lowering the costs of these services, making them affordable to as many people as possible.

I won't discuss healthcare in this section, but rather focus on services that traditionally had to be done by family members.

• Loneliness-focused elderly care: Lonely people are 50% more likely to die prematurely than those with healthy social relationships. While elderly care has rightfully mainly been focused on providing health care and home care, a new breed of companies have started tackling loneliness and social isolation among seniors. Miami-based Papa is matching aging seniors with college students and has raised $250M in less than 5 years. Element3, JoyClub and Hank focus on match-making seniors around hobbies & activities. Zoog & Remento are bringing generations together around storytelling. Aidaly is helping family caregivers to get paid for their support. And lastly, Elliq, Cutii & Rendever are respectively building robots & VR solutions to fight seniors’ isolation.

• FamilyTech: 90% of new moms experienced loneliness after giving birth, and more than half (54%) felt like they had no friends. It takes a village to raise a child, but nowadays, many families face this challenge in isolation. There are new ways for them to share that burden: From women-centered communities (Tinto, WeMoms, Peanut) to parenting-expert marketplaces/memberships (Cleo, Bloss, Mahmee) or parenting circles (Guardians Collective, Oath), raising children isn’t a single-player game anymore. AI is also getting involved: Milo is developing a GPT4-powered co-pilot for parents. Even child-care (Otter, Winnie, Kinside) and taking kids to school (Zum & HopSkipDrive) can become tech-enabled. And when things are not going as expected, co-parents can rely on apps like Onwards and CoParenter and even single-parent co-living like Commune and CoAbode to make their life easier.

3. Neighborhood & Third Places

Neighborhoods have traditionally been a cornerstone of social wellbeing. Everyday encounters are amazing for our mental health, yet they are becoming increasingly rare. As living conditions continuously improved, we’ve replaced hanging out with strangers at the local bar with watching a movie on Netflix and ordering dinner on Uber Eats. So much so that today only 25% of people living in urban areas actually socialize with strangers at least once a week. We don’t really need our neighbors for either entertainment or support, so we never really get to know them. Plus, people are churning out of neighborhoods very quickly as the average tenancy in big cities like London has dropped to about 20 months. So, why bother?

The concepts of Neighborhood and Third Places (more on that below) are being reinvented and pulled away from their previous offline-only definition. Social compatibility is less and less limited by physical constraints, so we’re slowly trading local generic communities for global niche ones. In other words, we might have more in common with someone living far away than with our neighbors, so why limit ourselves? The Internet (especially with AI) is becoming this massive match-making machine where relationships start online and are bridged offline.

This URL-to-IRL cross-over has barely started and we undoubtedly need both forms of Neighborhood and Third Places in our lives. A few trends:

• Home ownership: Belonging to a neighborhood is a big function of home ownership. Unfortunately, renters now outnumber homeowners in large cities like London, causing people to relocate regularly as rent continuously increases. That’s where rent-to-own companies enter. Divy, HomePartners (acq. by Blackstone for $6B), Landis, Utopia Homes, Up&Up, Belong (funny name, huh?) are all helping renters build ownership and hopefully anchor themselves longer in their local community. Another trend worth mentioning is fractional ownership going social, with Fractional and Nestment letting you co-own real estate with friends and Fractal, Ember, Seqoon, Kocomo enabling shared ownership of second homes.

• Co-living: Renters can still create deeper bonds with their neighbors through co-living. Although the trend hasn’t delivered on all its promises (thanks, WeWork/Live), demand from millennials is still very strong, fueled by the rising cost of living in big cities. While the early days of coliving saw a burgeoning of new companies, the difficulty in scaling the model has recently led to market consolidation: Co-living giant Habyt has acquired 7 of its competitors and now boasts 30,000 units across 40 cities. Through consolidation, the co-living market is also diversifying into niches. From lonely seniors with Colette to traveling Gen-Z with Selina to older but still active individuals, the market is proving Jack Johnson right: “It’s always better when we’re together”.

• Social Gaming: Sociologist Ray Oldenburg defines "Third Places" as meeting spaces outside of home and work, where conversation is the main activity. Sure, you can think of bars, cafés, churches and  clubs, but if  you’re in your 30s like me (which means you’re not old YET, ok?) you might remember MSN, Myspace, and even early Facebook as such places. Now, If you’re in your 20s, you’d probably think of Minecraft, GTA5 RP and Fortnite as your Third Places. If you’re a teenager, Roblox and Rec Room would be your hangouts. Gaming is eating the (Third Place) world, and founders are now building social-first 3D experiences for people to connect around. Bunch and Rooms are building the new 3D hang-outs. Game studio ThoseBeyond believes “the next global IP is not just entertainment, but a culture of belonging”. Gardens is building “living worlds that bring players together to cultivate lasting friendships”. HeroJourneyClub provides mental health support while gaming. Finally, VR company Unison builds its hardware & software with social interactions as its core value prop. Considering that 67% of all teen boys ages 13 to 17 play video games over the internet with friends weekly, social gaming might be the future of Third Places.

• Hybrids: 3% of boomers met their closest friend online vs. almost 40% for millennials and Gen-Z. Friendships are now starting URL and moving IRL (more on that later), and a new breed of Third Places are following the same movement. BuildSpace is creating a new-gen online school for builders and is opening IRL hubs for its alumni to hangout and build from. SuperTeam is doing the same for Solana-builders. Even new members-only clubs like Chief—with 20k women in its network—have opened exclusive clubhouses in 4 US cities. It’s not crazy to think that successful online-first communities using Circle and Nas would at some point open Third Places and turn into members-only clubs? Especially relevant now, knowing that almost 20% of UK public libraries have closed in the past 10 years. The future of Vertical Social Networks may lie offline too.

4. Friendships

The last decade has seen the most rapid escalation in the quest for attention. Content Marketplaces (or Social Networks as they used to be called) progressively expanded the competition for attention from your friends, to your friends of friends, to anyone in the world. This enabled some talented individuals—the creators— to scale their reach like never before: They became our always-available parasocial friends. Mukbangs creators turned into our lunch buddies, creator collectives like David Dobrick’s became our extended friend groups, and vloggers like Emma Chamberlain our confidants. Some of us even watch them sleep. But in the meantime, Americans started having fewer friends than they used to: 15% of men have no close friends in 2021, a 5x increase from 1990.

Why is that? First, content marketplaces like TikTok and YouTube became so efficient, they’re now providing us with extra-personalised niche content. So much so that 55% of Gen-Z agree that they watch content that no one they know personally is interested in. We used to watch the same TV-shows, but now everyone’s TikTok feed is different. We now belong to horizontal non-geographic ephemeral niche communities (e.g. anime fans), which makes us sometimes feel locally inadequate. In other words, we all have our content kinks that we don’t often share with our friends. But that’s not it. A second reason might be that we’re becoming lousy friends to each other. How so? Well, as average screen time grew 3x from 2008, we’re now spending—on average—more than 7h a day on screens. Friendships require undivided attention that we don’t give anymore. So, instead, we’re turning to creators and AIs more.

• Meet new people online: In less than 20 years, we went from slow content (TV, Radio, Newspaper) to fast content (YouTube) and superfast content (TikTok). In parallel, the same happened in commerce: From slow commerce (retail stores with 12 months cycles) to fast commerce like Zara (3 weeks) and then superfast commerce like Shein (3 days). But at the community level, we’re still stuck at 1st gear: Slow communities like religion, family or neighborhood can’t evolve as fast as what we’re watching or buying. Belonging needs to be more fluid too, and companies like Yubo, Jodel, Wink, Wizz, Fam, Maven and LMK are helping millions of individuals explore new interest-based friendships that start online. Naval’s new company Airchat is pitched as “a dinner party in your pocket” and promises to help us “never feel alone again”. Sincerely built a safe place to help its users get things off their chest and help others. Even book clubs that have traditionally been a great way to meet new people based on shared interest are moving online with Fable and Bookshelved.

• Online to offline: Let’s not lie to ourselves: Online communities are great, but the most accurate measure of loneliness is what you’re doing IRL on a Saturday evening. We’re as happy as the quality of the relationships we have with the people closest to us, and these relationships mainly deepen in-person. Sadly, young people are hanging out face-to-face less often, and this drop ties into feelings of loneliness. This is a tough nut to crack—the URL to IRL space is such a gigantic startup graveyard that it became a meme. Maybe this time will be different? I believe it will, as meeting friends online is now crossing the chasm, just like meeting lovers online did a decade ago.  Meetup has been a pioneer and remains the leader in terms of user engagement, but competition is beginning to intensify. As a result,  former online-community platform Geneva is building upon a recent surge in running and book clubs and defines itself as the “online place to find your offline people”, similar to Dive Chat focused on “Making moments happen”. Social calendar apps Howbout and Saturn are taking a utility-first approach to help friends & students schedule more face-time together, respectively. What about eating together? You can meet new people for breakfast with The Breakfast, for lunch with LunchClub and for dinner with 222. Or take-out with friends on Snackpass. Even ticketing & event platforms  FeverUp, Dice and Partiful have all identified loneliness as the main issue they're working to address. Social traveling company Dharma turns creators into travel agents at scale and matches like-minded people with travel experiences they compare to “secular pilgrimages” and WeRoad promises you won’t have to travel alone again.

• Close Friends apps: Social media was meant to be a place where we share things with our friends, but it quickly turned into a place where we just show (off). Ten years ago, I wrote about this difference and about my (failed) efforts to use Path more than Facebook at that time. Path was the first app dedicated to your close friends, and was probably way ahead of its time. But I’d argue that tackling the challenges of abundance may soon surpass addressing those of scarcity. While the 2010s were about making as many friends as possible, the 2020s could be about forming deeper and better connections with your closest friends. No wonder we’ve seen a resurgence of apps like BeReal, Locket, Vibes, Sush, Lobby and more recently Retro, products focused more on sharing than showing, more on belonging than status.

• AI Friends: With the introduction of GPT-4, AI became human-level or better at many tasks, and one of them could be friendship. This is not surprising considering that we’re becoming subpar friends with our attention spans having shrunk 25% from 2000 to 2015. If people are given the option of either extreme loneliness, a lousy friend who doesn’t listen, or a thoughtful relationship with an AI, they’re going to choose the later most of the time. That’s the opportunity that companies like Replika, Character.ai and Chai are seizing, providing text-based AI companions to millions of people already. Ava (testflight only) is going one step further with a voice-first and a 3D-animated experience. Inworld and Convai are building a platform for any game developers to bring their NPCs to life. AI companions might take an increased size of our social life, but they also might help us connect with one another better, like Amorai’s AI relationship coaching app built to help us foster real-world relationships or Circle Labs building the AI spirit animal of a community, strengthening its members’ feeling of belonging. Friendship isn’t a zero-sum game, and just like we’ve developed friendships with pets, we’ll also develop new ones with AIs.

5. Couple

Over the past century, many institutions that provided us with a sense of belonging have eroded, leaving romantic relationships as one of the last pillars we can lean on. Slowly but surely, the couple took most of the pressure that was once shared by these crumbling institutions, and it’s heavy. We’re now expecting our couple to be everything we’ve lost: A family member, a best friend, a lover, a thought partner, etc. We want it all, in one person.

In parallel, the advent of online dating brought us near-infinite choices which triggers Option Paralysis: The more choices we have, the harder it is to make a decision and the more unsatisfied we become. Online dating also removed geographical constraints, which used to protect the average from the best. In other words, 10% of men get 60% of all matches and the bottom 50% of men combined only receive 1% of the total likes. If Tinder was its own economy, it would be more unequal than nearly 96% of all countries.

Combine these two phenomena, and you no longer need to wonder where all the lonely people come from. There seems to be a form of resignation since now 60% of single adults in the U.S. say they are not looking for a relationship or dates. This situation is not inevitable and we're not going to leave it at that. Like French poet Serge Gainsbourg sang, “la vie ne vaut d’être vécue sans amour”, so what’s new under the romantic sun?

• Post-swipe dating apps: The days of photo-based online dating apps may be numbered. People are actively looking for new experiences that are more social, inclusive, and immersive. Feels, Ditto and IRLY have bet on a video-first experience, Thursday & 222 have taken an offline-first approach and new companies like Doubble, Wingr & Yidui are making dating more social involving match-makers or friends in the process. AI is also entering the dance, with new AI dating assistants Rizz, Keys and YourMove helping you write that perfect catchphrase. Replika is going one step further and announced Blush, an AI-dating simulator. We’re entering a post-swipe era and lots of new companies are poised to revamp romance in the coming years.

• Tech-enabled couples: We’re not usually single because we never found anyone, but because we couldn’t make a relationship work. The days of lifelong relationships might be over, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try harder and better. A new breed of companies are betting that technology could help us extend the average relationship length to more than what it is right now. Paired, Blueheart, Relish, Flamme and Official (acquired by Bumble) have built “relationship care” apps for couples, Lasting, Ritual & Lover are democratizing couple therapy, and on an adjacent note, HoneyDue is helping couples manage their money together. The beginning of a new CoupleTech category?

• Online Girlfriends: Over 60% of men under 30 are now single, and 30% of them haven’t had sex in the past year, a 3x increase in 10 years. The phenomenon of romantic loneliness seems to be more prevalent in men than in women, with men actively seeking solutions on the internet. The rise of Onlyfans can be interpreted as a “commodification of intimacy” where, unlike porn, adult creators can now provide lonely men intimacy at scale over DMs. But true infinite scale is now possible with ChatGPT-enabled chatbots trained on a creator’s content. That’s what Forever Companion is pioneering with Caryn.ai, its first influencer turned into AI. Alphazria provides uncensored roleplay with an AI and its UVP is to ‘say goodbye to loneliness”. DreamGF helps you create your AI girlfriend and is already making 100K+ per month. Remember that scene in the movie Her where Theodore realizes that Samantha is talking to 8,316 people at the same time? Well, it’s happening now and I believe lots of men will find more companionship chatting with AI than being ghosted by 99% of their Tinder match after two sentences. The Simp Economy has only just started.

6. Company

For many people, the company is often the last standing pillar of belonging and socialisation. Activities like having lunch with colleagues, attending a co-worker's farewell drinks, or going to the company’s Christmas party are some of the few remnants of what was once a vibrant social life for many millennials. Unfortunately, as employment no longer offers the social and economic security it once did, employees are feeling lonelier than ever. And it makes sense: Why attach your identity and community to a company if you change jobs every few years? Consequently, new generations are rejecting traditional career paths and roll their eyes when pitched to join “the *insert company name* Family”.

As a result, 76% of Millennials and Gen Zs want to be their own boss—and America will become a freelance-majority workforce in 2027. The next generation is massively going independent and they have new dreams: More American kids want to become YouTubers than astronauts. Becoming a creator is the climax of independence for an individual: One person, one camera, one empire. Of course Gen-Z’s new entrepreneurial mindset is to be celebrated, but we need to be aware of the downsides. Indeed, becoming a solo-preneur, a freelancer or a creator comes at a (high) price: Loneliness.

How can we provide a sense of belonging in the workplace, either as an employee or an independent?

• Team Building 2.0: Feeling like you belong doesn’t just make you happier but also more productive. Indeed, employees that have a best friend at work will be twice as engaged. Unfortunately, going remote has alienated and isolated many people and broken down many groups of colleagues. Work is going hybrid, but is team building also following? That’s what companies like Jurnee and FiveToNine are betting on by building all-in-one business events platforms to easily re-engage employees. Another approach to the problem is Teamaraderie, which is building a B2B MasterClass-style platform to foster belonging in the workplace, or Intros, which is automating introductions between members of the same company/community.

• Mentorship: We used to benefit from a wide support network where relatives and longtime friends would act as coaches, mentors or role models. As these networks grew weaker, the workplace took over that supportive role, and the manager became a part-time amateur (clumsy) psychologist. We’re now witnessing an unbundling of mentorship from management, where employees, freelancers and entrepreneurs altogether are seeking external help to support their personal & professional growth. Surfing this trend, companies like BetterUp, CoachHub and Torch are building people development platforms for companies to deliver coaching programs to their employees. Wave is going the tech-enabled approach to democratize executive coaching by building a text-based experience for an affordable price.

• Virtual workspace: As remote ate the corporate world during COVID, we realized that the office meant more than just long commutes, cubicles and bright white lights. The “In Person” workspace experience also brings belonging, accountability & serendipity. In the great unbundling of work series, how can you keep the “In Person” upsides without the downsides? That’s what companies like Flown and FocusMate are trying to solve for accountability, both providing focus sessions where you can work silently alongside other professionals. For remote workplace serendipity, Gather Town & Remo have built virtual HQs that look like old-school video games like Zelda where you can interact with your co-workers and bring serendipity to the remote lifestyle.

• Business Collectives: As we’re unbundling work from employment, workers are looking beyond the traditional company structure for support and network. As employees or independents, individuals are increasingly disengaging from legacy vertical company-based networks and now seek horizontal interest-based professional networks. Work is following the footstep of the entertainment industry and Hollywood, where highly skilled and motivated individuals who worked in various locations around the world come together to create the top-grossing movie of all times. We’re probably witnessing the birth of Business Collectives, just like what we have in (French) hip-hop. And it’s already happening: Gen-Z professional network app Pineapple recently became members-only, entrepreneurship-focused communities like Verci, BuildSpace, SuperTeam & OnDeck are helping individuals build alongside others, and Collective temporarily assembles a team of top-notch freelancers to work on your project. Even legacy industries are getting their new collectives/network, with doctor community Docquity taking over South East Asia or Sales professional community Bravado.

Conclusion

Technology is often most helpful when it cancels the effects of bad technology that was alienating. Early solutions might look weird and counterintuitive, but it always starts like this. Yes, the thought of our kids growing up with digital friends might sound odd, but isn't it more exciting than gluing them in front of the TV for hours? Yes, showing up to an AI-curated offline dinner with strangers might sound lame, but isn’t it more exciting than scrolling TikTok the entire evening? Technology can solve what it helped create in the first place.

Loneliness has been a widespread problem for years. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam already warned that America's "social capital" was depleting. However, I believe the pandemic has brought us to a tipping point with loneliness. First, most of us experienced social isolation during lockdowns and realized it made us unhappy. Second, many have grown accustomed to solitude and haven't yet returned to their previous levels of social activity. Third, we've lost numerous connections with friends, co-workers, and acquaintances as people moved or started working from home. For many, 2023 represents a social reset, requiring us to rebuild our social lives from scratch. This massive tailwind is a huge opportunity for anyone who wants to ride it. Like Michael Jordan used to say: It’s time to build.

I’m not alone (lol) in this belief. I’ve talked about loneliness with hundreds of people, and almost everyone personally resonated with the topic. Tongues have started to loosen, and a huge number of founders and investors are ready to build and finance the future of belonging. I believe the Loneliness Economy will become a major consumer trend in the next few years, and I have the intuition it might make a great investment thesis ;) More on that soon 👀.

I want to back and connect founders who are as obsessed as I am about this massive problem, so if you have that kind of ambition, drop me a message! And if you think I forgot a company in the mapping, submit it here.

In this post-permission world, millions of creators are chasing the internet dream in the hope of finding virality, just like millions of diggers used to chase the American dream in the hope of finding gold. This digital gold rush follows the same pattern as its predecessors: while some creators are making large fortunes, becoming a creator is unprofitable for most. It’s visible in the math: 3% of YouTubers earn 90% of the platform’s revenue.

What does this mean for the future of the Creator Economy, creators themselves & the hundreds of companies building for them?

Anyone can become a creator.

The Creator Economy has been massively celebrated for its low barriers to entry: Anyone with a phone can become a successful creator. In 2022, Khaby Lame, a Senegalese-born, Italian-based, non-English speaking creator, displaced California’s own Charli Damelio as the #1 TikToker. Quite revealing.

But the lower the barriers to entry, the higher the competition. The size of the arena has grown fast, from 50M creators in 2020 to 200M last year to more than 300M in 2022. With so many creators, the dominance of the algorithmic feed that separates the average from the best is almost inescapable, and with it comes a world with no floor and no ceiling, where the winners take most.

The Fat (Kangaroo's) Tail.

But that’s not all. Not only does the creator economy have a high Gini coefficient, it also has huge mobility. So while it’s true that only 3% of creators are racking 90% of the views on YouTube, the creators making up that successful 3% of YouTubers change all the time. Creators are constantly moving up AND down the tail. Just look at YouTube search results for top creators like David Dobrick, PewDiePie, Emma Chamberlain, and even Charli D’Amelio. They’re all down 60-90% from their ATH.

The tail is fat, but it moves a lot - kind of like a kangaroo. And that’s due to 3 main reasons:

1. New creators: 25% of Gen-Zers and 30% of 8-12 year olds want to become creators. This trend isn’t going away. The creator world is a red ocean with constant new up-and-coming ambitious talents eating established creators’ lunch. It’s gotten so bad that creators are afraid to take a break, worried about being forgotten by their fans (and the algorithm).

2. New trends: A rising trend will lift a few creators to the top. Now that everything is trending all at once, most creators are rising and falling with trends. A video game, a vibe shift, a new content style… consumers are less and less faithful, consuming content on TikTok like fashion on Shein. Creators are playing a (literal) platform game where they must jump from trend to trend to stay relevant.

3. New platforms: Per TikTok exec Alex Zhu, “launching a new platform is like launching a new country: You need to attract people to come to your new land.” New land, new opportunities, new winners. And new formats. Ask The Kardashians how they feel about the shift to short-form videos and an algorithmic feed, and you’ll understand how new platforms could be more threatening to successful creators than new creators or new trends.

The Long Tail doesn’t (yet) exist.

What does it mean? Simply that the Long Tail does not exist economically and that it could indeed end up being nothing more than a theory. When faced with a huge variety of choices, people tend to gravitate more and more toward what they know best. The internet enabled any niche to become a short-term empire with a few creators as temporary princes. That’s why the 1000 True Fans thesis (or inequality, for that matter) cannot be understood as a static concept but only as a dynamic one. In a high-mobility economy like the creator one, the overwhelming majority of creators will ONLY reach 1000 True Fans on their way up to a million or on their way back down to zero. Very few will cruise along with their 1000 True Fans.

The implications are far-reaching for the Creator Economy in general and companies building for creators in particular. Indeed, the Creator Economy has been copiously referred to as the fastest-growing SMB segment, and lots of founders have been trying to apply the SMB/SaaS playbook to it: 1) Target an SMB segment (long tail), 2) follow your fastest-growing customers & grow pricing/product with them and 3) expand to enterprise-sized customers (fat tail).

Targeting the long tail of creators first would mean facing one of these two problems:

1. Scale: When they find content-platform fit, creators scale incredibly fast. They go from SMBs to Enterprise in months—not years—and their needs completely change. This makes it very tricky to steadily grow product/pricing with them.

2. Churn: To stick to the long tail would mean self-selecting for struggling creators whose churn is consequently very high. Then you have to add in their high price sensitivity, making it almost impossible to move up-market.

As a result, the Creator Economy is fat-tail dominated and far more similar to the music industry than the SMB-SaaS market. SMBs don’t scale; artists & creators do. Interestingly, the Music Industry is a decade ahead of the Creator Economy: in the late ‘90s, Napster (and then Spotify) unbundled music from CD/radio, and in the late ‘00s, YouTube unbundled video from TV.

If the music industry is similar to the creator economy, with a decade’s head start, what can we learn from it?

The Music Industry analogy.

Transformed by the internet tsunami, the Music Industry’s revenue halved in less than a decade. Meanwhile, the volume of music published yearly has increased 20x, from one million songs per year in 2000 to over 20 million in 2020. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek estimated that this number would reach 137M in 2025. The Internet has hugely increased competition between artists.

Music output increased dramatically, but what about the size of the tail? On Spotify last year, 1.2% of artists earned 90% of royalties, and over the past 30 years, the share of concert revenue from the top 1% of performers has risen from 26% in 1982 to 60% in 2019. As technology enables artists to increasingly reach a larger and larger audience, a few winners take most. So much so that we’ve witnessed the 1st artists going public with BTS label HYBE IPOing and reaching a 12B market cap last year!

Historically, this superstar-dominated market gave birth to major labels like Universal Music Group, which concentrated the industry and infamously became one of its strongest gatekeepers. With the advent of the internet and the mp3, we have been predicting the death of major labels for almost twenty years.

But did the internet really change the equation?

Why Majors Labels kept thriving.

With music production costs and distribution complexity plummeting, one could think that the major labels would vanish. If anyone can become an artist and find an audience online, why do you need gatekeepers anymore? Well, you don’t. Major labels turned into scale machines. Artists don’t need to ask permission to start their careers, but they still need help scaling them, especially when competition for artists increases 20x in 20 years. And because every artist's dream is to become a superstar, major labels kept thriving.

In addition to being a scaling machine, the majors are also banks that absorb and spread risk over several artists. In fact, of the ~700 artists major labels will sign each year, 9 out of 10 won’t become superstars nor recoup their advances. High risk, high reward.

Let’s take Universal Music Group (UMG) as an example (source):

• 9 of the top 10 songs on Spotify and 14 of the top 20 are UMG artists.

• 60% of the top 50 streaming artists on Spotify are UMG artists.

• UMG has almost a 40% share of the streaming market overall.

• UMG margins went from 13% in 2016 to 18% in 2021.

• UMG is worth $35B. Some analysts predict it could reach $100B.

Even Taylor Swift, one of the world's most popular and business-savvy artists, signed a multi-album contract with UMG in 2020! And I could draw the same picture with LiveNation, with its $20B valuation, on the concert side of the industry, but I’ll stop here. The music business is fat-tail dominated, and its winners are concentrated there. Barring a market earthquake, the creator economy is headed this way.

If so, what could a UMG look like in the Creator Economy?

Future Creator Economy winners.

UMG results from the Music Industry’s concentration over nearly a century. The Creator Economy isn’t even a decade old yet and is still quite decentralized. Nevertheless, we’ve already seen some companies emerge as potential category leaders who could ultimately consolidate into a global winner.

They’re spread across 5 categories:

1. Detect & Nurture: This is historically the role of a manager. They detect top talent and partner with them in exchange for a commission on deals they land. Legacy talent management companies like CAA, WMD, and UTA have all opened new practices focused on creators. The most interesting new entrant is MrBeast’s management company, Night Media, which is constantly signing the most promising creators and increasingly acting as a business co-founder for creators. Considering that music labels are spending more than $4B annually on A&R, it’s fair to say that we’ve only scratched the surface of this category in the creator world.

2. Produce: Creators are their own production company, so this is the most decentralized part of the puzzle. Nonetheless, content optimization at scale is increasingly tricky for creators; hence some management companies like Night Media are launching production companies. There’s a huge opportunity for efficient organizations who deeply understand the new formats & trends to build or consolidate internet-native data-driven ‘Own & Operated’ media properties that scale internationally. Jellysmack (disclaimer: I work there) started this way, and Moonbug showed the way with Kids' content; many will soon follow.

3. Finance: Beyond becoming a producer, it is notoriously hard to finance creators. MCNs, Content Houses—many have already tried their hand at it. The most promising and scalable financing option for video creators today is catalog licensing. Companies like Spotter and Jellysmack offer upfront money on the ad revenues a YouTuber’s back catalog will generate for the next 5 years. Both companies have announced raising hundreds of millions in capital to fund creators.

4. Distribute & Promote: In the age of Recommendation Media, platforms amount to 90% of a creator’s top-of-funnel. This gave rise to the tech-enabled publisher model, where companies like Jellysmack are abstracting away the complexity of going multi-platform for creators (formats, trends, algorithms, ads, platform relationships, etc). Tech & data can also be leveraged to help creators grow internationally through AI-powered dubbing & collabs with local creators.

5. Expand: Attention fuels the Creator Lifecycle and enables creators to transform their audience into empires. When MrBeast launches a country-wide burger chain, Popchew enables any creators to do the same. The same is happening to Merch with Fourthwall, DTC brands with Pietra, Communities with Nas, etc. The massive commoditization of the creator business infrastructure is moving OpEx to CapEx for creator organizations and enables them to scale on demand. And with Night Media just announcing a $100M fund with TCG to go in this direction, this is a category with bright days ahead of it.

What do these 5 categories have in common? They’re RevShare-based and fat-tail first: Instead of riding up the long tail with SaaS, they’re sliding down the fat tail with RevShare. They look suspiciously close to the structure of a music label, and something tells me that a similar market consolidation will happen over the course of this decade, as already seems to be the case in the video game industry.

This future Creator Economy giant could seize the lion’s share of a massive market. UMG is a $30B non-tech company in a music streaming market that generated $25B in revenue in 2021. How big is the opportunity for a tech-enabled company in a market where YouTube alone paid creators more than $15B that same year? Quite simply, gigantic.

Will we ever get a creator middle-class?

That's not to say that the creator middle class shouldn’t or can’t ever exist. There are lots of interesting arguments in favor of its development. But in a world with (1) no barriers to entry, (2) no marginal cost of reproduction, (3) non-substitutability where (4) the winners take most, but (5) have (almost) no defensibility, I don’t see the middle-class growing substantially anytime soon. Hence my prediction of a Music Industry like market consolidation in the next 10 years. If the internet is to the 21st century what America was to the 19th century, we might still be in the Gold Rush, and there could still be a long way to go before arriving in the Post-war era.

And remember, almost everything happens at the platform level, which makes it very difficult to implement national policies to mitigate income inequality. As long as Meta, YouTube & TikTok keep fighting the most intense attention war in the history of mankind with god-like algorithmic weapons, there is little hope for the emergence of a vibrant middle class in the Creator Economy.

We are more likely in a barbell situation, with many small creators making $1-2k per month and a few big creators making millions. That said, it’s still the best time to be a content creator in history, and that’s enough for me to celebrate!

🙏

I just published this article on Twitter here, it would mean the world if you could share or just like the post!

Big thanks to Matteo, Zawwar, Paul, Nuseir, Rémi, Quentin, Ben, Ariel, Michael, Chas, Rob, Jim, Tim, Alexa, Niel, Brendan for the feedback & convos—means a lot.

For creators, the great leap forward is bound to happen in the next 5 years.

Why? Because everyone is realizing that the opportunity of the creator economy is much broader and deeper than originally anticipated. Creators aren't simply disrupting the media world, they're turning entire industries upside down. Because they are scalable friends, educators & retailers, they can take over the markets of loneliness, education & CPG. The commoditization of business infrastructure means any creator can now transform their audience into a scalable empire. Suddenly, what looked like a multi-billion-dollar opportunity is becoming a multi-trillion-dollar one.

So what financing options exist today for creators? Which are the most promising and who’s out there pioneering new models? Because I recently joined JellySmack to build a YCombinator-like accelerator for early-stage creators, I’ve spent the past few weeks researching, having calls with creators, founders & investors to understand the different options. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Debt

2. Equity

3. Revenue-based Financing (RBF)

4. Income Share Agreement (ISA)

5. Shared Earning Agreement (SEAL)

6. Convertible Income Share Agreement (CISA)

7. Continuous Agreement for Future Equity (CAFE)

8. Donation-based crowdfunding (DBC)

9. Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

1. Debt

Debt is the most common instrument used by creators. Most of the stories I've heard from creators revolve around leveraging credit card debt to meet their short-term cash needs (cost of living, equipment, etc.). The reason for this is very simple: Credit card debt is the only external source of finance to which a creator has easy access. Loans have existed for a long time but banks separate those into two categories: Consumer & business. Creators are neither, so they're underserved. Hence, credit card debt.

The upside is that this form of financing is easy to access. But the downsides are quite large. Debt usually means compounding interest: the amount you owe will grow as the interest compounds and your payments will get larger over time. That's why debt is generally suitable for very low-risk profiles, which does not correspond at all to the reality of creators.

Debt is only interesting for very specific needs and low-risk situations. Need to buy a new camera lens in a hurry, knowing that some money is coming in soon? Debt might be the best option. The only other time where debt would make sense is for a late-stage creator with *very* predictable revenues, which is what Encore is intending to do. But other than that, there are unfortunately no traditional investors who have the knowledge and the experience to underwrite those types of businesses.

2. Equity

Equity is a different beast. A creator could sell a % stake of their business for a fixed amount of cash. The cost of capital is zero, but the investor would become more involved in the business. Whereas debt is very transactional, equity financing is more like a wedding or a face tattoo: very hard to get rid of. Just like a startup, creators have to be very careful about who they partner with, for better or for worse! Because equity fundraising is the go-to solution for startups, the financial tools & education to make it happen are widely available. But there are two main reasons why equity investment hasn’t happened in the creator world.

First, because creators don’t have exit scenarios that can make their investors rich. For a startup investment, the best scenario is a multi-billion dollar IPO. For a creator investment, the best scenario is a steady stream of positive cash-flows. Hence startups get tech-like 10-20x valuation multiples and creators only get media-like 2-3x ones.

Second, because creators are (scalable) individuals, not (scalable) organizations. Does equity fundraising mean that investors get a share in the holding company of a creator for the rest of their life? Can a creator declare their creative company bankrupt and then start another one? On what terms? Are all the future businesses of a creator integrated within the holding company (e.g. merch, courses, etc.)? All these unanswered questions mean that equity fundraising is not yet a real option for the vast majority of creators and thus for the industry in general.

In what cases could it still make sense? In my opinion, for the most ambitious creators who are actually starting media companies, having the ambition from day one to scale beyond themselves. Like Alex Lieberman with Morning Brew or Dave Portnoy with Barstool Sports, the next CNN or ESPN will probably be creator-led and could definitely be VC-backed. The commoditization of business infrastructure alongside the creator lifecycle and the entrepreneurialization of creators makes it likely that a new class of audience-first and creator-led empires will emerge.

3. Revenue Based Financing (RBF)

Revenue-based financing means a creator would be “selling” a percentage of their future revenue for a cash advance today. RBF terms are strongly dependent on the creator’s risk profile. The more established the creator is, the more predictable the revenues are and therefore the more advantageous the terms.

When revenues are predictable, terms are very advantageous for 3 reasons. First, it’s a non-dilutive funding option, so creators keep their cap-table clean. Second, it’s flexible. The monthly payments are a function of monthly revenue, contrary to debt where creators have to reimburse a fixed amount each month, no matter what happens with their revenue. Third, it’s light. Creators would typically pay a percentage of their topline revenue (generally 2-8%) over a period of 3-5 years.

But when the revenues aren’t easily predictable, things can get tricky. For example, in the music business—where labels often make bets on artists with high potential but very light track records—cash advances too often have uncapped, predatory terms. Artists often effectively give up all of their album ownership forever because 99% of them won’t recoup the costs of their predatory advance.

We need to set healthier standards for early-stage creators with a higher risk profile. It’s a problem that 3 amazing companies are trying to solve: Creative Juice, Stir & Karat. They’re aiming at an RBF underwriting model by building the financial service platform for creators. The pitch is simple: If they can bank the creators, they’ll have access to first-party revenue data that they can combine with third-party engagement data to build a proprietary and defensible underwriting model. The 3 companies have different entry strategies but all end up in the same place. While Creative Juice promises money (investments) in exchange for a bank account, Karat promises status (limited-access metal card), and Stir promises power (automation features). This competition will be one of the most fascinating and defining aspects of the entire creative economy.

One last adjacent RBF model that I find fascinating is Sam Lessin’s Creator Fund. They invest anywhere from $100k to $5M in return for a percentage (<10%) of a creator’s income & the IP they generate over 30 years. Because risk is a function of the upside, they’re essentially using RBF models to replicate equity-like upside. They’re pioneering a new hybrid model that I can’t wait to learn from.

These new options are still in their infancy and more tinkering is needed to make sense out of early-stage revenue-based financing options. As of now, in order to raise RBF, a creator would normally be generating recurring predictable revenues. In essence, this model currently fits:

• Newsletter creators turning their paid subscriptions into upfront capital with Pipe (e.g. Pompliano)

• Creators with large Patreon followings turning recurring donations into cash advances with Patreon Capital.

• YouTubers turning their evergreen videos revenues with predictable future performance into cash advances with Spotter or even selling their channel altogether with Electrify.

• Video creators distributing & monetizing their content across multiple platforms with JellySmack and receiving upfront cash advances + minimum guarantees.

• Creators instantly turning their future platform short-term ad revenues into cash advances with CreatorCash or Flowbo.

• Music artists turning the streaming revenues of their existing song catalog into cash advances with Indify, Stem, TuneCore, TheMusicFund, and RoyaltyExchange.

4. Income Share Agreement (ISA)

Instead of borrowing money at a certain interest rate as they would with debt, with an ISA a creator agrees to pay back a percentage of their future personal income for a limited period of time (~5-10 years) and with a ceiling (~2-5x). This financing model comes mainly from education, used as an alternative to student loans, but it could very well be applied to creators. In this scenario, a creator wouldn’t create a company and would pay back the investment from their future income at the individual level, not at the company level. Here's how it works in detail.

If it fails, the creator walks away debt-free; if it succeeds, the investor shares a better upside than with debt. With ISAs, the risk is mainly on the investor's side. Unlike equity, an investor can only recoup their ISA investment up to a limit, which means they should be able to provide enough value that makes a creator successful, so as to systematically increase their chances of having made a good investment. That's why today ISAs are provided by organizations like coding boot camps that know they can systematically turn smart kids into bankable assets. This doesn't (yet) exist in the world of creators.

This option would theoretically be best suited for up-and-coming creators who'd need ~$50k to focus 100% on their content for about a year and see if they can make it as a full-time creator. But as the risk profile needs to be quite low on the investor side, I think that ISAs will and should be mainly used to train employees of the creator economy (video editors, content strategists, etc.) Will we see a Lambda School for video editors anytime soon? I believe so.

5. Shared Earning Agreement (SEAL)

This is essentially a combination of the equity option and the ISA but at the company level. Just like an ISA, the SEAL includes an upfront investment that is paid back from the creator’s company’s future earnings. And just like equity fundraising, the investor has the right to convert future earnings into equity if the creator later decides to raise an equity round with external investors.

This financing option is what I would describe as high-resolution. It has the potential to evolve and grow alongside the creator's ambition. It can start as a mid-level risk / reward scheme with ISA and then evolve into a high-risk / reward one when it converts into equity. After all, a creator's ambition can be dynamic, not static, for example with a successful YouTube channel that could turn into an empire, but doesn't necessarily have to. Funding options should allow this dynamism to be reflected in aligned incentives along the way, and that's what a SEAL allows for.

That’s why it could match every early-stage creator. In my opinion, this scheme could become one of the standards for investing in creators. Not only because of its dynamism but also because raising a SEAL by definition involves the creation of a legal entity, which is a necessary step for creators. The creator economy needs a standard, open-source financial instrument, and my bet is that it'll be a fork of the SEAL, which is what Jonathan Hills (who wrote an amazing article about the topic) is pioneering with his Creator Fellowship.

6. Convertible Income Share Agreement (CISA)

Invented and pioneered by Chisos, the CISA model is a combination of an ISA at the individual level and a convertible note at the company level. It’s a combination of revenue-based financing, a bank loan with a personal guarantee, and a convertible note. This model allows investors to be comfortable funding a company or an entrepreneur at an early stage, which could well be applied to creators.

It offers the same high-resolution advantages as the SEAL with the ISA acting as a backstop for the equity investment, which brings more guarantees for the investors. Perhaps it’s most applicable for career changes, when one goes from a high-income job to becoming a creator?

7. Continuous Agreement for Future Equity (CAFE)

A CAFE allows a company to continuously fundraise from its community and stakeholders in order to give them access to the financial upside early on! Fairmint, which invented the instrument, is taking away all the legal & technical complexity to make it as simple as possible for any creator to fundraise from their community. One of the main differences with equity fundraising is that it offers a fixed dilution, no matter how much capital the company ends up raising. This model offers many other advantages (liquidity, governance, automation, crypto-compatibility) and is truly pushing the boundaries of not only fundraising, but capitalism in general.

This model is quite new, and even if I'd trust the Fairmint team with my life (they're THAT reliable), I'd understand if most creators wouldn't take the risk of being among the first to try it out. Also, raising with a CAFE means that you'll have a public valuation, available for anyone to see on your website (like Fairmint's).

This is best suited for later-stage creators with super-engaged communities that are financially educated, to make sure they understand the risk profile. So this would be amazing for creators like Packy McCormick from ‘Not Boring’ or Mario Gabriele from ‘The Generalist’, for example.

8. Donation-based crowdfunding (DBC)

Kickstarter, or non-equity crowdfunding, is arguably the OG of the Creator Economy. It's fair to say that half of the creator economy today is just an unbundling of Kickstarter. Pre-selling future digital & physical products to your fans has now been massively replaced with higher-resolution, higher-LTV options (Spri.ng, Patreon, tips, etc.). But for a long time, it was one of the only ways creators could finance their short-term needs and projects.

This is the least binding financing option, but crowdfunding still comes with a major downside: losing focus. Crafting, launching, and operating a successful crowdfunding campaign requires a lot of energy & time, and this comes at the expense of shipping more content. Especially given that a crowdfunding campaign won't yield life-changing returns (average successful project: ~$6k), the opportunity cost for creators could often exceed the reward.

Kickstarter would probably still make sense for super early-stage creators who need a few grand to buy their first video gear. And it can definitely be a better option than credit card debt.

9. Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

DeFi is doing to finance what the mp3 did to music: destroying the gatekeepers. It is therefore only natural that each of the options listed above should gradually be replaced, one by one, by a crypto-native alternative. Equity fundraising is being challenged by Social Tokens like Roll, Rally or BitClout, debt by decentralized lending platforms like MakerDAO, ISA by Tokenized ISAs, Kickstarter by NFTs, etc. This is only the beginning, as more and more people over the world are starting to own crypto and understand its fundamentals. DeFi probably will slowly but surely rebuild most of the financial infrastructure stack over the next few decades and allow creators all over the world to access capital for growth.

In the meantime, the space is still nascent and most of the options available today are still at the experimentation level, which is why you’ll see things like the Social Token platform Roll reporting a security breach resulting in a $6M loss.

For me, going full-crypto as a creator only makes sense for specific use-cases, where the creator and their community are crypto-educated and big crypto-believers/activists. For 99% of the creators today, it still makes sense to use one of the legacy options for fundraising and wait until crypto takes over the ownership economy.

Conclusion

Pioneering the financial instruments to support creators’ needs is a central concern of the industry. This could unlock a flywheel that could grow the creator economy 100x, fueling the next generation of creators with top talent & investors.

The first battle in the creator funding war appears to be Revenue-based Financing with everyone rushing to bank the creators and pioneer the underwriting model. In parallel, others are exploring tailored financing options that could cater to an Indie Hacker as well to a creator. And in another world, hordes of barbarians are fleeing legacy legal & financial institutions to invent an entirely new crypto-powered financial world.

I don’t know who’s going to win, but the creators are arguably the first native citizens of the internet, so whatever happens to them will probably happen to the rest of the world later on.

Watch this space, understand the future! 💪

There are no limits to what creators can achieve with an audience. Audiences are the wind of the Internet Ocean. Leverage them, and you can sail anywhere. Some have leveraged their audiences to build a 25B+ views media empire, some to build a billion-dollar DTC business, and some to launch a country-wide burger chain. These days, we're even talking about creators getting ready for an IPO!

How are successful creators transforming audiences into empires? To better understand the process, here’s the framework I use: The Creator Lifecycle.

As a creator, your most valuable asset is your relationship with your audience. It’s the raw material you transform into energy that pushes you forward. Since this relationship evolves and diversifies over the years, I divided the Creator Lifecycle into four steps: Attention, Trust, Commerce & Ownership. Each step has its own goals, ways to monetize, metrics & tools.

As the CEO of your company, your job isn’t to become the expert at everything. Your job is to learn enough about each step so you can set up the right processes, hire the right people & use the right tools. Your job is to scale yourself, freeing up as much time as possible so you can move to the next level.

I hope this framework helps you to think about this strategically!

1. Attention

Goal:

Like any relationship, that between creator and audience starts with attention: A funny thumbnail on the YouTube recommendation sidebar, a tweet that went viral, an algorithmic recommendation on the TikTok feed. Attention can come from anywhere. For creators, it often comes from media networks’ proprietary distribution. Just like you'd meet someone at a friend's party, media networks are the world's largest party throwers. As a creator, your top-of-funnel goal is to create great content to generate attention and start as many relationships as possible through these media networks. This reach isn't free, though, it comes at a great cost: Control. What media networks give you in free reach, they take away in the lack of connection to your audience. You are essentially renting your audience in exchange for free reach. This is not inherently bad, but it is a trade-off that you have to be aware of. If you're only meeting new people at a friend's parties, your social life is at the mercy of them not inviting you anymore! This doesn't mean you should stop going to parties; it just means that you also need to host your own at some point.

Monetization:

At the attention level, you monetize through ads, whether by interrupting your content (pre/mid-roll ads, banners, etc.) or by embedding ads (brand deals, endorsements, sponsored content). You typically earn your first bucks by renting your audience's attention to other brands and getting paid for it.

Metrics:

There are two types of metrics you need to track at the attention level: Content metrics and Business metrics. On the content side, you'll track metrics like the number of pieces published per week, views, average watch time, CTR, likes, etc., to track and optimize your content's growth & engagement. Are you publishing enough content? Is your audience engaging with it? Is your audience growing? Your North Star metric could change depending on which platform is central to your content, but the goal will be the same: Growth. On the other hand, business metrics are useful to track ads, business development performance, and future cash-flow. How much money are you making with ads? How many brands are you talking to right now? How much are they paying? What deals have you signed for the next quarter? These metrics tightly correlate with your content performance—the bigger & more engaged the audience, the bigger the deals. But that will also be very closely connected to your performance as a sales organization, your ability to continuously track, negotiate, & close the best deals.

Example:

Let's take Mr. Beast. In the first few years, he dedicated 90% of his focus to nurturing YouTube with amazing content until he got rewarded with massive awareness. He searched for his content/platform fit, which he found in 2017 with his "Counting to 100,000" video. From then on, the number of people who started casually watching his videos grew exponentially, as did his ads & brand deals revenue.

Tools:

• Content Calendar & Project Management on Notion

• Sales CRM on Airtable

• Design templates on Canva

• YouTube analytics on TubeBuddy and VidIQ

• Record, edit & master audio/videos with Descript

• 130+ more tools for creators here

2. Trust

Goal:

Once the relationship starts to deepen, it moves from attention to trust. Just like a friendship IRL, trust can happen in many different ways. Something you do, something you say, or just repeated interactions. To keep the metaphor going, after talking to a person several times at a friend's house, you start to trust him or her. This might be the time to start owning the relationship by exchanging phone numbers. At the trust level, your goal is to move your audience from other people’s media networks to your own digital house, throwing your own parties. This means collecting emails & phone numbers, creating membership-based private communities, segmenting your audience in databases, etc. At the individual level, this is intuitive. You have your contact list and you try to manage it as best as possible. As a creator, you are an individual that scales. So your contact list has to scale as well, becoming a CRM.

Monetization:

At this stage, part of your audience trusts you and feels like they belong to something greater than themselves. You're essentially monetizing that sense of belonging, selling nothing other than access to yourself. Monetizing this access can be scalable (tips, recurring donations, private-community memberships) or non-scalable (1-1 cameo-style video, AMA).

Metrics:

To strategically think about this step, you need to track 1) activation and 2) retention. Activating is about getting permission to contact them directly, through email or text, or on a platform you own (private community, etc.). Are you collecting more emails week by week? How can you create excuses to collect more? Tracking the growth of this base and putting systems in place to grow it are crucial. On the other hand, retention is about tracking who in your audience is regularly thinking about you. Are they opening most of your emails and texts? Are they engaged in the private community you've created? Is your membership and tipping revenue growing?

Examples:

Out of the hundreds of millions of people who've listened to one of his podcast episodes or read one of his books or blog posts, Tim Ferris gathered 1.5M emails. Over the years, he gradually structured email collection as the cornerstone of the relationship with his most engaged audience members and the pivot to cross-promoting new products.

Tools:

• Gather live tips with StreamLabs

• Accept donations with Patreon

• Redirect your top fans from your social media bio with Flooz

• Create your private community with Circle

• Gather and send texts to your top fans with Community

• Gather and send emails to your trusted audience with ConvertKit

• Host your website with OnUniverse

• Manage your members with Pico

• 130+ more tools for creators here

3. Commerce

Goal:

Once your audience trusts you, they can probably buy something from you. Thus begins one of the most exciting parts of the creator lifecycle: Commerce. I'm not talking about your audience buying something they discover through you; I’m talking about your audience buying your products. Why work so hard to build engaged audiences from scratch but then still promote other brands’ products or services instead of your own? Because commerce is hard - or, I should say, it *used* to be hard. Think about the product creators have historically sold the most, merchandising. Just five years ago it was still very tricky to sell great merch as an indie creator. You usually needed to "have a merch guy" that not only understood your design needs but also could handle the production process with providers and, more importantly, master the e-commerce intricacies! Fast forward to 2021: you can use Spri.ng and all of that complexity melts away for you. You can essentially have a Merch-team as a Service. What has happened with merchandise will happen to all the product classes you can think of: Games, Classes, Cloud-kitchen restaurants, DTC brands, etc. An incredible number of founders are building platforms to empower creators with tools to own the funnel’s commerce. They're not agencies; they’re full-stack Commerce-teams-as-a-service. They don't treat you like an artist, they treat you like a CEO, and they want to help you build your commerce empire.

Monetization:

This one is easy. Sell something to an audience that trusts you, make a profit. Digital products can have incredible margins because they have zero marginal reproduction costs (classes, games, exclusive or premium content series, etc.). Physical products have lower margins, but as these new platforms remove more and more complexity, the opportunity cost lowers. As the CEO of your company, your job is to gradually stack several layers of commerce revenue lines and make sure you're making a profit out of them.

Metrics:

To track the health of your commerce business(es), you'll have to understand & track a few e-commerce metrics like CAC, LTV & unit economics. They are pretty basic; it essentially boils down to 3 main questions: 1) How much does it cost you to get a new customer? (This shouldn't be much because you have the privilege of not needing external marketing, you already have an audience that trusts you) 2) How much does a customer spend on average? and 3) Do they come back to buy more? Your goal is not to become an e-commerce expert but to understand the world well enough to surround yourself with the right people and the right tools.

Examples:

One of the most successful moves from trust to commerce has been Kylie Jenner’s launch of the ‘Kylie Cosmetics’ DTC brand. Her entire first batch of LipKits sold out just one minute after sharing it with her 140M Instagram followers. More recently, MrBeast launched his cloud-kitchen burger chain in more than 300 locations overnight.

Tools:

• Sell merchandising with Spri.ng

• Launch your DTC brand with Genflow

• Launch your class with Teachable

• Sell your event with RunTheWorld

• Launch your restaurant brand with Popchew (soon)

• Create your own game universe with Manticore

• Sell digital downloads with Gumroad

• 130+ more tools for creators here

4. Ownership

Goal:

Once your audience has gone through the attention, trust & commerce steps, the final one is ownership. The goal here is to share the financial upside with your most engaged (and usually earliest) audience. What does it mean? Well, you know how when you're starting a business, your rich uncle might lend you some money to kickstart it? That's what family does; they put skin in the game. And at this point, for some part of your audience, you're family as well, and they want to chip in. It’s the evolution of Kickstarter-style crowdfunding. Your audience isn't just donating or pre-ordering things so you can make your project a reality. They invest in you as the ultimate embodiment of their belief in your future success. They love you so much they're ready to risk money just to prove they were right before anyone else, potentially becoming richer in the meantime. Just like your uncle.

Monetization:

Either your audience invests in your business or they invest in your content. Investing in your business means they'll get a share of your upside as a whole (e.g. investing in your holding company), while investing in your content means they'll share the upside of a specific piece of content (e.g. investing in one of your albums, songs, artworks, etc.).

Metrics:

The metrics attached to the financial performance of you as an asset are quite simple. How much are you worth? Or in other terms, what is your valuation? Again, no need to become a financial expert, but understanding the basics of ownership structure will help you to think critically and avoid bad deals. For decades artists (especially musical artists) have been dragged into bad deals with toxic people; they could have avoided 80% of those bad deals if they had understood the fundamentals of their ownership structure. Learn this initially for your fans, but ultimately for yourself.

Examples:

Grammy-award artist ‘Portugal. The Man’ issued their own PTM Coin, powered by Rally, to offer access and benefits to fans who buy or earn the coins. 3LAU has launched digitally-collectible songs on the Ethereum blockchain. Jack Palmer has used crypto to raise funds to produce a new essay in exchange for ownership of the work. And creators are now looking at Fairmint to let their fans seamlessly invest in them as well. One could even argue that Elon Musk is following the same pattern with Tesla. Die-hard Elon Musk fans are buying and holding $TSLA stock as fans would buy & hold a Creator Coin.

Tools:

• Let your fans invest in your company with Fairmint

• Mint your own Creator Coin with Rally or Roll

• Tokenize your essays with Mirror

• Tokenize digital art with Zora

• Let your fans invest in your content pieces with Foundation

• 130+ more tools for creators here

Conclusion

I know, this is a lot! Most of you already have enough work to do at the attention level, attempting to reach content/platform fit with great content. So how are you supposed to do all of these other things? But that’s exactly my point - you’re not supposed to. A startup CEO isn’t the best developer or the best marketer or the best product person. Their job is to surround themselves with the best. As the CEO of your own media company, your job is to understand enough of each function to surround yourself with the best people and set up the right tools & the most effective processes. This is why you need to learn enough about each function (goals, metrics, tools) to delegate it successfully & healthily.

In the next articles, I’ll go more deeply into each of the steps and share frameworks, tools & use-cases of creators having successfully mastered them! If you have set up similar processes as creators, please do reach out :) And feel free to subscribe to my newsletter to get the latest articles!

The internet is magic and creators are its purest expression. Where most people see a cultural oddity, I see an entire generation bypassing traditional gatekeepers for the first time in history. It’s a phenomenon that has fascinated me for more than a decade and I wanted to finally sit down and write out my thoughts about it.

The first step was to define what a creator *really* is. In a previous article, I argued that a creator isn't someone who creates but an individual who scales without permission. They are to the individual what startups are to the organization. They are the future of scalable entrepreneurship. As a result, a new economy is growing up around - and through - them: The Creator Economy.

I’ve curated a list of 150+ companies that are focused on one thing: Arming The Creators! You'll find below 1) my map of these companies, with some commentary and a favorite for each category, 2) the list of companies I didn't include and why, 3) the Airtable list with additional data (amount raised, lead investors, location, CEO's contact info, etc.) and 4) the next step, which will consist in gathering all the resources about creators at ArmTheCreators.com, a Notion-based website.

In the meantime, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter and don't hesitate to ping me, my DMs are open!

The Creator Lifecycle

Mapping means categories. I've decided to categorize companies according to their function in the creator lifecycle. Some companies address more than one step of the creator lifecycle, so I included them where I thought it made the most sense.

1. Create Content

These companies are building stand-alone tools to help creators create more and better content. They’re not tied to any aggregator (TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) and are solely focused on serving creators and their specific needs. For existing content formats, they are very often unbundling enterprise-focused all-in-one desktop suites like Adobe Creative Suite to nail just a few use-cases for a fraction of the price. For new content formats (livestream, highlights, games) they create completely new tools that fit the new usages that creators are exploring.

• Photo: Mojo, PhotoRoom, Lightricks, VSCO, Later, Unfold, Instasize

• Video: Aria, Kapwing, Triller, Trash, Vochi, Snippet

• Audio: BeatStars, Landr, Splice, eMastered, SoundTrap, Castbox, SquadCast, Descript, Artlist

• Livestream: Restream, StreamElements, StreamLabs, Xsplit, StageTen

• Highlights: Lowkey, Athenascope, Donut, Replai

• Games: Roblox, Manticore, Hiber, Unity, Epic Games

👏 Special Mention: Aria is a mobile-first vocal studio that lets you transform any vocal sound clip into an amazing animated subtitled video. Think Mojo, but for audio. The product is superior to anything else on the market and the team is moving very fast. I’d follow them very closely.

2. Grow (rent) your audience

Once creators have started creating content, they need to find their audience, and this usually happens on media networks. Because media networks are obsessed with the consumer, not the creator, I initially didn’t want to include them here since my intention was to list companies building tools for creators, not roads toward them. But as these aggregators remain the main growth driver for creators, it's impossible not to include them. You probably know all of them, they benefit from incredibly strong network effects and their valuations show it. In some ways they are the new gatekeepers; but they’re still way more democratic than all of their gatekeeping predecessors. But that's another story :)

• Media networks: Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Caffeine, Medium, YouTube, Twitter, Periscope, Audius, SoundCloud, Udemy, Twitch,

3. Own your audience

Once a creator has built an audience on one - or ideally several - media networks, the next step is to export that audience off those platforms. As long as their audience is on the media networks, they’re only renting it, not owning it. There’s a whole class of startups whose main purpose is to help creators convert media network followers into owned community members. It usually means that they’ll focus on creating new contextualized spaces where the audience can interact with the creators, like community platforms, interactive live-streaming experiences, an email-based newsletter, etc.

• Website builders: OnUniverse, Carrd

• Community: MightyNetwork, Zebra, Community, DSM, Fourthwall, Notify.me, Circle, Discipline Media, Oooh.tv, Laylo, Geneva Chat, Bunches, Commsor, Discord, Vibely, Wavium

• Livestream: Reach Live, Crowdcast, Mandolin, Stream Club, Maestro

• Email: ConvertKit, Substack, Revue, Ghost, Letterdrop

• Crypto: Zora, Roll, Rally, Cent, OnScout, Foundation

👏 Special mention: Circle is building an all-in-one community platform for creators. They’re obsessed with creators when they could have already turned to focus on B2B and I think that this discipline will help them win over the medium term. And the product really is a dream come true. If I ever host a Creator Economy community, I’ll definitely host it there.

4. Monetize your audience online

Even if the border is somehow blurry, I decided to separate owning and monetizing an audience. Where the former is mostly about moving the interactions off the media networks, the latter is mostly about extracting direct financial value out of it. And there’s a lot of ways a creator can directly monetize their audience: Sell courses, members-only content, fan interactions (1-1, shoutouts), donations, digital downloads, events, brand deals.

• Memberships: Patreon, Memberful, SpecialProjects, LaunchPass, Glow, Supercast

• Courses: Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, HeightsPlatform, Virtually, SkillShare, Uscreen, Didactic, GamerzClass, Airsubs

• Link in bio: Flooz, Koji, Beacons, LinkTree, Snipfeed

• Fan interactions: Superpeer, OnlyFans, Jemi, Starsona, Fundo, Cameo, Looped, StreamLoots

• Events: MomentHouse, RunTheWorld, Luma

• Donation: BuyMeACoffee, Ko-fi

• Digital Downloads: Gumroad, Ejunkie, Payhip

• Brand deals: HashtagPaid, PopularPlays, Tribe, ThePlug, Popcorn, Loots

👏 Special mention: Flooz is building a mobile-first business-in-a-box to help mid-tail creators easily transform their audiences into customers. It’s like Linktree on steroids. The product is already super-sharp despite being just 2 months old, and the team radiates creator vibes. Check out my Flooz Link and read my tweetstorm on the topic.

5. Monetize your audience offline

If we recently discovered that fans were willing to pay for digital products, we've known for a while that they spend massively on physical products! The physical world used to require high fixed operating costs (design, produce, ship, support) and the number of creators who could afford it was very limited. That time is (almost) over! Platforms like Teespring and Cala are building physical-infra-as-a-service platforms to help any creator move past the operational overhead of the physical world. They can launch product lines and convert the trust they’ve earned into commerce. The 2 major changes are that these platforms 1) aren’t tech-enabled agencies and 2) aren’t starting as marketplaces. They aspire to be creator-first scalable platforms.

• Merchandising: Cala, Teespring, Selz, Printful, BigCartel, Printify, Spreadshirt, Motefe

• Others: Pietra, Popshop, GlobalBelly, Sellfy,

👏 Special mention: GlobalBelly helps creators launch physical & virtual product lines by taking care of everything for them, from product design and tech to operations and delivery. Imagine a pastry chef who has amassed millions of followers with cookie decorating tutorials now being able to launch their own DIY cookie kits, books & e-tutorials -- all powered by GlobalBelly. They're building infra-as-a-service for creators who already have an engaged audience, not a marketplace for anyone to create and sell their products. Read my tweetstorm on the topic!

6. Manage your business

Being a successful creator requires a healthy dose of rebellion. It’s no wonder why Shopify’s mission statement is “Arm The Rebels”. They represent the fastest-growing emerging category of customers which lies between prosumers and SMBs. According to Yuanling Yan, there are 50M creators around the world, of which 2M are able to make a full-time living out of it. Creators are entrepreneurs and they need specific tools to meet their specific needs. I’ve encountered various startups building these tools that empower creators to run their business. Some are focused on specific verticals like project management, CRM or lending; the others are building platforms to enable a specific type of creator to run their whole business all in one place.

• Business-in-a-box: Shopify, Pico, Sounder, Anchor, RedCircle, Strydal, Playbook, SamCart, Kajabi, CreatorOS, Quorum

• FinTech: Karat, ReleasePlan

• Analytics: Stir, Kobalt, VidIQ, TubeBuddy

• Project management: FamePick, CloutJam, MoeAssist

👏 Special mention: Pico is empowering mid-tail new-media creators (think WaitButWhy, Ben Thompson) with horizontal infrastructure to run their businesses (CRM, payments, etc.). I really think they can win the mid-tail creators and grow with them. Then 1) going downstream is easy (free tier stuff) and 2) bundling their modulable product intro frameworks can enable them to tackle new verticals (for example the music business). I’m pretty bullish on their position + vision to become the Shopify for media companies (short-tail) and ultimately for creators (mid/long-tail).

Companies I didn’t include and why

It hasn’t necessarily been easy to define the scope of the Creator Economy, and there were many companies I decided not to include on my map. Here's which ones and the reasons why:

• Adjacent B2B, non-creator-focused tools: Creators are SMBs. They might not be small in terms of reach or revenues, but they’re definitely small by their headcount. There are a lot of B2B tools that creators could be—and often are—using. But as great as these tools can be, I’ve decided to not include those that are primarily targeting businesses. (ClickMeeting, Casted.us, HiveBrite, Hopin, Prox.io, TillyPay, Tribe, PlayPlay)

• EdTech marketplaces: These platforms are changing how school works. They’re incredible at enabling teachers to unbundle themselves from university and go direct-to-student. But in my opinion these teachers have no intention to scale (yet) and are fine with selling their time. (Juni Learning, Outschool, TakeLessons, Lingoda, VIPKID, Chegg)

• Consumer content subscriptions (or New Media companies): These companies are bundling creator content into consumer subscription and sell D2C. They aren’t primarily empowering creators to independently scale themselves. (Knowable, Luminary, LearnMonthly, SimpleHabit, Tingles, FitPlan, Meet Cute, NextUp)

• Tech-enabled merchandising agencies: Selling merch is one of the most efficient ways to make money for creators, especially in times of Covid. But these entities, however good they are, are tech-enabled agencies working with a limited number of clients. (CrowdMade, DFTBA, FanJoy, Killer Merch, Instaco, MerchLabs, Represent.com)

• Indie Hacker products: I love the Indie Hackers movement and I believe they have more in common with creators than most people think. But in these cases, the products they’ve built for creators are often side projects, so I preferred not to include them. (LiveKlass, JoinHologram, Qazy.co, Shinypass, Twine.video, Buttondown)

Download the Airtable

I’ve manually listed more than 150+ companies from the Creator Economy and included a lot of data that I found interesting. You can download it here for free (tips welcome, it's the Creator Economy after all 😇). I hope you find it useful!

ArmTheCreators.com

After having written my definition of a creator so I could logically list the startups arming them, I'm now building ArmTheCreators.com – a Notion-based website to centralize the best resources around all things “Creator Economy”: the best companies, thinkers/writers, podcasts, newsletters, investors, operators, etc.

The goal is obviously for me to structure my exploration around the topic but also to involve like-minded people. Ultimately, I'd love this to be a place where any young wannabe creator goes to find inspiration, education & support. A sort of Indie Hacker for Creators! DM me if you want to talk about it :)

But what really is a creator?

The definition of a creator

The struggle we have to define what a "creator" is reminds me a lot of the struggle we had to define what a "startup" was. Like many new words trying to define a concept of the internet economy, they often lack a shared understanding of the paradigm shift the internet brings.

In the late 90s, the general public settled with "Startup" to define this fuzzy phenomenon where young people locked themselves up in garages with a couple of PCs and came out a few months later with an IPO. People were confused and it was common to hear people say they "had a startup" when they actually were either just start-ing any business or building a web-agency. It took a while until Steve Blank nailed it: “A startup is not a smaller version of a large company, it's a temporary organisation in search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” That definition made it clear for everyone what a startup was, and more importantly what it wasn't.

Startups were a new species and therefore needed their own definition. It enabled anyone to easily understand their DNA and create appropriate institutions to support them (Venture Capital, YCombinator, SaaS, etc.). The same needs to happen with Creators. As we speak—anyone from freelance videographers to WeWork members or handcrafted jewellery makers—are calling themselves creators. They need a new definition, and here’s my take:

A creator isn't someone who creates. A creator is an individual who scales without permission.

The 3 ingredients that make a creator.

Let me expand this definition. In my opinion, creators are at the intersection of 3 things: Individuality, Leverage and Rebellion.

1. Individuality: Creators are less judged on their talent or passion and more on how good they are at being themselves. They are authentic individuals who followed the rabbit-hole of their own obsessions and are now weirdly good at something very specific. From ASMR to miniature cooking (or both), the number of niches (and their combinations) is virtually infinite, so is the potential to discover one's individuality and become the best at it.

2. Leverage: Creators scale themselves through internet-based leverage. Media, Code & Community have zero marginal cost of reproduction which means creators can multiply their efforts without having to involve other humans. Unlike freelancers and knowledge workers, they don't rent out their time. They build assets that earn while they sleep. This is what enables them to decorrelate their inputs from their outputs and ultimately scale themselves.

3. Rebellion: Creators don't need to ask for anyone's permission anymore. The internet enables them to bypass traditional gatekeepers and access the general public directly. Artists get billions of listens without labels, YouTubers build video empires without TV, Podcasters without radio, Course Creators build global classrooms without universities, Writers aggregate 1000s of subscribers without newspapers. They are consciously or unconsciously challenging the status quo. They have more ownership, more control & more upside. They trade security for freedom. They are entrepreneurs.

These 3 ingredients can obviously be present in variable proportion. But if you remove one of the ingredients, you'll have something very different:

• Individuality + Leverage = Performer. Without the rebellion, you'll get a Performer. Someone who's ready to give up control if it means more security, less complexity and more time to just create. A performer will delegate as many non-creative tasks as possible to pre-internet institutions (record labels, newspapers, TV channels, etc.). => E.g. a pro-gamer signing to an eSport team to only focus on playing.

• Individuality + Rebellion = Purist. Without the leverage, you get a Purist. Someone who's crafting something unique and who believes that its craft can’t or even shouldn't be made available to anyone to consume (leverage) and shouldn't be compromised by predatory institutions like record labels (rebellion). => E.g. an independent poet only printing and physically distributing his poem to connaisseurs.

• Leverage + Rebellion = Mercenary. Without the individuality, you get a Mercenary (not derogatory). Someone who's ready to do whatever it takes to make it in the short term. It is their way of repairing the social elevator that is often blocked on their floor, hence the rebellious aspect. => E.g. a drop-shipper who'd run Adwords campaigns to see to whom and where he could sell any high-margin products.

Why this matters?

In a nutshell, what "startup" did to the company as a social institution, "creator" is doing it to the individual. Creators are to freelancers what startups are to web agencies. The Creator Economy isn't primarily about the future of work, it's primarily about the future of (scalable) entrepreneurship.

Is "creator" the best term to describe the phenomenon of scalable individual? Probably not. Just as "startup" definitely wasn't the best term to describe a scalable organisation. But that's the one that seem to stick, so be it. This definition matters to me because it helped me solidify the diffuse intuition I had and it now allows me to quickly share my vision with others.

This definition also encompasses several adjacent communities that are not often brought together under the same umbrella. Artists, YouTubers, Influencers, Podcasters, Writers, Course Creators, Streamers—building permissionless leverage through code & media—are the new empire builders. They are facing the same challenges, armed with the same values: Courage, determination & optimism.

To me they are all creators:

• 🎶 Artists get billions of listens without labels

• 📺 YouTubers build videos empires without TV

• 📻 Podcasters build audio empires without radio

• 👨‍🏫 Course Creators build global classrooms without universities

• ✍🏽 Writers aggregate 1000s of subscribers without newspapers

• 🕹 Streamers engage millions of viewers without sports channel

• 🛍 Shopifyers sell millions of items without retailers

• ✊ Community Builders are gathering global societies without churches

• 🌎 Indie Hackers build worldwide products without VCs

• 👌 Curators are building scalable galleries without museums

The Creator Economy

Now that I've clearly defined what is a creator to me, it's now easier to define who is building for them and what is the Creator Economy. In a next article, I'll share my mapping of the Creator Economy with a listing of 100+ startups focused on building for them.

Subscribe to the newsletter below and if you are interested in the topic, please let me know—I'd love to be in touch!

💪