2021 Themes for the Passion Economy
2020 was the biggest year for creators yet: and we expect 2021 to surpass it
To kick off 2021, we launched the Passion Economy Stack to empower more builders for the passion economy with curated information and to build our personal knowledge about the space.
We're looking forward to seeing the following trends:
The Rise of Fan Interaction - We expect creators to leverage more of their fans to grow their business.
Scaling Creators - As creators' businesses grow, they need to scale beyond themselves through help from others.
Aggregation of Tools and Platforms - As more tools for the passion economy only continue to grow, there will be a natural aggregation of these tools to allow creators more time to focus on the work they do best.
Fan Interaction
Creators will focus on monetizing super-fans
Creators are going to be focused on monetizing superfans directly through higher ticket items (like 1:1 coaching). This will especially help creators who don't yet have a massive audience: they can monetize their 1000 true fans directly instead of requiring millions of followers to monetize through ads .
Peter Yang (ex-Twitch PM) shares examples of companies like Cameo that have helped on creators monetize super-fans in his article The Superfan Flywheel.
Creators will start their own fan-to-fan communities in dedicated spaces.
We think there will be a movement of fan-to-fan interactions from comment sections on created content over to dedicated community spaces. Communities create stronger retention moats for the creator. This play also decreases platform risk (ex. Mixer shutting down) and allows creators to truly "own" their audience and reach out to their fans
Ex: Twitch streamers have lively Discords where fans interact and play games with each other, creating many-to-many fan relationships instead of one-to-many relationships between the creator and fans.
Scale
Creators will rely more on their fanbase to help create content.
Creators are always looking for ways to scale themselves with their limited resources. One great way to do that is through engaging superfans to help with content creation. For example, Lenny's Newsletter (the most popular newsletter for Product Managers) has a Slack community where subscribers discuss tips and ask questions. Every week, a member of the community curates the best discussions from Slack into a "Community Wisdom" email for paid subscribers.
An example of the most recent Community Wisdom email from Lenny's Newsletter, curated by the community
Emergence of hiring platforms
It's exciting when an independent creator needs to scale beyond themselves. Typically creators will hire existing fans or via generic hiring platforms. As the rise of vertical-specific hiring platforms also continues to grow, we're excited to see how a creator-first hiring platform will form
Creators will have Community Managers to help scale fan-to-fan interactions.
A creator's fan base is a creator's lifeline & serving this community of fans, is a smart retention strategy. A creator's fan base will scale, but a creator's time will not, and will increasingly need someone to help prioritize community-first tasks. We think Creators will begin choosing community managers to help manage their fan base and scale themselves.
Ex: Most prominent Twitch streamers have a dedicated moderator team that also play the role of Community Managers on both Twitch and Discord.
Creator tools will focus on serving middle-class creators first and then move both upstream and downstream.
"Middle class creators" (who have a loyal fan base but do not yet have large audiences) are desperate for tools to help them scale. An effective strategy is to focus on building for middle-class creators to iterate quickly to get a service out the door, and then moving upstream (to capture creators with larger followings with more premium features) or downstream (to creators with smaller following). Serving creators at all levels democratizes access and moves towards a vision of letting anyone create.
Ex: Cameo. As CEO Steven Galanick shared:
The contrarian bet we made was that it would be way better for us to have people with small, loyal followings, often unknown to the general population, but who were willing to charge $5 to $10. One person’s D-List is somebody else’s favorite person in the world.
Aggregation
All-in-one platform to help creators manage their business
Creators are multi-SKU-ed and rely on loads of tools, platforms and revenue streams. As the passion economy only keeps growing, and as more tools and possible new revenue streams arise, there will be more ways to bring all these tools together. Like Buffer is to social media management.
Ex: Stir gives you analytics of all your revenue streams in one single view
Creator tools will continue to solve for niche verticals.
Today, a creator may hack different horizontal tools together, for a "just enough" experience. In particular, creators can benefit from business in a box models that build their entire solution with one persona in mind — a new wave or version of the franchising model. The promise of vertical solutions is in optimizing for a particular use case, solving their specific problems, and focusing on their success.
Examples: Stem.is for music professionals, Dumpling for grocery delivery businesses, Hotpod Yoga for portable hot yoga studios
Li Jin outlines the different platforms for niche verticals with the above graphic in her article “Unbundling Work from Employment”
Rise of automation tools for Creators.
We expect more tools for creators to automate and bring together different parts of their tech stack, similar to how Alloy brought automation to the ecommerce stack. Automation tools can also help emerging creators (who can't afford a team yet) scale themselves.
Ex: Li Jin describes how a fan that signs up for one service of a creator automatically receives services for everything else the creator makes. This adds value to any one fan, keeps them loyal and retained as well as saves time for the creator.
With increasing verticalization by content type, a single login/authorization system can help superfans pay for a single subscription and access all of a creator’s content. For instance, paying for a creator on Patreon could grant access to their private Substack group, private Zoom events, paid podcast, etc.
TLDR;
Creators will focus on monetizing super-fans
Creators will start their own fan-to-fan communities in dedicated spaces.
Creators will rely more on their fanbase to help create content.
Hiring platforms specific to creators will merge to help them scale
Creators will hire Community Managers to help scale fan-to-fan interactions.
Creator tools will focus on serving middle-class creators first and then move both upstream and downstream.
All-in-one platform to help creators manage their business will emerge
Creator tools will continue to solve for niche verticals.
Rise of automation tools for Creators.
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