a new project
👋🏼hello, I’m fabri
founder, investor and advisor
the extended version of this post is live
on the creator survey’s substack
Over the last 30-years the cost of producing and distributing media (eg. written, audio or video content) has steadily decreased to the cost of just one individual’s time. This has enabled a new professional class to thrive, we call them creators.
These businesses can provide a steady ‘upper-middle-class’ income that is comparable to a ‘mum & pop’ store over the last century. Unlike brick and mortar however, creator’s businesses are unconstrained by geographical boundaries. Thanks to their digital storefronts creators can tap into an infinite long-tail of audiences that aggregates globally around different vectors such as formats, topics and style.
Examples?
Graham Stephan / Personal finance. YouTube 1.5mm subs. $1.9mm 2019 via ads, sponsorships, courses, coaching, merchandize and affiliate fees.
Hubman and Chubgirl / Greeting cards. Instagram 591k followers. $150k 2019 est via subscriptions, digital downloads, merchandize, commissions, sponsorships and affiliate fees.
Ben Thompson / Business analyst. Newsletter 2k subs (2015). $200k 2015 via subscriptions and speaker fees.
What’s wrong
The rise of multimedia creators represents an answer to the decade long question around the sustainability of publishing businesses in the digital age. This new paradigm offers a resilient ecosystem able to serve an infinite long-tail of demand by distributing production across an equally infinite long-tail of supply. This enormous surface area however makes this economy hard to track, map and understand.
Industry stakeholders reports are naturally biased by their relative standpoint in the ecosystem (ie. investors, providers, creators) and their point of view doesn’t represent a full assessment of the creator’s economy but rather a single media (eg. video) or audience segment (eg. esports) or a given format (eg. newsletters).
Without a comprehensive view and understanding of the market, platforms and creators alike are missing a key tool required to formulate first-principled product thesis, market data.
Idea
A business positioned at the epicenter of this economy stands to capture a lot of value just by reporting on key trends and then sell those reports back to industry stakeholders. The Creator Survey (CS) is an information arbitrage business that aims to do just that.
The mission of this business is to provide creators and other stakeholders in the creator economy with relevant data to inform capital allocation decisions such as investments, launching new products or expanding to adjacent services verticals (ie. specialized legal or recruiting services).
The long term vision is to leverage the insights collected over time to become a business platform at the center of the creator economy, similar in nature to a management consulting firm.
Why me
I’m fortunately positioned to understand media by training, technology by trade and micro- businesses by vocation (I co-funded three, food, fashion and consulting).
I graduated with a BA in digital media at the height of the debate on paywalls and, published my first thesis on creators in a bid for an MSc at the Oxford Internet Institute in 2015. I didn't get the spot and instead started a growth agency, our first client was indeed a creator (single platform influencer).
Currently I focus on micro-businesses go-to-market for a publicly traded smb services platform (Square). I joined my current employer on a thesis about the convergence of micro-businesses and the digital-long-tail.
Over the last six months I've been ramping up on the creator economy by advising a seed stage creator platform as well as attending several industry events, building a CRM of industry stakeholders and meeting with thought leaders in the space and I felt an itch to formalize my new hobby.
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