*Bonus: A fun Internet experiment I launched this morning to find a better business model for funding quality writing: ghostknowledge.com
A few threads I explore in my work:
1. Media in conditions of abundance: Technology has massively reduced the barriers to creating and distributing content. As a result, more and more people can now create content independent of legacy distribution and consumers are drowning in a virtually infinite supply of things to watch, listen to and read. In a world where attention is the key constraint, not capital or distribution, we’ll see a renewed focus on curation and tastemakers, as well as new media models that empower individuals to build a business around themselves.
2. Community-Curated Knowledge Networks: In a world of abundance, curation becomes increasingly important. But thus far, the conversation on curation has been too focused on the information and not enough on architecture; how we collect, store, augment, and utilize what’s already in our minds. Our current information architectures are oriented around the now, stripped of context, and designed for recreation, not thought. The Internet offers us the first major opportunity to introduce new architectures that improve our understanding of the world through added context and relation.
3. New business models for funding quality writing: Ghost Knowledgeis an experiment I launched today to find a better business model for funding quality writing. Context: Human evolution can be seen through the lens of publishing advancements; from oral language and the printing press to ad-funded Internet writing. Recently, subscription media has dominated the conversation, with Substack popularizing newsletter subscriptions as the dominant business model for writing online. But the paid newsletter model only works for a certain kind of writer – one that wants to primarily dedicate themselves to sharing their ideas online, consistently. The model doesn’t work for the inspired one-timer, busy founder, or expert practitioner that doesn’t want the pressure to publish often. Ghost Knowledge is an experiment to get the people who don’t write enough to share their knowledge.
4. The Ownership Economy: The intersection of Crypto x the Creator Economy is one of the more exciting spaces in tech right now. And a lot of the innovation is happening in what Jesse Walden calls the Ownership Economy, which tries to align incentives for the long-term among a variety of stakeholders. In a world with more individual autonomy and direct to fan relationships, we’ll see new modes of collaboration between creators and their communities and creative organizations will begin to look more like flat peer-to-peer networks as opposed to hierarchies.
There’s so much more to Startupy, Ghost Knowledge, the future of media, curation, knowledge networks, and the ownership economy and I’m excited to chat with you all about it!
Passing this along! On the topic of architecture - there is a 6 part -documentary series about Adam Curtis on BBC called, 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' that shares a perspective of how we have evolved into an individualist first society. We have slowly opted into a dream world that doesn't challenge our imaginations (individual/collective), & justifies the loss of our individual and collective agency. It seems critical that we make time to pause, sense-make, document how we got here, and move forward to discover frameworks that hold space for critical thought, dialog, and imagination. https://watchdocumentaries.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/?video_index=2
First, You are not the only non-fan of Discord here.
In reference to the Community Platform portion, do you have any insights on how to show your product build and/or thought leader credentials when choosing to not always build in public?
Example, I have been in multiple community forums where we all agree not to post to social to protect ideas/anonymity for a safe space. It seems like most are exhausted of having to build in public on social.
Also, my customers are on Insta and the VC sector lives on Twitter... advice on how to cross-pollinate?
I would say be where your customers are, not where the startup industry is! Every startup founders dream is to be featured on TechCrunch, and so was mine when I was building my first company. But you know what TechCrunch coverage did to my business? It led to hundreds of inbound pitches from SAAS businesses and marketing consultants. And you know what coverage on Refinery29 did to us? It brought in thousands of paying customers. As far as building in public, answered this in a related question above but I'd say lean into it if it feels natural to you and you enjoy it. But by no means do it out of pressure. There are many ways to grow and drive attention and being a public founder is only one of many playbooks, and probably applicable to a very small fraction of founders (the Sophia Amoruso's of the world)
Thanks for your time, Sari! I'd love to hear your thoughts on the expectation that founders should be personal brands/content creators. I've noticed that there is a pressure for a founder to show every aspect of their life and business journey on TikTok and IG, which helps consumers feel like they are part of the evolution of the product and brings a level of personalization to the company. I understand this approach in the beginning as a means to building a community and brand, yet, how do we create boundaries around a company/product and its founder? As a podcast host of Okay Sis and self-proclaimed "comfortable person on the internet," I'm fine doing this while I start my new travel recommendations app, Camber, yet my co-founder isn't as comfortable sharing personal updates online, which is totally fine! Do founders need to have personal brands for their company to succeed in the modern age?
Great question! If sharing, storytelling, and being extremely online is your thing then lean into your superpowers and GO ALL IN. Twitter, Instagram, TikTok etc are all powerful. That said, the vast majority of founders are quietly building empires without having a public persona. YOU DO YOU girl!
Hi Sari! Great intro and food for thought. Excited to dig into Ghost Knowledge!
What are your thoughts about reward mechanisms for online content creators who are not charging for their work but are creating prolifically without a plan to monetise, do you believe that the work recieves the rewards it deserves or that writers/creators need to be proactive in sourcing payment (monetary or otherwise) for their work?
I believe creators should be able to make a good living off their work. We've spent the last decade working for likes, comments, retweets... while the platforms got rich off our work, so broadly speaking, I think the renewed focus on compensating creators is a net positive for society.
Already, 40% of knowledge workers feel their jobs are pointless. In the creator economy, people decide for themselves how to best serve humanity, so I think this naturally results in a more efficient labor market.
Should writers be proactive about sourcing payment? Yes, absolutely! Especially for women, this is very hard - I know it's hard for me. But I'll tell you what I keep trying to remind myself: KNOW YOUR WORTH.
caveat: I don''t think all hobbies should become side hustles. It's amazing and respectable and totally ok to have a day job and create content for fun on the side and decide not to monetize it.
I've seen lots of startups try to build new networks for people to share and curate content. What I think most of them miss is that they focus exclusively on "discovery" which imo is already resolved by Twitter, Instagram, etc... or it's not painful enough to justify people moving to a new platform.
I think the bigger opportunity is in organizing curated content into searchable libraries in interfaces that make sense for the specific domain.
What is lacking in today's architectures is looking beyond the feed and taking more inspiration from libraries, repositories, bi-directional linking, wikis, rich search.
If we can accomplish this, then curated knowledge networks can not only help us better navigate abundance, but also give us psychological freedom (we know we'll find what we're looking for later).
Hello Sari, I always admire your "faster than light" thoughts. With influencers burning out and winner-take-all creator economy, Li Jin and others are calling for Universal Creative Income. What are your thoughts on this form of funding for creators? Do you think we can see something like this in the near future?
I love the vision and I want to believe this is possible. But realistically, the only platforms that could "afford" to do this are the large ones - TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc... and a) I'm not sure there is a strong enough business case for them to do so (or at least not a proven one) and b) I worry this could end up backfiring if new startups are crowded out of the sector because they can't afford to subsidize their creators.
i'd love to hear your thoughts re: yen.chat ... the first censorship-resistant community platform built specifically for metacreators in the metaverse.
Thanks for this question! I think it's a big problem but I'm optimistic that in the coming years we'll find new ways to better support the long tail of creators. I wrote at length about this here: https://sariazout.mirror.xyz/ but in short I think there's a renewed focus on platforms aligning their business models with creators of all sizes such that the key metric transitions to "intensity of fandom" rather than "size of fandom". Ad-funded models like YouTube by design cannot support a middle class creator, whereas companies like Pearpop, or NFTs are able to better align with creators that have a small yet passionate audience.
Do you think creators could collectively leverage this 'intensity of fandom' by building their own DAO? For instance, if it was a group of comedy writers came together with similar audiences, a co-created DAO could provide the funds for them to hire their own production teams - it could also slow down the pace of production to be healthier since the creators & their teams & their fans are determining if a project should be produced. The DAO could give 'shares'(tokens) to everyone who worked on the project or gave money as a fan. The DAO could engineer different tokens to represent different perks/involvement in the DAO. The DAO could also leverage its collective social capital/momentum to attract more funders (ie.sponsors), advisors, & resources and negotiate better licensing deals or distribution. Funds that come in could be pooled to create a new fund that invests in emerging writer's projects or towards a marketing budget or a lawyer. A fan of one creator's work, who purchases tokens would become an owner in ALL the content made - more incentive to promote all of the content made. This could really turn up the fandom intensity.
Long term YES, I think this is where we're headed. There is a ceiling of finances and attention. Who has time or money to consume 100 substacks a month? The redundancy question, and lack of coordination between different creators to divide up responsibilities and admin, I think eventually exhausts the medium and audience, and this is why it makes sense to build new institutions from the rubble of the independence economy - ie a newspaper or record label from the bottom up, based upon agreements between previously individualized creators. I love the idea of "guilds" and "liquid superteams". I think there are many challenges to work through before this becomes a reality - some legal (if economic upside is involved, treatment of securities etc) and some cultural (DAOs have limited utility as an abstract concept). Creators don’t care about buzzwords like protocols, multisig, on chain governance, minting, etc... What they care about is: how can I build a better relationship with my fans? And how can I make more money? I'm excited to see more experiments at the intersection of crypto and the creator economy. Ultimately I think the promise of web3 for creators is that there are more choices between monetizing by earning a little off of each fan or earning a lot off of deeper connections with a smaller set of fans.
Totally agree. Creators don't want to worry about all the extra stuff beyond making their content how they want. We will need intermediaries to help get the new structures set up to test and iterate
I love your articles and I can imagine you have a lot of research and observations on how people curate. What are some of the topics that you've noticed people naturally love to curate and talk about?
I've noticed Twitter and Substack are platforms where people actively go to share their curations. What do you think could pull people away from those platforms to share their curations elsewhere?
I think subscription fatigue is a real thing Substack will grapple with. People may not want another subscription to a "weekly" newsletter when they're struggling to keep up with their information diet. In this scenario, though, I think there are opportunities to monetize evergreen content libraries. For example: My Substack newsletter is free but I've made over $50k selling access to my second brain here https://startupy.typeform.com/to/zx7xrHRV
Other people have had success with similar (Patricia Mou's rabbitholes, and Nat Eliason's book summaries come to mind). I still think Substack is effective at distribution (everyone should own an email list) but the monetization can happen elsewhere.
Passing this along! On the topic of architecture - there is a 6 part -documentary series about Adam Curtis on BBC called, 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' that shares a perspective of how we have evolved into an individualist first society. We have slowly opted into a dream world that doesn't challenge our imaginations (individual/collective), & justifies the loss of our individual and collective agency. It seems critical that we make time to pause, sense-make, document how we got here, and move forward to discover frameworks that hold space for critical thought, dialog, and imagination. https://watchdocumentaries.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/?video_index=2
YES!
Give someone enough time to process what they’re reading, and they’re more likely to believe the truth… But time is an increasingly rare commodity.
First, You are not the only non-fan of Discord here.
In reference to the Community Platform portion, do you have any insights on how to show your product build and/or thought leader credentials when choosing to not always build in public?
Example, I have been in multiple community forums where we all agree not to post to social to protect ideas/anonymity for a safe space. It seems like most are exhausted of having to build in public on social.
Also, my customers are on Insta and the VC sector lives on Twitter... advice on how to cross-pollinate?
I would say be where your customers are, not where the startup industry is! Every startup founders dream is to be featured on TechCrunch, and so was mine when I was building my first company. But you know what TechCrunch coverage did to my business? It led to hundreds of inbound pitches from SAAS businesses and marketing consultants. And you know what coverage on Refinery29 did to us? It brought in thousands of paying customers. As far as building in public, answered this in a related question above but I'd say lean into it if it feels natural to you and you enjoy it. But by no means do it out of pressure. There are many ways to grow and drive attention and being a public founder is only one of many playbooks, and probably applicable to a very small fraction of founders (the Sophia Amoruso's of the world)
Thanks for your time, Sari! I'd love to hear your thoughts on the expectation that founders should be personal brands/content creators. I've noticed that there is a pressure for a founder to show every aspect of their life and business journey on TikTok and IG, which helps consumers feel like they are part of the evolution of the product and brings a level of personalization to the company. I understand this approach in the beginning as a means to building a community and brand, yet, how do we create boundaries around a company/product and its founder? As a podcast host of Okay Sis and self-proclaimed "comfortable person on the internet," I'm fine doing this while I start my new travel recommendations app, Camber, yet my co-founder isn't as comfortable sharing personal updates online, which is totally fine! Do founders need to have personal brands for their company to succeed in the modern age?
Great question! If sharing, storytelling, and being extremely online is your thing then lean into your superpowers and GO ALL IN. Twitter, Instagram, TikTok etc are all powerful. That said, the vast majority of founders are quietly building empires without having a public persona. YOU DO YOU girl!
Hi Sari! Great intro and food for thought. Excited to dig into Ghost Knowledge!
What are your thoughts about reward mechanisms for online content creators who are not charging for their work but are creating prolifically without a plan to monetise, do you believe that the work recieves the rewards it deserves or that writers/creators need to be proactive in sourcing payment (monetary or otherwise) for their work?
I believe creators should be able to make a good living off their work. We've spent the last decade working for likes, comments, retweets... while the platforms got rich off our work, so broadly speaking, I think the renewed focus on compensating creators is a net positive for society.
Already, 40% of knowledge workers feel their jobs are pointless. In the creator economy, people decide for themselves how to best serve humanity, so I think this naturally results in a more efficient labor market.
Should writers be proactive about sourcing payment? Yes, absolutely! Especially for women, this is very hard - I know it's hard for me. But I'll tell you what I keep trying to remind myself: KNOW YOUR WORTH.
caveat: I don''t think all hobbies should become side hustles. It's amazing and respectable and totally ok to have a day job and create content for fun on the side and decide not to monetize it.
What are your thoughts on what the architecture for a curation platform looks like?
I've seen lots of startups try to build new networks for people to share and curate content. What I think most of them miss is that they focus exclusively on "discovery" which imo is already resolved by Twitter, Instagram, etc... or it's not painful enough to justify people moving to a new platform.
I think the bigger opportunity is in organizing curated content into searchable libraries in interfaces that make sense for the specific domain.
What is lacking in today's architectures is looking beyond the feed and taking more inspiration from libraries, repositories, bi-directional linking, wikis, rich search.
If we can accomplish this, then curated knowledge networks can not only help us better navigate abundance, but also give us psychological freedom (we know we'll find what we're looking for later).
Would you have an example to show us?
really love the thoughts in Ghost Knowlege - Are we able to submit an idea of our own and have other people weigh in?
Yes, you can feel free to start a crowdfund for yourself!
It's very much an experiment and we want people to use it in whatever way feels natural.
awesome :)
Hello Sari, I always admire your "faster than light" thoughts. With influencers burning out and winner-take-all creator economy, Li Jin and others are calling for Universal Creative Income. What are your thoughts on this form of funding for creators? Do you think we can see something like this in the near future?
I love the vision and I want to believe this is possible. But realistically, the only platforms that could "afford" to do this are the large ones - TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc... and a) I'm not sure there is a strong enough business case for them to do so (or at least not a proven one) and b) I worry this could end up backfiring if new startups are crowded out of the sector because they can't afford to subsidize their creators.
i'd love to hear your thoughts re: yen.chat ... the first censorship-resistant community platform built specifically for metacreators in the metaverse.
What are your thoughts on the absence of middle class of creators? And how we can support smaller creators?
Thanks for this question! I think it's a big problem but I'm optimistic that in the coming years we'll find new ways to better support the long tail of creators. I wrote at length about this here: https://sariazout.mirror.xyz/ but in short I think there's a renewed focus on platforms aligning their business models with creators of all sizes such that the key metric transitions to "intensity of fandom" rather than "size of fandom". Ad-funded models like YouTube by design cannot support a middle class creator, whereas companies like Pearpop, or NFTs are able to better align with creators that have a small yet passionate audience.
Do you think creators could collectively leverage this 'intensity of fandom' by building their own DAO? For instance, if it was a group of comedy writers came together with similar audiences, a co-created DAO could provide the funds for them to hire their own production teams - it could also slow down the pace of production to be healthier since the creators & their teams & their fans are determining if a project should be produced. The DAO could give 'shares'(tokens) to everyone who worked on the project or gave money as a fan. The DAO could engineer different tokens to represent different perks/involvement in the DAO. The DAO could also leverage its collective social capital/momentum to attract more funders (ie.sponsors), advisors, & resources and negotiate better licensing deals or distribution. Funds that come in could be pooled to create a new fund that invests in emerging writer's projects or towards a marketing budget or a lawyer. A fan of one creator's work, who purchases tokens would become an owner in ALL the content made - more incentive to promote all of the content made. This could really turn up the fandom intensity.
Long term YES, I think this is where we're headed. There is a ceiling of finances and attention. Who has time or money to consume 100 substacks a month? The redundancy question, and lack of coordination between different creators to divide up responsibilities and admin, I think eventually exhausts the medium and audience, and this is why it makes sense to build new institutions from the rubble of the independence economy - ie a newspaper or record label from the bottom up, based upon agreements between previously individualized creators. I love the idea of "guilds" and "liquid superteams". I think there are many challenges to work through before this becomes a reality - some legal (if economic upside is involved, treatment of securities etc) and some cultural (DAOs have limited utility as an abstract concept). Creators don’t care about buzzwords like protocols, multisig, on chain governance, minting, etc... What they care about is: how can I build a better relationship with my fans? And how can I make more money? I'm excited to see more experiments at the intersection of crypto and the creator economy. Ultimately I think the promise of web3 for creators is that there are more choices between monetizing by earning a little off of each fan or earning a lot off of deeper connections with a smaller set of fans.
Totally agree. Creators don't want to worry about all the extra stuff beyond making their content how they want. We will need intermediaries to help get the new structures set up to test and iterate
I love your articles and I can imagine you have a lot of research and observations on how people curate. What are some of the topics that you've noticed people naturally love to curate and talk about?
I've noticed Twitter and Substack are platforms where people actively go to share their curations. What do you think could pull people away from those platforms to share their curations elsewhere?
I think subscription fatigue is a real thing Substack will grapple with. People may not want another subscription to a "weekly" newsletter when they're struggling to keep up with their information diet. In this scenario, though, I think there are opportunities to monetize evergreen content libraries. For example: My Substack newsletter is free but I've made over $50k selling access to my second brain here https://startupy.typeform.com/to/zx7xrHRV
Other people have had success with similar (Patricia Mou's rabbitholes, and Nat Eliason's book summaries come to mind). I still think Substack is effective at distribution (everyone should own an email list) but the monetization can happen elsewhere.
I love that!!! But how did you differentiate yourself from what Techcrunch has to offer for example?
I try to join the conversation but the link sent doesn’t work. It said « page not found »
Hey, it's a written Q&A and you are right here :) https://femstreet.substack.com/p/sariazout/comments
Yes :)