Creator is the New Consumer

The shift in consumer loyalty in the last decade from institutions to corporations to individuals is accelerated by “influencers” and upcoming online creators.

The term GTM content is anything that is effective marketing and not paid ads. It directly affects the 2 key areas of a business: Retention and CAC by fostering the development of organic distribution channels instead of relying on inorganic marketing. 

Creators are the power-house in business today. They drive popular culture in real-time, changing public influence and individual loyalty drastically over time. This is where the future of consumer businesses is headed. 

A consumer is much more informed today and has information at their disposal making them much more active in their buying process compared to the past when advertisers can sell anything with traditional marketing tactics. They also understand they have the same ability to share their experience with the product/service now with others making them into a creator.

Individuals who stay at the bleeding edge of this shift, gets to build a founder-customer fit. Creators are at the epicenter of this having content-audience and content-advertiser fit rather than the product-market persona.

The foundation for a creator business is community-led growth.

Having in-hand distribution helps but how to create disruptive companies that thrive in a crowded market of almost every creator launching another CPG business?

Partnering with really smart operators/firms who have long-term domain ownership on how to take it from 0 to 1 and scale the business and must be financially invested.

One model operators adopt to solve for “product-offering community fatigue” is building with a collective of creators building an attention cluster to boost sales.

There are 4 types of creator businesses (Alex Lieberman, h/t Greg Isenberg):

1. Creator-originated: A creator has an idea for a business that they believe is authentic to their brand and will resonate with their audience.

   Chamberlain Coffee, Creator Startup, OFFBRAND

2. Operator-originated: An operator has an idea for a business and wants a creator to launch it with to have day 1 distribution.

   Goodsport, Kin Euphorics, Rare Candy

3. Creator-incubated: A creator wants to launch a business but doesn’t know what to launch, figures out a business to launch with a partner and then launches it.

   Feastables, Viewstats, Happy Dad

4. Creator-brokered: A business already exists and a creator is brought-in to accelerate growth.

   Joyride (Ryan Trahan), Aviation Gin (Ryan Reynolds)