The Creator Business

I think the creator business is probably a little confused about itself, about where the edges of what’s a creator business can be found, but that’s fine.

What I like about the general concept is how most creators have some important web and online needs in common. Most other businesses have at least some parts of the same set of needs, but the scale and interconnection of the tools used to address those needs is actually fairly different.

It’s hard to imagine a creator business getting much use out of Salesforce (though no doubt somebody’s about to tell me otherwise). It’s too complex, requires too much interaction on a per client or per prospect basis, and so on.

Alright, maybe there’s even an argument to be made that Salesforce could make sense when dealing with the actual thousand true fans if that’s the way you’re thinking about what you’re doing. But even there I don’t really see it.

Home is where your home page is

You need a web home. You need your own mailing list of prospects and followers. You need a mailing service to get email campaigns sent out, possibly you need a drip campaign type of capability.

You need to be able to keep the books, possibly you need to track inventory, possibly you need to generate invoices. But you don’t, most likely, need the whole kit and kaboodle of a full-blown accounting package (even one targeting small businesses like QuickBooks). You may wind up using some of the more conventional tools, but you’ll just be using the outside edge of what they can do (which includes all the things you don’t need).

You may have paid subscriber needs, or you might want to be supported by a more Patreon-like (pay by the work product item, for instance) approach, and so on.

Build by plugging things together

What you need is a sensible platform where you can maintain your own web presence and, ideally, layer on the tools you need in a way that keeps things minimal and manageable by a solo operator or a small team. Almost all the things you need to do can be handled by a seeming universe of SaaS operations with annual subscriptions, but it you’re not careful you wind up paying a big stack of monthly fees for things that you wind up figuring out how to interconnect into a system on your own.

While PeakZebra’s initial product vision wasn’t targeted specifically at creators, it’s use in the creator economy became increasingly obvious as we moved forward building our toolset. You want newsletter signups, but not lots of extra baggage managing your lists. You’d like interactions with users that let you learn more about them individually, but in a way that allows you to mass customize the content you present each one.

You need subscriptions? We do it by harnessing one of the most-used WordPress plugin options (but you see it as part of our offering–no setting up, configuring, and learning to navigate completely new systems). You need reminders sent to members whose subscriptions will expire soon? It’s in there and it’s dead simple.

We’ve got some things to add before this makes total sense as a use case for PeakZebra, but we’re well on the way, so if you’re a creator, you might want keep an eye on us.

Join the waitlist…

PeakZebra is currently in active development. Sign up for the newsletter and be the first to know when PeakZebra reaches early release! Plus occasional previews and progress updates.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.