Learn How to Build for the Creator Economy

Learn How to Build for the Creator Economy

👩‍🎨  200 million people became creators in the last decade, transforming business and technology as we know it.

💡 Li has been a pioneer in this space and is a leading expert on the subject.

📸  In this course, she dissects the underlying fundamentals of this trend so you can apply it to your professional career: as a founder, builder, or investor.

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The course videos and content from Li’s highly-rated Creator Economy Course, held Spring 2021, are now available to all for free. While thousands of students applied to join the first cohort, only 150 students were accepted to the live course. Now, anyone can watch the course videos and access the reading materials to learn more about Building for the Creator Economy.
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Taught by:

Li Jin | Co-Founder & General Partner, Variant Fund

Who this course is for?

Founders & Operators

You have an early-stage startup in the creator space that is still finding a path to product-market fit.

Business & Product Leads

You work at a company where creators are an important segment, and want to better serve them

Explorers & Investors

You want to understand the creator economy to validate new opportunities for building or investing

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“Li is one of the deepest thinkers in the creator economy. I'm lucky to have benefited from her frameworks and perspective via our many conversations over the years.” - Sam Yam, co-founder and CTO of Patreon

📒 Course curriculum

1. 🎨 The Creator Landscape

An explosion of tools have emerged to serve creators, empowering them to not only advertise other brands, but to become their own businesses. In this module, you'll dive into the history and current state of the creator ecosystem, explore the major segments of creators, and understand creators' psychology.

4. 📈 Growing the Creator Economy

Understanding other companies' playbooks behind their launch strategy and tactics for gaining traction can serve as a foundation for your own explorations. In this workshop, you'll analyze how breakout creator-focused companies gained traction and overcame the cold start problem. You'll be able describe the creator growth loop, analyze successful referral programs, and explore specific channels to target your creator persona.

2. 💸 Creators as Businesses

Becoming a creator is a new, coveted career path in the digital age. What frameworks guide how creators think about monetization, and which tools/platforms to use? In this module, you'll learn to answer these questions and analyze creator-focused companies through various frameworks, like effort vs. earnings, and passive vs. active income.

5. 💰 The Investor's Perspective

To build an attractive business that scales, founders need to understand how investors think and evaluate business opportunities. After completing this workshop, you'll understand how investors focused on the creator economy evaluate startups. What does success look like across various business models? What leading indicators do they look for at the early stage?

3. 👨‍🎨 (Guest Lecture) Day in the Life of a Creator

It’s easy to talk in broad strokes about the creator economy, but what is it actually like to be a creator? How does it differ for full-time vs side-hustle creators? How is their mental health impacted by their work? In this guest lecture, veteran YouTuber and educator Justin Moore will break down how these complicated dynamics affecting creators’ decision-making.

6. 🔮 The Future of the Creator Economy

What’s in store for the future of the creator economy? What are the creator professions that will exist in the future? What can the history of the labor movement teach us about the creator economy and future of work? Li shares her predictions for the next few years of the creator economy.

✨ Bonus workshops

🌐 Jesse Walden on the Web3 Creator Economy

Crypto investor and Variant Fund founder Jesse Walden shares an overview of where we are in the web3 creator economy today, across NFTs, social tokens, and DAOs: what’s working, what’s new, and what’s next.

🔨 Nathan Barry on Building for the Creator Economy

Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit, a leading creator marketing platform, shares hard-won lessons from founding and growing ConvertKit over the last decade.

© 2023 Li Jin

This site was built by Li Jin, Blake Hayward, and Alli Pope.