In today’s digital age, content creation has become an undeniable force driving the online world. With the rise of social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, internet users now have the ability to create and share diverse forms of content. As a result, more and more people have begun discovering and nurturing their creative sides, generating a profusion of content for their followers. This influx of creators and content has resulted in the acknowledgment of the relevance of a reliable community and the need for creators to connect with their audience in order to maintain their success. However, navigating community management while creating content can be tasking for many creators as there are a lot of moving parts to be considered.
It is with this in mind that Anjolaoluwa “Anj” Fayemi, the co-founder of Rivet and his other co founders set out to devise a solution.
What inspired Rivet?
My name is Anj and I grew up in Lagos Nigeria to a family of artists and I’m a musician myself, I release music as a rapper and a singer. When I was putting out my second album. It actually started when someone had come to a show, bought something from me, engaged me in the past, was very manual, very distributed and when I wanted to use that information in any way going forward, say a new release, it was extremely frustrating to use. So I paused creations of my own over the past year and I’ve been really focused on solving that problem, first for myself but in that time I also spoke to over 200 artists and creators to figure out how they were nurturing their fan communities, how they were harnessing data from their fan interactions and I found out that problem wasn’t just mine so we started building Rivet with my other co-founders. We all went to MIT, we studied engineering and the idea was really just to create something that solved that problem for those creators. Now in its current iteration, it’s an AI driven CRM platform that allows these creators to be more like small businesses – the idea there being allowing and empowering them to be able to lean more to their top fans or things like exclusives, offers, discounts etc but also use intelligence to tell when fans are about to churn and take steps and actions to re-engage them.
I see that you’ve clearly identified problems that creatives have to deal with based on the fact that you are a creative yourself, so Rivet is kind of born out of your own experiences, correct?
In its very initial stage yeah.
So when you say in its initial stage, what has changed now?
Basically what I meant by that was, yes it started out as solving a problem but then there was additional validation from other artists and creators that have shaped for beyond the use case that was just my own stuff and so now it’s much more representative of the artists currently and creators that use the platform and the ones that we continue to talk to and continue to join the platform, that’s what i meant to say there.
Where does the name Rivet come from? Why did you decide to call it Rivet?
At the core of the company, the people that work on our team and the creators that have joined the platform there’s this notion of creating magical experiences. So for us that’s creating a magical intuitive experience that allows these creators to better engage with their communities and for creators that’s the core of their businesses they are trying to create these experiences for their fans and their supporters and so that word for us is riveting and create riveting experiences that what we aim to do with our product and the company and that’s what we aim to enable and empower for the creators that join the platform.
How does one sign up for Rivet? Are there specific requirements for you to be eligible to sign up on the platform or is it a platform that everybody can join?
Yeah we’ve been focused on creators that have 10,000-400,000 in their audience size and we are calling those mid tier/midsize creators and it can be a little bit bigger but that has been our sweet spot for the types of creators we’ve been targeting so far.
Do you have any plans to extend services to creators with less following?
Yeah, so what this is actually allowing us to do is that we are at a unique point where this is where the pain pinches the most, where there’s enough traction for these creators in their communities for the actions to be meaningful and better coordinate with actual revenue uplift and engagement uplift so that’s where we are focusing our understanding of the data, our building of the recommendation engine right now, but as that continues to mature on the product side and on the data side, it will then make it a lot easier for us to offer more robust solutions to creators that are earlier in their journeys, but we’ll also be able to create a product that can also be suited to larger creators and I see opportunities for us to go both those routes in the future.
If you are talking to a creator about Rivet, trying to get them to sign up on the platform, what are some of the challenges Rivet solves for them that you can outline for them?
So right now, you don’t understand who your top fans are, very simply and that’s to the level of granularity of who they are, what types of actions are they taking and based off of their preferences and past engagements, how can you get them to take more of those actions, how can you get them to be a higher value fanbase for you, spend more money on you. And so a lot of what you’re doing today is manual across whether you’re managing a storefront, whether you’re sending out mass emails, whether you’re responding to comments or dm’s and just a lot of things that aren’t really rooted in any data or strategy and are quite tedious and not that effective. With Rivet, we allow you to understand engagement, on and off platforms and we provide those recommendations and actions that you can actually take without having to understand any sort of marketing, any sort of community building and really just spend more time focused on creating content and be sure that it’s getting to the people you want it to get to at the right time and that the actions people are taking, you are understanding, and its guiding your future engagement with them.
With your Rivet experience, what do you think the tech industry should prioritize or focus on when building for creatives?
I think having significant understanding of the space in some capacity on the decision making side so either some way to incorporate creatives as decision makers beyond just how do we appear as a brand in the market but actual product decisions and actual operations of the business, i think it’s a big piece and then the other thing i would say is focusing on simplicity just from a product perspective, i think simplicity and intuitiveness is something we found is really important in this space, there’s a lot of tools and there is a lot of tool fatigue so people dont wanna learn new things and don’t have the time to learn new things so really just emphasizing that in the design thinking approach I think is a big lever that tech can pull when building for creatives.
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