It’s been over 15 years since YouTube launched, but one thing hasn’t changed for content creators: it’s hard to build a creator business, and a lot of it has nothing to do with making content.
We want to change that. Today, we’re launching Beacons 2.0, an AI-powered platform that not only gives creators the tools they need to run their business, but uses AI to do work for them.
Our cofounders met as PhD students at Stanford doing research in machine learning, and have been working on AI for almost a decade. We’ve always believed that AI can, and will, help creators scale themselves and build smarter businesses.
This is why we’re so excited to release Beacons 2.0. Creators can now find everything they need to start building a business today—our reimagined Link in Bio, integrated with native Store, Email Marketing, and Media Kit—all in one place. AI is woven into the platform to help creators at every turn, and by learning from data across millions of creators, each individual Beacons user gets personalized recommendations and better results.
Early last year we raised our Series A, led by Kora Management, to bring this vision to life. Now, we’re sharing what we've built.
From 1.0 to 2.0: Building software for creators
Building a creator business is hard, and there’s no playbook. We’ve seen that creators at all stages and in all niches struggle with the same challenges around being a creator solopreneur:
- No cohesive toolstack: There’s plenty of software to help traditional SMBs, but creators have to stitch together a bunch of different tools that aren’t made from them.
- No time to do everything: Operations and admin take too much time away from what actually drives their growth—making content.
- No platform stability: Creators rent their audiences instead of truly owning them, living in fear of the algorithm.
Beacons 2.0 changes this by bringing creators a single platform with all of the tools they need, supercharged with AI that gets them better results with less work. Here’s how it all fits together:
- Link in Bio: Our flagship product that helps creators drive engagement to their most important content.
- Email Marketing: Creators can build an email list through their Link in Bio, then send emails to fans through a channel that they control.
- Creator Store: Creators can sell digital products both through their Link in Bio and directly in emails to drive more traffic and more sales.
- Media Kit: Creators can use this portfolio with automatically updating social stats to pitch brands and make money through sponsorships.
On top of helping creators monetize directly from their audience and from brand partnerships, Beacons includes additional tools to help creators manage operations and run their day-to-day tasks.
With everything in one platform, creators don’t need to spend time figuring out what to pay for, learning how to use a bunch of different tools, or trying to make everything work together.
And with everything in one platform, all of the creator’s data is in one place too—this is what unlocks the opportunity for powerful applications of AI.
2.0 and beyond: AI for creators
With our backgrounds in AI and machine learning, we’ve always believed that there would be opportunities to use these technologies to help creators. As we expanded the product to support more and more creator workflows, we thought about how to collect a unique dataset that we could someday use to create real value for our users.
The exciting recent advances in generative AI have made it clear that this future is here now.
We’ve already started rolling out generative text and image applications across Beacons to help creators build their websites, sell products, and email brands that they want to work with. Emails and product descriptions are written in the creator’s tone of voice, image generation is at their fingertips wherever content is needed, and key insights are automatically surfaced.
It’s no secret that generative AI is hot right now, but the potential for AI to help creators goes much deeper than these early applications. AI can—and will, someday soon—surface previously unseen insights, suggest actions creators wouldn’t have known to take, and even do work proactively on behalf of creators while they sleep.
AI is a powerful technology to help creators scale themselves—what we’ve done so far is just the tip of the iceberg.
Beacons for Managers: Serving creators and their teams
AI can help creators get more done, but there are still some things that only humans can do.
For many creators looking to grow their team, their first teammate is a manager who can help them with brand deals. To help creators succeed, we need to help their managers succeed too.
We launched our Top Creator Agencies List earlier this year to help every creator find the right manager or management company that can help them grow. Now, we’re taking it a step further with Beacons for Managers, a set of tools for managing a roster and pitching creators for campaigns:
- Creator CRM: Managers can manage all of the data on their talent in one place
- Rosters and pitch decks: Managers can generate beautiful, automatically-updating pitch materials in one click
- Custom social feeds: Managers get custom, aggregated content feeds across their roster, with real-time analytics
- Campaign reports: Instantly compile comprehensive reports for every campaign, ready to send to brands
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By bringing advanced data capabilities to managers, we’re able to help them help their creators. Everyone wins.
Creators are the businesses of the future
We’re already seeing creators and managers succeeding with these new AI-powered tools—we’ve added some of our favorite examples to our new home page, which showcases the entire Beacons 2.0 platform.
One of the best parts about building for creators is that they immediately put what we’ve built into action. Creators are trailblazing entrepreneurs—they’re constantly pushing the boundaries of what a creator business can be, which pushes us to keep up.
We believe creators are the businesses of the future, and we’re building the next-generation business platform that this new class of entrepreneur deserves. This is just the beginning.
You can check it out and join the creators on Beacons—get started today!
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