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3. “Creator-GTM”

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What is Creator GTM?

How the creator economy changed modern GTM.

Creator GTM is a go-to-market strategy that builds a team and initiatives around non-traditional online marketing (not through traditional ads.) Instead, relying on production/content, community, creator-relations, and influencer marketing. Creator GTM affects directly two buckets of a business: CAC and Retention %.

Creator GTM initiatives can be segmented as the following:

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These buckets, specifically, are “marketing” initiatives not typically considered in a founder’s CAC. [See “Organic” = unpaid?]

In all honesty, I just want for you to care about the segmentation shown above. It’s not too deep, it’s just the modern “growth team.”

What’s changed?

  • Expectations. Marketing, in startups, is a process that is expected to scale as fast as SWEs can build. When founders present that $XB slide, even though they’re reasonable, it’s expected that the founders can actually hit at least $1B in volume.
  • Costs. Anecdotally, famously, my old boss used to say, “At [top-tier firm], we quickly realized [in the 2010s] that at least 1-cent to every dollar spent at the early-stages was on customer acquisition.” And that is absolutely not the narrative presented by founders within the last ten years.
  • Trust. Simply put, for a bunch of historic reasons, people trust people more than companies. People now have incredible reach, so attention is following that preference accordingly.
    • Credit
    Credit Ben Mathews’ Creator Capitalist.

Creator Team Segmentation

These functions are similar to those hired on successful creator teams, separate from personal staff and entrepreneurial projects for software or CPG side businesses. This is the mental segmentation of a core creator team.

How to get started

So you want some of the Creator GTM goodness, but don’t know where to start. Here are some questions to get you prioritized on

  1. Retention vs. Reach. Which number are you not happy with?
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1. Community

Community-led growth was a term spread throughout early 2020s to connect with customers, teams, and brands that could create a cohesive community that cares about the quality and mission of one company.

It’s hard to say who exactly was the first to coin the term, but by 2023, it’s safe to say that the “community-led” … community has become mainstream.

Example 1: Bessemer

Example 2: McKinsey

Personally, I think of David Spinks and his Business of Belonging book or communities like CMX or Community-led (to which I get a ton of the following community frameworks from) as those making it popular within software.

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2. Content

This one’s a little more obvious. Content is:

  • Self-written
  • Self-written (a ghost writer - lol)

Content can be:

  • Written
  • Audio
  • Video
  • Image

Video content is currently important because:

In short, Alphabet bought Youtube for a reason. Google search rank does not translate to Youtube search, but Youtube search results do rank decently within Google search.

Here’s a decent video on it.