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.
Anjolaoluwa ‘Anj’ Fayemi, artist and co-founder of Rivet has had first-hand experience dealing with the frustrations of fragmented data which led to the creation of Rivet as a solution. Rivet is an AI-driven CRM platform that allows mid-tier creators to better engage with their fan communities by harnessing data from fan interactions. Its core idea is to enable creators to be more like small businesses by empowering them to lean more towards their top fans, use intelligence to tell when fans are about to churn, and take necessary steps and actions to re-engage them.
Rivet, which started as a solution specific to Fayemi’s data management problem has since evolved into a platform targeted at understanding the unique perspectives of creators and artists, resulting in it becoming more representative of the community as a whole. As Fayemi puts it, “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.”
For creators, it is essential to understand who their top fans are, what actions they’re taking, and how to carefully nudge them toward becoming a more valuable fan base. However, this level of granularity can be challenging to achieve without the right tools and strategies. Many creators find themselves bogged down in manual tasks such as managing storefronts, sending out mass emails, and responding to comments or DMs, which can be time-consuming and not very effective.
The idea for the platform, which boasts big names such as Ivy Sole, was mostly developed during Fayemi’s days as a student at MIT. Together with his co-founders Simran Pabla and Nafim Rahman, Fayemi spent a significant amount of time utilizing the entrepreneurship resources available on their campus to develop the venture. This process involved applying the knowledge and skills gained from classroom instruction and real-life experiences to Rivet. By doing so, they gained valuable insights into product development, primary market research, and user feedback. This allowed them to build Rivet in real-time while simultaneously learning and developing the necessary foundational skills required for building a successful venture.
Rivet helps creators and artists gain a deeper understanding of engagement, both on and off platforms, and provides recommendations and actions that can enhance your engagement with your top fans. The platform eliminates tedious and ineffective manual processes, allowing creators to leverage data and strategy to create a more efficient and effective engagement strategy that empowers creators and helps them build stronger, more valuable fan bases.
Recently, Rivet received a $500k seed funding led by Drive Capital and according to Fayemi, this funding will be channeled towards launching the platform fully in the next few months as the startup continues to expand its user base. Currently, Rivet houses around 1,400 active creators on the platform but aims to reach 20,000 active creators in the coming years. To achieve this, there is a need to concentrate on product development to support this level of scale and the actions these creators will take as Fayemi explained – “A lot of the product development and getting the product to work needs to be in terms of maturity to support that degree of the scale of creators and the degree of the scale of actions that those creators will take.”
Despite Rivet’s growing popularity in the creative community, its early days were not hurdle-free. Rivet faced challenges related to messaging and product design. Recounting Rivet’s earliest hitches, Fayemi said “early on it was figuring out the right, concise message for cold outreach, and that took a lot of iteration, sending out lots of different messages, calls to people on social platforms, seeing what got people to respond, seeing what got people to hop on a call with us and then continue to just learn from what we were seeing to tighten up that message and tighten up that outreach, so that was something that was tough early on and has continued to improve”
According to Fayemi, the Rivet team emphasized the platform as a tool to help streamline creative workflows without adding extra steps or requiring users to learn new skills. However, the team’s focus on creating a functional product due to its founder’s strong roots in engineering resulted in a lack of emphasis on design. “We’ve since focused on significantly improving on both of those elements from a design perspective and that was just something that we had to put the product out there and see the feedback that we were getting,” Fayemi pointed out.
Since its creation, Rivet has organically expanded beyond enabling artists to all types of creators such as podcasters and YouTube influencers. In the coming years, Rivet expects to collaborate with a wider range of creators who are building different types of communities and require a more robust product to cater to their varying needs. Rivet also intends to service other verticals such as fitness and D2C brands backed by the potential of its underlying intelligence and community and retention engine. The platform aims to position itself within its workflow at the individual creator level to provide support for community building, allowing them to offer support for brand-level launches and other products. For Fayemi and his co-founders, Rivet has a huge opportunity to expand and leverage its product to achieve this goal, gain insights into consumers, and assist more creators in building successful businesses.