How Rivet Is Enabling Creatives Track & Manage Fan Engagement Across Social Media
Co-founders Anj and Simran let us in on how their platform will eases the content creation process for creatives
Today’s world is undeniably content driven and creator oriented. Apps like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and more have given any user with accessibility to the internet and social media a chance to plug in and generate various forms of content. Now more than ever, everyone’s tapped into their creative side, churning out a plethora of content for their varying audiences. This results is a high concentration of creatives, content and oftentimes support or followership from users across the globe. It goes without saying that a number of creatives see the value in staying connected to those who appreciate their content, seeing as it helps them stay at the top of a highly saturated market.
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By streamlining and organising ones fans, creators can best understand how to satisfy their needs as well as the best mediums to communicate with them. Alongside this, it would enable content creators and other creatives determine which audiences to target with their varying content. Gathering all this data by would undoubtedly be tedious. “When I was putting out my second album, I found that people tried engaging or buying something from me went through a manual process,” Anjolaoluwa ‘Anj’ Fayemi shares with The NATIVE. “Even when When I wanted to tease information like new releases, it was very frustrating to use because it sometimes got lost.”
With his first-hand experience, Anj, an MIT graduate, teamed up with Simran Pabla, whose experience in computer science and machine learning was integral in the creation of Rivet, alongside their third partner Nafim Rahman. They began building Rivet, an AI-driven Customer Relationship Management platform to help creators lean into their fans with exclusives and discounts. The data gathered also enables creators discover the demographic of their fans that are less active and discover ways to re-engage with them. The platform ultimately aims at providing its users a more prescriptive tool to drive engagements and possibly monetise it.
Recently, the platform received a $500k pre-seed funding led by Drive Capital with additional participation from The Hustle Fund and Visible Hands to further the groups vision of empowering creators and artists across the world. As the creative community grows and proves to be an increasingly lucrative business, a platform like Rivet that enables users seamlessly navigate consumer relationships couldn’t be more beneficial. Following the funding announcement, we caught up with Anj Fayemi and Simran Pabla, two of the platform’s founders to discuss the technicalities of the platform as well as the future of Rivet.
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Our conversation, which follows below, has been lightly edited for clarity.
NATIVE: This platform is being built partly from your experiences and frustrations. What gap does Rivet intend to bridge in the content creator ecosystem?
Simran: The artists we work with, we’re finding are active on over five platforms on average. They have social presence and presence on various commerce platforms. Managing that just as a team of one or two people in incredibly difficult. Our initial focus was understanding to make it possible for artists to manage across these fragmented ecosystems more effectively. That’s where we started stitching information across those pools to better inform these creators on what fan behaviour looks like across those different points. We became really interested in taking it a step further and understanding, not just how we can make that data available in a more useful manner, but how can we make it actionable.
NATIVE: Could you explain in detail what it would require to access of join the platform? Talk me through that process.
Simran: When you first sign up on our platform, you’ll be guided to connect your different accounts with Rivet’s. So Instagram, Shopify, Eventbrite and wherever else you’re engaging your fans. Once you connect those with us, that’s how we start understanding what your fan behaviour looks like across different platforms. From there, Rivet is able to start building fan segments for the creator. It shows fans that are most likely to attend a show or ]purchase something from you for example. We’re able to offer those kinds of insights and guide you through the best way to reach out to those people. We have tools within the platform that enable you directly start reach them. Rivet learns more about your fans, builds a stronger profile for each of them and is able to really tailor and personalise your engagement with each of those individuals, based on those preferences.
NATIVE: You recently received a large investment led by Drive Capital, how does this enable improving the platform for users?
Anj: This allows us to invest more on product development and hire across, engineering and marketing in order to build more awareness for the product. It would enable us get more creators onto the platform and all that does is give us momentum ahead of our full launch in the summer.
NATIVE: What inspired the name ‘Rivet’? Does that represent anything?
Anj: Yeah. What it means is this concept of creating experiences that are really magical from creator to fans. It’s facilitating those experiences and enabling creators provide those experiences to their fan communities. One of the words we used to describe this is ‘riveting’ and so Rivet comes from that.
NATIVE: Briefly describe the accessibility of the platform to users. Does a creator need to have a specific following before being able to use the platform?
Simran: So right now we’re focused on artists that have at least 5000 to 10,000 followers and above across social media platforms. That just means we’re able to build stronger insights about their community. We’re really excited in the future to expand and make Rivet valuable to anyone who’s looking to take their art seriously and build a business from it. That’s where we’ve started today to build the strongest models and understand those trends more effectively.
Anj: A little smaller is fine for growing artists, but we’ve been focused on those numbers as a threshold for where you can really see value on the platform right now. We’re in beta, which is free, so we’re optimising for feedback on fan experiences interactions and driving up engagement. The platform will see and continue to improve the product ahead of our launch.
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NATIVE: Why did you guys centre the focus of Rivet on social media content creators specifically?
Anj: We’re focused first on musicians and then social media, content creators. It’s more about where the pain pinched the most. From our customer discovery user interviews, we found the pain was felt the most within that demographic but now we’re receiving organic interest from other types of content creators. With that, we’re expanding the platform to be more functional for them but that’s guided our approach to who we target.
NATIVE: Other than following, what else do you look for in artists and creators looking to use the platform beyond those numbers?
Anj: Creatives that are serious about their journey as a content creator and are looking to build a business. A business that at its core is their community and are they ready to start investing in what that could look like.
NATIVE: How do you hope this platform expands the creative economy? What are those changes you hope to see better the creative ecosystem as a whole?
Simran: Artists, musicians and any creators really with a community driven focus built and maintain their community. We just expect the number of platforms creators engage their fans to continue to grow, change and shift over time. So the intelligence that we can bring to that ecosystem can really change the way artists, creators and really anyone with the community engages with those people and retains them over time.
[Featured Image Credits/The NATIVE]
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