Quick aside - I’m convinced I am on a week lag to Rex Woodbury’s Digital Native articles. This week my article is about social media marketing, last week his newsletter was. The week prior his newsletter was about the sustainable economy and mine was about Brilliant Planet. If I’m onto something here, this week or next he will write about workforce management (Rippling)!
Onto today’s topic, the creator economy and tools helping creators streamline their marketing and engagement of followers!
The rise of social media began in the early 2000s.
Myspace was started in 2003, Facebook in 2004, Instagram in 2010, Snapchat in 2011, TikTok in 2016, and many before, after, and in-between.
Since then, individuals online have risen to and fallen from fame. People have amassed hundreds of millions of followers and shared their lives online with family, friends, colleagues, random individuals, and everyone in-between. Some of them over a slow and steady period of time, and others overnight!
With the power of a computer in our pocket, our smartphones, billions of people worldwide can access social media within seconds (4.62 Billion people to be exact - according to Datareportal), each and every day.
For brands, this is a super lucrative advertising opportunity. They can put their products in front of more than half of the planet’s population!
For this reason and more, the same mediums we use to socialize, connect, and share our lives with others have become mediums for brands to advertise and get us to buy their products and drive their top lines.
This gave rise to the creator economy and the digital age.
The creator economy is a description of the current digital era where people via their online presence, can share and monetize their hobbies with their following.
By building a following, individuals can advertise and sell directly to their audience and thus create an income stream that was not as accessible prior to the vast ubiquity and presence of social media in our lives.
These people go by “influencers”, “creators”, and much more. Put simply, they provide content (and products, advertisements, partnerships, and more) to a pool of followers who they can monetize engagement from.
For these “creators”, managing it all is no easy task. Constantly creating and releasing high-quality content, engaging followers and acquiring new ones, and monetizing adjacent selling opportunities – it’s a true business. And spreadsheets, reminders, and notes are not gonna cut it.
Creators need tools that facilitate the function of the creator economy and help them monetize their gigs.
Norby, one of them, puts great marketing tools in the hands of these creators to help them handle everything we talked about above and more.
Norby is an “audience-relationship toolkit” built for creators and brands. Norby helps you build, cultivate, analyze, and activate your audience using its all-in-one toolbox.
In July of 2021, Norby raised a $3.8 million seed round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s venture AI-focused fund, to grow its team and scale its full-stack marketing platform. Bungalow Capital, BBG Ventures, Charge VC, and Notation also participated in the funding round.
As put by TechCrunch -
Norby’s big idea is to combine services like LinkTree, Eventbrite and MailChimp into a single, affordable, subscription-based service, offering anyone who handles an online community a single solution rather than an expensive patchwork of services that have to be individually set up and managed. Norby is ideal for small brands and solo entrepreneurs, and most of its customers run less than 10-person operations. The creator tool suite is purely subscription-based and won’t collect any fees like Eventbrite and other popular services.
Norby gives creators the tools to leverage their audience. Let’s see why this helps creators from the consumer perspective
I follow @litquidity on Instagram, a finance meme page that pushes out hilarious content on finance, the markets, politics, society, tech, banking, and more. I get a lot of joy from seeing the memes and content from the page and it provides much-needed comic relief to many of the absurd events that have occurred in the last 24 months.
But I also follow ~1,200+ people on Instagram, have multiple other social media accounts, have a job, don’t like being stuck on my phone, etc. I’m a customer with a lot of different things asking for my attention.
So are you, reading this newsletter!
It’s hard for litquidity to get me to engage with his content and make a purchase that will net him some cash.
Norby’s marketing tools allow creators to reach out directly to followers and activate them at the right moment on the best channel.
With this outreach to litquidity’s audience, Norby tracks how each individual engages with the outreach, looking at conversion for all steps in the funnel for things like “lives”, launches, tickets, and more.
Engaging customers through the whole funnel means having personalized, easy, and logical flows. It’s hard to build these yourself, especially without design / CS experience.
Norby has bespoke workflow tools that enable creators to build customizable signup flows that capture audience data in ways that make sense and insight can be drawn from.
Creators often reach out to their audience across multiple platforms and mediums. It’s hard to track who is seeing what, how engagement varies, and which one works best / how to improve them.
Norby easily tracks and analyzes stats across platforms to create powerful insights
In addition to much, much more.
Norby has a number of tools built into its platform. Some of them include:
Outbound marketing methods
SMS marketing, newsletters, and email campaigns
Your audience will receive these pushes from your custom phone number as well!
Generalized bespoke marketing materials such as landing pages and link-in-bios
Create customizable workflows for followers to interact with
Event suites and ticketing abilities to help sell products, events, workshops, classes, and more
And analytic and analysis tools to help manage and track it all!
Track and analyze audience actions
Clicks, subscriptions, purchases, and more
Across Clubhouse rooms, IG Lives, panels, product launches, or content drops.
Integrate events, signups, buttons, and reminders from your custom website ship or blog with Norby.
Works with Instagram, Clubhouse, Mailchimp, Flodesk, and Zoom.insights
Right now, Norby has two pricing tiers
Basic: $5/month - Affordable pay as you go SMS and email, 3 landing pages, 1 team member
per email, SMS, and MMS pricing of $0.001-$0.03 per message
Premium: $20/month - 500 SMS, 100MMS, 25k email, no ticket fees, unlimited landing pages, and team collaboration
After the limits above, premium per message pricing applies
More is always better right?
More things, more clothes, more shoes, more followers, more cars, more houses. But these things make our lives more complicated and bog us down. In reality, many times
Less is more.
This will eventually prove true for the work productivity / collaboration tools space (post on Cord here) but it is definitely true for creators and influencers.
We live in the digital age. Where people can rise to fame from the power and algorithmic prowess of Tiktok in an instant. Individuals that make a living being a creator, influencer, or monetize the social media world need a platform that makes their business simpler and easier. They use multiple apps like Linktree, Mailchimp, and more to manage every aspect of their business. Things like referrals, newsletters, marketing tools, events and ticketing - it can get messy. It’s disorganized, siloed, and separated from each other causing inefficiency and difficulty.
Norby is a super interesting company at the forefront of our digital age and the creator economy that has blown up in the last few years.
COVID, increased cell phone use, and more young people having access to technology and thus social media will only drive tremendous growth of the creator economy in years to come. As a tool aimed towards inherently smaller businesses / standalone influencers, the market for Norby is likely to be competitive, with niche point solutions for various marketing needs. Norby’s success lies in its ability to continue to add marketing solutions for the smaller end of the creator market, add many new customers, and add in adjacent revenue opportunities that could even allow Norby to function as more of a horizontal creator solution (much like the way Microsoft and others do).
More than usual this weekend was all about food.
Was my mom’s birthday, and no better way to celebrate it than with a back-to-back L’artusi - Via Corota weekend.
Also got to see my uncle (dad’s brother) who I haven’t seen in quite some time.
The food at both was great as always, think i’m officially a bigger fan of the pastas at L’artusi and the salads / vegetables at Via Corota (excluding LArtusi brussel sprouts and Via Cacio…). Need to learn how to cook Lartusi’s Spaghetti immediately.
Also go to see my uncle (dad’s brother) for the first time in a while which was great. A new place I got to try this weekend was this insane Thai seafood joint in Essex Market down in the LES. It’s called Essex Pearl and it opened about 6 weeks ago.
Frankly, I am blown away the place isn’t packed all hours of the day. My dad and I sat at the bar and watched as chefs prepared super extravagant Thai flavors using seafood and meat like Dungeness crab (only get if you’re willing to get down and dirty), calamari, steak, shrimp, and more just a foot away. Was an interactive, lively, and awesome experience that I could not more highly recommend. If you like the flavors of Wayan, Wayla, Thai Diner, and seafood - this is your next must-try spot. Their menu with photos is linked here, and their Instagram is here. Check it out and shoot me a text or drop a comment here once you do with your thoughts.
GW
Loved this week’s Next Round - Norby summary…Although L’Artusi’s spaghetti was the highlight meal of the birthday weekend!