Manychat

We were promised robots doing our laundry. Instead we have to know Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lecture schedule. For those still blessed with ignorance... Palantir is named after the palantíri from Lord of the Rings. The magical seeing stones. The objects famously associated with the Bad Guys. The things Tolkien put in the story as A FREAKING WARNING. Somebody read that and went: yes. that. but for governments. And THAT IS NOT EVEN THE WEIRDEST ENTRY. The AI industry currently has: → government fights → secret societies → God-complex accusations → employee revolts → rare books being scanned and destroyed → AI photo-consent disasters → whatever the heck “Mythos-class” means You cannot simply “follow AI news” without a corkboard and red string. Anyway, Caroline B. made an AI-CYCLOPEDIA. This field guide is for who’s who, who’s suing whom, who has beef with the federal government, which ominously named corporation does what, etc. While we were documenting the increasingly baroque mythology of the people building our technological future: 🥤STËLZ gave 65,000 IG users product-development privileges and somehow this went FINE. 📊 We compared 2 BILLION engagements with 7 MILLION TikToks to determine the best time to post and science triumphantly returned with: Monday-ish. 💰Jessi Jean made $7 million in two days with zero ad spend and one assistant, meaning “yapping” has now outperformed several traditional asset classes. Please answer one question... at what exact moment did you realize we had wandered out of “technology industry” and into a rejected season of Black Mirror?

Creators are told to answer everyone personally or risk becoming “inauthentic,” so they spend the day copy-pasting links, answering the same question 50 times, and calling the resulting nervous breakdown “community management.” Some see automation and picture a skeevy robot in a trench coat forging emotional intimacy. Meanwhile, the audience is standing in the hallway holding a question, a credit card, and rapidly diminishing hope. Automation isn't supposed to impersonate the creator, though! It’s supposed to keep the door from being locked. Nicole Ramirez put that question to Manychat CMO Ido Mart for a new piece in Inc. Magazine about the missing infrastructure between attention and an actual business. Attention is not the business, people! Attention is the crowd outside the building. The business begins with what happens after somebody cares. Do they get an answer? Do they know what to do next? Can they buy, book, join, respond, or keep moving while the creator is asleep, filming, parenting, eating, working, or lying face-down on the floor trying to remember why you walked into the room? The point isn’t to automate the human, but to stop forcing the human to behave like a machine. So when the question or comment is emotional, complicated, strange, or actually about you? Be there. Bring your whole inconvenient human self. Full piece in the comments!

Millions are starting their creator journey. Only a fraction turn it into their business. What's the invisible blocker for success? It's almost never a content problem. It's that content earns attention, and attention alone pays nothing. Is nothing enough money for you? didn't think so. I dare you to take a few minutes to read this Inc. article by the incredible Nicole Ramirez - it is full of doozies. (Link in the comments, and I'll even summarize it for ya if you're 𝑙̶𝑎̶𝑧̶𝑦̶ busy)

Maybe don't build things no one is asking for?? While the internet is busy producing its 900,000th beautifully branded course with 47 modules, 13 worksheets, and exactly four customers, a creator named Jessi Jean built a $7.4M business in roughly 10 weeks with $0 in ad spend. If you don’t know Jessi, you probably don’t spend enough time rotting on Instagram. She went viral teaching people how to “yap” — aka get better at talking directly to camera. The audience basically invented the product for her. She posted. Something hit. She posted more of it. People asked questions. She listened. Those questions became the offer. Then she sold the challenge before she had actually built the challenge. Effective? $7.4M says hello. Meanwhile, plenty of creators are doing the exact opposite... Building first. Perfecting second. Rebranding third. Making a 62-page launch strategy fourth. Asking whether anyone wants it somewhere around step 847. We need the creator jury on this one: Would you ever sell something that wasn’t finished yet? A) Absolutely. Demand first, build second. B) Absolutely freaking not. C) Yes, but only if ________. We interviewed Jessi about the entire ridiculous BTS of the launch. Full video is linked in the comments.

The algorithm did not kill your business. Your merch is ugly. We are so sorry you had to find out like this... We spoke to a man who wears basically the same outfit every day, eats the same turkey sandwich, goes to bed at 8 p.m., and occasionally changes the bread when he wishes to feel the icy tongue of death against his neck. He runs a fashion marketing agency. Of course he does. Elsewhere in the creator economy... People with small audiences continue making actual money while larger accounts drag their enormous follower counts behind them like the decorative tail of a peacock that has never successfully completed checkout. Brands are discovering that “niche” is less “put yourself in a tiny little box” and more “please give me literally any indication of why these 17,000 people are gathered here.” There are apparently 11 major creator niches. One of them is pets. Meaning there is a non-zero chance your primary professional competitor has no concept of mortality and eats from a bowl on the floor. And we introduce you to another our very own Sierra Rogers, who knows too much about carnies and has specifically requested that an old blog of hers never resurface. Anyway, the new Manychat newsletter is out. It contains creators, ugly clothes, niche economics, carnies, a business Terminator, and a turkey sandwich whose bread occasionally changes under circumstances we assume require federal authorization. Stay here and explain why your niche is actually “lifestyle.” We would LOVE to hear what the lifestyle is.

Why are creators still screenshotting analytics to prove a brand partnership worked? You post the content. It cooks. Then comes the glamorous part of the creator economy: 1. Open Insights. 2. Screenshot everything. 3. Send screenshots to brand. 4. Brand opens spreadsheet. 5. Someone manually types numbers into tiny little cells. Everyone pretends this is a normal way to conduct business in 2026. 🫠 Except… maybe we can kill that whole ritual? Aaron Roy and Victoria Siemer from Manychat discuss what happens AFTER the sponsored post goes live, and how creators and brands could actually understand what worked without assembling an archaeological dig of screenshots, emails, spreadsheets, and prayers. Proving a partnership worked shouldn’t require a minor in forensic accounting! What if brands could clearly see when your content crushed? What if creators had an easier way to prove their value? What if “that campaign slapped, let’s work together again” was backed by something better than a screenshot buried 46 emails deep? Watch the clip! Then tell us the most cursed part of brand deals right now... Screenshots? Reporting? Getting paid? Approvals? The 900-email thread from hell? Tell your horror stories. 👇

A woman painted sneakers so successfully that she is now being transported across state lines.... A cat has a media career... A physical therapist discovered the doctorate-to-content pipeline... Someone with 1,900 followers is making money while somebody with 190,000 followers is staring into the middle distance whispering “brand awareness..." A Chicago sandwich company made dozens of commercials that look like they were filmed during a gas leak... CONTENT IS A REAL JOB, YOUR DAD HAS BEEN SERVED. We asked creators to make the case. They did. Our grand prize winner, Beau Thistle, turned painting custom sneakers into an actual business and will head to NYC to see her face on a billboard. Our runners-up include a physical therapist, a comedian, a somatic movement creator, and a rescue cat whose primary professional competency is hitting cards with her paw. Noelle (the feisty feline) will be speaking at Cannes by 2028. Also, Bobby Hilliard was supposed to cover White Sox Grateful Dead Night like a journalist. Unfortunately Bobby has a White Sox tattoo and wants to be cremated in his Sox cap. Then PR let him onto the field for batting practice. Ethics professors, please turn away. What's the most unserious thing you've ever done that accidentally made you serious money?

Marketing teams are splitting in two: Team Agent and Team Human. So I'm hosting a SXSW panel with 3 C-suite execs from Gamma, Manychat, and Wispr Flow to figure out which side wins. Who will be leading this panel? - Daniel McCallum, CMO @ Wispr Flow - Kristin Fracchia, CGO @ Gamma - Ido Mart, CMO @ Manychat This session was inspired by a keynote I heard at Profound's Zero Click NYC event. The speaker (Kristin, above) described how leading companies are rebuilding their marketing teams around the same shape: A barbell 🏋♂️ Discovery moved to AI. Making content became free. Every playbook written before that assumed the opposite. One end of the team went technical thanks to AI, because what other people say about you now matters more than what you say about yourself. The other end went pure taste with Humans: events, culture, and storytelling that cannot be generated. The generalist in the middle is hollowing out. On stage: what they hired first, what they cut, and what they would do again. But we need your vote to make it happen. 🗳️ 🤠 Send us to Austin if you want to see us with boots and cowboy hats: https://lnkd.in/edmg8wrU *** 🔔 Follow me AJ Eckstein 🧩 (HIRING) for more content on entrepreneurship, creator marketing strategies for tech brands, and tips for creators

Parents, don't let your babies grow up to be creators... ...unless somebody is going to teach them copyright law, contracts, analytics, finance, sales, audience strategy, production, marketing, and how to recognize when a skincare company is trying to buy perpetual usage rights for $400 and three bottles of moisturizer. Arizona State University launched a BA in Content Creation through its Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Naturally, the internet heard: BACHELOR OF TIKTOK DANCING 🤡 What ASU is actually teaching: *Video and podcast production *Content strategy *Audience analytics *Social media strategy *Integrated communication *Personal branding *Media ethics In other words: business. And ASU is nowhere near alone... University of Missouri-Columbia offers a BA in Digital Storytelling where students can study digital media production, story development, video, animation, audio storytelling, screenwriting, emerging media, and the theory behind all of it. Mizzou also boasts an 18-credit certificate in Personal Branding. And before you picture a semester-long seminar called "How to Look Thoughtful While Holding an Iced Matcha," the curriculum includes personal finance, entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, PR, communications law. Mizzou explicitly says it's designed for people pursuing self-employment through their personal brands, including athletes, musicians, artists, bloggers, freelancers, and, yes, social media influencers. Which is... exactly what we should be teaching them? Syracuse University — Creator Economy minor. Launching this fall, jointly through Newhouse and the Whitman School of Management. University of Pennsylvania — Certificate in Digital Storytelling and Content Creation. Penn's program gets surprisingly creator-y: UGC, audience engagement, social media strategy, cross-platform content, editing, virtual communities, and building a professional portfolio Indiana University Indianapolis — BS Media Arts & Science, Digital Storytelling specialization. Digital-platform storytelling, scriptwriting, storyboarding, production, commercials, animation, and emerging media. You can laugh at the word “creator.” The IRS won't. Neither will the brands negotiating their contracts. Neither will their customers. And we definitely won't. Manychat exists because creators aren't playing business. They ARE businesses. If someone's face, ideas, expertise. and audience are going to become the economic engine of their business, maybe teaching them how to manage the money, market the product, protect the IP, and understand the law isn't the collapse of higher education. Now, parents: your kid gets accepted into a four-year Content Creation / Creator Economy degree tomorrow. Are you paying the tuition? Yes or absolutely not? We would VERY much like the parents, creators, professors, and “this generation is doomed” delegation to fight this one out below. 👇

We hired someone to make taking your money less memorable. Meet William Osteux, our new Product Director for Billing & Accounts — aka the person responsible for making sure the payment process does not become its own traumatic subplot. Think about the last time you paid for Netflix. Do you remember entering your card details? Thinking about tax calculations? Wondering what mysterious financial plumbing was happening behind the button? No? Exactly. As Will puts it: “The highest compliment my product can get is that nobody remembers using it.” Creators should steal the hell out of that philosophy. We spend a LOT of time talking about making things memorable. Memorable hooks. Memorable content. Memorable brands. Memorable offers. But some of the best experiences you build should be completely, gloriously forgettable. Your checkout. Your booking flow. Your lead capture. Your delivery process. The 16 tiny steps between “I want this” and “take my money.” If your customer has time to notice the machinery, the machinery might be machinery-ing too hard. Will has also lived in enough countries to develop “patience with paperwork, impatience with taxes, and a deep suspicion of the word obvious,” which feels like ideal preparation for billing software. He’s French, so apparently bribery is ineffective. A good argument, however? He’ll change his mind in front of you. Outside work, you can find him somewhere sunny with a book, enjoying Barcelona and presumably healing the inner teenager who absolutely did not consider The Black Parade “just a phase.” His coworker warning label would read: “Contains strong language. Not aimed at you. It’s punctuation.” So, naturally, he’ll fit right in! Welcome to Manychat, Will! Okay, internet: what’s a completely normal online task that has absolutely NO BUSINESS being as annoying as it is? Wrong answers accepted. Petty grievances encouraged. Specific company names… legally, we did not ask for those. 👇