Daniel Koss: Building Creator-Centric Platforms
Last week, I interviewed Daniel Koss, a creator turned entrepreneur who founded Creable.io. We have spoken about his career trajectory from a gaming youtube in 2009, to building Switzerland’s largest creative management agency, to his venture-backed startup Creable, which has become a data-led collaboration platform for top creators & brand managers.
[This interview has been shortened and edited for clarity. Full remarks can be found via the podcast here]
How did you get started as a creator?
I started when I was 11 when I fell in love with gaming, at the time it was a competitive but unpaid tribal. I was one of the world's first browser-native games and I was pretty good at that game. I made some money by boosting and selling accounts to people who were very bad at the game, but that then became illegal. I think sometime around 2009 when YouTube was starting to gain some traction and I saw somebody was making money from Google AdSense. And I was like wait, what this person is making silly videos on YouTube, and they're making a living from it. And I'm here ranked one in a video game and not making any money and no career options. Nothing. Okay, wait a minute, why don't I just become a YouTube gamer?
Being a creator at such a young age, what is your primary motivation?
Back then that all happened between me being 13 and 17. So there weren't many sophisticated thoughts. I had no idea what the job was. All I knew is I hate school and I love playing video games. So I want to and I also like money and I don't like being broke, but money was hard to save between money and gaming. I'd prefer to play more video games.
So basically, the logic was I just wanted to make as much fun as I get from YouTube. So I could play video games all day and don't have to go to school. That's the full logic. That's like the full equation.
What did you do before founding creable?
Long before when I was still a YouTuber, I was managed by a lot of MCs (multi-channel networks), which was basically the first iteration of a creative management agency back then. By being signs a couple of MCN sometimes with ridiculous deals, like they got 60% of my revenue and stuff like that. I think one time I'd like a 60/40 deal, when I got 40% of my own revenue and gave 60% away to somebody who did literally nothing for me, except monetizing my videos because back then google AdSense isn't available in Switzerland, so you would have to sign to a German or American MCN even make any money.
That was a very horrible experience. I felt like I was being held hostage in this big MCN, every partner manager was matching 40 to 60 creators, which means even if they would spend time on creators, it led to less than one hour per creator per week. So you can't really call them full-time managers because they aren’t always available.
So I decided to start up my first startup extract, which then long story short over six years becomes became Switzerland's biggest creative management. And at one point had over 100 creators and the management was a monopoly on Swiss Swiss digital influencers back then it was mainly Instagram. We got a lot of amazing brands that came to us through inbound. Many brands like Coca-Cola, Samsung, Apple, national Swiss telecommunication companies and insurance companies, etc.
What did you do before founding creable?
At the time, I was very happy with my accomplishment with the creative management agency, but not in relation to my ambition. I realized I actually want to build something that can be in the billions not in the millions. At this point 13 years in the industry. I didn't see a change from when I started as YouTuber people were still using screenshots and doing so many things manually.
The creator economy is not just getting bigger. It's also getting more professional, more advertising and venture money are flowing into it. More resources I thought growing exponentially as for the level of interconnectivity with the rest of the economy. I had the idea to crave to create software for creators.
Either a brand or an agency reaches out to you as a creator and then you can send them your book healing through which they can see all everything they care about you as a creator. They can see your personal information your own supergraphics, your performance metrics, your services, your prices, previous brands, and the brands you've worked with. It comes directly from official APIs that update themselves in real-time.
how did you determine which type of creators you want to work with?
Yeah, so right now we're definitely focusing the most on YouTubers. So our logic is we want to be on the advertiser side, we want to help advertisers find the highest ROI Chris to work with. I'm not a huge fan of micro-influencers, except if you're targeting a specific niche where there are no big influencers and you have to decide between good targeting at a smaller scale or horrible targeting at the bigger scale, then I would. You kind of has to work with smaller traders just to target that specific niche. But if you're targeting bigger topics like mainstream fashion, food, and travel, I've never it never made sense for me to work with micro-influencers because the ROI for advertisers is just worse. You get fewer sales, fewer conversions, less traffic, and get fewer results for your money
The difference between YouTubers and Tik Tok is simple. For TikTok, the focus is on the content whereas on YouTube the focus is more on the content creator. Let's say for a TikToker with 1,000 videos uploaded and you see every 10th video so you see 100 videos on an average of 30 seconds. So you've watched it for them for like a year and you've seen 50 minutes of the content. As a YouTuber, I've uploaded over 1000 videos and my fans who watch half of my videos with an average watch time of five minutes, it would become 2500 minutes. So as YouTuber your audience doesn't spend minutes with you. They've literally spent days over the years with you.
Daniel’s Advice for entrepreneur building in the creator economy
If you want to build for creators, you really have to understand your own business model and your unit economics. Targeting creators are hard because creators are like “bootstrapped founders” who are entirely self-funded with no outside capital. To have creators paying a significant amount of money, usually, that only happens if you help them save half the production time or 10x their content output. That's just the scale that I'm talking about.
It's a very competitive market with high churn rates. So what again, the short version is the unit economics really have to work and you have to understand what you're doing otherwise you're preparing a word of pain. Most companies that started in the creator economy a couple of years ago when we were in a great funding environment are now struggling incredibly hard to grow, some are pivoting hard or just closing.
What do you want to be known for?
So privately, I don't really want to be known for anything. It's just not something I care about. Currently, I'm just happy in life it's just there's not much I'm there's actually nothing I'm missing, Being known for something probably makes my last night my life worse not better. On the professional level, I would like to be known as the influencer marketing expert that creators can go to or managers can go to to help them.
Learn more about Daniel and Creable
Follow & connect with Daniel on Twitter
Check out creable.io product demo here
💡 This Week's News In the Creator Economy
Youtube announced structural changes on Shorts Monetization
Untitled raised $4.6 million from General Catalyst
BeReal experienced a multi-hour outage
Instagram and WhatApp are no longer accessible in Iran
Observer released Top 25 People Powering the Creator Economy
YesTheory released their first featured film
Substack alternative Beehiiv raised $1.6M seed round
✌️ That’s it until next time!
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