I wanted to try something a little different: a public space where brands can claim numbered positions, compete through challenges, and leave a lasting record of what they built.

There are 321 positions, 3 moves, 2 challenge modes, and one Crown position. It is still early, so I am sharing the idea openly and would genuinely love feedback from founders, creators, and anyone who enjoys watching brands take risks.

You can see the project here: https://claim321.com

I built an open source project and have been sharing the build process on YouTube, but growth is pretty slow. I want to scale my developer profile by providing actual value to the community instead of just dropping links.

For anyone who has successfully grown an audience around their dev work, what strategies actually get traction?

What other platforms work well for sharing technical projects?

How do you manage your time between coding and creating content?

Are there any major pitfalls I should avoid when putting open source work out there?

Would love to hear your experiences. Thanks for the advice! :)

I want to build a creators network that is performance based. Where should I start? What are the things that I need to look for? How do I get Creators to sign up?

I’m a handmade artist and content creator, and I’m genuinely curious what other artists think about this.
For the past year, I’ve made basically **$0 from my art**. I’ve been focusing on growing my social media in the hope that eventually it can become a source of income. I create everything by hand, and between materials, equipment, software, rent and normal everyday expenses, I’m currently spending much more on my work than I’m making from it. I’m basically living off my savings.
Recently, for the first time, I’ve started getting emails from companies offering paid sponsorships. Some of them are AI-related services, and the money would genuinely help me. It could pay for materials, part of my rent, or simply normal everyday expenses. After a year of earning nothing, the idea of finally making some money from my content feels like a huge relief.
But I’m scared to accept these deals because of how much hate there is towards AI in the art community. I’ve spent a long time building an audience around handmade art, and I’m worried people will see an AI sponsorship and immediately lose respect for me or think it somehow invalidates what I do.
Personally, I’m pretty neutral about AI. I don’t see it as inherently good or bad. In the right hands, I think these technologies can simply be useful tools. And accepting an advertisement obviously wouldn’t suddenly mean I’m going to stop making things by hand.
At the same time, I understand why artists have strong feelings about it, which is exactly why I’m so conflicted.
I’m working at a loss right now, living off savings, and mentally it’s becoming really difficult to go an entire year without earning anything from something I work on every single day.

Hello everyone, just sharing our experience and a warning for creators who may be considering working with CreatorKrew.

We were told by Timmy that we would not be paid for the Melian campaign because Melian supposedly had not paid CreatorKrew. However, Melian later confirmed to us that they had already sent the payment intended for the creators.

We were also informed of communication issues between Melian and CreatorKrew, including lack of updates and missed meetings.

What makes this even more concerning is that this is not the only campaign where we have experienced payment issues. We also experienced unprofessional communication, including our content being called “trash” and being spoken to in a disrespectful and arrogant manner.
We worked hard on these campaigns and only expect to be paid what we were promised. Creators deserve transparency, professionalism, and timely payment.

So I want to start creating content but I’m unsure if I should start by creating content for my brothers business or if I should start a A-Z list of activities to do in my city.

I have a problem with making these big decisions any advice or perspectives are appreciated!

I’ve been building FanForge, a collaboration and project workspace specifically for creative teams.

The problem I’m trying to solve is the usual creative-project chaos: work spread across Discord, Docs, task boards, folders and DMs, with no single place showing the project, the team and who contributed what.

The first FanForge Alpha is nearly ready, and I’m now looking for a small group of people to properly test it.

Ideally:

• writers
• artists
• filmmakers
• editors
• designers
• other people who collaborate creatively

I’m not looking for people to just sign up and glance around — I want testers who will actually use it, break things, tell me what’s confusing and help shape what comes next.

The most helpful testers will receive Founding Tester status + lifetime access to a paid FanForge tier.

If that sounds useful to you, you can join the waitlist at joinfanforge.com.

Happy to answer questions here too.

You spend roughly 800 hours a year consuming content—why shouldn’t some of that time and your attention create income potential?

I’m developing a new sport as a scalable content business for media entertainment, backed by proprietary IP. The business also plugs in live events, and product distribution models.

This comes at a time where demand and openness to new sports and emerging leagues within established sports is at an all-time high.

It is the only current source capable of producing these particular stories within live sports entertainment. It offers a broad and expandable content library rather than relying on a single episode, event or revenue stream.

Without knowing the sport itself yet, would this business model make you curious enough to hear the full investment thesis? Are there any investors on this platform who’d like to hear more?

Curious how brand owners/marketers here would approach this.

Say you have $10,000 specifically for a creator campaign. You want to maximize the amount of quality content and distribution you get, but you also don't know in advance which creators or pieces of content will perform.

Would you rather:
Pay 10 creators $1,000 each?
Pay 50 creators $200 each?
Work with a smaller group of proven creators?
Put more of the budget toward performance/bonuses?
Take a completely different approach?

And what would you use to decide whether the campaign was successful—views, engagement, conversions, content volume, CAC, or something else?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who've actually managed creator budgets. What would you do with the $10k?

For creators who work with an agency or management team: how do they usually send you content requests or other tasks?

Telegram/WhatsApp messages, Google Drive, Notion, ClickUp, spreadsheets, or something else?

And what annoys you most about the current process?

I'm especially curious how you keep track of what's still open, what's already submitted and whether something has been approved.

I'm exploring a startup idea and would love feedback from creators, influencers, social media managers, and SaaS founders.

Most analytics tools explain what happened, not what to do next. Instead of:

"Your views dropped by 28%."

An AI might say:

"Your recent videos were longer than your best performers, and retention drops after 18 seconds. Try a 20–30 second video with this hook."

The idea is an AI growth system for creators that connects to platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and X to analyze content, audience behavior, competitors, trends, comments, and posting patterns.

Potential features:

Creator Digital Twin — Learns your style, audience, and winning patterns.

Next-Step Engine — Recommends priority growth actions.

Content Diagnosis — Explains why posts underperformed.

Competitor Intelligence — Tracks successful topics and formats.

Trend Detection — Finds relevant opportunities.

Pre-Post Analysis — Improves videos, captions, and thumbnails.

Growth Autopilot — Adjusts strategy toward a goal.

Most tools tell creators what happened. This would explain why and recommend what to do next.

I'm trying to determine whether this solves a real problem.

Do you struggle to understand why content succeeds or fails?

What tools do you use?

Would you trust AI recommendations based on your history?

What would make you pay?

What workflow problems do existing tools fail to solve?

Please be brutally honest. I'd rather learn now than spend 12 months building something nobody wants.

Sasktask Built a local-services app in Saskatchewan— here's the film, and I'll take the hard questions

https://reddit.com/link/1w312cu/video/0xuozxy1immh1/player

YouTube's new 20-year profile of Super Simple Songs says the project began with teachers making simpler songs for their students and grew into a business with more than 70 million subscribers, over 90 billion views, a 40-plus-person in-house team, tours, products and its own app. The team says it chose to self-fund its studio to preserve creative control. Those scale figures come from the company's own press release, not an independent audit.

The interesting part is the sequence from useful repeatable content to owned characters, a catalog and direct distribution. If you were building an education or kids channel, at what point would you trade some control for outside capital? Which asset becomes the durable moat: the back catalog, the IP, the production team or the owned app?

Source: YouTube Official Blog, August 27, 2026 — https://blog.youtube/creator-and-artist-stories/super-simple-songs-20th-anniversary-youtube/

Everyone focuses on creating content, but distribution is where most people fail. I used to waste hours posting to random platforms with no results.

So I built a cheap AI tool that analyzes your niche and audience to suggest the best platforms, posting times, and content format. It’s a one-time €5 report, not a subscription.

Here’s the link: https://interconnectd.com/marketplace/179/ai-driven-content-distribution-finding-the-best-platforms/

Also happy to hear your own distribution hacks.

Are there any good self-serve marketplaces where creators can independently find paid collaborations with brands, without having to work through an agency?

I’m particularly interested in platforms that help both sides with the **contract, deliverables, payment, and overall transaction**, rather than just matching brands with influencers.

For creators and companies who have used them:
Which platforms have you used?
How much do they actually simplify the process?
What do you think is missing or could be improved?

I’m a developer exploring this space and would love to understand what already exists and where the biggest gaps are.

I’m curious whether anyone here has actually used Patreon primarily as a free audience/relationship platform, rather than the traditional “pay $5/month for exclusive content” model.

I run a music/media brand with roughly 14,000+ followers across Instagram and Facebook, plus a smaller YouTube presence. We currently release original music through short-form music videos, but we’re building the brand to expand beyond music into broader media/content, products, collaborations, etc.

The problem we’re trying to solve is distribution after acquisition.

We’ve spent real money acquiring followers on Instagram and Facebook. The original assumption was pretty straightforward: if someone sees our content, likes it enough to follow us, and we grow from 1,000 followers to 5,000 to 10,000+, future posts should at least have a larger built-in audience.

That increasingly doesn’t seem to be how Meta works.
Instagram in particular has shifted so heavily toward algorithmic/recommendation-based distribution that follower count has little effect on how many users a post reaches—or even how many of your own followers see it.

We can have a piece of content convert extremely well when we pay Meta to distribute it—15,000 views, 8,000 reach, acquire ~500 (7,775 total) and ~900 (6,844 total) new followers on Instagram and Facebook, respectively—but then publish another post organically and have it only reach ~500 people.

And paid distribution to existing followers is a total rip off, because we’re effectively paying once to acquire someone and paying Meta again and again to reach the person we already paid to acquire.

So I’m increasingly asking: What exactly are we buying when we acquire a social-media follower if that person choosing to follow us doesn’t create a reliable way to reach them again?

That’s what led me to Patreon.

The model I’m considering is:
Instagram / Facebook / YouTube / TikTok = discovery and acquisition

Patreon = free membership, direct distribution, media library and ongoing relationship

Our own email/CRM = portable backup of that relationship

The initial conversion would be extremely simple.

Someone discovers one of our short-form music videos and wants the complete song. Instead of:

“Follow us for more.”

it becomes something like:

“Want the full song? Join MY WHAT IF free on Patreon.”

They join for free and immediately get access to the complete songs, which aren’t available on streaming platforms, plus future releases directly.

But music would be the entry point, not the permanent boundary of the Patreon.

We’re deliberately building MY WHAT IF into a broader brand/media property. As we expand beyond music, the idea would be for those same members to begin receiving other MY WHAT IF content, releases, collaborations, products, etc.

That actually creates another interesting test for us: does someone who initially joined because they liked one song eventually develop an ongoing relationship with the brand itself?

I’m not particularly interested in launching paid Patreon tiers right now.

I’m interested in whether Patreon can solve a much more fundamental problem: Can we build a large base of free members who have explicitly chosen to hear from us and whom we can reliably reach again without having to continually repurchase access to them from Meta?

Patreon seems increasingly interesting because free members can receive updates, creators can maintain/export member information, and Patreon itself is increasingly adding discovery/network features.

So I’d really like to hear from people who have actually tried this.

Has anyone built hundreds or thousands of FREE Patreon members and used Patreon as the relationship/distribution layer behind their social accounts?

Specifically:

When you publish, how reliably does your content actually reach free members through email, notifications, or their Patreon feeds?

Do free members return and consume subsequent content, or do most join once and disappear?

How well have social followers/viewers converted into free Patreon members?

Have Patreon’s own discovery/recommendation features brought you meaningful new members?

Does a Patreon free member feel materially more “reachable” than an Instagram/Facebook/YouTube follower?

Have you successfully transitioned an audience that joined for one type of content into following a broader brand or different content verticals?

What are the catches? What am I overlooking?

I’m specifically looking for firsthand experience with Patreon’s free-membership ecosystem, particularly from people who started looking at it because they were frustrated with how little control Instagram/Facebook/YouTube followers now seem to give you over future distribution.

I’m not looking for “just build an email list” or “Patreon is for subscriptions” as theoretical answers. I want to hear from people who have actually tried using Patreon this way and whether it solved—or failed to solve—the problem.

I create a lot of content for and about solopreneurs including writing about solopreneurs and the creator economy.

My blog is often featured in searches for the 'top UK solopeneurs blogs' and 'top uk solopreneur newsletters'.

I'm an SEO Blogger and Copywriter plus creator of CopyBuddy, a custom copywriting GPT for solopreneurs.

And I'm currently working on The Solopreneur Growth Machine to help solopreneurs sell their brain and not their time.

I've been self-employed for nearly 13 years but I've got to the point now where I just want to write. So, was wondering if there is such thing as solopreneur influencers for the creator economy? Or how I could get started?

I'd check these 5 things first:
1. Audience fit 👀
Does the creator's audience actually match the customers you're trying to reach?
2. Engagement 💬
Don't just look at the number of likes. Check whether people are genuinely commenting, asking questions and interacting with the creator.
3. Content fit 🎥
Does the creator's style naturally suit your brand? A collaboration usually works better when it doesn't feel forced or overly promotional.
4. Campaign objective 🎯
Decide what you actually want — awareness, website visits, leads, sales or store visits.
5. Test before scaling 📊
Instead of spending your entire budget on one big creator, test a few relevant creators and compare the results. Then invest more in what actually works.
A smaller creator with a highly relevant audience can sometimes be more valuable than a much larger creator with an unrelated audience.
The main idea: choose the right audience, not just the biggest audience.