Case Study: Pillar's Journey To Product-Market Fit Began By 'Living The Problems' Their Users Face
Surveys and phone calls are not enough to collect feedback. Sometimes you have to put yourself in your customer's shoes to figure out how to truly solve their pain points.
Introduction:
Making a living as a full-time content creator has never been more viable than now. However, the financial challenges of making an online living are still real barriers for many. Ad revenue from platforms like YouTube or Twitch isn't enough (or even reliable) to stream games full time.
Additionally, brands and content creators face unique difficulties on both sides in partnering with one another. Faisal Younus and Michael Ivkov saw how brands and content creators were disconnected and created Pillar to bridge the gap.
Pillar (formerly known as Athlane) is an end-to-end monetization platform that helps streamers reliably connect to brands who want to partner with them. The San Francisco-based startup previously raised $3.3 million from Y Combinator, Tyler' Ninja' and Jess' JGhosty' Blevins, and many institutional venture capital firms and angel investors.
Executive Summary:
Problem: Fixing Asymmetrical Relationships Between Creators and Companies
Creators have a difficult time reaching brands and sponsors to form partnerships. Brands and sponsors struggle to identify the right creators to work with, but even when they do, the terms of such arrangements usually favor the former instead of being beneficial to both.Market: Building For Creators First, Companies Second
In Pillar’s market place, the creators have market power, as their fanbases are the end-users or intended customers of the companies who want to reach them. Younus and Ivkov recognized this fact and prioritized solutions for their creators first before brands and sponsors.Solution: ‘Living The Problems’ That Your Customer Faces
The best way to validate their solutions for companies was to embed as closely as possible with initial customers, such as Reebok, to ensure the pain points the two identified actually existed and needed to be solved. From there, their proximity to their customer was crucial to codifying insights that will produce long-lasting advantages at scale.Team: Hyper-Competence And Curiosity Is Pillar’s Formula For Success
It’s not enough to be smart nowadays for joining any startup, let alone Pillar. Curiousity of early employees at Pillar has made the difference in them being where they are as a successful early stage startup today.Takeaway: User Feedback Validates Product Assumptions
Younus and Ivkov said it best: “You need to validate product assumptions always - and for that, you need to talk with your best (and most honest!) users to reach the truth of the matter and eliminate bias.”
Case Study: Pillar
Problem: Fixing Asymmetrical Relationships Between Creators and Companies
Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.
Asymmetrical relationships are rarely win-win partnerships.
We definitely did things that didn’t scale to prove our business model when we first got started. It was at this stage that we realized how deep inefficiencies laid in the brand endorsement space. The creator’s journey is marred by inefficient pricing, opportunistic deals that lack staying power, and business management partners hastily entered into that yield problems down the road.
Some questions kept on coming up - what’s my price? How do I negotiate a better offer? How do I work with my favorite brands? Even after the initial ‘prospecting’ phase between creators and brands, after entering into a partnership, other questions lingered. Perhaps the most jarring being, “I thought I crushed it, but have yet to hear anything or see any data that might help me be a better partner.” We realized this information was unnecessarily opaque and a gate to valuable information for the creator. All you have to do is ask to start building that deeper level of trust in a partnership.
Ineffective tooling leads to lost value.
The world is changing - while talent is universal and found in all sorts of places, opportunity is not. A lack of adequate plumbing leads to problems conducting ‘business’ conversations stunt the careers of tens of thousands of creators.
The problem is perfectly encapsulated in this TikTok by TPain, one of our favorite streamers. This problem is not unique - when you get big, or even viral, you start getting thousands of DMs from fans, friends, and brands - you have no way of seeing what matters to you most and will end up with ‘missed opportunities.’ Suddenly you’re overwhelmed, and you start to lose time you should be spending working on your content to grow even further - you seek help and get a lot of interest from people who want to ‘manage’ your career.
You’re not sure what’s a good deal and what isn’t, and you make a decision signing away 40% of all of your earnings to get back to your content - it seems like a great deal at the time.
“I’ll sing for my supper, but I’m not selling out!” Authenticity breeds success.
The rise of the star content creator is a trend that’s been 15 years in the making - monetization through brand deals is crucial, but no one wants to be a walking billboard.
How do you fix this problem? By letting people partner with the companies they love - authenticity breeds success. Our solution is to productize organic and authentic recommendations and curate an elegant and inviting product experience that makes fans support creators because they want to.
Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?
There are three key problems: asymmetrical relationships, long feedback loops, and alignment around the ‘North Star.’
The asymmetrical relationship problem was critical to solve for a few reasons. One, it was mission critical - literally. As a company that prides itself on building for creators, we knew that it would be impossible to affect true change in the industry without shifting standards to be more equitable for them. Two, we needed to align our users - both brands and creators - to facilitate life-lasting partnerships. Finally, by empowering creators with their data, we empower them with the tools they need to improve and succeed while building trust.
Long feedback loops are pretty universal in our opinion. When introducing software to help users optimize existing workflows, the more detailed and specific the ‘suboptimal’ workflow is, the easier it is to gauge usage - it’s called short feedback loops in the product life-cycle. For example, it’s a lot harder to solve ‘how can I remember many things throughout the day” than it to solve ‘how can I automatically store my desktop screenshots in a folder meant for them.’
The problem of building for the creator first and not the enterprise was crucial for us to solve. Our mission as a company is to help all creators monetize their passion. A core component of monetization is brand deals. Delivering sponsorships and brand deals to all Pillar members at scale is the goal. We’re able to do so through rebuilding the opportunity funnel from boardroom to creator email inbox, productizing the path from fan to affiliate to brand partner. Starting this summer, members can curate a Pillar profile, a supercharged link-in-bio, and instantly monetize by recommending the products they love through our new ‘Deals’ portal. Personally, it was eye-opening to have the revelation -- once Pillar reached 1,000 users, then 10,000 users, etc. - we saw loyalty built upon this mission and North Star alignment, helping us become the creator’s preferred life partner.
When conducting customer discovery, a few things are abundantly clear. When talking to customers, it’s important to get actionable feedback. What is actionable feedback? It’s the feedback that is able to justify characteristics of an approach that would address an obstacle the stakeholder is facing.
To that end, there are a few guiding principles that, if not followed, render feedback useless in building product:
Choosing the right metrics for your business and painstakingly tracking them.
This is the most obvious one, but oftentimes some of the most key indicators of PMF are one or two abstractions away from commonly defined metrics like ARR or GMV. When you’re tracking the success of a recent update, being able to segment your funnel and assess metrics on a more granular level can be crucial in understanding user preferences.
Contextualizing customer interviews and user testing to eliminate biases and preventing “false positive” validation when users express interest/preference for a feature/product because of the interviewers’ perceived attachment to it.
Cross-functionality is crucial, and maintaining high EQ with your customers and teammates is crucial to executing on tight timelines.
Eliminating excessive tooling and going lightweight when necessary - this is one of the biggest time-sucks. This one’s a challenge because those obsessed with products always want to optimize and never want to miss out on learning from new product undertakings, but oftentimes going lightweight with a well-defined process early on is crucial to saving time.
When introducing software to help users optimize existing workflows, the more detailed and specific the ‘suboptimal’ workflow is, the easier it is to gauge usage - it’s called short feedback loops in the product life-cycle.
Market: Building For Creators First, Companies Second
Let’s get deeper into the pain point or points you were trying to solve. Imagine I’m a customer thinking about using your product or service. How do you go about understanding my pain and creating a solution to address it?
We talked to creators every day to get started. All companies at the seed stage boil down to executing on the main vertebrae of your business well. In that regard, it’s pattern recognition - on an average week in our validation stage(s), our team would interview hundreds of users.
Self Awareness and Social Awareness. We control for false-positive feature validation and make sure to empathize directly with the user. We listen more than we talk. We sell the customer on how we track success and find ourselves building a loyal community around a win-win attitude. Once you have that intrinsic trust, you start to hear what people truly want.
Finally, your users need skin in the game - assessing how well your solution comes to solving the user’s problems can be measured through conversion (from free to paid tiers, for example).
Assuming you’ve managed to address the pain points I face as a customer, what additional information did you discover in your journey to PMF that there’s a large market in need of a solution to the existing problem?
Back in 2019, our usage of the “economy” to describe what we were witnessing across the world was often looked at confusedly. Sure, YouTubers like Casey Neistat and RomanAtWood had built massive empires atop incredibly loyal fanbases, but the prospects of ‘striking it rich’ in pursuit of one’s passion was often looked at with a lack of faith.
Now, with the rise of mega-creators across platforms (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch, to name a few), we’ve seen the growth of monthly-active, full-time creators reach a point it’s never reached before - with tens of millions of monthly-active content creators, it’s an immensely large market.
How did you narrow your scope of what portion of the market you wanted to tackle first? Who did you decide would be your first beachhead customers and why?
We narrowed in on gaming-focused creators for a few reasons. First, our team loves playing games and watching streams. It’s in our company’s DNA and was the content that’s most natural for us to build for. Second, we weren’t the only people to feel this way - ½ of YouTube’s most popular channels are gaming-focused channels, for example. Third, gaming-focused creators are amazing at picking up and stress-testing new tech, so as the first cohort of creators, they have been incredibly helpful in the development of our product.
We first built for streamers and other gamer-centric creators because we're fans ourselves. We spent time in streams getting to know our favorite creators and building relationships from the ground-up. This helped us empathize with our customers in a way that was more endemic to the fan experience and helped us separate feasible solutions from viable solutions. Over time, many of these creators have become our most loyal customers, oftentimes turning to us first for advice as they progress in their career.
We spent time in streams getting to know our favorite creators and building relationships from the ground-up. This helped us empathize with our customers in a way that was more endemic to the fan experience and helped us separate feasible solutions from viable solutions.
Solution: ‘Living The Problems’ That Your Customer Faces
How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit? If you haven't found PMF yet, what have you learned? What are the blockers for getting to PMF?
There have been a few things that have helped us on our journey to become the preferred life partner for every creator, although we’re not saying we’ve hit it just yet! For our product, customer buy-in is contingent on them getting their fanbase involved and engaged. It’s thus really easy to maximize relevance for the creator if their livelihood (their fans) are interacting with their Pillar each and every day. We would say long feedback loops (i.e., longer than a couple of days) to tell if a user is truly engaged with the latest build or update are detrimental to finding PMF. This is especially true when you’re removed enough from the pain points that you’re stuck with problem fatigue (you don’t think about the problem in a manner as accessible as you should) and solution-envy.
What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?
Our first brand-customer was Reebok, which taught us a ton as our product wasn’t fully built out initially. When we deployed Pillar to Reebok’s headquarters, our team had to act as ‘agents’ for a month while we set up attribution tracking and creator sourcing tools within the enterprise-brand-facing version of Pillar. For example, we leveraged some of our earliest analytics to find the best fits for the brand and then would get in touch with those creators through any means necessary - it was a great way to live through the problems we’re so focused on fixing day-in and day-out. It’s a great way to validate your product assumptions as you’re building out features, and it keeps the business moving forward.
What did you learn to best engage with your customers? How did you build a tight feedback loop with your customers to rapidly improve your solution to their problems?
We learned to talk with them through the tools we’re accustomed to (in this case, Discord and Twitter) and answer their questions. By focusing on teaching, we’ve built trust with our users around our shared success metrics. To us, that means helping creators achieve their business goals and benchmarks – especially if it means rolling up our sleeves to get right in there with them. This has led to us getting feedback from users without us having to ask for it and for us getting introductions and organic referrals from creators to their friends because they know they’ll be taken care of.
Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.
We partnered up with our first cohort of brand customers by pitching to their executive teams after cold outbound. As brands started to use Pillar, awesome creators joined the platform. After we hit a critical mass of great opportunities for creators, we did a soft (and closed) launch on the Streamlabs app store, reaching creators where they already live.
We ran pilots with flagship brands that we knew creators wanted to work with. Through these pilots, we embedded ourselves within the creator-partnerships teams of our customers to build tools that would empower marketers and bring them in front of more creators.
On the creator side, we built our platform for launch through widely-used platforms our customers live in to produce their content. By partnering with these tools, we were discovered by our target audience faster and unearthed user habits we would go on to iterate upon faster than if we’d pursued a different route.
When we deployed Pillar to Reebok’s headquarters, our team had to act as ‘agents’ for a month while we set up attribution tracking and creator sourcing tools within the enterprise-brand-facing version of Pillar. For example, we leveraged some of our earliest analytics to find the best fits for the brand and then would get in touch with those creators through any means necessary - it was a great way to live through the problems we’re so focused on fixing day-in and day-out.
Team: Hyper-Competence And Curiosity Is Pillar’s Formula For Success
If you have a cofounder, walk me through a time that you two had a conflict. What was it about? How did you handle the situation? What was the resolution, and how did it impact your working relationship with your cofounder?
We’ve been friends for years and also in college - we’ve been humbled by lack of experience more times than we can count and it's led to an empathy about how we operate our day-to-day.
What key qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?
The key quality we look for in early hires is hyper-competence, specifically asking questions that convey a deep understanding of the objective at hand. This, coupled with an unbridled curiosity that’s only satiated through immediately delving in, is usually a good sign of energy and ability to execute.
If there was a potential employee of your startup reading this Case Study right now, how would you convince them that joining your team is the next best step in their career?
We’re tackling the most important and challenging problem in the creator economy - that of consistent monetization. By building the future of how creators go ‘full-time,’ we are directly building the plumbing that will be used by hundreds of millions of prospective creators who will build their livelihoods off the products you build at Pillar - and they won’t be quiet about just how much they love what you’ve built with us, either.
The key quality we look for in early hires is hyper-competence, specifically asking questions that convey a deep understanding of the objective at hand.
Takeaway: User Feedback Validates Product Assumptions
What are the key lessons have you learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?
You need to validate product assumptions always - and for that, you need to talk with your best (and most honest!) users to reach the truth of the matter and eliminate bias.
Pillar’s Founder File:
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Dhanush Rad, Co-founder of Demigod: Demigod is the ultimate all-in-one organizational system
Omri Mor, Co-founder of Routable: Routable is the simplest way to send and receive business-to-business (B2B) payments.
Haron Shams, Co-founder of AICore: AiCore is a specialist Ai and data school that will launch your career in the field.
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