Startup Spotlight #208: Rivet
Rivet is a platform that utilizes artificial intelligence to generate actions and recommendations that make fan community management and revenue generation easy for artists and creators.
Anj Fayemi is co-founder and CEO of Rivet, a platform that utilizes artificial intelligence to generate actions and recommendations that make fan community management and revenue generation easy for artists and creators. Anj studied Chemical Engineering at MIT and Imperial College and is an active recording and performing musician. He also has a Theater Arts Minor. He is Nigerian and comes from a family of artists, which explains his dedication to working on creating tools for content creators to do what they love and build community-driven businesses.
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Startup Spotlight: Rivet
Problem: Artists and content creators struggle to consistently activate and monetize their fanbases due to a significant and costly leaky funnel between fan discovery on social platforms and how they actually monetize these relationships in a repeatable way.
Market: We’re starting first with musicians as our beachhead market before expanding to the creators across content platform, which today is 50 million people and worth $100 Billion and is the fastest-growing small business today.
Solution: Rivet is an AI-driven platform that uses machine learning to find and understand creators’ high-potential fans and provides them with actions and automation to unlock more revenue from them.
Team: We have deep connections with musicians and have shared the stage with Grammy-nominated artist 6lack. We are an All-MIT founding team w/ backgrounds in machine learning and have patent-pending ML research, and so are solving a personal struggle with both the creative credibility and the technical expertise to execute on our vision.
Recent Success:
Fayemi: We are excited to have built a team as diverse as the creators we serve and this has helped us acquire creators through partnering with like-minded companies and organizations. We’ve spent a lot of time on tight customer feedback loops, and that’s helped us find evangelists organically, adding to the social proof for presenting ourselves to those partners. In line with that, we’ve been able to build relationships with great creator companies like Mavrck and Songfinch because of our approach to how we’ve been building our community.
Recent Struggle:
Fayemi: We struggled with building a strong enough culture in a remote environment since that was how we started. And as a result of that, we’ve also had a lot of coaching, reading, and learning on how to evaluate and assess fit for talent on our team, especially since most are senior to us and we don’t have frameworks, experience, or mental models to track against.
Founder Advice:
Fayemi: What’s been really helpful for us has just been being very open with what we’re working on, starting an update list (before we had anything good to say even) with everyone from friends to family and investors to mentors, and sharing our wins, losses and asks with everyone who cared to listen. This has made it easy for serendipitous things to happen, like people randomly talking about us to others and leading to opportunities, people feeling more comfortable introducing us to users, investors, and mentors, and genuinely having the emotional and mental support and coaching we’ve needed as first-time founders.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Fayemi: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Devshi Mehrotra, Founder of Justice Text: Justice Text strengthens the ability of attorneys to analyze this crucial data with our evidence management software.
Susan Conover, Founder of Piction Health: Piction Health provides a personalized care plan for your skin problem from the comfort of your home within 2 days.
Abi Sundaram, Fonder of Zencape Health: Zencape Health is a virtual care platform dedicated to treating chronic pelvic health conditions, through a whole-person, whole-body approach to treatment.
Previous Startup Spotlights:
Startup Spotlight #207: Diddo - Diddo is building a next-gen computer vision to empower a paradigm shift and open up new revenue streams for social commerce.
Startup Spotlight #206: reUser - reUser provides software to help dining services and their clients, such as universities, hospitals, and corporate campuses reUse takeout packaging.
Startup Spotlight #205: Swapt - Swapt enables businesses to capture data and deliver personalized consumer experiences in the physical world powered by intelligent QR codes and NFC technology.
Startup Spotlight #204: Yofi - Yofi is a platform that enables you to better understand your customers, their intentions, and the best way to interact with them.
Startup Spotlight #203: Simplify - Simplify helps you discover and autofill job and internship applications on millions of sites in one click.
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