Welcome to my newsletter!
I’m Ashwin, and I’ve spent the last few years in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem, as an engineer, product manager, startup founder, and investor. I love empowering people to create a living for themselves doing what they love, and I’m currently exploring startup ideas in the Creator Economy.
I figured the best way to empathize with Creators and figure out their true needs is to become one.
Consider it ‘user research’ on steroids.
What am I Creating?
The first step in creating anything is finding my niche. Who’s my audience, what problem am I solving for them, and where can I find them?
Fortunately for me, the content I want to create is something I’ve been informally thinking about for the last few years:
I’m creating content around helping early-stage startup founders pitch their companies to investors.
This fits right at the intersection of these 3 circles:
What interests me: I treat the pitch process like solving a challenging puzzle, and I love helping people navigate this. I gain incredible satisfaction in taking a set of information and telling a compelling story with it - it’s what I do for fun!
What I’m good at: I’ve pitched hundreds of times myself, I’ve helped dozens of founders with their pitches - elevator pitches, pitch decks, YC interview prep. I know from talking to the founders that my advice has been helpful and has had a significant positive impact on their pitch, confidence, and overall ability to fundraise.
What people want: Most founders hate pitching and fundraising, and I don’t blame them. It’s grueling, it’s not their core competency, and it takes time away from working on their company. Adding to that, there’s a dearth of great content out there on helping founders craft their pitch, and much of it isn’t nuanced enough to get into the dirty details. But the consequences of a bad pitch could mean missing out on millions of dollars in funding or suffering through a prolonged fundraising process. The desire to ‘solve’ this problem is extremely high.
So many questions that I need to answer!
I’m starting from scratch - I have no real online presence or extensive experience working with Creator tools. My skillset going into this: I can code, write, and pick up software products quickly. I’m sure I’ll have to learn a lot along the way.
I need to answer a lot of questions on this journey:
What kind of content will stick with my audience?
What platforms should I be using? Medium, Substack, TikTok, YouTube … the list goes on and on!
How can I measure if my content is helping me build an audience efficiently?
What kind of audience monetization model will work for me (eventually)?
What software and tools do I need to learn in order to create great content?
Follow along on my journey
I’ll be documenting my journey in answering these questions with this newsletter. As an engineer and product person, I’ll be taking a very methodological approach and documenting my thinking here.
Hopefully, for others in the Creator Economy space, this serves as a window into what becoming a Creator looks like, the problems that Creators run into, and how we can all help advance this growing ecosystem.