Lucy Mort on LinkedIn: Free ideas for people who want to build products in the creator… (2024)

7 less common signals to look for when hiring a top 1% product designer at your startup:1. They’ve been a graphic designer, brand designer, or visual artist at some point in their past. These people will have a stronger visual eye than pure UX/UI designers.2. They can sketch and they actively keep a sketchbook. I find that people who can quickly translate an idea from their imagination onto paper, have that “think outside the box” energy.3. They can take you on a journey and tell human stories about the problems users faced with products they’ve previously worked on, as the backdrop to talking about their design solutions for these problems.4. They can command your attention and pitch their work. If hired, they’ll need to be able to make a case for their work and get buy-in from others.5. They’re tapped into culture in some way. Perhaps they have an interest in fashion, architecture, music, fine art, or film. They care about being tapped into the zeitgeist. Especially if you're hiring them to design a consumer product, these influences will bleed into their work in a good way.6. They have a running list of ideas of products they want to design and build. This shows they have an inventors mindset, and they genuinely love solving problems.7. (This one is may be controversial)... They’re socially adept or socially connected in IRL or online spaces. I find this can be a proxy for being good at reading cues, being a good listener, being empathic, intuiting and anticipating what people want, having high exposure to the problems people face day-to-day, etc. Which are all critical soft skills for product designers.

Big career/business learning for me: Don’t make big decisions while you’re burnt out. You might be considering quitting your job, selling your company, or stepping down from a leadership position. But your judgment is so impaired while you’re in a state of burnout. You feel like you need to take whatever action is necessary to alleviate the bad feelings of burnout — the exhaustion, the low motivation, the lack of focus, the depression.To prevent the possibility of regretting the decision: pause, take some vacation, ask for a sabbatical if it’s an option for you, or intentionally lower your work hours/output for a period of time. Get back to equilibrium, and then consider that big decision. For me personally, 9 times out of 10, getting to a place of feeling better showed me that my compulsion to make that big decision reflected a small moment in time, and didn’t reflect my overall feelings or desires. I was in a particular season. We all have them. And it passed with recovery.

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10 examples of tech companies integrating 3D illustration into their branding.For so long, most of our favorite software products stayed faithful to flat illustration styles. Over the last few years we’ve seen 3D illustration styles emerge and find integral places in the visual ID’s of our favorite brands. 3D illustration often has this futuristic vibe that can make a brand feel more modern or give a brand more personality. Here are some of my favorites:

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When recruiting big (1M+) creators to Sunroom, these are the things they tend to want:- Help from an account manager on content, launch, and sales strategies.- To know that other creators like them (similar geo, audience size, and content niche) are using the platform. They want to know that other successful creators are using Sunroom.- Help from us with promotion across our channels & internal discovery feed.- Guaranteed earnings. They want to re-risk their launch by getting some compensation upfront. Larger creators are used to receiving cash in exchange for anything they do on social media platforms, so you need to work within those expectations. - Assurance that there’s no adult content on the platform.- A sense that we’re a culturally relevant brand that has good awareness. Larger creators view using Sunroom as a brand partnership, not just a product they can utilize. They want to work with brands they align with. Being relevant + having a strong mission/brand helps win them over. - To know that there’s money to be made on the platform. Large creators often ask for earnings insights on Sunroom creators of a similar following size + insights on how they earn.

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10 product changes we’ve implemented at Sunroom to make it much easier for creators to self-serve onboard and launch:1. Scraping a creators’ social following using their Instagram/TikTok profile URL, and generating an earnings estimate based on their audience size. This gets creators more excited to continue onboarding.2. We built in a checklist of to-do’s at the start of the onboarding process, to set expectations.3. An interactive progress bar of profile setup tasks.4. Pre-written suggestions that creators can select for custom experiences, membership benefits, and house rules.5. Hiding a creator’s profile until they share their link publicly (this helped us to educate creators that they had to bring their existing audience to Sunroom to earn vs purely relying on Sunroom’s discovery feed).6. An educational drawer of launch tips, including screenshots from other creators’ launches, an encouraging voice note from my co-founder Michelle Battersby, and an easy way to copy your link and open your Instagram to launch.7. We moved larger onboarding tasks like ID verification and adding a bank account until the creator achieved some initial traction.8. We started showing new creators the sort of content Sunroom creators are posting. We created a specially curated ‘Creator Feed’ and populated it with the most quintessentially ‘Sunroom’ content.9. We started showing prospective creators how much our existing creators were earning each month.10. We launched a series of emails to accompany the onboarding journey and provide inspiration for newbies.

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The fastest way to recruit creators to your creator platform is to spread earnings stories. But the stories really have to be told by the creators themselves, not by your brand. And the creators telling the stories have to be influential and respected among other creators.The tricky thing is, talking about money is so taboo, especially among women (the group that our platform Sunroom is designed for). As women, we could help other women unlock new sources of income for themselves if we could get past the shame of talking about our earnings. But for most women creators, they fear:😨 Reminding their audience that they’re being monetized, and being labeled as greedy, a sell out, or opportunistic.😨 Reminding their audience that their account is a business, and their content being labeled as inauthentic or strategic. At Sunroom, we’ve had to get creative with ways to incentivize and normalize the sharing of earnings stories:💡 We created ‘Year in review’ style shareable assets that include earnings.💡 We’ve revealed the monthly earnings figures of our top creators to prospective creators in the app and other marketing materials.💡 We’ve created social content about earnings stories where the creator is anonymized.💡 We’ve aggressively re-posted any creator who’s bold enough to speak publicly about their earnings.💡 We’ve even paid some of our top creators to talk about their Sunroom earnings in their Instagram posts.By the way, I earned $1,400 on my Sunroom in July! I spent about 2 hours per week on it, and I have just over 2K Instagram followers, for reference.

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I received this DM from one of my Sunroom members the other day. Chatters have become the dirty little secret of many of OnlyFans’ biggest accounts. In some ways they’re the backbone of OnlyFans, doing the rote work and relationship building that brings in a significant chunk of their annual revenue.I’m so curious if OnlyFans has plans to build AI-driven productivity tooling so that larger creators don’t have to rely on chatters to man their DMs. Many OnlyFans creators who I’ve met over the years use pre-written scripts for sexting and particular message sequences for upselling. Just having an AI that drafts messages based on where you’re at in the script or conversation would be a huge lift. The key being: creators are helped with drafts, not with the actual sending of messages. A creator's presence and attention are still really important, and ultimately what most customers are paying for.We’re not yet facing this problem at Sunroom, as most of our creators have hundreds of paying subscribers they can self-manage. But if our creators had the problems of scale that some OnlyFans creators do, experimenting with AI-composed message drafts could be the solution. Do you think this would keep the authenticity of a creator’s account intact?

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It feels like creators are ready for this sort of tooling. Everywhere I look on Instagram these days I see "Comment 'Book' to get the info". ManyChat is the service underpinning these automated sales flows. And they clearly remove a lot of rotework for creators, and drive engagement and sales. It will be interesting to see if the AI chatbots developed by the mainstream social giants will take over this function for creators.https://lnkd.in/gVvwwC6F

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A friend of mine who's a very talented backend engineer is looking for his next role! He's worked at a range of companies (Seed, Series A, public). He'd love to work in-person in NYC.We've worked together several times over the last 7 years, and I highly recommend him! Very friendly dude, smart, and will help you build your team culture as well as ship product quickly. DM me for an intro : )

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