Year
2025
Client
Patreon x Cornell Tech
Category
Tech
Product Duration
4 Months
As part of Product Studio at Cornell Tech, we partnered with Patreon to tackle a big question:
How might we help content creators achieve economic freedom?
We approached this not just as students, but as creators ourselves - interviewing real artists, building rapid prototypes, and ultimately launching a personalized AI newsletter to support early creators on their journey.
Our job was to understand what economic freedom actually means to creators, and identify the systemic gaps holding them back.
Key Findings:
Creators don’t just want money - they want momentum & understanding. They need better tools to understand their audience, stay motivated, and make consistent progress without burning out. Once creators were "on a wave with brands" as one creator put it, they were able to pursue multiple brand deals.
In Creator fashion, we created an outbound interview request video. We interviewed over 30 creators (primarily Youtubers to constrain our findings) to understand their journey, challenges, and relationship with their content.
We explored:
How they define success
What tools they actually use
Where they feel alone, confused, or stuck
We also studied creator education platforms, niche newsletters, and AI tooling trends.
Notable insights:
Many creators feel data fatigue: they’re overwhelmed by dashboards but don’t know what to do next
Motivation often dips when growth plateaus
Most tools are built for professional creators, not those just starting out
The project concluded with a functional MVP and a TikTok launch experiment to test demand which proved that there was interest from creators in using this creator newsletter.
Next Steps include:
Integrating directly with platforms like YouTube or SubStack to auto-pull data
Offering accountability + planning tools inside the email flow
Check out our tiktok for our little marketing outbound - we primarily used trends and automated editors since it was a time-limited project.
