Source: SPEEDA Edge research

Background

Questions

1. Spirituality coaches, passive income gurus, social media coaches, and more use Stan—it feels like an eclectic bunch. How do you talk about and think about Stan's customers and what makes a creator a Stan creator, a Patreon creator vs an online course creator (Kajabi & Thinkific) vs a Passes creator?
2. And just to drill in a bit on education, what do you think about Stan’s customer base with respect to online course creators, like people who make courses in Kajabi or Thinkific. Is that a more heavy-duty education use case? Is there sort of a notion of a heavy-duty education-focused creator versus kind of like a lightweight, heavy education-focused creator?
3. Which product categories are growing the fastest on Stan, and where do you see the most opportunity?
4. The long-held belief is that creators were a hard category to monetize and lacked a willingness to pay. Linktree, for example, is largely free with a USD 5/mo starter plan. Stan, on the other hand, has no free plan and starts at USD 29/mo, the same price as Shopify. What do you think about willingness to pay in the creator market, and what has Stan unlocked to drive paid signups?
5. Expansion revenue for creator businesses has tended to come from payments (Shopify) or usage (ConvertKit). At Stan, how do you think about expansion, particularly when Stan has sworn off monetizing transactions?
6. Churn is 13% monthly. How do you think about churn and net revenue retention at Stan?
7. Stan has been growing ~20% month-over-month every month in Q1'24 with high velocity even as revenue continues to scale. Can you talk about word of mouth and Stan's referral program for driving growth?
8. In terms of the referral program, it seems like this is pretty widespread, and creator products have a referral program. Is there a reason why you think Stan's program seems much more successful in encouraging the type of behavior that you're talking about?
9. How do you think about de-risking the high percentage of GMV that comes from Instagram, given that platform's push into enabling creators to sell on the platform?
10. Did you do anything intentional to move from TikTok to Instagram in terms of from a product perspective? You mentioned that most creators were on both TikTok and Instagram. How did the GMV shift so much if that were the case?
11. Passes is a fast growing creator platform that calls itself a "Gen Z Patreon". How do you see the positioning with respect to Passes? How do you break down the creator market generally?
12. Creator platforms like Beehiiv and ConvertKit have built recommendation networks to network creators with each other and ad networks to network creators with brands. What is Stan's approach to building a network? Or do you think of it as more of a platform like Shopify?
13. Data we've seen says ~70% of creators say direct brand deals are their top income source. Yet we've heard from brands that search/discovery and matching with creators is broken, and no one has stepped in to fix this at scale. What tooling do brands need to better connect and transact with creators? Why have platform/marketplace approaches failed or at least not noticeably succeeded?
14. If everything goes right for Stan over the next 5 years, what does it become, and how is the world changed?