What is the Clara for Creators App?
Creators have a lot of pain points, this app hopes to address some of them.
Clara for Creators is a community sharing app for Creators especially about brand and sponsor deals and tips and tricks about negotiation fair pay. It was founded in January, 2022 by Christen Nino De Guzman, who most recently quit her job at TikTok, where she was making $150,000 ($120,000 + signing bonuses, etc.) .
On LinkedIn she says she got 15,000 sign-up with zero marketing, but for the record she was featured in CNBC here. She’s young and with experience at Pinterest and Instagram as well, she has a unique perspective on Creator deals and how they work. She’s a solo Latin-X entrepreneur with big ideas of how Creators of this pain point.
I’ve always enjoyed working with content creators. At 31, I’ve helped launch creator programs at some of the biggest tech companies, including Instagram and Pinterest.
As I’ve realized how poor most Creators actually are, whether hustling on Twitch, YouTube or in other places I really resonate and relate to the pain point she wants to help fix.
Millions in funding? ❌
15,000 creator sign ups? ✅
Money spent on marketing? $0 💰
TikTok followers? 20,000📱
Who is the Founder?
Christen De Guzman is the Founder of the newly launched app Clara, a community that empowers creators through transparency, brand reviews, and discoverability.
Transparency, brand reviews and discoverability for Creators
An industry vet, Christen has almost a decade of experience working with top content creators at social networking companies such as Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. She is a motivational speaker and mentor in the tech space who is passionate about helping people break into the industry through career advice and actionable content.
📱https://www.tiktok.com/@chrristen (350k)
📱https://www.instagram.com/careerchristen (40k)
We know Creators don’t have an established middle class and she says she was “frustrated to see the pay inequality that content creators constantly faced.” She worked at TikTok and Pinterest for about a year each but at Instagram for longer, so she’s seen a lot of brand deals and worked with a lot of clients with extensive experience working with creators themselves.
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The “Glassdoor for the Creator Economy”
She Calls Clara a “Glassdoor for Creators” type app.
So earlier this year (I believe it was January, 2022), she decided to quit her $150,000-per-year job at TikTok to start a “Glassdoor-like” app called Clara for Creators.
You can follow her LinkedIn posts below
I like the simplicity and relevance of the product, though I have yet to test the app. They verify your identity with mostly video apps, so I’m not sure I will be approved.
She has 15,000 LinkedIn followers and of course more traction on TikTok and Instagram. She’s been building Clara about as long as I’ve been active on Substack.
Kristen wants to work on the pay gap for Creators.
She’s noticed many Creators are sort of winging it and have little knowledge about how much money they could — or should — be making. I believe she also sees a gap on the corporate side on how much they should be paying creators as well.
Nino De Guzman started developing and securing funding for Clara in March 2021, working from the ground up. Haha I am not sure to call her Kristen or Nino, but it’s both I guess.
Her roles at TikTok and the others was mostly around Content Partnerships.
After months of cold-calling potential investors, in July 2021, she finally got the funding she needed to create Clara, which launched in January 2022. So it only around that time that she quit her job at TikTok and started to take on the world.
As of March, 2022 she really wanted to address video creators first.
The app is specifically intended to help establish pay equity for TikTok creators, Instagram creators, and even YouTubers. With Clara, Nino De Guzman hopes to change the world of professional content creation by putting creators first.
That she’s from the Latin-X community is also I think hugely significant. From L.A. to Miami, America needs more solo-entpreneurs who represent their communities.
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Creators Lost in the Shuffle
The thing about influence marketing, is there’s still a lot of loose ends. Content creator deals are tricky. How much you’re paid depends on the type of content you’re offering a brand and on what platform — an Instagram post versus a YouTube video, for example. Other factors include the size of your following, engagement metrics and success rates with previous partnerships.
To make matters even more complicated, brands often ask an influencer for their rate instead of offering everyone a base pay with room to negotiate. Corporate will screw over indie Creators if they can, or if they don’t know the going rate.
Compared to how little huge companies like Microsoft on LinkedIn are doing for Creators, you really have to wonder. It reminds me a bit about how UFC fighters are chronically underpaid, but in the end Creators will be like Athletes, commanding revenue equal to the attention they command but it can be a slow crawl for niche creators. Video creators can at least benefit from the community they enable with video and podcasting, but I noticed for writers it can be less easy to establish that personal connection with an audience.
But it’s 2022, Creators have discords, telegram chats, WhatsApp groups, but it’s still not easy to navigate it all. Hopefully Apps like Clara can help. In a field like Venture Capital that’s historically very white male dominated, hopefully Kristen is not finding it too hard to raise funds as a Latin-x female founder, and also one that is relatively young. Some Creators would even pay a free to enter such a community, if it helps them negotiate better brand deals.
Kristen noticed that many creators end up selling themselves short, especially women and people of color. I have noticed myself a fair number of successful TikTok creators are young and white, often male. Many of the biggest stars on Twitch or YouTube, also fit that description.
The Clara app could establish an essential floor plan that changes the creator negotiation process.
Imagine being the Stripe of Creator negotiations? (Sorry the Glass Door).
Clara wants to be a direction of brands and experiential reviews but also a media kit.
What Is Clara?
Clara is a free app where content creators can read reviews of various brands written by other content creators. It features information on what those brands have paid content creators for past projects, including what type of work was performed and how many followers the content creator reviewing the brand has.
The content creator industry is rife with pay disparities that disproportionately affect creators from marginalized groups
How Does Clara Work?
Content creators download the app and create a profile that doubles as a media kit. Profiles include a bio, location information, follower count, and even skills. Creators can also search specific brands to read anonymous reviews, ratings, and pricing insights from other creators. The more content creators who join, the more power creators — particularly creators from marginalized communities — will have.
So it’s a bit like an open-source directory of Creator deals with brands focusing on Video creators. Namely YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.
I love how transparent Kristen is about the process as well. She said:
In March 2021, I sent a bunch of cold messages to potential investors on LinkedIn. In July, after weeks of non-stop outreach that turned into more than 10 pitch meetings, I received a small investment from an individual investor. I used that money to contract a team of developers, who I worked alongside to build and test the app.
I knew a major problem that creators faced was that they couldn’t Google how much money they could charge for marketing a product or service on their platform. That lightbulb moment — and how much I cared about the creators I worked with — inspired me to build Clara.
Without the right information, Creators are a bit at the mercy of the market and companies that would seek to use them as influencer marketing channels at a lower cost than Ads for essentially higher ROI. That’s obviously not equitable.
Many younger Millennials and GenZ have an ingrained concept of crowd-sourcing, decentralization and open-source learning. Kristen just wanted creators to be able to share reviews of brands they had worked with, along with how much they were paid for different types of content based on their number of followers. I think she might find Clara, can be a lot more.
Thanks for reading guys, please consider sharing this article if you think it’s a good cause.
Pro-tip for Creators, know your real value to industry, brand and corporate sponsors, partners and product placements or Ads you do with them.
She was also featured in Marketing Brew, among many other PR channels. As of the end of May, 2022 since its January 2022 debut, more than 15,000 creators have signed up for Clara, according to Nino De Guzman.
No matter how basic the app is, anything that empowers Creators with knowledge, can only be a good thing. Sometimes the tips you get in a network or community need to be tailored to people in a niche, people like you.
I’d be pretty interested to know who that 1st founding investor was in Clara.
I may not be let into Clara, since I’m not a video-native Creator, but hopefully Kristen will realize the variety of Creators that could benefit from an app like that.
Sometimes you have to quit a good thing to build something better for everyone. Kristen as a founder now knows a bit more intimately what Creators go through trying to monetize and raise buzz about their work.
I don’t know much about it but apparently there are plenty of companies, such as Grin and CreatorIQ, created to serve brands’ influencer marketing needs. There aren't nearly as many in the space that serve creators first, brand second. This Creator-first aspect really fascinates me.
I like her bootstrapping story too. Kristen on January 14, 2022 quit her job at TikTok as a creator program manager to work on Clara full-time. It doesn’t sound like it has been easy but the first year is the hardest part.
Nino De Guzman told Marketingbrew she wants brands to be successful in their work with creators, just like she wants creators to be successful in their work with brands. As of now, she doesn’t know how many brands have signed up.
I can imagine Clara could make some really interesting Creator-centric content, see the Instagram account here.
Creating Equal Pay in Influencer Marketing
Simplistic example but all too true. How Does Clara Help Content Creators Get Paid Fairly?
Clara gives content creators the power to negotiate rates, based on facts. For example, a white male might get paid $5,000 for a couple of Instagram posts while a Latina is being offered $3,000. The Latina can now go to Clara and see that someone else was offered thousands more for the same two posts and use that information to negotiate a better rate with the brand.
If the Creator Economy is about elevating the personal brand, our individual stories matter. Good luck to Nino (and all the Latin-X creators out there).
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Regarding minimum wage for Creators Nino pointed out something all too real:
“In this new creator world, there’s no baseline,” Nino De Guzman
What do you guys think?