Our First Creator Mag Drops Sunday!
Plus, read a snippet from our cover story, pre-order a physical copy (and merch), and explore Donald Glover's evergreen world of 'Because the Internet.'
Did you catch our last video essay, The Gambino Doctrine?
In 2013, Donald Glover built the evergreen world of Because the Internet, featuring 19 tracks, a short film, and a 72-page screenplay. But just prior to that, the artist was dealing with a constant feeling of loneliness, struggling to figure out his purpose in life.
For Essay 4, we took a look at Glover's journey towards finding beauty in existential dread. Given the task of trying to explore the world of BTI in under 15 minutes was a daunting one, I brought in Camden Ostrander, the Internet’s favorite Glover scholar and a co-writer for longform musical analysis podcast Dissect. Cam is a really dope guy, and you can keep up with him and his work here!
Past that, I have some other really exciting news. An idea one-and-a-half years in the making, we’re dropping our first magazine dedicated to covering the creator economy this Sunday at 7 p.m. CT!
Our cover story is a profile on Mateo Price, the founder and CEO of a creator analytics agency called Authentic Media Ascension (AMA). His startup has helped clients gain an additional 8M subscribers, 250M views, and $5M in revenue. You can read a teaser below, as well as the rest of the story (and more) come Sunday. Sign up to get notified when it drops!
So…why a Creator Mag? Well, as someone who’s been creating things — and following the space — for a good chunk of my life, I always found it strange that there wasn’t much coverage. Creators like Mr. Beast draw in viewership numbers comparable to that of Sunday Night Football…every single day. Backed by venture capital, founders are building emerging technologies in the space, which is now valued at $104 billion. And in 2019, YouTube’s Partner Program contributed roughly $16 billion to U.S. GDP alone, the equivalent of 345,000 full-time jobs.
The mag started simply as an idea I wanted to see exist, then turned into a way to network, then turned into marketing for the agency side of Powder Blue, before ultimately becoming real, original IP in of itself. I was always striving to make the final product solid; after all, if you’ve been following my journey over the last several years, you’ll know that I’m really passionate about longform storytelling. But after the project continued to pick up steam in October, I’m now travelling to New York and Los Angeles over the next couple of months to profile some really dope creators and founders.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. In any event, you’ll be able to read the online version on our website, as well as pre-order a physical copy of the magazine! Also, we dropped some new Powder Blue merch inspired by Season 1—our shop is now live, so make sure to browse (and purchase) the mag and merch for a limited time here. All proceeds will be used towards producing our content moving forward (including paying for plane tickets, freelancers, and more), so your support truly means the worlds to us.
Oh, and before we get into the cover story, this first edition of Creator Mag is sponsored by Laylo, the customer relationship management tool for creators.
Laylo sets you up with a page so that fans can easily sign up via email, phone, or Facebook Messenger and never miss a drop. Plus, they have a ton of really useful integrations with platforms like Google Analytics and Facebook Business so that you can track the success of campaigns. We use Laylo for our drops and have seen a clickthrough rate of 78.9%, which is almost 8x more than what we’ve seen when using other tools.
Fans forget—remind them with Laylo! Get started for free today.
Now, on to the story.
Mateo Price Has The Launch Codes
As we’re walking back from the cover shoot for this story, Mateo Price stops for a second, reflecting. “I think both my biggest strength and weakness as an entrepreneur is that I’m happy,” he tells me.
The wind is howling in Chicago. It’s a chilly day in late November, like many of the days before it and many of the wintery days to come.
I first interviewed Mateo for this story back in February, but his life has changed dramatically since we talked then over Zoom. After graduating from Northwestern University in March, he’s been working full-time on Authentic Media Ascension (AMA) — the creator analytics agency he started in 2019 out of his dorm room — for several months now. His clients are an eclectic bunch, from productivity master Ali Abdaal to basketball creator Kristopher London, yet there’s a consistent story they share after working with AMA: more views on their channels, and more money in their pockets.
Things are going well. Soon, Mateo will be travelling to Paris to meet with some clients and expand his network; he’s excited for some of the sight-seeing he’ll do in between meetings, too. He’s also expanded to a team of nine, bringing on a lead designer, developer, and content strategist, meaning he needs to allot more time towards managing. The new additions are already exceeding his expectations and then some, though, and with the quality of their work improving, 2022 is looking bright.
But not too long ago, Mateo was at a crossroads. His co-founder had moved on in the spring, and he had no idea what direction he wanted to take with his life and career — much less what to do with AMA. Some mentors balked at the idea of dropping a company that had cleared nearly $500k in revenue in less than three years. Nevertheless, the decision to pursue the venture by himself loomed large.
Once we’ve sat down indoors, away from the bitter cold, Mateo continues his thought from before. “[My happiness] is a strength because it keeps me sane, but it can also be a weakness because I don’t know when to keep pushing.”
He pauses again before resuming. “I don’t want that to come off as I’m always happy though. Because I still do get caught up in the rat race from time to time, and I have bad days. And to some people, hearing what I’ve done and what AMA has done, $500k is nothing.”
If you told him three years ago, though, how much his life would change based off of one cold email, he probably wouldn’t have believed you.
“The short answer is, I genuinely had no expectation of being here. And so when I say, like, it started by accident, it really did.”
I met Mateo when we played pickup basketball together during our first year at Northwestern, but it wasn’t until I reached out the following February that we sat down and dove into what he was up to.
Huddled in the basement of my dorm, Mateo told me all about the digital sports publication he worked on throughout high school, TheLeagueNews (TLN). Growing up in Libertyville, IL — a suburb forty-five minutes north of downtown Chicago — he was a huge NBA fan, pulling for his hometown team in the Bulls. With TLN, he was able to cover the sport he loved while gaining invaluable experience in the world of online publishing and social media.
After starting as an unpaid staff writer for TLN, he quickly worked his way up to a position as Co-owner and Chief Growth Officer. By partnering with meme accounts and NBA Facebook Groups, Mateo was able to grow their following from 800 to 237,000 views per month…in just two years. They were even able to secure interviews with NBA players like Jabari Parker and Justin Holiday.
Upon gaining this experience, Mateo considered applying to journalism schools, but ultimately decided to double-major in economics and psychology due to his interests in business and marketing. When he got to college, he described wanting to “feel like he belonged,” joining various clubs and working hard to earn good grades. But it was his experience at The Garage, Northwestern’s incubator for student startups, that acted as a consistent through-line during his four years in Evanston.
Melissa Kaufman, the executive director of The Garage, remembers meeting Mateo during his first year. She described him as a “pretty outgoing guy” that was “interested in entrepreneurship and had some ideas, but didn’t know where to get started.”
Mateo got involved with an accelerator program called Launch and ended up working on Roominate, a startup offering poster subscription services to college kids looking to redecorate their dorm rooms every month.
“It was very classic college in that, like, we made $85 in revenue and won $250 in prize money, and we thought we were hot shit.”
Mateo laughed before continuing. “And then we, like, tailspin out due to equity conversations. You know, classic college startup.”
Not everyone found it funny, however. “Our operations manager has to deal with disseminating funds to students, and the Roominate team was causing her a lot of problems,” Melissa recalled. “They were pretty disorganized…I think they were young and didn’t know what they were doing yet.”
After that experience, Mateo interned in a marketing and biz dev role before he began prepping for consulting recruitment during the fall of his sophomore year. Anyone who’s gone through that process will tell you how intense and cutthroat it can be, especially at a school like Northwestern, where students foster an ultra-competitive culture amongst each other. Mateo described the anxiety of shuffling into a room with 70 other bright-eyed 20-year-olds jockeying for a position at Deloitte. Slowly, that room whittled down to 35, 15, 6, 3, then 2.
Mateo was one of those final two. He didn’t get the internship.
Feeling burnt out from recruitment, Mateo withdrew his various applications to consulting programs and thought about what came next. He’d visited companies like Google, Lyft, and Dropbox on a school trip to San Francisco as a freshman; this year, he was organizing it. So, maybe there was a place for him in the startup world — after all, even if Roominate wasn’t a success, working with the team was a ton of fun, and he really liked the marketing side of it. Plus, he’d run a pretty sweet project with one of his favorite creators the previous summer, and he though that it might be worth taking more seriously.
For years, Mateo had been watching a YouTube channel created by Jesse “Jesser” Riedel, who uploaded basketball-related content such as trick shots and NBA reaction videos to an audience of 1.5 million subscribers as of 2018. Given his time building TLN, he decided to shoot Jesser a cold email and pitch the creator on how he could help grow — and engage — his fanbase through a focus on analytics.
Mateo didn’t really have the expertise for this, but he felt confident in his knowledge of social media and familiarity with Jesser’s community — he was a member, after all. But he tried a little too hard to personalize what he calls an “aggressively long email,” and was met with radio silence.
Upon following up a couple times, however, he refreshed his inbox to find a new message:
I’m a bit confused what you are trying to do and why you want to do it for free, Jesser wrote back, yet the creator still offered to hop on a call. They agreed to work on a pro bono analytics project together, and after Mateo presented his findings on September 1, Jesser was so thrilled that they extended their working relationship for the next three months. Only this time, the creator paid him $1,500 to do it.
“In a way, it felt like getting paid to learn,” Mateo said. “And that just kicked off the roadmap for this company that otherwise would have ceased to exist.
He officially had his first client.
To read the rest of this story — and the entire magazine — when it comes out, sign up to get notified here.