Congrats @nicholasychen@jasonwbade@rodolphek@vora_vor on the launch of Pico 2.0. Creators often struggle with connecting with their audiences in a more authentic way and monetizing more effectively. I can't wait to see how y'all enable them to take more control of their businesses and enable new recurring revenue streams
Thank you @sahilkhosla14 stay tuned, we have major releases lined up for 2021 and big plans to empower professional creators to fully own their audience and be able to build viable digital businesses.
It's so cool to hear that you share our vision for the creator economy 🙌
Congrats to @jasonwbade, @rodolphek, and the rest of the Pico team!
I recently started using Pico to help run Trapital, my digital media company that covers the business of hip-hop. Pico's tools have been easy to integrate in my tech stack. The team has been great to work with too. Tons of expertise and guidance.
Excited to see where they take it from here. Congrats again on the PH launch!
@jasonwbade@rodolphek@runciedan I love Trapital! Just found you as the business of being The Smiths went viral and it was an instant subscribe. Looking forward to you monetizing me soon :-)
Appreciate the hunt, @chrismessina!
So excited to be back on Product Hunt to share the next evolution of Pico.
We publicly launched Pico in Spring 2019 with the goal of democratizing powerful audience monetization tools for a new generation of media entrepreneurs.
But in the last couple of years, especially with COVID-19 as an accelerant, we've seen an unprecedented explosion of creative entrepreneurship across a range of categories. Journalists, analysts, instructors, and knowledge workers of all types are now looking to build their own audience business, using the power of their words and the reach of the internet to find economic independence.
With Pico 2.0 as our new product foundation, we're expanding our vision of monetization infrastructure to prepare for the needs of these ambitious creators, whether they're coming to us today or 5 years from now.
Monetization comes in two parts:
(1) understanding you how your audience is engaging with your work
(2) crafting products and experiences based on those insights.
That's why Pico 2.0 features some of the most powerful tools available in the market to grow your email list faster, understand user engagement at an individual level, easily manage paying and non-paying subscribers at scale, and configure a wide variety of products to sell. All while giving you complete freedom around where and how you host your content.
Today's announcement is just the start. For the Pico team, 2.0 is also a new codebase upon which we can more easily develop exciting features that push the envelope of what's possible in the fast-moving creator economy.
We look forward to hearing the community's feedback and sharing more of our roadmap in the coming months!
Very exciting to see Pico on PH, I've been a fan and follower of their platform for years. Pico is absolutely the best out-of-the box app for turning your audience into paying subscribers. Anyone looking to earn a living from their content should have Pico on their radar.
Rich Gordon, faculty at Medill School/Northwestern University. Have been following Pico for several years - and they've helped inspire/inform my master's students in Media Innovation & Content Strategy. https://www.medill.northwestern....
Congrats to @jasonwbade, @rodolphek and the whole Pico team for the launch of Pico 2.0!
Over at SparkLoop we share Pico's mission to help independent creators build and grow their audience and business... and we only hear good things about the Pico platform and how easy it is to use.
Excited to follow along as more independent creators start using Pico 2.0 to own their business instead of renting it!
Hi everyone!
I’m Jason, Pico’s co-founder! Thanks for checking us out!
In addition to meeting in the 4th grade(!), @nicholasychen and I started Pico a few years ago to give creators the same power tools that e-commerce entrepreneurs have had for years with Shopify and brick and mortar stores have had with Square – to not just be creative as a hobby or side gig but as a truly scaling business that’s built in *your* vision for your audience.
We started by figuring out how to serve the creator businesses we knew best and dearly love – local newsrooms! By learning how the best local newsrooms – made of up of teams of writers and editors and business operators – ran and grew their businesses, we knew we’d have a platform that could serve any business that was based on creating value for its audience. That’s why Pico is so focused on the entire audience development funnel – not just payments. (It’s also why our customers grow so much faster when they put Pico at the center of their stack 😛)
And… it’s also why we’re so laser-focused on audience development and monetization – leaving newsletter publishing and websites to the many other richly developed platforms (Pico works with just about every CMS and ESP). There’s so much to build in just this part of the tech stack – the relationship engine, if you will – that we have our work cut out for us for years to come!
It also means we get to work with so many types of inspiring creator businesses – because every Pico customer can build the unique product mix and business model vision that best matches its team’s talents and its audience. We’ve got yoga and meditation studios using Pico to drive email signups and gate video livestreams on their website. We’ve got an expert tech analyst using Pico to offer a free and paid newsletter on ConvertKit, posts on Webflow, and a members-only Circle community. We’ve got a very popular sports and culture blog using Pico to paywall articles on Lede and offer members-only commenting via Coral Project.
And…we’ve got so much more in the works for the rest of the year – the new version of our Pico operating system gives us the robust foundation for some really exciting analytics tools, integrations, developer tools, and additional commerce options to come, so stay tuned!
We used Pico for a project we did for a newsroom in Myanmar, and loved it. I can't wait to use 2.0 one day soon! Would recommend. Well done, @jasonwbade and team!
Hey Product Hunters 👋
Big thanks to @chrismessina for the hunt! #WeLoveYou ❤️
I’m Rodolphe, Pico’s Chief Revenue Officer. I’m an entrepreneur with 10 years of experience in the creator economy. You can find me on Twitter 🐦 https://twitter.com/RodolpheK
I have been helping creators grow and make money since 2011 and my days at YouTube where I led different monetization initiatives for content creators. After leaving YouTube in 2018 to become a startup founder, I recently joined Pico to help the team double down on its efforts to create the most amazing platform for creators who want to build independent digital businesses. 🚀
Today, we’re starting the roll out of 2.0 (a full code rewrite 💪) but we’re also launching a new website, with a new logo and brand identity. We’re super excited to reveal both to the Product Hunt community and also provide insights into our process.
So what is Pico? 🤔
Pico is the operating system for creator businesses. Think of it as monetization software for the creator economy.
We provide tools to help creators:
1. Make more money online (collect emails, sell memberships, build subscription paywalls, enable donations or tipping)
2. Grow their audience independently (via a CRM tool that lets creators own their audience and customer data).
Pico makes the creator tech stack smarter and empowers creators to be business owners.
Pico works with any CMS (Wordpress, Webflow, etc) or ESP (Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Active Campaign, etc) that creators choose in their tech stack. It’s like the magic glue that connects the different tools of your stack and makes them work better together. Pico is also 100% no code so you don’t need to be a developer to use it.
With Pico, we’re really putting creators are in control #PowerToCreators We believe creators build two critical assets: brand and audience. To build sustainable businesses for the long term, they need to own their brand and customer relationships.
Pico is built to empower creators to become real business owners, not just online audience renters.
With Pico, as a creator:
- You can use Pico on your own domain which means more ownership of your brand
- You can use Pico to have direct relationships with your customers which means ownership of your audience
- You can use Pico to segment your audience and surface valuable insights (like who’s your most valuable customer, how to acquire and retain them), and you can export that data with no restriction which means full ownership of your customer data.
Pico equals ownership. Stop renting your online audience, start owning your digital business today! 🔑
What’s next?
2020 was a big year for the creator economy. At Pico, the number of creators we serve grew 5X! We now have a large community of creators to care for. Some are getting started and others have well established businesses. Some are journalists and writers, others are athletes, yogis or musicians. And everyday more are joining and using our products to grow their audiences and monetize their work. 2021 is going to be an even bigger year for Pico and creators. We have major product milestones in the next few quarters and high profile creators about to join our community (more soon).
Join us today and benefit from $20,000 of free payment processing fees !!! 🤑
cc: @annisms@chudson@eriktorenberg@roybahat@annedwane
special thx: @almostmedia
I've been using Pico for the past few months. I've worked as a product manager building tech for publishers in past roles and Pico continues to blow me away. They have a great product with the simplicity that should exist around subscriptions and their customer service has been top notch. I could have (and have in the past) gone and cobbled together a bunch of tools to build subscriptions on my site but having Pico work out of the box with the ability to use the API and apps to make it go further.
The way I found them? I was sick of my duck tape solution always breaking...went to producthunt and searched for subscription tools for publishers and newsletters. I'm happy to see Pico 2.0 show up here!
Thank you @matt_broffman ❤️🌈❤️ We are very much focused on building simple tools and solutions that help all creators scale their business 10X without having to spend 10X time managing the business!
Stoked to try this out. I write part-time and start side-projects for fun - Pico seems like a great fit.
I signed up and am looking forward to getting started!
Thanks team! Good luck 🚀
Can't wait to get you started @darwinb our team will be back in touch in the next couple weeks and we'd love to hear you feedback once you're up and running. Thank you for choosing Pico 🙏