Analytics that enable creators to turn data into action
About Rootnote
Jason: Rootnote is a collaborative business intelligence platform we are building for digital content creators. Anyone looking to build their brand around digital content is currently utilizing dozens of different platforms and creating millions of data points. They’re all connected to their digital careers, including podcasters, music creators, live streamers, and short-form video makers. We are even moving into an era where college athletes, for example, can start building their brands around digital content. We’re kind of moving into this world where anybody can build their brand around digital content. They’re generating successful businesses around their content and millions of data points within the process.
The problem is that all of these data points live in silos, and it’s hard to make actionable business decisions around your data if you have to consolidate, aggregate, and then try and build models on top of all these different data points. That’s where Rootnote comes in where collaborative business intelligence platform that enables you to track all of your social streaming and revenue data in a single source. You can invite all your team members and collaborate, whether that’s your marketing department, a management team, or a content team, to see that same data. We are creating a single source of truth, making that data very shareable so that you can share it with relevant stakeholders. The kind of creative world revolves around data today.
Rootnote best integrations
Jason: We started mainly with music creators. People were building their businesses around music content primarily because they’re kind of the OG creators. In addition to music, they’re also building their brands on social media. They’re launching podcasts, they’ve got e-commerce stores on platforms like Shopify, they use platforms like MailChimp, so they started doing almost everything.
Regarding the types of integrations that we’re supporting, basic media integrations, we’re building the capability to ingest data from any type of data format, CSV files included. The big challenge in our space is that most data does not live in APIs, and getting access to that information is actually quite hard and challenging. Make it easy, irrespective of whether that data lives in an API, a spreadsheet, or a discrete manual point that you have to put in yourself, building the capability to get the data in the system.
Top 3 features Rootnote
Jason: Right now, we are starting with descriptive analytics, the process of just getting the data into one single source of truth. Many of our early users have defined us as this all-in-one data source where they can visualize everything in one place. The second thing that we’ve done is we’ve made data collaborative. As I mentioned, everyone is looking at different data sources and looking at data that might be scraped from Platform X, aggregated from platform Y, or tracking their own spreadsheets. It’s hard to get a single source of truth where everyone is on the same page. That’s where we’re coming in, and we’re creating the ability for users to go in and invite their entire team on the platform.
Then the third thing that we’re doing, which I think is quite innovative, is helping people build their creator stacks. We’ve identified that because the space is becoming so crowded and there are so many different creator-focused platforms, podcast distribution platforms, and music distribution platforms, it’s tough for creators to understand their options. Because of that, we’ve actually started building a marketplace of all of these products and services where a user can go in, they can identify what they’re using, but they can also discover new platforms, products, and services that are going to help them continue to grow their businesses.
What is the pricing for Rootnote?
Jason: It’s a premium SaaS model. We believe everyone should be able to view, use and access their own data. We’ve got a premium version of the product that’s built for individual users, which we’re starting some initial testing out at $15 per month. We’ve got a pro version of the platform built for teams that work with multiple pieces of content and need multiple licenses for their entire team to use and access the data. And then we’re also working on our enterprise version of the platform built for teams that work with hundreds to thousands of creators. It’s built to scale with both the creator’s size and the number of team members.
How do you view competition are the first one to solve this problem?
Jason: I think data is a huge challenge, and many people have been solving it in unique ways. A solution many people are using is some form of spreadsheet software to go in and try and track all of this. They might work with, you know, a more traditional kind of data lake or software provider where they can go in and help integrate some of their existing SQL databases challenge with that is it’s incredibly expensive. The vast majority of creators can’t afford a solution like that. It’s still very time intensive, and then kind of the third thing that we’re saying people use are what we consider to be more market analytics platforms. These platforms are scraping publicly available data, which is excellent, but the challenge is that they pull in a lot of public data.
The challenge is that they don’t pull in private data, and to provide a genuinely comprehensive bi-product for an individual, you need to marry both public and private data, and a lot of that private data includes financial data, revenue data that’s not included, or publicly available. That’s how we see ourselves, providing the same level of customization that you could with a spreadsheet but automating a lot of ways automating away a lot of the challenges and inefficiencies of spreadsheet technologies, and bringing in the power of some of these enterprise solutions to scale you know business intelligence for an individual.
How do analytics help creators?
Jason: I think the question that everyone’s trying to solve right now is they’re generating a ton of data. Creating content is incredibly time intensive, and you have to be everywhere. And if you have a limited number or amount of time in the day, you’ve got to know what’s working. The problem is that most people can’t even answer what’s working because to answer what’s working, you have to be able to see all of your different sources, and generally, what happens is people will end up either ignoring data altogether that’s more in the long tail or as you start becoming more part-time full-time and a full-time professional and working with larger teams you get teams that are wasting incredible amounts of time pulling data from different sources and then trying to analyze it themselves. That’s where we can really come in and add a lot of value for the teams currently doing it manually, making data analytics and business intelligence accessible to the vast majority.
What is your story, Jason?
Jason: I started my consulting engineering career in college and didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I grew up. In my first job, I worked as a consultant for about three and a half years. It was a great job, I learned an incredible amount in a short amount of time, but I realized that it wasn’t for me forever. I worked in social impact venture capital while I was in grad school, and that was when I really first got inspired to build something. I was just getting to talk with and meet with all of these incredibly inspirational and amazing founders. That gave me the entrepreneurial itch to try and build something. I was also really interested in alternative financing, and my brother, who I mentioned, is a content creator, and I saw an opportunity to do something together in the space.
What’s your favorite software apart from Roonote?
Jason: I actually just made a remote working trip to New Zealand, and what made my life a lot easier was Calendly. I use Calendly all the time for booking and scheduling. Especially as a founder, when you have to manage to work on versus working in the business, scheduling meetings in multiple time zones, I have meetings in eight different time zones in seven countries, and Calendly has been a substantial help.
