CREATOR ARCHETYPES

Head of Design, Lumanu
2022

Background

There is a big opportunity in solving problems for creators. In 2023, the creator economy was worth $250 billion, and there are over 200 million creators worldwide. (Source: The Leap by Thinkific)

At Lumanu, our mission was to empower creators to thrive on their own terms and this included getting them paid on time. It was important to know our users deeply and where they experienced the deepest pain points.

I proposed foundational research to identify creator archetypes in order to guide us in feature prioritization and led this effort to answer the question:

“How might we build features that creators would find value in, that would also increase transactions on our platform?”

The current Lumanu ecosystem

The current Lumanu ecosystem required either creators or the agents that represented them to invoice e-commerce brands to pay them out. However, Lumanu’s vision was to offer invoicing and payment solutions that met creators where they were: Patreon, Substack, YouTube, Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, and more.

But where to start?


My role

As Head of Design, I led a team and also collaborated with the Head of Product, VP of Engineering, Director of Product Marketing, and kept our CEO, CTO, CMO and Director of CX in the loop — making sure to accommodate their questions and goals for the project.

We had a few epics that would benefit from prioritization, and each would require months of work on different aspects of helping creators get paid.

By incorporating cross-functional feedback and conducting stakeholder interviews, I got support for this project by sharing that understanding our users would

  • give us clarity on impactful opportunities to serve all creators.

  • help us connect better with what’s important to full-time creators.

  • provide insights on positioning features based on ICPs.

  • provide context on why existing users ask for feature requests.

The study

We talked to 18 creators in 60 minute moderated interviews, spending a majority of the time interviewing and using the last 15 minutes testing out a prototype that included a few feature ideas the design and product team had.

The design and product teams divided up interview facilitation, and I conducted synthesis on Dovetail.

The findings

After synthesizing the data across 18 interviews, I found commonalities across creators including primary and secondary creator types, and was able to use these definitions to come up with several approaches on how to tackle the work. For example, there were “bare essentials” common across all archetypes that would strengthen the core offering, or we could double-down on the creator archetype we were already the most impactful for.

Given that the type of creator who valued our platform already were those that were established creators with multiple income streams, we decided as a team that rounding out the “bare essentials” features made the most sense because that category included viewing earnings from platforms such as Shopify, Substack, etc. so creators could manage more of their business in one place.

The result

We were able to focus on the most important features to build out for the mobile app for the quarter, and the company had a shared vocabulary for which specific archetypes we were building for and a more clear picture of the creator landscape.