For our guest this week on Means of Creation we welcomed Joseph Albanese, co-founder and CEO of Stir!

As we’ve discussed on the show before, creators are becoming a larger and larger part of the economy. But these individuals don’t just have to create content, but have to be the CEO, CFO and COO of their business. They have to manage all of these parts of being a business owner despite not having expertise in these areas.

Stir is a tool that solves this problem. It helps creators manage all of these gritty details for their business. Stir is also one of the first tools to offer collaboration among creators - what Stir calls “Collectives”. This makes it easy to share analytics and split revenue between multiple parties.

Last week Stir announced a $4 million seed round led by Homebrew, XYZ Capital, Ludlow Ventures, Jack Conte, Casey Neistat, our own Li Jin and more.

Before starting Stir, Joe worked at Bitwise Asset Management (an index for cryptocurrencies), Facebook and was also on the founding team of viral college app Yik Yak. In this interview, we talked to Joseph about:

• The story of how Joe went from selling backpacks on Instagram to starting Stir
• The most surprising thing he’s learned about the passion economy through building Stir
• How Joe thinks about internal project “Drops” like OnlyTweets and TikTok Exporter and his plans for them going forward
• How he managed to build relationships with top influencers living in Los Angeles
• The most popular tools that creators are using that weren’t made for the passion economy and which ones need a verticalized solution
• And more!

Watch or Listen

We held this conversation live on Friday, October 30th. You can listen to the podcast here or watch the YouTube video here. Enjoy!