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Read the pitch deck Glystn, which uses AI to help creators automate interactions with audiences, used to raise $4 million
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- Glystn, an AI-driven community management tool for creators and businesses, is launching publicly.
- The platform uses AI to collect and distill information from different social-media audiences.
- The company also raised a $4 million seed round. Here’s the pitch deck the cofounders used.
Glystn, an AI-driven platform that aims to facilitate community management and engagement for creators across social-media platforms, is launching publicly.
The company is also announcing a $4 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures with Hannah Grey VC, Precursor Ventures, and Future Perfect Ventures.
Cofounders Ethan Fassett and Michael Rowehl, respectively CEO and CTO of the company, have over 20 years of experience each in the tech sector, and “worked almost our entire careers in social media and adjacent markets, particularly focused on building out community functions and monetization functions,” Fassett told Insider.
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Glystn — a portmanteau of “glean” and “listen” — plugs into the APIs of existing social-media platforms, captures the community data across them in real time, aggregates it, and uses artificial intelligence to distill it. The tool currently works with YouTube and Discord, with others coming soon.
“Creators now have an array of publishing platforms, monetization platforms, and community platforms,” Fassett said. “The problem is that when you live a multi-platform world, your community becomes a diaspora. It’s fragmented across this landscape, and it’s a huge amount of overhead for these folks.”
By aggregating data from different platforms, Glystn allows creators to analyze information and trends from their audience in one place.
The AI can search for keywords and topics in comments and messages, highlight and organize the top responses and most active members of the community, recommend and automate actions, and let the creator natively respond to targeted groups or create personalized answers without leaving the platform. A generative AI function can help the creator craft their responses as well.
Fassett said in the future, Glystn could also offer new monetization opportunities by letting creators direct relevant sponsored content directly at specific pockets of their community through the targeted responses function.
“You can have multiple sponsors at any one point in time in your community without fatiguing everybody else,” Fassett said. “It’s a big unlock in terms of the monetization potential.”
The platform can also be used by community moderators to filter negative or harmful content, and by managers and agents who help creators with their businesses.
Current pilot partners include creators like Steve Mould, EmperorLemon, and AJ Rafael. Media businesses like Fox Sports have also been experimenting with Glystn.
The platform will operate with a tiered subscription model, but exact pricing is still being defined. Currently, creators can apply to try out the product for a limited free trial.
“Right now, we want to make sure that we have the right communities coming on board,” Fassett said. “This is a really powerful tool. We want to see creator communities that are large, vibrant, and for creators to really grow using the tool.”
Here are 15 pages of the pitch deck Glystn used to raise $4 million:
Note: Two slides containing confidential information about strategy for upcoming product announcements and SAFE details were removed at the company’s request.
The first slide includes the company name and its mission: to provide “community superpowers for creators.”
Glystn
The second slide summarizes what Glystn does.
Glystn
Then, the deck introduces the company’s team.
Glystn
The slide reads:
Team
Mike and Ethan have a combined 40+ years experience founding and growing companies.
Their expertise covers search, social gaming, social media, MMO / virtual economies, adtech, machine learning, healthtech, and wearable / IoT.
Ethan Fassett
CEO, Co-Founder
20 year product veteran 10+ year GM / executive 2x EIR
7 patents
6 career exits
Mike Rowehl
CTO, Co-Founder
20 year technology veteran 10+ year CTO / Princ engineer Serial founder
9 career exits
(2 as founder)
The following slide gives a monetary outlook of the current creator communities, in web2 and web3.
Glystn
The slide reads:
The Evolving Creator Community
- Engaged communities, not passive audiences
- Distributed across multiple platforms
- Cultivated via engagement and growth best-practices
Web2 Creators
$104.2b 2022 (est), 427% YoY
$16b to YouTube creators alone
$54m to highest grossing creator
Web3 Creators
$17.6b NFT sales 2021
$10b in DAO treasury
$5b social token market cap
The next slide contends that there is increasing fragmentation and complexity in the creator economy.
Glystn
The slide reads:
Increasing Fragmentation & Complexity
This new world comes at a cost:
- Complex, opaque user funnels
- Lost conversations and feedback
- Repetitive engagement practices
- Distracts from creating
Then, the company presents its solution: “a meta-layer that helps creators scale and automate growth and engagement.”
Glystn
The slide describes what the Glystn platform offers:
- Monitors platforms activity in a simple real-time feed
- Distills comment streams into trends to stay in touch
- Automates and incentivizes best-practices to scale activation
The following slide shows some of the functions the platform offers.
Glystn
The platform can track global community engagement trends, send native replies from one dashboard, recommend actions, highlight issues, and summarize social-platform activity into an integrated view.
Text on the slide reads:
Listen across platforms and see community insights in one view, using AI and ML:
- Always see most important messages
- Find community trends
- See and engage influencers
- Get detailed feedback
Another slide gives an overview of what information the user will be able to distill and summarize thanks to AI.
Glystn
The slide reads:
glystn’s AI takes platform community data and presents a prioritized, summarized view for the creator
- Summarize community data into semantic “conversations”
- GlystnRank determines “most important” members, topics, and messages
- Drill down by platform, tenure, topic, etc
The slide also shows features like “Topics,” which cluster activity by themes, plus additional segmentation that gives deeper insight.
The next slide shows how the tool can automate the interaction with audiences on different platforms from the creator side.
Glystn
The slide reads:
Hyper-targeted community engagement
- Intelligent, best-practice workflows
- Integrated with AI insights
- Tied into native platform hooks
The slide also presents features the platform offers, like the ability to quickly launch workflows, to bulk replies and actions targeted to AI summaries, to customize and suggest reply variations en masse, and to use multiple native communication methods.
Then, the deck presents the company’s business model.
Glystn
The three phases the company envisions are:
Phase I
- Basic freemium monetization
- Add-on features to increase attach rate
- Begin building ad hoc creator<>creator networks
Phase II
- Incentivize cross-traffic & collaboration networking
- Recommendations for creator networking based on AI and other community data
- Engage brands, publishing platforms, etc, with creator communities
Phase III
- Scale creator community networks
- Enable marketplaces around traffic, collaboration, and content
And another one covers its distribution strategy.
Glystn
The company aims to launch “feature rich, differentiated, and free,” with three main targets:
- Influential creator projects: large web2 creators, large media publishers
- Aggregators: creator-management agencies, brand agencies, and community managers/mods
- Platform ecosystems: influencer/creator-marketing platforms and social/creator token platforms
The following slide analyzes Glystn’s competitors.
Glystn
The slide identifies Glystn competitors, and states that Glystn wins because it:
- Differentiates with AI insights
- Targets community use case
- Uses a creator-first UX
The next slide includes some early reviews from users and a list of pilot partners.
Glystn
This slide includes three reviews from Glystn’s early partners.
For example, Louis Weisz, a science YouTuber with over 700,000 subscribers, said, “Glystn optimizes community building for creators by making it easier to stay in tune with your members.”
Lastly, the deck presents a timeline of milestones the company expects to reach through 2024 and beyond.
Glystn
The company aims to start working in community management, and add economic layers as the ecosystem matures.
The timeline reads:
1H23
Beta & Launch!
Complete core platform features and basic incentive system.
2H23
Growth & Early Networks
Scale AI/ML applications
Early ad hoc creator networks
2024+
Cross-Platform Creator Network
Large-scale creator network
Traffic & brand campaigns
The deck ends with a “thank you” slide and some contact information.
Glystn