#16 — Joseph Albanese, CEO and co-founder of Stir, on building business tools for creators and collab culture

Joe Albanese is the cofounder and CEO of Stir, a startup that’s building tools to help creators run their businesses. In the new era in which power and influence are shifting from institutions to individuals, Stir is addressing the needs creators have in running their businesses and optimizing their finances.

Last week, Stir launched a public beta of its core product and also announced its $4 million seed round led by Homebrew, XYZ Capital, and Ludlow Ventures, with participation from some heavy-hitting angels in the creator economy, including Casey Neistat, Jack Conte from Patreon, and our own Li Jin.

Stir's core features include a dashboard of various revenue sources ("Mint for creators"), a calendar view of different income streams, and collaboration tools. Stir has also launched various Drops over the past few months, which include products like Presubscribe FYP.RIP, OnlyTweets, and more.

Before starting Stir, Joe was Head of Product and Design at Bitwise, a Product Designer at Facebook, and an early employee at Yik Yak.

In this episode, we talk to Joe about:
- the backstory on how he ended up building for creators in the first place and major learnings so far
- why collaborations between creators (“collectives”) are important in the passion economy
- why they’ve been creating Drops

Related links:
https://www.usestir.com/
https://twitter.com/BearUNLV/status/1275143945417142277

Brought to you by Means of Creation: http://meansofcreation.substack.com/