Early in the pandemic, Nick Gerard, Steven Layne, and Samantha Safer Valentine had a hit on their hands. In the era before Zoom fatigue set in, the trio launched Mainstream Live, a website and newsletter that curated live virtual events across platforms and gave people text-based reminders to check them out.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started with the discovery problem of people looking for cool things to do online,\u201d Gerard told TechCrunch. \u201cRight away we knew that we were tapping into something.\u201d Overnight, tens of thousands of people were on the site, browsing for online events to keep them connected in a period of unprecedented social isolation.<\/p>\n
After going viral, the Mainstream Live team found itself inundated with questions about the tools it used to surface events and keep its community in the loop. As the team built more services for its own needs, it eventually opened its custom toolkit, sharing the code to other community leads and content creators who implemented the same set of tools with a rebrand.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople loved it \u2014 more and more people asked for it,\u201d Gerard said. \u201cWe got to the point where we were juggling a dozen of [these] for different partners.\u201d By the fall, the team wound down the original community, leaned into the inbound interest in its toolset and built Norby<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n Image Credits:<\/strong> Norby<\/p>\n The new company rolled together everything that people were asking for: a link-in-bio service, referral tracking, SMS, ticketing and other marketing tools necessary to keep a small brand or creator community humming.<\/p>\n Gerard says the team at Norby has been \u201cfollowing that signal\u201d ever since. Now, Norby has raised a $3.8 million seed round<\/a> led by Gradient Ventures<\/a>, Google\u2019s venture AI-focused fund, to grow its team and scale its full-stack marketing platform to new heights. Bungalow Capital, BBG Ventures, Charge VC and Notation also participated in the funding round.<\/p>\n Norby\u2019s big idea is to combine services like LinkTree, Eventbrite and MailChimp into a single, affordable, subscription-based service, offering anyone who handles an online community a single solution rather than an expensive patchwork of services that have to be individually set up and managed. Norby is ideal for small brands and solo entrepreneurs, and most of its customers run less than 10-person operations. The creator tool suite is purely subscription-based and won\u2019t collect any fees like Eventbrite and other popular services.<\/p>\n Image Credits:<\/strong> Norby<\/p>\n For brands, it starts at $20 per month, and the company has plans in the works for a $5-per-month tier for individual use. There\u2019s no free tier, and Gerard prefers to think that Norby\u2019s customers will be excited to save time and money on the company\u2019s bundled offering. \u201cWhat we found is that people spend an enormous amount of money on these tools,\u201d Gerard said. \u201cWe can knock a bunch of tools out of your stack and save you money. But we can also save you time.\u201d Norby\u2019s team spends a lot of time talking to creators and small companies. Its customers range from sexual wellness companies to advice columnists and activists \u2014 anybody who needs to manage an online community. It counts Sad Girls Club<\/a>, EVRYMAN<\/a> and Allbodies<\/a> among its early customers<\/p>\n The company is growing slowly and organically, bringing new users in through a waitlist and invite system and showing them around the product in group demos. \u201cWhat\u2019s been really cool for us: We\u2019ll get a new customer for one or two features \u2026 then they came into the product and were like, \u2018Oh we\u2019ve always wanted to try SMS,\u2019 and then it\u2019s just there and they can start using it,\u201d Gerard said.<\/p>\n Big picture, Norby views itself as an advocate for creators \u2014 and an insulator against the power that big platforms wield. In the long term, Gerard hopes to help creators own their communities as a kind of \u201ccounterbalance\u201d to big platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.<\/p>\n Norby aims to help more people make a reliable living creating content and communities online. \u201cThere\u2019s a handful of extreme winners and it\u2019s just barren after that,\u201d Gerard said, citing Li Jin\u2019s ideas on building a creator middle class<\/a>.<\/p>\n Helping creators \u201cown the relationship\u201d with their communities is something that big platforms will never have an incentive to do. But those same platforms are realizing that creators wield some very real power \u2014 and the ability to pick up their content empires and take them to go if they choose to.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s exciting about this moment is that right now looking ahead to the next five or 10 years, nothing is inevitable,\u201d Gerard said. \u201cThese windows don\u2019t come along all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n