Be Zealous

TL;DR

• After two years of exploring how we could be helpful to the creator economy, Petr and I are excited to finally announce Zealous.
• Zealous is a live community platform. It’s designed to let creators build more engaging relationships with their audience and true fans. It’s also a way for fans to support the creators they love interacting with the most.
• You can sign up right now at https://zealous.space
• We just launched on Product Hunt and would love your vote of confidence

What’s Zealous?

Zealous is a web-based platform for creators to build their own audience on. Zealous focuses on real-time, live connections between creators and their fans. If you’re into analogies, we’re Twitch for Non-Gamers, SFW OnlyFans, or Cameo for Creators.

Zealous gives every creator a base to build their audience on:

• Live Home Page — this is our version of a “Link in Bio” tool, just way better. It’s designed around the basic idea that creators go live more and more and need to make sure their audience doesn’t miss a beat
• Live Rooms — these are our spaces for creators and fans to interact. They can work independently like Zoom or as a companion to existing live experiences. We make it easy and possible for any fan to appear on stage with their favorite creator. Fans can also give feedback through chat and reactions in realtime.
• Live Audience — this is our lightweight CRM and loyalty program. It helps creators keep track of and communicate with their loyal followers and fans.
• Live Revenue — this is how creators monetize. We believe live content is far more valuable than static posts and our revenue tools give creators an easy way to build a sustainable revenue stream without ever having to pitch or sell to their audience.

Who is Zealous For?

Zealous works for almost any creator, but we think there are a few ideal kinds of creators:

• Creators already selling something premium to fans and need to offer something extra (ex. Patreon creators, OnlyFans creators, course creators)
• Creators who already go live on another platform and aren’t currently monetizing (ex. IG Live Creators, TikTok Live Creators, Snapchat Live Creators)
• Creators who have been considering going live but don’t feel like Twitch or OnlyFans is the right place for them
• Creators who produce serialized content where fans want to dive deeper (ex. Podcasters, Newsletter Authors)

Why is it called Zealous?

We believe in the power of passion and, more importantly, giving passionate people a place of their own. The internet is filled with lots of places to chat and connect with others, but only recently with the arrival of live streaming, stories, and, now, social audio are people taking that to the next level.

We believe every creator has a passionate community of true fans hoping to engage in a whole new way. Zealous lets them make the space for that to happen.

How it started

Zealous has been a lifetime in the making, it seems.

I have always been an entrepreneur, but over the past 2 decades, I have also been a blogger (2003), podcaster (2004), video blogger (2018), live streamer (2019), and now social audio creator (2020). Turns out, without even considering it, I was a creator too.

It’s no surprise that over the last decade I gravitated towards influencer and creator companies, all of which taught me something different. At Klout, I learned the power of building an audience and conveying a message. At Chute, I saw up close how creative every one of us is, especially when inspired by something we love. At Creator Cash, I saw how challenging building and sustaining a creator business truly

I started thinking about how to create lasting value since the early days at Chute. Back then, I was more focused on how brands could benefit, but today I’m focused on creators of all shapes and sizes. I was lucky to reconnect with Petr, my old colleague from Chute, a couple of years ago. Together we explored a number of different pathways, but mostly we made a lot of mistakes (startup life).

How It’s Going

We started building this iteration of Zealous in January 2021. It’s been a rapid succession of designs, developments, and tests with creators from all walks of life. We’ve taken into account their feedback and blended that with what we think will be an amazing opportunity for our business, creator businesses, and, most importantly, the fans.

We’re grateful for the clarity, overwhelmed with the mountain of things still to be done, but excited for the journey ahead.

Zealous is available for use right now. You can sign up here.

What’s Next?

We want to leave some surprises for the future, but we can definitely say we’ll be maturing all of the feature areas we currently have created. We’ll be adding more real-time tools asap (everyone wanted these) and monetization tools shortly afterward (most were happy to wait for these).

1. Zealous works on every modern browser (no downloads ever), but we know how important a great mobile experience is, so we’ll likely have one in the future.
2. Zealous is currently free to use, but we do hope to make money sometime in the future, as well.

Team Zealous,
Greg + Petr

p.s. we heard these kinds of posts are better with emojis, so here you go! 👋 🎉 ❤️