Things Have Changed
Things Have Changed
Storytelling That Sells: How to Build a Product Everyone Wants to Share - with Selim Benayat, Bento
In this episode of Things Have Changed Podcast, we sit down with Sélim Benayat, co-founder of Bento and now Director of Product at Linktree, to explore the shifting landscape of the creator economy and how Bento is helping creators showcase their work in a whole new way. Sélim shares the story behind Bento’s creation, their journey through Sequoia’s Arc program, and how they scaled their vision into a platform now empowering creators worldwide to curate their digital identities effortlessly.
Creators, from engineers and designers to artists, have always had a hard time trying to visually showcase their work when it's scattered across different platforms. Sélim and his co-founder, Mugeeb recognized this problem and built Bento, a slick and visually stunning platform that lets you pull in all your creative projects into one central hub, making it easier to keep your work & portfolio organized and presentable.
Tune in as we dive deep into Bento’s acquisition by Linktree, the lessons learned from building a startup, and where Sélim sees the future of the creator economy headed.
If you're a creator, entrepreneur, or just curious about the evolving digital space, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss!
Be sure to subscribe to Things Have Changed Podcast and share this episode with fellow creators and visionaries.
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if you are an engineer, a designer, an artist. Like this type of creative, we identify so much with our output of work that it's a good reflection of who we are.
Jed Tabernero:The creator economy has redefined how individuals express themselves. People have turned platforms into stages for showcasing talent. But as these tools evolved. One problem. Persisted. Content was scattered. There wasn't really a central place to easily display all your work. Selim Benayat and his co-founder. recognize this gap. And set out to build bento. Uh, platform designed specifically for creators to organize and present their portfolios beautifully.
Sélim Benayat:by asking the question, how can we make it as easy as possible for people to showcase their work? We started to understand that most of that work probably lives online somewhere
Jed Tabernero:so through bento, creators were able to merge their creative projects. Into a single stunning digital space.
Sélim Benayat:our sort of challenge became, how do we make linking as sexy as possible?
Jed Tabernero:In today's episode, we dive deep with Selim Benayat co-founder of bento and now director of product at link tree, following their acquisition. We're going to explore the origin story of bento. How Selim his team scaled their vision? And how bento fits into the future of the creator economy. Join us on things have changed podcast. As we talked to Selim about what it takes to scale a startup in today's world. Tune-in. So over the last few years, this concept of the creator economy has come to light where it seemed like anyone anywhere can make it just by building their own brand, right? Digital platforms like social media were used to enable creators, artists, writers, musicians, influencers, to build direct relationships with our audiences. It just shows how much we value authentic content, driven by individuals, not companies necessarily. But one problem still persisted with the growth of different digital platforms. Creator's work was scattered and there wasn't really a central hub to easily showcase, Their content to even just friends and peers, right? became challenging to share ideas and progress and ultimately even getting feedback for the cool work that you've been doing. This is a problem that, Salim Binet and his co founder Mujeeba San has been thinking about and in early 2022 led them to build Bento, a platform that allowed creators to showcase their work, including the tech stack they used. Showing proof of skill and ultimately your portfolio, right? So they've recently combined forces with link tree. We all saw that on the news recently, and, now they're able to provide even more value to creators who are at the heart of this product. So today we're super excited to welcome Salim Binayat. To Things Have Changed podcast, a three time founder, two awesome exits, and now director of product at Linktree. Selim, welcome to Things Have Changed podcast.
Sélim Benayat:Thanks for having me guys.
Shikher Bhandary:Salim, you come from a pretty technical background, like mechatronics, robotics, biophysics. How did it click in your mind to actually going and creating a business, creating a company? During my master's and this is across the board, across my postdoc colleagues and PhD colleagues is they're more or less like they have the blinders on for their product. They are research, and it's hard to really just take off the blinders and see what's out there, what else they can do. So it feels like there's such a diversity in your work where you were able to take off the blinders. Like, how did that come about?
Sélim Benayat:I think this goes back to, my time spent studying biophysics. Or let's just call it science, which is, I don't know, you develop a way to look at problems. I remember at the time, like a lot of students, which was the master's sort of time, they were complaining that, we weren't really doing too much math or doing too much physics. Like I want to go into the lab and stuff. But I think what I came to realize. The time spent doing math and physics and chemistry really was a time where you started to develop problem solving and I think helped you become curious because you were able to look at many different things in life and try to understand like, how does that actually work? To the point where some people I think sometimes are not with me when they walk through, I don't know, when we're on a walk and talk and I just sometimes just have these random questions and, about nature or life, or I think about proteins and I go like, how does that work? Like why does a protein know where it has to go in your cell? And then I go down these rabbit holes, right? And so I think it's just this way of looking at problems that Did you learn or you acquire, that's I think the acquired skill in your studies that then led me to, yeah, just be curious and then look at different problems and then try to solve them in different ways.
Shikher Bhandary:Curiosity is such a key trait for so many of the conversations that we've had on DHC.
Sélim Benayat:Just the ability to ask questions and to ask different questions. I think this theme will come up over and over, probably that discussion, because for instance, yeah, Bento would just ask, I think, a different question and thereby we're able to. Build a differentiated product, right? So I think that if you have to summarize it, yeah, I think the ability to look at certain aspects of life and have the ability to ask different questions than the majority, I think can give you a leg up, when you want to build something,
Shikher Bhandary:good point asking a different question when I first came across bento This was even prior to the waitlist. It felt so different compared to any other way of showcasing your work Throughout either when I was in undergrad or doing my master's or even the work after that. I've always had a portfolio website I used that a lot for a long time, and I just like that visual representation of what your work is. Because, as you might know, when I was doing mechanical engineering, a lot of things is physical. It's showing a design. So I was into product design, but on the hardware side, so I needed something to showcase, okay, what I can build with CAD, what can I build with 3d printing, so on and so forth. I've always liked having a visual medium, but it always felt like I had to create a Wix website, a Squarespace website to actually have a certain level of aesthetic to it. About. me was just, you put some pictures and text and that's about it. It's just a blurb. It's not interactive. So to your question of asking different questions, how did this thought process even arise? Were you in a pain point that you suddenly realized, hey, hang on my does not reflect a bunch of text on the screen. It needs to be visual.
Sélim Benayat:if you are an engineer, a designer, an artist. Like this type of creative, we identify so much with our output of work that it's a good reflection of who we are. Let me say, I think the pinnacle of that obviously, painters, really bringing their self onto that canvas. engineers or digital artists, very similar. And so bento started actually as a product called creator space and creator. The word for us meant much more the creative rather than the influencer. When we started working on creative space was much more a product like medium. It basically was a blog esque product that would empower users to bring their work onto a almost blank canvas where they could write about it. They could upload images and videos and even container the demos about their work and then present that to the world, but much more in a medium esque format. What we saw there that Is that the initial thought of having such a space you can call your own, and showcase your work was enticing to people. However, we ran, into the limitation that is. laziness, right? A core human trait. I think we're all lazy. And I don't mean this in a negative or whatever light. No, I truly believe like humans are just lazy in the sense that we try to do, and even our brains biologically just try to use the least amount of energy for anything we were doing. And so if you think about this, Tropic state, I think you, you have to build consumer products, that don't run head first into that core trade. And so we ask ourselves the question at the time, how can we help people showcase their work as easily as possible? And this was in November, 2020. we started to notice, okay that's the key issue here. Like we're not seeing an uptick in the market because we believe, yeah, there is this white space problem. It's difficult for people to fill that white space. by asking the question, how can we make it as easy as possible for people to showcase their work? We started to understand that most of that work probably lives online somewhere. In the worst case, it lives in a G drive. Like Mujib and my side projects, they live in a G drive or maybe on the margin, like on GitHub, in the best case, that stuff lives, somewhere dockered on a webpage that is easy to access accessible, or it lives on art station, dribble, any of the easily accessible sort of very visual sites. And so we believed. You can just link to your work most probably. And so then all of a sudden our sort of challenge became, how do we make linking as sexy as possible? How do we make this as visually appealing as possible? Because if our thesis turns out to be true and you want to have link to your work to represent yourself. That sort of end result needs to be visually appealing because you have to be proud about it because it's the culmination of your digital identity in that sense, because you have this fractured landscapes of different digital identities and we hope to unify it in a very accessible, delightful sort of way. Plane, which then we started calling Bento
Jed Tabernero:and just to clarify, it is definitely sexy. I put together my Bento website last night, very impressed.
Shikher Bhandary:was like, Jed, we got to do this. Because Jed is amazing with his drone. He travels to different places just for his drone.
Sélim Benayat:I appreciate good drone shots.
Jed Tabernero:does. It does take a while to load by the way. Cause there's such a big, especially if they're 4k. Oh my gosh. They are super huge files, but thanks shaker. I appreciate that. Not. This problem that you focused on and really the questions that you've started to ask, for this specific community of folks, right? I think from my end, we were reading one post that your co founder Mujib had posted, and he was talking about lucky us. We fell in love with the problem rather than the solution. And this is something where being customer focused, that's what's, that's what it's all about. Falling in love with the problem essentially is being also customer focused, right? It's to understand what that problem is. So I guess what influenced your approach to be really customer focused and specifically,
Sélim Benayat:one of our core values at Bento was to be a user advocate or call it customer obsession. And often these values are a bit corny and not really authentic. however, for us, I think customer centricity and obsession really was a thing that we noticed later on, And I think it came from, us building a product for ourselves. Mujib and I had this problem. We had all of these cool projects that we were building and we were frustrated that nobody would see it. we had it on G drive and we were like, we're not the best at launching stuff and product hunt. And we're also quite honestly, we're not like these flashy social media people that like to post it on social media and be loud about it. And so I think we were slightly frustrated also that we weren't getting the recognition that we thought some of these products deserved, because we couldn't show it anywhere. And since this was the way. We started to build the product by just asking ourselves what would we need? And then we start to ask our creator friends, our engineer and designer friends, what they think about the product. It just became a ritual. And at first, yeah, we didn't articulate it. It just was the way we worked. we would reach out to people on Twitter, reach out on people on this score, just people we knew. And then we started to expand the pie because we needed more opinion on stuff that we were doing. And since it was our DNA when building Bento, I think, yeah, we just kept it, throughout, The entire time we were building Bento halfway through when we started to I think, articulate our values, we noticed that, this for sure was, or is a value of Bento. Yeah.
Shikher Bhandary:In startup life, we've had so many companies, and startups on, and, It's tough. It's a struggle. It's hard. Things don't move as fast as expected to get traction and virality. It feels like y'all got that virality very early on with just moved things a lot faster. I feel like I just set up my bento. Walk us through how that virality was achieved. Was it some ambassadors that pushed Bento that helped you get that initial surge, which then kept it going. And also looking back, does it feel like it just all happened in a flash? Because it did feel like it was probably under 12 months, from official release to acquisition or was it in and around that ballpark?
Sélim Benayat:It was about five months, to take on the broader question of virality and let's just say product growth. I think there's tons to unpack And I try to be exhaustive in the answer. So bring me back if I rear off track. Bento being a pure consumer product, and understanding the fact that Mujib and I. We're not the loudest on social media or on product hunt or any sort of outward facing sort of activity. I started to realize very early on that. To compliment the team, we would not only need design because consumer products need delightful and elegant design, at least in my mind. And we would also need community. We would need that social media slash outreach piece that we were really missing between the two of us. And so against all recommendations from VCs and friends and then, yeah, and founders and everyone around me, basically even against Mujeeb's recommendation, it was a discussion. We hired a specific person, to do community Social media. And the idea was that if you think about Bento as a product, it's inherently a network product because basically you create your Bento for two things. One, you just want to see your digital identities converge on one surface and you want to see yourself represented in a good light. You want to see your drone footage. You want to see your products. You want to see your podcast. You want to see whatever represents you on a beautiful day. I believe that to be true for a lot of people. And once you see it, it makes you feel good. However, what makes you feel even better is if actually all the people that you care about see it. If my friends see my cool profile or if a recruiter sees my profile or a customer is going to see my profile, that makes me feel even better. And so at its core, bento is a network product. And because of that, we believed we had to foster a network around the product. Not just for defensibility, which is another topic we can talk about later on, because it would help us grow because achieving the first five to 10 views would make you rave about the product much more than if you would not get it And so we started to lean into that fact one from a product perspective. So we would build specific features that would make it easier for you to share your bento. One, or that would make it easier for you to build a good bento, be it on desktop or on mobile, such as the little physics that we have in there, like these delight features that just make it nicer to build, or the mobile editor that just makes it very easy to build a mobile,
Shikher Bhandary:plane flying over a map.
Sélim Benayat:there you go, or the little music notes that come out of the podcast player and stuff like this. And all of this, these delight features and the ease of use obviously helps from a product perspective. The product to grow because it makes it easier to build beautiful things, which is easier to then consume. Now from a community let grow side, we started to notice that, creatives inherently are in search of inspiration and this comes often through their peers. For instance, for Majip and me, we love to go on product hunt or just chat to friends and understand what they are building, same for artists, ArtStation, Dribbble, all of these places. And so it was a natural sort of extension of that group's behavior to start building community. And then obviously community in itself helped the growth of the company and the product, because basically people were referring each other and ultimately wanted to be part of that very positive community that was fostered.
Shikher Bhandary:From outside in, it feels Oh, just the right notes were hit and they were able to get that success. But, thanks for peeling the onion. and giving us a showcase of what, instrumental steps and very mindful steps have to be taken internally for the world to then see that virality.
Sélim Benayat:Yeah, it was definitely orchestrated. So it was not just happenstance. one of my regrets is that we didn't start with community advocates earlier. I remember I spoke a lot to the Figma guys at the time and their advocacy team to understand how they do it, how they think about, the advocacy programs and their community around Figma. I believe one of the big mistakes we did at Bento was. To realize too late that we should have leaned into creating an actual ambassador program, because we had people that call themselves bento ambassadors, by, their own volition basically. And that took a lead in the community, but I think we should have been more deliberate, more concrete about these actions earlier, which goes back to the fact that, yeah, we tried to orchestrate it, but this basic was a miss. Yeah.
Jed Tabernero:Thanks for sharing that. I think one of the things that, was also really fascinating. What was bento was part of the first cohort of startups in Sequoia arc. And, we're talking about growth now and how you've led to this community led growth. How was the experience at Sequoia arc? What kind of things did you learn from that experience? That program that helped you build this company,
Sélim Benayat:Yeah. So Bento was in the inaugural batch of the Sequoia art program, which was an illuminating. Sort of journey, I think, mostly personally as a founder rather than the product. And this has something to do with the fact that we basically applied to ARC without really knowing what we're going to do. To be honest, creative space only existed in a Figma at that time. And so we were by far. The earliest sort of product team or company in that program. And we basically, one of our milestones together with George, one of the partners at Sequoia was that we're going to launch creator space within the eight weeks of the program. At the end of the program, we're going to use that demo day to launch greater space. So that's how early we were, and so for us, I think the main benefit was the ambition that Sequoia gave you as founders because they have a program called, basically company building the Sequoia way. And one of the main takeaways as founders, as a founder is that you as a founder have to grow so that your company can grow. And so they really focus on the fact that you need to have huge ambitions as a founder. And at the same time, you need to work on your skills to actually reach those ambitions. And by doing that, you will pull the company behind you up to these heights as well. exercises, being in the room with another 30 tremendously skilled founders, being shown what world class looks like, being able to talk to world class. Being all of these huge Sequoia founders that they brought in. You name the company, they're going to have the founders going to come in to talk to you. So being exposed to world class gave you an ambition, gave you a good sort of understanding what world class actually looks like and how it behaves. And helped you to find community within those other 30 founders. which was transformational, I think for us as a team with Jeep and myself. And then this basically was then translated into how we approach Company and product building.
Jed Tabernero:cohort is telling to what kind of founders you guys were already. So getting to that level after meeting with these like super successful people that's awesome. Is there any like favorite story you have on your journey and Sequoia arc, which really led to a lot of this stuff that you're building today? didn't know what you were going to deliver, right? You had said it yourself. Like you started with an idea, they taught you how to grow. And then now you have built something, way past that.
Sélim Benayat:think it was just, I would say the community that we built, around the cohort, Sequoia was really intentional in helping founders create lasting memories and grow closer as a team. I don't want to say family because it's still a team. It was still competition in that sense, but not competition for the money, but more like healthy competition amongst ambitious people because we all knew it's not a zero sum game. There's enough money from Sequoia that, they could feed a hundred thousand teams. So that was not what we were competing about. It was more like healthy competition amongst friends. And then at the same time, because we grew so close as friends, Due to these activities that Sequoia hosted, we were also very supportive of each other And I think that was the, yeah, the biggest sort of, I think, value add to us. I think to also be realistic about it all and not just only mention the tremendously positives, I think where Sequoia could put in, some reflection is on specifically product. Help.'cause I think Sequoia thinks so big all the time and has all of these huge founders that their advice tends to be much later stage, rather than super early stage.
Jed Tabernero:it's really fascinating that throughout this call, you are vocally, not only self critical, but you're also critical of those things that you've learned from, through your entire journey, and that's quite unique, to be honest, when we're on the show, a lot of what we hear from founders are like, these are the cool things that happened, and this is what's awesome about it. So really appreciate the backdrop and saying, look, I'm going to remember from this call that, we should have leaned in further into creating this community. And getting ambassadors, so I think really appreciate you going back and like being self critical about that. You think that's really important trait to have being a founder?
Sélim Benayat:Yeah. I thinks self-awareness is, I think is key. I self-awareness because it helps you understand, where you need help, right? And at the end of the day, I think this goes back to having no ego at the end of the day, it's all about winning as a team because then the company wins. and creates shareholder value and societal value. So yeah, throw that ego out of the window and be self aware to create also an environment of trust, right? Because no one of us is crushing it all the time. That's not true.
Jed Tabernero:Yeah.
Shikher Bhandary:So fast forward from your Sequoia Arc experience. Now we have gained that virality. You find yourselves five months into the product. In conversations with, the biggest player in the space, which is Linktree. So how was that process look like? Because firstly, as part of the product lead and, the founding team, you were still getting your stride in trying to balance, not just your internal costs, hosting, and all of that, but also the creator side of it The, your revenue side versus the creator monetization side. It feels like at odds and the creators win and you win as part of that as well.
Sélim Benayat:Yeah. Multi layered sort of question. First of all, I want to say I love your engineering mindset of you thinking about the hosting costs, and research that it takes. That, that little map, by the way, that shows you the little clouds and the planes, that feature is way too expensive if we talk about, but it's worth it.
Shikher Bhandary:is the first thing that came to my mind when I put that map. I was like, Jed, stop what you're doing.
Sélim Benayat:Yeah, there you go. Sometimes you can put a price tag on delight on user delight. Sometimes. Okay. Let me go back to that question. You talked about the acquisition and how that went and how we were thinking about balancing costs and possible sort of revenue streams and how that sort of intertwined with the acquisition. I think first of all, our thinking and frameworks around revenue creation and cost had nothing to do with the acquisition. If we want to tackle sort of revenue streams first or how we thought about monetization, Bento was fairly obvious how we would monetize the product in the short term, how we would monetize and build a category defining company out of it in the long term. Wasn't clear, which I think then would be the segue into the M& A discussion. So short term, we were in the lucky position of again, being very close to our user base, right? The proximity to our user was very short, which led to us understanding what they actually would want to pay for and to not speak so cryptically, they literally just send us hundreds of messages asking us, I want to pay for analytics. I want to pay for personal domain. I want to pay for more customization. Now long term, I think you have to unravel a lot of things around the creator economy, which I think is the big question for any company current in this space. So if you think about the creator in the word creator economy, not the way Bento defined it, right? So a creator is someone who's a core skill. Is in creating content to engage an audience and the core monetization is driven through sponsorships and advertising, brand collaborations, merchandise, subscriptions, revenue, and similar, right? And so it's in direct correlation with their audience. And, you have to then think about the power law distribution within that cohort of people that we just defined and the parallel distribution in terms of eyeballs from power players to the long tail, right? And then we were cognizant about three characteristics in that. Let me see if I can recall it. So it was the distribution of value captured. Within that, whether the long tail is monetizable or not, and whether you can build a big company around then these two points. And so if you look about the distribution value. Within that creator cohort. I think it's pretty clear that you have the power creators who generate a tremendous amount of revenue, you can go from the movie stars to Mr. Beast, through their content and then the long tail, if you think about monetization of the long tail Is very difficult because I personally think that sort of the idea that everyone should be a creator is somewhat of a fallacy because Being a great creator is so difficult And a lot of us just live like boring Unexceptional lives in that sense like we just live normal lives, right? I'm drinking my coffee in the morning and then I sit in front of the pc for 10 hours, right? So we don't generate like That original interesting content for all of these people, right? So basically it's difficult for the long tail to be monetized because there's not tremendous value in there. And so how do you build. a company around that, especially if your power users get all of their revenue on a couple of platforms like TikTok, basically platforms that, that host their core skill, their content, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and that stuff. And so as a company that space, you somehow have to build a product. Where you can retain your core user. Otherwise you can't grow as a company and to retain your core users, somehow have to meaningfully create. Career lifetime value, meaning you have to create a big portion of their revenue because otherwise creators are very unloyal users because anything but the big platforms are ancillary products to them.
Shikher Bhandary:Yeah.
Sélim Benayat:Anything that sort of helps them bring more eyeballs to their core revenue drivers, they will use. And they will jump if there's another product that does it better. And so in the longterm for Bento, the big question that I was pondering over, together with the team was how do we become a meaningful chunk of their revenue over the next years? Like what would that look like? Cause otherwise we have no right to build a company and be here. Otherwise we're just going to be noise. And so what we started thinking is obviously the lines of not hosting content because you don't want to directly compete with YouTube, but more in the lines of maybe a financial backbone to them in terms of e commerce and it's the new Shopify. We were thinking Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, Bento kind of thing that could have been in the long term something. But for that, we would need to aggregate more and more eyeballs. And this is where the segue to the M& A basically, I think comes into play.
Shikher Bhandary:I think this is one aspect of the creative economy that is not spoken about a lot where churn is real and you need to be growing 35 percent because your churn, whatever, whoever it Is substantially high like you need to be always on to the last bit the acquisition was it Stressful because things seem to have moved so quickly I don't know if it happened over a phone call over a drink or over a weekend But how was that whole process was the team aware as the co founder were you thinking about? Okay, do my Company's goals align with Linktree. Was there some uncertainty? Would love to get a glimpse of what that whole process looks like.
Sélim Benayat:Yeah. I think, an acquisition process is a multidimensional problem, right? it's an emotional challenge. It's an interpersonal challenge. It's a financial challenge. a vision slash mission alignment challenge. And as a founder, you have to deal with all of it at the same time while running the product. It happened by cold outreach through basically Linktree reached out cold. And they were like, Oh, we hear you're in the market or funding rounds, yada, yada. At the same time, there were other companies that I can't mention that were actually doing the same. So our deck must have been in the market and must have changed hands because there were other big companies that reached out for M& A. And so as a founder, the first thing you do. is to ask yourself and your co founder, basically the co founder team, to ask the question, is this something can entertain at all? Like this thought of being acquired. once you pass that conversation, you need to really commit And try to get to the outcome that is getting acquired. And you have to gradually start sharing the broader team, the broader shareholders. But the keyword is gradually, News of a potential deal hits the broader team. The company is in a standstill and nothing happens anymore. Everyone is on garden leave. Everyone is excited. Everyone already thinks about their boat houses that they're going to buy and nothing gets done. And if it doesn't happen, you have the hangover. And so it's, that's the emotional challenge. And the interpersonal challenge that you need to get right. Then obviously you need to talk to your shareholders and make them aware that this might happen and what that would mean for their shares and sort of their returns and all of that jazz I think more anecdotally, basically Linktree and I, we were talking, I was the main person to push that deal forward because again, Majib, my co founder. Sort of needed to keep on building because what if doesn't happen? The team didn't know at the time. And so it was basically a ping pong, on many zooms between me and Linktree and the other sort of MNA, parties that they were interested as well, and you were trying to get the best deal at the right time. the reason why we decided to do it was. The ambition to get Bento to a generational defining product, much like at the time, MySpace or then Facebook, because we believed it was time for Bento to hit the big stage and really grow worldwide hugely to a new sort of social product that would put the people into the center of the story and just create a more. delightful internet, a new corner on the internet called Bento, where creativity would shine and basically creatives would call their home, right? That's what I really wanted to get done with that deal. And I decided that Linktree would help in doing so because their scale on the internet is just mind blowing. I can't talk about numbers, but you wouldn't imagine the scale that Linktree has, and so I believe plugging in that scale into Bento would get us there faster, We had we have a nice tree here and I like to look at that tree. Through the seasons in the morning. And I would be worried slash scared that Bento would stop working and that we would lose that hype in the market and people would just not like it anymore. And I always imagined it to be the snowflake, the first snow that falls from the sky and you're lucky enough to catch it on the tip of your finger. You can look at it briefly at this beautiful snowflake and then it melts away. And I always felt like we're at this stage. Like I somehow have to keep the conditions on the tip of my fingers cold enough and perfect enough that this snowflake doesn't melt. And I was constantly scared I would not keep these conditions right. And so I thought with the Linktree deal, I could keep these conditions right and start building snowmans actually, right? That was the idea.
Jed Tabernero:That's super poetic. Thank you for that. I think we're going to use that as a soundbite for sure. What's next for the creator economy, right? You've gone to the stage where you've got the perfect conditions on your hand to hold this snowflake, at least presumably, how do you make sure that the seasons then go well? And, creator is still at the center of what you're building in the future
Sélim Benayat:Yeah. That's, I think the major question for the entire industry. Where is the creator economy going? Obviously AI, enters the discussion. Because AI will obviously supercharge. The ability of people to create, probably content or create products that then people want to use. And thereby I think the creator economy will grow in the sense that businesses of one will be much more prevalent than ever before, that you can run rather big businesses rather successfully with the help of a lot of AI and agents. So I would start to include that into the creator economy. More broadly speaking about the influencer economy, what I'm seeing there is that it becomes more and more professional. And obviously the spurt in e commerce helps them to build bigger businesses there. Because at the end of the day, it's always a question. You build your audiences to somehow monetize them. And I think the capabilities of monetization go beyond now advertising and just sponsored content into, much more tangible sort of monetization, opportunities such as e commerce, but e commerce, not only for hardware goods, but also for digital goods due to AI. So you can build your own educational environments. For instance, you have education influencers, or fitness influencers that can build, digital fitness coaches and stuff. So I think all in all the creator economy just gets flattened out, gets broader, where there's going to be much more niche content. Because you now have the time to create that niche content. And so I think successful companies and products will hop on that, trend to help people monetize niche audiences, more efficiently.
Shikher Bhandary:there's going to be a pre chat GPD world, there's a post chat GPD world. And we are in that phase. There was this really good tweet, and I saw that you had retweeted it too, where I think Scott Belsky had tweeted out that in this now AI world, taste will be a lot more important than skills. skills is not going away, but I feel the embodiment of that statement. there is a certain taste to it that I will not get anywhere else. It is really well designed and I love such things. So do you think that will be now a key trend with the creator economy as well? Because now anyone, You put in your persona into cloud or, chat GPT, and you could potentially get certain content elements that you can share. So would it now be more on your specific taste of what you bring different? To the table more than it's ever been
Sélim Benayat:Yeah, I think, again, like multi multifaceted, Super interesting question. Multifaceted because you can see it from the perspective of building product or from building a, an influencer persona online. So I think if you're an influencer out there, I think your audience will gobble up the stuff that you put out. And so I think the most. Successful influencers will have taste in what they put out, how they curate themselves and the new AI enhanced capabilities that we'll have, they will use to, to craft something that, that has a certain type of elegance. But in a way that represents themselves the best, I think this is where taste comes into play. How do you represent yourself the best so that your audience can connect with it the best? Now, if you look at it from a pure software slash product perspective, I think taste truly goes back to craftsmanship. And I do believe it's the only way currently in the application layer, how to differentiate yourself. Because if you look at AI, it still feels like that there is a huge Delta the felt or perceived value of AI in different, implementations. I think why everyone, or a lot of people, went nuts about Apple intelligence was that. All of a sudden, like it's small use cases, but they're so well executed. They're so elegant. And I don't want to sound like an Apple fanboy because actually I'm not anymore, but I got to give it to them. It's so well executed that all of a sudden AI doesn't become AI anymore, but it's just product. And I think like we have to get to an expression of a product where AI is not the driving factor, but the experience. The product expression, that's how we talk about it because I have the cheeky saying that AI is only called AI if it's not working. And if it's working, it's just software, right? And I think we're going to move towards that, that it's just about the expression of the product and how well it is curated. How well does it understand the current cultural sort of environment and drum beats that you're launching it into? And with Bento, we started noticing just like this general, almost anxiety in the market about all of these constant dopamine hits that you were getting these constant, this sort of this scattering of your online life, constant checking everywhere, constantly needing to check everywhere. And so we believed, you know what, let's create a sort of an environment of tranquility of delight, where you just turn down the noise, like just turn it down, have a lot of white space, have nicely defined sort of little widgets and let that be the start of the experience.
Jed Tabernero:at the end of the show. So give a platform to you to also chat with our users a little bit to share a little bit about, what's next for you, how our listeners can learn about you and what you've built. And yeah, it's up to you how you want to, Present that information. Typically, a lot of founders use it to say, Hey, we're building this next. We need this set of expertise. This is where we need help next. And we'd love to hear from you about this, et cetera. But yeah, just wanted to give you the space to chat about that stuff.
Sélim Benayat:What is next for me is reflection, trying to understand like what is going on in the world right now, I think first at large, and then I start zooming into areas that are relevant to me and then hopefully, relevant to other people as well. So I think for me next until end of the year is reflection. trying to understand where is this all headed? Cause it feels so fluid right now. It's such high ambiguity. I'm always open to connect with people that have an interesting point of view of the now and the future, but also the past because it always rhymes. And yeah, I'd be happy if people just reach out, if they have something to share on product, aI and the trends at large.
Shikher Bhandary:that's great. Thanks. We Really enjoyed your candidness Yeah, we are big fans. So we are probably gonna be watching out for not just your Work at linktree, but also beyond what's coming
Sélim Benayat:Thank you. Yeah. And thanks for having me guys. It's always a blast to talk about product, company, people.
Jed Tabernero:Absolutely.
And that's wrap for today's episode on things have changed podcast. We hope you enjoy this deep dive into the crater economy with Selim Benayat and how bento is helping creators showcase their work and build their digital identity in a whole new way. If you don't learn more, be sure to check out bento@bento.me as always, if you found value in this episode, don't forget, subscribe, leave a serve you and share it with someone who needs to hear the story. Stay tuned for more groundbreaking conversations on the future of work tech. In the economy. Please note the opinions and insights shared by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of things have changed podcast. This episode is intended for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as professional advice.
