Camille Hearst
Head of Fan Monetization at Spotify, former Head of Product for Creators at Patreon
Where to hear and read about Camille Hearst1 episode or test
Camille Hearst is Head of Fan Monetization at Spotify, and was Head of Product for Creators at Patreon after it bought her startup Kit. The most useful thing to learn from her is to build for the supply side first, whether that means marketplace suppliers or creators who need to grow an audience and get paid.
every creator needs two things. They need to grow an audience and they need to get paid
Monetizing passions, scaling marketplaces, and stories from a creator economy vet | Camille Hearst
Camille Hearst: the story and the lessons
1Camille Hearst's path from iTunes to Spotify
Hearst got into iTunes through a label relations internship. After grad school she interned in label relations, then took a full-time product marketing job and became the second product marketing manager on iTunes.
Apple had no product manager title then, only product marketing managers. She had asked the recruiter what iTunes was, since Apple was not yet the brand it is now.
She thanked Steve Jobs on her first day, against coworkers' jokes. In 2005 she told Jobs his Stanford commencement speech, given days earlier, had inspired her. He asked who she was, then welcomed her, and waved back whenever he saw her after that.
Coworkers had joked he might fire the intern, and she had not yet heard the elevator story about his habit of asking what people did there. Her parents had taught her to tell people whose work affected her.
Her real iTunes job was running Jobs's press rooms. She ran press rooms for iTunes launches, with an iMac, a synced iPod and a curated library, all reset after each interview.
Jobs gave feedback on the library for months, adding favorite Beatles and Bob Dylan records. She says she would have described it as product marketing that included fixing his press room.
Her career covers both the platform side and the founder side. She was a product marketing manager at YouTube, VP of product at the ride-hailing startup Hailo, and co-founder of Kit. Then she became head of product for creators at Patreon and head of fan monetization at Spotify.
She ended up in creator work at YouTube by accident. Hailo, a London rival to Uber and Lyft, was her one job outside creator platforms.
A musical, artist-technologist family shaped her pull toward creators. Her parents are described as radical Buddhist artists technologists, and her father is a drummer who joked that real musicians have day jobs.
He needed benefits to support the family. Her interest in helping artists make a living began there.
2How Hearst built and sold Kit to Patreon
Kit bet on trusted recommenders over strangers' reviews. Kit let people follow trusted curators of gear. She started it in 2015, raised over $2 million, and sold it to Patreon in 2018.
Her example: if a brother-in-law who is a great cyclist says buy it, you just buy it and the reviews do not matter. She tried to raise a Series A first, and selling made the most sense. She stayed at Patreon a couple of years.
Hearst treats selling a company as a managed process. She compares a sale to fundraising: you meet many investors and push them through a funnel. A sale rarely just happens, so you build a list of possible acquirers and manage it actively.
The StartX accelerator at Stanford taught her what M&A looks like. She also notes that venture capital funds women and people of color poorly, so the raise itself was a real accomplishment. Her words: "treat it like a process and manage it like a process."
She started talking to acquirers too late. Kit began acquirer conversations late, so the acquiring CPO met her for the first time during the deal.
By a fifth meeting there would have been an established relationship and a known vision. Her lesson: "we should have been talking to potential acquirers from the beginning."
She pitches early acquirer talks as partnerships, not sales. Frame the meeting as something that fits their vision and could become a strategic partnership, never as a request to buy you.
When you reach out about a sale months later, they already know who you are. The aim is for acquirers to think of you when they have a problem you could solve.
3Why Hearst starts marketplaces with supply
Hailo showed her that empty supply breaks everything else. At Hailo she worked on making sure enough cars met demand. A polished app and strong marketing meant nothing when users opened it and no cars were available.
In her words, it does not matter how nice the experience is or how much demand you generate if there are no cars available.
She sees marketplaces as two-sided, not chicken and egg. You start with supply, then decide which side wins when the two conflict. Suppliers who are unhappy, on strike or blocked by regulation hurt the whole business.
Hailo's US launch needed livery drivers, like an aunt or cousin who switches on Lyft, while Europe had only taxis. She calls Rover a rare case where supply was easy, since many people will watch a dog for $50.
She expects aggregating platforms to win, with room left for vertical tools. Once a platform holds the supply or aggregates demand, network effects make it hard to break out. Big platforms also added monetization features early so creators would not leave.
She sees room for new companies in vertical-specific features and tooling, with Twitch as a juggernaut that did not exist before this era.
4How Hearst thinks creators grow
Hearst says every creator needs an audience and a paycheck. Audience comes first because it opens up the ways to monetize. Other unsolved problems are financing, health insurance and the bursts of creative flow that salaried jobs do not have.
She does not think the space is nearly solved, and advises anyone building a creator platform to pick a real problem and go for it.
She credits consistent, quality output as a top success factor. She compares it to the 10,000 hours needed for mastery. Consistency was top advice in YouTube's creator playbooks in 2010, and she says it still is.
She tells creators to collaborate to share audiences. Working with other great creators exposes each to the other's audience. Kit hosted events where creators could meet and cross-pollinate.
The hope was outcomes like a YouTube video made with someone met at a party.
She tells creators to get associated with trusted curators. With too much content to consume, audiences rely on curators whose brand, vibe and ethos do the filtering, much like a record label or radio station.
She says to pick curators who are on the same page and whose audience would like your work. She does not see curators as gatekeepers in a bad way.
5Hearst's approach to fan monetization at Spotify
Her team turns fan passion into money paid directly to artists. The goal is more money going straight to the artist, not just streaming income, and not only for superstars.
She points to how Taylor Swift and Beyoncé tours visibly move local economies, and notes that smaller artists also have rabid fans who want to support them.
Merch is the mature tool and listening parties the newest. Merch has long been sold on Spotify, but few people know it, so her team is making it more prominent as a fan reward. Rewards include an exclusive discount, an exclusive design, or early access for top listeners.
Listening parties were run last year, and she wants to roll them out to podcasts too.
She helps artists accept a value exchange instead of free everything. Musicians carry a starving-artist ethos and want to give fans everything free. Her own listening party pitch drew feedback like have everything be free.
She holds that some value exchange has to happen for a creative person to live from their art. Fans are generally happy to be patrons and see it as a badge of honor.
She wants platforms to smooth revenue and handle pricing. Creators struggle to price their own art because of the emotion involved. A platform in the middle handles pricing, payment, tax and finance, and Patreon and Substack smooth out revenue into a predictable paycheck.
She calls it almost the perfect marketplace solution, except when the supplier does not want to make money.
She wants tools that get creators off the content hamster wheel. Her team calls it the hamster wheel of content creation: you get on because you love it, then can't get off. Ideas include creator services, financing that banks would not offer, and platform-made content such as data aggregation or summaries.
Platform-made content would let a creator take a break.
6What Hearst learned about product at Apple
Apple planned launches from the story, then chose features. Her team set the anchor story and three key messages months ahead for a launch like iTunes 10, and worked on consumer positioning before anything was built.
That framing decided which features to build, rather than a single metric to push.
She saw Apple run on craft and tinkering, not strategy-first moves. Apple had no product managers. The closest were technical program managers who ran sprints and schedules, and the culture was to tinker, craft and build until it felt right.
She contrasts it with Google, which had many people from Coca-Cola, McKinsey and Bain. She thinks Apple had none, and notes Airbnb has moved toward the Apple model under designer Brian Chesky.
Monetizing passions, scaling marketplaces, and stories from a creator economy vet | Camille Hearst
Lessons on monetizing creators and fans, building marketplaces from the supply side, and selling a startup, drawn from time at iTunes, YouTube, Hailo, Patreon and Spotify. The most useful parts are concrete creator-success habits, advice on running an acquisition as a process, and why supply comes first in a marketplace.
Hearst got into iTunes through a label relations internship. After grad school she interned in label relations, then took a full-time product marketing job and became the second product marketing manager on iTunes.
Apple had no product manager title then, only product marketing managers. She had asked the recruiter what iTunes was, since Apple was not yet the brand it is now.
She thanked Steve Jobs on her first day, against coworkers' jokes. In 2005 she told Jobs his Stanford commencement speech, given days earlier, had inspired her. He asked who she was, then welcomed her, and waved back whenever he saw her after that.
Coworkers had joked he might fire the intern, and she had not yet heard the elevator story about his habit of asking what people did there. Her parents had taught her to tell people whose work affected her.
Her real iTunes job was running Jobs's press rooms. She ran press rooms for iTunes launches, with an iMac, a synced iPod and a curated library, all reset after each interview.
Jobs gave feedback on the library for months, adding favorite Beatles and Bob Dylan records. She says she would have described it as product marketing that included fixing his press room.
Her career covers both the platform side and the founder side. She was a product marketing manager at YouTube, VP of product at the ride-hailing startup Hailo, and co-founder of Kit. Then she became head of product for creators at Patreon and head of fan monetization at Spotify.
She ended up in creator work at YouTube by accident. Hailo, a London rival to Uber and Lyft, was her one job outside creator platforms.
A musical, artist-technologist family shaped her pull toward creators. Her parents are described as radical Buddhist artists technologists, and her father is a drummer who joked that real musicians have day jobs.
He needed benefits to support the family. Her interest in helping artists make a living began there.
Kit bet on trusted recommenders over strangers' reviews. Kit let people follow trusted curators of gear. She started it in 2015, raised over $2 million, and sold it to Patreon in 2018.
Her example: if a brother-in-law who is a great cyclist says buy it, you just buy it and the reviews do not matter. She tried to raise a Series A first, and selling made the most sense. She stayed at Patreon a couple of years.
Hearst treats selling a company as a managed process. She compares a sale to fundraising: you meet many investors and push them through a funnel. A sale rarely just happens, so you build a list of possible acquirers and manage it actively.
The StartX accelerator at Stanford taught her what M&A looks like. She also notes that venture capital funds women and people of color poorly, so the raise itself was a real accomplishment. Her words: "treat it like a process and manage it like a process."
She started talking to acquirers too late. Kit began acquirer conversations late, so the acquiring CPO met her for the first time during the deal.
By a fifth meeting there would have been an established relationship and a known vision. Her lesson: "we should have been talking to potential acquirers from the beginning."
She pitches early acquirer talks as partnerships, not sales. Frame the meeting as something that fits their vision and could become a strategic partnership, never as a request to buy you.
When you reach out about a sale months later, they already know who you are. The aim is for acquirers to think of you when they have a problem you could solve.
Hailo showed her that empty supply breaks everything else. At Hailo she worked on making sure enough cars met demand. A polished app and strong marketing meant nothing when users opened it and no cars were available.
In her words, it does not matter how nice the experience is or how much demand you generate if there are no cars available.
She sees marketplaces as two-sided, not chicken and egg. You start with supply, then decide which side wins when the two conflict. Suppliers who are unhappy, on strike or blocked by regulation hurt the whole business.
Hailo's US launch needed livery drivers, like an aunt or cousin who switches on Lyft, while Europe had only taxis. She calls Rover a rare case where supply was easy, since many people will watch a dog for $50.
She expects aggregating platforms to win, with room left for vertical tools. Once a platform holds the supply or aggregates demand, network effects make it hard to break out. Big platforms also added monetization features early so creators would not leave.
She sees room for new companies in vertical-specific features and tooling, with Twitch as a juggernaut that did not exist before this era.
Hearst says every creator needs an audience and a paycheck. Audience comes first because it opens up the ways to monetize. Other unsolved problems are financing, health insurance and the bursts of creative flow that salaried jobs do not have.
She does not think the space is nearly solved, and advises anyone building a creator platform to pick a real problem and go for it.
She credits consistent, quality output as a top success factor. She compares it to the 10,000 hours needed for mastery. Consistency was top advice in YouTube's creator playbooks in 2010, and she says it still is.
She tells creators to collaborate to share audiences. Working with other great creators exposes each to the other's audience. Kit hosted events where creators could meet and cross-pollinate.
The hope was outcomes like a YouTube video made with someone met at a party.
She tells creators to get associated with trusted curators. With too much content to consume, audiences rely on curators whose brand, vibe and ethos do the filtering, much like a record label or radio station.
She says to pick curators who are on the same page and whose audience would like your work. She does not see curators as gatekeepers in a bad way.
Her team turns fan passion into money paid directly to artists. The goal is more money going straight to the artist, not just streaming income, and not only for superstars.
She points to how Taylor Swift and Beyoncé tours visibly move local economies, and notes that smaller artists also have rabid fans who want to support them.
Merch is the mature tool and listening parties the newest. Merch has long been sold on Spotify, but few people know it, so her team is making it more prominent as a fan reward. Rewards include an exclusive discount, an exclusive design, or early access for top listeners.
Listening parties were run last year, and she wants to roll them out to podcasts too.
She helps artists accept a value exchange instead of free everything. Musicians carry a starving-artist ethos and want to give fans everything free. Her own listening party pitch drew feedback like have everything be free.
She holds that some value exchange has to happen for a creative person to live from their art. Fans are generally happy to be patrons and see it as a badge of honor.
She wants platforms to smooth revenue and handle pricing. Creators struggle to price their own art because of the emotion involved. A platform in the middle handles pricing, payment, tax and finance, and Patreon and Substack smooth out revenue into a predictable paycheck.
She calls it almost the perfect marketplace solution, except when the supplier does not want to make money.
She wants tools that get creators off the content hamster wheel. Her team calls it the hamster wheel of content creation: you get on because you love it, then can't get off. Ideas include creator services, financing that banks would not offer, and platform-made content such as data aggregation or summaries.
Platform-made content would let a creator take a break.
Apple planned launches from the story, then chose features. Her team set the anchor story and three key messages months ahead for a launch like iTunes 10, and worked on consumer positioning before anything was built.
That framing decided which features to build, rather than a single metric to push.
She saw Apple run on craft and tinkering, not strategy-first moves. Apple had no product managers. The closest were technical program managers who ran sprints and schedules, and the culture was to tinker, craft and build until it felt right.
She contrasts it with Google, which had many people from Coca-Cola, McKinsey and Bain. She thinks Apple had none, and notes Airbnb has moved toward the Apple model under designer Brian Chesky.
Spotify
