Astute
Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
Start new thread

Astute - Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators

by
•
Astute is the first B2B new media platform, starting with creator partnerships. We monitor your presence in the new media, build a data-backed strategy around the creators your buyers trust, and run the partnerships on autopilot. All within minutes.

Add a comment

Replies

Best
Maker

Hey everyone!

My name is Vida, and I am the Founder and CEO of Astute (). 👋

A bit of context on us: I ran growth at Fluidstack through the $2M to $2B stage, was an ML engineer at The Trade Desk. We met at EF London and just closed an oversubscribed $1.2M pre-seed from VCs and angels to build the first B2B new media company, starting with creator partnerships.

As a B2B marketer, I knew that the marketing playbook (ads, PR, SEO) doesn’t work anymore. At Fluidstack I quickly realised that our audiences weren’t clicking on our ads. Instead, they were reading Substacks like SemiAnalysis, listening to podcasts like Acquired and TBPN, and scrolling on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Every team I speak to already knows this. But most can't activate this channel today, because it takes months of manual searching, cold outreach, and back-and-forth, with most of it going nowhere. 

Even the current tools in the space don’t work in the way that brings value. As a marketer, and now a founder, I want to understand the best types of creators, the optimal audience size, best performing platforms - for my company. I want a personalized data-backed strategy. And then I just want it all done for me. I don’t mind investing $10k in creators who will bring me customers, but I don’t have the bandwidth to manage the CRM, comms, payments. All the current players fail to understand this.

On top of that, most offer only ad slots, but the real value is in an endorsement or editorial partnership with a creator. But editorial partnerships are difficult to productize. They lead to organic content which is why they require a higher volume of granular data from both sides, to ensure the right match. Competitors haven’t cracked this - we have, with over 16,000 creators in our proprietary network.

So we built Astute. We have two AI agents - one is a new media manager for B2B companies, the other is a talent manager for creators.

How it works

  1. Astute first listens. Astute monitors over a million creator posts every minute and surfaces where you, your competitors, and your category are being discussed, including the specific threads worth engaging with.

  2. Then it builds a strategy. 1,000s of data points turn into a creator strategy specific to you: who your buyers already follow, which audiences overlap with your ICP, and what a realistic first three months looks like.

  3. It handles the partnerships. The manager agent searches the 16,000 creators on the talent side - people with loyal, high-intent audiences on Substack, podcasts, LinkedIn and X - picks the right ones, and locks in the partnerships once you approve. Editorial features, podcast guest slots, newsletter ads, event collabs, and more.

  4. And it measures ROI. Impressions, conversions, brand mentions, and visibility inside AI search engines.

But this is only the beginning. We are going after the full new media stack. We want to build a space where every B2B company will come to build their brand, legitimacy, and an owned audience in new media.

Now the juicy stuff - our Product Hunt deal

Finally - HUGE thanks to for hunting us today 🚀

     Tracking ROI on podcasts and LinkedIn has historically been a black box, are you relying on unique landing pages and promo codes or using probabilistic attribution models for conversion tracking? congrats for launch 🙌

Maker

 Hi Priya! That is correct - for podcasts and Linkedin, in the case of a company URL being present, we track CTR and link this to company conversions via a custom pixel, or alternatively attribute from a promo code. For organic appearances, we track standard metrics (impressions, listens, etc) and use AEO (AI engine optimisation) as an attribution heuristic, in addition to EMV.

Maker

 From the engineering side it is deterministic wherever we can get it. Tagged URLs and promo codes cover placements with a link and the pixel closes the loop to conversion. The measurement rules are written to fail closed because a false positive means telling a sponsor they got something they did not. For organic appearances like a podcast slot we report listens and impressions, whether the mention shows up in our monitoring and whether AI engines start citing the company, and those are labelled as influence signals rather then conversion claims.

Maker

   Excited to be on this journey with you

     Every founder I talk to knows they should be sponsoring Substacks and podcasts, but nobody has the bandwidth to manage the CRM. Astute hits the nail on the head, qq how do you prevent audience fatigue if multiple B2B companies in the same category are using Astute to target the same niche creators? congrats guys🎉

Maker

   Thanks Vikram - we're getting the same feedback here so must be doing a little bit of something right.

Re your qq - The simplest answer is that we have over 16,000 creators, and each company's unique goals, audiences, context, previous marketing, current growth stage, funding, current brand position score is all taken into consideration when we make a match. It happens rarely that it's always 1 creator that gets picked by all companies, even in the same niche.

   that makes complete sense factoring in brand position score and funding stage gives much better spread than just surface-level category tags. Appreciate the clear answer.... all the best🫡

Maker

     Great question Vikram! Our matching agent uses a company profile built out initially using signals from a large number of enrichment providers, and then contextually completed from all the questions and answers given by the user (which is updated on a frequent cadence by our strategy agent). We also collect historical performance context from companies in the same niche that have run campaigns. This means, based on the strategies given to the company, the overlap is already fairly minimal for each individual company - one company could have a brand building strategy involving dedicated newsletter features, another could be trying to build their founder/executive credibility with podcast appearances.

Even if there is overlap, this is normal and expected for the creator partnership field, and shouldn't affect any company's growth ability!

Maker

       I should add that our creator network is growing at a rapid pace because we don't charge creators or take a % of their fees.

Maker

 Last night in the office I realised i don't say this often enough - I couldn't be more grateful you're my co-founder. You're the hardest working, most ambitious, insane people I know. The good insane. You get us places, and you get things done. Thank you for all you do for our startup Vida!

Maker

   This is actually so true!

Maker

Hey all - Founding Engineer @ Astute here!

When and told me what they're building - I knew I had to get on this. My family runs a big media company in my home country - so I REALLY get this.

I've been working mainly on the social listening and media monitoring element of the platform, which all powers our data strategy. Feel free to shoot over any questions you may have for me :)

Maker

 has literally been sleeping in the office to get us to launch!

Maker

 Ahaha feels like yesterday.

   what a dedication 🙌🏻

Maker
Hunter

Super excited to hunt this one.

I run LeadDelta (PH SaaS of the Year 2022), so I live inside B2B distribution all day. Somewhere in the last 2 years, the answer to "where did this deal come from?" stopped being an ad. It's a newsletter now. Or a podcast. Or someone on LinkedIn my buyer has been following for three years. Everyone I talk to knows this is happening.

So when Vida showed me Astute I got it immediately. 

The more I got to know her and her co-founder, the more I realized there isn’t a better team to build this company. Vida spent years at Fluidstack helping grow the company from $2M to $2B using this exact channel! Her co-founder Abhi was a creator himself - 15M+ views on YouTube is HUGE - he's literally the guy on the other end of the partnership emails.

Vida and Abhi are around all day, ask them anything. 

Congrats on the launch team! Proud to be a customer (and Hunter!).

Maker

 Thanks so much for hunting us today Vedran!

Hunter

 Brilliant product! Super proud of the team!

Maker

 Thanks so so much!

Maker

 Thank you for the support and all the advice you keep giving us. Great to have you as a mentor.

Hunter

 well done Riz! It is my pleasure to work with your team.

Maker

 Thank you for hunting us Vedran! As someone who produced engineering content, I saw firsthand the value of tech companies reaching their audiences through creators they trust - and we want to make doing that as easy as talking to your agent with Astute. We really appreciate your mentorship!

Hunter

 you've built quite an amazing product, Abhi!
You certainly made it a hell of a lot easier. Thrilled to work alongside you.

Maker

Thanks for hunting us Vedran, and for the advice along the way. Good to have you as a customer as well as our Hunter!

Hunter

 you have one awesome team, love working with proactive, smart people!

Maker

Hey - I'm Abhi, the Founder and CTO of Astute!

Before Astute, after graduating from Oxford Uni (CS), I worked as an ML engineer at The Trade Desk, but on the side I ran a B2B engineering YouTube channel that ended up doing 15M+ views (itisAbhi on YT). I've personally received 100s of partnership emails from brands.

And to be honest, I said no to almost all of them. Not because I didn't want to work with companies, but because saying yes meant weeks of back-and-forth, contracts, chasing invoices... And with a lot of companies I also didn't want to work, because they were not relevant to my content at all. It made zero sense.

So when we started building Astute I was really excited to fix that side of the problem. The creator side. We built the talent manager agent I wish I had. And over 16,000 creators in our network are already using it!

Happy to go deep on how any of it works - the matching, agent architecture, whatever. All questions are welcome!

Maker

 I don't say this enough but I also have to flag how lucky I feel Abhishek is my co-founder. Not only is he a perfect person to be building in our space (ex creator!), he's an incredibly talented and hardworking ML engineer, but also an incredible human. Kudos to him!

Maker

 your a rockstar! So impressed watching you perform on little sleep and monster energy to get us to launch.

Great problem to solve! One question i was wondering when looking at your pricing page - how are creators charged? Is this included in the plans or paid separately? Best of luck today!
Maker

 Hey Urh - unlike EVERY other platform, we don't monetize from creators. We don't charge them $ or %, nothing!

that’s great! What about from a business perspective? Does a business pay for a subscription and creators separately?
Maker

 Yes, so the way to think about it is: if the creators charge fees which most do (again depending on the type of partnership too), company will pay creator fees. Our subscription fee covers us owning the network, ie service of handling the sourcing, matching, outreach, back and forth comms, admin, payouts... That is what companies pay us a subscription for.

💎 Pixel perfection
yes, that’s what i imagined. From a conversion optimization point of view that would be the question that pricing page should answer more clearly in my opinion. At least that is one of the key questions i would wonder when comparing different platforms and deciding which to dedicate to. Otherwise looking great!
Maker

 Thanks so much for the feedback, i'm charge of this so getting insights on decision making process is super valuable to me. I'll work on a way to make this more obvious and clear on the pricing page. Is it ok if I come back to you for validation on the changes I make?

of course, would be happy to take a second look.

Super cool! Love the direction. In the past few years, I noticed that all kinds of marketing simply repel me, and I don't trust the product. A lot of the ads and SEO are AI slop anyway. But when I see someone I read, e.g., Lenny or Pragmatic Engineer, share some tool, I instantly get a thought: "Wow, why haven't I tried this before?"

Congrats on the launch!

Maker

 Thanks Mykhailo! Really appreciate it :) and to be super honest, I couldn't agree more. At one point I was prepping a script for one of our videos that we were shooting and I had a line about how "bad marketing makes me sick in the stomach". I think there is SO little that a) looks good b) does the job now in B2B marketing. Creators really are it.

Maker

 The decision making process for purchasing software is definitely changing and collaboration with trusted voices is now key.

Maker

 Completely agree! I chose the tech stack for Astute based on creator suggestions, because of the trust I had in them - and the same is the case for B2B audiences. As someone who previously worked in adtech, and the direction AI slop is taking it, this trust-based marketing for B2B companies really is the future.

Maker

 You are absolutely right about the AI slop issue. Personally I have been working with a lot of tools and understand how much of a wrapper or scrapers they are and never really give you the right answer or even an outcome. I've personally worked to solve several of those pain points within out systems. Feel free to give it a go and happy to receive feedback aswell!

Maker

 That's a good example because it shows what actually does the work. It is not the reach, it is that you already trust their judgement on exactly the kind of thing they are recommending. That is the bit we spent most of our engineering time on, building enough granular data on each creator and their audience that the match is to a voice your buyers already trust on that topic, not just someone with a big list. Get that right and the endorsement lands the way you describe.

Congrats! Really excited for this

Maker

 Thanks Gary! You know we love Chert at Astute - and will be a loyal customer for a VERY long time :)))

 Thanks!!

Maker

 Thanks Gary! Happy to jump on any calls and run you through it should you need any help.

 Thanks!!

Maker

 Thanks Gary, really appreciate it! Speaking as the engineer who got to wire Chert into our stack, it has been a genuine pleasure to build on. Love what you are doing over at Chert and the direction you are taking it, going after iMessage is such a unique angle and nobody else is really doing it properly. Cheering you on!

 Thanks for the kind message!

Maker

 We love Chert!!!

Maker

It was a WILD RIDE working on Astute with and , especially the past few weeks leading up to our launch!

I am so excited to share what we've built with the world - it's really a game changer for Founders and Marketers!

Feel free to @ me with any technical questions :)

Maker

   So lucky to have you on board, you're brilliant!

Maker

  thanks for all the crazy hours you've put into us.

Congratulations on the launch of Astute! (and a terrific launch video!) Compared to B2C, B2B has a lot of catching up to do due to the shift in marketing from the old playbook to how audiences now consume media. Very excited to watch your journey!

Maker

   Thank you so much Randy - I could not agree more. B2C marketing has been a bit epic over the years. B2B on the other hand had to follow the professional "norms". But I think we all now know where attention is and that we need to grab it. Just have to find a way to do it - which Astute is :)

Maker

  thanks Randy! The game is changing and we are here to help B2B companies catch-up.

Maker

   Completely agree - it's about time B2B makes use of creator marketing, in our opinion one of the most effective channels for gaining trust in B2B buyers. B2C marketing can get away with nurturing impulsive purchases with paid ads, but for a six figure B2B contract, it's vital to earn that trust. Previously you could do this with PR; but in this age of new media, creator partnerships are how this will be done, and we're building Astute to pave the way for exactly that.

See you there for the 2nd time. You are nailing your distribution! :D :)

Maker

 It'd be very concerning if I didn't, what with being a distribution platform :)))

Maker

 Thanks Nika! also great to discover I definitely need this.

 Happy to see that more people want to live without smartphone :D

123
•••
Next