Launching today
Astute
New media for B2B brands, starting with creator partnerships
50 followers
New media for B2B brands, starting with creator partnerships
50 followers
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.
LeadDelta
Super excited to hunt this one!
I'm Ved, and I run LeadDelta (PH SaaS of the Year 2022). 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_stanic1 spent years at Fluidstack helping grow the company from $2M to $2B using this exact channel! Her co-founder @abhishek_manikandan was a creator himself - 15M+ views on YouTube! He's literally the guy on the other end of the partnership emails.
So, congrats on the launch team! Proud to be a customer (and Hunter!).
P.S. Vida and Abhi are around all day, ask them anything.
Looks good! Would you say this is for early-stage founders as well... like going 0-1 with a small team?
@sami987sa Thanks Samir!
And yes! Absolutely!
Our core customers are teams looking to 100x grow in the next 6-12 months (Lovable-style). By partnering with creators who have their ICP audiences before they have any audiences of their own (which is usually the case at 0-1 stage), early-stage teams get instant distribution and brand credibility.
Hey all - Founding Engineer @ Astute here!
When @abhishek_manikandan and @vida_stanic1 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 :)
Uizard
This is a problem I’ve run into countless times myself: you know the audiences you want to reach are listening to podcasts, reading newsletters and following creators, but actually finding the right people, figuring out who to work with and managing everything is incredibly manual.
So excited about what @vida_stanic1, @abhishek_manikandan and the @Astute team are building. A problem I genuinely wanted solved. Huge congrats on the launch 🚀
Hey everyone!
My name is Vida, and I am the Founder and CEO of Astute (www.joinastute.com). 👋
A bit of context on us: I ran growth at Fluidstack through the $2M to $2B stage, @abhishek_manikandan 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
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.
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.
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.
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
Go to https://company-app.joinastute.com/
Apply code PRODUCTHUNT
Do it before 31 August, 23:59 PT - the code expires automatically
Finally - HUGE thanks to @vedranrasic for hunting us today 🚀
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!
It was a WILD RIDE working on Astute with @vida_stanic1 and @abhishek_manikandan, 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 :)