Sesame Summit 2026 – application open

Ben’s List 38

This you’ll learn with this week’s list of articles.

You’ll also dive into Web3 & community with 4 articles. Looks like I’m a bit obsessed with that topic lately; wondering if we should be launching our own $SESAME token.

We’re also discovering how a startup founder got placed on 100 podcasts in 6 months and the coolest AgTech startups of 2021.

Let’s start with the revenues made by creators in 2021 with Stripe’s new Creator Index.

Creator Economy

Indexing the creator economy

“The pandemic proved to be an unexpected tailwind for what was once a community on the fringes, ushering in a new generation of creators and bringing substance to the idea that anyone with an idea and an internet connection could make something of value.”

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Screengrab from a video within the article

Web3

Social Token Mid-Year Report

“In 2021, the total market cap of key social tokens surpassed$303m, a ~500% growth from 2020.”

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How To Build An MVC: Minimum Viable Community

“The community is surprisingly sticky, right? Because you know, someone else is a part of it, and you want to be part of it because they’re part of it because they bring you joy. So I think that’s very much under-appreciated and it’s kind of the secret sauce to building great communities, right?”

The community-owned rave: event organisers as DAOs

“Many events already function as decentralized autonomous organisations in informal ways. Connecting it to the Web3 allows the community to persist across the metaverse and leverage NFTs, communal creation, and channel the unique talents of all involved.”

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Spiral Tribe logo

Community

Building An Online Community: From Getting Started To A Community-First Organization

“It’s common to find community managers toiling away developing a premium platform or a complex MVP program without having enough members to use it or plenty of questions to answer. This ends up being a distraction. You should only be working on the activities which take you to the next stage of the community lifecycle. It’s really easy to plot a path forward when you know where you are now.”

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PR

The Playbook This Startup Used to Get Their Founders on 100+ Podcasts in 6 Months

“What if instead of a 60-second scripted ad read that costs $10,000, you did a 60-minute ad read that deeply educates your target audience on the problem you’re solving, that costs $0? Enter: the Podcast Tour. A ‘podcast tour’ is when a brand secures podcast interviews for its founders on shows that its target audience is likely listening to. For a startup, the main value of a podcast tour is education and awareness. This is especially true when you’re building a new product category.”

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Getty Images / akinbostanci

AgTech

Q3 2021 AgTech Venture Capital Investment and Exit Round Up

“Last quarter set a record for venture capital investments into AgTech startups. In total, $4.016B was raised by 171 startups in Q3. To put this in perspective, last year AgTech companies raised a total of $5.15B, so this this a huge haul in just one quarter. In the first three quarters of 2021, 441 AgTech startups have raised over $8.3B.”

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Science

Tree of Life Explorer

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Community 5 days ago

At Sesame Summit 2025, we put VC comms experts and event pros in the same room and asked: how can this relationship actually work?

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Community 5 days ago

LIFT99, a startup-themed co-working hub in Tallinn, helps the wider startup community grow.

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Podcasts are not a passing trend, and this evolution presents an opportunity for the event media space.

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