Video analytics company VidIQ announced earlier this month its acquisition of Creator Now, an online education platform for aspiring YouTube creators. Financial terms of the deal are not disclosed.

Founded in 2021, Creator Now has focused on helping people with little to no following unlock full-time creative careers on the platform. The startup’s co-founder and CEO, Zack Honarvar, said “our goals and our vision for the company was to try to become an industry-defining app that aspiring creators would use to grow their channels.”

VidIQ Acquires Creator Now To Empower Emerging YouTubers

Through weekly workshops, an online community, and direct feedback from top YouTubers, Creator Now aims to provide creators the necessary skills, tools and connections to turn their aspirations into reality. “And we felt like we had done a really good job building the community and the education component of that,” said Honarvar. However, they had made less progress developing the technology and tools he sees as equally vital.

Enter VidIQ, a 13-year industry veteran known for its video performance insights and channel growth tools used by over 2 million creators. “They have been doing what they had been doing for around 13 years and had been chipping away at this for a very long time,” Honarvar explained. “And so it felt like together we could both skip a lot of steps that would take us a long time to get the community or the tools.”

While VidIQ boasts an established product suite, its new partner brings expertise engaging younger, unknown creators – a demographic many competitor products have overlooked to focus on those already successful. “A lot of companies especially, the ones that were formed during the big creator economy boom focused on established creators,” said Honarvar.

VidIQ felt aligning with Creator Now would uniquely position the combined entity to realize more value helping the “99% of creators that don’t have a following are still trying to grow.” The startup’s community-building and educational offerings nicely complement VidIQ’s analytical tools. “And it felt like everybody was not servicing them,” Honarvar added.

By joining forces, the executive believes they “can get there a lot faster” towards their shared goal of “becoming an industry defining app that aspiring creators would use to grow their channels.” While financial terms are not shared, Creator Now’s investors, community and unique understanding of emerging creators offer strategic value as VidIQ looks to expand its platform.

“I think the expertise that we bring is just, creator empathy, if that’s a skill,” said Zack Honarvar, Co-Founder & CEO of Creator Now. “As you know, Airrack, who’s our co-founder, is one of the top creators in the world. My co-founder and I have been managers in this space for the last seven years of our lives. And we know a lot of creators and interact with a lot of creators, both big and small and kind of all throughout the spectrum.”

This deep knowledge of the creator audience will help guide VidIQ’s product development to address real problems creators face, according to Honarvar.

“And what we, I think, understand really well is the real problems and the topics and the things that keep creators awake at night,” he said. “The things that people are thinking about, that’s in the zeitgeist of creator culture and being able to bring that to VidIQ in a world where, the products that they develop, the technology that they develop and all the resources that they have and all the smart people that they have, building stuff is targeted specifically at those problems and targeted specifically at the personas that I think we understand really well.”

Honarvar characterizes his company’s role as a bridge between VidIQ’s engineers and product developers and the creator community they aim to serve.

Honarvar believes Creator Now can help connect VidIQ’s technical teams to the day-to-day needs of creators. ” a lot of the people inside VidIQ are really smart people [but] they don’t know what it’s like being a creator every day,” he said. By bridging this gap between VidIQ’s engineers and product developers and the creator community they aim to serve, Honarvar hopes “we can act as the bridge that actually makes sure that tools are built with real problem sets in mind, not just fun features.” 

When asked about the current state of the booming creator economy, Honarvar said it “has been, up into the right” and continues to grow despite some hesitations from companies looking to capture creator value.

He hopes to see more collaboration between creators and business-focused partners to help creators operate independently.

“I think more operational and entrepreneurial talent collaborating with creators is something that I want to see in the future,” Honarvar said. “Creators aren’t co-founding companies with engineers yet. And so I think more operational and entrepreneurial talent collaborating with creators is something that I want to see in the future.”

Additionally, Creator Now’s founders look forward to guiding major UX, UI and branding changes at VidIQ to better serve the next generation of young creators through a friendlier, more modern product experience.

Beyond internal improvements, Honarvar believes industry trends like AI and mobile editing are making content creation more accessible daily. Integrating Creator Now’s community directly into VidIQ will help newcomers “learn how to become a content creator and, more importantly, how to connect with other people that want to become content creators”- addressing feelings of isolation that often hinders new creators