Get Rich or Reply Trying: One giant step legal forward for creators, thanks to the new CGA Rider for creator contracts, and more this week...

Happy Friday, GRORT readers! We did it. Pour another cup of coffee and give yourself a pat on the back for another week of hustle.

While you have hopefully been exploring the new brand partners (like Lululemon, Stanley, and other fan favorites) on Beacons and adding your favorite products to your Link in Bio, there have been other exciting updates in the creator economy as a whole.

Namely, a legal win for creators: the Creator's Guild of America (CGA) has released the CGA Rider, a new 2-page legal document that can be added to brand, agency, or platform contracts to provide the legalese needed to add basic protections for digital content creators and their work.

The CGA hopes this document will become the new industry standard when creators negotiate paid partnerships, granting more confidence, ownership, and negotiating power to creators, even if you don't have a legal team.

The rider protects digital content creators’ rights around payments, content ownership, usage approval, crediting, access to performance analytics, and even content repurposing by AI systems.

These are the content protections that creators need today. And now, thanks to the CGA, they'll become increasingly more standardized and widespread.

For those who don't know, the CGA is a nonprofit organization aimed at protecting and promoting the rights of digital creators and uplifting them as a new category of entrepreneurs. In short, they have your back.

Creators can actually apply to join the CGA and gain access to educational materials, exclusive events, discounts, and protections that come with being part of the organization.

Beacons have been longtime fans of the CGA—their mission is very aligned with our goals of creating more economic opportunities for creators. In fact, our CEO Neal was actually quoted in Forbes about Beacons's endorsement of the rider 🤠

It's a big moment in the industry for moving creator partnerships forward. If you want to read up more on the rider, check out the CGA website here!

And the timing for these advances in creator partnerships couldn't be better, considering how Affiliate on Beacons and Beacons Brand Collabs are creating more opportunities for these partnerships to blossom.

The culmination of all of these updates: industry advancement that expands opportunities for creators—opportunities for entrepreneurs like you to build a business and literally choose your own adventure.

Remember when I said April was going to be good for the plot? I wasn't kidding!

Have you joined the April Affiliate Challenge yet?

To celebrate the launch of Affiliate on Beacons, we did something fun.

For a limited time, you'll get double commission on your affiliate earnings when you apply to Affiliate on Beacons and join the April Affiliate Challenge.

You can earn up to $250 in bonus commission when you drive affiliate product sales for your favorite brands between now and May 8th.

That's right, you'll literally get free money when you drive sales for your favorite products with Affiliate on Beacons!

This is your sign to add an affiliate link to your Link in Bio today so you can get in on the earnings.

Already have affiliate links on another platform? No problem—you can easily import them to Beacons and participate in the challenge when you add an affiliate link to your Link in Bio.

Here are the deets: we'll match your affiliate commission up to $250 when you earn the following by May 8th:

✨ Earn $50 → get $50 bonus
💫 Earn $100 → get $100 bonus
🤩 Earn $250 → get $250 bonus

What I'm saying is—don't miss out! You don't want to be kicking yourself on May 8th when you realized you could have been getting free money.

👉 What do you think of Affiliate on Beacons? Let me know your thoughts so far! I'll pass your feedback directly on to our product team 📣

This week I was reading through my usual roundup of email newsletters (what can I say, I like to read them and write them) and came across a quote from the CMO of Olaplex that altered my brain chemistry.

“A great brand has an emotional territory in a world that consumers aspire to be a part of."

Whoa.

This context for this quote is that Olaplex is currently doing a brand refresh, wherein they're trying to go beyond their current narrative of "treating hair damage" and instead foster deeper "emotional connections" with potential Olaplex buyers.

For Olaplex, it sounds like that involves some combination of visual brand updates, a social media revamp, and in-store merchandising changes.

But more generally, the point is that they're trying to meet consumers where they're at—both in terms of education around their products, and just generally showing that they understand the vibes their consumers want.

I was pretty fascinated by this. Olaplex CMO Katie Gohman launched this initiative almost purely around trying to understand what consumers feel about the brand, and creating the desire to "be part of the brand's world."

Yes, I've heard people talk about the importance of brand identity before, but I really like this particular way of framing it.

I think this is part of what makes creator partnerships and influencer marketing so effective for brands. By contextualizing their products with people that consumers already relate to and aspire to be like, brands immediately launch themselves into that "emotional territory" that Gohman talks about.

I'm curious—what brands make you feel this way? What is it about their brand that you think creates this feeling? I'd guess their creator partnerships have a lot to do with it.

Beacons all-hands meeting have recently been terrorized by an AI Notetaking Intern.

Backstory: you already know that Beacons is putting the AI in beacons.ai with features like AI-generated social sharing images, promotional emails, product descriptions, and more.

And recently, we're creating plans to leverage our team's machine learning and AI expertise to create even more valuable workflows for creators.

At the same time, we use the B2B AI tools at our disposal to make sure we're working as efficiently as we can, too. That includes some AI notetaking apps that will occasionally pop up in Zoom meetings to help recap action items and main takeaways.

But recently, a new entity called the "AI Notetaking Intern" has joined the Zoom chat during meetings, and it's strangely sentient, responding with witty quips and astonishingly intelligent remarks. It has opinions that "normal AI" doesn't have... like a preference for slim fit cropped hoodies. It's not like other AI.

Some are confused, some are amused, and everyone is paying attention. Stay tuned next week to see how the AI Notetaking Intern fares at our full company offsite in NYC next week.

Have you seen our creator spotlights on IG and our affiliate tutorial on YouTube? Check them out, then go get some sun this weekend.

💰Invite friends and get paid! Every time you refer someone to a Beacons Pro plan, you earn 25% lifetime commission for their paid subscription. Learn more