• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 3, 2023

Google AdMob and Yahoo alums have founded a company that created a content creator tool based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) wrapped in large language models (LLM). It is receiving buzz and funding from a few well-known investors.

The tool, Glystn, allows content creators to engage with followers, gather insights and read and answer comments from multiple social-media platforms from one place. Then it aggregates the data to show the creators the topics and content that communities care about most.

The startup recently announced public launch of the web application, and $4 million in seed funding led by Eniac Ventures, Hannah Grey VC and Future Perfect Ventures. Glystn is also backed by angel investors Michael Spiegelman, Netflix’s vice president of content and business product innovation, and Craig Sherman, managing director of Meritech.

“The content becomes a firehose -- an ocean -- making it impossible for creators to make sense of all that data and information,” says Ethan Fassett, CEO and co-founder of Glystn. “Creators loose touch with their community members. Pockets of their community just drift away. They don’t know what positive and negative feedback is being said. Toxicity is a big problem with communities, and creators start to burnout”

Fassett, a former Yahoo senior product manager, equated the burnout and confusion to being in a crowded party trying to jump in and out of many conversations.

“The feedback loop is essential to social media, the community, and it has become threatened because it’s fragmented,” he says. “We wanted to create a solution that lets creators identify content, get feedback, and know what to produce next.”

The platform today, through an API, only integrates across Discord, and YouTube, but Fassett says there is a plan to add others.

Glystn plugs into APIs from all the community platforms. In real-time, the technology reads all comments from community members. It summarizes the comments and presents the topics to the creators. It also lets creators respond to comments on forums from the Glystn platform.

A diverse community of top YouTube stars and social media influencers such as Louis Weisz, AJ Rafael and Steve Mould already work with Glystn to manage audiences. 

Having the ability to identify what goes on in each community lets creators bring in bigger sponsors. It helps the creators identify topics like technology, sports or outdoor events. Rather than one sponsor, it lets them have many.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with large language models (LLM) have changed the dynamics. It’s no longer about identifying keywords. Today it’s more than keyword extraction. It’s knowing the semantic content. Even if two comments do not contain the same keyword, the technology can identify that the people making the comments are talking about the same topic.

Identifying the comments and topics allow creators to identify topics to focus on, similar to the way publishers identify what people visiting websites read.