Short videos are in high demand. On major platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, users are watching billions of videos every day, with companies benefiting massively from this content explosion. For creators, this often means there is more pressure than ever to create content in order to be relevant and make a living from it, especially as more AI-generated slop is infiltrating these platforms.
Jay Neo, creator of short videos and former head of content at MisterBeast, believes that AI can help creators understand what is working for them and also help them create new content ideas in that direction. That’s why, along with former Palantir engineer Shivam Kumar and creator Harry Jones, they are building a platform called follow To help the creators.
Neo joined MisterBeast at the age of 18 to work on maintaining an audience. In a conversation with TechCrunch, he said that he got busy studying various metrics to understand where the decline in video viewership occurred.
Neo said, “I was so obsessed with retention graphs and figuring out why viewers stayed or left. I had a document where I noted all this. Gradually, my role became to take on more responsibility around editing and brainstorming.”
Neo’s biggest gem was a video in which the creator asks people on the street if they would fly to Paris get a baguetteWhich received more than 1.8 billion views across all channels. MisterBeast made several videos with this format.
In 2023, Neo left MisterBeast and started several channels under the “Creaky” branding with another co-writer of MisterBeast and these receive over a billion views per month.
From these experiences, Neo came to understand that there is power in content creation and analysis. During the creation of Creaky, the team had several spreadsheets tracking various metrics of the video. At the time, one of Neo’s advisors suggested he turn these insights into a product for creators, and he began working with Palo’s other co-founders in early 2024.
Palo’s app has three main parts: an AI-powered ideation and planning tool, analytics, and community. The company onboards a creator and asks them to integrate all their accounts. The tool then analyzes all of their short videos and provides insight into what’s working and what’s not.
Kumar, who is CTO at the startup, said Palo uses a mix of models to extract a data tree that has insights into the hook, audience sentiment, topics of interest, originality and potentially related search terms.
“The inference engine takes these primary data points and then uses a cocktail of top LLMs to hierarchically aggregate these data points into a cache for hot memory, which can then be retrieved semantically, and various other structured data formats,” Kumar said. “All of this helps us create a persona for the creator that is true to them and completely representative of their tastes and style.”
AI Planner has a conversational interface like any other chatbot, and creators can ask general questions about their content. Additionally, they can also ask the tool to create a script based on a formula. If someone is more of a visual creator with less speech in their clips, the tool can also create a storyboard with various hooks.
Right now, the community part is nascent and allows creators to send messages to each other.
In its testing phase, the company worked with around 40 creators with over 1 million users across various channels. Today, the company is opening its tool up to creators with 100,000 followers, with a starting price of $250 per month to use the tool, with pricier tiers available for higher usage rates.
The company has raised $3.8 million in funding from Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India) Surge with participation from NFX and individual investors.
Rajan Anandan, managing director of Peak He said the team’s experience and technical understanding of being part of successful creative teams motivated the firm to invest in the startup.
“Creators everywhere are looking for tools that simplify their process without taking away their voice. Jay and the team had unusual clarity about where the real value is and where there isn’t, which gave us strong confidence. AI is enabling a new class of identity-aware systems that learn deeply from the world’s best creators,” he told TechCrunch.
Josh Constine, a former TechCrunch editor and investor in Palo, said the tool could help creators meet massive content demands.
“I’ve experienced burnout as a creator myself, which is why I invested in Palo. The challenge today is that in order to keep up with the latest viral hooks and strategies to beat the algorithms, you have to spend hours per day consuming brain-rotting, content, which I think rewires your brain to default to consuming rather than creating something new. This can lead to procrastination, writer’s block, and burnout,” Consteen. Said.
The launch of Palo comes at a time when there is apparent tension between AI and the creator community. Platforms like TikTok, Meta, and Google have added more AI-powered tools for creators. While creators have started to use AI tools, people like MrBeast have spoken out about its negative impact on the industry.
One of the main challenges in building AI tools for creators is getting them into a formulaic habit of creating similar content. Neo said that Pallo, the tool, tries to point creators in a direction where they can be successful and acknowledged that good videos will still come out of creators’ emotions.
“Here’s an analogy…when a comedian tries out some new material on stage, they are consciously and subconsciously gathering data on whether the audience was happy or not. Each performance becomes an iteration, and each new audience benefits from what the comedian learned from the first show. We believe AI can give creators a similar benefit,” Neo said.
Sam Beres, a creator also known as Sambucha, said that AI companies working in creator tooling should always involve creators from conception to better understand their pain points.
“Many times, AI tools will present a lot of irrelevant information and ironically hinder creators because they will get shiny object syndrome and use emerging AI directionlessly without actually enhancing their videos. This is why I always recommend emerging AI companies to partner with creators at the time of launch/concept not only for marketing efforts, but more importantly, to help build products where applicable.”
