When Jordan and I started talking seriously about building Fanlytiq in late 2022, the question of where to base it wasn't really a question. We both live in LA. But more than that — if you're building tools for the creator economy, being in Los Angeles isn't just a lifestyle preference. It's a strategic advantage that's hard to replicate anywhere else.
This piece isn't a San Francisco vs Los Angeles tech debate. That argument is tired and not what we're doing here. This is about why creator-economy infrastructure specifically benefits from being where the creators are — and what two years of building in LA has taught us about the product decisions that come from that proximity.
Creators Are LA's Industry
Los Angeles has always been an entertainment industry city. What's changed in the last decade is that "entertainment industry" has expanded far beyond film and television. YouTube creators, Instagram influencers, podcasters, TikTok personalities, newsletter writers, course creators — the full breadth of what we now call the creator economy has significant density in LA. The infrastructure that grew around the traditional entertainment industry — talent management, brand partnership networks, audience research, content production — has partially remapped itself around these newer formats.
What this means practically is that we've had access to creators at every stage of their development — people with 30,000 followers trying to figure out their first monetization move, and people with 3M followers running what are effectively eight-figure media businesses. Both types live in LA, both go to the same industry events, and both are accessible in a way that wouldn't be possible if we were in, say, Austin or Seattle, where creator density is a fraction of what it is here.
What Proximity to Creators Actually Teaches You
The most important thing proximity gave us in our first year was the ability to do casual, unstructured research. Before Fanlytiq had a product, we spent months just talking to creators about how they thought about their businesses. Not formal user interviews — informal conversations at events, coffee meetings, casual back-and-forth with people in our extended network.
The consistent theme that emerged from those conversations wasn't about a missing feature or a broken tool. It was a more fundamental problem: creators had a lot of data and no useful way to interpret it relative to their actual business goals. They were drowning in vanity metrics and starving for intelligence. YouTube views, Instagram reach, Patreon pledges — each number existed in isolation and none of them answered the question that actually mattered: who in this audience should I be creating for?
That insight — which became the organizing principle of Fanlytiq — came directly from being in the same city as hundreds of mid-tier creators and being close enough to their daily experience to hear what frustrated them. I'm not confident we would have identified it as clearly from a distance.
The LA Creator Community as a Feedback Loop
We launched a private beta with a small group of creators in early 2024. Most of them were in LA. That proximity made the feedback loop unusually fast and high-quality. When a feature wasn't working the way we'd intended, we could sit across a table from a creator and watch them use it. When a new insight surfaced from the platform data, we could call someone within 48 hours and talk through what it meant in practice.
This is a significant competitive advantage for product development, and it's one that's genuinely hard to replicate without being in LA. Creator-economy tools built in cities without creator density tend to make product decisions that are technically coherent but practically off — they solve the problems that look like problems from the outside, not the problems creators actually experience from the inside.
We're not saying you can't build creator economy infrastructure anywhere. We're saying that the quality of the feedback loop you build is directly affected by how close you are to the people you're building for.
What LA Is Not (And Why That Matters Too)
LA is not a SaaS hub. There are SaaS companies here, but the culture, the talent networks, and the social circles are not oriented around enterprise software. For a company building for individual creators rather than enterprise buyers, this is actually a feature.
Building in a tech culture that's primarily SaaS-enterprise has a gravitational pull toward certain product assumptions: annual contracts, sales-led growth, complex onboarding, feature-heavy dashboards that look impressive in demos. Creator tools built in that environment often end up over-engineered for their actual user.
LA's tech culture has more of a consumer and media orientation, which keeps us honest about simplicity, product-led onboarding, and building for people who make their living in front of a camera rather than behind a corporate dashboard. Our design sensibility, our pricing philosophy, and our product development cadence have all been shaped by being in this environment rather than a pure enterprise-SaaS environment.
Two Years In
Fanlytiq is two years old. We have a small, tight team. We're building at a pace that lets us stay close to our users and iterate on real signals rather than imagined use cases. LA has been the right place for that approach — dense with creators, open to new tools if they're genuinely useful, and honest in feedback when something isn't working.
If you're a creator in LA and you want to talk about what's working (or not) in your monetization strategy, our door is genuinely open. The informal conversations are still where the most useful product insights come from.
