By Dami Oyeleke
Multiple misconceptions affect how people live their lives; one of which is that people are one dimensional with a set life goal, one career path and no room for versatility. This misconception feeds into the decisions they make, depriving a part of themselves for the benefit of the other part, as if their desires are mutually exclusive and their existence is too short to encompass it all. As a result, people do not dream beyond what is expected by other forces, or their myopic ideas for themselves. This limitation is most prevalent in a typical African household, where your creative dreams cannot coincide with your more traditional ones, or to put more accurately, where your creative dreams cannot easily manifest. This idea however is unfamiliar to Anj Fayemi, a musician and the co-founder of Rivet, a platform which seeks to foster connections between artists and their fans. In response to why he decided to pursue both paths, Fayemi replied with an astute “Because I can.” He followed the statement with a laugh, but the accuracy of his statement cannot be diminished because we truly can do all we desire to.
Growing up in an artistic household, where his father was an artist who dabbled in different forms of art ranging from visual art, metal craft and fashion design, Fayemi was exposed early to the visages of creativity as well as entrepreneurship. He shares that “My earliest exposure to creative expression and entrepreneurship was through my dad. I always watched him and I wanted to be like him”. His expression through art finally manifested in his secondary school days, with influences from Bonafide Crew and Code Z, who he says inspired him to have a rap group, thus marking the genesis of Fayemi the musician.
From this background where creativity is priced highly, it is unsurprising that Fayemi has built an unabridged belief that his abilities are limitless. Having three main interests in his childhood; music, soccer and entrepreneurship, he quickly recognised his passion for them and his desire to pursue them simultaneously. Striving for a well-balanced experience, where all his interests were at the forefront, Fayemi decided to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where students are encouraged to take up a wide range of classes to have a rounded experience. “It was part of the reason why I went to the school I did, where you could mix and match your different interests and at least academically pursue them. Whether that was music, theatre and performance, which was huge for me as well as entrepreneurship, engineering and finding a way to merge everything, and then to also play sports even though it was not at the level I wanted” he says. He studied Chemical Engineering with a minor in Theater Arts, and through the years he believed that his business would be centered around renewable energy.
Although entrepreneurship has been a recurring theme in his life, Fayemi confesses that he only fully understood what it meant during the MIT-Imperial Academic Exchange program where he got the opportunity to study for a semester at Imperial College London. During this exchange program, Fayemi explored business classes for the first time and gained a wider perspective on his interest in business. Following his return to MIT, he continued this fresh vigor, adding an entrepreneurship concentration to his major and participating in the StartMIT course, a two-and-a-half week Independent Activities Period course aimed at exposing members of the MIT community to the elements of entrepreneurship, where business leaders and founders came in and spoke to people who were interested in business and venture. Fayemi speaks on the impact these opportunities had on him, stating “That period, I fully understood what it was to not just build a small business; which I think is great and you see a lot of really successful small businesses, but what it meant to build in this context, a venture-backed business. That was when I saw what it’s like to get investors and build a scalable product and all those things you don’t necessarily think about if you’re in a small business”.
Along the journey to actualising his entrepreneurship dreams, Fayemi’s multiple interests gave him a unique perspective on a problem he experienced. At a music show, he realized the difficulties for creators like himself to efficiently stay engaged with fans and create data to foster a better line of communication between them. Relationships between supporters and creators have always been linear; artists release music and host shows, while supporters listen and attend. Although social media and newsletters have attempted to bridge that gap by bringing creators closer to their supporters, those devices do not go beyond a few retweets and replies, leaving creators with fragments of these interactions, no real way of identifying who and where their supporters are and hindering their ability to market their product effectively. After speaking with over 200 artists, Fayemi observed that this “felt problem” was not specific to him, and thus the platform Rivet was founded by himself and his co-founders Simran Pabla and Nafim Rahman to address it. Rivet is an AI-driven Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that allows mid-tier creators to better engage with their fan communities by harnessing data from fan interactions.
The platform also addresses the misconception that creators only need to create in order to be successful in their fields, and it further identifies the significance of understanding the ins and outs of business to optimise one’s talent. In acknowledging this disadvantage, Fayemi and the Rivet team have provided a platform where creators who have no knowledge of business and analytics can easily understand their fan engagement, while the platform does the heavy lifting of analyzing data and proffering recommendations and actions to increase engagement and potential revenue. He points out that the distinguishing feature of Rivet is its focus on building a prescriptive tool of actions to increase engagement and potential revenue value from fans, and its “frictionless experience for fans,” in which they are not required to join Rivet but can, in a distributed fashion engage with the creator’s products and content. Rivet allows creators to pinpoint who their fans are, determine the cause of their engagement and consider how to create a higher-value fanbase. Currently, the platform is focused on “mid-tier/midsize creators” who have an audience size of 10,000-400,000 in order to track significant traction to better coordinate and create a more efficient engine that will then contribute to generating robust solutions for creators that are earlier in their journeys.
When it comes to identifying a problem and demanding its solution, minimal efforts are expended, however, for value to be placed on such keen observation, it has to be backed up with possible solutions and plans for execution, much like Fayemi and his co-founders are doing. Innovations require intelligence, effort, dedication and funding, the absence of which makes it impossible to execute successfully. In 2023, Rivet has been a recipient of pre-seed funding of $500k led by Drive Capital which will feed into product development and enable them to hire across engineering and marketing to build more awareness for the product. Moreover, the dedication to close this gap has transcended from merely a business to a community-wide effort. This transformation is a result of the creators Fayemi has met along the way, who he says interfacing with has been the most valuable part of creating Rivet. He explains that “Meeting cool artists who all bring their stories, passion for the community they’re building and for the art their putting out, and seeing that there are positive reactions to what we’re building – but then also even if there are no positive reactions- those people are interested and care enough about the problem to even give us feedback to become better”. Coincidentally, on the journey to creating a solution that encourages community within the creative industry, Rivet is also creating a community of people invested in their success.
Asides from this determination influenced by his growing community, Fayemi cites the privilege of his opportunities as one of the driving factors to see Rivet through. The marriage of his music career, entrepreneurial spirit, the under-represented backgrounds of himself and his co-founders, along with his deep technical background courtesy of MIT, instilled the grits and drive necessary to build the platform. “I believe I’m privileged to have gotten the opportunity to go study where I did, to have been surrounded by the types of people I was surrounded by, to give me a real shot at going after the problem in a way that could potentially have an impact” he states. Fayemi acknowledges that only a few people can relate to this interesting mirage of features he possesses, so he is determined to make something of it.
Although all his life, Fayemi has played into the multiplicity of his passions, he acknowledges his earlier difficulties in navigating an identity with competing personas in different fields and different networks. He refers to a famous artist with similar distinct personalities and muses “I guess you can get to a level where you’re Donald Glover for everything – but there’s still a Childish Gambino, and there will be people who like Childish Gambino for Childish Gambino and Donald Glover for other things.” Fayemi approaches his personas as completely different people; Fayemi the business-savvy founder and Solsticefayemz, the singer-songwriter. He explains that it helps to understand who he is and why he cares about the things he does, to perform in these different areas.
Fayemi has found a sweet spot for expressing his identity in different forms. As the artist, he is focused on his upcoming project which he says has been influenced by his new experiences with Rivet, but as an entrepreneur, his goal is to establish Rivet to cater to a wider range of creators. Fayemi’s experiences are evidence of the multifacetedness of individuals, and the endless possibilities achievable once people lean into all their passions, because at the end of the day, you simply can do it all.
