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Get professional assistance to Level Up your content business
We offer services to support the endeavours of modern creators and help them maintain a professional back office operation; wherever they are in the world. Get help vetting business and promotional opportunities, negotiating the best deal, or dealing with content moderation.
Streamline Your Content Business
Incoming Business Handling
Many digital agencies offer services to help creators handle incoming enquiries and negotiate on their behalf, but it’s hard to believe their asking prices. Why give up a percentage of your sponsorship deals just to have someone respond to the enquiry?
We offer incoming business handling and vetting services at workable fixed prices (no percentages) that start small and grow with your support base. There are no sneaky catches either, our services are sold under a straightforward contract, just as it should be.
Beyond just Representation
We go beyond traditional legal representation to offer creators services that actually enable them to keep total creative focus. We pair these with extra value-adds like content moderation.
If you’re too busy (or not inclined) to deal with incoming comments on your content or multi-channel enquiries, we can setup a straightforward process for us to handle these on your behalf. You can receive a summary digest via email or in a regular meeting, where we give you just the important bits.
Service Overview
Here’s a quick overview how the Incoming Business Handling service works and how it can help your content business.
Our service helps content businesses of any size pursue commercial opportunities that come in as enquiries through your social channels.
Incoming Business Handling at a glance
We’ve developed our Incoming Business Handling service by listening to the needs and concerns of real content creators across the world. Here are the basics of what Artificer can offer content businesses with the service.
What is the Service
Our Incoming Business Handling service helps content businesses of any size pursue commercial opportunities that come in as enquiries through your social channels. Principally this is done through email; you advertise a business enquiry email on your social platforms (like an info@ or you@custom-domain.tld). We can accommodate other methods we agree on in advance, just ask us how.
How we capture opportunities
We setup a shared inbox facility that we can both monitor, and then we use real humans, assisted by technology, to filter through the junk and identify commercial opportunities that fit within the brief you give us. Once we identify an opportunity, we perform a vetting exercise to decide whether it warrants your attention, and if it does we take steps to secure it and bring it to your attention. Read on further to understand what steps are included in our standard service.
How we can help close
Once the opportunity to brought to your attention, we can propose a series of add-on services to assist you to close the deal. This can include legal services such as reviewing, drafting and negotiating contracts for the opportunity. You don’t have to use us for these services, but we’ve made it easy to add-on these services if you need a little more firepower to close the deal. See more about our add-on services below.
We never take a percentage
You don’t have to accept agency contracts that take high or recurring percentages of your sponsorship or funding deals. We work on a clear fixed-fee or hourly rate. You keep more with us.
Onboarding Process
There are just a few steps to get you on-boarded with our Incoming Business Handling service, which allows us to free you up to focus on content production.
Our service helps content businesses of any size pursue commercial opportunities that come in as enquiries through your social channels.
Five steps to a streamlined back office
Once you’re ready to proceed, we undertake a free onboarding process which helps us get familiar with your content business so we can make sure we’re vetting commercial opportunities properly for you.
Develop your commercial brief
We work with you to develop a commercial briefing document that will form the basis of our vetting of inbound business opportunities for you. It is divided into three sections; the first section focuses on your commercial objectives as a content business. The second section deals with the types of brands or organisations you’re looking to partner with. The third handles the commercial parameters that you require for an opportunity to be worth pursuing.
Complete Onboarding
Once we have your commercial brief and have a picture of where your business is heading, we can setup your inbound channels for receiving enquiries. We have purpose-built email infrastructure for this, and all we need from you is access to your DNS host to point your domain’s email settings to our infrastructure. Once that is complete, the emails will come through to our server, and you can login and see the shared mailbox that we will manage for you.
Attend your regular reporting meeting
As requests come in, we will vet each opportunity and escalate the ones that fall within the brief. Once per month (or more regularly if your plan provides for it) we meet with you to summarise the inbound enquiries and activity on the mailbox. If you do not wish to conduct a meeting, you can instead receive an email summary of the activity to a mailbox of your choosing. This review exercise offers an opportunity to amend the commercial briefing document, which you are welcome to do at any time.
Pursue vetted opportunities
Once we hand over the vetted opportunities to you, it’s time to pursue them further. If you require additional assistance bringing the vetted opportunities to fruition as business or sponsorship deals, we are available to be retained as your legal counsel to negotiate on your behalf at very competitive rates.
Choose any add-on services
Beyond legal representation to assist you in closing deals, we offer other add-on services to help you scale your operation. For instance, we can take on additional channels such as YouTube comments, Instagram DM’s, Whatsapp messages or Facebook messenger chatter. Whatever platforms you use, chances are we can integrate it into our services and allow you to totally outsource your incoming enquiries through our service. Just ask us how.
Inclusions and Exclusions
Let us take you through the details of what is included in the Incoming Business Handling service.
Our standard services includes monitoring of your inbound mailbox to vet inbound opportunities within the scope of your commercial brief.
The scope of the Incoming Business Handling service
This section outlines the scope of a standard package of the Incoming Business Handling service. It’s what you get when you purchase one of the subscription packages set out below in the pricing section.
Standard Inclusions
Included in all packages are the following services. Note that if you need more than the below, we’re happy to tailor a package to your requirements, just get in touch.
- Setup and regular review of one (1) shared mailbox to identify business opportunities are report them, according to the commercial brief you provide to Artificer in the free onboarding exercise.
- Vetting of opportunities, including of those that are close to the commercial brief but not quite there (for instance not enough money offered or opportunity could be a good fit if a better deal was offered). Vetting includes responding to inbound inquiries to clarify what offers are available and includes outlining to the inquirer what modifications they could make to their offers to maximise chances of acceptance, in line with the commercial brief you provide us.
- Email reporting of vetted opportunities where time sensitivities warrant your attention, to your own private mailbox.
- A monthly meeting or email digest (whichever is preferred) to summarise activities for the month and optionally review any excluded deals.
Exclusions With add-ons
The following activities are not provided as part of the standard packages we offer, but additional add-on services are available for them. See the Available Add-Ons section below for more information if you are interested in using these services in conjunction with the standard inclusions above:
- Content Moderation of social feedback on a per-channel basis. Content Moderation is designed to free you from exposure to pointless online negativity and only bring to your attention the comments that could be of genuine interest to you. You can update your brief anytime to define what this is.
- Negotiating the contract terms with sponsors/contributors/marketers: we offer great rates as part of our legal practice to assist you with this should you require it.
- Additional mailbox monitoring beyond the single shared mailbox; should you require multiple mailboxes we can accommodate you with a tailored plan.
- Community management/engagement/reach-out services, although we may be able to accommodate subject to your requirements as an additional add-on service.
- Proactive enquiry and business development services, the standard inclusions are to deal with inbound enquiries only and the service pre-supposes that you will be responsible for marketing your brand. If you wish for us to arrange business development services however please enquire and we may be able to assist you.
Total exclusions
The following activities are explicitly excluded from the service, and we won’t provide them:
- Commercial advice (we apply a reasonable interpretation of your commercial brief in vetting incoming opportunities, but we are not responsible for the quality of the judgment exercised in deciding what to put into the brief, or whether to pursue or not pursue any opportunity).
- Taxation, accounting and/or financial planning advice, you should always seek the assistance of a professional if you have concerns of any adverse tax, accounting or financial implications of entering into a given transaction.
- Technology or cyber security advice or services, beyond the administration of the mailbox we provide which we will host on our own infrastructure. The mailbox should never be used to host material that could cause serious harm to individuals (i.e. passports, Tax File Numbers, Driver Licences or any other personal information).
- On-site or in-person services, meetings or other administrative attendances beyond those provided by the standard inclusions.
Introductory Pricing
Incoming business handling and content moderation services at fixed-fees that grow with your audience.
You are eligible to purchase one of the following levels based on your total subscriber audience across your active platforms. Limited Icebreaker places are available, get in while they last!
Icebreaker
Up to 150k Subscriber Audience
For content businesses and influencers that are building a solid audience and starting to have trouble keeping up with the influx of business enquires.
$260
per month
Add Content Moderation for an extra $45
Limited places available
Juggernaut
Up to 250k Subscriber Audience
You know it’s got legs, and now you need serious help to sort the time-wasters from the genuine growth opportunities. Your brand has earned it.
$570
per month
Add Content Moderation for an extra $160
Includes two (2x) monthly update meetings, in addition to the standard inclusions from Icebreaker.
Mogul
Beyond 250k Subscriber Audience
You’re running a content enterprise, let us support you with tech-driven back office that demonstrates to stakeholders you’re a serious operation.
$1,280
per month
Add Content Moderation for an extra $280
Includes weekly update meetings, in addition to the standard inclusions from the previous levels.
All packages are purchased as a non-refundable month-by-month recurring subscription, cancel anytime during the current subscription period and your services will end at the conclusion of the pro-rata month. Terms and conditions apply, we will provide you with an opportunity to review them in detail prior to signing up.
Available Add-ons
Here is the range of add-on services that can help you to close deals and scale your back office. Keep them in your back pocket for whenever you need a little bit of extra help.
The Content Moderation Add-On is an extra service for us to monitor places where public comments or feedback is left on your social channels.
We can give you just the highlights allowing you to avoid online negativity without worrying about missing any business opportunities or positive themes that come through.
Additional channels can be added to either the Incoming Business Handling core services, or to the Content Moderation.
We have an in-house technology implementation practice that can write integrations to any source, should there not already be a pre-supported integration pathway. Common pathways include additional mailboxes, Whatsapp and Instagram DM’s.
Marketers using social platforms often recycle contract terms or put in harsh or overprotective provisions. They might think your content enterprise doesn’t have access to great lawyers to make sure it’s getting the best deal.
Make them think twice with access to experienced legal counsel. We’ll make sure you get a fair go.
FAQs
We’ve collected some common questions here about our service. Please feel free to write to us below using the form if we’ve missed an important question you have.
There’s no guarantee that we’ll catch every opportunity, just as there’s no guarantee that you would. However, we’ll take professional care in interpreting your brief and applying it to the inbound enquiries that you receive. We then review what’s come through in our regular meeting (regularity defined by your plan level), and so that presents another opportunity to look at what didn’t make the cut if you’re not already too busy with what did. It’s not an ironclad guarantee that we’ll catch every opportunity, but we don’t think such a guarantee is available.
Definitely not, but we like this type of critical thinking!
There are three important points here: The first is that we properly vet opportunities that meet your brief, which means actually responding to organisations that you might partner with to make sure a genuine opportunity exists, that goes beyond just reading emails.
The second is we’ve found AI doesn’t exercise very good judgment, and at the end of the day the value in the service is all about cutting through the noise and identifying and qualifying opportunities that come your way. You’d notice pretty quickly if AI was in the driver’s seat, because it wouldn’t critically assess opportunities beyond its training.
The third is that it’s a fundamental breach of our mantra as an organisation. We’re for the ethical use of new technologies, and we want to help build a future where technology enhances lives. We’re excellent at using AI, but we won’t compromise our beliefs just because it can sort of do a task. The day AI can actually do this well is the day we’ll launch an AI service to replace this one or partner with the organisation that does. Don’t take it from us, take it from leading AI development lab Anthropic, who recently ran a test to see if it’s AI model could run a shop called Project Vend, the results demonstrate that the technology (perhaps hilariously) isn’t quite there yet,
Our use of AI in the service is limited. We use it to perform intelligent junk mail filtering, which is the same as any filtering service you would apply to your inbox if the enquiries were coming in directly. We have a few options to tweak the filtering, which we will do in consultation with you. We might also use AI to assist in crafting messages just like in any office environment, but we don’t send those messages unless they are read first by a human.
At the end of the day, we can size up a commercial opportunity very quickly if it actually exists, and AI can’t do that at this stage because it lacks the kind of critical thinking skills that probably caused you to click on this FAQ.
Outbound enquiries are not included, but responses to inbound enquiries are. By purchasing the service, you’re agreeing to let us put a reasonable counter-position to any inquirers in order to assess whether they’re serious about partnering with you on terms that fit your commercial brief. That does entail us contacting organisations on your behalf, but we have not included searching for or instigating contact with organisations as part of this service. That is a type of marketing service we don’t offer.
Because we don’t work that way with any of our services, so we didn’t propose to change that as a market entrant into this space either. Artificer is a firm of modern multidisciplinary lawyers and technology consultants. We sell our services for fair market value on a by-the-hour basis and we do so profitably without relying on taking percentages of your well deserved profits.
When we act as lawyers in a court case, we are legislatively prohibited from charging the way that some agents charge (i.e. by taking a percentage of the winnings on a successful court outcome). So we are quite used to operating using a commercial model that doesn’t rely on percentages by charging what we view as fair market value for our services.
If you think that an agent will be more motivated if they might receive a percentage of the deal value, then hire an agent. If, on the other hand, you’re concerned that an agent might be taking too much of your earned deal value, then hire us.
No, the service is not a legal retainer. It is an administrative service that applies a reasonable interpretation of your commercial judgment as you express it in the commercial brief. If it’s convenient for you to do so, you can then move on to a separate legal retainer with us in relation to any opportunity that arises if a legal retainer is required. We will furnish you with a separate, digital Statement of Work that is clearly marked as creating a legal retainer and governed by a Retainer and Costs Agreement.
We can still present as a representative of your business when responding to enquiries, but your communications with us relating to the administration and vetting of business opportunity is unlikely to attract legal professional privilege, and you won’t receive the other benefits of retaining us as lawyers unless you do so separately.
Yes you can use us wherever you are as long as you do business in the English language and are happy to pay for our services using Australian Dollars ($AUD). We offer this service for export to citizens of the globe.
You can also retain us as your lawyers to handle contracting or negotiation using our add-on service, provided you are able to understand the nature of the advice each practitioner is licensed to give. In particular, we are predominantly staffed with Australian legal practitioners, but we are capable of producing contracts that work in an international context (which we do routinely for Australian businesses that perform international deals). Additionally, some jurisdictions like England and Wales and New Zealand recognise a right for Australian lawyers to give advice on their laws.
If your deal is of a nature that requires international advice, we can retain other lawyers around the world on your behalf and integrate their advice into our work. That way, you can benefit from our knowledge of your business and the benefit of local advice in the jurisdiction that matters for your deal.
Not as part of the standard service.
An agent has authority to bind its principal (which would be you) to the terms of a negotiated deal, which is outside the scope of the service.
You can however can retain us to act for your organisation or you personally as lawyers to negotiate a deal through to conclusion, and in that case agency is inherent in the lawyer/client relationship. However, that relationship is governed by a Retainer and Costs Agreement, separately to the standard inclusions in the Incoming Business Handling service.
Let’s talk
Free onboarding
Once you’ve selected your desired plan, we’ll onboard you for free, just get in touch using the form and we’ll setup a time to discuss what brands and opportunities you are looking for.
Get started quickly
Need urgent action on a pressing opportunity? We can pursue any commercial opportunity while onboarding occurs, no need to worry about missing out on an important deal.
Ask us anything
Need more info to get started? Feel free to drop in a videoconference or booking link into the form and we’ll answer any questions you have.
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