Spotlight: How Popcall is Driving Human Connection and Earnings for Creators

Before founding Popcall, Rob Silver spent over a decade building out Columbia Records' A&R research team, where he paired data with creative judgment to discover and predict breakout artists. As you can imagine, the way to track these artists changed with the advent of social media. When this shift occurred, it put Rob deep inside how fans and followers actually engage with people they follow. "I was living on TikTok and Instagram, and just started seeing the way people interact with creators across socials," he said. "There was this need for connection that didn't really exist at the time." Followers wanted more than a like or comment. They wanted direct access to someone whose time and expertise they valued, and there wasn't yet a way to make that work for both parties.

The possibility of this type of interaction coming to fruition stuck with Rob for the better part of a year, ultimately leading to the creation of Popcall. Partnering with Scott Hiett, an engineer known for creating viral apps like MusicPals, Rob co-founded Popcall to allow creators and experts to be paid for instant and direct communication with their followers. I invested in Rob's pre-seed and recently sat down with him to garner some reflections, especially in a world where consumer growth hacking is a coveted skill set. Our conversation circled back to a problem that exists on every social media platform for creators: when you have access to almost anyone, at any time, a genuine reply on social media is as rare as connecting in the real world.

The Problem: Unread DMs

Creators with tens of thousands of followers use business accounts to manage the flood of messages that they receive; tools like Meta Business Suite help them sort through fan messages and brand collaborations alike. While these kinds of platforms are built for clearing inboxes fast, they do not give creators the opportunity for a real one-on-one exchange, nor do they reward creators fiscally for the time a genuine reply takes. Furthermore, a creator with <50K followers may not even have access to these business accounts. Many have the same personal inbox that you and I have, with no way to separate a real inquiry from noise, and are certainly not being paid to sort through it. Popcall helps make sense of all the madness that exists in a creator's DMs.

The creator economy is now worth an estimated $250 billion, compounding at a roughly 23% CAGR¹. The majority of creators' DMs are flooded daily, and most of them never get opened, let alone answered. "Creators get flooded with half a billion DMs every day, and they aren't incentivized to respond. Most DMs that get sent to creators don't even get seen", Rob said. By one 2026 estimate, 78% of working creators say burnout is affecting their motivation and physical health², driven less by the content itself than by the sheer volume of inbound they're expected to manage for free. Creators face the following issue: boundaries don't exist for their followers. The followers are always on, in each time zone in the world, and the creator is treated as an always-on resource, with no mechanism to signal what their time is worth.

Consumer tech typically reduces friction. Popcall is taking another angle: a small amount of friction, priced correctly, makes the inbox for creators usable again. "The moment that somebody has to pay, you're going to reduce the number of people who come in, which is actually a good thing," Rob told me. "That's the key feature." On Popcall, creators can set their own price per message, often starting low to gauge demand and raising it over time as they become more sought after, which increases earnings while naturally capping volume. This lets a creator's unfiltered inbox become something they can manage and fold into their business. It also gives them peace of mind that the person behind the message is genuine. In a time when athletes and creators have reported negative impacts of hurtful DM messages on their mental health, the extra layer of verifying ID, phone number, and credit card before paying provides security. "The bad actors dropped to almost zero", Rob told me.

Currently, the gap in the content creator economy is relationships, not reach. Reach meaning how many views, interactions, and follows a post gets. I understand this firsthand (subscribe to Memphis to Mars on Substack :) ). Popcall, on the other hand, is building a different part of the economy that is narrower, but real and durable. The ongoing, one-to-one relationship between a creator and the people who trust them. Rob is deliberate about language here, preferring "followers" to "fans": a dog trainer with 10,000 followers, a parenting expert, an interior designer - none of them celebrities, all of them sitting on real expertise that people will pay to access directly.

Natasha Victoria is one of them. She is a relationship expert who advises followers who are navigating fearful-avoidant attachment styles. She has built her business on Popcall exactly around the ongoing access Rob has described. "People can text you, they can send you a voice note, and you respond to it when you have time, and you get paid," she said. Stephanie Boridy, a tarot reader, uses it differently. She cannot always fit everyone into her calendar, so she answers questions on Popcall whenever she has time. "It has allowed me to monetize a segment of my clientele that probably otherwise would have gone unnoticed." Since launching its paid texting product last fall, Popcall has grown to almost half a million dollars in annualized GMV, and a number of creators on the platform have already earned five figures from paid texts and pay-per-minute calls. Unlike a one-off video shoutout or a broadcast post, a Popcall thread can run for weeks or months. The product doesn't depend on a platform's algorithm or changes that may happen on feeds. As Rob put it, "Human beings are always going to want to talk to other human beings. Social media is simply the distribution engine." Popcall is on a fast path to becoming the layer where the actual conversation happens once someone's been discovered.

A company like Popcall is all the more important in a time when AI threatens to disrupt human connection. For the content creator, a large part of their value is being accessible to followers and interacting with them in a genuine way. While AI can write a caption, generate a thumbnail, and respond to a DM, it cannot attain that creator's specific perspective on preparing for a newborn, dog training, or fixing that pipe in the basement. The more interactions get easier to fake, the more followers will desire real interactions. The creators that will continue to grow over the next decade will be the ones that understand and capitalize on this dynamic.

Sources

1. Creator Economy Statistics 2026 - DemandSage
2. 78 Percent of Creators Report Burnout - The Creator Economy

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