The feed got boring
Creators' best ideas die in the gap between imagination and infrastructure.
I’ve spent the last six months embedded at a startup, building something in stealth for creators. And in all the discovery research I did, there’s one creator I keep coming back to. In my notebook she is always Emma, though she has had different names in different conversations — Maya, Emilio, the one with the YouTube channel, the guy with the Substack — she is both a composite and exactly one person. She has built, over the last several years, an audience that any brand would describe in a slide deck as “highly engaged.” She has succeeded at the thing the internet was supposed to enable. She has reached people. She found her niche, and built a business.
She also, in the notes app on her phone, has a list of things she has wanted to sell — a PDF city guide (Aspen), a caviar collab with CYK, a small run of merch, a community dinner. The list never gets shorter, but the ideas for the most part stay there. The time and effort required to act on one (e.g. build the page, integrate payments, manage email distros) exceeds the expected return. So she doesn’t do it. She does the next piece of content instead, because that is the thing she knows how to do and the thing the algorithm rewards. The list stays a list.
The Bottleneck Isn’t the Creator
I’ve spoken with hundreds of creators of every type and size, across all kinds of categories: fitness, travel, women’s health, investing, media, food, fashion and more. Emma’s story turned up in almost every one of those conversations. It points at something strange about creators, the creator economy, and a version of the internet sitting unrealized inside them.
Creators have dozens of orphaned ideas: products, brand collabs, in-person events and experiences their audiences are literally asking them to make. But most ideas never make it out of the purgatory that is their notes app, despite the revenue and engagement they would have produced. Some ideas were as brilliant as they were obvious — and I kept coming away puzzled by how much money so many creators were leaving on the table.
The standard explanation is that they’re too busy, or that they don’t know how to pull their ideas off, or that they aren’t “business-minded.” None of these are true. You don’t make it as a creator without becoming savvy along the way. Yes, they’re busy, but as the saying goes, if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. Creators more than anyone else are quick to learn what they don’t know, so the learning is not the bottleneck.
The real reason is that the infrastructure creators need doesn’t exist. The tools they use were built for traditional businesses — for stores, for merchants, for venues, for enterprises — not for a person whose storefront is her feed and whose “product roadmap” runs on content, comments, and replies. The problem of selling one PDF to an inbox with 5,000+ DMs, in a way that does not require six tabs and an afternoon, was never a problem any of those tools were trying to solve for creators like Emma.
So she does what most creators do: she frankensteins together a patchwork of tools that no are not designed to talk to each other, and that certainly weren’t built for the creator economy. The real cost isn’t the platform fees and subscriptions. It’s the time and attention it takes; most attempts die before they’re even built. The dollars would be tolerable. The activation energy is the thing that breaks her. This is the obstacle that stops creators. Not bad ideas, not lack of motivation or shortage of demand — just infrastructure built for a different shape of business than the one a creator is trying to run.
What this produces is not just slowness. It produces selection effects. The only ideas a creator ships are the ones she’s most confident about. Predictable wins the day. Anything weirder, smaller, more experimental, more interesting — the things you would want a creator economy to produce — never gets out of that notes app. The creator economy becomes a place where only the safest ideas survive, which is to say it becomes a place that is bad at being a creator economy.
For a creator to build the business their audience deserves, the cost of shipping an idea has to fall by orders of magnitude. The thing that should take six weeks should take an afternoon. The default should be simple: if she can dream it, she can build it.
This is the part where the technology, finally, gets to do something useful for creators.
What becomes possible
What technology can now do, that it never could before, is collapse that activation energy to almost nothing. It can read an audience the way a creator never has time to — scanning every post, every reply, the requests buried in a DM folder no person or team had the bandwidth to reach the bottom of — and find the patterns: the products, collabs, drops, and events their audience is already asking for. And it can take the idea sitting in the notes app and quite literally build the back end and front end required to launch it. The work that used to take endless weekends or a small team and a budget becomes something a creator simply decides to do. The infrastructure stops being the obstacle.
The interesting thing about collapsing the time and cost of bringing an idea to life is not that a creator’s existing work gets a little cheaper. It is that whole new categories of business become possible — new revenue, new products, new ways of growing the business she’s built.
The first thing that changes is the shape of what she ships. The PDFs and the merch are still there, but now they sit alongside everything that never made economic sense to build — the one-time workshops, the seasonal drops, the limited collaborations, the things that live for sixty days and then expire.
The second thing that changes is where the ideas come from. Many of the best things creators ship will not be ideas of their own. They’ll come from the audience itself: patterns creators don’t have the bandwidth to notice, signals they’ve been too close to the work to see.
The third thing that changes is who this works for. The version of the creator economy where you need a million followers to monetize is function of the friction that exists. It’s a treadmill, a constant making of new content to bring in new followers because the existing ones don’t stick. When the cost (and time) of shipping a product falls to near zero, a creator with two thousand people who actually care can run a real, durable business off that audience. The economics stop favoring scale and start favoring depth. Creators stop chasing the algorithm and start retaining the audience they’ve spent years building. Real businesses run on repeat customers—getting a new customer is 5x-25x more expensive than retaining one1. Until now, even the most successful creators have not had that.
Making the creator economy the creator’s economy
The creator economy is on its way to becoming a half a trillion dollar industry2, and is already bigger than the global music and film industries combined3. What used to come from brands and traditional media now comes from a person. Creators are the ones culture moves through first. They’re the people audiences trust to tell them what’s worth their time, their money, their attention. What hasn’t caught up is the business behind it. For all the value they create, creators have captured only a sliver of it—most of it goes to the tech platforms. That’s because its the platforms who own the infrastructure. But when discovering, building, and shipping an idea costs almost nothing, a creator stops renting her business from middlemen and starts owning it outright — capturing, for the first time, the disproportionate value she’s been generating all along.
That’s the opportunity in front of us. Not to make the creator economy a little bigger, but to hand it back to the people building it — to make the creator economy the creator’s economy.
The Value of Keeping the Right Customers, Harvard Business Review
The creator economy could approach half-a-trillion dollars by 2027, Goldman Sachs
Movies And Entertainment Market Size, Grand View Research
Global Recorded Music Revenue, IFPI