How I stopped competing for an audience and made creators the customer.

The roadmap said grow an audience against platforms with a decade's head start.

It was the plan every new social app writes. Build a better feed, offer creators better terms, and pull an audience away from the incumbents. Those incumbents had a thousand times our users, and every creator we wanted already posted there.

Ask a creator what they want from a new platform and the answer is reach, which was the one thing we had least of.

Creators who already have an audience somewhere else, and nowhere to run the business from.

So I changed who the product was for. The creators worth having already had followers on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. What they needed was one place to run what they'd built.

They were already paying for that place in pieces:

1. Scheduling. A queue and a calendar, sold per seat or per post.
2. Publishing. One post onto five apps, each with its own limits and its own ways to fail.
3. Earning. Memberships and paid posts, usually a third tool with its own checkout.

Most tools they used covered the first two. The third was the gap, and it was the part a platform could own.

One post, written once, scheduled and delivered to every account a creator has, ours included.

Every platform's composer publishes to one place, itself. Instagram posts to Instagram. TikTok posts to TikTok. None of them will send a creator's post to a competitor.

We had nothing to protect, so we could be the one that did. A creator writes the post once in the Studio, picks a time, and it goes to every account they've connected, with our app switched on by default.

That always-on default was the bet. When the post lives on our app too, the people who follow it back land with us, and that's the relationship a creator can charge for.

Publishing to someone else's app is harder than it looks. Each one has its own rules, and connections expire. A broken account gets skipped with a one-line reason, and the post still goes everywhere else.

Two composers, one in our app and one in the Studio, and creators asked which one was real.

Our app already had a composer. The first Studio prototype added a second one for scheduling, because we'd designed the two halves apart. It held up in every internal review. Then creators found both and asked which one the post actually lived in.

A meter on connected channels: our app never counts, and two outside channels are free.

Publishing everywhere is also the part that costs us. Each connected account is someone else's API to maintain. Each scheduled post is storage and delivery we pay for, whether it earns or not.

Tools in this category charge per seat or per post. Both meters charge a creator more for posting more, which was the behavior I wanted most. Our cost moved with channels, so the meter went on channels.

1. Our app is always on and never counted. It costs us the least, and it's where we want every post.
2. Two outside channels are free. Enough to make the Studio the place a creator posts from.
3. A subscription above two. Tiered by channels, with custom memberships sold from the same plan.

A creator sees two of two connected, and the price of a third, before they need it.

Paid conversion at the third channel, membership attach, and how many posts still included our app.

I watched three numbers, in this order:

1. Paid conversion at the third channel. The meter only works if a third account is worth paying for.
2. Membership attach in the first 30 days. Whether creators turn an audience into income once the tools sit in one place.
3. Posts that included our app. The share of scheduled posts with our app still switched on.

The third one could kill the whole idea. If creators started switching our app off, the Studio would be a free scheduler for everyone else's feed. A hub that doesn't bring the audience home is a cost center with a nice calendar.

Over 1,000 creators paid through the Studio.

Memberships and network rewards settle into one balance. A creator sees what they keep and withdraws it from the same app they post from. The Money tab, with sample figures:

The audience call, the hub, the composer merge, the meter and the price.

Mine

• The call to stop selling reach and sell to creators.
• The hub model, with our app on by default.
• The prototype, and which creators we put it in front of.
• The call to merge the two composers.
• The channel meter, the packaging and the price.

Not mine

• The integrations and the publish pipeline, built by engineering.
• The production design, and the day-to-day product management once it had a team.

A meter past two channels, creators starting from zero, and paying for someone you follow free.

The Studio worked for creators who already had an audience and wanted one place to run it. A creator starting from nothing gets a scheduler and an empty balance, and I don't know what keeps them.

Two outside channels is where this plan bends. I haven't seen whether creators pay for a third or just pick their best two and stop.

Memberships also ask people to pay for someone they already follow for free somewhere else. That works for a creator's closest fans. I don't know how far down the list it goes.

First number I'd pull at a bigger company: membership revenue per creator at 90 days, split by how many channels they connect.