Turning the tide back into the hands of creators in the $100B+ creator economy
Juliana is the founder and CEO of SupaPass, a website and app builder for creators to have all their content, community, and paywall in one place.
The Creator Economy is exploding. There are 50 million Content Creators, but:
- Most Creators don’t own the relationship with their audience.
- A Creator’s website (if they have one) is often like a train station; sent away as soon as you arrive.
- The user journey from follower to superfan is broken.
At SupaPass, I’ve been building tech for the Creator Economy for over 10 years — before platforms like Patreon and Substack existed and when Spotify was brand new. These are the top three things that the Creators I work with wish they knew before.
Why?
First, let’s look at how the Creator Economy got here, to a time when this new future — where Creators finally have the tools they need to take back control and build a better business around their content — is finally possible.
Who has the upper hand?
There is a power struggle going on right now. The Platforms (social media and streaming platforms) co-exist in a symbiotic balance with Content Creators. Both need each other. Over the years the pendulum over who needs the other more has moved as the ecosystem has evolved. It has swung in both directions, but the market is now seeing a gargantuan shift in favor of Creators.
The evolution of the Creator Economy
Infancy (pre-2000):
No platforms. Tech savvy Creators made their own sites. Email lists were king, Monetization was tricky. PayPal was born.
Childhood: (post-2000):
Social media and streaming platforms gave Creators unprecedented reach, but also took away control. It became “pay-to-play.” The traditional content publishing model was flipped on its head; instead of publishers paying for content, content makers had to pay to reach their own audience through ‘boosting’ posts to cut through the noise in a crowded environment.
Teenagehood (Now):
The Creator economy is coming of age. Creators know they need to take back control, own their audience directly, and create direct ways to monetise their content. No-code platforms that put the Creators back in control are exploding, earning billions of dollars for Creators.
Adulthood (Next):
Creators will realize they have the tools to create their own streaming and community platforms at the click of a button. They’ll be able to launch their own mobile apps and website for everything in one place, where it’s their brand, a direct audience relationship that they own, and 100% their money.
When Platforms had the Power
Social media and streaming platforms have been key to the explosion of the Creator Economy. Millions of Creators around the world are able to earn a living from their art as a result. Yet this comes at a cost.
Benefits:
- Unprecedented reach to find and grow your audience.
- Anyone can publish and have a voice.
- Easy to setup - no code tech solution and design that works instantly.
Problems:
- Difficult to monetise for over 90% of Creators.
- Audience is split in many places and difficult and time consuming to manage, with a fragmented experience for users.
- Doesn’t cater for the needs of your top customers who are lost in the noise.
- Walled garden where the platform owns your audience, not you. Creators can’t take their audience with them if the platform goes out of vogue, or their audience leaves the platform.
Solving a Fragmented Landscape
A broad value chain has led dozens of disruptive products to address these challenges for Creators. But the result is an even more fragmented journey for audiences.
That’s why I’ve dedicated the last 10 years to building an all-in-one solution where everything can finally be in one place that’s yours.
A Creator’s audience needs one call-to-action to one ultimate destination, experienced through seamless design that feels as intuitive as Netflix or Spotify, served natively on every device, for everything a Creator makes and sells – all managed from one dashboard.
Websites: Train station interchange versus an ultimate destination
It’s surprising how many Creators don’t yet have their own website. Of those that do, most feel that theirs is outdated. Those are two problems we’ve been keen to solve at SupaPass.
But most striking of all is that most Creators’ websites are like a train station; they send users away as soon as they arrive. From a product, marketing, and user experience perspective, this is where the market is most broken; your website should be a place you provide value and keep users engaged. Instead most websites usually serve as a ‘Link In Bio’ that simply sends people away to dozens more places to support you or find your content:
- To social media
- To podcast players
- To course platforms
- To your subscriptions, tip jar, and other paid products
- And on and on…
This is exhausting and confusing for Audiences.
Plus you’re sending people away to places where they’ll easily get distracted away from your brand. It feels crazy. Once followers finally arrive at a Creator’s website, that’s a key opportunity to deepen the relationship, collect email addresses to own the connection, and help users find exactly what they are looking for in a couple of clicks.
Conclusively it should feel obvious that the ultimate solution for Creators is to send your audience to one destination - their own platform for their content, membership and digital products, and where they can own their audiences directly via their own website and mobile apps.
Yet too many still don’t do this.
The final hurdle — ease of creation
So why has it taken so long for Creators to start to invest in their own site? To answer this, it’s important to look at what else the social networks offer users that custom websites typically haven’t in the past.
The key is simplicity, ease of use, and a great experience. Creators don’t want to struggle with plugins, designing, upgrades, and solving complex UX challenges. Yet this is the clunky experience offered by most website builders. In contrast, creating a Facebook group or YouTube channel is easy, takes just minutes, and solves the design and UX challenge for you, so you can just focus on your content, branding, and marketing.
No-code mobile apps and websites finally make it possible to compete with the user experience that previously only social media and streaming platforms could offer.
But the slew of products addressing Creators’ needs don’t yet offer everything in one place, although many want to and are striving towards this. At SupaPass we’ve taken this further than most. Our belief is that the future of the Creator Economy is a suite of products where Creators can finally have everything on their own platform, where they own their customer data, keep 100% of their revenue, and it’s their brand front and center, but where the tools they use to create it are as easy to use as setting up a Facebook group or YouTube channel.
A new kind of future
As a Creator myself, I wanted to produce a way for Creators to have the best of all worlds: where you could grow a business around your content directly on your own platform, where it’s your audience, your money, and your brand front and center. We’re working to give Creators the type of experience that traditional platforms like Netflix and Spotify offer their audiences (with interfaces and players designed for large catalogs), but which previously was out of reach for most Creators on their own platform.
Social media and streaming platforms will still always hold an important place in this new ecosystem, seeding discovery and growth, but Creators are becoming increasingly savvy about the opportunities now available to build a lucrative content business that’s truly theirs.
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