Creator-first

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Email is the most powerful distribution channel on the internet. It’s also the one that every “creator-first” platform is trying to kill.

Email is an open protocol that was created in the 1970s. No one owns it. It’s also entirely decentralized, meaning you can spin up a server to send and receive emails entirely on your own.

There are no gatekeepers by design.

Naturally, some companies have built on top of the protocol to consolidate parts of the value chain (Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft to name a few). And while many people use those services, the point is that no one necessarily has to.

Open is good. Especially for creators.

Open means distributed and bottom-up. Open means optionality: the ability to decide one day that platform A isn’t serving you and move to platform B. Open means that the power lies with the people using the protocol, not any one individual or company.

The opposite is a closed ecosystem — one where people are subject to the rules and limitations set by a single person or company. Whatever people build there remains there.

Facebook is the textbook example. Users can create content, but it’s entirely up to their algorithm to determine what content is prioritized. That content lives on Facebook and isn’t portable to other social networks.

Neither are the millions of data points collected about you and your social graph — those belong entirely to Facebook. And the company can choose to shadowban your content or shut down your account entirely as they please.

But Facebook never promised to be something that it’s not. It didn’t position itself as a creator-first platform where you should build your business and livelihood.

Which is why it’s so egregious to see platforms like Substack and Patreon make strategic decisions that are completely misaligned with the people they claim to serve.

About a month ago, Substack's Head of Design went on X to argue that creators should trust Substack’s app over email for reaching their audience. That it was best to let them own that relationship.

Most people saw right through it — an attempt to cede control of your audience to another closed platform.

Email is the most powerful distribution channel on the internet because it’s one of the only channels where creators actually own the relationship with their audience. And the distribution happens without intermediaries — that's the beauty of an open protocol.

Meanwhile, Substack is an intermediary.

When you upload your list to their platform, that becomes their user, not your reader. They take over the audience relationship and send them emails on your behalf to subscribe to other creators and to download their app (both of which are KPIs that benefit their business, not yours).

And once your subscribers download their app it’s game over. You've handed your audience over to them. They control the distribution now.

It’s insidious and self-serving, so I jumped in because people deserve to understand the risks.

I must have struck a nerve (i.e. told the truth) because Substack's cofounder thought it was wise to clap back while on the losing side of the argument.

Which made my rebuttal all too easy.

But I'm not here just to argue with other founders online (although, I have been known to do that once or twice). I'm speaking up because I genuinely care.

I’ve spent the past four years building in the creator economy. I’ve had the privilege to connect with and serve so many who have transformed their lives building on our platform.

I know what it means to be “creator-first,” and I know for sure what’s not:

There was a time when having likes on your Facebook page and followers actually meant something. There was a time when Facebook was an incredible place for creators and publishers to distribute their content and build an audience.

That was up until January 2018 when Mark Zuckerberg and a team of product managers decided that the News Feed should deprioritize that type of content in favor of content from friends and community.

Just like that, a single decision made by a small group of people led to the destruction of businesses like VICE, Mic, BuzzFeed, and thousands of others.

If you're overly dependent on a single closed platform for distribution, you're not in control of your own success. Full stop.

In 2023, Twitter deprioritized external links, crushing traffic back to the websites of publishers and creators. In 2024, Google launched AI Overviews in search, cutting traffic to external websites by as much as 50%.

Substack is just the latest example of a company that promises distribution in exchange for control.

The take-rate model is predatory. It unfairly penalizes content creators for their success.

There are publishers on Substack who are paying the platform more than $1M in fees each year for providing the same basic services it provided back when they were just getting started.

What changed? The creator produced content worth paying for and converted their readers into subscribers, meanwhile, Substack taxes them 10% of their earnings for simply passing dollars through its pipes.

Take rates penalize success, and they rarely stay where they are.

Patreon increased its take rate from 5% to as high as 12%. Gumroad increased theirs from 3.5% to 10%. Etsy increased its transaction fee from 5% to 6.5%. Take rates don’t go down, only up.

Many users claim that they would leave if take rates were ever to increase. That’s until you realize that part of the creator platform playbook requires…

Creators with paying subscribers on Patreon are essentially stuck on Patreon indefinitely. There is no way to transfer those paid subscriptions without asking people to cancel, take out their card again, and resubscribe with payment.

Last year, Substack announced that all writers would be required to offer Apple’s in-app purchase (IAP) payment option. That means that Apple collects a 30% fee for all subscriptions purchased on Substack via IAP.

While users interact with Substack, Stripe is actually powering the backend payments.

When writers join the platform, they connect their own Stripe account to Substack. This means that the writer owns the data and billing relationship with their readers, independent of Substack.

When a reader upgrades to pay for a newsletter, under the hood, they become a customer in the writer’s own Stripe account. The writer has full ownership of this transaction and can view, update, and manage billing settings as they please (it’s their customer after all).

Substack charges a 10% fee on all payments simply for calling the Stripe API and transferring funds from the reader to the writer’s Stripe account.

The writer, at any point, can disconnect their Stripe account from Substack and move it to another platform of their choice.

For example, when writers grow tired of paying Substack a 10% fee for a simple API call, they can simply disconnect their Stripe account and move it to beehiiv (which doesn’t tax revenue from its writers).

With Substack’s latest launch, writers are actually ceding control of the billing relationship to Apple, which now owns and controls the subscription. These transactions, subscriptions, and customers will no longer be accessible in their Stripe account.

That means that if writers choose to leave Substack, they won’t be able to port their paid subscriptions over to another platform like they could previously. This is predatory platform lock-in and is incredibly dangerous for writers. It strips away data and control, while locking them into the platform.

Data portability, which allows users to export and import critical data across platforms, is the foundation of the creator economy. It’s the most creator-friendly principle there is.

Platform lock-in kills it.

The most successful creators today need ownership, flexibility, and control.

They integrate their newsletter with HubSpot, sync their Discord community and Slack workspace, and take advantage of the countless tools available on the open web.

Closed platforms keep users in a silo.

Without APIs and webhooks, what happens on Substack stays on Substack. Without accessible data pipelines, the only information available about your audience is what Substack decides to give you.

The same can be said about Patreon. These platforms keep their users locked away from the power of the open internet.

So we did the opposite.

We are an open platform with APIs, webhooks, an MCP, and native integrations. You can connect whatever tools and platforms you want directly to beehiiv.

We don’t take a cut of revenue from our users. Ever.

We are unabashedly email-first, giving our users control and ownership of their audience and distribution. And we’ll never get in between that.

We are unopinionated about how users build their business. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all: we allow encourage users to monetize with ads, subscriptions, products, affiliates, or anything else — even if we don’t offer it natively or stand to benefit at all.

And most importantly, there is zero lock-in. We work hard to earn the business of our users, but if we were ever to disappoint, we make it simple to export subscribers, data, content, and subscriptions.

We may have arrived to the party a bit later than Patreon (launched in 2013) and Substack (launched in 2017), but I’m convinced that building a truly “creator-first” platform will ultimately prevail.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/creator-first

Shoutout to Dan for the reader submission. I need to step up my AI office renderings — this almost looks like a photo 👀.

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