Thread by @fortelabs

1/ I think of every creator business in the creator economy as being built on a 6-level “stack”:

Level 6: Social distribution
Level 5: Email distribution
Level 4: Content hosting
Level 3: Content creation
Level 2: Ideation & development
Level 1: Information capture

2/ It is a “supply chain of ideas” from the first moment an idea pops into your head, all the way to spreading all over the world via the internet

The lower levels are like R&D and wholesale warehouses, and the higher layers are retail stores and “last mile” delivery of products

3/ To have a viable business that can monetize effectively and stand the test of time, every creator ultimately has to own or control every level in their stack

For every level you don’t control, you become vulnerable to a gatekeeper or platform squeezing you for money & power

4/ Here’s my current stack:

6: Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, YouTube (social distrib)
5: ConvertKit (email distrib)
4: WordPress (hosting)
3: Google Docs (creation)
2: Evernote (ideation/dev’t)
1: Instapaper (capture)

My business depends completely on them

5/ The trick is, it takes real time and effort to gain control over every level

You have to learn new skills, master new interfaces, get to know their culture, and ultimately delegate or automate their operation so you can focus on creating

6/ You can’t do all this at once, and certainly not right from the start

So the entry points to the creator economy are defined by which levels you start with, and which ones you outsource for now

7/ For example:

Medium: combines levels 3-4 into one, but at the cost of not being able to email your followers

Substack: combines levels 3-5, but lacks serious email tools like segmenting & sequences

Roam: combines 2-3 into one, but struggles with capture & hosting/publishing

8/ Platforms create value and make it easier to get started by integrating levels, but whichever levels it integrates, the ones at the top and bottom edges will suffer

And the more levels it integrates, the worse those edges will be, since they’re trying to juggle more balls

9/ New, emerging platforms allow creators to “skip steps,” which is to say, levels

There are TikTokers with millions of followers who I’m sure haven’t even begun to figure out more than 3 levels: ideation, creation, & social distribution

Everything else is handled by TikTok

10/ But this is where you hear crazy stories of people being deplatformed overnight, such as on YouTube

They’ve built a following, but not a business