u/teraflopspeed

Not here to promote anything. Just want to share what I've been learning running a creator venture studio, might be useful for some people here.

Background on what I do:

I'm the founder of a creator venture studio. The model is simple: I partner with content creators to build software products specifically for their audience. Not courses. Not brand deals. Software with monthly recurring revenue.

The core idea: creators have already solved the hardest problem in any business — building a room full of people who trust them. Most of them are monetizing that trust in the least efficient way possible.

So why software over everything else:

An Instagram creator with 200K followers doing brand deals might charge $3,000–$5,000 a post. Good money. But it's one-time. Brand comes, brand goes. Revenue is only as consistent as your inbox.

Platform bonuses? $30–$100 per million views, if the program doesn't get removed overnight.

Software is different. Monthly. The audience pays as long as they're getting value. The math is completely different.

The case that made this real for me:

Neda Farr. Astrologer on TikTok. 220K followers. Two years of content about zodiac compatibility — love, dating, who you're compatible with. Audience was completely obsessed.

She built an app called Starcrossed.

$70,000 MRR in 90 days. No ads. No cold outreach. No launch campaign. Just her audience, who had been asking for this exact product in the comments of every video she'd posted for two years.

She didn't have to guess what to build. Her audience had been telling her. Over and over. For 24 months straight.

The rough math on why this works:

200K engaged followers. Even 1% converting to a $10/month product = $20,000 MRR.

Neda was at $70K. That's well above 1% — which makes sense. Her audience was pre-sold before the product existed.

Compare that to $3,000–$5,000 per sponsored post, inconsistent, dependent on brand budgets and algorithm performance. Software compounds. Sponsorships don't.

71% of creators earn under $30K a year. This is genuinely the most underused path to changing that number.

Why most creators never do this:

Building software requires technical capability most creators don't have. So the gap stays a gap. The audience keeps asking, the creator keeps making content about the problem, nobody builds the product.

That's what I spend most of my time on.

Some final thoughts:

• This only works if the audience has a specific, repeated, unsolved problem. Entertainment audiences don't convert. Problem-solving audiences do.
• The product has to come from what the audience is already asking for — not what the creator thinks they want. The signal is in the comments, not in a brainstorm session.
• The creator doesn't need to be technical. That's exactly why this model exists.
• Once it works, it compounds in a way no other creator revenue model does.

Feel free to ask questions about how the economics work for different creator sizes or niches. Happy to share more of what I've found.

ApplyAgent. then Synvo. worked on both around a day job, late nights, genuinely thought the product would do the talking.

it didn't.

kept telling myself I was one iteration away from it clicking. I wasn't. the product wasn't the problem. just took me embarrassingly long to see that.

then I found Neda Farr. astrologer on TikTok. 220K followers. launched an app in 90 days and hit $70K MRR. no ads, no cold outreach. just posted it to the audience she already had.

went through her numbers properly. what content actually reached people, how viewers moved to paying customers, what they paid for versus what they just engaged with.

the answer was almost boring.

her audience had been asking for this product for two years. same request, different words, every comment section. she didn't figure out what to build. her audience told her. she just built it.

I'd spent two years building for no one. she built for a room that was already full and already knew what it wanted.

one side has the audience. other side has the product. both stuck, for exactly opposite reasons.

don't have a clean answer to this yet. still in it. but it's the first time in two years the problem has felt like it's actually worth solving.

anyone else figure out which side they're on?

I assumed the smartest creators made most of their money from sponsorships and courses. they don't.

spent the last few months going through comment sections of mid-size creators. finance, productivity, fitness. looking for patterns in what their audiences kept asking for versus what the creator was actually selling.

something kept showing up that I wasn't expecting.

the creators building real recurring revenue weren't selling their knowledge. they were taking the specific framework their audience already trusted them for and turning it into a product.

there's an astrologer on TikTok. 220K followers. spent two years posting videos about zodiac compatibility. specific niche, specific point of view. her audience was obsessed with one thing and that was compatibility readings.

she didn't sell a course on how to read charts. she built an app that did it for them.

$70K monthly recurring revenue within 90 days of launching.

courses plateau because people finish them. software compounds because people stay.

what surprised me was how obvious the product was once you looked at the comments. her audience had been asking for exactly this thing for two years. the gap was just sitting there.

as an entrepreneur I see this as a huge gap to fill what's your thought?

Brand deals pay for attention.
Courses pay for knowledge.
Coaching pays for time.

None of them pay for trust.

But trust is actually the scarcest thing a creator has.
A finance creator with 300K engaged followers has spent years building the kind of credibility where people make real financial decisions based on what they say.
That’s not attention — that’s something much harder to manufacture and much more valuable.

And almost nobody builds a permanent product on top of it.

The standard monetization stack — course, coaching, affiliate — requires constant new content to generate revenue.
It’s a treadmill. The creator is essentially renting their trust to other companies one campaign at a time.

The exceptions are telling:

• Tori Dunlap’s community put $18M through her investing app. Not because it was the best investing app — because it was hers.
• Pieter Levels built Nomad List from a spreadsheet his audience helped populate — now $5M+ a year.

In both cases, the trust came first. The product was downstream of it.

I went through 15 personal finance creators’ full monetization stacks recently.
Maybe 2 out of 15 had built something their audience uses daily.
The other 13 are creating content to sell other people’s products.

For people working in this space —
Is there a reason this pattern persists?
Do creators consciously avoid building their own products, or is it just that nobody’s shown them a clear path to do it?