One thing I have been obsessed about over the past year has been “infrastructure plays.” Put simply an infrastructure is a company that you can use as a proxy to an entire industry or space..because it powers it. Some examples of that would be
Agora->Audio
Plaid->Fintech
Stripe->Ecommerce
Coinbase->Crypto
and Stir->Creator economy
One important thing to clarify is that Stir is not another Onlyfans or another Patreon. Those are platforms and while platforms can grow to become insanely huge and profitable….infrastructure plays are much more powerful. Platforms mostly offer distribution to their participants, infrastructure plays powers your entire business. You can move from one platform to another rather easily, maybe there is some audience lock-in but we have seen many people easily migrate their audience from one place (tiktok for instance) to another (youtube for instance) where they get better economics and have a strong incentive to do so. Now to Stir, stir turns a creator into a business, you plug in all other platforms you use and it gives you 360 visibility into your “business” (which is your content performance and revenue performance) and gives you some superpowers. For starters, collobarations have been one thing that influencers have leveraged extremely well to grow their audience. With Stir collobration is at the core of the product. You can collabrate on merch, split revenue on youtube/substack..etc all while having a birds eye view to the impact on such collaboration on your business.
Substack launched a few years back and now the top 10 writers are making over 7million combined, Onlyfans generated $2b in revenue for its members and this is just the beginning. Over 30-40% of children say they want to become youtubers or influencers. The creator movement has been accelerated in 2020 but its still at the very very very very very early stages. Just like Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart made flexible gig work a reality to millions of people, Substack, Clubhouse, Onlyfans, Gumroad and Stir will make creative independent work available to hundred of thousands if not millions of people over the next decade. A bet on Stir is a bet on the creative economy…..and I am as bullish as one can be!