Can a former Myspace CTO drive the creator economy's next evolution?

Modern mobile browsers, Shapiro believes, are just as versatile as anything you’ll find in the iOS store. Over the course of 2020, his team built out an app store of individual units they called Kojis. Each Koji has a very specific functionality — whether it’s a game or a way to lock content behind a paywall — and aims to be as customizable as poss... See more

Koji is built entirely on the open web. “We don’t believe that we will ever need to create a native app,” he told me earlier this year. Koji gives creators dozens of ways to collect money from their audiences through subscriptions and one-off purchases, and its mobile-friendly design is perfect for the in-app web browsers used by Facebook, Instagra... See more

A user of Patreon, in other words, is limited to whatever tools Patreon makes available. If you want to offer some kind of functionality that isn’t within the company’s product development plan, then tough luck. In Shapiro’s view, Patreon shouldn’t be its own platform, but rather should exist as a Koji. In fact, he predicts that, within a few years... See more

Once Shapiro realized that link-in-bios were the connective tissue that held the entire creator economy together, he knew what he had to do: eliminate the middleman. “It took us one week to build our link-in-bio, which we propose is the most powerful, most sophisticated, easy to use link-in-bio on the market.”