Community

Seed Club is a participant-owned venture network. It’s a bet that doing venture capital from the first principles of a network instead of the first principles of a firm will create dramatically more interesting outcomes.

It’s a subtle but fundamental shift. It means that instead of the organization at large being narrowly focused on investing activi... See more

One of the most powerful, unique features of STP is Subscriber Rewards, which allow creators to share a percentage of their revenue with subscribers. Our philosophy has always been that your earliest subscribers should get rewarded more than later subscribers, incentivizing support for Hypersub creators from the earliest days.

In STPv2, we’ve comple... See more

The primary development of STPv2 is Tiers, which can be understood as the ability for creators to provide different offerings at different price-points.

For example, a subscriber to the $5 tier might only get access to Bob’s newsletter, while a subscriber at the $10 tier gets access to Bob’s newsletter and his private group chat. Creators can creat... See more

Until last year, launching an onchain subscription was difficult, as NFTs and ERC20s had no concept of time embedded within them. Instead, they offered one-time, discrete value transfer between buyers and sellers.

Token allowances and streaming escrow contracts are one solution to this problem, but they are complex and difficult to use.

We made STP t... See more

In a luxury media landscape, the traditional roles of creator, curator, and consumer are being redefined. Artists are not just creators but are now stewards of cultural communities, leveraging their individual legitimacy to direct communal conversations and brands. In the Age of Average, where mediocre content is abundant, creators become artisans ... See more

This framework implies a return to patronage – we are not paying for utility, we are funding the story, the taste, the culture, and its support and proliferation.

Ironically enough, patronage is an even older media business model than advertising or subscriptions. During the Renaissance, patronage was symbiotic – it afforded patrons cultural capital... See more

Traditional business models no longer work in the internet age because they’re dependent on monetizing access to content (production) or selling ad space (distribution). The business of internet-native media shouldn’t be primarily concerned with either of those things. People must pay to support a specific POV – a subculture.

This is what we call lu... See more

Let’s recap: as content creation and distribution tends to infinity, community emerges as true internet-native media. Community is an exercise in cultural production, and communities filter content proliferate a specific point of view. The role of the community, then, is to create and curate cultural artifacts in-line with their collective point of... See more

The subscription access business model results in a creator’s dilemma. If their best content is paywalled, how will they demonstrate the value of subscribing to new readers? If their best content is paywalled, subscribers have no way of accurately assessing the quality of a creator’s work.

The longstanding struggles of digital media businesses drive home the fact that internet-native media requires a fundamentally different business approach. Monetizing content assumes that the value is held in the content itself. Under the physics of infinity – frictionless content creation and distribution – the marginal value of every additional a... See more