Creator Economy
Generic Design for a Creator Economy Platform
You want to build a creator economy platform. It could be a newsletters platform, like Revue or Substack, a podcasting platform like Anchor or Transistor, or a crowd-funding platform, like Patreon or Buy Me Coffee.
How do you design such a platform? There are many moving parts and infinite possibilities. Yet, after studying many creator economy platforms, we constructed a generic design you can use to build your platform.
The Two Faces of Creator Economy Platform
A creator economy platform wears two faces:
- 1. A consumer-facing face - the link the creator gives to its fans to see the profile, newsletter, podcast, etc.
- 2. A creator-facing face - the interface through which the creator creates content, such as uploading a new podcast, writing the profile, and tweaking the consumer-facing face
The Consumer-Facing Face
The consumer-facing face is a website, possibly with a custom domain or custom subdomain.
The website presents the creator and its activities. Its specific content will be defined by what the creator economy platform is doing.
For a newsletters platform, the website will present the newsletter information, the creator information, and a listing of newsletter issues. The front page will include a call-to-action (CTA) for a subscription to the newsletter.
Generally, this website is either a one-pager or has two levels:
- 1. Creator information and list of creations (e.g., newsletter issues, podcast episodes)
- 2. A page for each creation (e.g., podcast episode)
The Creator-Facing Face
The creator-facing face is foremost a website builder - for generating and tweaking the consumer-facing face.
This includes several generic components.
Profile Creator
The profile editor sets creator details.
The profile creator tweaks the website theme and style and provides a setup for the essential assets for the website, such as the profile photo and background.
Creation Board
The board is where you create content. It includes:
Details Form
A form with inputs for creation name and additional details, and panels for uploading assets, such as cover images
Rich Text Editor
Most creations involve some long-form text. For a newsletters platform, it is a newsletter editor. For a podcast platform, it is an episode editor.
Rich Media Interface
Most creations are media, such as audio for podcasts or video for courses. The rich media interface is where you upload the media.
Through the interface, you may further process media, such as changing formats.
Integrations Setup
For most creator economy platforms, the website generated is just the presentation layer. The content has to be distributed from the platform to the consumer. If it is a newsletter, you need to mail it. If it is a podcast, you need to distribute it to podcast platforms such as Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Hence each creator economy platform needs a section of specific integration to enable this distribution for the creator. We cannot give a generic design here.
Conclusions
Hopefully, our generic design will kickstart the design of your platform.
Yoram Kornatzky