The Next 10 Years At ConvertKit: Top 8 Takeaways

At ConvertKit’s June 2024 Craft + Commerce event, ConvertKit CEO Nathan Barry conducted a session ostensibly focused on the next 10 years at ConvertKit.

The session content was less crystal ball and more rearview mirror, but is useful as a concise recap of the evolution of the creator economy to date and how ConvertKit has evolved to serve those needs, along with a review of recent announcements for new features that have been launched.

Newsletter Business has reviewed the 31 minute session and condensed it into the following top 8 takeaways:

1. Creator Economy & Challenges: Providing a newsletter platform for creators has been an evolving challenge as the definition of creator has matured. Being a creator is now an accepted and desired career path, with 29% of American high school students specifying creator as their preferred career choice. However, creators struggle with the content hamster wheel and whether this career path is sustainable.

2. Audience: Sustainability is directly related to building a focused audience of the right people, rather than a larger crowd of less engaged members. An audience is about connection and delivering real value to that audience to build a viable, monetizable business.

3. Publishing: Modern newsletter platforms are consolidating separate website and newsletter publishing needs into a single platform. The ConvertKit Site Builder plus Creator Profile offers 8 templates to choose from when building a site, as well as the ability to create customer pages.

4. Engagement & Traction: Asking questions of your audience is important so that you can understand their needs and segment them accordingly. The Polls feature allows you to achieve this and are embeddable in emails or on website pages. With a better understanding of your subscribers, you can also recommend other creator newsletters via the Creator Network (aka Sparkloop) and they in turn will hopefully recommend you to fuel your growth.

5. Free Plan Changes: Recent subscription plan changes have included increasing the free plan from 1,000 to 10,000 subscribers. This increase is being subsidized by ConvertKit’s reinvestment of profits in its platform, but also through the introduction of the new Smart Recommendations feature.

   • Smart Recommendations appears as part of the newsletter recommendations that appear in a newsletter’s subscription flow (aka Creator Network). On free plans, ConvertKit is reserving one of the newsletter recommendation slots for paying subscribers to help them grow their lists (and hence ConvertKit’s fees as subscriber rosters grow).

   • Following is an overview of the new free plan features:

     

6. App Ecosystem vs. Integration: ConvertKit has many integrations to other platforms, however it evolving its integration strategy via an app store approach that will more natively integrate such functionality with the ConvertKit user interface via apps. Initial apps offered include Mighty (community), SavvyCal (meeting scheduling), KitBoard (CRM), WordSmith (Youtube video transcripts as a newsletter) and Segmetrics (analytics).

7. Creator Studios: ConvertKit has opened several studios in Boise, Idaho where customers can come record their content professionally and for free. Obviously, there are geographical limitations to this benefit unless more are built in other locations.

8. Re-branding to Kit: As has been previously reported, ConvertKit is being re-branded as Kit this year. The process will be conducted in public via a documentary series. The adoption of this name is intended to reflect the vision that this platform can become a one stop shop to serve all of the needs that a creator has to build a thriving business.