The creator economy has a design problem that nobody wants to name. Platforms keep launching with payment rails, subscription tiers, and tip buttons bolted onto a feed, then act surprised when creators sign up and go quiet. The assumption baked into most of these products is that monetization is a plumbing question: install the payment infrastructure, and the money follows. Catie Jungmann, co-founder of Aquarix, the technology and media company behind CosplayXclusive, has spent enough time talking directly to creators to know that framing is backwards. “Creators put time, talent, and energy into building their audiences, but helping them monetize is not as simple as adding a payment button,” she says. The harder question, and the one most founders skip, is what actually makes someone want to participate at all. Her answer draws on a background in psychology as much as product, and it points to a different way of building.
Listening Before Building
The instinct in early-stage software is to ship first and learn from the wreckage. Jungmann inverts that, and the reason is specific rather than sentimental: creators do not share a single motivation, so a product built on an assumed one will misfire for most of the people it targets. “Talking to creators has shown me that there is no universal motivation,” she says. “Some want to monetize, some want to grow, and some simply aren’t ready.” That third group is the one platform builders tend to ignore entirely, because a creator who is not ready looks like a failed conversion rather than a signal about product timing.
Treating those conversations as research rather than sales changes what gets built. Jungmann describes her role as talking directly to creators, testing messaging, and working out where the real value sits, which means the feedback loop runs into both the marketing and the product itself rather than just the copy. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Plenty of companies survey their users and then use the results to rewrite a landing page. Using them to decide what the platform should do next is a different discipline, and it requires a founder willing to hear that the thing they built is not the thing anyone needed.
Making The Value Immediate
Founders love the roadmap pitch. They describe the network effects that arrive at scale, the audience tools shipping next quarter, the ecosystem that emerges once enough people join. Jungmann has watched that argument fail in real time. “Explaining what a platform could eventually become doesn’t necessarily give someone a reason to join today,” she says. “Creators need to see where the value is now.” For anyone courting an audience that is already spread across three or four platforms, this is the whole ballgame. A creator is not evaluating a vision. They are deciding whether the next hour of their time is better spent posting somewhere new or maintaining what already works.
That constraint has forced product decisions rather than just messaging ones. Jungmann says the thinking has shaped a new system the company is preparing to launch, designed to give creators another way to build value on the platform. The underlying logic is worth sitting with: if a platform cannot justify itself on day one, every subsequent feature is being sold to an audience that has already decided the answer is no. Immediate value is not a marketing tactic layered over the product. It is a design requirement that determines what the product has to do before it earns the right to talk about anything else.
Reading Behavior, Not Interest
The most useful thing Jungmann says is also the most uncomfortable for anyone running an early-stage platform. “Someone can be excited about an idea and still never use it,” she notes. Enthusiasm in a conversation is cheap, and it is exactly the kind of feedback that flatters a founder into building the wrong thing. Interest surveys, waitlist signups, and encouraging replies all produce numbers that look like traction and behave like noise. The gap between what people say they will do and what they actually do is where most creator platforms quietly die.
Her alternative is to watch the sequence after signup rather than the sentiment before it. “As an early platform, I pay close attention to what happens after someone signs up, posts, pays, or disappears,” she says. “Those behaviors help me understand what needs to change.” Posting, paying, and disappearing are the three outcomes that tell you whether the product works, and the third is the one that carries the most information. A creator who signs up and vanishes has told you something precise about friction, timing, or fit, and that message only arrives if someone is looking for it. This is behavioral analysis applied to product strategy, and it is a natural fit for a founder trained in psychology, but it is not standard practice across the sector.
Taken together, the three lessons describe a posture more than a playbook. Most platforms decide what creators need and then spend their marketing budget persuading creators to agree. Jungmann’s position is that the persuasion step is a symptom of a diagnostic failure upstream. “Putting creators first isn’t about assuming what they need,” she says. “It’s about staying close enough to them to keep learning.” In a category where switching costs are low and attention is the scarcest input, that closeness may be the only durable advantage a platform can build.
Follow Catie Jungmann on LinkedIn for more insights on creator monetization, early-stage product strategy, and building for the creator economy.
