Tom Brady has a massive deal with Fox Sports. He could reach tens of millions of people every Sunday just by showing up to the broadcast booth.
And yet, he's obsessed with his email newsletter.
Not casually interested. Not dabbling. Obsessed. Because email lets him say what he actually wants to say, in his own words, directly to the people who care most. No algorithm deciding who sees it. No platform trimming his message to fit a feed. Just Tom Brady talking to his audience.
That detail comes from Nathan Barry, founder of Kit (formerly ConvertKit), who's worked directly with Brady, Matthew McConaughey, Dua Lipa, Ellen DeGeneres, and Morgan Freeman on launching their email newsletters. And if there's one thing Nathan has learned from helping the biggest names in the world build direct audience relationships, it's this:
Email isn't dead. It's the sexiest it's ever been.
In a recent conversation with Stu McLaren (Co-founder of Membership.io and host of the Marketing Your Business podcast), Nathan broke down exactly why email remains the most valuable asset a creator can own, and shared the stories, strategies, and systems that prove it. What follows isn't theory. It's a playbook built from working with everyone from A-list celebrities to solo creators running memberships from their kitchen table.
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Email gives you a direct, unfiltered line to your audience that no algorithm can take away. With 4.6 billion email users worldwide and an average return of $36 for every $1 spent, it remains the highest-ROI channel available. Social platforms are powerful for discovery, but email is where trust deepens, relationships compound, and revenue actually happens. The creators building the most sustainable businesses aren't choosing between email and social. They're using social media to find people and email to keep them.
Nathan frames the creator opportunity in a way that stops you in your tracks.
Attention is the most valuable currency on the planet. Brands collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year trying to buy it through TV ads, billboards, influencer deals, and paid social campaigns. They're in a constant, expensive war for eyeballs.
Creators can get attention for free.
Think about that for a second. Every time you post a video, write a newsletter, or share a story on Instagram, you're generating something Fortune 500 companies would pay millions for. The creator economy surpassed $250 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $500 billion by 2027. That growth isn't slowing down, and it's accelerating.
But here's where most creators leave massive value on the table. They generate all this attention and then just... let it sit there. They collect likes and comments and followers, but never ask the two questions that actually matter:
What's the most valuable thing I can point this attention toward?
How can my existing audience help me get there?
Nathan calls this the "Billion Dollar Creator" concept. And the creator who embodies it better than anyone might surprise you because he started with a paleo diet blog.
Mark Sisson ran a blog called Mark's Daily Apple. If you were into paleo or ancestral health in the early 2010s, you probably read it. At its peak, the blog attracted 3.5 million monthly readers.
By most creator standards, that's a massive success. But here's where the story gets wild.
Mark's readers kept emailing him the same question: "Can I just buy your salad dressing recipe?"
He'd share recipes for paleo-friendly condiments on the blog and people didn't want to make them. They wanted to buy them. So Mark did something most bloggers would never consider. He started a physical product company called Primal Kitchen.
Now, launching a consumer packaged goods brand is brutally hard. Getting shelf space at a major retailer like Whole Foods can take years of meetings, broker relationships, and slotting fees. Mark didn't have years. But he had something more valuable than any distributor relationship.
He had an email list.
When Primal Kitchen landed a test run in select Whole Foods locations, Mark didn't just cross his fingers and hope for foot traffic. He emailed his local readers in those test markets and told them to go buy out the shelves. They did. The stores couldn't keep the products stocked. Whole Foods expanded the distribution. Other retailers followed.
Within roughly three years of launching, Mark sold it for $200 million.
Let that sink in. A blogger. Writing about paleo diet. Used his email list to build a physical product empire and exit for nine figures. Nathan's point is razor-sharp: Mark pulled off what most entrepreneurs would consider 100 years of value creation by simply asking those two questions… what's the most valuable thing I can point my audience's attention toward, and how can they help me get there?
This is exactly why building a membership or recurring revenue model makes so much sense for creators who already have an audience. You don't need 3.5 million readers. You need a direct relationship with people who trust you, and a way to deliver consistent value to them.
One of the biggest mistakes creators make is treating email and social media as an either/or decision. Nathan describes it as a hub and spoke model. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Email is the hub. It's the center of your business, your audience relationships, and your revenue. It's the thing you own. Nobody can change the algorithm on your email list. Nobody can shadow-ban your newsletter. When you hit send, it lands in someone's inbox. Period.
Social platforms are the spokes. They're distribution and discovery engines with incredibly powerful algorithms designed to put your content in front of new people. That's what they're good at. Finding you people who've never heard of you.
The system is simple. Use the spokes to reach new people. Bring those people back to the hub. Deepen the relationship through email. Repeat.
But the spokes still matter. Without them, your hub doesn't grow. The magic happens when both systems work together and one of the most powerful spoke-to-hub strategies right now is something Nathan is particularly fired up about.
Lead magnets, such as free downloads, checklists, templates, guides, have been the go-to list-building strategy for years. Nathan says they're still the number one growth tactic. But the delivery mechanism has been completely reinvented through Instagram's comment-to-DM automation.
Here's how it works. You create a post or Reel and tell people to comment a specific word (e.g. say "GUIDE") to get a free resource. When they comment, an automation tool sends them a DM with the link. That DM collects their email address and adds them to your list.
Simple enough. But here's the part that makes it incredibly powerful: Instagram's algorithm actually rewards the engagement.
Think about how most platforms work. You post something with a link and the algorithm buries it because you're trying to send people away from the platform. Instagram does the opposite with comment-to-DM. All those comments signal massive engagement, which tells the algorithm this content is interesting, which means it gets shown to more people, which drives more comments, which drives more reach.
If you're thinking about how to monetize your content and build a sustainable business, this is the bridge. Social gives you reach. Email gives you revenue. The automation connects them seamlessly.
Here's a story from Nathan that should change how you think about follower counts forever.
At VidCon, organizers set up meet-and-greet areas for TikTok creators. These were people with millions upon millions of followers. Huge numbers. The kind of accounts that rack up views in the tens of millions.
Nobody showed up.
Meanwhile, YouTube creators with smaller followings had lines wrapping around the building. Fans who drove hours, bought tickets, waited in line, and showed up with gifts.
The difference? TikTok creators had built a crowd. YouTube creators had built an audience.
A crowd watches you. An audience knows you. A crowd scrolls past you. An audience seeks you out. A crowd gives you views. An audience gives you their email address, shows up to your events, buys your products, and joins your membership.
Nathan is building intentionally for this distinction. He's not optimizing for the biggest possible following. He's optimizing for the right audience. These are the people who genuinely connect with what he's sharing and want to go deeper.
The creators who understand this are the ones building communities that actually market themselves because their members feel a real connection, not just a passing scroll.
Attention without direction is entertainment. Attention with direction is a business. And the most effective tool for directing that attention is email.
Here's the objection Nathan hears constantly: "I don't have time to build a personal brand."
He gets it. He's running Kit full-time—a software company with hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions in revenue. He's not sitting around with spare hours to fill. So he built a system that runs on roughly 3-5 hours per week.
The core of it is batch recording. Once a month, Nathan either travels to a city or flies guests out to Boise, Idaho (where he lives), and records a full batch of podcast episodes. He's currently sitting 12 episodes ahead. That's three months of weekly content, recorded in concentrated blocks.
The podcast then becomes the flywheel for everything else. Episode conversations generate ideas for his newsletter. Newsletter topics turn into Instagram content. Instagram content drives people to the podcast. The whole system feeds itself.
This is the "one channel, one year" philosophy Nathan advocates. Stop jumping between platforms every few weeks. Pick one channel that matches two criteria: what you actually enjoy creating, and where your audience already spends time. Then master it for a full year before adding anything else.
The platforms have never made it easier to do this well. Instagram and YouTube now provide incredibly detailed retention data. That means you can see exactly where people drop off in your videos, which hooks are working, and what content keeps people watching. Pay attention to the metrics the platform gives you. They're telling you exactly how to improve.
If you're exploring subscription business ideas or thinking about building a membership, this system is the blueprint. You don't need to be everywhere. You need to be consistent somewhere — and use email to turn that consistency into relationships and revenue.
Nathan's message isn't really about email versus social media. It's about ownership and intention.
Social platforms are rented land. You don't control the algorithm. You don't own the audience. The rules can change tomorrow (and they frequently do). Building your entire business on rented land is a gamble.
Email is owned land. Your list is yours. The relationship is direct. And the data backs it up overwhelmingly. Email converts better, retains better, and generates more revenue per contact than any other channel available.
The question isn't whether you should build an email list. That answer is obvious. The question is what you're going to do with it once you have one.
For many creators, the most powerful answer is building a membership… a place where your best content lives, your most engaged audience gathers, and your revenue recurs month after month. You can see how others are doing it across different niches in these real-world membership site examples.
You don't need to work with Tom Brady or sell a condiment company for $200 million to put these principles to work. Here's how to start right now.
Pick your spoke. Choose one social platform where your audience hangs out and where you enjoy creating content. Commit to it for a full year. Don't spread yourself thin.
Create a lead magnet. Build one genuinely useful free resource (such as a checklist, template, mini-guide, or toolkit) that solves a specific problem for your ideal audience. This is your bridge from social to email.
Set up comment-to-DM automation. When you post content related to your lead magnet, tell people to comment a keyword to get it. The automation handles the rest.
Email consistently. Once people are on your list, actually talk to them. Share stories. Offer value. Be a real person in their inbox. The relationship compounds over time.
Ask the two questions. What's the most valuable thing you can point your audience's attention toward? And how can your existing audience help you get there? Maybe it's a course. Maybe it's a product. Maybe it's a membership that turns one-time buyers into long-term members.
The creators who win aren't the ones with the most followers. They're the ones who build real relationships with the people who care and give those people a reason to stay.
Ready to turn your audience into recurring revenue? See how Membership.io helps creators build the membership their audience actually wants and stop building your business on borrowed ground.