Kit wants its 550,000 creators to dominate email marketing and keep building their IRL connections. Here’s how it’s helping them–on and offline.

Thirteen years ago, Nathan Barry sat down at his desk with one goal: to send an email campaign advertising the book he’d written about app design, in hopes of getting a few more clients to hire him as a freelancer.

But, to his surprise, he sold $12,000 worth of his book in the first day. Then $19,000 in the first week. And in the end, he “never took on another design client again,” he tells Tubefilter.

Instead, he became “obsessed” with email marketing. Three months after that campaign, he launched Kit, an email marketing, newsletter, and subscription platform specifically aimed at content creators, authors, and other creatives and professionals. He was banking on the fact that internet-savvy influencers would understand how to grow their audiences on social media, but might need help to connect more deeply with those audiences off-platform–and to turn their viewers into long-term fans.

“Everyone was talking about social, Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and all of that,” he says, “but email sold more than every other channel combined. And I would go talk to friends about this, and they would be like, ‘Yeah, we know. It’s been that way.'”

But 2013 was still “the early days of the whole content creator movement,” Barry says, “and back then you had to convince people. They just didn’t believe that you could make money [creating content].”

Obviously things are different these days. COVID lockdowns brought an enormous surge of talent and attention to our creator industry, buoying businesses like Barry’s. He says Kit (formerly called ConvertKit) really took off about two years ago, “and now we power most of the biggest newsletters on the web–which is kind of crazy, especially because Kit started as a little side project.”

These days, Kit has more than 550,000 people using its tools, from content creators to podcasters to authors and entrepreneurs, as well as celebrities including Atomic Habits writer James Clear, actor Matthew McConaughey, and author/business coach Jenna Kutcher.

Kit has also put serious effort into courting content creators. It just concluded the latest iteration of its annual creator conference, Craft + Commerce, where it announced it’s opening a third IRL professional production studio where Kit creators can come work and network, and introduced two new features aimed at helping creators grow their businesses.

Craft + Commerce ran June 10-13 in Boise, Idaho, where Barry is based. (It’ll also run there June 9-12, 2027.) He joined 400 attendees and experts for a creator conference that focuses on long-term takeaways from keynotes, workshops, and meetups.

Featured speakers included Gen Z marketing strategist, creator, and CEO Gabby Beckford; Pat Flynn, entrepreneur and creator/host of Pokémon YouTube channel Deep Pocket Monster; author, CEO, and coach Jay Papasan; Socialfly co-founder and co-CEO Courtney Spritzer; Ellen Yin, founder & host of Cubicle to CEO; and entrepreneur/coach Simon Alexander Ong.

Barry says Craft + Commerce is “part of the DNA of the company” for Kit. “It’s all about, how do we get creators in person so they can connect and learn from each other?” he says. “This event is at the intersection of people who care deeply about what they make and are passionate about making money from it.”

He was inspired to host a creator conference in the first place because “events have been pivotal in my life,” he explains. “My entire creator career, every step I had came from events. All these amazing connections come from being in person with creators, and that’s why we do this event year after year.”

He also carries that IRL importance over to the aforementioned Kit Studios. Kit opened its first one in Boise, and outfitted the space–open to everyone who subscribes to Kit’s Creator and Pro plans–with podcast studios for solo and two-person recording, video rooms with professional lighting, and a conference space for planning sessions and team meetings.

It later added another studio in Chicago, and just opened a third in the Flatiron District in New York City.

Barry introduced Kit Studios because the Kit team operates remotely, saving the company significant money where it would normally have to pay for office space, and because he knows that nearly all content creators work from home, or in independent spaces.

“Since we’re a distributed company, I thought, why don’t we take the money we would spend on offices and invest it in creators? What’s the most interesting, most effective way I could spend that money?” he says. “Creators are all over the country, all over the world. You no longer have to be in LA or New York to build a career as a creator. But I really miss the in-person collaboration and the connection and all of that. So I had this idea of, what if we could build these recording spaces where we were really enabling creators to come in, connect with each other, and put out high-quality content, and fight back against the isolation?”

Another major component, Barry notes, is that Kit is self-funded.

“We don’t have growth targets to hit,” he says. “We don’t have to go, ‘Oh, we need to cross X millions in revenue by Y date so we can close our Series ABCD,’ you know?” Instead, Kit is interested in “being really proud of what we built,” he says.

That’s not to say Kit isn’t still pouring development into its digital assets. Alongside launching Kit Studios NYC, it’s adding two new features to its core platform:

• Subscriber Signals, which it describes as “the first subscriber intelligence tool designed for creators, [which] provides rich insight into a creator’s subscribers including influence markers, purchase history, and engagement patterns”
• and the Kit MCP, which “connects Kit directly to leading AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Cursor, with full read and write access to their Kit account”

Subscriber Signals, like a lot of Kit’s other offerings, was conceived based on Barry’s personal experience. He built an initial version of Subscriber Signals because Kit’s data showed that creators were “building these really big audiences” on its platform.

“Someone might have 50,000 newsletter subscribers, or a million, but if you think about even the 50,000, you look out at a stadium, that’s an NFL game,” he says. “We’re approaching a Taylor Swift concert level of scale. So you look out over all that and you’re like, ‘Wait, this is all actual people.'”

The idea with Subscriber Signals is to surface people based on very pointed traits. “I can say, ‘Hey, show me all the podcasters in New York City who subscribe to my list, sorted by influence,'” Barry explains. “Or I can say, ‘I’m running a launch. Show me everyone who has at least 10,000 followers or an income of at least $100,000,’ and I’ll send my final follow-up email just to those people.”

Barry says Signals has already paid off for him personally. He was scrolling through the followers of his own newsletter when Signals’ data showed him that one of his subscribers had 2.5 million followers on LinkedIn.

“I was like, ‘Who subscribes to my newsletter that has that many followers?'” he laughs. “I clicked on it, and it was Gretchen Rubin, and I’m a big fan of her. She’d said she was going to be in New York, so I emailed her and said I was going to be in New York, would you want to get lunch? She’s like, ‘Yeah, I read your newsletter, it’s great, would love to get lunch.'”

He wants Subscriber Signals to foster those kinds of connections for Kit’s half-million users.

The other new feature, the Kit MCP, plays into our current era of generative AI omnipresence. Barry says Kit knows its customers are using outside platforms, including AI platforms, and it wanted to give them a way to funnel all that into Kit and have everything in one place, on its hub.

“We’re making the product as extendible as possible,” he says. “You can install any level of app to add functionality. You can access any API. Whether you’re doing things yourself, through another product, or through AI, all of this data is totally accessible to you on Kit, however you want to build it.”

He says the crucial detail about the Kit MCP is that it has write access, not just read access. That means “the amount of things that the Kit MCP can do compared to competing platforms is just night and day.” He points to a personal example: Beta readers for his next book are able to go through his draft and leave comments, and MCP allows them all to collate within Kit for him to peruse.

Kit Studios, these new features, and Craft + Commerce all help bring Kit to Barry’s core goal: “taking creators who have great ideas and great stories and really elevating them.”

“I want the absolute best creators on Kit,” he says. “If you look at all our New York Times bestselling authors and everyone else, the who’s who on the platform is pretty ridiculous. 23-year-old me who started the company would freak out if he saw the list of where we’re at now.”

Kit is a Tubefilter partner.