The Interest Economy: A New Manual for the World We're In

What we call the “Creator Economy” is actually something deeper. It is an Interest Economy. The shift isn't just that more people are creating content. It's that attention has become the foundational currency of modern life, and creation has moved from optional to obligatory.

The arc is clear in hindsight: YouTube democratizes video → streaming wars flood us with prestige content → TikTok collapses attention spans → X/short-form makes everyone a broadcaster. What started as a professional opportunity for a few has quietly become a survival requirement for everyone – whether you're a founder, a job seeker, a student, or a brand.

AI has made execution cheap and ideas abundant. So the only real moat left is distribution, community, and owned attention. The content itself is no longer the asset. Who sees it, and whether they trust you – that's the true asset.

Here's what brands are quietly learning: audiences can smell promotion instantly. The moment something feels like an ad, trust evaporates. Gen Z especially has grown up so saturated in content that their bullshit detector is finely tuned – a forced integration, an overly polished caption, a hashtag-ad in the wrong voice, and they're gone.

So the smart brands aren't sponsoring content anymore. They're building belief.

What that looks like in practice: instead of paying a creator to post about your product once, you architect a 360-degree content ecosystem. The founder is posting about the problem they're solving (authentically, consistently) before the product even launches. Niche community builders are talking about the space. Early users are sharing their experience in their own words. A small creator with 5,000 followers says something that happens to align with your brand's worldview. None of it looks like marketing, but actually all of it is.

This is content marketing as infrastructure, not campaign. The goal is that by the time someone encounters your product, they've already been surrounded by the idea from enough trusted nodes that buying feels like a natural conclusion, not a decision. You don't sell to them. They buy from you. You construct the conditions under which they sell themselves.

The most effective version of this has three layers working in concert: the founder, niche communities and aligned creators. When these three are coordinated without looking coordinated, that's the new moat.

Founders and VCs have noticed where attention lives and they're chasing it with everything they've got.

We've entered the Genzification of startups: Hampton Mansion-style startup houses (Series), Love Yacht events (Ditto), founder content that looks more like reality TV than a pitch deck (Cluely). These all are attention plays. Startups are learning to market themselves through spectacle, aspiration, and FOMO.

The underlying logic is sound: if you can't buy Gen Z's attention with ads, you manufacture organic content moments that Gen Z wants to share themselves. The startup becomes the content. The culture around building is the distribution strategy.

The subtler but more structurally interesting trend: startups are going iMessage-native. (This can be seen by companies like Chert specializing in iMessage infrastructure.)

Rather than competing for home screen real estate, these products find the user where they already live, i.e. in their texts. Companies like Zamana and Locky are building inside the messaging layer. For young people, an AI that texts you back inside iMessage doesn't feel like a product. It feels like a friend. No onboarding friction, no new interface, no download required. Just a number you text.

This is the “find the user in their natural habitat” playbook at its logical extreme. But it's also a belief-building tool because a product that lives in your most personal communication channel doesn't need to advertise, it's a part of your daily routine. The distribution is the relationship.

Pull all of this together and a central tension emerges.

Everyone is being pushed to create. Personal brand is no longer optional. The parallel to geopolitics is real: just as countries are reshoring production rather than depending on imports, individuals are being pushed to own their output rather than rent their identity from an employer or platform. Create internally. Build your own economy.

But at the same time, attention spans are collapsing. People watch at 2x. They scroll past in under a second. The very audience you're trying to reach is being trained to consume faster and in shorter bursts, while simultaneously longing for something genuine to hold onto.

And when everyone creates at once? Noise. Paralysis. The abundance created by the Interest Economy is also its biggest problem.

The brands and individuals who win aren't the loudest. They're the ones who figured out how to be present from enough angles, in enough trusted voices, that by the time you encounter them directly, you already believe.