Building a creator business isn’t about one breakthrough moment. It’s about showing up consistently, making small improvements every day, and trusting that those details compound into something meaningful.
I think building software and being a creator are actually very similar—just this consistent, relentless focus on the small details that compound to become something meaningful.
That relentless focus is what drives every feature we build at Kit. We’re not just adding capabilities. We’re creating tools worthy of your creator business that will scale with you as you grow.
Here’s what we’ve been building.
Recommendations: The growth flywheel creators deserve
We’ve always believed that creators grow faster together. As a product leader I hunt for patterns we can make repeatable, and one of the clearest patterns was our Recommendations flywheel.
Over the past few months, we’ve focused hard on helping you grow your email list with high-quality subscribers so you can focus on making great content.
And the results speak for themselves:
- Creators using Recommendations are seeing +30% list growth on average
- Creators who recommend each other are seeing 2x faster list growth
- We’ve helped add 12 million subscribers across the platform
But those numbers only matter if we keep connecting you to creators who are the right creators for you. Most platforms treat recommendations as a growth hack, a checkbox. We know from experience that the right creators and connections drive more growth.
Smarter creator discovery
We’ve completely reimagined how you discover creators to work with:
Featured Creator Spotlight: A rotating section that gives new or fast-rising voices prime placement, so you can discover creators before everyone else does.
Richer Profiles: Social links and quick bios so you can judge content fit at a glance, not after a lengthy back-and-forth.
Recommended Creators: Our Netflix-style experience where you can be matched with creators based on different criteria like:
- Creators you already subscribe to
- Creators who subscribe to you
- Creators with similar content
- Algorithmic suggestions that feel relevant immediately
Activity Status Indicators: Signals that show a creator’s recent send frequency and growth trends, so you spend time partnering with people who are as invested in this as you are.
These improvements are designed to surface introductions that feel natural and useful, because the quality of a connection matters more than the quantity.
The power of reciprocal Recommendations
Just like in real life, the best relationships are those that go two ways. Our data shows that when two creators recommend each other, both lists grow about twice as fast compared to one-way recommendations.
It makes sense once you think about it. We started tracking this “reciprocal” metric in January 2025 and made it a weekly focus. By the end of the first quarter, the number of creator pairs with two-way recommendations had more than doubled their lists.
So if you notice the “Recommend Back” button in the UI, know that it isn’t just a polite gesture. Behind that single click is analysis aimed at helping you build an audience that grows faster and stays more engaged.
A little tease for the future: Real-world creator connections
We know how important real-life connections are for creators. So we’re starting to imagine what personalized connections based on location could look like. What if:
- You’re a food blogger in Austin and want to find other food bloggers nearby
- You’re a creator in San Diego looking to meet other creators near you
- You’re traveling to New York and want to know who you should meet up with
We’ll keep you posted as we start working on this future iteration of Recommendations.
With these enhancements, we believe we’ve become one of the largest networks of creators focused on making meaningful connections. And while we can’t yet measure the correlation between how many coffees you all get together and your list growth, we’re working on it.
Personalization that converts strangers into subscribers
Recommendations are amazing for list growth, but they have one tiny problem: subscribers join your list without fully knowing who you are. Thankfully, we think this can be solved with personalization, making every subscriber feel like your content was written just for them.
Welcome new subscribers the right way
You can now personalize emails when subscribers come from Recommendations. It’s easy to set up and auto-populates with whoever recommended each subscriber. So for example when Steven Bartlett recommends Mark Manson, Mark’s new subscribers get a reminder of how they found him and it doesn’t seem so random and cold.
Or you can take the advanced route and introduce them like you’d naturally talk in real life. In one great example, James Clear lets subscribers know they joined from a Tim Ferriss referral, even adding a video showing they’ve done a podcast together to prove this isn’t just a random referral. It’s genuine.
We love seeing how personalization can make this product that may seem mass-produced feel really personal, so subscribers know from day one why they’re joining your list.
A/B test your actual content, not just subject lines
You’ve been able to A/B test subject lines for a while, but you’ve been asking for more. Maybe you want to know which images prompt the most clicks or if a storytelling format work better than quick bullets.
You now have that power with A/B Testing for Content. You can now draft two completely different versions of your email at the same time. Change anything—the layout, pictures, call-to-action, whatever you want to test.
Why does this matter? Just as everyone’s tastes change, it’s important to make sure your content is resonating. You don’t know what you’re missing if you’re sending the exact same thing to subscribers all the time. We want to help you future-proof your design, messaging, and format.
As creation changes, what works in email might be different. We want to give you the tools to navigate and quantify what’s resonating most with your subscribers.
The Kit App Store: Your business, your way
The truth is none of us can predict what tools will win next month, let alone next year. Our job at Kit is making sure you can navigate that change with a product that adapts to the way you work, not a one-size-fits-all tool where everything breaks if one thing changes.
At last year’s conference, the Kit App Store started with 4 apps. Now? It’s a robust ecosystem of 31 apps live in the store, from commerce to courses and everything in between.
Apps that work where you work
Plugins for the Media Gallery are third-party media apps that connect straight into the Kit media gallery. Now the perfect image, GIF, or graphic is always one click away when editing. We launched with your two most-requested apps: Canva and GIPHY.
Email Editor Apps let you add functionality directly inside the editor by simply typing /{app name}. Here are just a few of our newest apps to help you build your emails directly in the editor:
- Zeen transforms product recommendations into revenue with visually engaging shoppable collages that automatically populate your affiliate links
- Transistor Podcasts lets you drag a responsive player into your broadcast with one click for dynamic email content
- DevScribe automatically converts code snippets into beautiful HTML for developer creators who want to show code in their newsletters
Three completely different apps, zero context-switching while building inside our editor.
Automations that scale your business
We believe automations are the engine that scales creator businesses. By opening up our automations so partners can layer new capabilities on top, we’re giving you the ability to scale with the tools you love most.
We’ve now opened up our Automation Plugin Framework starting with entry nodes and event nodes, turning automations into a playground. Any tool—commerce, courses, communities, AI—can drop directly into your flow.
Shopify: From integration to full app
Shopify has been an integration at Kit for years. Now it graduates to a real app, unlocking new capabilities:
- Product blocks in emails: Add products and collections directly into your emails, preloaded with your Shopify images and links, formatted for mobile conversion.
- Automation entry points: Access Shopify as an event node and entry node in automations. Add “Shopify product purchase” as a way for someone to enter an automation, automatically tag them, and send follow-up emails.
- Coming soon: Our hotly requested Abandoned Checkouts event node that helps you convert potential buyers into purchasers by targeting subscribers who started but didn’t complete a purchase.
Following that, we’re rolling out more e-commerce improvements like back-in-stock notifications and order fulfillment to help you drive even more sales through email.
The future of automations
As you can imagine, this extends far beyond Shopify. We’re adding actions and conditions that let other platforms plug into our automations framework. Picture this:
- A course taker is inactive and gets a re-engagement sequence based on course progression and login data
- A newly released podcast episode auto-generates a GPT summary and fires it to your list
- When someone abandons their cart, a personalized text message automatically follows up
The combinations and permutations are really exciting.
Apps for every creator business
Our vision is deep integration with every tool in your tech stack:
- Circle: Embed events and posts, sync subscribers with members
- Thinkific: Turn course browsers into customers and customers into highly engaged students
- Senja: Collect testimonials, design them with ease, and embed them into emails
- Thermostat: Get NPS scores to know how newsletter subscribers really feel
- Coming soon – Linktree: Sync new leads directly to Kit
The combinations of these apps is where the real magic happens. Whether you’re a coach, author, or course creator, we’ve got apps that work together to power your business.
Building apps with AI: Creators become developers
To keep quality and innovation high, we want to make it as easy as possible for developers to extend Kit. We’ve launched brand new developer docs and MCP (Model Context Protocol) support.
For those unfamiliar with MCP, this lets you interact with our APIs, the Kit App Store, and your Kit account directly in the LLM of your choice. All you need to do is authenticate with your Kit account, and you’ll have access to your Kit data directly in your AI client.
Through our partnership with Replit, we’ve seen creators and agencies build apps for the public, adding features they want to see.
Kit Studios: Where creators connect
The most impactful moments in any creator’s career happen when sitting across from another creator, sharing ideas, and solving problems together. That’s what we’re building not just software, but spaces to connect people.
Last year, we launched Boise as our first Kit Studio location. It’s been incredible seeing so many of you recording there this week. To build on that success, in April, we opened Kit Studios Chicago.
One of my favorite things is watching people’s faces light up when they realize they get access to all our studios offer totally free because they’re part of the Kit community.
And now we’re excited to announce Kit Studios NYC, coming this fall.
With these three locations live, more than 80% of the US population will be within a three-hour direct flight of a Kit Studio. Because while AI might generate infinite content, it can’t generate the energy you feel when you’re in a room with other creators who get it.
The future we’re building together
At Kit, we’re building tools to set the tone of future of the creator economy by connecting people and connecting technology. Tools that grow with you, communities that support you, and spaces where you can create something real.
The future belongs to creators who stay human in an increasingly artificial world. And Kit is here to help you build it.
Ready to try these new features?
Jump in the app or start your free 14-day trial today, and keep an eye out for more announcements as we continue shipping improvements every week.
