Brought to you by beehiiv.
What actually makes you trust a creator?
Is it their perspective — the feeling that nobody else sees the world quite like they do — or their reliability, their ability to consistently teach you something useful?
Identifying which mode you naturally lead with can clarify everything from your content strategy to your monetization model.
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
Get your subscribers off of YouTube
Every video you publish earns YouTube a subscriber. You get a view count, sure. But you don't get an email, a name, or a way to reach the person who just watched.
Open.Video is the channel you own, where you can import directly from YouTube and customize to match your brand, and even host your video on your own domain.
Now, your channel captures real email subscribers from every view, and keeps 100% of the revenue with you. Plus you can connect Claude or any AI agent to the MCP server and run the channel on autopilot. There's zero cost to take full ownership of your content and audience, and you keep 100% of the revenue earned on your channel.
Visionaries and vendors
In last Friday’s poll, we asked you, our readers, to let us know what type of creators you preferred following: visionaries or vendors?
33% voted visionaries, creators you follow for their point of view
10% voted vendors, creators you follow for useful, objective information
57% voted both, depending on the subject matter
Three of our favorite written responses from readers:
I will absolutely go to battle for the visionaries, but cannot deny the vendors have their place.
Often, I find that a visionary leads me to a vendor!
I would love to say I follow more visionaries, but when I think about the pages I follow or remember the most, it’s educational content or explainer videos on topics I find unique. It’s less so about the individual’s ideas, but rather their expertise on a topic they can share with me.
Identifying your positioning
Most creators are already operating in one or both of these modes instinctively, but the most perilous place to be is in the middle: not yet distinctive enough to be a visionary nor sharpened enough to be a vendor.
Here are four questions to help you identify (and leverage) your mode:
1. What do people come back for — your perspective, or your reliability? Visionaries build audiences around a worldview; people follow because they want to know what you think. Vendors build audiences around consistent, useful delivery; people follow because they trust you to show up and make sense of something for them. Most creators have more of one than the other, and that lean usually points toward your dominant mode.
2. What category are you in? Analytical categories — finance, tech, health — have high reader tolerance for vendor content. Subjective categories — culture, taste, lifestyle — reward a strong point of view. Your niche has a natural mode. Working with it, rather than against it, is one of the higher-leverage decisions you can make.
3. What is your content actually for? If it's building a relationship around ideas, it's most likely visionary mode. If it's helping someone understand or do something specific, it's most likely vendor mode. Most creators dabble in both, but separating the goals helps you identify your positioning and your primary value.
4. What does your monetization model require? Brand deals and paid subscriptions run on trust and affinity — visionary mode builds that. Digital products and lead generation run on demonstrated utility — vendor mode builds that. Work backwards from how you make money, and your dominant mode usually becomes obvious.
See it in practice
Recent Spotlight guest Matt Kiser’s newsletter, WTF Just Happened Today?, is vendor content by design — a daily political digest, every story sourced, every edit logged publicly on GitHub, the same format every day.
But his business runs entirely on visionary trust: a free product people feel compelled to pay for, because they believe in what it stands for and the person behind it.
What is the creator middle class? (Creator Spotlight)
What if your job used AI to monitor your emotions? (The Atlantic)
A quiz to see how cultured you are (NYT)
It’s a super weird time to be named Claude (Bloomberg)
The content repurposing workflow that runs while you sleep (Content to Commas)
