What is the cost of switching between creator economy platforms?

Guest: There's the real switching cost and there's the perceived switching costs.

Perceived switching cost is always very high for people, because you're not just switching a product, you're switching a habit. A lot of people who are working in Gumroad or in Teachable or Thinkific or in Kajabi or in Patreon or whatever it might be, they've they have over a long period of time built a habit of: I'm going to log into this product, I know where everything is inside this product, I know where I go to see my analytics. I know where I go to send my emails, et cetera. 

So changing habits, changing behaviours like that, the perceived switching cost is very high. So that's always something that we have to battle.

The actual switching costs really depend on the platform because there are two main categories of platforms. There are open platforms and closed platforms. 

So Gumroad and Podia are open platforms. These platforms do not own the customer relationship or the content, or the data. Open platforms make it easy to take all of that with you when you leave. And in those cases, the switching costs are very low. It's usually you export a CSV, you import a CSV somewhere else. Some platforms offer free migration. It's a five minute process. It's very easy. 

In contrast, there are a lot of platforms that are closed. An example of that would be something like Patreon, which creates lock-in where they build this moat that makes it more and more difficult for their customers to leave. They don't allow you to move subscriptions off of Patreon. They make it very difficult to get email info and switch to another platform.